Haunted Memories

Team: Wasps

Position: Keeper

Prompt: "Well, as long as we're digging up the past, we may as well dig up your mother."

Word count: 2741

Thanks to my lovely teammates savedprincess85 and Queen Bookworm the First for beta'ing

Twelve years. He'd spent twelve years locked up in the worst place imaginable, but it had felt like an eternity at the time.

There was no way to describe Azkaban and do justice to the sheer misery that hung over the prison like a thick fog, clinging to its walls and seeping through its floors. It was the kind of anguish that clawed at your throat and settled like lead in the pit of your stomach; paralysing fear that ate at you from the inside out and tore at your mind until there was nothing left. Most of the people imprisoned there went mad after a few years if that was any indication of how thoroughly awful it was.

Sirius had managed to avoid the madness… mostly, but you can't spend twelve years surrounded by Dementors sucking on your soul and remain intact. He may have been one of the sanest people in Azkaban, but as soon as he'd gotten out, the extensive damage to his psyche had become painfully obvious.

It wasn't just nightmares and flinching away when anyone got too close, those he was used to. In the household he'd grown up in, how could he not be? If that were all that Azkaban had done to him, he'd have kicked back and declared that he'd gotten off easy, but it wasn't.

For those of you who don't know or need a refresher course: Dementors are the worst monsters out there. These things feed off of happiness and revel in despair. They have the ability to drain every ounce of hope and peace from the human soul, leaving behind only darkness and decay. If you ever come across one, either make sure you've got a strong enough Patronus or run because these things don't respond to pleading. They don't show mercy, and they have no concept of compassion. They will feed off of you until there's nothing left; until you're nothing more than an empty shell. There's no worse fate in the universe.

Sirius had managed to escape that sordid kismet. His innocence had served as his tether, and he'd managed to keep his wits about him. But no one got out of Azkaban unscathed.

The Dementors took something from him, and he'd been spending the better part of a year trying to get it back. It hadn't been so bad right after he'd escaped because he'd had a purpose: stop Peter Pettigrew. Then he'd been on the run, and his priorities had been focused on the struggle of filling his stomach, finding shelter and keeping Harry safe. He hadn't had the time or energy to spare a thought for anything else.

Now though, he had nothing but time. He was trapped in the house he'd grown up in, the house that had always featured so heavily in his nightmares. Dumbledore had forbidden him from leaving, had said that it was too dangerous and for his own good. Sirius couldn't tell if the old professor realised the torture that he was subjecting him to. He'd like to think that Dumbledore could never be so callous, but indifference was its own kind of cruelty.

He felt like a ghost wandering these decrepit halls, like someone who belonged to a past long forgotten… like someone who was never meant to be. He'd always felt like an outsider in Number 12 Grimmauld Place, but never like this. When he was young, it had felt like he was the only person there that was truly living. Now his role had been reversed, and in a way, it made his new prison worse than Azkaban. At least in Azkaban, he'd served a purpose, ghastly as it had been. Here, he was useless. He may as well have been a ghost.

Several floors down, a loud knock on the door woke the portrait of his mother who started doing her best impression of a banshee. He ought to go down and help shut her up, he thought, but he didn't feel like facing anyone in his current state of despondency.

He hated pity, always had. It made him feel weak and vulnerable. It made him think he'd never be able to dig himself out of the pit he'd been buried in. The members of the Order were good people intent on stopping the spread of evil, and Sirius knew that their sympathy for his plight was not designed to debase him. Their compassion was meant as a kindness, but he found it grating, nonetheless.

Buckbeak was all the company he needed. They had a surprising amount in common. Both he and the hippogriff were wanted criminals, although Buckbeak's great escape hadn't made the front page of every wizarding newspaper in the UK; they would both have preferred to be outdoors, anywhere but here, and they both enjoyed ruining his parents' old room.

The master bedroom of Number 12 Grimmauld Place had once been a grand room, but age and neglect had taken their toll, and when Sirius had seen it again after so many years, he'd barely recognised it. The canopy of the bed had collapsed in on itself, amassing dust and mildew as the rats and Doxies made their home in the rotting folds. Mould covered one corner of the bedroom where water had leaked down from an upstairs bathroom. The floorboard in that area was warped and water clogged, groaning and creaking even when everything else was still. His mother's cloying perfume had long since faded away, and the air hung heavy with the smell of damp and decay. A room that had once belonged in a palace was now only fit to house escaped convicts.

