From the get-go: This is Bellatrix totally re-imagined; that is a key premise of this story. So...please don't be surprised/offended when my Bellatrix is nothing like the book's :)

Chapter One

"Who's that behind Malfoy?" Harry whispered urgently to her, green eyes straining in the dim lighting.

It was impossible to make out in the darkness. Though the veritable army of silver masks gleamed behind Malfoy in the Department of Mysteries, the figure slowly but steadily emerging from the shadows to his left was still unidentifiable.

And yet, Hermione had the chilling notion that she knew exactly who the approaching person was.

It was a name that had only recently begun appearing in the Daily Prophet. And then, it had dominated the newspaper and others with a frenzy. After that, it was as though a ghost that had been forgotten for fourteen years was suddenly brought back to life—a name on every witch and wizard's mouth a breath after 'You-Know-Who.'

"Harry…that's…that's Bellatrix Black," she heard Neville confirm in a hiss as the mask-less figure reached light, a deep, unfamiliar growl in his voice. Hermione gritted her teeth.

Reason would allow that vestiges of Black's stay at Azkaban be visible: a certain haggardness, unhinged behavior, faltering sanity.

And yet, the only thing that could be said harkened of a stint in one of the Wizarding World's most brutal prisons was Black's short unevenly sheared hair. She was cloaked in the same luxuriant, silken robes that the other male death eaters wore with black slacks and dragon-hide boots. Her stance, far from weakened or injured in comparison to her counterparts, was dominated by a certain deadly stillness; she stood with hips thrust slightly forward (strangely, as though to proudly emphasize something Hermione knew for a fact Black did not have). Dark brows, sharp cheekbones, harsh jaw, and a certain cocky tilt of the head only further contributed to a marked impression of androgyny.

"Well," the infamous death eater spoke, a strange charismatic roughness to her voice as she fixed her gaze on Harry. It was lower than expected. "If it isn't the Boy-Who-Lived."

She looked deceptively young, Hermione noted further with trepidation. It was common knowledge that wizards—particularly powerful ones—aged at a much slower rate. Dumbledore himself was well over a century in years despite appearing only in his sixties. Sirius, for that matter, looked scarcely five years older than a Hogwarts graduate, though visibly haunted by more worldly demons. Black's baffling youth, unfortunately, was unwelcome but undeniable proof that her alleged magical prowess was beyond tall tale.

Hermione watched as Harry stiffened.

Lucius Malfoy came to the fore, his voice slow and calm as he removed his mask. His expression was disarmingly pleasant, as though coaxing a child to give up a toy before bedtime. "You know why we're here, Potter."

Hermione glanced at the glowing orb in question, moving slightly in front of it defensively. For one chilling, breathless moment, she felt Black's dark eyes flicker to her, before they returned to rest lazily on Harry once more.

"Why did Voldemort need me to come and get this?" Harry asked, voice strong. But she could see his shoulders trembling, and she knew that he had realized: this had all been a trap—the dream, Sirius being captured, Voldemort being at the ministry.

"You dare speak his name?!" another death eater roared, stepping forward, "YOU FILTHY HALFBLOOD!" He raised his wand to fire a spell at them, but Malfoy placed a restraining gloved hand on the masked death eater's wrist, forcing the wand away.

"Harry," Hermione whispered to him, taking advantage of the minor power struggle between Malfoy and the unknown death eater, "We need to get you out now. I—I think prophecies can be accessed only by the people they're about. I think Voldemort couldn't remove the orb himself or he wouldn't have tricked you here."

"Potter," the elder Malfoy interrupted. He had finished dealing with the errant death eater. "You know how this goes. You either make this easy for your friends—and simply hand the prophecy over—or we force it from your hands through more violent means of persuasion. And I assure you, that would make things challenging for your friends."

Harry stood still. Hermione watched as, encouraged, Malfoy began to inch forward with his arm outstretched. Ginny, Neville, and Luna shifted to focus on Malfoy's approach, but Hermione kept her eyes on Black, wary of the wand she dangled almost carelessly in her hand.

"Haven't you always wondered," Malfoy whispered, moving closer slowly, "the reason for why you and the Dark Lord share this connection? Why he was unable to kill you when you were just a boy?"

Hermione watched from the corner of her eye as Malfoy paused for a second, gaze intensifying. He seemed to latch onto something in Harry's eyes. "Don't you want to know, Harry? The answers to all your questions…the secret of that miracle scar—"

"NOW!" Harry roared. Hermione jerked as she watched Black suddenly come to life, a savage grin on her dynamic features. Harry had raced down the perpendicular aisle, and without pause, Black sent a curse after him and made chase.

