Sirius really was smiling.
He was praising this pain, grateful for the agony gnawing at his heart because it ensured he would never forget just how foolish he had once been.
Only this pain could ease the torment inside him.
But the pain brought by Dementors had a long aftereffect. Even though Sirius felt relief each time through the suffering, even though the torment made him feel as if he were atoning, the damage caused by that pain never lessened.
So every time, it took Sirius a long while to come back to himself.
He did not know how much longer he could hold on, but he believed the rest of his life ought to be spent in this pain, until after death, when he could go and apologize to the Potters.
"Phew..."
Sirius let out a long breath as he gradually came back from the pain. Just as he was about to push himself up from the floor, he suddenly felt that something was off.
He lowered his head and was startled to discover a raven with crimson eyes standing on his chest, staring at him.
There were hardly any living creatures of that size anywhere within Azkaban. Even finding a nest of ants here would have counted as a miracle.
"Little one, how did you get here?" Sirius could not help asking.
Though the raven's crimson eyes made it look eerie, Sirius, who had gone far too long without seeing any living thing, still felt a surge of excitement.
He knew that contact with a living creature would stir up happy memories, and that would only make the next Dementor feeding even more painful. Even so, he could not help reaching out, wanting to stroke the little thing.
The raven, Sta, beat its wings and flew up, which made Sirius tense in worry that this hard-won little creature would fly away.
But he soon let out a sigh of relief, because the raven did not leave. It merely landed a short distance away.
"Don't be scared, little one. I won't hurt you," Sirius said softly. He casually picked up a piece of stale hard bread he had not finished earlier, crushed it into crumbs, and tried to feed it.
The raven avoided Sirius's outstretched hand, its crimson eyes looking at him with weary helplessness.
"Sirius Black."
A voice suddenly came from the raven.
Sirius's hand froze. He stared at the raven in disbelief.
"Who are you? An Animagus? No, that can't be right. Even an Animagus can't talk while transformed into an animal," Sirius said in astonishment.
Harris Raymons paused for a moment, then said, "Then have you considered another possibility? That ravens, as animals, can speak human language?"
As the symbol of the Raven Organization, Harris Raymons felt obliged to restore the raven's good name.
"Really?" Sirius blurted out, eyes wide.
Harris Raymons: ...
Harris Raymons suddenly felt there was something off about this conversation with Sirius Black. There was a strange air of pure idiocy hanging around the exchange.
Sirius Black was the one who had been locked in Azkaban for more than a decade, so why was he getting dragged into this nonsense too?
"I'm not an Animagus. This raven is my partner." Harris Raymons cut off that increasingly stupid line of conversation. "None of that matters. You only need to know one thing. I'm here to get you out."
"Get me out?" Sirius repeated blankly, and then his eyes suddenly turned sharp. "Are you a Death Eater?"
"A Death Eater? Of course not. Why would you ask something so strange?" Harris Raymons said helplessly.
"Don't you know I'm a mad Death Eater? A filthy traitor." Sirius's eyes were wild.
"Though you were indeed imprisoned under the accusation of being a Death Eater, in my view the evidence against you has serious problems," Harris Raymons said.
"Oh? Is that so?" Sirius's reaction was flat.
Harris Raymons was puzzled. He could tell that Sirius did not care in the slightest about the so-called truth.
"Don't you feel wronged? You clearly didn't betray your friends, and you never joined the Death Eaters, yet now you have to suffer the Dementors' torment every day." Harris Raymons was deeply confused.
He was beginning to suspect the man in front of him had already lost his mind.
"Heh..." Sirius let out a cold laugh. "This is exactly what I deserve. I didn't betray James, but they died because of me."
"Because of you?" Harris Raymons thought for a moment and immediately landed on the key figure. "Peter Pettigrew?"
"So you've heard of him too. That's right. He was the filthy traitor. I made him the Secret Keeper for James and the others, but he told You-Know-Who where they were hiding!"
The moment Sirius said that, his eyes turned green with fury, and his face twisted savagely, as though he wanted to grind Peter Pettigrew's bones to dust and scatter the ashes.
At that, Harris Raymons finally understood what had happened.
Back then, for reasons no one knew, Voldemort had suddenly gone mad searching for the Potters. To keep them safe, they used the Fidelius Charm.
To the outside world, Sirius Black, the Potters' closest and most trusted friend, had been the obvious choice for Secret Keeper.
But in truth, Peter Pettigrew had been the Secret Keeper. It was he who betrayed the Potters.
This kind of information had been known by so few people that even the Ravens had never learned the inside story.
Looking at Sirius Black, his eyes bloodshot with rage, Harris Raymons finally understood why his teacher had given him that abrupt, contextless sentence.
"Peter Pettigrew isn't dead," Harris Raymons said.
Sirius Black jerked his head up, his blood-red eyes like a demon's.
"Peter Pettigrew isn't dead, and you, the man condemned as his murderer, didn't know?" Harris Raymons asked.
Sirius's face darkened. "I thought... I thought he died from magical backlash."
He desperately searched his memory for that confrontation from more than ten years ago. All he remembered was Peter Pettigrew using some unknown method to unleash an extremely powerful spell, and despite Sirius fighting with everything he had to block it, he was still left badly wounded.
At the time, the whole street had been engulfed in fire and smoke, with Muggles screaming everywhere.
The reason he had believed Peter Pettigrew was dead was because he had seen Peter's severed finger.
"That wasn't magical backlash. Based on analysis, it was probably an ancient sacrificial spell. With Peter Pettigrew's background, there's no way he could have learned something like that. That magic most likely came from You-Know-Who."
Harris Raymons gave the matter a quick, serious analysis. "Most likely, Peter Pettigrew used a large-scale spell as cover, left behind the severed finger, and then found a chance to escape. But something about it is strange... could that round little fat man really move nimbly enough to evade the Ministry Aurors' sight?"
"He can!" Sirius Black said with absolute certainty. "Because he's an Animagus."
...
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