Downspiral

Azkaban rises out of the roiling sea, a grim hulking mass just where the skulking shadows swallow the moonlight, where the smoky clouds drift by.

Outside it, forms black and insubstantial glide slowly, almost elegant, drawing haunting, chilling, decaying breaths; inside there echo a thousand deathly screams, a mind-numbing litany of terror, prisoners crying out to masters far-away, to loves lost, to friends betrayed, to a thousand things that lay beyond the howling night and the tortured granite walls of their prison.

(For the prison walls are tortured, if nothing else; shaped massively, grotesquely, like some giant hand had swooped down from the heavens and cloven the stone into two with clenched fist, not caring for accuracy or for beauty, and what walls that housed people like these, the scum, the rejects, the most loathed, accursed fiends in society, would not share some part of their torture, or be tortured by sheltering them from the cruel night?)




He does not feel. He has begun, slowly, to cease to feel. And this is a good thing, for feeling in this place is a weakness and a failing and a tool for them to use, feeling is the lever they will use to break your mind and feed on the pieces.


But in the night, he dreams.


He is searching desperately, desperately, for something the name of which he does not remember, and that he is not sure why he wants. And then the dream seems to shiver and twist and resolve itself into the hollowed shell of a familiar house, a house where there had been hopes and dreams and sighing loves and rather appropriately named 'stag' parties, where hands had held the baby and voices shouted in jubilation, where Lily had been charming and beautiful and intelligent and Prongs had been Prongs.

He dreams of the flickering green light, and of seeing them lying spread-eagled amidst the smoking ruins of their home, James' unruly hair like a dark mockery, green light glinting in Lily's eyes.

James does not have his glasses, and this troubles Sirius, because he knows that James is blind without them. He rummages through the blackened rubble until he finds them, tearing apart the last desolate remains of the house, and gently places them on James' face, telling him that it will be all right, as if by that simple gesture he can take back a thousand mistakes, and somehow bring James back to life.
But he is more comfortable seeing James with his glasses on, perched askew on his crooked nose.

I'm sorry, he says, trying to close the dead eyes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

There is no-one left to hear his apology, but he always says it. He feels a little lighter for it, somehow.




He is a dog very often these days, changing back only when he hears footsteps and voices approaching. They do not come often, because no one wants to brave the Dementors to visit a traitor. He is left alone to the howling, haunted mazes of his own mind.

He has almost cloven himself into two – Sirius and Padfoot, man and dog, and he rarely thinks like Sirius. Life in that place is much easier when he is a dog; in human dreams, the roiling abysses of his memory drag him inexorably back to Hallowe'en, to watch and re-watch everything he loves slipping away from him again; when he is a dog, Padfoot dreams of rabbits.



He tried to kill himself, once, and almost succeeded, almost drowned himself in a pool of his own blood, but in Azkaban even the criminally insane are not allowed to determine their own ends, and if any of the few human guards felt a stab of pity for the hollow-eyed boy, sitting awash in a sea of filth and red, they dismissed it quickly – death was too good for him. They would not, they resolved, let themselves be swayed by some pretty-boy Death Eater hardly out of his teens. He'd fooled the Potters in that way.




Sometimes in the dark of his cell he hopes for a saviour, hopes for a powerful figure to burst in at the door and cry out his innocence, tell the world that someone else was the traitor. But there is no-one left who can, for Dumbledore does not know and Remus is heartbroken and James and Lily are dead.



When the moon's cold light shines down – for the moon is full – and reaches even his remote cell, he imagines that he hears a howl, and thinks of Moony, of Prongs, who did not deserve to be betrayed – and of Wormtail. Traitorous Wormtail, who should by all that is right be languishing here in this cell instead of him.

He hates Wormtail, hates him almost as fiercely as he had once loved all his friends. His hate is one of the few emotions he allows himself to feel.



And in his head there drums one thought, unrelenting and incessant, and perhaps that thought helps him stay sane, a constant in a sea of tumbling chaos –

My name is Sirius Black (Padfoot, blood traitor, prankster, wrongfully imprisoned, loving friend and fierce enemy, Purveyor of Aids to Magical Mischief-Makers), and I am innocent.

When he was a child, Peter Pettigrew had always longed for friends who were better, stronger, braver than he was, friends he could run to when he felt like the world was about to crash down about his shoulders, friends who would banish the spectres that haunted the gloomy corners of his room with a wave of a hand or a few choice words.

