This trial is turning out to be twice as long as I had first thought it'd be...
Oh, well.
I really considered titling this chapter "The big, boiling, burning soup pot of the painful truth", just so you know.
Chapter 18: There shall be good Blacks with just as much fame
It was an interesting question, after all.
Really, that was true! What told them he wasn't going to get bored and torture a few people – enemies, preferably – once he'd be free? Eh? Eh?! What told them he wasn't going to do just that? And, even if something was currently guaranteeing them just that, who said the something wasn't lying? Or that this something just didn't know Sirius Black at all? After all, the guy had a thing with the Dark Arts!
No, truly, Sirius would have rolled his eyes at the stupidity of the question – if he hadn't prepared an answer, that he knew would certainly not please everyone in the courtroom, but that was exactly what made it so entertaining.
Sure, he couldn't lie, thanks to the sinemendatium. But because he thought it true now, didn't mean he wouldn't change his mind later on. Whether or not he would torture someone with the Dark Arts, one of those days, wasn't a question he could frankly answer with a "yes" or a "no".
Of course he had no intention to do so. It was in fact so unlikely he could truthfully answer "no". It was the truth, now. Sirius Black, as he was this day, in this courtroom, during this trial, would surely not torture someone with the Dark Arts.
He could say "no", and it wouldn't be a lie. The truth potion wouldn't keep him from saying it, because it wouldn't be a lie.
But this question was in reality whether or not he thought it possible that he would, whether or not he intended to torture someone with dark magic.
No one could answer truthfully about the future, because even one's intentions could give in when confronted with the reality of the world, to the fact that no one does control the world.
Sirius' smirk only grew wider when he answered Lord Abbot's question, for he knew the man would surely not like his answer.
What could he say? He liked riling people.
"You have absolutely no guarantee that I won't do just what you said, Lord Abbot, because I don't think you take my word for what they are worth."
Or in other words, why was he even bother justifying himself in front of people who clearly didn't even want to listen to what he had to say?
"However, I'd like to point out that your question is utterly stupid. No one knows what the future hold for them, and I'm pretty sure many people have done things they never believed themselves to be capable of in their life. Because I say I won't do something, doesn't mean I can't change my mind about it, or that time and circumstances will never bring me farther than I'd have expected. Even my word is not enough of a guarantee, not even your word is, Lord Abbot, nor Dumbledore's word, or the word of anyone you trust more than anybody on this earth."
Sirius sat a bit more comfortably in his armchair, still watching Benjamin Abbot right in the eyes. He didn't intend to look away as long as he wouldn't be finished with the stupid question of whether or not he was able to predict his own future, for it was exactly what it meant to ask for something like guarantees about his future behavior.
The Abbot lord was visibly turning paler every second their eye contact lasted, and Sirius wondered absent-mindedly if he could possibly become see-through by the time he'd be done with him. That'd definitely be a sight. Or a non-sight. Whatever, it'd be funny.
To everybody's surprise, the young Black lord sighed.
"For these reasons, I don't think I can answer, sinemendatium or not, your question honestly. Well, it'd be honest, but maybe not as the future will come to be. Nevertheless, I can speak about your question and worries, and why exactly you shouldn't worry about it. Why I personally believe I won't do such thing as using the Dark Arts against my opponents unless they give me no other choice to save my life, or others."
Obviously, it'd have been better if the Black lord had promised he wouldn't use the Dark Arts at all, Emilia Croyne thought as the accused was speaking. What he had just said implied he wouldn't shy away from using them if needed. It implied he was, in the end, a dark wizard, even if he didn't usually act like one.
The thing was, Sirius Black wasn't denying he was as good a dark wizard as another one.
But because one had a knife in hand, it didn't mean they intended to stab someone with it.
"Muggles are fascinating, you know."
Several people blinked in the courtroom, not sure if they had really heard what they thought they'd heard. And it wasn't because they couldn't believe Black had just said that – even if many obviously didn't share his point of view on the matter, be it because to them muggles were worms, or they just didn't care enough to think they were something like fascinating. No, the thing was, they had no idea how this fit into the conversation.
Of course, Arthur Weasley was fervently nodding at the Black lord, many spectators thought drily as they tried to widen the space between themselves and the muggle-loving Weasley. You never knew, maybe it was contagious.
No, but seriously, what did it have to do with anything?
