Sirius Black’s heart pounded as he apparated onto a street he knew as well as his own, a heavy pressure settling on his chest as he struggled to draw breath. Terror drew its claws into him, sharp and unrelenting.
His eyes were immediately drawn to the chaos and destruction of the house he’d spent so many days of his life in since their graduation, and the world moved in slow motion. It was his confirmation. Confirmation that Voldemort had made it to Godric’s Hollow—more importantly, he’d made it to them. He’d gotten through each and every single one of their exhaustive defenses.
He’d come as soon as he felt the spells fall.
The cottage Lily and James had bought and moved into after leaving Hogwarts three years ago lay ruined, charred wood and shards of glass littering their lawn and the garden the five of them had taken care of together. It looked strange—as if someone had cleaved the house in two, cracking their house open like a picture book for those who wished for a glimpse of their lives.
Sirius blinked long and slow, forcing the tears from his eyes and the ice from his veins as he forced himself into movement and made his way to their once-perfect white fence. A flicker of hope shot through him as he approached, hot and striking and electric. His mind raced, weighing every conceivable possibility.
The killing curse leaves no mark. His mind rolled over the concept, winding around it and settling comfortably like a cat curling up in the sun. The killing curse left no mark, and so that was not what had happened. The killing curse left no mark, so they could not be dead. The rational part of his mind screamed that he’d seen what his cousins had done, seen the destruction they’d left behind, seen the death and suffering that seemed to trail at their heels. The rational part of his mind told him that he’d seen too much of the war to believe that the killing curse was the only way to take someone’s life. That his family may be lying dead just inside that broken shell of a home.
He ignored it.
They’re alive, they’re alive, they’re alive. They have to be alive.
The young wizard repeated the words like a mantra, leaving no space for the terror threatening to seep into his consciousness. He refused to yield an inch to his fear, ignoring the panic mingling with the blood in his veins. They’re alive.
He settled into himself, falling into the practiced routine of a soldier. He drew his wand and took half a breath to catalog his surroundings. His feet carried him over the final feet to the gate, stepping over the lifted stone in the path with familiarity.
They’re alive.
The mangled gate screamed in protest as he forced it open with reckless abandon, harsh and grating in the relative silence of the night. His hope faltered as he passed over the threshold with ease, flickering as he took in the absolute lack of the magical barrier he’d come to recognize the feel of.
Each and every time he’d pushed that gate open and made his way through the barrier seemed to flash through his mind. Every time he’d come to their home, whether it had be with tears in his eyes or a smile on his face, he’d been welcomed with open arms. The gate was barely hanging on, Sirius’ dimly panicked force propelling it ever closer to its breaking point. A voice in his head—the voice of reason he had ignored so consistently that it hardly existed anymore—whispered that Voldemort could still be there. That they could be dead.
He ignore that voice as he’d always done. The rest of him was ruled by love and loyalty and reckless abandon, and those parts of him were in agreement: they were not dead, and if Voldemort was still there then he’d fight to his last breath.
For them, he’d do anything.
They’re alive.
He forced his rationale back until it was nothing but a murmur, barely audible in the concurrent chaos of his mind. He advanced across the lawn quickly, moving over and around the bigger chunks of debris. His gait slowed as he passed by the flower beds by their door. His gaze caught momentarily on the cluster of lilies he and James had planted when the couple first moved there, half of them crushed beneath one of the shutters that’d covered a window above.
Sirius swallowed roughly and forced himself to keep walking. He maneuvered through the remains of their front door, reduced to an empty doorframe with shards of wood dangling from its hinges. He walked into a world of uncertainty, wand held high and mind running through spell after spell with practiced understanding.
They’re alive.
He made his way through his second home silently—one he knew just as well as he knew the flat he and Remus shared. He slowed his pace as he made his way toward their living room, the light falling away as he pushed into a part of the house that was more intact.
They’re alive.
He kept his movements silent, taking a steadying breath as he wordlessly cast Lumos, subconsciously preparing to fight in spite of the bone-deep silence—if war had taught him nothing else, it had taught him that silence was not security. The room came into sudden light, Sirius squinting as his pupils shrank and he was momentarily blinded. Then his arm dropped, and a small smile pulled at his lips.
“James?”
He didn’t respond.
It was then that every detail hit Sirius like a dagger to his heart, tearing him apart.
