Without you, there is only darkness.
He lay, day after day... year after year.
He had only memories. Memories of when his world was bright.
The floor was cold... the air was cold... he was cold. Warmth had long since left his soul. He could melt into the floor and belong perfectly. Or twist and tumble with the ice crystals in the stormy wind.
They built this place on an island for a reason. Isolated. Alone. Forgotten.
They days are so long... and cold...and dark. In the depths of the darkness he sometimes forgot his own name.
Sometimes he wanted to.
Sometimes he wanted to be gone, to be mere ashes and dust. Sometimes he envied even the Dementors their numbness.
It would be better than this wretched in-between. The white space of nothingness was so wearying to exist within.
And re-living over and over... the moment he found out what had happened. What had happened to James and Lily... to Harry.
Even through the foggy numbness, the memory of that night could pierce him like a blade, twisting at his heart and rapidly spreading the painful venom through his system until his every cell was ablaze with agony.
He could remember it all. Every detail. At the Order headquarters the news which tore his world apart arrived quickly, and without mercy.
He had found them. He had found them.
The hard ground as he fell to his knees. Anguish. Agony. Loss.
Then numbness. Anger. He knew James had changed Secret Keeper. To him. Peter.
Vaguely he remembered giving his motorbike to Hagrid. "I won't be needing it anymore." He heard his own deadpan voice as though from a great distance.
He was drowning. But no-one could see.
The rest of that night was a blur of pain and darkness.
And when he cornered him. The anger. All of his pain channeled into anger towards his old friend.
He meant to kill him... he really would have murdered his old friend. Would he have regretted that? Sometimes he wondered, in the long, endless nights when sleep evaded him, but the nightmares clung on regardless.
And then to be framed. The glint in Peter's eyes as he diaspparated, killing all those innocent people. He knew he had won.
That night... round and round, every day. No embellishment was needed to make it his own hell.
The Dementors fed greedily off his despair, relishing in his pain.
.
Sirius lent against the cold wall, barely feeling it, and gazed out at the thin chink of sky he could see through the tiny window. The full moon.
He knew it was tonight, of course. He always knew. Each month he stared at the moon when she reached her greatest. And he counted the days until the next, thinking of his friend.
It was how he measured time. It was how he held onto his friends...It was how he stayed alive.
And now the moon was full. She flaunted herself before his weary eyes, mocking him for the pain his friend was enduring that night.
Every month he thought of Remus. And he hoped. If he had any remaining faith he would have prayed for him. But he had long ago abandoned any belief in a merciful and benevolent God. He had found no reason to believe.
Instead he did something far more powerful than praying; he remembered.
And the memories kept him strong.
They were not the haunting memories of that night... they were memories of his friends.
James. Bright, intelligent, daring.
Star of the Quidditch team, top of his classes, popular with the girls.
But to Sirius he was so much more than that.
He was a best friend and a brother.
He accepted Sirius. He loved him when Sirius couldn't love himself.
And when Sirius finally couldn't bear to live in the hellish, bigoted atmosphere of the Black House anymore, James and his parents took him in. He was treated as a second son, a brother.
He had somewhere he belonged. James had shown him the light in the world.
Remus. Smart. Kind. Loyal.
Friend and confidant.
Always there for Sirius with wisdom and kindness. He had taught Sirius so much, both about the world, and himself.
Becoming an animagus, creating the Maurauders Map. They did it for Remus.
And Sirius knew he would do it a hundred times over. Remus deserved so much. So much more than he got. No amount of love would be too much to show to that gentle young man who spent so much of his life hating his very existence.
Peter.
Sirius used to struggle when remembering Peter. The first couple of years he was full of rage, enough rage to fill an ocean and keep spilling over. He struggled and shouted, and cursed Peter day and night. But the anger was rotting him, eating up any goodness within.
Now when he thought of Peter, he wasn't angry. Merely strangely tired.
He always tried to remember the boy he had known at school.
Anxious and eager. Friendly and kind. He was excited to learn from James and Sirius, and keen to embark on mischievous adventures with them. He worked hard to keep up with the other three.
And Lily.
Above all she was kind. Intelligent. Beautiful.
She never wavered on her morals. Was conscientious to all.
And, very importantly to Siruis, she completed James... made him happier than Sirius had known anyone to be. They deserved each other. They deserved happiness. All of his friends did.
Each full moon he desperately, fervidly remembered his friends.
And he hoped, somehow, that Remus was doing the same. That the memory of their friends could sustain his humanity.
Sirius knew there was no logic in this. But he clung on regardless. Perhaps he did have a sort of faith after all.
A faith in his friends.
At school, his world had been so bright. They had been together. That was all Sirius needed.
And now, he tried to remember. Strove desperately to keep those warm memories. Summer days by the lake. Laughing. Late night 'revision sessions', as Remus called them. Trips to Hogsmeade. Sneaking around the grounds in the Invisibility Cloak. Christmas. Opening presents with them; his true family.
Friends are the family we choose for ourselves, and Sirius knew he had chosen the best family a man could find.
Like an old photograph, starting to fray, its edges beginning to curl, his memories were slowly being eroded by the Dementors. But he would not lose them.
He felt, above all, that as long as he remembered his friends, they would live on. The word could implode in a fiery inferno, but as long as he remained, to remember things as they had been, his friends had existed. And they would continue to exist. They were alive in his memories.
.
My sun, moon and stars.
How bright my world was then.
Now, there is only darkness.
You were my everything. I will not forget you.
My friends... I miss you.