Deeper than Madness
She is not very old in that day of her earliest memory. She knows this because in it, she sits at her mother's toilette, her fingers toiling at a string of pearls she remembers in her later years she is forbidden to touch. Her mother sits behind her, and Walburga can see her white hands in the glare of the mirror, twining and coiling strands of her hair into plaits, dark and precise and separated by the clean white lines of her scalp.
"I don't want to dress up today. It's not even Yuletide yet," she whines, picking at the black lace of her skirt. Her mother pulls sharply at her braids, and though Walburga winces, she understands this command for silence and does not cry out.
"Your cousin Charis is being married," her mother replies tersely, "to that Crouch boy." She draws a ribbon from the end of her wand and ties it into her daughter's hair. "A perfect waste, but with that halfwit Yaxley pushing things through, it's the best she's going to get."
"Married?" Walburga scowls and wrinkles her face. The pearls are cold and smooth and will not be warmed by her hands. Marriage is for old people, and Charis is if barely older than she is. Wulburga asks, "Does she love him?"
Her mother does not respond, but Walburga can see her face, screwed and sneering. "That is beyond the point," she says at last, tying off the last braid with a bit of silk. "Walburga ," she says suddenly, turning her daughter to look her in the face. "You are a woman, but beyond this, you are a Black. We are the descendents of ancient kings; our house is of most noble blood. We always come back to the family."
Walburga Black holds this to be her defining truth. She is a Black, but hasn't the inclination to come back to the family, rather, every intention of remaining in it. So when her father beckons her to take the hand of his cousin's son, she does so with a batted eye and a simper. Orion Black is young and lank and though Walburga sees her own face within his, he not a man easily loved, and so Walburga has no trouble despising him. His fingers are thick and meaty and his square Scottish jaw juts with undeserved arrogance.
The house he brings her to is heavily cursed, thrice hexed from the outside in and for a while she lives alone, surrounded by ancient accessories and bottled in time. For a while, he will not touch her, and for a while, she is glad of it, leaves him to his painted whores and beautiful boys. She has her own interests, none quite so messy as his, because she knows the meaning of discretion and lines the hollow walls of Grimmauld Place with tiny bones and charcoaled flesh.
The house whispers to her sometimes, fervent accusations and muffled stories, and sometimes she sets her embroidery aside, closes her eyes and listens. Then she casts a silencing charm and quiet wraps around her again, alone and mute amongst the jeweled ruins of her ancestors.
When her brother marries Druella Rosier, it is not without satisfaction that Walburga smiles upon her wedding. She is a thin woman, hooded brows and nondescript hair, but Walburga recognizes a slant to her eyes that she has known all her life, and welcomes her as an ambassador of three generations returning to the fold. Druella is not bright, but she is exceedingly fertile, and Wulburga knows her brother needs little encouragement for him to turn to a warm body in the sheets. Their children are born in what appears an impossibly rapid succession, but girls, every last one of them.
"Won't you try again?" she asks her sister-in-law, not without a guise of concern above her calculation.
"Oh, well, Cygnus says we've had our fill for now," Druella responds with casual flippancy. "Besides, Orion's is the main house, and we can always wait –" She stops, but Wulburga is reminded that Black this woman may now be, she has her share of lesser blood in her, though that does little to excuse this abbreviated slight.
When Walburga finally conceives, her brother's youngest is almost a year old. Her husband's conditions are elaborate and, Wulburga feels, unnecessarily involved. He hasn't touched her since their wedding night, and that brusque ten minute affair had been unsatisfactory for all parties involved, and had left her without child. This second time, it takes, and Wulburga's triumph is more than worth the disgusting grunts of her husband plowing into her from behind. She has the Tree moved from the front hall into the library, where she can gaze at it from her chair, to figure a properly ancestral name for her son.
In three months, this victory is dead. She finds a book of star charts and arithmancy and summarily proves the son she'd thought she'd carried does not exist. It is a girl.
Within the hour, it too, does not exist.
She diplomatizes her husband from across the vast dinner table. "What happened to the last one I gave you?" he demands, sucking wetly at a chicken bone.
"I lost it," she says, picking disinterestedly at her food.
Orion snorts. "Can't see how that's my problem; besides, it's not my fau—" He chokes, coughs, flails for a moment before he goes rigid in his chair.
Wulburga wipes her mouth delicately and stands, slips her wand back into her belt before she crosses the room. "I thought you might say that." She smiles, and she is not unpretty when she does so, narrow Black cheekbones framing perfectly around a full, red mouth. She pushes her husband's stiffened arms so that they spread above him, like perverse surrender, and she makes herself comfortable in his lap. "This can be very easy," she tells him, close to his ear, her fingers working daintily at his flies. "All you have to do is obey." Still smiling, she presses their lips together and imagines she can taste his spiteful submission just beneath the grease of his dinner.
