james potter (deeringdo) wrote in the100, @ 2015-03-31 20:29:00 |
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Entry tags: | !log/thread, james potter, sirius black |
Who: James & Sirius
What: running into each other.
When: now!
Where: random hallway inside Mt. Weather, near the exit
Warnings: mentions of, you know, James's death. Voldemort. Stuff.
It was really bloody cold.
It had been summer last James checked, so he really wasn't dressed for this. He'd given up on the idea of pursuing the snitch outside, if it was even out there, although he was pretty sure the sneaky little thing would have found a way out. James had found the exit, too, but the moment he'd opened the door a gust of wind had blown a bunch of snow in, and he had to struggle to close it again.
Right. Not doing that.
"Oi," he called to a silhouetted figure he saw down the hallway, "You seen a snitch around? Little golden ball with wings?"
--
The one moment he had hit wizards all over him. Him. And hit wizards. And it had been such a bloody, bloody joke, and he couldn't stop laughing. He'd gone down when they'd told him to go down, and they'd restrained him all the same, as if he was the most dangerous wizard they'd ever come across. (Wouldn't his mother be fucking proud in the morning? Look, here he was, an enemy of the wizarding world and supposed right-hand to the Dark Lord himself. Oh, they would all be fucking loving that. His mother and his bat-shit crazy cousin. The whole fucking lot of them would know that he'd never been anywhere near the Death Eaters, but they'd smile around the irony of him being arrested for it. No trial even. The verdict so fucking sure -- everyone so absolutely fucking convinced that he'd help murder the Potters that he didn't even get a trial.)
He didn't know if he should be grateful or not that he'd been pardoned from the Dementor's Kiss. The oblivion of it would be a relief.
But now he had no idea where he was, other than that this was probably not Azkaban from the lack of Dementors.
But then, he knew that voice. (And he was cracked. He knew it. He had fucking known it when he'd heard himself laughing: Mad as a fucking dog, Black.) He turned at the sound of it even though everything in his body was telling him not to. And then he couldn't move at all, feet pinned to the floor, because James Potter was not 10 feet away from him. Younger. He wasn't worn down by the war yet and being exhausted from being up all night when Harry was feeling fussy.
It's a hallucination, Sirius told himself. And then he wondered if he cared.
--
The person turned around, and James paused, mouth already open to say something else, his hands halfway lifted to do some kind of gesture to illustrate what he was looking for-- little thing like this, see? and wings, flap flap flap-- but something about the man in front of him made him freeze. It took him a few more seconds before he fully processed what he was seeing.
“Sirius?” he said, and then his face split into a grin. “Merlin’s tits, is that you? You look like you really got roughed up, mate. What happened?”
Of course, he had no idea how loaded a question that really was-- or rather, how heavy the answer would be. He moved forward, where he could see his best mate better, and looked him over. As he took in the state Sirius was in, his brow furrowed. “Seriously. What happened to you?”
--
All he could see was James in the lower level of the house, sprawled out, eyes open. He hadn’t even been anywhere near his wand. (That should have been funny. That should have been something they joked about later: Remember that time you tried to take on Voldemort without your wand, Prongs, you prat? And they’d be safe, having a drink, chuckling over their war-time adventure stories, grateful to be past that. But it wasn’t funny at all now. It was just devastating. James had never even stood a chance.)
“I,” Sirius tried to say, only getting out the single world, the single letter. His voice was hoarse from the screaming. He didn’t sound like himself.
But then, he shouldn’t be doing this. Shouldn’t be engaging with the hallucination. It would only make things worse. It would have to change, to flip -- either to something worse, or to just the truth. That James was gone. That after everything, his brother was dead, and he hadn’t even gotten to fight for him either. Everything had just been pulled out from underneath them, and James had been extinguished before Sirius had fully realized the level of the threat.
…
--
“Cat got your tongue, eh, Pads?” James said, in mock seriousness. His voice actually almost sounded serious, but his face gave him away: head tilted, eyebrows raised, his mouth forming a small pout in playful imitation of Sirius’s current mood.
But then Sirius really didn’t say anything else, and it struck James that the situation was-- well, serious. He needed to be genuinely serious about Sirius.
Of course, that required being much more attentive to the entire situation and what Lily had been saying to him, and James’s mind just wasn’t ready to function on that level yet. What he could comprehend was that they’d all ended up in a strange place, Sirius was having trouble dealing with it, and that was what he could actually do something about.
His frown returned, and he reached out to pat Sirius’s shoulder, then brushed a lock of his hair back from his face. It seemed longer, or was he imagining that? What about the strange, almost hollow look on his face? Up close, the evidence of something being truly wrong was too much for him to ignore. But Sirius couldn’t seem to speak to tell him what it was. Which left him with only general reassurances to give. “It’ll be alright, mate. Don’t worry.”
