Anna IX
“-burnt twice, the fool, then got herself drowned by a bunch of muggle priests.” Bellatrix huffed, her gaze sliding across the painting in dancing disdain. Her lips are curled into an amused sneer, making her beautiful features turn sour. “She was lucky that Lord Arcturus didn’t have her struck off the tapestry for it.”
The portrait in question - frozen in time, a forever punishment to a wild woman who relished in freedom - was a woman in red, with more blonde than brown hair and more blue than grey. Even without life given to her, she looked down upon the older girl with piercing eyes, her face thin and cunning. A storm in life as she was in death. Bellatrix Black , the twelfth of her name, beautiful and endless and dead before her time , Anna thought.
The sixteenth Bellatrix clicked her tongue, tapping Anna on the head with the end of her wand. There was a cruel gleam in her eye. “Don’t go getting yourself struck off the tapestry, little sister, or else you’ll be living with Uncle Marius and his…” She wrinkled her nose in disgust, “ muggle wife.”
Narcissa frowned unhappily where she stood beside her sister. “Can you not, Bella?”
“She’ll learn eventually.” Bellatrix scoffed languidly, sweeping past her sister and forcing Anna to follow after her with a tight, unyielding grip on her hand. Hogwarts had only made the girl more daring, arrogance building upon an ego without any true competition to push her down. “I can see her light up every time you so much as think of that hovel down the road. I’ve been, dearie, and trust me, I would prefer a sty.”
“She’s young,” Narcissa argued as if she had forgotten that Anna was there. “She’ll learn in time the truth of them. Even you enjoyed their company, once upon a time.”
“Yes, well, I was three , Cissy.” Bellatrix huffed, twirling a stray curl with her wand. It twisted merrily around the wood. “ She’s getting to be twice that. I think that’s more than enough time to understand that muggles are nothing more than filthy animals.”
Looking down at her beneath her nose with an expectant look, a sneer curling on her features, Bellatrix tilted her head in a ‘ well ?’.
Innocently, Anna returned her gaze from beneath a curtain of dark hair, dragging a sly smile onto her face.
It was only Narcissa’s timely intervention that stopped her from face planting on the floor. Her cheeks flushed pink as she couldn’t restrain an unwanted yelp of alarm escaping from her. The girl hauled her back to her feet, hands tight around her shoulders and shielding her, almost, with her body. If you squinted, Anna thought it was almost like watching Druella and Cygnus standoff against each other again - neither willing to yield, to admit to any fault, until another folded away their cards and swooped back off to their duties.
Bellatrix threw one last angry sneer her way before storming off down the hallway, hands hitting the delicate frames of portraits. It was only luck that there wasn’t a wand in her hand.
“Stop riling her up, Ursa, please,” Narcissa told her quietly. “One day, I won’t be there to stop her.”
Anna frowned. “She won’t do anything.”
Narcissa’s eyes darkened inconspicuously, her lips pressing into a thin line as she began to herd Anna back down the hall - in the opposite way of Bellatrix. “You are not Andromeda, Ursa, Bellatrix doesn’t afford you the same protections,” she murmured.
Guided down the hall, even though Anna wasn’t stupid enough to go chasing after the furious girl but Narcissa kept sending wary glances behind them. Bellatrix hadn’t come out in a storming rage as she was prone to and was likely sulking with Andromeda’s darling company, she wanted to tell her, to soothe the worry that boiled within her, but the words stuck in her throat uncomfortably.
“Go to your room, Anna.” She said finally as they reached the beginning of their wing in the house. Druella barely had any visitors over and Cygnus was half a shut-in. It gave them almost entirely free reign over the manor.
Narcissa had shared a room with Anna for years, crammed with the baby of the house as Bellatrix put it, but as the years to Hogwarts approached, Druella had split them. It had left the room feeling draftier and colder than it had in years and brought her back to her younger years, where the silence of her mind was her beloved company. If Narcissa was displeased by the decision, she made no show of it to her mother, merely bowing her head in silent submission. For some reason, it sat wrongly with Anna and left her itchy in her own skin.
