001. Beginnings
Sirius stared out the window of 12 Grimauld Place at the pouring rain and bleary grey London weather through the crack left between the two thick black curtains that fell to the floor. How in hell had he ended up here?
The past few weeks, being around so many old, familiar faces… he'd spent a lot of time remembering. All the ones who were no longer with them, the hopes and lives that had been dashed and ground into the cold unforgiving asphalt of reality. Events rolled into each other, spinning off consequences, a war that never really ended.
So many years later, and they were still caught in the same old struggles. What had they all died for?
His eyes trailed to the tapestry that took up an imposing place along the wall to his right, a cynical sigh escaping his lips. His heritage, his…family. The word tasted bitter on his lips, filled with sickening formality, memories of stifling loyalties, and a wealth of pain.
The past was reduced to blurred events, half-glimpses and blurred feelings. Some details were razor sharp, others smeared to nothingness. Hesitantly, he reached out and ran his fingertips along the black, charred hole where his name had once been so proudly emblazoned. What were you supposed to feel when you were blasted out from your home, your name a word whispered in hate and disgust? He wasn't sure.
He sighed, his sharp shoulders sinking beneath robes that still hung loose around his body. He had always been lanky, but his current state made his previous body seem stocky, far more solid then he felt now.
Perhaps more despairing then any sadness or hurt was the nothingness, the complete and utter lack of feeling as he traced again and again over that place. It was foolish and he knew better, but for a moment he felt as though he had been erased from the face of the earth. He was invisible, empty, lost in the greys and the shadows of the cold stark room, standing in the broken heritage of his house.
He was the last.
No, not even that. Because there, on the tapestry, there was nothing. A blank space, a destroyed life.
X
"Hi, what's your name?"
Confident eyes, a daring smirk, and messy black hair that would not stay in any sort of ordered state. In a word: trouble.
"I'm Sirius Black," he shook the other boy's hand, sitting down across from him. He loosened his tie, slouching across the seat. His mother always had hated that habit, but she wasn't here to nag him anymore. "What's yours?"
"James Potter."
Potter. He had heard the name whispered among his parents friends. They were blood traitors, friends of half-bloods and mugglelovers. Not worthy of associating with. Flouting tradition and their own lineage. A disgrace to the lines of purebloods.
But James merely grinned at him and offered him a chocolate frog, and Sirius found himself smiling back as he took it.
X
It was simple, an introduction. Life's great gnarls, it seemed, were spun from the subtlest of changes.
X
"It's bad enough that you were sorted in with those muggle-lovers and mudbloods, now you're best friends with Potter and his scabby friends."
He stared up at Bellatrix, towering menacingly over him. It was midway through his first year, the last for her. And he realized suddenly that there was a gap between them, a chink where the pieces no longer matched up. He couldn't sympathize or understand her hate anymore.
The thought both terrified and emboldened him as he straightened and looked her square in the eye.
"What will you mother and father think? They're going to hear about this sooner or later," she hissed, piercing gaze alight with that dangerous gleam that seemed too old for her years.
"That's my concern, Bella," he replied coldly.
It occurred to him then, as he looked at her in the darkness of the cold hallway as night fell out beyond the walls, that he no longer applied himself only in terms of family and duty. His obligations and expectations had seemed suspended here in this haven from stuffy traditions.
X
Before he had known it, he began to form a division in his mind without being completely aware of it between himself and "them".
X
"You know they're wrong, though, don't you?" Andromeda asked him, setting down her teacup.
Sirius stared down at his own muddled brew. He had never really liked tea all that much. "Yeah."
The ring glittered on her finger. He found it hard to not stare. Bellatrix's marriage had almost been easier—both because it had been exactly what he had expected of her and because the distance between them was now abysmal. But Andy… It had raged and roiled through his household. He was sick of treading careful lines, of the constant fights with his parents, of their threats and storming. "It's hard when it's your family, though."
Andromeda smiled fondly, though there were traces of an older, near motherly sadness in it. "Family is not only defined by blood, Sirius."
X
Where did the end begin?
Life was not a series of starts and stops. It was circumstances bleeding into each other, cause and effect, action and reaction. Inescapable. He wondered, sometimes, what the slightest flicker of a difference could have affected. How his life might have been.
He had once been the heir of this legacy, now dismal and broken. Once the future had seem bright with promise and wealth and glory. He had known his place and been assured of his supremacy.
He remembered the grandeur of his parents and their glittering world as a child.
The power and thrill of magic when he first began his learning at Hogwarts.
Camaraderie and laughter amongst friends as they ran wild in their youth, unstoppable and full of their own glory.
Fear and the growing threats of war that crept around their school across their education.
Struggling to comfort Remus after a hard day.
Watching his family be shredded to pieces by their beliefs.
The terror and exhilaration when he stomped out across the threshold of 12 Grimauld Place with all his worldly possessions in tow.
He had lived through so much—how had it ended here? In this drab room with its empty grandeur, skeletal remains of a beauty and majesty that had withered in the grasp of time.
He asked this question silently to the imposing tapestry, and the splendid titles and generations upon generations of noble blood embroidered in fine detail stared back down at the last heir of the Black house, asking the same question.