Prologue: A Dying Wish (636)

Most people's dying thoughts fall neatly into one of three categories: the selfish, the really selfish, and the really, really selfish. Allow me to explain further. At the moment of their death, some people are thinking only of the immediate physical sensations they are experiencing, which is what I call selfish. The really selfish people are thinking about what they never got the chance to do. And the last group is often angry with whatever circumstance brought their death about and is thinking only of what impact that has.

There are, however, rare people whose last thought is something nobler. Some parents wonder how their child will fare without them, some people die proudly for a cause they really believe in. There are enough of these people that their dying thoughts don't catch my attention any more often than the others that are constantly murmuring in the back of my mind.

Yet every once in a long while, someone thinks something as they die that impresses me.

That's what happened when a relatively young man by the name of Sirius Black fell through a veil and into the realms of the dead. Yet before he came under the power of the entity that rules there, I grabbed him for my own. In my celestial home, Sirius Black came to, slightly woozily. I could hear the groggy thoughts that floated through his mind, wondering if he were in heaven, but I ignored that.

What had impressed me about the man's final thoughts wasn't that they were full of a selfless sort of regret, because that happens often enough, it was that one moment, one decision had been pinpointed in his mind as what he would change. I looked into his eyes and learned his story. Something seemed slightly odd about the moment he wanted to have done differently.

"Mortal, is it true that given the choice, you would raise your friends' son rather than save their lives?"

"What? Uh, yeah…" he said aloud. His thoughts wandered from my question, probing our surroundings. I found that he saw everything through a sort of haze, though the details were all clear to my eye. He even saw me as little more than a blinding light. He wondered briefly how I knew anything about what had happened to him, why I knew what he would change. Soon, he was on the verge of asking, but I cut him off with a question of my own.

"Why? You loved them; why not regret that you didn't become their Secret Keeper? Why wish more that you had done things differently once they were already dead?"

"I would do anything to have Lily and James alive again…but I don't think that we could have evaded Voldemort forever. Eventually he would have overcome our efforts, so it is better that it happened as it did. Because things went as they did, Harry had a chance to grow into his fate a bit before it was dumped on him. As much as it pains me to be without James and Lily, I think that this way is better for more people than just me. But, as much as I think that James and Lily's deaths were unavoidable, Harry's life afterwards wasn't. I should have been there to help him pick up the pieces. I should have been there to raise him. What I regret is not hanging onto Harry from the moment I pulled him from the rubble in his bedroom." The mortal frowned then, wondering why he had felt compelled to say all that, to articulate thoughts that he was scarcely aware of having.

I paused a moment, looking into the past that was and the past that could have been. Then I was decided.

"Very well, mortal, you may have your second chance."