The Marauders - Order of the Phoenix - Part One

V: August 14, 1993

It was unusually chilly in Godric's Hollow for a mid-summer night, and a mournful drizzle of rain was keeping everything gray and damp.

It was a stupid thing to do, really, and Sirius knew it; he had spotted a couple people who looked as though they might be aurors, stepping through the doors of the Lion's Den, damp and shaking off their umbrella-charms from the tips of their wands as they went to warm up or else to go home for the evening. If there'd been two, surely there would be others - he would need to be extremely careful, lest he get caught on this fool's errand.

It wasn't as though James or Lily were really here.

But he had to see it for himself.

The moon overhead was a sliver - the new moon was just days away.

Sirius couldn't help but tell time by the cycles of the moon. It was ingrained in him the way breathing was - possibly even more so.

A part of him had hoped when he'd gotten here that he'd find a figure sitting on the stone wall - that he would be here, too, by some beautiful miraculous coincidence - but Sirius knew better. On a night so close to the full moon, he just hoped that wherever he was, he was drinking aconite tea and wrapped up in at least a dozen comfortable jumpers and blankets, or perhaps eating a nice, extra rare steak.

The shaggy black dog padded through the quiet streets of Godric's Hollow.

Sirius passed all the familiar landmarks of the little town, all the places that he and James had spent years haunting, trying to keep the places from haunting him now in return. There were so many memories built into this place, it made his stomach turn and his heart beat a tattoo of pain against his ribs as he passed by. The images were quite vivid in his imagination... There was the market he and James had spent their pocket money at for sweets, and the fountain where Lames had first got together (which James could never pass without telling the story again). There was the old dirt road that Sirius had first learned how to drive his motorbike on. There was the shiny new house that had been built where Charlus and Dora Potter's old house had been, long ago, and the Dumbledore house, behind which was the woods where the Marauders liked to go camping. And the big field where they'd first attempted their transformations, where Sirius had accidentally got himself stuck in his dog form for an entire summer which, then, had seemed an eternity. There was the duck pond where they'd always taken Harry for picnics... and then --

Sirius came to a stop, staring.

The rain that was falling around him wasn't ordinary rain, after all, and the cold was not natural. Rather, these unusual weather patterns were the result of a lingering hooded figure that had been stationed in the yard of the magical concealment that surrounded the site of the destroyed Potter house. A dementor, gliding as though pacing - back and forth, just inside the short stone wall, just past the broken white wooden gate. The billowing black cloak looked even more chilling and ghostly against the backdrop of the dead stems of passed morning glories and thick ivy that had claimed a good part of the trellises and crumbling stone of chimney. Thick clumps of moss, mold, and grime gave the house an old and decrepit appearance. It had always been a bit wonky - that had been part of the "charm" that had made Lily fall in love with it, and part of what had gotten James such an excellent deal in buying it, for that matter - but now it looked damn near ready to fall apart.

Especially with that terrible, gaping hole in the roof, where the wood beams had fallen in and the tiles and brick had crumbled to bits that now littered the dead garden and tiny patch of grass just inside the stout brick wall that enclosed the property. The little wood gate hung haphazardly from it's hinges, barely hanging on.

Sirius dared not get closer, staying instead across the street from it, by the edge of the old churchyard. From here, the dementor did not seem to sense him in his dog form, but he didn't dare press any nearer for fear that it might realize he was there. His fur pressed to the cold stones that squared off the cemetery.