At seven, Sirius spent his first day among Muggles.
His cousin Andromeda was watching him and Regulus for the day, and she took them into Muggle London. Regulus was fussy most of the day and spent the rest of it demanding Andromeda "be a proper witch" and do things the magical way. Sirius, on the other hand, was fascinated, and when at the end of the day, Andromeda knelt before him and said quietly, "Muggles aren't really all that stupid, are they?" he agreed with her vehemently.
He had always had something of a rebellious streak, and this discovery that his parents just might be wrong in their pureblooded ideology gave him an actual reason to rebel.
If he had known just how much that rebellion would cost him, he might not have been so quick to jump aboard with Andromeda's ideas.
(On the other hand, years later he was to compare what had happened in his life, when he rebelled, with what had happened in Regulus's, when he went on being a good little pureblood, and he wasn't sorry he had rebelled at all.)
At seven, Harry accepted that his aunt and uncle were never going to love him.
He'd tried to be perfect, tried over and over again to do everything they had ever asked him to do, to avoid doing anything "freaky." Dudley never tried to do anything they asked and threw temper tantrums nearly every day, and Harry wondered why Dudley was praised continually while he was called "freak" and "boy" and told he didn't deserve to live with them. He tried harder, but nothing changed.
He'd forced himself to do poor work at school so he wouldn't be better than their precious Dudley. He'd watched as his aunt and uncle fawned over their fat son every time he got a passing grade, and he'd thought they might be pleased with the much better grades he got. Instead, he'd been scolded severely and told not to act like he was better than Dudley. He'd promptly dropped his grades – and been ignored entirely on school matters. He didn't dare try raising them again.
In spite of all that, he still longed for just one kind word, just one affectionate touch, just one acknowledgement that he had done something right. He still clung to the hope that the Dursleys might give that to him.
That day when he was seven, he somehow wound up on the roof when he was running away from Dudley's gang. When the teacher who informed his uncle had left, Uncle Vernon swung on him and gave him the scolding of his life. And then he hit him.
That night, in the cupboard, nursing his bruised cheek and broken lip and feeling the bruises on his arms where Uncle Vernon had gripped him as he shook him, he shoved his hope that the Dursleys could love him one day deep down inside himself and forgot about it.
(But he knew, on some deep, instinctual level, that he would never be able to stop hoping, not unless his one great dream came true and someone who did love him took him away from there.)
At ten, Sirius was ready to escape to Hogwarts.
His visit to Muggle London had piqued his interest, and he had spent a great deal of time since researching Muggles, Muggleborns, and halfbloods. He had come to the conclusion that the pureblood superiority was rubbish. It was not in his nature to conceal what he felt deeply, and his changed opinions had led to a great many clashes with his parents.
They had never loved him as much as they had loved Regulus, not even before his ideology changed. Regulus had always been the perfect pureblood son, while Sirius had always been a little too wild and carefree for them to truly love him. But after he began talking about the worth of those people the Blacks traditionally saw as scum, their treatment of him changed from a tendency to give him the cold shoulder to outright verbal abuse. His parents tried to corral him back into believing the "proper" way, but the insults they freely dished out to "mudbloods," to Sirius's views, and to Sirius himself, only served to confirm to Sirius that he was in the right.
It was when his mother began perfecting the whipping jinx on him, where she waved her wand and he felt as though a stinging blow had been delivered across his back, that he really began longing for Hogwarts.
(He knew, though, that once there his actions, freed temporarily from his parent's consequences, would probably cut him off from them altogether. And though he told himself he was tough and could survive on his own, without parents, a trembling little part of his heart cried out to be loved as his parents loved Regulus.)
At ten, Harry had learned how to cope.
He did all his chores and kept his grades lower than Dudley's; he kept his head down and called Uncle Vernon "sir" and gave him no obvious backtalk. But now it was not out of the aching desire for them to give him a little acceptance, never again; it was because he did not like being acquainted with the back of Uncle Vernon's hand. He was not afraid of his uncle, so he told himself, but he didn't like being hit in the least either.
So he muttered uncomplimentary, sarcastic comments about the Dursleys under his breath, when he knew they couldn't hear; he obeyed them, but only, he told himself, because he wanted to; he did his homework perfectly in the cupboard under the stairs and then dumbed it down before he turned it in. He distanced himself as much as he possibly could, and whenever they shot their denigrating comments at him, he let them roll off his back and outwardly showed them no heed.
