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It’s done. It’s over. Everything is silent. 

Sirius opens his eyes. 

Which, wait. That’s not right. Does he have eyes? He’s dead. That curtain to nowhere- he’s done. Gone. Finished. 

All the same, he opens his eyes, and all he sees is blue. Blue and clouds shaped as perfectly as if by a carefully discerning hand. He reaches up, and, yes, he has a hand, a hand devoid of all the dust, scrapes and bruises of battle. He flexes it up into the sky. He sits up. 

The sky above him is blue and the ground below him is the greenest, sweetest grass he’s ever smelled, and, he thinks, this is really alright, even if he is dead. A dog can run for miles on a  never-ending field. Even if, the smallest of thoughts niggles from the back of his brain, even if it’s truly remarkable in its loneliness. It doesn’t matter. He’s been lonely for some time now. It’s only to be expected. It was foolish to have hoped, with Harry… 

He sighs, pushing his way to his feet. No point in dwelling. No point in thinking about it at all. Wherever he is, he’s too far away to do them any good. But they’ve won that battle. He can feel it. He turns around slowly, because there is a great, big field to explore and all the time in the universe to explore it in.

And he stops. And he blinks. 

“Hey, Sirius,” James says, raking a hand through his hair. He’s grinning. Lily waves from beside him. There’s laughter in her eyes and a smile on her mouth, and this hallucination is the cruelest he thinks he’s ever had. 

“I’m imagining things,” he says, and he’s stunned, really, that his voice can make it out from the dry, broken caverns of his chest. “I’m imagining things. You’re not- I-“

Lily reaches out to lay a hand against his arm. “You’re okay, Sirius,” she says softly. “We’re really here.”

He supposes, to be fair, this means that he is, in fact, dead. But bugger it all, he throws himself between them, wrapping his arms around them, because they’re HERE, wherever here is, and he is too, and it’s something. It’s something brilliant. And Lily hugs back, and James, JAMES, James is hugging back too, and they’re laughing at him, and GOD, he likes that, their laughter, and he’s definitely, surely not crying, not at all, no. 

Perhaps a little bit. 

But it’s lost in the green below and the blue above, and the green and blue on either side of him. He’s lost forever. It feels an awful lot like happiness.