Harry Potter Hitherto

**A/N: Man, I've wanted to write this for awhile, and I had a rough week last week, so this came spewing out in response. If enjoyed it, or have any critiques please leave a review!**

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"Peter?"

The word echoed around the doorway hollowly.

Sirius raised his hand to the wood again, trying to ignore the gnawing sense of dread that was building in his stomach with each passing moment of silence. It seemed as though one could never escape dread these days.

"Oi, Wormtail! You there?"

The only response was the quickening of his heart.

Fingers reached out for the doorknob, wrapping around its cold surface. For a moment he wondered if he would have to charm the door open, but to his surprise it swung open before him without so much as a push. It had never been locked.

Heart in his throat and wand at the ready, he carefully stepped inside the safe house.

To both his surprise and anxiety, nothing seemed to be out of place or amiss. The bed was made, perfectly so, in fact. The sheets were tucked in and crisp against a fluffed white pillow. A look towards the small kitchen area revealed nothing more. All the dishes were stacked along cabinets as they should have been. Nothing was smashed or broken. There was no sign of a struggle anywhere. For some reason this did nothing to quiet the pounding of his racing heart.

A sudden noise made him whip around, a thousand and one curses ready on his lips before he recognised the sound of rat paws scuttling over wood.

"It's just me," he said, turning to the dark corner where Peter's eyes glinted at him from the blackness. "You're okay. You can come out."

The rat, seeming to weigh his options, made a run for the open door and darted out into the night. Sirius' heart leapt back up into his throat as he watched it run by. The animal was white. Not brown. Not Peter. No sign of him at all.

He gave the small room another quick survey, desperately searching for something, anything, to explain his friend's whereabouts. He found nothing. No speck of dust. No hair out of place. No sound to be heard save his own breathing, which was shallow and unseemingly loud in the impending silence.

He walked anxiously back out to his motorbike, not realising he was shaking until he fumbled with the ignition for thirty seconds. Everything was fine - he tried to assure himself. Everything was going to be okay.

"Come on!" he growled after a full minute of struggling to get his fingers to stop shaking enough to turn on the bike. He reached with one hand to pinch his other wrist, hard. After a moment the pain helped him focus, and his hands finally complied to start the bike.

Then he was roaring off into the night, Peter Pettigrew's hideout becoming a small speck below him as his attention turned quickly back to that gnawing sense of wrongness he felt.

It would only be a five-minute flight to Godric's Hollow.

The motorbike chugged slowly down the sleepy street. To his right walked Panic, and to his left, Trepidation. His two best friends in recent times, it seemed.

"Everything will be fine," he whispered out loud, needing to feel his lips say the words before he could begin to believe them. "I will drive past, and nothing will be out of place. I will drive past, and everything will be fine."

Just before he turned the final corner to the cottage his bike crunched over something. He had jumped halfway out of his seat before he realised it was just a twig. But then- sparks. Not just a twig…two broken halves of a wand.

The bike was flung to the side as he clambered out of it, falling to the pavement, and pawing the ground for the wand he had just broken.

"No. Nononononono." The words tumbled from his mouth as he picked up the two pieces of James' wand.

The calm he had delicately fabricated for himself was gone in an instant, and he was stumbling to his feet, running back along the road. His shoes hit pieces and parts of debris as he ran by, and he tried not to recognize parts of beds and picture frames and a stuffed dog he had given to Harry.

He came to a rushing halt in front of the house because he found he could no longer breathe.

Smithereens. The whole thing was just smithereens.

Some of the original framework stood, but most of the top floor was completely blown apart. He could only still see the crib balancing itself up there- damned white thing still standing in the midst of the chaos. Everything else was completely gone. Half of the objects seemed to have obliterated directly to dust, the other propelled outward by the force of the explosion.

Sirius was completely still - frozen - for half a second. "Hello?" he called desperately. "Hello?" His voice cracked. Still, nothing but the terrible, terrible silence. He clenched his eyes shut so tightly it gave him a headache.