(He never let on that every time they called him a freak, every time they said they wished he had died with his parents, every time they called him the son of ne'er-do-wells who didn't deserve to live, it drove the wounds carved deep inside him deeper. He never showed that he lay in his cupboard some nights and cried silently with the intangible, aching pain.)
At eleven, Sirius let himself be sorted into Gryffindor.
He'd met James Potter on the train, and they'd become friends instantly. James was everything he wished he could be – he was a pureblood, too, though Sirius knew that didn't matter; he was loved fervently by his parents; he thought Muggleborns and halfbloods were as good as he was and didn't pay any price for that belief. For some reason, though, Sirius didn't envy James, maybe because he was warm and outgoing and couldn't care less what Sirius's background was. James would be sorted into Gryffindor, Sirius could tell, because he had just that sort of attitude – the one that believed he could take life by the horns and come out jolly and unscathed.
(Sirius knew better, of course, but he wasn't going to tell James that. Not yet.)
So Sirius stood in line to be sorted and knew that his future hung on his choice. If he went into Slytherin like a good Black, he might someday have a chance of reconciling with his parents, maybe even being loved by them, but it would mean becoming a bigoted pureblood. If he let himself go into Gryffindor, he'd probably be with James, and he would have no pressure from those around him to be proud of his heritage – but he'd cut himself off completely from his family.
Well, well, well, the Hat said when it sat on his head. You are a most interesting case. You could fit several places, of course, but you have the courage to stand up for what you know to be right and the nobility to go with it. I think Gryffindor would be just the place for you.
Not Slytherin? Sirius thought, because he couldn't quite give up the dream of reconciling yet.
The Hat was silent for a moment, and when it spoke, there was somehow a gentleness to its words, as if it hated having to dash his dreams. You have no real ambition to speak of, and you are too straightforward to be cunning. I am afraid that is not the House for you.
Very well, Sirius thought, because he really didn't want to grow up a bigot. It was just hard to let go of his family.
I think you will find family in Gryffindor, the Hat told him gently, before it shouted to the Hall at large, "Gryffindor!"
Sirius was glad he had been sorted into Gryffindor afterwards and cursed himself for that moment of hesitation under the hat. James was swiftly becoming the brother he had never had, and for the first time in his life he was surrounded by people who believed what he did about bloodlines.
(There were moments, though, as he carelessly did well in his classes, that he knew his actions had cut himself off altogether from his family – moments when he was desperately afraid what his new direction would mean for him.)
At eleven, Harry discovered he was a wizard.
This clarified to him all the things he had done that he had never intended to do. He had a proper name for it now, and it was nice, very nice, to be able to insist to himself in his head that he was not a freak, he was a wizard. More than anything, though, the discovery gave him a way to escape before he grew up. He would finally be able to leave his relatives' house, live in a place where there were other freaks – wizards, he corrected desperately – learn how to control the powers he hadn't even begun to understand yet.
(He knew boarding school would never be able to fulfill his longing for a home, that teachers would never equal parents. He told himself it didn't matter, as long as he didn't have to be despised by everyone there.)
He was sorted into Gryffindor, mostly because he knew Malfoy was a bully, and the last thing he wanted was to live with bullies here when he had just escaped them. And Hogwarts was magnificent, and it was wonderful not being looked down on every time he did something freaky – magical, that was. No one despised him here except Professor Snape, and Harry quickly started hating Snape with a passion, because he had just gotten away from being hated into a world that accepted him, and Snape just brought all that hate back into his mind. It was hard not to flash back to being at the Dursleys around him.
But in spite of the immense relief that being in the magical world was, in spite of the fact that he knew he wasn't a freak now, the image from that summer that stayed burned in his mind was Uncle Vernon's threat.
The beefy man had taken Harry aside after they had gotten back to their house from the hut on the rock expedition; taking off his belt, he dangled it before Harry's eyes. "You may have learned about your freaky powers now, boy," he snarled, "but one use of them here from now on – ONE use – and I'll not hesitate to take this to you."
Harry had swallowed and said, "Yes, sir," in an obedient little voice, but he couldn't forget that moment. He knew his uncle well enough by now to know when a threat was real and when it was a bluff, and this was very real. And the last thing he wanted to have happen was feel that belt whipping him.
