A/N: Written for The Ultimate Death Eater Contest, round two, which is found at the HPFC forum. I picked the character Bellatrix Black and the prompt "no one has the right to judge me."

Also written for Fanfiction Tournaments, which can be found at the HPFC as well. This was for November – round 3 – third year.

I also used the thread Prompts to Feed the Imagination (which can be found in the M&MWP forum) – the word prompt "red," which was given 11/09.

Many thanks to my beta-reader mew-tsubaki.

consciences are for ninnies

There it finally is. The burning heat against your skin, the touch so hot, and you can finally, finally tell it is real. You can tell it from the way the mark on your arm becomes redder and redder. You can tell it from the way it feels, you can tell it from the way the tip of your wand is pressed against your white skin, and from the way you're grinning to yourself in the mirror.

You shouldn't be doing that to yourself they will say, but they can't decide what you're doing. They don't know what makes you feel alive; they can't decide what is right and wrong—only you can.

You press a fingernail in one of the marks so that a drop of blood seeps out and you feel like saying Hello there, dear friend but in the end you just smile.

Your fingertip is unrelenting against the scars on your arms, prodding them, examining how hard you can press until the redness of them will be so much redder, and you smile to yourself in the mirror in front of you.

One of the doors of the stalls behind you is suddenly opened. "Bellatrix!"

"Debra." She's a short girl, a Slytherin just as you, a third-year just as you. But you don't like her. She, however, seems to believe you two are friends with the way she always smiles with shining teeth and looks at you as though she wants to share all of her confidences with you. (But you can't help but wonder if she isn't the most cunning of them all, the slyest, the one who will know everyone's secret and then one day hold it against them. So you're not telling her a thing.)

"How was your summer?" she ask in that twittering voice of hers, as she makes her way over to a sink and begins to wash her hands. You wonder what it would have looked like if she was washing blood off them, how much it would have to bleed for the water to be crimson red instead of a pale pink.

"Splendid."

"I'm glad to hear that! Mine was, too. My dad bought me a baby rabbit." She leans her back against the sink, as though you two are those best friends and she's waiting for you to finish so that you can leave the bathroom together.

"I killed a rabbit this summer," you answer, and you're not lying. You had walked in the forest behind the Black lands, barefoot so that you wouldn't be heard as easily. And when you had spotted the tiny rabbit, you had launched yourself on it and broken its neck with a quick twist of your hands. It had been so warm just afterwards, but in the end, hours later, it had been cold and hard. You hadn't used your wand, but you knew the rabbit had been too easy to catch for it to have called for magic involved—and somehow it had made you proud that you had managed to petrify it without casting a spell. The blood that had drained out from its neck had been dark red against its brown fur, and you had smeared it across your hands, arms, and face. Then you had walked to a small pond nearby and watched your reflection and wondered if your parents would scold you. But you wouldn't let it come to that, you had decided, because there was no reason for them to be mad at you. None at all.

"You didn't!" Debra's hands fly up to cover her mouth and you smile.

"Oh, I did."

"That's horrible, Bellatrix! You oughtn't kill an innocent animal—that's barbaric!"

"And who are you to decide that, Debra?" You spit out her name, and your eyes meet in the mirror. "Just because someone thinks it's barbaric doesn't mean it is. Just because someone thinks they know what's wrong and what's right doesn't mean it applies to everyone." No one can judge me, and especially not you, you think and watch how Debra's eyes narrow.

She's still leaning against that sink, and you imagine bashing her head against the porcelain edge, until her blonde hair that she's always puffing up so that it'll have more volume would be soaking with redness, so that the blood would stream down her cheeks and into her mouth and then she'd know the real taste of herself.

"So what new classes are you going to take this year, Debra?" you ask, walking over to her and linking your arm with hers.

You watch the two of you in the mirror for a second, and then you leave the bathroom together.