A/N: For MNFF's monthly challenge number four, a one-shot using the sentence: "Ten to one we're gone when the smoke clears. They will do everything in their power to destroy us." from Eponine in Gryffindor.

And thank you to my betas Potterphile123 and witchwannaB

~ ~ ~

Darkness.

It surrounds him to the point of suffocation. Not even a glimmer of light can be found in this infinite river of nightmares.

Sirius, hands extended, blunders through his blindness. He does not know if he is standing or floating. Nothing around him seems positively solid. Deafening silence surrounds him, thick as the air right before a storm.

He is not sure how he has arrived at wherever he is, but tries to find some way, any way, out. Then, his memory strikes him like the curse that had pushed him into this terrible place. He tries to take in a breath of realization, but nothing fills his lungs.

“Harry,” he tries to shout, but even then, can’t hear his own voice. ”Harry!”

Then, a light, just a glimmer, sparkles somewhere. Sirius can’t tell if it was nearby and very small, or very, very far away. He runs towards it, groping the air to capture the light.

Sirius’s eyes burn from trying to navigate in the nothingness.

”Dumbledore!” He waves his hands through the air to find something to hold on to.

The glimmer of light flickers.

”No!” Sirius lunges for it, but can’t grasp it. He doesn’t know why he wants to stop the light from going out, but knows terrible things would happen if he lets it fade away.

The light seems to dance towards him. He reaches for it, but only feels it burn against the tips of his fingers.

The light grows bigger, and Sirius smiles. More light was better; the more light, the less darkness. But the light isn’t eliminating any darkness, even though it continues to grow. Sirius’s smile turns into a frown.

"Stop!"

But it does not stop. By the time it is about three times bigger than Sirius, it halts for a moment. Before he can express any relief, the light explodes and lights up everything in a blinding shine.

Sirius glances at his surroundings. He is standing in some sort of river of deathly black. Around him are mountains of striking yellow and a sky of blood red.

Whispers fly past him, taunt him forward with the current of the river. He follows their beckoning calls and wades through the dark water.

The whispers are getting louder and suddenly are no longer comforting. Sirius clamps his hands over his ears, but if anything, the whispers get even louder.

”Stop!” he yells, but he cannot hear himself under the now shouting voices.

He shuts his eyes, thinking of a way to escape. Turning away from the current, he pries open his eyes. Yellow mountains loom above him. He clambers out of the river. His dark hair drips wetness into his face, and he hastily brushes it aside.

Glancing up at the mountains, he again tries to take a deep breath, but finds that his lungs don’t fill with air, though he doesn’t really feel the need to breathe anyway; habits, though, are hard to break.

He is closer to the mountains now, or considering he has not moved, the mountains are closer to him.

Whispers follow down the dark current of the river, not up the bright path to the mountains. Clearly, up the mountains is the better choice. Nervously, he places a hand on the bright yellow stone and then places a foot.

He finds it isn’t nearly as difficult to climb up the path as it looks, and is glad to have the voices well behind him.

Finally, the peak of the mountain is before him. Sirius places a hand on the level ground, but before he can haul himself up, he feels himself being pulled away, as though a great gust of wind is passing. He holds onto that rock until his knuckles burn from the strain of his weight.

The darkness begins coming back. It creeps up around him. As he shouts and tries to avoid it, it swallows him and leads him to another land of nightmares.

And suddenly, everything is gone again. He is in nothing, he is nothing. Sirius gropes in the darkness for something he can never find, just searching for something to assure his existence.

”Sirius…”

Sirius blinks. He cranes his neck to look behind him.

”Sirius…

A shiver runs up his spine as if a cold, dead finger is stroking it

”Who’s there?!” he calls out to the voice, spinning clockwise to try and catch a glimpse of whatever it is.

“Sirius Black…”

This time, the voice is softer, kinder. Sirius smiles to hear it; it fills the coldness spreading through his body for a moment. He spins around, trying to find the voice. It reminds him of how Lily would speak to Harry when he was only an infant.

