First of all: sorry this is so late. I REALLY need ideas, so even if you want me to try a one-word prompt or something, or one piece of dialogue, please say. I'm running low on creativity right now!

Started as a bit of practice to get myself into a Sirius mood, but I think it's good enough to go on here.

The start is a bit slow, but it gets better a bit later on!

STAINING THE TAPESTRY

Sirius had always loved his cousin Andromeda.

He half expected her to come back. Yet here he sat, barely eleven years old, at the foot of the tapestry. He wondered what had spurred her to do such a terrible thing. He wondered if she'd ever come to her senses. He wondered, if that happened, whether she'd ever be forgiven.

She had used to tell him that muggles weren't so bad. She'd told him to call mudbloods muggleborns instead. He should've known from that moment what had happened to her. That she had become one of them, one of the people Mother ranted about. Muggle lovers.

The tapestry was green, like the Slytherin robes he would soon wear, like the official ties he'd don afterwards, like a snake. The same snake that lingered behind his mother's eyes when she lectured him on the Black family values, or in his father's when he stood from the table and gave a toast to the future. The same snake that had slithered its way onto Bellatrix's forearm. A snake is sly and resourceful and ambitious. A snake would go far in life. The tapestry was green like the light of the killing curse, like the candles in the dining room when they burnt too low, like the shrewd eyes of the house elf, Kreature.

Green like royalty. Green like pride and the purest emeralds.

The writing was black. Black like Black, like his mother's heart and his grandfather's soul (or so they proudly claimed), like the very essence of their noble family. Like the curling calligraphy that his father wrote in, like the potions he locked away. It was black like the dark feathers of a lonely raven, like dress robes and shined shoes and Sirius' hair. Black like a delicate beetle's wings or the silent flutter of a bat through the night. His parents' wands were black and his surely would be when he got it next year.

The burn was also black. It was black and Black. Sirius didn't know what to think of this kind of black - to him, this wasn't elegant and noble, but dark and bold and evil.

The hole in the tapestry stared at him like an eye, a single blemish in generations of purity. It looked into him. It looked through him. Andromeda had seen something he had not, and now this eye was left to commemorate her.

Andromeda had ruined the family. That's what they all said. But to Sirius, the family had ruined her. Her picture had been so lovely before they blasted it off.

Sirius looked at his own picture, at the curling hair and the proud, pale face. So much stronger than his own trembling, skinny self. He wouldn't let Mother ruin that as well.

Uncle Alphard went next. It was the summer after fourth year, and Sirius felt awfully grown up, but still he wept, curled into a ball at the foot of the tapestry.

His ancestors sat smugly on their branches above him, noses in the air, chins tilted and eyebrows raised superciliously.

He had thought they were perfection only five years ago. Now he knew they were anything but.

There, another burn. Another stain on the green background.

Though now, through older eyes, the green wasn't royal. It was like a fading bruise, like sludgy pond water, like the slimy surface of a toad's back.

Now, Sirius ran his fingers over the other mottled areas on the tree.

Iola Black.

She'd married a muggle and had been thrown onto the streets because of it. They had lived happily for three years until he got a muggle disease and died. His parents wanted nothing to do with the posh, pretentious girl who had taken their son from them, who had no money or muggle skills, so yet again she was cast away.

For weeks Iola had wasted away in the gutters before returning to her family home and begging at her father's feet. She had written letters with the little money she managed to gather, knocked on the door for hours on end.

It was pneumonia that got her in the end. The snow fell thick and heavy that year, and she had nowhere to go. On Christmas Eve 1871, she had sat outside 12 Grimmauld Place, the very house Sirius stood in, and her parents and siblings had watched her die. By the morning, her body was frozen over.

Under his feet, Sirius could almost feel the cold of that night.

He wandered onwards, passing haughty faces, grey eyes that followed where he stepped.

Phineas Black Jr.

This was a man Sirius could respect. He had led a campaign for muggle rights, trying to ban muggle hunts and other violent action towards muggles. When he'd returned home, the door had refused to open, and yet again, his family watched from the window at his futile attempts to enter.

Disgusted by their lack of understanding and hatred of muggles, he went on to pass several anti-mugglehunting laws.

Phineas had shown them. He hadn't cared about noble heritage. He had done what was right.

If only Sirius could do the same. More likely he'd end up like Iola.

Marius Black.

Sirius had always hated the story of Marius Black.

For the first few years of his life, he had been cherished and spoilt, fed the same lies everyone else in the family was.

At the age of eight, his parents had become suspicious.

At ten, they started to doubt.

When his Hogwarts letter never came, they gave up hope.

They beat him bloody and yelled a hundred curses and locked him in the cellar for weeks. Sirius had seen the message Marius had gouged into the walls:

GET OUT WHILE YOU CAN.

Marius Black disappeared and the only time members of the Black family told their secret was to threaten their children. I've told you about Marius Black, have I not? Screamed for days before he finally died. My father was there. So come on then, boy, try again! If you can't get this simple spell right, you'll end up like him.

He had been a squib.

And again, just as with every traitor, Marius' family had watched. Sirius' grandfather had watched.

Maybe Sirius didn't like it because of the cruelty displayed by his family. Maybe because it was the loss of an innocent life.

