Sirius
Marius Black was born in the war.
Born in the spring of 1917 to Cygnus and Violetta Black, born the third of four, born as war rattled the windows of the world, although the walls of 12 Grimmauld Place never even trembled. He was a wartime baby born to a family unaware that outside, the world was changing.
Sometimes, the wars of Muggles are battles waged with marionettes. These are wars with strings attached, where all the political machinations and military assignations are turn on the anger of wizards. Generals become foot soldiers, unwitting pawns to their magical commanders, and entire battles are fought without a drop of magical blood shed, while rivers of Muggle blood run red in the gutter. It sounds horrible, to tell it like this, but the truth is, it's messy and it’s complicated. The Muggle world and the wizarding world are not as separate as some like to pretend. We’re all caught in this tangled, heaving snarl; the web of magic weaves all. So sometimes, when the wars of Muggles are really the wars of wizards, neither party is particularly wise to it, and it’s not as if you can just blame wizards for the bloodshed. War isn't merely a game, you see. Wizards don’t just sit in drawing rooms and strategise the deaths of Muggle soldiers, all to prove a point. Or rather, they don’t do it any differently than the Muggles might.
But sometimes, Muggles get themselves embroiled in war all on their own, and Marius Black was born into such a war. This was simply the first war of Marius Black's short life.
The second war came in Marius Black's seventh year, although the reconnaissance which informed it had begun years prior. You see, Marius Black was being watched; he had been watched all his life, much like you have been and will be. And as the years passed and certain facts proved incontrovertible, Marius Black was found wanting. Marius Black had been found out, you might say. Marius Black was the enemy.
The war on Marius Black began quietly, as some wars do. Swords were not yet drawn, guns not yet fired, wands not yet bared. But by the time Marius Black was eleven years old, he was no longer being watched. His fate was decided.
Marius Black was not what he should be, and so he was marked a traitor, a deceiver, because Marius Black was not a wizard.
What he was - that word cannot be spoken within the walls of Grimmauld Place, as you well know. And on September 1 of his eleventh year, when the undeniable could no longer be denied, Marius Black was taken prisoner of war. Mother and father turned judge and jailor, and they locked their shame in the deepest recesses of the battlefield that was Grimmauld Place, in the basement. The prisoner was fed thrice daily, allowed light and water, books and bedding. If he wanted for something, he had simply to write it on a sheet of parchment and slip it under the door at the top of the stairs, and a house elf's wrinkly hand would clench around the note, and the request would be fulfilled. The terms of his capture might be inhumane, but his quarters were not entirely without some pity. For the most part, he was simply ignored. His capture stank not of cruelty but of inevitability, as if this were the only option, as if this is simply what one did with a traitor like Marius Black.
Seven years passed, and Marius Black remained a prisoner.
The war was now over, and the world had forgotten about Marius Black. He was still fed thrice daily. He was, occasionally, allowed out of his cell, out of the basement and into the house, on days when its inhabitants - his mother and father, his judge and jailor - were out, always under the careful care of the house elf. That house elf, who would sit with Marius Black in his basement, who would prepare his meals and unlock his door and show him small scraps of kindness, that house elf was the only person Marius Black spoke to for seven years. That house elf was a prisoner of her own kind, relegated to the demeaning duty of watching after this family secret. She was a good elf, by my standards; a failure, by her masters.
And when Marius Black was seventeen, he left 12 Grimmauld Place. The house elf unlocked the door on a spring day in 1933, and Marius Black just walked away.
You see, that's what happens to boys like Marius Black when they're born into family's like that. Families like ours. They won't be abandoned, they won't be starved to death, not anymore, not in this day and age. But they'll be left alone, imprisoned in their own homes, and set free as soon as they can be, as soon as the world will take them. When a boy like Marius Black turns eighteen, he walks away from magic forever.
Marius Black was ready to go. Marius Black had learnt to hate magic and to despise the world of his family, which had named him enemy and imprisoned him. And now that he was free, Marius Black was ready to build himself a new life.