Sirius didn't let himself be disheartened by his audience's obvious lack of understanding of his genius thread of thought. Actually, he quite liked it. If he hadn't, he certainly wouldn't have toyed with his public for so long, losing them, getting them back, losing them again, only for them to finally see the big picture, more as a shock than as a slow realization.
He liked leading the ones who were listening to him onto false paths, pointing at the banquet table waiting for them at the end of the path, and suddenly, without warning, shoving them aside into the big, boiling, burning soup pot of the painful truth.
He didn't do that, usually, that was true.
He wasn't a cruel man.
Okay, maybe a bit. But not so much.
He didn't do that to people who hadn't deserved it. He didn't act like that with people who weren't reveling into the belief that he was a bastard deserving the worst suffering. With people who had done nothing to him, who just looked at him like a human being, and not like some kind of wonder, some kind of criminal legend, or even some kind of poor misunderstood thing, he spoke normaly. When there was no reason to torture one's brain, and get them startled out of their comfortable prejudices, he acted like any other human being.
Sirius was able to speak like anyone else, and laugh, and joke, and live.
Like everyone else.
But to these people, most of whom didn't want to acknowledge that he, too, was human, he would twist their minds, not to destroy them, but to make them feel pain.
And the part when his audience was utterly lost was one he quite liked. The people in this courtroom were surely lulled into false safety. They thought there was nothing he could hurt them with in such a claim. Muggles were fascinating! And so what?
But those who were a bit cleverer, and who had noticed how he worked, knew he was going to turn this very simple, very innocent, and very beside-the-point claim into something they wouldn't like.
It wasn't so hard to figure out, really.
It was what Sirius Black had done so far, each and every single bloody time.
Emilia Croyne knew it, she could see it just by looking at the public, be they on the spectators' seats or in the heads of Houses' tribune, be they convinced of Black's guilt or doubting his so-called evilness. The temporary Chief Warlock could also see in some people's eyes that they had understood, too.
But most of the time, it was only a shimmering understanding, for they were unable to just go past the knowledge of what the young lord was doing with their mind. They knew, but they couldn't do anything about how it affected them.
Lord Black was able to be a particularly manipulative wizard, when he wanted to, if even those who knew they were being manipulated couldn't shake the manipulation off.
Then again, the witch thought, perhaps it worked because no matter how manipulative Black was being about it, it was still the truth that he told them.
Croyne contained a sigh, and decided she'd better scout around the courtroom in search of this shimmering understanding she had glimpsed here and there amongst the public while listening to the young lord's speech.
Not that, for now, Sirius Back was talking.
It seemed this was a perfect moment, according to the Black lord, for the public to get a bit more anxious, waiting for the other shoe to drop, or to lose themselves in a feeling of false safety. Because yes, some apparently seemed to believe that if the young lord hadn't said a thing for the previous ten seconds, it surely meant there wasn't much to fear from this particular part of his speech.
As if Black could possibly have said "muggles are fascinating, you know" just for the fun, or even better, because he didn't know what else to say.
This was so likely to happen that Croyne wouldn't even bet an already used bubblegum on it.
Nevermind the idiots, the temporary Chief Warlock would rather watch out for the ones who knew the danger of just assuming things about Sirius Black and the trial-from-hell he was seemingly determined to give them.
Because so far, the witch had the nasty feeling they were the ones being tried, and not Black.
If the young lord was smirking at them while allowing them some respite, it wasn't out of good will.
Those who had undestood that were scarce, apparently.
Albus Dumbledore was, of course, not at all affected by Black's speech, but it was surely because he agreed with the man since even before the trial. It was the same with several people sitting around him, and who were definitely acquaintances of the Black lord. Still, even amongst those, some were completely enthralled, no matter that they were on Black's side to begin with. A few, like Harry Potter, the Blacks in general, and Remus Lupin, were shaken by their friend or relative's speech, but they seemed to know full well what the man was doing. Still, most of them were affected.
Then there were a few people amongst the regular public who knew too.
One journalist in particular had that greedy look in his eyes, waiting with glee for anything that came out of the Black lord's mouth, knowing very well he'd have plenty of things to analyze in his next article, about how most people in a courtroom were completely blind to manipulation when it was well used.
Eleanor Rowle was also worth mentioning. She had been the one to stand up for Black in the Atrium, and she seemed to have one very sharp mind. Croyne wouldn't be surprised if the two purebloods were to become fast friends.
