I got seriously stuck on this chapter, but ultimately I think it came out okay. The next two chapters, however, are my favorites (or actually, they're not written yet but in my extremely vague plan they're my favorite.)

Chapter 19- Love Lessons

For the last few days leading up to the Christmas holiday, Bella and I barely spoke to each other. I was distracted even from exams, which had previously seemed all-important, struggling with the confrontation we had over her fight with Sirius. For the first time I was not entirely sure Bella wouldn't hurt me, and that was an idea that had truly never occurred to me before. For the first time, I wondered what she was capable of. I knew about the dark magic, I had always thought her exploration was academic. Was she capable of unforgivable curses? Was she capable of murder? Had she killed already?

I suppose she was trying to adjust to the realization that maybe I didn't believe as strongly as she did. I'm sure she never suspected that I had started, in my own way, to doubt her cause as much as Sirius, but she realized I didn't share her passion. For so long she had assumed we thought the same things. She didn't reconcile herself to it, for Bella never accepted anything that wasn't on her terms, but at the very least she began to understand.

As always, Narcissa was the one who noticed and worried when we fought. Until Lucius became the center of her world (for then he was still on the periphery, waiting for her to grow up), Bella and I were the constant and familiar to her, and dissension between us left her adrift. She had learned early on to navigate Bella's moods and my silences, but she had no idea how to get us to make up, and during those last years she was often in the middle.

When we went home for the holidays, with nothing else to do and no one else to talk to, we hesitantly eased into normalcy. Still unable to forget the unease her sudden rage had left me with, I was still glad for the return of the Bella I knew; I had missed her. I don't know how much Bella was doing for Lord Voldemort then, or if she was doing anything at all. She was not one to take sitting on the sidelines so it seems from the vantage point of many years later, she must have been, but she seemed carefree. In fact, as the round of parties approached, it seemed her biggest concern was the fact that I didn't have a boyfriend.

I personally didn't really mind being single. It wasn't unusual, I was only fifteen. But then when you took into consideration the fact that both of my sisters had latched onto the men they would marry at the age of eleven and never had a second thought, I suppose it did make me a bit of an anomaly in my own family. By the night of our parents' winter ball, she had decided the situation simply had to be remedied.

She called over Narcissa, and then for good measure Elizabeth, and sat in a chair near the steps and surveyed the room with the air of a queen.

"All right ladies, it's time to find Andy a man. Now, we have collected here in this ballroom almost all of the eligible young men in the pureblood world. Surely we can decide on one."

"Bella, you've got to be kidding, I'm not-"

She held up a hand imperiously to stop me. "Now Andy, no arguments, you broke up with Will four months ago, and you've not been dating at all. How will we ever get you married at that rate?" Her voice was teasing, and it seemed like she was raising the question merely for amusement, but under that there was an element of truth to it. "Now, we're looking for someone within a reasonable age range, good-looking of course, and arguably single."

Narcissa and Elizabeth seemed to take this task seriously, scanning the ballroom. I rolled my eyes and tried to protest again. "Bella, this is-"

"It took you two years to get brave enough to admit you liked Avery-"

"I was eleven then!"

"Still, you may as well be having a bit of fun."

It's not that I was averse to the kind of fun Bella was referring to, but more that the kind of brief-but-intense flings she enjoyed were simply not my style, they didn't suit my personality. But I also knew that when Bella got an idea in her head, there was no dissuading her.

"What about Rigobert Bulstrode?" suggested Narcissa. "His father's just died, so he's come into a good bit of money, and he's only a year out of school."

"Haven't you seen what's written about him on the wall of the fourth floor girls' bathroom at Hogwarts?" Elizabeth said.

"Oh…right…" agreed Narcissa. I had no idea what it said on the wall of the fourth floor girls' room, and I decided I didn't want to.

"What about Oswin Vaisey?" Bella suggested. "He's a seventh year, and quite good looking, and they'd be rather pretty together."

"After that rumor about him and that house elf? No way!" Elizabeth said firmly. I definitely didn't want to know the details of that one, and apparently Bella didn't either.

The whole conversation only served to illustrate the disconnect between Bella and other people her age. She had little interest in teenage gossip and drama. She didn't have girlfriends like other girls our age, and the friends she did have were generally older. Her interests ran to very different things.

"Tristan Travers then?" suggested Bella.

"Umm…you don't think he's…" Elizabeth began delicately.

