v: The Birds are Singing
The birds don't sing in Azkaban. Or if they do, nobody notices them. A cloud of despair surrounds the island, sucking every positive feeling from its inhabitants and preventing them from appreciating anything in life, let alone something as innocent and optimistic as birdsong. It's a dark and desolate place. Sirius still isn't quite sure how he survived it, except that he had one thing the others didn't: the knowledge that he was innocent.
Birdsong is one of the first things he remembers noticing when he escaped. Still in dog form, he arrived onto the mainland in the early-morning sunlight, greeted by a symphony of tweets and twitters. It was not only a new morning, but a new beginning for him - one he wasn't sure he would ever get. Had he been in his human form, he would have laughed out loud in the delight of it all. Instead, he bounded around, following the birds in their flight path, barking so loudly that he alarmed the poor creatures. He was finally free.
The birds sing in Grimmauld Place, too, but here it feels like a mockery. The sun filters in through a gap in the curtains of his dingy old childhood bedroom - a different kind of prison that he thought he had escaped twenty years ago - and the sound of the birds frolicking in the trees only remind him that, once again, he is not free.
(He will never be free again.)
A/N: Aren't drabbles just the perfect remedy for writer's block? I was working on something bigger and got frustrated at how little progress I was making, so instead I dug out the prompts for this old collection (which I'm pretty fond of) and thought I'd bash out a few more of these. Hope you enjoy!