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Sirius opens the door to James's home and feels instant relief stepping into the familiar hallway. Everything is quiet and dark and abnormally orderly - usually the narrow room is full of Harry's clothes and toys. Sirius turns on the light and drops his rucksack on the floor, too tired to carry it any longer. His plan for the night is to take shower, down a couple sleeping pills and crash out in James's and Lily's bed.
Even though his friends are away, their lingering presence in the house is enough to calm Sirius down. It is comforting to have a place where he can go when the walls of his own apartment start to tilt menacingly over him. Nothing bad can happen to him in this perfectly ordinary family house. Sirius would never do anything that upsets its happiness.
He does have actual reasons to be there, something unrelated to his tendency to seek shelter. James is turning thirty and Sirius and Lily have been plotting for months to throw a surprise party for him. James thinks that the trip to Highlands is his celebration, but in reality it is simply a ruse to give Sirius enough time to set everything up. He has a long morning ahead of him of picking up foods and drinks and presents and decorations and he is looking forward to all of that, hoping that it will mellow out the doom that has been following him around for days.
Sirius clings to the hope of it and walks into the kitchen. He hasn't been able to eat anything since morning, operating purely on caffeine and natural born stubbornness. He hopes that there is something easy in the fridge, plain yoghourt or bowl of fruit or anything to stop the nausea from building.
Instead he finds a cake box in the middle row. Sirius freezes on the spot. For a moment he just stands there, begging himself to back out and walk away. In the end the curiosity wins. He slides the box out and carefully places it on the kitchen table to take a peek inside: a dozen of cupcakes with bright blue frosting.
The room starts spinning. Sirius tries to run through his usual mantras of free will and ability to choose, but it is all for the show; his fate got sealed the moment he saw that damned box. Fighting is useless, there is only one way the evening can end. He is mad at himself for looking. He is mad at Lily for leaving the pastries unattended when she knows better.
I shouldn't be doing this, Sirius thinks as he sinks his teeth into the cupcake. It is sweet and soft and promises him that everything will be alright if he just keeps eating.
I should not be doing this.
And then he thinks nothing at all.
*
In the earliest memories of his childhood Sirius is always hungry.
A painful gnawing in the pit of his stomach makes him unwell. The cramping, the tiredness, the vertigo when he stands up. Their townhouse is built upwards and Sirius avoids going up to his room if he doesn't have to. Most of the time he stays downstairs with mother.
"I want to eat", he demands. He is six years old and jealous of Regulus who gets to have a full breakfast instead of plain gruel. Mother strokes the middle of his back and says:
"I know, my love, but you can't. Your body won't handle it well. It will make you sick."
That is what she keeps telling him over and over again. Sirius isn't allowed to play alone in the garden, stay overnight at his cousin's house or make friends with the children who live on the same street. His mother is always there, watching like a hawk. Her tall figure looms over every moment of Sirius's childhood.
One night she makes a mistake and leaves him unattended. Sirius slips immediately into the kitchen. He is starving and just wants a piece of bread, or perhaps some of the stew everyone else had for the dinner. He finds the pot in the fridge and gets a spoon, not bothering even to pull the dish out. Once he gets the first pieces of meat and potatoes in his mouth, he finds it impossible to stop.
Sirius is in awe. It is so much better than anything he has ever eaten. Vaguely he understands that he is doing something forbidden, and that he has to be act quick before anyone notices. The sense of urgency makes him scoop the food in such a hurry that he loses the sense of taste and his surroundings until someone grasps him from the shoulders.
"What on earth are you doing!"
Mother wrenches him away from the fridge and Sirius drops the spoon on the floor. Her nails sink painfully into his arm and there is a storm in her eyes that Sirius has never seen before. Mother has always been gentle with him, he has always gotten away with things Regulus would get yelled at.
"What have you done?" she demands and shakes Sirius. He tries to curl into something small, but it is impossible to slip away from her.
"I was hungry", he mutters, barely louder than a whisper. A heaviness is setting into his body. The rage is twisting mother's features into something unrecognisable, and Sirius is afraid that she might hit him.
"I am sorry", he wails. It does seems to help: mother doesn't yell anymore, but doesn't let him go either. She drags Sirius out of the kitchen and into the bathroom, where she thrusts him on the floor.
