"The truth. It is a beautiful and terrible thing, and should therefore be treated with great caution."
-Dumbledore

To Sunder the Sea
Chapter One: "Introduction to Destruction"

They say there was a murderer and a dozen corpses.
They were wrong.
There was a bystander and countless victims,
and then a ghost.

I was there when he had killed all those people. Up close and personal, you could say. Because it was personal; everything is personal when you're a person. Still, no one had expected it. To die so unexpectedly. So soon. So quickly—unable to take one last glance, unable to say goodbye. Not on a hazy November afternoon where there was still a hopeful warmth in the air.

But it had happened. The time had come. The beginning of the end, as it's said.

The real question is, however: just how long is the end?

— — —

November 2, 1981
Monday

There was an explosion.

And then, afterwards, silence.

Evelyn Martin had been thrown back by the force of the blast. An instantaneous heat encased the air, and for a quick moment she thought that this was what a volcanic eruption must feel like; the heat kindling against her face, singeing her eyebrows, smothering her airway all within the moment between heartbeats.

Looking back, this would be the moment she remembered most.

The moment when the dust began to settle.

She couldn't move for the longest time, couldn't breathe for the longest time. Her chest shuddered, aching and heavy from the momentum of the explosion and from the jarring of being thrown backwards onto concrete. Everything seemed too slow, and there was an instant where she panicked, her body refusing to react when she attempted to push herself upright.

All she saw was black, and then:

A vision was unfolding behind her eyes. Surges of golden light quaked like jolts of lightning, an exact imprint of the same light that had ruptured forth from the darkened alleyway only moments before. It was scintillating and cataclysmic, teeming with force and striking within the blink of an eye. It didn't fade behind her eyelids, but grew brighter, flashing and thrashing, striking through her head and pulsating down her spine like a force of nature. She gnashed her teeth, fighting against the shock.

It was unlike anything she had ever experienced, and years later when the memory resurfaced, the heat that smothered the atmosphere was still tangible upon her face.

Then came the screams.

Her eyes snapped open, gasping as if some colossal weight had suddenly been lifted from her chest, her quick breaths feeling cool against her clammy face. Each wisps of air pushed through the dust settling around her, spreading like a dandelion blown into the wind.

And she saw.

Destruction.

The screams retreated—faded, perhaps—because only the ringing of silence filled her ears. Everything had been masked into gray and dust, and it was haunting. It was hauntingly slow how the curse's haze receded, wherein it felt like hours that she watched lifeless bodies materialize, it had only been minutes. They were strewn across the street like abandoned marionettes.

The haze finally lifted. The screams stopped and a deathly silence reigned. Then the aftershock began to augment. In her periphery, through the density of dust and destruction, there were small specks of black, silhouettes of every Muggle that had witness the eruption. None of them seemed to be breathing, but they stood, silent and stunned from what had just occurred. From a distance, a crumbling block off a building fell to the ground, clattering against a ruptured pit of cement.

The sound shook within her ears.

She moved. Her palms stung as she pushed herself upright, leaving two handprints of blood against the sidewalk. Standing, viewing the calamity on a higher level, Evey felt her feet become fused to the ground. Another scream began, reverberating in her eardrums like echoes that wouldn't fade.

The corner was empty. Not a single speck of existence—only pure, abrupt nothingness. Dust lay undisturbed, settled into a fine layer of gray, not far from the alleyway. With panic her gaze tore around the street, eyes wide with horror, always being pulled back to the last spot she had seen him, the last spot he had stood, the last spot he had existed.

Gone. Obliterated. Nothing.

Dust.

The screaming became choppy and muffled, as if filtered through a sieve until all she heard was a toneless reverberation. Then, as the seconds slowed and passed and became heavy, her heart began to palpitate and her blood to heat and her eyes to blur. Something hard clenched within her chest, almost knocking her back, when she realized that the screaming was coming from her, that she could barely breathe as her lungs burned for oxygen.

She fell to her knees.

The heat upon her face began to cool, too cool, as though a vat of rainwater was soaking her through to the bones. She couldn't breathe. She couldn't think. She couldn't move.

Gone.

