Three O'clock in the Morning

Three O'clock in the Morning

In the real dark night of the soul, it is always three o'clock in the morning. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Naked

Song, let them take it, for there's more enterprise in walking naked. - W. B. Yeats

Sirius and Sasha found a small café on a side street that Sasha claimed was quite good. Never having heard of the place, Sirius had to take her word for it. All he cared was that no one would bother them or eavesdrop on their conversation. He still did not know how much he should tell his sister-in-law and was currently cursing himself for not taking Severus' advice and avoiding all mention of Azkaban at dinner.

After they both ordered their coffee, Sirius began their conversation. At least, he thought, I've already done this once with Severus. Speaking to a dead woman can't be as hard as confessing your life story to your arch- nemesis. "What do you know?"

Sasha cocked her head to the side. "What do I know about what?"

"Azkaban, your brother, me, and what we're doing here. What do you know about all of this? How much do you believe?"

"Why don't you just tell me what's going on?"

"No," Sirius replied, shaking his head. "I want to know how much I need to explain."

"You mean you want to know how much you can avoid telling me."

Sirius shrugged as if there was no difference.

"I know that Regulus and Lily and your friends are worried about you, that you've been acting oddly all week. It's rather absurd that Lily and Reg jumped to the conclusion that you were cheating on her and I'm sorry I gave that impression. Your new attitude is worrying me."

"Worrying you?"

"You're acting like Wolfgang did; like you don't know anything or anyone. You look at people like they aren't there or you're seeing someone else in their place. Sometimes you look at Lily like Wolfgang looks at me, as if we frighten you just by being here. You act too much like my brother for my liking."

Sirius slammed his hand on the table. "I told you that I'm nothing like that traitor!" he whispered. "Remember that!"

"You do that, too: qualifying everyone as ally or enemy, loyal or treacherous. We aren't fighting a war! There's no need for intrigue."

Sirius bit his lip. He could not let this woman formulate ideas on her own, comparing him to a certified psychotic. "You may not be fighting a war, Sasha, but your brother and I are."

"What?"

"I assume he called me a traitor when you talked to him?"

Sasha nodded. "He used to call you a traitor whenever I talked about you, but when I saw him on Monday morning he said you finally showed your true colors. He said you saw the light and then laughed, as if it were a joke."

"It was a joke. If I were here for the reason he thinks I am, I would have seen the Dark, not the Light."

"I don't understand."

Sirius' heart went out to her, remembering when Remus had not understood why he cried in the dorms when he was sorted into Gryffindor. Again, he was from a different world with different expectations, expected to blend and conform to a place he did not understand. And, again, he would do his best to try. "Has Wolfgang ever tried to explain to you that he isn't from here?"

"Well, yes. But he always claims he's a powerful wizard, and those without magical powers are dust under his feet, too. Are you saying you believe him?"

"Well, not the dust under his feet part, but I do believe the rest of it."

"What?!" she squawked, drawing attention from the other tables.

"Be quiet! Look, I know it's hard for you to believe, but its true...Look, let's talk about something else..." Sirius was more uncertain than ever and was feeling a strange desire to have Harry or Severus with him while he was talking to Sasha. He decided that the wine from dinner had gone to his head.

"I'll want an explanation on that later."

"Yes, yes, of course. It's not something I'd feel comfortable explaining in a public café, anyway. What else do you want to know? I'll try to tell it to you in way you would understand."

Sasha glared at him, thinking that he had just insulted her intelligence rather than try to bridge the culture gap she did not realize existed. "Very well. What does he mean when he talks about Azkaban? You said that he was mad before he went there."

"Well, he was certainly mad when he left. Sometimes I think I've gone mad from my time spent there. No one can live in that place and not be affected."

"But what is it?!"

"Azkaban is a prison. Your brother lived there for three months before the ensuing trial and execution."

As a word in her favor, Sasha did not blink an eye when he mentioned her brother's death. "Why was he there?"

"He was a blood traitor in our war. He betrayed an innocent family and the Light for the power promised to him by the Dark Lord. Luckily, he was caught and tried before he managed to kill anyone."

"And you, why were you there?"

Sirius rubbed the bridge of his nose. He really needed to find a better way to explain his wrongful imprisonment. "I was sentenced to life in Azkaban for murder."

