…
I… uh…
No excuses. Well, yes, I do have excuses, but none of them are good excuses. So… I'm sorry?
Good news: the series is finished!
Bad news: the series is finished!
Reviews: I enjoy them a lot.
This starts out really, really light, but I figured we needed a couple bursts of funny before… you know… the bad stuff happens.
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Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
Sirius stared at the wall of his room at Grimauld Place. Good God, how long could he stand to look at this bloody wall? There were exactly 42 places on this wall that were chipped. Slightly, hardly noticeable at all, but he had seen them, damn it. And one of these days, he was going to take a bloody sledgehammer to this wall. Not magic it away—oh no. That would not be nearly satisfying enough. He wanted to smash it, smash it with his own two hands.
Oh, God, he was pathetic.
All of the anger that had boiled up in him after all these years was being directed at a wall. Sirius sighed and kicked at it half-heartedly.
Stupid wall.
No, not a stupid wall. A stupid bloody house! Stupid bloody house with a door that was very, very stubbornly closed. It would not open. No matter how hard he tried, no matter how he attempted to pry it open, it would not budge. The goddamn wall was going to drive him in-bloody-sane.
Of course, that implied that he was sane before he started trying to pry the door off.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
Sirius closed his eyes in frustration. That could not be true. Harry could not have fallen for that! He had not gone to the Ministry because he thought Voldemort had him! How did he think that they got him, anyways? This damned house was impenetrable!
He didn't believe it. He wouldn't believe it! Harry was brash, he acted on impulse and emotions—he was practically the living incarnation of James—but he wouldn't do something that dumb! Harry was not always the cleverest of wizards, but surely, Hermione was with him. And if Harry might fall for a trick as simple as that, Hermione wouldn't!
But yet there they were. He knew it. He could feel it. Harry was in danger. When he was in Azkaban, he had had the very same feeling too many times to count, but he could do nothing about it. Now, though, now that he was out, he would be damned if Harry's blood was drawn on his account…
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
"DAMN IT, YOU CURSED HOUSE, YOU!" Sirius screeched as he, once again, attempted to throw himself out of a bottom-story window. "The bloody doors won't open for me, and the windows are made out of that muggle stuff, the bendy stuff, rubbour, or something of the like! GRAH! Dumbledore shouldn't have thought this out so well!" Sirius screamed angrily as he once again catapulted himself towards the window, and once again bounced back into the wall.
Sirius was backing up to try getting out of the window again, but as he pressed himself against the stone of his old house, ready to propel himself into the muggle crap again, he stopped and sighed deeply. It was incredibly, amazingly ironic that he was, once again, trying to escape from this house. For such a short while, this house had held all of the answers… for such a short while, it had felt immeasurably happy…
He could almost hear the laughter, the ringing voices. The faint smell of Molly's cooking went fleetingly through his nose, and the image of Harry sitting at the dining room table flashed through his brain. How few memories there were of happiness at this place.
Before he could place his displeasure, a completely different image floated through his senses. There was Regulus's faint crying ringing through his five-year-old ears, his father's loud, abrasive voice assaulting the quiet that rung through the present-day Grimauld place. An old, musty smell wafted into his nose, the smell that he had so desperately tried to get rid of over the last year. In front of him, he could see, so clearly, his father, slumped over in her chair, bottle of firewhiskey in his hand. And he could see Kreacher, the devil, giving him more. The old, musty smell was quickly replaced by the all-too familiar scent of a drunken breath.
This place had always been a prison. Even when he wanted to be like his family, even when he was sure he was destined to be a Slytherin walking in his father's shadow forever, there had always been something that he wanted, needed, beyond these thick, stone walls. Before, a solid wall of fear had stopped him from exploring what he knew he needed. Now there was only a solid wall of magic, and a thin layer of muggle blubber, or whatever the hell it was.
With renewed confidence, Sirius took out his wand and started firing spells.
He was halfway through 'bombarda' when he realized it took him nearly twelve years to demolish the first wall.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
All of the pain that he was feeling was completely, totally worth it. Everything that he had thrown into knocking the shit out of that bloody window was worth it. He wasn't even sure how he had gotten that rubbour on his window to break, but somehow, he had.
Now, however, he was sitting on his front lawn, his rump sore and his hair in wild disarray. To make things worse, he was in the middle of a muggle neighborhood, and he had just appeared out of nowhere, screaming, and falling through an invisible flubbour window.
