No Children

She carved the lines into her victim's face. The feeling that she craved every moment of every day - the dense satisfaction - finally settled pleasantly into her bones as she continued scraping her favorite knife across, through, into the flesh. Blood ran cordial-red and she could lick her lips with the beauty of it. Grinning madly, she let the blood soak into her skin, the warmth of it diffusing through her whole body.

Quickly it cooled. She shoved away from the limp - useless - body, heels clicking on the stone floor as she strode away. Up the stairs. Into the corridor. Up more stairs. Through the labyrinth of the manor and into the sitting room, where her sister flicked through a magazine.

"Try not to get blood on my furniture, dear," her sister said calmly and turned another page. Her sister was dead pale, the same shade of white as the corpse in her basement - but she didn't think of that.

It was impossible to keep the sarcasm and mockery from her voice. "Still worried, darling?" But she tried, she did.

"Still filled with vicious bloodlust, dear?" Narcissa never missed a chance to cut to Bellatrix's soft spots.

That is the essential problem with the bond of sisterhood, Bellatrix thought to herself. They know you too well. They know your weaknesses. They know your failures. And they exist in a constant state of competition. We all know what Daddy thought of his girls. Too many. When Sirius and Regulus would visit - he'd decry his fate to father the weaker sex. He'd despair at his lack of a son, he'd blame himself. As if they couldn't tell. As if they couldn't see it in his eyes as he stood an arm's length away.

And it was much the same in other households, she supposed. There were too many girls, battling it out for what little affection was offered them. Fighting like dogs. Fighting like rabid dogs that pulled the flesh, fighting like dogs whose teeth cut deep -

She terminated that line of thought. She'd had her fix. She'd taken her kill.

"The Cruciatus curse would be much neater, you know. You might actually get some information, for once - "

Her head snapped at the sound of Narcissa's voice, smooth and sultry. "Would you like a chance, sister? A shot at the glory? Think you can do better than me?" It escaped her notice that in comparison with Narcissa, he voice was jumpy and schizophrenic.

Narcissa looked up from her reading, folding the magazine carefully in her lap and lacing her fingers. Studying her sister with narrowed eyes. Bellatrix, silhouetted by the setting sun in the window, had taken a fighting stance. Mad. Mad as always. "Glory?" her sister said, voice filled with feigned curiosity and veiled threat. About to go in for her own kill. "I don't find that there is much glory squatting in a squalid cellar, ripping into the already half-dead body of some nobody without any true meaning to the cause. It's a simple, debasing job. And when the Dark Lord finally sees that you can't even do that, we'll see which sister ends up in the good graces of his Lordship."

It cut her through the heart. Bellatrix stood straight and tall as possible. "The Dark Lord trusts me," she hissed with a desperate edge to her tone.

"The Dark Lord trusts no-one," Narcissa said with some finality, returning to her magazine.

"Mum!"

Andromeda kept folding the clothes. Calmly, determined not to let her daughter see her crack. "Darling, don't shout," she called down to her daughter.

"Mu-u-um!" Her shrill voice grew more insistent.

"Darling, I said don't shout." Of course, she had been saying it since Nymphadora learned to speak.

Andromeda quickened her pace, folding as fast as she could. Her daughter's voice carried up the stairs. "What're you saying - I hate when she does this, she knows I can't hear her - MUM!"

"I said, don't shout!"

There was the smallest pause. "KEEP YOUR CLOTHES ON, WOMAN, I'M DUE TO POP SOON. I DON'T NEED THE STRESS, DAMN YOU!"

Andromeda couldn't help but laugh at her daughter. She never could. Giggling slightly she gathered her baskets and carried them back downstairs. "You wicked girl," she said under her breath.

Nymphadora began to shout from her place lying on her back on the sofa, "I'm wicked? Me? Your precious angel?"

"Oh good, that she hears," Andromeda muttered to herself, then giggled. Dropping the baskets on the floor in the living room, she threw out her arms and cried to the heavens. "What? What have I done to deserve a daughter such as this?"

Nymphadora pulled her mother down onto the couch with her. "Mummy," Nymphadora began in a high-pitched, squeaking voice. "Mummy, do you love me?"

Andromeda wrapped an arm around her daughter. "You know I do, Nymphadora." Her daughter snuggled closer into her side.

