Author's Note: For the "Oscar Wilde" challenge. It feels good to get back to writing the Black cousins :) Reviews greatly appreciated!

Fallen Stars

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."

-Oscar Wilde

She crouches in her dark, gloomy cell, rocking slowly back and forth. She's too tired to fight the madness today; she lets it engulf her, warm and welcoming.

The voices in her head chatter; the voices outside her cell scream. Bellatrix doesn't join them, not today. She stares up at the sky, taking in the twinkling stars above. When she first came to Azkaban, she thought the cells with the towering walls and the open ceiling, giving her a glimpse of the sky, were a blessing, a place where she could mentally escape her prison and return to the stars.

Now, she knows that they're a curse. The stars taunt her daily, laughing at her. Freedom is so close, she can taste it, but she's trapped inside her prison.

Still, she stares at the stars and picks out her own star. Bellatrix, the Amazon star, the forty-second brightest star in the sky. She shoves the lurking thought that Sirius' star is brighter than hers to the back of her mind, and instead, lets a gaunt smile cross her face.

She'll return to the stars, one day. She'll be free, and she'll be a warrior again, and she'll shine.

ii. andromeda

She used to dance among the stars, all shining eyes and flushed cheeks and warm giddy laughter.

Ted would laugh at her, call her a beautiful Black princess and teasingly wonder what she was doing with an ordinary bloke like him.

She would scoff at him, turning up her nose at his teasing, and say that she might be a Black princess, but she was his Black princess, and she loved being with him, even if it was on the ordinary ground.

She'd try to erase her aristocratic breeding, try to fall down from the stars and dance on the plain earth, but it never could last long, and Ted would take her in his arms and whisper that he liked her standing on constellations with stars in her eyes.

Now Ted has died, and her heart is too heavy to be anywhere near the stars. She's standing still on the earth, and she looks up at the nighttime sky, with stars sprinkled across it like sugar across velvet, and is filled with an inexpressible longing.

She can't dance among the stars anymore, and she misses it.

iii. sirius

He remembers being a whirl of fire and spark and energy, remembers being Sirius Black.

Now, he's a shell of his former self, empty and broken, and his eyes filled with stars and laughter are now sunken and dead.

He tries to remember James' laugh to mimic it, because his own is irrevocably broken, but it comes out as desperate and slightly mad. Something dulls in Remus' eyes when Sirius tries it, so he never does again.

He's grateful for Harry, who doesn't remember what Sirius Black once was, and thus, has no expectations for Sirius to try to live up to. And at the same time, he's grateful for Remus, the one who truly knows that he wasn't always this broken.

He tries to repair himself, but it won't work because James is dead, and isn't coming back, and how can he be whole without James? And so he goes about life with burnt-out stars and broken laughter in his eyes, and he's never quite the same.

He looks to the stars, and remembers what he used to have, what he used to be.

iv. regulus

When he's knelt before the Dark Lord, trying not to scream as he burns his Mark into Regulus' flesh, his mind is galaxies away. When it's over, and the Death Eaters are coldly celebrating by murdering innocent Muggles, Regulus clenches his teeth and takes himself to the stars.

They've always been his refuge, even when he was a child and his house was wracked with screams and curses and terror. He'd look to the stars, and immediately be able to pick out his star and his brother's star, the Dog Star. They twinkled above him, always, even when Sirius himself wasn't there to protect him. Regulus knew it was stupid, but the stars were a source of comfort to him- cold, emotionless comfort, but Regulus was a Black; that was all he expected.

And now his nights are filled with the screams of the innocent, and flashes of cold green light, and Regulus no longer feels safe.

He looks up at the sky, and sees Sirius' star, shining brighter than all the rest. It makes him want to be brave.

v. narcissa

Bellatrix was the warrior, etched into the sky, fierce and brave and wild. Andromeda was the dreamer, shining in the stars, dancing in the stars, living in the stars, even as she ran away. Narcissa was the princess, but her castle was never in the stars, it was always implanted firmly into the ground.

She used to envy her family's legacies among the stars, and used to wish she could join them up into the galaxy.

Now they've all fallen, one by one, from sanity, from grace. Narcissa watched them fall, and she watched them explode, as stars often do, and all the while, she stood in her stable place on the earth.

And for a while, as her family disappeared around her, Andromeda and Sirius becoming nothing more than charred fabric (and Sirius even less than that, eventually), Regulus disappearing into the mist, and Bellatrix falling in a blaze of fire and glory and intensity, Narcissa didn't want to look into the sky. She didn't want to see the stars and remember how they have fallen. She didn't want the reminder that she, smeared by her Black name and connections with the heavens, could fall just as quickly as they did.

And as she huddles next to her husband in her once-glamorous manor, and waits for the Aurors to come and arrest them, she looks out the window at the stars, and tears prick at her eyes.

The Most Ancient and Noble House of Black has fallen along with the stars.