Exploding Into Existence

Sirius stared longingly out of his window. He almost never got to leave the house. The elves did the shopping so that his mother wouldn't have to be seen near Mudbloods; Muggles lived all around their house, so they weren't allowed in the yard; and even if they had been the only house on the street, it wasn't proper to play in the dirt. Walburga had forbidden it. And of course, that was why Sirius wanted outside so badly. After all, why make something forbidden unless there's an exciting reason to do so?

Sirius knew his mother liked to make up rules for no reason - he called them 'nothing-rules' - but he knew Muggles lived in the zone that was forbidden by this particular nothing-rule.

He'd always wanted to meet a Muggle. The way his mother talked about them gave Sirius the image of a monster even fiercer than a manticore. Just thinking about Muggles gave Sirius a jolt in his stomach that announced a craving for adventure.

Looking around, as though expecting to see someone hiding in his room, he cautiously pried open the window and crept out onto the roof that covered part of the house below. He peered over the edge to ensure that the coast was clear, and then jumped off of the roof. His feet hit the grass hard and he fell onto all fours. The force of the fall knocked the wind out of him, and he crouched for a moment before standing up again.

Heights had never scared Sirius as they had Regulus. He glanced once at the peak from which he had jumped, without the foresight to wonder how he would ascend it when he returned, and set out on his way.

He walked down the street - no, strutted; after all, he had just snuck from the house - with no set destination. He tried to differentiate Muggle houses from wizard ones, but it was disappointingly impossible from the outside.

Just when Sirius was beginning to feel that the trip had been anti-climactic, he saw a girl his age in the street. She was spinning a strange pink disk around her middle, and Sirius edged up for a closer look.

"What's that you've got there?" he asked her. It was quite odd talking to someone to whom he wasn't related. Thinking back, he couldn't recall ever doing it before in all of his six years.

"What's it look like?"

"I don't know. What is that thing?"

"You've never heard of a Hula Hoop? You sure are dumb."

Sirius stared at the hoop. "Are you a Muggle?" he asked her.

"What in the heck is that?"

She is, he thought. But she looks just like me, only her clothes are different! "How do you do that?" he asked her.

"It's easy." She spun it around herself and swung her hips to continue the rotation. "Try it."

Sirius hesitated when she held it out to him. What if it was poisonous? He cast it a wary look, then slowly grasped it as if it was a bomb that could detonate at any second.

When no explosions occurred, he put it over his head and dropped it. It fell with a clatter to the ground.

The girl giggled. "No, you muffin head! You've got to make the Hoop spin; it's not going to do that itself!"

Why would you want to do something like that? He thought. Sounds a bit silly to me. He took the Hoop again and gave the girl a look as though sure this couldn't work, then raised it over his head. He dropped it and it spun around once before falling to the pavement.

"You're not trying very hard!" the girl teased. "You have to do this!" She placed the Hula Hoop at the level of his hip and Sirius jumped at the touch as though scorched. "You're strange," she said, giving him a concerned look.

"Sorry," he muttered. She gave the Hoop a spin and stood back. To his amazement, it continued to twirl about him.

"I'm doing it!" he said. What amazed him even more was that this didn't seem pointless - it was fun. It didn't matter that it was silly. "This isn't so hard!"

He saw a shadow drown his own from behind and the Hula Hoop hit the left side of his hip at the wrong interval. He felt a hand grip his shoulder as the toy wobbled out of its motion and fell. Sirius trembled as he heard his mother's voice.

"Boy," she said. Her voice was dangerous and Sirius found himself wishing that she would say more; her silence was much more frightening than her screams and left theories of her ulterior motives much more difficult to determine. Subsequently, the punishments were often more harsh when her anger was inexpressible through words.

As his mother steered him away, Sirius waved a miserable goodbye to the girl, and a thought cropped into his mind that the girl had been a Muggle, yet she had seemed to be generally the same as him.

"Sit," she said when they had gotten back to Grimmauld Place. He sat.

She paced about him, with her wand behind her back, considering what to do to him.

Walburga had learned very little about Sirius since his birth, but one thing that she did know was that he didn't respond to physical punishment; his eyes often glazed over as if he wasn't aware of his surroundings; unless it was coupled with an emotional tug. He was a loving boy by nature, and since she had not yet conceived a way to destroy such spirit, she had found that it was quite easy to use it against him.

