Midnightmares
by Nicole


It had been happening on and off for weeks. Ever since Harry had told him exactly what had happened in the maze at the Triwizard Tournament. How the trophy was a Portkey. How Cedric had been killed. How Harry had valiantly fought for his life and managed--barely--to escape. It all seemed such a simple plan now, but back when it had happened, Sirius had stayed up nights trying to figure it out.

Now he was up about it again. Only for different reasons. Not only was his mother's house driving him insane, but it seemed his own memories were working against him.

He remembered, just after Harry recalled the story of the Triwizard Tournament to him, discussing it with Remus. And the two of them had both been shaken just as much as everyone currently in the Order.

"It's starting all over again, Siri," Remus had told him cryptically, and ever since then, Sirius' brain seemed always to be working. It drew nasty parallels between the narrow escapes James and Lily had with Voldemort and the most recent one Harry had suffered. And the most frightening part was that his brain didn't have to work hard to draw these parallels. It seemed like the Potter family was cursed.

And there was nothing he could do about it. That thought seemed to haunt him most. He had been unable to save James and Lily from Voldemort's clutches. All because he had insisted they switch Secret-Keepers. Time and time again he found himself dwelling on that fact, and he found himself believing he deserved the time he had spent in Azkaban. He had done nothing wrong by wizarding rules, but in his mind, he had killed his brother.

Now he found a sort of voluntary insomnia taking over. When he had first volunteered his mother's house as headquarters, he was quite used to sleeping alone. But as he had spent more nights alone, in the hellhole of his childhood, the nightmares had begun. Before he would drift off into restless sleep, he would think about James. He would think about the Marauders, and how it used to be. It was hard to avoid, since he had returned to his childhood. While the memories of the house and his family weren't pleasant, he always had the memories of the Marauders, his real family, to cheer him. But lately, they had turned gruesome. All he could remember were the bad times. Once James and Lily started dating, Peter began to drift. He became resentful because he was being brushed off to the side. In their last year at Hogwarts, kids picked upon Peter viciously, and James was too busy to pay attention. They all had been too busy to realize how Peter was beginning to transform. Ever so slightly, but consistantly. To the point where he betrayed them all.

And Sirius, ever noble, had realized it too late. Just as he had pieced everything together in Harry's situation a moment too late as well. Luckily, Harry had escaped. But so had James and Lily the first three times.

It always made him sick to his stomach to imagine that Harry, after becoming the Boy Who Lived, would succumb to the same fate as his parents. As hard as Sirius tried to shake these dismal thoughts, he simply couldn't. After the Marauders believing they were invincible for the longest time, and their egos only becoming more inflated each time they avoided Voldemort's grasp, James' death had left a hole that nothing could fill. While Sirius believed wholly in Harry and his ability to persevere, he would never, ever be able to shake the feeling that his death at Voldemort's hand would be inevitable. However, he had also made a deal with himself, way back as he sat in Azkaban, that he would never let Harry suffer the same fate.

*Grand bloody job you've done of that so far, Black,* he thought to himself as he rolled over. It was the same every night. The same thoughts. The same parallels. The same nightmares. It was like he were practicing a script. Every night, at nearly the same time, he would reach these thoughts and think the same things to himself as he waited for sleep, which would never really come. He had vowed to protect Harry when James had declared him Godfather. At that point in time, he didn't know if any of them had believed he would ever have to, but either way, he intended to fulfill his duty.

His dark eyes cast around the room, which was nearly pitch. But his eyes had long adjusted to the dim light shining in, and he focused on the many, many papers scattered upon his desk. Most were papers for the Order, but some of the topmost ones were sprawling diagrams of the parallels between Harry's encounters and James', others were theories on how Voldemort would go after Harry next.

He was determined to stay one step ahead, always. No one else in the Order seemed to see this, probably because none were here long enough to notice that he didn't really sleep anymore, and didn't see what he did when he wasn't sleeping. Except, of course, for Dumbledore. There were more reasons to Albus keeping him sheltered than the fact that he was an Azkaban escapee. He knew that. He could see it in the old man's eyes every time he delivered an order personally. Sometimes Sirius hated him for it. Other times, he loved Dumbledore for doing it, because he truly felt he was going insane. Perhaps not in the same way everyone else seemed to think he was crazy. Molly obviously thought he couldn't tell the difference between James and Harry, and Sirius was positive she had mentioned something to her children about steering clear of him. That didn't bother him. As long as Harry didn't follow along. He was going crazy because of Harry, after all. He just...needed to protect Harry. Always. He needed to do for Harry what he had been unable to do for James.

He rolled over again, and miraculously his eyelids grew heavy. Then again, this was about the same place in his thoughts where, every night, he would begin to drop off to a horror-filled sleep.

*I'll do anything it takes, Harry. If I need to go against all of Dumbledore's attempts to keep me sheltered, if I need to go against the entire Order, I will. Just to keep you safe...*

His eyes slid closed, and he slipped into a restless world of screams and sorrow.

Fin.

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