Who: Harry1-can & Sirius7-1war What: finding Padfoot. When: Wednesday evening, after this Where: the hiding place they arranged for a failed plan. Warnings: ALL THE SADS. Status: Threaded; incomplete
Everyone was grieving, and Harry felt as though he ought to be there for all of them, but he knew he couldn't. He had his own grief to deal with, too. He would try his best to be there for the people that needed him, but he also really wanted time to think and breathe and not have to consider... well, everything. He really needed a moment to grieve, to cope.
And normally he would have gone to be alone, but he didn't want to be alone. When Sirius had asked that he come to find him, to sit with him, that had seemed like the perfect solution. It didn't matter that it wasn't his specific godfather from his own world back home; it was different, but Harry still cared. He didn't know what he would have done, if the villagers had caught him, if yet another Sirius had died in this world, on top of everything else. His own was alive, still, but deaths of versions of people he loved still hit him hard. The death of the Remus that this Sirius was mourning had made Harry cry, too.
And, frankly, he was really looking forward to the company of Padfoot. He'd gotten a big hug and spent a little while with his godfather who was still in human form, but it wasn't incredibly easy to be around people, around their grief and their anger and their... everything. Harry wasn't ready to talk about whether things would have fallen out the same way if they had done things differently, or to contemplate their future chances for survival, even though he'd been the one to bring it up. He just needed to get away, just for a little bit, and sitting out in the forest with a familiar big black dog sounded like a perfect way to do it.
It was eerily quiet in the village when he went outside, but Harry was too stuck inside his own head to think much of it, except to be grateful that no one tried to stop him leaving the village. It was dark, and even darker once he was in the forest, but Harry didn't light the tip of his wand; he did, however, leave himself little glowing trail markers by touching rocks with the tip of his wand. Being in the darkness felt appropriate, really, and his eyes adjusted after a few moments.
It had been a good thing they'd arranged a hiding place for him, even though their plan hadn't worked. Maybe their plan had managed to save someone, after all. Maybe it had saved Sirius.
But since he didn't have a light, he couldn't see the shape of the dog in the dark. So he stood still, and said quietly, "Padfoot?"