Chapter Text
Walburga doesn’t remember when she fell into this habit, though she remembers the night after Sirius left. She had screamed till her throat was raw, crying out into the now abandoned room, but the room still screamed Sirius all over it. He didn't need to be physically there to be so persistently present in the room with her. She admired the way that he had left his presence in that room so vibrant. She doesn’t remember when she stopped dusting, she just knows that she must have because the dust was thickly coating every surface. The colours had since dulled by the thick grey coating of dust. This house always had a way of making the place muddy, and now that curse was intruding into his room.
She sat silently on the chair by his bed, the sheets she’d washed just last week and the week before and the week before that, because maybe her baby would come home, maybe he’ll ask her for a place to stay and a warm bed to sleep in. But he never comes, the door remains silent, and the only person who enters and exits now is her or Orion. She watched the dust pile instead of dusting it away, let the floor become dirty, neglecting the sweeping, watched the curtains pale and yellow, sun stripping them of colour, her eyes became more clouded and vision blurred more as her eyelashes batted away the dust more than they surveyed the room. Despite Orion's attempts to take down the flags, Sirius’ Gryffindor flags and Quidditch banners remained on the wall. She suspects Sirius must've spelled them there, forever keeping his mark on the house.
Regulus offered her food when she didn’t come down for dinner, and offered her a plate from the doorway, which he never stepped past. It was now time for Regulus to offer her a plate of food or a glass of water. The time when the roles were reversed felt so long ago, she doesn’t know if time is real or if grief had an expiry date; maybe her motherhood had expired long ago. She wants Regulus to escape the house, but the thing about this house is that it claims its victims, preying on those who are considered weak and leeching on their happiness. Apart from the screaming portraits, or the thick smoke from the never-ending chain smoking, it's the fact that generations of witches and wizards have died here by rotting away. Their marriages were forced upon them at too young an age, scraped by till death swept them off and surrendered them.
She knows that Regulus wouldn’t leave even if the opportunity had been presented to him; no, he’s too wrapped up in beliefs that she can't say she didn’t influence. A child watches your every move, studies and learns by your actions. He noticed the way she held herself together when the dark lord ordered her around, or when Orion yelled and she screamed back, or when she stopped checking on him. Too caught up in grief's grip that his shine couldn’t break through the clouding fog she’d enveloped herself in. She had failed to raise her five children, and none of them got the mother they needed. She could see that now it was too late.
Regulus is clever; she never thought less. It was his cleverness that got him killed. The letter that proved that was stuffed in his drawer, she’d begun going through. One of the hundreds for Sirius was addressed to her.
And oh, she thought, he would’ve been a beautiful poet.