To a well-organized mind death is but the next great adventure.

There is a story about a boy who many people like. So many people like him and if the boy actually existed and knew about all these people who like him he would probably be surprised because much of his life he was used to people strongly disliking him. This boy's name, of course, is Harry Potter. There is quite a bit written about this boy, from best-selling novels to various works of fanfiction, where he is snogging persons of assorted age, nationality, and gender.

This is not his story.

This is the story of the death of the aforementioned boy's godfather because many of us Frequent Followers of Harry Potter particularly liked this man almost as much as Harry himself did (though for many females, and even a few males, perhaps it was a liking on a different level than Harry's…). This man's name was, of course, Sirius Black, and he, of course, met an untimely end at the end of a particular book none of us really liked the ending of very much. If you were in anyway like the author you were up at 1A.M. in a hotel room in Mexico City bawling your eyes out over Sirius Black's tragic death, but the author suspects that the weeping was a side effect of her rampaging female hormones and that very few people were in Mexico City at an insane hour of the night reading fantasy books. But this story is not hers either. It is the story of what followed the event she so hated in a book she so loved.

If you understand the last paragraph, than you should pat yourself on the back. If you do not then you shouldn't be too discouraged. You should just keep reading. You should also know that the author owns very few of the characters mentioned below. If you are pondering suing her, then you really need a new hobby.

Also, there is one more thing you should know.

On average, about 40 people a year die from shark bites.

On average, about 150 people a year die of being hit on the head by a falling coconut.

The author thinks you might find this comforting in a way.

Prologue: Polly

It was interesting to Sirius that two of the worst falls of his life took place in front of his cousin Bellatrix.

The first on was at a dreaded family dinner at Number 12. His mother had somehow thought that he should carry the cake into the dining room where the family sat, rather than Kreacher. The cake was a fearsome thing, about a foot in diameter an set on an old glass plate. It had been for Uncle Alphard's birthday, and while Uncle Alphard didn't really like cake, or even parties with his family in general, he didn't seem to protest this one, which was unfortunate for Sirius. Sirius had stalked down to the kitchen, mumbling curses to his mother under his breath, and yanked up the plate. He had to walk very slowly, because the cake was heavy (covered with very ugly gray frosting that reminded him of wet cement and had about the consistency), as was the plate, which was quite slick, almost greasy (the plate, not the cake). He'd made it all the way to the top of the kitchen stairs when he'd seen Bellatrix down the hall returning from the bathroom and simultaneously managed to 1) sneer at her malevolently and 2) step on the hem of his robes, go flying, and land facedown in the cake. Very bad physical humor there.

A few decades later and he suffered a similar embarrassment, though this time it did not involve cake and, of course, caused his death. Landing where he did, he did think it was better than being facedown in the wet-cement frosting. He wasn't anywhere in particular. Just a stone corridor, much like other ones in the Department of Mysteries.

Only this one was reserved for the dead.

Bit of a subtle difference there.

Bellatrix had either sent a Stunner or Avada Kedavra-ed him, and which one it had been seemed inconsequential at this point. They had both got him to the same place: behind the veil and dead as a doornail. (Poetry had never been Sirius' strong point in life so he didn't know why it was popping up here in his death.)

He had landed flat on his back but had sprang back to his feet almost instantly. The veil, curiously enough, was no longer there. Just a solid brick wall. Sirius placed an ear against it and could swear he heard these words.

He can't come back, Harry. He can't come back because he's dead.

And then several frantic shouts of his name.

At that moment, Sirius Black would've given a considerable amount to be on the other side of that wall. Or veil. Or whatever it was.

It is an interesting phenomenon, what Sirius Black was experiencing at that moment. Unspeakables who study matters of life and death call it "mortal awareness" and it is simply this: once a human has a died he knows it. Perhaps he will deny it initially, but deep in the recesses of his mind he know the truth of how dead he really is. It is an instinctual thing. Sirius Black desperately did not want to be dead, but he is (or, more properly, was) not a stupid man and knew the truth. He had just crossed into a place that was fairly easy to get into but very hard to get out of, that place being death. Unspeakables who study matters of life and death have given a name to the type of boundaries that separate life from death, "semi-permeable boundaries," and there are a lot of them in the afterlife.

