The Death of a Dream
The stars shone for her that Christmas. They shone brightly and boldly, up in the vaulted ceiling of the grand ballroom that Phineas Nigellus Black had enchanted to resemble the one at Hogwarts. Yet even if their light was but a poor imitation of the original, a feeble earthly replica of the celestial, it never ceased to hold a wonder for her. She loved tracing the familiar lines of the constellations, and marking out those tiny pinpricks of light that held an especial significance- Bellatrix the Amazon warrior queen, Regulus the little prince, and look, there's Sirius, Orion's hunting dog, the brightest of them all. She loved the way they fell to earth, transforming the dull, flickering beam of the candles into something infinite, becoming trapped in the crystalline glass shards of the chandeliers, illuminating the grand piano and the carved frescoes of dogs and serpents and winged stallions. She loved how, if she closed her eyes, a miniature map of the heavens was embedded in the blackness underneath her eyelids, as if they had somehow grown to be a part of her as well. In a way, they were. Andromeda, the closest galaxy to their own, basin-shaped and spiralling, a rich jewel stitched on to the tapestry of the sky.
"What do you think stars are made of?" she asked Bella. They were lying entwined on the dance floor, her head resting on Bella's shoulder, both of them surprisingly still. Cissy had, at her insistence, been dispatched to bed with the story of a unicorn and some wicked huntsmen. How long ago was that now? Hours? Minutes? Days? Years? They were no slaves to time, not bound to its whims or caprices, beyond its ordering of things into neat little units.
"Fire." Bella stirred. She sat up, the half-light casting teasing, dancing shadows over her face. "They're made of fire. See the sky? Well, that's all part of a deep, dark pit stretching down further than even the deepest, darkest Gringotts vault."
Andy roused herself, eager to hear another of Bella's stories. She was thirteen, getting too old for such flights of fantasy, or so she told herself. Regardless, they never failed to transport her into a world where gods and kings and monsters still roamed free, away from the humbler realities of toujours pur and the house of Black and the constricting force of pureblood society.
"And down in that pit, people are at work. But they can't just chip away at the dark. They need a light to guide them."
"And that's the stars?"
"Yes. Long, long ago, in the days of the first witches and wizards when the earth was still young, night made a bargain with them. He said that if they provided him with a light, he would not leave them in darkness. So they gave him a dragon, and he kindled its fire and called it the moon. And all the other stars you see in the sky are descendents of that one dragon."
Bella started to drum her fingers restlessly against the floor, evidently losing interest in the story she had just created. That was the problem with her tales- they never ended, but only fizzled away, as if put out by a deluminator.
"Could you make a star stop burning?" Andy wondered, not to be deterred. She did not like the idea that the flames high, high above her, kindled in the depths of the darkness so long ago, could ever be extinguished. It seemed inconceivable. They had stood there forever and would always stand there.
"No. Stars never die. Night made sure of that. They'll keep on burning long after we're gone." Bella stood up. In her loose cotton dress, stained with little specks of starlight fallen down from the ceiling, she looked oddly brilliant, like she did not really belong to the mundane formalities of everyday life, but to another place and another time. "Dance with me, Andy."
"Why? We'll be doing enough dancing tomorrow," protested Andy, feeling an elusive stillness slipping away, out of her hands. Time- and Bella- were always moving on at breakneck speed, dragging her with them against her will. They'd never learned how to slow down, how to preserve the memories that they were making. And she wanted to capture this moment, right down to the scent of the dripping candle wax and the holes starting to wear through her slippers. She wanted to hold it in its stasis until it was engraved indelibly on her mind, and could not be erased or corroded.
"Merlin, Andy, you're such a spoilsport!" Bella grabbed her hands and hoisted her up to her feet. "That's not the same. There, you've got mother and father and all the other Twenty Eight families watching you to see if you're doing things the proper way like a good little pureblood girl. And you have to dance reels and waltzes just as they tell you, with exactly the partner they pick for you. We're free here."
She started to spin Andy round and round in dizzying circles, in complete disregard of every rule they had ever learnt. They were not Blacks, not restricted to the beat of the music or confined by the rigid voice of their old dance master explaining this-is-how-it's-done. No, for now they were just Bella and Andy, sisters, best friends, dancing out under the stars as they had danced before they understood the meaning of the word.
"Imagine doing this when we're great ladies."
"What, you think our husbands would let us?" Andy had not given much thought to that unspecified time in the future when she would have to leave the neverland of Three Elms for good to perform the duties society required of her. A part of her believed- in spite of everything- that her childhood would never end. Until her dying day, there would always be the secret spot and the black pond and the endless grounds to roam, and the playmates to roam them with.
"Oh, I don't suppose they'd mind." Bella tossed her head back airily. "And if mine did, I damn well wouldn't care."
