Fanfic / The Choices That Make Us

A Harry Potter story by Anla'Shok detailing the lives of the five Black cousins; Sirius, Regulus, Narcissa, Bellatrix and Andromeda. The story focuses on their troubled upbringing, interactions with each other, varying sense of family loyalty and roles during the two Wizarding Wars before, after and during the events of the novels.

The story itself can be found here The Choices That Make Us. There is also a companion piece, Defiant Until the End about the three times James and Lily Potter defied Voldemort.

Anla'Shok has not added to any of their stories since early 2022, so it is possible that the unfinished fic is dead.

Tropes in this story:

• Abusive Parent:
  • Orion and Walburga Black are emotionally and physically abusive. As Sirius puts it, they do things to him that would get them sent to Azkaban if they ever tried doing it to someone else's child.
  • Cyngus and Druella Black put curses on Bellatrix in an effort to keep her from marrying without their permission. When Andromeda gives birth to Tonks, due to her own parents’ lack of example, she has no idea about how to be a loving parent until she starts watching her husband and taking cues from him.
  • As per canon, Tobias Snape is a mean drunk who is pretty nasty to his son.
  • Snape's mother was cursed and stripped of her magic by her father for refusing an arranged marriage.
• Accidental Suicide: Druella Black burns herself to death with magical fire that she summons in a desperate attempt to drive a swarm of dementors out of her house after they spend weeks hovering around to make Druella and her husband miserable (likely at the instigation of their estranged daughter Bellatrix).
• Adaptational Villainy: While Regulus and Narcissa get a Sympathetic P.O.V., both are also involved in various deeds far blacker (albeit not without nuanced motives) than anything they did in canon, such as killing Regulus's uncle Alphard and setting up the Prewett brothers to be ambushed and killed.
• Affectionate Nickname: Sirius calls Harry (the son of his friend James/Prongs) "Prongslet."
• Alas, Poor Villain: For all of their scores of nauseating pureblood supremacist and Abusive Parents moments, the last days of Walburga and Orion Black are surprisingly sad as they mourn Regulus, reflect on the broken status of their extended family, come to hate the Dark Arts, and even regain a little affection and longing for Sirius that they never manage to convey to their older son.
• Ambition Is Evil: Plenty of Death Eaters in both wars end up in the thrall of Voldemort because they see him as a chance for political advancement of themselves or their pet causes. Also, Mrs. Pankinson ends up serving a life sentence in Azkaban for a series of chilling crimes committed partially to try to impress Bellatrix Lestrange and be taken under her wing.
• Anachronic Order: The chapters jump around between characters, and any one chapter may cover anything from a few days to most of a character's lifetime, while subsequent chapters may give a different character's view of an already-covered time period.
• An Arm and a Leg: Regulus cuts off his right arm after he takes Voldemort's Horcrux in order to get rid of the dark mark that could be used to track him, and to fake his death.
• The Atoner: Regulus becomes deeply remorseful for his acts as a Death Eater and strives to stop Voldemort's plans and live a humble and virtuous life as atonement.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Blacks, and nearly every other pureblood family are full of members who hate each other.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: The only Azakaban to treat Sirius well is a man named Gibbon, and it turns out this good treatment is because he is a Death Eater sympathizer who thinks Sirius really did betray the Order of the Phoenix.
• The Confidant: At various points in the story, Snape listens to Regulus and Narcissa’s problems and gives them advice with a certain amount of loyalty and affection even after he becomes a spy for the Order of the Phoenix.
• Critical Staffing Shortage: The roles of Hogwart's deputy headmaster, head of House, and Transfigurations professor are normally filled by two or three different people, but McGonogall is given all three jobs (and the novice Snape is made head of Slytherin) due to fewer people wanting to teach at Hogwarts after the first war against Voldemort.
• Dead Guy Junior: Regulus is named after his deceased great-uncle on his father’s side of the family, who the family greatly misses.
• Death by Adaptation: Lavender Brown and Ernie Macmillan are mentioned as casualties of the Battle of Hogwarts when Lavender's fate was less clear in the books and there was nothing to indicate Ernie had died.
• Descent into Addiction: After losing her immediate family and falling out with most of the few peers who can tolerate her (pureblood supremacists whose support for Voldemort makes her furious after what happened to Regulus), Walburga Black spends the last years of her life constantly using the kinds of drugs she once disapproved of her brother Alphard selling. She is at her nastiest during the rare moments when she is sober, and substance abuse hastens her death by a number of years.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Sirius playing with a Muggle neighbor and his dog causes his father to murder that neighbor.
