“You’re still here.” Voldemort blocks what little moonlight manages to escape into Sirius’ cell. His eyes glowing an intense malevolent red.
“Shouldn’t that be my question?” Sirius rasps. He shifts, awkward in his tiny cell, in his cramped bones. He’s absurdly aware that he doesn’t look his best. “And here I thought Bella finally just lost it."
Voldemort doesn’t look surprised that Sirius is still this coherent. He looks… he almost looks pleased.
“I told you they’d abandon you, you refused me then, denied my claims.” Voldemort’s feet are soundless on stone. Sirius wonders for a moment if it really is Voldemort or if he’s started hallucinating again. He hadn’t, for a couple of months, but Azkaban isn’t kind enough to rob her prisoners of clarity all together, some measure of sanity was apparently necessary to appreciate how truly fucked you were. Sirius blinks, trying to get his weak vision to focus. He’s not been able to see clearly for years either, but no, those eyes are unmistakable, Sirius could never dream that up, no nightmare could fake that particular shade of red. So distinct in how much hate it managed to have for the world.
Sirius wants to pluck them out. He thinks he should try, get up and gouge them out with his fingers, but he’s afraid he’d fall, that his brittle fingers would turn to dust on contact with Voldemort’s skin. The only thing more humiliating than failing to kill an enemy would be falling flat on your face in the attempt.
For once, Sirius listens to sense, pushes himself back into the wall as much as his chains would allow.
Voldemort follows him, leaning forward. Darkness oozes from him in wisps, he’s more spirit than man, an eldritch horror told to frighten children, a monster. But Sirius doesn’t fear monsters anymore, he’s lived with them for more than half his life.
“Look at you now.” Voldemort hisses, satisfaction dripping from his voice. “No strength, no power-” he stops for a moment, and then, “I can fix you, put you to rights the way I will my Death Eaters-”
“Like you fixed Bella?” Sirius croaks. “Like you fixed Regulus?”
Voldemort’s eyes flash. Perhaps he shouldn’t blame Voldemort for Bella’s insanity, she’d never been the shiniest galleon around, but Regulus? Regulus, barely seventeen, dying in a war he had no place being in?
He still doesn’t know which mission Regulus died on, they’d refused to tell him, probably fearing that Sirius would turn his wand toward the order member that did it.
Sirius can’t confidently say he wouldn’t have. So he stuffs that uncomfortable part of himself that insists on ‘Family First’ even now, and squares his shoulders, meeting Voldemort’s cold gaze.
Voldemort just smiles, gentle, almost indulgent. Like he finds all of this amusing. All of them. “What joy do you get from being so hated?” He wonders, “They all think you my loyal lieutenant, why not make it so? Why not avenge yourself for all the ways the ministry and Dumbledore have ruined you?”
Sirius can’t do that, Sirius can’t do that because he should be better. Because Voldemort is a monster who hunted Lily for sport and killed James like he was an afterthought and not Sirius’ whole heart, because his rise had radicalised even his unflapable parents, made them hate Sirius more than they might have, had the world been different, because Voldemort had, in one way or the other, ruined Sirius’ life since he’d been born.
Voldemort didn’t send you to Azkaban.
Sirius shakes the thought away. He’s not about to blame the whole world for their failure of a government. “I won’t prove them right.” He manages to say after a pause even he thinks is lengthy. Voldemort had waited, unusually patient. Perhaps he truly was overjoyed at reuniting with his beloved loyalists.
“Is the trifling satisfaction of making a point worth Azkaban, Sirius?” Is it? Sirius doesn’t know anymore. Is it just about proving a point? Is it just about telling Dumbledore and Fudge and Crouch and Moody that he’d not been bad after all, that they were the ones who’d made a mistake. He’d fantasised, before, when he’d still had hope, when the dementors hadn’t ripped away everything soft about him, that some day, someone would come into his cell, come and tell him that they’d caught Peter, that they were sorry for ever believing that he’d betray James, that it was all over now and he could go home. He blinks again, rubbing his eyes with a closed fist. He’d never taken Voldemort for a liberator.
“What you are doing is wrong-” he insists, “you killed the people I loved.”
“They’re dead.” Voldemort waves it away like it means nothing, like James and Lily Potter had meant nothing. “They’re dead and you’re not, do you wish to rot forever surrounded by the memory of ghosts? Do you fancy that they’re proud of you? There’s nothing after death Sirius. They’re gone, be selfish, be selfish for once and come with me.”
Voldemort’s fingers flutter, slipping under the cut of Sirius’ jaw. His touch is gentle, the softness of his grip belying the pain he usually visited upon everyone, trembling with the futile energy of restrained violence. Sirius leans into it for a moment, feels a pang of hunger at the feel of human touch, of tenderness. Goosebumps pebble his skin, his breath stuttering in his chest. Voldemort indulges him, running the pad of his thumb down Sirius’ hollow cheek, his spindly fingers curling around his ear, to bury in his dirty hair. Sirius is so cold, he’s so cold even Voldemort seems warm, warm and human and filled with flesh and blood and bone.
