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flightlessfinch · 2 months ago

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garden song by phoebe bridgers / the black brothers.

"the doctor put her hands over my liver she told me my resentment's getting smaller"

in the house of black, resentment and anger is a birthright. it's passed down from parent to child, and the only escape is estrangement. if you're disinherited, you cannot inherit your mother's rage.

this song makes me think of both of the black brothers, but especially sirius. being scapegoated for your entire life will build resentment toward the golden child whether you want the anger to be there or not. sirius loves his brother, but in childhood they were not only brothers, best friends, but rivals for their parents' love and affection. favouritism is toxic. it builds a rift between children. at ten, regulus learned that association with his own brother would sour his image in his parents' eyes. he lived in fear of becoming him. he'd been taught that he could only earn love with obedience and "goodness." sirius' abuse was a tool orion and walburga used to exert control over regulus. "if you're bad, if you're anything like your brother, this will be you. we won't love you anymore." when you are a child, losing your parents' love is the subject of nightmares.

their gentle treatment of regulus served as another tool of abuse toward sirius. "we care capable of being loving, patient, and gentle. just not to you, because you are wrong, and bad, and broken. you are a rotten child. if you were different, we would love you." they had completely different childhoods under the same roof.

children growing up in abusive households don't have a baseline for "normal." abuse is normal to them. they don't know it's abusive or bad until they are much older, and reflect on their experiences in childhood (if they even remember, which oftentimes they don't. trauma gets written over by the brain all the time). sirius likely thought he was evil, and bad, and broken when he was a kid. he was told he deserved it by his parents, and they're his parents, so he believed them. he loved his mother and father. he was hungry for their love in return, but he couldn't do anything right in their eyes.

the scapegoat cannot earn love with "goodness" or obedience. everything they do is wrong.

sirius grew up angry. he was taught his emotions weren't important, and he was punished for expressing himself, so his quiet childhood anger grew louder and louder. he was hungry for love, but he learned love was impossible for him to acquire, so he settled for attention. hatred can be a substitute for love. at least when he was hated he wasn't invisible.

"i grew up here 'til it all went up in flames except the notches in the door frame"

sirius and regulus had a complicated relationship that often toed the line between love and hatred, because every lesson they learned about love taught them that it is conditional and transactional. they loved each other but it was in a stormy, inconstant way. they fought like cats. the bond between brothers is vicious in a way a relationship with anyone else could never be. they were in each others first memories, they don't remember what it's like not to have a brother (until sirius learns, and realizes estrangement and death are more different than he imagined when he left. "you're dead to me" is one thing, death is quite another).

they are the only two people on earth who know what it was like to grow up in that house.

i don't think they ever apologized to each other for anything. they've said unforgivable things to each other over and over again, and didn't address a word of it once the anger faded, just like their parents. they were close when they were kids because sirius hadn't ruined himself in his parents' eyes yet. likely, before sirius was sorted into gryffindor he was his parents' favourite child because he was their heir.

regulus was more than likely an afterthought most of the time for the first ten years of his life. he isn't as charming, handsome, or outgoing as sirius, which probably resulted in negative comparisons. "why can't you be more like sirius? why are you so shy?" that sort of thing. he grew up hungry for love, and sirius grew up nourished by it because he was golden.

then, he revealed his "flaw" and his parents turned on him. this must have been terrifying. regulus, after being an afterthought for his entire life, was suddenly the favourite. despite sirius' suffering, regulus must have been quietly happy about this for a long time. children aren't as empathetic as adults are. they're also selfish, it's developmentally normal. regulus didn't understand why sirius couldn't just be "good" and stop making their parents angry. he didn't understand that no matter what sirius did, there would always be a fault in it.

to his parents sirius was a rotten, bad child. no matter how much you wash rotten fruit, it won't unripen. he was doomed. he probably tried to please them, especially when he was younger (first to fourth year, i'd say, before he learned that his childhood was not normal). he was clever, he probably brought home perfect marks with the hope that his parents would offer him a crumb of affection, and was left disappointed every single time. which resulted in more rebellion because if he was going to be bad in their eyes no matter what, why would he even try to make them happy?

regulus didn't have friends like james or remus to help him understand that his childhood was abusive. if you believe his friends were people like barty crouch jr and evan rosier, both of them probably had similar childhood experiences to regulus. the rosier family is also old, traditional pure-bloods. barty canonically has a horrible relationship with his dad, which his mother seemingly enabled if not normalized. she obviously loved barty a lot, but she also failed to protect him from his father's anger.

because he didn't understand how abusive his parents were to him as well as sirius, he probably blamed sirius for his own suffering. when he talked about it with his friends, barty and evan probably would have agreed with him. "they're nice to you, they'd be nice to him too if he wasn't such a shit-stirrer. he's doing it for attention." he was taught to hate his brother. his parents indirectly told him with their actions that sirius didn't deserve love, and as they grew older and grew apart, when sirius found unconditional love and acceptance outside of their family, regulus' resentment toward sirius turned into hatred.

regulus was a lonely child. he was shown over and over again that he could not be himself or he would not be loved by his family. he was taught that he couldn't be close with his own brother. as a subconscious form of self-preservation he likely distanced himself from sirius regardless, because if he knew him and loved him less it wouldn't hurt so much to inevitably see him be abused right in front of him. to survive, regulus made himself so small he hardly existed. he didn't interfere with his parents' punishments and harsh words for sirius because if he did, he would lose the only source of acceptance and love in his life.

sirius watched regulus watch him suffer and do nothing. he decided he was a coward, and he didn't love him enough to help him.

