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Today, its name is Sirius Black. There’s darkness swimming around inside him as surely as it knows its name, but this is no matter: it knows how to play this game, how to tease out the good and leave the hurt behind for the vessel to deal with. It doesn’t feel remorse doing it, especially not to someone like Sirius whose pain is overwhelmingly characterized by guilt. If Sirius weren’t responsible for his own undoing, he’d have nothing to feel responsible for. If Sirius didn’t belong in this prison—
But Sirius is in this prison. His mind is unclear on the point of whether he actually committed the crimes that he’s in for: they happened recently, so recently that he didn’t have much time to come to grips with how he feels about them before being fed upon. With it so focused on Sirius’s more pleasant memories, it hasn’t got a lot of capacity left to determine whether Sirius did kill all those Muggles—whether Sirius is responsible for his friends’ deaths. It can’t really tell whether the explosion came from Sirius’s wand or Peter’s, and it doesn’t really care to sort it out; it hasn’t taken the time to feel out the nuances of whether Sirius’s hand in the Potters’ deaths was direct or indirect. They wouldn’t call it a dementor if its priority was the health of its victims.
It doesn’t think of Sirius as a victim, though, not really. The reasons he’s in here are good enough for the Ministry, and they’re certainly good enough for it. If anything’s the victim, it is. After all, without minds like Sirius’s to feast on, it’s got nothing but a void that stretches on endlessly into misery, and nothing should have to live like that, not even a half-alive virus like it is.
For all Sirius’s angst, he’s got plenty of good stuff in there for it to find, too—more than most people, even. For all Sirius’s agony, he loves fiercer than anyone it has ever seen. It starts with Sirius’s friends and the nights he spent awake with them until four in the morning, planning pranks and confiding in them about his family and running in the woods with them as Animagi on full moons. Sirius may be enormously conflicted about the one called Peter, but that’s none of its concern: it will gladly take the fond memories and stick Sirius with the melancholy.
Besides, it’s less concerned with Peter than it is with James, the best friend, or Remus, the partner. Seeing the way Sirius looks at them in his memories makes it sting with something like—not jealousy, not exactly, but some kind of longing to have a real life like Sirius’s with people in it who will look at it the way James and Remus looked at him. Then again, it’s easy to forget that it doesn’t have Sirius’s life—that Sirius and it aren’t one and the same.
That’s what it does: it latches on inextricably, buries itself so deep that it forgets the way it feels when it hasn’t got a Sirius around from whom to feed. It hasn’t had to feel that way in a long time, not since before it came here to Azkaban where the food is plentiful and the joy is boundless.
For someone so broken, Sirius is positively teeming with joy.
xx
“Sirius, I…”
It’s late—after midnight—not that that’s late by its standards. Its heart is pounding so hard it can almost imagine it has a heart. The dormitory is dark, and it can barely hear Remus’s frail words over James’s and Peter’s snores, but Sirius has memorized the pitch and cadence of every word for it to inhale.
“I’ll wait,” it says in Sirius’s voice, savoring the vibrations its throat makes, the feeling of the heat of Remus’s body against its own—the feeling of having a body. “If you’re not ready to come out to Wormtail and Prongs, I’ll wait as long as you need me to. If I have to wait until midnight every night when they’re asleep to steal these moments with you, I’ll do it. I just want you.”
“But—I don’t understand. I’m not brave like you or charming like Prongs or loyal like Wormy. I’m just me. I’m the werewolf. I’m—”
“If you’re about to call yourself nothing, I’m going to smack you,” it says, but it doesn’t think there was ever any danger of Sirius doing any violence here tonight—not against Remus. “I just—I need you. Okay? I don’t need anybody else, not like I need you, and if you’ll have me…”
It can relate. It’s gobbling this up like it needs this, and maybe it does—need something. Need everything.
When Remus kisses it, it’s almost enough to make it feel human.