"He's what?" she replied.

"You know…ah…he's…"

"Chasing for the other team?" I suggested.

Bella gave a shriek of laughter that made Mother shoot her a deadly glare from all the way across the hall. "Is he? Well, that explains a great deal!"

"Why not Paul Yaxley?" suggested Narcissa. "I know you say he's a prat, but Lucius says he's all right."

"He's got a girlfriend," Elizabeth pointed out.

Bella snorted. "She's not that pretty. Andy could have him if she wanted him."

"She wouldn't steal another girl's boyfriend, she's too nice."

I appreciated this vote of confidence from Elizabeth, but Bella cut an annoyed look in her direction. "Don't underestimate Andy. Blacks always get what they want."

"This is stupid. I definitely am not interested in Yaxley. Cissy was right to begin with, he's a prat, and I'm certainly not going to date anyone based on Lucius's assessment."

"What about Marshall Urquhart?" Elizabeth went on.

"Nah, Andy likes smart guys, and he couldn't find a clue with both hands and a lumos spell," Bella decided.

Elizabeth sighed. "High standards will get you nowhere Andy."

Bella frowned, and then her face cleared. "What about Hadrian Davis? He's quite smart, and he's good-looking, and he recently broke up with that prissy little Ravenclaw girl."

This was, of all of her suggestions, the most reasonable. Hadrian Davis was in fact one of the more likeable Slytherin boys- soft-spoken, intelligent, and more inclined to stand back and not participate in the bullying and mind games that were part of the Slytherin culture. He had survived in Slytherin because he was a pure-blood, and his mother was a McMillan, an old and wealthy family.

My lack of an immediate protest seemed like agreement to Bella, and so she gave me a push in his direction. "Go on then, ask him to dance."

"I am going to do no such thing Bellatrix Black!"

She stood, tossed her hair over her shoulder, and shrugged. "Fine, I'll ask him. But I'm going to tell him he should ask you to dance."

Elizabeth and Narcissa seemed to find this terrible amusing, but I wasn't about to be set up by Bella, and so as soon as she sauntered away, I took the opportunity to slip outside.

It was surprisingly cool outside on the terrace, clear and refreshingly quiet after the crowd and noise inside. It was a nearly a full moon, and the countryside was bathed in moonlight. I was leaning against the railing when a voice spoke softly behind me.

"What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?"

Ted had once used the same line on me, and so I whirled around and found it was only Sirius, balanced precariously on the railing, threatening to plunge backwards some twenty feet down to the ground.

"Get down from there, you'll fall!" I commanded, irritated by the scare he'd given me. He considered a moment, and then obligingly hopped down.

"What are you doing out here? Why not inside breaking hearts?" I inquired.

"I have a girlfriend," he pointed out.

"Only about half the time," I corrected him.

He finally cracked a smile. "Touché."

After an episode in which Marlene had made me scream and cover my ears by revealing a tad too much information about how they made up, I had politely requested to resign my job as their relationship counselor. It was simply more than I wanted to know about someone who I often felt was more of a brother than a cousin. I still knew when they fought (anyone who happened to be in the same wing of Hogwarts knew when they fought) but I was spared the details.

"I just needed a breath from all the heartbreaking," he answered me. "And what are you escaping?"

"Bella trying to marry me off. Oh, stop laughing! It's not funny."

"No, actually it's very funny. What fine examples of pureblood masculinity did she offer up for your consideration?"

"I think anyone with a pulse who isn't already married is eligible. And the not married is negotiable, as I think she might be willing to knock off a wife if she thought it would get me settled down to marital bliss."

"Well, no one has ever thought Bella was stupid," he finally said, with a shrug. The comment didn't seem to follow, as the whole thing did seem rather ridiculous to me. Sirius caught my confused look. "Don't you see why she cares who you date?"

"So she can embarrass me?" I suggested.

"I'm sure that's an unexpected benefit, but no. Ultimately, if you end up with someone in that ballroom there, Bella has a guarantee that you're tied to her world. She can't lose you."

"And the fact that this is my family and she's my sister doesn't tie me to this world?"

He sighed and leaned back against the railing, looking up at the stars. "When push comes to shove, maybe not. This war is forcing a lot of choices on a lot of people."

Most people did not see Sirius as particularly insightful, and normally he wasn't, but he was and intelligent and perceptive, and did have moments of clarity that showed a surprising grasp of human nature, and it made me uncomfortable.

