He'd been so wrong. If he had sat with it longer, if he had thought to approach the person he should have apologized to: Lupin, the Potters, himself, he might not have been sent to Azkaban at all. They could have come up with a plan, a way to fix it. Lupin and Sirius both could have come up with a plan. Lupin would have done anything-
Sirius couldn't dwell on that now or ever again. Instead he was sitting in a stall laughing. His sides still ached from the last time he had laughed like this and because he couldn't sit with what he had done. It was his own honest mistake. And he would pay for it, would remain there for years and years until he died.
When he first arrived, the dementors did not effect him as much yet, they couldn't, or they could but he had only been there a brief time until he saw his cousin and her husband marched in and his laughter started up again. He felt like he would throw up from laughing so hard, his head pounded with the sound of a spell going off and from lack of oxygen and he was sweating from the pain of it all, the turmoil of it all. From all of it. Tears ran down his face because they had to, at the grief and the laughter and he couldn't look into his own mind. It was just the memory on loop as he realized too late, only a second too late that he had made a mistake and Peter too had thought it was Sirius who had killed the Potters and now Peter was dead and Lupin was gone and the Potters were gone and it was so painfully funny. What exactly was so funny he didn't bother to ask himself. Why are you laughing? Did you kill them? Did you do it? Was there something you said to the wrong person? He didn't ask himself anything because he would have to answer in the affirmative. He would have had to answer himself.
Yes. I did kill them.
A small group of wizards walked the Lestranges past the enclosure where Sirius sat. Sirius had kid himself, he was very much part of his own violent, lunatic, proud family. It started as a roll and a chuckle. And then another silent chuckle forced its way through and then he was covering his mouth with his dirty hands. Bellatrix looked over and dropped all pretense and could no longer control himself. His laughter ricocheted off the cold, wet walls echoing through the salty air. His laughter drowned out the moaning, the other light laughter. It drowned out the sobbing, the light knocking as if a door opening and closing that sometimes echoed through and the light whooshing of the waves splashing against the walls and each other.
Bellatrix had already turned away. The wizards escorting them hadn't even glanced in his direction. Sirius could no longer breath. He felt himself gasping for air, could feel his face turning colors and thought he might pass out. That is what he wanted, to die, passing out would be the next closest thing. He wanted to be dead for killing his best friend and his best friend's wife but his body wouldn't let him. He took in one enormous gasp of air quickly like when someone is sick over the toilet, desperately and he became lightheaded with the new intake of cool air and even this was funny. He could kill other people but he would be punished to not be allowed to die. Certainly he could not die of laughter. It was too good of a death, too happy, too unjust.
He was silent now, his voice long having given out and he lay on the ground on the hay, gasping for air and in a pool of his own sweat warming and acidifying the scent of the already molding hay that would be refreshed only once a year but he could not have known when that was since he had no idea of how much time had passed. A year was generous even then as after the salt air and laying on it in every configuration wore it down to dust that was swept away with the multiple drafts that arose anytime of day.
He only had a sense of the time of day it might be because of the meals. A plate of food would materialize the corner of the stall smelling of roasted, garlicy potatoes and grilled steak with thyme and big pat of butter melting on green beans. It filled the stinking tower and made his and everyone else's mouths water but he knew already what would happen once they started to eat. He himself had long since lost his knife and only had a spoon and fork, they would have to do for such a meal or he could just eat with his hands if he could stop laughing long enough. The thought of the honorable and self-indulgent, with her deep love of sincerely beautiful things, if they were inanimate objects, might be eating with her hands also?
He jolted on the ground staring at the lavender of the sky. He twitched again as if something had poked him but he realized again that he was smiling and trying not to laugh. Some part of him groaned to think that he would miss the meal window and have to satiate himself on the flavorless tea service or worse go to bed hungry again waiting for breakfast but the image of Bellatrix sitting hot cross buns on the floor on hay a hand flew to cover his mouth. That everyone was eating the same as her would be bad enough but she was in for an even worse surprise. The food, as fragrant as it was, as mouth watering as it was, would taste like very close to nothing and that would send her into a smoking, spluttering rage and then he gave into whatever it was and would let it stay there as long as it needed to.
He laughed a sincere silent laugh, clutching his sides, rocking back on the cobblestones that dug into every part of his back and, in pain, occasionally glimpsed the ever darkening sky now a soft velveteen blue. This was not so bad, all things considered. He would pay for what he'd done and then die. In the meantime he would laugh in pain and live. Even if he could not find the thread in his own mind yet, he had not realized then, nor would he ever have the time or health again to realize that the first few days, even weeks and months when he lost all that weight, when it started to dawn on him what happened, when he started to cry without the laughter and to understand that he really would die in Azkaban, that it was the initial laughter is what would save him. He was building a small, warm, bricked safe-house around the part of his heart that would feed a stream of an idea to his mind and that the idea might work if only he could muster up the energy to get up and try it. If only he could just turn over on the stones, if he could only get up and stretch or change his breathing patterns but he would leave that for another day, another day.