  • When Narcissa overhears a classmate insinuate that she's promiscuous, she pretends to seduce him, leading him on with the promise of sex while deliberately sabotaging his friendships and academic performance for weeks before publicly rebuking and humiliating him.
• Driven to Suicide: After hearing of Regulus's death, his father commits suicide, while reinstating Sirius as his heir as an act of defiance against Voldemort.
• Due to the Dead: Andromeda and Narcissa use magic to scatter Bellatrix's ashes into space after the war.
• Everyone Has Standards: McGonagall mentions that, while Mad Eye Moody has some Knight Templar aspects, he was appalled to learn that the Hogwarts staff assumed he would have ever cast the unforgivable curses instead of students as a learning experience like his imposter Crouch did.
• Faking the Dead: Regulus uses a memory charm to make Kreacher believe he was killed by the inferno when really he escapes, cutting off his arm and leaving it outside the Forbidden Forest so Death Eaters will find it and believe he was killed there, while journeying to Asia to live among Muggles.
• Family Theme Naming: Petunia and Lily Evans' mother and grandfather also have flower names, causing Narcissa to point out to Pansy Pankinson that the Evans family could easily be a squib branch of her family, and that even if they aren't, imagining it's true might help her care less about blood purity.
• Foregone Conclusion: Anyone whose read the books, or even the characters wiki pages, has a good idea of the basics about what's going to happen with the five cousins, with the suspense coming from filling in the gaps, and establishing their relationships with each other. Although Regulus faking his death is meant to be a Wham Episode.
• Forgiveness: Andromeda and Narcissa eventually mend fences after the war.
• Go-Karting with Bowser: Junior Death Eater Regulus is on better terms with several of the Order of the Phoenix-affiliated kids than Harry ever was with Draco and his cronies. They occasionally chat together at mealtimes or while working on spells and are guarded but affable and trying to understand each other better. However, the tension is still there, such as when Regulus tells Gladys that she'd better not put off any conversations she wants to have with her grandmother Dorcas Meadows, due to Dorcas being on the Death Eaters' radar for her Order of the Phoenix work.
• Good Is Not Soft: Sirius is the most willing of the Order of the Pheonix to use violence against Death Eaters.
• Heel Realization: Like in canon, Regulus gets this after spending enough time with Voldemort.
• Hellhole Prison: Azkaban is portrayed at its worst in the story, through the perspectives of Sirius and Bellatrix.
• His Name Is...: The story shows Sirius being stunned by Aurors right as he's halfway through trying to tell them that Wormtail is still there as a rat.
• If You're So Evil, Eat This Kitten!: After Regulus captures one of Eliphias Doge's granddaughters during a mission, his fellow Death Eaters tell him to use the Imperius curse on the girl largely to observe if he has the resolve to. He makes an effort to, but her magic is too strong, and he doesn’t really want to anyway.
• Impoverished Patrician: Cyngus Black, one of the cruelest and proudest members of his Blue Blood family, ends up in this state after his wife burns their house down while trying to clear out dementors. Cyngus is forced to live off of his sister's begrudging charity. They don't get along well, and she kicks him out with instructions to ask his daughter Narcissa to let him move into Malfoy Manor. Narcissa's violent refusal briefly sends Cyngus back to his sister's house before he emigrates to South America and spends the rest of his days as a con artist who can't even afford a house to himself.
• Improbable Infant Survival: Eliphias Doge's six-year-old granddaughter Bryony is captured by Death Eaters, several of whom show some Would Hurt a Child indications, only to escape when seeing Kreacher causes her to call out for her own family house elf, who appears, grabs her, and disappparates them both to safety.
• Innocently Insensitive: Muggle missionary Brother Allen (who isn't in on The Masquerade) doesn't know any better than to refer to an orphan showing uncontrolled magical abilities as a "poor child", but the mere fact that he does so is a sign that she needs to be raised in the wizarding world, where people see her magic as a good thing.
• Inspector Javert: Downplayed but Cyrus Diggory, grandfather of Cedric Diggory, is not so quick to forgive Narcissa for abetting various Death Eater crimes after the war and seizes a pretext to arrest her and douse with with veritaserum to try and find out any previously unknown crimes.
• Law of Inverse Fertility: The first time that Regulus ever has sex, with a girl who was believed to be sterile, he gets her pregnant.
• Let the Past Burn: Snape burns down his mother's family's mansion after the First Wizarding War due to guilt about all the atrocities the Death Eaters committed there.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Snape's feelings towards Lilly get this treatment when Narcissa speaks with him about it at the end of the war.
