Disclaimer: Not JK…
A/n: Written for the 'Those Voices The Mirror of Erised' competition. The character was 'Sirius Black'.
Sirius Black waited before the door of his best friends' house.
"Coming!" a voice was heard from within and in seconds, the door opened to a smiling Lily Evans Potter. She held little Harry with one hand. Seeing the visitor, Harry smiled his toothless grin and jumped into his godfather's arms.
"Ah, there you are little Prongsie!" he held the child at arm's length and grinned. He looked so like James already, he couldn't help but think.
"Don't call him that! It was bad enough that you got him a toy broomstick that he uses to constantly cause havoc in the house. Now don't go about teaching him your prankster ways" Lily admonished as she led Sirius into the living room.
Leaving the two alone, Lily went to the kitchen to make dinner.
"You'll be staying for dinner, right Sirius?"
"Sure, Lily. Moony told me he'd drop by sometime this evening too" he yelled back to the kitchen before he began to show Harry a few muggle tricks. Playing with Harry gave him an odd sort of happiness. He felt guilty, almost. He was supposed to be feeling afraid, sad, and anxious about the war going on outside. He should be out there protecting innocent people. But here he sat, idly playing with a child. A child who had no idea about the world that was slowly being destroyed by one wizard gone bad. But it was precisely that innocence, that naïve smile that brought him straight to the Potters' everyday.
"Where's James? Don't tell me he'll be late today too" Lily complained.
"He was just having a chat with Gideon. He should be back any minute now" Sirius replied in a comforting tone. With the death toll and number of disappearances mounting, Lily had begun to act paranoid. She had demanded that each of her friends should visit her atleast twice a week and Sirius had had no trouble at all with that.
Speaking of Lily's friends brought the one thought he had been trying to avoid. He still remembered the sight clearly, as if he was watching it now, and Sirius shook his head to clear his thoughts.
"What are you so worried about, Sirius?" Lily asked as she settled down on the couch before him with a cup of tea in her hand. He took the offered cup and drank while silently contemplating what lie would work best. Deciding to go with the funniest, he said, "I got lost again at the Ministry today" which worked, for Lily laughed.
"I swear, Lily, those pesky memos were trying to mess with my concentration. I got off on the wrong floor and there was no door where it was supposed to be. You know how adventurous I am," Lily snorted here, "so I decided to find the place myself and ended up in a room with no doors, no windows and no nothing"
Lily kept laughing. "What else was there in the room?"
"Just a plain old mirror" he replied, though the mirror had been anything but plain.
"Why do you reckon you get lost so much?" Lily asked, curious. He had never had a problem with finding his direction at school.
"It's not so much getting lost as being curious" Sirius contradicted her and Lily shook her head in exasperation.
"Careful Sirius, one day you just might find something disconcerting hidden behind one of those doors" Lily warned, but there was no need. He had already found one disconcerting truth about himself.
"It's just that we have so gotten used to having the map with us."
"Ah! The marauder's map! One good thing you did while at school!" Lily commented and went to open the door and another female voice was heard. A very familiar voice that made Sirius sit up so fast that Harry was startled.
"I'm already late, Lils. I'm just checking in. Giving my role call. I should be going now. Say hi to Harry and Jamie for me" the voice floated away and Lily returned.
"Mary?"
"Yeah! She's late for her Order shift. What's taking James so long?" Lily wondered but it fell on deaf ears for Sirius was living back his memories. A memory of when he had got lost in the ministry and found the mirror of Erised.
"Oops! Sorry" Sirius apologized as he got off at the fourth (or what he thought was the fourth) floor of the ministry of magic. He had joined as an Auror just weeks prior and the paperwork was already killing him. The girl who he had bumped into glared at him and his eyes shifted into the pale blue orbs of Mary McDonald's.
"Watch where you go Black" she snapped and she left him standing in the middle of the corridor, stricken. He had watched where he had gone, but apparently, that hadn't worked out so well and he had gotten lost. He was walking along a deserted corridor when he saw a door that was labeled 'the Deputy Head' and Sirius heaved a relieved sigh. It hadn't even occurred to him that the room of the Deputy Head wouldn't be so isolated.
The room was dark and Sirius' anxiety increased. He lighted his wand and in response, the room glowed with a light that seemed to have no visible source. He was blinded temporarily and let loose his hold on the door which shut silently behind him. Sirius looked around and found that the room was empty. No, not empty; mostly empty, except for a tall object in its middle, which was covered with a satin drape of pale cream. The wrap in itself indicated the value of the object inside and Sirius forgot the reason for his entering the room for a minute. This surely wasn't the Deputy Head's room. He wanted to leave immediately and turned to do so but found, to his alarm, that there was no door behind him. Only solid wall that reflected the mysterious pearly light. Or may be the light emanated from the walls?
Sirius spent a whole five minutes trying to find a hidden door in the room. Desolate, he sat down on the floor, wondering how long it would be until someone would find him. James would surely start searching for him within a few hours but who would know where he was? Except…but it was no use hoping that Mary McDonald would help him. She loathed his very existence. And he couldn't truthfully say that he returned her feelings. He hadn't seen her after graduation and when he had heard her voice suddenly, it had brought back all the memories. Memories of how he had been foolish enough to let her go. Mary McDoanld was perfect, he realized that now. But he had hurt her in the past. Only he could fall in love with the girl he had dumped mercilessly a year ago, Sirius thought with a wry chuckle. But it had been too late to make amends. The thing was, she was too strong willed to accept anything less than a heart felt apology, something he wasn't willing to give.
