Writing Challenge - Family

[in_the_blue]

Writing Challenge day.

Those of you who said don't do it in July because of HBP can, as always, feel free to take a pass. But as promised, here is this month's writing challenge and guidelines. Come and play if you want! (Yn Cymraeg: der i chwarae!)

---

Rules (remember, they're more like guidelines):

• Fandom: any, so long as it's one you know well. Yes, HP HBP fics allowed!


• Word count: 300 or less


• Main theme: Family


• Ratings: No restrictions.


• Duration: Challenge opens today and closes at 11:59 p.m. Sunday, July 24. Just one week.

Post your drabbles as comments to this entry. Feel free to do as few or as many as you want, and if you see one you really like, be sure to leave a review or a comment.

Comments

Fandom: Harry Potter / featuring Sirius Black

[in-the-blue.livejournal.com]

JK Rowling: Sirius would have done it. He, with all his faults and flaws, he has this profound sense of honour, ultimately, and he would rather have died honourably, as he would see it, than live with the dishonour and shame of knowing that he sent those three people to their deaths, those three people that he loved beyond any others, because like Harry he is a displaced person without family.

(Again: Sirius in Azkaban.)

---

Who in their right mind ever would consider Dementors family?

I'm not in my right mind.

I lost my family long before I got Sorted to Gryffindor. That was the crowning touch on my parents' disappointment: at least they still had Regulus to uphold the family honour. My mother, so far gone on her path to insanity; that came from a lifetime dedicated to serving darkness. She knew it was wrong. She just wouldn't admit it, and that duality drove her quite mad.

My father followed.

I remember lying in my bed at night in that room Regulus and I shared, our great-great-grandfather's portrait standing watch. He talked to my brother but never to me. I was too much of an embarrassment: outspoken and firm in my beliefs, and there was no bloody way I was ever going to be like them. Not even from the start; one of my earliest memories is of some family outing or other, my mother leaving me with my cousins. I liked Andromeda, she was all right, but the others: Bella, Cissy... they were horrid even then. They hated me. They hated me for catching frogs and letting them go instead of torturing them like they did, and they hated having to watch over me. They hated everything about me. I remember sneaking off with Andromeda, the two of us wading in some pond, refusing to turn the frogs and toads into potions ingredients for them.

I wonder what’s happened to Andromeda.

Family members aren't allowed to visit here. They don't let them into Azkaban unless they have special Ministry dispensation. I look at the family gathered round me now and laugh: thieves, murderers, and creatures so foul we don't even want to say their names aloud.

I would laugh if they'd let me.

Re: Fandom: Harry Potter / featuring Sirius Black

[sff-corgi.livejournal.com]

:(

This reminds me of Medeni's realisation that if she had been able to visit Sirius in Azkaban, not only would that have lifted then dropped his spirits that much more, but her last memory of him would have been this damaged person, not the man who kissed her goodbye at the train station. The prisoner isn't the only person punished.

Poor Sirius. It's all so completely unfair.