A F T E R I M A G E
Chapter One: Innocence
"The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time"
- William Butler Yeats
"Ladies and gentlemen, please give a warm welcome to Miss Lily Potter, Head Girl of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!"
The crowd clapped. My family cheered.
They were cheering for me. They were clapping and calling for me. The Great Hall of Hogwarts was alive with the sound of my name. There were ministry officials, prominent society members, students, families... everyone I could think of. Headmistress McGonagall had even performed an enlarging charm on the ancient room, just to fit them all in.
I found myself afraid, standing in front of nine hundred and twenty-two people.
Not of how I would be received; I had did not doubt that I would face certain resentment and disgust for what I was about to do. I knew that, for some time, I would be hated within these halls.
But I, Lily Luna Potter, would be remembered for this day.
The day the youngest child of Harry Potter spoke out against everything we stood for twenty-nine years ago. The day the world stood still and listened as the famed daughter of the Hero spoke about the injustices our own side committed. About the misjudged and mistreated life of Bellatrix Lestrange.
They would remember me for my understanding of someone who the majority of people deemed the most evil woman to have lived. They would recall my empathy, they would recall my ability to see past this facade we have thrown up.
Because, once more, the wizarding world was heading in the direction of a war. And with one speech, I knew I could stop it.
I didn't need to be a hero, like my dad. I didn't need to be a well-known Quidditch star, like mum. I didn't need to be a goofy sidekick, like Uncle Ron, or a bookworm, like Aunt Hermione.
I just needed to speak; to show people how to understand. They just needed to understand.
And Bellatrix Lestrange was going to help me show them.
The night air was cool against my skin; I fought for breath. My fingers tightened around the hand of my dearest and last-surviving friend, Hazelya Dolohov. Her raggedy gasps for air were becoming sparser. I knew that the spell they had hit her with was starting to take its toll. I knew that I must get her to safety. I glanced down at her bleeding, pregnant stomach as we ran. No... This couldn't happen to us. Not again.
"Come on," I encouraged her in the barest of whispers. "Keep running."
"I can't... breathe!"
My steel eyes tightened, but I didn't respond. This forest was endless, or so it seemed. I had thought that we only went a few miles from the Dolohov Estate. Obviously, I was wrong.
I hated being wrong.
And this mistake was likely to cost both of our lives.
"The Aurors," my terrified friend gasped in panic. Her hands were clutching her bleeding stomach, trying to hold in her life-liquid, and protect her unborn baby. "They're right behind us!"
"Zel, hurry, come on!"
Tears were running freely down my friend's sixteen year old face. She shook her head, and her pace slowed. "No, Bella. I can't run anymore..."
I swung around, grabbing her arms and trying to drag her. "My baby..." she kept muttering. "My baby..."
That deeper, darker part of my mind - the part I sought so desperately to suppress – began to whisper its evil thoughts. Leave her, it told me. The baby's dead anyway, keep going, it hissed through my head like poison.
"Zel, we need to keep moving," I breathed heavily, my panting interfering with my oxygen intake. "I can't end up like Evangeline. I can't."
Evangeline Rosier, the golden-haired beauty that completed our trio, was violently raped and murdered just last year. By Aurors. Zel and I were there. Their prisoners; the next in line.
They dragged her to the centre of the room, tore her clothes off and raped her in front of us. Then they killed her. I saw the whole thing. At the age of fifteen, my life fell apart, and I wholly embraced the Dark.
For what sort of 'Light' could do something like that?
And then those 'saviours', as the muggleborns and blood-filth called them, the Aurors brought Hazelya out next. They assaulted her and raped her. I thought she would be killed, too. Like Evangeline.
Luckily - or really not so luckily in my opinion - our families, the Death Eaters, burst in at that point. The Aurors were murdered, and justly so. Zel's life was saved and I remember her crying in the arms of her fiancé, Nikodemus Nott.
About a month later, just after our sixteenth birthdays, we discovered that Zel was pregnant to one of those bastards. She was shattered; I have never seen my friend so wholly undone, not even the night after her rape, which she spent in my bedroom at the House of Black.
That was seven months ago.
I was now a Death Eater in training, one of the first females to truly turn evil under the reign of the Dark Lord. Zel had a difficult decision to make and the result ... the baby is due in a month. Nik decided to stay with her, and marry her afterwards. He wanted to be that baby's father, to everyone's great surprise, and Zel's joy.
But now... It looked like it was about to turn foul.
I could not convince Zel to keep going.
