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The rule, as it is known, is that at least one Black in every generation will be cursed with the Madness that lurks in their blood—at least one, you must remember, lest it creep up on you.
The one to draw the short end of Aster's generation is a second cousin of hers, a girl four years her senior that Aster never had much interaction with. (Denebola, sixteen, there was always something off about that girl. She had killed a Junior Auror in broad daylight simply to see if there would be consequences, and if that Junior Auror happened to be a mudblood, that was just a point in favor of the murder.) Aster's mother makes her wear a set of truly horrendous funeral robes to the wake, a terrible thing that is open-casket despite the visible concave of her cousin's abdomen. (Altair, fourteen and her first cousin once removed, tells her that Denebola had been gutted by an Entrails-Expelling Curse by that Junior Auror's partner. He says this with the sort of malicious glee that only a fourteen year old boy can have, as if a relative of theirs hasn't been made into a scapegoat for the Madness to manifest within, as if there isn't a gaping hole beneath Denebola's pretty robes where they couldn't stitch her back together.) She pretends not to notice how her father's hand is clawed over her left shoulder, holding her so hard she can feel bruises forming beneath his fingertips. I'm just glad it wasn't me, she thinks emptily, and watches the casket close with finality before it vanishes away to the Black Crypt. Denebola, sixteen and mad. She had been set to be engaged to the Parkinson heir the upcoming fall, a mere handful of months away.
Aster floos back to the Manse with her family, ignores Cygnus when he tries to continue on with the same thread Altair had been spinning—boys, honestly—and forgets the cardinal rule of 'at least one' in favor of ripping off the itchy funeral robes. The last time the rule had been brought up was four generations ago with Maia, Aries, and Helvetios, a triple-feature spanning three different branches of the family tree; and Aster, though her father's perfect little princess, was never one for the history lessons her tutor attempted to give her. It will come back to bite her when she is fifty-four, but for now, Aster is twelve and unburdened.
Helyas is a name that shall never be used within the Black Family. It is ironic that a man named for the brilliant light of the sun was the one to cast the darkest shadow upon the House of Black, but as it is, no child born to a Black will ever be called Helyas for fear of attracting more of Lady Fortune's unfavorable attention.
(He raped a sorceress' daughter and for that he was cursed with a madness that ran blood-deep. Since, seventy-three Blacks have died with mercury in their eyes.)
Here is a little story from before Aster, before Denebola, before even Maia and Aries and Helvetios.
It is 1696 and Amaranthea Black, fifth-year Slytherin, has a plan. It is not very well thought-out, nor is it backed up by any sort of evidence, but Amaranthea has a plan. The Black Madness does not branch out from the family, this is a known fact; therefore, it is not a leap to infer that Amaranthea, who is one of three in her generation, can escape the curse if she marries out.
(This sort of delusional logic goes hand in hand with a mercurial sheen to the eye, but Amaranthea's irises are a startlingly pale blue, and whatever glint that may be there is easily lost. Her waterline, too, is made almost white by greensickness. What is there left, then, to look for? What is there—who said that? Must be Peeves playing tricks on her.)
She marries Richard Selwyn during her seventh year at Hogwarts and preens with the knowledge that she's safe, for there is no Amaranthea Black anymore—just Amaranthea Selwyn, daughter of a house with no blood curses to date. Perfect, perfect, perfect.
(At just the right angle, Richard swears her irises look–)
There is a house purchased for them after graduation and that is as far as they get, for Amaranthea starts hallucinating months after their move-in and doesn't get better no matter how many healers her husband calls for. One cannot have a baby when they're too busy chasing illusions and howling at phantoms to shut up, shut up, shut up! now can they? But Amaranthea is a Selwyn, and so there should be a cure to this—right? There should be an end?
"The gods only know what I was thinking when I agreed to marry a Black," Richard spits one evening. Or, well, perhaps he doesn't—she has had a difficult time lately differentiating between what is real and what is fake, and she's spent so long crying in the solarium over that awful wench in the parlor that she cannot see him through her puffy eyes.
"I'm a Selwyn," she croaks anyways, flinching when something whispers at her over her shoulder. "Th-this will pass. I'm sure of it."
