Here is the update! (happy little sound)

Review me please. I'm sixteen today. Let's celebrate all together with our friend the green review button! Woop! Woop!

Thanks to Elo and Hannah for your reviews. I love you girls.

Bella and Draco aren't mine. Sob. I wish.

Should have asked for them as a present...

(ponders)

In a blur ran the silent dinner, the brief talk with his mother – how his friends were, how his OWLs had been – the sleepless night in his cosy room. A blur of blinding lights and restless shadows, of endless questions. An out-of-time moment.

In the morning he felt strangely alert. The sun shone through his window, lighting the room without hurting his eyes. No shadows this morning; his eyes felt rested, keen, greedy. And he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Draco cleaned himself up and put on his clothes quickly before leaving his room. It was very early, he knew that....but he didn't seem to care. He couldn't wait right then.

As soon as he was in the corridor, he realized that he didn't know exactly where to find her. Never mind. He went right to the first guest room and knocked at the door.

"Come in," he heard.

He walked in the room. His eyes scanned it quickly; he didn't think he had ever been in that room before. He had never invited his friends home. He wouldn't have his puppets there, under his father's wry gaze. And Pansy....well, he could have asked her to come. He hadn't. No, he had never seen that room indeed. It was probably quite bright, but the curtains were drawn, so the room was full of shadows. There was no one here to be seen.

A door opened and closed swiftly, and he jumped. She was there, the one he had wanted to see. He suddenly wondered why. He should have kept to his room.

"Draco," she whispered. It was not a greeting, merely an acknowledgement. She looked at him intensely, her eyes sparkling like onyx under her heavy lids.

"You look much like your father. I have to say, I'm disappointed with that."

This caught him off guard. His eyes widened.

"What?" he blurted out without thinking. He regretted it instantly. What kind of an idiot, rude child would she think he was?

A half-smile raised the corner of her thin lips. "I hoped we wouldn't get a miniature Lucius," she clarified, "but I do have trouble finding a little of Narcissa on your features. I do find, though. Somehow. Something in the curve of your brows, in your forehead....your jaw, maybe." She paused. "I'll have to watch further."

He was puzzled. She was bound to notice it: his mouth hung open, and he didn't seem to find available cell brains likely to conclude "Let's stop acting foolish". After a few seconds of freaked speechlessness, he remembered how to use his tongue. "Well, you don't look like her," he murmured. Since when could a murmur sound so hoarse?

"Wrong," she disagreed with a brief, flashing grin. "Perceptiveness does it all, you know. But it's a learned behavior. Anyway, although on the one hand you have her, pretty little blonde doll, perfect wife and mother and all, and on the other hand you get me, black-haired and let's face it, a little bit wilder, we don't have to be exact opposites. I have to admit we are on some points. But we have kind of the same features. Once you go over the colours...."

It was true. They had something in common indeed....the narrow forehead, the pointed brows, the slender lines of the face, the jaw....Yet Bellatrix's features looked sharper, harder in her gaunt face. It still held some kind of baroque, wild, almost tribal beauty, a beauty made of aura and charisma. Draco looked around quickly.

"What are you looking for?" she asked. Her voice, too, was different from her mother's. Narcissa's was brief and clear, with some kind of an aristocratic melting of contempt and delicacy. Bellatrix's voice was low, almost whispered, yet its tone was quite high. It was brief, too. This was a voice that could murmur love words; but it could shriek as well, and probably turned sharp easily.

As she lightly cleared her throat, raising her eyebrows at him, he recognized his mother's wry, sophisticated manners. But there was something more to her: a hint of strangeness, a sharp edge under the calm she had shown since his arrival. Something weird and tameless, not really unleashed, but close enough. All the people he had met in his life were sane. In his aunt's quick babbling where every word seemed to hide another sense beneath its sharply precise meaning, in her shining eyes and gaunt face, he felt something that frightened him and pulled him close at the same time.

"Sorry," he said lightly, "I was daydreaming." He had to get a hold on himself again. He went on anyway, trying to clear his mind with more conventional subjects than hidden resemblance: "I was surprised not to see you yesterday evening, at dinner."

She frowned. "I thought you'd be better off alone, with your mother of course." She made it sound like it was wrong of him to ask. "Besides, I'm not a sitting-dinner kind of person," she added.

He felt silly, not to understand. Not a sitting-dinner kind of person? Then how did she eat? He didn't dare to ask her to elaborate. Her wry grin was making him uncomfortable.

"What were you looking for, a couple of minutes ago?" she asked casually.

There were mirrors everywhere in his house. Do I look like her, somehow?

It didn't matter. He knew that he would find a mirror as soon as he was alone again, and the thought disturbed him a little. "Merely looking at the room," he lied smoothly.

She smiled knowingly.