The following months were no better than Christmas day, and as the predictably icy weather continued to ravage the British countryside it appeared that a similar atmosphere had fallen over Lestrange manor, trapped it under a thick blanket that showed no signs of relenting, smothering them against their will. Rodolphus had explained the events of Christmas day as quietly as he could to his parents, but that didn't matter, it was only going to spread like a dragon's fire throughout wizarding society, becoming the latest gossip. The whispers on the corners of every street were always lingering, of what an unfortunate year the Black family had, lurking like a spear poised inches from the flesh of their backs. Each member handled the situation differently, from outright denial to silent grief and dread of those harsh whispers, but Bellatrix could only have been described by those around her as falling into some kind of depression.
Nobody mentioned the incident, nobody expected her to grieve, least of all herself. What made everything so painfully unbearable was the thoughts that haunted her every waking moment. Pain, anguish, hurt, things she told herself that she was much stronger than and wouldn't feel over anyone, least of all a filthy blood traitor. But that blood traitor was her sister, her flesh and blood, the girl she'd watched blossom in to a woman and shared so much of her life with, a girl she'd cared for, and now she couldn't. Someone with which she'd shared a bond like no other, and now she didn't. Years and years of happy memories had been lost in the space of five minutes, dissolved into thin air, ceased to exist and she was expected to feel nothing, she wanted to feel nothing. The most conflicting thing, she found, is that this seemed to be happening to no one else. Nobody else felt like every time they breathed their lungs were being ripped from their chest, nobody else felt so conflicted that they felt like tearing themselves apart. She hated it, feeling every moment like she was going to explode, she felt weak, and once again she was the family disappointment, the one who couldn't just move on. But pretending that she could was also killing her.
Bellatrix became exceptionally hard to be around. Her face was fixed in a permanent scowl and her eyes were dead. Rodolphus was the first to notice but soon it became for anybody to believe the persistent lies she spun when anybody asked her if she was okay. Her insistent denial was what frustrated Rodolphus the most, not her foul temper, her withdrawal or the fact her old self seemed like it would be permanently lost, it was the fact that she just wouldn't talk. She couldn't admit what was painfully obvious, to everyone including herself. But he swore to himself that he would help her though this, no matter how badly she pushed him away, and she did, she pushed everyone away. She stopped visiting her mother on a regular basis and writing to Narcissa at Hogwarts. She'd spend days on end doing nothing but sitting in the library, Rodolphus thought she must have read its entire contents by the time January was over. Rodolphus once called her mother over for a house visit, desperately worried. On that foggy morning he practically begged her to do something, but nothing could be done, she confronted Bellatrix gently with hope to encourage her to say something, and it had almost worked, but mere talking could do nothing to repair wounded pride, and the situation only ended worse.
"She went and ruined everything Just when I was beginning to feel like I wasn't completely useless she went and left and made everything worse!" cried Bellatrix. There was a mutual gasp. Druella's tight face began to soften. Panic flooded through Bellatrix at the realization of what she had just done, the thing she had tried so desperately to avoid. All reason was shoved as aside as she leaped to defend her pride.
"Get out," Bellatrix growled. Druella's smile faded instantly.
"But you finally..." She chirped, hoping for Bellatrix to relax and finally talk to her. She was met with the look she imagined a vicious animal would have if it felt it were being threatened.
"Get out!" she spat. She was growing impatient with her mother and her refusal to understand, with everyone's refusal to understand. She could feel tears threatening to well in her eyes, she needed her mother out.
"But..." Druella stammered, completely astonished by the entire situation. She stared at Bellatrix, worried.
"Get out mother, get out!" she screamed frantically. Druella gasped and then fled the room, slamming the door behind her. Bellatrix fell into a heap on the sofa, struggling to stifle her sobs. She threw the book she was reading across the room and punched the sofa arm. She was furious. Furious at her mother, furious at her sister and furious at herself. It would have been better if her sister had died, it would have been easier. She had become a sniveling heap, crying over something she could not change and she felt infuriatingly frail, wishing everything could disappear. Blacks are not weak, she told herself, but it was no use, every cell in her body told her she was weak, from the pain in her chest to the streams of tears falling down her face, she was absolutely pathetic, sure in the knowledge that if anybody saw her like this she would too be disowned, for this was not the behavior of Blacks and never would be.