Orion's fights are short-lived, as everything else about him. He gives in, soon enough, and lies still when she bids him to, even learns to come at her beckon. The next few turns are disappointments, but Wulburga is as adept at potions as she is at hexes, and bleeds them away with a few swallows of bitter root.
When her first son is born, it is the end of winter and she is no longer young. He is a strong one, stubborn. He fights her every step of every way and has to be torn from her womb with the midwife's pliers before he will be born. Wulburga holds her son of a thousand difficulties and he squalls, angry and red. Sirius, she names him, with deep satisfaction. This one may find his own line.
Orion comes home two months after, cringes puerilely when the house elf offers to help him pick the baby up. "You're sure he's mine?" he asks, extending a finger to prod Sirius's face and yelping when the boy sneers gummily and bites at him. Walburga laughs, but waves him to her bedside, yanks him down to her with a fist in his sleeve.
"No," she murmurs to him, pinning him beneath her as he sputters things like 'woman, are you mad—' and 'the boy's right there—'
"He's mine," she tells him, teeth in his ear, and her husband eyes are wide, but comprehending.
He doesn't touch her again. Her or her son.
It doesn't matter. She's got what she wanted.
Sirius grows what seems preternaturally quickly and proves to be no more cooperative in the cradle than he was in the womb. He demands to be held, shrieks when he's set down, cries in the middle of the night for no reason at all.
"He must be a nuisance!" Druella exclaims, leaning over Wulburga's son. Her words turn to squeals when Sirius fists thick coils of her hair and yanks. Wulburga smiles as her sister-in-law coaxes ineffectively for 'good boy, let go of Auntie's hair, let go.' She smoothes her hand over her swelling belly and shears the ends of Druella's hair with an absent flick of her wand. Sirius screams in delight and Druella gasps, but Wulburga isn't watching her sister-in-law's frantic attempts to re-grow her fringe, only her son as he waves his fists at her, colorless strands still clutched tight as he shrieks to be lifted. Her next child may not be a son, Wulburga decides, as long as it is just as beastly as its brother.
But her second child forces his way into the world almost a month before he's expected. He catches Wulburga entirely by surprise and is already half born by the time word can be given to the midwife, who Apparates in time only to hand the boy over to his mother and to clean up the mess. Wulburga knows immediately that this son will not be his brother. The midwife has to strike him twice with her palm before he can even be convinced to wail a few mournful notes before quieting almost immediately. Regulus, she calls him, but he does not respond, a pale, slick, tiny thing between her hands.
Regulus's stillness is infinite, obstinate. He will not eat, he will not cry. He shifts uncomfortably when he is held, and if Wulburga holds him too long, he shudders and coughs, mewling bursts of sound, looking up at her with horrid, revoltingly dull black eyes, as if he refuses to be brought to tears.
Sirius's potential is seemingly without bounds. Though he is only ten months older, he is almost four times his brother's size, and his eyes are a hot, bright blue. By the time he learns to walk – a full three months before any of her girls had figured it out, Druella decries – he is trying the house elves and terrorizing his cousins. He will not be told what not to do and nearly kills himself at least a dozen times before he even learns to speak. Sirius grins like a baby-toothed demon and screams like a devil and latches to Walburga's skirts just long enough for her attention but never enough for her to touch.
Regulus is not quite so anything his brother is, and that forever remains the insurmountable difference between the two in Wulburga's mind. He is still of Black blood, this she cannot begin to deny; his nose grows in straight and narrow, his mouth generous and red. But he lacks the regularity in feature that besets his brother's face; he grows forever more carefully, forever more delicately than Sirius ever could. Illness tails behind him like the dragonflies that follow his brother from the lily pond, imprecise but dogged. Wulburga is forever culling this herb for fever, or this root for rash. She wonders clinically if these bouts are possibly a way of testing the boy's strength, or if he will finally crumple beneath the weight of his own body and die in his infancy. She can not honestly say which she prefers when Sirius, bright and inquisitive, draws gradually in from the outdoors and discovers a new curiosity with which to fill his days.
The first time Wulburga finds her older son wrapped around his brother, she simply assumes that boy's unresponsiveness had bored him to sleep. She pets his hair fondly, appraises his fine judgment, and has the house elves move him to his own room. Wulburga thinks nothing more of it until crashes shake the house and shrill cries of 'Master Sirius! Master Sirius!' break her from her stitching.
