The Abyss Gazes Also

The Abyss Gazes Also

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." - William Shakespeare

[one]

Sirius wakes to unadulterated darkness, uneven stone under his back. When he moves, chains bite into his wrists. Cold iron. That wakes him up, truly, so that he knows where he is, pain flooding him from head to heel.

James, dead. And Lily. And Peter...

He gags, chokes it back, the bile scorching his throat. So this is Azkaban. He wonders why he's alone. Maybe they're deciding what to do with him. They. He reaches instinctively for his wand. It isn't there, and he curses himself, curses the shudder that runs through him. It's only stale energy; there's nothing left to do, or fear.

After a minute or maybe an hour, he wrenches himself to his knees, resisting the shackles at his ankles and wrists. It isn't pitch dark as he thought. A slotted window, a few feet above him, admits a knife of frozen night sky. Sirius can see no stars. He gropes for the wall, shoulder to the stone, squinting through the darkness.

It's like looking up from the bottom of a well. If he could stand, his head would press the ceiling. If he could spread his arms, he'd be touching two walls at the same time. It hurts him to look down the narrow stretch of the cell, at the bars. They're blacker than black, thick as his legs, and they murmur to each other in gnawing, iron voices.

He grits his teeth, forcing his thoughts forward. There'll be a trial, in a week or a month; the Ministry likes to flaunt its prizes. He'll take the stand. His eyelids fall as he imagines telling them how it went:

Roaring down the street in bright daylight, so fast that everything blurs except for Peter's small, frantic form, unmistakable as he darts between buildings. An alley barely wide enough for breath, but Sirius simply slams his way through it, knowing he'll catch up, he's faster than Peter, he's burning grief like grease, emerging into a crowd, and the chase suddenly over as Peter turns. Peter turning, face contorted, eyes glittering, wand raised, both their wands raised, and Peter screaming:

You killed James and Lily!

In the words' echo, Peter is faster, and the daylight explodes.

Sirius comes up trembling from the fresh memory, unable to keep from vomiting this time. Unwelcome tears leak from the corner of his eyes. He wipes his mouth on his torn sleeve and drags his head up.

A shape flickers and catches his attention, ragged at the edges and almost indistinguishable at first. A Dementor. It's on the other side of the bars, but he can feel its cold fingers, creeping like shadows down the long cell and into his skull.

No. He flinches, like a kicked puppy. "No," he says, his voice raw, and then gathering strength, "I'm innocent."

Dementors cannot laugh; they are eyeless and soulless. He knows this, yet he knows that it's laughing at him. He straightens his back against the wall and looks at where its eyes would be.

Dumbledore will believe him. Remus will believe him. He's got the best friends a man could want, eleven years with James Potter to draw on, and Peter...Peter burned in his own explosion. How's that for a happy thought? Sirius almost laughs out loud.

"Sod off," he bellows, toward the Dementor. It lingers for a moment and moves on, leaving him alone once more.

Sirius turns toward the window and breathes the clean northern air. He gulps it in again, and again, until his lungs feel clean and his pulse steadies. He's never been patient, but he can wait.

[two]

For twenty nights, Rodolphus paces, his path crisscrossing itself on the dirt-encrusted floor. He tells himself that if he moves a little faster, he can stop himself from thinking. Fear turns like a worm in his belly and it gives him no peace.

To be this powerless and still physically whole is a torture all of its own. He closes his left hand over a shallow scratch, the last proof he has of his wife and her fleeting, final grip. Otherwise, his body is unharmed. It shames him that he let himself be taken alive.

Rodolphus turns to face the wall, pressing his forehead to the stone. The Dark Lord expects better of his servants than this.

Expected. The word flashes against his eyelids. Expected?

Stone by stone, the reality of Azkaban is collapsing onto his shoulders. He slumps against the wall, bashing his shoulder, jamming his fists against his eyes. Someone in a nearby cell is whining, a shrill, animal noise. And Rodolphus realizes it's him; the moan is issuing from between his teeth. He can't stop it. The sound struggles out, though he clamps his jaw tighter, bites his tongue, and it turns into gibberish, and finally into words: "Kill me. Kill me. Kill me."

Long after he's run out of breath, his lips keep shaping the words. It's longer than that before he's able to raise his eyelids. The skeleton hands of a Dementor hover in front of his face and he screams.

No, they're his own hands and nothing else.

He is the nightmare in the cell. His breath frosts in the air, vanishing when he looks at it directly. Rodolphus blinks. He should have known. They will not kill him. They will feed him, as long as they can feed off him. They will--what is the proverb?

An idea flickers across his mind, like a ghost moving in a crowded room. He looks at his hands again, turning them over to weigh the air. His memory of Bellatrix is fading as fast as the scratch on his palm. Kill you with kindness, that's what they say. Azkaban will take everything, except his life.