The stark stillness of his chest, so at odds with the wild familiarity of his untameable hair. The fading color of his face, chased off by a pallor that would be forever cemented in my mind. The awkward angles of his body. He saw the wand he knew almost as well as his own lying mere meters away from forever outstretched fingers. James’ hazel eyes, flecked with brilliant gold, open and glassy on the other side of square glasses—staring into oblivion. As though he was staring Death himself in the face, kicking and screaming and being taken by him all the same. Sirius could read the desperation, the horror, the shock, everything on his face as if James was a book he’d flipped through a hundred times before, every word committed to memory.
Sirius’ heart was battered and bruised, a composition of scar tissue and stubborn stitches woven by his chosen family. It was battered and bruised and messy, but they had put him back together piece by piece, and they had loved him all the same. It was battered and bruised and messy and healing, and in that moment his heart broke in a way that it never had before. It broke in a way that was entirely permanent, in a way that he knew could never be fixed, no matter how much he might try—and he didn’t think he would try.
He shattered for his friend, who would never hear his wife laugh again. Who would never see his son grow up. Would never smile, or joke, or cast another spell. Would never run through the woods with him as Prongs again. Never drag his hands through his hair, a habit that Harry was already doing his best to replicate in his infancy. He would never duel at his side, never laugh over dinner, never call him out on his idiocy after a fight with Remus, never fly with him, never breathe with him—never breathe at all. He would never cry, never scream, never fight. He would never get to live the rest of his life.
Never felt like a too-permanent word, but it echoed the way he fell apart. Splintering fissures ran through his heart—ones that he knew with absolute certainty would never heal. Not without him.
His knees buckled, sending him to the floor in suffocating silence. He could not even hear his own breath over the ringing in his ears, could only collapse as he fell to the ground mere feet away from the person who had saved him time and time again. The person that he couldn’t save. The word came out a whisper, wholly broken. “No.”
It set off a chain reaction within him, and suddenly he was scrambling across the floor towards James, screaming and sobbing and praying that it was all a dream. He knew it wasn’t—he’d had his fair share of nightmares, and nothing hurt that badly, that vividly, in a dream. Nothing. “NO!” He couldn’t be gone. He couldn’t, because Sirius’s life revolved around James in so many ways. He was his other half in every way imaginable, his brother—separated only by the mere technicality of blood.
They made each other better. They always had. Even when they were only eleven, barely aware of themselves and stumbling through life, they had fit together in a way he’d never experienced. They had fallen together in that train car, molding the foundations for a bond of unbreakable steel and impenetrable light, shining brighter than anything he’d ever known. Not with the ‘friends’ he’d had thrown at him as a child, and certainly not with his family. James and his parents had taken him in when he lost everything. He’d given him a reason to live when he’d been abused and then disowned, ripped away from his brother by the parents he loathed.
James hadn’t even faltered, pulling Sirius further into his life, into his home. Accepting him as family again and again without a single thought. Most of all, James had helped Sirius do more than merely survive, hanging on by the skin of his teeth, fighting to make it through each day of his life. He’d taught him to live. Showed him how to want to survive, how to exist in a way that wasn’t a constant fight.
Sirius screamed and screamed as his vocal cords tore themselves apart, filling the deafening silence with his pain. He fell onto James, acutely aware that his chest did not rise and fall, that his heart did not beat, that his best friend was gone in the most painful, most perpetually irreversible way possible.
He could do nothing more than yell and sob and stare at James, waiting for him to sit up and tell him it was all a joke. His body was in mutiny, heaving and heaving and heaving and operating in complete disjunction, trying to compensate for the part of himself that’d been ripped out.
He could only watch, frozen in time as he fell apart. As his entire world imploded. The sounds of the world around him fell upon deaf ears, fell upon a boy in pieces as he stared and stared and stared at the person who meant everything to him. The person he was supposed to protect, supposed to save, supposed to fight and live and die with.
He was never supposed to have to live without him. That had never been the plan. He had always been more reckless, hasty and hotheaded and never careful. He was supposed to die first. That was the narrative that made sense.
Sirius couldn’t put the feelings to words if he tried to. Could never even begin to describe the desolate vacuum he had become, filled with darkness and interminable pain.
Sirius would never know how long he spent like that, his soul splitting back into scattered pieces for the first time in a decade, for the first time since he’d first stepped onto the Hogwarts Express and entered that compartment, completely unaware of how it would change his life for the better. Continued to unravel past those puzzle pieces, dissolving into nothing more than dust and ash and bitter poison.
Honey-toned memories faded into greyscale images faster than he could chase them, swallowed by impenetrable darkness as the final vestiges of the delirious happiness he’d learned to live in left him. They mutated, changing from memories to memorials, shadows of what they once were. Reminders of all he’d had, all he’d been unable to preserve, all that he would never have again.
