Head-canon and fugue (variations on TMI) - Sirius Black

[wemyss]

 

1. Never mind his brother’s christening: Sirius was always the Little Prince.
2. Even when he became the Rebel Prince so far as his family were concerned.
3. When - as the underage son of the immensely influential and self-regarding Black family - he ran away from home, of course it was to stop with James and James’ family. Almost no one else should have taken him in; and absolutely no one else should have been able to look the massed Blacks in the eye as they clamoured for their son’s return, and told them, patronisingly, to sod off.
4. And made it stick.
5. He liked James immensely, as a person. He befriended and all but worshipped James because James was a Potter, with all that arrogance and inborn air of command, who could outface even the Blacks.
6. When he and James had first met, there’d been a tussle for dominance.
7. Sirius lost. Just.
8. He and James were very much the complete Ruperts, the destined sacrificial equivalents of upper-class subalterns of the 1914 War.
9. Remus … was a puzzle to him. One of those donnish types, from an upper-middle family of the sort that in the Muggle world provide generations of University Worthies.
10. Pettigrew was never more than a hanger-on. A batman of sorts, really.
11. Sirius hadn’t minded too terribly that James had proven himself the leader and relegated Sirius to 2IC status. It was a shock to him when, they having become Animagi, James took the form of a tough, noble, powerful, but essentially a prey animal.
12. It was a much bigger shock to Sirius to find that he was a dog to Remus’ wolf. It caused him - the more so in light of his ‘beta’ status to James in human form, which had not previously perturbed his mind or forced him to think - to reassess Remus and their relations.
13. Considerably.
14. James always remained his friend and leader. His best friend.
15. Pettigrew … was simply there, a licensed butt and hanger-on.
16. But Remus, if he never became Sirius’ best friend (or James’), became Sirius’ obsession.
17. A dark, animalistic obsession, an obsession of submission to the wolf that lurked, powerful and fierce, beneath the tweed and kindliness.
18. Sirius’ desperate attempts to ignore that and not to confront or admit it - not least by diverting himself with Witches and displacing his self-knowledge by mindless pranking with James - were largely responsible for his not thinking what had befallen Remus - execution as a beast - had Sirius in fact lured Snape to his death.
19. That brought him up short. He’d tried to plan something without James’ guidance, and ballsed it up, all but fatally, and wanted James to set it right: that was bad. He’d damned nearly managed to get Remus killed, let alone that snivelling greasy Slytherin of neither bowels nor breeding, which was worse. And, he forced, kicking and screaming, to confront, he was no better or saner or less morally vicious than his damned family, which was not to be borne.
20. Although he couldn’t bring himself to make amends to Snivellus, he did, under the shock of these self-discoveries, work surprisingly diligently, more so than he thought was in him, to be a better man, after.
21. What had begun as a rebellious rejection of his family’s dark past and of his ghastly hag of a mother became a point of principle.
22. When James - and, more to the point, Lily - rewarded his reformation by making him little Harry’s godfather, he knew he’d turned his life around, and that the world was just.
23. When his reformation was rewarded by betrayal, prejudice, being fitted-up for murder and treason, and being banged up in Azkaban on charges of which he was innocent, he realised that the world was a cruel joke, that tormented a man with hope and then dashed it.
24. From this, and the disintegration of his personality that was attendant upon it, he never recovered.
25. For a few brief months, it seemed that there was hope after all, although he wasn’t always stable enough to separate his godson from his dead James.
26. It was by then too late to try to begin a relationship with Remus, had Remus - Sirius couldn’t be sure and did not dare ask - been amenable to one, or even capable of feelings for another man. Sirius was, and knew, when lucid, that he was, too damaged for anything of the sort just then. Perhaps in time, when he was well again, and the War over and won….
27. It is notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to forgive those whom we have injured; much easier to forgive those who have injured us. Repairing any sort of relations with Remus was difficult.
28. Ceasing to hate Snape was impossible.
29. The more so when the great dungeon bat was openly cruel to Sirius’ godson.
30. There were so many things Sirius meant to do and repair when he was healed, when the War was won, when he had time … but he hadn’t time.
31. Sometimes, the best one can do is a Drang nach vorne.
32. Sometimes the best one can do is to die gallantly and hopelessly for a good and great cause.
33. And Sirius did, caught and defeated at the last not because he despised or discounted his opponent, but because, for the last half-second of his life, he looked past the wand trained on him, and hesitated at seeing - mad now with the same Black madness that coursed in his own veins, marred and twisted with evil and the embrace of evil - the face of a little cousin he’d once loved and teased and protected. It was the last betrayal.