“Padfoot…”

He shouts out of happiness when he hears his old nickname. But the voice is getting softer. It continues to call his name, but is getting farther and farther away.

”Wait, come back!” Sirius runs towards the voice, trying to stop it.

Is this what it’s like to die? he wonders, shivering again, hoping he will not have to stay like this for all of eternity.

Before he can answer his own thought, everything turns upside-down, or as upside-down as he can guess he is. He shouts, and tries to push his way back up to standing. The world flips again, but this time he is no longer in nowhere.

Some sort of marble room surrounds him. It is by far the most normal area he has been in since he fell. He turns around, examining the room. There are carvings of ancient wizards near a large archway, similar to the one that he fell through. The engravings seem to tell the stories of the Wizarding world in the marble, and get more modern around the circular room until, at the other side of the archway, it stops.

Sirius runs towards the archway, his footsteps echoing through the large room. He runs through, and finds himself in an even more average room. People, regular, every day people sit, talking, playing chess, eating, and just relaxing. He is surprised to realize that he can name at least half of the people in this room. As his gaze slips across the room, his face splits into a grin as he sees the last group of people.

“Prongs! Lily!” James and Lily look up from a game of wizards’ chess that they are playing; James’s face breaks into a grin, but Lily frowns.

“Padfoot!” James runs over to him and embraces him in a heavy hug.

“Sirius?” Lily walks over to them, her heels clicking the ground with her delicate footsteps. “Wh--what are you doing here?” She glances from James to Sirius, waiting for his answer.

“Well I--I fell through this … veil,” he begins, unsure of what she means, “at the Department of Mysteries.”

Lily’s expression doesn’t change. “Well, I’ve never heard of that. But, surely, you couldn’t have just fallen in. I mean, we all know you’re a bit clumsy, but--”

“No, I didn’t,” Sirius says, eager to get his juicy tale told. “I was dueling my,” he growls, “cousin, Bellatrix Lestrange.”

James and Lily exchange glances. James adopts Lily’s worried expression.

“Wh--why?” asks Lily in a hushed voice.

“Ah -- well, that’s a long story,” Sirius mutters, scratching the back of his head. “I mean I--”

“Padfoot, we have all the time in the world,” James says.

“Well, yes, I guess we do. Well… Voldemort somehow tricked Harry into coming to the Department of Mysteries where an entire group of Death Eaters were waiting for him. And--”

“Is he alright?” Lily’s face is slowly getting paler.

“Well, I think so. I left halfway through the fight, you see. But Dumbledore and the rest of the Order were there.”

“They started up the Order again?” James asks, an unworried smile spreading across his face. “Well--”

Lily shoots him with a deadly glance, and turns back to Sirius. “Yes, but when you left did--did it look good? Did it look like you were winning?”

“Oh, yeah,” Sirius lies, trying to smile.

Lily’s face slowly relaxes. “Oh thank God,” she whispers.

James glances around the room. “Lily?”

Lily looks up; her eyes are getting rather red.

“I need to talk to Sirius for a moment; we’ll be right back, okay?”

Lily nods, takes a rib shattering breath, and tries to interest herself in the chess game.

James leads Sirius into a corner and glances back at Lily. “It’s been hard for her,” he says, ruffling his hair. “We can’t see anything that goes on up in the world. Everything we know is made of simple updates from the people who come through here. We didn’t even know what had happened since we left until a boy named Cedric Diggory came a year ago, and told us all of what Harry had done in his years at Hogwarts….” He smiles, pride beaming through his hazel eyes. “What he did in his first year, how he stopped the Heir of Slytherin in his second year, about you escaping Azkaban, the Triwizard Tournament… Everything.”

The corners of Sirius’s lips twitch as he tries to hide a proud grin identical to James’s. “Yes, he has saved quite a few people, including me, if you haven’t heard that story.”

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” James says, having heard Cedric’s vague version of Harry’s third year. “But, I just wanted you to know, that after all of these years, Lily has just pained over what we cannot know. If she asks you to tell her the stories, be careful of those sensitive topics.”

