James would smile at him with all the sadness of a receding seashore. There would be the sound of waves crashing beneath a high cliff.
"Is everything all right now?" he would ask, and Sirius would say yes without even needing to think about it.
He dreams of seeing James's dead body in a familiar-unfamiliar destroyed hallway, and his heart stops.
"Wake up," he shouts at James's bed. "Prongs! Wake up!"
"What?" yells James, alarmed. The red curtains of James's four-poster fly apart, and brown, thank Merlin, brown eyes meet his. "Did Peter set off a fire again?" ("No," Peter says from his bed. "I did not, thank you.")
Sirius subsides. "No, I was… nothing."
"What a way to start the morning, Sirius, honestly," James moans, rubbing his eyes. "And it's a Saturday to boot. You'd better pay me back for this."
"Yeah… yeah, sure," mumbles Sirius, unable to take his eyes off James. He blinks and it's Harry.
"Sirius," Harry's saying urgently, shaking his shoulders. "Sirius, are you all right?"
It is twenty years later and all Sirius knows now is grief and a bottomless ache and regret. "I'm… fine. Sorry. I was dreaming, I think."
"You were screaming," says Harry, disturbed. "You were screaming Dad's name over and over, telling him to wake up."
"Shouldn't you be at school?" asks Sirius, confused. Harry looks worried.
"I'm here for Christmas," he replies. "Mr Weasley's discharged, remember? From St Mungo's? Sirius, are you really okay?"
Sirius pulls himself up and doesn't stagger. "Yeah, fine. Shall we put up the Christmas decorations, then? Where are Ron and Hermione?"
He had silently encouraged James as James had gone to ask Lily out for the umpteenth time, and silently commiserated with him when she had turned away from him with a disgusted look and not so much as one spoken word.
"Date me instead, Padfoot," James had said, too many stars in his eyes, "Kiss me and fuck me and do all the things she'll never do with me."
Sirius had held on tightly to James's hand with a choked throat. Later, he had kissed James in their dormitory after Remus and Peter had begun snoring, and James had put his tongue in Sirius's mouth and pushed him onto his bed.
James's son kisses like James did, with the same restraint and careful worry and love brought forth from some deep, endless chasm.
"Stop," Sirius shouts, pushing a twenty-one-year-old boy with the same height as James and the same black hair away from him and feeling cold wind rush between their bodies and into his eyes and ears and raising goosebumps all over his arms and sending chills up his spine. "This isn't right! This will never be right!"
"But it is right," the boy in front of him says helplessly. "It's always been right."
They are on the edge of a cliff. The twenty-one-year-old boy isn't James's son. It's not Harry. Sirius will not know what Harry looks like past fifteen for a long time. It's James, and James looks as handsome as he had at his wedding and Sirius is dead.
He jumps off the cliff and somehow James pulls him back and kisses him again. The benefit of being dead is, apparently, this.
When he washes his hair for the first time in Grimmauld Place after thirteen years, the water that comes out of the showerhead at first is brown and muddy and dirty.
After he's done showering, he goes to his cruel mother's portrait and provokes it, and sits there, right in front of her, listening to her unending vile insults, shouted at him even though the Mrs Black of the portrait knows he is not even ten feet away. Kreacher walks by, but neither acknowledge the other.
The Gryffindor decorations in his room are old and faded. Sirius does not remember how or why he'd put a Permanent Sticking Charm on them. When he isn't listening to his mother lament giving birth to him, he sits in his room watching a photographic remnant of an old, forgotten life hang on a wall and collect dust.
When he's with James, the skies are always blue.
He jerks awake. Harry's green eyes stare back at him. "Are you feeling better?"
Buckbeak nudges him with his beak from behind. Harry and Sirius are both resting against Buckbeak's wing.
"Have you been eating properly?" Harry asks, expecting a lie in return. But Sirius shakes his head. "I don't think so," he replies. "Have you?"
"Yeah," Harry says. He doesn't speak further.
"I gave you to Hagrid that night," Sirius says.
"I understand," Harry says, "you wanted to stay by my dad."
Remus would find him in the place he and James live in. Remus would hug him and cry into his shoulder and apologise for his dusty robes, he'd been fighting in a wrecked castle.
"Is everything all right now?" he would ask, and Sirius would say yes without even needing to think about it.
Remus and James would look at each other and Sirius would see the torment of leaving behind a child to suffer without parents in the world of the living shared between them. He would wonder why he never even thought about having children of his own, and realise James couldn't give birth. Something about the obviousness of that fact would carve scars into Sirius's back.
"Wake up!"
"Wake up, James!"
"Prongs!"
"James! Wake up!"
"Please!"
Dead James Potter will not open his eyes and sit up and smile and say, "Sorry about that." Dead James Potter will lie there until he is buried and a beautiful funeral is held for him and his wife, but Sirius will not be there to witness it because he will be falsely arrested for the murder of thirteen people and sent to a hellish prison to relive the memory of dead James Potter not waking up again and again until he sees a rat in a newspaper and finds his godson is too much like the man Sirius has loved beyond sense for most of his pathetic, meaningless life.
Lily searches for him in Hogwarts, and finds him at the parapet of the Astronomy Tower. "You know why I can't say yes to James," she says, tone pleading. "He only thinks he loves me."
Sirius says, "There is no way you know what's going on in his head, Evans."
Wind whistles past them. Lily's hair lifts in it and Sirius catches its sweet smell.
"What makes you think you know what he thinks about, then?"
Sirius shrugs. "I know I don't know sometimes. Do you?"
"I love him," she says, and it's almost an apology.
"It's all right," he responds. "I'll still fight for him."
That cheers Lily up.
The best man and the bridegroom kiss desperately in a small hidden alcove hours before the bride enters the chapel. James says, "But I will love you forever," and keeps his promise.
Sirius chances on James shaving in the bathroom, and snugly draws his arms around his waist. "You should've left the stubble on, James, you looked so ravishing." He raises his eyes to the mirror.
Harry is crying.
"Nice one, James!"
Death is a cool blanket under his sweaty neck on a hot summer's day.
"Will you be godfather?" James had asked.
Sirius had said, "I'd be a terrible role model."
"That's okay," James had replied, sneaking Sirius's hand into his own. "My child would know, and would understand."
There have been too many unspoken apologies and admissions of guilt in the air around Sirius.
"Yeah, I'll be godfather… I wish," Sirius had said then, fingers tightening around James's. "I wish…"
Tears had rushed down James's face but tears do not heal anything.
It does not matter in the end. He wonders what curse the red light brought with it, that his despicable cousin looks so triumphant. He catches Harry's stricken face and perhaps the hush that falls around him; he has an inkling of what is about to happen but he is leaning backwards and when he falls to the ground and gets up he is on a cliff and he sees a sunny blue sky and a laughing twenty-one-year-old boy rushing to kiss him. Decades of sorrow melt away, and
and when he opens his eyes, he is signing a Hogsmeade permission letter on behalf of a man who became dust and bones much too soon.