The dream
Sirius was dreaming.
He was in his old childhood bedroom again, with antique furniture thickly coated with dust and the walls plastered with posters he had put up in a fit of rebellion. He stared at the walls for a second, lost in a series of memories; he and Regulus here, hiding together from their phantom mother’s wrath; him lying on this bed, eagerly reading a letter from James; him crumpled on the floor, sobbing into hands that held a flash of silver blade.
He was pulled out of his thoughts by scratching at the door. An unsettling noise like long nails across a chalkboard, fingers cold as the grave down his spine - around his throat. The door opened a sliver with a teasing sort of slowness; dust hanging in the air with the great melancholy of the house. Thin fingers wrapped around, brushing the chipped green paint. The tip of a pointed shoe clacked against the ground.
Clack, clack.
“No,” he thought, “no, no, no-.“
One step, then another, then the whole woman was inside, black hair styled elegantly, a dress like emerald water poured from the hollows of her collarbones to the straps of her delicate shoes. She stepped forward again.
Clack, clack.
And then there she was, at the foot of his bed. Walburga Black with her high, regal cheekbones, full lips and sharp, beautiful jaw. A beauty that was so razor-sharp that it could ruin lives, his and Regulus’s. He thought he could escape, but now he knew it was foolish to hope. You were better dead when the Blacks wanted you.
He was eerily silent as during her approach waiting for what was to come. A mother’s final goodbye. A devil’ final whip-crack.
Her skeletal white hands, reaching with a cruel precision, stroked the pale, sunless skin of his chest, more gently than she had ever done in life. Then, with a sudden, convulsive movement, dug her long, claw-like nails in.
“Toujours pur,” she whispered tenderly.
Then her face twisted and she ripped her hand out. And there, held up and pulsing with black blood thrummed his heart. Red like Gryffindor. The colour of the house, the life, he had chosen - and now, the death.
Sirius screamed.