The Best of Mothers


There was a bloodied handprint and a single, chipped tooth on top of the dresser. That was all that was left of her son.

“Aargh!” Walburga cried, she raised a gilded casket above her head and flung it against the dove grey wall where it broke apart, revealing crystal bottles with cologne, strange palettes containing colourful glitter and a straight razor with an ivory handle, all tumbling onto the thick carpet he had charmed to match his world view.

She bent down, her eyes narrowed as grey and purple glitter bloomed like mushroom clouds around her, the rug roared like a lion before it sunk its woollen teeth around her wrist while she grappled for the razor.

“Down!” she snarled, blade out and how it gleamed. The rug retreated.

The razor had the Black crest on it, as well as the mark of the goblin that had forged it. The blade shimmered against the pallor of her palm, she was holding her own stormy eyes, she closed her fist over the reflection and blinked.

It was still building inside her, that fear, that anger. Screaming did so very little, and she used the razor to cut open the bedding; snidget feather downs blanched by age falling all around her.

It was hard work, tearing finest embroidered silk to shreds and she gave up with a final howl. The razor fell from her hand and she sank down amongst the debris, the floor and all the furniture covered in a layer white as snow.

There were flashy magazines underneath the bed that made her retch, there were empty bottles long since stolen as well as a still-smouldering copy of Nature’s Nobility, the one she had gifted him that morning for Christmas. She reached out and touched it, felt it burn her fingertips. He had been here. Right here. Forsaken the family and all he left her with were sooty fingers and an empty heart.

And there, in the furthest corner underneath the bed, lay another box mislaid, forgotten in the heat of the moment a mere hour before. It was painted scarlet and boasted gilded inlays.

Walburga raised her shaking wand arm to summon the box, but it scuttled out like it was an old friend of hers, the lid yawning open and the contents rattling expectantly.

“Eager to show me his dirty little secrets, aren’t you?” she asked it sweetly, warmly, but like she carried the razorblade still in her hand or between her teeth. “Ah, no, he left you behind and this is my house.” She caught it swiftly in her hands before it managed to retreat more than a few steps. It trembled in her lap as she forced it open.

Photographs. Dozens and dozens of moving pictures, happy smiling faces, hands waving up to her until they wavered, until the smiles froze, until bright eyes turned away, all looking to each other with alarm.

Walburga lifted the topmost one, held it close to her face and stared into her son’s silvery eyes. He was wearing purple black glitter above his eyes.

“It makes you look like a muggle woman whose suitor has smashed her face into the sink,” Walburga told him calmly. “I saw it on film, once. It’s not their fault either, bless them, they truly are that stupid. Black eyes, blood and teeth everywhere… It seems heartless to say that they deserve it, the suffering they inflict on their own race. I know you disagree with that, but you know… At some point you will have to face facts. Unless you’re too soft, of course? Many a time, dearest, I’ve thought that some of your brains got washed away with the afterbirth… Feeblemindedness, it’s been generations since such a plight has touched the family, but, alas…”

Walburga drew a triumphant breath.

“I care about this family more than anyone, but I loved you so, don’t you know? If I’d loved you any less, like an average mother would have, then I would have recognized you for what you were at birth. I would have seen you for what you are, and I would have cracked your fuzzy little peach of a head open against the sink. It would have been a kindness.”

Crooked fingers had shot up in defiance and she stared down the Potter boy instead, smirked when she noted that the two smaller boys had stepped back, morphing into insignificance behind the two leaders in front.

“I want you to know that this is what I think of you,” she said and raised her wand. All four flinched, although her son and his lapdog were acting as though they hadn’t. She laughed quietly and summoned her cigarette holder. It eased itself in between her lips, long and thin and inlaid with ivory, the goblin maker’s mark no doubt visible to the four pale faces in the photograph. The cigarette, of finest lovage root and germander with a sprinkling of doxy bone marrow she lit by snapping her fingers together, right by her son’s impertinent, upturned face.

The first drag burned like Fiendfyre in her lungs, she really had not been feeling herself lately and then this, this… Walburga blew smoke into their faces before turning the photograph round, she made them watch as she ashed the cigarette into the scarlet box of his memories. A girl on top with long blonde hair cried out silently and tried to cover her face. Walburga made quite sure to flick more ash into it, more and more until it became charred and ruined and young no more.

She stifled a cough and snapped her fingers, watched the whole pile light into flames, watched the muted screams and made quite sure her son watched, too. Burning arms and floating cinders, she tossed the last photo inside and closed the lid. The scarlet paint was crying, the box shaking and trembling like a kicked crup puppy as it attempted to retreat back under the bed, one corner scraping badly against the expensive wooden floors, smoke pouring out between the cracks.