Bored, Sirius decided to spend his time observing the mysterious object. What else was there to do, anyway? Thinking so, he stood up and walked to the center of the room. He had been right, the material was silky beneath his hands and he pulled it away. He found that he was staring at the back of a full length mirror. Walking around, he looked at the ornate designs and engravings on it. The mirror was beautiful, certainly, and antique. He had seen enough ancient objects at his home to know one when he saw it. And this one must be several hundred years old, if not a thousand. There were a few letters on the mirror which he couldn't make sense of. May be it was a different form of writing. Sirius ran his hands along the edges, noticing the detailed decorations on the gild.
He didn't bother to look in the mirror. He had seen his face enough times to have it memorized. He knew some people who stood for hours on end in front of a mirror and frankly, they amused him. Did they think they'd forget their own faces if they didn't look at it continuously?
But when he glanced accidentally at the image, he blanched and his hands immediately let go of the frame. Shaking his head to dispel what was no doubt a trick of the light, Sirius walked to the front of the mirror. And stared shell shocked.
The reflection on the mirror wasn't his face. It was a figure that resembled…his father? Why on hell was he seeing his long dead father in a damn mirror? May be this mirror had been a dark artifact ceased from the Black family and his father had come back to ask him to reclaim it. But, wait…was his father smiling? In the ten or so years Sirius had lived with his father, he had never once smiled, not even a twitch of the lips. So, it was a surprise to him that the mirror-father was smiling so brightly. Did death change people so much? The image was clearing up and Sirius noticed that something was off. His father had never had a scar over his right eyebrow. He had that from one of his escapades with Moony. A disastrous doubt crept up in Sirius' mind. Had this room suddenly made him age and was the mirror just another ordinary one?
But that doubt soon cleared when he placed a hand on his cheek and the image remained still. The image wasn't him, but why then did it show him? An older version, nonetheless. May be the mirror showed the future, or something?
Curious, Sirius looked intently at the mirror. There was a movement from the back of the mirror and the small figure of a child, a boy, appeared. The child was sinfully beautiful, with raven black hair and grey blue eyes that somehow seemed familiar and shone like a lantern. The child was smiling widely and it was echoed on the face of the man in the mirror as he lifted the child into his arms. It was like watching a scene from one of the sappy movies that Lily had once dragged him and James to. As he stood before the mirror, there was another disturbance. The mirror stilled. There was another commotion behind it, almost as if the image was hesitant. Sirius chuckled to himself at the thoughts he was having. But his amusement was cut short when he saw the figure that appeared now.
It was Mary. Sirius looked behind him to make sure that she wasn't standing behind him by a chance of fate. When he turned back to the mirror, she was at the front, her black hair hanging to her waist, her face glowing and smiling brightly like the rest of the people in the image. Sirius rubbed his eyes to make sure it wasn't some hallucination. He touched the frame of the mirror once again to make sure it wasn't a mirage. The image stayed put and the cold gild of the mirror was solid.
What was he witnessing? Was this his future? He felt an unexplained happiness rise in him. He did not even think about escaping from the room. He'd have been quite happy to stay watching the reflection forever but a door appeared in front of him suddenly and opened with a thud.
"Now that you've found him James, I've got to leave" he heard her voice exclaim and stood up abruptly. He was only able to catch the strands of her raven hair as she walked away. James was standing at the doorstep and Sirius walked casually to him.
"How did you get stuck here?" James asked with a raised eyebrow.
"The door disappeared as soon as I entered it" Sirius said and proceeded to explain the bizarre mirror he had seen, excepting the part about what he had seen.
"You saw the mirror of Erised, Padfoot! Gee, one would think you'd know it by sight from the number of times you've tried to find it at school" he exclaimed and they walked back to find the room where Sirius had spotted the mirror. All they found there was the sheet that had covered the mirror. James had been dejected that he hadn't been able to catch a glimpse but Sirius had been too preoccupied to listen to him properly. Was that his heart's true desire?
For a long while, Sirius had wanted to take a look at the mirror of Erised because he had been sure of what he'd see; his family, whole, united and happy.
But the morning's events had made Sirius realize that his desires and indeed his own character, had changed. He had finally come to terms with the fact that his family was lost to him forever. There was no more hope for a reunion. But one thing hadn't changed and that had been his longing for a loving family. A family in which he'd be the doting father, rather than the desperate son. It had shaken him to the core and he had gone about his work absently for the rest of the day and had come back to Godric's Hollow on instinct. The memory faded with time but his desires, as the mirror had shown him, hadn't.
And when, a few months later, he had gathered the courage to make things right with Mary, he had apparated to the sight of a burnt down house, where her once pristine home had stood. Murdered, by Bellatrix black and a few other Death Eaters. Having lost the one person who had managed to snatch his heart, he had struggled to save the lives of the rest of them and had, as usual, failed dismally. It had been that guilt that had plagued him as he had rotted behind the prison bars at Azkaban. And it had been the vision of her in the mirror that had prevented him from slipping into insanity. Hot and Cold, Happiness and Sorrow, Love and Hate; the emotions had left him reeling and had made him weak when he had managed to escape.
"Is this the mirror of Erised?" Molly asked as she looked deeply into it. She seemed happy as she turned around.
"Yes, Molly. Dumbledore moved it here from the castle"
"Beautiful isn't it?"
"Yes. She certainly is" Sirius whispered as he stared at the sky blue eyes that had haunted his days and dreams for the past fifteen years. He had changed, but this time, his heart hadn't.
A/n: Review!