Title: Tied Up Between the Lines
Author: Amalin


Your name is Sirius Black.

You are thirty-six years old. You have lines in your face that you don't remember having fifteen years ago, eyes that shouldn't look like someone else's but do, and a godson that looks too much like your best friend.

You have a Wanted Poster hanging in the Ministry and an entire section of Aurors memorizing your life so they can better understand you, better predict where next you will hide. You wonder if they know you like your toast burnt with marmalade, about the last time you cried over an argument with your shrieking mother, about the time you watched James undress in the Quidditch locker room. You wonder if they know you better than you know yourself. You wonder sometimes, because when you rise to greet yourself in the mirror, a stranger stands before you with wrinkles you don't have and dark circles you never get and shadows of ribs that never show on you because Remus always said you had the appetite of a dog, didn't he?

It's only when you look at Harry in the fire and see James' face that you feel like yourself.

And then, withdrawing, disoriented, into your own dark room in number twelve, Grimmauld Place, you are surprised to find yourself in the body of a thirty-six-year-old that feels as weary as Dumbledore's. You are surprised that your tongue sighs the word "Harry," not "James," and tangles with the taste of ash from the Gryffindor common room.

Remus tells you, once, that you aren't reconciled with the reality of your age. It hurts to look at Remus, this shabby, worn-down, worried version of Remus. You wish that he would shave more often. You wish that he would nibble on the end of his quill sometimes, the way a seventeen-year-old Remus once did. "I lost my life to Azkaban," you snap at him, loud enough to be angry, not loud enough to wake your mum. "I'm allowed to need time to catch up."

"You had time," he says softly to the chimes of the clock that overshadow his words.

You are a thirty-six-year-old man who is, by all wizarding standards, still astonishingly young. You only cease feeling old when in dog form and Remus never lets you stay that way for long, too afraid you'll do something rash. Padfoot hates being trapped inside as much as you do. "I feel so old," you tell Remus over tea, one day. Tea, where once it would have been Firewhiskey.

"In these times, aren't we all old?" Remus says. You wish he didn't sound so much like Dumbledore. You wish his eyes weren't thirty-six-year-old eyes, instead of the ones you expect.

You talked about death with James once, as you yawned in the Gryffindor common room, waiting for the clock to strike midnight so Peter would go to bed and you could sneak out to the kitchens without him. You had both vowed to die heroically, protecting something you loved, as brave and reckless as you had lived. "Out with a bang," you'd declared. "People will know I'm gone. They won't take me out without a fight."

They, of course, were Voldemort's forces. That was all the school talked about then, the great battles, the worries of death. You both thought it grand, to go down fighting Voldemort and his forces of darkness.

James died a hero. He went out with a flash of green and left a legacy that traveled the world over, a boy with a scar who is suddenly yours to protect. He left you that: a sentence in Azkaban and his own son. You would have rather died with him, side by side, wands held out, fighting Voldemort to the last. The papers would have heralded your sacrifices.

Oh, but instead. Instead.

Remus doesn't understand, is too practical, knows how to temper his reckless bravery. When you lash out at him for being trapped in that dark house that haunts you and leaves its shadows on your skin (a little death, oh, every day), he waits patiently for your fury to subside. When you tell him you want to do something, anything, just to be out of the house, that you don't care about death as long as you go down screaming, he fixes you tea.

"The world will know," you vow to him, the same way James vowed to you over a shared Butterbeer and a fervent look that brightened both pairs of eyes. Remus smiles too sadly, too much like an adult.

Your name is Sirius Black. You only ever wanted to be young and fearless, free; at least in your death, you think, you can be there again. You can taste the courage, the rebellion in your eyes that you know James felt too. You think that his death, as much as you mourn it, must have been beautiful.

You dream about it, sometimes.

And you—

You die a fugitive, misunderstood, too quickly and less heroically than you would have imagined. Your fall is almost comical; you see it in your mind's eye as you arc backwards, into the darkness.

You are a thirty-six year old man who never grew up, and already your life is over.