Disclaimer: If you recognise it, it's not mine.
AN: Honestly? I don't know where this came from.
Bellatrix is dreaming of a boy she never knew.
Tall, dark stranger takes her by the hands.
She's seventeen in the dream, and he is not much older. They sit in the sun-dappled shade of a great tree.
TOM LOVES BELLA, he has carved on the old elm.
She adores him. Tells him he is a silly boy. He laughs.
It's strange how clear the dream is, in this place she has never seen. His collar is unbuttoned carelessly, his sleeves rolled up. Their arms are bare and unmarked. Their fingers are laced together. Her black hair brushes his hands. She is seventeen and not innocent. The ground beneath them is so green.
He leans in and kisses her. This has never happened. Her memory fills in the blank with the taste of Sirius, and for a moment she is frightened.
Look, Bella, he says lightly. Look what I wrote for you.
She looks up at the tree again.
TOM LOVES BELLA LOVES SIRIUS LOVES JAMES LOVES LILY LOVES HARRY LOVES GINNY LOVES TOM.
The words are carved so deeply into the trunk that the old tree begins to shudder and fall.
His hands are gone. Her own are thin and white, spattered with blood, her cousin's blood, blood she didn't spill. She is Bellatrix Lestrange again; she is who he has made her. The Mark on her arm burns, and she screams, and night covers the sky.
Rain pours down.
She drowns.
Wakes.
In a way, she likes that it has come full circle. It is the snake that bites its own tail.