Prologue:

A/N: Yes, I know. I caved. I started another story while I have a million going on-but I have reasons! =P Right now, I have a direction for Raw (my Harry/Bellatrix story) and Harry Potter and the Alchemist's Secret (my Slytherin Harry story), but I've presently lost direction for Blood and Crystal (my Bellamort story, sequel to Bella and the Beast). For awhile, it was a thing that I was still updating while I was working through some shit, but now it's losing it's fire and people aren't reading it anymore...so rather than just abandon the story, I've put it on hiatus. Buuuuuut I still want to write about Bellamort and I also wanted to try writing something in first person. So, with that, I present to you...Black as Night, my latest passion.

As always, thank you for reading my work-you've no idea how much it motivates me!

xoxo,

SunDance

~I have dreamt of a place for you and I

No one knows who we are there

All I want is to give my life only to you

I've dreamt so long I cannot dream anymore

Let's run away, I'll take you there

We're leaving here tonight~

I wake to the sound of breaking glass somewhere far away from me. Breaking glass...followed by the unmistakable sound of rock crumbling into the sea, as in my mind I am drifting with it. I've been here too long. Fourteen years? Fifteen? I've lost track...and somewhere along the line, I stopped journaling, too. After awhile, when I thought I'd told You everything there was to tell about me...when the pages were full and I'd written away all that white space in the margins, the spine, the lines between the other lines of small black text...when I realized You wouldn't ever read any of it anyway (not because I gave up hope that You would return, but because I gave up on myself having anymore stories in me worth telling)...when day after day, the entries were the same, I stopped writing. All the same: darkness, screams, noises, starving, shivering, cold...Cold. No news. A death. Cold. The sound of the dementors dragging the body away. Shivering. Crying (in the beginning and then only ever so often)...Starving. Cold. No news. No news. Nothing. Cold.

Then I heard about You coming back. Even the dementors were excited-drifting about making unintelligible hissing noises to each other like they do right before someone dies, like they do when they get inside your head. I thought You would come for me right away. You must have heard, right? I never gave up on You. I tortured those Aurors to bring You back, because I knew they knew. I let myself get caught instead of going down fighting because I knew to die such a weak, pathetic death would be useless to You. I wrote You eleven or twelve or thirteen years of letters I knew You'd never read, just to bring myself closer to You. I kissed my Dark Mark every night/day/unknown time before falling asleep hoping You could feel it...but maybe You forgot about me. When I thought about this, I cried until everything went black and I welcomed it because everything is gray here. There were days I woke disappointed by the absence of pain. I never wanted to be here long enough to become numb. But on this night I wake to the sound of destruction, I welcome the fresh pain I feel, too. I must be drifiting farther now, I think, as I feel a chink of rock graze my forehead-this warmth-is it water? The sea? Blood?

I hear a sound like an explosion and feel a burst of incredible pain. I close my eyes. I must be almost to the sea (I feel the wind against my hair for the first time in I don't know how long) and I wait to smell salt. Instead, I smell sulfur. Lead. The crushed dust of stone. I hear myself moan out and I wonder if I am finally dying. I tried for You, really, I did. I outlasted Barty by about a decade I think. And the countless others they buried outside the fortress.

"Bellatrix," someone says, and I try to move but I can't. Something heavy is pinning me down.

"Bellatrix," they say again, with more urgency this time. "Get up, the Aurors will be here any minute. We need to be going. Now." I can no longer feel the wind, but the feeling of someone staring down at me. The feeling is strong and full of life, a real human being, not a dementor, here with me? In my disbelief, I force open my eyes and in a landscape of gray, I see red-not blood-eyes. Your eyes. And now I know I am dying. I wouldn't want to get up if I could. I just want to lie here taking You all in. You don't look the way you do in my memories, after all. You are different-and of course there is nothing wrong with that-but You are different. Taller (or maybe that's the angle You are at standing over me), paler-skin white and hard as quartz, and upon closer inspection, covered in thousands of scars. Your nose is no longer full, but flattened into two snake-like slits. And all those tiny scars...only visible to me now I'm really looking for them...as if you've been stitched together by unpracticed hands, out of tiny particles of air itself.

And somehow I want You more than I ever have before, now that I know that You, too, have suffered. Know what it's like to be hurt by someone-maybe even someone You never expected to hurt You. It's like You are back as I remember, but at the same time...just different...not exactly human...but you are beautiful in ways a younger version of myself never could have fathomed.

Yes, I am still the Bella who resents her husband for his wasted affections, who never wants (or wanted) to be anyone's...But all I want in this moment is for You to consume me and keep me forever. I shiver as I look up at you telling me to move. Shivering. Crying. Cold. Until the gray (and red, too) disintegrate into black.

~At sweet night, you are my own

Take my hand

We're leaving here tonight

There's no need to tell anyone

They'd only hold us down

So by the morning light

We'll be half way to anywhere

Where love is more than just your name~