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'Looking up to the sky
Never ceases to marvel me.
Within the day the stars are shy,
But at night they're all I see.
When we look to the atmosphere,
Really, we're spying the past,
For their shine takes thousands of light-years
To reach our earthy vast.
Galaxies litter the lonely black,
We're made from mainly stardust,
And maybe you'd look back,
If I said an orb has just combust.
So with Constellations ever changing,
you'd never really know
What it's really like
to watch a star grow.'
-G. Lee
The House of Black, Order of the Phoenix.
Nightmares. Night terrors.
What darling treasures they are, reinforcing memories in the most spiteful segments, knowing your weaknesses, controlling how you feel and what you think and what happens next...
They crush you in the palms of their hands, twisting you and mangling your emotions. Inhuman beings and actions against the Laws of Physics. You're both aware and unaware of what the hell is going on.
That's what Sirius defined them as anyway after they had took a role in Adeline's sleep.
All of them about her disgusting, cruel, vile, insane, psychotic... father. How he tortured those she cared for. How his little weird henchman thing cut her without spilling blood.
How they unleashed a Demon from inside her. Literally.
These thoughts, these actions, these feelings encrypted themselves into the code of her mind. Always a heavy weight within the back of her head and the pit of her stomach and the whole of her heart and the blood of her veins.
It's hard to escape from something that's inside you.
It's hard to drown something out that already knows how to swim.
You're a hostage of it, but then you look out your window to the night sky and see how small you and your problems can be even if they seem bigger than the entirety of the universe...
She hadn't known of the word to describe it; a nightmare. Sirius says that if you a put a space between the words then it means a horse in the night-time. Adeline didn't know what a horse was, but she was too tired to question.
Whenever she were to wake from one of those nightmares, Adeline would gently make her way to the attic of the house. It was small, old and dusty, smelling rather like an old book- she didn't rummage through anything (as Sirius told her the place hadn't been cleaned out for decades).
But there was an object of sorts- pointing out the small window, one end small and the other large. A telescope, Sirius had named it. He said he frequently came up there; he too was forced to stay inside the Black house for protection of some sort. He said he liked to look at the Moon because maybe someone he loved was looking at it too, so in a way he's with him or her.
She didn't know whom Sirius 'loved', but it was another one of his words. She learnt many words when she was with him. Adeline didn't understand why Albus Dumbledore hadn't taught her as many as Sirius did.
Love. She liked that word. Sirius told her it meant something like a strong emotion that made your heart warm and happy when you were near someone. Someone who made her feel safe and comfortable.
Never had she heard that word. He said there were three types: romantic, family, and friendship.
Another three words.
He didn't talk about 'romantic', or 'romance', nor 'family'.
But he talked about friendship.
He stared at the stars (sparkly things in the sky) when he talked about friendship. His eyes seemed to reflect them more than usual, in a glistening matter. For hours, he talked of the love of friendship, and she listened to him with interest and curiosity and a... it was hard to describe.
She felt an urge; like a wanting for what he described. He said things like happiness, light, warmth, safety, comfort, and other words that sounded lovely to feel.
Adeline liked the word love.
She just didn't have a use for the word.
Sirius said that she should find it. He said it's all you need in life.
So she made a promise to herself (another word!). She would find love. She would find happiness, light, warmth, safety, and comfort.
