Inside

INSIDE

Inside, the doors are sealed to love,

Inside, my heart is sleeping,

Inside the fingers of my glove,

Inside the balls of my right hand.

January is the coldest month of the year. I look out from the window, concealed by the lace curtains, and see the wind blowing outside, dragging sleet and the odd snowflake with it, along with a few abandoned bags and a broken umbrella that crawls along the pavement with an eerie rusty sound. The weather is at its most uncomfortable, but nevertheless I wish I were outside, feeling the cold wind on my face instead of the stifling air of this room that smells of old smoke and pixies.

But I'm not allowed out, and everyone is gone, the children to Hogwarts, Molly to the Burrow, Arthur, Kingsley and Tonks to the Ministry and everyone else to where they will, leaving me here to keep Buckbeak company, pacing restlessly around the old plundered rooms that I never wanted to see again.

The only way to keep my sanity, or what remains of it, is not to think, to numb the emotions running like crazed Nifflers through my chest, to freeze the carousel of bitter thoughts inside my head, to put my heart to sleep and my blinding rage to soak in a wicked mix of potions I have found in my father's night-stand. Finally I found the secret for his twenty years of marriage to my mother.

Inside, it's colder than the stars,

Inside, the dogs are weeping,

Inside the circus of the wind,

Inside, the clocks are filled with sand.

The fires are lit in every single fireplace, there are candles and torches along the corridors, but still I have the feeling my breath freezes in my throat, and that the strongest gust of that wind outside cannot rival what I feel every time I must go past my mother's portrait, veiled as it is. The ghostly aura that canvas emanates is even colder than the coldest clear sky I remember seeing from the skylight in my cell in Azkaban, when I saw the Dog Star and could not remember its name.

It's so cold, in fact, that sometimes I curl up as Padfoot between Buckbeak's outstretched legs, and I wake up to the sound of my own pathetic whimpering to find that all the clocks seem to have stopped and it's still three o'clock in the morning, always three o'clock in the morning, the same time that was forever immortalised in my wristwatch when I smashed it to bits on top of the charred remains of Godric's Hollow, so long ago though it seems it was only yesterday.

Inside, you'll never hurt me,

Inside, the winter is creeping,

Inside, the compass of the night,

Inside, the folding of the land.

I barely sleep, for fear of nightmares, and I can't stand being awake with my thoughts. My options inside the house are limited, almost even more so than in Azkaban (at least I have Buckbeak here with me, one friendly creature who does not recoil at the sight of me, whichever shape I'm in), and the compass that directs everyone's movements, the one that points to war, and action, and glory, goes haywire inside my head, going from patience to madness, from numbness to world-encompassing rage in a heartbeat.

I should feel safe here. 'It's *your* house,' said Molly Weasley when talking about cleaning the second-floor studio, unwittingly driving the knife in deeper, which is what she does best. It's my house, and I should feel safe here, but it's also a prison, a cold, lonely place where I came to have my emotions and feelings of happiness leeched out by soulless creatures that belonged to the grave. If I am grateful to my family for anything, it would be for preparing me for Azkaban and the Dementors even before they wished I'd end up there.

But if I have survived this far, I'll survive this. If nothing else, not to join the rest of the Blacks in whatever particular Hell they have devised for me in the Afterworld.

Outside, the stars are turning,

Outside the world's still burning!

And even though I complain at my loneliness and wish for company every waking moment, when people finally come I can barely resist the urge to throw them out, to shout at them to leave, to ask them to take their useful, active, energetic, purposeful selves elsewhere, to stop rubbing in my face the fact that life outside goes on, that the world turns, the stars burn and yet I can do nothing about it.

Inside, my head's a box of stars I never dared to open,

Inside, the wounded hide their scars,

Inside this lonesome sparrow's fall,

Inside the songs of our defeat, they speak of treaties broken,

Inside, this army is in retreat, we hide beneath the thunder's call.

But I don't say anything to anyone, when there is anyone here to say anything to, and I keep it all inside my head, where ideas and recriminations and thoughts of revenge and memories and premonitions and remorse and guilt blend into the shadows that form my conscious mind.

We are all wounded here, after all, and we all hide our scars: Harry flattens his hair nervously over his forehead, Remus puts on a cloak of mild-manners and a ragged robe over what the wolf made of him, Tonks metamorphoses into anything that doesn't remind her of her family, Molly smiles to conceal the pain, Mundungus drinks it away, and only Moody wears his scars on the surface, his magical eye and disfigured face mocking me with their openness, me, who hides away even from his own reflection.

And when the wounded meet, they secretly acknowledge their scars and then sit around the long kitchen table to strategise, talking about those who have betrayed them, those who are betraying them, those who will betray them, talking about places to hide, plans to retreat, ways to fall back, manners of withdrawing while Voldemort runs free in every field of the wizarding world, mocking us (and me in particular) with his activity.

Outside, the rain keeps falling,

Outside, the drums are calling,

Outside, the flood won't wait,

Outside, they're hammering down the gate.

I look outside again, and find that the sleet has turned to rain. The drops hitting the panes of glass sound to my fevered ears like drums calling to war, like the blood rushing in the ears of a man who's gone berserk (I wonder if it's a distant memory of a time when I could and did act on my feelings), and they keep falling until the street outside is a solid river, and the rubbish on the pavement has drowned, and there is nothing to see but dirty water and wet stone, and I hope it will never stop raining, and I hope the time finally comes when notions of right and wrong, of safe and dangerous are swept out by the flood and I am set free, free to do what I want, free again like I wasn't since a night where the full-moon shone in the sky and a slim figure made its way to the Whomping Willow, not knowing what it would find inside.

