AN: I have no excuse for this being so late, I'm sorry! Well, actually I do, there's a global pandemic and I'm in the US where everything is still an absolute clusterfuck, so that's a thing. But this chapter was also just hard for me to write because it's kind of a monumental event and I wanted to get it right, which was hard. Hope you like it!

I know it's short, but I *agonized* over this y'all.

Also, James' parents names are Dorea and Charlus, because I said so, so there.

Also, also: I CAN'T BELIEVE I HAVE OVER 500 FAVS AND ALMOST THAT MANY REVIEWS YOU GUYS ARE SO AMAZING I LOVE YOU!

CW: child abuse/extremely ugly and unhealthy family dynamics

Chapter 27: Once A Black

It had been years now since Sirius had gone home for the Christmas holidays, and it was undeniably weird to be on the train when he could see snow swirling outside its windows. He stared broodily out at it as it fell, all but ignoring James and Peter, who were engaged in a halfhearted game of exploding snap on the floor of the Marauder's compartment, letting him be. His friends' presence was comforting, even if Sirius couldn't bring himself to engage with them much. Maybe Remus, when he got back from his damnable Prefect patrol (why anyone would ever want to be a Prefect was a mystery which continued to elude Sirius entirely) he'd be able to draw him out. Or maybe not. For the time being, Sirius settled for stewing in his own dark thoughts, dwelling on them masochistically, but also probably inevitably given what he knew awaited him at the end of his train journey.

He was in no way disillusioned about what would eventually happen once he got to Grimmauld Place. There were no visions of ill-conceived reconciliation dancing through Sirius' head that day. There was simply no point in prolonging the illusion any longer. His ties to his family, his heirdom, had been lost a long time ago, and Sirius had come to terms with that, even if his parents hadn't. They were about to though. Sirius only hoped he could manage to escape the fallout with minimal bodily harm-and maybe a book or two purloined from the familial library. The library of a family he was about to officially no longer be a part of. Sirius figured he ought to have something to remember them by. In addition, of course, to all the psychological damage he was obviously suffering from. As far as mementos went, books were about as good as anything else, he reasoned. A tad heavy, maybe, but at least they might end up being useful, to Granger if not to him. Besides, he'd once stolen a book from Granger, so it only stood to reason that perhaps he ought to do something to make up for that previous incident.

Sirius told himself that he didn't know why he was so willing, if not exactly eager (okay maybe he was eager, Sirius admitted to himself, more eager than he should have been anyway, given how fucking dangerous this all was), to enable and abet Granger's fucked up little research expedition into Voldemort's various unconfirmed activities. But the truth was, Sirius had always possessed a cavalier attitude about putting himself in harm's way, and he'd never come across a stupidly dangerous idea he wasn't at least intrigued by. Whatever Granger was up to, and Sirius was well aware she wasn't telling him the half of it, he was very intrigued.

And he couldn't even pretend that surprised him, because when it came to Granger, Sirius knew, he'd always been intrigued; right from the moment third year when he'd told her he liked her hair and she'd told him, in not so many words, to fuck right off. Maybe James wasn't the only one who was a glutton for punishment when it comes to girls, Sirius reflected, glancing sidelong at his bespectacled best friend. Not that he was romantically interested in Granger the way James was in Evans or anything. He was just…intrigued.

Besides, it was nice to have a reason for going home that wasn't related to his inevitable disinheritance. Sirius was more than happy to seize on whatever it was Granger thought he might find in his parents' library as a distraction from the real reason he'd been called back to Grimmauld Place in the middle of the school year. What were his parents going to do if they (or more likely, Kreacher) caught him nicking their books? Disown him? Sirius let out an unexpected laugh at the thought, drawing James and Peter's attention.

"Alright, mate?" James asked, looking at him in mild concern.

"Fine, Prongs," Sirius said, stretching his legs out across the compartment seat and staring mulishly at his shoes, rather than his friend. "Listen mate, you're sure your parents are fine with me coming to stay…after?" he asked, his underlying anxiety betraying itself despite Sirius' assurances just a breath earlier of being fine.

"'Course, Padfoot," James said easily, attempting, seemingly, to be casual about it, though the other boy couldn't quite stop the earnestness from leaking through his voice. That was okay though. Sirius appreciated it, even if it might have been vaguely embarrassing to the both of them.

