Challenge # 58: Grimmauld Place
Title:Empty Hearts and Empty Places
Rating/Warnings:PG-13, none
Characters/Pairing:Sirius Black
Summary:It had never been home. It wasn't a home, just a house. Yet, it was more than a house.
Word Count:1027
Author's Notes:NA
Registered purchases?:both
Grimmauld Place is the house that Sirius grew up in but he would never go as far to call it his home. It never felt like he believed a home should. The house was always cold and draughty, filled with fear and expectation. Either you were giving orders tipped with harsh words and torments or receiving them and learning to transition from one to the other wasn’t the sort of childhood Sirius feels he should have had. House elves had started as his companions who he could play with or ask for snacks and then they become the eyes and ears of his mother that prevented him from doing the simple things like writing a letter to his friends in the holidays without his parents knowing about it.
The house was always quiet save for his mother’s ranting and his father’s heavy footsteps that signalled that either Sirius or his brother had pushed his mother too far and punishment would come from their father. Heavy footsteps came to mean pain. Sirius couldn’t stand it. The way James was with his parents seemed an alien concept and like a life Sirius could never have. He didn’t understand the way James was allowed to talk back without consequences or the warm embraces that were showered upon his friend. Yet he never said such things, because how could he possibly explain that he couldn’t question his parents without curses flying and that his parents hardly ever touched their children once they turned ten years of age because that would encourage weakness?
The cold doesn’t bother Sirius because he grew up with it. The main rooms had huge roaring fires in winter but the house was so large and the heat escaped quickly so the corridors always had a certain chill about them whether it was winter or the warmest summer day and Sirius has long since given up trying to understand why his parents don’t just use magic to fix it. Maybe they too are not bothered by it. Perhaps his father is used to it from living in the house so long. Or maybe they are just trying to toughen up their children, another mad scheme to create the perfect pureblood heirs.
Darkness goes hand in hand with the house at Grimmauld Place and Sirius finds it ironic. The House of Black, shadowed in darkness. House elves have been ordered to clean and scrub and break their backs trying to clean the windows but the house is so old that the dirt is all but engrained in the glass now, making the glass murky and depressing, keeping out the light and adding to the house’s misery.
There are so many rooms that Sirius could often hide from his mother simply by staying on the move until she calmed down. They had no need for all of the rooms. Sirius knows it is all for show. Inbreeding meant the Black family never had many children any more. His aunt’s three children was a surprise that left the other women of the family seething in rage and jealousy. Everything was a show to the Black family; everything was an expectation to appear better than their peers. A more impressive home, better marriages, more money and that was the life they expected Sirius to live.
Hogwarts opens doors for Sirius. Before, he had just disagreed, a stubborn refusal to accept his parent’s words but he had still believed to a certain extent that he would still be married off to some plain looking pureblood from a good family and spend his life doing what was expected and not what he wanted. Suddenly, at school, his parent’s dislike of muggleborns seems so much easier to understand. They seemed smarter than his parents sometimes. He befriends muggleborns, half-bloods and purebloods without distinguishing between them and learns that arranged marriages are all but gone in muggle Britain. Things are not as restricted and people have more freedom and it sets a fire roaring deep within Sirius, a need to gain that freedom for himself.
The house seems darker when he goes back that summer. The windows appear smaller and the corridors just that little bit colder. His parents words sound a little emptier to his ears and he thinks of the stories from his peers after he has been screamed at over his sorting, the stories about growing up playing at the beach, getting covered in dirt and going to school with people from all different backgrounds. Sirius was carefully watched at the beach, and he wasn’t allowed to get dirty because there was always a house elf watching him the garden and he was expected to sit by his parents at gatherings while his brother was allowed to play. He was the heir, the trophy.
The longer he spends in the house, the more determined he is to escape it. It was the relic of a time that had been lost. When he is returned there, years later, and all but imprisoned in his childhood home it fills him with unexpressed rage. He is powerless to do anything about it because there is nowhere else to go and Harry needs him but that doesn’t stop the rage and under that the sorry at being back. Now the walls are darker, and close in on him as cobwebs block the windows, and no magic is able to banish the freezing chill from the house that has sat empty for so long.
When he is given the chance, the reason to leave, he seizes it with both hands. He knows how dangerous the situation is and he goes anyway because even growing up in that house, he still challenged the darkness and the ideals and escaped from it, and he doesn’t know how to back down. That saves him in prison and destroys him when he leaves to see Harry. He wasn’t serious enough about things. The house he hated ended up being what saved his godson’s life as they planed Voldemort’s downfall. Sirius had always been a joker but with the House of Black at Grimmauld Place, it seemed the last joke was on him.
