A/N: Written for the 10 times 10 challenge, Potion Category, Dreamless Sleep potion, and for the If You Dare Challenge, #569 – dreams of darkness.
Lying Past
1. Prologue
Do you trust the past? Do you trust those memories of yours that sleep within? Or are they simply echoes you've changed too many times to count, to know the original, undeformed that lay buried within – or maybe lost forever?
Do you even know the past, to trust it? Or do those memories slumber so deeply they are beyond even yourself? Are they buried beneath blood and sweat and the chains of punishment that wrap your body and your soul? Or have you shoved them away yourself, locked them in that black box at the back of your mind because you cannot bear to look at them any longer?
You will have to look at them someday though, you know? You cannot sleep with a blank mind forever. See; it already lets some light past is scaffold, yellow dots marking the black blanket you'd throttled yourself within? It might be some time still: days, years, decades…but you'll be waking up soon, and you'll be seeing the memories, that past, that you've been fleeing from.
This was supposed to be your punishment, Sirius Black, but you turned it into a brief respite instead. Twelve years isn't enough though; that past you tried to abandon, tried to flee from, is awakening again.
But do you trust what you see in that past? The images you've changed so thoroughly, painted over again and again with blood and grief, that the original is long since lost? Or do you seek the truth: the truth you can't bring yourself to believe because it's too forgiving to you?
I suppose none of that matters in the end though; reality has a way of breaking through both dreams and dreamless sleep.