This idea is a nonsense idea; he knows that, but it's the first idea to glitter in his mind since he was taken here. It's the first focused thought they haven't gnawed away and spit back in his face as a nightmare. He raises his right hand, spreading the fingers. His nails are black with filth, his knuckles white and the veins ash-blue, thick as worms under his skin. He still has blood. His blood is pure, and purity is power.

"Lumos." He points at the low ceiling. Nothing happens.

His first wand was the first one he tried, leaping like a fish into his grip, as if it recognized him without any skill or training. Rodolphus has so much skill and so much training, all worthless now. But he supposes there's time. "Lumos," he says again, clocking his hoarse voice to the rhythm of his rattled heart.

A tiny firework bursts and vanishes at the tip of his index finger. Lord Voldemort is not dead, he thinks, with a new, acute clarity. And he wasn't wrong. All magic is blood magic. He grits his teeth and shouts it: "Lumos!"

The light appears, dwindles, and returns. It is small and green and alive.

Rodolphus moves his burning hand slowly, vertically and then sideways, in a circle, in the looping path of his name. It lasts long enough that he smiles. He begins to write, on the foul air, his life sentence.

[three]

Without warning, one day, the chains dissolve into nothing. Sirius almost falls over from the shock. It feels like flying. It lasts about a minute before he stumbles over his own feet.

He has to learn the rules here: not to follow them, but to have something to steer by. Chains, and then no chains. Food when he has no appetite. Never enough water when he's thirsty. Sirius counts the passing days, grasping after the calendar of another world. A real world. The nights stretch longer and longer between short spells of daylight, until finally dawn doesn't come at all.

By his reckoning, it's the first day of winter. He squeezes his hand into the lancet window and scrapes out a handful of frozen snow. It tastes dirty and metallic, but he licks it up anyway, tonguing the last ice crystals off his palm. The wind whistles obscenely past the window. Sirius steels himself against a shiver, and whistles back.

The sound is thin. Everything about him is thinner than it should be. He sits in his corner, legs splayed, shoulders touching the wall. He flicks his hair out of his eyes, trying to concentrate. Memories must be exercised, to keep them strong.

They've been working at this spell for ages, their foreheads together under the cloak, books pinched from McGonagall's office, it's midnight, a bell ringing somewhere below them, and James suddenly grinning like a madman, I think I've got it--

Something skitters over Sirius's foot, running off with his concentration. He growls, lunges, and catches a furry handful of darkness. Teeth sink into the numb skin at the base of his thumb. He winces, bringing the rat up toward his face, glaring into the beads of its eyes. Peter, he thinks, and starts squeezing.

The rat screams and belches out a red glow.

That stops him for a moment, the rat writhing in his fist. The redness expands like a cloud of gnats. Letters burst from the vague cloud and dissolve again quickly, but not too quickly to read: Courage. The Lord lives.

Sirius throws the dead rat away and a smile cracks his face. Bellatrix and her slimy husband and the rest, reduced to charming messages into rodent vomit. He can't help but smile, it's that desperate, that pathetic. They'd probably say the same if they were chained to the corpse. Anything but face facts: the Death Eaters are already dead.

The smile freezes on his face. He just manages to throw up a useless arm before the Dementor reaches him. It moves with the force of an explosion, the explosion from Peter's wand, hitting him in the face, his back slammed to the pavement.

You killed James and Lily!

No. Sirius is shaking, he can't help it, but he can remember that Peter is dead. There is still rat blood on his hand. He remembers that he's not a murderer. Somewhere, he still has friends who believe in him.

The Dementor crouches down, so Sirius is staring into at the void where its face should be. The void contains a horrible hunger, and a horrifying intelligence. It doesn't speak, but he hears what it thinks.

Anything but face facts: You're already dead.

It leaves Sirius alone in the cell.

James isn't there, shining with sudden inspiration. Dumbledore isn't waiting with his infinite smile. Sirius shuts his eyes, summoning all his power, and searches, and can't quite picture Remus's face.

"I never did it," he shouts to them.

Not even an echo. No one's coming. Sirius tips his head back and laughs at himself until he's screaming.

[four]

It's the strangest feeling, living inside this body that came from her own. A dirty thatch of hair on the concave chest, white blades of ribs under the grey skin, an uncomfortable bud of flesh between the thighs. Iris Crouch looks down at her son's shape a dozen times a day to make sure it's still there. She clutches the bars with his hands and gazes down the dusky hallway that, she prays, led Barty to safety.

Iris is incredibly tired. Polyjuice does that, dose after dose of it, and of course the Dementors, watching her from their shrouds. And there's the Ailment inside her, swimming at her core, devouring the little strength she has left. Neither potions nor prisons make any difference. She's had plenty of time to get used to the idea of dying.

