The Prisoner in Azkaban: Year Eleven (Harry Potter)
Title: The Prisoner in Azkaban
Chapter: Year Eleven
Word Count: 2,272
Author’s Notes: I have taken liberty with the timeline during this chapter. I know Sirius is supposed to escape just after Fudge gives him the Daily Prophet, but I insist my Sirius needed some time to snap back into it. Plus, twelve years is too many and I ran out of chapter ideas.
Year Ten
The dream had edges; lines Sirius couldn’t walk past no matter how hard he tried. He was sure there was more, something he was missing but there was no way to pass over the edge of a thin slip of parchment that was everything he knew. Outside of it he was sure he would be able to see everything clearly but this was a start.
He would walk on a map, tiny feet showing where he had been and where he was going. Next to them a name, written with deceptive simplicity: Sirius Black. He had been stumbling aimlessly on the map for months before it meant anything. One day the lines became letters; eventually they linked into words until he remembered how to make sense of them. And then that rush, the recognition, the first thing that had genuinely made Sirius happy in all of the years he could remember. He knew what it meant. It meant he was somebody.
After that tiny discovery, the rest began to come much faster. It wasn’t just a map; the feet were going somewhere familiar that wasn’t just lines on a dried up scroll. Sirius was walking down long stone corridors, there were doors to rooms marked with names he understood…finally other feet that belonged to people he swore he knew.
It was home to him, but not in the same way he’d known home. For as long as he remembered he lived in a place with long, dark hallways and walls made of stone but it wasn’t the same as the place he saw now and that place had been safe, warm, beautiful. Sirius wanted to go back there, to explore the rooms with the titles that brought up images and to meet the people with the names he already cared about.
But nothing came easy to Sirius, not anymore. It was months before his wishes began to be fulfilled, months of hard work while he was awake. Finally he broke through. He could go into the rooms and each one proved to look just the way he thought he remembered it. Inside those rooms there were memories that played themselves out silently and each one became clearer and made it easier for Sirius to understand the others. Even the miserable memories were precious to Sirius.
At first they were simple. Out by the Lake, a black dog ran after the stick a black haired boy with glasses threw. Sirius knew who the dog was and was sure this had happened many times before but the longer he spent wandering the map, the more the brief flashes of memory began to tell stories.
Three boys hiding in the Slytherin common room dropped something and laughed before fleeing. Two black haired boys beaming wickedly and a chubbier, blond one trying not to look as terrified as he was. The names were his, James Potter, and Peter Pettigrew. Sirius didn’t know which boy was which at first.
Sirius sitting alone in the Transfigurations Classroom, a severe woman glaring at him as he tried to speak into a mirror without getting caught. The other black haired boy, who he finally knew to be James Potter, beamed back at him and Sirius could tell he was mocking the large man that would pass by his desk and ask questions about his potions without hearing what he was saying.
In the Gryffindor common room, Sirius let his head fall and his eyes almost filled with tears. He was clutching a letter but he never saw who it was from. He’s wasn’t alone, though he’d thought he was, but the brown haired boy didn’t tease him, didn’t say anything at all. It was a hand on his shoulder, just enough pressure to let Sirius know he was there.
The brown haired boy was sleeping in a hospital bed. Sirius was cowering as James gesticulated furiously and moved his mouth as if he was yelling. Peter was sitting off to the side silently, looking worried and if he caught Sirius’s eyes, he would avert his gaze self-consciously. Sirius was sure he deserved whatever James was saying because when the boy woke up, Sirius leaned in and said something to him that made his sick friend fall back into himself and Sirius suddenly realized that was the last thing he wanted to do.