Refraining from rolling her eyes at her mother-henning, Anna murmured a quiet agreement. “Will she be down for dinner?”
“Of course, don’t be silly.” Narcissa tucked a few stray hairs behind her ear, giving her a reassuring smile. “Mother won’t let anything happen. And if Father’s there - then, well, she’ll be silent the entire time.”
It was endearing to watch this older girl - still a child herself, with baby fat clouding her face and an uncomfortable amount of motor control - try and comfort her. Bellatrix wasn’t a person she was scared of; annoyed, wary of or eternally annoyed by her posturing, yes but scared? Unlikely. Reincarnation had taken the fear - or, common sense , she could hear the distant, faint voice of her past life echo in her ear - from her very quickly.
Narcissa sighed deeply, frowning again. It was wrong on her features, marring her face like an ugly scar, stretching across like a languid, lethal cat, and leaving Anna feeling twitchy and unsettled. “Mother was… annoyed today.” A revelation dawned on her face as she whirled around to face Anna, crouching in front of her. “Don’t annoy her - Bellatrix or Mother, Ursa, do you understand?”
“Why would I do that, Cissa?” Anna chirped breezily. It was easy then, to play the part of the annoying younger sister. “Don’t worry. I won’t cause too much trouble.”
Resisting the urge to pat her on the cheek condescendingly - because, despite it all, Anna had always been a bit of a bitch- she spun on her heel, letting her skirts swirl behind her dramatically as she left for her own room.
Living there for the past five years of her new life had given her insight of the place and as soon as she was walking, Anna was crawling about the hidden spaces and secret doors with reckless abandon. The long ones had featured in her and Sirius’ many adventures and the few times Regulus could be persuaded to join had been…. scintillating, to say the least.
The younger Black boy was easier to get along with. Anna chafed at the self-imposed restraints she placed on herself in the eldest’s presence, a rearing monster of annoyance surging at sporadically. But she was used to that, to irritation and anger living beneath her skin like a simmering cauldron. If Anna had truly been born Ursa, without practised patience of before and the ability to taper down on a short fuse quickly, the girl would’ve been a spitfire for sure.
Lucky them, they got me , she thought smugly.
Or not so, the elder, more senior and experienced part of her reminded her with brutal honesty, souring her mood, lucky them, unluckyme.
But Regulus was quiet and interested in the same books as her and liked sitting in silence with nothing but the rustle of pages to fill the air. He was a child of course, prone to flights of fancy and strange obsessions, but he wasn’t unsettled in the way that Bellatrix was, or strictly ordered in the way Narcissa was, or gifted with an abundance of energy like Sirius. He was just… normal.
Or, well, as normal as a racist, would-be nazi wizard could be , but Anna was taking what she could get.
“Don’t you think it’s time?” Druella’s voice echoed through the airy staircase. Anna stilled in her brief jounrey, ducking into an alcove as she caught a glimpse of blonde hair. It disappeared quickly as its owner continued down the stairs.
An annoying sound that Anna recognized immediately as she spied a few shreds of dark hair and pale skin. Cygnus , she thought with a frown. “ He might ask for her.” He insisted, weary as if this was a common argument. “Despite how much you think I’m a cold-hearted bastard, I can’t risk that, won’t risk that, Dru-”
“Don’t call me that.” The woman snapped angrily as her heeled shoes clicked against marble floors. “She’s going to Hogwarts next year, and you don’t even have the decency to floo-call Orion? Even just a basic session or a book on the theory-”
Cygnus huffed. “Yes, ask the heir to the house, who’s bound to tell the Lord who owes the very man I’m trying to avoid, a debt. Brilliant logic there, Druella, tell me-”
“What? That every time she walks into a room she’s miserable? You promised me that you’d sort it out and with Rosetta-” Her breath hitched on the words but refused to break. “With my sister gone, it leaves only you’re side of the family since you refused to even ask mine.”
