Any collector can see the differences in their pieces while to others, they may appear like multitudes of the same thing. To make things simple, someone who does not collect chocolate frog cards sees only that every card his a different picture, name, and description but are in essence exactly identical to each other, just a bit of history on a card. Someone who does collect the cards will see more; they will see the rarity of the card, the greatness of the historical figure, they might remember how they acquired a particularly good card. They will see the sets of cards they want to collect, all the founders, for instance or all the Ministers of Magic in a set time period. So it comes at no surprise that I wanted to collect people of rarity, of greatness, and of a certain set. I wanted to collect the Blacks.

The first one I saw in that generation was Bellatrix, and that was the instant I knew one of the sets I would be after. I was Deputy Headmaster at that time and I greeted the first years at the door. They were all in various states of fear, all a bit pale, her included. But still, she carried herself with a type of self-confidence I'd rarely seen anyone use, much less a witch of only eleven. It was an automatic sort of thing, pounded into her I suppose. And she seemed unhappy, unsatisfied. She was amazed, there was no doubt about that. I had never seen a new student who wasn't amazed by the vastness of Hogwarts when they first arrived. But there was something she wanted that she did not have. I found out later, that look meant she was hungry. Bellatrix's most pressing desires, were physical. She was led to the kitchens, to flying games where she moved quickly and got a lurch in her stomach, to boys. Amazement didn't make her happy. Sex, food, and exercise did.

She was one of the first to have the hat placed on her head, obviously she would with the last name Black. It didn't take long before she was sorted into Slytherin but at the same time, it took longer than I would have guessed. I hadn't imagined that the hat would find any qualities strong enough to put her anywhere else. It took me a long while to guess where else she could have gone but after a time I saw it. There became no doubt in my mind that she was brave and she was loyal to her causes. I've rarely wanted to lose part of a set but if I was given the option, perhaps I would choose to have her put in Gryffindor instead of my house. Given the right growing conditions, there is nothing more deadly than a Slytherin with Gryffindor courage and recklessness. The reappearance of Tom Riddle was exactly the right growing conditions for a troublesome beauty of a girl to become a gorgeous woman of terror. Tom Riddle figured out exactly how to motivate her towards him. She was a weapon of impressive power but being controlled by the desires of her body, the bodies of others became her prime targets. Bellatrix Black loved causing physical pain but she rarely attacked the heart or the mind. Perhaps she even underestimated them.

Two years after the arrival of Bellatrix, another Black girl came to Hogwarts. Had I not sent her Hogwarts letter myself and had her hair not been brown, I at first would have thought Bellatrix was parading around under two names. I found out quickly that I was wrong. Andromeda sat under the hat for a little bit of time longer than her sister but still slipped off to Slytherin with a proud kind of grace. Besides me, I heard another teacher groan. We'd had enough trouble from Bellatrix the past two years; she fought hard to get what she wanted and she was not afraid of using every hex and curse she knew to make her point. Even I was slightly dreading her clone. But Andromeda was anything but Bellatrix's clone in personality. If anything, she seemed to calm her older sister in a way no one had managed over the years before. She was by far the less reckless of the two. But she was a Slytherin and a Black. She would fight for what she wanted. And what she wanted was mental stimulation, wanted it as much as Bellatrix wanted physical stimulation. She would have done well in Ravenclaw but I was always proud to call her mine.

I've heard people say that Andromeda left them later because she fell in love. Well that's codswallop if you ask me. As her sister fell for Voldemort because of a sexual desire, her mind and heart following her body, Andromeda fell for Ted Tonks because he challenged her and made her think about values she had always just accepted. On top of that, being with him made her feel she could truly do something to further to keep learning after she left Hogwarts. Her heart and body followed after with little hesitation. Through school, Andromeda was the studious one, the one who would become very attentive when I was correcting someone else's potion, desperate to pick up tips. She was the one who wanted to become a healer, a job with constant new curses to break, antidotes to find, and diseases to conquer. I loved having her in my collection though we quickly lost touch when she left school, as she was trying to stay out of the public eye and make it harder for her family to find her.

Narcissa was the third sister, and a true baby of the family. She had the usual Black looks to an extent but some of the darkness had been replaced by blonde hair and blue eyes. And to complete the picture, she had the same self-confident air that her sisters had before her. She strolled up to the stool and sat with the hat on her head for less time than either of her sisters before strolling off to the Slytherin table. Still, the decision was not as quick as her future husband's. The hat had time to bring up another possibility. Like Andromeda, it was related to her inner drive, her powerful desire. But Narcissa's desires did not come from the mind but from the heart. She was directed by her love, making her loyal and dutiful, at least until her love began to split in half, split between her sisters. She watched in disgust and distress as a line was driven hard between her family members. And when Andromeda finally ran, Narcissa gave up on both of them. She tried to protect her heart, allowing most people to think she had given it to Lucius Malfoy. She became colder, shrewder, more cautious with her heart. The only one she ever seemed to love as much as she had once loved her sisters, was the little boy she gave birth to, the one she fought hard to keep from the influences that had taken away Bellatrix and Andromeda years before. In the end, she never fully succeeded.

