Songbird
By: Lyra Aphrodite Moon
Summary: Bellatrix Black – age 16 + - the only female Death Eater- young Marauders, Narcissa, Lucius, Severus & a not so heartless Tom Riddle have their moments. Life is bittersweet and what happens when you're torn between what you want to do and what you were born to do; love, hate, your heart, the expectations of others and the rest of your life? The unexpected predictable.
Prologue
Bellatrix Black laid on her back on the Hogwarts grounds. She was overlooking the enchanted lake, during the last days of summer, at the beginning of her 6th year.
The Tuesday midday sun was beating down on her as she rested across her school robes with her eyes closed. Her body was shaped like a muggle crucifix, with her legs pressed firmly together, her arms spread apart and her back slightly arched, jarring her lips slightly, as if she was trying to kiss the sun.
Most times when she left 'the group,' no one followed her; she liked it like that. Everyone – almost everyone – in their circle drew some sort of line around the rest of them, a line separating themselves from the rest of the world - some blurrier than others and some nonexistent. But she had one.
She was not exactly like the other Slytherin girls or the other girls generally. She was not overly vain like her sister Narcissa, nor was she a twit, with a mudblood obsession, like her other sister Andromeda. No, definitely not. Bellatrix was smart, sassy, a rebel of a sort, who was high maintenance, yes, but worth it. She was defiant, strong willed and strong minded, with a passionate constitution that accompanied her lust for life.
She loved life, yearned to experience it and wanted to inhale all of it. There were times she thought she was going mad; moments when she laughed not knowing why she found the morbid things funny. And there were times when she woke up sweating at nights feeling guilty. She didn't know why she felt guilty but she just did.
"Are you attending tonight?" a shadow said, blocking the sunlight from her face.
She opened her eyes to find Lucius Malfoy and Rudolphus Lestrange gawking at her.
Bellatrix sat up awkwardly, smoothened out her skirt and replied, "Hello, to you too Lucy."
"Do you ever give straight answers?" Lucius countered, clearly agitated by her latest nickname for him. He hated it, naturally, appalling really.
"Do the words silent as the grave mean anything to you?" she replied referring to her obvious state of wanting to be alone.
"Whose grave, love? Yours or mine?" he asked.
"So where are the rest of your trivial counterparts?" she answered his question with another one of her own mockingly. She was purposely irritating him for interrupting her solitude, "Letting Sirius take the better of you I see. At least his faction is always collective. Stronger in numbers I would think. Though I can't seem to say the same for you."
Bellatrix licked her lips and started counting names on her fingers, "You seem to be lacking Snape, McNair, Nott, Crabbe and that fool Goyle. My, my you're missing five of your happy bunch, how pitiful. Do you not feel just awful? And where is dear old Parkinson? Has he forsaken you to hang around with that silly girl Dafoldil? Name after a bloody flower, next thing you know they'll name their child, something sweet and tree like, maybe Orchid, or Pansy, or Tulip?"
She batted her eyelashes at him as he narrowed his at her.
She moved a strand of hair out of her eyes and proceeded to lie back down and closed her eyes.
She knew when he moved like a venomous cat, and laid his steel hands around her neck and she let him. She wasn't nimble, she was more venomous than he could be, but she possessed the wanting and the patience that made the elite of the best of the worthy of their kind– lethal.
"Never talk to me that way!" he quietly hissed at her.
She kept her eyes closed and breathing normal, "You have much to learn Malfoy. So Rudy," she started.
"Do not call me that," Rudolphus told her icily.
"Will you be there tonight?" she continued to ask regardless; she felt Lucius loosening his grip around her throat - due to lack of concentration - paying more attention to what she was saying than threatening to strangle her.
Bellatrix possessed senses to die for; she knew the movements and pulses of the human body to the finest point – she felt the muscles in his fingers against her throat tremble and she knew that she could take him then.
A small crude smile came across Rudolphus's lips, "Will you?"
