You think you know someone

 Sirius was cackling as he dodged yet again another of Bellatrix’s attempts at cursing him.

 “Come on now, Bella, you can do better than that!” he taunted, challenging his cousin as she continued to send numerous red sparks. Judging by the deranged expression Lestrange wore, she didn’t seem to be planning on stopping her ruthless attacks anytime soon. So it was only natural for Harry to be filled with a sense of doubt when she did stop.

 Something wasn’t right.

Harry faced Sirius as the Animagus felt a magnetic force that sucked his body the way a dementor sucks one’s soul. . .

 He turned to check on Harry, but his eyes didn’t seem to have noticed Harry standing there at all. . . Sirius Black could only see now what no one else could.

 A dumbfounded but gleeful look lit up Lestrange’s face, as though she couldn’t quite believe what she had just done herself. She let out a shrill scream of triumph that made Harry wince, laughing maniacally like the unhinged Death Eater that she was.

 It all happened too slowly and yet too fast for Harry to comprehend what was going on. His memory replaying the look of shock on Sirius’s face as his body curved backward and fell into a hung veil that seemed to have come out of nowhere—and he kept falling backwards until the veil welcomingly swallowed him whole, making him disappear from this world. . . and Harry’s only instinct told him to follow. . .

 “SIRIUS!” he cried, reaching forward to let the veil swallow him in as well.

 Once he stretched out an arm to touch the veil, it flapped dangerously. And instead of pulling him in the way it did with Sirius, it ended up doing quite the opposite, sending Harry flying across the room.

 The veil reacted differently, it had rejected him.

 No.

 “SIRIUS!”

 Harry couldn’t move.

 The force of the veil’s hit left him feeling paralyzed on the ground. Or maybe, he thought, the veil had stunned him somehow. All he could do was stare helplessly at where his godfather disappeared, silently begging for Sirius to waltz back through the veil like nothing happened.

 Unable to concentrate on the commotion going on around him, Harry gazed at the veil with such ferocity as if his glare alone could force the thing to spit Sirius right out.

 In an odd miraculous way, the veil did end up spitting out a person. Just not the person he hoped for.

 Harry stared in disbelief at the figure who was not Sirius. This looks like—

 Surely this must be a joke. He thought he might’ve hit his head hard enough on the cold stone that he started hallucinating. Because there was simply no explanation of what his unreliable vision was showing him. The person that emerged from the veil and stood before him was Harry Potter.

 But he was Harry, and he was lying here—not standing there!

 Whoever that faker was, Harry wanted to violently shove him back into the veil, so he’d switch places with Sirius because this was ridiculously unacceptable!

 Before Harry could manage to do more than just glare uselessly at his lookalike—who stared right back with a mixture of disbelief and confusion—he felt immense pain shoot from his forehead.

 The blasted scar!

 The pain was so great and so sudden, it reminded him of how he felt around a year ago when Voldemort resurrected himself in the graveyard—had it really been a year? He wondered. It felt like it happened a lifetime ago and yesterday at the same time—He had placed a long, white-bone finger on Harry’s scar, causing him a tremendous amount of pain that hurt nearly as much as the cruciatus curse had at the time.

 Only this was much worse. Not only could Harry feel Voldemort being somewhere physically inside the ministry, but he also felt his presence in his mind. The aura of Voldemort was even stronger inside Harry’s mind that it felt connected to his very soul. And Harry’s poor attempt at Occlumency was in vain.

 The last thing Harry saw as he felt his conscious surrendering to Voldemort’s was his other self hesitantly approaching him. His own green eyes looked back at him with deep concern.

 Numbing pain enveloped Harry’s entire being and everything went dark.

 “Nick? Hey Nick!”

 No response, so Harry tried louder.

 “NICK!”

 Several days ago, Dumbledor had assured him repeatedly that Ron and Hermione, along with Nevil, Luna and Ginny were all safe and unharmed. And that, at last, Sirius Black’s name has been cleared, but what was the point? Sirius wasn’t alive to live as a free man, and Harry’s friends should’ve never been in the position of being in danger to begin with—it was all Harry’s fault. He made a mistake that could’ve cost his friend’s lives! It already cost Sirius’s lif—NO THAT WAS DUMBLEDOR’S FAULT IT WAS HIS FAULT HE ADMITTED IT HIMSELF.

 Though Dumbledor avoiding Harry throughout the year might have played a factor in the whole mess, Harry knew he was just as guilty. A part of him realized that Dumbledor only tried to take the entire blame to ease Harry’s mind and take the burden off him, but that was not how life worked. Harry needed to suffer the consequences of his own actions. Sirius’s death was all on him. His stupidity and naivety got Sirius killed, and for what?

 “Hey—hey, Nick!” Harry tried and failed at getting the ghost’s attention. It almost felt like Nick was ignoring him. . . just like Albus Dumbledor had been ignoring him all year.

 “NEARLY HEADLESS NICK!” He bellowed when at last the ghost turned toward him with a pained expression that Harry didn’t notice.

 “Good evening, young gentleman.” He smiled weakly at Harry.

 “Nick, may I ask you something?” Nearly Headless Nick nodded hesitantly.

 “Now?” Nick anxiously avoided Harry’s gaze. “Surely it could wait until later, young lad— Perhaps you’d like to go the Great Hall first and feast like everyone else?”

