Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter… I'm sure I'm not the only one who wishes they did.

A/N: Dedicated to Inkfire. Thank you for the reviews, the alert, our conversations and being my Florence buddy.

)O(

I've fallen out of favour,
And I've fallen from grace.
Fallen out of trees,
And I've fallen on my face.
Fallen out of taxis,
Out of windows too.
Fell in your opinion,
When I fell in love with you.

Florence & the Machine, Falling

)O(

When Bellatrix was broken out of Azkaban, she knew it was a reward for being so faithful to the Dark Lord. She did not loose the arrogance she had had before her Master had fallen; it had never left her.

When she attended the first meeting since prison, she sat at the right of the Dark Lord, as she had done in the First War. She remained favoured. The affair continued.

Yes: everything, for a small while, was practically the same as before.

And then…

And then she messed up at the Ministry.

For a moment, her deluded mind tricked her into believing she was not going to be punished as much as the others. She believed that though her mistake was the biggest one she had yet made in her life, everything would return back to normal. She would stay favoured. The nights she spent with her Lord would still happen.

She was wrong.

The Dark Lord acted as though she was weak–weak–weak. She was not. He knew that however much superior he acted–however many times he humiliated her–she remained strong. Strong. Strong in her faith, strong in her loyalty, strong in her magic, strong in her belief in the cause.

She was not strong mentally, but she never had been.

Her mental health continued to become worse. Ever worse. She became less stable when she did not sit beside him in meetings. When the amount of nights she normally would have been with him in his chambers decreased, she lost more grip of any sanity she had. She was aware of others rising in the ranks just as much as she was aware of falling.

Falling, falling, falling.

She fell from favour. She fell from grace.

Even as the Dark Lord began to forgive her for her foolish mistakes, even as she climbed back to her usual place, things did not return to how they once were.

And then, when she was slowly–so slowly–picking up the pieces of her sanity, they fell from her shaking fingers and smashed on the ground.

Once you fall in the Dark Lord's opinion, she found, there is no way of becoming his favourite once more.

So her efforts were wasted. She stumbled, she tripped, time and time again.

No one was there to help her back up.

)O(