"Murder?" the woman reeled.

"Yeah."

"But... what? Who-- how?"

"Who? Thirteen people. And the Potters. What? Homicide, insanity, treason. How? I wouldn't know because I didn't do it."

"If you didn't do it, why would you be imprisoned for it?"

Sirius did not miss the fact that Sasha had scooted her chair as far away from him as possible without leaving the table. "I was never given a trial. I was framed and they needed to flay someone's hide, so why not Black, he's got the background for it. They came up with the most amazing reasons for me to go on a homicidal rampage. They said I was in love with Lily and went mad with desire, thinking I needed to kill James. They said I had finally returned to my roots in the Dark Arts and my price for returning to the fold was the Potters' blood. They said I was insane and neither side could trust me, that I was fighting both the Light and the Dark. Their all time favorite, though, was that I had been a spy for years and showed my true colors when I thought my 'Master' was strong enough to protect me."

Sasha frowned. "Your 'Master?' A spy? I'm afraid I don't understand."

"We were fighting a war, and we still are. When I was still in school, a deranged, but commanding man began to rise to power. He was violent and obsessed with the purity of blood. Who was that Lily compared him to?" Sirius thought for a moment, trying to put a magical war into Muggle terms. "Ah, yes. Some man by the name of Hitler did a similar thing in Muggle - that's non-magical - society. He would kill people who did not believe in his regime or weren't what he considered pure. His followers called him their master or their lord.

My family was known for their obsession with purity as well. I can only assume that the Blacks here don't feel the same way. I was something of the white sheep in my family. I wasn't interested in the torture or death of innocents and ended up finding my chosen career as something of a police man and something of a soldier. When I supposedly showed my colors, people assumed that I wasn't a sport, and had merely been a good actor for years.

When the Potters, James and Lily, died, though, Harry lived. James and Lily were the only people who knew for a fact that I hadn't betrayed them, other than myself and the traitor. And this Dark Lord, Lord Voldemort, fell. So I was imprisoned."

"But that doesn't explain what you are doing here or why you say my brother was executed."

"We called it execution, the people believed it was execution, but it wasn't really. You see, we don't have the death penalty. It is considered the ultimate sacrilege to take human life. A single murder will keep you in Azkaban for life, without a chance of being set free. But when the war began, we had too many prisoners and not enough cells. We created new places for them. Blood traitors, those who betrayed the Light for the Dark, who had not killed or tortured yet, were pushed through a mystical Archway and Veil. Since their bodies disappeared and never returned it was called 'execution,' but no one knew what actually happened to the victims. Your brother was found Marked by his Master, but he had not participated in an attack yet. So he was pushed through the Veil and ended up here."

"But you said you were imprisoned for murder," Sasha pointed out cautiously. "Why would you be here if the Archway is only for the traitors?"

"It was an accident. I escaped my prison two years ago. Last Friday I was fighting in a battle in which I should never have participated, and my dear cousin managed to knock me through the damn Archway. I'm here by mistake, not by execution. The Ministry decided that execution was too good for me."

"Too good for you? What can be worse than execution?"

"As I said, we cannot take a life, by law, unless it is in battle. But the Ministry is allowed to destroy the soul. It's something of a loophole in the law. When I escaped, they put a price on my head and ordered that, when I was found, my soul was to be destroyed. In the end, my body would have wasted away to nothing. Those without souls can't do anything on their own and no one would have bothered to feed me or give me water. I would have died in a matter of weeks and they knew it."

Sasha paled, marking the contrast between her hair and skin. "Destroy your soul?"

Sirius stirred his coffee. "That's why I wasn't supposed to be in the battle, you know. I wasn't to leave the safe house and the battle was in a public area. If I had been injured and the others couldn't get me out in time, there's a good chance I would have lost my soul. I didn't think about it at the time. All I knew was that Harry had rushed headfirst into a potentially fatal battle and I had to help him. I didn't listen to them... I should have stayed home. Maybe I could be with Harry today if I had..."

"Well, that's not like Wolfgang anyway."

Sirius snapped his head up. "What?"

"Wolfgang never mentions his regrets, not to anyone. He'll look at us like there are things he wants to tell us, but he never does. The way you look at Lily - will you tell her?"

