Disclaimer: Don't own and never will.
AN: Written for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition Game Day - Round 8. Prompts are in BOLD
Leo Tolstoy wrote in his book Anna Karenina that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This one sentence could apply to virtually every pureblood supremacy family in existence. In the case of the Black family and in particular, the case of Walburga Black, it started when she discovered she enjoyed screaming out abuse at those she deemed deserving of her scorn. Mudbloods, half-bloods, blood traitor's and those lesser magical beings who corrupted and polluted their world.
It happened when she was nine. The Black family, like so many pure-blood families, visited Grindelwald's Germany. Like so many people her age, she was swept up in the rallies and the marches. For young wizarding children, there were large scale blood-purity camps run for the Grindelwald Youth movement although they also welcomed pureblood children from other nations. And Walburga was a welcome resident to these camps. They attended meetings, played blood-purity games and even marched at some of Grindelwald's large-scale rallies, screaming hatred and destruction to all those who failed to meet the pureblood supremacist ideals they espoused.
It was also here that she met her future husband for the first time, although she did not realise it then. He was her cousin Orion Black and he was one of the many young wizards enamoured with Grindelwald.
For the next few years, they attended the camps of the Grindelwald Youth movement, becoming more and more involved. At Hogwarts, they practised and prepared in secret for what they thought would be the inevitable rise of Grindelwald in Britain.
Then, in nineteen-thirty nine, war broke out across Europe. The visits to Grindelwald's camps stopped and although there were plenty of pure-blood rallies, the movement fizzled out as time passed. Ironically, the very man they believed would usher in an era of blood-purity was the one who set it back and in the privacy of their homes and families, the pureblood supremacist families cursed and yelled. For Walburga, it gave her an excuse to vent and scream, her expression slowly becoming more animated with practise and even her eyes began to bulge. The resulting effect was, according to her fellow Slytherin's, was fearsome. Walburga liked that a lot. Fear was something to be inspired.
Then came her first pregnancy and her hormones made her emotions switch rapidly. Her husband disappeared to away to his clubs and his whores, witches who deserved little better than to be used for such purposes. Instead, Walburga screamed and yelled and vented at the House Elf and her husband when he was home. How dare he leave her like this, carrying this thing inside her. How dare he try to run away? But in truth, she didn't care. Theirs was a pureblood marriage through and through and like so many pureblood marriages, it was cold and loveless. No, the only reason she yelled and screamed was because it was the only time she actually felt alive.
When her first son Sirius Black was born, she celebrated with the rest of the family, cheering the arrival of another Black who would no doubt be as right-thinking as the rest of the acknowledged Black family. But inside, Walburga felt the same sense of detachment she felt for everything else about her marriage. The child was nothing more than an extension of that detachment, another person for her to be disconnected to.
Her detachment to Sirius manifested itself in the way she cared for him. She delegated his care to house-elves and ignored him as much as possible. Unlike the mothers she had read about, she felt no bond to her child. He only mattered as the heir to the Black dynasty. But all that changed when he was around a year and a half old and she disciplined him for the first time. She managed to intimidate him with her screaming and soon she began to live for the times he would give her an excuse to yell at him. And as time moved on, Sirius began to misbehave more and more as he tried to get more and more of his mother's attention. And the more he misbehaved, the more she screamed.
When her second son Regulus was born, she doted on him like she had never doted on Sirius. Unlike Sirius, Regulus grew up to be as good as gold. He was the son she always wanted.
Sirius on the other hand, continued to disappoint. He rejected the Black ideals that were his by birthright and the righteousness of virtue of his bloodline. Instead, he was sorted into Gryffindor at Hogwarts, befriended blood-traitors like the Potters and associated with the kind of filth they had tried to teach him to reject. Instead, he embraced the worst excesses of acceptance and tolerance. But he gave her plenty of opportunity to scream and shout at him and every time she received a letter from Hogwarts, she pulled herself up and began yelling out another howler.
Regulus on the other hand, was a perfect little pureblood Black. He was a Slytherin, practical and devious and he played his way between their torn family with the expertise of an expert politician. A skill that became even harder after Andromeda ran off with that dreadful mudblood. How dare a filthy little thief DARE approach a pureblood and a Black at that. The Potters and the Weasley's were acceptable, they were little better than mudbloods anyway, but better standards were expected from a Black. And so, in typical Walburga fashion, she sent howler after howler to her wayward niece, but in the end she had to acknowledge defeat, followed by blasting Andromeda off of the family tree.
Instead, she turned the focus of her screaming onto her useless, good for nothing- oldest son Sirius. She would not have a direct descendent of hers become the next Andromeda of the Black family. As Sirius grew older and more and more involved with the scum of the wizarding world, the more and more she screamed and yelled at him. Events came to a head when he was sixteen when she discovered that his friend was in love with a filthy mudblood. She ordered him to break off all contact. He refused and the resulting shouting match was so loud even the muggles on either side of Twelve Grimmauld Place could almost hear them.
But the shouting made her feel alive and during that argument, she was at the zenith of her prowess.
Then Sirius ran away.
She didn't know how he escaped, all she knew was that he did and to those awful Potters as well. As with Andromeda, she sent howler after howler, each one louder and more vicious than the last and every time she received no answer.
Regulus was fortunately more malleable. He continued to be a good little Black and a far better son the Sirius had been. When he joined the ranks of a new and powerful blood-purity movement called the Death Eaters, her heart swelled with pride. Sadly it was a pride that did not last.
Firstly, her son was killed. Her precious Regulus Black was dead by unknown causes and she went half mad with grief. She yelled and rallied and screeched at the walls and the remaining house elf Kreacher. Her husband Orion died not long afterwards and it was only through sheer force of will she kept herself alive.
Secondly, she saw Voldemort and what he was doing and cursed him for making the same mistakes as Gellert Grindelwald, his excesses and violence leaving scars across the magical community that would take decades to heal. Walburga was bigoted, but she was no fool. Even she understood the necessity of bringing the pureblood wizarding world together without losing more old family names. There were too few of them as it was and although they could survive the loss of the occasional disgrace, the destruction of the whole family line was dangerous.
Then one day, a few years after the fall of Voldemort for what would later be known as his first fall, Walburga had a heart attack mid-way through a screaming fit and died. And as she fell to the ground, a tear fell from her eye as she realised that the screaming was all she had left.