"You never do get used to it, though," she murmurs aloud, and the small sound of her own voice soothes her. Nobody else is here to talk to her.

There are occasional screams, and rain whipping the walls, and mice that glow unpleasantly and dash with strange urgency past the cell, but all this senseless noise amounts to silence. Iris touches Barty's face with his fingertips and tells him everything.

"You changed at Hogwarts," she says. "I'll never understand it. I was a girl there--I loved it on first sight. The Great Hall was shining, it was the most beautiful place I'd ever seen. And the safest place in the world. Do you remember how badly I embarrassed you the day you went off?" One of his teeth is rotten in her smile. "I cried all morning. After you were gone, I sat down on the platform and cried for half an hour. I thought I was being silly...just to see my baby growing up..."

Iris presses his cheek to the bars, remembering. Her Ailment sends out a noxious wave of heat, bending her almost in two. The prison robes are too heavy and too loose on his frame.

"But I wasn't being silly." She sighs. "And you weren't safe at Hogwarts. You fell in with those horrible children, with their horrible ideas..." She doesn't let herself think their names. Some of them, after all, are here. "Oh, I wish you'd tell me why. Why didn't you see that no good could come out of the Dark?"

Through her dizziness, she senses herself slipping out of his body. Time for another sip from the bottomless flask of Polyjuice. She digs through the robes for it, grasps the tiny vial like a diamond. The potion gags her, scalds her, but it goes down to the pit of his stomach. She squints at her son's bony, fragile, faraway feet. They look like his father's.

"You're still a child, you know." She bites his lip, hearing the drum of her own poisoned pulse. "You have years and years. Now you're free. Will you grow up, darling?"

Her hands are slippery with sweat. She slides downward, and are those stones underneath her, or is it a cold, hard hand, catching her as she falls? The ceiling whirls in an elaborate dance.

"I put you on that train," Iris whispers, barely able to hear it anymore. "And your father couldn't stop me crying. God, how I wanted you back..."

She's crying, or at least his eyes are wet. She cradles his thin body, arms wrapped tight around the middle. Perhaps the mothers of those horrible children cry just like she does. She wants to ask Barty about them, but she can't make his mouth open.

She falls silent.

[five]

To begin with, there's the sea. The sea he can't see. He has no idea of the tower's height, but somewhere directly down below is the rocky island, and the cold, cold water. There could be a freak storm, a wave to drag them all, walls and prisoners and guards, into oblivion with nothing more than a splash.

On a bad day all he can do is lie on the floor, flat as a shadow. Unable to think beyond the syllables of his name. Sirius Black. Sirius. A silly sort of name. It must mean something.

Secondly, destruction from above. You can ward against most lightning strikes, but--a meteor, maybe. A rock the size of the moon. It sounds unlikely. Anyway, perhaps Azkaban isn't where it's said to be. Perhaps it's really underground, upside-down, an ulceration in the bowels of hell. He can't be certain where they sent him; he was stone unconscious at the time.

At least he knows he isn't dead. He's seen dead. He raises his chin and looks at dead: a coffin is drifting aimlessly down the hallway, like a lost first-year trying to find the front door. Someone else having a bad day.

Thirdly, starvation. For weeks, maybe months, at a time he doesn't eat, and trays of dry bread and stringy meat pile up, spoiling and stinking. He experiences five stages of starvation: ordinary hunger, nausea, ravenous hunger, excruciating hunger, homicidal hunger. Each time, though, something surfaces out of his mind, out of the Black, a face he thinks he might have loved once, or maybe it's his old face. A dark-haired boy who laughs and says, what are you playing at?

Each time, he throws himself on the remnants of food and eats until he's sick. He crosses this off the list of possibilities.

On another bad day everything comes back to him at once. He mutters names to himself like dirty words. Sirius, Remus, Regulus, Albus, Andromeda, Lily, James. Peter. Yes, and he's allowed to recall the crime he's supposed to have committed. He endures five stages of grief: denial, anger, righteous anger, uncontrollable tears, denial. But never guilt. The knowledge of his innocence is tiny and terminally irritating. A pearl under his shell. He's already given up on the sea.

Fourthly, open rebellion. He's not dead, therefore he is alive, therefore he could fight, therefore he could die fighting. The worst the Dementors can do is Kiss him, and would that be so bad? He wonders. He pictures it, tastes it, almost craves it. One embrace and it's over, you lose your mind just as easily as your cherry. But the boy's voice comes up through the fog again, saying, Padfoot, you're going, forgive the pun, barking mad.

"Not impossible," he says.

Fifth:

On a bad day, he stands in the center of the cell, rigid as a tombstone, pushing at the walls with his mind, willing them to fall. When suddenly he thinks, Padfoot?

