Inventory

There's one window to the outside world that Sirius can see from the courtyard of Azkaban when they let the prisoners out for a mandatory exercise walk around the interior pavilion. Like everything else about the prison, the window itself is old, worn and covered in moss. It's tiny too, which is probably why no one ever took the measures to board it up like they have everything else in the compound.

Personally, Sirius doesn't get it really. In a jail where all the inmates are half a step above drooling vegetable, who cares if the outside can be seen from the inside? Everyone's too crazy for it to have much of an impact. On the other hand, though, not all the inmates are loco. And maybe the window in the wall is just their final way of taunting their captives into losing their capacity for rational thought. God only knows that Sirius has spent many an hour in his own cramped cell, contemplating the window and many a walk out in the pavilion trying to resist the urge to go over and stare longingly out of what essentially amounts to a crevice in an impenetrable barrier to the outside world.

Sirius has had a lot of time to contemplate windows. That one in particular. Just outside it, he can see the trees growing and the wildlife that thrives just outside of the reach of the prison walls on this hellish little island. He can see the seasons change, and he can watch the trees grow and the wildlife flourish, and he can literally watch as his own life passes by him.

He kept meticulous time the first four years. There was always the hope, buried somewhere inside, that someone would figure it out. He wasn't guilty. He didn't belong here. He wasn't unredeemable and he didn't deserve to languish here in this place for crimes he'd never committed. He was the victim. They'd wronged him, and he wanted to have an accurate count of every day that they'd forsaken him and that they'd stolen from him.

Somewhere around the fifth year, he gave up caring about counting the days and etching them on the wall of his cell by his bed. One too many encounters with the dementors had disabused him of believing himself the victim. There were too many bad memories.

There were thoughts of not belonging. Because there had never been a place he'd ever truly fit. He wasn't even sure he'd know how if ever presented the opportunity. He was the proverbial black sheep of his own family. They'd rejected him just as surely as he'd rejected them. Sometimes, the lines between who had rejected whom first even blurred, giving him some relief in that at least he could tell himself that he hadn't begged pathetically for affection that they'd been unwilling to offer.

School had been an interesting extension of home. But by that point he'd gotten better at playing the game. Maybe the same stubbornness that kept him hanging onto his sanity here in hell was what had kept him tenaciously attacking things until they worked for him. Why give them the chance to make him feel inferior when he could make them feel rotten first. He couldn't help what he was, or more accurately, what he wasn't. He made a handful of friends who accepted him, and then he made everyone else's life miserable before they could make his miserable first.

It was hard to acknowledge in year five what a vindictive little snot he'd been.

Years six and seven were marked by the seasons changing out through the little hole in the wall that led to the rest of the world. By that point, the dementors had gotten to him, bit by bit, bringing all the unhappiness he'd buried all the way up to the surface. It was funny too, because he'd liked the pus and filth in his soul better when it'd been buried so far down that no one—not even himself—had been able to see it.

And then, it was no hardship to figure out why he'd been left to languish on his own in the first four years. A person couldn't love something that was inherently unlovable. He'd been an obnoxious brat from the moment he'd been born, pushing people's buttons. Making them uncomfortable. Pushing at them, pranking them, making them miserable. It was no small wonder that he found himself in the one person's company that he simply couldn't stand. And really, this place? This prison was just a garbage dump for disposable people.

It took some doing to realize that he was just as disposable as the lunatics he walked with every noon at the pavilion.

Maybe it was the loneliness in realizing how worthless and meaningless his existence was that led him to the what might have beens in years eight and nine. Looking out the window to the world had been painful those years.

Seeing winter on the snow covering the evergreens and realizing that there would be no more lovers in his future to snuggle up with under the blankets on a cold morning.

Falling into spring and realizing that there would be no more puppy love, or falling in love or taking those first steps into something exciting and new in getting to know another person and sharing his world with someone else. There would be no making amends with old foes or reuniting with the people he had carelessly cared about when he'd still had the chance. There will be no apologies at the Potter's grave. No playing with his little godson who probably is no longer so little any more. There is no making up with Moony and making up for the error in his ways.

No summer picnics or barbeques and no boisterous get-togethers with familiar loved ones. And in the fall of his own life, there would be no one to help ease him through it. No family to take care of him, no friends to shoot the breeze with and no one to mourn his passing when he finally shuffled off.

It's not that he ever particularly wanted the things that everyone else wanted. But he wanted to have the choice at least. The chance to have a family. The chance to have children. The chance to help in raising Harry. The chance to see the world. The chance to live a life worth living.

Years eight and nine were about acceptance. And accepting that his innocence didn't matter. That there was no escaping and that his existence was narrowed down to the four stone walls that confined him to just his own company. They were about accepting the solitude as his punishment for simply being who he was. They were about incorporating into him the ironies of his life and resigning himself to this existence. Because in the reality of things, there were no what might have beens to be lived. This was the hand he'd been dealt and all the what ifs in the world were never going to be possible.

Year ten was about struggling to maintain sanity when the reason to keep it had long since left.

And in year eleven, the paper, the rat, and the boy. Once again, he finds himself staring out the window into the rest of the world. He's no longer the person, the Sirius that entered through the gates rebelling against an unfair lifelong incarceration. He's taken his captivity to heart now, and the system has done its job because he knows he'll carry the prison with him no matter where he goes or how far he runs. It's a breathing, living cage that thrives inside him.

He's stared out this old stupid hole in the wall for eleven years, and he's going to escape through it now.

It just seems a pity that once he reaches the other side, it still feels as if he's looking out a window at something that will never be his.