Author's Note:
The Houses Competition (or THC) Round 3
Story Type: Standard (up to 3,000 words)
House: Hufflepuff
Class: Muggle Studies
Prompt: 1. (Weather) Rainy 2. (Dialogue) "Hey! Wait up!"
Word Count: 1,897 words
Disclaimers/triggers: Sirius hallucinates due to the combined pressures of solitary confinement + Dementors
Beta Love: Thanks to my teammates for beta reading
Sirius could hear the wind howling as the rain fell in sheets against the cold stone walls of his cell. The twenty-one-year-old wrapped his arms around his torso and shivered. A puddle was starting to form where the walls of his cell let water seep through. In a previous life, the rain would have frustrated him and he would have paced his room waiting for the weather to calm and allow him to go exploring outside. He might have hopped in the puddles with his friends, or frozen it with a casual spell to use as snowballs in the middle of summer, or even transformed into a dog and lapped it up for entertainment value.
But his friends weren't here to laugh at his antics until the sun came out. Remus had refused to answer any letters in the month he'd been locked up, and Sirius had eventually stopped writing. Sirius couldn't blame him. If he'd only seen that Peter was a traitor, Lily and James would still be alive and well. What did it matter if Peter had spilled the secret when Sirius had as good as offered the Potters to Voldemort on a silver platter when he'd convinced the rat to be Secret Keeper? Indulging in self-pity, Sirius wondered if he ever wanted the sun to shine again.
A Dementor glided down the hall, making the chilly cell somehow even colder.
"I'm innocent. I'm innocent. It wasn't me," Sirius whispered to himself, trying to ward off Dementor's power. Sometimes, when he was feeling stronger and when righteous anger made his heart beat strongly in his chest, this was enough to ward off the Dementors spell. They'd pass by and leave him feeling clammy and nauseous, but he was spared the tortured memories the creatures could evoke.
Sirius couldn't rouse any righteous anger today. Even before the Dementor arrived, his stomach had churned with nothing but guilt or regret. His protestations of innocence fell silent as a memory swam to the front of his thoughts.
In the first memory, Sirius felt himself pulled into his childhood home. He was eleven-years-old again and the house had been decorated for Christmas. It was a rather sad job, with Kreacher creeping around in a worn Santa hat and a bit of wilted mistletoe wrapped around the bannisters. He would have preferred to stay at school for the holidays, but his parents had insisted he return, no doubt to express just how disappointed they were to have a son sorted into Gryffindor. Sirius followed his mother in through the door and she let it close loudly behind them. The house felt ominously silent.
"Take that scarf off immediately," she ordered, gesturing to Sirius's red and gold scarf. "I don't know what you were thinking, wearing it in public."
Sirius had been thinking it would be fun to get under his parents' skin by proudly wearing Gryffindor paraphernalia through King's Cross Station. James had thought it was a great idea and, while Remus had had some reservations, Sirius figured he could deal with his parent's response. Suddenly he wasn't so sure.
Walburga Black had taken out her wand and was twisting it through her fingers deliberately, her muscles taut with anger. She'd never actually cursed him, Sirius tried to reassure himself, she wouldn't now.
"You know what, I'm proud to be a Gryffindor!" he blurted out, his pride getting the better of his fear.
A flash of red emerged from Walburga's wand, paralyzing Sirius as she came over and dragged his scarf from his pocket and threw it in the nearby fireplace.
Sirius was jolted back into himself as the Dementor passed beyond his cell. The prisoner to his right let out a high-pitched scream. He sounded young, even compared to Sirius. Sirius tried to shake it off. It was probably just a Death Eater who had been rounded up. New ones had been coming in almost every day since Voldemort had fallen. They yelled through the walls that they'd been forced through rushed trials or no trials at all. Some insisted they'd been under the Imperius curse the entire time.
Some voices Sirius recognized from his days at Hogwarts or in the Order as men and women who had been all too eager to follow Voldemort when it benefited them and were just as quick to deny their allegiance now that it didn't. As each day passed, old voices fell silent or into hysterical screaming and new prisoners were brought in. Sirius felt a flicker of pride that he was still coherent after a month.
"Because I didn't do it," he whispered to himself, "I'm innocent."
"I wouldn't have died if you hadn't interfered," countered a voice. Sirius started.
"You're not real," he said, refusing to make eye contact with the man he knew he would see, "you're just an effect of the Dementors doing their rounds."
"Do you remember that time in our second year, Padfoot? I had just joined the Quidditch team right after ol' Frater took a fall from his broom and left an open position and we went out and threw the ball around? It was early in the spring. It was at sunset and you were playing Keeper."