As for the lords and ladies, those who weren't completely oblivious were most of the time former Slytherins or Ravenclaws. From what the temporary Chief Warlock had witnessed so far, they were some seven or eight people... Lord Rowle, Lady Ollivander and Lord Longbottom stood out, in fact, for obvious reasons. Frank Longbottom was a known friend of Sirius Black, and had miraculously gotten out of a cruciatus-induced madness only days before. Lord Rowle and Lady Ollivander had been the only ones, of the heads of House who had spoken, not to have been verbally laminated by the accused, for they had asked sensible questions, which didn't outright show disdain or disbelief.
Now that she thought about it...
Emilia Croyne squinted at the Rowle lord. Was it a smirk that she could see...?
It was definitely a smirk, though well concealed.
Theodore Rowle and Sirius Black seemed to have at least one personality trait in common; they were unabashedly enjoying the show.
And Croyne was pretty sure that Rowle's intervention had been more to help the trial to go on again than to ask an actual question, as if the man had known all along that Black had a plan, and the public was being totally slow on the uptake, and it was all very good and everything, but could they please make use of their brains, for once?
When the Black lord decided it was time to go back to business, she was staring at Lord Nott, who decidedly knew what was going on, and apparently didn't like it at all. It surely had to do with the fact that while the previous Lord Nott was in jail for Death Eater activities since roughly three weeks, his brother simply hated anything that had to do with the Dark Arts since it had taken his siblings away, and that in various and always unpleasant ways.
Both Emilia Croyne and Roderic Nott started at the sound of a definitely-too-cheerful-for-it-to-be-harmless voice.
"We wizards and witches have magic, and with it we made many incredible things. We have talking paintings, moving pictures, auto-knitting needles. To you, pure and halfbloods, it may seem like normal stuff. But ask any muggleborn, and they will tell you it is not normal, at all. Paintings and pictures are not supposed to move, because they are nothing more than images. For muggles, the very idea of moving photos is ridiculous."
And for wizards, the fact that a person on a picture would not move and go away was wondrous, because, you know, didn't they get bored after a while?
Sirius could very well see that on the puzzled faces of many of his audience, while the muggleborns in the room were nodding intently.
"Truly, were you to draw something, it would not move unless you magick it in some way. A picture is a picture, it doesn't have a counsciousness, not even when we give them an artificial, magical one. That is the truth of the world, and that is the truth we deny on a daily basis, because we have magic. But in the end, it does not change anything, that we refuse to see the world for what it is."
At that point, many people were simply lost about what the Black lord was getting at, but Sirius didn't care. This was the fun, nice part of this particular argument.
The next part wouldn't be so nice and fun at all.
"Muggles refuse to see that magic is real, for various reasons, the biggest being that we keep it away from their knowledge. But apart from the fact that they ignore and dismiss, when it is shoved into their faces, the existence of magic, they see the world much better than we do. And so, they have to compensate with what we can do, and they can't. It took them years, decades, centuries, and maybe some things will take millenia, but in the end, they always find a way to make things that we can't even envisage without the help of magic, happen. We use magic, they created sciences."
And with the looks, and sometimes scowls, on the faces of the people in the various tribunes, Sirius had no doubt about why muggle studies wasn't a much loved subject at Hogwarts. Wizards truly didn't have an inch of common sense, and when it came to logic...
Better not to talk about that.
"Now, you might wonder why I am telling you all this."
In the spectators' tribune, Remus was rolling his eyes so pointedly he had a feeling he might just get stuck seeing his brain if he persisted. Of course the public had no idea where his friend was going with that reasoning. Hell, for once, even the werewolf didn't have even the slightest idea as to what it was about.
Remus knew his best friend better than most, and so far into the trial, he had always had an inkling about what Sirius was trying to do. But there, even he was lost.
Not lost like most of the public, though. He, at least, understood what the young lord was talking about. With his mother being a muggle, and his condition, he had lived more like a muggle during his first years than most halfbloods. Sirius was right about what he was saying, even if the ones who had grown up amongst witches and wizards didn't seem to understand half of it.
But even understanding what was being said, Remus simply didn't get what his friend was trying to achieve with that.
And this, in itself, was maybe the biggest clue as to how much they wouldn't like what was going to come.
Sighing at Sirius' wildness, Remus just rubbed his fingertips againt his left temple.
If he didn't leave this trial with a headache, he'd count himself lucky.