But what is a boy like Marius Black to do? What has he got in his favour? What possibilities lie ahead for him?
Marius Black did what many boys like Marius Black must do. Not just Squibs - for that's the word, for what Marius Black was - but also many Muggle boys who are punished by their families for being different. Boys like that go to war.
And so, in the spring of 1933, when he was seventeen years old, Marius Black went to war for the third time.
Real war had not yet descended, but when it came, Marius Black had already been training for years. In a way, he had been preparing to fight his entire life.
When war came, its maw was jagged and it devoured everything in sight. It devoured Marius Black, who fought with his fellow men on foreign soil, who came bursting out of a great metal monstrosity and charged, who fought and fought until his blood ran in gutters of the earth. This war, the war that really did change everything, wasn't entirely a Muggle war, nor was it entirely a wizarding war. We were all mixed up in this fight, but it's true that those on the frontlines, those were mostly Muggles. And Marius Black. He fought well.
Marius Black was blasted from this earth twice in his short life. The first came on a spring day in 1933, the day Marius Black turned seventeen and walked away. His father took his wand to the tapestry emblazoned with our family history and blew Marius away, like that was just the end of the story. The second came on a grey day in 1941, when Marius Black - who was twenty-four years old, going on twenty-five, whose story had kept unfolding - was blasted away, blasted to pieces.
Marius Black died in the war, just as he was born, just as he had lived.
Upon reaching the last inked line, just as he had lived, Sirius Black lifted his eyes from the piece of parchment that told the story of Marius Black and sank back into his red and gold pillows. Sirius had unfolded, read, and refolded the parchment so many times over the last two weeks, it was already going soft at the corners. On his first night at Hogwarts, he had been surprised to find the envelope, addressed in the angular scrawl of his Uncle Alphard, tucked into a corner of his trunk. Alphard must have escaped the fray of Sirius’ sending-off party on his last day at Grimmauld Place. He hadn’t noticed his uncle’s absence that night, but then again, he’d been busy ferreting out abandoned wine goblets and quickly draining their last drops, avoiding his mother’s talon-like grasp.
Sirius’ skin shivered as the unwelcome memory of the sending-off party took hold of his weary mind. He curled into his blankets. It had been almost two weeks since he had left his family, and for the most part, he simply refused to think of them, of their silence and his failure, but late at night, in those hours before sleep took him, he couldn’t help it. Burying his head beneath the thick, red bedding, suddenly grateful for the drawn hangings, Sirius bit his lower lip and screwed his eyes shut. He could not escape the memory, couldn’t help but see his mother’s feverish smile, his father’s blank eyes, his brother’s trembling shoulders.
It has been a special day at Grimmauld Place. On the afternoon before the party, his father had brewed a golden potion and brought a brimming goblet of it to his mother's bedside. Sirius had knelt at their slightly ajar bedroom door and watched his father press open his mother's jaw and pour the potion down her throat in a curiously tender gesture. By supper, his mother was flitting about Grimmauld Place, having shed her dressing gown for the first time in days, glittering.
It had been Orion Black's idea to celebrate his elder son's imminent departure for Hogwarts with a party, although this ostensible milestone was in truth nothing more than an excuse for Orion to draw together the Black family. The landscape of the wizarding world was in flux, and when lines were drawn, Orion Black knew that he and his family would stand on the side of power. His wife Walburga's brother had already begun to boast of his eldest daughter's cunning bravery, her political acumen, her alliance with a cadre of witches and wizards who fancied themselves stewards of pureblood lineage. Cygnus' stories made for interesting talk over drinks with their friends, that elite pureblood stratum of wizarding society, but Orion rather thought that Cygnus had forgotten his place within the Black family. Bellatrix might style herself a crusader for the sanctity of wizarding blood, but it would be his son who would assume the mantle of the Black family. It would be his son who would wield family influence and inheritance to preserve the position of the Black family for the future. These matters were not simply a question of bloodlines, but also of breeding, of power, of politics.