It had only been mere moments before that he had stood here. No more than five minutes, four minutes, three minutes, that he was strolling towards her with his endearing, crooked smile, the dark of his eyes bright and warm and so, so alive. Now, there was no breeze to muss his already unruly hair, no skip to his step, no tenderness, no cryptic magnetism, no warmth encompassing him that was intended only for her and belonged to no one else. Even the yellow rose in his grasp had disintegrated.

Obliterated.

There was no indication or proof or a mere suggestion that he had ever been alive. Had ever breathed. Had ever walked upon the surface of the earth or had been the pinnacle of significance in her world. All that remained was the silver band on her finger, the small diamond barely glistening in the day's drear, a small and final relic of him.

Nothing.

There was no trace, no evidence, that he had stood there. Just...

Dust.

Evey watched as the blood on her hands began to coagulate, smeared against her dress. The diamond was speckled with it, blackening each facet. Time, of course, was passing.

What had just occurred was now a memory. Now there was only remembering. There was only empty, ripening, nightmarish memories.

How they would soon haunt her.

How they would perpetually lurk behind her eyes, unspeakable and tragic and harrowing, moments that would always prick and pull and tear away at her. Already, remembering was a monster within itself, a creature that devoured without dithering, a continuous reliving in a moment of time where her life had been slated for absolute nothingness.

Already, there was no in-between. No twilight. No goodbye. Already, there was no moving forward. Already, there was no enduring.

Already, as she was bowed against the ground, watching her blood begin to dry, she feared to forget.

If she forgot, it would have been as if he had never existed.

There was only remembering, even now, as the memories were all too stark and vivid and unendurable. She could feel it sweltering, the anguish, the anger, this last day, the last moments—his last moments and, essentially, her own.

And she remembered, and she vowed to herself that moment.

To never forget. To never forgive.

— — —

A small fact:
Only one person ever made her a bystander
and a victim, and maybe a lover.
And on that day, he made it happen
Twice.

I had watched them die, the dust settling upon them like a blanket. It had frightened her, I'd seen, the spell's lightning surge reflecting in her eyes. It was a last moment, one of many, and I am eternally grateful it was never her own.

What happened after that last moment? Not the end, but the truth of it.

— — —

But then the silence was fractured and a sudden squall of wind rippled down through the street, cold and startling, the ringing in her ears fading and a new sound plagued itself into her mind. It was terrifying and what made the memory blacker than any nightmare, what grappled with her lungs when she tried to breathe, what snaked up and down her spine and clung to her fingers when she tried to break away from it. It was laughter, another man's—his laughter.

One that she would never forget.

Locking her eyes onto him, everything fell into place. Horror and anguish and rage fought for control within her, hands beginning to shake as she looked at the man responsible for everything. Responsible for the end. For his death. The horror locked itself into her bones, immobilizing her; the anguish surging beneath her skin, blurring her eyes; the rage burrowing deep within her, amassing with each wrathful thought.

She watched so that she would not forgive.

He stood there, within the beginning density of the alleyway, and when her eyes snapped onto him, his face was instantaneously cauterized into the back of her eyelids. She memorized him. She memorized his stance, his expression, how his body was rigid with the abominating laughter, his black hair flying out behind him as another jet of wind rushed through. His wand heedlessly flailed about as his laughter increased. His eyes were lit with perverse mirth, his laughter deepening to something like a distorted, hair-raising growl when the Ministry officials appeared.

He never once looked at her, or noticed the panicked Muggles, but his face was one that would relentlessly haunt her long after the Ministry had taken him away. His was also the face that she dared never to forget, feared to ever forget.

Ultimately, however, it was his name that kept her wrath, her anguish, resolute. It gave vigilance to her vengeance. And as the years passed, it resounded within her ears like a banshee's heartless, unforgivable shriek.

Sirius Black.

— — —

Author's Note: Prologue aside, this story is set during OofP, straight after Sirius escorts Harry to the Hogwarts Express. To be honest, I'm more interested in the post-Azkaban Sirius rather than the charismatic, roguish Hogwarts student we all tend to glorify—it'll be interesting to unearth more facets of the man he became because of his incarceration. But adding fragments of his Marauder-esque magnetism is a bit of an inevitability. A lovely inevitability.