She Apparates upstairs, incurious about what is being broken, only what occurrence it is this time that has her son smashing family heirlooms so indiscriminately. She appears and finds the house elves ducked behind various pieces of furniture, still crying out her son's name as pieces of crystal and china whirl about the bed in the center of the room.
"Sirius!" she shouts, brandishing her wand, but a candelabra spins out towards her and strikes it from her hand. Her son sits hunched in the middle of the bed, face and expression caught between irritation and blankness. A calculating part of Wulburga's mind triumphantly catalogs this incident as further evidence of her eldest's destined greatness – four years old and using magic! – but her rationality decries her for losing her wand to a child's temper tantrum. The whirling dies eventually, and the house elves set out at once repairing damaged walls, dented furniture, powdered pieces of glassware. "Sirius! Do you know what you have done?" she demands gleefully, wrapping her fingers around her son's soft wrists, tugging, though Sirius remains unmoving. "Oh, darling, come here! We must celebrate—"
"Don't want to go," he mumbles unhappily, and Wulburga is momentarily startled enough that he is able to twist away from her hands and clamber back towards the pillows where, Wulburga notes with dazed disbelief, her younger son is still asleep. "Don't want to," Sirius repeats, and puts his arm back around his brother's shoulder.
Sirius's mind is not one that settles for momentary curiosities, Wulburga assures herself, but weeks pass and she still hears happy declarations of victory and demands for "Sirius, wait!" from behind the nursery door. This is one thing, she finds, that her older son will not be distracted from.
He stays indoors all summer, books in his lap as he pretends to read, piecing together stories of ancient Black glory from patchy memory and pure fabrication. He pulls his chair to Regulus's side of the dining room table when his brother is well enough, takes his meals in Regulus's room when he isn't. If Wulburga bribes him with sweets in the morning, tells him to keep them to himself, Regulus's sheets are invariably smeared with chocolate by the afternoon.
He still will not come when he is called, but slowly, increasingly, Wulburga realizes just how his reasons have changed.
Autumn comes in bursts of red and blue, and by then Regulus is finally well enough to venture outdoors. Sirius will not let go of his brother's fingers, waits for him even when he trips and lags between the topiary and snags his oversized coat in the wilting rosebushes.
This cannot do, Wulburga thinks as she watches them, gathers the last of her herbs and flowers before the coming frost. But he is still young, she reminds herself. This bind that ties him now will only make him stronger when it is broken. "Mother!" she hears shouted from behind her. She looks up and sees Sirius mercifully alone, though scowling and petulant, balling his tiny fists. "What are you going to do with that?" he demands, pointing. Wulburga glances down. She's caught a gnome by the spindly throat, she realizes, an action so perfunctory that she hardly notices when she snaps their necks and tills them beneath the soil.
"Sirius," she says cheerfully. "This animal has been burrowing through Mother's garden. Do you know what will happen if I don't kill it?"
Sirius' face screws for a moment, but he shrugs, defeated. "It will continue to burrow," Wulburga explains, fingers curled tight, just beneath sharp, pointed teeth. "And it will breed, and eventually, Mother's entire garden will be so hollowed by gnomes that there will not be any space left for the things that are supposed to be here, like these pretty flowers." Her son's face relaxes and Wulburga nods satisfactorily, swelling with pride at her child, her son who at so young can understand that everything has its place.
"Then you understand what you must do," she says, pulls him by his hands and puts them beneath the tiny teeth like her fingers had been. Sirius looks contemplatively at the gnome for a long moment, as if considering.
Wulburga breathes, "Go on, just a little snap, just pull—" But then Sirius' hands fly apart like white birds and the gnome yips and dives back into its hole before Wulburga can even react.
"Sirius!" she shouts. "Don't you understand that—"
"I understand, Mother," her son says, quiet. His face is smooth and perfectly calm, filled with a sort of half understanding of when children's minds oversimplify matters to better make them fit. "But Regulus was crying. He didn't like it when they stopped moving." He turns back to the house almost solemnly, shuts the heavy door behind him and leaves his mother staring back at where the gnome had disappeared, as if she could reach down after it and reclaim her hopes from within the earth.
She brings in a tutor for Sirius a few months after his sixth birthday, a bookish young man from her sister-in-law's family, recently graduated from school. Sirius shows no inclination in learning his letters or numbers, leaves his tutor nasty surprises in between book pages and bed sheets. Wulburga can hardly be persuaded to do anything for him, even when the Rosier boy requests that she at least lock the library doors so her son won't, at interval, run from the room. She does him one better though, and locks her second son in the library along.
