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Sirius Black took up a new hobby over the Spring that followed that visit from Eileen Prince. He called it “muggle watching”. He never connected this new hobby with the visit of Eileen Prince and her ten year old son - but whether he realized it or not, there had been a nagging question that had seemed to tumble about in his mind ever since they’d been there. He would perch himself in the attic of Number 12 Grimmauld Place with an old pair of Omnioculars obtained at a Quidditch game Orion Black had taken Sirius and his brother to for Sirius’s birthday present. He would spin the dial and watch the muggles as they moved about the park opposite the house, walking dogs and playing games in the shade of the trees as the months grew steadily warmer. Was there a difference between muggles and wizards? Was there really a reason for the hatred that his parents always displayed toward them?

The Blacks had always gone out of their way to demonstrate their hatred, actually. Orion Black was always blatantly ignoring the Statute of Secrecy, refusing to don muggle clothes, even when venturing into London’s public streets. He shot icy glares at anyone who dared to stare at him for his billowing robes. Walburga would mutter strings of insults under her breath as she passed anyone who was not of pure blood descent. She had blasted many a face off the Black family tree as she’d done Eileen Prince, all sorts of offenses could lead to the obliteration of entire branches of the tree. “Filth,” she’d hissed at the tapestry each time. The Blacks, too, had become very interested lately in the political movements of a new leader, a Dark Lord that they spoke of very fondly over the dinner table at night as Kreacher scrambled to serve the family their meals. The Blacks eagerly gave of their fortunes to the Dark Lord’s cause, looking forward to the day when they could do more. The Dark Lord would change the way things were looked at, they boasted, and set things right in the wizarding world. Blood status would finally be given the attention it deserved, and pure bloods would become rulers over the filth that were half-bloods, mudbloods, and muggles.

But in all the time that Sirius had listened to his parent’s steady streams of hatred, he’d never once really heard a reason for why they hated the muggles and half-bloods, and he was at an age that he felt silly asking why now - it was something he should’ve asked when he was a child, something that his parents just expected him to know by instinct. So he planned to observe it himself.

Thus, the Muggle Watching.

Everyday, Sirius would sit in the attic, perched on the sill of the upper most window of the house, staring out through his omnioculars. At first, his time in the attic was punctuated by visits from Regulus, who would wander up asking him to interrupt his spying to play a game of Exploding Snap, but as Regulus learned that Sirius never agreed to play, he eventually stopped coming up, opting to teach Kreacher how to play instead. Sirius would lose track of time and arrive late to dinner at the family table or completely neglect his studies for an entire day, caught up in the goings-on of the muggles that visited the square.

One boy in particular had caught Sirius’s attention more than any others that frequented the park. The boy would come to the park alone and sit on a bench and draw in a notebook. He drew great pictures that Sirius often zoomed the omnioculars in on to see - pictures of pirates and knights of the round table and merfolk and astronauts and all kinds of things. The boy’s pencil strokes were like magic, the way he pressed the charcoal against the page changed how the marks would be formed, and the pictures would seem to come to life - not because they were literally moving, like wizarding images often did, but rather because they were so well imagined that they didn’t need to. Something about the boy drew Sirius in and on days the boy didn’t visit the park, Sirius missed him as he would miss a friend.

Sirius was watching the boy one day when some other kids approached him. The biggest knocked the boy’s drawing pad to the ground and stepped upon it, smashing the delicate white pages into a puddle of mud, an evil grin upon his face. Sirius felt warm anger travel through his veins. The picture the boy had been drawing had been one of his best ever - a submarine under the ocean, caught up in the great twisting tentacles of an enormous octopus. Feeling the flush heating his face as he glowered down, Sirius only became more outraged as he watched the kids laughing and tossing the boy’s drawing utensils about, breaking the pencils and sharpener. One of them grabbed the boy himself and began to beat on him.

