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Sirius’s memories of the fight in the Department of Mysteries are blurry and half-remembered, like a camera lens that continuously shifts in and out of focus.
Later, he’ll find that his recollection of the spells and the movements and the people he fought slip through and out of his mind like water through rocks. What sticks with him, in almost painstaking detail, is the way he’d felt drunk on nothing but his own euphoria, something more effective than any amount of alcohol could ever hope to be. It’d been his first time out of the house in almost a year, his first time really fighting rather than scrounging around for scraps of second-hand news in more than that, and he’d relished every ounce of adrenaline that spiked his veins. The pressure on his chest, that had found its place there when he first set foot in Grimmauld Place again and only kept tightening and tightening and tightening as the days blurred into weeks and the weeks faded into months, always close to choking him but never quite doing so, had finally begun to unravel. He’d felt like the cage that had kept him locked inside of his own mind had finally cracked enough for him to crumble it with a single solid push.
As he fights with Harry, who casts spells with a speed and ferocity that seem impossible coming from a fifteen-year-old, by his side, he feels fresh, and sharp, and hopeful. Someone--Bellatrix, he thinks, though really it could be anyone--launches a spell that sends him toppling towards the Veil, barely missing the curtain and instead tumbling to a heap behind it, landing himself a nasty blow to the head. But even as he fades into unconsciousness, dark spots overtaking his vision, he relishes in his buoyancy, refusing to let it fade.
Until, of course, he wakes up and Harry is gone.
Sirius blinks, then looks around wildly, scanning every person. But no--he doesn’t see Harry anywhere, either alone or with someone else.
Harry couldn’t have left, could he? Sirius can do spectacularly dumb things sometimes, but even he’s not stupid enough to believe that Harry would ever willingly flee to safety.
Sirius’s heart jumps. His breaths shorten.
He couldn’t possibly have been asleep for more than a few minutes--from another quick glance Sirius sends around the room, everyone is still fighting with the same people, and no new major structural damages have occurred. But Bellatrix, or whoever the fuck he was fighting, is gone too.
Sirius feels his heart begin to pound rapid-fire in his chest. Fuck--the Death Eaters couldn’t have gotten their hands on Harry. They couldn’t have. Sirius had promised to himself, vowed over and over again, that he would sooner land himself six feet under the ground than allow that to happen.
Sirius is breaking into a sprint before he knows it, and this is where his memories start straightening out, slotting into neat places, even though it might very well be a mercy to forget them.
He vividly recalls that Remus calls out something unintelligible as Sirius passed him, or maybe it is intelligible but the furious roaring in Sirius’s ears won’t allow him to hear it, but Sirius ignores him, because he needs to find Harry. Needs to, right the fuck now, before the panic overtakes him and swallows him alive.
Sirius doesn’t know where he’s going, not at all, but he pushes himself forward anyway. He leaves the Atrium where the main fighting is happening, but it seems very soon like a mistake. The corridors strike him as endless, especially when he tries to map them out inside of his head, all winding corridors and identical doorways.
But then: a shout in a voice he vaguely recognizes as Bellatrix’s. Another shout in another voice. And then, like a knife slicing through the air, a scream so painful that it sends chills down Sirius’s spine, a scream that Sirius only recognizes after a few moments as belonging to Harry, a scream that goes on and on and refuses to end.
Sirius goes very, very cold.
“Shit,” Sirius says, his breaths feeling like they’re getting vacuumed out of him, “shit, shit, shit--”
But he can follow the voices. Sirius can follow the voices and the fucking screaming now, at least, can follow them and get to a point where he can fix this .
“I’m coming, Harry,” he mutters, under his breath, a mantra to himself, hoping it will wash out the screams that have drilled their way into his skull and now rattle around, “I’m coming, I promise, I’m coming, I’m--”
Sirius rounds another corner to the large, dome-like Ministry entrance that he’s positive the voices are coming from. He braces himself for anything--a duel, maybe, the Cruciatus Curse being used on Harry, Bellatrix cackling and Voldemort hanging in the shadows--
Sirius stops short.
