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They call her Prisoner 93.
Her cousin is four doors down, and across the hall. Prisoner 380. She hears him sometimes, pacing. Like a lion in a cage. Like a fish in a net.
They’re both alive, at least. That’s something.
There used to be more people between them. Ones who have gone mad. Ones who found an escape on a cutting edge or a scrap of material. That’s all you need, in here. That, and some willpower. That’s the part most of them lack.
The last to go was Prisoner 181. He pried out his own eyes. They took him away on a gurney. The stench of blood had lingered for what must have been days, if there had been time down here.
She doesn’t think Prisoner 181 had intended to kill himself. They make you see things in here. Sometimes, she considers prying her eyes out. She could do it, easily enough. They don’t bother cutting her nails. The Dementors consider it a victory when she’s caught in the throes of a nightmare and rakes her nails down her neck.
More so, she wishes she could cut out her tongue. Without her tongue, she would have nothing to tell them. There is nothing they could want of her.
____
They bring her food, when they remember. They don’t always.
Once, in the early days, with food to spare, she had thrown her roll to Prisoner 380. He had snarled and thrown it back.
There was a time, before, where he would have eaten arsenic out of her hand.
Nowadays, her ribcage cuts like razors into the fine mesh of her skin and she falls upon the food like a vulture on carrion.
She always throws him her roll, though. Just in case. Some instincts you never lose.
____
Frank and Alice Longbottom will live forever at St Mungo’s. Everything else forgotten, even their son. And Cissy will hate her for it, for Alice has forgotten her too.
She cannot explain to her sister why she did it. The mania that had filled her bones. The rapture at being chosen to kill the boy who could lead to the death of her master.
Her sister would not understand that the Dark Lord loves her in a way that she craves to be loved. He protects her, and in return she goes mad for him. An eye for an eye. A soul for a soul.
Was it worth it? She does not know.
She only knows the Dark Lord is her only hope for leaving this hell now, and she clings to that knowledge with bleeding fingertips.
____
Her bed is not a bed as much as it is a slab. It’s mounted to the wall, next to a toilet. The toilet is fixed to the floor and doesn’t flush. Once a day, the Dementors come in and throw down a bucket of water. She thinks it’s intentional, that they let her sit and stew in the smell of her own waste. She is an animal. It’s what she deserves.
Cissy would think so, she thinks, before suppressing any thoughts of her sister. It doesn’t do to think here. The Dementors are attracted to thoughts like moths to a flame, and she cannot allow them to taint her memories of her family.
If you asked for her name, it would take a moment for her to remember it. Even so, which name should she give?
____
Mostly, she waits. She had quickly discovered that the Dementors weren’t the worst of Azkaban. Nor were the occasional bouts of questioning she was subjected to, dragged out of her cell by real people. She can never recognise them. Her eyes can never adjust to the light before they bring out the masks.
At least their hands are human.
The air has a diseased chill to it, this is true. But the worst is the emptiness. Their cells are built like cages, thick iron bars separating them from the hallway, stone walls from each other. The endless time spent thinking is enough to drive anyone into insanity, and she hadn’t been far off before she arrived.
What can she do to fill the time, but think?
Thinking is dangerous, here. It reminds the Dementors where you are, that you exist, that you are alive.
And yet, if she doesn’t think, she does not exist.
I think, therefore I am. She is nothing.
She throws her bread across the hallway and waits for it to return to her cage. She rakes her nails down her wrists and scores tally charts in the stone wall with her fingernails, teeth set on edge at the grinding scratches. Sometimes, she allows herself to scream.
____
She recalls her childhood, sometimes. She can’t help it.
Scraped knees, games of adventure, wet socks. Her two sisters and her two cousins. Her four children. The sense of doom that crept into every crack and crevice of the house, even as she chased it away from them.
How was she to know that was happiness?
Prisoner 380 moans, sometimes. She thinks it’s in his sleep. They don’t take him out of his cage as much as her. They leave him be. She doesn’t think he has long before the madness sets in.