Walburga got to her feet and looked around. The odd snidget feather down still fell, a Christmas scene if ever she’d seen one. Christmas Day and what a night it had brought. There was another bloodied handprint on the window frame. The window itself had been left open as if to rub it in her face, as if to tell her how easily he had escaped. Had just packed his trunk and jumped onto his broom, and it did not take a genius to guess where he had flown.

“Close your legs!” she shouted, for although she wasn’t looking at them, plastered onto the walls all around her, onto the walls of her forefathers’ house, of her house, they were there, and she had tried and failed before to remove them. “Cover up your filthy… you’re not worthy to scrub the cellar floors of this house! Have you no shame?” She brandished her wand again but the woman in the picture didn’t flinch, her smile just as wicked as before.

“Locomotor mortis,” Walburga muttered under her breath, aiming for the widespread limbs, then for the whole poster. “Evanesco! Incendio!”

It was futile, and she shouted out her disgust once more.

“Diffindo!” she roared, pointing at one of the muggle vehicles on the wall instead, but her aim was off, and she mostly caught the wallpaper. It ripped open magnificently, the dark wood below dull like welling blood in a gaping wound, and she aimed her wand every which way now, cutting open anything it landed on, except for the hateful posters and the Gryffindor banners, protected by some spell of his. The rug she tore to shreds, though, it whimpered with all the courage of a rat as the red thread unspooled, and the curtains they fell in silvery folds, frozen rivers on snowy floorboards. For the finale she targeted the chandelier and it fell with an almighty crash, crystals scattered, candles rolled until they hit against something underneath the bed.

She bent back down and snatched up one of the bottles he had hidden, it was half-empty but it contained one of the finer elf-made port wines her husband had ordered for Christmas. Christmas, ruined.

She upended the bottle against her lips, it was thick and heavenly and sweet and spicy. She refused to look backwards as she exited the room, bottle in one hand and wand in the other.

Regulus stood in his doorway, like an ashwinder caught in the firelight, hands behind his back.

“Is he really… gone?”

“Show me what you’re hiding!”

“I didn’t… He just left it in my room, I would never have…”

“Show me.”

Regulus bit his lip and stepped aside, Walburga waltzed past him with the bottle held high, wand even higher.

On her younger son’s bed lay a magazine, one she didn’t hesitate to vanish the moment she set eyes on it. Underneath it lay a crumpled card and a crude-looking muggle vessel.


Sirius –

Happy Christmas, mate! I thought about what might help relieve your boredom until we’re back at school, and my Mum suggested something to do with your plan for a motorbike (she thinks charming one to make it fly sounds fucking mental in the best possible way, I’m quoting verbatim here) so I tried to look it up and apparently you need lube for the chain on it. Mum suggested I buy a steering wheel rather than a chain, but I told her that I know you and how much you value well-lubricated bits of equipment no matter which way you’re facing, and I think she saw my point eventually (although she thinks I’m cheating you out of a proper gift, seeing as I couldn’t get hold of a motorbike chain in time… Maybe for your birthday?) Anyway, in case the lube doesn’t keep you wholly occupied during your long dark hours in the madhouse I’ve also sent you a porn mag.


Hope I’ll see you soon and, remember, you’re welcome here anytime!

James


Walburga vanished the offending items with another wave of her wand and turned to her youngest.

“You’ve seen what happens to Sirius’s hands, haven’t you?”

“The curse you and dad use when – yeah. I mean, yes, I’ve seen what happens.”

“They become cursed,” Walburga said, slurring her words slightly. “The skin just – poof!”

She grinned, hand in the air miming a starburst, then hastened to correct her features into their normal sternness.

“That’s all you need to know.”

Regulus didn’t answer, he looked vary, but he flattened himself against the wall when Walburga strode past him.

“He’s gone,” she added over her shoulder as she pushed her older son’s door back open. “Your brother… He’s… he’s truly…”

She paused and she heard Regulus walk up behind her. They both looked into the room. His room. It looked just as it always did, a bit untidy, and the window was open, it was snowing in, flakes whirling round and round. Candlewax hung from the great chandelier in the ceiling and the bed was badly made. The rug growled softly, corner raised and sniffing in their direction. And, of course, depraved pictures plastered over every inch of the handsome wallpaper she had chosen for him…

Walburga slammed the door shut and pushed her remaining son aside. With her back to the door she heard it lock itself from the inside.

Another swig of port and it revived her, it lightened her step. She glided down the first flight of stairs like a prima donna in her prime. She looked a mirror full in the eye as she passed, she bared her teeth at it, stained and dark but she was beautiful. They say your children take your beauty from you, but here she was, as vivacious as ever. She leant in until she saw the whites of her eyes, little blood vessels like squirming snakes down under. The mirror rippled, and for a moment she saw herself at seventeen, ebony and cream and the lipstick she used to wear. Another distortion and she saw someone else, someone who’d forgotten to take their black nightcap off, someone who was ripping at their silvery black hair as they screamed, drool dripping down their chin.