Unable to sit by and watch any longer, Sirius threw down his omnioculars and ran down the stairs, passing Kreacher carrying a tray of hot chocolate to Regulus’s room. “Master is running in the house and mistress doesn’t like it when young masters run in the house,” he croaked as Sirius rushed by.

“Knock off, Kreacher,” Sirius shouted as he thundered onward down the stairs.

“What is all of this ridiculous racket?” shrieked Walburga’s voice from the library. “Kreacher! What is going on out there?”

“Mistress is angry,” Kreacher grumbled, “Kreacher is going to be telling mistress about master Sirius’s naughty running.”

“Well go on then if you must,” Sirius said, and he ran off down the hall as Kreacher shuffled back to the library door. Sirius didn’t have time to worry about Walburga’s anger at the time, though, for he’d already taken longer than he’d wanted in coming down the stairs, and there was the boy, still locked tight in the grasp of the others, kicking and crying to be let go of. Sirius ran across the street and into the park and right up to the bullies and their prey and shouted, “Let go of him!” at the top of his voice, shoving his palms solidly against the nearest of the bullies.

“Who the hell’re you?” asked the biggest bully, the one who had his arm ‘round the neck of the boy Sirius had been watching. The boy kicked against the bully, trying to free himself, his eyes widely staring at Sirius, clearly thinking the same question as the bully was.

Sirius felt uncontrollable magic welling up inside him, as though he were a grenade about to go off, and he shouted, “I said let -- go -- of -- him!” And with a great cracking sound, the magic erupted from him and the bully, not knowing what in the world had struck him, let go of the boy, suddenly quite bloody ‘round the nose. He clutched his face and hollered loudly.

“What the bloody hell have you done?” wheezed the boy, looking wildly at Sirius as he scrambled away from the bloody-faced bully.

The other two bullies looked at each other, their nerves evaporated, and the three of them ran off, shouting vows over their shoulders, “This ain’t over Spencer!”

Sirius bent and helped the boy collect his drawing pencils, or at least what was left to them, and the boy shook out his sketchbook, mud splattering out from the pages. He frowned, “I think they’re ruined,” he muttered.

“A quick siphoning spell would clean them right off,” Sirius said.

“A what?” the boy looked ‘round at him, confused.

“A siphoning --” but Sirius didn’t get the words out for at that moment, Walburga had stepped out onto the front stoop of Number 12 Grimmauld Place, her face furiously contorted, Kreacher at her side, dancing foot to foot. Walburga’s face was practically purple and Sirius could see the anger etched in deep lines across her features, even from way across the street.

“SIRIUS!” she bellowed. Though her voice had been quite ringing to Sirius, the boy, Spencer they’d called him, didn’t seem to hear it at all.

“I gotta go,” Sirius said. “Let me fix your book for you,” he suggested. “I’ll give it back tomorrow.”

The boy shrugged and handed Sirius the sketch book. “It’s rubbish anyway, you can have it.”

“I think the drawings are spectacular,” Sirius replied.

“SIRIUS!”

“Gotta go.” He tucked the sketchbook under his arm and ran, sprinting across the road. He wondered what the boy thought when he crossed the threshold to Number 12 because it was invisible to muggles. Sirius wasn’t sure how it would look to Spencer - like he’d simply vanished, perhaps? There was no telling.

By the time he reached the stoop, though, and looked into his mother’s fierce eyes, Sirius wished he had vanished.

“What were you doing? Consorting with that muggle filth!” Walburga grabbed Sirius by the hair and pulled him along behind her into Number 12, ignoring his cries as she did so. Kreacher cackled and shut the door of the house behind them, bolting the wild assortment of locks behind him with a series of squeaks and clicks. Walburga dragged Sirius up the stairs to the library. “Go to your room!” she shrieked at Regulus, who had crept down onto the stairwell just outside the library, a look of curiosity on his face. Regulus didn’t hesitate, he ran off quickly, feet thundering on the stairs as he went. Walburga slammed the door shut with a flick of her wand, locking it, too, and hurled Sirius onto the floor. “Crucio!” she shouted.

