Always Envious

I always was envious of Sirius.

I know I shouldn't have been - he was a blood traitor sure enough, but until he went to Hogwarts my mother adored him.

He was the first child, the epitome of perfection. I was always second best, in looks, intelligence, clothes, everything. Sirius had the better looks - dark eyes, hair that always seemed to look perfect even if he'd just rolled out of bed and hadn't bothered to brush it. I don't think he ever got a spot as a teenager. Me? I had acne. Well, I didn't really have acne, but like everyone else I got the occasional spot. Only it seemed like acne compared to Sirius's gorgeous, unflawed skin.

Don't get me wrong - it's not as if I fancied him. I mean, he was handsome, but I never thought of him in that way. I simply grew up learning how t admire beautiful things, elegant things - and Sirius is one of those things. Or he was.

Once.

He was clever too, my brother. Very clever. It was apparent from n early age - my parents found me clucking around my room one day after me and Sirius had argued so he, somehow, turned me into a chicken. My parents thought it wonderful. I thought it terrible. They asked him to turn me back, eventually. He wouldn't. He said he'd forgotten how, but he still got hit anyway. My mother turned me back into myself and I started crying. So I got hit too.

We stayed up late that night, neither of us able to sleep. Sirius padded into my room and threw himself onto my bed. He pulled my hair and I sat up quickly and tried to get his hands off.

"Idiot!" he hissed, "Why didn't you change yourself back?" I muttered that I didn't know how - it was the truth. I was only five.

"Idiot," he hissed again. He left.

I cried myself to sleep that night.

I always felt so clumsy and stupid next to him too. When he walked he seemed to have some unnatural, ethereal elegance. He didn't walk - it was although he glided across the floors. I always thumped around the house. I always tripped over and ended up with a grazed knee, or worse.

"Why can't you be like Sirius?" my mother used to shout. "He never trips, never falls, and never embarrasses me! Stupid boy! Nothing with come of you, that is for sure!" Sirius would stand in the doorway, watching. I know he didn't mean to get me in trouble. I know it wasn't really his fault. But it never stopped me resenting him.

I was always told I had to be like him, I had to emulate everything. So I tried to - I tried to as hard as I could but it just wasn't possible. The kind of grace Sirius had been born with was something you had to be born with. You couldn't ever copy him because you looked even more of a fool.

Believe me, I know.

He was born under a lucky star, it's the only way I can describe it. Pure blood families rate the qualities he was born with among most things. No one cared about his personality. Especially not my mother, she thought he should be quieter, calm and reserved "like dear Lucius," as she so eloquently put it. It was obvious she was trying to impress the Malfoys - one of our cousins was sure to marry him if my mother had no female heir. All she wanted was contacts.

"The most useful thing you will ever acquire," she used to say, "is a good contact who can get you in with the right people, the right crowd. The world will then be at your feet, my boys! At your feet!"

She didn't take into account any of the things that I thought were just as important - ambition, skill - no. All that mattered were good contacts and a pleasing visage.

Unfortunately for me, I had neither.

The trouble really began when Sirius went to Hogwarts. Mother and Father were both convinced that Sirius would be placed in Slytherin, Noble Slytherin, and continue the family honour.

Shows how much they knew about their son.

Sirius, it was true, had many of the qualities associated with Slytherin at first glance. He was determined and frightfully cunning, there was no doubting it. But if you looked closer into his personality, if you knew him as well as I did, then there was no doubt that he was a Gryffindor through and through. He had this irrepressible courage, loyalty to loved ones and bravery beyond what I knew.

It was obvious, to me at least, that he was to be placed in Gryffindor.

My mother and father were furious. They couldn't believe what had happened. If I remember correctly, they wrote to Dumbledore - insisting it was all a cruel joke, that he be re-Sorted into Slytherin immediately and that further action would be taken against the school and Dumbledore himself if nothing was done.

I believe Dumbledore ignored the letter.

So they sent Sirius a Howler.

It told him how he'd never amount to anything, how he'd let the entire family down - and worse. If it were me, I would have burst into tears at the things they had written. But not Sirius.

He was a Gryffindor after all.

From what I hear he started laughing.

Only Sirius could do that. Only Sirius could laugh in the face of danger.

So I became Mother's favourite. For a while. I was Sorted into Slytherin, I took up children of their friends as "friends" - I was everything they had always wished Sirius to be. I started to live for my parents and not myself.

And that's how I came to join the Death Eaters. I didn't want to. I wanted to leave home like Sirius had only weeks before. But I was too scared of what would happen if I did.

I saw how hysterical my mother was. I saw how angry my father got. I saw them blast his name off the tapestry that hung in the Drawing Room. He was nothing to them anymore, he no longer existed.

I was so jealous.

Even as I was about to be killed by Lucius - the same man I was taught to respect all those years ago - my mind still flashed to Sirius. What would he have done?

He wouldn't have joined. He wouldn't have risked it. He would have got out while he was ahead.

I was always envious of Sirius.