A / N : Written for the "Foreign" challenge on xoxLewrahxox's Forum. Not my best work but I'd love to know what you think. :)
They go on holiday every year. Several times a year as children, before school imposes structure on their days.
France, Germany, Italy . . . Mother and Father choose. It's never their choice, even as they grow older . . . but Bella and Andy have their favourites, even so.
Andromeda likes Northern France and Scandinavia. She likes shingle-clad beaches and storm-grey seas, strange, forlorn places, just on the edge of the wild. She spins her sisters round at the foot of glaciers, her voice already an echo as she spreads her arms to embrace some grim horizon.
Bellatrix likes forests. She's too pale for the heat, and too wilful. She likes Germany and the Russian border, likes to shake her siblings off and go wandering alone, in search of some mystery. Cissy catches a glimpse of her sister once. Her face is half in shadow, and she is smiling to herself. Give up your secrets, she seems to say. Give up your secrets unto me. Bella likes ancient forests, roots which twist and delve beneath her feet, branches twining high above her head.
Cissy likes neither.
Brambles catch at her dress and stones lodge in her shoes as she bobs along in her sisters' wake, until even Andromeda grows tired of her. Cissy is never happy 'til she's home. She breaks into a smile the moment her fingers fasten on the Portkey, and then they are home, home, and she dances through the house, across floors newly waxed for their return, laughing as the dustcovers rise like white kites on the breeze, as the dust motes dance in dying light.
Bella kicks off her shoes and Andy groans at the thought of unpacking, but Cissy simply smiles, her queendom restored to her.
The girls grow up, and the holidays stop. Andromeda leaves and her old haunts become abandoned remnants of a treacherous past. Bella finds new haunts, closer to home - trees of a different sort, now. Trees with hungry, questing roots. Mother and Father still take holidays, but alone. Mother takes a week here or there by the sea, for her nerves, and Father takes tours by train.
Cissy stays at home, accompanied by parties, and scandal, and Lucius Malfoy. His home is ghastly, a dreary, dead mausoleum, but the gardens are beautiful. It's a fragile, fleeting beauty, and it withers at the first touch of frost, but Narcissa is intoxicated. Lucius protests, argues their impermanence, but without much fervour. She makes him smile when he shouldn't, kisses him swallow-swift beside the fountain, serves as the colour in his life the flowers provide in hers. He tells her the feeling is foreign to him.
They honeymoon in France, and holiday in Florence. Lucius shows her botanical gardens and fine architecture, well-sculpted worlds. Narcissa models her own upon them, and Lucius vows to better them.
When they step from the fire the light fades in their eyes, forgotten gloom settling around an empty house.
He kisses her by the hearth, and she tastes his hunger for more.