"Please, God," he whispered. "Please, please, God."

He made his way towards the crib, tripping and stumbling over pieces of shattered portraits and smashed china. Something flickered in his vision - movement to his left, on the ground floor beneath the crib.

"Hello?" he called again, hoarsely. No response. He could see the source of the movement now - red hair drifting slightly in the nighttime breeze. "Lily!" He didn't know if it was a scream of despair or relief. He launched himself to her side, and was blubbering away, "Lils, hey, Lily, come on, come on, wake up."

He didn't need to shake her shoulder to know she was dead. He didn't have to scream at her to open her eyes when he saw her there; spread eagle on the ground, hair flamed out behind her. He didn't need to check for a pulse when he gazed upon her broken neck.

His eyes drifted upwards towards the white crib, which dangled rather precariously on the broken ledge of the floor above them. Her lifeless body must have fallen when the floor collapsed from underneath of it.

Her eyes were closed like she was sleeping, but he didn't need to plead with her to wake up. She was gone.

It occurred to him suddenly, randomly, how hard it was to conceive a child. What a miracle of coincidences and circumstance had to pair together. How much work it was to bring a life into this world. 9 months of tedious, hard labour.

And to take a life from it? In his world, that only took two words.

"How could you?" he asked, either to Peter or God he didn't know. Then louder, screaming, "HOW COULD YOU!"

Lily. Dead.

Just like that.

He straightened up from her body, feeling oddly like he was floating in the air. It was as if he hadn't just seen one of his best friends lying dead before him. It was as if he had never come to Godric's Hollow at all.

Perhaps this was all a dream. Perhaps he was imagining it all.

His eyes found more movement over by the road. A large figure. Hagrid, he recognised. He would go to Hagrid, and Hagrid would tell him that this was all some alcohol-related hallucination, and he would wake up soon to go check on Wormtail.

So he made his way towards the half-giant determinedly, because if he made it to Hagrid all would be all right.

He had nearly made it, in fact, when his shoe caught on something. Arms wind-milling wildly, he stumbled and face-planted into a destroyed armchair. Softly, he breathed out.

"Please," he whispered into the dust-covered fabric. "Please don't let that be what I think it was."

He glanced down, heart thudding to what seemed like a stop as he gazed upon the human hand below him.

"James?" he breathed, his voice still no louder than a whisper. He spun himself around, leaning against the chair as he found the body of his first friend and, later, brother.

"Prongs, I got your wand, mate, you left it in the street." It was with shaking hands that he pressed it to the boy's chest. "Not much…not much help it can do you out there, y'know. I guess you were always freakishly good without a wand anyways, so you probably wouldn't have needed it. Natural talent, I 'spose." He sat back on his knees and scrubbed at wet eyes.

"Don't know what I'm supposed to do without you though. Everyone…everyone who ever saw the good in me, they're all gone now. And what am I with no one who believes in me, y'know? Just another Black, I guess.

"Not of course," he looked up quickly, earnestly, "that I blame you for leaving. 'Know you went out in a blaze of glory and all, like you would want. Protecting your family. That's what's really important. I miss you already though."

He reached over, carefully pulling James' body out of some of the rubble so that he could lie in some sort of dignity. "Don't worry," he was telling him as he straightened out his arms and legs. "I'll find Harry, and give you all a proper burial and everything. Like heroes, you'll be remembered. I'll be sure of it."

He paused, wondering how he was going to find the strength to walk away. James looked so small before him, so incredibly un-James-like it was strange. With out his proud stance, or that effervescent cockiness in his eyes, he looked rather like a child.

Sirius reached down then, impulsively rumpling James' black hair, so that it was no longer flattened against his head.

"There," he said, his voice strange and wobbly and unlike him. "That looks better, yeah?"

"Sirius?' a gruff voice called to him. "Is that yeh?"