Upon disembarking the Hogwarts Express and emerging onto the busy train platform, crowded with excited families all eagerly anticipating reunions with their various offspring, Sirius discovered that his own parents were missing from the throng. Instead, Kreacher had been sent to fetch Regulus and him; the sour faced elf managing to stand out amongst the crowd, despite his diminutiveness, by sheer virtue of the amount of deeply unpleasant energy he was broadcasting in contrast to nearly everyone else's cheeriness. Sirius found himself oddly reassured by this typical show of neglect on the part of his parents. Or maybe he was just keen to avoid seeing them for as long as possible. Since he'd gotten older, they'd settled for mostly ignoring him whenever his presence happened to be required at Grimmauld Place, and Sirius had gotten used to the lack of interaction.

A sick part of him actually missed the screaming rows of his childhood. At least it had been a form of acknowledgment from his parents, before they'd stopped trying with him altogether. McGonagall said to him once that his problem (one among many was the implied bit, Sirius gathered) was that he was as happy with 'negative attention' as he was with positive. Sirius reckoned that was probably true. But even with his more dysfunctional tendencies, he still wasn't looking forward to what was about to happen; to this last holiday with his family. It was like a stupid gothic novel or something. Part of Sirius wanted to put off going through it at all for as long as possible, but another part of him just wanted it over with as quickly as he could manage it.

For all he'd built it up in his head, Sirius' arrival at Grimmauld was decidedly anti-climactic. Neither of his parents were even home. His father was probably at the Ministry, where he'd always spent an exorbitant amount of time, even though his only technical job was to manage the Black Estates. To Sirius' understanding, this mainly seemed to involve his father intimidating people into granting him political favors and advancing his pet legislation projects, almost all of which were inevitably horrible. With Uncle Alphard dead, Sirius knew his father now occupied the Black seat on the Wizengamot as well, which wasn't exactly a comforting thought.

Why was that shit inherited anyway, Sirius wondered. They really ought to have done it up like the Muggles and had elections for that sort of thing, he thought. That way, hopefully, you didn't end up with loonies like his family adjudicating the law. His mother, for her part, was likely off at some sort of stupid societal tea where she was undoubtedly filling her time by viciously gossiping about anyone and everyone in her small, exclusively pureblood and moneyed, social orbit. Godric, Sirius hated them both.

In absence of their parents, him and Regulus were simply instructed by Kreacher upon their return home to present themselves for dinner in the formal dining room at seven sharp, and left to their own devices to fill the intervening hours. Regulus fucked off to his room pretty much immediately, which suited Sirius just fine, although he did wonder, belatedly, if he ought to make more of an effort to spend time with his little brother while he still could. His parents would surely ban Regulus from interacting with him at Hogwarts once he'd been disowned, and knowing Regulus (and Sirius did still know his brother, even if they hadn't talked properly in years) he'd adhere to their orders. Sirius couldn't imagine what the two of them would have to say to one another at this point anyway though. By now they were simply too far gone in their separate directions, paths they'd chosen or been set on years before, to do much more than grunt at each other occasionally in passing. Honestly, Sirius tried not to think about Regulus very much. Whenever he did he always ended up feeling sick.

He'd always been a shit older brother, Sirius knew; too selfish and consumed by his own dramas to pay much attention to Reg, much less bother trying to save him. And now he was leaving. What was he supposed to do, drag the kid with him kicking and screaming? Regulus wouldn't go with willingly, and his parents would probably find a way to have Sirius thrown in Azkaban for attempted kidnapping if he tried to take him. Part of Sirius still wanted to attempt it anyway (he could probably hack it in Azkaban, for a while anyway), but the larger part of him knew he never would. It wouldn't do either of them any good, and the truth was, he'd given up on Reg a long time ago; left him to fend for himself.

Standing in dank entry way of their childhood home, Sirius watched as his little brother slunk off in the direction of his bedroom without so much as acknowledging him, trying not to acknowledge to himself just how much he inexplicably felt like crying.

The Black library was vast, a space you could easily get lost in, and which Sirius had more than once as a child. He'd also lost the tip of a finger to a particularly ill tempered book he'd happened to stumble across when he'd been about nine, his curiosity having overwhelmed the screeching warnings of his mother not to be sticking his nose, or any other vulnerable appendages, where they didn't belong. St. Mungo's had been able to reattach his finger tip in the end, though, so Sirius figured it was no harm done in the long run. Or at least not any permanent bodily injury. Besides, the magical flogging his mother had assigned Kreacher to administer to him as punishment after they got home from the hospital had hurt far worse, and for far longer, than anything the sodding book had done to him.

