The only light in the stuffy room came from a small lamp hanging above the table.
Two men were sitting in an uncomfortable silence. The one in the corner was reading a thick volume trying his best to ignore the annoying ticking of the clock.
Dust was flying through the air, glittering in the light, drying their throats. It swam on the whiskey. Aqua ardens. Burnig water. Its scent mingling with pergament and ancient stone.
A scream.
A head snapped up, the head of the one with the book. He raised a brow, not confused simply asking a question that needed no words anymore.
A grin spread over the other's face showing his disgusting yellow teeth.
He stood and reached for his glass. He drained it with a big gulp, coughed and waited for him to rise. „You'll like this one."
Sirius immediatly flew to the door, when it knocked, not even wondering why it knocked as it could only be Remus – the traitor. Who had a key to the flat.
His steady hand gripped his wand, the other was reaching for the handle, but he stopped. This was the moment he had feared all the time. Every little second since he knew.
And there was nothing he could do but decide which spell he should use first after he would have opened the last barrier between them. Stupefy would do.
The door was thrown open, the wand raised, the damned word already on his lips.
„We don't have time to play now, Black"the newcomer said and moved the stick out of his face.
He was speechless, stupidly gaping at Severus Snape's trademark sneer. It wasn't real, but what else could he show to his arch-enemy. The terror that was branded into the last twisted piece of brain.
Bloody fingers were clawing at the glistering red holes, ripping flesh and leaving crimson smears looking like demonic make-up. Fighting pain with pain.Black seemed to get a grip of himself, at least enough to hiss a „You!" at him dripping with hate and disgust. But blood-stained screams kept him from hissing right back, from hurling his best hex at the man he detested.
„What are you doing here?"
„We don't have time, you..."
„I have the time, Snivellus. So you'd better explain yourself quickly or I'll show you how I've-"
„They've got Lupin."
He expected him to be stunned, expected him to firstly look incredibly stupid for some minutes, secondly begin to stammer incoherent and ask even more stupid questions ( „Who?", „What?", „I don't understand...") and at last do the hero trip.
Well, Black decided to leave out the first two.
„Where is he now? And can you bring me to him?"
„He's with Malfoy, that is if he's still alive. It's to difficult to discribe the way, we have to apparate."He held out his right arm, cursing himself in his thoughts. Who was playing the hero now?
Black lifted his wandless hand, he hesitated and searched his face trying hard to find any trace of betrayel beneath the layers of times and tortures.
„If this is a trap, we are both going to die."
„No matter who set it up", he answered. „Now or never, Black. It's your friend."
„I don't trust you", Sirius said as he closed his hand around Snape's thin arm. Me neither, my friend -his eyes told - me neither.
Sirius followed him through the dark corridors. Through narrow passageways and gigantic halls, deeper and deeper into this horrible labrinth.
His mask was sliding over his too sensitive skin, he wanted to brush it away like an annoying fly. He always wondered how the Death Eater could fight and actually win even though they had to wear these things. Now he knew. He couldn't explain why he could see everything around him, but he did.
Half running, half walking they hurried forward. Dreamlike, surreal. It was memory and new. Fantastic and threatening. Graceful ornaments highlighted by the dancing flames decorated the walls.
But when Snape gave him the way, he could not stop all the tainted hours spent in his personal hell to burn themself into Sirius' brain.
So he saw the blood staining the elegant marble-stone, the screams curling around the columns like snakes, the eyes of thousands of misery peeking around the corner.
And Remus.
Suddenly it was there and over. He burst through the last door, alone but with Snape just a few meters away. Lucius was shot down and the liveless lump gathered into his arms. Too light, oh so light.
„Is he alive?"Snape asked, his eyes darted over the man, to his face and quickly away again. Sirius didn't answer. Of course he was alive, he had to. Good people didn't die, that wasn't how it goes.
He didn't think about anything. Neither about the blood that stained his favorit t-shirt nor about the rattling breath and definetly not about his friend dying in his arms.
They were running now, running for dear life. Just not their own.
A nurse came running through the corridor, frantically searching for a healer.