The curse the Aurors had hit her with was well-aimed. Her stomach, upon further inspection as I knelt down beside my friend, was lacerated with deep cuts. I hissed in displeasure; neither of us had our wands. Zel didn't even bother carrying one – women in their last trimester or whatever couldn't perform magic anyway. It was dangerous for the baby. And I had been disarmed long ago; it was the spell that alerted us to the Auror's presence.
I glanced back at my friend. Zel was sitting in the snow, crying and rubbing her belly, her brown hair sticking to her salty tears. Blood was leaking onto the white ice that lined the path.
The path.
A winding path.
The road to the Dolohov estate. It looked like something from a fairytale; sinister, forbidding trees, the hooting of owls, the soft falling of snow.
And the eerie silence.
"Bella," my dear friend gasped. I was kneeling right in front of her, silently protecting her body with my own. She was not going to continue. She was not going to escape this. And I had no way of forcing her. It's not easy to drag a heavily pregnant sixteen year old girl in fear of her (and her baby's) life.
"Tell Nik that –"
I shook my head. "Oh, hush," I whispered. "There's no need. We're going to be fine. And you know how I hate that cliché nonsense. You love him, he knows that."
A faint smile turned up the corners of Zel's mouth. But the image was broken as a dribble of blood trickled out of the corner of her lips. My eyes shuttered in pain for her. She was dying, and Hazelya was tortured by the fact that her unborn child would die with her.
We had minutes, perhaps even moments, until the Aurors would catch up with us. These were my last seconds with my friend. Zel and I had been best friends since we were three; thrust together from birth. My mother, Druella Black, was a pureblood supremacist. My mother's sister, Dimity Dolohov, had two children, the youngest was Zel. Mum saw my cousin as an appropriate playmate for me and my two older sisters. Andromeda, who was fourteen when I was five, had little time for Zel and me. And Cissy (aged ten) always refused to play.
We went to Hogwarts when the war began to rise. It did not affect us much; Hogwarts blanketed its students from the outside world. When Narcissa became engaged to Lucius Malfoy (she was in Seventh, I was in First) I was introduced to the idea of evil. I brushed it off. I was content with my pureblood expectancies. I was to marry a rich pureblood and make lots of babies. That was my duty in this world. It did not bother me as much as Narcissa, and when Meda ran away with Ted (who I did not mind, he was a nice enough guy) we became much closer, and I began to understand my beautiful sister, and her fear of being dominated by her future husband.
Zel rejected the war completely. She was not for it, or against it. She was a pureblood, like me, but not an extremist. She did not care for the extermination of mudbloods and filth, as long as they respected that they were below her. And then she fell in love with Nik...
"Bella," she said again. She coughed, and droplets of her blood splattered against my pale cheeks like some morbid rainstorm. I flinched.
"I'm here."
She coughed again, bitterly, and said something. I did not hear her over the loudening cries of the Aurors. I leaned forward. "Tell Nik that –"
"No, I don't..."
Zel shook her head. "Listen, Bella, tell him that his name is Theodore," she swallowed, her tears like diamonds against her tanned, blood smeared cheeks. "I don't want my son to have a nameless gravestone..."
I smiled weakly, playing along. She wanted a moment of semi-happiness before she died, and who was I to deny her that? "Theodore," I breathed, trying the sound out. "What's it mean?"
She smiled, her eyes still tear-filled, blood still trickling from her cracked lips. "Divine gift," she managed to choke out before the small patch of forest she had collapsed in erupted into a flame ball of clashing lights and shouting.
I was blasted back from my friend, crying her name as my back hit a thick oak tree. I think I passed out. My gaze kept going black, and I was hearing snatches of the torture that Zel was enduring.
I heard her screaming, I heard the sounds of tearing flesh. I heard yells and shouts. I heard their vindictive laughter. And then I heard the most horrifying sound of all... the sound of a crying child.
I'm pretty sure I blacked out again.
When I awoke, I was in a warm bed, drenched in blood that I presumed to be Zel's. I screamed. I screamed for five minutes at the highest frequency I could muster until four people filed into the room.
The first was Narcissa, who flew to my side and instantly began to stroke my hair and ask how I felt.
The second was a stony-faced Antonin Dolohov, Zel's older brother.
The third was my cousin, Sirius, who for some reason really didn't like me. Actually, I didn't think he liked anyone with the last name Black. I wondered why he was here.
And the fourth was Nikodemus Nott. And in his arms was a sleeping baby. I started to cry; having gleaned from the look on his face that Zel was dead.
