/N: At long last...sorry this stuffs been taking so long to write and upload, I've been really busy lately, what with studying for my SATs and everything. Anyway...this ones goin out to Kelly, Molly, Vivian, Lindsey (both of em), Jared, and everyone else in the Columbia HP club, and to Serpent91 and Lenarta (and in answer to your question I think Im going to keep this third person, switching off whose world were looking at. And I've got to agree that Remus's was the best chapter so far. :sigh: must work on keeping quality.) who gave me new resolve to work on Sirius's chappie. This is not dedicated to Josh because he's looking at colleges with his dad instead of playing video games with me and spell checking my fan fiction. Loser.

-The Evil Duck

PS: Sorry this is taking me so long to write, it will be this slow until the summer when I have far more time to just sit around and write.

Sirius Black

12 Grimmauld Place

London, England

10:30 AM

Deep in the slums of London there is an invisible castle. The castle was once called The Manor of The Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, and the family who once lived there from the Norman Invasion to the mid-nineteen-ninties, used to own a good percent of London. Although even the most knowledgeable London scholar has probably never heard of them.

The once-manor house has been compressed to fit between numbers 10 and 14 Grimmauld Place. Although you'd probably never even realize there is a gap between the two houses let alone that number 12 is missing. Even after being told, if you were to walk down said street you'd forget the invisible castle entirely and keep walking without reason, trying to remember why you stepped down the near alleyway into the pit in the first place.

The castle, which once covered the entire street in both directions, was then squeezed vertically, climbing skyward like a spiral staircase or, better yet, a serpent. It has in total, not counting the tower which grew above the house, seven floors. It towers above the ordinary street below it. The tower coils upwards spinelessly, without point or direction. It had once been one of four, and this was the south tower which had been used for the Black Family's astronomy expertise. It had been the highest and now it was the only tower left. In the year 1960 it became the bedroom sweet for Orion and Cassiopeia Black's eldest son, Sirius, who was the final occupant of the house in 1996. Now it still exists, aging into decay, deteriorating into oblivion. But this isn't a story about the castle, The House, or its eventual end. This is the story of beginnings and the child of The Noble and Most ancient House of Black...

"Sirius!" Cassiopeia Blacks voice came twisting up the staircases of number 12 Grimmauld Place. Her eldest son staggered down from his tower bedroom, pulling a red sock on his left foot that failed to match the green one he was already wearing on his right. He had a tooth brush clasped between his teeth, his new black school robe under one arm, one shoe missing, the other lying like a dead animal in the dark medieval hallway below. Sirius tripped down the stairs while still looking almost surreally perfect. None of the mornings rush showing any effect on him.

"Sirius!" she bellowed again even more angrily and shrilly so that the entire house seemed to shake. Sirius knew he was in trouble.

"It was Regulus!" Sirius shouted back, spraying the green hallway rug with white toothpaste foam. He had the tube in the back pocket of his new Hogwarts uniform pants.

"Get down here this instant!" she screeched.

"I told you, it was Regulus!" Sirius ducked into the fourth floor bathroom, rinsing his mouth and pocketing his toothbrush to add to the trunk Kreachur the house elf had waiting for him by the front door. "I begged him not to but he wouldn't listen to me!" Sirius paused to throw his robes over his head, realizing too late that they were inside out and backwards. He ripped them off again while running down the stairs. He found his right shoe holding the door to the second floor of the library opened. He pulled it free, ramming it on his foot.

Sirius slid down the railing to the first floor. He turned sharply, sliding down a second railing into the pit of the kitchen. "He's a madman, mum! Mad, I tell you!" He looked over at the intricately carved wooden table. The wood was stained black, carved snakes with emerald eyes and silver scales twinned up the legs. The chairs at both ends of the table were similar, huge and throne-like with the Black family crest carved into the high backs.

Orion Black didn't look up at his son as he entered the room, but his presence was felt. Orion was sitting farthest from his son at the head of the table. His face was hidden inside the Daily Prophet. Sirius immediately went quiet. The huge smile that had been fastened semipermanantly across his lips faded immediately into memory.

Regulus was sitting near the center of the long table on the right side, watching as his brother Sirius pulled back the emerald encrusted chair across from him before sinking into it. "Tell me what I did, Sirius," said Regulus smirking slightly, glancing over at their father.

Sirius did the same, his eyes darting quickly, worriedly, a frightened quivering half glance, before answering quietly so no one but Regulus could hear, "everything, you little git."

Kreachur came toting a heavy silver platter above his head just as Cassiopeia took her seat at the opposite end of the table as her husband gracefully and slowly. She truly resembled the queen whose chairs these seemed to be. She had heavily lidded, long eye-lashed eyes the color of frost. Her hair was pulled back into a braided knot at the back of her head, two delicate strands were braided in front pulled along her ears to meet it. She was thin, tall, and shapely with fairy-tale pale skin and dark chestnut hair.

Regulus looked very much like his mother, except he was slightly shorter, with hair that was neither black nor brown but both. His eyes were not as cold as hers, even if they were the same color. His were also slightly wider, somehow more reflective and clear.

"Glad to see you're awake," Cassiopeia said to Sirius without looking at him. She took her silver plate off the tray Kreature was offering her.

Orion folded his newspaper as he took his food from the elf. Then his dark eyes settled almost painfully on his eldest son. Sirius swallowed hard. Orion and Sirius looked nearly identical. They both possessed a handsomeness and grace that Renaissance painters had struggled to work into their images of saints. They were both tall and pale with straight noses and piercing color-changing eyes. Sirius, of course, was acquiring the teen lank all boys possess until their later teens and the inperportionate hands and feet of puberty.

Orion was also far less idealistic than his son and it showed. His eyes were, at the moment, black in the pit of the kitchen, as hard and emotionless as coal. The man himself was very much the same: his perfect lips never smiled. Sirius possessed a powerful and disarming smile that managed to be both cocky and charming. Sirius's eyes were at the moment a bright summer sky blue.

Orion turned to his breakfast, "are you ready, Sirius?"

"What? Yeah--yes, yes sir," Sirius caught himself.

Cassiopeia placed her tea down onto its saucer without a sound. She looked up at her eldest son, "this is just what you need, Sirius, positive influence. Hogwarts will get you back on track and end this little phase once and for all."

"Not bloody likely," muttered Sirius to himself.

Regulus had heard, and Sirius was sure of that, but the younger boy didn't say anything to his parents, which was unusual. Regulus, like the rest of his family, believed that Sirius was just going through a phase, and, in Regulus's opinion his parents had to know everything Sirius did wrong to cure him of it. Regulus thought that when Sirius joined his cousins and family friends at Hogwarts he would become exactly what everyone wanted him to be.

Sirius's life had been planned out for him as had every other Blacks life long before the Blacks came to England in 1066. Sirius was supposed to go to Hogwarts, be sorted into Slytherin, become a member of the ministry, marry his cousin (whom his parents would chose for him), and father children whose lives would be exactly the same as his had been.

Sirius was far from willing to accept this lot in life.

"I trust you will behave yourself," Cassiopeia said watching her son with narrowed eyes. Sirius didn't answer, partially out of deliberate rudeness, partially because his mind was with the Hogwarts Express and the vast amount of Zonkos products he'd managed to buy when his parents weren't paying attention to him.

After a few moments of silence Orion caught his son's attention as only he could, "your mother is speaking to you," he said in his deep, slightly threatening voice, "I believe you will answer her."

"Yes," he said, "sorry sir, I will, Mother." He mentally smirked there was no way in Hell he would keep that promise.

A/N: Grrr. This sucks. DAMN! It'll get better after this, I promise. I hope.