Regret for Sirius used to be a gut feeling – like a crater, or an ulcer, getting larger and more painful by the day. It was something that was alive, that could grow and hurt and distract him from the task at hand. Especially because he tried not to give his regrets real estate in his mind (something that makes sense, for someone who tries to act unaffected but has done no shortage of regrettable things that eat away at him), regret tends to catch him in his off moments. Right before bed. First thing in the morning. When he’s already spiraling. When happy drinking turns the corner into problem drinking and there’s no James or Remus or Peter around to shine the light into the dark corners of his mind and drive the shadows away.
Once Sirius lands in prison, regret changes. It’s all consuming for the first few days – convinced of his own guilt, he oscillates between hysterical and catatonic states.
It becomes clear, quickly, that Sirius is going to spend his life behind bars. So regret becomes one sentence per day, a grocery list of terrible things that he tosses around in his mind with a hypothetical ‘what if’ that would have driven him mad – if it hadn’t been the thing to keep the dementors from doing it first.
What if I hadn’t convinced them to use Peter as Secret Keeper? is the most common one, of course. But with all the time – and all the self hate – in the world, the list grows and grows.
What if I hadn’t hurt Remus during school – would he have trusted me more?
What if I hadn’t let James go into hiding?
What if I hadn’t teased Peter on the third Thursday of seventh year?
What if I hadn’t told Remus I loved him the last time we spoke – did I tell Remus I loved him the last time we spoke?
What if I hadn’t insisted on going on that one mission?
What if I had just checked on Peter earlier in the day?
He knows there has to be something. One big regret that led him here, something at the top of the mounting pile of regrets that broke the camel’s back and sent everything off the rails for good. He becomes consumed with finding it. Every action becomes an action to regret, because every action led him into Azkaban (which he doesn’t care about) far away from his friends, most of whom are dead or worse (which he cares about very much).
Regret becomes the defining factor of the twelve years he spends in prison, so different from the other unrepentant bodies in the cells around him.
It also drives him to escape prison once he finds out about Peter, however. More than a decade of ‘what would I do if I had done it all differently?’ finally leads to ‘what can I do now to make things a little more right?’
And off he goes.
hc + regret
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