If only his family were alive to see what the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black had become. It would almost be worth having them around to see the looks on their faces.

A sharp knock drew his attention away from his ruminating as the door creaked open. There was only one other person who ever came into this room, the only one with the stomach to face the smell and the mess and Sirius himself. Everyone else was content to let Sirius do his own thing and not disturb him when he chose to hide away, but not Remus.

Remus came in without invitation nor hesitation, stepping over the threshold completely self-assured in his own welcome, not so much as pausing at the sight of every broken and damaged thing laid out before him.

The faint and flickering light from the gas fixtures on the walls threw shadows over Remus's lined face, stretching and distorting his scars and darkening his eyes. He might have looked frightening if not for the tweed cardigan with its patched elbows and frayed sleeves.

That night in the Shrieking Shack, Sirius had barely recognised his old friend, not because of his new scars or greying hair, not even because of that questionable moustache he'd been sporting. He hadn't recognised Remus because he'd barely remembered him.

That was the worst side effect of extended exposure to Dementors: the holes they left in their victims' mind. They stole every happy thought and memory a person had and seldom left anything behind. The first thing Sirius had done after escaping was to scavenge around for an old newspaper with Lily and James's photo because, although he could remember their names and the guilt and sorrow he felt over their deaths, he could no longer picture their faces, and that had torn at his heart more than he cared to bare.

Bits and pieces of his happy memories had started to return to him since then, but it was still too little, and the effort it took to jog even those small fragments made Sirius's head pound with fatigue and frustration.

Since arriving at Grimmauld Place, he'd started remembering more and more thanks to Remus.

Whenever Remus came by, he would sit with Sirius and tell him stories of their time at Hogwarts. Some clicked, others didn't, but even when they didn't, Sirius still enjoyed listening to them. He didn't recognise himself in the boy from those tales, despite sharing his name. That boy was spirited and excited about life and, most importantly, he was happy, always smiling, always laughing, filled with so much joy that he could never contain it. Sirius wasn't that boy anymore, not even close. He was a shell of whom he'd once been, but he held out hope that Remus's stories might fill enough of the gaps left by Azkaban that he might at least become recognisable as that boy once again.

"Mundungus still hasn't learned not to knock on the front door," said Remus, easing over the debris scattered on the floor to open a window. He wasn't so immune to the smell after all.

"I think he does it on purpose," said Sirius. Even his voice no longer sounded the same. There was a rough edge left over from years of disuse that made every word sound like a growl. He hated it. "He's not nearly as dumb as he pretends to be."

"Tell that to Molly. She's in the kitchen giving him a firm telling off as we speak."

"Maybe he gets off on it." It was something the old Sirius would have said. He could tell by the way Remus's eyes snapped over to his as though Sirius had suddenly reminded him of someone.

Remus was quick to wipe the look from his face, but Sirius had already seen it, and it made him want to throw something, to watch it shatter into a million pieces as it hit the wall and crumbled to the floor. He wanted to stomp and shout, to throw a temper tantrum that would shake this entire godforsaken house, anything to keep that forlorn expression from breaking him any further.

This scraggly, beautiful man was the only friend he had left. He was someone that Sirius had once known better than anyone, someone he had once loved more than he'd ever loved himself, but the years had created a rift between them. They were no longer the boys they'd once been, and that was something Remus couldn't seem to get over. Sirius was competing with his own ghost for his friend's affection, and he was losing.

"We're having a meeting. Downstairs," Remus said, rather too quickly. He'd never been good at dealing with awkward situations. "Not everyone, just Molly, Arthur, Mundungus, Tonks and Kingsley."

"Not interested," he muttered. He sounded like a petulant child; he probably looked like one too with his scowl and hunched shoulders, but he didn't care. The universe obviously didn't want him to be happy, so why should he pretend to be?