Though it was only minutes, he would never know how long he spent like that, falling apart on the well-loved carpet, bent over his best friend’s body. It was only minutes, and yet it felt like an eternity had passed; felt like gods and cities and civilizations may have risen and fallen in the time he sat there, as the world crumbled beneath his fingertips. He knew that when the sounds of the world finally broke through, forcing themselves into the abandoned corners of his mind, he’d well and truly fallen to pieces, ground to powder and scattered to the wind.
It took him an unmeasurable amount of time to finally register what was reaching his mind, loud and shocking and unapologetic. When he finally did, he moved for the first time in what felt like centuries, cramming his scattered dust into a mold of his skeleton and hoping he would hold together as he broke out of it and pushed himself up onto his knees.
He rose on shaky legs as the familiar broken melody filtered through his mind, winding around despair and doing its very best to fill the void that he’d become. Crying. Crying that he’d come to know as well as his own heartbeat. The noises that fell from his godson, carved into his very bones through night after night spent watching over the child and long days spent soothing. The noise that was created by the child who was a composite of his parents, his black hair identical to his father’s and his bright green already just as captivating as his mother’s.
His body threatened to return to cinders and leave him on the ground, but his legs held as he took in the noise as if he was drowning, and his head was only just managing to break the surface. His wand lay forgotten on the ground as he moved, every step mechanical as he struggled to breathe, to move, to live while James did not.
He was an amalgamation of dust and monotony and pain so profound that he resented his broken heart for daring to beat. He moved towards the stairs, stepping over bits and pieces of the ruined home. A forgotten part of his mind refused to let him look at the flowers Lily had painted on the wall with him by her side the night her parents had died, some lines shaky with the sobs that had wracked her body and others clean when her tears ran out and the pain turned numb. Kept his eyes from falling upon the tiny drawings of a black dog, a stag, a rat, and a wolf. Kept him moving past each and every memory etched into the walls, the floors, the furniture.
He made his way up what remained of the stairs he’d helped carpet after one of them had slipped one too many times on the slick wood. The minuscule portion of his mind that had managed to cling to sanity warned him that the stairs could give out from beneath him, the emaciated remains crumbling beneath his weight. He couldn’t bring himself to care, the only thing keeping him moving and breathing being the grounding sounds of a tear-riddled child. A child that had to be alive.
His knees threatened to buckle as a thought crashed into the abyss within him with the force of a tidal wave: Lily. Where’s Lily? She was never far from Harry. The tiniest spark lit, breaking through the endless dark. Harry was alive, and so was she. It had to be both—not one or the other. Harry’s cries were proof of his vitality, so she had to be alive. While James had been his better half, Lily was without a shadow of a doubt his family. The thought that he would still have her and Harry grew the spark into the smallest flame. He knew nothing would ever be enough, knew that he would never be able to fill the hole that night had already carved from his soul, and yet the flame remained.
If she was alive, then maybe he would make it. If he didn’t lose them both, maybe he would make it past that night. Lily was pure and fiery and relentless and smart. She was the most passionate person he’d ever met, and she was an incredible mother. When they eventually got to know each other, they’d grown thick as thieves faster than any of them could track. Late-night talks by the fire consisted of their families; of how her sister looked at her as if Lily had taken all that was good from her, of how his parents looked at him like they regretted nothing more than the day he’d been born.
She’d always wanted to help people, never standing down and never giving up. They had spent hours in the kitchens, gorging themselves on whatever they could find and sharing their purpose: they would fight. Something was coming—and whatever it was, they would fight, and they would do it together. They talked about how Lily struggled to find her place as a muggle-born in the wizarding world, of how Sirius fought to deserve his place in Gryffindor and grappled with the views and beliefs that had been ingrained in his mind as a Black. She’d been the very first person he went to when he finally began to realize that he saw Remus as so much more than a friend, irrationally terrified of how James or Peter might react but knowing how Lily would.
Sirius had watched Lily make James happier than he’d ever seen him. Watched as they fought and loved and hurt, always finding their way back to each other. He’d seen them come into each other’s lives, planting seeds of happiness and truly finding themselves.
Lily was his family.
