There’s a scuff on the bedside table. Sirius can’t stop looking at it.
Can’t stop? Won’t stop? He’s not totally sure which it is. Maybe it’s both. All he knows is that his eyes feel glued to the little nick in the black paint.
He’s not sure where it came from. Maybe he hit it with something. More realistically, it’s probably from one of the last times this happened. It is right at the height of his wildly rocking bed frame, after all. It would make sense. Sirius would have to check his bed frame for a matching scuff to confirm that theory, though.
He can’t do that right now.
He can’t do much of anything right now.
Either way, there’s a scuff on the bedside table, and Sirius can’t stop looking at it.
Maybe, the reason he can’t stop looking at it is because, if he takes his eyes off of the beige wood showing through one of the Family’s preferred colours, he’ll have to look at something else. Nothing else in his room is particularly appealing to look at during the best of times, let alone now.
The ceiling is black and perfectly painted, no imperfections (he would know, he’s spent hours looking at it, on nights like this one). The rest of his furniture is too far away from his rattling bed to be damaged. He never leaves anything interesting out, lest one of the other inhabitants of the house take it away from him for the crime of being too happy. His floor, dull brown wood with a green and scratchy carpet, is bloodstained, unable to bring him anything but dark memories. The walls, also green, but darker and patterned, display nothing more than a framed picture of the Black Family Crest— and more bloodstains, towards the lower portions, where he can reach when nearly incapacitated on the ground.
He doesn’t want to look anywhere else in the room. He can’t, anyways. His ability to move seems to have been sapped out of him. Even the mundane things he usually does without any thought, like blinking and swallowing, are too tiresome to so much as consider.
His eyes are getting dry as he stares at the scuff on the bedside table, but Sirius really can’t stop looking at it.
Worse than seeing the rest of his room would be seeing his bed, outside of the small amount of mattress right next to his head. He doesn’t need to. He’s not expected to do anything other than lay there and take it, he knows. Not that he’s fully aware of anything happening, thankfully. He’s been offered that small mercy— the unspoken permission to let his brain cloud and distance himself from the situation at hand.
Perhaps he hasn’t been given permission, Sirius thinks distractedly, perhaps Rodolphus and Rabastan simply don’t care about him enough to consider the effects this has on him. Perhaps the men just aren’t paying any attention to Sirius’ mental state. That sounds likely.
Whatever the reason, he’s glad he doesn’t need to pay any mind to the sensations around him. He knows that’s a bad idea. He’d done that the first few times this had happened, finding himself unable to resist the innate urge to bite, kick, scream, and had forced himself to be fully present for every moment of the experience. That had been a mistake he has long-since corrected. It’s far easier for everybody involved if he gives in, lets it happen, instead of fighting back.
The hand on his hip and the one circled around his neck, applying barely enough pressure to make breathing slightly more difficult, but not enough to properly choke him. The fingers on his hip were digging in hard enough he knew they would bruise. The second set of hands are tangled in his hair and hooked under his knee, keeping his leg spread, grip just as harsh. He has mixed feelings about that fact.
The dark bruises would, inevitably, be extremely noticeable against his milk-white skin. He doesn’t like that fact, the visible proof that he is damaged, dirty, and less than. His classmates and friends all believe that he’s like them— clean and pure, has never been defiled and broken. If they could see the hand-shaped prints on his hips, welts on his arse, red splotches and bites on his chest, shoulders, and neck, Sirius knew they would never see him the same.
On the other hand, though, the obvious marks all over his body serve as evidence that what happened to him is real and not alright. He doesn’t know how he would be able to convince himself his horribly painful and overwhelming reactions to what’s been happening to him isn’t just sex. It’s… well, he doesn’t like saying or thinking what it actually is, then he’d have to admit that he was some kind of victim, which is the last thing he wants.
Being a victim would mean that this whole situation isn’t his fault, but it has to be. If it’s not his fault, then he’ll never be able to do anything to make sure it doesn’t happen again. That way, one day, he’ll manage to do something that will make sure this stops. He’s sure it’s his fault. It has to be his fault. It has to be.
He hopes it is, at the very least.
That scuff on the bedside table seems to stare back at Sirius.
Sirius’ vision is blurring. His eyes are burning. His face feels damp where it meets the pillow. He’s crying, he realizes quite quickly. That’s tiring. He cries far, far too much, he thinks. It always drains him. He’ll wake up hours later that he usually would with a tension headache and ugly puffiness around his eyes tomorrow morning, he knows from experience. It would be far easier to put this all behind him if he could wake up the next day without the pounding in his head. Sure, the bruising is helpful to calm his downplaying tendencies, but the headache is unnecessarily cruel.
