Author's Notes: Written for the Archery (2K and longer) activity for Camp Potter.
Write about a father and his child(ren).
)O(
"Those sons of yours are a disgrace," Walburga said. She bit off each word and spat it out as if it tasted like the polluted blood she accused their sons of having when she was in one of her rages. "Sirius- the things he had said in recent days have been positively disgusting. You should discipline them."
Sons of yours. Orion wanted to protest his wife's phrasing. They were hardly his sons, even if they did have a bit of him around their noses and mouths - a faint approximation of his looks in certain features was far from being enough to warrant pinning the blame for their existence or behaviour upon him. He was barely any closer to them than he was to the Lestrange boys. If someone had asked him Regulus's favourite Quidditch team, or the names of any of Sirius's friends, he wouldn't have been able to do anything but stare and blink blankly. Even Walburga was closer to them than he was, and she was no doting mother. At least she, hawklike, observed them with the intent of picking them apart, instead of only watching them with vague and passing interest as Orion did.
"What have they done this time?" he asked at last, after an extremely long pause where he tried to search out his words.
"Sirius is talking about Andromeda." Walburga's mouth twisted in such disgust that she might have just bitten into a rotting tomato. "As if she's someone to be admired."
Oh, her. Orion wet his lips absently with his tongue. Poor, dreadful, pitiful Andromeda. No one spoke a word about her anymore, except a disgusted hiss about the awful things she had done, and perhaps a whisper about how she had married a Mudblood, and wasn't that just the most horrible thing anyone had heard? No, Orion thought, not hardly. Her immediate family avoided even that; to talk to Bellatrix or Narcissa, one might have thought that they had never had a third sister. Privately, Orion pitied Andromeda in the same vague way that he pitied everyone who had had the misfortune to grow up in the Black family or one of its offshoots. Disgusting as her betrayal to her blood might be, he couldn't find it in him to be disgusted by her, the way the others were. Disgust was too strong a feeling for his taste, in any case.
"Orion! Did you hear what I just said?"
"Yes." He hesitated for as long as he dared, and when Walburga looked as if she might actually explode with anger unless he contributed something to the conversation, he added, "He's very young. Just talking about her might not mean–"
"Might not mean that he really believes that what she did was right? Don't be a fool, Orion, of course that's what it means! And I would have expected Regulus to set him right, but he just nods along with it! Disgusting! Disgraceful!"
There was no use in trying to disagree with her. It was a fruitless waste of energy. Walburga had decided years ago that their sons - Sirius in particular - were blights upon the family tree, and Orion did not care enough to try to dissuade her of her convictions about them. Still, he felt a little disquiet when he saw the anger on her face, the hatred boiling just below the cold façade of tight lips and yellowing skin. Danger radiated off her like heat from a lamp, and if Orion were any kind of father, he would not have allowed her to so much as go close to his sons when she was in this state. If he were any sort of father, he would have tried to protect them.
He didn't.
She stood up from the table, sending the chair careening backwards, and stormed out, and he took the time to finish his bourbon before trudging up the stairs and taking a seat in the parlour.
There he sat, stone-still, and listened. He heard Sirius padding down the hallway, saw him pass the parlour door, then heard the bath water running. A few moments later, Walburga passed by the door as well. She walked with a decisive stride, and did not even look over at Orion. For half a second, framed in the doorway, she looked very much like a statue of a warrior striding into battle.
Her battle was no battle at all. A battle needed an opponent. She had no opponent, only a victim.
Orion felt the smallest of twinges in his legs and stomach, but still he did not rise, did not try to stop her. He sat and listened.
Her footsteps paused for a moment, then he heard the creaking of a door, and softer, slower footsteps that were still quite certainly hers. The door clicked shut again. The water stopped running.
He heard the struggling, the splashing, and then finally the choked cry, and yet he did not move from his armchair. He listened until the splashing stopped, the door crashed open, and Walburga's hurried footsteps were audible again, now underscored with wails of protest from Sirius. When Walburga passed by the door, drenched from head to foot and red in the face, he did muster up the energy to ask, "What happened?"
"Nothing," she said sharply. He might as well not have said anything. It wasn't as though he didn't already know. He could see with his ears: he could picture just how Walburga might have perched on the edge of the bath, with - for just a second - the mask of a loving mother, then reached out, put her hand over Sirius's head, and forced it beneath the water. The only part of the scene that Orion couldn't quite see in his mind's eye was why Walburga had let him free. A moment of compassion - or weakness - perhaps, or maybe it was only that Sirius had fought too hard.
