No explanation behind this one, just a random, spur-of-the-moment Bellatrix ficlet.
Rebellion
The black liquid feels cold against her skin. The chill makes her shiver with excitement, though she can't quite say why. Her already pale skin gradually starts to look whiter the more paint she applies. The stark contrast of dark and light is neither pretty nor feminine, but it is striking. Striking is good. Striking is better than feminine, no matter what mother says.
Nobody knows she likes to paint, but she does. She paints in black; twice in her life she has tried to paint a scene in colour, but neither attempts turned out quite right.
The shapeless lines and elegant swirls she so carefully applies gradually begin to form into a skull as she continues to trace patterns just above her wrist with the ever-so-fine brush. It looks exactly like it did in her mind's eye, but this is no surprise to her. She is good at painting. Her artistic skills are the only thing she can place her trust in for now. It is a fact that she can paint, and nothing can change that.
Change is bad; change is happening everywhere. Change is Cissy deciding she is too old for porcelain dolls and crocodile tears. Change is Andi becoming more and more distant with everyone, more introverted that ever before. Change is mother trying to set her up with just about every single pureblood male in Britain despite the fact she still has two years left before she can marry. Change affects everything but the dark lines and the intricate patterns and the feeling of a brush under her slender fingers.
She dips the brush back into the jar of paint, and raises it again to her arm. She twists a thin line across her earlier painting, and another parallel to it. How unladylike. She hears her mother's disapproving tones in the back of her head, and smirks. She has never been refined or restrained enough for mother's liking. The lines draped around the skull already take their form, like they did before, like they always do. She shades between the lines in black, and holds her arm away from her face.
Her painted-on Dark Mark grins ghoulishly back at her, so lifelike yet so … fake. She knows in her heart that the lines and patterns on her arm are exactly that: lines and patterns and nothing more. If she screws up her eyes and believes, however, then the snake slithers around the skull and winks at her, enticing her with tantalising promises of glory and infamy. The promises she has made to herself that she will have all this and more one day, under the Dark Lord.
She isn't quite sure why she chose to paint on her forearm tonight: there are several rolls of parchment in the open drawer of her desk that could have provided a more suitable canvas. It is silly really to paint on her arm. Childish, even. She finds that she doesn't care: after all, in the eyes of the world she is still a child for another two years. She still feels like a child, despite what she tells her mother when treated as such.
All of a sudden there is a knock on her door, and she stuffs her paint and brush into the drawer, and pulls the sleeve of her dress down over her makeshift Dark Mark. Her mother enters without waiting for a response, and immediately asks her daughter why she isn't doing something productive with her time as opposed to staring blankly out of the window, and couldn't she learn to sew or play the piano like Cissy and Andi, and was she ever planning on leaving her room?
Normally this would aggravate her, and cause her to make a sarcastic comment that would land her in trouble. However, today she feels the moaning and nagging just wash over her, because she is safe in the knowledge that she will never learn to sew or to play music, because sewing is for Cissy and Andi likes to play the piano. She can paint instead, and that is something only she knows, like the fact that one day she will get a real Dark Mark and will be the most feared witch in Britain. Not pretty or feminine, but striking, which is much better anyway. No matter what mother says.
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