Oh, good fuck.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
Sirius ran into the Ministry at a screaming pace, wondering where in the hell security could possibly have been lose enough to let in a bunch of kids, not to mention Voldemort and a huge array of his followers, into the building. He didn't know where in the hell that was. Being a convict didn't help matters, he supposed, but if Voldemort wasn't on the top of the Ministry's most wanted, he had no idea who was.
Behind him, he could hear Remus, Tonks, Moody, and Kingsley's footsteps, pounding against the hard floor. With a deep sigh, Sirius looked around the corner of the dark, tall building. He had no idea how Harry and his mates had gotten into it. Sirius was about to scream bombarda for about the thousandth time that day and most likely get himself caught when he saw something out of the corner of his eye.
That was not Buckbeak on the roof.
Oh God, Harry sure as hell was James' son.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
Harry was an idiot. That's all there was to it. His Godson was an idiot. He could not believe that he was about to do something as stupid as hand over the prophecy to Malfoy and dear cousin Bella, of all people. It was so bloody stupid.
He had never been more proud.
If James were alive, yes, if James were alive this would be the defining moment of his fatherhood. Seeing Harry ready to give up himself, give up his cause, give up everything that he held over Voldemort to save his friend. Sirius was furious, but he had never known that Harry was truly James' son like he knew now.
God bless Nymphadora Tonks.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye
to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one
thing that I tried to hold on to…
He wasn't sure when he had been drawn into the fray of things, all he knew was that he was now. A stream of green light sailed by his head, and he ducked quickly, cursing under his breath. Oh yeah, he was definitely in the fray of things now.
With stealth he hadn't known he possessed, Sirius tried to back up against a wall so he could survey the situation. Being the brash person he was, he was just sort of fighting before he could even tell what was going on. Harry could be dead, for all he knew of the situation. Okay, well, not quite, because there would be a lot more hubbub if Harry were dead, but he could have missed a lot.
Just as he was scanning the room for Remus, (God, he couldn't let Remus get hurt again, not poor Moony, not after all he had been through), he saw Bellatrix shooting spells out of her wand like there was no tomorrow. Sirius wasn't sure what got into him, but seeing Bellatrix like that… She… She, of all of his cousins, was completely evil. She disregarded everything good about humanity, she ignored the laws that all humans should follow. In a nutshell, Bellatrix thrived off of pain, relished innocent blood, and, above all else, lived to serve her master.
With a heavy pain in his gut, Sirius realized that it could have been him, blindly following what he believed was right, flourishing because of other's pain…
A stream of red light was shooting towards him, and he deftly dodged it, nearly laughing with glee.
"Come on, you can do better than that!" he yelled back at Bellatrix. Though the laughter never left his eyes, as soon as the words escaped his lips he knew he shouldn't have said that. Bellatrix's almost-black eyes turned into slits. He could almost imagine them turning red with rage.
Another stream…
Goodbye
to you
Goodbye to everything that I knew
You were the one I
loved
The one thing that I tried to hold on to…
"HE—IS—NOT—DEAD!" Harry screamed as Remus tried to contain him. Remus's voice sounded tired and worn in Harry's ears, but he hardly registered the strain that it contained. Remus dragged him away, wanting to tell James's poor son that everything would be all right, that everything happened for a reason, that the world was not just cruel—it was cruel with cause.
Harry racked his mind for reasons why Sirius wasn't coming out from behind the curtain. With shocking, utter defeat, he realized that there wasn't any reason at all. There was no reason why Sirius wouldn't come out from behind that curtain. Sirius loved him more than anyone in the world. Years of dedication to his father followed by years of Azkaban… and when he finally got out, it was only by his will to see Harry. To see his Godson, the Boy Who Lived—despite all odds. Sirius had never hid from him before, had never made him wait for him before. Whenever Harry had needed him, Sirius was there—or trying to be there. And if he were truly alive behind that curtain, he would have come to assure him that he really was alive already.