„Sir! Sir!"she was crying after him and at last he stopped and turned around. „Sir, you have to come, it's an emergency!"
So he ran back the way to the main hall, without taking his break and the good smoke he craved for the whole day.
He was a healer for a long time now, almost twelf years, when you counted the training, too. Well, he could say, he had seen a lot of things. But he still couldn't understand, why he had to see them.
It was beyond his comprehension how a human being, the grace of evolution, the perfection of life, could be so destructive. How was it possible that he had to look into burned out eye sockets, that he had to push a pipe deep down that shredded throat to make his patient taste sweet breath again. Why is this happening to us.
The young nurse on the other side of this miserable creature gasped, his arm fell back onto the red sheet, when she stepped away. Horror and disgust painted on her round face.
He bent over to see, what could be so horrible for her to fail in her duty.
A tattoo. A small tattoo with much meaning to most of the world. Where was Gwenn, when you needed her. He couldn't expect a normal woman to treat a werewolf, could he?
„Gwenn, I need Gwenn here", he told her and turned away from her. She didn't move. How he despised her. „Now!"
She fled.
The worst was done anyway, he sighed to himself.
„I can't treat him."
„Why?"
„Why?" he asked himself. Slowly he washed out one of the numerous cuts in the heated flesh. „I won't be allowed to waste our good remedies on a monster-"
„How dare you-"
„-but that doesn't mean, that I don't want to. You have to see Mister -?"
„Black."
„Well, Mr Black, I'm sorry, but I can't. I'd have to smuggle them out of the store-room and that is impossible."He looked up to the poor young man. So desperate and helpless.
„Is he your friend?"Black nodded. „I want to do this, you can't possibly understand how much I want to help him. But we are surrounded by stupid blind people, who just don't see what's really lying here. Not an opportunity to get rid of an problem, but an injured man. A dying man. Sorry."
The only sound that broke the silence in the small room was of the respirator. Up and down, up and down, over and over. Perhaps it would be better to just let him die quickly before he woke up.
Breathing would be painful, but he could do it mostly by himself. The potion to heal his lungs could be brewed outside the hospital, but for the eyes...
„What would I give to be invisible, just one time" he murmured to himself.
„Is that all you need?"Black's voice shocked him out of his thoughts.
„Yes."
„A cloak would do?"
„I'd say, hurry up."
„Sirius!" Lily came towards him, bobing Harry in her arms, and greeted him with a smile. Just until she really looked at him and saw the dirt and blood on his shirt.
„What happend?"
„Where's James? I need..."
„I'm here, Padfoot, what's up?"James Potter came into his living-room and was almost thrown to the floor when Sirius grabbed him.
„Where's the cloak?"
„What? Why do you... what happend to you?"
„Where is it!"
James left and returned after a few seconds. „Here, but what-"
„Later." He grabbed the invisibility cloak and turned to the fireplace. Th threw a handful of floo powder into the flames and stepped into it. He looked his gaze with James' willing him to understand,
„St Mungo's."And he vanished.
Autor's note: I'm not happy with it, sometimes I'm even ashamed to be the one who has written this, but this is chapter two. It sadly lacks some kind of inspiration, but I fear it doesn't have a lack of wrong punctuation, grammar in general, and vocabulary. Well, I haven't got the nerve to go over it again and again, because I don't know what to look for. So if there is someone out there who might be interested in some beta-reading...
p.s. Now, I should have thanked you for reviewing a long time ago. I've forgotten, sorry. I hope to get to the AU part, it's not at the moment. Well, some parts are unclear... hell, the whole chapter is messy! But that is, well it's written out of Sirius' view, with a few breaks I quite like the flowing change to Snape's view, which I missed whilst writting it, but it's mainly out of his view and he just doesn't know anything at the moment, so no explanations, and then he's confused and angry, I mean there's Snape standing in his flat, and he's afraid. And for the rest it's just my messy writing style if you want to call it style. Translating pictures into words isn't one of my talents, it seems to me, so I have to improvise. Elmtree! You made my day. An emergency, that's exactly what it is. Thank you, to all of you.