Disclaimer: If I owned what I was writing about, I'd be the richest woman in England.

Author's Note: I've fixed the tense errors and have decided to continue this story at a relaxed pace, switching points of view each chapter. This is something I've had stewing in my head for a long while.

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We've been tromping around the English countryside for weeks it seems. A day entails about a week on our time. I say our though I doubt my sister in law has any concept of time.

I should take that back. Her insanity seems to have gauged the moment my brother died and acknowledges it each day. You could set your filthy muggle watch by her sobs. I remember pulling her away from the body. I can't imagine feeling that much affection for someone, that it would utterly break your mind to lose them. But to each their own.

She was singing softly. I remember that tone from another instance I just blundered into. For a Death Eater spy, in my personal life I always end up in these horridly awkward situations.

But at any rate their baby had been weak: a little boy who'd been barely four pounds and two months early. I remember Rodolphus has personally murdered the doctor who'd delivered him. Rondonvain was his name – the child I mean.

Bellatrix had been hysterical for days, laughing and whimpering at the same time with these horrific shrieks that can be likened to the time I had to fraternize with banshees to bring them over to the cause.

Oh right. The cause. The reason we all risked and lost many lives. This was the cause we'd grown up with. I remember when Rodolphus had been initiated, our parents had been so proud. They didn't give a shit about his astounding grades or the fact he was Quidditch captain for three years: it was this that mattered. The only consolation they'd given he and Bellatrix when their grandson had just sort of slipped away in the night was an anxious 'you'll have another right?'.

Bellatrix's body, I think for spite never allowed her to become pregnant again. It was a bloody mystery that got Rodolphus cut out of the Lestrange fortunes.

The money for a time was supposed to go to me. I didn't care either way, I did well enough on my own with a bit of a buying/selling trade going for 'medieval artifacts'. Their respect of their sons shifted, only slightly. The sort of slightness that could be detected at knowing looks during dinner parties, the sort of affection that my mediocre child and teenaged self had been deprived was all shoved upon my adult self. It was about as welcomed as the uncomfortable pauses and the times that say, Bellatrix was verbally attacked by our dear old mother, or how Rodolphus was a 'blood traitor' for staying with her. The nerve, when our father had done nothing but praise her father Avarius Black for this very lucrative marriage.

They never wavered though. Crazy as they both were, or seemed at times, that bond never broke. Comparing it to my own life, theirs was a roaring success. I too ended up cut out of that will for ending up with three daughters, with a timid French witch who hated my apathy, and even more than that the bit part I played with the Death Eaters. It was mostly as their spy in the Ministry, and when my cover was blown there, I was fully a liaison between them and the dangerous halfbreeds of the world. You know, werewolves, vampires, merfolk, veela... those bloody banshees.

She's started it again. Must be nine-seventeen on the dot. I don't know where we are, she barely moves of her own volition except to crumple into a black heaving mess. I put my hand on her shoulder the first time, I lost a front tooth for that. You can imagine the fit she pitched when I attempted to clean his blood off her.

Looking at her I think of silly things. I'm not developing feelings for her, that would be wrong and I could never disrespect Rodolphus in that manner, but for some reason I think back to when we were in that sixteen to nineteen range. She'd had a bit of a coming out party when she hit the lower end of that integer, in a time when we were still aristocracy and pureblood wasn't synonymous with 'inbreed'. She'd been astounding to the eyes really, I've seen veela that would hiss with jealousy. People say she wasn't capable of happiness, her soul was too twisted and her momentary elation came purely from murder. Bellatrix had looked happy that evening, coming down that long glimmering stairwell with her sister Narcissa trailing behind her who had been helping her get ready. Respectfully she was dressed down, Narcissa had already a fiancé eighteen and this was Bella's evening.

She's never been the horrifically polite type, but it was more an endearing quality to our family (before the dead baby and her fits she tended to take afterwards) and of course her own. She was never like that in say, the company of Grindelwald Jr. and it made her inner circle feel... something like blessed she'd be so goddamn honest when people rarely were in those days. But at any rate, she'd entirely ignored any male attention that evening except for my brother. I can't lie, I spent most of that night drinking with a halfblood who was gaining more status as time went on so that his drunken mudblood father was more and more forgotten. I can't say anything wasn't cultivated there, but it was long forgotten. At any rate, that four eyed pissant Potter had the honors of doing away with him.

That was a huge surprise. Harry couldn't have cursed his way out of a paper bag compared to Severus's skills. It wasn't a secret it had been Severus's wand, and not Narcissa's useless son as it should have been, to cast the Killing Curse on that old fool Dumbledore. I don't know how he managed that, and to this moment I doubt he did. It would be just like Severus to think it more shrewd to save himself and rejoin those that did survive... perhaps for a retaliation, perhaps for something more after we pick up the pieces of the Dark Lord. After all, he never really was big on those dramatic last stands, sticking around for them or instigating them either one.

Here we are Severus, here we are the survivor's the final stand where good triumphed over evil and all that rot. We're mourning our dead, Bellatrix is laying still and little girl laughter's in my head. I remember crossing the threshold of hell. The Aurors had made an example out of my family. Eva could've held her own against one maybe two Aurors. I know she didn't kill any of them out of her goddamn moral scruples she felt so high and mighty with. "And look what the did Eva!" I don't realize I said, or rather shouted that out loud as mental images of our daughters twisted and bloody in the fucking parlor came to mind.

"So the old ass has a heart," Bellatrix mutters, looking up from her kneeling positions. Her robes, the consistency of drapery that were standard issue basically for Death Eaters still cling around her emaciated body as she shivers without chill.

"What?"

"You hate her."

"No."

"You miss her?"

I don't know why I need to defend her, but pacing up and down a moonlit knoll that apparently we're going to sleep on like filthy fucking cattle, the verbal shit just flows, "She was always telling me what I did was wrong. Why she stayed I'll never know... she'd say I was a good father. A good father who leaves, who loves Voldemort more than his children, and leaves them to... to that! What kind of goddamn sense does that make BELLATRIX STOP FUCKING LAUGHING AT ME!"

I'm on top of her, hands around her throat and she just convulses with laughter. "Because Rabastan you stupid git! You lived your life with three prized daughters who would eventually grow up and marry wealthy Death Eaters who'd defend them for you! You think my father gave a rat's ass... you think that if I died, with Narcissa and Andromeda he'd mourn?"

"That's not true! You're not making any sense!"

"Yes it makes perfect sense for both our families to be dead, them, all our friends consumed by maggots on a field once occupied by festive little deer eating grass! We're being punished, it's our fate! Our Father doesn't love us anymore! We're the extra children who couldn't die for a noble cause... BWAHAHA Isn't it FUNNY RABASTAN?"

Without much effort she throws me off. An unnatural strength has come over her and she stands with her dark grey eyes looking wildly about. This glee isn't the girl who came of age years ago or danced with my brother, and held a baby. This is the glee of someone who's crashed a party and is getting away with it.

I'm sprawled on the ground, at a loss as to what to do. We can't go anywhere, in the muggle villagers they will run us out. Obviously we can't go back to the wizarding world. "Maybe we should kill ourselves," I suggest dejectedly.

"Nnoooo ickle Rabastan!" she shrieks unpleasantly, yanking me towards her. "It's their honor... why should we taint it?" She begins stroking my hair, raking her long dirty nails over my skin through the grown out ginger chunks. "This is how it's supposed to be... you and I here... we were wrong not to die, but we're wrong not to go further."

I hold her and she doesn't protest, she just smiles manically from what I can see in the half-light. "You mean... search a way to bring him back?"