Author's note: Well, I felt inspirated to write today and this little beauty is the product of it. A short one shot, it recounts what may have happened if the death eaters had ever gotten a hold of Sirius, specifically after they had killed Sirius's father and brother. It was inspired by a friend of mine, who commented about a week ago that "locking someone in a dark room with a dead body gets to them pretty well." Well, as writing helps express one's little issues with things you can't otherwise deal with, we have a dark fanfic on our hands.
"Just a Bit of Psychological Torture"
By, Kokoro
In the precise center of the floor lied the corpse of a pale young man of eighteen years, peaceful, perhaps, but the body had been arranged mockingly into a ancient funereal position, hands folded over the chest, a wilting lily held in its grasp. One galleon had been placed over each of the boys eyes, a tribute to the wealth of his murderers. The boy wore plain black robes. Beside the boy's head, two candles had nearly burned out, in a moment, the room would be overcome with darkness.
Sirius paced the perimeter of the room, entirely unsure of what to do from there. He had been in this room for three hours. During the first hour he had tried every possible means of opening the door available to him, everything he could possibly think of, then he had started pacing. After two hours of pacing, Sirius's legs were complaining of exhaustion, but Sirius didn't care, exhaustion was better than regular, average idleness. After all, imagination killed, if you gave it the chance.
Sirius scanned the room once more, while there was still some light to do so with. It was a plain, small room, maybe 80 square feet in area and 8 ft tall. There were no windows, a single door, sealed by both magical and physical means, and a noose, dangling daringly from the ceiling near the door. A warning, Sirius supposes, as well as a form of temptation, but he swore to himself that he would rather die of dehydration. Of course, there was one other object in the room, the corpse, and Sirius's eyes drifted towards it without his consent.
Sirius shook his head and stared at the wall again. He tried to focus on anything, anything at all, except for that corpse in the middle of the room. Anything at all except the guilt of knowing that he wasn't able to save his little brother from getting Avada Kedavra'd by some idiot death eater. Perhaps the injustice of what had been done. He had never, ever done something this bad to any of the death eaters. Perhaps he had messed up, been a bit vengeful every once in a while, but he had never thrown anyone into a dark room with the corpse of—
The candle flickered and went out, cutting off Sirius's train of thought. He stood in a corner of the room and angrily shouted anything and everything he thought of, from curses to desperate pleas to help, to spells that stood half a chance of unlocking the door or transforming it into something much smaller, if only he could have performed wandless magic. He shouted and shouted, although he knew it was all in vain and no one was close enough to possibly listen. He shouted because it made him feel a little better, a little less helpless, a little more like he wasn't locked in a total sensory black hole.
A couple of hours later Sirius had collapsed into a sitting position, and stared blankly at the opposite wall, his head hurt from too much crying, his throat was soar from all the shouting. He began to oddly wonder about absolutely practical concerns, like what he was supposed to do in the case of needing to urinate (this was the type of need that would need to be relieved soon, he could feel it), whether he could really sleep on the ground, and ultimately where he was supposed to get water from.
Every moment from then on was absolute suffering as time and time again Sirius's hopes of salvation was dashed. He slept at one point, although he suspected it wasn't for very long. After what Sirius hopefully qualified as a mid day nap, he awoke to the pungent smell of something beginning to rot, which he could tell at this point from the more constant stench. Realizing the implications of this immediately, Sirius made another desperate attempt to get out. He nonverbally and wandlessly attempted to cast a few unlocking, destructive, or even smell preventing spells, but it was all for nought. Convinced that he was going to spend the rest of his (very short) life with his brother's rotting corpse, Sirius decided that he might as well try to make amends with the pathetic thing.
Sirius knelt at the side of the room, facing towards the center. "Hello," he said. Surprise by the raspy quality of his own voice, Sirius cleared his throat and tried again. "Hello." It was no better but it would have to do. "Regulus, I'm sorry that I haven't talked to you in a few years, well, okay, about five. Honestly, I always thought you were a good kid, you just seemed swept away in our parents dreams. Now you see where they got the both of us?" Sirius winced, the death eaters had informed him that they had just killed his father before kidnapping him. "Well, I suppose Dad wasn't quite so bad when it all came down to it. He had some good qualities, like. . . Well, at any rate, it was mostly Mom who did all the yelling."
Sirius paused, thinking about it. "Isn't that odd? Our family's been around for more than a thousand years, and carefully tracking its linage. We're inbred and hell and what kills us is a cause the family supported right up until the end? That's downright idiotic, as much as serves Mom right for being so loud and obnoxious about that pureblood shit."
He couldn't see much in the room, not that there was much to see, but he tried looking directly at where his brother's eyes were. "I guess the overall message is just that I'm sorry, I messed up too, I wish I would have gotten to know you more. Before we were both locked up in this place."
Sirius found that he didn't really have much more to say, and he felt absolutely ridiculous for even attempting to talk to the corpse. Instead he settled back into the corner and attempted to convince himself that he would live through this, getting to see the child that Lily and James wanted so desperately to have, he would get married to some beautiful blonde and die at home, warm, old, and confortable. This marked first time in Sirius's life that he had honestly believed that he would like to die in bed as an old man. Most of the time he fancied himself an adventurer, and was willing to die by the wand and all that came with living for the next battle. It was just now. . .
Once again, Sirius's thoughts drifted back to water. The sparkling, clear substance that could quench the soul's thirst for as long as you lived. In his mind, water usually came in the form of a tumbling, crystalline stream, even though it was filled with all the nutrition you could possibly need. It wouldn't be too much longer, Sirius estimated, before he died of thirst. After all, he had been in this hell hole for what? Anywhere from one to fifteen days. Probably somewhere in between. How long was it supposed to be before one died of thirst? He couldn't quite remember.
Time went on. Sirius slept often. The rest of the time his mind got carried away with itself, he began imagining great swamp monsters, horrid creatures with axes that smelled like, admittedly, rotting corpse, but that were clearly trying to break through the walls to get to him. Sirius bodies of recently salted and killed animals hanging from the ceiling. In his minds eye, tacks littered the floor, waiting for Sirius to take one wrong step. At better moments, he could taste juicy oranges in a few moments between dreaming and waking up, and for a couple of minutes his hunger would be satisfied. Assuming that he had been left to die, Sirius soon started hopefully imagining the approaching footsteps of those who would save him. He started losing the boundry between dreams and reality, which is why, when the footsteps approaching the door were finally real, he failed to react at all and remained crumpled in his little corner, waiting for his own demise.
The door creaked open, letting in a blinding amount of light. Whoever was at the door paused at the doorway, and eventually took a step back instead of forward. "You can leave now," it instructed. There was a small, clattering noise of something being dropped onto the ground, the traditional banging sound of someone apparating away, and Sirius was left in silence once more.
Sirius slowly got to his feet and walked towards the door while using the wall for support. He stepped outside of the room and looked down. He immediately identified the object on the ground as his wand and carefully picked it up, looking at it without much comprehension. After a couple of minutes he apparated back to his house, thankfully not splicing himself in the process. It was only later that night, after a large glass of water (or six) and some quality food that he was finally able to place the voice of the man that had saved him. The name Severus Snape floated indistinctly through his mind and it all clicked together.
Sirius tried his hardest to forget about the three days he had spent dying in a dark room, but still, when his best friend asked him to be a secret keeper, Sirius knew that he couldn't do it. The death eaters knew torture, and Sirius had already broken down under it. The death eaters, though, found this one pretty quickly, and it was definitely one of the top four memories that Sirius couldn't stop thinking about during his stay in Azkaban, even in canine form.