"Lord Abbot asked me a question I can't answer, as to whether or not I would torture my enemies by using the Dark Arts in a more or less near future."
Sirius was smiling in some sort of sly way at Benjamin Abbot as he said that. He didn't bother to keep his thoughts from showing on his face. Sure, he was under sinemendatium, and he couldn't respond because of the impossibility to know the future, but still, there was something hilarious in the question itself.
A few people snorted in the courtroom, but the only snort truly audible was Lady Prewett's, for the others had been... well, silenced by the silencing charm over the spectators' seats.
As if anyone would answer that peculiar question when asked.
Like, sure, I'm in fact on my way to a friendly torture party, would you like to join us?
No, no one would ever answer that, unless they were under the most potent truth serum. Or maybe if they were completely stoned. Or utterly crazed.
"But, regardless that I can't answer, the right question is not this one. Lord Abbot asked if I'd do so with the Dark Arts, thinking in a totally wizarding way that if I were to torture someone, and may I point out how insulting such a question is, I would do so not only with magic, but with dark magic at that. The right question would have been about me torturing someone, end of the story."
Remus blinked, feeling this was going a way he really, really didn't like.
"Now, how does that relate to muggles and their fascinating ways? It's very simple. We have magic. They don't. But both us and them know of torture."
The Black lord hadn't stopped looking at Benjamin Abbot, and the halfblood lord desperately wished he would stop it, now. Because it definitely sounded like Black was implying he wouldn't use magic to torture someone, but he could do just as well without magic.
People who knew Sirius also knew this wasn't exactly the point of the young lord's speech. But Abbot didn't know that, and it was easy to read it on his face.
Tonks arched an eyebrow at her mother's cousin. There was no way in hell that Sirius would ever pick up a torture tool and use it on anyone, even a Death Eater, even Voldemort himself.
Of course, Sirius could use the Dark Arts, and he wasn't against doing what needed to be done.
But torture was, when it wasn't just for the fun, for the purpose of getting someone to talk. Sirius could do torture, and in a way, he was doing it right now. But it was mental torture, not physical torture. Mental torture had the advantage that sometimes, when it was done with good intentions, it could also lead someone to see the truth.
And no matter what others thought, the use of mental torture, even if on a lower scale, was something common. Usually, it wasn't too much, so people didn't think of it as torture. But all in all, it was the same idea, applied more or less forcefully. Forcing someone into a guilt-trip? Wasn't it playing with this person's feelings and reasoning to get them to do what one wanted?
Sirius didn't need any kind of skills at physical torture. He was good enough with the minds. And if it wasn't enough to get an information out of someone, he gave up and looked for another way.
Sirius Black wasn't a monster.
He could fight with the worst spells that existed, he could force someone to see what they'd rather ignore, but he wasn't one to physically harm anyone if not to defend himself or someone else.
Sirius Black could use the Dark Arts, but that didn't make him a monster.
As not using them didn't mean one wasn't a monster.
"We have curses which make a person bleed out until there is not a drop of blood left in their body. Muggles imagined the iron maiden, in which a person is locked and pierced by several blades if they so much as move an inch. We have bone-breaking hexes. Muggles created the breaking wheel, on which a victim is tied up and made to roll again and again, or bludgeoned until no bone is left unbroken. We have spells which slowly force all air out of the lungs. Muggles had the idea to tie someone to a bench and put a tissue on their face before continuously pouring water upon it, preventing them from breathing. What we do with magic, they do without magic."
Alright, Tonks had to admit, Sirius was damn knowledgeable about torture, it might seem a bit suspicious to someone who didn't know him and the Blacks in general.
From what her mother had told her, the metamorphmagus had gathered that if there was one thing the House of Black hadn't deemed downright shameful to be interested in about muggles, it was their most frightful ways. And how to adapt them to sorcery, of course.
And as Sirius had his kind-of-perfect memory, which allowed him to remember, if not word for word and sentence for sentence, everything that had ever been told to him, or anything that he had ever read, it was to be expected, that he'd know of such things.
Now, obviously, the young lord didn't have a constant access to everything that was in his memory, but if he searched for it, he just had to ask, and it would come back. If sometimes he didn't know the name exactly, he knew the concept, and that was enough.
Sirius didn't really forget things. He just put them aside.
