nekare

Wee! My style is back and I'm quite happy today. Lazy weekends are the best, definitely; staying in bed in your pyjamas and write dark, disturging stuff while the sun shines outside. *happy sigh* One-shots againg!!

Title: Stained
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 458
Author Notes: Written for blanketforts. Set in Azkaban. (Why yes, I can torture Sirius too, it's not a Remus-specific thing. XD)

Firework Series Day: 21

Freeze, freeze thou bitter sky,
That does not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot:
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As a friend remembered not.

-William Shakespeare


Sirius falls down from grace, so slowly not even he knows about the dark uncertainty biting at his toes, leaving purple-blue marks that used to be red and heated just a few months ago (when life was bearable and Remus kissed him on the collarbone so lightly it was almost a caress), soul asleep and waiting for something, something other than steely ocean by the window, for the first kiss of true love, maybe.

(He doesn’t wake up, though, and he stares at the gray world encased in steel bars).

His nails have grown larger, and he scratches at his arms, desperate to feel something, anything other than the dullness chewing at his brain, the pain that has made his heart stop. The blood looks too bright in the room when it finally comes, and Sirius laughs just like he did in November first. There’s art on the walls, crosses painted with four fingers and long stripes of scarlet paint, a graveyard for the dead, a curse for a betrayer, a shrine to a life long forgotten.

Dust and dim-lighted chandeliers drown his mind with the only thoughts he’s allowed to have, a mad woman shouting as he dances with her hands in the air, Black looks on the two children watching her silent, both of them doomed. The Dementors sometimes take a day to get to his cell, and the short moments of lucidness feel like acid on his skin, corroding and blistering angry red with just the barest tang of orange. Then he remembers wind on his hair as he flies and Harry’s tiny hands closed around his shirt, Peter’s shifty smiles (and then there’s bile on his mouth, tasting more like bitterness than real hatred) and Moony’s hair surrounding him as a crown as he lay on the grass smiling at him.

He sits in the farthest corner of the room, crouched low against the bloody letters of a name he used to taste as he spoke it, sweet on his tongue and the waves of the ocean crashing against his ears within a shell (a shell of real life, he thinks), and he stares at the real waves that are too devoid of color to match the ones in his imagination.

Remus has forgotten him, he knows, and Sirius thinks he’s right in doing so, that he couldn’t dare touch him with his hands soaked in guilt. It hurts, at night when the ghostly robes of the Dementors drag behind them, nightmare sounds written when they rustle in the filthy ground as their owners glide like a void of nothingness, taunting the prisoners that scream, scream, scream just as Sirius wants to.

Then the madness hue returns, and Sirius is almost glad for it.