On the edge of the map, there was a Forbidden Forest. The same three boys from the first dream walked there in the moonlight, but now Sirius could feel the absence of another and something about that absence was terribly important. The other two boys knew it, too. They were nervous and they sped forward as if someone’s life depended on it. Maybe someone’s did. When they got to the place they were heading, a twisted tree that seemed alive, they heard a howl. They went into the tree, by now Sirius was the dog but he didn’t need the map to tell him where he was. He could see the name in its thick black letters: Shrieking Shack. The house was so vivid in his memory he could swear it was real-the wallpaper’s faded designs, the furniture was torn violently. Further in they went searching for something: three boys pretending to be animals to fool an animal that pretended to be a boy. Every time he saw the wolf he hated it. He knew it had taken something from him, stolen a friend and turned it into a monster. But as he approached, the wolf would let out a sad sound and there wasn’t enough Sirius in the dog to remember to stay angry at it for what it did to Remus-Padfoot liked the wolf and was thankful for it.
In the Courtyard, Sirius passed a boy and a girl. The girl, pretty red hair tied in a practical bun, glared at Sirius spitefully and despite this, Sirius could not convince himself he didn’t like her. The boy, oily black hair blocking most of his face, did nothing to Sirius which didn’t seem to matter very much either; he was positive he didn’t like him. Their names he remembered after the first time he read them.
Severus Snape was well enough but Lily Evans posed a problem. The day he remembered that this was because her name was supposed to be Potter was the day he really began to understand the connections. He remembered the wedding while he was awake, his first conscious memory in several years. He could see himself giving a speech, he watched the happy couple dance, he sat next to Remus-his Remus-and they laughed. Their hands brushed accidentally and Sirius wondered what it would feel like if he took that hand and held it instead of letting it slip away. Sometimes, Sirius thought the boy was silently willing him to try it. Sirius loved to see the same desire mirrored in the other boy’s face but hated knowing that he had passed all of those chances up. Sirius could not remember a single decent reason for doing so, although there was a lot about the outside world that Sirius knew he still did not understand. Peter sat with them, too. Sirius ignored him as much as possible, resenting every moment he spent talking to the blond instead of to Remus or James or Lily and he was annoyed by the times Remus was paying attention to Peter instead of to him. In retrospect, he was sure he regretted how cruel he was to Peter, but he didn’t think it was guilt.
______________________________________________________________________________
The date is 1992. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at this paper and that still won’t sink in. Eleven years seems at once too long and too short a time for me to have been here. It’s too late now to live all of the life I had when they locked me up. Even if I escaped somehow, I’d be an old man by now. The people I’d live for are all gone. The ones that aren’t won’t remember me-will have spent years working to forget me, except for the one who grew up never knowing I was in here worrying about him. It’s nice to know I was right about there being more than this. But it’s worse than anything to know that I’m dead to that world and will never be a part of it again.
It took a long time to get here, but less than I would have thought. I’ve had this paper for months now. After the shock of figuring out I could understand what it said, I’ve read it over and over more times than I can count. It’s probably taken me almost a year just to start to remember but I was mush before it got here, I was practically dead. And now? I can’t tell you everything, but I can tell you the things that matter. My best friend was named James. He had a son who is older than he and I were when we first met. His wife was named Lily. She often joked that she liked Remus more than either of us-I could always see where she was coming from. I never had a family. The rat ruined everything, his picture saved my life.
The day that man (who I soon discovered to be Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic) gave that newspaper to me, I was almost entirely lost. Who knows if I could have recognized Wormtail in the picture had it been a few weeks later. I could have been stuck, permanently; half-dog half-lunatic. Nothing human left.
I was confused, at the time, by the way the man responded to me. Looking back on it, I must have seemed very mad indeed but that stupid animal drive that forced me to try to speak the man’s language was the most rational impulse I’d had in years.
He was walking by, some standard inspection…I’m sure I’ve witnessed hundreds of them but you’ll grant my memory of the last ten years will be somewhat shaky. I heard him speaking and I thought I knew what he was saying. Although I was a man, I was always the dog and the dog saw that paper and went wild. Play, play, play it kept thinking. After all the boredom and loneliness-didn’t he used to do that when he was alive? Didn’t the nice boy with the black hair used to throw papers just like that for him to chase? The dog loved the feeling of those pages between his teeth. The dog kept me happy, so I wanted to keep the dog happy.