It does not pass. Amaranthea makes it to twenty-one before her husband contacts Lord Black demanding an annulment of their marriage, and her uncle responds by showing up to drag her through the Floo screaming and crying and begging Donna—whoever the blazes that is—to save her. Corvus makes his decision on how to go about handling his niece right there in the receiving room, for the second their feet meet the hearth, her magic balloons so violently outwards that the Black Manse shakes.
"I'm not mad," Amaranthea sobs, hands over her ears and eyes squeezed shut. "I'm not a Black, so I can't be mad!" She never even sees the Killing Curse coming. Later, when Theodora pries her niece's eyelids open, the flatness of those glacial irises in death is the only reason that cursed mercurial glint shines through.
"You stupid girl," Lady Black sighs. "What a shame." She nods to her husband, who goes off to contact his brother and sister-in-law; and when they come to collect their only daughter, Theodora and Corvus share the quiet thought of, at least it wasn't our son.
The timeline resumes.
Sirius Black is six years old and heir to his family. Sirius Black is six years old and heir to his family and his waterline is already darkening.
Sirius Black is six years old and heir to his family and is not quite able to control his emotions. He is a child, and children are afforded allowances that adults cannot have, but he is six years old and feels the urge to scream and scream and scream until his chest rips open from the force of it. He keeps his mouth shut, though, because the one time he had given into that urge his mother had smacked him clean across the face with enough weight that it shocked him into silence.
Little lords do not scream like banshees. Sirius Black is six years old and bites his tongue, gnaws on it until it's bleeding and throbbing and agonized.
Sirius Black is seven years old and his waterline is dove gray, and he tangles his hands in his mother's dress robes and refuses to let go. Sirius Black is seven years old and hates his little brother for existing, for daring to take away his parents' attention, and so he hits the toddler with fists like rocks and shouts so that he can be heard over Phineas' crying. He screams when his father picks him up. He screams and screams and screams and not even his mother's stiff-knuckled slaps are enough to quiet him.
Sirius Black is seven years old and he will not let go of his father's hand, holding tight enough to grind bones because he loves his father so so so so much. Cygnus has to cast the curse with his left hand because of it, and the flash of green is especially bright when reflected off of his son's wide metallic eyes.
Sirius Black was seven years old when his blood rebelled against him and now he is dead. Such is the way things go in the Black Family, another name on a long list of them. Cygnus cradles his son's body close to him long after it has gone cold, and then he deposits the corpse into his sobbing wife's arms so that he may start on the funeral arrangements. Ella doesn't seem to remember that she spent almost eleven minutes striking their son wherever she could, shrieking at him to stop it you awful boy, stop it, stop it, for now she just crushes Sirius to her chest and sobs and ignores her smarting palms and bloodied knuckles.
Aster is the second Black that Cygnus has to kill, and he realizes that it hurts the same to put down his long-lived sister as it did to say Avada Kedavra to his wide-eyed son.
She shrieks throughout the whole duel, grotesque in her blistering rage, and it is only when he beheads her that she finally falls silent. If he cries the entire time he stitches her neck back to her shoulders, no one needs to know—he is stone-faced and cold when her funeral rolls around, open casket just as Denebola's was all those years ago, just as Sirius' was, just as the next Black's will be. If the coffins were closed, then the Blacks would forget.
(He pays the Gardners a pitiful sum of money, as if a palm-sized bag of galleons can make up for the fact that Aster slaughtered Mister Gardner in full view of his wife and four children while raging on about love, about how she loved him, about how she loved him so much that if she couldn't have him then no one could. It is a slight that is almost as painful as the death of Mister Gardner, but funeral costs are funeral costs, so Missus Gardner cannot refuse the money he's so graciously gifted her. The family looks at him with the same hatred that Aster had worn during their duel, and it is remarkable how alike madness looks to grief. Cygnus doesn't care. They're a family of mudbloods and muggle filth, and they were not worth the price of his sister's head.)
