Chapter Text
A woman, a mother, a mother is a very special thing and other than the Lord Jesus Christ, I think that a mother is one of the most precious gifts that God gives to this world because the mother is the one who loves the Lord and always seems to be there when we need her. A mother is a very special thing. A mother is a very special thing.
March 18th, 1991
He’s going to do it. He’s going to do it, this time.
Regulus Black, 1972--
All he has to do is write four numbers. 1-9-8-9. Regulus Black, 1972-1989.
Everyone else, they’d woven in. That’s how it worked with the family tree. Someone dies, and then his mother takes the tapestry down and weaves in the year of their death. Sirius runs his fingers over all the years he’d seen her sew with unshaking hands: 1974, 1976, 1986. She’d made those numbers, had cemented their deaths on the family tree. She’d marked their births, too: 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970, 1972. It’s proof that they’d been born-- that they’d been a part of a family, once. They’d walked on this earth and breathed its air and called people mother, father, cousin. And when it is time, it marks the end.
Sirius only saw her add something once. He remembers, faintly, his mother humming softly as she passed the needle through the cloth, creating Regulus’ name and birth year in. He wouldn’t be born for another four months, but she didn’t want to wait.
Regulus is dead. Regulus needs his end. Sirius has to give it to him. He can’t sew-- Walburga tried, but Orion never let him learn. He has to use a pen, instead. It’s ugly, it’s not right, it’s not the way it should be done, and yet it’s all he has.
Sirius reaches out and traces his finger over the blank space next to Regulus’ name.
Walburga catches him.
“HOW DARE YOU!” she screams. Sirius lets out a yelp as she grabs his hair, yanking him away from the tapestry. The uncapped pen falls out of his hand. “HOW DARE YOU TOUCH IT, HOW DARE YOU!”
He knows she doesn’t want to give Regulus his end. He can’t blame her. This is why he lets her drag him by the hair, why he lets her slap his face. This is why he kneels in front of her and apologises.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he chokes out, scalp and cheek stinging. “I’m sorry.”
“You must never touch that tapestry!” She slaps his face again. “It does not belong to you! You have no right!”
It does , he thinks, I am a Black, I am your son, it does, it does.
She rears back this time and backhands him, the small diamond of her wedding ring cutting a thin line across his cheekbone. Hand still wrenched in his hair, she hits him again and again and again, until the apologies begin to fall out of his mouth with earnest.
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he gasps. He tries to flinch away from her palm, but the hand in his hair keeps his head still. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry !”
“You cannot touch that tapestry! You must obey your mother!” she yells, striking him on must, obey, and mother .
“I won’t!”
There are tears coming from his eyes, mixing with the blood from the cut on his cheek. His chest feels tight, his scalp stings, and his cheeks burn. He’ll say anything to make it end, to get his mother to return to her cold, quiet indifference.
“ Swear it! ”
He swears, not for the first time, to never touch the tapestry again. Even as he chokes the promise out, he knows that he’ll break it. He has to give Regulus his end. He has to let Regulus rest.
Regulus Black haunts this house. He is behind every door, around every corner, buried beneath the floorboards and trapped in the walls. Sirius sees him constantly, out of the corner of his eye. He can hear Regulus’ words echoing in his skull, reminding him constantly to be good. At night, he stares at Regulus’ bed across from his own, untouched for years, now, but never quite empty.
If he gives Regulus his rest, then he can go, too. But he can’t leave Regulus here, trapped in the walls of this house.
Walburga leaves him on the floor. Sirius takes a moment to reassemble, pulling the pieces of himself back together. He reaches for the anger he once had, which used to get him off the floor in these moments, but it ran out years ago. He isn’t angry at her for hitting him. It’s his lot in life, and there was no more use in trying to change it. His mother was his mother, and he loved her for that fact, if nothing else.
Regulus’ voice speaks up in his head: Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you .
It’s best to leave the house after one of his mother’s episodes, so Sirius sneaks out the back door and makes his way toward town. He traces the crosses tattooed on his fingertips as he walks, then the letters over his knuckles: D-E-V-O-T-I-O-N.