“Please, Nick, it’s urgent.” said Harry, “I really need to talk to you about something.”

 “Oh very well,” he said tiredly. “I can’t say I haven’t been expecting this to come.”

 “Expecting what?” Harry asked half-heartedly.

 “For you to want to talk to me eventually." He answered. "It happened several times before when somebody has suffered a great loss.”

 “Er,” Harry nervously ran a hand through the unruly mess of a hair. “Well, you were right. It’s about. . .” Harry felt a lump rise to his throat. He felt that if he were to voice his godfather’s name, he might lose whatever control he had over himself and start wailing like a child.

 For once since a very long time, he did feel like a child.

 Nick waited for him patiently.

 He swallowed hard and tried again.

 “I mean—it’s just that—you’re dead, b-but also you’re still here, yeah?” Nick sighed. He somehow looked older. Harry was fairly certain that ghosts shouldn’t be able to age, but it felt that Nick suddenly grew a few decades within a few seconds since Harry approached him. Harry, sensing what this sign might mean, chose to ignore it. “You’ve died, but I’m talking to you, and. . . you can still move around and everything, yeah?”

 “I can,” Nearly Headless Nick agreed netually, “I walk and talk as you see.”

 “So it’s possible to come back! You came back, so that makes it possible, yeah?” Harry continued more desperately. “People don’t have to disappear entirely when they can come back as ghosts—”

 That’s when Nick finally stopped him.

 “He won’t come back.”

 “What do you mean?” He felt his voice tremble.

 No. This is not happening.

 He already mourned for him before he found this new shred of possibility—no, he didn’t want to give up saving Sirius—not now that he had his hopes up—he couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept to experience another heartbreak.

 I’m done with mourning.

 “Sirius Black.” Nick answered glumly, as if an answer was needed at all.

 “BUT YOU DID!” Harry snapped. “You’re here—you—you didn’t disappear!”

 “I may not have disappeared completely, but what I am is a left imprint of who I used to be when I was alive. As you have witnessed, I can only have access to limited space which was where my living self once was. It’s not a life, Harry, because spirits without living bodies don’t get to live this life” Nick gestured vaguely around them, looking utterly defeated.

 Nearly Headless Nick stayed quiet, letting the words sink in. Harry crossed his arms and looked down to hide his face, wrapping his arms tightly around himself as he willed the tears not to drop from his eyes.

 None of them spoke a word for a moment, then Nick was the first to break the silence.

“What I’m trying to say is that. . . it’s not a pleasant thing, being a ghost, and there are very few who would choose that path. Mostly those who either have unfinished business or were too scared to die because they enjoyed life a little too much, but even so, very few would want to choose such path.”

 Harry snapped his head up and looked at the nearly headless ghost with newfound determination. Not caring that he had tear tracks racing down his hollow cheeks.

 “Sirius would.” Sirius would choose to stay with him. Harry thought with conviction like never before.

 He had always been reluctant to accept Sirius’s affections at first. All the unconditional love his godfather chose to shower him with. It had been a foreign feeling. To have something he was deprived of for so long be offered to him so easily. Sirius had made Harry feel like he belonged in a way that Ron belonged with the Weasleys.

 Sirius was his family.

 “I am sorry to have to tell you this, Harry, but I don’t believe he would.”

 “No.” Harry shook his head stubbornly. “Sirius wouldn’t care about the circumstances, he wouldn't leave me if he had a choice in the matter. He’ll want to come back, I know he will!”

 He promised! Harry wanted to scream. He promised we’d be a proper family.

 “He will not come back,” Nick repeated, barely above a whisper. “I may not have known Sirius Black on a personal level, but I’ve practically seen him grow since he was eleven. Anyone who knew Sirius Black since then can see that he wasn’t—that he couldn’t—bring himself to be as happy as before. Not since James Potter. . .”

 “You don’t understand.” Harry had difficulty keeping his voice even. “H-he told me he regretted leaving me to go after Pettigrew all those years. He told me that I should’ve been his priority back then a-a-and that I would always be his number one priority.”

 The ghost looked down at Harry sympathetically, transparent eyes filled with quiet remorse.

 Harry shook his head. He didn’t want to be pitied, he wanted to prove to Nick that he was worth making Sirius stay. That he was enough to make Sirius want to come back as a ghost. But as he thought of what he was doing more clearly, arguing with a ghost and all that, he realized he was really only trying to convince himself that.

 Convince himself what? That he was ever anyone’s priority.

 Sirius said so. But even in his head, Harry knew, on a deeper level, that Sirius would rather be reunited with his best mate above anything else in the world.

 “Again—I apologize for not being more of help.” The ghost was about to make his departure when he turned to Harry once more. “You know, I find that the only way to deal with this kind of loss for a wizard such as yourself is through time.” Nick gave Harry a bit of a strained smile. “Now, if I were you, I’d want to use some time alone.”

 With that, Nick disappeared through a wall, leaving harry alone while everyone else was downstairs having the end of the semester’s feast.

 Suddenly, Harry's knobby knees couldn't support him anymore, he collapsed to the ground and whispered quietly to no one in particular.

 “I am alone, always.”

 Forever alone. As freaks should be.