And that was why he was so difficult to deal with. He never forgot what had been told to him. He always remembered when someone had been unfair to him. When he looked you in the eyes, he knew exactly how you had treated him in the past, and he expected just as much.
He knew people could change, at least partially. Sure, he believed that what made someone who they were couldn't be altered, that someone greedy would always be so, that someone good couldn't really become bad. But he also held for a fact that if someone knew who they really were, they could work on it. Their efforts wouldn't change who they were or how they reacted. But they would change how they acted, and to the world, that was what mattered.
That was why, even if he knew someone to have flaws, like everyone else, really – like himself, too – he always gave them a chance to redeem themselves.
That was, when it was possible, and not endangering someone else.
Sirius wasn't blind just because he was aware not everybody acted as they'd have liked, be it in the bad, or the good way.
Tonks surely wouldn't have liked it if someone had told her that there was another person who was thinking along the same lines, up above the chandelier of the courtroom, and that this person was the ghost of one Bellatrix Lestrange née Black.
Bella, like everyone this time, was wondering about what exactly her cousin was trying to achieve.
She wasn't surprised in the least, because that was how Sirius did things.
Yet, she had no idea where exactly he was going.
When no brain-storming helped her to see further into Sirius' plans, the ghost sighed, rolled her eyes, and otherwise did many things which expressed her frustration. It was only once all that had been done, that Bellatrix settled on observing her cousin instead of torturing her brain into searching for the deeper meaning.
The deeper meaning would come to her, and to the whole audience, when it'd be time. She had no doubts that Sirius had meant his speech to be exactly this misleading.
Unfortunately, Bella couldn't see much from where she was. For example, she just couldn't see the temporary Chief Warlock or the lords and ladies. She had a perfect view, however, over the public tribune, and especially Andromeda and Narcissa.
If the two thought they could get away with holding hands when the topic was getting too close to the emotionally-dangerous zone, particularly Narcissa's, they were terribly wrong. From where she was hovering, Bellatrix could just see everything. She was feeling a bit like the all-seing eye of God, right now.
Of course, that would have been more accurate if she could also see the other half of the courtroom, but well, one had to do with what was given to them.
But seriously, it was unusual for Narcissa to be so shaken, so... fragile.
Bella had a feeling it had to do with Lucius' imprisonment, but still, there was something else... Maybe she should get Sirius to investigate a bit. The ghost knew the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord well enough. It was more than likely that there would be some sort of consequences for the failure of Narcissa's husband in leading the attack at the Department of Mysteries and winning over the prophecy.
If there was any way she could get Narcissa out of the Dark Bastard's grasp...
Wait-wait-wait, had she just thought what she believed she had thought?
If there was any way she could get Narcissa out of the Dark Bast...
Right.
Not the "Dark Lord". Not the "Dark Bastard" either.
Voldemort.
Sirius was seriously rubbing off on her, it seemed. And while it was all good to get rid of her Death Eater's habits, Bella wasn't yet feeling too eager to embrace her cousin's ways.
It was waaaaay too soon for that to happen.
Anyway, she looked at Sirius, who was looking very teacher-like right now – and a teacher-like Sirius, that was pretty disturbing.
"The point is, dear public, that how I do things doesn't matter. Be it with a curse or with a knife, if I bleed someone to death, what matters is that I killed them, and not how I did it. Lord Abbot was kind enough to imply I might have the intention to use the Dark Arts on my enemies, but he seems to have forgotten that in the end, there are other ways to make one suffer. Dark Arts or muggle ways, the means don't matter. Only the ends do."
Sirius was still staring at Benjamin Abbot, and the other lord started to wonder if the man ever blinked, because it certainly felt as if the Black lord had never ever broken eye contact since he had been stupid enough to ask a question. Or maybe Black was so good at this thing that he blinked just when he himself did, and so he hadn't noticed?
What was certain, however, was that Lord Abbot was definitely trying not to think about torture and death and curses and knives, because thinking about torture and death and curses and knives was something he didn't particularly like to do. It made him feel really bad. A bit as if he was going to throw up, actually.
Unfortunately for him, talking about torture and death and curses and knives was exactly what the accused had been doing so far.
And apparently, he wasn't done yet.
Black finally broke eye contact, and looked around the courtroom. There was something stern in his gaze, this time, something hard, and unforgiving, too.