Devotion, North Carolina, is buried deep in the Appalachians, with only a few hundred residents. Everyone knows his name, and he knows all of theirs. He knows whose husband is cheating on their wife and with whom, and what teenagers are sneaking around behind their parent’s backs. He knows who has money, and who doesn’t. He knows who goes to church every week and catches all of their gossip. Sirius has never been anywhere else, never even gone past the sign signaling the town limits. He was born in Devotion, and he would die in Devotion.
He hates Devotion, for all its worth. As he finishes tracing the N on the knuckle of his pinky finger, he curses himself yet again for this one. He was almost certainly high when he got it-- he was high when he got all of his tattoos, courtesy of Barty. Sirius still isn’t quite sure if Barty and his brother were actually friends-- he hadn’t thought Regulus had any-- but ever since Regulus died, Barty treated him well. He has professional tattoo gear, which saved Sirius from the horrendous stick-and-pokes he’d been giving himself. Barty’s tattoos meant Barty’s drugs, too, and so Sirius found himself covered in ink.
The largest is the wings on his back, followed closely by the crucifix spanning his chest. In total, Sirius had thirty-nine crosses on his body. The first time he’d gotten high with Barty, he’d begged him to give him as many as possible, to cover every inch of his body. I need to be protected , he’d said, heart pounding loudly in his ears, please, the Devil is coming for me, you have to protect me, please, please, please.
Sirius touches his Adam’s apple, tracing the letters he knows are there. Forgive me, Father . That one, he’d done himself. Originally, he meant to do the whole phrase, but it had hurt so badly that he’d simply gone without the rest, until Barty started tattooing him. Now, the words for I have sinned run across the base of his spine. His hand drifts down his throat, fingers skimming over the snake twisting around his collarbone. That had been the second tattoo Barty had given him, and the only one he’d let Barty choose. Sirius had made him match it with a tree branch winding around his opposite collarbone. The head of the snake and the proverbial apple hung off the ends, facing one another. Temptation.
“The hell you want?”
Barty’s voice is how Sirius realizes he’s standing in Barty’s house. Not his house, really-- Barty had moved into the barn years ago to get away from his father. But nobody got away from anything, really, in Devotion. There was only so far you could go. Barty had opted for a couple hundred yards.
Sirius rips up his sleeve. “Do something.”
The dull pain of Barty’s needle is an ample distraction from the aching of his still-bleeding cheekbone. Barty doesn’t ask-- he never does. Sirius finishes their session with a series of teeth trailing up his arm. He regards his arm carefully, after it’s done, committing the change to memory. They’re alright, not what Sirius would have chosen for himself, but it works. Barty pulls out a metal tin, afterward, and Sirius props up his opposite arm.
By the time he leaves, the sun feels abnormally warm. He’s decently high, and it seems too far of a walk to get all the way back home. Besides, he wants to avoid his mother as much as possible, so he loops back around the Crouch’s fields and heads toward town. He doesn’t much care that anyone who sees him will know he’s high off his ass-- it’d be too much of a struggle to hide, anyway. People know he hangs out with Barty, and they know what Barty is involved with. It’s not very hard to put together.
People know, more importantly, that Sirius is the last of his family. They know that his mother is a shut-in, that his father is long dead, and that Regulus killed himself two years ago. As much as their mother tried to bury the tragedy that follows them around, people know. They always know. Their family is cursed, bad blood seeping through the roots of the tree.
He wonders if anyone knows what happened to Orion. He wonders if they knew who Orion was at all. Father Black was known around all of Devotion, and everyone sat in his church every Sunday. Nobody stepped up to fill the space after he died, and nobody rebuilt the church after it burned down. It should have been Regulus. It was always going to be Regulus, but then it wasn’t.
Sirius’ feet move to take a left off of Main Street, which would take him to the charred remains of his father’s church, but he’s stopped by a stroller running over his foot.
He’s still high and sluggish, so it takes him several moments to register what’s happened. “Ouch,” he says, belatedly, then drags his eyes up to meet the fierce gaze of his least-favorite cousin. “Narcissa.”
“You’re bleeding,” she says, tone devoid of emotion, as if she were commenting on the weather. Sirius touches where his mother had cut his cheekbone, but his fingers come back dry. “Your arm , you fucking brain-dead junkie.”
Sirius resents that. “I resent that.”
Narcissa rolls her eyes, then watches as Sirius processes that one of his new tattoos is bleeding. “Y’know, you could do something useful with your life, instead of wasting your time with Crouch. Help your mother out, maybe.”