Sirius wandered amongst the various shelfs, valiantly resisting the urge to indiscriminately run his fingers over the countless spines on display. He was capable of learning some lessons from his prior experiences, whatever McGonagall and Moony might think (and he was very well aware of their litany of disparaging thoughts on the subject). Sirius was sort of hoping that he might catch sight of a book conveniently labeled 'OMINIOUS IMMORTALIITY RITUALS INVOLVING VERY DARK MAGIC, NOT FOR THE SQUEAMISH' or something, but nothing was jumping out at him that obviously so far. Pity Granger wasn't there Sirius thought idly as he perused a rather sinister looking volume with an unmarked spine, shoving it in his bag when he managed to ascertain, through his somewhat muddled Latin, that it was filled with details on complicated blood magic. That seemed potentially relevant.

Over the course of the afternoon, Sirius managed to stow away half a dozen potentially useful tomes in his magically expanded school bag, though he wasn't in any frame of mind to pursue or analyze any of their contents very deeply just then. Sirius figured he'd leave that bit to Granger when he saw her next. He didn't even know precisely what he was looking for, and this was her pet project anyway. Besides, he couldn't concentrate for shit. Grimmauld Place always fucked with his mind, and the effect was only amplified by what he knew was coming later. When he finally saw his parents.

It was weird, but as Sirius sat down for dinner that night, he felt sort of drunk. He supposed it was adrenaline, or anticipation or something; his body doping itself up in preparation for a fight it knew was coming. Unbelievably enough, Sirius hadn't actually had anything to drink that day, if only because it hadn't occurred to him until he sat down across from his parents that it might have been beneficial for him to be some degree of inebriated for the coming confrontation. His mother and father were perched stiffly on the edge of their ornate, formal dining chairs, the same horridly uncomfortable ones his mother had insisted upon using for as long as Sirius could remember, and which he'd spent many hours bound to in childhood as part of Walburga's ongoing crusade to forcibly improve his posture. Godric, he hated those fucking chairs.

And suddenly Sirius couldn't stand any of it; couldn't stand to be in sitting in that fucking chair, at that overly long fucking table that seated at least 20 when there were only four of them, in that fucking nightmare house with his so called fucking family, for a second longer.

"Look, can we just get this over with?" he said hostilely, shoving his untouched plate away with a clatter and shattering the thick silence which had descended upon the room immediately after his parents' clipped greetings of him and Reg.

His mother, who had been about to take a bite of her steak, slowly lowered her fork, narrowing her eyes at him dangerously. His father went so far as to set down the copy of the evening of edition of The Daily Prophet that he'd been boredly reading. Sirius was undeterred by their responses. Suddenly, he just didn't fucking care anymore. At all.

"I don't know what you're waiting for. Actually," he said with a frenzied laugh. "I don't know what I'm waiting for." Emotions and energy and words were bubbling up inside Sirius so uncontrollably now, unable to be contained any longer, that he felt practically manic. Regulus was staring, wide eyed and, if Sirius wasn't mistaken, frightened somewhere underneath his shock. But Sirius wasn't scared, not anymore. Not of them.

"This is ridiculous," he spat contemptuously at his parents, vicious and gaining steam. "This is a fucking joke. Why should I sit here, and pretend like we don't all know what's about to happen."

"That is enough, boy," his father cut in, voice flat but steely. "You speak out of turn."

Sirius really couldn't help but laugh at that. "Yeah, you've never been able to cure me of that habit, have you?" he said, the adrenaline which was coursing through him making him as reckless with his words as his reputation had ever alluded to him being. "You did try though. Magic sure makes it easier to discipline your kids without leaving lasting marks, doesn't it? I'll give us that over the Muggles. At least when they beat the fuck out of their kids people can usually tell, even if they do still ignore it."

"You ungrateful brat," his mother hissed, and though she wasn't yet yelling, Sirius couldn't mistake the rage building within her, about to erupt over him, as it had so many times before. His father's was a quiet fury, dangerous but usually restrained. In contrast to her husband, Walburga Black had rarely bothered to restrain her infamous temper when it came to him, her eldest son, and Sirius doubted she was about to start now. He wasn't wrong either.

As he watched his mother reach for her wand, flicking it sharply in his direction, a sick sense of gratification overtook Sirius just as the force of the magical blow she'd sent his way did. The strength of the spell wrenched his head back, setting his ears to ringing. Regulus, a good few feet away from Sirius, but seated on the same side of the table as his brother, flinched. Luckily, his parents' attention remained firmly fixed on their eldest, where it had seemed, to Regulus, to reside for practically the entirety of his young life, even when Sirius wasn't physically at home with them. As usual, everyone appeared to have forgotten he was even there.