Hagrid. He didn't remember walking towards him, but suddenly he was running because-

"Harry? Harry! He's alive?" He didn't even see the great man's face because all his attention was focused on the baby with the ink black hair before him. "His head!" Sirius' eyes narrowed on the strange, bolt-like scar. He didn't consider the impossibility of it all for long, however. What was more important was that Harry was here. He was alive and breathing. A tiny miracle amidst the darkness.

"Give him to me," he said, holding his arms out for the kid. Harry squirmed in Hagrid's arms, eyes finding Sirius'.

A tiny fist shot out, fingers grasping for him as Sirius offered up his hair for Harry to yank. "Padfoo!" he squeaked, pulling hard on Sirius' head. "Da? Da?"

The expectant face look on the kid's face nearly broke Sirius' heart. "No, Butterbean, Da's not here." He turned imploringly to Hagrid. "Give Harry to me, Hagrid. I'm his godfather, I'll look after him."

His head was pulled to the side as Harry caught him by surprise. "Da?" he said again, as if he were waiting for James to congratulate him on this recent abuse of his godfather. Sirius tried to smile at him, but found that while the rest of him was shaking, his face was paralysed.

Hagrid seemed to watch all this sadly. "No, sorry, Sirius, but I'm on special orders from Professor Dumbledore. Harry's ter go ter his aunt an' uncle's."

Sirius frowned at him. "Lily's sister? Those muggles? You can't?"

"I trus' Dumbledore," Hagrid said. "An' I think you should trus' Dumbledore too."

Sirius clenched his teeth together. He should have known Dumbledore would never have trusted him with something as precious as a baby. "Yes. Of course. Dumbledore is always correct. Can never make a mistake, that man. He always knows best."

Hagrid missed the cynicism that James would have caught. The half-giant just nodded in agreement with him, as though he thought Sirius' statement to be entirely true.

In a single moment, Sirius found himself to be snuffed out. The candle that had flickered briefly at the sight of Harry had been blown into darkness. He was hollow. He was merely an empty shell.

"Fine. Whatever. Just be careful with him, yeah?" Sirius pressed the keys to the motorbike into saucepan-sized hands. "Here. I won't need it anymore."

The smoke from the candle was clearing in his mind, solidifying into a single word. Peter. Peter. Peter.

"I'll be real careful with 'im," Hagrid promised. "Don' worry."

But Sirius wasn't worried. In fact, he didn't know if he would ever feel anything but this destructive hatred for the rest of his days.

He peeled Harry's fingers off his hair, trying to suppress the feeling that he was getting stabbed in the chest when the bugger started crying.

"Come on now," he told him softly. "You've got to go with Hagrid."

He opened his mouth, trying to find the words for a goodbye. He had nothing to say, and everything to say all at once. And when his lips finally found words Hagrid was already gone.

He watched with a sort of numb indifference as Hagrid roared off into the night with the most precious thing in the world tucked inside his arms. Now there was only one precious life to Sirius and that was Peter's. The rat needed to stay alive long enough for Sirius to kill him himself.

That was all that mattered. That was all.

He picked his way up half-destroyed steps to the crib in Godric's Hollow, where it stood, still white amongst all the destruction around it. He ran a dirty finger around its rim before blasting it into nothingness with his wand because that felt right.

"That's what I'm going to do to you," he whispered to Peter. "Once I find you. Except I'm going to make it hurt twice as bad."

A full moon shown down on him from overhead. He lifted his face into her light, and laughed because everything was so fucked over but the universe didn't care because it operated on fucked up things. The bodies of his best friends lay around him, their son off to live with muggles. His other friend- a murderer. Him- soon to be.

"What do you think, Moony?" he yelled to the sky because the only comforting thing in all of this was the knowledge that somewhere else in the world, Remus was watching the same moon in the same pain that Sirius was, albeit for different reasons. "Things are a little different from our Hogwarts days, eh?" He laughed again. "One thing hasn't changed though. I can still promise one thing only." He turned on the spot, and vanished into thin air with a CRACK. It was time to damn himself even more than he was already damned.

"I solemnly swear I'm up to no good."


End file.

Harry Potter, Angst