It’s a poorly kept secret among certain groups of wizards that it even exists, but when you know you know.
Most kids aren’t able to escape it once their family is in the know, it’s a fact he knows very well given how many of the faces he sees at Hogwarts he’s seen there too.
Some are only brought to watch or join in on hurting others rather be directly hurt themselves, but if your family knows it exists then it’s likely you’ll be just as trapped as the rest no matter what type of victim you are.
None of them enjoy it, but eventually tradition wins out and the victims become the providers.
Their parents brought them and so now they bring their children because decades prior their grandparents brought their parents and their great grandparents brought their grandparents.
Some people have tried to destroy it, he assumes they have at least since in reality he doesn’t know for sure but he figures at least one person who came here didn't like what they saw and wanted to stop it, but too many members are far too powerful to touch and so he imagines it’s failed every time.
After all, who do you tell when the aurors who are supposed to help are regular patrons of that place?
The Black family has known about it for centuries, hard not to when you’re the most powerful wizarding family in Britain, though they aren’t one of the families who tend to participate generationally like some others he knows about.
Still, both of his mother’s parents, one of his uncles, and his mother were victims, so were Andy and Bella and Cissa.
And him, of course.
He’s been taken there just like the rest of them.
Something he and his mother have in common he assumes.
He wishes she was one of the few brave enough to break tradition.
For Sirius, it didn’t start there.
Nah, it started with wand light at night shining under the closed door and gentle touches in the dark from a face his mind blocked from his memory for years.
For a few years that's all it was, just touches.
Everywhere, with instructions to cross his wrists over his eyes so Sirius didn’t need to look at Him and He didn’t need to look at Sirius.
Father has always hated looking at Sirius, under every circumstance.
“You look just like your mother.”
It’s not a compliment.
Eventually it became more than just the touches.
Fingers mostly, “you’re too small for anything else”, and him on his knees.
Sometimes Father brings him to another house and there’s different hands touching him that soon become just as familiar to his skin as the first pair, but it doesn’t go further than that for a while.
Until, of course, it does.
It was always going to.
The next pair of hands, though far from the last, are from his piano instructor.
Sirius doubts this was orchestrated by Father so Sirius believes for the first time maybe some of the problem is him.
He’s doing something wrong for people to want to hurt him like this.
His instructor likes praise, likes giving orders and having Sirius obey them with a pretty smile and soft “yes, sir.”
He does not like when Sirius argues and soon arguing is fucked out of him along with his hope of things ever being better.
It’s easier to think the worst of every person and every situation, he figures out soon that you can’t be disappointed if you expected it to happen to begin with.
Sirius plays along until Reggie becomes the same age he was when things started getting bad, then suddenly he knows that just “playing along” isn’t going to cut it.
Him being unable to say no may not become the biggest draw if there’s an even younger boy who also doesn’t have that opportunity.
So, Sirius does exactly what he’s been brought up to be and Sirius begs.
He makes the first move more and more, taking all the filth aimed at him and the laughs he hears by men who think it’s amusing to watch the child in front of them beg nice and pretty to be fucked like a slut.
“You’ve got him trained well, Orion.”
Yes, Sirius is very well trained.
“You jealous baby? Don’t want our attention to move away from you, huh?”
Yes, anything to get their eyes off Reggie.
“Well since you asked so nicely…”
Eventually Reggie gets too old to risk starting, it’s an unspoken belief between the people in the know that once kids hit a certain age they’re harder to train and prepare for this type of stuff so it’s not worth it to bother, but by then Sirius is too stuck to stop.
So he keeps begging even if the threat isn’t there.
He begs knowing Reggie is safe and won’t ever have to know the stuff Sirius knows.
Sirius is very good at begging.
There are gaps occasionally, from potions or spells or just plain alcohol they forced down his throat until his brain was so foggy the world barely existed and the memories weren’t real as soon as they finished.
Sirius doesn’t know what happened then, there’s no visual memories of those times.
Just fear.
Lots, and lots of fear.
The next pair of hands is a healer.
Paid off by his parents to never speak of the Black heir slitting his wrists to the bone and screaming bloody murder about how much he wanted to die, sobbing on the floor covered in his own blood and tearing out his hair and scratching bloody lines down his face for hours until he can be restrained long enough to force a potion down his throat that makes an artificial calm wash over him.
Off the record healing and a memory wiped of the event as soon as Sirius is pumped full of multiple potions to heal his injuries without much scarring and knock him out just enough to keep him trapped in bed so he can't immediately try again like he wants.
But Sirius remembers.
He remembers being stuck, staring at the ceiling while unfamiliar fingers once again touch him everywhere they can reach because Sirius can’t move so he can’t fight and he can’t scream for help and even better for the healer who knew very well that even if Sirius managed to yell loud enough for someone to hear that no one would come help him.
So yeah, maybe the healer doesn’t remember that night, but Sirius does.
Oh Merlin does he remember.
He’s twelve the first time he’s brought to the place.
Sure he’s been fucked by people who go but he had never been brought there until then.