"i don't know when you got taller see our reflection in the water"

sirius waited until his sixth year to run away. i think if regulus wasn't in that house he would have ran away from home much sooner.

when you are the older sibling in an abusive household you feel a sense of responsibility to protect your younger sibling. you are automatically parentified. your parents are not to be trusted, so your little brother comes to you with the big, scary questions he has. you become independent and self-sufficient. you stand between your abusive parent and your brother because you don't want him to get hurt. you grow up fast because if you don't you'll suffer more, and your sibling will suffer more too.

sirius was taught that he deserved the hatred he experienced, and he knew if he left the hatred would have nowhere to go but his brother. the idea of leaving him alone there, and not knowing whether or not he was safe, whether or not his parents were in a rage, whether or not regulus had a question that needed answering that he couldn't bring to their parents, made sirius feel obligated to stay.

this brings us back to resentment.

regulus blamed sirius for their parents abuse. sirius blamed regulus for the abuse he experienced, because he was staying in that house for him, so every terrible thing he experienced, every harsh word, was for regulus. all of this, while regulus didn't believe they were being abused at all.

i imagine regulus wasn't grateful that sirius stayed. he probably thought he was stupid for not leaving whenever he had a chance. he probably said so every single time sirius went to him for comfort after something awful happened in that house. they had explosive fights about this, the kind of fights you can only have with your brother. this went on for two years, until something truly horrific happened and sirius had to go.

"i hopped the fence when i was 17 then i knew what i wanted"

even if you have to get out to survive, leaving an abuser is hard. sirius still loved his parents, and he loved his brother. he must have felt guilty for not being the son they wanted, despite his rage toward them. abusers are not abusive all the time. he likely has fond memories with both of his parents, as well as his brother. his mother's hands were gentle as often as they were harsh, and the emotional confusion that is created with that sort of inconsistency will result in guilt when a child thinks of their parent in a negative light.

regulus likely compounded this when they discussed it. "our parents aren't abusive. you're ungrateful. you want to be coddled. they're hard on us because they want us to be strong. you shouldn't speak that way about our mother. she says she does everything out of love for us, she's our mother, sirius, do you really think she's a monster?" sirius doesn't think she's a monster, he thinks she's cruel, and abusive, because his friends helped him to see her honestly.

in canon, when he discusses regulus' blood supremacist beliefs, sirius says: "...my idiot brother, soft enough to believe them..." (referring to their parents). i don't think that this mindset, for regulus, stopped at blood supremacy. regulus is always trapped in his parents' version of their childhood, and he is so emotionally invested in it that seeing his own childhood any other way is unthinkable to him. if his parents are abusive and unloving, and he has spent his whole life making himself small to appease them, how could he live with that reality? how could he bear it? it is a sunk-cost fallacy.

every punishment regulus was ever given, he was convinced he deserved. sirius knew it wasn't fair. they couldn't see eye to eye.

the night sirius left, i think regulus realized he was right about their parents. i think he thought they abused sirius, but not him. he realized that the way their parents treated sirius couldn't possibly be normal. i think he died believing his parents didn't abuse him. the guilt he must have felt about this is unfathomable. believing his brother was abused and for some reason he was not, when regulus was abused, is so painful.

regulus quietly resented sirius for leaving him behind. in his ugliest, most selfishly human moments he viewed it as a lack of love, not entirely self-preservation. his self-esteem was undoubtedly already terrible because of the nature of his parents inconsistent and conditional love, when sirius finally left regulus probably internalized his absence as proof that there is something fundamentally unlovable about him. they didn't speak after sirius left, even at school. if regulus spoke to sirius, he knew he might get in trouble for it. there must have been a sense of betrayal, no matter how justified sirius was for leaving. regulus doesn't seem like he would be able to handle guilt well. sirius represents a lot of unpleasant emotion for regulus. regulus represents a lot of unpleasant emotion for sirius. they probably both actively avoided each other.

it didn't help that there was another, external barrier rising between them.

they went to opposite sides of the war. regulus found community and acceptance among the death eaters. sirius found community and acceptance with the marauders and the order of the phoenix.

"no, i'm not afraid of hard work i get everything i want i have everything i wanted"

by his sixth year, regulus has everything he always wanted as a child. his parents' undivided attention and love. friends. power. it is bittersweet.

by his seventh year, sirius has everything he always wanted as a child. a home far away from his family. freedom. boundless love. it is bittersweet.

their differences are irreconcilable.

sirius heals the wound of his childhood and tries to build a life he is proud of, but it is impossible to escape the shadow of his family. they haunt him. he worries about his brother the same way he did when they were kids, but he knows he cannot stand up for him anymore. it was too much. he had to save himself. he knows the danger regulus is in, and the dark path he is walking down, but he can't help him because regulus doesn't want to be helped.

you can't save someone who doesn't want to be saved.

"everything's growing in our garden you don't have to know that it's haunted"

#character study #hp headcanon #sirius black #regulus black #sirius and regulus #the black brothers #the house of black #black brothers angst #regulus arcturus black #sirius orion black #the marauders era #marauders #all of this plays in my head like a music video when i listen to this song #song lyrics #garden song

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