Something in his pocket squirmed, and he was distracted by it, looking down. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a chocolate frog, still in its package. “Ha! Not everything got away from me. You want it? Maybe it’ll make you feel better.”
--
Sirius closed his eyes. This wasn’t real. None of this was real, and he couldn’t allow himself to buy into it. (But what did he have left to lose? Going insane, letting himself get lost in whatever the hell this was a whole lot more encouraging than drowning in Azkaban. But maybe that was precisely why he didn’t let himself. He didn’t deserve this sort of mercy, any type of relief from the sentence that had been handed down to him.)
All that fell to shit when James actually touched him, strangely solid, and just as cheerful as he had always been.
Sirius stared dumbly down at the frog that James offered up, still unable to string any words together. (His brain, ever unhelpful, conjured up an image of Remus offering up them up a slab of chocolate after their lesson on Dementors in Defense Against the Dark Arts. Moony, whom Sirius would never see again. Who had probably gone to James and Lily’s funeral alone. Who undoubtedly thought that Sirius was the spy -- probably beating himself up for not noticing the signs that he surely had to have thought were there all along.)
He wanted to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of James offering him chocolate when he should have been in Azkaban. He reigned the noise in though, tight, afraid to hear that sound come out of him again. Deranged and high-pitched, a nightmare laugh.
…
He was seriously (siriusly) starting to freak James out. He stared at Sirius over the proffered chocolate frog, and then lowered it again, stuffing it into his pocket. After a moment more of indecision and a sense of helpless confusion, he finally snapped and grabbed his friend by the shoulders, shaking him a little. “Sirius, come on, talk. What’s wrong?”
Alright, so it wasn’t the gentlest way to deal with an obviously shell-shocked and traumatized person. But gentle had never been James’s strong suit.
--
The shake seemed even more grounded than the fleeting touch on his shoulder. He flinched against it -- mostly because it made it absolutely impossible to block out James, that this was -- whatever it was -- was happening.
“Don’t do this to me, please,” he said it low, voice rough, and he didn’t know who he was talking to, whether it was directed at James or whoever had brought him here or whoever was pulling this trick. He’d take the Dementors. That was a fair punishment, he’d figured. But he didn’t want to do this again. He didn’t want the reminder of James flung in his face. He couldn’t block out the image of his lifeless James juxtaposed against this very real and very young one standing right in front of him.
…
James stopped shaking him and stared at him for a minute longer. “I’m not doing anything to you,” he said impatiently, but it was becoming obvious that he was getting nowhere. It kind of hurt, looking at Sirius and knowing his friend wasn’t telling him something. He let go, and took a step back. “Fine. You want me to leave you alone, go on. I won’t follow you.”
He wasn’t sure if he actually meant that. Because if Sirius actually left, he would be strongly tempted to run after him, still pestering him with questions as they went.
--
“This isn’t real,” Sirius said impatiently over James’ words, eyes shut once again. It was the only way he could start to block it all out. “You’re dead.”
The words felt as if they were pulled out from his chest, the first time he had actually said them out loud, even after being at the house. (“Give him to me, Hagrid. I’m his godfather.” It was the closest he’d actually come. And then of course there had been his ill-fated meeting with Peter, Peter screaming into the street for everyone to hear him. That son of a bitch putting his last mark on Sirius before taking his own life. Everything was framed against Sirius, and no one alive who knew any different would say anything.)
…
Lily had said that too, but James hadn’t really believed it. He was starting to believe it now, though he was resisting it all the same. “Stop it!” he said, almost shouting. Vehemently, he added, “Pads, this isn’t funny.”
He shoved him, not hard, but enough to make a point. And then he did it again. “I’m here, damn it! I’m real!” He was more afraid than angry, but it was turning into anger because that was easier to deal with. Because he was afraid that he really was dead, that he wasn’t real, that everyone he loved was just going to be treating him like this whenever he was around. It had been a really strange day, really far from the fun trip home for the summer and party on the train that he’d been planning on having.
--
Sirius’ eyes snapped open when James shoved him -- once, and then again. He could feel the solidity of James, the heat that came from just being alive. (He tried to shut down that train of thought, quickly, but wasn’t fast enough: He remembered being in the living room, James sprawled across the ground. Eyes open, unseeing, his glasses crooked on his face. And Sirius’ hands had been shaking, but he had touched him anyway, fingers pressing against James’ face, just for a moment, before he had pulled away as if he had been bitten. James had felt like the inverse of himself: still and cold, unyielding.)
“Jamie?” he breathed out, and he was afraid to touch, afraid that it would all slip away if he tried to get too near. The name he used was a childish one, one employed long before Prongs and Padfoot had come into play.
But he couldn’t stay away; they had always been distinctly tactile with each other. He closed the slight distance between them, one shuddering footstep at a time. And then he swept James up in a fierce and hard hug, clinging to him as if he could chase the past away.