With the act of surprise on her side, she grabbed Lucius's hands from around her neck, flung it outwards, moved her knee between his legs and ended up on top, straddling him and while pinning his arms above his head.
She snapped her teeth at him abruptly. "Not such a big snake now are we?" she hissed, much in the same voice he used on her. That was all she wanted, a moment to show him she had the upper hand.
Bellatrix released him and tumbled delicately to his side in the original position he found her in, "Get out of my sight."
The girl was definitely mad, pagal hai, fellow Slytherin Samir Patel once said about Bella after they attended the Yule Ball together. He mentioned in the future he wouldn't mind having twin girls with whomever he married - it was a good sign from the gods – double fertility to carry on the family bloodlines. She told him she didn't want kids, bloodlines were all they were good for – occasionally - and offered to castrate him.
There weren't enough words in the worldly languages of the universe to describe Bellatrix Black.
Lucius rolled over to her just as McNair, Snape and Goyle appeared coming from lunch.
"Aye, Bella," Goyle grunted waving like an idiot.
"Bella – trix," she corrected him and he laughed. She opened her eyes to glare at them, "Do the five of you have nothing better to do than to harass me? Go find Narcissa; she enjoys your smiles and flattery. You are wasting your time here."
"Who came to flatter you?" Lucius said peering at her from his up close and personal view ready to contradict his own words. He ran the tip of his tongue along the side of her cheek.
"Back to the original question," Rudolphus stated monotonously, crossing his arms over his chest, clearly not amused, "Are you attending tonight?"
"Back to the original answer," she responded, "Are you?"
Lucius rolled his eyes, exhaled, got up off the grass and simply towered above her.
"And if I told you that I was going to be there tonight, Bella-trix," Rudolphus accentuated the 'ix' of her name, "What would you say?"
"I would say, that I think you need to make up your mind about any 'if' presumptions. Then we can have this discussion," she said flatly.
"She'll be there," Severus Snape said, speaking at last.
Lucius raised a brow.
"Sevvy," a creepy smile came to her lips in a low voice.
"Belle," Severus darted his eyes at her extending the 'el' of his nickname for her like soft hot silk. No one dared to call her 'Belle', with the exception of her father, unless they planned on getting assaulted. Even so, there were only two people ever allowed to call her 'Belle', besides her father, and she had very strange relations with them both.
Severus held her stare for quite a few moments before it was broken -
"Bloody hell, I never – who in the world - that boy is absolutely, horrifically – wait until I wring his little neck…" said Narcissa Black, who was now coming across the green, ranting and raving, as usual, with one of her large round black hats on her head, adorned with one of her latest vogue sunglasses attached to her face.
Bellatrix rolled her eyes and turned over on her stomach, "Peace and quiet seems to be a misinterpreted concept by the people who seem to inhabit my life."
"What has your lacey knickers twisted?" Rudolphus inquired, clearly aggravated and not in the mood for one of Narcissa's 'all about me' hissy fits.
"Sirius! Who else besides that blasted cousin of mine! I swear I'm going to wring his little neck for what he did!" she shouted.
"He's taller and bigger than you, hardly 'little' as you put it," Bellatrix muffled from her position on the ground.
"How can you just lay there like that, for so long in the sun? I would fear getting sun burned or just turning scarlet," Narcissa pointed out, completely going off topic.
"Your name does you great justice," Severus interjected learning against the tree scowling.
Narcissa threw him a look of disgust and was about to open her mouth and comment when Alistair McNair stopped her with a question of his own, "So we are waiting, what did Sirius do to you this time?"
"You make it seem like I'm the only one he torments," she said defensively throwing a sympathetic look at Severus.
"Because, dear sister, between the rest of the family, excluding all others, you are the only one he torments," another muffled comment from Bellatrix.
"Well do you, or do you not want to know what he did?" Narcissa squealed.
"Why are we having this ridiculous, pointless conversation?" Rudolphus asked clearly getting more and more irritated with every passing moment, at the same time that Lucius said, "Narcissa, you want to tell us, and we are offering no objection to hearing it."