Sometimes it’s Remus’ name. Sometimes it’s James’, or Peter’s, or Marlene's.
Sometimes it’s Andy’s, or Cissy’s, or Reg’s.
More often, it’s hers. Or, more accurately, it’s Bella’s.
She covers her ears, then. Mumbles rough syllables to drown him out.
He and her were always too similar for their own good. Two sides of the same coin. They fit into each other, like a key into a padlock. Like a hook into an eye. Who is the hook and who is the eye?
She is all too acquainted with hooks and eyes. The barbs sink into her flesh.
____
She remembers the day Cissy was born. She’s too young to remember a life without Andromeda, but there are glimpses of memories without her youngest sister. Glimpses, nothing more.
She remembers holding her hand. She remembers declaring her ownership. She remembers the fragility of her sister’s wrist, cradled in Andromeda’s hand. She remembers thinking, I will protect you at all costs.
She remembers Reggie, too, but most of all she remembers Sirius. Remembers how he screamed. Remembers how she snuck into his room at night, begging him to be silent, please, Sirius, you have to be quiet. Remembers Walburga all but disowning him, even as they shared a house, and remembers thinking, well, that’s that then, he’ll be mine.
His curls grew in quickly, dark and thick. His first word was her name, spoken in the gummy tongue of a baby. She never told anyone, not even him. Fool that she was, she believed Walburga would love him if he called her Mama. She doesn’t think Sirius has ever said that word.
Prisoner 380 is what’s left of the curly-haired baby who babbled her name. History repeats itself.
____
They come for him the next day. She begs and pleads in a way she would never do for herself, begging them to take her instead of him.
When they drag him back down the corridor, she has to bite her knuckles to stop herself from screaming. There is a trail of something that shines trailing down the hallway where he has been dragged along. He whimpers as he’s thrown back into his cell, in a way that makes her heart burn.
She would give everything to let him be free of this place.
The bread today is mouldy. She picks out the green spots and throws it through her bars to his. It doesn’t return until the next day. By then the mould has grown back, and Prisoner 380 has gone silent again.
____
“Up.”
Human touch, lingering on her shoulders. She resists the urge to melt into it.
The hand grabs her wrist, tight enough to bruise, and pulls her along down the hall. She had hated people gripping her wrists, before. Here, she does not allow herself the luxury of panic. Prisoner 93 is not a person. Prisoner 93 cannot feel.
She strains her eyes to make out the rough shape of Prisoner 380 in the shadows. She thinks he’s looking at her. She doesn’t scream. Her feet stumble against the cracks in the floor. The icy chill in the air is replaced by a sterile warmth that feels alien. She squeezes her eyelids tight shut against the light which threatens to burn her eyes out.
There is a padded table in the centre of the room. Slightly longer than her, slightly wider. This table is an extension of her world. They strap her down, metal cuffs on her wrists and ankles. The Dementors don’t feed her enough to fight back. She wonders if it makes them feel better, if they believe she still has some power.
There is a two-way mirror on the wall, a lightbulb on the ceiling. Like everything else, they’re mounted and fixed in place. As if she could find a way to escape in here.
“Where are the remaining followers of He Who Must Not Be Named?” one man says. Always the same question. They’re sure she’ll crack eventually.
Even if she could speak, she wouldn’t. There are only so many people who have protected her, and the Dark Lord is one of them. In turn, she will protect him to the death. She is half-convinced that the only reason she hasn’t tried to gouge her eyes out like some of the others here, is the knowledge that one day he’ll return for her.
The guard’s uniform is black. He wears a mask, and sunglasses. They’re afraid of eye contact, these men. They don’t like remembering that the prisoners are human.
Not anymore, she thinks. She thinks of her barred cell, the mouldy bread, the smell of sewage, the chill in her bones, the tally on her wall. She is devastation in a suit of skin.
Her hands can’t stop shaking. Wrists, pinned down, fingers trembling.
There is humanity in her, somewhere. Etched on her brain, in the form of terror.