He drinks himself into a stupor and spends the early hours after midnight weeping in his office, still in his funeral robes. How awful is it, when both my son and my sister loved so passionately that it manifested as madness? He will never forget how much strength Sirius' little hand had held his own with, nor what it felt like to have to pry those stiff fingers apart afterwards. (On the contrary, it had taken Phineas only a year to forget that he had an older brother at all, much less that the scar on his brow came from Sirius' striking fists. He knows his brother as a portrait stuck perpetually at seven. Such is life.)
Belvina does not have any warning whatsoever to her mental breakdown—she invites the ladies Runcorn, Goyle, and Lestrange over for tea despite not liking Elara Runcorn nor Judith Goyle all that much, and then Elara makes some snide comment about Belvina's daughter, and then quite suddenly Belvina has no control over her emotions. She pulls her wand on Elara without a thought and tears the woman's tongue from her mouth, sees nothing wrong with it either, thinks she's perfectly justified even as Vivienne Lestrange starts screaming and Judith nearly faints and Elara chokes on her own blood.
Belvina bares her teeth in a twisted version of a smile, feeling it stretch across her face and twitch as though sentient in its own right. "If you cannot hold your tongue, then I shall hold it for you!" and she laughs at her cleverness, snatching up Elara's mutilated tongue from the crimson-stained tablecloth and waving it around in her fist.
Judith is first to run, upending her tea across the table in her haste; her clumsy escape jars the other two into movement. Belvina trips over the hem of her own robes when she makes to lunge after the fleeing women, and it is from her place on the floor that she watches Vivienne yank Elara along behind her. By the time Belvina manages to scramble to her feet, following the blood splatters left on the tiles all the way to the still-bright Floo, her company has vanished.
Cunts, Belvina snarls. The tongue in her hand makes an awful, wet sound when she drops it, but with Elara gone, the fun it in has died a swift death. She stands there before the smoldering embers, chewing on her cheek and thinking it all over. The gruesome chunk of flesh at her feet is a vibrant splash of color against the white of the hearth. Why in the hell did they– the puddle of blood reaches her toe. Awareness comes like the flare of a lumos, sudden clarity brightening her vision.
Belvina does not need to look at herself in the mirror to know that she is mad. Why would she, when she can feel the jagged edges of her mind crunching together, when she can hear her blood laughing at her in her ears? No, Belvina does not need any mirror to tell her that her waterline has darkened and her irises have adopted that dreadful flinty sheen. I'm mad, she thinks, and then begins to laugh. I'm mad, I'm mad, I'm mad. The transition from laughter to tears is indistinguishable, but the next Belvina knows she is sobbing so hard she feels sick, and she still has Elara's blood on her hand, and Herbert has probably already been notified, and her children–
The world pauses on an inhale. Her children. Her children share her blood, her Black blood, her mad Black blood. Belvina knows that she must die, that much is certain—the Black Madness is a death certificate signed at birth and shot into the dark at random. It goes to follow, then, that because Belvina is mad, so too are her children. It makes perfect sense: blood of her blood, and if her blood is poisoned... point A to point B to point C!
I am doing them a favor, she thinks, gnawing at her lip. Everyone knows what happened to Great-Aunt Aster... to succumb to the Black Madness is to live a half life. I am doing them a favor. The logic is infallible; and so Belvina scratches out three hastily-written letters, hands shaking and eyes unblinking, and watches the owls speed away in three different directions. Nolan arrives not even an hour later, bursting from the Floo looking frantic, and so he is the first to fall to her wand. Osiris apparates to the front gate and makes it halfway up the walk before Belvina wrenches the front doors open and kills him mid-step, hitting him again with the Asphyxiation Curse just to be sure. Charybdis, her frail, ugly little thing of a daughter, is last to respond to her summons and so she is last to die.
