Bellatrix Black had been rotten, and, Andromeda thought, so beautiful.
Andromeda had loved her, fiercely and burning like a fire in the pit of her soul, as sure as the sun rose in the morning she had loved her. She loved her even when it had become nothing but painful.
Before she had become a murderess, before she had become consumed, she had only been a girl.
Only been Bella.
She'd been vivacious, ferocious, funny, and wild and wonderful.
She'd laughed just a little bit louder, just a little bit longer than anyone else.
When Bella had come back from Hogwarts on her first Christmas break, she was bursting with knowledge and almost vibrating with excitement.
That whole evening she'd been unable to be still, had wriggled through mother and father’s embrace and barely managed to sit at the dinner table.
She'd all but shoved Andromeda upstairs when their parents finally sent them to bed that night.
In the safety of her room, she had thrust her wand into Andromeda's hand without a second's hesitation and closed her own over it, and now she was unable to contain the excitement any longer, now it was flowing over, spilling into the space between them.
Narcissa, eight years old and deemed too young in an unspoken agreement, had been safely tucked into bed, and Bella taught Andromeda spells that she'd learned in school.
She helped her to swish and flick her wand just so, and Andromeda would never forget the bright laughter blurting out of her from the sheer excitement and the happiness and the feeling of magic shooting through their veins and melting together.
And she knew Bella hadn't spared a single thought on how very intimate it was, her wand in Andromeda's hand, brimming with their combined power, their combined magic all flowing together and wrapping around itself and almost as brilliant as the spark in Bella's eyes.
They were like that, the Black sisters, they were close.
Close enough to share wands and beds and dress robes, to swirl each other around with childlike ease downstairs in the ballroom that was empty 95% of the year and push each other off the piano seat in the drawing room where they were supposed to rehearse traditional pieces for Christmas.
They loved each other with all the innocence of children, and all the unconditional absoluteness of sisters.
Narcissa was the youngest, but Bella and Andromeda were close in age, a mere eleven months apart, and when they’d been kids, Narcissa had often been somewhat left out by them, deemed too young or too small or not capable enough to keep up.
Andromeda loved her sisters equally, but she’d known Bella like she knew herself, once upon a time.
They even looked alike, they always looked alike. As kids, they would sometimes sit in detentions for each other. As adults, Andromeda would sometimes enter a shop and have a person draw their wand at her.
On the wanted poster after Bellatrix escaped Azkaban, Andromeda saw herself, broken and emaciated and with a blazing wildness in the eyes that hadn’t been there for a long time.
Bella, Andromeda thought, Bella had always performed magic with reckless, conscienceless abandon.
With wildness in her eyes, she threw all her spells like she was overflowing with magic, crackling with it, like there was this need to let out some of that immense energy inside of her before it’d burst out of her and rip her open.
There was something harsh in every charm and every spell, in the very signature of her magic.
She fought that way, too. Later. Andromeda hadn't seen her fight, but she knew that she did.
Knew that she fought without a single thought spared for her own safety, her own well-being, not bothering with protection spells. Just an onslaught of power, of sharp, harsh, forceful spells, never once, not for a second, thinking that anyone could actually defeat her.
And Andromeda knew that she died that way.
Andromeda had wept for her, had wept for her at the grave of her daughter that Bella had killed.
Because once, they had only been girls.
And she had been insane, long before her stay in Azkaban, Bella had been fucking insane, fucking consumed by it.
Bellatrix was deeply protective of her sisters, that’s how Andromeda excused it when she gutted Desdemona Flint’s owl and left the intestines and the feathers on the girl’s pillow for her to find because she’d caught her making a snide comment about Narcissa behind some library bookshelves.
When Desdemona screamed, hysterical and ugly and loud enough to be heard all the way to the common room, Bella laughed like she was bloody mad, and Andromeda felt sick.
A different student would’ve been expelled, but they were Blacks, hundreds of years of history woven into their names, carried around with every step they took.
When they were a little older, Andromeda just shy of 15 and Bella 15, they sat together on Bella's four poster bed in the Slytherin dormitory, hidden away by the curtains and the strong muffling spells they'd woven into them, and they let their magic melt together in another, different way.
Bella had read about it in the library, she'd been on a wild, manic quest to read every book and learn every bit of magic that the old walls had to offer.
Legilimency, the ability to dive into another person's mind, navigate through the layers of it.