____
It was Augustus Rookwood, the first time and all the times after. She had been eight years old. Sirius had been settled to bed. Andy and Cissy had been playing together quietly. She had been reading a book. She had known that her fathers friends were round.
Augustus had come into the library, drunk on whiskey and power. Bella had made the appropriate hello and then stood up to leave. He had asked her to stay.
She had been eight years old, too baffled and panicked to understand what was happening.
When he had finished, he had left the house. She had bled for a long time. She had picked herself up, and tried to explain to her father.
Eight years old, she hadn’t known what to say.
Sometimes, afterwards, she wondered if her father had known what she was trying to tell her. He wouldn’t have cared.
She had known that if she bore this burden, her sisters would not have to. She knew that as surely as she knew pain, and blood, and anguish. And so she bore it of her own free will, even as she screamed for him to stop.
____
“Answer me,” the man in black says.
She doesn’t remember how to move her lips.
____
He beats her, of course, in the hopes of an answer. She lets her mind drift away, as if on a cloud. The pain comes with her, of course, but it’s better than living in this room.
When they drag her back, it’s bruised and in agony. She mewls in distress as they pull her back into the darkness of her cell. When she passes Prisoner 380 again, she swears she sees his eyes. Open, shining. She doesn’t let herself look too deeply. Madness lies in those eyes. Not his, but hers. He is hers. She is no one’s.
She throws him her roll with a kind of desperation and almost misses his cage entirely, her body too exhausted to aim correctly. When he throws it back, she feels disappointment anew. She chokes down the hard bread before vomiting into her toilet.
God, she wants-
No.
That is the one person she will not allow herself to crave. She will not allow herself to want. She is the hook. She is the eye.
She yearns to split her skull on the hard stone wall.
____
She had been Ravenclaw. Quick-witted, sharp-tongued. Cruel in the kind of way that had been appealing to her younger self, because beneath the sharp tongue lay some semblance of a soft interior she had loved to probe into.
She had met her during their first Potions class at Hogwarts. They had been partnered up. They spent the whole time arguing over what to do and ended up blowing up their cauldron.
Their first kiss had come in their fourth year. Aggressive, passionate, bruising. The kisses that had followed had been more gentle. When she looks back on her fourteenth year, she remembers it with a sort of golden haze.
She hardly remembers her fifth year at all. She had lost her by then. She had lost herself, too. It hadn’t been hard. There hadn’t been much to lose. What there was had all been given to her, left behind in her warm arms and sharp nails. Her name, gone, written in acid green ink upon a scrap of parchment.
Perhaps that’s why she never loved Rodolphus, she thinks. There was nothing left to love him at that point.
Bullshit.
She had never loved Rodolphus because he wasn’t her. In fact, he was far more similar to Augustus Rookwood.
She looks down at her risk to see the Dark Mark’s gentle grey tone against her pallid skin. The first time she had seen that symbol, the hands that bore it had been stealing her of her innocence.
She hears herself gag, as if in a dream, and passes out on the stone slab with her name on her lips.
____
Rita. Rita. She thinks if she keeps calling Rita by any name other than her own she will lose her sanity altogether. In many ways, Rita had been her tether, grounding her to the earth even when she had tried to float away.
There she is again, in the corner of her cell. Don’t go mad yet, Bella. Don’t go mad yet.
____
They come again, the next day.
It’s unusual, for them to turn up so frequently. This is one of the rare days where she would rather have the waiting and the boredom than the pain. The chance to lick her wounds in silence.
She complies, however. Once a rebel of sorts, now she would follow every rule she was given. The sterile white room had ensured that.
She tries to move her mouth into words. It doesn’t cooperate. She’s starting to wonder if she even knows how to talk, in this room, where everything that makes her a human seems drained away. If she were given the chance to, would she form words, or would her mouth open and close like a landed fish, no sound coming out?
It is a moot point. She has no voice. She has no reason to speak.
They lie her on the bed, as usual. Her eyes are closed. The room is the same as it always is, except her eyes are shut.
