Departure

Bella is not beautiful.

She is not pretty.

She is not fair.

But she makes your eyes sting, your hands itch, and the world around you grow small and insignificant before her convictions in a way that makes you wonder if it shrunk or if she just grew to monstrous size.

She eviscerates you with lidded glances, cuts you open throat to belly and gazes half uncaring at what's inside.

She saves her emotion, her passionate rages for a few select things, causes, beliefs, people.

You're about to become one of those people, you're about to betray her.

She'll be so happy to have a Judas to her messiah, a traitor to her valiant crusader that you'll have inherent meaning other than honorable sister number two.

All you have to do to mean everything to her in one perfect moment is leave her forever.

You learned young and early that people never love anyone in their reality but rather in their absences.

You know that when you are gone she will create a perfect little sister in memory, and love her and hate her more than Bella ever cared for you.

Running away from everything you know is a small price to pay to be deified and demonized, and somehow you know the imaginary being that wears your face will be there long after you're dead.

That isn't the only reason you're leaving.

You like Ted.

Really.

Because he's nice and smart and different and not even distantly related to you.

Even if you didn't you'd still go because you have to get out of this house.

Dark as the name of the family it belongs to, and to full of the footsteps of ghosts to have room for living breathing girls.

Narcissa solves the problem by becoming a doll, at the same time more and less than real in a way that made you giggle when you were young and imagine people commending your parents on how life-like she was.

Bellatrix solves the problem by becoming the devoted follower, the crusader.

Not a person but a cause, not a goddess but a pantheon, not a star but a constellation.

Your well reasoned arguments for why generations of meticulous inbreeding are wrong and Andromeda Tonks (saying that rather than Black will never feel right to you, even though you say it every night before you sleep until your throat is sore and your husband worried) is right always shrink and stoop to half their stature just like the rest of the world when Bella's around.

Sometimes you wonder if you're doing this because you hate her.

Sometimes you wonder if you're doing this because you love her.

Sometimes you wonder if you're doing this at all.

It's mid-afternoon and there's tea on the table because someone decided important conversations require tea and you assured them all it was important.

Vaguely you wonder what it will be like not taking out the good china (as if you had any other kind) for any or no occasion at all.

(you never do get used to it, you take it out despite murmurs of not being able to take the Black out of the woman because it's yours, and damn it you sacrificed many things for your new family but manners weren't among them)

You look up from your tea and smile, because you're young and frightened and as convinced you're in love as you'll ever be.

You speak.

Someone drops their cup.

Shards of bone china lie splayed on the table, shattered and limp, waiting for a repparo that doesn't come.

(And never does. The great and noble house of black buys an entirely new set, and only Bella knows where the pieces of the old one are)

Tea is on the table, pale and tan from generations of selective breeding.

Mother and Father are so angry if they could shatter the heavens and remove your star they would.

And they wonder how you could turn out this way, saying to themselves that it isn't their fault, it was the nanny's job to raise you and they would be damned before they accepted the blame. (And they were.)

Narcissa is hurt.

This was a personal betrayal, (because how could anything that happened not revolve around her?) and how could she be honorable little sister number one without someone to stand with her?

You're her sister and she loved you, but she'll believe what they tell her to believe because she has nothing else.

She is nothing else.

Bella is dangerous in her silence.

You expect bold declarative sentences, harsh accusations, pleading cajoling, anything but this.

She looks at you.

She is metal. Heated, purified, refined to the inflexible toughness of steel. (And sharpened to a knifes edge that years in prison hone rather than dull)

You had considered asking your sisters to leave with you, remain a triad together.

You knew they would not leave.

But you will.

You were never the special sister, but you will do what they can not.

That will make you real.

You are not beautiful.

You are not pretty.

You are not fair.

You are no longer honorable little sister, or obedient daughter.

You are impure, and you will never fill the universe with you glances.

But you are not a Black, and that has to count for something.