She put her hand over her bulging abdomen. "I can't wait to meet my baby," she whispered. "Can you imagine? Her cute button nose, her brown hair? Her blue eyes?"

Andromeda chuckled. "Nymphadora, don't be foolish. What if it isn't a girl?"

"It is, Mum. I can tell," Nymphadora smiled a secret smile to herself. Andromeda rolled her eyes and stroked her daughter's spiked pink hair. They were quiet for a few minutes, and it was what they did now. They lived life, because it just didn't stop, not for anyone. But in the quiet moments they found the grief waiting.

"I miss Dad," she mumbled to her mother's waiting ear.

"I know," she whispered back, smoothing down her daughter's hair and kissing her soothingly on the head. "So do I."

Bellatrix was pacing. She often did. Andromeda stretched out in an unladylike way and watched her sister go back and forth across the comfortable carpeted common room.

"What are you thinking of, Bellatrix?" Andromeda wondered aloud.

"Don't bother, Andromeda," Bellatrix replied instantaneously, thoughtlessly and Andromeda felt the sting of her disregard.

She closed her eyes for just a second, then stood.

"I'm going to bed," she declared flatly. Climbing the staircase slowly, she stopped in on Narcissa's dorm, filled with giggly girls. "G'night, Narcissa," Andromeda said quietly, and waved to her smiling sister, whose long flowing hair was being braided.

Andromeda shut the door and pulled at her own locks, chopped short in a fit of vindictive rage. She heard Bellatrix coming up the stairs behind her, but she ignored her sister. They had no need to speak.

Reaching her dorm, she threw open the door and fell into her bed, the spindly frame banging into the stone with a metallic ping. Her dorm-mates were silent, dead asleep on their matching beds. Andromeda wondered whether she'd been using too much of the sleeping drought, but the idea flitted unconcernedly away as soon as it had come.

Restless, her thoughts turned to her sisters. The line of thought didn't go very far either. She cast glances around the room, bored and despondent. The short little bookcase they shared sat in the corner and she perused the books brought by her classmates. Thoroughly unimpressed, she tossed them aside and stretched to get her blood flowing. Grabbing her wand, she decided enough was enough and charged back downstairs, into the common room and out into the corridor. Then she began to walk.

It was numbing and painless to let her feet hit the stone and so she did it, and it took her to a place she'd only been once before: she'd been infatuated with an entitled boy who had stark black hair perfectly coiffed and a thin, lanky body. They had gone up to the kitchens and they had learned the name of a house-elf to call when they needed food. They hadn't gone back, obviously. They soon fell out.

Finally finding herself in the correct corridor lined with paintings of roast pig and fruit and cheese and wine, she studied each of them. She knew she could remember which painting was the one. Suddenly from the darkened end of the corridor she heard a noise. Steps.

Gasping she tried to draw back into the shadows. Then emerged - then emerged a boy. She looked at him. He was rummaging in a sack, walking with a steady gait. He was wide in the shoulders. She wondered if he played Quidditch. She noted his robes and tie - Hufflepuff.

She blinked. He continued rummaging, finally stopping and kneeling on the floor, opening the rucksack and sticking his entire head into it, followed by his arms. Andromeda heard him say, "Eureka!" with a sort of echo and he pulled his entire torso out of the bag with a feather in hand. She blinked again.

His head snapped up to see her. He looked up into her eyes and she felt her heart lighten with his expression - apprehension and guilt. His eyes were brown.

"Hi," he said confusedly. "An... Andromeda?"

She started, stood tall and with back straight. "Er, yes. Yes, I'm Andromeda," she said. She was suddenly defensive as she said sharply, "How did you know?"

He laughed at that, standing again and tossing his sack onto his back. He looked at her through light eyelashes, head bowed, and shrugged bashfully. She gave him a look that prompted more information. He sighed happily and continued studying the paintings surrounding them. "You're Andromeda Black. You set your textbooks on fire. Habitually. You... You're noticeable." He turned his head and smiled at her, and she had never seen a smile look so innocent.

"Well I don't think it's quite fair," she said, crossing her arms belligerently. "You knowing who I am and me having no idea who you are."

He frowned then. "You don't know me?" he said bewilderedly.