There is a certain preamble to this kind of torture. The kind that involves only men and the horror they bring. They drew it out of her in the early weeks here, when she had seen Augustus in a cell a few doors down. The Dementors had filled her with a sense of dread that had her screaming blue murder until she’d coughed blood.
One of the guards is below her waist, She can feel him moving backwards and forwards inside her, but her brain is elsewhere. She is barely in the room. She can feel everything, but nothing at all.
She opens her eyes for a moment, and sees the man in his polarised sunglasses. His brow is furrowed. She wonders how much extra he gets paid for this kind of work.
If she were braver, she would stare at him. She would stare him where his eyes should be until he was forced to look away.
She is not.
When he finishes, it is with a grunt, as of relief. He asks her again, speech slightly bored-sounding, about the location of He Who Must Not Be Named’s followers, but she is far, far away. She feels as though she is watching the scene from above. Her thirty-something year old self, watching the eight-year-old’s expression of bafflement.
He sighs. “Show her.”
She turns her head in surprise. This is new. One of the other guards clicks a button, and the mirror clears. When she takes in the picture, she feels her heart stop.
Sirius.
He is strapped to a chair, neck braced so that he cannot look away from her. His face is red. If she squints, she can make out tear tracks on his cheeks. He is screaming something which could be her name, and could just as easily be that she deserves this.
He is struggling against his restraints, and she feels something inside her crumble into pieces.
They made him watch.
“Say hi,” the man says. “Smile.” Bellatrix does her best to obey. She pulls her face into a grimace that makes Sirius scream more. Her face is wet with tears.
“We should have a breakthrough with him, at least,” the man in the mask says, before unbuckling her from the bed. She can still see Sirius through the mirror. Screaming, screaming, screaming.
____
She wonders if he’s realised now, why she had told him what she had the night she’d left for Hogwarts.
“Sirius,” she had said. She had taken him by the shoulders. “Can you be a big brave boy for me? I need to ask you a favour.”
“Anything,” Sirius had said. He had been three. Far too young. Precocious for his age, as the Blacks often were, but still. The enormity of what she was asking of him appalled her.
“You know the men that come to our house? The men that I don’t like?”
Sirius had made a face. “Yeah.”
“I need you to make sure they never go anywhere near Andy. Or Cissy, or you, or Reggie, but especially Andy. Can you do that for me?”
Sirius had nodded. “Why?”
She had picked him up and squeezed him in a hug, ignoring his question. “When they come round, the four of you hide from them, okay? If the others don’t want to, make an excuse.” She had exhaled shakily. “I’m not going to be here to keep you safe. Can I trust you to be a big boy and look after everyone?”
“Why can’t Andy?”
Because Andy isn’t three anymore and she’d want to know what was wrong. Because Andy is my twin. Because Andy doesn’t trust me in the same complete and terrifying way that you do. “Please, Sirius. Can you promise me?”
He had agreed, in the end, and pinky-sworn. When she had asked her sisters about Augustus later, they hadn’t known who she was talking about. She had thanked every God she couldn’t quite believe in for that. Every night she went without sleep when the memories plagued her, she thanked the universe it hadn’t been one of the others.
When she came home each summer, Augustus barely looked at her anymore.
She supposed he wanted the wide-eyed girl who had no idea what was happening to her. He didn’t want the woman he had made of her.
____
She throws him her roll, and he doesn’t throw it back. She’s relieved in a way she didn’t know she still could be.
This is her cousin’s way of saying ‘I’m here. I still love you. You still exist to me.” She has earned his hatred, and she has earned his love, and he will show her both.
She curls up in the foetal position and sobs like the world is ending.
Maybe it is.
____
She remembers the day she told Rita about Augustus.
She had wanted to tell other people. She’d thought about it hard. She lost count of the number of times she nearly told Andy, but the words would get stuck in her throat and she wouldn’t be able to push them out, no matter how hard she tried.
Ultimately, it had been Rita who she told.