Harry’s screaming sounds even more horrible here, where it has all the space in the world for every fall and rise of it to echo and reverberate and magnify itself. But everything else--
Chunks of the walls have fallen off, glass litters the ground, and the iconic fountain in the center of the room (something about St. Mungo’s, Sirius vaguely thinks, which is an absurd thing to recall at a time like this) lies in shambles, all of which point towards a very big duel that must have happened here a few minutes ago. But there’s no Death Eaters, no Bellatrix, no Voldemort, only Harry and Dumbledore.
Sirius focuses on Harry. He’s in the very center of the room, lying on his stomach, though, as Sirius watches, he raises himself with his arms, seeming to buck underneath a great weight. His mouth is open--wide, wide open--in a scream that never wavers, not for one second. His eyes are squeezed shut tightly, as though trying to ward something off, and the corners of his mouth and the skin of his face are creased and wrinkled in the sort of way that speaks of the greatest kind of agony. Even from a distance of what feels like five fucking miles, Sirius can see him trembling.
And crouched down next to him is Dumbledore. He has an outstretched hand, hovering over Harry’s arm but a few inches from it, as if wanting to touch him but uncertain of what will happen if he does.
This spurs Sirius into action, and he runs over, fury making his vision turn red, because Harry is literally screaming his head off from a kind of pain that sounds worse than death and so doesn’t he deserve even the barest source of comfort?
“What’s happening?” Sirius asks, forced to raise his voice over the sounds of Harry’s screams, which feels messed up in a thousand different ways. “Dumbledore, tell me, what the fuck is happening?”
Dumbledore doesn’t take his eyes off of Harry. “He’s possessed,” he says steadily, blissfully ignorant of how the word makes Sirius’s heart turn ice cold, “by Voldemort, just as we’d suspected would happen, all this year. Voldemort’s obsession not have been held off forever, as much as we’d liked to pretend that it could.”
Sirius crouches down next to Harry. Dumbledore puts a hand up, as if to warn Sirius away.
A beat.
“Get out of my way, Dumbledore,” Sirius says, twisting his voice into a deadly calm. “Get out of my fucking way.”
“I do think that you should reconsider--”
“I’ve considered,” Sirius says. “He is my godson, Dumbledore, and I’m not going to abandon him. So it would be very much appreciated if you could get out of my way .”
Dumbledore seems a hairwidth from protesting, but then decides against it with a single look at Sirius’s eyes, at the determined tilt in his mouth.
He nods wordlessly, pulling himself to his feet with his robes sweeping around him, and Sirius is unspeakably relieved for this, for Dumbledore not slipping and then manipulating and then forcing himself into other people’s lives for the first time in his entire fucking life.
Harry’s screaming gets even higher, somehow, the veins in his neck tightening and tears leaking out of the corners of his eyes. Sirius scoots closer, almost desperately, and lays a gentle hand on Harry’s arm, and then a second one on Harry’s other arm.
Harry goes completely, utterly, irrevocably still for one short moment that seems to last forever. And then he starts shivering again, even more violently, and Sirius feels Harry’s muscles contract and release over and over again underneath his touch.
Sirius refuses the urge to rip his hands off, because he needs to drag Harry back to reclaim his own mind and his own body somehow, and right now, for his short-circuiting brain, touch seems the best way to do it.
“Hey, Harry,” Sirius says, turning his voice gentle and bringing his mouth close to Harry’s ear, “I know how hard this is--wait, no, nevermind, I have absolutely no idea how hard this is--but you need to come back to me, alright? You need to fight him--Voldemort--off. You need to follow my voice, okay? Do you hear it? Yeah, I know you hear it. Latch onto it, alright? Latch onto it with as much strength as you can. Follow it, Harry.”
Harry keeps tilting his head to the opposite side, as though attempting to escape Sirius’s voice, and he tries repeatedly to force himself out of Sirius’s grip. But Sirius fights him and keeps holding on, because he’s not going to abandon Harry to Voldemort. He’s not .
“You’re so strong, Harry,” Sirius continues, Harry’s screaming like a knife that is stabbed into his spine too many times, each time in a different spot, “so, so strong. And I know it must feel like Voldemort is strong too, but he’s not. Not as much as you. You can fight him off. You’ve been doing it for a year, and you can do it now. I know you, Harry. I know you can push Voldemort out of your mind. I know you can.”
Red starts leaking out of Harry’s nose. It starts slow at first, just a few drops, but then they’re joined by more and more, forming a river.