By the time he walks through those doors for the first time he’s already a type of fucked up most people don't even know exists.
He’s being led by Father through the crowd, trying to ignore the fates of other children around him because he knows soon enough that will be him too and he couldn’t save himself so how could he ever hope of saving them?
Father hands him off to a tall man Sirius doesn’t recognize then but knows he’ll soon recognize at least some parts of if tonight goes how Sirius knows it will.
“I hear you beg really nice, Siri.”
And Sirius just lets the fog consume his brain as he smiles something practiced and long perfected, trailing nibble fingers up the man's arm in a way that makes the man smile the type of smile where you just know you’re about to feel unimaginable amounts of pain just for his enjoyment.
“You’ve heard right.”
He doesn’t have time to blink before a hand tangles itself into his hair and yanks him to the floor so the night can really begin.
Sirius doesn't know how long it's been since the night started, but through the pain and fog he somehow manages to turn his head just enough to the side to catch sight of who he's looking for; his long since beaten raw back and shoulders dragging back and forth against the hard surface without a real pattern and a numbness spread throughout his lower regions that he’s thankful for since this is the third one tonight.
Well, third that he knows of at least.
Father looks away from his conversation just for a moment, they’ve been coming here long enough that he no longer watches Sirius and instead spends the time talking to the other parents doing the same things to their own kids, but he looks away just long enough to make eye contact with Sirius.
And Sirius grins.
Through the blood dripping from his mouth and down his face and neck, one of the men was particularly violent with the throat fucking tonight, and the blood budding up from the new marks littered across his body, Sirius just grins something truly disgusting looking at Father until a nearly deranged sounding laugh is punched out of him by a particularly violent thrust he wasn’t expecting.
Oh Father, look what you’ve done to your precious baby.
For a second Father looks visibly repulsed at the sight of him before he schools his expression back to the neutral one it was before, turning his back to Sirius to avoid looking at him again (just like old times) and continuing his conversation like he wasn’t aware of the assault he alone orchestrated currently going on right behind him.
Isn’t it tragic how ugly your child has become?
He’s fifteen the last time it happens under Father's control, though that’s mostly just because that’s the age he ran away to James’ house.
He thinks about it sometimes, in some way he even misses it because suddenly the world is completely different from what he was raised in and Sirius has always been afraid of change, afraid of the unknown of it all.
After all, it was all he knew for twelve years.
Being on his knees, his back, his stomach, over the couch, on the floor, against the wall, in any position they placed him and any way they wanted him.
Lick, suck, moan, whimper, cry, take, take, take.
Always taking.
James doesn’t get it when Sirius tells him that sometimes he regrets leaving.
Sirius is glad James doesn’t get it.
Even after leaving Sirius doesn’t know how to stop begging.
He tries for a while, but eventually he finds himself wasted on the floor of the Gryffindor common room during a party for some celebration he doesn't remember with some girl he doesn’t recognize on top of him and even if everything feels more like then than now he doesn’t tell her to stop.
They didn’t before so why would anyone now?
Sirius doesn’t quite realize until the next day that he’s no longer there and the girl likely would have stopped if he said no, but the problem is that the next time he drinks he forgets again who he's with and when and where he is and the pattern just continues on.
It's not too bad though, after all, Sirius doesn’t even know how to say no.
He can’t think of a time he ever did before, except maybe the times where he was ordered to plead for someone to stop just for their own enjoyment.
So it continues and by the end of the year Sirius has a reputation for being so easy he’ll let anyone take him to bed no matter who they are or what they do to him.
Take, take, take.
Sirius doesn’t try to stop these rumors since he knows they’re true.
After all, it’s all he knows nowadays.
Father made sure of it.
Tonight he and Remus are silent.
It’s not often they get to be so quiet together, not when other people are watching with their own expectations of who Remus and Sirius are and they both know how to put on a good show for the audience.
It had been a shit day, just a few months shy of them finishing their seventh year when once they do maybe he can try again to escape the past in a new place where no one knows him, and Sirius knows there’s fresh marks visible on his neck from an encounter earlier that he doesn’t really remember happening but also doesn’t remember trying to stop.
It’s confusing, how fun the performance is but how terrifying the results of them are.
Or, at least, he thinks it’s terrifying, he doesn’t really remember most of them.
“You hate it.”
It’s not a question; Remus doesn’t really speak in questions on nights like this.
“I can tell that you hate it, so why do you keep doing it?”
Sirius just grins in response, something dark and twisted and angry.
And resigned.
So, so resigned.
“I’m good at it.”
And Remus, dear Remus who Sirius loves with every ounce of his being, just stares with a look far too understanding for someone who doesn’t think the same exact way fucked up way as Sirius to ever have and for a moment Sirius knows more about Remus than Remus would ever risk saying aloud and he realizes that night, at the top of the astronomy tower, that Remus gets it.
Sirius looks back out to the stars while Remus continues looking at a different star and neither one speaks again until the morning when it’s time to go back down to the Great Hall and perform for another day.
Just the same kind of fucked up, aren’t they?