The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part Two

LXXIII: 23 June, 1994

Sirius was laying on his back.

Two feet away, the water licked the shore of the lake, strewn with stones and dried up driftwood.

Everything was... far away... and ice cold.

So cold...

It was like Achlys was hugging him on the outside of his body for once.

Dementors.

"Nooo," he whispered. "Nooo, please..."

He could see his breath rising from his barely parted lips, trailing away in puffs like smoke.

His mind moved in and out - everything was in flashes.

There was fog settling over the water.

Far off, he could just barely make out the beach where they'd camped on the shore, see the logs and the remnants of the circles of stones they'd made for firepits.

After all this time.

Someone was yelling.

He could hear it the way you hear things underwater... recognizable as shouting but not clear enough to make out the words or voices.

So... far away...

Suddenly, James Potter fell to the ground beside him.

His eyes closed, glasses askew...

No... no, no, no...

"No..."

His eyes fluttered slightly open.

A flash of green caught by the moonlight...

Not James.

Harry.

Harry...

Harry?

"No --"

There were cold hands on his shoulder, under his neck... lifting his head...

"Sirius...at last..." Achlys breathed, rasping, rattling... leaning over him... hovering over him... her billowing black cloak, which usually filled up his entire chest, filled up the whole sky now.

From beneath her hood, he could see her mouth - thin lips on colorless skin, like the way the dead look, like the way an inferi looks... Strings of ghastly black hair hung from beneath the hood, and though her eyes was covered in shadow so deep he could not see them, he knew she was staring out at him... a nightmare come to life.

"I've waited years for this."

"Fuck off Achlys," he couldn't form the words, they came out as breaths instead, a sentiment without formation. She knew what he meant. He'd said it to her so many times... she had to know...

Last words.

Her mouth was on his.

Deathly cold.

Passionate beyond reason.

Urgent.

She wanted him dead.

Achlys inhaled, deep and strong and Sirius felt a hundred thousand memories stir through his mind in flashes like polaroids being thrown to the wind... voices echoing from another room far off... and Sirius felt his heart seize as she drew on him...

She released and he fell back to the stones on the shore.

Her mouth didn't leave his, but instead she drew in a second time and Sirius pictured himself like one of those cigarettes he liked smoking so much so long ago, like the cigarettes on the balcony over looking the castle grounds with James, when he would hold the thing between his fingers and hardly ever actually take a drag...