"Sirius, are you all right?"

"Sometimes I just…" he hesitated, shook his head slightly. "I've just been thinking maybe…" he stopped.

"What?" I prompted.

He brought his eyes back to me, and I must have looked worried, for he smiled at me. "Nothing. I'm fine Andy. Really. I suppose we should stop depriving all the people inside of the pleasure of our company." He offered me an arm, and when I hesitated, added, "Really Andy, I'm fine, you just caught me in one of my rare introspective moods. I won't let it happen again."

"See that you don't."

It was a few days later that I went to Diagon Alley with Uncle Alphard. I don't recall why Bella and Narcissa didn't come along, but I had gone in the hope of being left alone again. As we got older, I think we all started to wish for the kind of independence that teenagers usually do, but our parents still kept us at home, for fear we would mix with the wrong people. Bella and Sirius solved this by sneaking out, and ultimately I would get to that point as well. Though not completely averse to breaking the rules, I generally kept it as my Plan B.

I was disappointed, as he insisted as we arrived that I would have to stay with him. When I asked why, he merely said that Diagon Alley wasn't as safe as it had once been. Although we knew in Hogwarts that the war was escalating, we didn't really feel it, while Diagon Alley certainly did. The streets were still crowded, but people didn't linger at shop windows or stop to talk to each other, they ran their errands efficiently. Groups of children didn't congregate at the sweet shops or the Quidditch supply, but instead were kept tightly in hand by their parents. It was a bright, sunny day following a dusting of snow the night before, but there was still an air of suppressed tension and urgency hanging over everyone.

I kept up a childish sulk through most of the errands he had to make, and when he was finished he tried to appease me by taking me to lunch. This worked somewhat as it was a large, popular sort of restaurant with an outdoor patio (made comfortable in December by a warming charm) where we watched the people passing, and he entertained me by telling me funny stories about what passing people had been like when they were children at Hogwarts.

"Now Augusta Longbottom," he said, nodding to the regal woman as she passed. "She was terrible at charms. She's not a stupid woman, but she just had trouble with charms. One time in her fifth year, completely by accident, she cast a sleeping charm on the whole class. It was the last class of the day, so it wasn't until the next morning the first class found them all, sleeping like babies, even the teacher."

"See that tall man with the green cloak, he was a year ahead of me, and he fancied Walburga all through school." I found this a little hard to swallow, but then when I considered it further, Sirius's and Reg's mother was attractive in her own cold and regal sort of way, and she probably had been quite beautiful as a girl, even if aging had not been particularly kind to her. "He used to send her love letters constantly. Well, he was a pureblood, but always rather poor and definitely not worthy of her notice, so she always just chucked them into the fire. I don't reckon he ever quite got over her marrying Orion."

I was about to say that if you were going to spend our life pining over a woman there were better ones than my Aunt Walburga, but I stopped myself, remembering that she was his sister. True, I had never seen any indication that they were particular close, but it took nothing more than a single word against Bella or Narcissa to bring out my claws, and who was to say they were any different?

He went on. "Now that woman with the four little boys? She was a fantastic Quidditch player. Hufflepuff, so not exactly Minister of Magic material, if you know what I mean, but excellent on a broom. During a match gone bad in her fourth year she disappeared for about six weeks, nobody knew what happened to her. They found her, obviously, but she was always a little off after that."

I was enjoying myself despite my earlier sulking, but as he talked on, a woman coming out of the stationary shop across the street caught my eye. She stepped out of the shop, and then paused and rifled through the bag she was carrying, as though making sure she hadn't forgotten something. The bright sunshine and the angle she stood at gave me a startlingly clear look at her, and her profile, her hair, and even in a strange way her movements, were alarmingly like Bella.

She was much older than me, perhaps thirty, and entirely unfamiliar. It seemed unlikely that there was a Black I didn't know, for although the family was large and far-flung, we kept track of our own.

"Look at that woman," I said suddenly, cutting him off. "Over there outside the stationary shop. Wait until she turns…there, you see. She looks so much like Bella!"

"Mhm, that she does," he replied casually, as though there was nothing at all strange about it. "Also quite like you, then, naturally."

"But who is she? I've never seen her before."

"Her name is Lyra Weasley. At least I believe it is. She may be married now, I hardly know, been years since I've run into her."

"Weasley?" I repeated. "But Weasleys have red hair."

