Even then they never could be careless. They played to their strengths: Bella came up with the ideas, Andy made them better, Cissy made them work. Their parents always called them clever; Bella always called them genius,
(bella with the angry smile and manic look in her eyes)
telling them they'd make the Blacks proud when they were older. They spent all their waking moments together, for the Blacks would have none of this Muggle homeschool rubbish.
In retrospect, something had always been off. She knew it even then, but Bella told her she'd be great one day, and Cissy rested her doubts, even though she knew Cissy always agreed with anything Bella said.
After all, Bella came up with the idea, and Cissy made it work.
-:-
Sirius was born when she was seven, a tiny little thing with a mop of black hair and friendly gray eyes. Their parents took them to see him two weeks after they'd heard the news, and she'd broken into a genuine grin and let him play with her fingers at once.
"There's something fishy about the look in his eyes,"
(friendly gray eyes that twinkle when you smiled at him friendly gray eyes filled with a happiness i don't recognize)
Bella declared immediately at home, Cissy bobbing her head in agreement, and they both looked pointedly at Andy.
"I like him," she said. Bewildered, Cissy started to ask why on Earth she liked a furry-headed baby with weird eyes but stopped at the look on Bella's face.
(more manic than before she'll make a great black one day bella will make a great black one day)
When Bella wasn't looking, Andy toyed with her own ideas after that.
-:-
Bella went to Hogwarts when Andy was nine, and Andy and Cissy were left to their own devices. Andy was their leader now, and Cissy was open enough to her opinions, but the fact remained that Cissy asked that she be allowed to keep all of Bella's letters.
Andy left herself two years later and wrote daily to Cissy, weekly to Sirius and Regulus.
(regulus he's not one of them he'll never be one of them no matter how hard he tries)
She stayed at the castle with Bella for Christmas upon hearing Bella's promise to get her more connections with the older Slytherins, but she didn't really like the lot of them, with their cruel humor and cold laughs. Ted Tonks caught her in the corridors one day and asked why she put up with it, anyway; she asked in return what a filthy little Mudblood
(i shouldn't be seen talking to him i shouldn't be seen around him he's a mudblood he's impure)
like he had to do with her social life.
Andy settled for going home the year after and hoping to Merlin that Bellatrix wasn't becoming one of them.
-:-
Cissy started in her third year; Andy never understood how she continually idolized Bella when the eldest sister no longer wanted to be caught with younger students. Andy spent her time with Cissy still, though, and sufficed with writing daily now to Sirius, getting to know him. He was always reserved in his replies until he lost it and scribbled in tiny writing his furious confession of loathing toward the Black's pureblood principles.
She thought him insane
(what about ted tonks what about him he says i'm in the minority remember ted)
but still noticed the tearstains and splotched ink. "I'm here for you," she wrote in her reply. "Hang in there for me, okay?"
-:-
Whispers of blood purity and a certain Dark Lord hit Hogwarts in her sixth year; she was prefect and heard it on patrols with Ted Tonks. Andy thought it nothing new at first,
(that's normal bella will be happy mum and dad will be happy)
and when the Muggle-born confronted her furiously, she shrugged and said, "Isn't that normal, though?"
Ted taught her otherwise, and she found herself wondering whether Sirius wasn't off his rocker after all. In her letter that night, she sympathized.
-:-
They'd fallen out of touch, Bella and she, but Cissy promised to write her every other day after Andy graduated. The day before her sixth year started, Cissy showed up at her flat, sopping wet, her blonde hair streaked with mud. "What happened to you?" cried out Andy in alarm, fumbling with the lock to let her in, and she couldn't help but add tentatively, "Did Bella see you like this?"
"I didn't go to Bella's,"
(why not bella's a good black cissy should be proud of her)
Cissy replied, her voice shaking, and she stumbled inside, falling into Andy's arms. She was a follower, she said, and didn't trust herself on her own at Hogwarts, even with the support of her boyfriend, Lucius. "And I'm so confused about what I'll do with myself because I only got four O.W.L.'s, and I'm not even prefect, and oh, Andy, what'll I do?"
Andy promised her she'd do fine if she proved herself this year, maybe even become prefect next year if the girl who'd gotten it instead became Head Girl, and Cissy was just finishing her tea when Ted came in and rather awkwardly allowed Andy to make introductions.