“And not a single speck of grey,” she said resolutely, another undulation in the image, she was pulling out a couple of offending hairs as she struck another pose in front of the mirror, “not a single one…”

She turned her back on the past and future and walked up to the Christmas tree with its silver needles, black baubles and emerald snakes glittering from every branch. Sirius, the fool, had tried to bewitch it, change the décor, but this was back when he was all of thirteen. As if red and gold would ever have looked good in a house like this. He’d learnt, in time. Walburga laughed as she remembered, the memory warmed her, he had needed seven different antivenoms, but she had waited until the last minute to administer them. She had watched his pupils for when the time came. She could have just left him, she should have just left him…

“You never liked him,” she said loudly to the house at large, “you can’t tell me you ever liked him. So why on earth would you…”

Her voice died in her throat, she descended one more floor, two. A scale of notes sounded from the empty music room, from the piano, but the last one rang out false and jarring. The house and all its secrets, the mysterious ways in which it moved… Walburga had never cared much, because usually the house was on her side. Usually, it’s wishes and hers were one and the same. She was no fool, she would never go against it, the house of her forefathers. It was the culmination of every Black before her, the past, the future she believed in, and she would never usually question what it decided. But this time, hadn’t it decided to take Sirius’s party? Hadn’t it just restored his bedroom to the state he had left it in, like his command still ruled? It was just one room, but still… It didn’t sit right with her.

“Ah, here we are,” she said. She walked into the middle of the drawing room, stood on beautifully inlaid black walnut floors, stood quite still and drained the bottle. It warmed like nothing else, truly.

“It won’t work, you know,” a silky voice said.

Walburga dropped the bottle and it shattered at her feet, glass everywhere like a broken-up sea. She looked the painting in the eye, the painting of a clever-looking, black-haired wizard, family resemblance striking.

Walburga had never in her life known a portrait in her house to speak. They screamed, yes. Sighed. Sometimes they tutted. The handful of times she’d heard one laugh it had been an insane, reverberating noise that had sounded throughout the house. But speak, never.

“What do you mean?” she asked of it now.

“It won’t work. Disown him all you like, erase him from the tree, go on and do it! Pretend he never existed; see how long you can keep it up for.”

Walburga stepped closer, both to the portrait and to the family tree in the middle of the room. The glass crunched like new snow underneath her feet.

“Why wouldn’t I be able to keep it up? He’s been as good as dead to me for years, now.”

“Has he really?”

She hesitated but a second before she smiled.

“There was always something rotten inside of him. You’ve been here for longer than I have, you’ll have seen it. No reverence, no respect. No pride in where he comes from.” She swallowed, and it hurt like a bad cold. “I have two sons. Lucky, you know, almost like I sensed it already as I carried him. A precaution if you will. I still have one good son.”

“Yes you do, don’t you,” the voice of the portrait said. Unctuous, horrible. “He’s strong, isn’t he? Will be able to stand up for himself, hmm? Back straight… eyes clear. Heart – well. It’s not like he’d ever stray, is it?”

“He would never,” Walburga said sharply.

“I hear a lot on the other side, you know,” the portrait told her conspiratorially. “Lots of meetings, nowadays, important meetings… We won’t be at peace for much longer.”

“Regulus will be on the right side, unlike Sirius,” Walburga snapped.

“Ah, so they might meet in battle, then? Which one do you fancy would come out on top in a duel?”

Walburga’s eyes narrowed as she stared him down.

“You’ve got an agenda that has nothing to do with our noble forefathers,” she declared.

“Oh no, never that.” he said quickly, and she raised a curved black eyebrow.

“I know who you are! I know where your other portrait hangs.”

“This is not about what the mad old mudblood-lover thinks,” the portrait said. “Although, being on speaking terms, or at the very least eavesdropping terms with him has its uses… I’ve spoken up to you because I care about our blood. Our blood, Walburga, Black blood. It flows in both of your sons and barely in anybody else, and I would be loath to see it all go to waste in something as trifling as a war.”

“I’m afraid Sirius’s blood has already gone to waste. As the one who gave birth to him, I can’t tell you how much it hurts me. My heart… It is quite literally, er, broken.” Walburga smiled coldly to the wizard in the portrait. He looked unimpressed. “And as for Regulus, he will stand up for what’s right, no doubt.”

“And if he dies trying?”

“That won’t happen. He’s a Black. He’ll be alright. Now, tell me something I don’t know.”

“You’ll go insane, Walburga.”