"All of you, when a criminal is brought to you, you immediately think 'dark wizard' and 'Dark Arts' and 'get this shameless monster out of here and to Azkaban'. But if the criminal never used the Dark Arts, you seem to think it's not too bad, actually, maybe there is yet redemption for them, no matter what they did exactly. And from that, you moved from 'dark wizard' as in who uses the Dark Arts to 'dark wizard' meaning who can use the Dark Arts. You don't really care about what one has done, but only about what they could do."
In other words, they didn't care about what Sirius was guilty of, but they did care about what he could do if one day he woke up fancying himself a great torturer.
"If someone had 'angel' tatooed on their forehead, you'd forgive them the worst atrocities, but because I am a Black, because I am more than able to use the darkest magics, I obviously am a bastard who will come to murder you in your sleep. Forget second chances, you don't even give a first chance to people like me."
Sirius' voice went down to a whisper. Yet, the silence was so thick no one missed what came next.
"And the best is that you let those who live up to your expectations alone. All the Blacks who behaved like Blacks, you let them alone, unless they were brought to the Wizengamot with indubitable evidence, like Bellatrix. But the Blacks who try to get away from the family cliché, you can't help but suspect them, make them targets for your hainous accusations. It is so easy, isn't it? To go after those who don't have the support of the House of Black. So much easier than to go after those you really fear, those who have the money and the name to crush you and make your destruction be regarded as an unfortunate accident."
In the family's tribune, Narcissa felt her sister tense as the words slithered over the audience.
She didn't take time to wonder how Andromeda had lived after being disowned. She just reversed roles, and held her sister's hand, as her sister had held hers when the trial had hit too close to home.
"I always tried to be different from my family and its repute. And that is what I got as a reward."
Sirius finished his speech on this sentence, and gestured to the whole courtroom, to the whole trial, in fact.
His mouth was twisted in a caricature of a smile which reeked of contempt.
"I always did my best to be someone else than a Black, and this is what I got. Disdain. Hatred. Mistrust. I tried to play nice, and to make you forget that I had a last name. Yes, I was Sirius Orion Black. But I did my best so that Orion wasn't the name of my father anymore, and I did my best so that Black wasn't from the House of Black anymore."
It hurt a bit, Bellatrix thought from high up above the public.
It hurt a bit, to know how far Sirius had wanted to get rid, not of his surname per se, but of what it meant and who it tied him to.
It hurt a bit, that her cousin had been so disgusted with their family, that he had wanted not to be a part of it anymore.
"You denied me that first chance, despite everything I had done, and despite everything that I had never done. I never made use of my abilities to hurt anyone, even if I did never shy away from defending myself and others. I never cursed anyone for the hell of it. I never judged anyone on their blood status. I stopped the worst bullies in Hogwarts at the best of my abilities. I protected many people, wizards and muggles, as a member of the Order of the Phoenix. And the only times I used my knowledge of the Dark Arts, it was to save someone's life, be it because they had been hit with something particularly nasty or because there was no other way than to kill the attacker."
Suddenly, Sirius turned to the lords' tribune.
"Lord Wenlock, who saved your daughter's life in April 1980?"
But Sirius didn't wait for an answer.
His eyes moved to Lady Slughorn, a witch who looked nothing like her potion teacher of a second cousin; she was a scrawny, wizened woman, with huge grey eyes.
"Who protected Julia and Andrew Slughorn from a Death Eaters attack in September 1979?"
Then he turned to the public tribune, and his eyes searched for a tall and thin wizard he had noticed a little earlier, getting in the courtroom only seconds before the doors had been closed.
"Marcus Wright, where would your family be if I hadn't been there in January 1981, when three masked figures put your house on fire during the night?"
Many people turned to look at Wright, whose only answer – after a sign from Croyne – was a whisper.
"On fiendfyre, not on fire."
Sirius nodded to te man, who nodded back politely.
Then the young lord took a deep breath, and relaxed a bit.
When he talked again, his voice was calm, whereas it had been sharp and strained before.
"This is what I did."
He said no more after that.
For a time no one dared to speek.
Some wondered how they could have forgotten about all that. They wondered how, because it had been a Black, because it had been expected of a Black, they could have simply forgotten about all the things which had screamed that it wasn't possible, not Sirius Black! Not the auror trainee, not the member of the Order of the Phoenix! Not this man...
This man couldn't have been such a traitor.
Of course, they knew they had excuses. Sirius knew that too. He wasn't going to blame them, because they had considered it possible. Back then, everyone was suspect, everybody could betray even their own family. It just happened. Sirius Orion Black could have been playing a role. It had been a possibility.