  Narcissa: I'm sorry about Lily.
  Snape: Thank you for saying that, but please never bring it up again.
• Locked Out of the Loop: Due to the hurried nature of their Kangaroo Court incarceration, it's years before Sirius finds out that the Longbottoms were tortured into insanity or Bellatrix finds out that Sirius is also a prisoner.
• Lonely Together: In the first couple years after the war, Pansy reflects that after trying to turn Harry in before the Battle of Hogwarts, her only remaining friends are Goyle and Nott, who are both pariahs themselves for aiding the Death Eaters in torturing people.
• Long-Lost Relative: Here it's speculated that muggleborns are all descended from squibs who were abandoned by pureblood families, with it even being noted that Hermoine could be descended from a Black in this manner.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Sirius experiences a moment of this after his friends call him out for nearly tricking Snape into confronting a werewolf, causing Sirius to admit that he's inherited more negative qualities from his parents then he's admitted before, and needs to break free of them.
• My Greatest Failure: Cyrus Diggory believes not investigating Harry's claims that his name was placed in the Goblet of Fire (due to Fudge not wanting a scandal about the Tournament's security) was the worst mistake he ever made. An investigation might have saved his grandson's life.
• Nepotism: Just about every important job at the Daily Prophet has been in the hands of a single family (or alternated between a handful of families) for the past four generations or more.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Andromeda encourages Bellatrix to spend more time with Voldemort, before realizing what kind of man he is, due to feeling it would do her sister good to know and respect a half-blood.
• Parental Substitute: The Potter's care for Sirius after he runs away from home, so much that when an Azakaban guard tells Sirius that his mother died he initially thinks this means Mrs. Potter.
• Psychic-Assisted Suicide: Regulus and Bellatrix kill Alphard Black by using the Imperius curse to make him take a lethal amount of his drug stash.
• Rape by Proxy: While trying to set a trap for the Prewett Brothers by using a family of their friends as bait, Avery and Mulciber use the Imperius curse to make the youngest hostage have sex with his mother. This sadistic distraction ruins the trap by making them miss Molly Weasley arriving with her brothers, who she manages to save, at least for then, along with shone of the hostages.
• Sadistic Choice: Narcissa and Andromeda both want to visit Sirius and/or Bellatrix in Azkaban, but have the futures of their children hung over their heads (explicitly in Narcissa's case, ambiguously in Andromeda's) to make them drop the issue.
• Sanity Slippage: Bellatrix has her issues before going into Azakaban, but is far worse afterwards. Her husband Rodolphus is also unrecognizable afterwards, having lost his sense of self during that long confinement (which is part of why he and Bellatrix are so distant after escaping from Azkaban).
• Self-Made Orphan: Snape and his mother trick his abusive father into blundering into a lethal magical trap at Voldemort's urgings, which is followed by Mrs. Snape then killing her own abusive father and brother.
• The Scapegoat: Rita Skeeter, who is sent to Azakaban for six years after the war, is presented as being this for the rest of the Daily Prophet, who were rotten and complacent a long time before she came along and made her write some nasty stuff to even get the job.
• Sibling Rivalry: Sirius and Regulus have it bad, (but not quite to the point of Cain and Abel depths) even before the Wizarding War. As Word of God puts it, Sirius is talented, and Regulus is loved and each brother feels the other has it better.
• That Man Is Dead:
  • At times, Bellatrix is described as being a completely different person than she was before her time in Azkaban.
  • Regulus feels that Voldemort may have had some goodness or reason (or at least limited restraint) in him once, but he killed the person he used to be the moment he split his soul making a horcrux.
• Thicker Than Water: Bellatrix always holds back going against Sirus and Andromeda during the first wizarding war because of this, and it inspires Regulus to go visit Andromeda after finding out about the horcruxes.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Regulus, Bellatrix, Pansy Parkinson and Draco are all a lot more adorable as kids before getting blood purity into their heads.
• We Used to Be Friends: Regulus's friendships at Hogwarts suffer due to his falling in with the Death Eaters and refusing to listen any time someone tries to get it through his head how insane their philosophy is.
• What the Hell, Hero?: When Mad-Eye Moody tries to convince Sirius not to go to the Department of Mysteries, Sirius tells him to shut up, saying that Mad Eye owes him this after he and the rest of the Order let him rot in Azkaban without even giving him a chance to deny the allegations against him while he was in a rational state of mind.
• Would Hurt a Child: Voldemort and his people.