I leaned close to the bars and threw everything I had into trying to be human just for those few seconds it would take. I asked him, in speech that did not put an entire childhood of etiquette lessons to shame, for the paper and was somewhat offended when he stared for a few long seconds before barking a laugh.
“Would you believe it?” he asked turning to his companion. “The lunatic talks like a perfect gentleman.”
They both had a laugh at my expense but he agreed. He slipped the paper through the gates. And I had no idea what was so baffling to them about the fact that I grabbed it in my mouth like a dog. Must have been one hell of a sight. It’s a lucky thing those papers taste worse for us than they do for dogs, I would have ripped the thing apart if I hadn’t spit it out so quickly. If I hadn’t seen a picture of the outside world and paused to look at it, I wouldn’t have caught that flicker of a tail. Wouldn’t have stared until the rat coward showed himself. And even if I didn’t know why for a long time, I didn’t have room to doubt for a moment that this rat was different from the ones I kill in my cell.
I don’t remember everything; I don’t even remember what happened. But I know that it happened, I know what Peter did, who he did it to. I know what I didn’t do, what I thought Remus did. Soon I’ll know how. The thought is torture. I don’t want to be mad, I don’t want to forget everything because in the brief life I was given, I had friends that gave me better memories than most people get in long, so-called happy lives. But there’s no use in knowing if I can’t do anything about it and there’s no use remembering people and Loving them passionately only to remember to miss them.
There’s no comfortable solution between forgetting them and knowing I’ll never see them again. No way to comfort myself. It would be enough to drive me mad if I hadn’t already tried that. Going crazy was torture enough the first time. And even if I wanted to go crazy, it will be years before I can erase that 1992 printed in bold, black ink and forget who that rat is while he’s sitting in a photograph in front of my eyes.
Then suddenly that one giant thing I’ve been trying to figure strikes me. Hogwarts, that’s the place with the stone walls. That’s where everything happened to me, the home I dream about. Hogwarts, in 1992, and that boy holding the rat must be there. Must take his pet with him. But Harry is at Hogwarts in 1992 and the rat can’t get Harry. Not being able to do anything is no longer an option.
Year Twelve
Chapter: Year Eleven
Word Count: 2,272
Author’s Notes: I have taken liberty with the timeline during this chapter. I know Sirius is supposed to escape just after Fudge gives him the Daily Prophet, but I insist my Sirius needed some time to snap back into it. Plus, twelve years is too many and I ran out of chapter ideas.
Year Ten
The dream had edges; lines Sirius couldn’t walk past no matter how hard he tried. He was sure there was more, something he was missing but there was no way to pass over the edge of a thin slip of parchment that was everything he knew. Outside of it he was sure he would be able to see everything clearly but this was a start.
He would walk on a map, tiny feet showing where he had been and where he was going. Next to them a name, written with deceptive simplicity: Sirius Black. He had been stumbling aimlessly on the map for months before it meant anything. One day the lines became letters; eventually they linked into words until he remembered how to make sense of them. And then that rush, the recognition, the first thing that had genuinely made Sirius happy in all of the years he could remember. He knew what it meant. It meant he was somebody.
After that tiny discovery, the rest began to come much faster. It wasn’t just a map; the feet were going somewhere familiar that wasn’t just lines on a dried up scroll. Sirius was walking down long stone corridors, there were doors to rooms marked with names he understood…finally other feet that belonged to people he swore he knew.
It was home to him, but not in the same way he’d known home. For as long as he remembered he lived in a place with long, dark hallways and walls made of stone but it wasn’t the same as the place he saw now and that place had been safe, warm, beautiful. Sirius wanted to go back there, to explore the rooms with the titles that brought up images and to meet the people with the names he already cared about.
But nothing came easy to Sirius, not anymore. It was months before his wishes began to be fulfilled, months of hard work while he was awake. Finally he broke through. He could go into the rooms and each one proved to look just the way he thought he remembered it. Inside those rooms there were memories that played themselves out silently and each one became clearer and made it easier for Sirius to understand the others. Even the miserable memories were precious to Sirius.