They read everything they could find on the topic, and then they sat, cross legged and facing each other, and Andromeda could see the sheer excitement on Bella's face again, the anticipation.
Again, Andromeda had this notion that her sister didn't spare a thought on how truly intimate it was, how deeply raw and vulnerable, they really were about to just take over each other's minds, fully and completely, no secrets, no hiding, no distance, no nothing.
Wordlessly, Andromeda tilted her head just so, and Bella gave a tiny, almost imperceivable nod, and then they both plunged forward, dove and dove and dove, each seeking out the other's mind, trying to embrace each other with their own, entangle themselves.
They tried to let the other in, and Andromeda half madly thought of that intoxicating feeling when they were both holding the same wand, hands firmly over each other, and their magic, their powers, twisted and wrapped and melted together.
Wrapping their minds around each other felt like an endless spiral dragging them deeper and deeper into a sea of memories, of deep water, of intense emotions.
Of cool black and a million sharp, sparkling, blinding pieces of glass.
It was overwhelming, and Andromeda had no idea where she ended and where Bella began.
When they resurfaced, they gasped for air like they had really been drowning, like their lungs hadn't been able to breathe, they gasped and gasped and then they laughed, drunk on the success and on being so daring, on being young, brilliant and powerful and feeling invincible with it.
Bella's mind was chaotic, effervescent, it was harsh, every single thing she felt or thought or did happened with a punch, she was a violent raging sea, she was reckless and ruthless and wonderful, and Andromeda loved her so deeply, so all encompassing.
For the first time in her life, there on Bella’s four poster bed after sharing each other’s minds for the first time, she thought that that love was going to tear her apart.
That year, they did a lot of experimenting.
They found out that their spells were more powerful, more violent and forceful when they used the same wand and cast the spells together, letting their magic intertwine.
Together with Narcissa, they invented little spells and jinxes of their own, notes scribbled into the blood red diary that they shared, sloppily by Bellatrix, interrupted by the elegant cursive of Narcissa's handwriting and Andromeda's steep, scrawly one.
They figured out a spell to rifle through books and highlight pages that had a specific word on them.
They figured out a spell to softly float down a great height and land perfectly elegantly on their feet, and they tried it out on the moving staircases of Hogwarts, heads held high and faces impassive as they stepped off the disconnected last step and gracefully continued on their intended paths.
Narcissa figured out a new spell that made the entire night sky sparkle and move on her midnight blue dress, and mother loved that one. When she wore it to the Malfoy ball that summer, she outshone everyone.
Cissy had a real knack for beauty spells, she created charms that made the most beautiful braids, and Andromeda took to wearing her hair in a crown braided around her head while Cissy kept hers cascading down her back in soft waves, the front pieces kept away from her face by tiny, brilliant stars studded onto silver pins.
Andromeda and Bella worked all winter on a curse that managed to manipulate the way light would hit other people’s eyes, and it enabled them to create vivid illusions. They tried it on each other countless times as they were figuring it out, and once, it left Andromeda panicked and in tears as every time she opened her eyes, she couldn’t tell where the floor was, where her hands started and ended, whether it was light or dark.
They kept trying after that, and eventually figured it out, but privately, Andromeda kept that version of the spell tucked safely away in her mind, and she knew that Bella did, too.
Another more volatile spell that took all three of them countless weeks to get right was one that gave them an imperceivable charismatic aura, making everything they said sound reasonable and like it was a great idea, causing people to listen to their words with unnatural intensity.
It wore off once the person was out of their sight, but they managed to get it subtle enough where their manipulation wasn’t noticed even if someone wound up thinking differently as soon as they thought things over on their own, so they saw it as a success.
At Hogwarts, Narcissa had an entourage of friends, a whole flock of well-groomed, well-situated, well-bred little girls that followed her everywhere she went and clung to her every word and giggled at her every tasteful joke or artfully veiled jab.
Andromeda wondered, sometimes, if she used that spell on them, but she knew that Narcissa didn't have to.
Narcissa was that spell.
It was all her, that elegant charm, that eloquent way of talking herself, perfectly polite and well-mannered, into getting whatever she wanted.
The three of them had been born into this role, this name, but Narcissa was the one who was made for it.
It was a pity she was the youngest, really.
Bellatrix was, long before her insanity spilled over, unstable, indomitable, there was something uncontrolled inside her that burst out from time to time.
