Sirius Black sat in his cell in the Azkaban prison, faces out through the round iron bars that crossed the front of his living quarters. It was nearing midnight, and the other convicts had been screaming for hours. Sirius was amazed that he hadn't gone mad, as they had, but for a different reason.
He had seen death before. He had seen the vicitims of Lord Voldemort; he had seen the carnage. But here it was worse. Here it was an almost living death. Sirius had become numb to it by now, though. He had been numb ever since that night when he had brought Elisa across the sea toward Miami, away from her hom in England. Away.
the tired man held up a hand in front of his face, looked at it, he looked at the skin, tight around his bones, and at the veins that stuck out. He had no muscles left, no will to fight, just the will to die. Finally, he fell asleep.
Two dementors walked in, a girl held between their scabby, slimy, dead hands. They sat her in the chair, and the golden chaind snaked around the armrest, to latch themselves onto her wrists. She held up a hand, looking at it, turning it to see every aspect of it. She put down her arm and faced those in front of her. She had no idea that an already condemned man was doing the same thing somewhere inside the darkened halls of the prison.
Two familiar faces showed in the small crowd before her. There she saw Dumbledore, and there, Cornelius Fudge, the pompous old fool whom she had so many times out-witted. She blinked slowly, almost lazily, turning her head, and cocking it lazily, too. In truth, though, she was like a loaded pistol with the safety latch off, ready to fire at any moment. she made sure that her back didn't touch that of the chair, to keep her alert. Orson Scott Cards had taught her that trick. The bailiff stood up and said his part. "The child in front of us, from here on referred to as the name she has taken up, Elisa Calconn, has been charged with a treason of the highest order: murder of a wizard child. We are here today to choose the fate of the convict before us. He sat down.>
Another man stood up. It was Crouch, perfect, unyielding Crouch. "What do you have to say in your defense?"
"Is there anything I can say that will keep me out of this hell-hole?" Elisa asked, staring once more at her veins. Her ears, which had accquired the hearing of a dog's over the years of becoming one, could hear the blood moving lazily through them. She could hear it pumping through the arteries, squeezing through the capillaries.
"If I were you," said Crouch, his temper beginning to rise at the arrogant adolescent before him, "I would try my hardest."
"As thou doth wish, my liege. The best thing that can come to mind is, no, your honour, I plead 'not guilty'".
"What evidence do you have to prove that? do you have an alibi?"
"Of course not. I don't tell people where I'm going. Where I come from, Cornelius, if you tell anyone it's not a good thing. You could easily be raped by a pedophile. There were eighteen caught at Sunset Place during the short time span of yesterday alone."
"You don't tell your parents where you're going either?" asked Fudge.
"If they were home, I would. But they're never home. Always gone on weekdays. so Dana came with me, yes?"
"Speak clearly, Calconn."
The court continued like this, until they got tired of going about this, and showed as much evidence as possible so as to escape the dungeon. as it turned out, Elisa was dragged away once more to the confines of the Azkaban prison.
Elisa was given a different cell this time, somewhere deeper in the fathomless tunnels of the island, a higher security area. How do they say that I murdered someone? Do they think me inhuman? Elisa questioned herself. It wasnt' out of temper, or sorrow, but it was the usual barrage of questions she threw at herself. She like to know why she was feeling the way she was. Right now, it was a feeling of hopelessness, a feeling of great loss. She sat here on the bunk at the back of her cell, laid down, and tried to sleep.
Then the screaming started, it scared Elisa. She hated screaming. She hated carnage, blood and destruction, at least in reality. She, unlike Harry, remembered a great amount of her childhood. Her father had taken her with him to watch his work, to show her that all this would be hers when she grew older. He had lamented about his child not being a boy, but had kept her all the same. He needed an heir, male or female, and this child was better than he could have hoped for. She was a Changling.
Elisa thought of the screamin she had heard then, it had pierced her ears, had frightened her so, but even then she knew not to show her weaknesses. If Voldemort had taught her anything it was the you shouldn't show your weaknesses to any that could overthrow you. Elisa was like him in many ways, she was power-hungry and ambitious, thoughtful. Yet, she was also unlike him in many more. Elisa wasn't cowardly. She didn't kill those weaker than her, those who were defensless, and she didn't kill for the joy of killng. she killed for food, whenever he animal instincts kicked in, and then, only animals.
Elisa couldn't stand the screaming, she covered her ears, and writhed and fought, creating as much noise as was possible to block whatever noise there was. A voice came from across the hall. "It's hard when you first come her." It was scratchy and ragged. It was a man's voice, and when Elisa looked up at him, ignoring the screaming, he looked like a man of a fairly young age, maybe thirty or older, but his eyes were sunken, his hair was matted into dreadlocks. He looked like a skeleton, one that had only been dead for a few months, its skin still there, but the skin was rotting away, slowly sliding off the corpse.
And yet in that face was something that Elisa recognised out of her childhood. She had never know his name, but his gently smiling face had often come into her mind, his deep, brown eyes were remembered always. Elisa thought of him as another father. She imagined that he had talked to her in her dreams, daydreams usually. But she turned over on her cot, to face the back walls, believing that she was already showing her weakness, and going insane.
At last after what seemed like hours, she fell into a fevered sleep. and she dreamed in that sleep, she dreamed of what she had seen during her infancy, and she dreamed of the smiling man. But she woke up often in the night, to the screaming of the inmates, and the tearing of what sounded like fingernails and skin against the hard, concrete walls. Elisa heard sobbing, and began to cry herself. Hers was silent crying. Orson Scott Card, her favourite writer, had taught her that as well.
Morning. Sirius Black awoke in his cell to find the child across from him rocking back and forth, holding her knees and muttering. Had she already gone mad, like so many before her? no, he corrected himself. He could hear what she was saying. It sounded like a woeful play, something he hadn't heard before.

