In the years after the war, Harry Potter thought he'd seen every kind of pain. But he hadn’t counted on this.
It started, like most other catastrophes in his life, in the shadows of something else. The Ministry had captured a rogue group of surviving Death Eaters, and Harry — now a special investigator with the auror department — was sent in to question them. Among them was Bellatrix Lestrange.
Except she shouldn’t have been there. She had died at Molly Weasley’s hand several years earlier. But this wasn’t the same woman. It couldn't be the same, could it?
Reborn by twisted magic, older, hollow-eyed, and more unpredictable than ever, Bellatrix Lestrange was a ghost of her former self — and yet still impossibly alive.
At first, Harry visited her only to ensure that she wasn’t a threat.
Then… to understand.
Then, because he couldn’t stop thinking about her.
She mocked him relentlessly. Called him boy hero, mudblood-lover, naïve child, stupid. But Harry noticed the way her fingers trembled when she spoke of the past, the way her laughter — cruel and jagged — faded too fast.
There was something behind the madness. Something he mistook for loneliness.
He brought her books, letters, even tea. She took them with disdain. "Playing the savior again, are you?" she'd sneer.
Still, he came.
And one day, he told her.
“I think I’m in love with you,” he whispered, more to the silence than to her.
Bellatrix stared at him, then laughed. It was sharp, hollow, and full of something bitter.
“Love?” she said, stepping close. “You poor, cursed child. You don't love me. You love the idea that something broken can be made whole.”
He flinched. But didn’t look away.
Bellatrix leaned in until her breath touched his skin. “I will never be what you want, Potter. I will never love you.”
And for once, her voice wasn’t cruel. It was kind. Almost.
He left the cell that day, and never returned.
But sometimes, when the wind howled through the Azkbans’s lower halls, the guards swore they heard a woman laughing — and a man crying quietly on the other side of the wall.
And maybe, in some broken part of the world, that was love.
Or the closest thing they'd ever have.