Remus was over by the vanity, riffling through its drawers. There was so much dust covering it that the splintering cracks that marred the mirror's surface were almost entirely concealed, and the peeling paint was barely noticeable. Sirius's mother had loved that thing. She'd spent more time sitting in front of it than she had anywhere else in the house. First thing in the morning, Sirius was going to turn it into firewood.

"Is this your mother?"

Sirius managed to stop glaring at the piece of furniture long enough to notice that Remus was holding a yellowed photograph in his hands. He edged closer to get a better look, kicking aside the plaster that had fallen from the walls and ceiling. It was his mother.

The picture had been taken at Hogwarts next to the Great Lake, and his mother was smiling. He'd never seen her smile before, at least not that he could remember. She looked so happy in the photo, her eyes lighting up as the wind played with her hair, that he couldn't correlate this girl with the woman who'd made his early years miserable. Surely they couldn't be the same person.

"You look like her." Remus's voice was soft, and his eyes were sad. He didn't look at Sirius as he spoke, and Sirius knew that his friend wasn't talking about him, not really. He was talking about a boy whose smile had been just as bright as the girl's in the photograph.

Sirius had never felt close to his mother, but he did now because somewhere between childhood and adulthood, they'd both lost their bright-eyed vitality and had become people that their younger selves wouldn't recognise. He knew what had forced the change on him, but he didn't know what had done it to her. In fact, beyond the most basic details, he knew nothing about the woman who had brought him into this world.

"Do you remember when James dared you to skinny-dip in the lake right after winter break?" asked Remus, starting in on one of his stories, but it wasn't one that Sirius wanted to hear right now.

He took the photograph from Remus's hand and flipped it over. There was a date inscribed there in neat handwriting; it may have been his mother's, it may not, he didn't know. June 1934, his mother would have been twelve years old, he knew that much.

"Sirius?"

Remus's look of concern was one that he was all too familiar with, and the memories it brought to the surface were almost enough to make Sirius forget all about Walburga Black.

He remembered that Remus was the first person he'd ever told about his life at home, the bad parts, the ones that James and Peter had struggled to understand because their families were perfect and normal and happy. Remus had understood though, and he'd been the first person to tell Sirius that he deserved better. Sirius had sobbed throughout that entire conversation, and the memory nearly brought him to tears all over again. Once he'd done spilling his guts, he'd asked Remus about his family, and Remus had spent the better part of two hours talking about his mum. He'd briefly mentioned his dad and hadn't spoken at all about his lycanthropy – he hadn't been ready for that yet – but the light in his eyes when he'd talked about his mum had been something to behold. He hadn't been jealous back then, but he was now.

He turned the picture back over and grazed a fingertip over his mother's bright smile. His voice was scarcely above a whisper when he said, "I barely know anything about her."

The look Remus gave him was long and penetrating, and Sirius thought he might have made a mistake. Would the old Sirius not have said that? Should he have let Remus carry on with his story about skinny-dipping in the Great Lake in the middle of winter?

He was about to change the subject when Remus's features softened, and a gentle smile touched his lips.

"Well," Remus said smoothly, "as long as we're digging up the past, we may as well dig up your mother."

It wasn't easy. Walburga Black hadn't been the type of woman to keep a diary, and if she had as a girl it was long gone by now, but they did find small clues that hinted to a bigger picture. They discovered more photos in the vanity of a smiling girl often surrounded by friends, and an extensive collection of pictures of Sirius and Regulus from when they were young scattered all over the house, hidden away in draws and boxes. A porcelain doll which must once have been beautiful with an inscription carved into the sole of its shoe that read 'To Walburga, happy birthday, love Emma' had been stored in a shoebox above a wardrobe, along with a rather dreadful hand-knitted baby blanket with the Canis Major constellation sewn in the middle.

Sirius had a sneaking suspicion that the blanket had been his mother's handy work, and he clutched it to his chest hoping that it would give him a clearer sense of who she'd been as a person.

The world was seldom black and white. There were many awful things that could be said about Walburga Black, things that might keep the more faint-hearted up at night, but there was more to her than that, there had to be.

Sirius hadn't found out what had turned his mother into the woman she'd become, and chances were that he never would. But as he gripped the blanket that she'd made for him, he knew that she'd had more depth than he'd ever given her credit for.