L'Histoire Noire

L'Histoire Noire:

Fall of the House of Black

V

But evil things, in robes of sorrow,

Assailed the monarch's high estate;

(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow

Shall dawn upon him, desolate!)

And, round about his home, the glory

That blushed and bloomed

Is but a dim-remembered story

Of the old time entombed

-from "The Haunted Palace," from "Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allan Poe

"Filth! Blood traitors!" she shrieked to little avail.

She glimpsed the abomination and the traitorous fruit of her loins at the edges of her frame, and together they jerked at the damnable curtains. She shrieked, but still she soon found herself entombed in darkness.

The frame of her portrait held her captive. Her son had somehow managed to spell it to keep her from moving into other portraits, and keeping other portraits from visiting her. Her only reprieve from the dark silence came when the curtains opened, when she heard noises in her hall, and she tried to make the best of those times. Her attempt at immortality was now shrouded in undeniable loneliness and it made her hatred that much more bitter.

She knew that her home was being desecrated at this very moment by the Mudbloods and the blood traitors, and her precious heirlooms were being tossed away, considered rubbish by her only surviving son.

She was occasionally visited by the house-elf Kreacher, who whispered that Sirius was still throwing away everything he could get his ungrateful hands on. She had a feeling that, had Sirius been able to leave the house without being swept down upon by Dementors, he would have sold everything that the Black family had amassed and given the money away to the Mudbloods and muggle-lovers.

He would have allowed flames to lick at her portrait, would have enjoyed watching her scream as the paint and magic that allowed her existence melted and burned away, had she not had the foresight to prevent harm to the portrait.

She wished, not for the first time, that she was not imprisoned within this frame. If she could reach others, if she could just tell other people what atrocities were happening within her home...

A glimmer of an idea began to form. She was still spoken to and respected by one. While that one wasn't precisely a person, he could still manage to set something in motion if it were planned right. And since he was bound to serve all Blacks, Kreacher could legitimately go to any Black. All they would need was an opportunity that Sirius, with all his hot-headed tendencies, would surely afford them.

She decided. The next time the house-elf came to update her on the latest atrocities her son had done, she would set her plan in motion. And thus she did

***

"Filth! How dare you befoul the house of my fathers with your half-blood abominations!" she shrieked as the curtains flew open.

The skinny girl with familiar features and violently bright hair blushed as she tried to tug the curtains closed. This one was the half-blood that one of her nieces had produced in a disgusting, perverted union with a Mudblood.

She continued to scream, making her mark in the brilliant, outside world through shrieks and proclamations of truth. She looked around, noticing that some of the dust and dirt had disappeared (only to be replaced with living filth) along with artifacts that had graced the halls of this house since before her conception.

She hated how downtrodden and forgotten Grimmauld Place looked. It was a disgrace to the noble and rich heritage the walls represented. The intruders were 'sprucing the place up,' but they were simultaneously destroying her heritage. Kreacher's reports were becoming more and more disturbing. Her son was throwing out all that remained of long dead relatives- his own grandfather's Order of Merlin, pictures that preserved the faces of now-dead women in the loveliness of youth, bits and pieces of memorabilia that were all that remained of entire lifetimes.

Her son was rebelling against their family's superiority by deciding that the entire Black family was solely Dark wizards and witches, and that they were utterly and without remorse. She was at a loss of where he came about that way of thinking. She had thought that she had done nothing but try to instill a sense of pride and honor into her boys, but Sirius had somehow muddled it up. He had changed right around the time that the terrible incident had occurred.

The incident had been when the heir of the Noble and Pure House of Black had been Sorted not into Slytherin, like his forefathers for centuries before, but into Gryffindor. From that point until the day he had ran away (a cowardly action from someone who was supposed to be brave, she had always thought) he had turned from a good , loyal son into a narrow-minded and self-righteous brat that she had been ashamed of.

***

The curtains flew open, allowing her to see the action that had woken her. She began to shriek her usual tirade of insults and degradation when she noticed something was off. The werewolf was crying. The Weasley woman was trying to console him while others passed through the hall, all looking pale and wan.