"Wait here", she commands. Sirius doesn't dare to disobey her, and presses himself into a corner, his heart pounding in his ears as he waits for mother to come back. When she does, there are two pills and a glass of water in her hands.
"This might help a little, but probably not that much… you need to stay here until it all comes out."
Sirius doesn't understand what she is saying. He takes the medication and once he has done that, mother goes back to the door."I hope that this will teach you a lesson", she says before locking it behind herself, leaving Sirius alone in the bathroom. He crosses his legs and sits on the cold stone, unsure of what he should be doing.
Gradually his body is overtaken by nausea. Sirius leans over the toilet bowl and throws up, pieces of food still intact. He shakes and coughs and tries to get up from the floor, but the effort makes his vision blur and the room around him tilt violently.
He has felt pain before but not like this. It is sharp and undulating, a fire ravaging through his insides. Sirius curls up and cries out, his hair dangling heavy from the sweat. Mother has left him to die on the bathroom floor, and more than anything Sirius wants her to come back so he that he doesn't have to be alone when it happens.
But mother doesn't come back, not for what must be hours. Sirius keeps dragging himself back to the toilet to throw up again and again, even after there is nothing left to purge. He is barely conscious when the lock finally turns, and his mother's legs walk into his field of vision. She leans down to sweep the sweaty hair out of his face.
"This is what happens when you don't listen to me, Sirius. Do you understand?"
"Yes", Sirius whispers, his throat is dry as sandpaper.
When the housekeeper cooks the same stew a couple weeks later, the reek of it around the house is enough to make him ill.
*
Sirius and Regulus get their primary education at home with private tutors. Once Sirius is done with his SATs, his father starts to demand that he starts in a public secondary school. Mother fights tooth and nail against the idea, saying that Sirius's condition makes him too frail. His father stands his ground, one of the only times he ever rises against his wife so intently.
"He needs to go to the school, have friends of his own age. Have a chance to be a normal kid."
"But Sirius is not a normal kid", mother argues. "He does well enough like this. He is getting top grades in everything."
"My sons will not grow up to be a socially isolated recluses!"
In the end Sirius switches to the public education at eleven. At the first day mother comes to the school to personally make sure that the teachers know that he can under no circumstances eat anything outside of his own lunch box. Sirius finds her behaviour embarrassing: he doesn't want to stand out any more than he already does being the new kid. Most of his peers have gone to the primary together and they stare at Sirius like a zoo animal.
Later that day he sits alone in the yard, when a group of three boys approaches him. Sirius eyes them suspiciously, mentally preparing to tell them to fuck off if they intent to give him any trouble. He remembers his mother's warnings about other children being often cruel.
"I'm James", the boy with a dark curly hair and glasses introduces himself first. Sirius remembers him from the class earlier, where the teacher kept asking him to stop talking with the boy next to him.
"We are going to the alleyway to check out the trash. Peter saw a rat there this morning. Want to come with us?"
Sirius quite likes rats, so he agrees.
James and Peter are both loud and rowdy, and Sirius hits it right off with them. He gets especially well along with James, who is smart in similar way like Sirius is, but doesn't stress too much about his grades. Soon they sit next to each other in every class, and start immediately getting in trouble for chatting instead of following the lesson.
Remus is quieter than the others. He doesn't want to run around the yard during the breaks and sometimes he walks with a limp. Sirius thinks that they both recognise something familiar with each other and he gets a confirmation when one day Remus draws up the leg of his trousers to show him a brace around his knee.
"It is because I can't keep them straight otherwise", he explains. "My joints are messed up."
Sirius is equally elated and sorry for his friend. He leans forward and shares his own secret out of solidarity.
"I can't eat properly. My stomach is paralysed."
Remus simply nods and does not ask any more questions. It is a relief because the details are too painful and messy for a school yard.
When Sirius goes home that day, he is impatient to tell his mum what happened.
"There is a boy in my class who is also sick", he says while mother administers the medications for him. "He has to wear braces in his legs because of it."
"Oh he does?" mother asks, not raising her gaze away from the foiled packages.
"Yeah. He is super nice."
Mother doesn't react to the news at all, like she hasn't even heard him talking. She hands him the pill cup and Sirius frowns.
