This chapter is a belated birthday present to one of my best friends, Justine, who, for some reason, can't get enough of this story. Much love to you, Justine. I hope you had a great birthday!!

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The whole room moaned and groaned to life, the walls stretching, bored at the thought of opening again. Sirius felt his heart quicken, and found it awkward being dead and still have a heart beat.

Was this the doorway to Heaven? Sirius always imagined pearly white gates that shone with purity and glory. But, he supposed, "pearly gates" must look better on paper than "large, old warehouse door".

He heard singing, which he had expected to hear. But it wasn't the choir of harmonizing angels. It wasn't a harpist. It was more of a pitchy mumble that slurred around the place. Apparently, there was alcohol in heaven, copious amounts, for when the door opened, the strong scent of sherry hit his nostrils.

He heard zigzagging, inconsistent footfalls and was confused as to why God would send a drunken angel to greet him. He began to walk forward when he was pushed to the ground again. He sat up quickly enough to see long tresses of blonde whip around the corner. The voice had pushed him down once more.

"Do you enjoy shoving me to the ground? If so, could you do it with a little bit less frequency?"

"Shh!" the voice spat at him from behind a shelf. "Be quiet and stay low. We have a visitor."

"And I can't be seen by this visitor, why?"

"The dead shouldn't move amongst the living unless called to."

"And how will I know when that is?"

"Oh, you'll know. Believe me." And somehow, Sirius did.

"Who… who's there?" a slurring, whimsical voice said.

Sirius remained silent, unmoving and the visitor; obviously a drunk, crazy female shook it off, blaming it on "too much sherry for the day," and continued her pitchy moan of a song. The clinking of bottles, more inebriated footsteps and the closing of the door, and then silence swept the room. Sirius watched, saddened by the sight of the door shrinking into oblivion.

"I take it the door wasn't for you?"

An idea struck Sirius. Like the barrier at King's Cross, all he had to do was run at the wall and he would go to the other side. If the living could do it, why not the dead?

Sirius got into position. "I wouldn't do that if I were you…" the voice said.

Disregarding the voice's warning, Sirius counted to three and with all of his might, pumped his legs until he felt the earth beneath him move and the wall came closer to his face.

Sirius couldn't recall much of what happened next, except for the fact he was still in the same room, staring at a giant harp and a bust. Sirius was unaware of much except that he wasn't where he had planned, and he had the world's largest headache. He didn't know what time it was.

How could the deceased get a concussion?

He heard rustling around him, much like the rustling he heard when he first arrived here. He saw the shadow of a hunched over woman, sewing rhythmically to the soft, motherly lullaby she sang. He sat up and the shadow looked up from her sewing, the lullaby dying in the embers of sound. "Good morning, sleeping beauty. How's your head?"

"What happened?"

"Most would say that running into a wall was not your greatest stroke of brilliance." The voice laughed with jubilancy once more.

"Yeah, go ahead and laugh." Sirius said, rubbing his eyes and his head simultaneously. "I'm sure you've done that before."

"No, never. Not once."

"Why? Have you never tried in fear of failing, or do you just not want to get out?"

"Neither. I just know that I'll know when it's my time to leave this place and go where I belong."

Sirius rolled his eyes, still unable to take her word as far as her beliefs went.

"So," Sirius asked, finally standing, able to walk around, "are you ever going to show yourself, or am I just to assume you don't exist and that I'm going crazy?"

"Oh... You're not crazy." she said, thinking, "You'll see me sometime. I'm just not one to just show myself immediately."

"When does it stop being immediately?"

"When I say so," the voice said, slightly irritated, but not losing her pensive, dream-like tonal quality.

"What? Is your face mangled or something? Because I won't judge, I promise. I mean, I saw the Auror Mad-eye Moody on a regular basis."

"Auror?" The woman said with a verbal cringe, "Don't get me started on Aurors."

"Okay, then I won't…" Sirius changed subject. "Earlier, when you said we can't interact with the living, and what have you, how did you know?"

The voice gave a shuddering, sad sigh. "I've been in here for almost seven years. And I was once like you, trying to get out, making sad and feeble attempts at it, too. I learned the hard way."

"When? When did this happen? How?" Sirius asked. Seven years was a long time to be alone.

"Recently. I… I…" The voice trailed off, choking on tears. "My daughter was in here and I couldn't touch her. I couldn't hug her and tell her how much I have missed her, how proud I was of her. When I tried, a defensive spell was casted my way. I didn't want to die again so I had to watch my daughter live from a distance. She… she's a rather talented young witch." Sirius could hear the emotional toll that this had on the woman as he watched the voice's shadow on the wall shaking with tears, getting smaller with each heaving sigh. "If… If you'll excuse me." And the voice disappeared once more, shadow and all not to be seen again for another week or so. It was a long week in which Sirius had read through a pile of books and papers, seeing a few familiar names, mainly those of students with whom he attended school. He grew bored with the yo-yo he found and shadow puppets were hardly a way of entertainment. Finally, by the eighth day, he cried out in the anguish of boredom, "I'm bored as hell! What's there to do?" He knew how immature he sounded, much like a small child tired of furniture shopping, but he couldn't help himself. Once boredom crept into the cracks of your soul, it grew there until insanity started.

"Then do something to fix that!" the voice said, echoing off the walls with her usual mystique.

Sirius's heart lurched with surprise. "Is this going to be a regular thing with you? Sneaking up on people! I'm already half dead, don't scare me half to death again!"

The voice laughed, but Sirius was not finding it comical. "You haven't ever had anyone in here with you, have you?"

"Oh I have. They've all left and gone where they need to be. I still to this day can't figure out how they did it. But anyway, none of them have been quite as humorous as you."

"Well thank you." He said with a bow the voice couldn't see. "I try to please."

"I wonder," the voice said after her giggle subsided, "if maybe you try too hard."

"Of course not!" Sirius said after a moment of thought, but knew the voice was possibly correct. Mentally, he put it on his list of things to improve on when and if he ever got out of this strange and beneficial building.

There was more rustling from somewhere in the room, and the candle, the only source of their light at that moment in time gutted out, leaving the room in a thick gloom, the darkness so opaque that Sirius's eyes had trouble adjusting and he couldn't quite tell if his eyelids had remained open or if they fluttered close, anticipating sleep.

Boredom wasn't a pleasant emotion to humans. But to animals, boredom was a way a life, so much that animals didn't know quite what boredom was to begin with. Boredom to them was simply that neutral feeling you get when emotions haven't quite deposited in your mind for the day.

There were also the other feelings, the ones much like a human being's, such as happiness and pain, sorrow and anger, betrayal and shame. And then there was the more complex emotion of excitement, that sheer happiness, love and craziness. It was much like the feeling a human were to get after eating a jar of pure, high quality sugar. It would be a lie to say that this feeling was a rarity in the animal world, but it was to a non-domesticated dog that had spent a large amount of his life behind bars, cooped up and locked away from the rest of the world.

So Sirius crouched, sprouting a tail and fur, becoming a dog. He was comfortable now, unable to feel the torture of tedium as it stabbed him with hot knives and shouted nonsense in a monotonous growl. A dog, when faced with their equivalent of boredom did what came naturally, they slept. And so Sirius circled out a soft area and plopped down with satisfaction. His senses heightened, he closed his very well adjusted eyes on the junk that littered the room, every smell filtering into his wet, black nose, so vivid that even the bloody axe across the room made itself known with an irony scent. He slowly drifted to sleep, comfortable in this form. The last thing he heard was the voice as she continued her song.