The yelling from the other side of the wall had stopped. He was now convinced that the voices he had heard belonged to Harry and Remus, and he knew now that both of them were gone. From the veil, from the portal, they were gone. And so, he knew, was he.

He turned around. The corridor seemed to go on for miles and miles. It seemed to call out to him just as fiercely as Harry on the other side had, perhaps even more so.

"Sirius! Sirius! SIRIUS!"

Sirius, as we have said, was quite intelligent. Even the dimmest person could see what this meant.

Whatever lay in store, wherever people ended up after they copped it, was down that corridor.

Tearing himself away from that wall like a magnet from a piece of iron, he started walking, his footsteps reverberating in the empty halls. Sometimes he would still turn around to get a glimpse of that wall. He would still wonder if he could see their faces if he looked hard enough.

He kept walking.

Another interesting thing about the deceased is their perception of time. They have none. Albert Einstein, a German scientist Sirius Black knows little of, once commented on this:

"If you place your hand on a hot stove for an hour it feels like a decade. But if you sit next to a pretty girl for an hour it feels like a minute. That's relativity."

Sirius Black, in fact, would be finding a hot stove eventually and would also be in the company of several pretty girls, but he would not notice any of what Einstein pointed out at all. It could just as easily be a decade, or an hour, or a minute for all he would notice. Time defines a great deal of our life but matters very little in our deaths. So when Sirius walked down the corridor for the dead in the Department of Mysteries, he did not notice how long he did so at all. He never even checked his watch, which, when you think about it, is a pretty miraculous thing for a human being.

Being called to someplace you don't know by a voice you're equally unfamiliar with can be somewhat disconcerting, and Sirius Black couldn't be sure how to go about all of it. So he walked. That seemed to work. Once he found his bearings (if that was even possible for a dead person) he wanted to get to Remus and Harry. Somehow. Couldn't the dead have some sort of calling plan? Talk to their loved ones one last time?

Sirius did not know it at the time, but he was beginning to sound like a very bad cellphone commercial.

It was sometime during this walk, when he was wondering what was happening to all who remained back in life, he remembered something else.

James and Lily.

Sirius stopped walking. Like his mind had been drawn to those he had left behind, it remembered those that had left him behind.

His mind was going in a course that most of the deceased's minds go, and that was this:

I am dead. That's a given. And I want to speak to several people who are not dead. That's obvious as well. But I'd also like to see many of the people I know (or, actually, once knew) who are dead like me.

Sirius did not know how very difficult doing both of these things would prove to be.

He also did not know that he had started walking again. That was the instinct again. He wanted to keep moving, to get to...wherever. To the afterlife. To Heaven. Sirius saw no importance in what the place was called, only in what he would find there.

So wrapped up was he in this place he wanted to get to that he barely noticed when he got to it's first stop.

As anyone whose been to Orlando, Florida knows, there is no place so beautiful or idyllic it cannot be touched by a sprawling bureaucracy and cheap commercialism. The afterlife, in some respects, is no different from this. The scene Sirius encountered when he reached this first stop reminded him vaguely of a very unruly pub, or a very crowded lunch line, only minus the "line" part.

This queue of rushing people is, in fact, quite unnecessary. People could get along in the afterlife just fine without it. In fact, most of them weren't really sure what they were rushing forward for. It simply is a testament to the human spirit, which likes to make things more complicated than they have to be.

