Hey all.

I'm back after way too long, I know. But my muse ran away and was in a theatre troupe in New Zealend, and I only just found him again. I hope he stays.

Anyway, I really like this chapter, so I hope you won't kill me for disappearing ( I was hunting down my muse! I swear! I have an excuse! *pleads* *grovels*) and then coming back after so long with such a short chapter.

Well, just read it. Please.

As usual: I don't own anything. If I owned it, why would I be posting this stuff on a fanfiction site? Hmmm?

Narcissa stares across the Hog's Head, a mixture of sadness and happiness and something else that tastes sweet and sad in her mouth and smells like the garden in the summer when they were children, whirls through her like the gently swirling, shimmery white surface if the gillywater clutched in her pale hand.

There's Minerva, across the room, talking to Rosmarta, playing the heroes, the golden girls. And here's Narcissa, in the corner. She's so sick of it, really. Once upon a time, back in another life, she was everything that she wanted to be, and that was the top of society, the respected, the beautiful. And then the war came, and burned through everything she knew. And then she was in the dirt, and the villain, and was everything she feared.

Narcissa is no stranger to being left behind, forgotten for the next big thing. Once upon a time, Andy was too far ahead of them to be competition, and Bella was the one that their parents were always angry at, and Cissa was the lovely blond angel. But then Bella became Bellatrix, and Andy was blasted off the tapestry, and Bellatrix was beautiful and wonderful and brave suddenly, and just as fast, Cissa was Narcissa, the naïve, irritating kid sister.

So it bothers Narcissa that she was forgotten again, just when she though that she had made in the world out of her sister's shadows. Of course, shadows were Bella's domain, and one could never fully get out of them. And it seemed that she was still stuck in the tar-sticky mess. Lucius was in jail, moldering in Azkaban, and it seems like Draco has turned away from her completely.

And so, Narcissa Black, belle of the ball, beauty queen, princess, sits in the corner booth of the pub and nurses a gillyweed that tastes like nostaligia.

" 'Evening, Narcissa. "

When Narcissa hears the voice, she thinks that maybe her memory has conjured it up, and that maybe she going mad. Because there is no rational explanation. She hasen't heard that voice, that tone, the way it slides gently over the hiss in her name in over twenty years.

But reality and rationality are fickle beasts, and Narcissa raises her eyes from her glass and stares into the liquid eyes of her older sister Andromeda.

Narcissa thinks of a million trillion thousand things she should tell her sister, on their first meeting in so long.

But the grandeur, the pomp, and the declarations planned out on sleepless nights and raised lovingly in a nest of remorse and second guessing due on Narcissa's tongue. They all are so fake, so clichéd, so see-through in their attempts of profoundness. Instead, all Narcissa can comment on is the weather.

"Miserable weather we're having, isn't it?" Her voice flows with careful lightness that someone less than a sister would swallow happily.

Narcissa knows from Andromeda's slow, quiet gaze that she, at least, reads between, and see's the panic behind Narcissa's deliberate exterior.

After all, they are sisters. Raised, together, to be china dolls, hard, shiny, porcelain. And raised to see the hairline cracks in the surface of a substance so perfect it must be flawed.

"Tell me." Andromeda sits down opposite Narcissa.

Narcissa sees the cracks in Andromeda, and she sees the places that the cracks have healed and made her stronger. Andromeda isn't a china doll anymore. She's real.

So Narcissa begins to tell her.

Hola-

So? How was it? Hate it? Love it? Think it was a waste of your time? Hope I burn in hell?

Lemme know in a ... (drumroll please) review!

And may the force be with you.

Only if you review.

So review.

You want the force, don't you? Eh? Eh?

You know you want to. . . just write some stinkin' reviews.