Like his father before him, Sirius would attend Hogwarts, graduate to a respectable Ministry position, advance himself promptly, and then retire from public service to begin his real work: that of backroom strategy and calculating whispers, handshake deals and the careful meting out of favour. Sirius would, like his father, rule without the banality of office. Orion had worked diligently to impart a sense of fidelity and obligation in his elder son, to teach Sirius what it meant to be a Black, but Orion was never sure if the lesson quite stuck. Orion found his son hard to read, a boy inscrutable from birth, temperamental like his mother, prone to lashing out without cause. Sirius seemed perpetually on edge, restless.
But he was young yet, Orion reasoned, as he watched Sirius skulk at the fringes of his own party. He had time to grow into the easy grace of his birthright, into the surefootedness of his privilege, into the expectation of his last name.
That night before King’s Cross, that last night at home, Sirius was confronted with a parade of distant relatives and family friends-in-high-places, many of whom were strangers to the ostensible guest of honor. His uncle Cygnus and aunt Druella were in attendance; they were frequent visitors to Grimmauld Place, often bringing along their three girls, Bellatrix, Andromeda, and Narcissa. Sirius and his brother Regulus had spent many stilted afternoons stuffed into their best dress robes, staring moodily across a tea service at the three sisters, as Druella simpered softly at the brothers. (“Going to grow up to be such fine boys, and doesn’t Sirius have his father’s eyes, oh how lovely, just look at the pair of you.”) The three girls never paid much attention to Sirius and Regulus, instead preferring to whisper amongst themselves, hands flashing and hair whipping about in that secret language of sisters.
On those afternoons, Sirius' mother would teeter down the stairs for tea, but as the years passed, that became a rarer and rarer sight. His mother was what Druella called a delicate soul, and what his father called not right in the head and so she was best left alone, according to all involved. Of course, no one bothered to ask what her sons thought of this.
Alphard had also descended upon Grimmauld Place for his nephew’s party; Sirius had not seen his uncle since his eighth birthday. On that occasion, Alphard had appeared on the front steps uninvited and unannounced, tossing a sack of Honeydukes chocolate at Sirius and Regulus, twisting around the drawing room in a frenzy, speaking in too-loud tones about things that Sirius could not quite understand, in a way that made Orion wince. That afternoon, Walburga had considered her brother as if at a great distance, as if she were enveloped in a heady fog, as if she were looking at a ghost. Shortly after he arrived, he was gone again. Orion had pressed a small pouch of clinking gold galleons into his palm, curving a firm hand around his too-thin spine, driving Alphard out to the street. And once he had gone, Orion’s black temper snapped, and he shattered a floor-length mirror in the great hall with his fist, roaring about layabout brothers who only turn up for money, who only turn up like that, and while Sirius didn't understand what it meant to be like that, he knew it was bad. He had not seen Alphard in a long time; he looked older, now. He didn’t look like that anymore, he just looked tired.
But others at his party, they were only familiar in fracture: he found himself in pairs of matched grey eyes, saw his brother's dimpled chin, his father's ivory nose, his mother's thick, dark curls. Sirius had never seen so many people milling about his childhood home. Visitors to Grimmauld Place were usually heavily cloaked, furtive figures rushing to exchange heated whispers with his father, or members of the immediate family paying their obligatory respects to his parents. It had been this way forever, Sirius reckoned, although he had once found a box of dusty photographs that attested to the contrary, tucked away in his father's library, which was strictly off-limits and thus inescapably tantalising to a nine-year-old boy who doesn't know better. The photographs captured a different sort of life for his parents, one that glowed and danced and was replete with young, pretty well-bred men and women sipping from silver goblets and laughing at the camera flash. These photographs, unceremoniously boxed up and hidden away, showed his parents having fun. Sirius had never seen his mother smile like that before, so simply. She looked pretty and smooth and unshadowed. Sirius had pocketed one of the photographs, a candid snapshot of his father in mid-bow, asking his beaming mother to dance, and stuffed the rest away.
