The Shelter of Innocence

You are dragged straight to the door of Azkaban without making the customary stop at the Ministry of Magic. All others you knew of in this situation had that courtesy, but you were denied because of the crimes you are guilty of. No, you aren't suspected. You have become less of a person somehow, your humanity stripped away with accusations. After all, everyone knows you did it.

Everyone except you, that is.

You were laughing for a little while as they dragged you from the remains of the real perpetrator, but you are done now. It seemed so funny at the time. It didn't matter that you were accused of betraying your best friend to his death. No one took into consideration that a more cowardly, power hungry friend might do it, oh no. The man with the pureblood family was the automatic suspect. It didn't seem to be your life, this series of events, and so you laughed to experience it all.

The Aurors pause at the door, waiting for the guards within to open it, and you almost want to laugh again. You are innocent. For the first time in your life, you are accused of something you had absolutely no involvement in. Being blamed is nothing new; you and James had more fingers pointed at you in a lifetime than anyone could count. If you could get out of all of those minor scrapes you were obviously involved in with just slaps on the wrist, you couldn't be wrongly accused forever. Someday, the truth will come out, probably sooner than later.

The doors sweep open, and the intense cold hits you like a slap on the face. A laugh is stunned out of you, but only because it was on your lips before. It is so weak that it couldn't be considered a laugh in normal situations, but it is probably the closest thing to genuine humor the walls of the wizard prison have heard in years. The hooded figure you knew you would see sweeps into view, all at once more horrible than the pictures in your Defense Against the Dark Arts textbooks. The Aurors who brought you automatically drop back in a sort of defensive measure, and a thin hand reaches from its robes to grab you.

You stare as it drags you inside. It seems more than just an unknown creature in black robes. No, the void is comparable to a black hole, only dark because there is a great absence of light in the area. You know rationally that the sun is shining through the small holes in the rock walls, but standing next to a dementor would be dreadfully dim even in a room with the brightest of lights.

As you shiver, trying to hold the memories you know will come at bay, you return to a thought you came to earlier. You are innocent. You are innocent. You are chanting it under your breath before you realize it, looking at the stone ground. If you don't think, nothing will happen. If you don't see it, it can't affect you. You are innocent. The stone floors are just the floors at Hogwarts, and McGonagall is dragging you to her office to discuss your next detention. You are innocent. The hand holding you belongs to James, taking you away from another successful prank. You are innocent. You have to be.

You are thrown into the cell with no lack of force, and you wince as you hit the wall and fall to the floor. The bruises that will form on your body are the least of your worries. You can almost feel the dementors walking past your cell, although you can neither hear or see them because they make no sound and your back is turned. The only noises that reach your ears are the heavy breathing of the man in the cell next to you and the occasional screams coming from various places within the prison.

This is your life at first. You lay in your cell, fighting the pain of your physical injuries and struggling to keep the inhuman creatures guarding the place from breaking your resolve. For some reason, you manage to keep them from tapping into your emotions. Maybe it's because you aren't feeling anything but that cold. Maybe it's because they have so many others to feed from. Maybe it's because you aren't thinking about anything but the day you leave your spot on the hard ground and feel the warmth of sunlight again. Either way, you are still sane, if a little distant from your body.

Then you feel it. They have caught onto your defiance. You don't know how long it's been, although your thin hand on your scruffy beard tells you at least a few months have gone by where you accomplished nothing. The lack of food and human comfort has given your days no distinction. You listened to the others whisper to each other, talking of Voldemort and Peter Pettigrew and Harry Potter and Barty Crouch and Albus Dumbledore and every other person they hate, but that holds no interest now. No new people have come in since your arrival, so no one has anything but old stories and speculation to spread.

Your boredom is what they use against you. You long for something to break the tedium, and a memory comes into your mind. You see his smiling face, slightly lined with premature aging and scars. You remember how happy he was, one of the few moments of his life where he was perfectly, deliriously happy. You smile with happiness, your mouth screaming with pain as muscles unused for so long pull slightly.