“Of course I will, mate,” Sirius says, beaming around the room. “I just have one question.”

“Hm?”

”What is this place?”

“Well, that’s a question that could take some time to explain.” He gestures back to Lily. “But let’s get back before she drowns the whole place.”

Lily looks up as the two friends approached.

“So,” James says, conjuring a chair for Sirius, “Padfoot wanted to know what this place is.”

“Well,” Lily begins abruptly, “it’s something like a citadel for wizards. That room you just walked through with all of the engraved walls is kind of like a judgment room. It takes you to a place with people you know, or who are like you. But it’s not like we can’t go and meet all of the other people who are here. It’s just a matter of going into that room,” she points towards the archway, “that acts like something of a portal between all of the areas for everyone.”

“But, you have to be careful,” James advises. “Even the Dark wizards get here.”

Sirius puts his elbows on the table. “But what was that place I came through first?”

“What place?”

“You know, it was dark. It was something like a nightmare, really.”

“I don’t remember that,” James says.

“Yeah, we didn’t go through that,” Lily adds.

James scratches his neck and began, “I wonder--”

A noise like a banshee fills the room. Sirius shouts and glances to James and Lily.

“They’re coming,” Lily whispers. “James, what do we do?”

James pulls out his wand, and growls, “Protect ourselves.”

“What?” Sirius pulls out his own wand. “Protect ourselves from what?”

“The Adgias,” James answers.

“The what?”

“The poor souls who were destroyed before they died,” Lily answers hurriedly. Sirius casts her a quizzical look. “You know the ones who were blown up, maimed, or destroyed before they died.”

Smoke begins to creep in from the archway. It covers the floor, and begins to rise.

“What are they doing?” Sirius asks, beginning to panic.

“With smoke here, we can’t find each other. It just makes it harder for us to get away.”

“Away from what?!”

A mutilated shadow of what possibly is a human appears from the smoke. It moves towards them, shrill laughter and a terrible smell coming from it. Sirius has never seen anything so terrible, not even during his stay at Azkaban.

More of them follow, and the smoke continues to rise. Sirius can just barely make out James and Lily’s blurry figures. “Does this happen often?” he asks.

“No!” Lily shouts over the noise.

Sirius cannot see anything, except for the smoke that burns his eyes. But, suddenly, he is very hot. He begins to sweat and feels as though flames are licking every inch of his body. “What do we do?”

“Try to fend them off,” Lily whispers. “But no spells really work against them, they can just distract them. Once they get what they want, they’ll leave.”

“What do they want?” Sirius asks, turning in the direction he thinks she is.

“Us,” James answers.

The shrill laugh returns, and Sirius winces.

James finds Sirius’s shoulder and backs him up and the temperature drops from the sweltering heat, significantly. “Try to avoid them,” he whispers.

“How? How hard is it?”

James glances over at him and growls, "Ten to one we're gone when the smoke clears. They will do everything in their power to destroy us.”

“Destroy us?” asks Sirius, spinning in circles to try and find some way of escaping the smoke. “C--can they do that? I thought, since we’re already--”

“It’s worse than death,” interrupts Lily. “We don’t know what it is, but it takes somebody away from here forever.”

Suddenly, the heat comes back. He shouts as it grows in intensity; he can feel actual flames licking his body, scorching his skin. He shudders in pain, and feels himself moving. He struggles against it, but something continues to force him forward. He begins shouting. “James! Lily! H--help!”

But the world around him fades away, and he is back in the nothing.

“James!” He spins around blindly. “Lily?!”

A fire is flickering in the darkness. It illuminates only a few inches around it, but Sirius can see a few of the Adgias approaching. He tries to run, but before he can get anywhere, he feels fiery hands on his shoulders, trying to push him forward. He thrashes, and tries to free himself from them, but their grip is too strong.

Finally, they manage to push him, and he is no longer floating. Wind rushes past him. Without any idea of where he is going, or any destination, Sirius falls through the darkness.