He wishes he could leave the situation he’d found himself in, but he knows that’ll never happen. He likes to tell himself, when he’s at Hogwarts or alone in 12 Grimmauld Place, that he won’t cry, won’t beg, won’t embarrass himself, next time. He also likes to act like he believes that he really won’t cry, won’t beg, won’t embarrass himself.
Every time he tells himself such, he knows, deep down, that he’s lying his ass off.
Sirius is exhausted.
He doesn’t remember the last time he got a proper sleep. Generally, since he was around five, when this started, he’s been sustaining himself on three-to-six hours of non-consecutive, nightmare-riddled sleep a night. He constantly wakes up throughout his sleep, unable to get the feeling of phantom hands off of his body, repeatedly thrust into deep panic and flashbacks.
Sleep has always been illusive to him. He spends hours and hours tossing and turning each night, sometimes well into the early hours of the morning, when he’s forced to watch the sun peek over the horizon and hear the birds wake up. Inevitably, if he does manage to fall asleep, he’ll wake up at least twice during the night, in tears and unable to calm down for at least a while.
Still, regardless of what happens around him, the scuff on the bedside table stays where it is, and Sirius can’t stop looking at the damn thing.
It hurts, what’s happening below his naval. He knows, logically, that it must. Every time this happens, there’s red and white all over the bedsheets and running down the inside of his legs and smeared up his back. It’s always pooled on his stomach and splattered on his face.
Despite the pain he knows he must be experiencing, he doesn’t feel much of anything. Rodolphus is between his legs, grabbing at him while his hips slam against Sirius’ own at the punishingly fast and hard pace he’s long-since claimed to be used to (he isn’t, he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be). Rabastan is next to him, holding Sirius open for his own brother to pound into and running his mouth about something or other. Sirius has learned that he shouldn’t listen to that, it’ll just further ground him and make him feel worse.
Years ago, when it all started, blood would and up dried under his fingernails and crusted between his teeth. He’s grown past that phase. It hurts less when he doesn’t bother with that. Rodolphus and Rabastan don’t seem to feel the need to him as severely when he doesn’t fight back.
This whole arrangement had started eleven years ago, when Sirius was five years old. His oldest cousin, Bellatrix, had been eighteen years old, then, a fresh graduate from Hogwarts; young, hopeful, and wishing for a life she knew she would never get. Sirius thinks that her shattered hope, which was immediately torn away as she was forced to marry a twenty-eight year old Rodolphus the moment she was out of the school’s halls, is what caused her to go down the dark, madness woven path she’s currently walking.
Of course, Rodolphus’ younger twin brother, Rabastan, had been present for the wedding, after party, and all subsequent events. The Lestranges are family, in whatever the Nobel and Most Ancient House of Black’s twisted perception of family is, which means they must come along to every gathering. This fact does not bode well for Sirius. In fact, it routinely fucks him over, quite literally.
The night of Rodolphus and Bellatrix’s wedding after party, an absurdly grand affair that Sirius had become exceptionally bored of very quickly, was when he was first tainted by the men.
Sitting in the corner of the massive, black, silver, and green ballroom in itchy, stiff dress robes befitting of a young heir to such a powerful house, Sirius had been torn between childishly fiddling with the many rings on his fingers and maintaining the stick-up-your-ass posture that had been drilled into his head. He would’ve much preferred spending time with his baby brother, Regulus, who was still only three, but was heaps of fun and the brightest thing in the murky house he was raised in. Carrying insects and worms into the grass from the deck they’d crept onto, because Regulus didn’t want them to be hurt, but was horribly scared of them, built some of his most nostalgic memories.
When the Lestrange twins had approached him, asking if he wanted to come with them and play a game, he had been all too willing to follow them up to his biggest cousin’s new bedroom. The brothers, Sirius knew, were well aware that they weren’t supposed to be touching or looking at a little boy the way they were.
That night, he’d allowed them to strip him without fighting back, only becoming uncomfortable and asking questions, as, his Uncle Alphard had told him no one should be looking at his private parts. Despite this, they had reassured him that it was okay, they were just teaching him a big kid’s game that everyone plays, eventually, he would enjoy it soon enough.
That night, his face had been forced into a pillow before he’d comprehended that he was on the bed, and, suddenly, there was searing pain in his behind, and he’d screamed. Rabastan, who was inside him— though, he hadn’t known what was breaching him— had rubbed his sides and back almost soothingly, before pounding into him. Rodolphus had yanked his head up, scoffing at the tears, snot, and saliva running down his face, and had shoved his mouth around his cock.