Hermione flew into action, knocking a row of prophecies down from behind her and sprinting down the long aisle. She glanced back quickly to notice that Malfoy was the death eater chasing her. As she sent back stunning curses, she couldn't help but analyze the meaning of these assignments. Harry was clearly the most valuable of them, and Malfoy had allowed, perhaps even anticipated, that Black be the one to pursue Harry…which meant that Bellatrix Black, even after having just returned from Azkaban, was still Voldemort's de facto lieutenant. If all the rumors that had been circulating about her were true…

"Reducto!" Hermione shouted, aiming a well-placed curse at the floor in front of Malfoy. The ground crumbled in front of Malfoy, forcing him to come to a full stop.

Hermione plunged ahead into the darkness, racing towards a hint of light she saw ahead of her. Squinting, she roughly made out a figure with red hair twenty meters or so in front of her.

"Hermione!" she heard. She turned to see Harry running behind her. He looked considerably worse than he had been when he left her, blood dripping from cuts in numerous locations. They had been made with almost surgical precision.

"Where is she, Harry?" Hermione hissed to him worriedly over her shoulder as she made it past the door to Ron. Harry was only a couple of feet behind her now.

"I don't know, I don't know," Harry yelled desperately, making it through the door. Hermione and Ron moved to slam the door shut. Just as they were about to close it, however, one more presence made it through.

Dark mist formulized into a nonchalant figure leaning casually against the wall opposite them. Dark grey eyes shadowed by midnight brows examined them with cold amusement.

"I must say, Potter," Black murmured, "I had imagined Dumbledore would have made you a better duelist."

Harry trembled with rage, green eyes blazing. With a grandiose wave, he shouted, "Expelliarmus!"

But Black merely flicked the spell away with a twist of her wrist, dark uneven bangs falling into her eyes as she tilted her head. "Come on," the rough voice coaxed, "Give me something more. Show me what you can do." The words tugged at Hermione strangely, but she ignored it.

Harry seemed to contemplate the idea, alternately tightening then loosening his hold on his wand. After a moment, however, he seemed to make a decision. With the reflexes of a seeker, he lunged to the side and aimed a bombarda curse at the tank behind Black, creating a diversion for them to run once more.

In the chaos of the explosion, Hermione ignored the dark, throaty laughter that could only be Black's and grabbed Harry and Ron's hands to race to the opposite end of the room. Arriving in front of another door, she raised her wand to blast it open, revealing a large underground chamber with a large stone structure in the middle.

Seemingly alone, they moved to the center of the room and turned at the sound of panting to see Neville, Luna, and Ginny join them from another entrance. They immediately huddled together, placing Harry and the prophecy in the middle of them. Only seconds passed before they were immersed in a dark mist and surrounded by dozens of death eaters, Malfoy at the front.

"Potter," Malfoy hissed, all pretense of calmness gone from his demeanor, "Hand it over."

When Harry made no move, Malfoy reluctantly raised his wand, signaling the other death eaters to do so as well.

But before the first spell could be cast, the sound of distant pops echoed throughout the chamber. Hermione looked around and realized with great relief that the Order had arrived. Sirius appeared first, running towards Harry and pulled him protectively behind a boulder. Shacklebolt, Made-Eye Moody, and Lupin then appeared, and proceeded to engage the death eaters in battle. Tonks and a legion of other members she wasn't too familiar with joined the fight seconds later, giving Hermione and the others opportunity to duck behind other boulders and columns.

To the right, she saw Tonks dueling Dolohov. Just a little behind her and in front of the arching stone structure, Harry and Sirius were dueling Malfoy and an older man who looked very much like Theodore Nott from their year. Gesturing for Neville, Ginny, Luna, and Ron to stay put, Hermione cast a disillusionment charm on herself and ducked under spells as she investigated the room. No matter where she looked, however, she had yet to find Black—which was imminently concerning.

She ducked under a stray curse, but froze when she saw a jet of light miss Harry by the breadth of a hair from Nott. Sirius quickly sent a series of quick curses in the death eater's direction while Malfoy was recovering, and managed to send him flying through the air into the opposite wall.

Sirius then turned on Malfoy again with lightning quickness and finished him off with the same humiliating ease. Hermione found herself amending her impression of Sirius slightly. Until now, he had always come off as too impulsive and brash to her to be a very strategic duelist.

Seeing his opponents defeated, however, Sirius returned to his true nature and paused to bark in laughter, an edge of mockery to his voice. As Sirius opened his mouth to say something to Harry, Hermione felt a strange tingling behind her neck.

Years from then, she would contemplate what exactly made her turn her head just so in that moment. How it was possible that with unerring accuracy, she tilted her head at exactly that 45-degree angle and caught sight of the person who had been hidden from them for the past five minutes and managed to stop something she knew would have wrecked Harry for the rest of his life.

