CHAPTER 1: The Great Escape
There is no escape. No matter what he tried, even though he knew eventually he should be capable of it. It was impossible. There was no sense in trying. He could not get out. He cannot escape.
Hard and harsh grey stone surround him, sharp and malevolent in the icy cold that penetrates their bones.
Bars on the door, somehow wet entrapping him like a rat in a cage. A rat.
A mattress in the corner, mouldy straw inside.
Desolation
Despair
Doom
When one imagines themselves being sucked away from their mundane lives into the Magical World of Harry Potter, it's usually more along the lines of- squalling babe in the arms of loving parents, a prodigal talent for magic, usually accompanied with a light sprinkling of long lost and much revered talents, parselmouth, metamorph, seer, better than you, etc etc whatever.
If one had much choice in the matter they likely would not choose Azkaban prison.
There was no great light, or superb display of the extraordinary in displacing him from his life. No great and powerful voice from beyond urging him to "save Harry" or some such.
It was simply, one moment he was rotting in bed feeling sorry for himself in his apartment- the next, the exact same but somewhere… else.
There seemed no rhyme or reason.
The horror of the Dementors cannot be understated. They do not walk, they simply are. They trade the air around them woe, fill the chambers of your heart with the deepest blackest thickest depression until it is almost too much effort to convince yourself to merely continue breathing. It is torture of the soul. It is worse than being dead.
At first he didn't realise that he had been swept away to another place, assuming instead that his half-hearted depression had finally kicked in some more effort.
For the first week he didn't move an inch but stayed where he was on the bed, drifting in and out of consciousness waiting to die. Wanting to die.
The issue with magical bodies is that what would kill a muggle would not kill a wizard. And he realised something was wrong.
Trying to organise your thoughts whilst there is a dementor outside your door is almost impossible. The brain fogs up til you cannot see your own hands in front of you, thoughts slip away in the mist unable to be held onto. You start to do something but cannot remember what it was. You are doing something and pause, and you can no longer remember what is was you were doing .
Time slips away this away.
You stay as far away from the door as you can.
The worst is when they reach their skeletal, flesh rotting, clawed hands into the cell to try and grab you, snatch and reach and pull you out and devour and consume and reap.
Deaths foot-soldiers.
Denizens of hell itself.
You get memories that don't belong to you. A Mother with dark hair and darker criticisms at every turn. A father with his cruel dismissals, expectations that burn. A brother- (but you don't have a brother?) that says 'I wish you were never born, I wish you were dead. I hate you. I hate you.'
In the distance you hear the voices of others, of insane laughter of screams and shrieks of pain, pleas for forgiveness, for salvation. Murmurs and mutterings coming though the walls, resting in the dark corners but you can never quite make out what they say. The howling wind. At times you come to and realise it is yourself howling or crying, muttering, moaning and you wonder if there is anyone else here at all. You cannot be sure.
Dreams mix in with reality. Nightmares invade the waking world.
There is a rat somewhere in here. It hides in the dark, it is very clever this rat. Sirius is going to catch it, to kill it, (Sirius? Who is) to rip it to shreds, cleanse the earth of its very presence. You know the incantation You Know the spell. The sound slips around in your mouth 'ah-vah-dah' you practice the wand movement. You know the spell. It is not a happy memory.
He's here! You scramble across the cell, knees scraping on the cold hard floor. Fingernails scratch desperately in furious anger. The nails split and crack and you scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch and scratch and.
You don't know how much time has passed. You don't know it time is passing at all.
Your hair is long now. Greasy and dry and flaky and itchy, it has long since consolidated into a great matt behind you.
A thick film builds up on your skin, at the corners of your mouth. Grey scales around your feet and ankles. Grease and sweat and blood and tears and dust and decay all become your new skin.
You are Sirius Black. Yet. You were not always (an apartment in the city, a lightswitch, the cold light of a fridge in the dark)
We slip and slide and dance with insanity. We rock back and forth. To and fro.
You step on something sharp and look down at the pads of your feet but there is nothing there.
Pad-footed, Padfoot.
You follow a strange instinct and there is a relief. A numbing and dumbing of the calamity of the mind. He curls up in the corner as a hound (the insanity of this), in the bed, a furry tail in his face and this is wrong wrong wrong and its also the best thing he's ever done. It is better.
The dementors do not affect him as much in this form. So he stays.
The only time he changes back into a man is when the guards walk past, when there is a human.
He retains some of his sanity this way, what of it that's left.
Time passes.
And then. A guard comes by escorting a guest with a newspaper. He asks for an answer to the crosswords.
An image of a family. A pyramid in the background. A Rat.
A rat on a boys shoulder.
Peter Pettigrew, I am coming for you.
—
It was punishingly cold and his bones ached as he climbed out of the sharp grey ocean. His wet fur stuck down in thick matts against his body.
He was on a dreary English seaside town, sparely populated. The dark clouds lay low across the sky, smothering any sunlight.
Sirius felt like absolute dogshite. Everything was in a state of fugue, he shuffled along as if in a dream.
What stuck him now was the lack of magic in the air. It was something almost alien to Sirius, whom being a pureblood had spent almost his entire life embraced by it was disturbed by the severe lack of it.
What also stuck him was how absolutely fucked he was. Having just escaped from what essentially amounted to super-max he was sure the authorities would be after him at any moment.
There was no reason to assume that a guard hadn't seen him in his animagus form, so even walking around as Padfoot wasn't safe. Even though he was sure that being a dog wasn't any safer than being a man he reasoned that as a dog he would blend in better than seeing a skeletal and filthy man in a quintessential prisoners garb, and so he set off to get out of the open and under a shelter of some kind.
Along a cracked asphalt road there was an old worn down house with crude amateurish graffiti sprayed up the sides of its timbre facade. The left window had been smashed with what looked to have been a ball or rock. The lawn was overgrown with tall grass and dead thistle and large, large dandelion plants.
The black dog trotted towards this building and nosed the door which had been kicked in at some point open, the tip of his tail slipped past the door, and he could no longer be seen.
It was in this house that Sirius found himself in a dusty corner kicking away an empty beer can, turning around three times and curling up in ball with his tail over his nose, and falling asleep.