"This is more than usual."
"The doctor prescribed you new medications because your condition has deteriorated since starting the school. It is a lot to handle for your body. Now, drink them up."
Sirius wants to say that he hasn't noticed feeling any worse, but the tone of mother's voice doesn't leave any room for arguments. He swallows the pills dutifully, and is rewarded with a smile and a kiss on the forehead.
"Your father doesn't always understand how serious this thing is", mother says quietly. "But I will never let you go through this alone, Sirius. Never."
It turns out that his mother was right. Throughout the winter Sirius is constantly absent from school because he is too unwell to get up and dress himself. The amounts of food he can eat without throwing up get ever smaller, and his frustration grows.
Mother takes him to the hospital, to the chiropractic, to different specialists. Sitting around in the waiting rooms doesn't seem to bother her at all - she dresses up for it and always keeps calm even when the hours drag on and nobody comes to them. Sirius hates it, but is mostly too tired to protest. Sometimes the exhaustion becomes so overwhelming that he lies his head down on mother's lap like a small child.
When they finally make it into the doctor's office, mother's demeanour changes. The concern bleeds through her every word when she starts to list the symptoms Sirius has been experiencing since starting the school: loss of appetite, lethargy, stomach pains and general dullness.
"He needs a jejunostomy", she tells to the doctor. "This has been going on for far too long. I can't keep watching him withering away."
The doctor purses his lips. "That is a pretty invasive procedure. We would still like to try out some other options."
"We have been trying out everything since he was four years old and none of them have helped. I have looked into the mortality rates of this illness if left untreated…"
Instinctively she wraps her arm around Sirius, who clings to his mother. He does not want to die; not when he has just made his first friends. The doctor fiddles with the pen, frowning at Sirius like he is trying to figure something out.
"I will write a referral to the consultation", he says slowly. "They need to run some more tests, but if his condition has really gotten this bad, I do think that there are arguments for tube feeding."
*
Sirius is few months shy of sixteen when he hits a breaking point. The seed of doubt that has been growing inside him for years is now thorn bush tearing him apart; he suspects that the medication he is on is making him worse rather than better.
While people his age around him are taking their first steps towards freedom, his mother grows more stringent. Sirius wants to know the names and purposes of the pills she crushes up into his feeding tube every morning, but she says that he doesn't need to worry about it.
"It is much faster if I just do it for you."
Sirius wonders how he is supposed to do it on his own later, when he is living alone. He is already thinking about universities. Oxford or Cambridge would make a lot of sense, but he is fascinated by the idea of moving somewhere else, maybe out of the country.
He watches how mother cleans the tube with accustomed hands and gets a creeping sense that he is never going to leave his childhood house.
He is terrified to say these things aloud. He fears that people around him will think that he is a liar or a mad man if he does. Sometimes Sirius thinks that he must be: in what universe would a parent do something like that to their own child? But there are more and more days when Sirius wakes up confused, in pain and without memories of past hours.
Mother is always there. Sometimes she looks a little dissapointed that he is still alive.
James has become Sirius's best friend, a better than he could ever have asked for. He loves spending time in the Potter house when ever he has a rare chance to go somewhere else than school or the emergency room. It is there, lounging around in the spacious garden enjoying the first warm spring day, where Sirius finally finds his voice.
"I have to tell you something", Sirius says. "But you have to promise not to tell anyone."
James leans forward, looking him intently in the eyes to let him know that he is listening. Sirius can't bear it. He stares into his hands and spits the words out of his mouth before he has time to second guess it.
"My mum is poisoning me."
For a while he can only hear James's breathing hitch. They both wait quietly for Sirius to say something, to undo the confession, but he can't.
"Are you pulling my leg?" James asks.
Sirius shakes his head frenetically.
"She is giving me too much drugs. They make me feel like shit."
"You have to tell someone about this. We can tell my mum, she will help."
Sirius feels the panic raising. He specifically chose James because he thought he could trust him to keep the secret.
"What? No! I told you that you can't tell anyone about this!"
"I thought you would tell me about like… a crush or something! This is a whole different thing!"
The sincere worry in his voice is even worse than if he didn't believe what Sirius told him. What can they do to the situation? Sirius does not trust any adult to take his word over his mother's. In the back of his head he is worried that somehow he is wrong about this.