She yelled, cursing her disappointment of a son when the werewolf leapt at her frame and began to pull at the curtains, though he couldn't quite manage to conceal her on his own. The Weasley woman hurried over, and glared with pure hatred. "Your son is dead," she said bluntly.

She froze.

"He died today, killed by that horrible Bellatrix Lestrange," said the Weasley woman. "Your family is no more."

Then they pulled the curtains with a mighty heave, and she found herself in the empty and familiar blackness.

How could hundreds of years of Black heritage be reduced to this? Wiped away by her fool of a son?

The knowledge that the Black line would stretch before her as it stretched behind her had been her one true assurance that her life was not in vain. She had birthed two sons, two bearers of the noble name, and neither had lived to perform their familial duty of producing an heir. How could that hope be gone?

Bellatrix- her own niece had destroyed the last of their line? The lovely young girl endowed with all the Black line had to offer had thrown her pride and family honor aside in her blind service to the so-called protector of the purebloods, and had destroyed their line.

She had originally thought that the Dark Lord had had a good grasp on what was important. He had preached the same things she had, about the inherent superiority of those born of pure magical heritage, and the importance of keeping the power in its rightful place. She'd beamed when her dear youngest son had quietly confessed that he had gone into the Dark Lord's service.

But when her darling Regulus had died, she had come to question it. How could anyone who truly believed in the superiority of the purebloods allow one of the few remaining sons of as noble a house as Black to die needlessly? Then, whispers of rumors had reached her ears that not only had the Dark Lord allowed her son to die, but had requested it.

She had been, therefore, surprised but not shocked that such a leader could be brought down by a young child. The final nail in the proverbial coffin had been the news that her estranged son had not only been a Death Eater, but despite his holier than thou attitude had become the most infamous supporter of the Dark Lord in the entire wizarding world.

She needn't even check her vast knowledge of the Black lineage. She knew that the last hope of the House of Black had lain in the hands of her son, and he was no more. Their name was no more. Their future had been tossed away on the winds of chance, and she was the only one left to mourn it.

Except she wasn't left. She had died, too.

They had carried her corpse directly past her frame. She had watched solemnly as the men carried it past, noticing the wisp of grey hair that escaped from under the white sheet. She had heard the coughs and moans coming from the grandest upstairs room for a while, and had known that her flesh and bone counterpart was not long for this world.

After all, for what reason would a sick widow who had lost both sons have to recover?

Her beautiful, golden niece would visit, on occasion. She had escaped the shame her sisters had caused her through their ill choices through her marriage. Once she had shed the family name in favor of that of Malfoy, the actions of others who besmirched their blood had caused her no heartache. During those long, final years of her flesh, Narcissa would come visiting nearly once a month, always during the early afternoon when the sun filtered into the hallway and 12 Grimmauld Place looked its finest. Narcissa would bring her son, the pale, fine boy whose features reminded her dearly of her own Regulus.

She had been delighted to hear Narcissa call the boy Draco, thrilled to know that the Black's heavenly system of names had not been forgotten to appease her niece's overly proud husband.

Narcissa never stopped to speak to her, and her flesh counterpart rarely ventured downstairs, so she knew nothing of their conversations. She knew nothing of her own final days, nothing of the chill or acceptance of death.

Her sons had died, her husband had died, she had died but here she remained, unchanged and eternally lonely. She screamed into the darkness, knowing her labors were fruitless. No one could hear her here. No one wanted to hear her. She was one of the relics her son and the blood traitors had sought to destroy, and only her self-preservation measures allowed her to escape the fate of the other baneful antiquities.

They were so quick to destroy that which they thought was harmful and evil. Did they not realize what could be learned from the past? Did they wish to be doomed to repeat it? The old families, the untainted ones, understood the past. The old families knew what Muggles were like from obituaries in dusty books, telling how a great-grandmother had been killed by a Muggle wasting disease or a great-uncle killed in the crossfire of a Muggle war. The magic and the mundane were not to meet, and the existence of Mudbloods and half-bloods were an affront to the centuries-old belief.

But none who entered this house would listen to reason. None acknowledged the wisdom of old, and none would change. The Black name had been tarnished to the point where none remembered the days when they had been respected by the inferiors, and none realized that the Blacks would have any sort of helpful insight.

So she would allow them their doom, and only wished that they would allow her peace.