Goodbye, loves. Belvina has purged her line of her failure like any good Black would do, and all that is left is to put her wand to her heart and say two simple words. In a flash of green, Herbert Burke becomes both a widower and father to none in the same day. When he bursts through the Floo ten minutes too late it is to the sight of his wife, daughter, and youngest son laid out in the receiving room, and beneath his heel is Elara Runcorn's mangled tongue. It takes him half an hour to pick himself up from the floor and go looking for Osiris, only to find his eldest's body sprawled gray in death by one of the poplars lining the walk-up, throat slashed. It takes him a day more to come to terms with it all and call for the Aurors, distantly surprised that none of the three ladies had raised the alarm. The Senior Auror that arrives with the squad is familiar in ways Herbert's dazed mind cannot comprehend until after he has been given a potion for the shock, and then he just pinches his lips and wonders if it is Fate's cruel laughter that he can hear ringing in his ears. What are the odds of this Senior Auror being the same one that killed Denebola Black all those years ago? Never zero, it seems.
Arcturus does not realize that he's going mad until he's seventy-two thinking to himself, I want her heart with me always, while staring at Lysandra. This would be romantic if he wasn't picturing himself peeling her skin back and cracking her ribs open so that he could hold her heart in his hands. He has to excuse himself rather abruptly from the dinner table after that, and as he hunches over the bathroom sink and takes in the weak tint of gray darkening his waterline, he finds himself thinking of Denebola and Aster. At least one. It seems that it is Arcturus' generation that has run out of luck, Belvina having succumb to the curse six years prior.
He does not tell his wife, nor his children, nor his siblings. He is not like his sister, who reached insanity and death in the same day; Arcturus just quietly begins to shuffle the entirety of his life into neat categories—Callidora gets this, Charis gets this, Cedrella gets nothing—and when his will is finalized and his irises have turned to mica flakes, he drinks down an entire flask of Murtlap Essence and falls asleep with a racing mind and twitching hands. The dreams he has as he drifts past the veil all feature Lysandra's bloodied insides cradled close to his chest.
Arcturus Black dies at seventy-four of heart failure. Murtlap Essence is a healing tonic when given the correct dosage, after all, and does not show up on a toxicology report. (If Lysandra thinks any different, she says nothing, but hindsight is twenty-twenty and she spends the entire funeral recalling all the times his temper was a little too short or his stare a little too intense.) Arcturus is survived by his widow and his two daughters, which is more than what can be said about the Burkes—Herbert stays locked up in his shop these days, bitter and sour enough to spoil milk.
Eloïse goes mad at forty-six, though it takes a bit longer for it to catch up to her with how fast she's going—a decade, to be exact. Younger than Belvina and Arcturus, older than Denebola and little Sirius, two years off from Aster.
She understands why the Blacks resort to death when it comes to their madness. It is a mercy killing, the better of two evils, an escape from the horrors of the blood curse. It is such a pity, then, that her own family does not allow her that reprieve.
Walburga is thirty-two and the mercurial glint behind her eye is faint enough to be a trick of the light. She knows, however. She knows, and she refuses to tell anyone, and she refuses to give herself an early death, and she refuses to be caged like cousin Eloïse. Let it come for her, creeping up her legs and tangling around her waist and crawling across her mouth. Let it come and she will do something about it then, but not a second sooner. It is easy to glamor the flinty sheen away—she has always been talented in charms, and this is no different—and purchase the darkest liner she can find, citing a need for make-up experimentation after supposedly seeing it on a witch in Diagon. Aunt Cassiopeia continues to teach her the ways of priestesshood, the deities to invoke and the words to travel down and the rituals only a priestess would know. Walburga is strong—she will keep on top of this Madness until the very last breath.
A few years down the line, when the glint has gotten no brighter and her waterline has darkened no further, there is a big to-do about Eloïse being cured and the subsequent grieving, apathetic fugue the woman has retreated into. The Black Madness finally defeated, but still as inescapable as always. Thomas is cold and tired when he tells her of his ritual's parameters, and as a priestess, Walburga knows from the first word that it is not replicable; regardless, her cunt of a cousin exhausted himself with finding the cure for his mother—he will not expend the effort to find a general cure, nor does he care to. He is a Leighton, not a Black, and Eloïse's line is safe from the curse. Walburga will succumb just as her predecessors.
Eloïse locks herself away to rot in the Northern Keep and Walburga continues on with life. If the older woman went out with a whisper then Walburga will go out with a bang, but it will be by her own terms. She ignores the way the shadows mutter to her, little demons perched on her shoulders, voices belonging to no one ricocheting around in her skull. The hallucinations are a little more difficult, but if Walburga is anything, it is determined. There is a reason that she had been made a priestess rather than a bride.