He needs to somehow wipe the anxiety from James's face.
"I will be eighteen in couple years and I can move out. Everything will be alright then."
"If you stay alive that long."
James sounds grave and Sirius laughs humorlessly.
*
Sirius can't bring himself to enjoy the summer break because it means staying inside Grimmauld Place from sunrise to sunset. Mother is overtaken by a fervour that makes the atmosphere volatile. Father escapes it by staying at the office until the last possible moment, only coming back home after the dinner time. In the absence of her husband mother is putting all her attention on Sirius.
Regulus turns fifteen in the first week of the holiday. He has started to spend his time in a strange group of people that Sirius vaguely knows from school. Their reputation is not amazing. Sirius tries to his duties as older brother and talk to Regulus about it, but he shuts all the attempts down.
"Who are you to talk about choosing your friends wisely? Didn't your friend Potter get into trouble for bullying Snape?"
Sirius rolls his eyes, and ignores the dig. He and Regulus have been slowly growing apart for a long time, but he has not completely given up.
"I am just saying - if you or your friends had anything to do with the anti-immigrant attacks and the police catches you, that won't look amazing in your university application."
The slight tightening of Regulus's mouth is enough to tell Sirius that he might be onto something. Sadly they both share the same stubborn nature that won't let either of them to back down or admit a defeat.
"At least I am allowed to apply to universities because I don't need mummy to feed me", he hisses. It is a slap to the face - Sirius wishes he was strong enough to attack and wipe the stupid self-satisfied grin Regulus wears.
The truth is that his brother is weirdly jealous. if Sirius really tries, he can sympathise with it - his illnesses have always been the vocal point of their family life and their mother has not been able to pay Regulus same kind of attention. If he could, he would change the roles with Regulus in a heartbeat.
Growing up sick has made Sirius resent being doted over. Every little aspect of his life and body is tightly monitored to the point where he could as well be a prisoner. He never has any kind of privacy and all the doors in house only lock from the outside. He wakes up in the middle of the night with someone's lying with him in the bed. The familiar scent of mother's perfume surrounds her, but something in the situation feels foul.
"What are you doing?" he mutters. Mother gets up from the bed immediately, and even though Sirius can't see her face, he can sense that she is surprised by him waking up.
"You were sounding distressed. I just wanted to make sure that you were alright."
Sirius shifts around, his skin crawling. He doesn't want his mum to sneak into his room and settle down next to him when he is sleeping. Something about it doesn't sit right with him; the quiet sound of alarm bells going off in the back of his mind.
Reluctantly mother raises herself from his side and leaves the room, but her presence lingers all around him, heavy and threatening. Sirius stays awake the whole night, staring and the ceiling and becoming more and more convinced that he has to get out of the house.
When the first possible moment comes, Sirius picks the lock of drawer where mother is keeping his cellphone. There are lots of messages from all of his friends and for the first time since school ended, Sirius smiles. He wants to go over every single one, but mother might be coming upstairs at any minute, so he has to be quick.
Sirius's hands tremble while he writes a quick short message to James: I need your help. Can you come pick me up tonight?
He listens carefully for any sign of approaching footsteps and wonders if he should just slide the phone back to where it was and come back later. But James answers almost immediately, like he has been waiting for Sirius to contact him.
Yeah of course. Is around midnight alright?
Sirius's heart starts beating faster. What he is doing is insane, and he can only thank his luck that James is just as mad as he is. As he starts to type, he hears the noise of high heels approaching from downstairs.
Perfect. Can't talk anymore now. See you then.
He shuts off the phone and throws it back to the drawer. He has just enough time to sneak back to his own room before mother barges inside and announces that he needs to take his solution.
She hooks him up to the drip, and Sirius glances at the clock on his wall. It is eight in the evening. If everything goes according to the plan, he will be out of her reach in only few hours.
*
Couple minutes before midnight Sirius opens the door as quietly as he can and steps out into the warm July night. He sees a car on the other side of the road with rolled down window, and James's head pops out from the back. He is grinning at first, but his face drops when Sirius gets close enough that James can see him properly. He can guess the reason: the evening medication makes his head spin and his legs feel too weak to support the weight of his body.
