Bellatrix
Azkaban, 1993
The cold bit deep into her bones. Not the cold of winter, nor the damp chill that seeped through the mossy stone of her cell. It was something worse, a cold that was born from within—a black void in her chest that no coat could ever fill.
Years. Years of nothingness.
The Dementors had passed by recently. She felt empty, frozen from the inside out, but she no longer feared them. After so many years, pain became a companion, a cruel lover you learn to endure.
And she was used to being possessed by cruel things.
She didn’t speak. She didn’t scream. She didn’t call for her master as she once had, as the others still did. There was no need.
He would return. She had always known.
But today… today, she wasn’t thinking about that.
Today, she only watched.
The world beyond the bars had become a distant echo, a memory dissolving like ink in water. But she didn’t forget.
She didn’t forget her misery.
She didn’t forget her hatred.
Every second in Azkaban was a curse that repeated endlessly, a whirlwind of resentments and grudges that suffocated her more than the heavy, stale air of her cell.
She hated her family.
She hated the Black name, that disgusting pure-blood tradition that chained her to a fate she never wanted. She hated her parents, hated her sister Narcissa with her perfect marriage to Lucius Malfoy, but most of all, she hated Andromeda.
Andromeda, the coward who ran away.
Andromeda, who got the life Bellatrix had once dreamed of.
She had love. She had a home. She had a daughter.
A burning knot formed in Bellatrix’s stomach. She too could have had a daughter.
She could have had a family.
But her child had died the same day she became Voldemort’s beast.
The day Remus Lupin left her to rot in her personal hell.
She laughed, but it was a dry, hollow sound, devoid of joy. That was the day Bellatrix Black died and Bellatrix Lestrange was born.
The mad witch. The devoted one. Voldemort’s bitch.
Tears burned her eyes, but she didn’t shed them. She was no longer a woman who cried.
Her hatred wasn’t only for her family.
She hated the Light Side, all those hypocrites who spoke of mercy and justice while branding her a monster. Hadn’t they done the same things she had?
She hated the Longbottoms.
Not because she wished them harm, but because she had envied them too much.
Frank and Alice were happy, had a life, had a love that had never broken.
That’s why, when she had the chance to destroy them, she went beyond what was necessary.
And if she was honest with herself… she had done it because she wanted them to suffer as she suffered.
But worst of all… what consumed her every night when the darkness closed in around her…
She hated Remus Lupin.
She hated him with every fiber of her being.
She hated him because he abandoned her. Because he looked at her with coldness when he had once been the only one who had ever seen her as more than a pawn on the chessboard.
She hated him because every time she closed her eyes, she could still feel his skin against hers.
She hated him because she still loved him.
Because he had been her only truth before they turned her into this ruin of a woman.
And that was the most beautiful and tragic contradiction of all.
—"I DIDN’T DO IT! THE RAT! THE RAT BETRAYED THEM!"
The scream made her lift her head.
From another cell, Sirius Black was raving.
Bellatrix tilted her head, watching the spectacle.
The fallen star.
Sirius Black, the heir, the rebel, the one who had everything and threw it away to play at being just another Gryffindor. Now he was nothing more than a sack of bones covered in rags, a specter of what could have been.
The star that should have been the brightest of his generation, reduced to a wretched shadow. Just like her.
And she hated him for that.
She hated him because he was what Lupin had been to her: a traitor.
But Sirius wasn’t screaming out of guilt—he was screaming out of desperation.
He was proclaiming his innocence.
"The rat betrayed them."
Bellatrix closed her eyes.
Sirius was talking about Pettigrew.
Pettigrew.
Not Lupin.
Not her Remus.
A shiver ran down her spine.
Fudge arrived two days later.
She chuckled, condescending, and slid a newspaper through the bars.
—"Oh, Black, how miserable you are,"—she murmured in the darkness, a half-smile on her lips.—"How far you’ve fallen."
The crunch of the Minister’s boots pulled her from her thoughts.
Cornelius Fudge entered with his escort, but he wasn’t here for her.
The bastard had come for Sirius.
Bellatrix watched silently as he stopped in front of her cousin’s cell, pulling out a folded piece of paper. He didn’t speak right away. He didn’t need to.
Instead of words, Fudge let the newspaper fall to the floor, right at Sirius’s feet.
The flickering lantern light cast a glow over the yellowed paper, revealing a moving photograph.
The Weasleys.
A large, noisy family, all together in Egypt, smiling without a care in the world. Poor, but free.
Bellatrix sensed the change in Sirius before he even moved.
The silence in the cell became thick. Dense. Like the air before a storm.
Sirius remained still, his eyes fixed on the image. His lips parted slightly, as if trying to form a word but unable to.
There it was.
The rat.
Bellatrix watched as her cousin began to tremble. His breathing turned erratic, his hands clenched into fists on his knees.
Fudge smiled. He was enjoying this.
He didn’t need to tell him that even the poorest family had more freedom than he did. He didn’t have to say that he was a caged dog while the world moved on without him.
Sirius already knew.
The Minister was only here to savor the moment. To drink in his suffering.
Bellatrix didn’t look away.
Watching someone else’s pain was as good a distraction as any.
But then, something changed.
Sirius stopped trembling. His hands loosened. A new light appeared in his eyes.
And Bellatrix realized.
This wasn’t desperation.
It was determination.
A chill ran down her spine.
Because at that moment, she understood that her cousin was going to escape.
And she…
She would follow him.
Not because she wanted to. Not because she forgave him.
But because she was tired.
Tired of damp stone, of Dementors, of the monotony of misery.
Tired of following a script she hadn’t written.
If Sirius was going to leave… if he was going after Harry Potter…
Then she would go too.
Because helping him meant screwing over Dumbledore.
And if there was anything left for her in this life, the only thing she wanted to do was watch the world burn.