The scene swam before him, sometimes blurred at the edges and slightly distorted, at other times nothing more than a mass of intermingled colours, from which his addled mind refused to process into a recognisable picture.
Harry could discern that people were sometimes present at his side. He could vaguely hear people speak to him, but the voices were distant and still his mind wasn’t even trying to identify them for him. On the days when his vision was less blurry, Harry recognised the folds of a curtain surrounding his bed. He would vainly try to take in his surroundings, but his moments of lucidity were much too brief. All too soon his eyes would begin to close and he would let the darkness take him again.
The darkness provided Harry with little respite. His spirit didn’t try to fight the images that came to him unbidden when his eyes were closed. Images of a dead Sirius returning to him to confirm his worst fears; that he had indeed been solely responsible for Sirius’s death.
For that was Harry’s torment, to relive over and over again the return of Sirius to accuse him of leading him to his premature death.
Despite all that Harry had suffered in his young life so far, the death of his parents, the lack of any close relative to love him, the death of his godfather; it was Sirius’s accusations that were what made up his worst living memory.
Having blamed himself over the summer for Sirius’s untimely demise, he would never have imagined that he would have felt so utterly devastated to have that blame confirmed by the ghost of his godfather.
Harry’s spirit was broken. Closing his eyes and giving himself to darkness and despair was the only way out. He had loved Sirius like a parent and friend. Sirius was the person that he had trusted; the one person that he didn’t have to worry about revealing his fears and worries to; and he had killed Sirius. He didn’t need to be the one holding the wand, Harry had killed him just the same.
Harry would have welcomed a return of the images that had haunted him in Privet Drive. Somehow seeing Sirius fall through the veil didn’t feel quite so horrific when compared to this new image.
Harry had always been alone. Even his earliest memories of his loving parents were distorted and unclear. Even Harry couldn’t tell which were real and which were the result of his desperate need to know that he had been loved.
Ten years of consistent emotional neglect at the hands of the Dursley family had left a boy whose emotional growth was parched and stunted like a lily in a desert. It was a wonder at all that he still had the ability to feel and had not turned into the type of child that would truly have attended an institution like St. Brutus’s.
He had the ability to still relate to and care for his friends, even if he was a little reticent to give or receive affection openly. He felt sure that nothing but his parent’s genes could have granted him the ability to do so, after all he had endured with the Dursley’s.
To Harry, discovering and meeting Sirius was like scaling Mount Everest and finding yourself on the top, sore and aching but filled with contentment. Finally, here was someone who had an actual link to Harry. Someone who had stood by his parent’s side at his christening and pledged to do his best to help Harry grow and to protect him. Harry hadn’t needed to prove himself to Sirius in any way. Sirius had loved him all these years, even if he hadn’t known it. Somehow that gave Harry an immense feeling of inner peace and did more to help him recover from his bullied childhood than anything else.
All that time when he had been suffering under the Dursley’s tyrannical rule, Sirius had loved him.
Harry’s mind had numbly begun to register and collate everything that had happened since the night at the Department of Mysteries right up until the day in the room on the Third Floor of Number Twelve, Grimmauld Place.
Too many people had died already. Dimly, Harry recognised that surviving with the guilt of Sirius’s death was almost too much to bear, but more importantly he knew that he would never survive the guilt of watching death come to visit his friends and the people that he now loved most in the world.
His mind wandered constantly to the picture that he had found. Fate seemed intent on dealing out a cruel hand to all those he loved. They didn’t deserve to die. Hermione, Ron and Ginny were too young to die.
Being around him was putting them in incessant danger and it couldn’t go on anymore.
His aching mind ground slowly to a halt, and letting logic take a back seat, Harry began to give up and slip away further. Maybe the only way to stop the pain was to let go and let the darkness take him completely. At least that way, his friends just might survive.