Bellatrix exhaled quietly, sat up, grabbed her things and walked away from the absurd conversation between her sister and the other purebloods.
She was stalking off, back the Slytherin common room, thanking the gods she didn't share a room with Narcissa or Andromeda, she's kill them from sheer frustration, when she ran into none other than her infamous cousin, Sirius Black.
xxx
He extended his hand to help her back up.
"You're alone," said Bellatrix.
"As you see," he answered.
"So tell me dear cousin, what brilliant form of distress did you inflict upon our dear Narcissa today?" she asked slowly letting go of his hand.
"Did you notice she was wearing a hat?" he smirked offering his arm to escort her.
She took his arm and nodded, "I turned her hair fire red – Gryffindor fire red that is," he said.
"I'm going to the dungeons," she pointed out.
"I'm going to the Astronomy Tower," he told her.
"We are arm locked, going in two separate directions, from two very different sides of the four house spectrum, I doubt we should continue farther," Bellatrix replied. She was use to this, they always played this formal game with one another. It made their relationship easier, she supposed.
"Unless one party, forgets the other's affiliation and changed direction momentarily," he retorted.
"Or neither," said Bellatrix.
"And where are your associates on this fine day Belle?" he asked.
"They would be deadly furious if they saw you," she answered as they changed direction and headed for the edges of the Forbidden Forrest.
xxx
Bellatrix's fingers combed through Sirius's hair as he rested his head on her lap. They sat in silence.
From their first year at Hogwarts, quiet became their best form of communication, less said, less heartbreak, no attachments.
They were extremely close as children and there were many childhood portraits of them together, laughing, playing or just sitting in each other's company - enough to fill many Black family albums. There were even two identical portraits, of the two children, hanging on the library walls of each of their family manors.
As pureblood families went, for non-immediate relatives, the two of them were a perfect, probable future match.
Marriage.
But the sharp blade of reality set in almost six years ago, when he was sorted into Gryffindor and she was sorted into Slytherin – like a proper Black child. They fought their differences as much as possible, but time changed everything; the long conversations of hopes, dreams, life and common interest shattered to sweet, serene silence of what could never be again.
"He is assembling his final group tonight," she said suddenly.
"Who?" Sirius asked.
"Thomas," her voice was low and barely audible.
"Are you going to meet him?" he already knew the answer, but asked regardless.
"I use to love to watch you with your eyes closed. I remember the day before the train left for Hogwarts, you feel asleep on mummy's bed, I was sent to awaken you for tea, but I rathered to just sit there, next to you, and watch," her words of long ago, diverting from the question everyone was asking her, made him uneasy, "I always enjoyed watching, even now."
"Belle, things are not what they use to be, you know that," he closed his eyes.
"I'm not going," her statement was flat and emotionless.
"It's your choice," he shifted slightly to move onto his side, put his hands around her waist and rest his head against her stomach.
"Nothing is ever our choice," she twirled a few of his strands around her fingers, "If we had choices, you wouldn't be in the house that you're in. You'd be with me, and I wouldn't be on the edge of the tides of change, with Senior Malfoy, Snape and Lestrange knocking on daddy's door for my hand in marriage."
"Big words Belle, but surely, they aren't the only ones?" Sirius asked her.
"Of course not, but they are the only ones whose company I can stand," she answered.
"Malfoy, I cannot remember you always hating him," he recalled.
"Indeed," was all she said.
"Snivillus?" he asked referring to Severus.
"I hate that you call him that," she spat.
"I hate him."
"I don't."
"And Lestrange?" Sirius asked.
"What about him?"
"You tell me?"
"He intrigues me. He is silent but strong, calm but spirited and his intellect amazes me."
Sirius let out a raspy laugh, "I think you already made you choice," and a genuine smile reached her lips, "He was never my first choice," she told him.
"And tell me, Belle, love, about tonight, what are you so afraid of?"
"I think I would loose myself."