A/N: Hi. I'm still alive, if anyone who was reading my Percy fic was wondering. Standard disclaimers apply- not mine, and if they were Harry would've kicked it facing Quirrel. Or would never have made it to Hogwarts in the first place. Just kidding, Harry fans.

Is it true what they say about life when you're dead?

Cause I'm going away.

Is it true what they say about curtains that close when you're going away?

Beta Band

life when you're dead…

There was an extended period in which there was nothing at all.

There was something that was vitally important, and he…

There was…

There was some kind of light. There was no waking, no slow coming-to. There was himself, as far as he could tell, standing in… what…

"What the hell is this place?" He looked around, or tried to. As far as he could see, there was nothing of any apparent character at all. Turning around and around to look produced no result. He was standing. At least empty blackness, or whiteness, hell, he could take that… But he was clearly standing on something, and there was… It he concentrated too hard it fought him, becoming flatter and flatter until he could almost believe he'd somehow tumbled into a painting. But that was certainly imposs- the silence was crushing, he was panicking, he ran… He couldn't run, because the place refused to move around him… He screamed…

"Never do you any good." The voice sent a shock through him with such electric force that he would have fallen, if the damned place would cooperate. Instinctively he turned, and though the world stayed the same a gaunt figure slid into his view. He stared.

The man was old, and young, and nothing at all. He was perhaps forty, but the weight of some unseen force gave him the haunted look of the immortals- doomed to a life of endless repetition… He shifted…

Sirius finally found a voice, presumably his, and launched his questions at the figure. "Where the hell am I? What is this place? Why can't I move? Who the fuck are you, why are you so damn… whatever you are! What…" He stopped. The man looked at him levelly, his eyes blank. Sirius knew that expression- he'd seen it too many times in Azkaban, too many times lurking ominously at the edge of his own reflection. The man was hopelessly internalized, mad beyond all reach. But he'd spoken to him first… "Why?"

"Never do you any good. It will never do you any good. It will Never." The man lowered his eyes, and slid away into the distance. It took Sirius a moment to realize that it was because he was running away.

Or not.

It was a dayweekdecade or something like… there were others here… he knew where he was, in theory. He was behind a curtain. The shit part of that was that it did not appear to have another side. He was trapped here, and Harry was out there with Voldemort… a name which lost its terror here… he'd been gone for a centuryminutenanosecond and he had to get back… had to escape… he'd escaped worse, maybe worse, a thousand times better because there he could see how to escape… He screamed. He never stopped screaming.

The girl could not have been any more than twenty, by the look of her, despite the float of shifting overlay that affected everyone whom he'd found in this strange place. She sounded young, certainly, although Sirius felt that he was losing his capacity to judge anything anymore. It was almost as bad as Azkaban… it was worse than… it was prison… it was insanity…and yet she'd spoken to him, which none of the others he'd encountered would deign to do… she'd looked at him with a sort of hope, with fear, with curiosity. He was still screaming at terror, unbearable confinement, injustice.

Sirius could not describe her, even to himself. She was colourless- in greyscale, transparent, a void of blackness… you can only see the planets, sometimes, when you look slightly to the left… but she was speaking and he stopped screaming, even in his head, tried to listen…

"What did you do to end up here?"

Hoarsely. "I fell through the curtain. Am I dead?"

She laughed, or gave the impression that she would have laughed, or didn't laugh at all. "No. You're not-dead. We do not die here. We cannot- at least, those who have tried cannot. Or perhaps they have. Some just disappear. Maybe they don't stop walking. But you did not answer me. Why are you here?"

"What.. where is here? I don't know…"

"Prison. It was an accident, then?"

"Prison? I've been in prison… it is not like… it is not this."

"Azkaban, yes? There is room there? There was a time when there was not. The Dark Lord fell. The prisons were overrun with Death Eaters, Supporters, Innocents. So they made this."

"And this is?"

"Prison."

"But what… why? It doesn't make sense… the Department of Mysteries is experimenting…" The more he spoke, the more lucid his thoughts became. It occurred to him to wonder why the girl apparently had no trouble functioning in this strange place, when all others he'd met looked through him, as if he was part of the unchanging landscape. "Are you in charge?"

"No. I am a prisoner." She looked vaguely distracted for a moment, then refocused on him. "Why are you here? Are you going to release us?"

"I fell. Through a curtain. Fighting your 'Dark Lord,' who apparently didn't fall half hard enough. I don't know anything more than that." For a moment panic surfaced in the girl's face, and she looked at him with wild eyes…

"He is not destroyed? Oh, God… How much time has passed? Has it been so short a time?"

Sirius blinked at her, processing. She'd said she was put here because Azkaban was filled with Death Eaters. So- just after his own imprisonment. He'd had to watch countless guilty witches and wizards released on technicalities and bribes in the few months following… "About fourteen years, I'd guess." There was a war of emotions- apparent relief that time in the prison did not move so slowly after all, clear distress at being imprisoned for so long, and fear- of what? Voldemort? More time in this barren, horrible place? Fear of what she would find, could she escape?

Finally she cast her eyes downward and laughed… a shaking giggle… laughed. "Fourteen years. And he is not destroyed. And I am still here. It was for nothing, then." She looked up at him, and grinned brokenly, deranged. She gestured to the underside of her left arm, which pulled into sharp focus. A Dark Mark. "And you fell. Tragic."

"Surely someone will realize the mistake, and come get me."

"Oh, yes. They tried that. There are at least three of them here- Ministry men who came to retrieve us. One of them will talk to you, if you like. If it will reassure you."

"He can get me out?"

"No. he can tell you that nothing you do will be of any use. It will never do you any good."

"Oh. We've met." Her meaning sunk in slowly. He was trapped here, not dead, not alive, trapped more surely than he'd ever been trapped in Azkaban. No one had ever escaped... but here, the Ministry… life when you're dead. Purgatory? Limbo?

"Most people go insane, at first, and then their minds just sort of shut off. Some of us cannot do that. We just have to wait." She turned, was farther from him than she had been.

Sirius discovered that he would be crying in his distress. "I've spent so much time waiting… I can't do this… I… help me, damnit! Why? What is the purpose of this? What's your story? Talk to me, for fuck's sake!"

The girl turned and looked at him with her cold, infinitely sad grey eyes.

"You can go back to screaming now, if you would like."