They had been sitting together, on the Quidditch pitch. Fourteen years old and drunk on the summer sun. Slytherin had just lost a match to Ravenclaw. Rita had been delighted. They had spent fifteen or twenty minutes simply arguing with one another in the affectionate way they had learnt to, before falling silent.
Her head had been resting on Rita’s shoulder. She had felt entirely relaxed. Almost unbidden, her mouth had opened.
“Rita?” she had asked. She had hummed a response. “Has anything… bad ever happened to you?”
Rita had replied with a sleepy voice. “Depends. What do you mean bad?” Her tone was even.
She had searched the tone for any hint of the journalist’s curiosity that she loved so much but couldn’t deal with right now, but found none. Rita was safe.
“Has anyone ever…” she had paused. She could feel her heart hammering. Rita had stroked her hair and laid down in the grass. She had lain down beside her, gripping her hand. “Hurt you?”
There had been a silence, a too-long silence. She had been able to feel her hands shaking. Rita had begun, “Bella-“
“Don’t,” she had said. Please don’t ask me what I mean. She had made to stand up. “This was a mistake. Never mind.” Rita would never look at her the same, after this. This knowledge was like rot. It ate away at you.
Rita had stood up with her, and grabbed her hand. “It wasn’t a mistake,” she had said. “And no. Never. Not in the way you’re asking me.”
She had let out a thick knot of air that was clogging her throat and tried to remember to breathe. Rita had wrapped her arms around her.
“I was eight,” she had managed to choke out. Rita’s grip had tightened. “The first time.”
Rita had been silent. She had been able to feel her hot breath on cheek as tears trickled down it. “He was a friend of my father’s. I didn’t like it.” She had let out a sob that she hadn’t known was even inside her. It hurt as it burst out. She gulped mouthfuls of air, clinging to Rita like the lifeline she probably was. “I didn’t want it.”
“I believe you,” Rita had said, and she had held her for a long time, hours, maybe, whispering sweet nothings into her ear.
She had told her more, in the months to come. Rita would let her share her bed when the nights were too dark and each shadow looked like a hand reaching for her neck. The two of them had never touched one another in the greedy way teenagers sometimes did, and for that she had been eternally thankful.
____
Prisoner 102 steals a scalpel from the white room and slits his throat with it.
Prisoner 380 is moved to his cell. The one next to hers. His proximity is tantalising.
She thinks the Dementors have noticed her little trick with the bread.
They whisper in her ears, telling her how helpful she’s been in finally cracking Prisoner 380. She cradles her knees to her chest and tries to remember who she was.
____
When she had lost Rita, it had been as sudden as a storm.
“You’ve changed,” Rita had said. It had been the last day of their fourth year, the best and only good year of her life. “Let’s just… get some space from each other this summer, okay? You decide what you want, and I’ll understand.”
She had hated Rita, in that moment, for sending her home to that house without a friend. She had hated Rita for weeks, and she had channeled that hatred into love and passed it onto Cissy, who was starting school that September and terrified. She channeled it into teaching Sirius all the tricks she had learnt, and playing games with Regulus, and she did not allow herself to think about Rita.
When Augustus had come again, it had been the final time. She had thought he was finished with her, that she had escaped his clutches. She had not yet learnt that she was bound to him by invisible thread, wound around her neck.
In many ways, she thinks afterwards, Augustus had done her a favour. He had revealed that Rita did not care about her, had never cared about her, and would sooner let her rot from the inside in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black than send her a single owl and a ‘hope you’re okay.’
When the Dark Lord had come to the house and she had met Rodolphus, the son of a devout Death Eater, she had thought it was fate. The rest, as they say, had been history, and Bellatrix Lestrange had been born.
_____
They do it to her again. This time, Sirius is in the room with them. She shuts her eyes and remembers why she bore it all those years before, remembers who she bore it for, and she bears it again. She looks into Sirius’ eyes with all the love left in her heart and feeds him with any remnants of strength she has remaining in the crevasses of her bones.
