chapter 1 - brother
and i left you alone
in a house, not a home
the night that sirius black left home was dramatic in all ways that the black family excelled at.
it started out as a small thing. something that really shouldn't have mattered that much. something that wouldn't have mattered at all in most families.
but the black family was most definitely not most families. they were excessive and cruel and borderline evil.
it was raining that night. raining and dark and cold. corvus and sirius black were sat in sirius’ room.
corvus never really noticed how different regulus and sirius’ rooms really were. not until sirius left. not until his room was empty and the house was uncomfortably quiet.
reg’s room was dark. quiet. empty. he didn't have many things in it. except for the hidden journals that he did flower pressings in (corvus snuck out to the garden and stole some for him every day), but he didn't write in those anymore. not since sirius left.
siri’s room, on the other hand, was full. vibrant. loud. he had posters stuck up to his walls with spells that walburga and orion couldn't manage to undo. his walls were plastered in magazine clippings, vinyl records, gryffindor posters, and pictures of him and his group of three other guy friends (they called themselves ‘the marauders’). his walls were painted a bright shade of red that he had done himself when their parents were away on business one weekend a couple of years ago.
corvus had the room in between sirius and regulus’. and in all senses of the word, she was the ‘in between’ of the three siblings. she was louder than reg, but not as loud as sirius. her room had meaningful things scattered around, but it wasn't full to the brim. she stood up to her parents, but stepped back when necessary.
she never had the bravery or the courage that sirius had. she was sorted into slytherin, like regulus, not gryffindor, like sirius. maybe that's why she wasn't the one who got out. she was sirius’ twin sister, and they couldn't have been further apart.
the three of them still all went to hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry, and it was about the only escape from reality that the siblings had.
sirius used to be that escape. until they went to hogwarts. that's when he drifted. he became friends with the marauders, forgetting all about corvus and regulus the second he laid eyes on james potter.
james potter, who corvus couldn't help but smile at the sight of, even though it made her want to tear her teeth out. she hated him. but she couldn't. because james potter was the sun. and as much as you could hate the heat, you could never hate the sun.
again, being the in between of the three siblings, corvus wasn't super close with sirius’ friend group, but she also didn't hate them as much as regulus seemed to. her younger brother couldn't even look in james’ direction without scowling.
she figured it was different. for reg to lose sirius. regulus was his brother, after all. brothers have a different bond than a brother and a sister.
but then again, sirius was corvus’ twin, so maybe that hurt even more than regulus losing his brother.
but the fact of the matter is, they both lost him. whether they were twins or younger and older brother, they lost him. they lost their brother the second they set foot into hogwarts, and sirius black complimented james potter's jacket (that was, to be completely honest, a very nice jacket).
and they lost him even more the day he left home. the day their parents exploded and he took off into the rain and the dark and the cold without so much as a second thought. when he ran off to james potter. just like he always did.
corvus thought, that for sirius, james was it. james was his , after all. corvus could tell. regulus could tell. hell, even walburga and orion could tell. that's why they hated james so much. and hated sirius just as much for loving james.
james was sirius’ brother. and sirius was james’.
sometimes corvus wondered if sirius really did want james to be his brother. if he wished he had been born into the potter family. wished regulus and corvus weren't his siblings.
maybe corvus wishes that too, sometimes. that way, he would have never left her behind. left her to mend the broken heart of not only herself, but their baby brother as well.
she knows that she shouldn't blame him. he did what he had to do. he got out.
but it doesn't erase the fact that he didn't take them with him. as hard or easy as it may have been for him, he didn't look back. he didn't spare a glance towards his siblings, collapsed on the floor, silently begging him to stay. to suffer with them. to stick it out. to take them with him, at least.
why couldn't he have taken them with him?
corvus promised herself that if she ever had to leave, she would take regulus. and she would die before she broke that promise.
why did sirius have to be the lucky one? why did sirius get a james potter. people like corvus and regulus didn't get people like james. they got people like evan and barty and dorcas and pandora.