Rodolphus was beginning to lose hope, every night when he sat across from her at the dinner table, watching her pound glass after glass of wine. Boiling with resentment that every night she drowned herself rather than talking to him. Every time he raised it, it only made things worse, a slight comment at dinner resulted in cruelly defensive insults, slamming of crockery and a hasty exit. He felt like she was caged and no matter how many times he reached for the exit to free her, he was thrown ten feet further away. His parents somehow tolerated the frequent display of rudeness and apathy that became dining with her, they watched her choke down her food and guzzle back wine like it was air, and despite them never saying anything Rodolphus could tell they were displeased, and mildly concerned. But no matter what he tried it backfired, he was slowly becoming exhausted.
Bellatrix could tell that her behaviour was affecting those around her, but nothing could have convinced her to care. If anything she was glad she was hurting them, that way they could understand a fraction of what was happening inside her. She wished it was more, that they were the ones being asphyxiated every day by their own feelings rather than watching someone else self-destruct. She hated the way they all looked at her, her mother's kind smiles and the pitiful look in Rodolphus' eyes. You want to help me? She wanted to say, to scream at them until her lungs collapsed then take this away.
She relied on keeping herself busy to get through the days and keeping herself drunk to get through the nights. She spent every day engrossed in books when she had the energy, and other times just staring at walls, watching the rain fall though the wide mansion windows. She imagined herself as the raindrops, one day standing out in the grounds with them until they soaked her robes through. Rodolphus found her standing there, shivering with wet hair in her eyes and waterlogged robes clinging to her frame. He coaxed her inside and warmed her up, she didn't complain, but she wished he'd left her there, where the cold ate away at the pain. And each night when she picked through her food beneath the scrutinizing stares of her in laws. She'd never liked them much, Mr. Lestrange was almost never there, and his wife was the same breed as her mother, cold and compliant. She watched them silently judge as wine coursed down her throat, filling her insides with a numbing warmth, and she hated the glares because it showed what little they understood, how they had no idea that she was drowning and needed that numbness to survive.
As January faded and February began to take hold things became no less difficult, only less disappointing. Rodolphus came to expect it, that every day his wife would ignore him, speak to no one and spend the night shut away in one of the guest bedroom rather than in their shared suite. The Lestranges found more bottles of firewhiskey going missing from the liquor cabinet, but now nobody blamed the house elves, not after one of them found the broken remnants of the previous missing bottles in a far corner of the grounds. The house elves noticed a mirror in one of the guest bedrooms had been broken, it was quickly replaced and nobody asked questions when Bellatrix spent the next week in a fashionable pair of silk gloves. The silence was slowly driving Rodolphus insane. Why was nobody addressing this? He despaired over how much longer this could go on. The one day he finally cracked, when he vowed that he would no longer be complacent in letting his wife destroy herself despite insisting she was fine, he felt a piece of himself break too. This was the strongest woman he'd ever known, and that afternoon when he found her on their bedroom floor sat in a pile of feathers, the gutted shells of their pillows strewn around the room, that he would help her recover who she was if it killed him. He helped her up, and she did nothing, just stared at the fireplace where the fire raged, Rodolphus just making out the faint curls of photographs dancing amongst the flames before noticing the open book on the floor. He ran cold water over the burns on her hands while she sat there dazed, like she didn't know he was even there at all.
That was the lowest day, and after that Bellatrix swore she would never fall that far again. She channeled her pain into anger and her anger into energy, she returned to the library, acquiring knowledge at a rapid rate and rather than turning on herself and others she fuelled her inner fire with the promise of something more, taking moments of twisted joy from the whispers in the newspapers, that dark times were on their way. She started to smile again, which as far as she was aware had everyone fooled, and as February progressed and neared its end, her façade of normality seemed concrete as ever. She found comfort in fire, setting things alight and poking around the hearth. She imagined throwing her thoughts in to them, watching them turn to dust. She still could hardly stand being around her family, and often after visits to them Rodolphus would find her asleep somewhere in the mansion with an empty bottle of wine. She smiled more because they thought she was getting better, they'd stopped fretting, which meant that she harboured less hatred for them because their pandering had only made her feel worse. Now they thought she was better, but she wasn't, she still felt like her body was eating itself alive and her every spare moments were filled with reminders of her sister's betrayal and her own failure, they still tormented her. They thought she was better but she wasn't, she was just waiting.