4. Family, Again
The air was a cold pregnant grey, but rain had not yet begun to fall.
Thank God, because Sirius felt that the only thing that could possibly make this funeral more cliche, more unbearably pleasing to his mother's insatiable thirst for drama, was rain.
A heavy odor of pipe smoke, frankincense, and roses filled the dreary air, permeating the crisp morning with a thick-sickly-sweetness, and making his gag reflex twitch now and again. Handkerchiefs were whipped in and out of sight, and faint sniffs echoed in twos and threes around the small group clustered around the closed casket. All the usual.
Sirius sighed audibly, and saw his mother's waxy face turn sharply towards him. Her eyes were wide with the madness she was calling 'grief' today, and when he ignored her, she hissed his name furiously,
"Sirius Orion Black."
It felt like something slimy and cold had slithered up his back and into his spinal canal, just hearing her voice. He raised his eyebrows questioningly, with a polite smile, just to piss her off.
"You dirty little blood-betraying brat," she spat in a whisper behind her demurely raised handkerchief. This was one of her favorite things, his mum, leaning in to hiss obscenities at him in public, under the pretense of doing something motherly, "you have brought enough shame and humiliation to this family already- I will not have you acting blasé at your own father's funeral."
Sirius made sure his face was stony, taking a deep breath so as not to lose his temper. He had not seen his mother in three years, and her only concern today had been that he might do something to betray his differences from the family, and embarrass her. As if everyone present wasn't already painfully aware of the differences between them, and the one lone man in their midst.
In appearances, nay, he was one of them. Tuxedo and dark dragon-hide cloak clad, he had even shaved and combed his hair back. In outfit he matched nearly every man there. In face, he matched half of them- his uncle was nearly his older double, his cousin Prewian was clenching an identical jawline, and across the casket, Bellatrix kept looking up at him with his own irises and lashes; smirking and once drawing a finger across her throat.
How strange it was to be here now.
He had always been the odd man out in his family, but how very strange to be here amongst them now; a brief time-out from the battle, the most bizarre of reminders that war was an illusion of their own making; playing-pretend left in the hands of adults who had outgrown their ability to see life's rules as just a silly game.
How very odd to know that if they were anywhere else, they would literally try to kill each other- him and everyone else here, without much of a second thought.
How very odd to feel that with the simple occurrence of a natural death, he could be standing suddenly in a circle with his enemies, feigning that they were family again.
He wondered how long he would have after the service ended, before this strange unspoken moral code would break, and Bellatrix would try to kill him.
Two minutes and thirty-four seconds, as it turned out.