The magic comes back to him, hard, a blow to the back of the head. He doesn't will it, exactly, his body just knows how to change itself, a head-to-toe twist and he's a dog, a dog with his teeth bared. Hungry dog, his ears sharply back, fur running to tatters, ice forming under his paws. He barks in surprise, and the strangest thing happens.

The Dark Things recede.

Padfoot barks again, lowering his head. Yes. They're actually pulling away.

He licks his teeth, turns three times, and curls up. Sirius. The dog whimpers, eyelids falling. Black.

He escapes a little, just enough to sleep.

[six]

Deep in the belly of the fortress of Azkaban, under the cells where they keep the witches, there's a fire. The fire is constant; it heats the dungeons nearly to the point of pain. Bellatrix wonders what they burn. She toasts her bare feet on the flagstone floor until it doesn't hurt anymore.

She eyes the blank and windowless walls, restless for something to see, anything of beauty or ugliness to distract her from empty time. They would never let her have a looking glass--of course, she'd be scrying with even a puddle of ink--and so she smoothes her hands over her face, noting how the years have sharpened her bones. Her long fingers never stop moving, combing her hair, stroking her throat, playing out an elegant waltz against her knees.

Sometimes the air thickens, becoming almost too foul to breathe, or her ears ring with shrieks and laughter, indistinguishable from the roar of flames. She's spent hours looking at the shapeless smudge on her left forearm, but those are the only hours she's spent in tears. The agony here rarely reaches the agony she expected to face when the Ministry handed her sentence down.

Now Bellatrix stands, naked, sweat cruising along the ridges of her body. She crosses the cell in three strides. Heat sizzles between her body and the bars, almost visible, almost setting her alight.

"Come here," she calls. Nothing happens. She tries it louder. "Komm her? Accio. Come here!"

A Dementor materializes opposite her, only three inches away. It lifts a dead hand as if in greeting, and ice water syringes into her veins, turning her sweat to frost. It exhales a silver-blue breath. Bellatrix feels the truth of her age, every day of it. She is withering, shriveling, like a hothouse flower in the face of December.

But this is nothing new, and after all, she's not like Narcissa, she knows more than beauty. She has a mind like a knife. A knife with a curved blade.

With great effort, she forces her eyes to open, her lips to part. "Who made you?" she asks. Her own words make her bold, and she straightens up, thrusting her shoulders back, her hips forward. "Were you always here? Were you never human?"

It rears back, black robes rippling out to the corners of her vision. Bellatrix is reminded of her Master by the power of the thing's presence, the sense that its fingers can ravel the fabric of the world. The feeling of its teeth in her soul. She's shaking again.

"You're just like me," she goes on, cocking an eyebrow. Maybe they're the last words she'll ever say. "A prisoner. The Ministry fears you and somehow that gives them the right to lock you up here." She licks her dry lips, brings a hand up along the curve of her waist. Carefully, now. "At least I had twenty-six years before they did this to me."

Her fingers just barely graze the swell of her left breast. The Dementor does not move a muscle--do they have muscles?--but the way it's watching her changes, like a shift in the winter wind. It wants something from her, maybe something more than her life.

She presses herself hard against the bars. "When the Dark sun rises again," and the words are hissing from her lips, "we will both be free."

Its hand falls, sending the fire's heat singing up through the bars. She doesn't flinch. Not even as her Dementor vanishes, and the metal begins to burn her. Scar tissue is the hardest kind to harm.

[seven]

You could see it from three thousand feet up.

This refrain haunts the black dog, ringing in his head, like a bell he heard far away, long ago. He runs in circles, hunting for its meaning, the burnt smell of lost time hurting his nose.

The Dark Things surround him, having no scent, giving no warning. His fur is all needles and flame...

He sees it from three thousand feet up. The motorbike drops like a star.

Ant-sized people are running the streets of Godric's Hollow, all strangers to Sirius; if not strangers, certainly not friends, certainly not--and his wheels digging into the dirt. He inhales sparks from the skeleton of the burning house, smashing through a splintered door, he's on his knees--

It happens whether his strength is at low ebb or high tide. It happens whether he's a dog or a man. It happens again and again.

James. James, get up.

White crescents looking back at him.

Motionless.

Magicless.

Tears poison his closed eyes.

Look, Prongs.

You can't do this to me, so you'd better just--oh God.

Running in circles, trying to escape, he blunders deeper into it.

How long? Sitting there with his hands under the weight of James's skull and the wreckage burning around them both, caring for nothing else in the world, for how long? An antlered shadow flickering out of his vision.

How long has he been in this cage? A rational question: a ringing bell. He tries to think, every bone and bark of him aching. The past rides his back, biting and baiting him, no matter how he tries to throw it off.

