Ring of Fire/King's Cup Challenge. Prompt: Grimmauld Place. Include: "No, this is Patrick."
Pick a Card Challenge. Nine of Spades: Write about an overlooked character.
Grimmauld Place was a place of creeping shadows and forgotten arts. It was the home of doxies, house elves and boggarts. The house that was once proudly called the ancestral home of the Black family was now but a crumbling ruin of hubris. There was nothing pure that remained.
When had the rot set in? Kreacher wondered as he walked through the deserted halls. His magic, unbound to any witch or wizard after the death of his mistress, could only just keep the dust from clogging the air. "Was it the blood traitor?" he asked the portrait in front of him.
"No, this is Patrick," the man inside huffed, and Kreacher continued on.
Sirius Orion Black had caused it all, a part of him whispered. He remembered the years when he had been but a baby elf, when a horde of elves had filled the house. Magic had leapt like falling water from their fingertips, and the house of the Blacks was a thirsting desert. There had been children – oh, so many children – tearing through the hallways and blowing something up every third day from their accidental magic. He could remember melted cauldrons and wasted ingredients, dirty clothes that piled high in the secret rooms of the house elves and – above all – he remembered the laughter.
Those high-pitched tinkling noises that fell from the lips of sweet sweet children, and the resounding giggles that the elves would mimic to show the joy and pride they took in their work. When Kreacher had become the head elf, there had been three little sisters that visited, but it had been the two brothers who held his heart.
Fierce and powerful, they had been, and oh so mischievous. They blew through the house like a raging tornado and left destruction in every room they visited, but Kreacher hadn't minded. He had changed their diapers, calmed their tears and fed them from the moment of their birth. He could have never stopped doting on them, if it was not for that faithful day that the blood traitor had revealed his true colours and entered the house of pussies at Hogwarts.
Oh, the shame! Kreacher had burnt his fingers for weeks with the iron, wondering where he had gone wrong in looking after the boy. His mistress had wept and shouted and things had been broken, though it was not in the usual joyful smashing but one of fury and betrayal. The house elves had hated the new darkness that had crept up on them.
It had only gotten worse from then. How Kreacher wished his mistress had killed the traitor that day, the last day he had dirtied the ancestral home with his presence. Maybe then Master Regulus would still be alive. Maybe then his mistress wouldn't have died from a broken heart. Maybe then there would be younger elves running around, and Kreacher could have joined his predecessors hanging off the wall. Maybe, maybe, maybe….
Kreacher wandered through the darkened hallways and forgot. He forgot the madness of Walburga Black. He forgot the crying six-year-old heir who was always covered in the bruises of his parents' disappointment. He forgot the eleven-year-old who had pulled the house elf aside and begged him to take care of his only brother, to protect Regulus from the abuse Sirius had suffered alone for so many years. Kreacher forgot the promise that he made, and he would never realise the bitter disappointment he had been to the last living Black.
But Grimmauld Place never forgot. It locked away the memories inside its portraits and dusty artifacts, hoping that someday a Black would come and free it from the burden of rejected history.