Druella Rosier—Black, now, though Walburga's delight over that union has since soured—has been a good friend for nearing twenty-five years now, and yet it is a scrying vision that tells Walburga of how cruelly her brother is treating his family. Cygnus hangs over the four girls like their very own Sword of Damocles, blistering in his contempt of them. How many times had she heard him muttering over his lack of an heir? How many times had she missed the way Druella looked to the ground to avoid his hateful stare? She rises out of the vision with a gasping heave, face dripping with water and scrying bowl tipped over before her. How dare he lay his hands on her, she thinks, to which the shadows reply, So kill him.
She blames it on the Madness, what she does next. Walburga is in a nightgown, hair undone, some monstrous hysteria driving her forth when she bursts through the Floo to Cygnus's home and hunts him down like a dog to his office. He only has enough time to blink owlishly at her from over the rim of his nightcap before she flays him alive. There is raucous laughter behind her left eye and dark satisfaction in her heart, but this only lasts long enough for Cygnus' whiskey glass to fall from his limp fingers before the realization of what she's just done catches up with her.
Oh, gods.
She goes to fire-call Antares, and uses Cygnus' own Floo to do so.
Barty is not a Black, but his great-grandfather had been, and if the stories are accurate about his death, he had been one of the mad Blacks. He wonders sometimes if that is what caused him to be the way that he is, some passed-down inheritance that lingered in his blood. His grandmother doesn't think so, says that the Madness follows the family and that Barty is a Crouch and that the curse ended with her because she married in. He wonders if the Blacks are liars like that. It wouldn't surprise him if the Madness leached down into other families, a Fawley here or a Rowle there that went undetected because they weren't a Black. The fact stands that there is something off in Barty's brain, and it isn't his fault.
(He doesn't know of Denebola and how she went mad in a quiet sense, a cold sense, an I'm going to murder a nineteen year-old in the middle of Diagon Alley just to see if I can sense. They are alike in these ways, but Barty doesn't yet realize that madness is not always raucous laughter and wild rage. Madness can be psychopathy that goes under the radar until suddenly it doesn't. Madness can be the edge between genius and insanity and the inability to walk it in a straight line.)
Regulus gets tired of it easily, flighty at the mere mention of his family's blood curse and downright waspish whenever Barty pushes past surface-level inquiries. Barty is a Ravenclaw for a reason, though—he wants to understand, wants to pull it apart, wants to see if he fits into the web the Blacks are tangled within. He pries, and pries, and pries, until Regulus' never-ending patience abruptly runs out one afternoon in the beginning weeks of fifth year.
"The Family Madness stays within the family, Barty," the Slytherin snaps, a refrain heard many times before. "You're a Crouch, for Merlin's sake, and the second your grandmother married into your grandfather's line, the blood curse reached the end of its line. Gods, why are you so obsessed with this?"
Barty flicks his tongue out to catch the corner of his mouth, running his fingertips along the edge of his Divination essay. It is a quick movement that draws blood easily, a tiny cut opening up across the pad of his index finger. He feels the pain of it acutely, but there's a jittery feeling in his lungs that makes him want to do it again. (Regulus is staring at him, though, so he won't.)
"How do you know that-"
And this is where Regulus loses his temper. He reaches across the table and grabs Barty by the jaw in a one-handed vise, fingertips digging harshly into his cheeks; the other hand he uses to leverage himself fully out of his seat so that he can loom over Barty and yank the Ravenclaw's face up to meet his own. The silence is tense enough to hang himself on, teeth grit as Regulus' gaze moves over him ever so slowly—calculating, shrewd, looking for empirical data. The other boy pulls down roughly on the skin beneath Barty's eyes to expose the delicate skin of his inner sockets; all the while his breath puffs against Barty's jaw, and so he stays as still as he can, trying not to fidget until Regulus lets go of his face and reclaims his seat.
