A/N: I own nothing. Just an idea that came to me after reading Order of the Phoenix
Whiskey & Despair
The last person left hours ago, and somewhere in the back of my mind, that old voice which is Remus tells me I should sleep. But I can't. Instead, I'm sitting here holding this faded photograph, watching myself laughing and joking in the kitchen of a house in Godric's Hollow with James and Remus, and wondering when the hell it was that we stopped being children.
Maybe it the day we graduated, eyes smiling, faces full of excitement as we looked around us at the world as if for the first time. We were happy then, but fearful; in the evening we drank together and the cocktail of joy and trepidation buoyed us up till we thought we could reach the stars. I remember we laughed until we cried and the next morning we felt different as we said goodbye, sometimes forever and sometimes just for a few weeks.
Or maybe it when we first joined the Order and saw around us the true destruction, sudden and real, not some newspaper cutting from a different world. Death was suddenly tangible, but when we staggered home at midnight, every nerve ending pounding with life, it seemed to me impossible that it could end. And yet I still remember the nights when we cut it too fine, and the blood and the fear haunted you as you tossed and turned in a nightmare so close to reality that it bought tears to both our eyes.
And then again, it could have been the day you named me a 'Godfather', and I wept for pure joy as I cradled my godson in my arms, vowing never to let him come to harm. I should have known it was a promise that I could never keep, but I was young and reckless, and as I looked into his eyes it seemed that anything was possible. He blinked up at me and I felt that the war had been swept away. I was wrong; the next day the battles only seemed harsher and I escaped shaken and bloodied some time before dawn, limping back to your place as the sun rose red over the houses.
But I think that perhaps it was the day you died; that fateful day, All-Hallows-Eve', when I realised too late what a fool I had been, and lost to betrayal all the family I possessed. The eerie green light still hung in the air as I pushed aside the battered door and found you laying there, limbs splayed awkwardly with your hand still reaching for your wand. You knew it was hopeless but you stayed anyway, and the wail of your child filled the air as I climbed the stairs. The sight of Lily brought me to my knees, but somehow Harry was alive against all hope, and I found my feet as blinding rage drove my hands into fists, and I swore, goddamn it I swore, that I would find the traitor and kill him.
Later, in a frozen cell in Azkaban, when the silence was as much a torture as the screams, and despair washed over me like the ocean, I relived that day for what seemed like eternity. And here, stuck in a second prison, I relive it again. It wakes me in the night, but like before there is no one here to hear my screams, no one here to comfort me, and I wonder is it possible to be a child again, to go back to that time when we were happy, when we were sane, when we were alive? I hope that one day it is.
I hope that one day I will be free to walk these streets again, to laugh with Harry as we wander through Diagon Alley, to drink in the Leaky Cauldron, to stop existing in limbo between the life I once had and the living death that has been the reality since you were killed. But such a time seems impossible as I sit here alone, eyes misty and head bowed, drowning myself slowly in whiskey and despair.