Disclaimer: Day 6 216 and I still don't own Harry Potter, I'm still making no profit out of this and I am still not J.K. Rowling.
"And no matter what anybody says about grief and about time healing all wounds, the truth is, there are certain sorrows that never fade away until the heart stops beating and the last breath is taken."
-Tiffanie DiBartolo
"I always thought insanity would be a dark, bitter feeling but it is drenching and delicious if you really roll around with it"
-Kathryn Stockett
If you were to ask them, most people who knew Bellatrix Lestrange would tell you that she was insane. Those who had met her before she was sent to Azkaban would tell you she always had been.
Of course, those who knew her from childhood would tell you monsters weren't born, but created. Growing up, she'd had two younger sisters and two younger cousins who could testify on that.
She'd lost Andromeda when the younger girl had married the Muggleborn Ted Tonks and gotten herself disowned.
She'd lost Sirius when he'd strayed too far from their customs for Walburga's taste and she'd blasted her eldest from the family tree.
She'd lost Regulus when the idiotic boy had gotten himself killed, though she never knew how. Luckily, she never learned why, either.
I wonder if perhaps it was grief that made her who she was at the end of her life.
After all that, only Narcissa had remained, but the youngest had her own family with Lucius and, later on, Draco and was too busy playing the perfect wife with a perfect home to notice the changes.
She had her husband, Rodolphus, and his brother Rabastan, of course. Though even if they supported and helped her, their personality did nothing to appease the growing darkness inside her mind.
Most people who knew Bellatrix Lestrange would tell you she was insane, if you were to ask them. Most people who knew Bellatrix Black would tell you that grief has the power to make a monster out of you. They would still concede that the dark little seed had always been lurking in the corners of her soul.
Eventually, she had embraced that side of herself and, as they say, when she gave it a hand, it took the whole arm before engulfing her entirely.
Besides, as the other Wizarding families would say, Blacks were never the most balanced of people.