Then his eyes opened wide as he realized that she wasn't, in fact, joking. "Well imagine that!" he said suddenly, turning away from her abruptly and heading toward a huge painting of a fruitbowl.

Standing there, arms crossed, she looked after him. Then she shouted, "Wait!" as it began to seem as if he were going to ignore her.

Her.

"Wait just a second!" she shouted, following him and his feather. He glided it gently along the painting of the pear, paying no heed to what was essentially a demand. "Hey, look at me!" she said, pulling on his sleeve as the portrait creaked open. He let himself be pulled, rolling his eyes. Faced with his bored expression, gently mussed hair, she stopped for a second. Finally she burst, "What is it?"

"You have no idea who I am," he said matter-of-factly.

"So?" she asked, crossing her arms again.

"So," he began, taking a breath. His face contorted in a pained expression. He gestured lamely with his hands, avoiding her eyes. "So I… Well we're both year sixes, yeah? We've had about forty classes together since we started, I've lent you quills and parchment. The fact that you don't even have an inkling of an idea as to who I am shows an intense self-involvement the likes of which I've never seen." He stopped and dropped his arms and his voice. "That makes you officially not worth my time, something that I'd never really considered would be the case, interestingly enough because I had considered about a hundred and two different ways this could go." His face was plain in his honesty. His eyes drilled into hers and they were filled with reproach. Disappointment. She took a breath.

"Did you say… Did you say you've imagined meeting me before?"

Andromeda expected him to backpedal. She expected him to take it back, to smooth it over with something more appropriate. She expected it without even realizing she expected it, without realizing he could do anything different.

"I said I imagined our first conversation. I've met you dozens of times. Obviously."

He crossed his arms, mirroring hers. Her eyes narrowed and his eyebrows raised. "What're you doing here, then?" she asked.

He shrugged his broad shoulders. "Midnight snack. Little tradition in the Hufflepuff house." She wondered again whether he played Quidditch, and wondered what would happen if she asked. The low light of the corridor, the soothing quiet made it easier for her to ask.

"Do you play Quidditch?" Her own honesty shocked her.

"'Course," he replied, nodding.

There was more silence.

"Okay then," she said, and smiled. He returned it.

The near-empty house was filled with slamming doors and the thump of full suitcases.

"You can't leave us," she whispered.

"I have to," she replied, as boldly as she could.

They spoke through tears.

"What will I tell Narcissa?"

"Tell her the truth. Please, Bellatrix, tell her the truth."

"I won't disgrace you."

"This isn't disgrace! I promise you, Bellatrix, this is - this is the only way I can be happy."

"Is that all you care about? Happiness? We find happiness in honor, Andromeda. We find happiness in loyalty and duty."

"That isn't happiness!"

"Then contentment! And contentment is all we need."

"I can't live like that. Don't askme to live like that."

"What are you throwing us away for? For some mudblood without - "

"Don't you dare call him that - "

"That's what he is, Andromeda! Can you not see that anymore?"

"I can't live without him, Bellatrix."

"You think that now. They don't feel things like we do! They can't feel love the way you and I can."

"Do you hear yourself? Bellatrix, you sound mad. They're humans, too. They can feel!"

"Sheep can feel!"

A pause.

"I can't talk about this with you."

"Of course you can't. Your opinion is clouded by your youthful indiscretions. But soon, Andromeda, you will need to come back. You will need to be welcomed back into our family, you will need support. When this is all over - "

"It - Merlin, Bellatrix, can't you… Sometimes I think you're the one that can't feel love."

"We can't wait for you forever. When you walk out that door, the window of opportunity begins to narrow - "

"I won't come back."

"It will only be so long that prudence allows your return - "

"I'll miss you."

Stillness.

"You're disgracing your family."

"I love you," she whispered.

Silence.

They didn't speak of it. Not the Blacks, or the Malfoys, or the Lestranges, but not the Tonkses either. Not a one. Nobody uttered a word about the wayward Pureblood princess running away with the mudblood scum. Nobody spoke of the Black's great tragedy, the Tonks' great victory. Their happiness.

But it hung there. It lay dormant in the shadows of the old empty houses, in her old room, where her blackened portrait had been taken down, lingering in the negative spaces she left behind.

Nobody spoke of it, but perhaps more importantly, nobody forgot.