With one hand, Sirius rips a scrap of cloth from his shirt and immediately brings it to Harry’s nose, wiping the blood away. But the blood keeps coming and coming in a seemingly endless supply, and soon enough, the entire bottom half of Harry’s face is slathered in blood that glistens cruelly off the glass shards lining the floor.
Sirius hates, with a burning passion, how he knows nothing about possession, how he has absolutely no idea what’s going on or what to do next. The blood could just be a byproduct of two souls being crammed into one body or Voldemort could actively be trying to injure and bleed Harry to death, and Sirius simply would not know.
Sensing the blood, Harry tips his head back instinctively, but Sirius hastily puts his hand on the back of Harry’s head and maneuvers it forward. The last thing they need is Harry choking on his own blood, especially when so much of his breath is being wasted towards screaming.
“This isn’t you, Harry,” Sirius says, and trying to keep his voice coaxing is killing him, because all he really wants to do is cry out of sheer hopelessness, “Voldemort isn’t you. Maybe he’s trying to trick you into thinking that he is. Or maybe he’s just trying to force his way into your mind, I don’t know, but you’re not him .” He wipes away more blood. “You’re so much better, I swear, and you can fight him, okay? I know you’re doing that right now. And I know that you can keep doing it, and I know that you can win.”
Sirius suddenly feels Harry’s skin go very, very hot under his hands, and that’s the only warning he has before Harry’s screaming cuts off abruptly and his jaw starts to move.
A second wave of panic slices into Sirius.
“ Kill me now, Black ,” Harry says, except it can’t possibly be Harry saying this, even as the words clearly come from his mouth, because the voice is deep and raspy in a way that cannot be human. It sounds like a thousand rocks being scraped against each other. “ You killed my parents, Black, so why don’t you just kill me too ?”
Harry’s eyes open and Sirius seeks them out instinctively, but then almost wishes he hadn’t looked. Because they’re not the emerald green that he’s grown accustomed to, not Lily’s green. Instead, his pupils have been narrowed like a cat’s and the eye has been covered in a scarlet film.
Abandoning all caution, Sirius lets go of the flimsy, blood-soaked scrap of cloth and wraps his arms around Harry, clutching him to his chest. “ No . No, Voldemort, get out. Get out. Get the fuck out of my son’s head. Harry, push him out, come one, please, I’m begging you .”
Sirius has never, in all his grand thirty-six years of living, loathed someone so much. Not his mother, not his father, not any of the other Death Eaters. Even the disgust he’d felt towards Peter on the night he found his best friends cold and dead in their own home can’t hold a single candle to this. No amount of anger he has ever felt or will ever feel will come anywhere close to the fury that flows through every ounce of blood in his body and melds itself into every bone and nerve as Voldemort wraps his filthy hands around Harry’s mind like a demon and dares to bend Harry’s body into doing his bidding, as if he’s a goddamn puppet .
“ Do you hate me, Black ?” Voldemort continues through Harry. “ Are you dreaming of ripping me apart right now, limb by bloody limb, and watching me choke in my own blood? ” A cackle. “ How painful it must be, to lust after revenge so passionately and yet be so helpless to do anything about it. To watch the person you were foolish enough to love crumble to dust and blood before your very eyes. ”
“Harry,” Sirius says, raising his voice. Harry’s jerking his head from side to side and pressing his palms into the ground so hard it’s a miracle they haven’t cracked yet. Sirius hopes it means that there’s still some of his own soul left in there, that not all is completely lost. Sirius tightens his hold on him. “Harry, come on, don’t give up. Don’t let him destroy everything that makes you you . He’s tried to do that already, tried to do it too many times. Don’t let him do it, Harry .”
Harry’s eyes flash to green, then back to scarlet, then green, then scarlet again. Still, Sirius feels his spirits, impossibly, lift.
Hope. There’s hope to hold onto. Sirius can do that. Sirius can hold onto hope.
