Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. All rights go to the author J.K. Rowling
To Bring You Back: Prologue
31st December 1981
I feel dark.
She cloaks me, the darkness, in chilling blankets. Sorrow overwhelms my heart and tortures my soul. The best of me has been lost, and to where, I do not know.
Two months' time has passed me by since the night I died. I have become the shell of a young woman filled with fire and dreams. I am the ghost of a lover too shrouded in shame to abandon a world of life to which I know longer belong.
I see them speaking with their self-righteous words of sympathy, and those whom dare it, regret.
Yes, I too, can hear him crying. His tears are of want and need. I no longer have anything to give.
I feel dark.
Lily
"Sirius, dear boy, where is she," asked a frantic Minerva McGonagall as she scurried from out of the fireplace. The severe, yet fatigued looking woman took a moment to survey her surroundings. Her gaze fell upon the young man to whom she was addressing with a look of mild astonishment on her otherwise stern face.
Sirius, feeling somewhat insulted at the woman's thinly veiled shock at his very near immaculate home, in obvious exception of the odd child's plaything strewn about, nodded his head towards his bedroom door. "She's holed herself up in there for weeks," he sighed, "I don't know what to do Professor, I just don't."
Minerva took a moment to appraise the young man before her. Sirius Black had always been an extremely handsome boy with a vast propensity for magic. Although, the boy she painstaking drilled rules of magic's cause and effect into was no longer there. In his stead was a tired young man that looked as if he had been to the darkest depths of Hell and shook Satan's hand. 'Perhaps he had,' she thought sadly.
Her eyes then settled on the baby he was bouncing in his arms. Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived. He smiled up at her as though all was right with the world. He had a carefree smile of a child encompassed with love. He had a smile that did not hold a tell of a lethargic mother in the next room. She envied his innocence.
"I will see what I can do for her, Sirius." She had moved to step by him to bedroom with the grace of a woman on an unpleasant mission when she felt his hand grab her arm in halt.
"No, not for her," he shook his head, "She clearly doesn't care what happens to herself. I want you to go in there and see what you can do for him." Sirius gazed down at the boy who already looked so much like his lost friend. "Harry is all either of us has left of James. She needs to pull herself out of this for him."
Having no adequate response at the ready, Minerva nodded her acquiesce. Once she was released from his grasp she made her way into the bedroom knowing all the while that she was in for a very painful ordeal.
Sirius felt as though time was at a standstill while Professor McGonagall was attempting a breakthrough with Lily; it was a particularly great feat for time considering he was minding a one and a half year old. All Sirius could focus on was damned insistent ticking of the clock, hung above the mantel.
'Has it really only been fort-five minutes,' he thought wryly turning away from wretched ticking machine.
At long last Minerva emerged from under the dark cloud that was Lily Potter. Sirius wasted no time in jumping to his feet from the sofa. He was eager to interrogate his former professor on her findings. Taking a moment to observe the aging woman he realized that she looked much worse for wear, and if Sirius did not know better he would have sworn those were unshed tears trying to escape to her lashes. She did not look to be in the mood for any more conversations. This, he understood, as Lily had become quite draining to ones psyche as of late. But, needs must and he just had to know.
"How did it go?"