Repetition Fandom:
Disclaimer: Black family & their history belong to JKR, I have merely taken liberties, as always.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1683
Characters/Pairings: Druella; Druella/Cygnus
Summary: How did Druella Black, the mother of the three Black sisters, cope with her own family's desires and expectations? A brief look at her life.
Author's Notes: I love how things spark. I wanted a fic featuring World War II bombers, so I landed here, with the Black sisters' mother, Druella. Another nice way of exploring other characters and their personalities through a host. And as with Tonks and Andromeda, one has to wonder about Druella, and how she brought up three such strong minded, individual girls.
Enjoy!
The bombers fly overhead like migrating birds, and all she can do is lie on her back on the unmown lawn watching them. They are taking part in a war in a world she barely knows and certainly doesn't care about; but they are strangely fascinating as they buzz across the sky, day and night, like clockwork. It is the summer of 1943, and Druella Rosier is fifteen years old.
Her blue tea dress is old and threadbare and two inches too short, with more than a few stains that even their house elf has been unable to get out, but she puts it on anyway. It is the only suitable item of clothing left in her wardrobe. She looks at herself in the old, broken mirror, and is startled by her reflection. She looks like a refugee. Her eyes are huge, her hair long and tangled.
She tilts her head, and her reflection splits in the cracks. Druella Rosier knows about poverty, knows that no matter how old or noble a family can be, in the end it is gold that matters. Preferably large piles of it in the deepest, dragon-guarded vaults of Gringotts, with an engagement ring and a betrothal attached.
This is why she is wearing the blue dress, why she is picking her way down the stairs in cracked patent leather shoes which pinch her toes, why her hair has been braided neatly into a single plait after an hour of brushing and combing. This afternoon, the Blacks are coming to tea, and Druella knows that the fate of the family is resting on her shoulders.
As she enters the parlour, she frowns at how odd it feels to be seeing schoolmates in this way. Alphard and Cygnus Black, the year above and the year below her at Hogwarts, are seated side by side on the sofa. Their older sister Walburga sits tall and proud on the piano stool, looking in barely veiled disgust at the horsehair stuffing poking through the worn velvet cover. "This is my daughter," Druella can hear her mother saying. Her voice sounds far off, as if in another country or a dream. "I believe she is in the year between your two sons at Hogwarts."
Druella curtsies politely to Mr and Mrs Black. "You have a beautiful daughter," she hears Mr Black saying, and blushes politely, as she is meant to.
"Would anybody like to come out into the garden? It's such a nice day." Her tone of voice makes it seem totally unplanned. She sees Alphard smirking, and instantly dislikes him. But Cygnus is nodding; and Fate and Destiny are calling them into the garden.
Half an hour later, her mother is discussing suitable periods of betrothal with the Blacks; and Druella is sitting next to Cygnus, where Alphard had once sat. It was much easier than she had imagined it would be, in the end.
---
The bombers are still flying when she returns to Hogwarts in September, and Druella misses the noise at night in the Slytherin dormitory, a heavy silver ring set with opals on her hand. She wishes it was still summer, and she could lie outside on the grass and watch them fly overhead, and feel free again. For being engaged has given her parents a whole new set of strings to pull, demands to be met and lines to be toed. No longer can she sit in the courtyard, talking with boys from her year; for she is a prize, a trophy, with the Black name all but engraved on her.
Druella hardly notices the chaos going on around her that year. The Chamber of Secrets has opened and closed and a Hufflepuff is dead in the girls' bathroom before she is aware that anything has happened.
She knows something is going on in Slytherin, though; for Cygnus and her younger brother Evan are caught up in it. Druella knows the ringleader, too; a tall, intelligent, handsome boy in her year.
Druella has never liked Tom Riddle. His arrogance has never appealed to her like it does to some of the feather-headed Slytherin girls, who hang on his every word as he rails against Mudbloods and the Ministry in the common room.
She suspects that he has never liked her much, either. Tom Riddle hates rivals, and Druella Rosier is the best in her year at Charms. Her blood could not have been purer were it distilled, but to Tom Riddle, competition is anathema.
But Druella does not care much if she is rivalling him. She has two years left at Hogwarts, and then she will be married. What good will an O in Charms be then?
