Black

Black

there are no flowers, no not this time
there'll be no angels gracing the lines
just these dark words I find...
~AFI I grew up in a haunted house.

Mondays always rained. Not warm rain, but cold, wet rains that hung heavy in the air, dripping from the roof with a sort of cold finality, crushing the azealas and petunias and roses. But not Mother's favorite--the narcissus were tucked away, close to the house, protected by clinging to the walls while shallow eaves kept the hard rain at bay.

Monday was the day that we were left to ourselves--Narcissa, Bellatrix and I, left to wander the dark halls. We were so small then. I remember rain beating down on the roofs as we restlessly meandered through the house, lost among the tall, dark wood-paneled hallways where paintings watched with cruel, glittering eyes and whispered hoarsely at us as we passed, things we didn't stop to hear.

Monday morning, we wandered the halls, lost admist dark wood panels, past half-open doors where Bella covered Narcissa's eyes as we passed so she couldn't be afraid. Candles along the walls made shadows more than light, and all you could hear was the silent omnious beat of rain on the roof and Mother on the piano. Mother always played the piano on days that Daddy didn't come home, and he never came home on Mondays. She played songs that somehow floated through the drawing room up through the walls, songs that had words of dark magic, music written for Dark spells. The music permeated the house, a soft humming through the floors, and it kept the half-open doors locked. For that was the way our house worked.

I grew up in a haunted house.

And it was dark.

Dark at six years old, wandering the house in a gray-candle-lit haze, two dark shadows and a pale ghost restless among the tall walls and cold floors. Dark at eighteen, watching Sirius slam the door, never to come back, watching Mother, her face red with screaming, crumple to the floor among the shadows, sobbing and sobbing and sobbing. Dark, watching Bella at night, her eyes black with darkness as she poured over ancient books of curses.

We were dark, the lot of us, dark with a brooding malevolence in our souls. Technically, we weren't on the dark side, yes. But we didn't have to be. Politics means nothing to a person's soul, and it was in our souls, deep, sinking darkness that ran through our blood, making it bleed darker and truer than those of others. It showed--cruelness in petty pranks, the deep, passionate anger that never forgave, the deep-seated emotions that flared at a snap, the love of blood that ran through our veins, contempt for those not of it.

I was one of them.

And I never completely outgrew it.

The elite. Bellatrix, Regulus, Narcissa, Sirius, and Andromeda. Family picture, 1968, black in every corner, eyes glinting, smiles secretive and sinister, hands and faces pale white shadows in our macabre family portrait. Six dark shadows and a ghost. Bella our vampire and Cissa our ghost. We were a family of monsters.

I grew up in a haunted house.

And this isn't what I wanted to be.

~

I was lucky, they say, and I think it's true. They're still trapped there, in their minds, and in a way I am too. Trapped in the hot dark summers, hot dark shadows and blood-red sunlight, skin sticky against my skin. Trapped in the cold shivering winters, curled up beneath black silk sheets that gave no warmth, huddled next to Cissa to try to gain warmth. But it didn't work. Cissa gave no warmth; ghosts never do. Trapped in the dying springs, watching Bella climb the tree in the front yard and systematically smashing all the robins' eggs in the nests, watching the shells crack and shatter and the goo that would have been a bird oozing out of it, seeping into the grass. Trapped in the morbid falls, leaves in the graveyard and Cissa sitting on the tombstones looking like one of the dead herself. I know them, all of them.

They're trapped in the past...

I can see it in their eyes

...and in a way, I am too.

~

This isn't who I wanted to be. You can never outgrow anything, and how does that make you feel? I'll never stop being one of them. I grew up with ghosts in my childhood and vampires in the bed next to me, and I'm not afraid of monsters anymore. And I'm stuck in the past and I can't get out, and I know that they're like that, too.

I feel it in their blood.

~

The house isn't the same, anymore. Sirius got it, turned it for the Order. I went to see it, a while back. There were no cobwebs in the corners, no ghostly chandeliers--they had replaced them. Every corner was brightly lit. The drawing-room piano isn't haunted anymore, and I've heard them play showtunes and cheerful war songs on it, things that don't sit right with me and grated on my nerves, things that would send me screaming from that house if I lived there, things that the piano would not have let them play in the "good old days". There are no more monsters in my room, no vampires, no ghosts. They're trying to cure the house.

I could tell them of the magic sunk into this house, about the Dark Magic that is in sunk into every one of it's bricks, tell them that the very charms that make it Unplottable, Unreachable, what they value most about it, are dark magic, powerful counterspells to all that is happy and light. But I suppose that they know that already, after all.

It's not the same, now. I wander the halls and all the doors are firmly shut, candles brightly lit to illuminate the hallway. There are no mysterious shadows, no ghosts lurking in my room or vampires that would corner you in the shadows There are no more family portraits. There is no more family.

Bella has sunk into darkness. Regulus is dead, and now Sirius is dead, too. Narcissa is married to the soul of the darkness. And I...I am not a Black anymore.

They're slowly healing the house.

They're slowly killing my childhood.

I grew up in a haunted house...

But I am not a Black anymore.

---

Notes: Characters not mine. There, I squeezed the disclaimer in. And so they all live in one house, sue me. It's my fic.
Wow, I loved this. I don't know why, but I loved this. My beta's computer is crashed, so this is a present to msyelf ;) Whatever sublimal messaging is present in Sing the Sorrow is present in this fic. But I just like this fic; it has a lot of atmosphere. It ended up sounding quite a lot like Liebling's; sorry 'Lissa! If you liked it too, review!