The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

XVI: 31 October, 1993

Sirius lay in the dark corner of the tunnel, pressed against the dirt wall in his dog form, quaking with nervousness.

Remus Lupin lay on that couch less than a stone's throw distance away, and he couldn't bring himself to even so much as try to go back through the trap door. What if he did? What if he went and explained it all to Remus? Remus, weakened by the effects of the full moon, would have no choice but to lie there and listen to the full story. Remus could explain the whole thing to Dumbledore. Dumbledore could fix it all, could help him, Sirius, with clearing his name, with undoing the past twelve years.

But the look in Remus's eyes when he had gazed upon him that night in the cemetery had been so terrible... What if he looked at Sirius like that again? In horror, fear, disappointment, and distrust? Sirius thought he might crumble to ashes and cease to exist, were that the case...

Besides that, Dumbledore must have done something back then, back when he was sent off - no trial, no defense - he must have tried, right? Which meant that maybe, perhaps, Dumbledore wasn't able to sway the minds of the Ministry of Magic. Maybe he wasn't as powerful as they'd once all believed.

Or maybe Dumbledore himself had believed in the lie, too.

Dumbledore certainly wouldn't leave Remus unguarded and unprotected if he truly believed the lie, though, would he? It had been decidedly too easy to sneak into the Shack on a full moon night, too easy to find Remus, if one knew where to look... Was it a trap? Set specifically because Dumbledore would know that Sirius's best bait had always been the promise of Remus Lupin? 

Well. If it was a trap, he had apparently managed to get out of it, past it somehow. If he went back up there, he might end up entangled in it, might end up back at Azkaban before he could explain himself again. Or worse, he thought, remembering the cloaked figures he had seen guarding the gates around the school grounds.

Coming to Hogwarts itself was the trap, he reckoned. Maybe Lupin had been the bait, after all Dumbledore had hired him on only now - years after he should have done - and why? To lure in Sirius Black. Of course the path to the Shack was unguarded. They wanted Black in the castle, wanted him to come close enough to feel he might be safe in Hogwarts, so they could turn their dementors on him, and capture him once again.

He didn't much care if he was captured again, really. In fact, he sort of wished they would catch him and kiss him and end his miserable existence already.

Except for one last thing that needed doing before he died, he would be fine with it, honestly.

And that one last thing - he could do it tonight. Tonight, on the Anniversary, on the proper time. Justice rang through the blood in Sirius's veins. He felt almost hungry for it. How bleedin' poetic that he had made it to Hogsmeade the day before, how poetic he had discreetly spent one last night, snuffles and the werewolf, in the Shrieking Shack before going to avenge James and Lily...

All he had to do was to make it that far.

Thunder rumbled somewhere far above, and Sirius looked up, despite the pitch dark of the tunnel, as though he could see the sky. How miserable this year at Hogwarts must be so far for the students, all these dementors hovering about, the weather must have been terrible, rotten, dismal.

At least soon the dementors would leave the school. Once he'd been kissed, they would have no reason to be there. Then maybe there would be sunny days again at Hogwarts.

Suddenly, there was a sound in the tunnel, far off, and Sirius lay flat against the dirt, his dog ears prickled and his body tense. The black shaggy fur made him near to invisible in the tunnel.

A dim light came 'round a bend, then, getting slowly brighter until a silhouette appeared. Sirius's doggy eyes squinted and he realized the figure coming along the tunnel was Madam Pomfrey, the school mediwitch. She held her wand in one hand and a small silver tray in the other, a steaming goblet and a plate of food upon it, picking her way carefully over the ruts and roots of the passageway until she got to the steps that went up into the Shack. She hesitated on the stairs a moment, right above Sirius, and set the tray on the steps while she pushed opened the trap door ever so slightly.

"Mister Lupin?" she called into the Shack tentatively, checking if she would be answered. She must have been, for she went ahead and pushed opened the door. Light poured into the passageway and if anyone had looked down at the floor past the stair at that moment they would have spotted the shaggy black dog, but Pomfrey was focused on her task and simply lifted the tray and pulled herself up and out of the tunnel. "The headmaster thought you might well have come out here, once we found you were not in your office," she said, but that was all Sirius heard before she had turned, closing the trap door behind her.

Sirius lay still a moment, and then he realized that now, this, this was his shot, his chance. He could get to the other end of the tunnel and when Pomfrey returned, when she'd opened the knot at the base of the willow at the far end, then he could bolt into the bushes at the base of the castle. How he would go unnoticed once he had followed her inside he did not know, but if he could only get in the doors, he could find one of the old passageways, and make his way up through the castle - just like old times... He could find the boys dormitory and figure out which one the Weasley boy was staying in. He could kill the rat and whatever came of him after that... so be it.

So Sirius set off at a run through the passageway, his heart beating a million miles a minute at the thought of finally, finally getting to commit the murder he had been accused of twelve years before.