Chapter 3
Chapter 3
Growing up and seeing your parents’ flaws is like losing your religion. I don’t believe in God anymore. I don’t believe in my father either.
Nicola Yoon The Sun is Also a Star
Arabella's memory was a remarkable gift, a trait her parents had always admired before everything changed. She could recall moments from her early childhood with a clarity that surpassed that of her two brothers.
Sirius often teased that she could remember her own birth if she tried hard enough.
She remembered the tender moments, like sitting between her mother's legs while she brushed through her dark curls. Her mother would confide in her, expressing her longing for a daughter while deftly weaving Arabella's hair into neat braids. At parties, her mother would shield her behind her skirt, and around the house, she would carry Arabella on her hip, a protective barrier against the world.
But Arabella also remembered the day when her mother's affection came to an immediate end.
It was February 14th, 1962. She was supposed to have received her Hogwarts Admissions letter that morning. She remembered Sirius and Regulus bickering over Winter Break on whether or not she would be sorted into Slytherin or Gryffindor. Arabella would never have told them but felt although she would have been in Hufflepuff.
As the day wore on without any sign of an owl, her anxiety mounted. She felt the tension in the house coil like a spring, tightening with each passing moment.
And when the sun began to set, casting a melancholy glow over the dinner table, her tears began to fall.
Her parents entered, the slamming of the kitchen door signaling their arrival. But instead of comforting words or reassurance, Arabella was met with her father's cold gaze.
"Well... It looks as though we have two disgraces in the family," he sneered, his words cutting like knives.
Arabella's heart clenched in her chest as she looked up at her parents with teary eyes. "Maybe they made a mistake?" she whispered, her voice trembling with hope.
That made her mother scoff. Walburga couldn’t even bear to look at her only daughter, settling to stare out the window at the fading light.
“Hogwarts does not make mistakes. You have disgraced this family more than either of your brothers ever could, and for that, you will suffer.” Her father’s harsh words floated out into the air as he reached for his wand
And with those words, Arabella's fate was sealed. Branded a disgrace by her own family, she became a ghost in her home—locked away, isolated, forgotten.
Her father cast wards around the house, ensuring she could never leave. It was as if she had never existed at all.
As the years passed, it got less painful for her, the pain began to numb.
Yet amid the darkness, there were still moments of light as her brothers cared for her that much she knew. They would sneak into her room at night over summers and give her the gifts they got for her in Hogsmeade that year, her favorite being the copy of Pride and Prejudice that Sirius had given her after his fourth year. She didn’t know how they treated each other at Hogwarts, but in her room, they acted as if they had never been sorted into different houses. Their bond is unbroken despite everything their parents tried.
During the summer of Sirius’s sixth year and Regulus’s fifth, tensions in the house began to rise to a breaking point. Walburga and Orion had begun to pressure Sirius into taking the Dark Mark.
“You are a disgrace, Sirius,” Sirius flinched as his mother’s hand came up to brush against his face,” This could fix that.”
“It’s time that your little rebellious streak ends,” Orion spoke through his harsh French accent.
“You are our heir; it is time you began acting like it. This mudblood lover act will be tolerated no longer.”
She listened from her perch on the wall, unseen and unheard, as her family's facade crumbled.
“Tolerated?” Sirius’s voice began to rise
“You haven’t been tolerating anything! Every day I breathe in this house, I am reminded of how disgusted you are by me.” Arabella’s nails began digging into her palms.
“Sirius, that is enough!” Orion shot back
“Maybe if you weren’t so focused so much on blood purity, this family wouldn’t have been inbred enough to be cursed with a squib-”
“CRUCIO!”
Arabella jumped in shock at her mother’s voice and ran to her room. She gently shut the door so as not to give away that she was listening. She sat in shock on the edge of her bed, unconsciously rubbing the scar across her lower stomach. She had never thought Sirius would say something like that about her, not that he knew she was listening. He was always careful not to call her a squib to her face, not wanting to hurt her already fragile emotions.
She laid her head on her pillow as tears began streaming down her face.
She squeezed her eyes shut and placed her pillow over her head in a fruitless attempt to block out her mother’s screaming.
And when morning came, Sirius was gone—erased from the family tree; his existence reduced to ashes beside Regulus's name.