All my eternal gratitude to Litfreak89, who is always so kind to take some of her spare time to correct my stories :)
Walburga Black hated having to walk down the muggle road on which she lived. Sometimes, she really cursed her ancestors for choosing to build their family home in an area so crowded with muggles! Not that the area was bad; in fact, Islington-Angel was one of the nicest places to live in London, and Camden and Notting Hill were fairly popular choices among many wizarding families who had decided to settle down in the country's biggest city.
Sometimes, Walburga had ardent discussions with her husband (and cousin) Orion regarding the decision of moving out of the city to one of the family's countryside properties. The family's manor in Windermere was spacious and opulent; or perhaps they could move to their small cozy cottage home in the village of Tinworth in Cornwall. However, Orion had never been a nature lover. He was a man of the city, and he loved the liveliness of the English capital far too much to give it up to live "like a farmer in the middle of nowhere," as he usually described it.
On this particular sunny afternoon in July, Walburga was walking back home with her two sons – Sirius, her firstborn at nine years old, and Regulus, the youngest, who had just turned eight. She held their hands tightly as she feared that they might try to escape from her grip while they were walking toward the square located near their house. It was a beautiful, tree-lined square, full of flowers with a small playground for the kids. The only drawback was that it was always plagued by dirty muggle children. Therefore, it wasn't very surprising that she had never allowed either of her sons to spend any of their free time at the playground – no matter how inviting the weather was outside. She would never let her precious babies be contaminated by that kind of scum.
Regulus was walking with his mother and older brother after coming back from visiting their old aunt Lucretia, who lived in a very small town near the bother of Wales. The only exciting occurrence for the boys was that they had gotten to travel by Knight Bus because their mother didn't trust him and his brother enough to travel alone through the Floo network on such a long journey just yet.
He looked jealously at a group of children who were playing together at the park. Usually, Sirius was the only playmate he had, and his brother wasn't really known for his companionship except on the infrequent occasions that their mother would decide to have an afternoon tea with one of the Ladies of High Wizarding Society who had children around their age. All three of his cousins—Bellatrix, Andromeda and Narcissa—were far too old to play games with him. It's not surprising, then, that Regulus was a very lonely boy.
Regulus turned and caught a glimpse of two extremely identical twin sisters who seemed to be around his age and were playing together with their dolls not very far away from them. An older boy was teasing one of the girls, trying to put something in her hair. The three children all had similar coloring – possibly siblings. The woman near them, whom Regulus thought to be their mother, was completely unaware of her children's behavior as she was reading a book and looked deeply entranced. Regulus looked to his brother, who had also spotted the scene. Immediately, Sirius let go of their mother's tight grip, dashed toward the muggles, and took the doll from the girl who was being bullied by the boy whom Regulus believed to be her brother. His brother and the muggle boy exchanged a shared smirk before running as far away from the girls as possible.
"Miss Morgan, Alfred and that boy took my Emily away!" The girl complained tearfully to the woman whom Regulus had previously believed to be their mother
"SIRIUS BLACK! COME BACK HERE NOW!" Regulus heard his mother shouting, letting him go from her grip.
"Those silly boys are going pay for this!" the sister of the girl whom had just had her doll stolen said loudly, more to herself than to her sister. "Wait here, Belle," she said before standing up and running after both boys, hunting them around the playground. Sirius and the boy named Alfred started throwing the doll to each other, making the girl run in two different directions. Regulus noticed that the other sister was still sitting on the grass, not far away from where he was, silent tears running from the girl's wide eyes. Regulus couldn't help but feel compassion for the muggle girl. Why did his brother never miss an opportunity to be a complete prick?
"Alfred! You are so dead when I get my hands on you!" the twin chasing the boys screamed to her brother.
"Alfred! You are so dead when I get my hands on you!" The boy mocked her, speaking in a falsetto girl's voice. "That's not a very lady-like thing to say, Helen!" The boy made fun of her again, impersonating another voice, a serious, fatherly one.
The girl, Helen, Regulus assumed, showed Alfred her tongue before turning around to chase Sirius, who was holding the doll at that moment. Somehow, Sirius had managed to climb a tree, and he was laughing at the girl's efforts to chase him there.
"You're not so big now, are you?" Sirius laughed again and exchanged another mischievous grin with the girl's brother while watching her pointless efforts in climbing the tree.
"SIRIUS ORION BLACK! GET DOWN HERE NOW!" Walburga Black screamed with unbelievable strength. Walburga was near the tree that Sirius had climbed, standing beside the muggle girl who was still trying to climb the tree and recover her sister's doll.
"Hey mate, I'm free here!" Alfred said to Sirius from the other end of the park.
Sirius, who had noticed that Helen was having some success in climbing the tree, decided that it would be much more fun to throw it to the other boy. However, the doll fell on the ground not very far from the spot where Regulus was still standing. The other boy, Alfred, was running towards him to get the doll once again, but Regulus decided to go and get the doll first and to be finished with all of this nonsense once and for all.
Regulus picked up the doll, and Alfred smiled at him, believing that he had decided to join their game. However, Regulus looked down the boy with the arrogant derisive glare that the Black family was famous for, and that he had learned to give since he was a toddler. Then Regulus walked to the girl who was still crying on the grass and offered the doll back to her.
"I'm sorry for disturbing you Miss, but I believe that this belongs to you," Regulus said, offering her the doll back.
"T-Thank you," she said, trembling before she smiled at him. He smiled back, and they continued to glance each other's way for a few seconds until his mother, who was pulling Sirius by his ears, looked at him and screamed, "REGULUS! NOT YOU TOO! COME BACK HERE RIGHT NOW!" With one last apologetic look directed at the girl, Regulus went down to where his mother was standing. He immediately felt pain when her hands gripped tightly on his right ear. "BOTH OF YOU ARE IN SO MUCH TROUBLE!"
Without exchanging any words with the muggles in the park, she dragged both of her sons to her house. Once there, she pushed them straightaway to the dining room before she shouted at them again.
"HOW DARE YOU?! BOTH OF MY SONS, INTERACTING WITH MUGGLE SCUM? YOUR FATHER AND I WILL NOT STAND FOR THAT!"
"But I haven't done anything!" Regulus complained, feeling that she was being very unjust with him, as it had been Sirius the one who had started everything.
"YOU TALKED TO THE MUGGLE! YOU TOUCHED A MUGGLE POSSESSION REGULUS."
"But mom, I was only trying to be a gentleman! You told me that…" Regulus start to say, but he was cut off by his mother.
"I've taught you to be a gentleman, yes. But you need to be a gentleman around people that deserve such treatment! I haven't raised any of you to be integrating with muggle scum. Both of you are grounded." Both boys started to protest when she said that. "For an entire week," she declared.
Both boys looked extremely disappointed. Regulus looked at his brother with rage.
"Kreacher!" she called, and the house-elf appeared with a POP. "Make sure these two young men are locked up in their rooms." Turning back to the boys, she said, "I want both of you to write me an essay telling at least ten reasons why wizards should not interact with muggles. I want a one-meter-long, Hogwarts-styled essay. You two are only allowed to leave the room to research in our family library and go to the bathroom. No dinner tonight."
Sirius rolled his eyes while Regulus nodded his head in acceptance.
"If the essays aren't good enough by next Friday, both of you are going to have to give me twenty reasons instead of ten. Now, get out of my sight!"
Without exchanging words, both brothers left the room and went up the stairs.
A/N: So, this story is a short outtake from my main fanfiction 'Lost Connections'. Though you don't need to read one to understand the other, if you are following my other story you might have guessed correctly that the version of the facts that Sirius told to Harry isn't completely right.