I... I could... I could hear her screams...:
September 1981
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Sirius shows up on your doorstep early in the morning, haggard and pale and shattered. James, half asleep and grumbling, tells you that if you want you can head back to bed, but when you see the look on Sirius's face you stay, mumbling that Harry'll be up in a few minutes anyway. So the three of you sit around the kitchen table, James asking gruffly, "What is it, mate? It's bloody five AM." He's obviously not the one who's talked to Sirius these weeks; not the one who he confides in about Marlene. Still, when Sirius says, "I had a dream about her," it only takes James a couple seconds to figure out her, and to look awake and properly ready to listen.
"We were running along the lake," he murmurs, twisting his hands through the rough fabric of his shirt. "The one at Hogwarts, and she was ahead of me; laughing and calling to me to keep up, that she's getting away."
You shudder, able to so clearly imagine how much Sirius hurts; how much it's costing him to keep it together now. And yet he is, better then most times you see him—although your view, you know, is the unsolicited one; the one where, although you have no idea why, he lets his guard down and breaks.
"And then we made it to a cliff," he continues as you jerk back to attention. "She was standing right on the precipice when I finally caught up to her. She held out her hand to me and I started to reach for it, but then a robed figure stepped from the shadows.
"'You have another chance,' it growled at me. It said I had another chance to save her.
"So I turned to snatch for her hand, to pull her back, but she jerked away as our eyes caught. She looked at me for a minute, then lowered her head, turned around, and . . . and . . .
"And then she jumped. I could . . . I could hear her screams as she went down, and I tried to follow her; to somehow reach her on the rocks below. But she wasn't anywhere." Sirius pauses, twisting his fingers around each other; pulling them around his wrists as they whiten and veins pop.
"Or else," he finishes, "She didn't want me to save her. Or else, she wanted to go on her own terms; to be free again."
There's a pause; five or so seconds of heady, emotive silence. Then, "Maybe," Sirius murmurs, "To be free of me."
What can you say? What can James say? You look at each other for a second, then turn back to Sirius—and this time, it's James who talks gently to him; James who murmurs the right things, and you who slips into the kitchen to brew a pot of tea that will, no doubt, go untouched anyway.
But when you come back, Sirius is smiling wanly, and when you set the mug of tea in front of him, he pushes it away and, with a chuckle that cracks in the middle, says, "Screw that. I never liked the stuff anyway."
Last angsty second person Sirius! And there's one more to finish the series :)