"Neither would I," asserted Andy.
"No, of course you wouldn't." Bella squeezed her hand in affirmation. "You'd come back here, with me and Cissy, and we'd dance away until dawn in our long, floaty nightgowns." She gazed up at the enchanted sky and closed her eyes momentarily, as if she could see the three of them in ten years' time, bright-eyed and with jewels in their hair, still twirling to the same music.
"And if we get tired, we'll tell each other stories." Andy did not fear this future; it stretched out before her as constant and enduring as the stars Bella had assured her would never die.
"Yes, that's right. And when day breaks we'll go to the secret spot and play in the gardens and the forest just like now."
"And nothing has to change. Nothing at all. We don't have to be like mother, entertaining guests in the parlour and sitting in the library and doing embroidery."
"Merlin, no!" Bella laughed, her eyes widening. "God, you think I could stand that! I'd end up killing myself of boredom if I had to do that every day. My husband couldn't make me. I'm not going to let him control me. We're Blacks, after all, and mother isn't, not by blood anyway. Whoever he is, he's not going to be better than us. Not unless—." She trailed off. A strange, faraway look Andy had never seen on her before came over her face.
"Unless what?"
"Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of someone father ntroduced me to, that's all. Someone even greater than we are."
Slowly, imperceptibly, the stars began to dim.
That Christmas, the stars barely shone for her up in their distant heights, obscured as they were by a muffling mass of clouds. It was impossible to see more than a faint glow here and there, and who knew if that was Rigel or Betelgeuse or Bellatrix. She certainly could not recall the old patterns of the constellations, in spite of the hours she had spent poring over them as a child, Bella by her side. There were far more important things to preserve and remember.
A haze seemed to pervade the whole room, shrouding it in a thin mist. Dust motes danced slowly in the waning half-light and the candles choked in the heavy air, spluttering out wispy tendrils of smoke. Even the chandelier looked dim and faded; with nothing to reflect, it hung vacantly into nothingness, smooth and glossy as a block of ice. Everything was dying; rotting away as it was devoured by time, that greatest parasite of all.
Just like the Blacks.
"Dance with me, Andy," Bella declared, as they lay against the cold, hard surface of the dance floor (and it felt colder and harder than it had ever been for the Andy Black of five years ago). "Just like we used to, remember?"
Andy did remember. She remembered it so vividly, so acutely, that sometimes she doubted it had been real. Perhaps it was just one of her dream-pictures, a figment of her imagination that could never truly have come to pass.
"Come on, Andy! Let's dance!" she repeated, coming closer and taking hold of Andy's wrists. Stop it! Andy wanted to cry. What was Bella's request but a frail echo of the one she had made once upon a time, eyes ablaze with the glow of stars fallen to earth?
Her eyes still blazed now, but with a different fire, one of passion and fury and madness. She still laughed, but it was not the same joyous, exuberant, childish laugh as before. She laughed vindictively, in triumph, because of the Cause and its victories. Everything was for the Cause these days. Andy looked down at her sister's hands, thin and lily-white, and wondered how much blood she had shed with them, how many she had killed and maimed and tortured in the Cause's name. She noticed the slight swell of her belly beneath the folds of her dress where she was expecting Lestrange's child, a child that was to be born and bred for the Cause, to join its ranks at sixteen and live and die fighting for it. A great honour, Bella probably thought; the greatest honour on earth. How she pitied it, even now, when it was nestled safely in its mother's womb.
But wouldn't her children be cursed with exactly the same fate? Malfoy had the Mark, and she suspected from those little remarks Bella kept dropping that she would soon bear it too. The thing ran in the blood, passed on from parent to child down the red thread of the generations. As one warrior fell, another rose up to take their place. She did not think she could bear it sometimes: to have a child and want nothing more than to shelter and protect them with your whole being, to kiss them better when they fall over and tell them bedtime stories, to see them off to Hogwarts at eleven with desperate pleas to write back and promises to send sweets, only to lead them, like a lamb to the slaughter, to be sacrificed on the altar of your devotion.
You could just run away from it all. Go, with Ted, to somewhere safe. Then you never have to worry about the Cause or the Dark Lord.
No. She was doing the honourable thing. For the sake of Siri and Cissy and Reggie, for all the children who were not yet born, even for Bella, in remembrance of the promise they had made, she would face the bleak prospect of a lifetime of fighting for a Cause she did not believe in, face it alone and without respite, face it because ultimately she could never bring herself to desert them.
And, really, she could not imagine a life without them.
