XI.

Sirius is gazing out of his window again on a cool fall night and has a specific certainty resonating with perfect assurance in his head. It is an annual occurrence, this awareness. Tonight is October 31st, Sirius knows. It is Halloween.

It has been a very long time since he has had any idea what the year it might be. It is 1992 and he has resided in Azkaban for eleven years, in actual fact, but so far as he knows, it might be twenty, or it might be five or forty or sixteen.

It is not the year that matters, in any case. It is the date. Halloween. A bitter anniversary that Sirius has never stopped keeping, though he has long forgotten how to measure the passage of years. On this day, every year, he thinks long and hard on Peter Pettigrew, and on the many precious things that Peter has stolen from them all. Halloween and Samhain are the same thing for those of Sirius' ancient blood, and Sirius has never quite been able to completely expel the influence of that blood from his psyche. Fire and blood and sacrifice: there is still some small something in him that craves these blacker mysteries and crueler magics.

Sirius spends his day carefully considering Peter every year, and his thoughts have such a quality of savage devastation in them that perhaps Pettigrew, miles away and securely hidden in an incredibly clever disguise, might feel the distant touch of Sirius' virulent, unquenchable enmity, and shudder against a sudden chill in his blood.

The daylight hours of Halloween Sirius customarily dedicates to all the darkness that is in him and to all the wickedness that is in the world. But the evening he saves for Harry. In the darkest hours of Halloween, Sirius shifts his private yearly ritual to the consideration of Harry, his own godson, and the son of a murdered father whom Sirius still loves with all that is left of his heart.

When Sirius thinks of Harry, he sees in his mind's eye a dark-haired toddler, a slightly pudgy baby with solemn green eyes, quick hands, and a fine, questing spirit. He does know that years have passed since this mental image was current, even if he can't say exactly how many years out of date it might be. Harry will no longer be the baby Sirius remembers, but a child grown now, or even, quite possibly, a young man.

He will have come to Hogwarts himself by now, Sirius is certain. Sirius still believes in the abilities of Albus Dumbledore, regardless of the terrible errors in judgment that Dumbledore has been guilty of in regard to him. Albus will have protected Harry; kept him safe; made certain he will have been gently guided toward the life-paths that are his birthright. Sirius still trusts Albus enough to be certain of all this.

He hopes Harry will have been happy too, over all the years that Sirius has been unable to look out for him. He hopes that Harry has had many occasions to laugh, and has had good friends, and has sometimes made discoveries wonderful enough to stagger his naturally questing mind with joy. These things too, Sirius still believes, are the normal and attainable parts of any proper human life. He trusts that Dumbledore will have insured Harry's safety, but he is not as certain the old and heavily burdened wizard can be trusted to have a care for Harry's happiness as well. He is not quite positive that Dumbledore could ever learn to consider Harry's happiness as vital a priority as his survival.

But Sirius is not in a position to do more than hope for the happiness of his godson. And, in fact, he knows that the happiness of loved ones can never be completely assured, no matter how deeply one might love them. He has too often tried and failed in such quests himself.

So he does what he can. He imagines Harry at various ages, and sends out every strange and incorporeal tendril of long sight that is in him toward the place where he imagines Harry must be: Hogwarts. And in that mental milieu, on Halloween evenings, Sirius opens all his inner channels and tries to see Harry – attempts to use the intuitive senses he has always had to watch over the godson that he once vowed to love and protect.

Over the past eleven years, now and then, disconnected images have indeed come to him. He has seen a Snitch zooming on an updraft on a sunny day. He has seen a tall boy with red hair and he has seen, much to his bafflement, a three-headed dog. He thinks there is a girl who, just as Remus Lupin once did, always carries too many books to class and bends under the weight of her book bag. He has seen Hagrid, not the way Sirius himself remembers the huge and kindly gamekeeper, but older, with more grey in his great beard and in his hair. He has seen a comfortable and familiar common room, and he suspects, with great delight and glee, that Harry may be a Gryffindor.

Over the years, during the daylight hours of Halloween when Sirius is observing his self-imposed annual celebrations and consumes himself in a dark fire of hatred and the iron-edged desire for vengeance, the dementors have learned to gather eagerly, inside and outside his cell, like bees at a hive. This is one black and compelling feast that they cannot ever bring themselves to miss.

But when the sun goes down and Sirius shifts the direction of his rituals back toward love, as the years have passed, approaching him then has become another matter entirely for his jailers. During these times, he seems to grow and swell uncontrollably in their consciousness, and he acquires a bright psychic shadow that, at first, made them uneasy, and now flatly frightens them. He is more there at these yearly occasions, and yet, at the same time, he is far more remote. As a group, observing their favorite year after year, the dementors have slowly arrived at a suspicion that their human charges may possess unknown parts, unquantifiable aspects that can neither be heard nor touched nor consumed, and that can never be imprisoned. On Halloween nights, there are parts of Sirius that move far outside the walls of the prison in which he resides.

On this Halloween night, 1992, Sirius calmly gazes out his window at a half moon gleaming in the velvety blackness of a clear autumn night and casts out to touch Harry, in the only way he still can. He has learned to be patient when he performs this last half-magic, and he will be at his window for many hours more, unmoving, not quite there.

Now and then, it seems to the dementors gathered around outside his barred walls, all of them swaying gently to and fro, that the solid and familiar components of the prisoner in their custody blur and grow faint. All of them would very much like to enter the cell and speak to their prisoner, perhaps touch him, assure themselves that he really is exactly where they left him during the day, before the night fell on this Halloween. But none of them do it – not one enters the cell.

Not one of them dares to go in.