A/N: Written for the Quidditch League, Round 3, Chaser 2, as a reserve for Puddlemere United.

Prompt: Furby. After doing some research (via Wikipedia and my little cousin XD), I discovered that the central idea of a Furby is learning a new language (English). I also found some horror stories about some Furbies learning . . . the wrong sort of things. It is these stories that inspired this piece.

(Word count a la Google Docs: 1314 :))

This is my first-ever Harry Potter fanfiction, and I hope you enjoy it! Thank you so much for reading this, whoever you are!

Love, Milan

Magic is a language, a dialect and an art, and no one knows this better than Sirius Black. He's grown up surrounded by it: by his mother draped in shrouds of it, by the dark sort of power that radiates from his father, by his relatives brandishing wands like swords.

Watching, waiting.

"It's a gift," his mother tells him with a proud, haughty smile. "A gift some" — she pauses to curl her dark crimson lips in distaste — "are not so lucky to have. And that some" — another pause, this seemingly for the dramatics of it — "do not deserve to have. For only a special few can learn magic, but there are some who have stolen this sacred thing."

Sirius doesn't understand.

For it didn't seem fair for some to have this wondrous gift running with the blood through their veins, and some to not. And that aside, Sirius cannot comprehend how people could have stolen it.

But his mother is a daunting woman. The magic flows fluidly from her lips and from her wand, and in a single incantation she could have Sirius dead, if she so chose to.

That sort of power both intrigues him and terrifies him.

He wants to learn this language, he truly does.

But he's not sure that those who he's looked toward for years truly know how to use it right.

When his letter comes, it's decidedly unceremonious. It's a simple nod from his mother, an absent pat on the back from his father, and merely a look from Regulus.

But Sirius holds the envelope as though it's made of glass.

At least, until the burning curiosity gets the better of him and he rips it to shreds, much to his mother's disdain.

He's always pined for her approval, for she is so fluent in the language he hopes to learn, and while this is not the first time he's questioned it, it is the first time he's realized that no matter what, he's never going to be what she expects.

And it's far, far from the last.

Dragon heartstring.

Sirius thinks it fits him.

He remembers Bellatrix brandishing her own wand like a bejeweled sword, despite their aunt's scolding that she shan't use it outside of school.

He remembers the boy who'd spoken to Ollivander just before him, remembers the wonder in his eyes.

Like speaking your first word, Sirius had thought, as the boy uttered something unintelligible, nearly sending the shelves toppling had Ollivander not steadied them with a spell of his own.

"Dragon heartstring," Ollivander tells him now, eyes twinkling. "A very strong core. But it also suggests rebellion. Freedom. Exhilaration."

At each of those words, Sirius's mother recoils, lips pursing and brows creasing into a deep frown as Sirius's own expression morphs into a smile.

Rebellion. Freedom. Exhilaration.

He can feel it at the tip of his tongue, can practically taste it.

Someday he'll be like his mother, like Regulus; it's what he's always been told.

Someday he'll be as fluent as his father; he'll take that gift and turn it into something brilliant.

Someday.

Slytherin is a word he's heard over and over and over. It's where everyone in his family has gone, where Sirius would go, should go.

He's not sure he wants to, though. After a vivacious conversation on the train with a decidedly mischievous boy — James Potter, he introduces himself — Gryffindor house seems like a much more feasible (and favorable) option. Though he's sure to keep that thought very close to his heart and very quiet — despite being miles away from his parents, he doesn't want to take any chances.

Rebellion. Freedom. Exhilaration.

Dangerous words, ones that he's not sure will help him learn this decidedly dangerous language.

Or perhaps they would, and what his family had been teaching him was all wrong.

Now that is a dangerous thought indeed.

Sirius is startled by how close it feels to the truth.

"Better be . . . Gryffindor!"

Sirius's smile is unabashed.

He does not look at his family members, sitting stone cold at the table where he should have been.

The Howler from his mother is no new thing.

It's his 64th one, a number he declares proudly. It's only his fifth year, after all, and he's already procured a collection of the menacing red envelopes.

He's advancing quickly in many ways, it seems, for no one can deny that Sirius has learned this dialect of magic brilliantly. Not even his mother, no matter how many times she tells him that he's a disappointment, that he's disgrace.

Sirius's mother is wrong about a lot of things, he's realized in these five years.

Five years of becoming fast friends with the likes of James Potter, of wreaking havoc upon the school and laughing all the way.

Of learning the intricacies of what he used to envy his parents and cousins for, of using this gift shamelessly, of taking something once so enlightened and sophisticated and fulfilling Ollivander's prophecy from all those years ago.

Rebellion. Freedom. Exhilaration.

Of doing that dragon heartstring justice.

But, while Sirius mocks his family for their pretentious sort of pride, he's shortsighted when it comes to his own confidence.

For magic might be a language, but it's also intoxicating.

The more you speak it, the more you want to know.

Sirius is blindsided by this.

Why should it even cross his mind, though, when this year he's learned how to transform himself from young man to dog with merely a thought? A feat, he's been told, even some of the greatest wizards could not achieve without years upon years of training and preparation.

Why should he question it, then, when it seems this was a language he was born to speak?

He loses James Potter many, many years later.

It's like a shock of cold water.

A realization that magic is not all vibrancy and allure.

A realization of how little Sirius truly knows.

That perhaps he should have listened to his mother.

Perhaps he had been wrong.

It's a disheartening thought, one that chips away at the pride and jubiliance he's spent years crafting.

When the dementors take him away, it seems only fitting.

Thirteen years.

Thirteen years of regret and pain, and the desolate darkness that serves as a constant reminder that he is not as fluent as he hopes to be.

That he has this gift, but it it nothing compared to the power others can wield.

James Potter, dead at two simple words.

Sirius's family hardly batting an eye, for it had been their own master who'd perpetrated it.

All of Sirius's mockery seems so childish, so futile now. Questioning his family's sense of right and wrong, attempting to take magic and fashion those words into his own, and look where it had gotten him: At the mercy of the dementors for thirteen years for a crime he did not commit.

Revenge is a word he's heard before, but never has Sirius thought about truly learning it.

But after thirteen years of this, it seems the only option.

Sirius does not get his revenge.

Peter Pettigrew crawls away like the rat he is, despite Sirius's knowledge of magic and the words he's spent so many years learning.

He wonders, for the umpteenth time, who really is wrong. Because in the end, they had all fallen. The light and the dark, his friends and his family, the good and the bad alike.

And so Sirius was not surprised when he finally fell.

When a few simple words and that flash of red light stole the very life from him, sending him tumbling into darkness.

A language, an art, something draped over his mother's shoulders so beautifully all those years ago, ending in such carnage and destruction.

Powerful, intricate, dark, dangerous —

And no one knows that better than Sirius Black.