Title taken from the Pink Floyd song, if you were wondering.
On The Turning Away
In the morning, he is listening to the old radio when the brown owl raps at his window; the strains of Mozart's fortieth symphony echo tinnily through the room as he reads the letter, and he stumbles to his chair feeling like a man being slowly, relentlessly drowned. The music has always suggested passion and transcendence and power, but by the time he has finished reading, and sees the face in the morning newspaper, black and white and tortured, the violins are singing strident anger, and through it all the whispered notes of sorrow. The next time he hears it, he will taste blood, and the next time he grieves, it will be with the remembered taste of lukewarm tea swirling with a sodden teabag, cheap tea and tears tasting like bitter dust; he will grieve with the scent and rustle of newspaper, paper and tea and violins for sadness.
The morning sky is grey like slowly tarnishing silver and like heavy fog and like the disappearing letters on old, well-loved books; the sky is grey like Sirius’s laughing eyes.
-
He spends most of the morning waiting for someone to tell him that the newspaper and the letter are some monstrous practical joke, that everything is fine. Moony, you gullible great oaf, you fell for that?
When he sees Dumbledore's face, he knows that it is not, and he buries his head in his hands. Dead, then. Three dead and one as good as dead and one left watching.
Are you all right, Dumbledore asks.
I'm fine, he answers, eyes fixed on the eddies in the carpet on his living-room floor. They both know he is lying, but by unspoken, gentlemanly, dignified agreement, they both pretend he is telling the truth.
-
In the afternoon, he looks at the newspaper again. Half the page is covered with a picture of Sirius laughing, and although he cannot hear the sound, he knows what it will sound like - a harsh, clashing, grating, horribly mirthless laugh that bounces and echoes and clashes and hurts. Sirius laughed like that, always laughed when he did not know what to do, laughed when something in his life was being destroyed, always laughed because he did not know how to cry.
He thinks, He should have cried, then; cried, and not betrayed.
-
In the evening, he sits by the dying fire, red-gold embers fading to dust and ashes, and remembers that every great idea started with James and Sirius beside the fire; every plan and every deed born late at night, by the fire, laughing.
Later he will think, bitterly, that he should have known; he will think that it was obvious from the very beginning that Sirius Black was no good, no good at all, that James Potter was a fool - but such a brave, brave fool - for trusting him; now, he tries to reconcile the laughing friend he remembers with the murderer who is.
He cannot, and he wonders if the world has gone mad, and then he thinks yes, yes it has, because James and Lily are dead, and Peter too.
-
He takes a walk impulsively in the night past the looming shadowed trees bent as though under invisible weight, and in the still dark his own breathing, quick and shallow, is the loudest thing he has ever heard. Standing by the deserted pond, he sees a tall wavering shadow thrown across the pavement in the orange glare of a solitary streetlamp, and hears the silence swirl into the sound of soft footsteps hurrying. He turns, breath caught; it is a young man, tall, thin, dark-haired, long dark coat hanging loosely off too-thin shoulders. He opens his mouth to call out, but restrains himself, thinking that appearance alone does not a Sirius make, thinking Sirius is in Azkaban, Sirius is in Hell; when he looks up again, the man is gone, the sound of his haste receding and the memories rushing into the empty space he left behind.
He stands in the black clawed shadow of the old oak tree waiting for the abdication of all thought, and is still striving for blankness when his feet of their own accord walk him home.
-
In the night, he dreams of murder, of fire, betrayal and torture, and wakes as if underneath a thin veil of calmness and control as though the world has turned to monochrome, to dusty shades of grey in his sleep; the sight of yesterday's wrinkled coffee-stained newspaper lying spread out, abandoned on the kitchen table (a black-and-white photograph of a familiar face screaming, wild, trying to tear his way out of dusty ink and parchment) rips his composure to pieces, and calmly, systematically, methodically, he spends his morning breaking every dish in the house.
end