But it hadn't been – or, given how it had evolved, it shouldn't have been – obvious.
If they hadn't doubted him after what had happened, Sirius would have thought them idiots.
They should have doubted him, but not condemned him on the spot.
Yet it was exactly what they had done.
Lord Rosier raised his hand, and Emilia Croyne allowed him to speak.
"You claim that you did everything to distance yourself from your family because they were everything you didn't want to be; worshipers of blood purity and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named amongst other things. You claim that this distanciation should be proof enough that you don't have the same beliefs."
Lord Rosier was an old man, who had seen his brother and nephew fall, and die, to the call of Voldemort. Now that Voldepants was back, Sirius was under the impression that the wizard was literally fading into despair. His hair seemed whiter than before, his complexion paler than even one year sooner, and it happened that people simply didn't notice him, more transparent than even a ghost, and at least not locatable by how cold the air was around him.
It would surprise no one if his daughter soon became Lady Rosier.
Sirius' face went serious under the old wizard's scrutiny, not because it worried him – after all, he had nothing to hide – but out of respect for the man.
"Yet, you are now Lord Black."
Sirius smiled genuinely at the Rosier lord.
"I was Lord Black even in Azkaban. I became so the day my grandfather died. But I guess that what you mean, Lord Rosier, is that not only I am Lord Black, but I accepted the lordship at last?"
And he raised a hand, for all to see the black and silver ring of the Lord of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, the ring of the duke of Black.
Lord Rosier closed his eyes and slowly nodded.
"You distanced yourself from your family, but now you claim it back."
"I do."
The Rowle lord had to try hard not to roll his eyes when he saw the triumphant looks on some of the audience's faces. As if by saying that, Black had actually admitted to being a Death Eater or something...
If things were so easy, this trial would have no reason to be. After all, everybody knew that Lord Black had taken his cousins back in the family, and to do that, Sirius Black needed his lordship. So everybody already knew that the young lord was claiming to be part of the House of Black again.
Or they were stupid, not to have realized it sooner. More than probable, truthfully.
Theodore felt it wouldn't have been very polite to snort at Lord Abbot and similar, so he didn't. But he really, really wanted to.
Oh well. It'd have to wait for him to be back home. His wife hadn't been able to come to the trial, but she would be pleased to hear about it.
"Proving to everyone that I wasn't like most of my family was obviously a failed attempt, or I wouldn't have been thrown into Azkaban without even a mock trial. I won't try it again. But if I can't be anything else than a Black, I can make it so that the House of Black changes its reputation."
Andromeda smirked at that, but Narcissa flinched a bit.
"The Blacks are one of the greatest wizarding families this country is home to. We have been here for centuries, and if we take into account the time of the House of Darke, for millennia. We invented many spells and charms, some good, some evil. We took part in many wars, and our blood can be traced in every other House and in many halfblood families."
Many people shifted as they tried to remember if there was a Black somewhere in their family tree, and amongst them, quite a lot shifted again, when they found that yes, they had Black blood, even if for most of them it was only from a distant ancestor – even if most of those ancestors had been disowned from the House of Black, for the halfblood families.
"I have been disgusted with what being a Black means. But no matter what, to everyone I was still a Black. So I will be a Black, and I will be proud of it."
This, Remus sneered, was Sirius' usual strategy: when you are denied something, do the exact contrary, and do it with panache.
"If I am to be Lord Black, then I will do so that it becomes a title to be proud of. I can't erase the dark past of some of my family members. But I can ensure that there shall be good Blacks with just as much fame."
At that, Dumbledore's eyes twinkled.
Sirius was truly one to take the bull by the horns when it came to that kind of things. He certainly didn't lack bravery and spirit...
But amongst the heads of House, one wasn't pleased by that speech.
Without even asking for the right to speak, Lady Yaxley looked at the Black lord with contempt. When her clear voice was heard, it was as sharp as a dagger, and to some, it sounded as deadly.
"To think the high and mighty Sirius Black, proud of his being a Gryffindor, pureblood yet blood traitor to his family, erased from the Black Family Tapestry by his own mother, would use the worst secret of the Black Family to save his life, drenching himself into the Dark Arts he always loathed and killing his own blood! Whatever you say, Black, you are the same as the rest of your family, only you put on a decent mask."