Sirius is sure she sees the bruises littering his face, so he chooses to ignore that last bit. He crouches down, instead, staring intently at the baby in her stroller. “Yeah, too bad I couldn’t make myself useful and pop one of these out.”
“Don’t touch him,” Narcissa snaps, jerking the stroller away from his face.
Sirius straightens up to stare her down. The years have ripped them in opposite directions-- as children, they’d been remarkably close. All five of them had been inseparable, spending every Sunday afternoon chasing one another around the yard. Druella’s death had changed things. It was hard on all of them, but Bellatrix the most. She held it together until Cygnus died the following year, and then she was shipped off to an institution. Sirius still wasn’t sure whose decision it had been-- Narcissa’s or Andromeda’s. He supposed it had to be Andromeda, because she left Devotion a few years later to marry some West Coast guy, and never came back. It should’ve brought them together, Sirius and Narcissa, being the only ones left of their siblings. Instead, Sirius could hardly stand the sight of her. She’d gotten married and had a baby and planned the rest of her life out in Devotion, as if her entire family hadn’t been decimated in just a couple years. Losing his brother had permanently derailed Sirius’ life, sent him on a never ending spiral of destruction-- he can’t picture how Narcissa had lost both of her sisters and kept going.
Narcissa looks him up and down, then purses her lips. “You need help getting home?”
“Nah,” Sirius gestures to the gravel path that winds up to his father’s burnt-out church. “Was just gonna head up to the church.”
His answer is met with a strange look from Narcissa. “She gonna hit you if you go back?”
It’s hard to ignore the twang that re-enters her voice when asking about his mother. Sirius blows out a breath, then checks an imaginary watch on his wrist. “Probably been enough time.”
“Right,” Narcissa tightens her grip on the baby’s stroller. “Well, I’m heading by that way, if you want to walk with me.”
Narcissa walks him as far as the mailbox. The haze of Barty’s drugs clouds his mind just enough to prevent him realizing that Narcissa has no business being on this side of town. He chatters mindlessly away, instead. He blabbers on about Draco, and Barty, and the latest TV show he’d seen. Narcissa doesn’t listen or answer.
“We’re here, Sirius,” Narcissa cuts him off abruptly, interrupting a rant that probably never would’ve stopped, anyway.
Sirius looks down the long gravel drive to the white house at the end of it, its porch wrapping around both sides. It’s too big a house for just two people. When it was four, Sirius used to moan and groan about having to share with his brother. He’d cut off his right hand to share with his brother, now.
Narcissa clears her throat. “You gonna be okay in there?”
Sirius doesn’t know if Druella ever hit Narcissa. Maybe she was too young when she died. Maybe her mother hadn’t had the time for her love to warp into something different. Or maybe mothers didn’t hit their daughters. Maybe they saw too much of themselves reflected back in that scared stare.
Sirius looked like Regulus. Maybe that was what made Walburga so angry.
He watches the house, tries to make out if there’s any movement behind the curtains. They’re too far away for him to really tell. This late into a warm afternoon, Walburga’s probably recovering from one of her ‘migraines’ that keeps her in bed all day. Sirius is used to this little routine of theirs: she beats the shit out of him, he fucks off for a few hours, they avoid one another, then he does something to piss her off again. He’s bought at least a little time, until she sees the teeth tattoos and tells him they’re of the devil.
“Yeah, Cissy, I’ll be alright.”
She pinches his arm almost instinctively, then bristles. “Don’t call me that.”
Sirius shrugs-- he had to do something to re-establish the distance. Let Narcissa too close, and she’ll start asking questions. He’d learned that the hard way with Barty, who’d started getting a bit too curious about Sirius’ family once they’d spent too much time together. He wanted to know why Sirius let his mother beat him, what started the fire that burned his father’s church, what sent Regulus over the edge--
It’s better to keep everyone at arm’s length, even his own cousins. Sirius could never let them know what happened. Never .
