Sometimes it hurts to even look at them. It's like looking at the sun - they are great, powerful and it feels like their presence is essential to keeping her alive. They burn so brightly, an eternal, glorious blaze that she wants to bask in forever...
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BELLATRIX'S POV
SEPTEMBER, 1962.
Sleep didn't come easily to Bellatrix that night. She lay awake, entangled in too-cold silk sheets that chilled her skin, her mind in complete and utter turmoil. Her chest ached as a result of the ferocity with which she missed her sisters. Normally, they would be close to her, taking up rooms in the same wing of the manor as her. But tonight, they're not. For the next few months they'll be hundreds of miles away. She tosses and turns for a great deal of time. Eventually, darkness encroaches at the edges of her vision and she succumbs to the weariness.
She's not awoken by light. There's no real light in the slytherin common room and the dorms. They don't get sunlight, being so far underground, and even if they did, the dorms distinctly lack windows. She's not even awoken by sound, either. The dorm is completely silent. One moment, Bellatrix is dead to the world, entrapped in dreamless slumber, and the next she is painfully aware that she is awake.
The first thing she thinks when she wakes up is that she would very much like to go back to sleep. She grumbles, disrupting the tentative silence of the dorm, and shoves her face back into the pillows. They, too, have silk cases and are absolutely freezing. The whole dungeon, and subsequently the slytherin common room, is almost glacial. Silk isn't exactly a brilliant material for retaining heat. Bellatrix mentally scoffs - Merlin, Narcissa could probably spin off at least ten facts about silk. That was all mother filled her head with. Etiquette, clothes, fabric, social conventions.
The mere thought of Narcissa sends Bellatrix into an early-morning spiral. Narcissa, the youngest of the three of them, the most poised, the most similar to their mother, had never lived in a world without either her or Andromeda. For a fleeting time, prior to Andromeda's birth, Bellatrix had been alone, an only child. She didn't remember that time and she didn't want to.
Bellatrix begrudgingly rises, thinking of the letters burrowed at the bottom of her trunk. Briar had said she would help mail them, using Cassian's owl. Which was nice of her. Polite, really. Briar at least made Bellatrix feel comfortable, unlike the other two girls in their dorm, Adora and Clarice, who set her resolutely on edge. They operate in the same kind of way Narcissa does. Any insults they dish out are veiled behind sweet words and a kind smile. Bellatrix has never been like that. She doesn't do that. If she dislikes someone, she'll leave them physically and psychologically hurt, not second guessing their choice of shoes.
Bellatrix draws back the emerald curtain that had been drawn around her four-poster bed. She finds that Briar has already done the same thing, having tied the curtains to the bed posts, and she's currently sat, fully dressed in her uniform, green and silver tie hung around her neck, on her bed, reading.