_____
She dreams here. Every night. The dream is always the same. She always knows she’s dreaming.
Lashed to her bed, she feels herself shudder. The knots are too tight around her wrists. She feels the pain, white hot on her skin. There are footsteps on the hallway. She knows she is dreaming because they are louder than she remembers.
A voice, always the same, always hers. “Get up.”
She strains at her bindings and urges herself into freedom. Always, she manages to untie the knots. Always, it is never worth it. There he is, hands made of rope, his eyes as familiar to her as her own. Always, his face is the same, and always, she forgets she is dreaming.
“Get up.”
She feels the weight of his body on hers. She feels his hands on her wrists, tighter than the ropes, and she realises fleetingly that the rope was merely an illusion, distracting her from the monster approaching.
And then she is floating, up into the air, and she is watching herself on the bed, pinned down by the weight of a thousand hands. And she is changing, she is Andromeda, and she is Narcissa, and she is Sirius and Regulus, and he is slowly destroying everything she loves. In the bed, her family is screaming, and she is reaching down, unable to save them.
And then she is back in her body, and she is staring into polarised sunglasses. She is in a sterile white room, and he is inside her. She reaches up to his face, and removes the sunglasses, and finds a Dementor staring back at her, mouth raw and deep and toothless.
She screams herself awake and scrapes at her wrists until they bleed.
_____
“Bella.”
The voice comes at midnight, and she is woken awake from her place on the slab.
“Bella.”
It is coming from the neighbouring cage.
She pulls herself up and staggers across the floor to the edge of her cage. There is a hand, stretching round the wall, and she sticks her own hand out through the bars of the cage and seizes it.
“Bella?” comes the voice, uncertain and grating with underuse. And really, she is not Bella anymore, she is not Bellatrix, either, she is not anything, but to him she is Bella and her first priority will always be the children.
“Yes,” she says. Her voice is foreign to her.
“Bella, I’m getting out,” Prisoner 380 tells her. “I’m leaving. I found a way. And I'm going to come back for you.”
She holds his hand tighter. “Leaving?”
“I’m an Animagus,” he says. “I’m leaving. I can get out. The Dementors are blind. They won’t notice till it’s too late. I’m leaving.” His hand grips hers so tightly she feels the crescents of his nails in her flesh. To love the knife is to take the cutting. “I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking. “I’m sorry that they- that they-“ His voice trails off.
She twists her face into a grimace that he cannot see. “It was not your fault,” she says brokenly. “Get out of here, before Augustus gets you too.”
“Augustus?” he says, and she realises her folly, too late to stop the dots connecting. "Augustus Rookwood? As in-" He cuts himself off. Bellatrix can almost hear the cogs turning in his brain, the dominos falling. She has ruined him.
He is sobbing now, unabashedly. “It happened to you before?”
She feels a wetness on her own cheeks, now, and she clasps her other hand over Sirius’s. “It was me, or one of you,” she says. “The choice was mine to make.” And so she had made it, and it weighed heavy on her shoulders every day.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he sobs, clinging to her hand like a child. “I would have killed him. I would have done it.”
She lets out a peal of laughter, long and loud and mad. “Sirius, you were not even a year old. What could you have done?”
“You were that young?” Once again, she realises her slip up too late. Years in Azkaban have frayed her edges, taken away her power to lie and manipulate. His hand is shaking. “Why didn’t you tell?”
She cuts him off with a harsh squeeze to his hand. “You are not to worry for me,” she says. “I want you to remember that you hate me, Sirius.” The tears flow, hot and loud. “Remember everything I did, all the evils. Remember the cruelty. Remember everything I did. Leave here, and live. You are to leave me behind. I am not the woman you remember.”
“Bella,” he sobs. “I’ll come back for you.”
She holds his hand tighter. “You will not,” she spits with venom. “They have done nothing more than I deserve. Sirius, if you allow yourself to be burdened with me, it will all have been for nothing. Do you understand me?”