…
“It’s me,” James managed to insist one more time, his voice strained from all the emotions swirling around inside of him. And then he was wrapped up in a hug so fierce that the air was crushed out of his chest, but he didn’t care. He made a slightly strangled sound, involuntarily, and then wrapped his arms around Sirius in return, curling his fingers into his best friend’s clothing and hair.
His breath coming short and shallow, he felt nothing but relief. For the horrible moments before Sirius had hugged him, he’d really thought that they were never going to be alright again, and that was one of the worst things he could possibly imagine.
“Good to see you too, Pads,” he manage to get out, but the roughness of his voice and the tears pricking at his eyes took away from the intended lightheartedness of the statement.
--
Sirius held James for a few seconds, just relishing in what should have become the impossible. (Again, he was struck by the image of James cold and in the ground, he and Lily in caskets side by side. A funeral procession attended by the thousands, one that he would never attend. Himself stranded in Azkaban while Remus was lost in the crowd, little Harry whisked away to the Muggle world, unaware of everything that had swirled about him.)
Sirius pulled away again, although he kept one arm around James. The other went to James’ neck, gripping him so he could look at James more properly. (This, perhaps, would have been strange between anybody else, but they had always touched each other in a way that was easy, assuming.)
“You’re young,” he said, the words surprised and straight. Maybe it was just that he felt old, aged beyond his own scant years by his loss and grief and rage.
…
The touch made James feel more solid, more real. If he were a ghost, Sirius’s hands would have gone straight through him. He kept one arm around his friend, and just let Sirius do whatever he needed to do to prove to himself that James really was there. It helped to prove to James that he was real, too.
He gave a surprised laugh at the statement. There was an edge of hysteria to it, because he just didn’t know how to deal with it. “First I’m dead, then I’m not real, now I’m young. Make up your damn mind, Pads.”
--
The comment drew a smile to his lips, pained as he still felt inside. It was just so unabashedly James -- and everything he was doing in this moment seemed miraculous. Breathing, joking, just existing. It all smacked of the impossible and quietly overwhelmed Sirius. He was scared to let any of it go; he felt as if he had taken all those childhood years with James for granted. Greedily drinking them in without any regard of how fleeting they would be, how quickly he would lose James.
“You’re young,” Sirius said again, trying to laugh, but it came out as more of a bark, far too strained.
It hit him in the chest suddenly, with blaring awareness: Jame didn’t know. Couldn’t know. And how was he supposed to explain everything that happened? He felt drowned just by the idea. He wanted to protect James from a truth that he had already given away.
…
“Yeah,” James said, still kind of vaguely amused, though he wasn’t laughing anymore. “I guess I’m not going to get a whole lot older, though, right?”
He said it without really thinking, but as he said it, he knew it was the truth. There was no way around it with the evidence right in front of him. He’d never wanted to see what Sirius would look like when he was grieving James’s death, nor Lily-- and he’d have to face her eventually-- but that appeared to be what was happening. If he’d thought about it before actually seeing it, he might have found some comfort, even an ego boost, in imagining how much they’d miss him. But the reality of it was breaking his heart.
“Sorry,” he said, just a moment later. “I’m sorry, Pads.” And he reached in again for a hug, this time with real tears in his eyes.
--
Sirius’ face fell visibly when the words came from James’ mouth. He couldn’t lie to James, and not about this, never about anything that was actually important. So, he just shook his head, a grim motion. He gripped James too tightly again, keeping hold of him with a fierce amount of protectiveness.
“I’m sorry,” Sirius begged, unable to hear James saying the words to him; they were ridiculous. “I’m sorry, James. I didn’t protect you.” He was crying now, ragged sobs that had been swollen in his throat since he had found James and Lily -- there hadn’t been time for them when Harry was in his arms, and there hadn’t been time for them during his obsessive hunt for Peter, and there hadn’t been time for them when the hit wizards had came and arrested him. But there was time for them now, a cresting tide of pent-up emotion that he simply let himself drown in now that he couldn’t push it down any longer.
…
The hug was more overwhelming than comforting. It made it too real, made him too aware of his fragility, as if he might actually just fall to pieces and die if Sirius weren’t holding onto him. Which wasn’t the case, of course-- James had felt perfectly healthy only minutes ago. But he was, for the very first time in his life, genuinely afraid for his own well-being. His normal confidence that he would heroically survive whatever came his way was faltering in the face of all this evidence that he would, in fact, end up dead. Apparently very soon.
He wanted to know more, but he also really, really didn’t. It was bad enough knowing he died; knowing how was sure to make him paranoid. “Did I go down fighting, at least?” he asked, taking one more stab at being the lighthearted, courageous hero he’d always wanted to be. A moment later, however, he regretted asking it. Instead he said, “It’s alright, Pads. It’s not your fault.”