Certain Dark Things || Book Three

ii. his own demanding ghost

In the middle of the sea at the end of the world, a man sat alone in a stone cell pressing ink into his skin.

He was a terribly thin man, more bone than flesh, waxen skin stretched taut to his skull, his black hair and beard both matted into thick, stringy clumps. An old torn cuff had been sacrificed to tie the mess back from his sunken eyes. There wasn't much in his cell: a pallet laid at his back, covered in a threadbare blanket that might have been white at some point, an empty food bowl waiting by the iron gate, and in his hand he held what remained of his spoon. Time and a bit of magic had whittled it down into a passable needle, the ink fashioned from sea salt and tar, preserved in a little hollow worn into the floor.

The man pressed the needle's crude tip into his skin again, flinching ever so slightly at the sting, pulling the needle free only to heal the skin with a pulse of raw magic. He panted softly and studied the effect, moving his arm into the watery, barely-there glow of distant sunlight drizzling through the window's thick grate. The glyphs were an exhausting endeavor, mere centimeters taking weeks to form—but it wasn't as if he had anything else to do.

The only thing Sirius Black had left was time.

He scoffed, muttering "Time served," to himself as he twitched the needle about and added yet another point to the symbol above his elbow. He'd been shite at Ancient Runes in school; that'd always been Remus' forte—oh, God, Remus, Remus, I'm so—but he remembered enough to get by.

His fingers traced the rougher skin above nyd on his heart, a rune pleading dire, dire need. It came first, of course; every other word etched into his worthless hide was simply an elaboration on that single plea.

Sirius returned the needle to the ink and tugged the pallet's edge over it all—not that anyone would bloody well care should he fashion a shiv; the only one he could use it on was himself after all, and Sirius wasn't such a bleeding heart Gryffindor that he'd never considered the idea—why not, after all, a fitting end for a dog, a failure, but no he couldn't, he couldn't—.

Shaking his head, Sirius dragged in a lungful of brine-flavored air and let it out.

Distantly, he felt the pressure emanating from that part of himself where he kept the worst bits hidden— "How could you do this without telling me? How could you? How—?!"—lessen like a balloon with a small puncture, a flimsy veil lifting enough for him to hear the world outside his own skull once more. He could hear the dull, repetitive thump of the waves hitting the island, the wind howling, and—the other prisoners.

"Ooh!" came the high, girlish shriek of his least favorite witch in the world. "Looks like the Dementors are moving off!"

"It's gotta be inspection time," grunted another, a voice for a face Sirius' had never seen and couldn't place—Rowle, he thought. Not Rabastan or Rodulphus; they were either dead or, more likely, in the other ward. It wasn't Wilkes, or the Carrows, the latter too far down the way for Sirius to hear unless the witch started screaming. Bellatrix Lestrange laughed, the sound garbled and deranged, like a dragon's claw scraping inside his head—.

"Shut the fuck up, you mad bint!" Sirius shouted.

"What's that? Still breathing, cousin?" Bellatrix laughed again, and Sirius softly cursed under his breath, wishing he could wrap his hands around her neck and squeeze. Silence—true, Merlin-blessed silence—came like rain in the desert here, rare and precious and almost always spoiled by the Death Eaters he lived down the hall from.

Sirius settled on the floor, angling himself so he could somewhat see down the corridor, past the black cell across from him, toward the stairs he'd been dragged up twelve years ago and hadn't laid eyes on since. If it weren't for the sound of the waves, the whole bloody sea could've dried up, and Sirius wouldn't have a clue. He didn't know anything outside of that cell, no bigger than a coat closet.