A quick blurb I wrote because I had to put something Harry Potter on here to celebrate Bellatrix. It is short and very clunky. Not my best work, honestly, but again- I was going to shrivel up and die if I didn't get something on here.
There was blackness. Blackness, and the insatiable tug of an empty heart, urging him onward, whispering in his ear, telling him exactly what to do with the bodies writhing under his wand. He liked the blackness. He coveted it, bathed in it. Dark as his soul.
Before she came, Tom Marvolo Riddle saw only in black and white, and, on a good day, shades of gray.
He was used to it. Black and white, like his ideals.
There were only those who seek power, and those who have power, and the other mongrels in the lower zoo who had never tasted freedom, and never would. Wizards were always so cleanly cut, their lines defined, their textures outlined perfectly so that for a moment he forgot that others could even see without monochrome. Like their pure blood. Like their eyes, shining with kindness, the first humans to smile at him in so many years since the orphanage.
Muggles blurred into a slushy mix of black and white. A picture someone threw away because someone had blinked.
Sometimes, when he was lucky, there would be gray. Gray like a raincloud, ripe with fruits of its weeping. Thick, scratchy grays woven into sweaters. And, when absolutely necessary, in the eyes of the innocents.
And then she showed up.
She. Bellatrix Lestrange, although she had been Black, then. Black like his whole world. He had immediately taken to her because of the name.
Voldemort remembered her well. She was in line, one of many, at the dining table of his old hiding place, sequestered away to have a pleasant meal with a few pureblood families and discuss recruiting. He had been relatively silent the whole meal.
Nothing special about these people.
Until his eyes caught hers.
Everyone else was pure, shining black and white. The weasel on the end, who appeared to be a distant cousin of Cygnus Black, was tinted with the soft gray threads that accompanied a bit of nonmagical blood. But they perfectly carried Voldemort's views, molding to his eyes.
He swung his head, and nearly fell out of his chair, because he had been wrong for the first time in quite a long period.
Not everyone at the table was black and white.
Yes, he could remember that first day, her eyes were red. Not in color, but in aura. The very air she breathed was red. She coveted it, and although she was dressed completely in black, she seemed to emanate color like a too-bright oil painting. He had never liked those colorful people, what few of them were left, but something about this woman…
Bellatrix looked at him with all the fires of the world burning bright in her eyes. And he would be lying if he said her colors were not beautiful.
