A / N : Chapter title is from the Kelly Clarkson song. Hope you all enjoy the flashback! Let me know, as always.

Also, I have a new oneshot, Moment of Clarity, featuring Bellatrix and Barty Crouch Jr, if anyone's interested, as well a collection of oneshots from the Doctor Who fandom, The World Has Turned And Left Me Here. The links are on my profile page. I'd love to know what people think.

Because of You

The house was oddly, eerily quiet, and Narcissa couldn't stand it. It wasn't as if the Blacks were a noisy family – the opposite was true in fact – but this wasn't a normal silence. It wasn't the sort of silence that suggested her father was working in the study, or her mother was out shopping, or Bella was doing who-knew-what in her room. And it especially wasn't the sort of silence that suggested Andromeda was sitting in her favourite window seat, reading. It was an ominous quiet, a threatening silence. The calm after the storm, because Andromeda wasn't sitting in her seat. She wasn't even in the house. She was . . . .

Narcissa swallowed and got to her feet slowly, unlocking her bedroom door and letting herself out of her room. Her eyes were puffy and swollen, and her head hurt from all the shouting. She crossed the hallway with light footsteps, making as little noise as possible. The silence felt, somehow, like something she wasn't supposed to break. So she opened the opposite door in silence, but she couldn't stop herself from crying out in shock at the sight that confronted her. Andromeda's room had been destroyed. Every single possession her sister had ever owned was ripped and smashed and torn and broken, and in the middle of the destruction, breathing hard and looking strangely distant, stood Bellatrix.

"Bella! What have you done? You've . . . you've ruined everything!"

The words emerged before she could stop them. Her sister blinked, and slowly, the glazed expression left her eyes. Then she began to laugh.

"I've ruined everything? Cissy, it's just stuff. What does it matter?"

"But . . because . . it's Andy's stuff." The answer seemed obvious to Narcissa.

Bella gave an odd, involuntary sort of twitch at the mention of her sister, but pulled herself together again in time. "So?"

"So? So . . it . . she . . she might come back," Cissy stammered. It was a fatal mistake.

"Come back? Come back?" Bella's voice was rising to hysterical levels now, she looked quite mad. Cissy scarcely ducked in time.

BANG! BANG! BANG!

"She's not coming back! Don't you understand? Are you stupid? She's – not – coming – back!" Bella punctuated each word with an accompanying blast from her wand.

Narcissa wanted to beg her to stop, to tell her that the Ministry might start asking questions if she didn't, but she knew that her sister wouldn't listen.

"She's not coming back!" Bella yelled. "If she even tries I'll . . . I'll . . ." She trailed off, apparently horrified by the realization that she didn't know what she would do. Opening her mouth, then closing it again, she stared at the mirror on the dressing-table, and just for an instant, she didn't look frightening anymore. She looked frightened instead, lost and confused. Like Narcissa herself. Then, suddenly, her expression hardened and with another ear-splitting bang, she blasted the mirror apart. Shards of glass flew out in every direction, and both girls ducked.

Narcissa screamed and ran from the room, staring in horror at the jagged cut on her forearm. It hurt. And so she turned around and hurried downstairs, to find her mother. She would make it better, she would make it go away . . .

She froze in the parlour doorway. Her mother stood by the sideboard, oblivious to her youngest daughter's presence. She poured herself a glass of red wine, moving slowly, as though the day's events had aged her somehow. And then, slowly, deliberately, she raised the glass, her mouth twisting in a sour smile, to toast an invisible person. She downed the contents of the glass in one.

Narcissa stared. And then, very slowly, she backed away, careful to remain quiet and hidden from view. She shivered. This woman, cold and smug and horribly pleased looking, didn't look like her mother. She looked like a stranger. Cissy swallowed nervously. Scarlet blood was now streaming from the wound on her arm - it made her feel dizzy and sick to look at it. She approached the room at the top of the house with caution, unsure of what she might find. Everyone in her family seemed to have gone mad, and so somehow, when she opened the door to find her father standing in the middle of his study, surrounded by torn pages, she didn't feel quite so surprised. It was only when she picked up one of the pages and looked at it that she gasped.