He feels hot. Narcissa is walking away, now, put off by hearing her sister’s old nickname come from her cousin’s mouth. He can’t stop hearing Barty’s words echoing in his mind: what started the fire? What started the fire? What started the fire? Whatstartedthefirewhatstartedthefirewhatstartedthefire--
Sirius runs like a bat out of hell down the driveway. The gravel crunches under his feet, and he can feel the rocks digging into the soles of his cheap boots. The wind lifts his hair, drying the sweat on the back of his neck. His worn-out heart is beating too loud in his ears, but at least it covers the sound of what started the fire and what started the fire and whatstartedthefirewhatstartedthefirewhatstartedthefire?
By the time he reaches the porch, he’s out of breath. The drugs have aged him, made him tired-- he can’t run as much anymore. He used to love running. When Regulus was alive, he’d spend every morning pushing his body as fast as it’d go. He used to pretend he was getting far away from Devotion, leaving on foot never to return. But he’d still turn back when he saw the sign denoting the town limits. Regulus would be awake when he got back, coffee on for the both of them.
Everything is different, now that Regulus is dead. Sirius digs through himself and can’t find a piece that isn’t changed.
Walburga’s in her room, but Sirius creeps quietly through the house, anyway. She’s got all the lights off and the curtains drawn, cloaking the rooms in a strange darkness for the afternoon. It’s hot, though, and Sirius is sweating from the walk, so he strips off his shirt and abandons it at the stairs. His jeans hang low on his hips, beneath his boxers, exposing the antlers stretching up his v-line. If his mother walks in on him, he’s fucked, but he should have several hours until she drags her body back out of her bed to stare out the window some more.
He passes through rooms they haven’t touched in years, dust gathering on couches and tables. It feels like a shrine to the days when Orion and Regulus walked the halls: there are photographs of them everywhere, staring blankly into the camera. Blacks haunt the walls of this house, sepia-toned photos of fathers and their fathers and their fathers shoved together unceremoniously. Nearly all of them are taken in front of this house, built almost 100 years ago by one of Sirius’ relatives. Sometimes, he finds it comforting that there’s more souls here than just Regulus’.
He finds the TV room in the back, the only one he frequents, besides his own bedroom. The television is tiny, sitting on a small stand in the center of the back wall. The walls are wood-paneled and carry the smell of rot. There’s a cross hanging above the television, as there is in every room. There’s a couch and an armchair, too, upholstered in matching floral fabric, but Sirius prefers to sit on the floor. The armchair was Orion’s, and the couch is too big for him alone. He slips his hand between the cushions and finds the bottle of whiskey he keeps stashed here.
His pillow sits in the center of the room where he left it, just a few feet in front of the television. Sirius settles on it, then clicks on the TV. He searches for a few minutes before finding one of his favorite teen movies. It feels good, with his high only just beginning to fade, to sit back and watch someone else live a normal life.
Walburga and Orion pulled them out of school when they were 12 and 10. Orion held the firm belief that their teachers were corrupting them-- nevermind that Devotion’s singular schoolhouse was a sorry excuse for education and practically controlled by Father Black. Sirius had known for years that Father Black dictated what was taught at their school. It was why Sirius had thrown such a fit when they’d been pulled out. He liked school, liked escaping their house for a few hours a day, liked sitting next to James. It was his only solace every day, and it was ripped from his hands because his parents felt like it. Walburga wanted them home more, so they could learn ‘real values.’ Said values were forcing your children into housework and hitting them when they refused. Sirius and Regulus spent countless afternoons kneeling on hardwood floors, memorizing Bible verses instead of learning math. Sirius could recite Leviticus backwards and forwards, but his math skills ended at addition and subtraction.
So, he likes the teen movies on TV. He never got high school-- it's nice to imagine what it would’ve been like. He’s never even had a crush before, but he obsesses over stories of teenage good girls falling in love with the bad boy. It’s comforting to think that, in another life, he could’ve been a teenager living in the suburbs, going to football games and prom, his biggest worries in life being tests and college.
The movies make him think of James, too. At the first thought of him, Sirius unscrews his whiskey and takes a long gulp, liquid running down the sides of his mouth and neck. There’s a black-haired jock in this one, and everything he does reminds him of James. For what it’s worth, he hopes that James finished high school. He hopes with everything he has that James joined the football team and went to the prom and worried about normal things like college and girls and not what it feels like to rot from the inside out.
Sirius does what he knows in a moment like this, where thoughts of James are suffocating: he presses his palms together, brings his forehead to his index fingers, tunes out the television, and prays.