The woman called Lily, pale as her name, neck oddly bent, one arm outstretched into half an embrace. Her hair like flames, her hair is burning.

Someone's got to help her.

For the first time in years, he remembers how he helped her.

Pulling her from the fire, carrying her to her husband. Holding them both in his arms, heavier than they should be, and he speaks, he shrieks, wand raised in the night--

What did he say, then? Something Unforgivable. No doubt. No doubt he deserves this.

The two of them dead in his arms.

He snaps his jaw, tearing into the memory with his teeth.

He cannot wake them.

At last he kisses them, roughly, once each, their lips still warm, and stands. Extinguo, Scourgify, the ruined house begins to reassemble itself. He wraps his friends in a spell, the brightest one he's ever cast, and lifts them free of it, free of it all.

Strange thing to do. He tastes blood, molten metal on his tongue. Strange to care so much for the bodies of people you--

--You killed James and Lily!

This is only a memory, a story, a nightmare. This is exactly how it happened. The black dog opens his eyes, and sees no monsters. How long has he been alone?

How long before he makes himself release them? Thinking, Peter Pettigrew, you are already dead. Rage inking his eyes. I only hope I kill you with my hands.

He must rest. He collapses, skin prickling over a heap of bones.

And hearing some sound, he turns, to see a circle of ground seared clean. In the circle's center, a baby, darkened, dripping, drenched in blood.

He hears, or makes, a small cry. Remembering:

Harry.

For the first time in years.

Blood all over, but he finds only a cut on the small forehead. He touches it. The baby begins to wail.

The black dog licks his wounds.

The boy lives.

[eight]

After ten years in Azkaban, one does not dream of freedom. Antonin Dolohov, at least, does not. He is an old soldier, well past making a young soldier's mistakes.

He does not hold tight to some remembered joy from his childhood in St. Petersburg and then Siberia. In truth, he forgets everything he possibly can. If he were a less cautious man, he might fumble back through the seven decades of his life, grasping for a consoling word or an infant giggle, opening his mind in the search and exposing all his wounds. Antonin forgets even the faces of the women who've borne his children. He recalls only the whiteness of snow, falling for a solid six months of the year, blinding everything.

He does not look forward any further than he looks back. He neither plans for rebellion nor prays for deliverance. If Lord Voldemort lives--and he might; it's not beyond possibility. He was not exactly human at the time of his fall. Still, several Seers made the same claims about the Dark Lord Grindelwald, and swore that he would rise again, and Antonin spat on the old idiot's corpse himself. There again--if Lord Voldemort lives, it doesn't change the odds on Antonin's survival. Generals sacrifice soldiers. He expects nothing to deliver him except death. The snows of his past cover everything, footprints and signposts alike.

He does not make lists. Not of his enemies, not of his friends. There is no plot, only the grind of day upon day.

He does not devise a new method of communication. He invents no elaborate trick of tapping fingers against walls, or enchanting letters onto the rodents and roaches in his cell; he makes no desperate leap of imagination that proves his extreme fortitude under these conditions. He doesn't compose inspirational messages or silent speeches. He doesn't work secretly at the magic of blood, hiding new skills from ever-present eyes.

He does not feel a flood of compassion for the Death Eaters interred above and below and beside him, and he doesn't keep track of the ones that die. Neither their youth nor their courage moves him to tears.

He does not observe everything that passes with caution, learning the secret patterns of the Dementors' movements, or the rhythms to which the prison pulses. Wisdom will give him no power here, and he is wise enough to know that. He does not escape the random tortures they choose to inflict. He does not learn to wall them out of his mind. His worst memories remain vivid, violent, and intimately familiar.

He does not hold himself proudly against the Dementors, or try to cast a Patronus out from his fingertips, or lash himself to the wall and struggle against their assaults. He fears them like any beast of burden fears the whip. He does not starve himself, thinking the freedom of death would be better than a life in prison. He has known for a long time that there is no nobility to be had in suffering, no pride in pain. One does not lay an Unforgivable curse without learning that lesson, and Antonin has lain more than his share.

He does not smile to himself in the dark, knowing himself to be stronger than his enemies, or better than them. There is no pure place inside him that the Dementors can't reach, no secret spirit concealed in his racked body. In his blackest hours, there is no inner light. He endures it as earth endures the snow.

He does not resist.

He does not hope.

He does not die.

[nine]

Time is a closed circuit with no entrance or exit. Sirius can't measure it, but he's learning to track his passage. He's well trained for this: a Marauder knows a hundred ways to leave a mark. Although--maybe--there used to be someone else to find them.

This go-around, he comes to with bile in his mouth, a pain festering in his ankle, and an urgent desire to move the rough blanket in the corner. Crawling over, scraping his knees. His nose touches the floor before he see it, scratched in the dirt.