Ten years later, even though the world was slowly falling and every day's newspaper brought fresh horrors, even though jokes about the relief of not finding one's own obituary in them had become too sadly true to be amusing, even though he had friends who were closer to brothers, friends who would die for him, Peter had never wanted them less; he wanted nothing more, now, than to be free of his powerful, brilliant, flamboyant friends and free of the fear of death that came with them .

(His friends were hunted. And by extension, so was he.)



But here, in the middle of the darkness and the dying, caught in a swirling vortex of deaths and madness, they could still talk, and laugh by the fire, and get progressively and steadily more inebriated.


Peter hated it, hated the fact that they persistently refused to be serious, persistently behaved as though nothing mattered more to them than Puddlemere United (Padfoot), or some girl Padfoot fancied (Prongs), or the interesting way in which grown men were still capable of reverting to a mental age of six with scarce a moment's notice (Moony, exasperated).

Peter loved it, because they helped him forget the possibility that he might not live long enough to get up late on Monday morning, to drag himself to the Ministry office bleary-eyed, to greet his daily cup of coffee as though he had given it up for dead three years ago.

They helped him forget the fact that, above all, he was afraid. Afraid to stray down isolated roads for fear that he would be the next corpse found with eerie green sparks floating over his head, afraid to answer his door when he wasn't expecting a visitor. Afraid for his life, above all else.

(Oh, how he was afraid, afraid because there was no good in having friends who would die to save you if they died and you still needed saving.)





He wondered if James or Sirius or Remus felt the same way. Probably not, for James would far rather Lily live and he die than the other way round, and Sirius had loudly proclaimed that he did not care how or when he died as long as he managed to make a worthy exit, and take 'some of those Death Chompers with him', and Remus – well, one never knew with Remus. One never really knew what was going on behind his weary brown eyes and crooked smiles.

(Remus could betray them all, Remus could be plotting their deaths this moment, and Peter was sure that he, for one, would never know.)

-

He was roused rather abruptly from his reverie by James pressing another drink into his hand.

"What's the matter, Peter, mate? Voldemort been getting to you?"

Peter managed a forced smile.

"No. Nothing. I'm fine."

-

He did not like saying 'Voldemort'. He knew, in an intellectual way, that it was perfectly potty to be afraid of a made-up name, but somehow the name carried with it a veneer of death, of green light flickering underneath distant stars, a feeling of not being entirely human, and the people who said it (people like James, people like Sirius) had the unconscious air of being almost too brave, of walking proudly to certain destruction merely for the sake of taking as many of the enemy as possible down with them.

-

Across from him, Lily laughed in response to a comment of Sirius' about exactly what he would like to do to Voldemort, most of which involved green hair, pus, red rubber noses and excruciating torture; the glass of red wine in her hand appeared almost luminous, seeming to glow with clear red light. Little glints of gold caught themselves in her hair like so many little specks of stardust; next to her, James reached over and put his arm around her. Sirius surveyed them with raised eyebrows and the beginning of a grin; Remus was quiet and contemplative.

Peter wanted to laugh. Peter wanted to cry. Peter wanted to seize Sirius' skinny shoulders and shake him hard, shake some sense into him – you fool, he wanted to say, you thrice-damned fool, this is war, this could be the last dinner you ever have with any of us, and Voldemort isn't like that, it isn't like sneaking around school with an invisibility cloak being nasty to Slytherins, this is different, this could get all of us killed, you and me and Remus and James and Lily and everyone you care about, because that's what Voldemort will do, he won't stop to be nice to people, he won't stop because there are footsteps in the corridor and he knows Filch is approaching. He won't care.

-

The fire began slowly to die down, and the clock's hands swept inexorably towards morning; the shadows swept into the room like spectres, swallowing everything they touched; they extinguished the little lights in Lily's hair, they cast James' face sharply into blackness; they played across Sirius face, hollowing his eyes, and Peter thought he saw a fleeting glimpse of him years into the future, grim-faced and gaunt and sunken and tortured; Remus looked tired and pale – had he always been quite this ghost-like, quite this shabby and worn?

He looked at his right hand, lying somehow aimless on his lap; it was a ghostly grey, and it almost seemed to shimmer in the last dying embers of the softly-glowing fire.

Wind howled over a cold, empty plain, and not even the standing stones were left to stop its passage.

Perhaps he was a madman; perhaps he was a coward; perhaps he was the only one here with wisdom, the only one here who knew how the future would turn out.



He blinked, and he shivered, and the moment was gone.

---

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