At first they were simple. Out by the Lake, a black dog ran after the stick a black haired boy with glasses threw. Sirius knew who the dog was and was sure this had happened many times before but the longer he spent wandering the map, the more the brief flashes of memory began to tell stories.
Three boys hiding in the Slytherin common room dropped something and laughed before fleeing. Two black haired boys beaming wickedly and a chubbier, blond one trying not to look as terrified as he was. The names were his, James Potter, and Peter Pettigrew. Sirius didn’t know which boy was which at first.
Sirius sitting alone in the Transfigurations Classroom, a severe woman glaring at him as he tried to speak into a mirror without getting caught. The other black haired boy, who he finally knew to be James Potter, beamed back at him and Sirius could tell he was mocking the large man that would pass by his desk and ask questions about his potions without hearing what he was saying.
In the Gryffindor common room, Sirius let his head fall and his eyes almost filled with tears. He was clutching a letter but he never saw who it was from. He’s wasn’t alone, though he’d thought he was, but the brown haired boy didn’t tease him, didn’t say anything at all. It was a hand on his shoulder, just enough pressure to let Sirius know he was there.
The brown haired boy was sleeping in a hospital bed. Sirius was cowering as James gesticulated furiously and moved his mouth as if he was yelling. Peter was sitting off to the side silently, looking worried and if he caught Sirius’s eyes, he would avert his gaze self-consciously. Sirius was sure he deserved whatever James was saying because when the boy woke up, Sirius leaned in and said something to him that made his sick friend fall back into himself and Sirius suddenly realized that was the last thing he wanted to do.
On the edge of the map, there was a Forbidden Forest. The same three boys from the first dream walked there in the moonlight, but now Sirius could feel the absence of another and something about that absence was terribly important. The other two boys knew it, too. They were nervous and they sped forward as if someone’s life depended on it. Maybe someone’s did. When they got to the place they were heading, a twisted tree that seemed alive, they heard a howl. They went into the tree, by now Sirius was the dog but he didn’t need the map to tell him where he was. He could see the name in its thick black letters: Shrieking Shack. The house was so vivid in his memory he could swear it was real-the wallpaper’s faded designs, the furniture was torn violently. Further in they went searching for something: three boys pretending to be animals to fool an animal that pretended to be a boy. Every time he saw the wolf he hated it. He knew it had taken something from him, stolen a friend and turned it into a monster. But as he approached, the wolf would let out a sad sound and there wasn’t enough Sirius in the dog to remember to stay angry at it for what it did to Remus-Padfoot liked the wolf and was thankful for it.
In the Courtyard, Sirius passed a boy and a girl. The girl, pretty red hair tied in a practical bun, glared at Sirius spitefully and despite this, Sirius could not convince himself he didn’t like her. The boy, oily black hair blocking most of his face, did nothing to Sirius which didn’t seem to matter very much either; he was positive he didn’t like him. Their names he remembered after the first time he read them.
Severus Snape was well enough but Lily Evans posed a problem. The day he remembered that this was because her name was supposed to be Potter was the day he really began to understand the connections. He remembered the wedding while he was awake, his first conscious memory in several years. He could see himself giving a speech, he watched the happy couple dance, he sat next to Remus-his Remus-and they laughed. Their hands brushed accidentally and Sirius wondered what it would feel like if he took that hand and held it instead of letting it slip away. Sometimes, Sirius thought the boy was silently willing him to try it. Sirius loved to see the same desire mirrored in the other boy’s face but hated knowing that he had passed all of those chances up. Sirius could not remember a single decent reason for doing so, although there was a lot about the outside world that Sirius knew he still did not understand. Peter sat with them, too. Sirius ignored him as much as possible, resenting every moment he spent talking to the blond instead of to Remus or James or Lily and he was annoyed by the times Remus was paying attention to Peter instead of to him. In retrospect, he was sure he regretted how cruel he was to Peter, but he didn’t think it was guilt.