So even as he learned magic, he held himself back from doing his best, just as he had in the Muggle school, and all the teachers recorded him as a mediocre student, except Snape, who recorded him as a wretched one.
(After all, he had to go back to Privet Drive every summer, and he couldn't let his magic loose there. He had held it in hard for ten years, and he couldn't stop holding it in now, so he just let little bits out to do his work in class.)
At twelve, Sirius started putting as much distance between himself and his birth family as possible.
Spending a summer being tortured was a good way to make one both fear and despise one's family, Sirius learned. He'd been right to fear what his sorting would cost him; both his parents now hated him for it. His father mostly ignored him, shooting him a derogatory "mudblood-lover" or "blood-traitor" if he ever saw him, but his mother took it on herself to re-indoctrinate him properly.
That meant hours of lessons in proper pureblood etiquette and in the reasons why they were better than the "filthy mudbloods." Sirius had a temper and couldn't keep from talking back at times when her statements became outrageous, which turned her lessons into torture sessions. She never laid a hand on him (Sirius bit his lip and prevented himself from remembering the nights when she would hug him and tuck him in), but he quickly learned to fear a wand lifted in his direction. His mother perfected sharp stinging hexes and whipping jinxes on him and other spells that left no marks but made him miserably uncomfortable.
It got to the point where Sirius flinched if she even pointed at him with her wand, even if she did nothing. He had never been so glad to escape back to Hogwarts.
No one knew what had happened there, except perhaps James, who gave him a few odd looks when he flinched as the professors pulled out their wands to teach. But Sirius, determined to rebel, didn't reform his ways as his parents might have wished. He threw himself into making friends with Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew, who were definitely not pureblooded, and brought them into the close friendship he and James had formed the previous year. Even the discovery that Remus was a werewolf didn't phase him. His parents hated werewolves, and he knew from knowing Remus last year that they could be perfectly normal wizards most of the time. That combination of facts made him determined to befriend Remus all the more when he knew he was a werewolf, partly because he couldn't bear to see Remus lonely and partly because doing so felt very rebellious indeed.
And he played more pranks on Slytherin than ever before and dragged his friends into doing that too. Slytherins represented the dark, the bigoted side he was determinedly choosing against. He saw everything in black and white, and the Slytherins were black.
The only exception he gave to this was that he never pranked his little brother, who came to Hogwarts and was sorted into Slytherin that year. He gave Regulus immunity.
Sirius found a surrogate family with James, Remus, and Peter, and a purpose in repelling every hint of pureblooded bigotry that came near him. And there were times at Hogwarts when he was happy.
(But deep down inside, Sirius knew he had been wounded deeply by the summer, and the wounds were bleeding badly. He knew he threw himself everything he was doing to mask the pain of being tortured by his own family. He knew, even if he never acknowledged it to himself, that his heart's cry was for someone else to love him like a parent.)
At twelve, Harry was beaten by his uncle.
He hadn't asked for a house elf to show up in his bedroom on the night of his birthday. He hadn't asked Dobby to drop the pudding on the kitchen floor, either. But there was no way he could explain house elves or why this one had ruined the pudding to his uncle. There was no point anyhow; Vernon would have just decreed it his fault no matter what he said. And his uncle was most determined to follow up on his promise from last summer. So Harry gritted his teeth and clenched his hands and felt the blows fall sharply across his thin back.
Dobby has failed most spectacularly in preventing me from going back to Hogwarts, Harry thought with a grim smile as he watched bars being nailed to his window afterwards. The house elf must have thought that threatening him with getting in trouble with his aunt and uncle would be enough to make him say he wouldn't go back to Hogwarts. But Harry was honest, and he wouldn't say that unless he meant it. And what Dobby apparently hadn't realized was that he would much rather take this one punishment, even if it was harsher than any he'd ever received before, and go back to Hogwarts, where he was free and could preform magic and wasn't just a drudge and a freak, than stay here and be punished by the Dursleys' words and disgust all year round. Going back to the magical world was well worth one beating.
Still, Harry thought as he lay on his side, feeling every bleeding welt on his back stand out sharply, this incident had done something to him. Some little living hope in him had died, and he felt empty and dried out.
(If he had bothered trying to identify it, which he really didn't, he might have realized that it was the hope that his life would ever get better that had died. He could stay here and be a freak, or he could go back to where he was a wizard and be in danger. Apparently he couldn't be safe – or loved – anywhere.)