Saudade

A/N: Saudade – (Portuguese) a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia. This is a collection of Sirius Black and Marlene McKinnon one-shots, in no particular order, and does reference my longer Blackinnon story The One Left Behind. I love this couple, and while I know it isn't the most popular ship, I hope that those who do like it will like my writing of it.

Salvaged – A/N: We begin, at the end.

It was tempting to fall into blissful insanity. Merlin knows it would have been the easy option. But her face would surface in his memory every time he started to walk down that path. Each time he began to give into the guilt, the pain, the agony he felt at losing everything, her face was there and for whatever reason, he'd pull himself out again.

The Dementors would pull all the chaos in him to the surface and at first, he desperately wanted to descend into the madness, the madness would at least keep his conscious from constantly repeating that it was his fault; but then her face would be there and he couldn't do it. He couldn't seem to get past her; she blocked that road to blissful insanity, and for the first few months, he hated her for it. Hadn't he suffered enough? Couldn't she see that he was useless, just as he'd been told countless times growing up? There was no reason for him to continue existing, and since they'd just thrown him in here, he might as well let his mind go off the deep end; his body could sit here and rot now.

But she would simply smile at him, blocking his path to oblivion. After a while, he became resigned to it. The madness would pull and her face would appear. She never said anything, just smiled that damned beautiful smile at him. He'd scream at her, tell her he hated her, that he needed this, and all the while she'd smile at him. At some point, the anger faded and he came to expect her anytime the madness beckoned him. Sometimes he'd break down and weep at her image blazed upon his brain. Other times he'd simply talk at her about how crazy this all ended up being. They'd won, but he definitely didn't feel like a war hero. No. He felt shattered.

He couldn't tell you when it happened, but at some point, the madness stopped pulling at him. That was when she started to fade away. He could still pull her memory forward, just as he could with James and Lily. But she went back to being a part of him. He still missed her, still thought of her daily, but as the threat of insanity eased away, so did her constant presence. That was when it became, well, boring.

Azkaban still had its horrors, but even the screams of other prisoners started to fade into background noise. At a certain point, the dementors even began to sense his boredom and only came to torment him when the requirements were set. Merlin, what he wouldn't have given for a fucking radio? The best days were when a wizard would leave a copy of the Prophet and he'd snatch it. He'd rather taken a liking to the crossword puzzles in the back. He'd smile thinking about her and Lily doing the puzzles back when they were all living together in the flat, before everything started to spiral out of control. She'd be impressed at how good he'd become at them.

He'd found a level of normal within the nightmare of his life, resigned to rotting away in Azkaban but managing to keep sane, if bored. He didn't really feel alive, but he at least felt. He'd only wanted the crossword puzzle the day Fudge walked in, Merlin it had been ages since he'd been able to do one, but he got the whole paper. That was when life came back to him, granted in the form of rage, but it was enough. The realization that Wormtail was in the same building as his godson sent his blood boiling. The bloodlust he felt when he realized Peter was the traitor all those years ago came back as palatable as it had been the day he went to kill the rat.

Getting out was easy once he really put some thought into it, and while the swim was exhausting, not to mention fucking cold, it was exhilarating to be out again. His main goal was Harry, but since she was on the way, he spent the night there, curled by her gravestone.

"Thank you," He thought as the morning sunlight lit her name and he stretched, standing to keep moving towards Harry, "For everything."

He looked once more at the spot she had laid for the past 12 years, smiling at the name of the woman he loved all those years ago. It had been her, or her memory, that had saved him, kept him from going insane. She'd been the reason all those years ago as well. And as he set off into the dawn, he knew she always would be.