Voldemort’s voice returns. “ The boy is stronger than I ever would have thought of expecting, ” he says, sounding delighted. “ But in the end, his will shall crumble underneath mine, just as everyone else’s does. And do you know what I’m going to make him do first, Black? I’m going to make him kill all of your friends in front of you and then torture you for hours and days and weeks. I’m going to make him curse you and stab you and gouge your eyes out with his fingers, and through it all, you’re never going to raise a finger to fight him, not even a little bit, because you love him too much. Because he could slaughter a thousand people or bring the end of the world and you still wouldn’t be able to find it in your heart to hurt him. ”
“Harry,” Sirius says, “it’s me. It’s Sirius. It’s your godfather. And you’re my son in every way that really ever matters. I love you so much, kid, so goddamn much.” In a desperate leap of faith, he takes Harry’s head and forces it to lean against Sirius’s chest, right over his heart beating a rapid rhythm. “Do you hear that? It’s my heart, Harry. Follow the sound. Come back to me. I love you so much, Harry. So come back to me, please. Please , Harry, if you ever had even an ounce of love for me or Ron or Hermione or any other human being in the entire fucking universe, use it to fight Voldemort off. Use it to get him out of your mind. You’ll be so much better for it, I promise, I swear.”
“ Sweet words, Black. But it won’t make even the slightest diff-- ”
Voldemort’s words cut off, so abruptly that Sirius wonders for a moment if his ears have simply stopped working. But no, he can very clearly hear Harry’s breaths, rough and pained and gasping for freedom.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Sirius says, hardly daring to believe it, “yes, Harry, you’re doing so good. So good. I’m so fucking proud of you. You can get him out completely, come on, I believe in you.”
“I don’t know,” Harry says, and it’s his voice, not anyone else’s, that comes out in a pained whine. “I don’t know, Sirius--it hurts, shit, it hurts so much--I can feel him, but he won’t get out--Get him out of me, Sirius, I don’t want this .”
“I know,” Sirius says. “I know, but I can’t do anything, I’m so sorry. You have to do it. You have to push him out. Think of anything positive you can, alright, think of everyone you love. Don’t let them leave your mind, whatever you do.”
“Okay,” Harry says in a choppy voice, “okay.”
“And I’m going to be right here, okay? I’m going to be right next to you the whole time. I’m not going to leave. I’m going to stay here and help you as much as I can, okay?”
Harry jerks out a nod.
The next few minutes are slow and painful and unbelievable. Harry’s eyes flash from scarlet to green so fast it makes Sirius dizzy. The blood pouring from Harry’s nose only pours harder, no matter how much pressure Sirius puts on it, and soon enough, blood begins to trickle from Harry’s ears too. Harry pukes once, then dry-heaves a couple more times, doubling over with the intensity of it. The temperature of his skin falls and rises at an alarming rate, scorching hot one moment and numbingly cold the next. Sirius’s heart skips too many beats to be healthy.
Lifting one of his hands from the ground, Harry wraps it around Sirius’s own and squeezes it so tightly that he feels bones shift and then shift again. Sirius has had experience in enduring pain from his father and he doesn’t let the slightest complaint slip, just holds Harry in his arms and murmurs sweet nothings and prays to every god and deity that he’s ever heard of that Harry makes it out of this day in one piece.
And then, finally, Harry relaxes in Sirius’s hold. Slowly and cautiously at first, but then he must become confident that Voldemort is well and truly gone, because he effectively collapses.
“Shh, I’ve got you, it’s alright,” Sirius assures him, cradling the back of Harry’s head with one hand. The bleeding has finally inched to a halt, and when he tentatively looks, Harry’s eyes are a solid green. “It’s over, Harry. Shit, it’s actually fucking over .”
“Oh my god,” Harry gasps, “oh my god, Sirius, that was a nightmare. Remember when I got food poisoning from the warm sushi last summer and said it was the worst thing I had ever gone through? I was so innocent, Sirius. I was so wrong. This was the worst. No doubt. Tops the list of every bad thing that has ever happened to me.”
“It’s very depressing that you have a list,” Sirius says, then laughs, because this whole nightmare is over and isn’t that just a straight-up miracle? He didn’t feel this light-hearted since he escaped Azkaban. “But I’m--I’m so glad you’re alright, Harry. So unbelievably glad.”
“Me too, believe me,” Harry says, then hesitates. “Sirius--I’d really thought you died. When Bellatrix hit you with that spell--you just fell, and you didn’t move again, and I just--I don’t know--panicked.”
“But I’m not,” Sirius says soothingly. “It’s okay, I’m right here. I’m never going to leave you, you know that, right?”
“Yeah,” Harry says, knocking his head back, a smile on his lips, “yeah.”