Sirius knew nightmares well.
Those shadowy figures lurking in the cracks of his life, with outstretched claws and sharp teeth that had nothing on the seething words that would escape them. Through the years he’d learnt how to avoid their grip, how to turn his head and pay no mind to their gnashing fangs.
James had helped him with that to a degree, he’d taken his hand and pulled him into at least partial light. Drowning out bits and pieces of the surrounding vignette. He’d let him into a home, with warm lamps burning, and rich aromas swimming in the air, with soft spoken words of love, and more care than he thought he may ever know. James had shown him a family and let him find his place in it.
Though he never thought he’d be free from it all entirely. He may forever wear the scars of nightmares lived through, where the shadows wore hauntingly familiar faces, and their claws came in those shamelessly uttered curses.
Now though, in this very moment, he knows he’ll never know anything but those nightmares again. Their jaws had latched onto him, bladed teeth sank into flesh, eyes lit up in a fury, as they gnawed on the bone like rabid dogs. Consuming every part of him. Leaving him solitude in the stomach of the beast.
And this time James was nowhere to bring him light.
James- or what there was left of him- was lying on the base of his stairs in his home at Godrics Hollow. He was void against the rubble, no more his friend- his brother- than any other bloke left lifeless on the coroners table.
Sirius felt the ground beneath him before he even knew he’d collapsed, left side to side with what he’d discovered to be the worst nightmare he’d known.
If you’d have asked him only yesterday what that was, he wouldn’t know what to tell you. A life without James was an impossibility, a far away idea too revolting to be fathomed in the slightest.
Yet, he was there, looking nauseated into the gaunt face of the man who swore him forever. Trying to weigh out the fact that it was over, that said oath was no more. Perhaps- he tried to reason- no promises were broken, Sirius could only hope that the world would come to an end in that moment.
He needed to feel the planet stop spinning, he willed the sky to fall.
His sun had fallen, Sirius couldn’t bare to even look up the stairs, he couldn’t bare to find that his Earth- Lily Evans- the sturdiest and most consistent woman he would ever know- had collapsed too.
For longer than he cared to know, Sirius stayed at the bottom of those stairs. A lone star in a fallen sky.