A pale long fingered hand whipped out from dark mist as the rest of a figure began to solidify in the corner of the room, sending forth a vibrant stream of green that electrified the air. Hermione felt her heart stop as her mind panicked, trying to formulate a solution rapidly. It was too late to warn Sirius; Hermione wouldn't reach him—was at the wrong angle for her to send a spell at him—in time to push him out of the way. No spell could block the killing curse. No spell could stop it…

No spell could…

Before she could fully process the thought, Hermione soundlessly levitated Nott's unconscious body—the closest solid object—and placed it in line of the spell. A second later, the spell hit and Nott convulsed, his eyes opening in his last moment of consciousness—wide, panicked brown eyes that sent Hermione's heart falling into her stomach. And then, he was no more.

For the first time since the battle had started, there seemed to be silence in the room as everyone struggled to determine what had exactly happened after the flash of green.

Hermione paled and clutched her midsection, nausea rolling through her.

"Damn, cousin. It seems that the infamous Black luck has yet to desert you," Black's rough, drawling voice echoed throughout the cavernous room.

Sirius's handsome face tightened coldly, his expression suddenly strikingly similar to his mother's portrait as he grabbed Harry and placed him protectively behind him.

Black was all hard angles and edges in this room, the light highlighting certain planes of her face and casting others into shadow. In her hand, she twirled a jagged ebony black wand, analyzing the young witch who had stopped her spell.

"And who…" the Dark Lord's lieutenant questioned with a tilted head, leaning forward, "are you?"

Hermione heard the words as though through a vacuum; they were incomprehensible to her. Lupin made a step toward her but someone held him back.

"Killing an unconscious man…" the pureblood continued conversationally, lifting a finger to flick dark bangs out of her eyes as she prowled closer to Hermione, "There's a certain irony to that, somewhere. Although, I can't say Nott was a devastating loss. Isn't that right, Lucius?"

Malfoy pulled himself up from the floor, legs trembling, "I-Indeed."

"Indeed," Black repeated slowly, mockingly. Her attention snapped back to Hermione. "Your name or I kill one of your friends."

The threat ripped Hermione out of the haze she had been in. In that moment, she forgot the power of a name, evaluated that what she offered was meaningless, and, for the purpose of buying time for more reinforcements to arrive, said tonelessly: "Hermione Granger."

Black's tongue darted out to glance her lip. "Ah, a mudblood. And yet, your predecessors seemed to have followed our own customs in naming you."

Maybe it was because she had just recently become a murderer. Maybe it was because she was too in shock to really care. But at those words, Hermione felt the burgeoning of an all too dangerous amount of recklessness that was undoubtedly reflective of newfound self-destructive tendencies.

"Shakespeare, actually," she bit out, glaring up at the taller witch, "Though, I suppose I can't fault you for being uncultured. I've heard Azkaban tends to hinder access to some of the finer pleasures in life."

"Hermione," Ron hissed from behind her, face paling. Hermione darted a glance at him, lips thinning.

"Well, you certainly are a Gryffindor, aren't you?" Black murmured, grey eyes dancing wickedly as she eyed Hermione's uniform.

And then she set the floor beneath them on fire.

Some had the presence of mind to try to apparate, but the thick smoke had created a thick, suffocating film that made it impossible to muster the necessary focus.

"Aguamenti!" she heard Harry shout behind her. It did not do anything.

The temperature of the room had gone up by at least thirty degrees as flames began to consume it. Several other witches and wizards tried the same spell to no avail, but she knew a simple Aguamenti would not work with advanced magic like this.

Sirius was chanting something under his breath, weaving complex patterns with his wand that were beginning to stave the flames, but not nearly quick enough. Her heart dropped to her stomach when she heard Tonks scream—a gritty, ugly sound—as flame flicked at the bottoms of her boots.

"Fuck, fuck," Hermione cursed with feeling, allowing herself this reprieve from good behavior. Mind working frantically, she found one impossible, unlikely course of action and because she had no time to pause with Tonks screaming like that immediately leapt into action.

She worked solely from memory, eyes closed as her wand hand moved to carve a rune she had only managed to stumble on due to supplementary research for an Arithmancy project into the floor and prayed that her attempt would work.

It appeared that perhaps a god did exist because, miraculously, a roaring wall of water—by far, the most expansive piece of magic she had ever produced—plunged through the room and doused it and everyone in it.

Beside her, she heard Ron let out a breathy, slightly hysterical laugh.

Across the room, Black straightened, dark, burning eyes fixed on her with a small curve to her lips. Something clenched in Hermione's body at the sight, her muscles tensing.

Then, a cold chill filled the air and everyone except Black stiffened as another presence joined the room.

"I see you have things well in hand, Bellatrix." Voldemort said lightly, stepping forward with a tilted head.

Black inclined her head in turn, gaze never leaving Hermione's. "Yes, my lord. Potter is here, the prophecy is intact."

After coolly surveying the room, the Dark Lord's eyes returned to his right hand and, following her gaze, rested briefly on Hermione too. Then his gaze moved away.

"Excellent. I will take it from here."

A minute later Harry smashed the prophecy.

Author's Note

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