"There is no glint," the boy says bluntly. "Your waterline is as pink as mine. I don't doubt you when you claim to have something wrong with your mind, but it's not the Black Madness, Barty. It's distinctive, and you show none of the symptoms."
He looks into it later, just to see if Regulus is a liar. (He also doesn't want to admit to himself that whatever defect he has comes from unknown sources.) Barty follows every lead he can, reads as far back into the archives as the Daily Prophet will allow, scours through all of the yearbooks in the Hogwarts library looking for any hint of darkened waterlines or flinty eyes in someone who does not carry the surname of Black. This goes on for another year despite Regulus' silent disapproval, and by the time Barty finally admits defeat, all he has to show for it is that his grandmother was right, and whatever is off inside of Barty's head is his alone.
This is alright. The Blacks know how to deal with instability, and Barty plans on sticking with Regulus until the day that he can't.
Bellatrix and Sirius are two sides to the same coin. Their Madness has not manifested, and perhaps never will, but when they lock eyes with one another—brown on gray, no glimmer in sight—an echo can be felt that transcends everything.
(She wakes up, sometimes, gnashing her teeth and crying and laughing like a raven, rawk rawk rawk, struggling to breathe through her frantic giggling. The mirror shows her plain irises and a pink waterline each time. Dreams or hallucinations?)
(He gets lost in his head, sometimes, and shivers himself apart before reawakening to the sound of his own hoarse sobbing, cold to the bone with his face set in a rictus smile. The mirror shows his plain irises and a pink waterline each time. Dreams or hallucinations?)
They know without knowing how that it was the two of them to draw the short stick, but they don't think it will manifest in their lifetime, not now. Privately, Bellatrix thinks that it was her father who saved her from her fate—not Cygnus, never Cygnus, but rather Antares. The Black Madness is a generational thing, but because of the adoption, Bellatrix now spans two generations. Perhaps that confused the Madness enough to overlook her; or, maybe it was the fact that Da gave her use of his last name when her father voiced his concern over the Madness, making her a Lestrange in the same way that Thomas was made a Leighton. Sirius has no such excuse for the absence of his own Madness, however, so perhaps her beliefs are baseless.
(A different Bellatrix loses her mind completely and utterly to the point that when Molly Weasley kills her, she cannot even feel relief. A different Sirius shakes more than a handful of screws loose in his brain pre- during- and post-Azkaban and laughs his way right into death. Two sides to the same coin.)
Thomas gives Andromeda all of his life's work, stacks and stacks and stacks upon parchment and ripped out pages of books with notes scrawled in the margins and massive diagrams of rituals, all different, all unique. There are potion recipes and arithmetic calculations and a calendar for different cycles of the moon as well as the sun, a miniaturized version of the family tapestry rolled up like a dusty carpet, piles of finicky metal instruments and phials of silvery memories propped in neat little rows. The tapestry, when she unrolls it, holds detailed descriptions of how each Black went mad—the age of onset, the symptoms, the time it took for them to plummet to rock bottom, how they were put down, who they took with them. (A woman with glacial blue eyes and lily-pale skin stares back at Andromeda. Amaranthea Selwyn née Black, b. 1680, ~15 or 21, hallucinations and—well, Aunt Walburga, what do you think of that?) Thomas has journals detailing countless conversations he's had, all done in the same mechanical scrawl that can only belong to a dictoquill, and records of experiments under lock and key in a heavy iron safe he gives to her with a sharp look in his green eyes. Thomas is a Leighton, but if he had been the person in his generation to pull the short straw, Andromeda wouldn't have been surprised.
"If you want a cure, you will have to find it yourself," he says, and then he leaves her with a mountain of information and no instruction. This is alright. Andromeda is a certified healer, second youngest to graduate from the program (right behind Thomas himself, no less), and she has enough motivation to reroute rivers and carve out canyons.
At least one echoes in her mind, that unwritten rule passed down from generation to generation. Andromeda gets to work.
This is the baton that is passed, Denebola to Aster to Sirius to Belvina to Arcturus to Eloïse to Walburga to Bellatrix to Sirius. This is the baton that will continue to be passed. This is the baton that is a metallic glint to the eye, a darkening of the waterline, and an open-faced casket.