VIII.

There are three dementors in Sirius' cell on this drizzly, grey early morning. They are the third shift in a twenty-four hour marathon of psychic poking and prodding and the constant ghostly pricking of their avaricious questioning. They have been at him all night and Sirius, too exhausted to continue the opposition they relish so avidly, has opted out of the forced dance until further notice. Padfoot is curled up against one wall of the cell, pale eyes closed and tail tucked neatly over snout. He is almost asleep, resting comfortably in the corner furthest away from the wet dawn draft flowing through the window, but his peaked ears still react to small sounds and occasionally his paws twitch.

Sirius does not know why he can still work this one magic; the most complex he has ever learned. He has been in prison for six years now, the prized pet of the dementors, and he barely remembers the simplest of charms.

He remembers, vaguely, learning one of the first spells he was ever taught to do with a wand, a common elementary lesson for magical children – lighting a fire.

His father had taught him, and it had been so easy, really, he'd been able to grasp that focusing of the imagination and peculiar mental twitch of the will so readily it had been as if he'd known just how to do it all along. It had seemed much more like play than like work to him. His dad had been quite pleased by his small son's natural aptitude, but he'd also been quite displeased at how little effort it had cost the boy to learn the spell and then perform it. So he'd made his son repeat the spell perfectly one hundred times before he would allow that Sirius had learned it properly. This repetitive drilling had taken all the fun and novelty out of the new magic for young Sirius, but ever afterwards, he had been able to light a fire any time, under any conditions: dead drunk, or deathly ill, or standing on his head, or sitting in a bathtub at the bottom of a lake in a torrential downpour.

Now, however, he imagines he could be standing in a bucket of Muggle petrol inside a blast-furnace in a forest fire, and he'd likely still need a match.

But in spite of this, it seems, he can still find the magical path to Padfoot, perhaps because it is a magic more fueled by passion and gut instinct than ruled by logic and conscious will. Once, long ago, when he had been watching over Remus after a particularly bad transformation, and had been chatting with him softly to take his mind off the pain, Remus had asked him, in his shy, quiet way, what it was like, becoming Padfoot. How sad Moony had looked as he'd asked; Sirius had been acutely aware of how wistful a question it had really been. Moony had known that he himself would never experience such a journey. His own transformations were forced on him by a curse, the Wolf rudely and abruptly grafted on to a nature spectacularly ill-suited to it. How could he have ever explained to Remus, who was obliged to fight a constant border war to maintain what integrity of self he could, that the Animagus spells were mostly a matter of relinquishing those same borders willingly? Becoming Padfoot was a little like turning one's own identity inside-out; but Remus did that literally, physically, every month. Sirius had been ashamed to say how truly easy it was for him by comparison, but he had described the process for Remus as truthfully as he could just the same.

Now, in Azkaban, Sirius has to fight a kind of border war of his own. The crawling, constant, greedy attentions of the dementors are also an assault to the identity. He has found that when his own thoughts and emotions become too hopelessly snarled, and he is starting to forget who he is, Padfoot's more elemental approach to life can be a refuge.

Padfoot is resting now, easily taking the repose that Sirius himself needs desperately but could not quite get to while he was the object of his keepers' enamored attention. They have come to adore him and covet him, he must admit to himself, he would be the apple of their eyes if they possessed eyes or valued any delicacy other than misery. Their monstrous affection cannot be put aside, and there are times when Sirius cannot even think of it without being tempted to start screaming.

And if he ever started doing that, he believes, there's a good chance he might never stop.

Sirius…please talk to us. Sirius.

Sirius?

Padfoot's simpler, far less nuanced thoughts are profoundly confusing to the dementors. They can sense many of the familiar components of their favorite prisoner in the great black dog, and many of the most dreadful memories are exactly the same. But Padfoot has never taken any of these things as hard as his human alter-ego has. Padfoot's canine sensibilities can be shockingly brutal, but they never hurt, and there is no malice or wickedness or regret in any of them.

Sirius? Can you hear? Won't you answer us?

Sirius?

Sirius?

The forlorn, disappointed edge in the dementors' nagging calls might have given Sirius a certain bitter satisfaction, had he heard it as himself. But Padfoot isn't interested much at all in these bloodless things that hang about the cell, cluttering up its scents and making such a dry, rattling racket. He is satisfied enough to have found a place out of the cold, rain-sodden air from the window to rest in, and he intends to eat the scraps of food left in the bowl by the cell door once the dementors get tired of all their nagging and calling and leave. Padfoot is slightly tempted to drive them out of his territory with barking and snapping, and he would certainly kill them if he could. The various scraps of Sirius' human views that are left in Padfoot's consciousness are more than enough to identify the things as deadly enemies. But Sirius has also left a few specific inhibitions behind in Padfoot's consciousness too, and he knows that he is strictly forbidden to bark or to attack.

He doesn't think he'd actually want to bite them anyway, the brittle, snuffling things. They don't smell quite right.

Padfoot and Sirius have always been enmeshed in a strange sort of mutual balance. When the dog is ascendant, some of the man's thoughts still remain, guiding his behavior and occasionally illuminating his simpler canine intelligence. And when the man is ascendant, sometimes what the dog sees as truth colors and shapes everything the man thinks he knows.

Padfoot is sometimes impatient with the bizarre impressions and tiresomely complicated conceits and restrictions Sirius leaves behind in his head. A good dog is a wonderful animal, loyal, loving, protective, often funny, frequently charming, a very good friend indeed. And Padfoot, as he himself knows full well, is a very good dog. But a dog is also a predator, and has been designed, through hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, to hunt and kill prey with deadly effectiveness. Even the most adorable, most sweet natured of dogs is also a killer.

Sirius? Sirius? Sirius?

Sirius ..?

Sirius is no longer present to hear their endless calls and pleas. And Padfoot couldn't care less what they have to say. One of Sirius' memories overtakes Padfoot as he drifts into a light doze, and he thinks, with a certain doggy satisfaction, of his own part in all that Sirius remembers.