Sirius raised a reflexive hand to his jaw, feeling out the blossoming pain, letting it ground him. "All this time," he said quietly, "for years now, I've just been waiting around for you to disown me. Fretting about it, agonizing over it, wondering when it would come; just fucking waiting for you to finally do it and kick me out once and for all. And I don't know why it never occurred to me until now that I could just leave."

His mother scoffed. "You're not going anywhere, boy."

"I am, though," Sirius said steadily, looking beyond his mother at his father, who said nothing, but was surveying him coolly, his steely grey eyes an exact match for Sirius' own. "I don't need a fucking ultimatum from you. I'm not joining Voldemort, and short of Imperious, you can't make me. So just burn me off the stupid tapestry already and I'll be on my way."

He shoved his chair back roughly from the table, the legs scraping jarringly against the wood floor, and he saw his mother raise her wand once more, instinctually perhaps, as he stood. But before she could cast whatever presumably horrible spell she'd been about to send his way, his father staid her, placing a restraining hand on his wives' arm.

"Let him go, Walburga," he said emotionlessly, beginning to methodically cut his steak, his action causing little rivers of blood to spread out across the white china of his plate. "He was lost to us, and to the cause, a long time ago." Orion glanced up briefly, looking not at Sirius, but at Regulus, before returning his attention to his meal. "Besides, we've another son. One that we've always known is much better suited to the role of heir."

Regulus seemed to shrink in his seat, and Sirius looked away from his little brother quickly; tried not to think of what he was consigning him to.

Sirius could see that his mother had gone back to her steak as well now, taking her cue from his father. He shook his head at the sight of the two of them, his parents, calmly eating their dinner as though nothing out of the ordinary had occurred; as though they hadn't just permanently severed ties with him as easily and unemotionally as they might have a solicitor whom they'd decided was no longer an appropriate fit to serve the needs of the Black family. In the end it was as easy as that, Sirius realized. He was that disposable to them.

All the angry adrenaline which had been surging through his body only moments earlier seemed to desert him abruptly, leaving him feeling numb in the wake of its sudden exodus. For so long Sirius had built up his disownment to something which would naturally involve a great deal of rageful screams and resistance on the part of his mother, and culminate in an inevitable violent clash between the two of them. He'd never bothered to imagine his father's role in anything very much, and maybe if Orion hadn't been there something closer to the scenario Sirius had been playing out in his head (fantasizing about?) for so long might have happened. But it hadn't. Instead his parents were simply letting him leave, without very much of a fight at all. With barely even a protest, really.

Sirius would have thought that's what he would've wanted. But as he summoned his trunk (illegally, as he was still underage, not that the Improper Use of Magic office had ever had any fucking idea what was happening at Grimmauld Place) and set about dragging it outside to wait for the Knight Bus, he didn't feel the least bit triumphant. Sirius wasn't sure what he felt at that moment, as he left. He didn't look back though.

James never told anyone, not even Remus or Peter, what happened in the immediate aftermath of Sirius' arrival at Potter Manor, which was basically that Sirius took one look at Mr. and Mrs. Potter standing on either side of James as his friend answered the door, and started crying. In front of people he hadn't even properly ever met before. It was fucking awful.

"Oh, sweetheart," Mrs. Potter said softly at the sight of him, which Sirius supposed was nice, but also made him want to die.

"Fuck," he said shakily, looking up at the stained glass window pane set in above the Potter's front door, avoiding all their eyes while he desperately attempted to get a hold of himself. Godric, why the fuck was he crying? He almost never cried, except for sometimes when he drank far too much. He certainly didn't make a habit of doing it in front of other poeple. And had he really just said 'fuck' in front of his best friend's mum? Great first impression he must have been making on them, Sirius thought derisively.

"Come on in," Mrs. Potter said after a moment, taking Sirius gently by the arm and urging him into the house. "Let's get you inside, no use idling about on the doorstep. Charlus, summon Preagy to handle the boy's trunk; James, go put on some tea."

"Mum-," James started uncertainly, looking back and forth from her to Sirius, the expression on his face suggesting he was at something of a loss as for what to do in the situation, or even how to finish his sentence.

Mrs. Potter though, was now in her element, having fully and comfortably taken things in hand. "Go James," she said firmly, hand still resting warmly on Sirius' arm.