But that was a lifetime ago, and 12 Grimmauld Place had been dark and shuttered for many years now.
After Regulus was born, Walburga Black had sunk into herself, collapsing into her own dark star, and she had never really emerged. She would appear in flashes, spurred by fitful spurts of energy that threatened to tear her apart from the inside. She was unpredictable, and in the world of the Blacks, that meant embarrassing, and so Orion shut her away from the world. Orion hid his home as best he could, and he protected the family name as its primary emissary, and he left his wife to her own devices. Sometimes, she would shriek with fury at the walls that threatened to contain her. Sometimes, she was sickly sweet, cloyingly attentive, drawing one of her sons into a too-tight embrace. But her teeth were sharp, and her restless mind was always shifting. She burned with horrific energy, and on the worst days, the Black brothers learned to hide in the darkest corners of their family home, lest she burn them up too. These were the dark days, and Sirius grew up knowing their acrid taste. And in the last years, she was only getting worse, and those moments of fire and fury had taken on a kind of cruelty that spit and swore, sending her two sons cowering for cover.
But for the most part, Walburga Black slept, only walking to stalk the gloomy halls in a haze, looking at her sons as if they were spectres, just another two ghosts haunting the twisting corridors of her broken mind.
Sirius could not remember anything but this; he had always known his mother to be a cataclysm. Orion seemed calculatedly indifferent to even her most intemperate moods, only stirring himself to put out the fires she left in her wake, lest she burn down his precious fortress. And with his mother flickering in and out of reality, the business of bringing up Sirius and Regulus had fallen to Orion.
The house elf Kreacher took care of the cooking and the cleaning, and at Orion's command, taught Sirius and Regulus to read from pureblood genealogies and wizarding histories. Kreacher quizzed the Black brothers on their vast, recursive family lineage, and showed them little pieces of basic spellwork and potionmaking. Devoted to Walburga, Kreacher groveled at the family name, whispering to the young boys how lucky they were to be of such standing, how important it was to protect their family name. This was the rhythm of their childhood, the background music of their early years.
Orion was often absent, concerned with the work of secretive governance, but when he returned to Grimmauld Place, he busied himself with the real education of the Black brothers.
Orion taught his sons that to be special is to be better than the rest. That some families are chosen by history and charged with the duty to protect the purity of the wizarding race. That purity of blood doesn't necessarily guarantee good breeding, but it is a prerequisite. That power is a family affair.
Orion taught his sons to dismiss the world outside Grimmauld Place, the world outside the Black family. Orion lectured his sons in the entitlement of their birthright. Orion promised his sons that only blood could be trusted, and that other people would always try to trick you. Other people would always want something from you.
The failures of the world, the foibles of the Ministry, all that was wrong with society could be attributed to bad blood, bad breeding. The world could be explained by genealogy, and the future was written in blood. And as long as people like the Blacks remained in power, there was a chance that these wrongs could be righted. That work, the work of righting the world, fell upon men like the Blacks, boys like Sirius.
Sirius did not question the life his father described, because he had never known any other alternative. But some small part of him bristled at the rules, the weight, the obligation. He wasn't sure he wanted to grow up to be a man like his father. The world Orion described for Sirius was one of with little room for gray, little room for ambiguity, and Sirius wasn’t entirely certain that he fit into the black-and-white universe his father was offering. Sometimes, he would lash out in his childish ways, but by the time he turned eleven, he had learned that the consequences of rebellion were great, its reward small.
And while he had Regulus, Sirius grew up lonely. At the pit of his stomach, he felt a peculiar sort of isolation, like the pang you can get even in an immense crowd. The kind of loneliness that has nothing to do with being left alone, and everything to do with feeling like you’re the only one, the odd man out.