As abruptly as the memory came, now it is gone, and in its place is the wreck of the house you knew so well in Godric's Hollow. Maybe the house itself wasn't destroyed, you haven't thought about it since you were there, how long has it been? But it should have been ruined. It should have been crumpled to the ground like the wreck that was your life. You see James frozen forever more in an offensive position, testimony to his final moments of trying to save his wife and son. You see Lily face down on the ground, never to move again. You see the large man holding your godson in his arms, telling you he has orders to go to Dumbledore. Tears stream down your face, but it didn't happen in your memory, they're disturbing the dirt caked on your face from many days of laying idle without bathing. They sting the half-healed sores eaten by bugs that gave up weeks ago.

The dam that breaks with this memory is overwhelming, and you see everything that you've hated in your life. Your mother's cruel smile as she blasts your name off the family tapestry and throws you out of the mansion on Grimmauld Place. Snape's greasy hair as he faces Dumbledore and tells him what he's seen in the Shrieking Shack. The Quidditch Cup in the hands of the Slytherins your sixth year of school. Lily's eyes filled with fury as she tells of the betrayal of your lovers, then her face twisted in ecstasy as you pay them back together. The face of James when he finds out what you have done to him, then his subdued manner after you tell him what Lily found her future husband doing in a storeroom. The solitary tear streaming down his face when you scream that you never want to see him again when that's the last thing that you are thinking.

When they find out how this group of memories torments you, you never stop seeing them, and they become more vivid. You can almost feel the smoothness of Lily's naked skin under your hand. You can almost hear James's angry voice, the only time he was genuinely angry at you. You can hear the lonely howl as you sit outside the Shrieking Shack and feel regret and loss. After all, you are both innocent.

Just as you are about to break, that howl and that last thought saves you from utter destruction. The memories recede, and you use your paw to scratch at a flea behind your ear. The cry of the wolf reminded some hidden part of you of your own powers, and the remembrance of why you need to survive snaps you from the coma. The simplicity of the emotion as the dog isn't enough for an emotion-sucking fiend. You are more yourself than you have been these past years, and you know now that it has been years as your mind slowly returns. That hell of memory, the consistent experience of the only act you are ashamed of, that horrific eternity was only a decade long. You are fortunate that you were strong enough to even make such a change after this long period of torment.

A light is at the end of the tunnel. You can see it again. You are human again and slightly stronger, and you eat all the food you can find in the cell that you've neglected, stale or not. You vomit in the corner by your straw bed, but you don't care. You haven't done anything so violent in so long that the familiar action, vile though it is, is welcome. As you claw at the wall because you are unused to the physical pain, you scratch your first finger, blood dripping on the floor steadily. You look at your finger, entranced, then push open the wound slightly with your thumb and gasp at the joy the pain brings you. You spread the blood on the floor with your uninjured finger into shaky letters, spelling the word "SIRIUS" just to find out if you can still spell your name. A laugh escapes your lips, reminding you of a dog's bark.

The coldness starts to seep back, recovering from being startled at the life that flooded back into you, but you change into a dog again and are redeemed. They will not hold you again. You remember Remus's beautiful face as you did when you first started to think in this place.

"It's true, Sirius." He laughs. "I understand why you hated me, but you have to know I wasn't involved."

"I can't believe you don't hate me for what I've done."

"It isn't your fault. There's a reason that there are laws against what Snape did. Lust potions are illegal, and so are unauthorized Polyjuice Potions."

"You could have him sent to Azkaban for posing as you, especially under those circumstances."

Remus kissed him gently on the forehead. "I have better things to do with my time."

You hadn't been innocent then, but Remus's kiss of absolution cleansed your soul. You were fully innocent again, and being framed for a murder can't alter that. You can escape now if for no other reason than him. It may take time and effort to work everything out, but you have a reason to live again.

You are innocent.