Harry didn't feel himself stop struggling. He didn't feel the embrace that Remus pulled him into. He didn't hear the clatter and the worn screams ringing through the devastated stone room. The bouncing spells flew around he and Remus, and though he normally would've been the first to ward them off, Lupin had to do all the work. Harry searched through his heart, through his brain, through anything he could access to find signs of his Godfather. If he was alive, surely he could feel it… but all he felt was searing emptiness and unmasked pain. Pain that made him reel with regret, that made him cringe with it's unbridled, scorched sting. It was an ache that resonated throughout all that he could see… walls that looked grey, sounds that seemed empty, words that meant nothing at all. The room smelled of his shaggy black coat after a rainstorm, Lupin's hair felt like his after a bath… Everything in the room was Sirius, and yet everything in the room was a barrier between him and Sirius.
He had heard it said that people went numb when things went wrong. As he felt the pain engulfing his senses, felt his eyes sting with the threatening of acid, heard his heart pounding louder and louder with each passing second, he desperately wished he were one of those people. He wished with all of his remaining will that he couldn't still hear his Mum's screams, that he couldn't see his Father running out of their house. He wished his scar didn't hurt whenever something reminded him of these thoughts. He wished that everything about that night wasn't pounded into his brain and that no amount of prying could get it out.
He wished that screams didn't haunt his dreams. He wished that he hadn't seen so much death. He wished that fatal night had gone just a bit differently…
Was it really so bad to wish he had died that night? Was it really so bad to wish that his mother had succumbed to Voldemort and let him die? It was times like these, when Lupin, barely standing up himself, had to drag Harry away from the spot where Sirius fell, away from the spot where all hopes of ever having a good life shattered before his fifteen-year-old eyes, that he thought everyone would have been better off if he had just died that night. And even if everybody wouldn't have been better off, he would have been.
Harry felt his heart beating in his throat, but that was about the only thing he felt. He was vaguely aware of Lupin's arm on his shoulder, but everything else had blended into his chaotic thoughts. He hated that he remembered so much about the night he became the Boy Who Lived. But that wasn't the only thing about himself that he hate. He hated that he had disliked Cedric so much in his life and admired him so much in his death. He hated that he desperately wanted to shake off Lupin's arm. He hated that he wasn't a good enough friend. He hated that he got all these things he didn't deserve. He hated that he acted like a brat to his friends. He hated how he always acted on his emotions and never on his thoughts. He hated that he wasn't a good enough wizard to save everyone.
He hated that he was too much of a coward to go and hold the body of his Godfather, hold the source of the only parental love he had ever experienced. He hated that though he was a Gryffindor as surely as his Father was, he was too big a coward to do what he wanted—needed—to do so badly.
A curtain would never stop Sirius from reaching him.
A prison never stopped him.
Being on the run never stopped him.
Certain hatred, certain fear, certain pain never stopped him. To Sirius, Harry was all there ever was. There used to be James. And when there was James, there was Lily and Remus and Wormtail, too. But without James, his whole world had been Harry. And he would've given that world up to see Harry's face one last time…
But Harry? Harry couldn't even pry himself from Lupin's grip and go confirm what he was sure he already knew—that behind that curtain, there was his very dead Godfather. He couldn't bring himself to move a curtain to see the only father he had ever known, and for it, he hated himself more than ever.
Goodbye to you
Goodbye to
everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing
that I tried to hold on to…
"Harry?" Ron asked tentatively a few weeks later. He gently pushed open Harry's door and walked in. Harry lifted his head and almost spoke before turning over on his side. Ron, un-phased, walked over to his bed and sat down.
"Come on, Harry," he said pleadingly, hoping that he could get his best friend out of bed for once.
"Ron," Harry said quietly.
"What?"
"Every time… it's…"
"It's not your fault, Harry," Ron said quietly. There was a squeak by the door, and they both looked up to see Hermione standing there, tired and looking as though she hadn't eaten for as long as Harry.
"Harry," she said softly, before going up to sit on his bed with Ron.
"It is my fault," he said.
"Harry…"
"Every time I've ever had a father, a mother… every time I love them, every time I know I would do anything for them, they die. And every time, it's my fault."
Neither Ron nor Hermione said anything.
Black eyes burned in Harry's brain. The shock on Sirius's face haunted his mind. That wand flew across his vision over and over again. His mother's screams… his father's voice… but then above everything, there was Sirius's laugh…
Goodbye to you
Goodbye to everything that I knew
You were the one I loved
The one thing that I tried to hold on to...
FIN.
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It's all done…
Review, please.
