Theme: Season Two focused on places within the wizarding world, but we never visited the dark island of Azkaban.
**Write about someone who is imprisoned, figuratively or literally. **
Prompt: [Quote] "What is grief, if not love persevering." — Vision
Special Rule: Season 2 Round 6: You are allowed to write an **M rated story**. This means that non-explicit adult themes are allowed but detailed descriptions of violence or adult activities are not. Especially here, remember what was said about trigger warnings.
WC: 1544
Warning: decomposing body, eating a maggot, canonical character death
"You're still here." There is no cruelty behind the statement, just a clear yet amused laying out of an obvious fact like a radio announcer who hasn't quite worked out the redundancies he is announcing includes his own.
Sirius doesn't respond, but rounds his shoulders to ward off the biting chill from the thin slit of a window, not large enough to jump from, not small enough to keep him in perpetual twilight. He is aware enough of the days stumbling past without the unwanted visitor reminding him. Every. Single. Day.
Instead, he keeps his face turned to the slick stone, his breath puffing in trembling silver clouds until he fancies he will drown as he is, curled up on a cot that smells of mildew and regret. It is probably haunted by whatever poor bastard finally died so they could shove Sirius in here, with his hair salt-spun into threads that he couldn't even hang himself with.
"You can't ignore me forever, Sirius," the voice says again, aiming for reproachfulness but missing with the wild swing of a Beater's bat, crashing instead into a petulant whine.
Sirius closes his eyes against the flood of memories that it brings with it: the jut of a lower lip over arms that aren't quite folded but wrapped around a torso because he hadn't worked out how to do it; the slow slide of his plate sideways, deliberate inch by deliberate inch, because he managed to pluck the last cookie and is now ignoring its escape; a hand on his ankle as he stretches out on his bed, demanding attention.
There is a hand on his ankle.
It doesn't feel right, sensation without substance, cold and wet in a way that skews closer to rot than anything else. A whimper breaks free from Sirius' chest, aching and pitiful and too doglike for a human throat to accomplish and yet he manages. He wants to move away, wants to shed his skin for fur, wants to sit up and shout at the other being to go away and leave him alone, wants to scream and never stop. But he doesn't. He can't move. Spite is a stronger motivator than the revulsion that crawls over his skin and he won't move.
With a soft pop, something falls from the hand on his ankle and begins to make its squirming way up his leg.
"Merlin's tits, what the fuck is that?"
Regulus Black, dead and buried for some two years, breaks out into as delicate of a snort as he can manage. "It's a maggot, Sirius. Surely you've seen them before in potions?"
Sirius, his skin crawling and now likely bruised from his sudden impact with the opposing wall, growls at him, too furious for words.
His brother stretches out one slender hand — his skin a pale mottled grey and Sirius swallows against the reflexive bile in his throat — and plucks the maggot from the discarded blankets. It twists, writhing against the inescapable press of Regulus' fingers.
He is missing a tooth. Sirius focuses on that change, on that slight difference in a face he knew just as well as his own. It offers a shadowed counterpoint to Regulus' actions: the slight tilt to his head as he surveys the maggot; the spark in his eye that used to only burn at the sight of something sweet and layered with chocolate; his mouth hanging open and Sirius can see the inside of his other cheek, with its tight black stitches, through the gaping hole in the side of his face. There is an oddly sterile scent in the air; embalming fluid, Sirius realises, scented with oranges.
Regulus chews and he swallows.
"I would have thought that you would have escaped from here by now," Regulus says, as if what he had just done was normal and, in a way, it was quickly becoming so.
Sirius crosses his arms and lets them fall to his side once more as his fingers brush against the jut of his ribs, skin stretched paper thin over the lines of them. "How could I leave such fine hospitality?"
With a tip of his head, he indicates his small cell with a single low bed that he now cannot sleep on as a human without his skin breaking out in shivering riots, a bucket shoved into a corner as far away from either of them as they can manage, the heavy iron bars rusted into strange topographies. Everything is a dull grey, from the weathered stone to the thin clothes Sirius wears and Regulus' has fared little better, dressed as he always is now, in loose dark robes, unbuttoned and left to hang open.
"If you are going to keep bothering me," Sirius begins, lowering himself to the floor as Regulus does the same a moment after, "could you, at least, try and be helpful?"
"No."
Sirius catches Regulus' eye, still as bright as it had been when he had been wholly alive, and they break into helpless trembling giggles. It feels almost normal, as if they're tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Black Family home, nursing some new bruises or cuts or pouring over the cartoons stolen from the crumpled pieces of that morning's paper.
Regulus recovers first, brushing tears that smell like salt and brackish water from his eyes. "Are you though? Going to escape from here?"
Tugging on the ragged hems of his trousers, Sirius tries to draw them down further against the biting chill. It is a question he has considered carefully ever since his sentencing. He could do it. No one knew about his Animagus form, and what was one more scrawny shadow amongst thousands?
But what was waiting for him outside of this cell? A world just as empty and grey as inside.
"There's nothing for me out there anymore, Reggie."
His friends were either dead or traitors or believed him to be a traitor. Harry would be better off far away from him and his only other possible reason to escape is dead and quietly rotting and sitting across from him.
"I know you don't approve of them, but you still have our parents. Sirius, they are proud of you for what they think you've done, they're prouder of you for being in here than they ever were of me being out there."
If Sirius looked at Regulus now, beneath the decomposing skin and the inescapable crawling damp that clings to the other, he fancies he would see flashes of Regulus' silver tongue as he croons out his agenda. His brother believes what he is saying on some level, but on another…
Regulus watches him, his mouth pulled into the half-smirk he favours, his hair dripping onto his shoulders and the stone beneath him. When he vanishes, and he will vanish at some point to leave Sirius alone once more, he'll leave behind the sweet scent of rot.
"They aren't my parents, remember?"
Sirius skims his fingers over the tattoo on his lower leg. It has faded now, the lines blurring into each other so the finer details of the face and mane have long since been lost, but it is still recognisable as a lion, as a Gryffindor lion if an observer was in the know. He had managed to pass it off as a football emblem to the tattoo artist, some obscure team up in the north of Scotland and the man had shrugged at Sirius' stumbling explanation.
"Makes sense," he had said, lowering his gaze back to Sirius' leg, the marked patch devoid of dark hair and strangely cold without it. "Gotta support your family, after all."
"Regulus?"
"Yes?"
Sirius returns his gaze to Regulus, stares at the rotting face of his younger brother, now slightly washed out at the edges like a photograph laid over another. There are hints of grey stone peeking through the holes in his face and chest, in the gaping nothingness where his throat had once been.
"When you go wherever it is you go"—Sirius twists his fingers together tightly, the frozen joints protesting but he ignores it—"can you see James and Lily there?"
Regulus says nothing for a moment, simply looks at Sirius with eyes as dark and as unforgiving as a mausoleum. "You truly love them, don't you?"
Sirius curls his hands into his fists, his nails a jagged smear against the rough scrape of his palms, catching on the calluses that are beginning to fade. How could Regulus ask that? It feels cruel, it is cruel, a picking over of a wound that has scarred closed until it bleeds once more. "You know I do."
"I know." Regulus inspects his fading fingers, flicking at the edge of one until the shell of his nail comes loose. "That's why it hurts so much."
Between one blink and the next, Regulus is gone and Sirius is alone once more, alone and abandoned and hurting. He shifts clumsily, his spine cracking as he forces himself into his Animagus shape, landing on paws rather than hands, curling up in the corner of a cell that smells of salt and the copper-tinge of blood.
He is alone in his cell once more.
He'll be alone in his cell forever.