People. Now that he was dead, Sirius couldn't be help but think that he'd tragically underestimated them in his life. You never really appreciate the incredible diversity of humans until you see a multitude of them of varying races, ages, and nationalities that shout so many different languages in one place. When this happens, they collectively lose everything that made them so very different and simply becoming one rushing mass that screams in no particular tongue. Sirius had never seen anything like it in his whole life, but he corrected himself quickly after that. He'd just never seen anything like it before. The most people he'd ever seen in one place had been in France at the World Cup, which he, James, Remus, and Peter had gone to the summer after they graduated. There, the flow of various languages had washed around them in an amiable manner that reminds of those nice picnics you used to go on when you were small. (Well, some people had gone to them, but Sirius had never been one of them.) Here, all the languages collected together in a menacing way that seemed to jab at you like a very sharp stick. Perhaps because he was still quite dazed by the whole spectacle, perhaps because some inner, very stupid instinct told him he should go along with all these people. He staggered forward and was swept into the crowd for several minutes, though Sirius did not note how long it was, for, as we have said, Sirius now had a very poor conception of time. Shortly after that he came to his senses and turned back toward the direction he had come. He was slightly taller than the crowd (already he had seen that trying to fight against this tide of people was useless, so he did not even try) and found that he could not see the corridor he had emerged from. He frowned and nobody even looked at him. That's when a frightening thought hit him.

What if I'm the only dead one here? he thought. What if these people are all alive and can't see me? The odd thing was, he felt that these people should be able to see him, because he still felt quite solid, which was even more curious, because that was a sensation one never associated with being dead. Frantically, he searched for a someone in the crowd he could ask. The most friendly-looking face he could see was that of a little girl who was crying. (When you are in the middle of a crowd and the friendliest face you can find is a sobbing child you know are in trouble, particularly when you are dead, but this hadn't fully registered with Sirius yet.) He had never been good at guessing the ages of people, and this little girl could've been anything from five to eleven for all he knew. She was very small and wearing a sundress bedecked with colored splotches that could be seen as flowers but not to Sirius. She, like him, seemed in no hurry to get where everyone else was going, she simply sat cross-legged on the ground. Everyone else gave her a berth of about a foot, rushing around her like a river does around a rock in the middle of it. Sirius walked up to her and cleared his throat. He them realized that he towered over her considerably, so he squatted down to her level.

"Hello," he said in a manner that he hoped didn't remind her of the type of men her mother told her to never talk to. "I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but can you see me?"

After a second's consideration and after she'd wiped her tearing eyes on the back of her hand, she nodded. (Sirius was too relieved by this answer to count himself as lucky that she spoke his tongue.)

"Oh, good. That means you're..." he trailed off. He'd meant to say she was dead but then decided that something like that could be a little distressing to anyone, particularly a girl who's crying. Hell, it distressed him quite a bit. He looked around a few seconds more, decided she had the right idea about things, and sat down next to her.

"So..." he started conversationally. "How did you get here?"

"Walked."

"Did you? I did as well. I sort of fell and didn't know where else to go but he..." his somewhat nervous rambling had been punctuated by a pronounced sniffle from her. "Sorry, are you all right?"

The little girl shook her head but didn't say anything, wiping her eyes again.

"I suppose you miss your mum," he observed, and was incredibly pleased when she nodded, as he had been able to tap into the thought process of a young child with, he thought, moderate success.

"Yes," she said, sounding as if she had a bad cold. "Yes, I want my mummy, but also..."

"What?" Sirius was even more pleased that she was talking more, for he, being a dead person, found talking to another one of the deceased heartening, a step in the right direction.

"Pudding."

"Sorry?" Sirius realized he still had a lot to learn about the thought processes of young children.

"Well, you see, it started at my little brother's birthday party. We were all upstairs, he was opening his gifts, and then we were going to go downstairs to eat his birthday pudding. My mummy made it. She makes wonderful pudding, thick chocolately stuff, I loved it." The little girl licked her lips. "My mother always tells me not to run, especially down the stairs, but I didn't listen. I tripped on the second step and fell. I landed on my head. At first it hurt, but then I sort of woke up, but my mum and my brother and my friends weren't there. I was in a hallway and then I ended up here. I'm hungry and I'm cold." She didn't say any of the last in a complaining tone, more as if she was just stating facts she wished she could change. She sighed."What is this place?"

Sirius looked around, trying to see beyond the vast sea of people. To be honest, he'd been so intimidated by the rush he hadn't taken in the surroundings. It looked almost as if they were in the middle of a great fog, for everything looked gray and washed out. He sighed as well. "I'm not sure. But I don't think it's where were supposed to be."

She agreed. "How do we get where we are supposed to be?"

Sirius did not speak for a period. They might have sat there for a very long time, neither of them could tell, but eventually they both came to the same conclusion.

