a / n; written (somewhat lately) for challenge three of the forum-wide competition over at the HPFC forum. I am representing slytherin house and using prompt table two: feeling dizzy, orange, are you sure?, flickering, it's expected, something is wrong, and candle. The italicized prompts are the ones I've used in this story. I had so much fun writing this, and I'll admit it was largely inspired by the movie Inception and the book The Five People You Meet in Heaven, though there are numerous other inspirations. The title is taken from Andrew Marvell's poem To His Coy Mistress.

et al
had we but world enough, and time

: - :

There is a time – minutes and years and no time at all, simultaneously – when he does not exist, and it's a curious non-existence because it's after his conception and before his rebirth, and he's dimly aware of the whole affair in a cellular sort of sense – the falling, the stillness, the dizzying circles and silence and reverberating whispers that speak stagnation to his molecules.

It is a curious non-existence and he is just enough aware of it to realize that when it is over he is dead or a ghost or something less, and he is entirely unsurprised, when he opens his eyes to grey wheat fields and orange skies and the reckless tilt of this world's horizon, to find himself twenty-one again – the age just before everything went horribly awry and he became something other than himself.

Here, he is Sirius Black. Here, he still smells of leather and butterbeer and ignorant immortality. Here, he is exactly himself and a memory of himself, and being dead is exactly the same as being alive but with more remembering and an atmosphere like dust and stagnant air.

And he doesn't know, but he thinks, that if this is the afterlife it isn't singular, and it is his and simultaneously someone else's and he wonders whose it is ('James', he hopes) and how long it will be until he teases them out of the fabric of this place.

And because he is twenty-one again and the sort of reckless and impatient that modified motorbikes and chased girls and courted death, he begins to walk.

: - :

He is startled and unsurprised at how this world changes – how the wheat field, on a whim, is cut through by a swath of asphalt; how the asphalt is replaced by a city square; how the square becomes London; how London becomes a foyer; and how the foyer becomes some tantalizing bit of memory.

It's all about the intent, he thinks, and then, but not here.

Because if this is someone else's afterlife he would never have thought or hoped or wanted it to be hers.

Yet there she is, sitting quite still in the adjacent room, hands folded, hair dark against her pallid cheekbones, studying the wall (and it's so expected, he thinks, and, of course, he should have known), occasionally whispering to herself, "Lycoris. Regulus. Arcturus. Lucretia. Orion. Cygnus. Pollux. – Sirius."

And it is the last that she shouts, and it is the last that is punctuated with the smell of burning threadwork.

There is nothing for him here, so he turns on his heel and slips through the door of his childhood.

: - :

12 Grimmauld Place dissolves behind him or maybe it was never there to begin with, though he doesn't bother to ponder the physics of the dead, just accepts it and moves on, though he supposes in this place he doesn't have to. He supposes he could bask in this moment of ostracism for eternity, and it's a strange thought, but it was never in his nature at any rate, so he continues onward.

London gives rise to verdant country and snatches of other places, and he can't know for sure, but he supposes that these are fragments of other afterlives or perhaps residual memories that the living have forgotten and so ,too, have died.

He hears opera music pouring from the trees, sees insubstantial children dashing down dirt paths, feels subway trains rattling absurdly beneath the surface.

And without him quite knowing how, he is standing beside a lake, and just on the periphery of his vision there is a boy or a young man skipping stones on the surface of the water.

And his heart speeds in his chest at the sight of the black hair and pale skin, and he thinks he knows who this must be, and he calls out "James!"

But it isn't. Of course it isn't.

The boy who turns to face him is eighteen and looks rather like himself, and for an instant he is confused, and then he remembers –"Regulus."

"Sirius," he nods, setting down the stones he had gathered and walking over to the older brother who had outlived him by fifteen years. And it's just a little bit unsettling, that Regulus is still so much the same, like no time had passed since he had last seen him. For him it hadn't, he supposed.

"I knew we'd cross paths eventually," Regulus's smile is a little bit hesitant and weary, and maybe even a little smug, too. And Sirius wishes he could say the same, but the thought of his brother being here had never even so much as occurred to him, and he feels that twinge of guilt he occasionally does when thinking about Regulus, when thinking about how lousy an older brother he must have been, how he could have maybe stopped everything from happening, "in this place, they always do."

"How long have you been here?" Sirius asks and he knows the answer, knows he's been here for the past decade and a half, but that's not quite the question he's asking.

"Since I opened my eyes," he says, and it's so typical Regulus it almost hurts, "it is a nice place, after all, and I would rather people come to me than the other way around," a wry smile, "though I don't suppose the same could be said of you."

"No, of course not," he stops and hesitates and goes for it anyway, "Reg, I- -"

"You were right about them, Sirius," he says, looking out at the lake, and back at his brother, and Sirius can't help but notice the way his shoulders tense watching the water. He wonders why his brother chose this place, "You were wrong about me."

This is an unexpected absolution, and the two of them spend untold moments in it, revelling in the way death has wiped clean a slate that life never could. They talk for hours or days or years – about life, about death, about who they've found and who they haven't, who they're still waiting for. They talk about school and Regulus's treachery and Sirius's imprisonment. They talk until there's only silence and then Regulus quirks an eyebrow and asks, "So, are you leaving then?"

"No, Reg, of course not," but the words are half said and he already knows they're false. He hasn't finished looking – for James, mostly – and he tells him this apologetically and Regulus only smiles.

"Well, we've got eternity, haven't we? And like I said, our paths are bound to cross eventually, they always do."

"Are you sure?"

Regulus nods and waves him on, haughtily.

Sirius smiles then and brushes his cheeks clean, and all at once he's somewhere else entirely.

: - :

He appears, once again, in London – but this is a different London, fonder than his mother's and filled with more memories. It is raining lightly in this London, making the world smell of earth and water and damp newspaper, and everywhere people are bundled beneath coats and umbrellas and conveniently placed awnings.

It takes him a minute to gather enough sense to recognize where he is, but when he does, he catches his breath.

King's Cross Station, dreary as he remembers from his last train ride, but impossibly vibrant because of it.

And because it's his intent, he finds himself suddenly sprawled across Platform Nine and Three Quarters, and there is laughter in his ears that isn't his own, but as familiar as if it was.

"Feeling rather clumsy today, Mr Padfoot?"

And there is a hand pulling him up and he doesn't even have to ask whom it belongs to.

"James," he breathes, looking into the face of an eleven-year-old boy who is, at the same time, seventeen and twenty-one and the kid he met for the first time on this very platform and his best mate and a father and a long dead hero. And he's flickering between each one and is all of them simultaneously, and looking into his eyes Sirius is overwhelmed by guilt and and brotherly affection and boisterousness and a feeling that is inexplicably like being home.

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