Between the noise of the rain and the thumping inside my head, I hear someone knocking at the door. I lean to look down to see the door and start, not knowing if the vision is real or a product of my guilty imagination. How has Snape managed to arrive so quickly and without me noticing?

Love is the child of an endless war,

Love is an open wound still raw,

Love is a shameless banner unfurled,

Love's an explosion...

Love is the fire at the end of the world

Love is a violent star

A tide of destruction

Love is an angry scar

A violation, a mutilation, capitulation,

Love is annihilation.

I stand still, not running to open the door like everything, from the duties of a host to the rules of secrecy, recommends, and watch the black lean figure standing in front of the door, wishing myself to be one of the raindrops that falls on him. Wishing will get me nowhere, it never has, so I make my way downstairs to open the door. Snape brushes past me, wordlessly, into the hallway, and I know that insignificant touch will be what will get me through the day.

I suppose it's something else to add to the total score of my remorse, one more line to write in that long rhapsody of regret I will have to read out to Lily and James if I ever meet them again, the fact that Snivellius has come to mean more to me than Moony, than Albus, than even their half-forgotten memory tinted with guilt and revenge. Snape and Harry compete in my heart for the first place, just like they compete outside for dominance and pride and all the things that seemed so important to me before; they are still of great importance to everyone else, so I pretend to mind them too, and feign to rekindle the fires of indignation where there are only ashes.

I have come to stand in the doorway to the kitchen, and so intent have I been in following Snape's wake that I did not notice the painful tugging that the open door always generates inside me, the cold draft emanating from my mother's portrait, Kreacher's maddened mutterings (too much like my own, too much like my mother's). It seems as if the man who would like nothing more than kill me with his bare hands is also the only one who can soothe the emotional rash that this house produces in what little is left unscarred inside me.

He raises his eyes to acknowledge my presence in the doorway, and for a fleeting instant the candlelight puts in his eyes an expression of wistfulness that sets my heart beating double-rhythm before I realise it's my own wistfulness I see reflected in there.

Inside the failures of the light,

The night is wrapped around me;

Inside my eyes deny their sight,

You'd never find me in this place;

Inside we're hidden from the moonlight,

We shift between the shadows;

Inside the compass of the night,

Inside the memory of your face...

This house feeds off me like a cancer. Sometimes, late at nights, I think that the house is a sentient entity, an ugly creature that has absorbed my family's beliefs over the centuries and is now the embodiment of all I tried to run away from at age sixteen. And now, when I'm trapped in its rooms without hope of escape, when the people I trusted more have locked me here 'for my own good', when the voices of my friends sound like the voices of my parents ('You mustn't go out, Sirius', 'Use your head, don't put yourself in danger', 'I know you don't like it, but it's for your own good'), now I feel that what Peter started that Halloween Eve, what the Dementors continued in Azkaban, this lethifold of a house will finish, and I'll become some kind of empty shell that looks like Sirius Black, speaks like Sirius Black but it's not, inside, where it counts, Sirius Black.

When Snape is near, I am Sirius Black again.

When Snape is near, this house is more of a shelter and less of prison.

When Snape is near, I have a purpose: to stay alive, to keep him and Harry alive.

When Snape is gone, I can close my eyes and see him imprinted in my memory, driving away the ghosts of the past, of the present and of the future.

Outside, the walls are shaking,

Inside, the dogs are waking.

Outside, the hurricane won't wait,

Inside, they're howling down the gate.

But the truce that he grants me with his sole presence doesn't last long, and every time he leaves, the house is more empty and more filled with ghosts. I walk restlessly where he walked, trying to pick up a trace of his presence, but all I receive are vibrations from the house that threatens to collapse under the pull of its hatred and its corruption, taking me down with it.

I won't let it. I have something to live for. I have Harry. I have Snape or, at least, he has me.

Perhaps it was the fleeting illusion that he might return my feelings, though I know he can't, but I feel awake now, I feel alive again, all the emotions that were previously tearing me apart now coalescing into a tight rope of purpose and energy. It seems a pity to waste it all in a sudden attempt to restore this house into a decent state when the world outside is in dire need of people who will do things, who want to do things, and make a stand, and make a difference.

When I wake up, Padfoot is in the hallway, howling at the closed door.

I climb this tower inside my head,

A spiral stair above my bed.

I dream of stairs, don't ask me why,

I throw myself into the sky...

I go back to sleep in my human form, making a conscious effort not to look at the clocks.

I dream of stairs, don't ask me why. I'm climbing endless sets of spiralling stairs, higher and higher up, always in pursuit of hurried steps, sometimes Harry's, sometimes Remus's, sometimes Peter's, sometimes Bellatrix's, most of the time Snape's. When I reach the end of the stairs, there's just a glorious night sky to be found, and a gaping hole in it, and the need to fill that space is so overwhelming that I just throw myself into it and as I'm falling into the void I finally remember my name.

I wake up screaming, 'Sirius!'. Buckbeak is not amused.

Love me like an innocent,

Love me like your favourite toy,

Love me like a virgin,

Love me like a courtesan,

Love me like a sinner,

Love me like a dying man,

Love me like a parasite,

Love me like a dying sun,

Love me like a criminal,

Love me like a man on the run...