“You know why.”
“We also both know where she gets it from.” Druella snapped. “The Blacks have been spies and secret keepers for centuries but we Rosiers don’t need sixteen different blood boiling curses to get someone's secrets.”
“Who else do I ask?” Cygnus exclaimed in equal exasperation and fury. “What, next you’ll have me running to Dumbledore or some blood traitor who thinks that because-”
“I’ll call up Marietta Goldstein.” Druella hissed, her words barely audible as they floated up the grand hall. “You might be incapable of talking to anyone unless they’re family or fucked them but that doesn’t mean I’m not, Cyg. I’m more than willing to set my pride aside to ask a half-blood for help.”
“So it does run in the family.” Cygnus spat. Anna recoiled at the rare kind of cruelty from him, trying to edge around the corner to get a peek at the newest game of ‘ who can hurt the other the most?’ .
A stinging slap reverberated throughout the room and anger filled in the silence. “How dare you. Not everyone's like you Cygnus. Not everyone has the audacity to-” She inhaled sharply as if refusing to breathe life into a terrible truth. There was steel in her voice, as cutting as a goblin-forged sword. “Find her someone or I will.”
The magic in the room flared as the doors slammed with a violent rage, the last of Druella’s storming fury dissipating with her exit.
There was a smash, porcelain against stone, high and ringing like bells, and Cygnus left in a flurry, not unlike his wife’s. Anna steeled herself for the flinch that never came, for that old, cramped feeling of being trapped between an argument and anger and being unable to escape. For that feeling of watching in a corner as two, larger-than-life beings scrapped and fought - almost unaware of your existence bar when they tried to include you in their own clash.
It never came.
Anna frowned, out of confusion and not upset.
There wasn’t that air of anger that sat heavily on her chest - not her own, but existing anyway- or nausea rising with every breath. No unwitting shake of her hands. No spare flinches she didn’t want to offer, but was taken from her anyway. There was fear - genuine but not heavy- but not for them or herself and a fierce sense of curiosity.
( -na?)
It was experiencing the whole thing anew when she hadn’t even realised it was reset.
( Anna, I’ve been waiting for ages , won’t you hurry-)
Where had that restrained emotion gone? Had she done this?
(I’m telling mum!)
When had she begun to become more of someone else?
(you know, sometimes, brother, I wonder if-)
She didn’t want this.
(i wonder, what it would be like to be somebody else -)
(-just for a day.)
(go, return the damn books. the rain’s probably stopped anyway-)
(-so eager, why don’t you do it yourself?)
(very funny, i’m not stupid , not like you. don’t make promises you can’t keep, anna .)
Was she still her, that girl in the rain with books in her bag?
(Anna? Anna?)
Did she want to be her?
(Anna, turn that off and come play with your brother . )
If she went back right now, would she live the same? Would she want for something more, like she always had? Would that yearning that she could never satisfy, not with books or with learning, dissipate after learning the trials she was capable of living?
(Anna, I’m not kidding. He’s been waiting all day. You promised .)
No, she wanted to say. That there wouldn’t be a secondary thought spared for this terribly askew family, for their terrible secrets and ability and inability to communicate. For their curses and infidelity and death that haunted their steps-
(I’m going to pull the plug on that damn computer if you don’t -)
Her thoughts floundered in her mind - (pick one) - something deep within her soured at the thought of Anna - had it always? It couldn't be sheer luck that she was here, she wasn't Harry Potter and even if she was, then maybe...
(It was a deal, a life for a life.)
Was... was Rigel, that boy who never was, was he like her?
Had he chosen-?
(Anna!)
She clenched her fists at her side, exhaling deeply, feeling like the world was spinning off its axis. But there was no nausea, no gut-wrenching guilt or grief - (who are you) - and the world was brighter, saturated as if she had been living in black and white.
(Hold on, I’m coming. )
Ursa continued on.