Cause and Effect

Disclaimer: I don't own the Harry Potter series or any of the characters.

Summary: Just because Bellatrix does the same things for the Death Eaters doesn't mean she does them for the same reason she joined for.

She barely even thinks about The Cause, ridding the world of mudbloods, any more. All she considers now is what will please him, what will make him see her and care. So she continues to act as if she even thinks of the cause, because that is what will please him. She knows that The Dark Lord is incapable of loving her back, but Bellatrix can't tear herself away from him. He's quite happy to keep her around: she's useful, even if he can't understand her attitude any more. His approval is all she lives for now, the prospect of it all she hung on for during the worst fourteen years of her life. And like a filthy muggle addict, she will keep coming back until it kills her. Because that's the only option she has any more; she couldn't live any other way.

Her whole world shattered when she heard he was gone, and she let herself be taken to Azkaban as a reminder of what he had meant to her, refusing to renounce him so she could prove how much he meant to her. The elation she felt as the dark mark on her arm signalled his return was, in the briefest seconds before it was snatched by the Dementors, almost the best feeling in the world, second only to knowing, when she was able to return to him, that she was still his favourite. This knowledge was what fed the fantasy that she breathed like air– that they could ever be more than uncaring master and blindly faithful servant, who would eventually die for a cause she no longer believed in and a man who could never love her back.