Falling

Falling

It seemed to take Sirius an age to fall--

They say your life flashes before your eyes at the moment of your death. Sirius sees his by falls of light and shadow.

Blocked behind harsh grey walls, the forbidding stone embrace of his mother's eyes, the white coldness of his father's smile; for eleven years he remembers "Toujours Pur" but cannot remember pure colour until he reads the iridescent script of his Hogwarts letter.

Sirius breathes in the emerald writing that leaps off the page with its promise of life in the list of staid schoolbooks; the crimson of the Hogwarts Express is his heart beating in time to the swish of the wheels. Until the Sorting leads to the unexpected red and gold of friendship; a kaleidoscope of colour follows--purple, orange and blue, explosions and hexes and laughter with James joined at the hip, Remus and Peter racing close behind, for seven years the brightest star shines in searing glory.

Yet oddly the best, the happiest, times of his life in Hogwarts are painted not by colour but by black and white: hiding under the silver shimmers of cloaks; running through pitch of night to howl at white moons; (were)wolf and rat and stag--Moony, Wormtail and Prongs--in monochrome relief.

Achromatic defines the worst time of his life there too; the chiaroscuro of a first betrayal, unintended perhaps, but slicing through light all the same; the star of friendship dwindles, almost burns out, then rekindles, but never to its former intensity; and something else is kindled too, at the edge, suspicion, distrust. Then Hogwarts blends into the distance of memory; the brilliant colours fade, wash out and merge to rust, while it is in this space between that Sirius learns the colours of life are twisted to become those of death.

Love too, is delimited not by colour so much as by brilliance, beginning in the utter golden brightness of a baby's smile; the burnished flutter of tiny fingertips on his cheek, light puffs of milky sleepy breath against his chest. Trusting innocence forever linking James' child in his arms to the man he will become; unknowingly cradled within it, love's ultimate sacrifice in the blackness of an instant. As he falls he remembers the twelve endless years, more forbidding stone with only the grey fluttering fingertips of Dementors on his cheek, no warmth and only one thought providing light against the shadows--the thought of innocence, harsh and white, enough to see by, enough to sustain. When he escapes he brings its purity, enough to convince those who need it, and white transforms to colour and burns again--forgiveness, reunion, Harry so much like James now, and the green of Lily's eyes.

Another year and Voldemort is re-born; so too the Order rises from the ashes, but Sirius is relegated to the shadow, back in the clutches of his ancestral home, forbidden to shine. Harry is only an occasional bright spot illuminating months of drear sameness. Even finding love again in this most loveless of places, love after a fashion, cannot fully illuminate this darkness; love is no longer brilliant, faded to sepia and no longer trusting, but it still resides in the brush of Remus' fingertips on his cheek. Sometimes it flares to something approaching a glow--and this is what he settles for, these brief kindlings in the twilight, almost reflecting in a touch.

Tonight is the last time Sirius fully shines; instinctively he knows this is what he was born to do--protector to the end, dodging and mocking the shots of boiling red and bitter green, burning freely and no longer diffused, but focused to a single laser-point of life. Until the last ruby jet that catches him square in the chest--and as the Veil reaches for him in its final, implacable embrace, Sirius learns the true definition of Black is the total absence of colour, of light, as the star once more brilliant than the sun fades, then disappears.