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Sirius Black loved his friends. He loved James. He loved Lily. He loved Remus. Even Peter had been one of his closest and dearest friends.
He loved so passionately and deeply. He loved with his entire being . But as it turns out, love cannot protect everyone from the world or the nasty people in it. Harry Potter had just gotten lucky.
Sirius was torn away from his home, the people he loved, and the world he’d come from on the night he discovered his two best friends had been murdered. Betrayed by a man who called himself their friend.
Sirius had been framed and ripped away from the only person he still had and tossed into a prison of howling guilt and the stench of death forged into its very foundation.
There was no reprieve from the despair. No moment throughout the day when Sirius was able to remember without the melancholy seeping in as the memories slipped out. Except for when the moon shone through the cracks and cuts of Sirius’ skin.
His mind was broken and he was alone, but he felt like could live when, through the barred window, high up on the wall of his barren and grey cell, a sliver of moon would appear, bathing the dreary state of things in a silver glow.
With each ray of its divine light, Sirius remembered more and more of the man he loved. His moon. The moon he used to hold in his hands and marvel at. The moon that astronomers didn’t need a telescope to see because he was right there in Sirius’ arms, laughing and crying and oh so human .
But when the moon came out, came the reminder of what the moon brought to his love. Destruction and pain. And when the moon would leave, so would any semblance of Sirius’ moon’s face or hair or lips.
The moon would rise and fall with the tides, leaving Sirius with restless hopes each morning for his moon to come back to him. And with those hopes came the dementors, stealing every drop of his moon from him.
Every last sliver of its surface, wiped from his mind to dream about. Every last vision of its beauty, withheld from his eyes to gaze upon. The pictures of all the grace and the whispers of his name were replaced with the images of the death he’d witnessed and the cries of anguish from a war not really won. Because war does not have winners. It has survivors.
Memories of love and laughter morphed into the cold hands of his friends and the shouting mess of his last conversation with his moon, until there was no more. And Sirius could no longer find his moon amongst the endless chatter of the universe in his mind.
The moonlight dulled with each passing day as Sirius’ moon became nothing more than a distant feeling. An unnamed emotion. Something of a different life.
Until the moon was no longer a symbol of love, but a signal to sleep.
Le clair de lune, vide de toute lumière.
Son clair de lune.
But sitting in Azkaban, cold and alone, the moon he could hardly remember, was his no longer.