Word Points: 34
Item Points: 10
Sam//Hufflepuff
Rating/Warnings:PG-13, none
Characters/Pairing:Sirius Black
Summary:It had never been home. It wasn't a home, just a house. Yet, it was more than a house.
Word Count:1027
Author's Notes:NA
Registered purchases?:both
Grimmauld Place is the house that Sirius grew up in but he would never go as far to call it his home. It never felt like he believed a home should. The house was always cold and draughty, filled with fear and expectation. Either you were giving orders tipped with harsh words and torments or receiving them and learning to transition from one to the other wasn’t the sort of childhood Sirius feels he should have had. House elves had started as his companions who he could play with or ask for snacks and then they become the eyes and ears of his mother that prevented him from doing the simple things like writing a letter to his friends in the holidays without his parents knowing about it.
The house was always quiet save for his mother’s ranting and his father’s heavy footsteps that signalled that either Sirius or his brother had pushed his mother too far and punishment would come from their father. Heavy footsteps came to mean pain. Sirius couldn’t stand it. The way James was with his parents seemed an alien concept and like a life Sirius could never have. He didn’t understand the way James was allowed to talk back without consequences or the warm embraces that were showered upon his friend. Yet he never said such things, because how could he possibly explain that he couldn’t question his parents without curses flying and that his parents hardly ever touched their children once they turned ten years of age because that would encourage weakness?
The cold doesn’t bother Sirius because he grew up with it. The main rooms had huge roaring fires in winter but the house was so large and the heat escaped quickly so the corridors always had a certain chill about them whether it was winter or the warmest summer day and Sirius has long since given up trying to understand why his parents don’t just use magic to fix it. Maybe they too are not bothered by it. Perhaps his father is used to it from living in the house so long. Or maybe they are just trying to toughen up their children, another mad scheme to create the perfect pureblood heirs.
Darkness goes hand in hand with the house at Grimmauld Place and Sirius finds it ironic. The House of Black, shadowed in darkness. House elves have been ordered to clean and scrub and break their backs trying to clean the windows but the house is so old that the dirt is all but engrained in the glass now, making the glass murky and depressing, keeping out the light and adding to the house’s misery.
There are so many rooms that Sirius could often hide from his mother simply by staying on the move until she calmed down. They had no need for all of the rooms. Sirius knows it is all for show. Inbreeding meant the Black family never had many children any more. His aunt’s three children was a surprise that left the other women of the family seething in rage and jealousy. Everything was a show to the Black family; everything was an expectation to appear better than their peers. A more impressive home, better marriages, more money and that was the life they expected Sirius to live.
Hogwarts opens doors for Sirius. Before, he had just disagreed, a stubborn refusal to accept his parent’s words but he had still believed to a certain extent that he would still be married off to some plain looking pureblood from a good family and spend his life doing what was expected and not what he wanted. Suddenly, at school, his parent’s dislike of muggleborns seems so much easier to understand. They seemed smarter than his parents sometimes. He befriends muggleborns, half-bloods and purebloods without distinguishing between them and learns that arranged marriages are all but gone in muggle Britain. Things are not as restricted and people have more freedom and it sets a fire roaring deep within Sirius, a need to gain that freedom for himself.
The house seems darker when he goes back that summer. The windows appear smaller and the corridors just that little bit colder. His parents words sound a little emptier to his ears and he thinks of the stories from his peers after he has been screamed at over his sorting, the stories about growing up playing at the beach, getting covered in dirt and going to school with people from all different backgrounds. Sirius was carefully watched at the beach, and he wasn’t allowed to get dirty because there was always a house elf watching him the garden and he was expected to sit by his parents at gatherings while his brother was allowed to play. He was the heir, the trophy.
The longer he spends in the house, the more determined he is to escape it. It was the relic of a time that had been lost. When he is returned there, years later, and all but imprisoned in his childhood home it fills him with unexpressed rage. He is powerless to do anything about it because there is nowhere else to go and Harry needs him but that doesn’t stop the rage and under that the sorry at being back. Now the walls are darker, and close in on him as cobwebs block the windows, and no magic is able to banish the freezing chill from the house that has sat empty for so long.
When he is given the chance, the reason to leave, he seizes it with both hands. He knows how dangerous the situation is and he goes anyway because even growing up in that house, he still challenged the darkness and the ideals and escaped from it, and he doesn’t know how to back down. That saves him in prison and destroys him when he leaves to see Harry. He wasn’t serious enough about things. The house he hated ended up being what saved his godson’s life as they planed Voldemort’s downfall. Sirius had always been a joker but with the House of Black at Grimmauld Place, it seemed the last joke was on him.
Word Points: 34
Item Points: 10
Sam//Hufflepuff