astronomy • marlene mckinnon

twenty eight

"Oh for fuck's sake," The raven-haired girl cursed under her breath as she looked at the broken piece of mirror which was now stuck in her left hand.

She winced as she carefully took the piece out of her hand and held it right in front of her. She could see the striking grey colors of her right eye, and the black strand of hair that refused to stay behind her ear all beneath a layer of crimson red blood.

She threw the piece in her hand back to where it was again, next to the other broken pieces she was trying to clean up, thinking that she would clean it up later, as she headed to the bathroom, keeping her bleeding hand elevated, and leaving bloodstains on the wooden bathroom door when she opened it with her right hand.

Astraea was running short on time anyways.

The seventeen-year-old let out a low hiss of pain as she turned on the tap on the bathroom sink and the cold water ran over her bleeding hand, washing the blood-covered handle of the tap, and then drying it with the towel hanging next to it, before opened one of the drawers in the cabinet and took out a handkerchief, forgetting about the pack of bandages she always keeps in her bedside table.

She let out a sigh of relief once she noticed that the bleeding had stopped after she had wrapped her hand in the handkerchief and applied pressure to her palm, she didn't know the spell to do so, and neither did she have time to go downstairs and check one of the books in the large library in her house.

The raven-haired girl ignored the sound of people talking and then a door being closed, it was probably her younger brother, Regulus, being forbidden to move out of it until further permission by their parents.

Usually, the girl who was now unraveling the piece of cloth on her hand wouldn't be allowed to set a step out of her room as well, but this matter was an entirely different one, and she was absolutely terrified, even though she was pretending to not be.

And really, she would be much happier if her younger brother would stay away from the person her parents were taking her to meet.

Her palm now had a scar, starting from the bottom of her pinky finger and ending at the bottom of her thumb, and there was still some blood which had been printed after the handkerchief had been pressed a bit too tightly and had left a mark- but the blood was easily washed away once she had put her hand underneath the running tap once more.

The girl wiped her hands with a clean towel and then looked at herself in the mirror, her grey eyes reflecting fear and determination all at the same time back to her.

The mirror had a few drops of blood which were racing each other to see which would get at the bottom first. She had no idea how they got there, but she still watched as they made their way to the very bottom of the mirror.

Astraea pushed back the stray strands of her hair behind her ear, while still looking into the mirror. She couldn't understand why she was feeling this dread and uneasiness about what was about to come, even though she knew exactly what was headed her way, and had been mentally preparing herself for too long.

She had agreed to do this, she had time to back out, and she even had an option, but she had already said yes, and refusing to do whatever she had to do now would be letting people down, it would be letting down her elder brother who had long since been kicked out of the house by her parents, her friends who had no choice but to fight the oncoming war, and it would let down a certain blonde she was so fascinated by.

All of her friends, her brothers, and the blonde girl were the reason she had agreed to this. And they were the reason she was now standing in a black skirt with black boots, wearing a black leather jacket that didn't belong to her over a black tank top.

She didn't understand why the dark lord had insisted for all the death eaters to wear black only- of course, she wasn't a death eater right now, not yet anyway.

"Astraea!" Her mother's cold, demanding voice echoed through the dark and gloomy walls of number twelve, Grimmauld Place, and reached the girl standing in the bathroom attached to her bedroom, on the second floor. "It's time."

The raven-haired girl looked at the mirror once more and watched as her own eyes became a reflection of her father's grey ones- hard and devoid of any emotion, before she walked out of the door, not looking back towards the bathroom whose sink still had blood stains she hadn't cleaned up, and whose mirror had blood stains which would dry up to last there when she would return.

She checked her pocket for her wand for the tenth time that night before she opened the door to leave her bedroom and enter her hallway. Her eyes found her brothers' closed bedroom doors, and she was sure that her younger brother would have his ears pressed to the door, trying to hear anything, trying to know even the tiniest bit of information about what was going on.

As she walked down the stairs, she knew that a part of her would be different when she would return.

And as her mother gripped her hand, without giving her only daughter any greeting, and she held the girl's fathers hand and the three apparated away, the grey-eyed seventeen-year-old knew that even though the scar on the palm of her left hand would fade away soon, but she would acquire a mark which would never wash away when she would open the door to her bedroom once again.

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