As foolish as his hope may have been, he refused to believe that she could be gone. That they could both be gone—the idea was unfathomable. He stepped onto the landing, still struggling to breathe and drowning in fear and hope and the vast expanse of nothing within him. He moved down the hallway, and a flash of red drew his attention. A shade that he had committed to memory, the color of hair that he’d spent so many hours learning to weave into intricate braids. “Lils?” It emerged as a question, childish hope coating his voice. The silence that he received in response was the loudest thing he had ever heard, broken only by Harry’s cries. He stepped fully into the nursery, and whatever part of him that had clawed itself back together on those stairs shattered once more. His eyes fell upon the body on the ground, blind to the crib he and Peter had built and the children’s books he’d bought with Remus when they’d been told that she was pregnant.
In front of him lay the girl who had carried him through those late nights. Her brilliant green eyes seemed to mock the flash of the killing curse, remaining vibrant and defiant through her fear. Her hair matched the shades of the Gryffindor common room, splayed around her shoulders in her final moment. More than anything else, he could see the love written across her features with painful clarity.
His pulverized remains fell from the shape he had forced them into, his limbs turning fluid as he crumpled to the ground again. Shaking hands stretched out in his blurred vision, brushing hair off a face that was far too cold, freckles fading in and out of focus on skin that was even paler than he’d ever known it to be, lips already going gray.
The sound of a crying baby broke through yet again, and he forced himself to pull his hand back. Pushing himself up in the dimly lit nursery, he stumbled to the crib, feeling like he was watching himself move.
Inside the crib he’d assembled while James stood at his side critiquing his every step sat his godson. The boy he loved more than he had ever thought he could. The boy who was alive against all odds, crying as he stared at his mother and waited for her to stand. Sirius had seen him nearly every day since he’d been born—one of his first words had been Padfoot, to his parents’ dismay. Seeing him alive and well, with only a cut on his forehead to show what had happened, managed to fan life back into the flame that had gone out. It grew, centimeter by centimeter, until the glow within him was enough to return his most basic senses to him.
For the first time since he’d found James motionless, his thoughts were semi-coherent, honing in on the life in front of him and holding on to it for dear life. His love for Harry carried him, keeping him from drowning in his grief completely.
A flood of emotions washed over him as it was then, with his mind finally ever-so-slightly organized, that he recognized the truth: it was his fault. All of it was his fault. Pettigrew may have been the one to reveal their location—a fact that sent wave after wave of suffocating fury over Sirius as he swore to himself that Peter would find his retribution at Sirius’ hands—it had been Sirius who had suggested the switch in the first place.
It was his fault Peter was the secret keeper, his fault Voldemort could get into their home, his fault, his fault, his fault.
His fault that they were dead.
He forced himself to put his fury and guilt and regret into a box in the back of his mind, forced himself to focus on his godson. He picked him up with tender arms, Harry’s sobs quieting as he settled into familiar arms. His throat squeezed painfully, silent tears coursing down his face as he left the nursery without looking at Lily again. If he did, he knew he would fall again. He would fall, and he would never get back up.
He carefully carried the newly orphaned boy to the stairs, working his way down with far more caution. He stepped through the living room and let the numb feeling forming in his gut take over completely, pausing to pick up his wand where it still shone brightly next to a body that he refused to look at. He carried Harry over the threshold and through the yard, making his way to the motorcycle he’d started leaving there. Lily and James had never apparated with their baby, and he wasn’t going to start.
He dimly recognized Hagrid approaching, stopping just behind the broken gate and swallowing past the painful lump in his throat, willing the nothingness to surge upwards and take its place. Hagrid was teary-eyed and full of hope as he looked at Sirius. “Are they okay?”
He shook his head in response, opening his mouth to speak and faltering for a moment before words broke out, creaking and breaking their way past bruised vocal chords. “No. No. Pettigrew- he- he was the secret keeper, and they’re dead. They’re both dead.” His voice broke time and time again, but he forced himself to continue. “Harry… he’s alive. I don’t- I don’t know how, but he’s okay.”
Tears were falling in rivulets down both their faces by the time Hagrid spoke. “Lily n’ James?”
Another silent nod. “It’s my fault. I’m the one who suggested they use Peter as their secret keeper instead.” Hagrid shook his head violently, but allowed Sirius to continue releasing word after shaking word. “I’m… he’s my godson. I’m going to bring him home to Remus, and then I’m going after him.” Steel hardened his tone as he said, “I’m going to find Peter, and when I do, there’s going to be hell to pay.”
Hagrid stepped aside to let him pass as loud sobs broke from his massive frame, and Sirius’ feet carried him to his motorbike. He clambered on carefully, cradling the baby in his arms, and then he was gone, leaving a trail of pain and grief and anger so potent it was nearly physical.