"No, I can't do that to her. She is too intertwined in what happened to me. It would be like telling Remus or Peter. They were too involved in my life back home... It makes sense that Wolfgang watches you the way I watch Lily...I didn't realize... I'd forgotten..."

"What?"

"Before he turned, Sasha, you have to understand that Wolfgang was the only Sullivan left. In my fifth year, over the Christmas Holiday, you were all killed in a battle near your home. It was one of the most violent battles of the entire war and no one knew which side killed whom. Wolfgang was spending the week with friends and he turned traitor not long after. He was the one who had to identify your bodies. They said that's when he went mad. I was the first one to find the Potters' bodies. For twelve years I was haunted by that image and I can't see Lily now without seeing her corpse in my mind. I think it's probably the same for your brother. Every time he sees you, he also sees your dead body."

"A few minutes ago, you said you never wanted to be compared to him. Now you sympathize with Wolfgang?!"

Sirius shook his head. "I don't sympathize with him at all. We all make our choices. I just know something of what he is experiencing. We are both haunted by the dead and were uprooted from everything we ever knew. Even when I was in Azkaban, I understood what was going on."

"You can't actually expect me to believe that!"

"Yes, actually I can."

"But it's absurd!"

"Your brother apparently talks about it all the time. I can't see why it isn't absurd when he talks but it is when I do."

"Sirius, my brother is in a private psychiatric hospital. You're supposed to be a normal man with a family to take care of and a business to run. You aren't supposed to be talking about wars that never happened, executions that don't kill, and prison sentences you never served."

"If I made you uncomfortable, it is your own fault, Sasha. I wasn't the one who suggested we talk about it. If I had my way, I wouldn't have fought in a war, been executed or imprisoned. If I had my way, I would be relaxing at home with my friends telling wild stories to our children."

"You do realize that I have no reason to believe you, correct?"

"You sound just like Severus, you know. He said the same thing after he confronted me about my 'new' attitude."

"Dr. Snape knows?"

Sirius nodded. "Yes, he knows, but he didn't believe me at first, either. He's something of a stubborn git, if you remember him at all from school."

"I don't remember him; remember, I was a few years behind you. I had better things to do than pay attention to older boys I wasn't interested in. According to Thebe, though, he's skeptical of everything unless he had proof."

"Is this your way of asking me how I got him to believe my story?"

Sasha shrugged benignly, not admitting to anything.

"It was a rather simple strategy, actually. I brought him home to the flat, gave him pink hair and a purple gown and turned into a dog. After that, it was quite easy to get him to put faith into my crazy story."

"I still don't believe you."

"Do you want pink hair, too?"

"If you can do that, why can't my brother? I'm sure that if he had that capability, he would have used it by now."

"Not necessarily. Before executions, prisoners' wands were snapped. It's quite hard to do wandless magic, especially if you aren't used to it. Have strange things happened to inanimate objects around him, though? Exploding glassware? Heavy objects found in different places in the morning? Has he ever managed to evade danger without a rational explanation?"

"Sometimes his soup will implode on itself if he doesn't want to eat it. They've always assumed that it was a heating malfunction, though."

"That's wandless magic right there. It's harder to control when you don't have a wand. When I pranked Severus, I had my wand so I could control which spells I used."

"You're either an incredibly convincing madman or a lost soul with a silver tongue."

"Couldn't I be an incredibly convincing soul with a silver tongue?" Sirius asked cheekily.

"I never said I believed you."

"What could I do to convince you then?"

"I'm not sure. I believe that's your job, not mine."

Sirius thought for a moment as they finished their coffees. "Would you like to talk to Severus about it?"

"That might help."

"Harry told me Severus is a psychologist. I didn't know what that meant, so I looked it up in his dictionary. Wouldn't Severus know whether I was insane or not? Could he put your fears to rest, even if I can't?"

"Maybe."

"I'll ask him to come over to the apartment tomorrow, then."

Sasha nodded slowly. "I'll come around mid-afternoon. We'll continue this discussion then."

Sirius agreed and paid for their coffees. As he walked Sasha home, he tried to think of what Severus would tell his sister-in-law. He hoped that his new ally would not lie to the woman, just to spite him over an old rivalry. Sirius knew that if the positions were reversed, he might do just that. But Severus, this Severus, seemed to be of a kinder and more forgiving temperament. Sirius hoped it was not all an act.