______________________________________________________________________________
The date is 1992. I’ve spent a lot of time staring at this paper and that still won’t sink in. Eleven years seems at once too long and too short a time for me to have been here. It’s too late now to live all of the life I had when they locked me up. Even if I escaped somehow, I’d be an old man by now. The people I’d live for are all gone. The ones that aren’t won’t remember me-will have spent years working to forget me, except for the one who grew up never knowing I was in here worrying about him. It’s nice to know I was right about there being more than this. But it’s worse than anything to know that I’m dead to that world and will never be a part of it again.
It took a long time to get here, but less than I would have thought. I’ve had this paper for months now. After the shock of figuring out I could understand what it said, I’ve read it over and over more times than I can count. It’s probably taken me almost a year just to start to remember but I was mush before it got here, I was practically dead. And now? I can’t tell you everything, but I can tell you the things that matter. My best friend was named James. He had a son who is older than he and I were when we first met. His wife was named Lily. She often joked that she liked Remus more than either of us-I could always see where she was coming from. I never had a family. The rat ruined everything, his picture saved my life.
The day that man (who I soon discovered to be Cornelius Fudge, the Minister of Magic) gave that newspaper to me, I was almost entirely lost. Who knows if I could have recognized Wormtail in the picture had it been a few weeks later. I could have been stuck, permanently; half-dog half-lunatic. Nothing human left.
I was confused, at the time, by the way the man responded to me. Looking back on it, I must have seemed very mad indeed but that stupid animal drive that forced me to try to speak the man’s language was the most rational impulse I’d had in years.
He was walking by, some standard inspection…I’m sure I’ve witnessed hundreds of them but you’ll grant my memory of the last ten years will be somewhat shaky. I heard him speaking and I thought I knew what he was saying. Although I was a man, I was always the dog and the dog saw that paper and went wild. Play, play, play it kept thinking. After all the boredom and loneliness-didn’t he used to do that when he was alive? Didn’t the nice boy with the black hair used to throw papers just like that for him to chase? The dog loved the feeling of those pages between his teeth. The dog kept me happy, so I wanted to keep the dog happy.
I leaned close to the bars and threw everything I had into trying to be human just for those few seconds it would take. I asked him, in speech that did not put an entire childhood of etiquette lessons to shame, for the paper and was somewhat offended when he stared for a few long seconds before barking a laugh.
“Would you believe it?” he asked turning to his companion. “The lunatic talks like a perfect gentleman.”
They both had a laugh at my expense but he agreed. He slipped the paper through the gates. And I had no idea what was so baffling to them about the fact that I grabbed it in my mouth like a dog. Must have been one hell of a sight. It’s a lucky thing those papers taste worse for us than they do for dogs, I would have ripped the thing apart if I hadn’t spit it out so quickly. If I hadn’t seen a picture of the outside world and paused to look at it, I wouldn’t have caught that flicker of a tail. Wouldn’t have stared until the rat coward showed himself. And even if I didn’t know why for a long time, I didn’t have room to doubt for a moment that this rat was different from the ones I kill in my cell.
I don’t remember everything; I don’t even remember what happened. But I know that it happened, I know what Peter did, who he did it to. I know what I didn’t do, what I thought Remus did. Soon I’ll know how. The thought is torture. I don’t want to be mad, I don’t want to forget everything because in the brief life I was given, I had friends that gave me better memories than most people get in long, so-called happy lives. But there’s no use in knowing if I can’t do anything about it and there’s no use remembering people and Loving them passionately only to remember to miss them.
There’s no comfortable solution between forgetting them and knowing I’ll never see them again. No way to comfort myself. It would be enough to drive me mad if I hadn’t already tried that. Going crazy was torture enough the first time. And even if I wanted to go crazy, it will be years before I can erase that 1992 printed in bold, black ink and forget who that rat is while he’s sitting in a photograph in front of my eyes.
Then suddenly that one giant thing I’ve been trying to figure strikes me. Hogwarts, that’s the place with the stone walls. That’s where everything happened to me, the home I dream about. Hogwarts, in 1992, and that boy holding the rat must be there. Must take his pet with him. But Harry is at Hogwarts in 1992 and the rat can’t get Harry. Not being able to do anything is no longer an option.
Year Twelve