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chapter nine, like a mad woman [ august, 1976 ]
Usually, Walburga would be screaming and raging, having another one of her fits. Orion would send a small glare in her way, a non-verbal glance, and she would shut up instantly.
This time — as the three Black kids returned home from Hogwarts for holidays — was different. They had sat down to eat and Walburga was standing up, she kept on yelling at Charis even though Orion forcefully insisted they have a quiet, nice family dinner.
Some nonsense about Charis not making friends with the right sort of people. She tells her mother that she doesn't have any friends and yet she is set onto believe her daughter is befriending Muggleborns and Halfbloods.
"You could be speaking to your distant cousin Lucretia Travers, the Rosier boy is in your year. There's Avery, the lovely Eloise Nott, and there's Camila Laurent, too," she rambles on, listing names Charis has not paid enough attention to learn in her six years of attending Hogwarts, "why do you choose to accompany filthy mudbloods?"
"Don't say that word!" Sirius yelled out, and in doing so, he accidentally spilled his drink all over his robes, "shit, shit!"
"Language." Regulus hissed, casting his father a small glance as the two women continued to argue in the background.
"Why are you suddenly trying to be a good mother?" Charis retorted, "you didn't care about me all these years and out of nowhere, you want me to be friends with these... nightmarish, disgusting pureblood fools—"
"Do not dare to speak of proper pureblood ladies, it'll tarnish your own name!" Her mother's yelling rang in everybody's ears for hours, and Charis turned around to see her father sitting silently, just drumming his fingernails against the mahogany table as he looks between the two. "They have far more grace than you'll ever do! What am I meant to do with you?
"Well, guess what, you don't have a say in it because it's my name and I can tarnish it all I want," Charis spat, and Sirius snorted in the back, "I'm so sick and tired of hearing you bitching about disgracing my name when you're the one yelling like a lunatic—"
Charis was quickly cut off by a loud slap, a sharp sting prickling across her left cheek. Gasps were heard from her brothers, leaving Charis speechless. Her mother had never hit her.
"You're impossible!" Walburga just went on and on.
The second Orion caught of the cut on Charis' cheekbone, he stood up alarmingly fast, the creaking of the chair falling backwards silencing the entire room. Wordlessly, he picked up the chair Charis was initially sat on and threw it at Walburga's head.
She almost dodged it, slipping to the side as the chair flew through the air, and hit her arm instead of her head which he aimed for.
Orion stomped forward, and Charis got in the middle the second he was about to raise his wand at her mother. "No!" She yells, tilting her chin up to look at her raging, heaving father. "Don't touch my mother!"
Easily overpowered, the teenage girl was shoved aside with a simple shove of Orion's arm as he pressed the tip of his wand right against his wife's neck, who was left shaking and rubbing her injured arm. Splinters from the now-broken chair drawing blood.
"How dare you raise your hand on her?" Orion whispered in his venomous tone, "I need my daughter to be spotless, you certainly understand why, Walburga, don't you?"
"Oh, you don't want me to be scarred, do you?" Charis spitefully spat. A chorus of gasps rang through House Black's dining room when she picked up a knife from the table, and made a slash across her arm. Blood, purest of blood wasted as it dripped and soaked into the dinner table. Another cut across her arm, ragefully and recklessly, formed just before Sirius almost tackled her to the ground in the process of snatching the godforsaken knife away.
The state of her mentality had worsened, and she had not been put on proper medications yet. This often led her to resort to violent actions that she does not think through. Ending in harm.
Charis let out a shriek of some sort when Sirius gripped her wrist with a bruising pressure and slammed it against the table, clattering of knives and forks so loud that Regulus flinched away — standing up quickly to get away from his insane family. Charis' cheekbone split, arm covered in crimson, the same droplets of blood soaking into Sirius' white shirt. Their mother cowering against the wall whilst their father looked so mad, so, so mad.
Then Orion Black uttered something, lowly, angrily, and everybody went silent. The entire world went silent, to Charis, at least. "Crucio."
Her head span, and it felt as though a thousand cacti were stabbed into every flesh and organ of hers repeatedly, with brutal force. She wanted it to stop, she just wanted it all to end. The ground was growing nearer, and Sirius had caught her in his arms before she could fall. She was shaking, twitching like a tortured animal as gasps and strangled sobs escaped her whilst she buried her face in Sirius' neck, desperately trying to hide away from the cruelty of everything else.
Everything hurt. It all hurt.
She gasped when Orion seized her by her arm, certainly leaving bruises and snatching her away from Sirius' shaking embrace.
"You're a sick girl!" Orion yelled, and in the haze of the torture in her chest, his voice rang and rang in the back of her head, he turned to Walburga. "You better fix that improper filth you're raising. I for sure did but nobody else will ever marry a mad woman."