Walburga might have murdered the boy that night, and Orion would have done nothing about it. He didn't even feel a shred of the guilt he should have experienced. What did it matter if his sons died? They were hardly anything to do with him.
But when Sirius passed by the door, red-eyed, hands shaking, in his damp nightshirt, Orion cleared his throat.
Sirius whipped around, eyes narrowing, and his hands clenched visibly.
"Yes, Father?"
Orion didn't know precisely what he meant to say, and he stared blankly at Sirius for much longer than he meant to, struggling to find the words. At last, he managed to say, in a very dull, flat voice that certainly did not convey what a father should have felt for his son nearly being drowned, "Your mother…"
Two words were all he could get out before he needed to pause again, but it was enough. Sirius drew himself up, jutted his chin out, and glared.
"She didn't do anything."
He might have been protecting her. Orion doubted it. It was more likely meant to protect his own pride, and Orion sighed a laborious sigh before he spoke again.
"She did."
"No, she didn't!" Sirius's face was crimson, and he lifted a hand and rubbed vigorously at his eyes - probably stinging from soapy water. "She didn't."
Orion couldn't think what to say to convince him that he knew otherwise, so he simply stared at him. People always seemed to fall apart when someone looked at them for too long, even if Orion's stare wasn't piercing in the least. He doubted he would have broken down and spilled any secrets if someone had looked at him the way he looked at other people, but then, he didn't have secrets boiling inside him the way some people seemed to. His secrets - and oh, there were many, and many more secrets belonging to other people that he had managed to pick up over time - simply settled to the bottom of his heart like sediment in water.
Sirius took only moments to crack. His lip began to wobble, and he crossed his arms over his chest and glared.
"Anyway, she didn't hurt me any." He paused for half a breath, then added, "She's mad."
"She's your mother."
"I don't care!"
What Orion intended with that statement, even he wasn't sure. Walburga being Sirius's mother didn't make her any less mad. He certainly wouldn't have changed his perspective if someone had told him that he should say that his own mother hadn't been mad, simply by virtue of her being his mother. And she had never even tried to drown him.
"Why?" he asked, and Sirius snorted and rubbed at his eyes. When he spoke, his voice wobbled tearfully.
"Probably because we fought earlier. I said Andromeda had the right idea, running away."
"You shouldn't have said that."
"I didn't say anything else! I didn't say I was going to run away?"
"Didn't say it?"
"Didn't- didn't say it- didn't mean it…" For a moment, Sirius looked frightened, an animal caught in the headlights, then he regained his defiant expression. "I'm not running away, and what would you care if I did, in any case?"
I wouldn't. Any other answer was a lie, but Orion needed to lie to sustain the family that he had grown used to. If Sirius got it into his foolish little head to run away, there would be consequences far surpassing the loss of a child, upheaval that would disrupt days, weeks, perhaps even months of his life, and he did not want to contend with that.
And so he searched for things to say, for words to convince Sirius that his place was here, with the family, even with a mad mother and a father who did not and would not care.
"You should be more obedient."
A worse choice could not have been made. Obedience was not in Sirius's blood. His lip curled and he looked inches away from spitting in disgust. When he forced his face back into a calmer mask, it looked as if he was swallowing mouthfuls of bitter medicine.
When at last he spoke again, his voice was as sweet and horrible as poisoned syrup.
"Of course, Father."
And then he turned away, and Orion had no opportunity to try to rectify his mistake. Not that he would have known how to, if he had had the chance.
So he watched his son go, and he knew then, in the immutable and irrefutable way that he knew his own name, that Sirius was going to take after Andromeda, and he was going to lose a son. He was unsure quite how long it would be before it happened - perhaps not for years, perhaps tomorrow morning - but he knew it without so much as the slightest hint of doubt or distrust.
Orion did nothing to try to regain the boy who was supposed to be his son. He did not mourn for Sirius's loss, and he saw no reason to tell Regulus or Walburga what he had learned. Neither of them would be able to chance Sirius's mind. Not Regulus, with his doe-eyes and his pout, clutching at Sirius's hands and begging him not to leave. Not Walburga, with hate written on her face, telling him he would live to regret it if he left. They would only make the whole matter even messier than it was already destined to be.
He expected they probably had their suspicions - or if they did not yet, they would before Sirius actually left the house - but as long as they did not have Orion's irrefutable certainty, they would not try to act upon their fears or doubts. They would keep silent for fear of spurring Sirius into action.
And so he simply filed away that secret along with the thousands of others he had absorbed over his years, and waited for Sirius's departure with the same dull expectation of the inevitable that one waited for the leaves to fall from the trees in autumn.
)O(
Fin