Sirius is so done with this bloody nightmare of a family.
He limps down the stairs towards his room, favoring his right arm from where mother’s nastiest (and possibly dark) cutting curse hit him. The stairs seem to lengthen with his every step, prolonging his journey downstairs. He scowls, cursing the house that plays to Walburga’s wicked whims.
He can hear said woman screeching in the distance, threatening him in ways that would make a less accustomed man flinch and cower. Sirius, however, has lived with her colourful language for sixteen bloody years.
So he ignores her threats and jumps down the rest of the stairs, barely landing on his feet. He swears he feels his left foot strain under the pressure, but he pushes on. Sirius makes his way to his bedroom, the door wide open from where Walburga dragged him to the family parlor just an hour prior. In their house, that room is a glorified torture chamber.
Ever since he was seven, Sirius contemplated running away. He remembers making up elaborate plans of sneaking out in the middle of the night, taking a sleepy Regulus with him and leaving the house for good. He is sure that he still has that tiny red notebook (the one with all of his escape plans through the years) somewhere deep down in his trunk. For as long as he could remember, the idea of running away was a distant dream; unattainable, foolish. He always wished to be rid of the last name 'Black'. Dreaming about such a thing becoming reality made living in Grimmauld a little easier. But now, after three solid rounds of the Cruciatus curse and nasty cutting curses that reflected his mother’s radiant temper, Sirius knows that if he stays, he might just kill her.
As Sirius throws his multitude of prank experiments and half-done summer homework in his trunk, he doesn’t notice the figure shadowing his doorway. When he turns around, he does so with a little shout that quickly turns to a nasty sneer.
“What the fuck do you want?”
The words that leave his mouth are sluggish, the muscles around it protesting and twitching at the sudden activity.
Regulus, his younger brother (once, partner in crime, his sole confidant) and second-worst person in the house, looks at him with a deep frown stretched across his haughty features. Sirius hates them. He hates how much they look alike when put side to side. He wants to beat their similarities out of his brothers face. When his hand starts clenching in a fist, Regulus steps back and out of the doorway.
“What did you do?”
Sirius has no time for his brothers 'concern'. He throws the rest of his things (the silly muggle trinkets Remus bought him, the origami’s Peter liked folding and the caricatures of their professors that James drew) into his trunk, shrinking it and tossing it into his jeans’ back pocket.
Regulus, still expecting him to answer, stops him from leaving the room. He puts his palm on Sirius chest and braves the icy glare that his older brother sends his way for the unwelcome action.
“Unhand me.” He growls, like the Grim beneath his skin.
The younger teen doesn't relent, pushing on Sirius chest harder, making him stumble back into the red and gold clad room. Sirius grinds his teeth at the pain the touch brings him and tries his best not to fade away into that blank headspace that follows him whenever his nerve endings are on fire.
“What happened?” Regulus insists and tries his best to block the doorway. He doesn’t quite succeed, as his seeker build barely takes up half of the space. Sirius can’t help but snort at the sight, the action pulling at his chest again, making him wince.
“She snatched the letter I was about to send to Remus. I guess a gay son is as bad as a blood traitor one.” He croaks out (his throat is raw, red and possibly bleeding from the amount of screaming he’d done) and delights in the way that Regulus’ whole body flinches. He runs his tongue down the back of his teeth and grimaces at the metallic taste on his tongue. Yeah, he definitely tore something when screaming.
“How bad?”
“June of 72’,” and Regulus didn’t need any more information to know. That had been the time when Sirius fought back, for the first time. It wasn’t the worst Walburga had done per se, but not the best either.
Looking closer, Regulus sees that Sirius looks absolutely awful. Regulus can see all the cuts around his brothers’ body and the deep gash in his right arm, along with some sort of bruise forming around his brother’s neck. The unmistakable Cruciatus tremors run through Sirius’ battered body and Regulus lets a grimace paint his face.
In their moment of silence, the screeching voice of Walburga comes closer.
Not even sure what she is saying, only registering the adrenaline in his veins, Sirius jumps to action. Seeing Regulus lost in thought, Sirius rushes past him and down the corridor. Even with his wand in one hand and the other around an experimental protective pendant Remus had carved for him, he stumbles and falls as a tripping jinx lands on his back.
Shit.
His mother, in all her terrible glory, looms over him and he feels like a misbehaving Crup about to be put down.
“I cannot believe I’ve put up with you for this long.” She glowers, her face stony and indifferent. That is one of the worst things about his mother’s abuse. She is always so apathetic. When she ruins him, rips screams and pleads of help from Sirius, she watches with that passive gaze of hers and it drives him wild.
