The Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition, Season 5, Round 8 – The Wonderful World of Head Canon

Montrose Magpies

CHASER 3: Sirius was actually Walburga's favourite child (he was the first born son and future heir of the House of Black) before he started at Hogwarts, and it took her a while to accept/believe his Sorting

Optional Prompts:

9. (scenario) A character is sent to Azkaban

12. (dialogue) "You have his eyes"

13. (object) paintbrush

Wordcount: 1348

The Pride and Joy of Walburga Black

The day Walburga Black received news that her son had been sorted into the house of Gryffindor at Hogwarts was one of those days that she would never forget. She was plagued with nightmares of that very moment for years after the fact. She just could not believe her eyes when she read the letter.

Her son Sirius had always been her life's pride and joy. The boy had strong features, as if they had been painted with a fine haired paintbrush. He was a delightful young boy. Not a single silky smooth strand of hair out of place. He'd always had a strong set of lungs; the day he took his first breath of air, he had quickly followed it with the most piercing scream the staff of St Mungo's Hospital had heard in years. His proud father had proclaimed it was a sure sign of impending greatness.

"You have his eyes," every relative who came to greet the little boy and welcome him into the world had whispered to him in a conspiratorial tone of voice. "You are going to be just like your father one day, aren't you?"

The blow of the sudden and unexpected bad news had momentarily left Walburga speechless with disbelief. How could anyone have sorted her most treasured boy into Gryffindor? But as soon as she recovered from the initial shock and regained her ability to use her voice, she used it to command her husband to pay the school a visit to set things straight. When that failed to give them a satisfying answer, she resorted to angry letter-writing. The Headmaster's office had never seen so many Howlers in such a short period time either before or after that incident. He always wrote back, always with a firm — yet kindly phrased — refusal.

As a mother, the only conclusion Walburga could draw was that either there was something seriously wrong with the old hat, or someone had sabotaged the Sorting just to spite them. But after Headmaster Dumbledore denied her request for a re-Sorting, she firmly believed that the true reason was that he had wanted to recruit their wonderfully bright and talented son to his own house so that he could influence Sirius' young mind to see the world the way he did himself.

At social gatherings, people started giving her their condolences on her firstborn having been sorted into the 'enemy house', and some snidely implied there was something wrong with either Sirius himself or her whole family in general. She caught more than one faint voice muttering gleefully, "I always knew there was something off about that boy."

The pureblood matriarch just turned up her nose at them and made sure her rage and humiliation was perfectly contained by the time she had composed her biting reply.

"It is quite obvious what has happened here. The Muggle-loving old Headmaster couldn't bear the thought of not having my talented young boy belong to his own old house and had his mouldy pet hat make it so," she said, calm as can be, as if it wasn't her deepest wish at the time to be able to incinerate the spineless, disrespectful hag with the force of her icy stare alone. "Now, Tessty dear, I haven't had the opportunity to show you how sincerely I was grieved by the news of your own son being rejected for the position at the Ministry he applied for."

At the very public reminder of her own family's recent humiliation, the woman in question turned an irrepressible shade of red before the rest of the society vultures descended on her with their own insincere condolences.

It wasn't until the day she came home from a tea party at the Bulstrodes' to the sight of the formerly pristine wallpaper of her oldest son's bedroom draped and sullied by the presence of a mass of unmoving pictures — all depicting dreadful young women in various states of undress, or something that could only be a Muggle invention — that she finally conceded that the boy might not have been missorted by the old Sorting Hat. The realisation of that fact, and the crushing disappointment that followed it, led to her giving the teen his harshest punishment since the time he offered his frail, elderly aunt with a peanut allergy the peanut pastries he'd snuck into the kitchen and demanded that Kreacher teach him to make. The old woman was still metaphorically restrained to her bed on recommendation from her healer.

"If you love those inferior creatures so much, you can suffer your punishment as one as well!" she had exclaimed. And with that, she had put away her wand, bent the boy over her knee, and given him a good old-fashioned spanking the Muggle way. All the while, she couldn't help but admire her oldest son's magical abilities. At the tender age of thirteen, he'd cast a permanent sticking charm so strong that even she couldn't break it. She just wished he'd applied his obvious talent to a more worthwhile cause than sticking those disgraceful Muggle women and their useless machines to the walls of her house. Unfortunately, the horrid posters were there to stay, whether the punishment had taught him his lesson or not.

When he ran away from home at the age of sixteen to go live with those Muggle-loving Potters, she, in her anger, blasted him right off the great tapestry depicting their honoured family tree in the hall of the house. Even so, she kept a small portrait of the clever little boy he'd once been, the one she'd been so utterly proud to call hers, tucked away with her other valuables in an antique jewellery box that had been in the family for generations. It remained there until the day she died.

At least she still had her other son. Regulus Black might not have been either as skilled or as statuesque as his older brother, but, if nothing else, he had his priorities straight. Or so she thought until the day he revealed himself to be a coward and a deserter, getting himself killed trying to leave the honoured position of serving the Dark Lord's noble cause. Her poor husband's heart hadn't been able to take the blow of yet another son disgracing their family name. Their legacy was ruined. And she had lost them all.

Then, one day, came the news — in form of the front page story of the Daily Prophet — that her son had fed those gastly Potters to the Dark Lord and killed one of his other so-called friends himself. That the Dark Lord had died in the murder of those people was inconsequential. All that mattered were the actions of her son. The proof that he was not a lost cause after all. That he was sent to spend the rest of his days in Azkaban was only a minor dent in the happiness it all brought her. She was so proud that he finally had come to his senses after all that time. He might have taken his time to get there, but as the saying went: better late than never.

By the time her precious young boy was proven to be wrongly imprisoned and actually still on the side of light, she was not around anymore to agonise over it.

Luckily, her essence immortalised in the shape of the horrendous portrait at her former home could not share its discoveries of her once again favourite son's true colours to her soul — wherever it might be after the death of her mortal flesh — and she could spend the rest of her eternity safe in her assumption that he had always been on the right side of things, deep down.

It's strange how these things can go. Sirius Black had spent the majority of his life being a disgrace and the greatest of disappointments in his mother's eyes, but — at least as far as she knew — he had both entered and left the world being her biggest success.

AN: If anyone wondered, the character Tessty is an OC that I imagined to be the wife of Cantankerus Nott. Made up the name using the word testy, since it's a synonym of the word cantankerous...