Written in the Stars

There are days when he is completely certain and days when he isn't sure of anything. Days when he wonders what any of it really means.

And he doesn't know, not really -- he has never quite been able to capture all the details completely.

He thinks sometimes that because Andromeda was good, and Sirius too, that maybe Bellatrix was really the black sheep, not them. Because Regulus never really wanted to be a death eater - not in the end, and yeah, Narcissa married one, but they say love is blind, so maybe she isn't really evil, not in the true sense of the word, not like Bella. And he thinks maybe this might mean that Nymphradora is safe, that she might not be a Black after all, no matter what her bloodline is.

Mostly, he just wonders how long he can keep lying to himself.

There are moments, moments when her eyes are too gray and her hair too dark, and her smile stretches too wildly and too knowledgeably, like she is the Cheshire cat, guiding him, leading him to a place he's certain he does not want to be. She laughs hollowly sometimes, too harshly and at nothing, at things that aren't really funny, or things that are, but not in that way...in the other way, the painful, "this is irony" type of way. And he wonders sometimes, fears, that there might be something inescapable in all this, like maybe it had all been set into the stone long before he even existed, before she even existed.

It is always little things that bring out these moments, the sudden realization that she looks beautiful in green (it goes with her pink hair), more so than any other other color, and that the small amount of jewelry she wears is always silver; never gold. She speaks French and Latin and scoffs at his notions of self-sacrifice, something he's always considered his uniquely Gryffindor quality. But she was not a Gryffindor, after all, and in spite of the demons he often sees swimming through her haunted eyes, she isn't much like Sirius either, though he isn't sure it would make much of a difference if she was.

And maybe he's imagining it, he thinks, watching the uncharacteristically steely expression in her eyes as she stares at the stars, but somehow he doubts it. Because they are written in those stars...their names branded into the sky as firmly as it was stitched into their family tapestry.

They have been blasted off now, of course, her and Sirius and Andromeda and Regulus, but you can't shoot the stars out of the sky, and you can't change the way the world was written. They will always be there, their names and hers, twinkling against the darkness, too bright to ever be snuffed out, and she will always be a Black.

From now until eternity -- until the day the world rewrites itself -- until the stars blink out -- he isn't sure if he can lie to himself that long. Because stars take years to blink out, and even when they do it takes a million more before their light even reaches earth, and her star could be dead now, for all he knows, and even then he doesn't think that it would matter.

Some things are just predestined.