She Summoned what she had discovered to be the most effective form of punishment for him. It wasn't the pain of writing in his own blood that got to the boy--although that had very much disturbed him at first--but the message it seemed to convey. After all, Walburga knew a great deal about blood pacts. While signing one's name (or in a child's case, writing lines) was legally binding, giving one's blood to a cause was physically, emotionally and spiritually binding. In other words, for a child to write a statement in his own blood firmly implants it into his mind as fact; part of him is telling him it's true, so how could he not believe it?

The look of terror on the child's face whenever she brought out the Quill was usually satisfying enough to her, but he had committed his largest atrocity yet. He needed to be corrected.

Another symbolism the blood quill represented was the willing of bad blood out. This one went back to ancient wizard Healers who thought that making a sick person bleed would remove the 'sick'.

Walburga was a strong believer in this method, so she made the boy write, "I shall quit disgracing this family or die trying." She glared at him all the while as he wrote, but allowed her mind to drift to everything that was wrong with him.

For instance: their image. How could the Blacks possibly retain their image if their own first born son was mingling with Muggle filth? The thought made her cringe to the extent that she had the urge to hit the child. But she held back. She knew it would be no good.

If he would only behave himself, she could be happy. She would be able to revel in her superiority and the perfection of her blood. But no. This boy was trying to ruin her life with his selfish actions. Where had she gone wrong? What hint could she possibly have given to him that he could associate with such scum?

She hadn't. It was clearly the brat's own fault; there was no one in this household from whom he could have picked up such notions! What had she done to merit such a disgraceful, disrespectful, curse of a child? It wasn't fair, and he had to learn.

Quit disgracing the family or die trying....Sirius tried his hardest not to disgrace the family. He didn't mean to be so bad, but he always messed up. He silently berated himself for forgetting to think about his actions and their consequences again. And even when he did that, he always bungled something.

And now Snuffles was calling Sirius away from the pain. Snuffles took over Sirius' body for the time being and kept it under emotional control while Sirius could not. While Snuffles was in control, Sirius went to the back of his mind, where Snuffles usually was, and where time seemed to speed up so that one moment he was writing the first line, and at the next, his mother was sending him away from the room.

Snuffles usually disappeared once the danger was over, but this time he seemed to stay. He made Sirius ignore his brother and sit on his bed in his room, staring at the quill-inflicted wounds. "Mudbloods are filth," they said. "I am nothing without purity of blood." "I shall quit disgracing this family or die trying." How could he learn to be good? To be exactly what his mother wanted him to be?

Sirius thought of the house-elves. They punished themselves when they burnt the lamb. Oftentimes when Sirius misbehaved, a house-elf was also punished for reasons Sirius didn't understand. He supposed he didn't understand it because it was just another flaw he had that lessened his value in his mother's eyes.

He remembered before Regulus was born (although the memory wasn't very vivid anymore) how his mother used to hold him, talk civilly to him, and scratch his head. She would do that again if only he could be good.

He thought again of the house-elves. They were definitely very good. He needed to do the same. It was the only way to gain his mother's love.

Sirius peered out of his doorway, and seeing that the hall was empty, snuck across it and into the room in which his mother had recently corrected him. There, sitting on the desk, was the quill.

Now how did it work? His mother had only ever given him the long black quill with the extra sharp point and told him to write with it. Maybe if he just started writing...

Sirius rummaged for a bit of parchment in one of the desk's drawers and set it on top of the desk. He began to write, and just as if it was one of his mother's punishments, Snuffles took him away from the pain.

I will be a good boy he wrote. The words shined red on his wrist over and over again, but his wrist kept healing. It wouldn't do. He scribbled on the parchment furiously; jagged lines streaking up and down his arm. Blood was falling onto the floor, and that was only another addition to the list of bad things he'd done. He scribbled harder.

"Snuffles, I feel funny," he said as his vision began to blur. Dark spots appeared in front of his eyes and both he and Snuffles passed out.

When Sirius regained consciousness, he found himself in his bed. He couldn't remember why he was there. He did, however, see the healed cut on his arm that had quickly scarred over. That must have something to do with it.

"Sirius, you're okay!" It was his mother! He watched her enter and shut the door. Then she was hugging him and he couldn't see anything else.

Sirius closed his eyes. It was the most wonderful feeling ever. If only this moment could last forever. He vowed that he would be good for the rest of his life if only she held him like this regularly. But she probably would now.

"Oh, what are we going to do with you, Sirius?" she said.

"I don't know," he said absently, still savoring the feeling of her hugging him, and disappointment filled him as she broke away. But that night as he fell into a sleep devoid of nightmares, for the first time in his life, he thought that, just maybe, he was loved.