l a c u n a

One month, five days, and fourteen hours after breaking out of Azkaban, Sirius steals a puzzle from a Muggle shop, playing lovable stray. It's one of those hard puzzles, the sort that's got five thousand pieces, and it's a picture of a lighthouse high atop a stormy cliff face, with the sea pounding the rocks.

The funny thing about it is how much the little lighthouse reminds him of Azkaban, and how little it seems to affect him. In fact, if anything, he misses the stone walls, in much the same way a person misses a thorn that's just been removed - not because it didn't hurt to have it in, but because taking it out is agony. It's been a whole month since he escaped the prison, and some part of him is still there, some fragment of himself that slips away every time he tries to identify it, maybe his sanity or his rationality or his wild side.

It's true - every moment since he's escaped, he's been meticulously careful, the same sort of careful Remus would have been, if Remus had ever found himself in this situation. He's taken no risks other than the ones he absolutely has to take, stuck to the shadows and the forest, under cover of trees, behind bushes, under rocks and water, swimming, digging, scrounging - whatever it takes to keep out of sight and safe.

He feels like a failure.

So he takes a huge risk that the Real Sirius Black would have taken, and steals the puzzle. Not because he really wants to steal a puzzle, and not really because he wants to be seen, or because he wants to see other people. He wants, more than anything, to take back whatever it is that Azkaban has kept, whatever part of him he can't recover from the North Sea, and in his fragmented, shattered mind, a picture of a similar place is a good starting point.

On the floor of the Forbidden Forest, he lays out the box and, with a care Lily would have been proud of, begins his puzzle. On the edges, because he always used to start in the center, and the farther he is from his old life, the better. His old life never did him any good, he thinks, especially because now he's stuck on the floor of the Forbidden Forest, trying to fix his mistakes.

For some reason, he thinks of his mother, and wonders if she's dead yet.

The edges of the puzzle are all the same kind of harsh blue-gray, the color all seas are painted and none of them actually are. The sea is gray, all right, stormy like clouds and thunder and darkness. He's used to that, though - it was all he could see from the sliver of window he was given in his cell, and so he's had plenty of time to contemplate the color of water. Somehow, the fact that the color is wrong is comforting, though. He can detach, mindlessly fit piece after piece into its own little spot without ever thinking about what the picture is of or why he's putting it together anyway.

After three days of this, and most of the edge finished, the sky begins to threaten rain. He looks up, feels a Dementor-chill, and decided to hide somewhere else. Carefully - again, so much more carefully than he ever had been - he puts the pieces back into the box, taking the time to count each and every little one, making absolutely sure he has all five thousand of them, before placing the lid on top and placing the tape right back where it originally was.

There's something cathartic, he's discovered, about being meticulous. There's something safe about acting like Remus Lupin or Lily Evans (no, he thinks suddenly, Lily Potter, Lily Potter, not Evans), something he isn't quite sure of.

He stumbles through the gathering doom, and becomes suddenly aware that school must have started yesterday. There's lights all over the school, like so many eyes watching him, a shaggy, unwashed, half-crazed animal loping across the grounds with a taped-shut box in his mouth, and it's funny, but he's more worried about messing up the edges he's spent three days fitting perfectly together than he is about being caught. The beauty of disassociation - pain, fear, worry, they can't touch him because he's lost all feeling, lost all sensation in his limbs, everything except a vague tingling numbness, much like putting a cold finger under cool water.

It's wonderful. It's terrible. It's all he has left.

On the floor of the Shrieking Shack, he spends most days putting the puzzle together, thinking vaguely about Wormtail and what he's going to do about him, but he's so far detached from the man who wanted Peter dead, so far gone from the Real Sirius Black Who Escaped From Azkaban, that he can't even remember what it was he wanted so badly to make Wormtail pay for.

He liked the forest better. The air was cleaner.

Eight days before Halloween - not that days really matter all that much to him, but he can't help but see the way Hogsmeade is decorating, and he dared to go out as Padfoot once, because he'd forgotten completely why the pumpkins were wearing faces, and he'd seen the words on signs screaming "Halloween Sale" - he is finished with the lighthouse and most of the cliff, and has only the rolling sea to complete.

But there's something wrong, and he's not sure what it is. That's a lie, really - he knows exactly what's wrong. Lily and James died on Halloween, remember, twelve or thirteen or a thousand years ago. He isn't sure how long it's been anymore, even though he was so certain of the time that had passed while he was in Azkaban. Even though he was so sure of himself when he took the Minister's paper, even though he had known exactly what he was after then, the time elapsed since his escape has drained it all away.

Like a cracked glass in a bowl of water. It's full, yes, until you take it out of the bowl. And then it begins to drip, slowly ebbing away, until all that's left is an empty, useless glass.

Eight days before Halloween, with the lighthouse finished and the sea a half-hearted splendor, Sirius realizes what it is that Azkaban kept.

They say that the Dementors will steal your soul if you get to close to them, they say that if they kiss you, they'll take it away for themselves, the great soulless monsters, trying to grasp the smoke and the light of a real person. Lily told him once that it was unbearably tragic, the way those creatures had to live, parasites looking for something beautiful they could call their own, looking for the thing they didn't have, the one sweet taste of humanity they could never grasp, not unless they stole it from someone. Lily said that the worst fate in the world wasn't having your soul taken by one, it was being one and having to steal the essence of others.

It took twelve years in Azkaban and almost three months of exile to realize it, but eight days before Halloween, Sirius realizes that the Dementors don't have to kiss you to steal your soul.

He left them behind, left Azkaban and its stormy seas and cold walls and dark corners, left the Dementors and their tragedies, but they didn't let him go. His body left, he stayed. And then he wandered around, more haunted than he'd ever been within Azkaban's fortress, wondering why he felt so empty, fitting puzzle pieces together to mask the way no one was putting him back right. To mask the way he couldn't grasp the one thing he'd left behind, the one thing he needed most.

He stays up all night that night, bright crescent moon guiding his fingers, long dull to reality, stiff with cold and underuse, making the wrong-color sea and gray horizon, and finds, come dawn, that he left exactly three puzzle pieces in the Forbidden Forest, and so can't complete his picture.

Lily, James, Sirius.

He doesn't go back for them.
---
--
-
(A/N: Merry Christmas, Fray!)