My best friend had been murdered by those bastards! I demanded to know and, surprisingly, it was Sirius who gave me the details that I so needed. Cissy and Nik thought it would be better if I wasn't aware of the grisly details of her murder. Antonin didn't speak at all.
My fury and pain rose with each word my cousin spoke.
They held her down, magically bound her to the tree, and cut the child from her womb whilst she was still alive. They never performed the killing curse.
Hazelya Dolohov, my dearest friend and the one person who understood my every thought, feeling and opinion, died from loss of blood and a broken heart.
I let the hate that had been building for years, the hate that I had unknowingly repressed, consume me like fire.
"Hello, everyone," I began, swallowing the lump in my throat. I was about to make history. I, Lily Potter, was about to rewrite history, to redraw the prejudice and redirect the hate of the wizarding world. I was about to become a legend, but not quite the way my dad, or Voldemort, ever did.
I was going to change the world, one story at a time.
"What I'm going to show you over the course of today, I am sure many of you would prefer to not hear. I'm sure that many of you won't believe a word. I'm sure that you may hate me once you leave this room. But I can assure you, even though you may hate me, that I speak the truth. And the truth is what binds us."
I smiled tightly, biting down my nervousness.
"You can pretend, if you like, that I am telling you a fairy tale. But remember, every fable and fairy story has meaning, and I pray that you can derive it from this one.
"To start off with, I am going to introduce you to a little pureblood girl, born in 1951, when the first wizarding war was rising. She was raised in the ways of her family. She was taught that duty, honour and blood came first. She was told that in order to be happy, she had to marry a rich, pure-blooded husband. She was content with that fate."
I stared out over the sea of faces. I saw my parents' faces, filled with dulled pride and confusion. I smiled at the regal Narcissa, whom I had met with many times over the past few weeks. She had helped me to write this speech, giving me an intimate understanding of her sister's deepest nature. I saw Scorpius Malfoy and my cousin, Rose Weasley, snuggling up together. I admired them. They truly overcame the adversity that this world was unknowingly faced with, and found a love that everyone was, dare I say it, jealous of.
"This girl was a victim of her upbringing. But more so of her experiences. At age fifteen and sixteen, she saw two of her closest friends murdered. By Aurors. These girls were known as Evangeline Rosier, and Hazelya Dolohov."
There were gasps from the crowd, as the older people recognised the surnames of some of the more famed Death Eaters.
"This girl saw Evangeline Rosier raped and murdered. Miss Dolohov was raped, also, but lived to find out that she was impregnated by one of the Aurors – the people these girls hated more than anyone in the world. The surviving two girls were only fifteen years old. The girl refers, in her diary –"I held up the faded leather book – "to Miss Dolohov affectionately as 'Zel'."
There were looks of disgust on many of the people's faces; they probably thought that Zel, Bella and Evangeline deserved their fate.
"When Zel and the girl, best friends, were sixteen, and Zel's baby was almost due, they were once again attacked by Aurors. Zel was murdered, her baby brutally torn from her stomach and left to die. The girl was spared, miraculously, and the baby boy was rescued. In fact, he is in this room today."
I stared hard at Theodore, who was standing at the back of the room with his young daughter. He was my dad's age, and I had written to him to ask what he knew of his mother. He apparated to my doorstep within minutes of receiving it. Theo was the reason I managed to finish my work. He was my driving force. He gave me the barest of smiles. I did not point him out; he did not need or want the attention.
"These events caused the girl to alter. She developed a mental disease, known to most muggles as Multiple Personality Disorder. This girl changed from the sweet Bella Black –" my audience gasped in horror – "to Bellatrix Black-Lestrange, Lord Voldemort's right hand."
The silence that followed was thick and penetrable.
"Today, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to take you step by step, through the tangled life of Bellatrix Lestrange. A psychotic Death Eater, a sadistic murderer, a lost soul. I am not asking you to sympathise, I could never ask that. All I ask is your willingness to hear me out, and a little bit of empathy."
There were whispers of denial and defiance and I smiled dimly.
"Do you know what, people? You, every single one of you, are the Purebloods of thirty years ago. The supremacists. The bigots. You have no idea of the hate you hold. You are directed once more down a path of destruction and death. I am hopefully going to break that cycle. Before the next war begins."
AN: A new story! It's only going to be a couple of chapters, nothing major. Yeah yeah I know I know - update Violent Deliverance. But it was calling to me and I couldn't write Violent without getting this out of my head. So, please tell me what you think!! I really wanted to do something unique with Bellatrix... and this is the result.
So please review! xx