Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter
A/N: I just found this, I hope it's okay. Oh...Bleed Like Me by Garbage is the BEST!
-NiCoLe-
There's a picture of them, in the darkest corridor of Gimmauld Place. It's decorated with flowers, all black and red, and stones and many other nic-nacs that Bellatrix and Narcissa had found while making the frame. Sirius and Regulus had to help, of course, and that's why the frame is a bit crooked, a bit disorganized, a bit normal.
Too normal for them.
Andromeda is sitting in the middle. Her long, wavy brown hair is pulled up into a flowing bun. Her gray eyes sparkle as the light hits them, and she wears a smile that would rival many a queen. She looks as if she were the happiest girl in the world. It seems that, if only in this photograph, she has everything she could ever want.
The truth is, Andromeda ran away from home a week after this photograph was taken. It was somewhere around three am and she just packed her bags and left. She was in love with a muggle, something her parents could never allow, and so she did the only possible thing. She chose her love over her family.
Somethings really are thicker than blood.
On Andromeda's left stands Bellatrix. Her straight black hair is down and flowing with whisps of it falling beautifully in her face, all but covering her black diamond eyes. Her smile is sweet and kind, nothing like her true being. If you look at the picture long enough you will see that the smile does not quite reach her eyes. You can see that she looks on the verge of breaking down and screaming.
But no one ever looks that closely.
Bellatrix could smile and melt any heart. She could glare and inflict shame upon anyone who saw her. She could make her eyes dance angrily and cause anyone to cower before her. Bellatrix had a power not many others had, she had the power to play off of others' weaknesses and force them to do her will.
But inside Bellatrix was broken. She was never whole in the sense of the word. Sure, at one point in her life, long before blood-lines and Hogwarts and Voldemort, at one point she was happy and carefree, but even then she could sense the parts of her about to break. Even then she felt the tension of her family.
The tension that would one day cause their break.
On the other side of Andromeda stood their youngest sister, Narcissa. Narcissa was, in all sense of the word, perfect. She had long, platnium blonde hair with sparkleing blue eyes and the sweetest smile ever imagined by man. Even at the tender age of eleven, she was able to turn many a boys head.
However, inside, she was as far from perfect as humanly possible. Even at that pure young age she was an evil little thing. She spent her time inflicting pain on anyone and everyone who crossed her path. She had a temper worse than spit-fire and a wand to back her up. At eight she was able to do the Crutacious Curse, and at eleven she killed spiders for fun.
No one's ever truly perfect.
On the left of Bellatrix, a bit off to the side, as if trying to rid himself of the family, stood thirteen year old Sirius. Two years younger than his older cousin, he shared her looks almost to a tea, save the eyes. He had Andromeda's eyes, his mother's eyes, eyes that would haunt him to the end of his days. If you looked close enough, you could see him watching Bellatrix, watching her as if waiting for her to jump up and scream to the heavens that this isn't the way it's supposed to be and that the tension and the breaks just weren't supposed to happen.
But she never screamed, never could, not really.
Sirius was the rebel. He would never act like a proper pure-blood, he was sorted into Gryffindor and held that over his family's head like there was no tomorrw. Which there wasn't, not really. His family was dead to him, and he would bet anything that he was dead to them too. Save Bella and Andi. His two oldest cousins loved him more than life itself. They didn't know why, not really, he was nothing like Bellatrix and he was too soft for Andi. But they loved him all the same.
Sometimes blood really does conquer all.
Last, and least by all accounts, stood Regulus on the right of Narcissa. He was always the weak one, always did what he was told and never saud one word against his family or their beliefs. Inside, though, he completely agreed with his brother. Inside, he was dying for a way out, always searching for a way to leave. But he was a Black, and Blacks never run from their families.
Sometimes he wished he wasn't a Black, sometimes he wished all of this would just disappear.