One of the curious traits of human beings is their sociable nature. They have the urge to group together, to form bonds and, sometimes, friendships. Some argue that this is the strength and downfall of human nature. They argue that the whole of people would be better off if they all lived in separate little huts on their own liberally spaced islands. One could argue in response that if humans all did this eventually there would be very few of them left. But arguing whether or not human's tendency to group together like water droplets has benefited them in long run is quite fruitless, as they are invariably going to do so anyway, even, curiously enough, in death.

"Sirius?" she asked an unspecified amount of time later.

"Hmm?" Her head was right next to his ear, which made conversing very easy. He was simply walking foward with the rest, which left little to the imagination when it came to the course he could take. So far he'd met no obstructions.

"Am I dead?"

He would've stopped if he had still been thinking about moving; now his legs more or less went on their own accord.

As for her question, he had so far been unsure of how aware she was of her own mortality, but then he should have figured she would know. Deciding the truth was the best route, he said, "Yes, I suspect you are."

"Hmm. Does that mean I won't see my mum? Or my dad? My brother?"

"Not necessarily. I'm sure you'll see them again. Someday. You'll just have to...wait." Sirius then remembered that that ws probably one of the most infuriating things for a child to hear.

"Oh." She sounded upset again, though not altogether surprised. Then another question.

"Is this Heaven?"

For a second they both stared at the people rushing around them in a hurried frenzy.

"No," said Sirius. "This isn't Heaven."

"Are we headed that way?"

"Where?"

"To Heaven."

"I suppose..."

She fell silent, but it was a deeper, more thoughtful one on her part.

"Polly?" he asked finally.

"Could you put me down for a second, Sirius?"

He did so with some trepidation. She was staring at him, particularly hard. He knelt down to her level again.

"Polly?" he asked again as she got much closer to his face, scrutinizing it. He suddenly remembered that he hadn't shaved in quite a few days before he'd died. It struck him as odd that it should matter now that he had. (Died, not shaved.)

"You always had more of a beard in the pictures," she proclaimed finally. "But I suppose they we're sort of guessing a lot. They'd never seen you."

"Polly, what are you--"

"And you're English. They never said anything about that either, but I supposed it doesn't matter. What did I expect you to sound like?"

Sirius gaped, thinking wistfully that his life had never been this complicated. He began, trying to sound rational, "I'm afraid I don't know quite what you're talking about, Polly."

"In church," she began in a manner that suggested she didn't think she should have to explain this to him, "they told us that when you die," she indicated herself, "Jesus comes and carries you to Heaven."

"So--oh, no."

She was staring at him with a slight grin on her face. "Your names even rhyme."

"Not really, they just end with the same letters, but that's not important, Polly, you've got to be kidding."

She looked quite pleased with herself and showed that she wasn't.

"But, listen, you've got it all wrong--I'm a convicted murderer." Of course he had been innocent, but he was hoping to press some common sense into her.

Polly shrugged. "So? Noah was a drunk, look what he accomplished."

Sirius' mouth opened. Then it closed again. "What did they teach you at that Muggle church?" he asked weakly. "That Noah is a drunk and you should go off with the first man who comes up to you after you've died? Polly..."

She held up her hand. "It's all right, Jesus."

"Don't call me that," he hissed.

"All right, Sirius. You don't have to say anything. I understand. I'll never mention it again." But she gave him a knowing smile that showed that the idea clearly wasn't out of her head.

He growled in his dog-like way. "See that you don't." And without another word she climbed back onto his back and they took off again. (It was funny that they had had that entire conversation while the flow of people kept going all around them.)

Sirius missed his life now, not only because of Remus and Harry and the others, also because he felt far more in place dueling with Bellatrix or arguing with Molly than being the Son of God to a tiny Muggle girl.

It was long after that, when Polly had fallen asleep with her head on his shoulder, that they reached the desks.

The author feels she should tell you that she did not make up the comment made by Polly about Noah in this prologue. It was in the movie Dogma and was said by the angel Metatron (played, coincidentally, by Alan Rickman.) The author also expresses her wish for you to review.

Thank you.