Suddenly, Walburga grabs him by the curls on the back of his neck and hauls him up the floor. He doesn’t have much energy for a fight, with his wand clattering to the floor from the sudden action and the lingering aftershocks of the Cruciatus still running through his body. He can only claw at the manicured, slender fingers tearing at his hair and glare at his mother with all his might.
“Your birth is the most unfortunate event in our family. Not only a blood traitor, but also a poof. You disgrace us..” She trails off and an odd sort of glimmer overtakes her gaze. “I suppose something must be done about that.”
She hauls him by his curls and he shouts in surprise, certain that she’d pulled some of them out. When they head up the stairs and down the hall, Sirius can’t help the dog-like whimpers that escape his mouth at being dragged around like a misbehaving puppy. Whenever Walburga hears them, she digs her fingers deeper into his scalp and tuts.
“What has become of our family?” She trails off and Sirius swears that she seems almost wistful. “Well, as long as you’re not in it, you can’t tarnish our image any longer.”
Confused and more than a little out of it from the tearing pain in his nerves and scalp, not to mention the lazily bleeding gash on his right arm, Sirius doesn’t even notice when his mother opens the door to the tapestry room.
It isn’t a room that Sirius and Regulus are allowed to enter on their own. Since the tapestry itself is a terribly important heirloom to their entire family, the door is locked and warded at all times. He’s only seen it during his early childhood, when Father insisted on both of his sons memorizing the entire history of their family, past and present. He’d sit both of them on each knee and spend long evenings telling them the stories of their ancestors. As Sirius is thrown on the floor beside their family’s branches, he tries putting the unwelcome memories back into his subconscious.
Sirius can admit that he doesn’t ever think much about the room, or his father for that matter. Orion Black is a man that sees his children and wife only during the dinners, choosing to separate himself from his family and dive headfirst into his work at the Ministry of Magic. The room is only a distant childhood memory, filled with tentative warmth from his otherwise absent father. It’s a painful reminder of his vacancy.
“Ever since you met that Potter boy you’ve been terrible. He's ruined what I made of you. I raised you better than that.”
“I only saw through your bullshit.”
He only gets a mild pain curse (that is certainly from the darker parts of their library) to his chest in response.
“You know, Sirius, I just can’t stand you.”
Despite the terrible words, all Sirius can think about is Walburga’s indifferent face as she says them. She looks like she doesn’t care while he cares too much and an angry fire burns in his gut. Sirius Black doesn’t love his mother, but she at least could pretend to care when she hurts him.
“You’ve brought such shame to us. Me and your father.” She sniffs and rises to her full height, wand drawn. “I think it’s time to end this little game. You won't spoil this family any longer.”
Sirius is about to give a retort, something about how they’re the ones that ruined him, but—
He screams.
It’s a terrible sound. Bloodcurdling and rotten. If Sirius didn’t know better, he’d think it was a banshee that possessed his throat and made him tear at it.
The fire that hung in his belly spread through his body in an instant, a hot orange fire overtaking his chest and rising to his arms and down his legs. He feels tears like hot lava swell and run down his face, the fire start to dance together with his rising body heat.
Sirius trashes on the floor, only the cracking sounds of fabric and his screams reaching his ears.
He doesn’t know how long he was on fire. He knows it must be a while, from the way most his clothes burned through and his multitude of wounds ran hot whilst getting deeper and gnarlier.
Slowly returning to his senses, Sirius groans and turns to his side, clutching his right arm and hunching into a ball.
“Leave and never come back, like you were planning to do.” A voice so familiar yet distant warns him. “Someday, I hope to see news of your death.”
With that for a goodbye, Sirius lays on the charred black floors for what feels like hours. With his magic trying its’ best to knit together all the damage done to him in the span of a night, he falls in and out of consciousness.
He isn’t sure if the black, shadowy figure by his side that made his body shimmer a baby blue light was real or a hallucination. After seeing that light, the next time consciousness returns to him, he can made out his surroundings without any sort of blurry edge to his vision. Feeling, ableist terrible and agonizing, returns to him and he can even manage to stand up.
With shaky fingers and wobbly legs, Sirius shuffles closer to the place that smells most like smoke — the place where he knows his name to have been embroidered. In the place of his picture, there is a charred black hole, burned through to the brick wall behind the tapestry. Sirius winces, the feeling of being burnt alive coming back to him.
He touches the place where the replica of his face once was and, strangely enough, feels an immense amount of relief.
Sirius can finally leave with his last name no longer hanging overhead like a curse.
He can be free.