It was an unbelievable pain, like none Sirius had ever felt before, as though a hundred thousand fiery swords had been jabbed through his flesh at the same time. Every muscle throbbed, every nerve twinged. He could hear his own voice shouting, screaming for it to stop, but Walburga didn’t stop for what felt like centuries. When she finally lowered her wand, Sirius pulled his knees to his chest, sore all over, crying and choking on his own tears. He rocked himself slowly, his cheek pressed to the carpet as Walburga stood over him, her regal chin held high, sneering at him down the length of her nose.

“You do not want to become a blood traitor, Sirius,” she hissed. “You are a son of the House of Black! You are better than that! And what is this?” she snatched the sketchbook from under Sirius’s arm. She flicked through the pages quickly, “Is this that muggle child’s?” she demanded.

“Mine,” squeaked Sirius, lying. “Mine, I did them.”

Walburga stared at him for a long moment, as though appraising whether she believed him or not, then flung the book across the room carelessly. She swept closer to Sirius so that he could smell the heat of her breath as their faces nearly touched, her black curly hair hanging over them like a privacy curtain. Her voice was low, quietly dangerous, and sinister. “I forbid you ever see that muggle again,” she hissed.

“But why?” Sirius asked, “Why do we have to hate the muggles?”

“Because they are beneath us, Sirius, we are better than they are. We are magic.”

“But that doesn’t mean they’re no good,” Sirius argued. “Muggle-borns are magic, too, and you hate them. So’s half-bloods.”

Walburga’s anger flared, “Because - we - are - better!” she seethed the words. “We are of royal stock, Sirius, we are descended from Salazar Slytherin, we are one of the Sacred Twenty-Eight.” She stood up, again holding her chin at a regal tilt. She stared at him, disgusted. “The day I would have believed that a son of mine would question the worthlessness of muggles - I never.” She shook her head. “I believed you would do great things, Sirius. I believed you were raised correctly, that I’d taught you well, that one day you might go into the service of the Dark Lord and become one of the greatest wizards of our time…”

Sirius’s words were desperate, “I want to become a great wizard.”

“Then you had better rethink your stand on the muggles. The Dark Lord would not tolerate the shenanigans of this day.” Walburga said. She took a deep, steadying breath and then, in a much cooler voice, “Sirius, it is for your own good that we keep you from the muggles. They are dangerous and terrible.” She swept to one of the shelves of books and pulled one down and carried it to where he was struggling to sit up, still sore from the cruciatus curse. “Here,” she said, thrusting the book at him.

“Muggles and Mudbloods: The Reason Why the Pureblood Wizarding Families Have Got the Right Idea About Purity And Why We Ought to Listen To Them,” Sirius read the title aloud.

“Go to your room and study that book,” Walburga said sternly, “And don’t come down until you’re ready to be a proper member of the House of Black.”

Sirius got up, every ounce of his body stiff and smarting, and grabbed the crumpled sketchbook from the floor, dripping mud. He tucked both books beneath his arm and trudged to the stairs. Regulus was standing a couple steps up, wide eyed, having overheard the entire thing. He turned to watch Sirius climb the steps. Sirius carried the books into his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

He sat down on the bed and put the book in front of himself, but instead of opening it straight-away, he lifted the sketchbook and shook it out a few more times, letting mud splatter about the room. When he’d managed to shake off a good amount of the dirt, he opened the book and flipped through the pages of the pictures that Spencer had drawn.

His mother was wrong, he thought, and so was that Dark Lord she was always talking about. So was anyone who thought that muggles were incapable of goodness for Spencer had created goodness in this sketchbook. Perhaps he couldn’t cast spells or anything but his pencils were sort of a wand - he had certainly done a sort of magic for Sirius Black wouldn’t ever be the same.