But it was probably because it reminded him too much of his own story - cherished, loved, spoilt, until he turned eleven and everything went sour.

Cedrella Black.

Another marriage to the wrong person. The Weasleys were part of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, but marrying one was still unforgivable.

She had fallen in love with Septimus Weasley, had ran off with him, and was never permitted home.

Fifty years later, at the age of sixty-eight, she had appeared in court about an attack on one of her children, Arthur Weasley, who had survived and left Hogwarts the year before Sirius joined.

Her younger sister, Charis Black, was a defence witness and had turned the trial upside down. Cedrella was sent home in tears, having been forced to pay Charis a fee for the property her son had supposedly destroyed.

Moral of the story (and the reason Mother had told Sirius): don't mess with the Blacks. You'll always lose.

Then, Andromeda, who Sirius still didn't want to think about. Who had been so kind. Who, for a while, he had despised for her act of treachery. Now he wanted to see her and her husband and her baby. To cry into her shoulder and ask for help. Because he needed it now, more than ever.

Finally, he reached the black mark he had started from. Alphard Black. He had gone to Alphard's every year, to a huge house in Durham, to play quidditch. It had been his only free time in the summer holidays, the one thing that made up for everything else. The one time among family that he had been able to feel alive.

Alphard had tried to help him.

Sirius paused when he heard voices at the door to his father's study.

"What in Merlin's name are you trying to say, Alphard?" came the icy voice of his father.

A much more pleasant, rumbling voice replied, "I'm just saying there's nothing anyone can do about it, so why do you hate him for it? Better to-"

"Don't tell me how I should treat my son, Alphard."

"Just listen, Orion. It's better to treat him as we treat Regulus, else this newfound hatred will only grow, yes? He is still a Black."

"He is a Gryffindor."

Sirius frowned. They were talking about him.

"But his mind is still salvageable. We cannot alienate him like this! He flinches whenever Walburga walks into the room. He's unnaturally quiet. He hardly eats! What had you been doing to the boy?"

"That is up to his parents."

"If the Ministry find out-"

"The Ministry WON'T FIND OUT! Who is there to tell them? Are YOU going to run to your precious mudblood Minister and tell them about this … this …"

"Abuse?"

There was a silence. A deadly, terrible silence, as if the very atmosphere was trembling at Orion Black's thunderous countenance.

"Discipline," he said, his voice seeming colder than usual. "We call it discipline. It seems, dear brother-in-law, that it is something you lack."

Another silence.

"I can discipline you as easily as I discipline my son, you know. CRUCIO!"

Never before had the colour red looked so cruel. This was worse than a sea of blood, than a bottle of poison or a raging fire. The light of the cruciatus curse burnt the very soul. It spilled from beneath the doorframe and into the corridor where Sirius stood, and he leapt back as if it would eat him alive.

His favourite uncle's screams shook the house.

It seemed to last years and years, and then it just … stopped. It happened so suddenly that Sirius immediately sprung to the door and put his eye to the keyhole.

He tried to step back, but he couldn't look away.

His father stood over his uncle, who was shaking on the floor, cowering in a tight ball and whimpering slightly. "No… no! Orion, please… please!"

Orion Black was a predator, and Alphard was his prey. The wand he twirled in his hand was the deadly barb at the end of the scorpion's tail. Orion the hunter.

He raised his wand, a small smile on his face that Sirius didn't understand. Wasn't he angry?

"Avada Kedavra!"

Green light rocketing through the room, stroking the back of Sirius' eyes, ricocheting around his brain.

No scream this time. The body lay still, looking so delicate. Orion dusted off his lapels with a lazy hand and returned to his paperwork.

Sirius couldn't drag his eyes away. The green flash still echoed over and over, that awful silence, the nonchalance of his father's movement.

Like a hundred other blood traitors, Alphard Black was never seen again.

All that remained was a burn in a tapestry, a few words in a will, and the broomstick (gifted by Alphard) that Sirius had hidden in his room.

That burn marked the end of Sirius' ignorance, and of his innocence. It was ugly, like an open wound, and it hurt. It hurt. Another eye opened; another eye gouged out. That should be the motto of the Black family.

The room, with its green and black, spun around him in a whirlwind of darkness. The haughty faces looked at him with displeasure. The candlelight dimmed. The world was waiting for his decision.

Sirius just curled into a ball and tried not to look, letting the tears carve into his cheeks.

He had never seen his own burn before. Now, 1995, nineteen years since he had been disowned, he looked at it. Sirius could remember, as a child, running his fingers along the different faces, pausing at the scorch marks and thinking about who had been there. He remembered the departure of Andromeda, and that terrible event that he had watched through the keyhole.

He thought of his own flight.

Now the face of Sirius Black was gone, replaced by a small burn mark.

Better to go in fire, he thought. Better to go in fire than in the ice that his mother had held inside her, that his father had wielded.

Now they were dead, and who was laughing now?

No-one. No-one laughed.

The house trapped him, forced him to relieve those awful memories he had tried to bury. Not Remus' kind words or the thought of throwing away his family's favourite heirlooms could stop him from running the hamster wheel in his mind that took his through the same scenes over and over and over and over until he was too dizzy to continue.

If he stayed in here too long, he'd surely go mad. Maybe he already was.

He could only stare at that awful stain on the tapestry, surrounded by a sea of royal green.