The Black Family Legacy

The Guilt Train Troubles

"Yes, Miss Black?"

"Yes, so pardon my inquiry. But you're our new Defense Against the Dark Arts Professor, right?"

"That is correct." The ghastly pink clad lady nods.

"So why, then, are you not teaching us how to defend ourselves from the Dark Arts?"

"Miss Black, I'll think you'll find that I do not allow students to speak out of turn in my class, ten points from Slytherin." A glint seems to flash in her black beady eyes. "And as for my curriculum, it is a ministry approved regimen, and what need do you have to defend yourself? Voldemort is dead, thanks to Mr Harry Potter no less, who else is there to fear?"

It dawns on Cygnus that something is horribly, irrevocably wrong. A pit settles in her stomach, but she keeps her lips sealed for the rest of the class.

-

"Miss Black, a word, please." Umbridge says, stepping behind her desk. Cygnus glances blankly at desk for anime to, screaming internally, before rising and approaching the toad like woman.

"Detention, six o'clock tomorrow evening." She says briskly, and Cygnus blinks. "I will not have you questioning my authority again, do you understand?"

"Yes."

"Yes what?"

"Yes, Professor."

The woman smiles, then nods tersely. "You may leave."

Cygnus exits the classroom and barely makes it down the hall before she hurls her bag at the wall, the contents spilling everywhere.

"Miss Black?" Comes the concerned voice of Professor Dumbledore. His hand lands on her elbow, and Cygnus turns to him, he panics when he sees her eyes are red.

"Why don't you come with me?" He asks, waving his wand. Her bag repackaged itself and sets itself back on her shoulder, and Dumbledore steers Cygnus towards his office.

-
"You will write 'I will learn my place.' 100 times." Unbridgeable says simply, nodding to the desk immediately in front of her. "I already have a quill for you to use."

Cygnus sat and glanced up at the woman. "There's no ink." She comments dryly.

"You won't need any."

Cygnus had become so numb to pain that she didn't notice the line she had carved into her hand until she stood to leave and the pool of blood spread over the top of the desk, she glanced at her hand, and then at the paper.

"I will learn my place." She mumbles, and then she laughs, throwing her head back in mocking. "Oh if only you had met my family."

-

"I can't take this anymore!" Cygnus roars, clutching her joke of a Defense Against the Dark Arts textbook and throwing it into the fire. The scars on the back of her hand shone pink in the burst of sparks that followed.

The other Slytherins in the common room freeze at her outburst. Her cousin leaps to his feet.

"Don't." She barks, glaring at him. He freezes, raising his hands in surrender. In a furious flurry of robes she stomps out of the common room.

-

Whispers began to spread like wildfire, tales of how the Slytherin would try Umbridges temper, how she never flinched during detention, and laughed in the face of expulsion. A third year Ravenclaw swore he saw her slam the door in her face, blood still streaming down her fingers, fresh from detention. A seventh year Gryffindor sat up eagerly in his bed in the hospital wing to listen to his friends re-enact the day's class.

The students admired her, but were at the same time, terribly frightened.

-

McGonnogal was the first person to crack the Black, and soon had the girl sitting in her office, talking about the troubles that plague her, the failures that haunt her dreams.

It is then that Minerva tells the girl stories of another young Black, not the infamous convict, but rather the soft spoken Slytherin who demolished on the quidditch pitch and in the classroom alike.

These sessions become more and more regular, and the sharp stab of pain that Cygnus feels turns to laughter, not sorrow, and she learns to become human again. It's hard to remember there's a fire burning you when you're roasting marshmallows.

The Gryffindor head of house regaled her with tales of her father, her uncle and his group of friends, how similar Cygnus and the Gryffindor boys had been.

Mcgonnogal grows sadder the more she talks with the Slytherin. Something has broken, she is no longer the girl who would shrink back from the potions Professor, she was no longer the girl who clung to her friends. This older, wiser girl had dark secrets in the blue of her eyes, a sense of power radiating from her skin.

Cygnus Black had become relentless. She was angry. And she hated herself for it. This was not the girl she had once been. This was something entirely new, entirely way too... dark for her liking. But there was no light to save her, so instead, she embraced it.