Harry Potter.

His fingertips trace the name. Message received. It tingles warmly in his chest. The letters shape a tomato-faced child with a shock of black hair, a squalling weight in Sirius's tired arms, a sprinkling of water, a voice: "I christen thee..."

Godchild.

It's too heavy to remember, too vital to forget. The words are not safe in his head now, and Sirius doesn't know how much time he has. He squints, but already his touch has blurred the letters. His touch and his tears. He rubs the message out so hard it bruises the heel of his hand. The letters disappear and the picture in his head comes unraveled.

He has it wrong. The baby's face is marked with blood, not water. There's fire in his mother's hair.

But Harry lives, and Sirius needs to mark that down while he knows it. A slash across the circle of time. He was never much good at Runes, but someone was, wasn't someone? Again he's forgetting. He writes with the blood from his knees and knuckles on the sackcloth itself, and rips the fragment loose, stuffing it into his ragged robe, against his skin.

--and Padfoot pisses a circle around the cell, comforted by his own thick smell, leaning away from the walls; the walls are clicking and thrumming. Words. In the walls, beating their wings to get out, beating about his ears, he hides his head under a paw--

And Sirius looks for an hour before he finds the bloodstained scrap lying at the exact center of the cell.

Harry Potter 31 7 80.

That's not Marauder code, it's not Arithmancy. His mouth goes dry. If you talk to yourself, you are mad. If he can't talk to himself, he will die. Sirius shuts his eyes against despair and when he opens them, he is looking at Harry's birthdate.

Be glad you weren't there, James says, it's worse than a bloody war, there's things a man's not meant to see. But she's all right, hastily, the grin firecracking across his face. And the baby?

He tries to stop thinking about a baby, to wrap years around the tiny body he's held just twice. Longer legs, bigger hands, James or Lily surfacing out of the doughy baby features. He's missed all the boy's birthdays. Ten, five, twenty. Where in the orbit of time is Harry Potter now, and is he alone in the dark?

Damnedest thing, Padfoot, I saw his face and fell in love.

Sirius sees Harry's face. The face of a clock, the round of a sundial. Time, turning. He holds his left arm out and, wincing, digs into the skin with the long ragged nails on his right hand. The scratches bloom white and then red. H-A-R-R-Y, Harry, and a drip of blood, to remind himself to remind himself.

Somewhere ahead in time Sirius reads the message in his skin, and somewhere further back he holds a baby up to its parents' laughter.

Padfoot sleeps, nose to tail, his body describing a circle.

[ten]

There's not a creature in the world that can live like this, in a black stone box, with little air and less light, and barely enough room to turn and spit. Tears funnel down into Hagrid's beard. The walls pinch his shoulders.

This is sorta like fate. Fifty years ago he thought sure they'd put him here, just for looking after poor Aragog. Just for being, well, just for being. Maybe they've been waiting for him all this time, keeping a cell ready, keeping after him like Fluffy on a trail of blood. It gives Hagrid a sick feeling to know there've been nights he's slept better knowing this one or that one was in Azkaban, and now his time's come, and nothing even the greatest wizard could do.

Not that he's given up. Nothing like. "Jus' waitin' fer Dumbledore," he says, trying it out, but his voice is cracked all over. He hasn't blubbered like this since they put his dad in the ground. Damn foolishness. Hagrid scrubs at his eyes with both hands, but there's no stopping 'em, the tears keep coming. They're the only free thing he's got.

There'll be killin's next.

He shouldn't've said that. It sounds too much like a ruddy prophecy, and Hagrid's spent enough time 'round centaurs to know those only bring trouble. He blows his nose on the sleeve of his coat.

Inside this cell Hagrid's been left pretty well alone. But the ceiling bears down on him like a great stone fist, and the nights here are just about the longest nights of his life. He feels like a boy in the halls of Hogwarts, twice the size of the other kids and barely keeping up, too big for Quidditch and too slow for most everything else. He's never yet learned the magic everybody else does with words.

So Tom Riddle said, "It's all over," and his prefect's badge shone in the dark. "I'm going to have to turn you in," he said, and, "I don't think you meant to kill anyone." So there was no way out.

If he had it to do over, Hagrid would break Riddle's neck, and he'd mean it. That'd be worth Azkaban. Worth the cold, the fear, and the ache in his bones. Worth a thousand years. But this way--with the monster loose in Hogwarts, and Dumbledore gone, and hardly anyone to keep an eye on wee Harry--oh, maybe he can take it for another day or two. Maybe a week.

Maybe not. He covers his face with both hands and tries to choke back another sob.

Crack. A horrible sound splits the darkness, like thunder inside the walls.