As much as he tried to remind himself that this was just an illusion brought on by loneliness, desperation, and the power of the Dementors, Sirius found himself drawn in. He looked up to find James looking young, whole, and healthy sitting against the wall on the other side of his cell. They could have been having tea together as Harry crawled around the kitchen.
"You hit me in the face with a Quaffle," Sirius responded.
"You were too slow," James laughed, "you were supposed to catch it with your hands."
On instinct, Sirius loped over and gave James a playful shove, but his hands passed right through the illusion of his friend. Without further comment, James disappeared
"Hey! Wait up!" he called, but James was gone. James would always be gone and every memory brought him back to this accursed place and forced Sirius to relive that loss again and again. He let his head fall into his hands and collapsed onto the bed
Azkaban sat on a desolate rocky island in the middle of the sea. Sirius had seen nothing in the way of grass or shrubs when he had been processed in and had assumed that, with so little sustenance, the only living beings here would be the prisoners and the Dementors, if such creatures could be called alive. Yet, somehow, Azkaban had rats who made their home in the grim stone. Sirius heard other prisoners speak to them and suspected several were keeping them as pets and assumed the animals were eating the leftovers of the barely-edible food dropped in prisoners' cells three times a day.
One rat, a fat grey male, stopped in the corner of his cell and stood chittering on it's back legs. It was dry, so it had clearly been hanging out inside the prison and was protected from the still-howling rain outside for some time. Sirius pulled off a boot and threw it at the rat.
"Get out!"
The rat ignored him and sniffed at the boot. When it looked like the animal was about to take a bite out of the leather, Sirius dragged himself over and grabbed the boot. The rat looked at him plaintively.
"Get lost, I don't want you in here," Sirius hissed
"You could have been Secret Keeper," he thought he heard the rat say, "maybe you were just too afraid to do it yourself and now they're dead."
"It's just a rat," Sirius whispered to himself, "Not Peter. Just an ordinary stupid rat that can't talk." He returned to the bed, rolling over and hoping ignoring the pest would cause the auditory hallucination to stop. Unfortunately, a Dementor chose that moment to float past the cell, forcing Sirius to grit his teeth and close his eyes as a wave of clamminess passed over him
"You could have taken in Harry if you hadn't come after me. James thought you would be such a good godfather," The rat needled him, "I just wanted to be safe. Dumbledore wasn't strong enough to defeat him; it was pointless to fight. Look where fighting got you."
Sirius gave up trying to ignore the hallucination, "You were a coward, Peter. A coward who valued his safety over the lives of his friends and countless innocent people. Well keep hiding, because one day I'll get out of here, and I will find you."
Sirius threw his boot again. This time it made contact and the rat scurried out of the cell with a squeak.
It took what felt like forever for Sirius to slow his breathing and heart rate after the rat left, but he eventually did. Once he felt sure doing so wouldn't cause him to burst into tears, he threw his feet over the bedside and stood up. The puddle had expanded and drenched the boot that had been thrown at the rat, so he took the other boot off and put both of them at the comparatively dry foot of his bed.
He walked over to where the rain was seeping in through the wall. He considered trying to plug the hole. He didn't have much in the cell, but he had been given a few papers for letter writing that he had no use for. They wouldn't hold up against the rain for long, but maybe for a little while.
Sirius pressed his face against the stone. The cool rock against his cheek helped ground him against the memories and hallucinations Azkaban brought on. With his ear pressed against the wall, he heard the roar of wind and crash of waves whipped up by the storm. He was in an impenetrable fortress, surrounded by stormy seas and people who had committed horrible crimes in service of a despicable ideology all held together by creatures who sucked warmth and happiness from the air. The Auror who had accompanied him to the prison at the start of his sentence had been very clear that nobody had ever escaped.
He tilted his head and squinted, through the tiny crack in the stone he was able to make out the grey of the sea fading into the slightly lighter grey of the cloud covered sky. In the distance, there was the tiniest hint of purple, like the sunset he and James had played Quidditch in so long ago. Somewhere out there, Sirius thought, was baby Harry. Hopefully he was somewhere he was loved, but with many of Voldemort's followers still free he would never be totally safe.
He had promised to care and protect Harry should something happen to his parents. James and Lily had not asked him to be Harry's godfather lightly; they all knew their work was dangerous and that Sirius may one day need to make good on his promise. Harry was nearly alone in the world because of Sirius's shortsightedness. He would keep his promise to protect the boy. Whatever horrors Azkaban held for him, he would hold onto his sanity and to the knowledge of his innocence. He would watch and wait, collecting any information about the outside world that he could. And one day, when Harry needed his help, he would escape.