We May Never Pass This Way | Dimension Travel AU

Chapter One

And there was a look of mingled fear and surprise on Sirius's wasted, once-handsome face as he fell through the ancient doorway and disappeared behind the veil, which fluttered for a moment as though in a high wind and then fell back into place...

The memories hit him, so fast and so hard that he doubled over from all of the pain. The first image he could make out was the weakest, a mere shadow in his mind, so blurry and made of shapes that he was barely sure it had been real.

His uncle taking him and his brother by the hand on a beach (had they been to a beach?); kneeling at the sieve; Alphard's seaside kitchen at twelve; and then a different scene, being pulled up by his arm as he stood with his brother in a ballroom; then his mother's pasty white face; and then pain, pain, pain as his mother gave him the Crucio, staring stonily down at him as he screamed himself hoarse, in the lounge, his father's hands tightening into fists, if Sirius could see him, he was watching his son convulse on the ground.

And then more pain, pain, pain as Sirius felt it, as his brother, whom he hadn't thought about in years, cried. There were more memories filtering through now, of a place he didn't know but he remembered, he remembered a pub, and a storm in the 1960s, coming to see Alphard when he was about eight, and of some local muggles- what had that man said? Something about a place where the spirit world comes close. How Skye was a thin place. He and Reg were there in the winter, and he could still see the mist and ice swirling around them, and the sucking glops of mud, and the invisible lighthouse. He remembered the cold and rain and wind in Azkaban, of being trapped in the North Sea. He recalled looking for stones with Alphard, not so far away.

And then he hissed, because he was now standing in soppy, wet, freezing mud. Water was pooling around his shins, and Sirius nearly stumbled. He squinted around. He felt so disoriented he felt like he could almost be back there, swimming to shore as Padfoot, but he was human, he was standing in mud. Where would all the mud have come from, then? He could still see the mist and ice swirling around him, and the thick mud, it was like wet cement.

He compared what he was feeling right now to where he had been, and with how little he could see; he was hunched against an incredibly bitter wind, with mud dragging him down. And he couldn't see. Everything was like ice in the black.

Is this the other side of the veil?

He was hearing faint screams somewhere around him in the darkness, he swam toward it, swam toward the noise, but grew confused when it fell silent; when he broke the surface, he couldn't tell whose voice it was, or even if it was a combination of voices. Could it be?

Someone was calling for him, pleading for him. But could he see them?

Where am I? Scotland?

He could make out the cold rocks of Salmadair, a lighter grey in the general black. Only how he knew it was Salmadair he couldn't, it was just a guess. If it was true, he was hearing voices, the voices must be on Salmadair, he just had to reach them and they would all get back to the mainland. At this point, he couldn't tell whether he was hunched against the gales or escaping from Azkaban.

The voices, though, they had fallen silent. Gazing into the chains of rain, he thought that he could have actually made out a figure- maybe two figures, an adult and a child. Both of them could have been hunched against the ferocious wind, like he was. But why would an adult and a child be out here, walking across these dreadful muds, in the storm, in pre-dawn darkness?