𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐖𝐍𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄𝐒 𝐎𝐅 𝐈𝐑𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐈𝐁𝐋𝐄 [𝐣.𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐫]

27: 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔭𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔨 {𝔭𝔱. 𝔦𝔦𝔦}

Tw: Sirius Black's poor esteem, Snape, minor mentions of religious trauma

Sirius Black rammed his fists on Professor McGonagall's door feverishly, eyes swimming with tears that would never touch his cheeks. He wouldn't allow it.

Her door opened after a few moments, lips pressed especially thin as she regarded Sirius stiffly, looking as though she wanted to transfigure him into a toad and keep him that way. She was dressed almost ostentatiously in a tartan pajama attire, looking no less menacing.

"What do you need at this obscene hour, Mr. Black?" She asked, waspishly. Her demeanor softened momentarily when her eyes focused on Sirius's hands, tremoring so uncontrollable he shoved them into his pockets. "Is something the matter?"

Slowly, Minerva McGonagall pieced together fabricated fragments of a skewed narrative. At last, she thought, Sirius Black had finally discovered Remus's secret.

"You mustn't tell anyone." Her eyes were no longer impatient. They held a firm note of urgency, as she stared down at the young Black. "If you believe that you truly cannot live with Mr. Lupin, I will make arrangements. But you are not to jeopardize his education in any way. Do you understand me?"

"No," Sirius gasped, clawing at his chest. His breaths were quick and uncomfortable. "No, I knew that. But now, Snape- he- he's there."

Minerva McGonagall was instantly alert. In a swish, her robes were comfortably situated across her narrow shoulders, wand clutched at the ready.

"Show me," she said, pressing. "Hurry."

As they sped through the halls, Sirius felt sobs tear through his chest, like Remus's splintering claws, ripping through his tendons, his ribs, deflating his lungs like helium balloons. A dull ache began to spread through his heart.

His heart, torn to bloody shreds, was reduced to nothing but a pile of tissue that once made up something great. Sirius Black was an old vase, made of aged porcelain and glazed to perfection before his inevitable shattering, leaving nothing but the remnants of what could've been.

That was him in a nutshell, wasn't it?

A coward placed delicately into the hands of magnificence, failing at anything and everything. He burned bright, beautiful, until the star went into supernova, taking everyone down with him.

And worst of all, he liked to cling to people against his touch starved chest, preen and fret and caress until they didn't know they were falling with him.

How could they know, when he didn't either?

Until they both fell through an endless abyss of self-destruction. And they tried to save him, pull him upward against the force of gravity itself. But there was no saving Sirius Black.

Sirius thought back to the first time Remus read Dante's Inferno. He'd hated it, of course (but he had loved it, too), 320 pages about hell and eternal damnation, paying repentance to your sins with the very source of your sinful actions. The greedy man would have nothing, the violent man would be subject to his very violence.

Well, Remus had chuckled, bitterly, I suppose I'll spend the rest of my dying eternity clawed at by a werewolf. And Sirius had laughed wryly, a blossoming sorrow spreading from the base of his lungs, each exhale a tender release of melancholic sympathy.

Oh, moony, he'd breathed, moony, your life and death will look awfully similar, then.

And Remus had only shrugged, sucked the smoke out of a cigarette, and gone back to hating the book, whilst loving it all the same. Sirius remembered, this, because he'd plucked the book out of Moony's veined hands, and snapped it shut, sharply.