Chapter Text
Victory—she was triumph, she was glory, she was life. She was Colette. She was a Black.
Her life had been peaceful in the way pureblood lives often were: steeped in tradition, cushioned by custom, carried along by a monotony so familiar it never needed to be questioned. She lived it with the quiet vigor of someone who knew consequences existed, somewhere, distantly—but had never been taught what they looked like when they arrived. Not out of fear nor obedience, but because it was all she had ever known and all she had ever bothered not to challenge.
She would like to blame her sudden awareness on a carelessly slipped comment about her father’s apparently rebellious, achingly fulfilling youth. But truthfully, it was not a revelation—it was an interruption, and not the only one. A boy with hair that caught the sun like honey and a smile capable of dissolving resolve, of unsettling something deep and unguarded within her. A boy who was utterly forbidden. A half-blood.
Truly, she knew not what this journey would cost her, knew not what her curiosity would cost her, but nothing could stop the flame that was her unwavering curiosity.
It started from frustration—her frustration for the once just-there customs that felt like barbed wire against her bleeding freedom, crimson with all the chances she’s ever missed, for the life she has to unwillingly float through with the elegance of someone who is perfectly fine with it.
She was going to be different: she could feel it in her bones and in the wings that flapped aimlessly as her being was being weighed down by the expectations of all those around and before her. She wanted out.
There wasn’t a singular moment that helped her find her purpose. It wasn’t a firework going off in her head; no, it was a compilation of her life: of the people so achingly forbidden in a way they were so familiar, and it was in the cage she was born into, unable to escape and dreaming of a glory she could only admire and yearn for in her towers of conservative tradition that stood on pillars of sacrificial honor.
It wasn’t a bang—no, it was something deep inside her being dug out with every injustice that nested and curled itself into her soul like an insistent, regretful parasite. It was familiar and damning. Then she was absolutely certain she wanted out, and all she needed was her stubbornness, and well, you, my trusted audience, should not know this, but her father gave her the opportunity he had once had and made her swear to not waste it—to live to the fullest and to never look back.
But fate was not that easy. Fate is never that easy.
He was a star, the brightest one that glittered in the night sky. He was the sovereign heir of the House Black. He was Sirius. He was a Black.
He was an illusion. He was perfection. He was poison.
His life was chaos in the way all purebloods tried to ignore: conservative traditions centuries of ancestors had marched through and continued without a question, thorned with outdated customs that constantly pricked his conscience with the unfairness of it all, and yet life floated along with a uniformity so familiar (yet so foreign to him) and lackluster that no one cared, or perhaps dared, to question it or even incite any sort of change.
It’s not that no one had tried—that no one had suffered, had felt pain, for even the chance of a difference—the system had been drilled into their minds, and the bolts rested under cushions of wealth and luxury and consequences—consequences that had gone further than the wounds littered on porcelain skin; it settled deeper and coiled into something ugly. And made them all ugly.
Sirius’ need to be different from the mass and his rebellion wasn’t sudden; no, it was always burning deep in his bones, and the hope was sparking just as deep in his heart. He needed only so little to light the spark that had once spiraled into a flame.
Truly, he committed such atrocities with the complete knowledge of the repercussions, and yet, he pranced around as though they didn’t exist for him, as though hell was a fantasy and threats were bluffs.
He had had the world, but his rage, his Blackness, swallowed that flame and burned anything good in his life to dull ashes that stood scalding in his memories—once vibrant springtime illuminations where his laughter had tasted like triumph and the hopeful naivety that life would stay this way.
If you must know, it didn’t.
No, life crumbled, and he was forced to be his worst nightmare: someone completely unextraordinary, someone who let the others pull their strings—a puppet. A thoughtless puppet.
He took the opportunity of a lifetime and squandered it, and now he was forced to confront his old life and make peace with it whilst being completely unextraordinary.
He says he was forced, but he treats the opportunity as though it were an old friend since, frankly, he didn’t have any more. Gone went his fiery spirit; he was broken, and that was the only justification he allowed himself to let the mundane of his new existence swallow up any ashes and for them to swirl in the air—never fully gone, but it was as though they were never really there.