So Sirius had gone to Hogwarts, to begin the life his father had promised, to be Sorted into Slytherin with the rest of his family and their friends, the first step towards becoming a man worthy of his name. Sirius didn’t intend to rebel against his family’s expectations; he didn’t want to thwart his birthright. It didn’t really even occur to him that he had the choice. But he had left Grimmauld Place with the tiniest seed of hope buried deep in his gut, and it threatened to bloom. At Hogwarts, maybe the gnawing restlessness that rattled his skeleton would subside. At Hogwarts, maybe the loneliness would abate.
But from the very start, it had all gone wrong, and now weeks later, Sirius still couldn’t sleep.
The fresh memory of the Sorting swelled bitterly in Sirius’ chest. ”Gryffindor,” the Hat had spit from its jeering brim, propelling Sirius forward with the force of its pronouncement. His entire family had been Sorted to Slytherin, and they had expected the same of Sirius. And while Sirius had always chafed slightly under the weight of familial obligation, it was easier to play the part. That was the blessing of being a Black: the absence of uncertainty, the guarantee of a comfortable life, lived by a script already written. And in his first steps toward that life, Sirius had already slipped. In his eleven years of living, Sirius had never been the object of ridicule, never been something to be stared at with the kind of curiosity usually reserved for freaks.
He had never felt more alone than he had these past weeks, even though he was perpetually grinding up against his fellow students, having to steal moments of solitude where he could. He needed the quiet, needed the space to sort through things on his own. And so he snapped at Potter, who kept prying, who kept trying to draw him out, and he glared at Pettigrew, who trembled before him, and Sirius couldn’t help but be a little pleased at that. The third boy in their dormitory, the tall one with the strange eyes, Lupin - he never tried to get close, he stayed away, as if he knew that beneath it all, a storm was roiling.
I’m glad they’re not bothering, I wouldn’t want them anyways, I don’t even belong here, Sirius thought over and over again, a chorus of defiance, a talisman to keep the doubt away.
Already a failure, always a mistake, the dark voice in the back of Sirius’ mind whispered back.
And on that night, just another night at Hogwarts, another sleepiness night, he pressed his face into the pillows, sucking hot air through the cotton, trying to drown out the taunt of the whispering voice. Alphard’s note, the story of Marius Black, lay discarded on the bed. For while Sirius had read and reread the parchment, he still couldn’t understand why his uncle had slipped it into his trunk, he couldn’t divine any greater meaning to the ink on parchment. It offered no comfort, only more uncertainty, and it would soon be relegated to the bottom of his truck, stuffed back in its heavy envelope, forgotten for now.
Sirius twisted underneath the still-foreign sheets, feeling fatigue settle into his fingertips. He turned over and drew a harsh, jagged breath, swallowing the metallic edge of panic off his tongue. Memories jostled for attention, bright static flashes of his father toasting him on his last night at Grimmauld Place, of the train ride to Hogwarts sitting with his cousin’s friends, of the Sorting and how it went so very wrong, of the look on Narcissa’s face when he sat down to the Gryffindor table, of the silent march to the dormitory on that first night. The faces of his housemates, of his professors, of the Slytherins he should have been with swam in front of his eyes, perpetually twisted in surprise, in shock, in derision. The curtains around Sirius felt too close, too heavy, like all the air was being drawn out through the fabric’s weave, like the wooden beams above were groaning under the weight and threatening to sink. And his mind spun forwards, tilting into the future, and Sirius couldn’t help but imagine what the next seven years would look like. He had ruined everything before it had all even started, and he had braced himself for the worst from his family, but there had been nothing, nothing at all, and what could he have expected, and what could he do, and…And finally, he slept, worn through, alone.
The next morning, Sirius took up his usual seat at the Gryffindor table, and kept his eyes low, away from the enchanted ceiling, knowing that no owl would come for him, knowing that he was still, as always, alone. Already a failure, always a mistake.