A/N: For the prompt, "You stumble upon a place where the time-space continuum does not exist. A place where people could spend hundreds of years in a span of a minute, and vice versa."

Time is Not

From his lofty realm of nothingness, Sirius Black watched the world die.

He kept vigil over his loved ones through the icy midnight sea separating him from them. A breath of the void, and familiar green eyes aged with knowledge, wisdom, and love. They aged until they clouded over gray, the pallor of the inescapable reducing his life to no more than the dust of a forgotten legend.

Sirius clung to every second, to every beat of his godson's heart, as that fulfilled life slipped through his fingers faster than finely ground sand. He bore witness to a twisted and mutilated world, a place bereft of green eyes and forever-mussed dark hair, the remnants of his past life.

It was a play he had no care for, waiting for the curtain to fall, for the dying note of the world's final goodbye.

Oblivion's bliss was denied to him, the painstaking turn of the planet marching onward even as everything he knew turned alien. Magic changed, wars waged and the very continents shifted with the ever-present wear of time. Sirius could imagine his own incredulous laughter reverberating, as he waited for that quicksilver flash of time. But time wasn't an accommodating master, so while the lives of every person Sirius cherished passed in the blink of an eye, the world's downfall turned into the sluggish flow of a lazy river.

Humanity tore itself apart, rebuilt, only to repeat the process. Magic turned into something unrecognizable, leaving scars in the ground as results from battles told over generations. The world didn't truly die, but there was nothing left of what Sirius knew—and for that alone, it might as well have died.

He couldn't count the years. The passage of time was meaningless in the realm beyond the Veil, years spanning the blink of his eyes, while the turning of the planet seemed to stretch for centuries.

Innumerable ages alone had made Sirius hyper-aware of the absence of everything, making the change as sudden and violent as shattered glass.

It was searing and white-hot, a palpable hatred that seemed to poison reality. Silence was torn asunder by wails and screams of torment, by unadulterated rage and murderous intent. The dead souls of thousands of people, innocent and not, trapped in the body of one wingless angel of death.

A brilliant crimson comet, the silhouette of a person, streaked through the maw of time and space. Sirius was a leaf trembling at the end of a deadened branch, weakly grasping onto nothing. He understood the malevolence of the spirits, their well-deserved yearning for revenge, before he was pulled from the fog of the Veil.

Sirius wished he could say he was regretful he escaped the Veil on the plucked wings of a murderer. But he wasn't. He really wasn't.

There was the scent of death among the musty leaves, the sift of a desert somewhere far in the distance, and the speckles of azure through the dark green canopy of the ancient tree. Sirius took pure joy in closing his eyes, opening them again to see the branches dancing along the same breeze.

Finally, his eyes were drawn to the slip of silver cradled in the branches, the lonely angel of death. It was a wonder he didn't bash his head on one of the branches coming down.

Silver hair to his godson's jet-black, indigo eyes to piercing green. The wild violet and blue plumage only served to separate them even farther. The only similarities were in their thin frames, the pinched looks that could be found in anyone who had suffered hardship.

It didn't matter—Sirius had been denied the life he wanted for too long. He wanted the chance he never had with his godson. Maybe he was driven to insanity in that timeless place. Looking into the angel's indigo eyes, hazy and sad and angry, Sirius thought he wouldn't be alone in his madness.

"Even now," came the boy's rasping words, "fate denies the simplest pleasure of solitude as I die. . . . It is only fitting, I suppose. It is far too late . . . and I've just learned what it means to live."

The boy had a lot of words, for one who was supposedly dying.

"It's strangely beautiful, the irony," said the boy, paled from blood loss. "How it's all so bright, before it's snuffed out. . . . Just as time is slowest, before it ends."

"Are you always so melodramatic?" asked Sirius. The boy had enough energy to look annoyed, so Sirius quickly added, "What's your name?"

There was a beat of silence, a moment of hesitation.

"Kuja," said the boy. "You may have heard of me."

"Doesn't ring a bell," said Sirius. "I'm Sirius Black. You haven't heard of me."

And because Sirius wasn't nearly as dramatic as Kuja, nor prone to poetic monologue, he stooped down without another word. Magic was both a friend and an enemy. It was fresh in his mind, the years flown past in a single exhale, caused by the potent magic of the Veil. Magic flowed under his skin, thrummed in the air. If Sirius had learned anything, it was that magic was illogical. It had no meaning or restraints, so long as the wielder was the same.

Kuja was unconscious after the healing, his face cleared of emotion, doll-like in perfection. A silver-furred tail coiled around Sirius's wrist when he scooped Kuja off the ground—it took Sirius some time to drag his eyes from it.

They were two entirely different beings, not even sides to the same coin. If they were, the coin was taken and melted together on purpose. Sirius had lost all grasp of time in general. Kuja knew the unrelenting hand of time too well. Perhaps it was a fool's errand, but Sirius had no intention from watching from afar. He wouldn't take that graceful swan-dive from the realm of mortals again.

This time, Sirius would be there until the bitter end.

Time is
Too Slow for those who Wait,
Too Swift for those who Fear,
Too Long for those who Grieve,
Too Short for those who Rejoice;
But for those who Love,
Time is not.

- Henry Van Dyke