O'CHILDREN
"...we're all weeping now, weeping because,
there ain't nothing we can do to protect you…"
- Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds
Chapter One: The Mystery
The portrait of Mrs. Black had been uncharacteristically quiet that day. It was this fact, perhaps, that made it so much more jarring when it finally did begin screaming.
"Hey Sirius," Harry had asked. "Who was Ariella Fawley?"
Behind them, there was an audible inhale — more of a gasp, really — and then all hell broke loose. The curtains of the portrait flew open like a storm had arrived, and a great screeching arose which caused both wizards to jump in place.
"HOW DARE YOU SPEAK THAT NAME IN THIS HOUSE! THAT MUDBLOOD WRETCH, I SHOULD HAVE HAD HER KILLED FROM THE BEGINNING! I SHOU-"
"SHUT UP!" Sirius snarled, looking irate as he wrestled the curtains back into place.
With a jerky hand movement, he sent a sharp silencing spell right at the portrait that cast the room into quiet once more, though it was a heavier type of silence now.
"Er... not a popular person here, then?" Harry said lamely, taken aback by the reaction the name alone had gotten.
Sirius snorted and then made some kind of facial expression that Harry couldn't have identified to save his life.
"That is an understatement," his godfather said darkly. "That's probably the only name more taboo in this house than my own."
"Everything alright?" came a voice from up above — it was Remus, leaning over the staircase railing three floors above with one eyebrow arched in question.
"Harry asked about—" and here Sirius stopped and cut a hesitant side eye toward the portrait before continuing. "One of our old classmates. Ariella."
"Ah," Remus said, face clearing in immediate understanding.
"You can imagine how favorable the hag's reaction was."
"Oh, no need for imagination, I heard it quite clearly from up here," the former professor said dryly.
As Lupin retreated back into the study he'd emerged from, Harry turned towards his godfather once more.
"I don't understand," he tried again. "Was she… a relative? Did she get disowned like you did?"
"Ha! Not at all," Sirius laughed loudly. "Ariella was Muggleborn… or effectively Muggleborn, at least. Certainly not a relation of mine."
"How can you be effectively Muggleborn?" Harry's face scrunched in confusion.
"If your family was originally magic but was born without it for enough generations, the next magical child is considered Muggleborn... at least in essence, if not in name," Sirius explained. "It's all a bit complicated. Some families stay in connection with their roots and the magical branches of the tree, but others just go on and live fully Muggle lives. Pureblood supremacists like dear old mum there hate both of them just the same."
"I didn't realize that was a thing that happened. Magic just disappearing and then coming back, I mean," Harry said, intrigued.
Sirius shrugged.
"Magic is finicky like that. Sometimes you have a squib crop up in a magical family with hundreds of years of powerful wizards before them. Other times you get an extraordinary witch from a family with no magic in its history at all, like your Muggleborn friend upstairs. Magic goes where it wills and blood doesn't always mean anything to it… and there are some people who don't like that."
"So were you friends with this girl at Hogwarts, then?" the boy asked, still curious.
"About that," Sirius frowned. "Where did you even come across her name? Ariella died sixteen years ago, Harry."
"We found it in a box upstairs. It's not just her name, there's… there's tons of pictures and— and letters and chocolate frog cards and things. It's like someone mashed a scrapbook and a school trunk all together into one box."
Sirius stiffened.
"Where was it?" he asked tightly, looking rather like he already knew the answer and he didn't care for it.
"Under a floorboard in one of the closed off bedrooms — the one at the end of the hall from yours. Mrs. Weasley thinks that's where the doxies are hiding out so she sent us in to clean it."
"Regulus," Sirius said softly.
"Yeah," Harry said, surprised. "That's what the plaque on the door said. Who, er… who was that? Should we not have gone in there?"
The older wizard had a distinctly uncomfortable, pinched look on his face, and the way his whole body had stiffened up made Harry feel like he was saying all the wrong things. It felt oddly similar to handing in an essay that he just knew was going to disappoint Professor McGonagall.
"Regulus was my little brother," his godfather answered after a long pause.
His voice was strangled, like it had a hard time escaping his throat, and it made Harry's shoulders hunched downward on instinct at the obvious past tense. After a moment, Sirius continued: "...he died not long after he left school. No one really knows how. I'm sure he got in over his head with Voldemort's lot and landed himself in some kind of horrific mess."
