Sirius doesn’t know where he is, but it didn’t matter, he knows where he’s not. He’s not in London, where it isn’t safe, where he isn’t safe. He’d apparated without a destination in mind, dangerous enough, even when one wasn‘t using a rare speck of self control to do it. Apparating anywhere but back to where he’d been told to felt a little like he was tearing his mind in two. He felt splintered now, fractured. His mind was a split open wire and he could feel the sparks that were being emitted, they were traveling throughout his body, lighting him on fire.
He walks, not knowing where he’s going, but he’s pleased that he hadn’t seen anyone around yet. Ignoring the pull at the back of his mind is hard, he’s thinned their control on him with distance and that first act of defiance, but it’s not severed. If they do manage to get him back, well his hands are already tremoring with the thought, with the countless round of the Cruciatus Curse he’s endured. It wasn’t long before they’d realized that breaking his body wouldn’t work, they had to destroy his mind if they wanted his spirit broken; and they’d acheived that long ago. He doesn’t know where this ability to fight, months later, came from, and he doesn’t have time to think about it. Not as a moving shadow, the soft patter of footsteps alerts him to a person nearby.
His reaction is both immediate and involuntary, he doesn’t even do more than tightly grip the wand that hasn’t left his side since he arrived, but the ground fractures around him. Cracks starting at his feet widen out a few feet to form a circle as if he had just fallen there from a great height. A heavy branch from a nearby tree falls onto a car, and the crash makes Sirius clinch. Merlin, he hadn’t meant to do that. But he hasn’t had control over his own magic for almost two months now, he hasn’t had control of his own body for just as long. He had harbored a small hope that getting away, stopping the Imperius Curse would make things better, but it seems that with everything that has broken inside his mind, he was almost safer as a tool for their destruction than he is now. Now he’s just a time bomb with no target. He watches as the person he’s sensed comes into view.
“I’d stay away if I were you.”