That night, he’d shaken, and sobbed, and begged as his throat and anus were bruised black and blue by the twin brothers, taking turns ruining him. They had— and Sirius only admits this because of his age at the time; once he was older, what it was changed— raped him for hours that night. It was still his fault, he knows, it had to be.
Rodolphus and Bellatrix’s bedside table had no scuff. Maybe it has one, now, after all the time Sirius has spent being fucked into the bed. He’ll have to check next time he’s there.
Sirius isn’t in Rodolphus and Bellatrix’s bedroom, this time. He’s in his own bedroom.
There’s still a fucking scuff on the bedside table next to him. Sirius still can’t stop looking at the fucking scuff.
Sirius, lying on his back, tears running down his face as he is further dirtied by the men, knows that this arrangement will end up putting him in the ground at some point. He knows that he can’t continue surviving with the knowledge of what will, inevitably, happen every time he enters 12 Grimmauld Place forever. He knows that this isn’t sustainable.
He doesn’t care.
Sirius realized, years ago, that he no longer wants to be alive. Hell, he doesn’t know if he ever truly wanted to live. After being raised in the House of Black, it’s difficult to discern whether or not you stayed alive because you wanted to, or because you felt like you had to. He thinks he’s wanted to die since he was a young child, maybe even before the Lestrange twins got involved.
His suicidal ideations had started out idle; wondering what the world would be like if he didn’t exist, considering how Regulus would’ve gotten on without him. It had spiralled alarmingly quickly, turning into wishes for death to come and take him into her sweet embrace, leaning over the edge of his balcony and wondering if the drop would be enough to kill him, only pulling back upon hearing a knock on his door to find his legs swung over the railing.
That scuff on the bedside table is laughing at him. Sirius is crying, he can’t stop looking at it.
Orion and Walburga were never loving. They knew how to break people down, drag them into the darkest areas of their minds and force them into the deepest forms of suffering and despair. That combined with their shared expertise in the most painful spells and where on the body to hit to cause the most damage curates a truly awful profile for the duo. Sirius has, over the years, become exceptionally familiar with the likes of the Imperius Curse and the Cruciatus Curse, courtesy of his supposed parents.
Well, he’s become familiar with those Unforgivables due to Rodolphus and Rabastan, as well, but Orion and Walburga were the ones to originally introduce him to them.
As a child, he was constantly beaten and screamed at by his parents, treated as though he was less than. He still is. He knows they’re right. He also knows that that behaviour from them is just as much his fault as what’s currently happening. He’s dirty, he’s tainted, he’s a failure. He doesn’t understand how so few people in his life can see that, but some do, and he knows he has to stay close to them, for they keep him in line.
They’re so different from the people he willingly surrounds himself with. Peter, James, Remus.
Peter; quiet, but wonderfully observant and with a sincere sort of humour. A fitting animagus form, disarmingly intelligent, loyal, and food-loving. Kind and non-confrontational with a soft face and sweet eyes. He’s a wonderfully supportive friend, deserving of so much more than people give him.
James; bright, and bold, and loud. A warm smile and kind eyes, brilliantly chaotic and funny. Sunshine Personified is probably the best way to describe the boy. For all the mistakes he makes, he’s always been so ready to admit fault. He’s confident, and it’s not a façade like Sirius’ is, nor is it egotistical and mean in the way the likes of Lucius Malfoy present. His animagus form, a stag, fits, too. Big and obvious, gentle and not a fighting type, but ready to defend himself if need be. James is too good for this dreary world.
Remus; quiet and nice, with the driest, wittiest sense of humour. He’s the smartest person Sirius knows, with his good grades and ability to answer every single one of the questions the other Marauders have. He’s stronger than anyone knows, surviving a werewolf attack at the age of five and brutal transformations once a month. The scars criss-crossing his body create the most beautiful map, one that Sirius could spend hours, days, even, tracing as they lay together, in bed.
Sirius recalls nights spent holding each other, the slow press of lips and gentle touches, a soft intimacy he’d never fest before— not from any previous sexual partners, and certainly not from the Lestranges. Upon getting together in early fifth year, Remus had been perfectly fine with taking it slowly, despite Sirius’ long track record of having sex with anyone who breathed. Their first time together had been the first time Sirius had ever felt truly cherished.
Remus’ mouth on his skin, hands tracing his body, allowing Sirius inside of him (because the thought of taking someone inside of his own body makes Sirius physically ill; a fact that Remus hadn’t pressed him on, simply accepting it and doing what made them both the most comfortable). It’s something good, something nice, something loving. It’s something Sirius had never felt. It’s right.
It’s the exact opposite of what happens when Rodolphus and Rabastan are involved.
There’s a scuff on the bedside table. Sirius can’t stop looking at it.