James jumps out of the car and comes over to steady Sirius.
"What the fuck did she do to you?"
Sirius wishes he could answer to that. He drops the heavy backpack in the leg room of the car and collapses on the backseat. The distance from the front door seems way too short to require so much energy, but maybe he is dragging something heavier than himself out of that house.
James sits in the back with him and Sirius lets his head loll against his shoulder. He can feel James giving his arm an encouraging squeeze and muttering: "You made it, buddy. You will be alright."
Sirius closes his eyes and hopes that his friend is right about that. The last thing he hears before falling asleep is James telling his parents to start driving.
And so Sirius is back in the hospital. At this point everything is far too familiar to him: being hooked up to IVs, people around him prodding him with needles and questions. Only this time he is able to give the answers himself, without mother working as his mouthpiece.
The results that come back are radically different from earlier. One by one the doctors undo the medical diagnoses from his childhood: no gastroparesis, no sickle cell anaemia, not even chronic acid reflux. All things point to him being perfectly healthy, albeit malnourished and suffering from prolonged dependency on tranquillizers that his mother has been dosing him with to keep him docile.
For his whole life Sirius wished nothing so badly than being magically healed, and now that the wish is granted, he is numb. He sits slumped in the chair, and the nurse relaying him the information looks utterly confused.
"This is good news", nurse says gently. "It will take a moment to correct your nutrition levels, but eventually you should be able to stop all these medications and live a normal life."
Sirius seethes. He wants to bite the nurses head off and tell that his normal life has just been taken away from him, and suddenly he is thrust into a reality where everything has been turned upside down. He is seventeen and he has to learn how to eat.
He is sent back to James's house with a stack of papers about proper nutrition and a colourful print out of a food pyramid to put on the kitchen wall. Sirius tears it to the shreds and throws away before anyone has a chance to see it. Potters are doing their best to make the situation bearable to him, but every dinner feels like a humiliation ritual. Compared to James his portions are pathetically small and the smells and textures are unfamiliar, nauseating. Sirius struggles through the meals and hates the sad, sympathetic smiles he gets from James's parents.
When he gets alone in the room that is now his, he gathers a handful of hairs and pulls until it hurts. Everyone around him is acting like this is perfectly simple and normal thing that people do, and Sirius is the weird one for not knowing how. It is impossible to trust that having a forkful of mashed potatoes won't make him violently ill. It is impossible to enjoy the soup when there is a voice in the back of his head asking how can you be sure that nobody has slipped any drugs into this one?
When his hunger starts to come back, it spikes in the secret. It makes him sneak around during the night when others are sleeping and rummage through the cabinets in dark. Next morning, when Mr. Potter asks about the missing loaf of bread, Sirius is six again, standing in the pantry where his mother grabbed him roughly and made him feel small and scared. Nobody yells at him this time, but Sirius still knows that he has done something wrong.
Quickly he learns that the best way to alleviate the anxiety is to purge himself from what is causing it. When he does it for the first time, he feels a comforting sense of familiarity mixed with exhilaration. This is what his body is used to doing when attacked with food, but Sirius has flipped everything on his head by doing it on purpose.
It seems like a perfect solution to everything, and Sirius starts taking regular trips to the bathroom after the mealtimes. One day he finds James standing in the hallway outside of the door, frozen in a spot. Sirius realises right away that he has been eavesdropping. He probably should be ashamed for getting caught, but he hold his head high and challenges James with his expression to scold him, or to snitch about him to his parents.
His friend clears his throat, and says: "You probably shouldn't be doing this."
"Probably not", Sirius answers laconically.
James just shrugs and drops the subject all together.
*
It takes a few years before his case goes to the trial. The first time he sees his mother since sneaking out of the house is from the witness stand, where he spends long hours recounting all his worst childhood memories and answering the questions from a lawyer.
He tries to keep his gaze straight ahead, but it is difficult not to keep glancing at mother, who has grown older beyond her actual age. Father and Regulus are there too, taking the side of the accused. Sirius is not surprised, but it stings nonetheless.
When his mother gets to tell her side of the story, she launches on a tirade of how she had been young and scared with a seemingly sick child and had just been doing her best in the situation. She had been fooled by all those doctors - overwhelmingly male - who had taken advantage of the worries of a first time parent. And now her son has been talked into going against her so that the corrupted medical system wouldn't have to suffer the consequences.
