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Sirius,
When we were kids, I sometimes wasn’t able to spot the difference between my body and yours, the way we were so chained to our bloodline. And every day I used to wonder, is this… It? Are we going to die like this?
But you made me believe different. You were always one to fight back. Ever since I can remember.
At nine, you talked back for the first time. We were reading a muggle magazine, one that aunt Andromeda bought us-- mid-July, our cheeks smothered against the patterned sofa cushions, overripe mangoes crying on our tongues, the sap stinging my bitten down finger nails. You told father he was wrong about muggle magicians, and that they were actually bloody good for people without real magic. I remember the thin red lines that pervaded your legs after father talked to you in private.
It was worth it, you said, showing all your teeth. I was right, and he secretly knows it.
You sat the entire day with your chest puffed and your chin pointing upwards. The aftertaste of revolution rubbing against your tongue made it all worthwhile.
At eleven, you got sorted into Gryffindor. I think that’s when it got worse. That’s when mother cut your hair short, so your curls pirouetted around your ears. That’s when mom and dad turned into mother and father, and the heir of the Black family turned into a disgrace. That’s when I started feeling foreign inside my own flesh. That’s when you stopped letting me into your room (because you were crying in there, hands clamped over ears. Father held you: not like his son, but like a fish caught in his net. I remember how he talked to you.
Oh, stop crying, you imbecile. Shut up. Shut up and listen to me.).
That’s when you stayed with the Potters during Christmas break, and the break after that, and the break after that. But I never let go of the remaining chords of our childhood chorus.
At fifteen, you started wearing paperclips through your ears and flared bellybuttons adorned with faux silver chains and belts. I barely saw you at home. You did help me cut my hair over the summer, though. I remember how you let me trace the guitar string scars on your fingertips to calm me down while you chopped my hair to my chin. Mother still called me her baby girl, and you told me to ignore it. She wouldn’t understand, anyway. You didn’t have a girlfriend, even though you were beautiful, and you told me it was because girls found you scary. But I had seen the way you looked at your best friend. Your unholy sins ignited our last name, constantly stoked with new rumors, but you didn’t quit stubbing your cigarettes on top of the dinner table, even if it meant new puncture wounds, even if it meant the noose around your neck would tighten.
At sixteen, mother used the cruciatus curse on you for the first time in my presence. Your head snapped backwards, your mouth foaming at the lips, and you let out a shriek so ear-splitting I considered killing mother right then and there. I knew, in that moment, that she would go as far as she could go to make you feel powerless. And I knew, also, that I couldn’t watch you rot with the antidote tucked in my pocket.
When you were sixteen, I was brave for the first time. I pointed my wand at mother— the woman that carried me, shaped me, neglected me—and made her suffer, the same way you did. I silently wished, and still do, that she suffered even more than you did. I started screaming all the things I’ve always wanted to say at her. I told her that she didn’t build this house, only burned it down. I told her I’ve always thought there might’ve been some twisted metaphor hidden in her ‘tough love’, but that I know now that it was just another empty promise found in the hands of a liar. I told her that every day I wondered whether she even heard us, whether she even saw the destruction made by her hands, whether she thought any of this was just. I told her she was pathetic, a fraud of a mother, and deserved nothing but to suffer.
I don’t think she processed anything I was saying, watching her squirm and spin on the ground like that.
At sixteen, you ran away, and took me with. I had grown into something more boyish by then; my hair was nearly shaved to the scalp and my brows had grown thicker and unruly. We sat down at the edge of the earth, where the waves sloshed against our heels. You spoke. Unsure. You said you had noticed how the silver bracelet around my wrist fit looser than it did last month. You asked why my knuckles were bandaged. I told you everything. You listened. You always listened.
Neither of us knew how to read the stars, so we decided to make a map of our own with them. That night, you searched for unknown constellations so I could name them whatever I wished to name them. You told me that if we ever lost one another, we’d just have to look up to the stars and we’d find each other. Just like that.
Sirius Black—my spine, my yesterday, my lionheart.
You changed my life. You changed everything, and you will continue to. That is what I believe. That this is your destiny: to carry the burden of revolution.
Promise you won't forget me, even if the night sky turns unfamiliar?
R.A.B