---
Druella's first daughter is born on her twenty third birthday, a shock of jet black hair and a strong pair of lungs. "It's a girl," Cygnus is saying, his head in the fireplace, and she can hear the disappointment in his voice. She lies back on the linen sheets, and when he surfaces, she looks at him expectantly.
"Bellatrix," he says. "Mother says that she must be called Bellatrix." And with that, he vanishes, shutting the door hard behind him. Druella looks down at the baby, tears rising behind her eyes.
"Bella." It is a whisper, no more. And by the time her next child is born, Druella already knows that her eldest child is going to be a challenge.
---
It was her father's expectations which did it. Bellatrix Black is the eldest, yet not the son her father had hoped for. Druella, heavily pregnant with her second child, barely notices the way her eldest child switches from one personality to another, first begging and wheedling, then defiant, then cruel, as she tries every trick to get her own way.
It is a relief, perhaps, when Andromeda is born, though not in the way Druella expects. Though Cygnus is disappointed, and does nothing to hide it, the tension that has hung over both Druella and the house for nine months has finally broken.
Druella lies in bed with her new daughter and reminisces. Ten years before she had been lying on her back in grass which hadn't been cut for a year, wearing a stained blue tea dress that she had outgrown, watching the Lancaster bombers flying high above, on their way to another country to kill and maim and destroy.
When she looks around at the polished antique furniture and the beautiful curtains of her married life, she realises that gold hasn't brought happiness. It has brought security, perhaps, but not joy.
---
Andromeda is an easy baby from the start, far easier than her sister, who has become quiet and withdrawn since the birth of her sister. Druella notices it, but does nothing except mention it to Cygnus, who shrugs. "Jealousy," he says, and leaves it at that.
The final baby, a girl born nineteen months later, puts some sort of a seal on their marriage. With her husband never at home, and three daughters vying for her attention, each in their own way, Druella Black wonders if this is it. Then she realises she is stupid to wonder. This is it.
---
The years pass. Her girls grow up, and one by one, they head off to Hogwarts. Cygnus, when he's around, acts as if they are all the same person, but Druella knows they are as different as night, dawn and day.
-
There is Bellatrix, dark haired and secretive. Druella doesn't like to guess at what goes on in her eldest daughter's head, but she sees what goes on when Bellatrix thinks her mother isn't looking. She sees the sly pinches and the cruel words inflicted on the younger girls.
As Bella moves up through the school, Druella finds herself becoming more and more afraid of her daughter and what she is capable of. The friends Bella brings home - her cousin Evan Rosier, the Lestrange brothers, a boy called Yaxley - send shivers down her spine.
-
Andromeda, her middle child, gives Druella the least trouble. She is the quietest but the most honest of the three sisters, and acts as a buffer between the cruel whims of Bellatrix and Narcissa's fragility. In Andromeda, Druella sees a reflection of herself, and hopes, but does not expect, that she will not suffer the same fate.
-
Finally, there is Narcissa, utterly comfortable in her role as the baby of the family. With her blonde curls and delicate features, Narcissa is there as someone for Bellatrix to tease, and when the girls are young, not a day goes by without a bout of tears. But Druella notices her youngest growing stronger as the years go by, becoming more determined and less willing to put up with Bellatrix's jibes.
---
On the piano in the drawing room of the Black manor sit three photographs of the daughters in heavy silver frames. A fourth lies unseen in a drawer of Druella Black's dressing table, covered by a velvet cloth. All were taken on the same day, as a Christmas present for their father. He had merely glanced at them, placed them on the piano, and never looked at them again.
Eight months later, one of the photos was removed, and another was cut apart to remove one of the occupants. Bellatrix and Narcissa stare up from the photographs on the piano, the fulfillment of their parents' wishes. Some days, Druella Black removes the photograph hidden away in the dressing table drawer, and gazes at the face of the daughter she lost.
A little over ten years after she loses one daughter, another is gone to a cell in Azkaban, and suddenly the Black name is tarnished. Cygnus is dead too, drowned by firewhiskey. Our parents brought us together, Druella thinks. Our parents brought us together.
---
And now she knows the truth. Marriage and the Black name have brought her nothing. As she sits alone in the cobwebbed filled drawing room, Druella Black knows, forty years too late, that in the end life is about happiness.