There were a few immutable facts in the world, and one of them was that Weasleys had red hair and were poor. It was one of those constant things, like gravity and tides, that you could count on. Uncle Alphard chuckled.

"Usually, yes, but the Black genes are pretty strong, and tend to show."

I blinked, while he sipped his coffee as though there was nothing surprising about that comment at all.

"But you said she was a Weasley."

He nodded sagely. "Yes, her father was Septimus Weasley. Her mother was Cedrella Black."

I squinted, trying to picture the family tree. It was huge, but I was fairly sure there was no Cedrella on it. I was about to say this, but Uncle Alphard seemed to be following my thoughts, and said "Think, Andromeda."

"The burn marks?" I said, phrasing it as a question even though I knew I was right. We did not discuss family scandals, so we didn't know the story behind any of those marks, but it didn't take much to figure out they had done something very, very bad.

"Yes, Cedrella is…or was, I'm not sure if she's still living…the daughter of Arcturus, who was the youngest of Phineas and Ursula's children. She met Weasley at Hogwarts I suppose, although she was in Slytherin and he was, I suppose, in Gryffindor, Weasleys always are. There's always been a rivalry between those houses, but it ebbs and wanes depending on the political climate, and sometimes it's no more than friendly jabs over Quidditch." I found that awfully hard to imagine, but said nothing, and he went on. "Of course, this is well before my time, so I don't really know how they became friends, but it's not so hard, you see someone in class, in the great hall, at Quidditch games. Anyway, I don't suppose anyone knew, because they were quiet about it, and surely you've noticed the family's selective blindness when it comes to people "beneath" us." He paused, sipped his coffee, and I didn't say anything, not wanting to distract him from finishing the story. "She was engaged to one of the Burke boys. In those days, they were still arranging marriages obviously, now at least they give the pretense of choice. In those days girls usually left school after their O.W.Ls, no need for a higher education really, and it was a few weeks after she left school that Arcturus got word that someone saw her in Diagon Alley with that blood-traitor Weasley. That was enough to ruin a girl's reputation, and so he forbid her to see Weasley again, and moved up the wedding. It seemed she was resigned to it, agreed to the marriage, that she was accepting what her family wanted. Then the night before her wedding, she disappeared."

"She ran away with him?" I said, pulled in by the story.

"Yes, and I'm sure there was a great scandal and the walls shook, and then she was disowned, and blasted off the family tree."

"Why did she then? She must have known that would happen if she ran off."

He smiled faintly. "I imagine because she loved him."

"But she'd be poor forever, and she'd never be able to see her family ever again."

He chuckled, and leaned back in his chair, his hands clasped behind his head. "Ah, the arrogance of youth. You have no idea, Andromeda, how powerful love can be."

I cut off whatever I had been preparing to say and looked at him. I couldn't claim that I was close to him, or that I knew him well. He was simply the eccentric uncle who was in and out of our lives. He was different, he had made the choice to not get married, not have children. It had never occurred to me, until then, to wonder why. What was different about him and his life that made him take a different path than his siblings? There was a part of me that wanted to ask, but while I was trying to find the words to do so, he smiled and tossed down his napkin.

"And someday Andy, I hope you find out. Come along, we'd better be going."

"Sirius?"

"Hm?"

"…Nevermind."

Sirius put down his quill and looked at me. We were in the old library, and he had been working intensely on something. O.W.L year or not, I doubted he was studying over the holidays, but I decided with Sirius it was sometimes better not to know. I had found him there alone when I was seized with a sudden interest in seeing the family tree that hung in there, identical to the one that hung in the drawing room at Grimmauld Place.

"Andromeda, that's three times you've started to say something and then stopped. Is there something you want to ask me?"

"It's silly really, but I was just curious…why do you think Uncle Alphard never married? It's a bit odd for this family, isn't it? I mean we don't really encourage alternative lifestyles."

"Understatement of the year, that," he said, with a roll of his eyes. "As for why Uncle Alphard never married, it's because the woman he loved married someone else."

I stared. "What makes you think that?"

"I don't think it, I know it. Because he told me."

"He did?"

He shrugged. "I asked."

"Who was she?

"He didn't tell me her name, he just said that her parents wanted her to marry someone else, and she did."

"That's…really sad."

"Marlene thinks it's romantic," he said, and then picked up his quill again. "What brought this on?"

"Nothing. I was just wondering."