"...If I had let my love for him alone,
It might have grown into a beautiful sorrow-who knows?
Filling my life with healing fragrance.
But I poisoned it,
I tortured it,
I blinded its eyes and it became hatred,
Deadly ivy instead of clematis,
And my sould fell from its support,
Its tendrils tangled in decay.
Do not let the will play gardener to your soul,
Unless you are sure it is wiser than your soul's nature."

"It's from Spoon River, and yet I forget who wrote it," she laughed hollowly, "I should know. I tend to memorize the authors. Proof of my need for a change in life. Now that I've finally gotten it, I wish the change would go away." She shook her head, then steadied herself against the wall, and vomited onto the ground next to her before passing out.
Sirius looked down at the unconscious form of the child in the cell across from his. He sympathized for ehr, because she was only a child, and because Sirius hadn't seen a child in eleven years. Her skin still had the transluscent quality of yout, even though she had to be a least thirteen years old. She was still young, she still had her whole life ahead of her to live in misery.
The Dementors floated by, glancing down at the still body, her hand resting an inch from the pool of regurgitated filth that she had been eating for a month before her trial. They asked each other if she was dead already, if she was dead yet.
But they passed, and the child slowly opened her eyes, and looked across at Sirius. She scrambled back in feat, mumbling once more a poem that was lodged in her still young mind. It had something to do with the fate of a ship, he noted and about all its many accomplishments. But for now, Sirius Black didn't listen. Instead he crawled from his crouched position onto his bed, and watched her, as she rocked back and forth again. Where had he seen her before? Sirius stared at the red eyes, so familiar, yet so distant.
Elisa sat in her cell. Stupid thing, Elisa, she chided herself, stupid thing to do. You've shown him your weaknesses, your most vulnerable area. Stupid, idiot, that's me. Oh, well. What's done is done, and I can't change it now. If he's a pedophile, I'm going to be raped.
That's what Miami had done to her; now she was paranoid to add to all her other psychological problems that she thought she probably had. Look, she laughed at herself, you've become paranoid about that too! Hysterically, she recited a poem, involuntarily and unconsciously. It was called Old Ironsides,by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a favourite of hers.

Aye, tear her tattered ensign down,
Long has it waved on high,
and many an eye has danced to see
That banner in the sky.
Beneath it rung, the battle shout,
and burst the cannons roar,
The meteor of the ocean air,
Shall sweep the skies no more.
Her deck once red, with heroes blood,
Where knelt the vanquished foe,
When winds were hurrying o'er the flood,
And waves were white below.
No more shall feel the victors tread,
or know the conquered knee.
The harpies of the shore shall pluck,
The eagle of the sea.
O better that, her shattered bulk,
Should sink beneath the wave,
Her thunders shook the mighty deep,
And there should be her grave.
Nail to the mast, he holy flag,
Set every threadbare sail,
And give her to the god of storms,
The lightening and the gale.

"I knowyou," she said to him, "you're the man from my dreams, I see you at night when I close my eys, and in the day when I question my past. You're the motorcycle man."
sirius, in the cell across the way, hear this. His mind jolted. A tiny child in a sling across his chest, a smiling face with red eyes and a baby's laughter. It was all he remembered from that night, when he sailed her across the sea.
Over the single year, which seemed like an eternity, they became good friends, the only thing in the horrible place of Azaban that kept them sane. But eventually, Dumbledore got her out, cleared her name, and she left him there, like a sudden storm in winter. He felt the bitter cold; she saw the clouded sky.
Elisa slowly got over it though, but to Sirius it was an obsession, forever eating away at his mind as if flies had laid their eggs there, and those now hatched infants were feeding at it. One evening, he found that he couldn't stand it any longer, he had questions he needed to be answered, and a mystery that had to be solved.
The mystery came to him in a dream one night, during his fitful sleep. He had always trusted his dreams, and believed that they meant something. In his sleep he had seen death, destruction, memories of what had happened that day so long ago. He also saw Voldemort, murdering Lily and James, but most of all he saw Harry. And Elisa. Harry and Elisa, arms around each other, like Lily and James, joined against Voldemort, victorious against the Dark Lord.
But that night he saw them both held prisoner in a dungeon, far away, across mountains and through forest, under rivers, and over brooks. sirius saw them in pain, but then his vision was fogged, the dream conclued, but it was left without an ending, unfinished, unanswered.
That night, Sirius escaped, and his first place of refuge was a house in Miami, Florida, where a girl with red eyes fed him and kept him warm. You know the rest of the story, but other parts must still be filled.

Skippy.

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