Wulburga is astonished, but satisfied, when Regulus proves a steady student, and cultivates her anticipation of Sirius's jealous violence at being outstripped. But when his brother asks, Sirius masters his multiplication charts in a week, and delights in showing Regulus the Trick of Nines and how to cheat through elevens. Regulus, in this and everything else, is just a little slower than Sirius, and there is no rivalry, no competition, only Sirius helping his brother every afternoon with his Latin grammar and arithmetic. Walburga watches them, a restive ache slowly deadening her nerves as Regulus, who will not even look his mother in the face when he speaks, gazes up at his brother with amazed, adoring eyes that shine, no longer dull in the slanting light.
She feels plans coming apart with every tamed outburst, with every gentled tantrum. She feels her hopes coming apart like unstitched seams. The frustration of it digs at her spine, grows like an elusive itch in her fingers: the impotence of her word against that of a little boy, her subjugation come to her at last in the body of her son.
It takes only a little much more to release Wulburga into fury. Sirius is seven and Regulus is six and the Black house is a treasure trove of ancient wealth but no less than a glass house with two young boys smashing about every which way. Wulburga feels the clinkering crash of some expensive finery or another smashing to the ground moments before she hears it. The house elves try to placate her with assurances that they could have the vase or urn or porcelain figure patched up and replaced, that Mistress shouldn't trouble herself, please. She sweeps past them into the music room, blood still wet on her slippers and finds Sirius sweeping at the crystalline pieces of a bud vase with his crude and childish magic.
Regulus stands silently to one side, eyes wide and still and dark beneath his too-long hair, not looking up, not looking at her, simply staring, staring as if Sirius's mess is sacred, the most sacrosanct thing in the world. Wulburga draws across the room, stepping over her older son's feet and bringing her hand over her shoulder. The back of her hand strikes across Regulus' jaw, jeweled ring rending a delicate line of blood through soft flesh. A child's clear voice sings through the room, a cry ripped from somewhere deep within and Walburga's eyes meet her second son's, who does her the little consideration of assuring that that voice is not his when he swallows pathetically and wipes at his mouth. But it is too late, too little, this tenacity he's so lacked. His defiance of her expectations now does little to soothe her fury.
"Mother, what are you—"
"It was you!' she shrieks, storms rising in the electric crackle at the tip of her wand. "You barbaric piece of filth!" She yanks Regulus' arm from about his face and pulls him to his feet. "You broke it! You broke it!" she chants as her palm becomes slick, her vision red.
"Mother--!" she feels Sirius catch her elbows in his clumsy hands, but forces him back with a jerk and a shudder. He has to learn, she thinks wildly. He has to learn what is proper brutality, because he won't survive without it, because he can't keep depending on –
"Crucio!" she shrieks, and watches with vindication as sparks dance over her younger son's twisting, damnably silent body as his brother screams, no, Mother, stop --
"Stop!" the magic is watery and unguided, a product of a child's misspent passion and it strikes her as a feeble pinch to the middle of her back. But it is enough, more than enough, and she whirls about in brittle outrage, her concentration snapped. Sirius breathes wetly through his spit and tears, dark hair a flying mane about his livid face. She won't have this, a child – a fool – who doesn't know his place, who doesn't know his limitations.
Anger crackles from her fingertips again, fills the room with static, but Sirius is her favorite son for a reason, smarter than his brother, not much older, but quicker. He is a sudden spark shooting towards her, shoving at her knees, tangling her skirts between her feet and ducking beneath her hands. When she turns, those two seconds too slow, he's already twisted around and behind her, crouched against the papered wall and wrapped rigidly around his brother. "She can't do that," she hears her son mutter, "I won't let her, wake up Regulus, she can't –" He stares at her, fierce red mouth moving furiously, hands gripped tight around Regulus' shoulders and hair. His eyes are dark, still and huge, dull like unpolished riverstones, like sheathed blades.
"Mistress," a house elf Kreacher croaks. "If I may, Mistress, it was Master Sirius –"
"Clean this up," Wulburga snarls and she steps around the crumpled pile of old dishcloths and bones.
Later, Regulus, patched and bandaged with vulgar house elf magic, creeps into her rooms and, bending his head, apologizes. She acknowleges him, but only as an effect, as behind him, beyond the heavy oak door, Walburga hears a rustle of angry movement and sees a shadowed shape move from beyond the candle light, opaque blue eyes lost in the dark.
Blacks don't love, Wulburga Black knows, but they always come back to the family. Her son will forgive her. This is not a battle, this is not a war. She has lost nothing.