The Portrait of Sirius Black

The Portrait of Sirius Black

Prologue

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"I shall tell you a great secret my friend. Do not wait for the last judgment, it takes place every day." ~Albert Camus

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In the hidden corners and the dusty crevasses is where one finds the best tales. There are no stories of greatness and intrigue plain in view; they are hidden behind locked doors, thick tapestries, and layers of grime. The best stories are the ones that happen accidentally, without reasoning, a series of events that unfold all from a mistake or an innocent stumbling.

So begins our tale...

A face of Grecian beauty like his was not meant to be stowed away in a corner of an ancient and long forgotten house. His majestic, aristocratic features were the sort that should always be plain in view, not packaged away in an attic. It was an outrage to what was right, a crime against those who knew and appreciated real beauty.

The portrait had been painted by a well known artist, who had taken a photograph of the boy while he was at school in his sixth year and put his likeness on canvas. Sirius had been at the peak of his youth. He had gotten past the worst years when his voice was changing and his ivory skin was doted with pimples to a better, more promising time. He had transitioned into a man well, and the portrait showed that clearly, but was still able to portray his youth, mischievousness, and vulnerability in his dark grey eyes.

He smirked at the viewer with a superior look, the look of a Black. A lock of his silky black hair fell across his handsome face and he blew at it lazily, with an air of total and complete casual elegance. That sort of composure had always come naturally to him as if the family manners, if not their ideals, had been inherited by him at birth. He was in all ways superior to his awkward younger brother Regulus. In all ways excepting one.

Although Mr. and Mrs. Black had always had their doubts about the boy, they had never expected him to do the unthinkable in his first year and place himself in Gryffindor, of all the houses. Gryffindor House, which was the rival of his family's usual Slytherin. It had been in the years following that the impertinent child had made his views on the family ideals quite clear.

Although a spoilt child from birth, the gifts he received the compliments he was given when he started school where above and beyond his wildest fantasies. He was young yet, his parents had reasoned, and perhaps his more liberal friends at school had swayed his beliefs with gifts and opinions. Children were impressionable like that.

However, when they found that no bribe or forced kindness could win the child back. They found themselves taking up a new strategy, one of disinterest. His letters home were answered with brief, uncaring scraps in reply, a fortnight or more after they had been received. Discouraged enough to believe they no longer cared; eventually his letters had stopped coming at all, something that had frightened Mrs. Black into hysterics.

For the brief stretch of time of the summer holiday between his second and third year, they once again tried to win their son with gifts and unfelt affections, but they knew now that it was an almost hopeless cause. When he returned from school for the holiday break, they had found an almost completely different Sirius Black. His composure remained the same: haughty, slightly arrogant, mischievous, and with a small hint of elegance, but his views and opinions on everything were so changed, so irrevocably altered it was almost unbelievable.

It was when Sirius was only going into his fourth year that the threats started. At first they remained thinly laced compliments, but with a darker message attached. Many of them went unnoticed by the boy, but the strain on his relationship with his parents that had been forming ever since he started school was becoming apparent. The threads of tension were now visible to almost all of the Black Family.

It only worsened as he grew older.

The thinly hidden threats transformed into out-and-out battles. Their disappointment, their rage at having such a disgrace for a son, and his arrogance, his wounded pride at having parents who as far as he could tell didn't know right from wrong all combined to make for a bitter environment.

To the public they were the Blacks, a strong, proud, influential pure-blood family of high distinction, but to themselves they were the Blacks, a family torn apart and waging war against each other within the confinements of their home.

It could now only worsen from what it was with the passage of time. His fifth year had gone and went, and when he came home for the summer the Black's had sensed something about their son that was different. He knew something, had done something that weighed him down. They didn't question him, and he never bothered them with an explanation. He went back to school that year, his disposition darker, more tired, than they had ever seen.

There was still a miniscule hope in the hearts of his parents that he would rejoin with the family, so during his sixth school year, they had followed through with the family tradition of having a portrait made of the eldest son.

When he returned home from school that summer, then tension was harder to bear than ever before, and fights became a much more common occurrence. After a particularly horrid lecture from his mother and father one late night, Sirius simply exploded at his parents, telling them all the grievances he had kept quiet for so long. In retrospect, they had exploded back at him explaining to him in vivid detail just how much they were ashamed to have him as a son. Curses flew through the air, magical and simple obscenities, and he finally just stopped, and looked at them darkly, before turning and flying up the stairs to his room.

He had come down again ten minutes later, his school trunk haphazardly packed, a bag heaving full of galleons and sickles hooked onto his belt. His mother and father screamed at him, forbidding him from leaving the house, but ignoring them, he charmed the trunk to be feather light and strapped it to his broom, and took off into the night sky.

He wouldn't step into the Most Noble and Ancient House of Black again until both his parents were long dead.

After his abandonment of the family and all that went with it, the portrait had been taken off its proper place in the entryway hall, and was replaced by a large painting of the family matriarch, grander than the former portrait had ever been.

By the mother's will it would have been burned, just as his name had been from the family tree, but the father, who was holding a calmer and more inward rage, firmly held his ground and had the painting stored away, to be put up only when the eldest Black child made amends with his family.

The Black's were a superstitious family. The portrait of his son held great significance to Mr. Black, its removal from the walls of Noble and Most Ancient House of Black symbolizing to him Sirius's abandonment of the family. That was why, when the portrait was put into storage, he placed on the canvas a horrible curse for those who would try to hang his disgrace of son onto the walls once more and without his permission, only to be removed when Sirius had made complete and total amends with his family and the pureblood way of life.