A Practical Lesson
(Walburga's lesson teaches Sirius something altogether different. Buzzword was "frustrated" and genre/cliché was "the first time." Warning: werewolf pain and asshole pureblood prejudice. This was the week I was eliminated, but I made it to the final 3!)
Sirius can remember the first time he saw a werewolf transform. He was eleven, Regulus nearly ten, and Mother had allowed them to stay awake far past their bedtime so that they might accompany her on what she had called an educational visit to a facility at the Ministry. Inside the facility was a holding cell and inside the cage was a woman. Sirius thought she might be Mother's age, though her hair was too thin, too grey, her face too worn. She sat curled in on herself in the center of the cage, in the center of the room, as wizards and witches Sirius recognized from Father's dinner parties or Mother's high teas entered and sat in crude seats along the walls. The only light in the room came from some ineffective sconces set here and there and a high, distant window directly above the cage, where cold silver moonlight seeped in.
This woman is not a witch any more, Mother had said. She associated with monsters and filth, and so she has become the filth herself. Then the woman's skin had rippled frighteningly, and that's when Sirius knew.
She doubled over, a mess of grey-blond hair. Sirius tried to shut his eyes against it, but Mother, frustrated, hexed them open, and Regulus's too. He watched, tried not to watch as this woman – his mother's age, and had she known her as students at Hogwarts, just as Sirius would be come September? – tore herself apart, snapped and splintered until she was an animal, howling, thrashing out. Somewhere else in the room a weedy dark-skinned wizard laughed, but Sirius was shaking, picking his own fingernails to shreds, wanting to weep but the hex had prevented that too, couldn't smile like Mother did, couldn't sit there unblinking and shrewd and analytical learning exactly what Mother wanted like Regulus. The lesson Sirius was taking away, as the tawny she-wolf flailed and fought and screamed, was a far cry from the one he was meant to.
Maybe, learned Sirius, we are the monsters.
At thirteen, Sirius is a Gryffindor, and a teenage boy, but when Remus tells him he squints his eyes shut and sobs like he couldn't before. He goes catatonic, can think nothing for hours and hours but no, no, no, no, no, not Remus, not Remus...The pain – in flashback, from someone he'd never met – is sharp enough, thick in his throat. The pain of this, knowing clever unassuming Remus, roommate and study partner and dear, dear friend, must endure the tearing, thrashing, screaming...
When his brain snaps out of it, it is because Sirius has suddenly, fiercely sworn that the pain will fucking end, and it will be him that does it.