He's heard that sound before. It's the sound of a bone breaking. Of a wand snapped against a stone and dropped in pieces. It's the sound of a large woman slamming a door behind her and walking away for ever. He cries out to his mother for the first time he can remember.

"Rubeus Hagrid," a deep voice says.

All the strength goes out of his body and he's reeling toward the floor. He needs both hands to brace himself. Against his will, he looks up. The bars of his cell have parted. Another crack and they vanish altogether, and a figure steps into his cell.

Fate. Come for him at last, after fifty years.

And then Kingsley Shacklebolt's face appears in the light of his wand. It doesn't seem possible, but he's smiling. He holds out a hand.

"It's all over, Hagrid," he says, his deep voice going gentle. "You can come home."

[eleven]

Fear shines out of Cornelius Fudge's face like lantern light, slicking his forehead with sweat, standing his hair on end. This is the best thing Sirius has seen in a very long time. He stares through the tangled hair hanging in his face, teeth bared. Fudge jumps back three feet. So scared. So good.

"Well. Er. Mister Black."

Sirius can almost see himself reflected in the Minister's eyes, rags and shadows hanging from a scarecrow frame. "In the flesh," he says.

"...Yes." Fudge touches quivering fingers to his cheek. "As you may know, I've pledged--er, I have decided to--to visit Azkaban and see personally to the conditions..."

And on and on, like that. He's talking nonsense. Sirius concentrates on the pitch of the voice, circular language, audible nerves. Mostly, he concentrates on the stress of standing still. He wants badly not to be a man right now, but he needs his secret more, so he presses his hands to the bars and the protective magic that seethes around them. "What is your fucking point?"

Echoes bounces off the walls like hysterical bats. Sirius laughs. Fudge's mouth narrows to a dash, fear burning scarlet across his fat face.

"I suppose," Fudge says rapidly, "I should ask if I can do anything for you."

"I'm innocent," Sirius hears himself say, and the dullness in his voice makes him queasy. It could be a second family motto, as polished and false as toujours pur. The bars rattle in his fists.

"Indeed," Fudge squeaks, stepping to the side.

"Yeah."

Fudge heaves a sigh and starts down the corridor, his back disappearing in the dark, leaving Sirius alone with--

The two of them dead in his arms.

"Have you, have you got a Prophet or something?"

They look at one another, equally surprised by this outcry.

"I miss the crossword puzzles," Sirius explains, with all the calm he can muster.

Fudge's hand is still shaking as he fishes the rolled parchment from a pocket of his robes. "Today's, I believe." He holds it out like a bone.

He lets go and bolts as Sirius fumbles to catch his prize, the wards stinging his fingers as he pulls the paper through the bars. He looks hungrily for the date. Eighteen July--can it possibly be July, somewhere? Ice glitters in the cracks between the stones--Nineteen Hundred and Ninety-Three.

Twelve years, then. Sirius feels as if he has been falling and falling, and he has just now shattered on the ground.

It's a long time before he can bear to turn the pages. He only lets himself scan the headlines, saving the rest. He never thought he'd savor reading this much, and thinks of Moony as he skims past Quidditch scores, Ministry squabbles, a family of redheads waving to him. Weasleys. He folds the page back, looking again at the youngest boy. For no reason, except that maybe he's Harry's age, yes, he's--

Sirius notices the rat perched on the boy's elbow.

His heart stops. It stops dead.

And then it shocks him back to life, thundering around his ribcage. Sirius sucks in a long, painful breath. He smoothes the wrinkles he's crushed into the paper, and the child grins as a Death Eater nibbles a hole in his sleeve. Alive and well. On his way home. A boy just Harry's age.

"You killed James and Lily," Sirius whispers, as Wormtail darts down the boy's arm and out of the frame.

The knowledge of what he must do flares up terrible and bright behind his eyes. Twelve years' worth of banked fire, eating the darkness.

[twelve]

No wizard has ever constructed an accurate portrait of a Dementor.

Nobody has ever numbered them, or calculated their--ages? Age? Nobody writes books about their history or their biology. Nobody knows how much they know.

They move through the spirals and tunnels of the fortress, sampling souls like candies in a box. They taste each person that they touch. Maybe they're blind, and deaf, and mute, but their sense of taste is exquisite, and they are always hungry. It's a painful hunger, held in abeyance for moments at a time but never diminished.

A soul tastes bitter and tough as an old crust. Another soul is like a honeysuckle blossom torn open. Another soul is weak, the way a very old man takes his tea.

About the rounds, a single Dementor pauses to savor a dying man's recollection of the purr of a sphinx, the rich darkness of it, and each of the Dementors is warmed, in passing. They complete one circuit and begin another. Dementors do not sleep, and as far back as they count such things, they do not die.