No Sirius, brilliant and laughing, placing a whoopee cushion underneath his mother's chair in the dining room and sliding down the banisters at Grimmauld Place. (There was an uglier side too that she could not ignore, red, raw scars criss-crossing his back, the way he flinched if you tried to lay a hand on his shoulder, don't make me go back to them Andy as she found the runaway on a deserted London street.) No Regulus, watching Bella with a look of rapt adoration on his face, lying in the long meadow grass with Cissy, blocking his ears at the sound of Sirius' war-whoops (it's just like home, Andy, I don't like it, make it stop). No Cissy, God, no Cissy! No little sister to snuggle up with late at night, when the thunder came and the big giant in the sky was stamping his feet. No one to make mud pies with or push on the swing. She would be forever tormented with the guilt of having fallen short of her sacred obligation to protect her.
No Bella. She stopped and paused. No Bella. But Bella had always been there, a guiding hand to hold when she took her first steps; a playmate in the days when the world belonged to them and them alone, no mother, no father, no House of Black, just them, feral and free, left to their own devices; a companion through the endless cycle of tutors and governesses and dreary lessons; her one friend (until Ted, but she mustn't think about Ted) in the confused, turbulent years of adolescence, always sure to take the seat next to hers in the Great Hall and to be by her side in the Slytherin Common Room. Even now, when she knew of the terrible, terrible deeds Bella was capable of committing, knew that unforgiveables flew out from her wand with the same ease she used to tell them a story before they went to bed, she could not bring herself to stop loving her.
Not now, when Bella took hold of her hands and pulled her up and began to spin her just as she had that other Christmas so long ago. And she did not look like a devil, a fearsome monster, a murderess, just Bella. As they twirled round and round she smiled, and her smile was not predatory or dangerous or sadistic, but human, full and sincere, stretching up even to her eyes.
"Do you remember last time, when I said 'Imagine doing this when we're great ladies'"
"Yes, and I was worried about what our husbands were going to think."
"Merlin knows why!" Bella snorted and rolled her eyes. "Mine doesn't give a flying fuck, and I'd show him a thing or two if he did. It's none of his business if I'm at Three Elms or not!" (But what else was his business? Andy remembered that day back in August when she'd found Bella hunched up on the sofa, tearing at her hair, dark circles under her eyes, fresh cuts the colour of Professor McGonagall's red ink scoring her wrists. She'd yelped and lashed out every time someone tried to touch her. Perhaps he'd finally succeeded in taking his wife. Andy shuddered at the thought.)
"I hope mine will be as... accommodating," Andy ventured carefully.
Bella threw back her head and laughed, long and hard. "My God, I still can't believe you have to marry Lucy! That was spectacularly cruel, even for father!"
"I wish you'd stop teasing me about it. It's all been set in stone now- everything's final, whether you can believe it or not."
"Don't worry, Andy!" Bella patted her shoulder. "Nobody can take him seriously the little slimebag. He's the lowest of the low. My Lord has nothing but disdain for him. Why, it's the funniest thing in the world watching him grovel on the floor and beg for mercy!"
"I can imagine," Andy muttered, averting her eyes from Bella's gaze. She had no great fondness for her sister's increasingly macabre sense of humour.
"He still thinks that he can compare to me though," continued Bella bitterly. "As if the Dark Lord could ever value someone like him as much as me! Why, He taught me everything he knows. He chose me out of everyone to be his protégée, his favoured servant, his queen."
"Andy, you'll always be on my side, won't you?" All of a sudden, her voice dropped its proud, reverential tone and became lost and inquiring, like she was a child in desperate need of reassurance. "You know, when you come and fight with us. You won't band together with Lucy, even if he is your husband."
"Of course not!" Andy replied, barely giving thought to her words. They tumbled out against her will, an instinctual, uncontrolled response every bit as natural as breathing or eating. "You're my sister, and he's just a smarmy, conceited git. I don't care if he's my husband."
"Good." Bella smiled again, and wrapped her arms around Andy in a brief, spontaneous hug. "I knew you wouldn't. You did promise me, after all. We'll fight together, and I'll watch your back, and you'll watch mine."
"My Lord will be so pleased to know this." She spun around on the spot delightedly. "I'll tell him when I see him next. He will be eager to add any relation of mine to the fold. You know, Andy, the future's turned out so much better than I expected it to."
"Really?" And how much worse for me.
"Yes. You know what I mean. Back then, I did not know my Lord as I do now. I knew nothing. I had barely lived."
"But now I do. The whole world is open to me. I can do anything. He has freed me from my chains. He has taught me that there is something beyond the horizon."
"He'll show you too, Andy. You remember what I used to tell Cissy when she came to me at night and couldn't sleep."
"The dark's nothing to be afraid of," answered Andy. It hadn't been in those days, but she confessed to herself she feared it now.
"That's right. Don't be scared of the shadows. The only monsters in there are the ones that live in your mind. Well, it's true. My Lord made me see that. He led me into the dark, and I have followed him into the light."
Andy sighed. She turned away, but Bella did not see.
The last star burnt out and died.