Torture the OTP Round 4 Prompt: One half of your OTP watches the other half die. (Scenario in which the death occurs is up to you, but Person B can't be saved.)
~1974. Time Travel. AU.~
~o~
Sirius threw back his hair, out of his eyes, as he tried to laugh away his pain.
Hermione had just dumped him. It was 1974 and he'd also been kicked out of his house by his parents. He should've been having the time of his life, attacking Slytherins and fighting the sons of Death Eaters by James's side. Instead, he found himself bitterly regretting his last words to Hermione. The mysterious girl who had his heart and with whom he'd just majorly fucked up things. By opening his large, stupid mouth.
Hermione had been trying to tell him something important, to guide him, but he just wouldn't hear her.
"You wouldn't understand me, Hermione. You've had a happy upbringing, you don't understand the choices I've had to make."
"Sirius, please, just tell me you'll try to make up things with your brother. I just know—"
"You don't know anything about my family, Hermione, just please don't make assumptions."
"What about Regulus? Don't you think he still cares for you? You're his big brother."
"Stop trying to get me to make up with my family, it's not something I'm doing," he'd shouted. "And that's final."
Hermione had simply wiped away a tear from her and stared staunchly at him. "Sirius, if you don't even try to understand or do this for me, I'm afraid this has got to end...because I can't watch you destroy your life or others anymore. Including Severus, you almost killed him! Can't you see how wrong that is?!"
"Don't fucking talk to me about Snape!" Sirius had hissed, but that had been the final straw and then Hermione had completely walked away from him and refused to answer his owls.
It was alright. Sirius didn't care. He was anaesthetized to pain. He didn't have a heart anymore. Or if he did it was all Black. A black heart. Perhaps like his blood.
~o~
When he was finally ready to make an apology, Hermione was no longer there and she seemed to have disappeared as suddenly as she had mysteriously first wandered into Hogwarts and his life.
He didn't see her again for nearly twenty-years, under the most surreal circumstances.
Because at first, it just appeared to be Hermione's daughter or a relative of hers, but then he gradually came to realize that this was the Hermione he knew all along—before she met him. Before she got the Time-Turner.
He hadn't said anything, of course, out of respect. Yet it haunted him to finally see her, be reunited with his Hermione even though he could never say or speak what he felt on his mind nearly twenty years ago.
~O~
Hermione wasn't sure what she thought of Sirius Black, her friend's godfather. He was a much older man and different wizard than any she had met before. She decided, though, it would be the right thing to save his life that night he escaped with Buckbeak.
Harry loved Sirius, it was like the orphan boy finally had a family for the first time. Though his family was only an escaped prisoner with a barrage of problems and a wild sense of humour and sense of adventure despite his problems.
Harry loved his godfather. Hermione wasn't sure what to think of him or whether to ever fully trust this strange, damaged man to properly raise or be a mentor to Harry. Truthfully, Hermione thought Sirius had too many problems to actually ever raise Harry as his own son. Yet she refrained from telling this to Harry, so as not to hurt Harry, even when Sirius got on her temper many times with his delusional and dangerous behaviour. Sirius seemed to somehow think he was invincible and that nothing, not even Voldemort or the Death Eaters, could catch him.
At first, Hermione hated him for his attitude.
Gradually, over time, and from a distance, she realized she had come to love Sirius for his attitude. He was reckless and handsome, if aged and battered by countless wrecks upon the rocks of time.
She never revealed to anyone, let alone Sirius himself, that she loved him. Instead, she watched with a mitigation of terror, hope, and fear each time Sirius risked his safety and well-being to be out there and free and fighting.
She never told him she loved him. Never. And then, as she hurried by Harry's side to the Department of Mysteries, she realized it would soon all be over. So she slipped one of the Time-Turners before all of the Department was destroyed and she thought, one-day soon I will slip through the veil of time and find him on the other side.
~o~
Sirius Black thought nothing as he slipped through death. Though he thought he understood how Hermione had travelled back in time as he watched her run towards him with the golden Time-Turner in her hand.
So this is where she had got one. This is where it had begun and ended too.
He slipped through the Veil in peace, and hoped this time, when she went back, he would make a better choice.
The right choice.
His silver eyes closed as she stared at him from across the hall, right before he slipped entirely through the Veil.
~o~
