As We Destroy, So Do We Build

She is thirteen when she realises what boys are for.

For years she has circulated the outer edge of this mystery, catching hints and losing innocence. She knows where babies come from and she's seen her sister in shadows, tangled. She is not a naïve girl, Blacks are never naïve. Rather, she has had whispers floating through her head for eons but she's only just started to reply.

A soft touch. Lips on lips. Chaotic hair and ensnared hands.

They brush. Gentle, awkward, curious. They crush. Feverish, insistent, mesmerising.

He is Slytherin, of course, and he knows what he's doing. His hands move, downwards, ever downwards. She pauses. He tugs on her bottom lip with demanding teeth. She squeaks.

She pulls back, opens her mouth to say something, anything. To protest, maybe. Or maybe ask for more. Her head is spinning and her thoughts can't walk straight.

She opens her mouth to say something and in darts a tongue, warm and wet. It explores her mouth and she lets it. Tentative, shy, she flicks her own. His breath is laced with firewhiskey and for the first time she tastes the liqueur. Intoxicating, they call it, and she knows what they mean.

She is thirteen when she realises what boys are for. Thirteen years old and thirteen minutes in the corner with a dark-haired, tipsy boy. It is the beginning of her adulthood and awakens impulses that she can't, for the first time in her life, control.

She is fourteen when she starts to question.

Her family like to mould her, build ideals into her flawlessly straight spine. For years she has listened to the same drills, repeated until the words mean nothing and her body obeys without question.

Sit up straight, shoulders back. Smile, dear. No, not like that, not so happy; elegantly, dear, be elegant. Eyes down, curtesy. Seen and not heard.

You must always look your best, not a hair out of place. You must never disobey. You must be graceful and beautiful and always, always noble. You must follow this path or else.

She starts to wonder about the dreaded 'or else'.

She likes the snow on her nose. She likes to laugh loudly and brilliantly. She likes to spin around in circles and she likes to giggle late at night. She likes running down empty hallways, she likes wearing old clothes, she likes to climb trees and she likes to read beneath their branches for an entire sunny afternoon. She thinks wisps of stray hair are terribly stylish and becoming.

She doesn't understand why it is acceptable to wander about in the dead of night with deadly secrets but not to study with a Hufflepuff. Why she can read about the darkest side of magic but not a classic romance?

She is fourteen when she starts to question her heritage and the mysterious laws that have governed her entire life. Fourteen years of austere commandments and not one of logic.

She is fifteen when she forgets herself.

A moment. Like all moments it has the ability to change lives, if the factors weigh out and the scales balance. Possibility, fate, chance; they all rest untapped, waiting.

She is staring into space; her inner monologue narrates fantastic stories of romance and heroics and she lets it run away with itself.

Her hair is tossled, her eyes are impassive. She has left this world for another. She gazes at the stars beyond the pristine white ceiling.

"Andromeda, your uncle asked you a question."

Bam. The voice is quiet and soft but it screams at her of consequences and duty and she knows she's stumbled.

"Oh." Lethal eyes glare. She shivers. The fatal moment has arrived and passed. "I apologise, I was thinking of what you said earlier, Daddy, uh, sir, I mean. About Mudbloods."

Hope, desperate hope for a clean recovery. Father looks at Mother. Mother is unsure, a little shocked, and embarrassed red rises to her cheeks (perhaps a first, at the very least it has never been seen by the room before). Suspicion remains laced between the clenched fists of her dad, the slick hairs of her Aunt's bun, the ice in her mother's water and the questioning, wicked grins of her sisters and she knows she'll have to face the 'or else' later.

"What was it you asked, Uncle?"

She is fifteen when she forgets herself. It is the first slip, the first hint of colour in a black life. It is the first time they start to realise that she is not quite like them. Nothing can ever be the same once you lose your footing and step outside their world. It is the first crack in the dam whose foundations are beginning to shake.

She is sixteen when she falls in love.

She catches his eyes. He winks one of them. Before she knows it she has subtly dropped her gaze, has let her hair fall voluminously down her shoulders, tantalising waves of silk.

The most sisterly act Bellatrix has performed is lessons in the art of seduction. They practice, the three of them. Eyelashes flutter, hips swing, the devious pout beckons. They learn how to make their voices breathy then husky, learn about smouldering gazes and innocuous giggles.

Bella is the strongest woman Andromeda knows. She is firm in her convictions, stoical and brilliant. She has never seen those shoulders slump, never seen her falter or stammer or stutter. All the things Andromeda has had to learn painstakingly and rigidly are instinctive in Bellatrix. Yet Bella teaches them that men like women to be meek and docile. Gentle creatures whom they can protect. Bella is the evilest woman Andromeda knows, too, and it all seems to contradict when she thinks too hard.

He likes it when she thinks too hard. He sees her screw her forehead into lines that will surely age her and he grins. He can read in her eyes all the unasked questions and he wants to show her the answers.

Bella's lessons become ghosts compared to his vivacious ways. He laughs when she averts her gaze modestly and he roars when she tries her breathy voice on him.

"Don't talk, darling," he murmurs against her lips and she is thirteen again and can't protest for the life of her. Right and wrong play games and keep switching mercilessly and it's easier to let him hold her firmly by the waist and paint pictures on her skin with his mouth.

He likes to rumple her hair. He likes to grab her by the hand and waltz her in the corner of the library. He likes to whistle love songs and he likes to steal her chocolate fudge from the kitchens. He likes to swim topless in the lake even though it's winter and midnight and it's the squid's mating season and then laugh at her when she haughtily lifts her chin and won't join him. He likes to read action-packed adventures and laughs wildly when she lends him a worn and dirty copy of "Wuthering Heights".

"Could this piece of filthy paper really belong to my Andy?" She blushes and he kisses it, claiming it will make his lips as ruby red as hers.

She loves being his Andy

She is sixteen when she falls in love with the wrong boy and she's sixteen years too young to understand why it all feels so right.

She is seventeen when she realises what men are for.

And though her world collapses around her she doesn't notice, she's built her own walls now.

-Fin-

Thanks for reading! Comments are eternally appreciated.