"Listen to your mother," Mr. Potter concurred, shooting James a faint but encouraging smile.

James himself shot one last searching look at Sirius, as though confirming that his friend was indeed okay with him leaving for the moment. Sirius wasn't sure what James saw in his answering expression, but he must have taken it as permission to go. Frankly, Sirius didn't have it within himself at the moment to be very much concerned with the current state of James' emotional wellbeing. He was having enough trouble trying to get a handle on his own. In any case, James must have seen something in his face that told him Sirius was alright with him leaving, because he nodded briefly at him, and then disappeared ahead of everyone into the depths of the house. Mr. Potter followed shortly behind his son, the older man pausing only to give Sirius a brief smile, similar to the one he'd bestowed upon James moments earlier, before retreating to parts of Potter Manor unknown, leaving Sirius alone with Mrs. Potter.

She led him quietly down the front hallway into a large, open space Sirius would later recognize to be the Potter's main family room, or at least the one they all spent the most time in. It was expansive, but had a comfortable, lived in feeling that Sirius wasn't capable of properly registering at the time, though he'd come to appreciate it later.

"Sit down, dear," Mrs. Potter instructed him kindly, depositing the shell-shocked former Black heir on a cheerful red sofa, reminiscent of the ones which occupied the Gryffindor Common Room.

"James will be in with tea in just a moment, I expect."

Sirius nodded faintly, unsure how else to respond. He didn't quite feel capable of speaking just yet. He didn't feel capable of very much at all right then, beyond sitting there numbly next to Mrs. Potter. At least it seemed he'd finally stopped crying.

"They just let me leave," he said hoarsely after a time, surprising himself. Mrs. Potter said nothing in response to this, perhaps not wanting to interrupt his thoughts. She did, though, place a comforting on hand once more on Sirius' arm, squeezing lightly there. "They hardly cared," he continued over a swallow, and fuck, he was crying again already, and he'd only just managed to stop before. "I don't know why I thought they'd care more. It's so stupid, but I did."

"Oh, sweetheart," Mrs. Potter said again, folding him somewhat awkwardly (Sirius was actually quite a bit taller than her) into her arms. Sirius let her, though somewhere beneath his numbness, it made him feel funny.

"I don't understand," he said, almost incoherently through his tears, unsure what it was exactly he referred to. Life in general, maybe.

"Maybe don't try to, just now," Mrs. Potter advised him gently, and Sirius buried his head in her shoulder, feeling pathetic and much younger, for once, than his 16 years.

Awhile later, Sirius wasn't sure how long it had been, he sat up slightly, wiping furtively at his eyes. It would have been quite obvious to anyone by now that he'd been crying for a prolonged amount of time, but thankfully, James and Mr. Potter mysteriously had yet to reappear. Whatever the reason for their lack of turning up, Sirius found himself glad for it. It was bad enough crying in front of her, all over her, really, but it would have been infinitely worse to do so in front of James and Mr. Potter as well. Even if they surely knew something of what was going on, Sirius could at least comfort himself with the notion that they hadn't witnessed him fully breaking down in person.

"What's going to happen?" Sirius mumbled, his head still somewhat foggy from all his tears. He felt slow and stupid. "Where will I go?"

"You'll stay here for now, of course," Mrs. Potter said, as though this was an obvious conclusion. "And from there, eventually, you'll set out on your own. And you'll be just fine, Sirius. You will be. You'll be much better off than you would have if you'd stayed."

"How do you know?" Sirius croaked, amazed, in that moment, at her assurance.

Mrs. Potter smiled at him, bittersweet and achingly understanding. "From experience, darling," she said simply. "Us ex-pats always do just fine. After all, don't forget, I too was once a Black."

AN: This is by far and away, the hardest chapter to write so far of this fic for me. I cried *a lot* writing it.

To be honest, I went back and forth between various approaches. In the end, I hope you guys feel that I did it justice. I made Sirius very vulnerable in this chapter, rather than going the totally defiant and graphically violent route. It felt more realistic to me in the end. Maybe it doesn't seem as 'badass', but Sirius is a 16 year old boy, and it is always difficult to cut yourself off from your family, even if it's completely necessary. To me I wrote it not as him mourning the loss of his parents so much, but as fully confronting their lack of love for him. And burying his feelings about Regulus/actual love for him, because it's too complicated and painful for him to deal with and confront.

I won't word vomit all of my thought process, but I hope you guys like where this chapter landed. Let me know.