She was volatile and violent and powerful, too much so to ever be that perfect little pureblood wife at the side of her perfect pureblood husband, Andromeda thought.
Andromeda sometimes wished to be much the same.
Oh, she knew how to be composed, to be comported, knew how to play well. Knew how to look down on someone and mean it, how to keep her head high and her cards close to her chest.
But in her mind, she felt sometimes that there was something grinding. That she was walking on cutting shards of glass, of broken edges and sharp cutting blades.
This life, her life, she wished sometimes to tear it all apart, spit it out, that role, that title, that burden.
Now, she was in Hogwarts, she was young and brilliant and free, but where was her life going after that?
She was to be the perfect pure blood wife, she knew that.
Marry a Black or a Rosier or another cousin of a cousin, pop out an heir or two for her ancient, noble house, do the galas and the soirées and the whole society pomp.
She would still have power, she thought, she'd always have power.
Her mother was a Rosier, and her father was a Black, and as far as Great Britain society went, it didn't really get more ancient than that.
She had thousands of years of history welded into her name, thousands of years of blood magic running deep within her veins, thousands of years of that power.
No matter who she was going to marry, unless it was one of her Black cousins, she was always going to be the one who carried the older name, and in their world, that meant something.
She was going to wear that role like a crown, like it was meant for her, because it was, but she imagined sometimes that she was not going to be very happy.
She never talked to her sisters about it, and she imagined that Cissy would never understand.
But her mind brushed that of her older sister sometimes, and she knew it was inside of Bella, also.
That mad desire to rip it all apart, all of it, until there was nothing left but destruction.
Andromeda and Bella taught themselves to become masters at legilimency, and at occlumency, too, wrapped their minds around each other and sifted through the layers, learnt how to build strong and stronger defence walls, made it a game to keep each other out or let each other in.
In all the books they’d read, legilimency was always very one sided, it was about navigating someone else’s mind, trying to make sense of it.
Granted, the Hogwarts library didn’t have the most to offer, even in the restricted section, but they’d gotten Polly the house elf to send them the Black library’s share of books, and then some from Rosier manor, too, because their grandmother Veradisia could never deny them anything.
Still, there wasn’t too much to be learned, and so they took to writing their own notes, here too. The red diary filled out nicely, and soon they had to replace it with a bright green one that snapped at people’s hands if anyone else got close.
If they did legilimency together, opening their minds, willing the other person in while also trying to plunge forward, they could meld their minds together, overtake each other.
It became easy to not only see the memories, thoughts, and feelings of the other person, but to also share their own, make the other see specific things of their choosing.
Once they figured that out, they spent entire days communicating entirely non-verbally to each other, the only sounds made to each other the bright laughter bubbling out of each of them sometimes.
They taught it to Narcissa, later, too.
Taught her how to defend her mind and how to recognise someone invading it.
How to weave a heavy, dark blanket of defence so strong and tightly knit, when she wrapped it around her mind, it was almost impermeable.
These, Andromeda would later think, these were the best days of her youth.
They were reckless and drunk on their own successes. They were just a little bit insane with being daring, with trying out dangerous and difficult spells, figuring out new ones entirely on their own without caring for the danger of the magic going awry; they were young and brilliant, and they knew it.
But throughout it all, there was something dark and liquid sloshing around inside Bellatrix, sloshing and sloshing and threatening to spill over into an uncontrolled burst of violence at any given time.
Madness ran in the family, it was an unspoken, yet well-known fact, Andromeda herself was never madder than when she left her life and her friends and her sisters behind forever on a warm July morning, barking mad, mad as a hatter, as Ted would say.
It was the summer between Andromeda’s fifth and sixth year that she really noticed Bella getting a lot worse.
They weren't really doing the legilimency thing as often anymore, it wasn't as easy now, the dark and dark and heavy thing inside of Bellatrix was sometimes all Andromeda could see and when Bella brushed her mind with her own, it felt sticky, suffocating, and instinctively she wrapped the fabric of the blanket tightly around herself.
Conversely, Bella complained that Andromeda's mind was sharp and full of tiny, broken edges, blinding and cutting and loud, painful in a different way.
Sometimes that desire to rip it all apart, this life and all that came with it, was all Andromeda could think of.
Each expectation of this world felt like a broken shard of something inconceivably sharp, that if she were to stumble against it she would tear herself apart. She almost thought she could hear it sometimes when she walked; the sound of a million pieces of glass grinding underneath her feet.
