Soul Deep
"You don't stop loving someone just because you hate them."
It would be so much easier if Sirius could just hate them.
That wasn't to say that he didn't hate them – his family was crooked, and broken, and wrong more often than not, and there was something deeply twisted about the way his mother, for example, thought that torture was an acceptable tool of education – but there was still a part of him that considered them his family, that, dare he even think it, loved them.
It was the part that remembered racing down the corridors after his little brother, laughing about some thing or another, not a care for a thing in the world.
It was the part that recalled brushing away the tears from that same little's brother face the first time he had faced their mother's brand of punishment, and helping him find his way when he got lost in Hogwarts during those first few months.
It was the part that couldn't forget how his mother used to read him bedtime stories and made them come alive in silvery lights on his bedroom's walls, leaving twinkling stars on his ceiling to watch over him as he slept.
But there were other things he remembered, things that were far harder to forget.
Things like his mother's sharp tongue and sharper spells, spells that left red and hot welts on his back when she felt he had disobeyed her.
Things like his brother, turning his back on him and following the crowd Sirius had warned him about, until the only thing left from the little brother he had loved was the façade the monster he had become hid beneath.
Things like the way everyone in this family seemed to be hell-bent on taking down the world with them on their descent into madness.
'Yes,' Sirius thought, 'it would be easier if I could just hate them.'