Sirius loved storms in his time at Hogwarts. The roaring wind through the trees and wind crashing out on the lake were a novelty to him, unlike anything he'd experienced in Grimmauld Place. The first night he didn't know what the noise was out there, privately thought that perhaps the world was ending now that a Black had been placed in Gryffindor. But the other boys, his new friends, were unconcerned about it, so he pushed the thought from his mind and revelled in the destruction outside the window in the morning. Leaves and branches strewn across the grounds like the mess after a party.
After that first night, he loved storms.
Many nights the bangs and clatters lulled him to sleep, flashes of lightning across the ceiling and the roll of thunder in his ears. Other nights - especially in later years - with his mind all a whirl, the storms kept him awake. Those nights he'd borrow James' invisibility cloak and creeping from the tower, weave his way outside armed only with his wand and eventually the map. And then he'd scream his frustrations into the wind.
The love of storms was something else that Azkaban took away from him. Everything was so much more immediate - the spray of the roiling waves coming in through his window, the crashing of water against the rocks, the howling squalls. (The window was only a small square with bars, but it was enough for the rain to pelt in at him and at him and soak his robes through if he wasn't careful.)
There was a storm on his first night in Azkaban, when he was so out of his head that he laughed himself voiceless, that same demented laugh from when he was arrested. He coped with those storms by curling up in the corner as a dog, head buried in his paws, away from the ocean spray and the rain. It was a little easier to bear them then. And they were never enough to drown the voices in his head.
In the year he spent hiding around Hogwarts he still hated storms. That love wasn't something that could come back. But they were easier than in Azkaban, the familiarity of his surroundings offering a comfort. He spent those nights in the Shrieking Shack, sometimes with Crookshanks and sometimes without. And still he couldn't delude himself that everything would eventually work out all right. So he howled into the storms, and fought to forget.
Forgetting, it turned out, was a lot more difficult than he thought.