Then, after how long being there when of all the bad memories were the only ones he could seem to remember, when he realized he had done everything right, hadn't he? but that right wasn't right enough he would remember that, even here in the middle of a floating prison surrounded by the cold of the sea, something had been funny. He couldn't remember what it was but he had laughed at something at one time or another surely, he thought. Something somewhere must have been a word called funny. Mostly, he remembered the feeling in his body, he remembered the scent of the hay, he remembered the diffused softness of the sky and he remembered, somewhere where behind where his lungs sat, in a pebble where his heart used to sit, that some other part of him knew better than he consciously did what had happened, and what was happening and what would happen.
His heart still beat though slower and heavier. He imagined that it now pushed gravel and silt through his veins as he was becoming one with the building he lived in. His joints hurt with the soreness not of not sleeping on a bed for years but of sleeping on an uneven floor. When he moved, his body made popping and snapping noises. He half expected the shrill screech of a violin to sound from somewhere in his musculature. His stomach growled, though it was full. He had just eaten but he shared his meals, literally and magically speaking, with the hundreds of people. There was not enough taste to go around and his mouth watered and he closed his eyes and breathed in and out and in and out till he fell asleep and dreamt that he was awake in that place and so it went until one day, he mustered all of the energy he had to simply roll from his side and onto his back.
It was dark, nightfall and yet. The movement brought his own sweaty scent to himself and thought- was it a full moon? It was! Its edges were sharp and it cast a cleansing light on a dirty place. He rolled over again and felt like his knees would crack in half for the weight they supported. His wrists became numb almost instantly. That would all be temporary. Sirius crawled on all fours to a pile of blankets in the corner, not that they made a difference in comfort, not like they kept out the cold or the wet or the rot. He curled into a ball and breathed in steadily in and out and nothing was funny anymore. The joke, whatever it had been, if it ever existed, had worn itself out and hadn't been funny in the first place. Inhale, exhale inhale exhale, he lulled himself into something like sleep keeping the sight of the moon, the curve of its outline and its brightness in the corner of his eye. He took in another large breath and heard the low soft growling exhalation of a large animal and knew before he fell asleep that really there had been nothing funny about any of this.
He woke up in the earliest part of the morning when the sky is unsure of who to follow, the light of the sun or the moon. He got up, still sore but a little stronger in a smaller body and still, on all fours, though not the same, he went over to the tray of good smelling but tasteless food ate that, went over to the stall next to his with someone slumped in a corner and ate that food too. Sirius paid no attention to the wizard who just scrunched his eyes tight at the sight of him and shook his head, no, as if that was the only thing anyone had ever had to do to deny the fate of death taking on the form of one of your greatest fears in life.
Sirius went down the spiraling ramp as curious about the witches and wizards he passed by as they cared about him, which is to say none of them cared at all. For their part, he could have just been a hallucination. Another horror cast by the shadows or what one saw when they were about to die, a relief for most, or before a dementor descended and kissed your mind out of your body. Someone shrieked and burst into tears at the sight of him. He continued on. As Sirius made his way down the ramp, feeling his blood move for the first time he was warmed by the movement of his body. He felt more alive and, ironically, more human than he had in a long time.
Sirius knew he would have to hold his breath. Knew the door opened outward and he would have to commit or be crushed by the weight of the door and the ocean against the underside of Azkaban. But now, through something else, he knew that it would be low tide soon. He stood on the door and could feel his weight was just enough to make the door bob heavier against the water. He stepped off of the door and back onto the stones and got in place. He ignored his tired, his hurt. When he thought it was clear, he jumped on the door which left an opening just large enough and he slinked or shimmied through (more like a cat than anything, really) and was immediately surrounded by the weight of the water. He paddled for dear life and his lungs burned but he had held his breath for longer once a long time ago and his lungs remembered. And even though they were smaller now, though they were weaker now, his lungs understood that he had laughed before and that he wouldn't die and that it would be alright and so they behaved one second longer than they might have needed to but by then Sirius had already cleared the water line and sneezed out the waves splashing into his nose. He turned to look at the tower and the dementors floating against it and around it. In the brightness of the day, it looked like a fortress and not the prison it was. It almost looked stately. It might have made a lovely painting. How strange an image it made. It was almost funny but, not in that way. It was funny but, certainly not enough to laugh.