He'd never sounded so bitter before, not even when he talked about Peter or Harry's father. Usually then he was filled with a white hot anger, or sometimes even just an overwhelming sadness that was always echoed by Remus, but Harry thought he just seemed… tired when he talked about his brother. Like losing his brother was something he'd resigned himself to a long time ago, in a way he still hadn't been able to get past Peter's betrayal and James' death.
"He was a Death Eater?"
"He was," Sirius sighed. "Regulus fell right into our family's nonsense beliefs and followed the path all the way to that insane lot. I imagine it didn't take much coaxing, but he never was the sort to push back against the family even if he had disagreed. He was always the dutiful one, always did what he was told without complaining."
There was that bitterness again, Harry thought.
"If he was a Death Eater, why does he have a box full of keepsakes from a Muggleborn girl?" Harry asked, feeling both overwhelmed and desperately confused by everything he'd just been told.
At this, Sirius snorted and his face transformed into an immensely amused look.
"They were friends during school, near as I could tell you. Ariella was his one and only holdout against the family ideals, I think," Sirius said wryly.
"But how was he friends with a Muggleborn if he believed all the rubbish the Death Eaters do?"
"I don't know exactly how it started, but I'm sure in the beginning he thought she was half-blooded at least, with an old pureblood name like Fawley. It's one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight families — easy to assume pure blood if you don't dig beneath the surface," Sirius explained. "Mother did, a lot of people at Hogwarts did. Once things started getting bad, Ariella didn't go to great lengths to correct that false assumption. Lots of people were happy to jump on anything that made them a smaller target back then."
"But once he found out— how were they still friends? And how was she okay being friends with him if he was like a Death Eater all along?"
"I don't know, Harry! I couldn't possibly hope to explain whatever went on between those two, I wasn't there for it. Ariella and I were never close, and Regulus and I never did see exactly eye to eye. Even as children we were very different, by the time the war started—" Sirius broke off, exhaling harshly. "I can count on one hand the number of times I saw Regulus after I left Hogwarts. I can only tell you what I and everyone else saw, not what he or Ariella thought or felt."
Sirius' frustration had leached into his words, making them short and snappy, and he seemed to regret it as soon as he registered how it had made Harry withdraw. Mumbling a quick and half-hearted apology, the teenager shoved his hands into his pockets, and an awkward silence fell between them again.
His godfather took a deep breath, obviously steadying himself.
"Look, why don't we go on and eat dinner before Molly comes hunting for us and says I've abducted you," Sirius rolled his eyes, feeling triumphant when Harry's lips twitched into an amused grin at the very real possibility he'd mentioned. "And then, after… if you'd like to, you can bring that box down and we'll poke through it. It may not be much, but... I'll tell you whatever I can about Ariella."
"Really?" Harry asked, perking up again. "Are you— are you sure? We could just put it back and I'll tell Mrs. Weasley that room doesn't have any doxies so we won't have to go back in there…"
"'Course," Sirius said, forcing false bravado into his voice. "It's probably better if you let me check it all over first anyway, who knows what manner of horrid cursed things Reg has tucked away in there. And Moony might know some things about Ariella that I don't. She was a Ravenclaw, after all, I'm sure that scruffy old swot had more in common with her than I ever did."
"I heard that," Remus' voice called faintly from up above, where he was winding his way down the staircase heading toward them.
"Good!" Sirius yelled, head craned back to look straight up at the other man.
Harry grinned softly as the two started lightheartedly bickering back and forth while Remus finished his descent. When he finally made it down to the ground level with them, he fixed Sirius with an extremely pointed look.
"I'm almost positive I just heard you say you were heading toward the kitchen… seeing as Molly has already called for you three times now," Remus said, tilting his head questioningly as he brushed past them both.
Sirius rolled his eyes.
"Once a prefect, always a prefect," he told Harry in a stage whisper.
"Padfoot!" Remus growled.
"We're cooo-miiing," Sirius sang innocently, shooting a wink at Harry before turning to follow his old friend.
And the teenager, in a far better mood now than he was just a few minutes previously, grinned and hurried after them with a still-new fondness blooming in his chest, and the mystery of Ariella Fawley — for the time being — shifted, forgotten, to the back of his mind.
AN: I wasn't planning to post this yet. Semper Fortis readers... I have half of the next chapter posted but I'm having a family emergency at the hospital and all I can do right now is sit and wait, so. I'm posting this instead of finishing SF's next chapter because this is ready and I want something good to focus on for a few minutes. As always: hearing your thoughts would make me very happy.
POSTED: 6/6/2021