and as good as those people are, they don't try and save people. they also need to be saved.
corvus wishes sirius could have seen that. that he wasn't the only one suffering. that they all had their own scars. visible or not.
maybe he did see that. maybe that's why he left. without so much as a goodbye. without so much as a tear shed in their direction.
corvus hated him. and she loved him. and she missed him. and she craved for him.
she just wished he could've stayed home. or that he would've at least taken them with him.
with corvus, it's always ‘them’. ‘them’ being her and regulus. after sirius left, it was always them. never ‘me’ or ‘him’ it was ‘them’ and ‘us’. because she promised herself that she would never leave regulus behind. and she would take her dying breath trying to live up to that promise.
maybe that was a bad trait. maybe it was a flaw. maybe it made her vulnerable. weak. as her parents thought. but she didn't care enough to bother changing it. she would never, ever leave regulus behind, and that was that.
corvus had promised herself. and she wasn't the type to break promises. even ones made to herself and only to herself.
before sirius and corvus went to hogwarts, they were all as close as siblings can be. they had to be close. if they weren't close, they wouldn't survive. not in that house.
corvus was three minutes older than sirius, making her live up to the protective big sister role with both him and regulus.
she had learned healing spells while helping out madam pomphrey in the hospital wing so that she could heal her brothers (mainly sirius) when their parents went batshit.
she took the blame for a lot of the things that sirius and regulus did.
like when sirius snuck into walburga and orion’s room and stole his wand back after he'd been grounded from it, and when they noticed, corvus said she had felt bad and stole it back for him.
that one had earned her a black eye, and walburga and orion had seen right through it anyway, winning sirius two days locked in his room without food.
corvus had gone without eating those two days, shoving her food into the napkin in her lap when their parents weren't looking so she could sneak it to sirius.
or the time when regulus had broken a vase on accident while the three siblings were playing tag around the house. he was only four then, and he was small and scared, so corvus had said that it was her.
luckily, their parents had believed that one, and corvus had gotten a red mark on her back that had bruised over for two weeks.
the night that sirius had left, corvus couldn't cover for him. after they left for hogwarts, she rarely could. he started acting out even more, being friends with all the people their parents absolutely didn't want them to be friends with.
that's why corvus had been in his room that night, she was trying to talk him away from the marauders, at least a little bit.
in the middle of their conversation, walburga had stormed in the room, holding up a package with an envelope on top.
turns out, it had been a christmas present from remus lupin, who their parents hated even more than james potter.
lupin also happened to be the boy that sirius was in love with. and lupin was in love with sirius, too. that's what the letter revealed to walburga black.
corvus already knew. it was hard not to. with the way lupin and sirius acted around it other. it was inevitable that they would fall for each other. it just surprised corvus how long it would take.
lupin and sirius being in love was all kinds of disastrous for walburga and orion. for one, having a gay son wasn't exactly fitting the picture for the two of them. they had already met a girl from a family that they thought highly of, and they were going to marry sirius off to her, as if it were the nineteen twenties.
they'd also found somebody for corvus. that somebody being evan rosier, who happened to be her best friend. and as much as she loved evan, she really did not want to marry him.
walburga had blown up, screaming and beating on sirius, not being the first time that she had used crucio on one of her children. any other topic, and it wouldn't have even phased sirius. but he was in love, and lupin was somebody that corvus’ brother wanted to keep.
so he ran away. without a second look. without a second thought. just up and left. he hadn't even put shoes on before running out into the rain on christmas eve to the potter’s house.
that year, it was a quiet christmas. too quiet. with sirius, there was never quiet. he was loud and obnoxious and bright. filling every space of the room with noise.
regulus wasn't like that. or corvus. they had always let sirius do the talking. let sirius introduce the three of them and be the outgoing, carefree one of the three.
without sirius, it was silent. no yelling, no screaming, no loud barks of laughter. just a creaky old house and ghosts living in the empty spaces that once held a boy full of life.
corvus hated him. and she didn't all at once.