Not that I regret having Narcissa as part of my collection. For years, Narcissa was my most influential member of the Black family. She was married to Lucius Malfoy who had strings everywhere in the ministry. With a connection to both of them, where could I lose ground?

Now, to go back to the example of chocolate frog cards, many collectors will tell you about subsets. Sure they may have cards from Merlin's time period: Merlin, Arthur, the Lady of the Lake, and Lancelot among others. But the collectors will often divide these into subsections like the "good guys" and the "bad guys" or the girls and the guys or something of that manner. With the Blacks, there were many ways to name the two subdivisions like the older and the younger, the children of Orion and the children of Cygnus, or simply the girls and the boys.

When Sirius arrived, there was already a recent scandal in the Black family. His cousin, Andromeda had recently been disowned because of her marriage to a muggle-born and was rumored to be pregnant with the muggle-born's child at the time that Sirius sat under the sorting hat. His sorting caused more trouble at home. He became the one I lost from my collection, my one short of a perfect set. Sirius became a Gryffindor. Again, the hat sat on his head for a while, longer even than it had with Andromeda. Perhaps that should have been my first sign that he would be different because before I had only seen the same haughty air that his cousins had held before him. Still it came as a shock to me, and to most of the hall, when he went down to the Gryffindor table.

Most often Sirius was compared to Bellatrix, both of them possessing the same recklessness, courage, and temper, or Andromeda because they both left the family. I wondered at times though if he hadn't started out more like Narcissa only when the time came that his heart was split by conflict, he had decided to start over, to give it to his friends. Because when he began to fight in the war, he didn't fall into it with his body or his head first. He fell in with his heart, fierce and often illogical, but powerfully attached. His friends, especially James Potter, became his new family. His old one was left in the dust and he quickly began to do everything he could to disturb them. He was in trouble every other week; he made friends with people he shouldn't have been speaking to; he was rude to Narcissa and his "approved friends". Sirius Black was trouble at Hogwarts but no where near the trouble he was in at home.

Regulus was the one who took the longest under the hat. I could see his mind working as he sat up on the stool, his eyes shut tight against the two stares directed most desperately at him. There was a war going for Regulus; which ever side got Regulus would win the war of the generation. After all, Andromeda was considered a traitor and Sirius, even at twelve, was fast on his way to following in her footsteps. It was painful to watch the two of them, Narcissa in her seventh year, pleading for someone in her family to stay with her and not run away and Sirius, in his second, sitting with his group of friends, vying for someone to be on his side. And Regulus was torn. It was a long time before the hat settled him in Slytherin and a look of disappointment covered Sirius's face while a matching one of relief came over his cousin.

At any other time, Regulus Black would have been the jewel in my collection. He was a fairly good seeker on the Quidditch team, he got good marks, and he got along fairly well with his classmates. Regulus was like Narcissa, always in the midst of a group of friends. I treasured him and brought him close, hoping the war would be over by the time he left the school. But by the time he got to Hogwarts, he was lacking in some of the confidence his brother and cousins had before him. Change made him insecure. He had grown up adoring his oldest two cousins, and by then one of them was presumably buried deeply in the Dark Arts and the other was about as long gone as he could perceive in his sheltered childhood, far from the muggle world. The war outside Hogwarts was raging, things were changing all the time, and both sides of his family were trying to show him different opinions of the war. He put on a good show but it came to be known among the teachers that if he came to class with a black eye, he had been fighting with Sirius. His grades would get better for a time because he would throw himself into his studies, burying his mind in books to keep it from dwelling on anything else. He found excuses to stay at Hogwarts over the holidays, despite the fact that he got glares from his older brother over Christmas dinner. I wished hard for the war to be over, because without the rapid changes that came with war he would be very successful. Instead the war continued and he died at the age of eighteen, caught up in war when he was never made to be a fighter.

By the end, looking back, I never got a huge pay off on that generation of the Blacks. Bellatrix became a criminal, never looking back, never thinking of me again as long as she had her "Dark Lord." Andromeda turned her back on everything in her past in order to protect her new family, and even after the war, she never rose to the administration at St. Mungo's; she liked discovering new things by working with patients more than running the jobs of other healers. Narcissa devoted herself to her husband and son, the Malfoys, and I distanced myself from them at risk of being associated. Sirius became Dumbledore's boy the moment he stepped out of Hogwarts, went to being a criminal like his oldest cousin in Azkaban, and then died Dumbledore's boy again; I never had a chance. And Regulus, had died at the age of eighteen, barely out of school; my jewel barely had a chance to shine.