Style // Sirius Black

Chapter LI - Part II

The cold is always seen as bitter, unwelcoming, and cruel—it's filled with biting teeth and scarring swords. No one wants to spend their life in it, always having to oppose the chill and battle the frost. Finding solace in something so hostile is rare, borderline impossible. That is until all that remains is the cold—the callous world around you freezing over with despair and malignancy. You cannot find comfort in something until it is all you have left.

A fire being snuffed out of your life leaves nothing but shadows creeping around you, sliding up your neck and gripping the base of it, forcing you into submission. Its darkness will beat you down and leave you a fragment of what you once were—nothing but the pulp of your spirit remaining. The candle that once guided you through that and kept those demons at bay is now gone, their soul sent somewhere unreachable and unfathomable to the human eye and brain. Where does that leave one with nothing left but the darkness in their minds?

It leaves them with the moon and stars overhead, the shadows of their haunted heart beating them away as one fights to reach the shore in the everlasting abysm that is a life led. You cannot outrun death, but you can fight its soldiers.

—

She sat in the frigid office, blankly staring as she observed the aperture in the stones that led to the bookcase by the window. Her eyes were glossed over and unmoving, scarcely closing to wet them. Light sat in her lap, gripping her skin and clothes as the nightmares slid back up her arms and around her neck. It was a blazing bolt of lightning, the daybreak that waited within her grasp, breaking through the storm and striking true in her heart.

It was November 4th, 1981.

Lyra ran her fingers through the thin tufts of hair on Harry's head, knees bobbing him up and down as he giggled away. He didn't even know what had happened—he had no idea that he was now up against the world with nothing but a shattered terror of a family behind him. She could scarcely breathe, let alone bring life into the world he was to bear. The only things that kept her heart beating were too far from her reach now, their clothes still rubbing between her fingers as she tried to sink into them. It was so empty, James's head, when she finally let out that scream of agony and delved into the inevitable.

He had let her in, whether it be the fact he could no longer uphold his barriers or some hidden spirit managed to linger in his head when she arrived. It didn't matter—he let her in and showed her what was left of her life. Nothing. She had nothing now. Her stars had disappeared behind the cloudy skies that drove winds around her heart, the fire that kept it warm gone in the gusts. James Potter had fallen at the feet of Lyra, and she no longer had anyone to keep her from doing the exact same.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Lyra," the voice of a demon echoed as his slippers shuffled along the stone floors of the office, "You can imagine how busy I've been the last three days."

"I can only imagine, Professor."

Her voice was unfamiliar. Distant and outlying, as harsh as the wood that sunk into her knees when she collapsed at her brother's side. Yet it was still soft, like the pregnant tears that had slid down her rosy cheeks, stained the blue of James's shirt, and soaked her nephew's face when she found him in his nursery. The fire of Hogwarts had burned beneath her, the green of Lily Evans' eyes contorted into a soft moss. Everything had slipped through Lyra's fingers that day as the game of roulette finally ended, and the bullets wound up in people she had never turned a gun to. James and Lily may have died that night, but it was Lyra who lost.

"That was insensitive of me," Dumbledore lamented as he slipped into the throne of skeletons behind his desk, "How are you doing, dear?"

"Where is he?" She couldn't even speak his name. The name of a man she had once whispered as a prayer in her life, the name she would yearn for and speak as though it were honey. His name wasn't hers anymore; who was she to say it?