Bella's laughter became shrill around the edges, higher pitched and more out of breath and less in control.
She started screaming in her sleep, not going to bed, staying awake entire nights.
Mother and father took her to healers, came home with different potions, tried to force them down Bella's throat in the evenings to get her to sleep, but they made her sluggish and dull and she took to pouring them into mother's vases when nobody was looking.
When school began, she collected the purple liquid in a cauldron in her dormitory instead, mixed in ingredients she nicked from Slughorn every now and then and maniacally cackled over the steam, and Andromeda had no idea what she was trying to do with it.
She had her lucid moments, of course.
Moments where she seemed almost normal, and where she was just Bella.
Just a girl full of energy and power and potential, but they were getting rarer and rarer in between.
She became almost obsessed with learning new magic, ripping books and shredding parchments when her patience ran out, absolutely fucking reckless with trying new spells even when they left her drained and weak and when they seeped the energy out of her.
One time, in a fit of sudden, blinding rage, she cast one such new spell on one of Andromeda's classmates, the older Greengrass boy, she ripped him open like tearing open a piece of fabric at the seams, she laughed when the blood spattered onto her face.
He'd not gotten up from where he was comparing Herbology notes with Andromeda fast enough, hadn't made room for Bella immediately when she'd appeared in a swish of billowing robes and impatience.
She was slipping through Andromeda's fingers, falling apart like a sculpture made entirely of sand, and Andromeda could do nothing to hold her.
When Bella cursed the Greengrass boy, Andromeda screamed, and she pushed her sister and wrangled the wand from her before desperately trying to quell the blood flowing from the boy's torso like a bucket that had been tipped over.
Bella didn't do anything to defend herself or keep her sister from taking her wand. She just stared at the blood and laughed.
Even when teachers and nurses descended upon them in a flock of chaos, she laughed. Even when they grabbed her by the elbow and took her away, she laughed.
At night, Andromeda would dream of that laugh, and of the blood that had drenched the hem of her broadcloth robes.
Mother and father picked Bella up that evening, and when she came back four days later, Aurel Greengrass was already back from the hospital wing with a great big scar down his chest and a substantial amount of money transferred to his vault.
Nobody spoke of it again, other than in hushed tones and unfinished sentences.
Bella was made to go to the infirmary every evening and sit and swallow her purple potion while the nurse watched with squinted eyes, and she spent hours in the bathroom retching afterwards.
Sometimes, as a kid, Andromeda had thought that Bella was the lucky one. She’d even thought it when she had gotten the silver and green prefect’s badge in the mail the year before.
It was supposed to be Bella’s, but no-one in their right mind would’ve given Bella a position like that.
And it wasn’t like Andromeda didn’t have the good grades or the good behaviour to deserve it, but she knew that that had played a very small role in why the badge had ended up in her mail.
She’d wished, then, to be more like her sister. To stop wishing it, and to just do it. Tear it all apart. Rip it open.
Bella didn’t think about it. She just did, it just burst out of her.
Now, Andromeda looked at her sister and she felt sorrow.
“We could do it”, Bella told her once, the dark eyes shining with a clarity that had become few and far between in the last couple of weeks.
“Rip it all apart, this life, this world. Is that not what you've always wanted?”.
It was.
The Bella who was numbed by potions and torn at by madness, was still, somewhere inside and somewhere buried underneath, the girl who knew her as well as she knew herself.
Once, they were only two girls who shared their minds, their magic, this world and all they were in it.
Bellatrix and Andromeda.
They could've, she would often think, even when she stood at her daughter's grave and wept, they could've done it together.
Rip apart their world, their lives. The dark and dark and sloshing thing inside of Bella, the broken splitters of Andromeda's unhappiness, they could've done it together. Like they'd used to do everything.
Instead, Bellatrix tore the world apart with slashes and curses, tore it open by tearing into other people's minds, into flesh.
But first, Andromeda tore it apart by leaving.
Head held high and steps measured, wand tucked neatly into her left sleeve. Leaving nothing but destruction.
The only things left of her old life were dreams of the blood soaking the broadcloth hem of her school uniform and dreams of holding a wand with two steady hands; her sister's wrapped warmly over her own.
Dreams of their magic flowing together and becoming one, and the word that ends her daughter's life on the tip of her tongue.