I'm With You

Disclaimer: J.K Rowling owns Harry Potter. I do not.

A/N – Happy anniversary, Worthfull1. This first chapter is very short but I aim for the following ones to be longer. I hope you enjoy! :D Shared credit for the concept and her amazing alpha-ing skills belong to the truly wonderful Siriusly Orion Wicked. Thank you, my darling!

Chapter One

Cold. Grey. Endless.

The barren plains stretch out in front of Sirius, rolling across the horizon in never-ending dips and loops, hidden peaks he's never found, and constant, constant flats. It just keeps going. He stares out at it, his hands in the pockets of dark muggle jeans, a biting wind plucking at his midnight blue shirt. With sleeves rolled up and his hair flicking into his face, he probes the distant fields, looking, searching, for something he already knows isn't there. It's never been there. Never will be.

Still, he searches.

It's a habit he can't for the life of him break, and it's one he's not sure he wants to break. If he breaks the habit, then isn't he essentially giving up hope? He doesn't know where he is. Somewhere… not his. But wherever not his is, he's stuck here, lost within a place that he's terrible afraid is entirely too real, and if he stops looking for the end, for the way out, won't he have found a different, more permanent end? It frightens him, that thought.

Another, ever-growing thought, that perhaps he'll be happier if he did break the habit and accept what's not his, frightens him even more.

He has no real memory of before this. He remembers people and places and a whole, complete life, but it's like it happened to someone else. Someone else who's still somehow him. He knows that it was real, and since it was, logically this can't be, but it's like there was a different him. A different Sirius. The memories he has have no connection to him, despite them being his. It's disturbing and distressing to remember a person's life who's him but not, so he tries not to think about it too much. Instead, he devotes all his time to finding a way out. Because even though he can't comprehend when this colourless world began, he knows, instinctively, that he wants it to end.

He needs it to end.

He's desperate to have the Sirius that he doesn't think about back.

Lightning cracks across the sky, thunder a predictable, ominous echo, and Sirius starts and looks up. Jet black brows draw down as he probes something that's been a little different from the everyday search lately. The thing about his world that isn't the world he was born into and grew up in, is that it doesn't change. At all. He has no clue how long he's been wherever he is, but in however long it's been, nothing has ever changed. Just the grey plains that he's walked and walked and walked.

The lightning is new. And he's not sure whether 'new' is a good thing or not.

Another bright bolt snakes its way through the grey the matches the earth, almost splitting the sky in half, lending light to dreary existence. The tips of his fingers beginning to tingle, Sirius's frown deepens. A second lightning strike straight after the first is something else that's never happened before. A shiver runs through him, the feeling of someone walking over his grave heavy down his spine as tension tightens in his belly. His heart begins to rocket against his ribcage.

Something is happening. The lightning is new but more of it is newer, and he can taste sudden change on his tongue. Catastrophic change.

What's going on here?

His legs are moving without forethought, panic a bite that's disturbingly sharp. He runs and the plains continue like always, the abruptly strengthening wind lashing at him, thunder booming. Giving chase. He can't see through the hair in his eyes and his breath bitterly cold in his lungs, but he runs because he doesn't know what this is and the taut anticipation in his blood says that the change is very wrong.

He's wanted change. He's screamed out for change. Now he has it and he urgently wants to give it back!

A sob cuts into a shocked cry when the terrain he knows so well veers into pointed peaks, tripping him up and tumbling him to the ground. His chest is heaving with stolen breaths, rocks stinging his palms, dust dirtying his knees. His world is literally rolling now, the ground bucking, the lightning turning the ozone white and hot and hell on earth. Thunder roars, and Sirius roars with it, fingers clawing in the dirt.

He screams and he screams until his voice peters out, this foreign world he's come to know and hate shrieking like a turbulent, maniacal banshee. And then, as if tied to his voice fleeing to the hills that hadn't been there seconds before, it all stops.

Just stops.

He's panting with fear. The plains are flat, the sky is calm, the earth is still. Sirius stares at the ordinary ground beneath his clutching hands with wide eyes. Eventually he manages to get to his feet, forcing himself up to see what needs to be fought now.

Cold. Grey. Endless.

Except it isn't.

Adrenaline flooding his system, he sways on the spot, eyes on the once again on the distant horizon that never stops being distant.

There's something there that has never been there before.

Something that's getting closer.

Sirius blinks in shock. The something isn't a thing. It's… a figure?

He sways and the figure approaches, suddenly right there. In front of him. Five steps away, with extravagant hair that falls over her shoulders and bewildered brown eyes that are currently gawking at him in disbelief.

"Sirius?" Hermione Granger whispers, the shock in her tone jabbing at his skin like icy pinpricks. Sirius swallows hard and shoves a hand through tangled black waves, the laughter that escapes his tightly compressed chest high-pitched and more than a little desperate.

"Hello, pet."