The Marauders: Year One | #Wattys2016

Muggle-Watching

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.