The Ministry doesn't classify them as Beasts, as it classifies vampires, nor does it classify them as Beings, as it classifies goblins. In fact, the laws don't mention them at all. Those who think about such matters assume that, at some point in history, an agreement must have been struck that bound them to the fortress of Azkaban, and compels them to obey Ministry guidelines. The term they use for this point in history is a Muggle term: once upon a time.

The Dementors possess little more than a vestigial memory of their own--and maybe this accounts for their unrelenting hunger; maybe they forget quickly that they have fed. Still, they know that once upon a time a wizard came to them, a very powerful wizard with a voice like the hiss of blood leaving a vein. He placed certain spells about the Dementors, and about the island, and after that there was less freedom, but there was also a food supply. They chose to accept the bonds, for reasons nobody else understands.

It happened before the Wizard's Council officially designated Azkaban as a prison-place and built the fortress around them. It happened, to be precise, before the Wizard's Council existed.

They allowed the Council to persist in its illusion of power, as they allow the Ministry to persist today. After a fashion, they even find this amusing.

Most commonly, they inspire despair in the wizards that meet them, and a sensation of extreme cold. This is because cold and despair are their natural conditions. They only experience pleasure second-hand. A first flight, a mother's breast, an absolutely perfect cup of tea in a chipped china cup. They take these things from their prey because they have nothing of their own, and that is all they're ever permitted to know of joy.

That, and the kiss.

Their kiss is a hook fitted for the soft flesh of the human heart. Their kiss is a grey alleyway with no known exit. Their kiss is an act of love: to take in all of a living soul, to draw it thin between their teeth, to the point of willing surrender--ultimately there is always surrender. Their kiss is considered by the Ministry to be an inhumane punishment, and it's been a century since anyone was sentenced to it.

The Dementors are beginning to be aggrieved by this.

No wizard knows whether they think, or how, or what they want.

No wizard knows how long they're willing to wait.

[thirteen]

Sirius wakes to the light of certainty in his head, clear and pure.

His fist is curled around the Prophet. He no longer needs to look at it. The rasp of parchment under his fingertips is enough. He crumples the page into a fold of his robe and changes, and there's Padfoot, draped in shadows heavier than his fur. He cocks his head, waiting. It is midday, he guesses by the temperature, midday, midsummer. July twenty-third.

This calendar is part of him now, and so is the picture of Wormtail, scurrying around the cavity of his chest.

Peter, trusted at the very last minute, pulled into the circle by Sirius's own open hands. Fidelius. And Lily and James disappear with him into the secret.

A Dementor is moving past his cell. Padfoot rolls over, offering his gut and his throat. Soft places. It comes closer.

Peter. Listen. James is going to ask you--something. Don't tell Moony about it, okay, and don't--and don't say no.

He can't help crying out as the Dementor turns, sated. The iron bars bend like willow to let it pass.

Padfoot pulls himself up, fighting an incredible gravity. And follows. All ribs, hipbones, and mange, he slips through the gap before it closes.

Nothing happens. No alarms and no attacks. He turns tail and hurries silently down the corridor, in the opposite direction from the Dementor. How do you know this is the right way, he wonders, but he knows, his body knows. Each step is easier to take.

Lily, barely pregnant but everybody already knows, it flashes through her brilliant skin, her darkening hair, a hand on James's wrist and one on Sirius's, she touches them both as if she's taking their pulses, Sirius, you'll stand up for him at the christening, won't you?

Presently he is descending a staircase, though half the steps are rotted and crumbled. He moves faster, now, leaping over a six-step gap, afraid to look back, afraid for his life. His paws hit hard on the stones, but he runs off the pain.

James says, I think I've got it, a bell tolling midnight, and suddenly a stag is standing right there in the Astronomy tower, the Invisibility Cloak still dangling from one Antler, legs splayed and wobbling, and the rest of them laughing as if they've been catapulted into the heavens.

Padfoot moves along the wall, sidling up to the portcullis. The square gaps are just big enough for him to wiggle through, squeezing, scraping his belly. And then he is outside, running on grey sand, under a grey sky.

When he finally looks back, there's nothing but dark stone.

It cannot be this easy.

It must be this easy, says the voice in his mind.

Like the first transformation, boy into dog, dog into man. Once he knew he could do it he'd already done it. It was all in his head. You build your own Azkaban, mate, and you let yourself out.

He doesn't believe it, but he knows that hesitation here is suicide.

The sea is so cold it sizzles his paws when he stands on the waterline. He fills his lungs and takes another step, and another. Each wave is a knife, edged in salt, edged in poison, but the pain is tolerable, because it is real.

Harry squirms in his arms. Red-faced, howling, cherished and christened and alive as alive can be.

Almost thirteen now. Sirius will have to see it to believe it.

Find Harry first. Then Peter. Then--

The dog swims and swims and the water slams shut behind him.

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

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