His nails are sharp. They draw blood when they press into Sirius’ lip. Voldemort seems surprised, like he hadn’t expected it. His eyes curious as he smears it over Sirius’ lips like rogue. The colour must be startling, Sirius thinks, he’s paper thin, his skin brittle and dry. For years, touch has brought nothing but pain. He’s so frail that even delicate handling leave bruises.
Sirius despises it, or atleast, he used to, he doesn’t have the energy required for hate anymore.
He feels his eyes grow warm. He wants to flinch away from the grip Voldemort has of him, these are the hands that killed James, he begs himself, but Voldemort’s touch is gentle and Sirius… Sirius longs.
“Come away with me.” Voldemort’s voice has lowered, he sounds husky. They’re breathing the same air. It’s devastatingly intimate. Something hot lands on his cheek, Voldemort bends in closer to lick it off his skin.
‘I’m foul,’ Sirius wants to say, he’s filthy and Voldemort shouldn’t touch him but why does it matter? How does it matter? Voldemort doesn’t matter. For all that he’s been the first person to touch Sirius in over a decade.
Voldemort’s thin lips press to the corner of Sirus’ eye. “We can tell them you were with me all along, you’ll be welcomed back a hero. What does the ministry have to offer? What can Dumbledore or the Order give you? Come away with me, let me warm you up.”
Blood blooms sharply under his tongue when Sirius licks his lips, resists the urge to sob.
Harry. A dying part of his mind pleads. Think of Harry.
The chains around Sirius splinter. Voldemort probably tastes victory. Without the metal chafing against him, the skin of his throat feels raw and vulnerable, especially with Voldemort so close. It should hurt, Sirius thinks, but he’s not quite capable of feeling pain anymore.
Perhaps he is right, perhaps this body belongs to another person, and his actual body is four legged and covered in fur and canines.
“You’re so alone, everyone’s left you. You have nothing there, Sirius. All they have for you is curses and cruelty. I, however, do not disregard those loyal to me.” He gestures around them as though it’s sufficient proof.
It kind of is.
Voldemort tore Azkaban apart for the loyalty shown to him by his death eaters.
No order member has visited Sirius once in fifteen years.
Not even Remus.
“Tell me what you need.” Voldemort says quietly,
“Spare him.” He is begging. Oh how his mother must curse him. “Spare Harry.”
Voldemort rears back. Clarity returns to Sirius along with the cold. Voldemort takes it away, what little humanity he’d brought it with him, but some old strength gives him the courage to look Voldemort in the eye. “Spare him and I’ll come with you.”
Sirius is in no position to negotiate.
Voldemort laughs, it’s high, cold, possibly disturbing. But Sirius had grown up with Bella’s laughter ringing in his ears, Bella’s, and his mother’s. Voldemort’s constructed cruelty doesn’t hold a candle to the inherent madness soaked in Sirius’ bloodline. “You want me to rescue you, spare the boy and what else? Gift you a crown perhaps?” Voldemort’s eyes turn harder. “I’m doing you a favour, Sirius.”
“I can escape by myself.” Sirius snaps. Voldemort just nods accommodatingly. “I do not doubt it, but you haven’t.”
He hasn’t. Why hasn’t he? Where would he go? What would he do? Go up to Harry and introduce himself as his godfather? He thinks of how James would have taken something like that and wants to laugh. James would have pegged him a lunatic and sent him packing back to Azkaban.
He doesn’t know how Harry would react. He doesn’t know anything about Harry.
It makes him sad.
Harry gives him strength, even now. He squares his shoulders. “Then we have nothing left to say to each other.”
Voldemort assesses him for a moment longer before he sighs, standing back up. There’s something disappointed in his eyes, something almost…regretful? Sirius doesn’t wish to understand it, even if he were capable of reading Voldemort’s eyes, he doubts he’d get anything good out of it.
Voldemort sweeps out of Sirius’ cell, robe glancing over Sirius’ face, the sharp silver lining tearing a thin line over his cheek.
“You’ll die alone.” Voldemort says, the quietness in his voice at such odds with the harshness in his words. “You’ll die alone and they’ll bury what’s left of you in the grounds here. You won’t be free of Azkaban even in death.” his eyes glint red, “Bellatrix was ever a more worthy heir to your name.” He shakes his head, “She’d hate this, she already hates you. What absurd satire, that you, of all people, be the last of the Blacks instead of her?”
He strides out, long legs cutting through the sweeping cold of the dementors. Sirius blinks his eyes, feeling out of focus and tired again, now that the dementors aren’t kept away from Voldemort’s presence.
He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing himself against a wall.
When the dementors come, Sirius welcomes them.