The pain was excruciating. The darkness pressed down, weighing a ton, and crushing his bones to powder. He was falling, falling, and the light above him was fading, but yet the veil still fluttered in front of his nose…

He reached out to grab it. He felt, he knew, that there was not much time left. If he could only grab the veil, that which separated the living from the dead, the pain would stop.

It was a strange sensation, to be so conscious of everything, to know what was going to happen, and at the same time feel incredibly detached from his body, which knew nothing.

“There were thirty drunk teenagers at that party last night, me included. But, Padfoot mate, none of them managed to make more of an idiot out of themselves than you!” Remus wasn’t mad as much as he just needed answers.

Nodding to Peter again, Sirius picked James up carefully into his arms, and with the great difficulty and stooped silhouette of a very old man, made his way slowly into the shadows.

Sirius sighed, almost resigned to another trip back into the past. He was a seasoned traveler now. He was a martyr.

“I have not yet lost everything,” he told Merlin a split second before he was yanked away once more.

          There was one thing Merlin was wrong about, though, Sirius thought to himself with a heavy heart. He had said that cathartic experiences were preferable to eons of solitude, but he didn’t know that a day of silence, invisibility was the same.

Weeping softly, Remus clutched him firmly against doing more damage and continued to talk to him, as much for his own benefit as Sirius’s. Now that he held him, Remus knew that Sirius physically did exist, that he could be touched, that he was not merely an apparition borne of his own sick hope or insanity.