“Bella-”
“I am not Bella,” she hisses at him. “Leave. Now. Before it is too late. Do not come back. And do not tell anyone, do you understand? You were not supposed to know, and this will be forever on my conscience. Do not tell Andy. Do not tell Cissy. Do you understand?”
“Bella-“
“I said do you understand?” It hurts her heart to do it, but she wrenches her hand free. “You are to leave this place. I have no place in your life other than to hate.”
In the morning, he is gone. There is a bread roll slipped between the bars of her cage. She clutches it to her chest and screams.
_____
Two years later, she is free. She is blazing through the sky like a spell, like a curse, like magic. Everything inside her chest is dead. Everything that came before means nothing.
“I am your servant,” she tells the Dark Lord.
There are two kinds of freedom, she had once heard. Freedom to and freedom from. She has learnt not to underestimate the power of the latter.
_____
Narcissa is a broken woman. She sees that with every fibre of her being. She sees that it is due to her. The Dark Lord tells her it was for the best, tells her that Cissy is a devout Death Eater and a loving mother to Draco, who will grow to be the same. She eats up the praise like a snake with a mouse.
_____
For Sirius, the end comes brightly.
When she looks back, it is almost like a game, to her. The way they had danced around one another, hurling schoolgirl curses. The tickling charm. The levitation charm. Small things, nothing more.
She does not remember what curse strikes the final blow. She only remembers watching her cousin disappear into the veil. She remembers the scream of his godson, remembers running away, cackling, remembers the chase, remembers being caught.
She laughs at Harry Potter when he tries to Crucify her. Here is a boy who has known pain, but has never known the anger it takes to cast the Cruciatus Curse. In Azkaban, her hurt had turned to anger, and that has festered into boils, pus-filled and bulbous. He has known pain, but not like that, never like that.
_____
Madness is beautiful, a bright green flame that taints everything she does and sets everything alight. When everyone else is dead, she is still fighting. Furious, deadly. She has nothing to live for but devotion to the Dark Lord, devotion to her master, devotion to the one man who has given her the only thing she ever desired - safety.
She kills her sister’s daughter and laughs over her corpse. She kills and she maims and she feels the green flame of madness consuming her, and it feels so good. There is nothing like the feeling of power. Powerlessness made her weak. Till the end, she will fight.
She had thought there was nothing stronger than madness. It was disgusting, really, to discover she was wrong. Love is stronger than madness. She loves nothing more than she loves her master. This is the way things should be. Love, love, love. The things she has done for love. The things she will continue to do. Love is all there is. She will let it ignite her.
Her end comes just as brightly. She is killed by love, in the end, Molly Weasley’s love for her daughter. She knows that love, does she not? She is intimately acquainted, in the end, with what it means to be a parent.
Bellatrix Lestrange dies laughing.
_____
An image, fleeting and final. Two boys and two girls, twirling on an ice rink. She runs a hand through her hair, curly and long, and everything around her seems giant. She looks down at her feet, and there are skates. She runs onto the ice.
“Bella!” comes a joyful cry, and there are her sisters, there are her boys, and she feels their arms round her soft as snow. She feels, as suddenly as they came, their arms leaving her, until it is just her and Sirius, drifting slowly on the ice, and she knows now that this is the end.
“I waited for you,” he says. His voice is broken. “In the veil. Between life and death. I waited for you.”
“I don’t think that was a good idea,” she tells him. “Death will not have changed me.”
“It is not change I want right now,” he says. He holds her, and she holds him. “It is you.”
“You have me,” she says. “You are my boy.”
On the other side of the lake, a boy with straight dark hair is jumping up and down, waving at them. What comes beyond that, she cannot see. But there is warmth on her skin.
Sirius laughs, gripping her hand. “Let’s go say hello. He’s been here a while.”
There is ice in her heart and madness in her veins, and she feels the urge to pull away. But there is Sirius, and he is smiling at her, all-teeth, and in the end, all of it was for nothing if she lets him go again.
Bella Black smiles at her cousin and drops his hand. “Race you.”