A/N: Yeah, that's right. Now I'm procrastinating with thing I used to procrastinate with. I have so many ongoing pojects at the moment so I thought I'd just finish one so I'd have something to post. I won't put a warning up because there's nothing explicit but like idk. It's pretty dark, in a way.
Disclaimer: I don't own anything recognisable, trust.
There are monsters, she knows.
She sits up at night as Uncle Alphard tells her a story because she doesn't like to be alone, alone and lonely - and lonely is much too scary. She asks for the one about the monsters, she always does.
Why are the monsters always bad? Why do they always have to die?
He spins words of dragons falling on swords, tales where the trolls are brought to the ground by the good, by the light. She doesn't understand why the monsters can't be good.
She grows up. And she starts to understand.
Mother calls her dirty little monster when she is caught plucking the feathers off a live bird. She starts to learn that the monsters can't be good. But she can be good. She can be good if she doesn't listen to the voices, the monsters in her head. Besides, dragons and trolls are ugly, and she most definitely isn't ugly.
She spends her days being perfect, being proud, being a Black. She spends her nights protecting her sisters from being perfect, from being proud, from being a Black. She protects them from the monsters.
And Bellatrix Black is well acquainted with the monsters in her bed. She knows Daddy likes to kiss her hair at night, likes to kiss her lips, her jaw, her neck. There is a monster in her bed and she cries.
He tells her she is his pretty little girl and she scowls at the lie. She's not stupid. She is not a pretty person, the hallways of her mind groan with wicked pleasure because the voices like to hurt her and it's not pretty when they do.
And she's not a girl, either. How she wishes she was a girl. But she's a monster and she knows that.
The demons. The voices. They come for her.
It's worse at night, when her fears crawl into her bed to hold and molest her. She's always fearful of Daddy, and when her fears have his fill, he leaves her alone.
But she's not alone, because her mind is a hospital housing diseases. And she tries so desperately to heal them, to heal herself but she can't.
Soon enough she stops trying because being a Black is a lonely life. When everyone is so scared of the others finding out what they all already know. Bella is lonely enough, desperate enough, that even the voices in her head are good enough company.
She's older now. She knows that her demons are her, and she is her demons. She's the one in control or at least she likes to tell herself that. Now when they talk to her, she smiles and listens. For the monsters are her friends.
They scream and she screams. She gives the demons in her head a voice to roar, a body to torture. She embraces her monsters, she feels their power and it is a drug, a toxic tonic that poisons her blood with the sweetest of pain. She can not live without them. She doesn't intend to live with out them.
They are not good, her monsters. But neither is she, so now when she sits alone in her silent asylum she isn't lonely. Because lonely is too scary.
She befriends the monsters and they help her to face her fears. And when he comes into her room at night and kisses her again, she doesn't cry.
Andy is leaving her. Her Meda is leaving her for dirt. How dare she? She can't. But Bella's known for too long, now. Those looks she gives to the man with a scruffy beard and dirty blood and she is relieved for Andy. Her little sister is free from the poison that will plague her own life.
But Andy can't leave. She'd never leave her alone, not her own sister. She can't leave her alone with the monsters. But she does.
And oh how the voices in her head scream, oh how they burn and torture her. She needs to let them out. She's a good friend so she does as they say.
And she wreaks their havoc. She screams they're torture because they just won't stop. They can't be lonely. Meda can't leave. She can't be lonely.
Because lonely is too scary.
She finds him and the voices purr for him.
Tom Riddle.
He is her narcotic, lacing her body with his venom. He seems to like her monsters, he likes the way they hurt people, and he shows her how to get her victims to scream louder, to hurt harder.
Roddy likes it too. He likes they way Riddle moulds and shapes and tames the voices that otherwise scream. He likes to see her power, her electric magic that can not be contained. It astounds him and enthrals him.
She sings as she hurts a man, just a silly muggle. But his screams harmonise with her voice, in a melodic rhapsody, deafeningly repulsive to the ears, but to Rodolphus it is music. She cuts scarlet lace patterns into her victims and Rodolphus watches as the crimson syrup drips from her hands to the floor. He takes her up against the wall that night, feels her talons drawing those very lace patterns into his skin. Her torture is art and her screams of pleasure are music and he is enchanted.
She continues to carve through her victims, fighting her way through to victory, to freedom. She wants to be more than a dirty little monster and Daddy's pretty little girl. And Riddle is helping her. Only he's not any more. Roddy sees he's not and suddenly he doesn't like what Riddle is doing to her.
He watches as his lady, his wife, never his love, is destroying herself. Riddle's not even the one doing it, he's too smart to leave finger prints on his victims. And she's a victim. She's never been a victim before.
He can almost hear the voices in her head shouting now, banging on her skull to come out.
They are ripping through her, leaking from her eyes in the form of salty, teary vulnerability. Her jaw is set and her teeth grinding, hoping the crunching of fangs will drown out the screams of the demons in her head. She is torturing herself now, the Longbottom's are just collateral damage. And she is dying with them. The light in her burning so hard it is flickering. Dying.
The Aurors come before she can finish the job, and they fight and scream. She cuts through them like butter but there are too many. She drowns in a see of violence, a sea of herself.
She is dead before she sets foot in Azkaban, it takes 14 years and another war for her body to catch up.
And there in the middle of the battle she falls. She falls at the wand of a mother and in the briefest of seconds, she hears Riddle's scream.
She smiles because she hears his scream. And she smiles because she doesn't hear anything. No scream, no battle, no shouts and cries of dying innocence – innocence that she's killing.
No monsters. Her head is empty and she feels lonely. But she isn't scared because in that briefest of seconds she is free.
Her body lies against the cold, ground, serenity and peace gracing her features. And that's how Rodolphus and Narcissa find her. Gracefully slumbering in her never-waking sleep.
As destruction tries to rebuild itself around them, they sit with her. Kissing away her grey hairs, and crying for her busted lip. But they know she is safe now.
They know that this is the only way she'd ever be safe.
Rodolphus is taken away eventually. Off to live out the remainder of his short life in Azkaban, the place where dead souls lurk. Fitting for him, really.
He is found dead not 3 months later.
Somewhere in the sun, beneath the rose thicket Bellatrix lies beneath the earth. Visited by her sister, she is safe. She is beautiful. Roses grow from her grave, delicate and beautiful, and for once she is not the serpent beneath.
She's not what they learn in their history classes. She's not the dragon of the First and Second Wars. She is not a monster, she never was. She is a sister, a protector. She is a victim of war, a victim of herself, of loneliness.
Death was Bella's cure. She is cured now, pretty and delicate and safe, beneath the earth.
There are monsters, she knew.
But she wasn't always one of them.