"I love him more than anything in this world", Walburga insists, her voice trembling from the tears held back. "I did everything I thought was right. I would have given my own life for my child."
Her speech is so effective that for a moment Sirius finds himself buying everything she says. What if all of this has been just a great misunderstanding? An initial misdiagnosis maybe, or one of those rare cases where an illness spontaneously improves over time?
In the end the verdict is still clear: the judge announces Walburga Black guilty of medical child abuse, and Sirius gets restitution for the pain and suffering. It is one of the first cases on Britain to go trial over this thing that professionals have only just started to recognise as a form of mistreatment, and everyone congratulates Sirius like he has done something revolutionary. He doesn't want to give any kind of statements to the media, but his attorney speaks shortly after the last day.
"Of course we are very happy about the verdict. It is a big win for every child who is currently suffering under similar circumstances, and my client can finally continue his life."
After the trial Sirius gets two big boxes full of papers that chronicled his childhood: the medical reports, the statements from child protection services, his mother's meticulous notes logging down the times and calories of his meals and wether it stayed inside or not. They answer most of the questions Sirius had after the extent of the situation started to dawn on him, but they don't really explain why any of it happened. Everyone else seems so preoccupied with wether Sirius is telling the truth or not that they barely have time to question the motives behind it. Sirius himself is less interested in the timeline of events and the list of diagnosis - he has already lived through them once - but even years later he finds himself being tortured by the simple question of why would a parent do something like that to their child.
Was his mother crazy? Probably in some sense of the word. Neurotic, moody, sometimes straight out paranoid. At the same time she no doubt knew what she was doing. In his darkest moments Sirius wonders if all of it happened because of him - maybe his mother could recognise something dangerous and rotten lurking inside him, and there was no other solution than to try stifle that with drugs and malnourishment.
There is one thing in the box that Sirius believes to answer at least some of his questions. It is an article from a women's magazine. At the time his mother was a small scale celebrity, a beautiful wife for the heir of an old merchant family. In the pictures she is dressed up in a light blue summer dress that has to be a prop, cradling a baby in her arms. Her smile is polite but it doesn't quite mask the cold, vacant look in her eyes that Sirius is intimately familiar with.
He himself is a bit over half a year old, the text describes him as a curious and active child. The interview discusses about Walburga's first time as a mother, the joys and difficulties of adjusting to her new role. It is all pretty standard, until she mentions offhandedly having feeding problems in the beginning. The journalist clings onto that.
"What kind of problems?" she asks.
The article describes how Walburga absentmindedly strokes Sirius's face while talking about how his son did not want to accept his breast at first. Everyone around her kept telling that it was perfectly normal, something that many new mothers went through but eventually most of the babies grow out of it. She talks about the worry and agony of not being taken seriously; how she knew that there was something deeper going on. Call it a mother's instinct.
"Nobody believed me when I told that my son was refusing to eat."
That becomes a headline on the cover of the magazine.
*
Sirius sticks fingers down his throat and thinks that he should have killed himself when he was still young and fragile.
He never really appreciated how easy it would have been back then. Nobody could have been mad at a teenager in a crises. His life would have been cut short before it really begun. Most people say those words with a profound sadness, but Sirius finds it enviable. How amazing it would be to be dead and not able to make a single mistake.
Now it is too late. If he really took his life now, he would be selfishly hurting the people who count on him; Lily and James couldn't go out on dates because there wouldn't be anyone watching Harry, who would Remus call to on the days when he can't get out of bed, who would put together the IKEA furniture for Peter? He doesn't want anyone else doing his job. He doesn't believe that anyone could do it better than him.
The cupcakes come out in a fluid motion, a result of a lifetime of practising. Sirius stares at the mess impassive; no shame or regret, but no feelings of triumph either. Throwing up has lost its novelty years ago and become just one of the things he sometimes does to de-stress, like smoking or downing few too many shots of liquor. Not the best way to deal with his emotions, but he has let go of the idea that he could ever be truly free from it.
He gets up from the floor and stretches himself. The damage is done, but at least his mind is finally quiet. There will be to replace the cupcakes in the morning.