"My – my new school books!" she cried, alarmed.

Her father looked up, breathing hard. For a moment, he looked quite as mad as Bella. Then, with obvious effort, he calmed himself.

"Sorry, Cissy," he said helplessly. He looked lost.

Narcissa stared at him, unable to process the odd role reversal that had her mother coldly triumphant and her father strangely broken. She swallowed. Suddenly, her arm didn't seem to hurt that much anymore. She tucked it inside her robes and hugged herself, hiding the bloody wound from view.

"It's . . . it's okay," she said, finding her voice at last. "They're only books. We can fix them . ."

Her father simply gazed at her with an odd, indescribable expression on his face. Then he uttered a single miserable laugh, and did something that surprised her. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

"You should know," he murmered, "Some things can't be fixed."

She was crying again. That seemed to be all she ever did, these days, cry and cry like a little baby . . . Her face was wet and her throat ached, and still she couldn't stop. Stupid, pathetic little girl, she thought. Bella wouldn't cry like this. But she wasn't Bella. She never would be.

"Narcissa?"

She buried her face in her hands. She didn't want to see anyone now, didn't want anyone to see her . . . . .

"Cissy!"

She jumped. Because the boy calling her name was the last person she expected. It wasn't Snape. It wasn't even Lucius. It was Sirius.

She scrubbed at her cheeks, immediately embarrassed. "What do you want?" she snapped, as though her tone would disguise her tears, if she could just get it cold enough.

Her cousin stared at her, apparently taken aback. Then he sighed, running a hand through his hair in a way that would have made every girl in her dormitory swoon. He frowned unhappily.

"Look," he said at last, "I came to say I'm . . . sorry." He grimaced, but repeated the word anyway with a determined expression. "I'm sorry, alright? I know you think I'm a waste of space, but I can see when I'm behaving like a complete moron, believe it or not. It's just that it's hard, sometimes . . ." He swallowed, looking unhappier than ever. "It's like I think everyone's against me. So I want to push them away first . . . but I never meant to hit you. I swear to God, Cissy. You're a girl. And you're my cousin. There's no way I'd want to hurt you. It was an accident."

"An accident," Cissy repeated flatly. "So, you want me to just . . . forgive you?" The word tasted strangely bitter on her tongue.

"Yeah . ." Sirius shifted his weight from one foot to the other, looking uneasy.

She stared at him for a long moment. Then - "No."

"Wha – what?"

"I said no. I don't forgive you."Narcissa wiped her face on her sleeve and got to her feet. It felt strangely good, not to forgive someone.

Sirius, meanwhile, was staring at her with his mouth agape. He shook his head as though trying to clear it, and then took a deep, calming breath.

"Look, Cissy . . ." He put his hand on her shoulder. Narcissa froze.

And then, just like that, she was furious. "Get off me," she said furiously. When he only blinked at her in confusion, she snapped.

"If you don't get your hands off me," she said fiercely, "I'll hex you so hard you won't know what hit you."

The words emerged before she really had a chance to think about them. She realized, too late, that she didn't even sound like herself. She sounded like Bella. Apparently Sirius thought so too. He lowered his hand, dropping it to her elbow, but he laughed at her as he did so.

"Please," he scoffed, "you're not Bellatrix, Cissy. As if you would."

Narcissa couldn't take any more. Finally losing her temper, she pushed her cousin away with all her might, pleased when he staggered and almost fell over. Then she pulled out her wand.

"You don't get to tell me what I can and can't do!" she yelled, incensed. "You don't! You can't just treat me horribly, all the time, or ignore me, and then turn around and act like you suddenly have the right to care! You don't! That's not how it works!"

Sirius had stopped laughing. He stared apprenhensively at her drawn wand, and then he backed down, giving in with bad grace. "Fine!" he snapped. "Do whatever the hell you want. I don't know why I even bother. You're all the same, aren't you?" He didn't give her a chance to answer. Instead he turned on his heel and marched off, pausing only to fire off a final parting shot as he rounded the corner.

"You need your head examined!"