Walburga smirked and took out her cigarette holder, as well as another cigarette. She lit it slowly, this time. Tenderly. The cigarette holder slithered around her index finger like a tiny, friendly snake.

She drew smoke deep into her lungs, so deep her eyes teared up. She could hear the fire at the end of her cigarette crackle.

“I care more for the health of our family tree than you do,” Walburga told him. “I’ve never been afraid of making hard decisions.”

“You’ll regret this one.”

Grey eyes on grey, she drew in the heavenly smoke and delighted in the fact that she was the one here. The one present. Alive.

“Good riddance,” Walburga said quietly and pressed the end of the cigarette into her son’s name on the tree. “If you have any decency left, you’ll die in the first battle.”

The portrait snorted and Walburga had another deep drag to steady her nerves. The name was completely burnt out, her branch of the family small. Most other branches had died a long, long time ago. Somehow, the expected satisfaction didn’t ignite immediately like she had expected it to. Her eldest son had sneaked out on his broom, like a thief in the night, like he had made a great escape. He was not coming back. Goodbye forever, and he hadn’t even left a note. Not to her, anyway.

“He did manage to tame his room, I’ll give him that,” Walburga said quietly. “That was a surprise. Not as great a surprise as you speaking up was, though.”

The portrait didn’t answer her, and she finished her cigarette in silence. Then she walked up to him and lifted him off the wall.

“Hey – what’s this, you can’t remove me! This is my home too, you know!”

“I’m putting you in old aunt Elladora’s room,” Walburga said with savage triumph. “She’s still there, sometimes… I’ve seen the empty sheets, tossing and turning. They say she snores, as well.”

“You can’t put me in there! I won’t have it, Walburga!”

“And I won’t have a spy in our midst, family or not,” Walburga sneered. Her feet were easy like a dance, she hung him onto a nail on one of the arid walls in the spare bedroom, tucked away on the second landing.

“No one to chat to in this room, you poor soul. And it just so happens that I know the curse to contain portraits to a single room…”

The portrait’s unhappy pleadings fell on deaf ears and Walburga slammed the door shut behind her. She muttered the incantation to keep the portrait inside but when she turned around, she was met by yet another portrait, this time that of her grandmother.

“What?” she said, a bit louder than he normally would have. “I’m only doing what’s good for my family.”

Her grandmother sighed, but she didn’t talk. Her portrait hadn’t spoken a word in its life.

“I’m a good mother,” Walburga stated loudly. “The best, really. I gave him everything and he broke my heart…”

She smacked her lips, tasting the words. This time, she thought they sounded about right. Sincere.

“He has betrayed everything we stand for and he’s not coming back.”

Walburga took to the stairs again. She was itching for another drink and as she glanced inside the drawing room she saw Kreacher scooping up the broken glass from the fallen port bottle.

“I’m the best of mothers, you know,” she said again, quietly this time. Her eye had been caught by another mirror, and she saw that the woman inside of it was nodding in understanding. She, at least, agreed. Walburga smiled and watched the woman’s hair grow silver again.

 

https://forums.darklordpotter.net/threads/q3-2021-dlp-writing-competition.40126/

Voting thru November 21

 

Huh. Glanced at it. Does appear to be doubled. Can someone else confirm (that actually read it) that it’s not intentional repetition of some kind? I’ll fix it.

 

Spoiler

Fantastic first sentence – best one yet of this competition.

And it continues well also, with Walburga feeling realistic to what we know of her in canon. Crazy bitch, etc.

One thing … I don’t know where this story is going yet, but initially I read it as SHE charmed his rug into the lion, but when I glanced back it was HE that did it. If you wanted to find a tiny way of showing that she might have loved her son, having her enchant something he’d like would do it.

But she didn’t. And she wouldn’t have in canon. But I can’t believe how much a “she” instead of a “he” there would have humanized her for me.

Great fucking descriptions – a muggle woman whose suitor smashed her face into a sink. ALSO Walburga went to see a film? Yup, that helps humanize her too. I love this.

The fact that she’s making her son’s picture watch this – as if it were actually her son – lends credence to her being a bit crazy. It still hits for the reader but makes her seem that much more off kilter.

I do have trouble accepting that she can’t get Sirius naughty pictures off the wall, but maybe she figured it out and that’s how she stuck herself to the wall? Except Sirius probably could have removed her then.

LOL @ James letter

Portrait and everything else is great too.

I like how we also got to watch Walburga basically convince herself that her words made sense.

Great story.

But it doesn’t… it fits the letter of the prompt, but not the spirit.

Well this... barely qualifies for the prompt, imo, but it does meet it well enough. After the end, but the "end" is Sirius's time at home?

This is the best entry I've read so far, but I can't give it more than 2-3 points even if it's the best written b/c I really don't think you considered the prompt enough, personally.