Bejeweled

Bellatrix hated her cousin and his stupid friends. Why couldn’t they just let her talk to Lupin in private for two seconds?! 

Clearly they’d been on edge. Maybe Remus was thinking she’d attack him…She should have attacked him. She should have jinxed, cursed, hexed him for daring to touch her, to talk to her that way. She’d wanted to. But more than anything, she needed the guilt to stop. 

She couldn’t handle the way it ate at her all day, knowing that she must have hurt him by joking about threatening to kill his friends. But…it wasn’t a joke, was it? In the moment it had been, but she was going to join the Dark Lord once she graduated. She was going to kill muggleborns. 

But that didn’t mean she had to joke about it to him. 

So she’d decided to simply apologize to ease her conscience. It would be easy. She’d just go up to Lupin, pull him aside, and quickly apologize. If anyone asked she could just say it was prefect business and move on. 

And her stupid cousin had ruined it. Made her apologize publicly! Honestly, if this got out, she was going to kill them all. 

Bellatrix was storming up to the castle lost in her own thoughts, almost muttering to herself in her frustration, to the point that she plowed into someone else, knocking them down. 

“Hey!” the girl exclaimed. 

Bellatrix glanced down, processing who it was. Evans, the person behind all of this! 

“Watch where you’re going, mud-“ she couldn’t do it. She couldn’t deal with the guilt again. Couldn’t deal with it if next Thursday Remus came to do rounds pissed off about this, her using the word to Evans’ face. “Muggleborn!” she finished with instead, and hurried off with a huff. Evans could pick herself up off the ground. 

~ 

Lily came over to their group looking just as dazed and confused as they felt. 

“Is something up today?” Lily asked them. “Like is it Opposite Day or something?” 

”We’re not sure ourselves,” James answered. “What happened to you?” 

“Bellatrix Black just called me a muggle born,” Lily said. 

“Isn’t that normal?” Peter asked in confusion.

“No! She started to call me a mudblood, but she stopped herself and called me a muggleborn instead!” Lily exclaimed. 

“Oh…the fuck? What happened to my cousin?” Sirius shook his head. 

“Maybe she hit her head really hard and it fixed her?” James suggested with a shrug. 

“Did she say something to you guys?” Lily asked. 

“Yeah, she apologized to Moony for what she said last night,” James explained. 

Lily blinked, looking around at nothing in particular in astonishment until her eyes landed on Remus. “Wow. Maybe doing rounds with you has been good for her.” 

“Me? We’ve hardly had three conversations, this can’t have anything to do with me,” he argued. But…he did wonder. 

Calling Lily a mudblood was the first thing he’d gotten upset at her for. Then he was the one she apologized to. But that didn’t make any sense, they weren’t close or anything, she had no reason to care what he thought. But…still. 

Probably something completely unrelated to him had happened to cause this. If it even was something. He didn’t really know Bellatrix, had never talked to her before this. All he knew was her reputation, and reputations could be wrong. Maybe she wasn’t as bad as everyone thought. 

Though, Sirius was her cousin. He’d grown up with her and had always said she really was that bad. But they’d never been close. They distinctly did not like each other. Maybe that played a part. 

Whatever it was, Remus was very curious how the next Thursday would go.