Cissy was cold the rest of the visit
(she's ashamed of me i knew she'd be ashamed of me)
but remembered to ask if she should save a place for Sirius at the Slytherin table. Andy smiled genially and said Sirius could very well end up in—
(gryffindor)
Ravenclaw, she made herself say last second, Ravenclaw, because she didn't know what she'd say next if Cissy realized Andy knew that Sirius was saving up money to buy Gryffindor tapestries for his bedroom already.
Cissy never did stop writing.
-:-
Cissy told her that Sirius was in Gryffindor; Lucius had saved him a seat anyway and gave it to Severus Snape, "a very promising boy who knows more magic than I do."
(probably dark arts all they care about is dark arts with bella a death eater to boot)
Andy expressed the proper reaction in her letter and didn't bother telling Cissy that Sirius had written her the eve of the Sorting and loathed Snape with all his being. "Sure to end up with the likes of Voldemort, that one," he wrote venomously, and Andy hoped hard that Cissy wouldn't be like him.
But then, Bella was a murderer now, proud of it too, so look where Andy's hopes had gotten her that time.
-:-
They married quietly, without the usual Black fanfare, for engagement to Ted had gotten her burned off the Black family tree.
(should have seen it coming)
She invited her sisters anyway and didn't let Ted call her Andy anymore.
Bella outright ignored the invitation, but Cissy came, even took up the offer to be Maid of Honor. She looked radiant in the dress they'd picked together, almost as radiant as the bride herself, and abandoned her adapted distance from the middle sister for that night only.
Cissy pulled her aside at the close of the reception. "We shouldn't be seen with each other anymore, Andy," she said with a hint of regret in her voice.
"I know," she replied. "And I'm not Andy anymore."
-:-
Still Cissy wrote daily, even after graduating, even after becoming a Death Eater, but she and Dromeda both knew no one else could ever know. So when she gave birth to Nymphadora, they did it at home. Cissy was there, Ted too, and they modified the Healer's memory after so Cissy wouldn't be in trouble with the Dark Lord by the off chance. They christened little Dora quietly, just Dromeda and Ted and Cissy and Sirius, with Cissy as godmother and Sirius as godfather, and Sirius promised not to tell anyone about it, all the while eyeing Cissy warily.
(he's never trusted her gryffindor through and through cissy's a good person why don't they see that cissy's a good person)
Cissy left quickly, and Sirius stayed in the flat for the rest of June until Dromeda and Ted finally bought a house big enough that July for company to come. His circle of friends stayed the day after they'd unpacked, James Potter and Remus Lupin and Peter Pettigrew,
(dead all dead within a few years bella killed sirius why did bella kill sirius)
and though proud of their status as troublemakers, they were all very polite to Ted and warm to Dromeda and cooed over the baby.
James and Peter came twice a week after that, Remus sleeping over a full two weeks to keep Sirius company. Sirius didn't leave until his parents forced him to mid-August, and Dromeda promised he could stay over most of the next summer, too. They didn't let him after that, of course, but it was worth the beam and tight hug he gave her: Sirius never hugged anyone and certainly never grinned like that where the Blacks
(andromeda tonks)
were concerned.
She lay in bed that night and wondered if she wouldn't have been better off in Gryffindor. As much as she was ashamed of it, the House had considered her for it, after all.
-:-
Sirius ran away from home in fifth year, in a haze of summer rain and solitude and Cissy not writing and Dora growing up. He wrote her a day after arriving at the Potters' and said he couldn't have stayed with her because they would have known where to look. He never talked about his friends at home, he said, and all Regulus knew about the boy with the hazel eyes and the glasses was that he and Sirius ate together in the Great Hall and pranked him once the year before.
(but regulus is all right he's like cissy harry says he died on our side)
She told him it was perfectly all right as long as he still visited sometimes, and he told her he would but never did.
She didn't hear about him after that until he was arrested; she didn't believe it. Crouch was always a git, Dromeda decided, and she was sure she was right until Sirius came back from Azkaban with a sunken face and hollow eyes and sadness, and he didn't light up like he used to
(his eyes don't twinkle)
when he finally convinced her through Dora to stop by Order headquarters and say hello.
She embraced him, but it wasn't the same, because he thought that Harry Potter was his only godchild, and his gray eyes weren't friendly anymore.