The sound of his own voice is strange. “Please keep James safe. Please let him have a good day today and a good week. I hope he’s away at college, or somethin’, and I hope he has new friends and people that love him. And keep Effie and Monty safe, too. Amen.”
It’s been three years since he saw or spoke to James. He’d thought they might come back for the funeral, at least. He’d planned to throttle James, to shove him against a wall and demand a recounting of every conversation he’d ever had with Regulus.
I know you loved my brother , he would've said. I know you were hiding it from me. Show me the parts of him I didn’t get to see. I need new parts of him to know. I need to know everything that he was.
All he got, in the end, was a phone call from Effie.
“I’m sorry to hear about your brother,” she’d said. “James is all broken up about it. We really wanted to come, baby, but it’s such a long way, and Monty’s new job...”
James didn’t want to come. Sirius knows that James didn’t want to come. Effie calls, checks on Sirius every once and a while out of what he knows is guilt for leaving him here, but James doesn’t. Because he knows . Because Sirius had trusted him, had told someone the truth for once in his life, and it scared him all the way across the country. James was never going to come back, not even for Regulus’ funeral, because he’s scared of Devotion and all the things it carries.
Sirius is one of those things. James is scared of Sirius. Because Sirius is disturbed, is soiled, is unworthy, is impure --
He silences these thoughts with a drink and shuts the movie off-- he doesn’t want to think about James anymore. It’s easier to pretend that he never told James the truth. It’s easiest to pretend that James never existed, that an angel like that never walked in a place as wretched as this, never associated himself with someone as damned as Sirius. If he can pretend that he never told James, then the only people who know about Orion are in the ground.
There’s a loud clattering from upstairs. His mother. Sirius can feel his heart beating in his ears: there’s no reason for her to come into the TV room, but if she does, she’ll find some reason to be angry again. Sirius has had his tattoos for several years, but they still send her into a blind rage. Leviticus 19:28: “You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves.” He knows that verse; he knew it when he did his first tattoo. He should've known that getting them would make her angry, but he’s become addicted to the feeling of a needle in his skin. The leftover burn from the teeth on his arm is grounding, comforting, addictive.
He can’t fault her for being angry. He knows he shouldn’t get tattoos, especially not to honor Regulus. He went against Scripture, and she punishes him for it. That’s what mothers are for, to make sure you are the Lord’s servant in all that you do. Sirius is a miserable failure, and Walburga tries to set him on the right path. It’s the natural way of things.
Still, even when he deserves it, he likes to avoid her rage. He holds his breath, waiting for the telltale creak of stairs to signal her movement, but it never comes. She’s staying in her bed, then. Sirius takes the opportunity to stash his whiskey and bolt up to his room. Walburga will never enter Sirius’ room, will never face the identical beds side-by-side. It’s the only place he can hide: alongside the shrine of Regulus’ belongings.
Sirius lays on his pillow and focuses on the sound of his ceiling fan rattling. He recites all the verses about mothers he can think of: Proverbs 31:31: "Honor her for all that her hands have done, and let her works bring her praise at the city gate,” Psalm 139:13-14: "For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother's womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well," Isaiah 49:15: "Can a mother forget her nursing child? Can she feel no love for the child she has borne?" Desperately, he tries to shake the negative thoughts of her from his mind.
Honor thy father and mother. Honor thy father and mother. Honor thy father. Honor thy mother.
It’s days like these where Sirius feels he might just be waiting around to die. It has to be on the horizon. The Blacks are cursed; everyone in Devotion knows. It stretches back generations, something about a rotten Black in the early days of Devotion who’d wronged an angel in disguise. It’s why the Blacks are the most staunchly religious of anyone in Devotion, why all of the sons become pastors and the daughters preacher’s wives. If they’re lucky enough to survive to adulthood, that is. Sirius won’t become a pastor. That was Regulus’ path. Sirius will wait to die.
When he was younger, Sirius would spend his nights wishing that he were someone different. He’d wish that he was born to different parents, or that he wasn’t born in Carolina, or that he was never pulled out of school. Now older, he knows how stupid this is. He’s been fucked by the fates, screwed by the luck of the draw. He’s been born into a shitty situation, where he’ll suffer most of his life and die young, hopefully. He can try to make it better or worse, but that will never change the fact that he is a Black. Wanting otherwise is foolish.