A/N: PROMPT: Keeper: asylum
For QLFC Round 4
TW for mental illness, mention of alcoholism, light violence/gore, and just general dark-ness overall
WC: 2250
ten.
"Do you want to know a secret?"
Crown Princess Bellatrix Black is sixteen, old enough to know people are scared of her but not old enough to know why. She knows what people call her. Crazy. Unhinged. She tries not to let it bother her.
"A secret?" asks Andromeda, her younger sister. It's clear from her frown that she does not like secrets. "Well, what is it?"
"I think I'm in love," Bellatrix whispers conspiratorially.
"Love?" This makes Andromeda brighten. "With who?"
"You remember that prince who visited us last spring? Thomas Riddle? Well, we've been writing, and…" Bellatrix flushes an uncharacteristic red. "He tells me I'm special, Drom. I think… I think he likes me."
"Bella, that's wonderful!" Andromeda claps excitedly, grinning broadly at her sister. "Oh, I'm so excited for you!"
There is little else like young love, and the two sisters talk of it for hours, planning dates and weddings and kisses by the lake, until suddenly their mother enters and dashes Bellatrix's sixteen-year-old world into oblivion with but three words.
You are engaged.
It doesn't register in Bellatrix's mind at first. Engaged? How can she be engaged, when the only man that's ever piqued her interest lies miles across the sea?
Rodolphus Lestrange will be your husband. It's for the good of the kingdom, Bellatrix. You know how close we are to financial ruin. War from our neighboring countries is only a few years away. Try to understand.
"I do understand, mother," she'd said, but she doesn't. She can't.
nine.
The worst part of it all comes in a letter two weeks later. One week before her wedding.
She'd written to Thomas in rushed, five-page letters explaining the situation, confessing her love and begging him to return to her kingdom, to offer her his hand in marriage. To save her from this hell.
To Her Royal Highness Bellatrix Black, reads the letter, I am afraid I cannot offer you a marriage proposal, for I do not share the feelings you so obviously have for me. I had hoped to marry you at first, I'll admit, but once I discovered just how close your kingdom is to ruin, I was more than happy to direct Rodolphus to your family. I wish you both a very happy union.
Best regards.
Thomas Riddle
Bellatrix stares at the letter in her hand for hours before she finally burns it in the fireplace. She knows she should hate Thomas, should want to destroy him for what he has done to her, but she is too blinded by the love she was certain she felt.
She hates her kingdom instead, for being so poor, for being in such a terrible location, for practically inviting war and devastation, and she feeds that spark of hatred with her tears until it bursts into a full-on flame that burns her alive from the inside out.
There are more whispers of her being crazy these days. They dig into her mind with razor-sharp claws.
eight.
Bellatrix marries Rodolphus in an extravagant ceremony fit for the heir to the throne she is, but she never stops writing Thomas. Late-night letters scrawled by the side of her bed, love-drenched paragraphs written only by candlelight. She is never met with a reply. She's so drunk with loss, with loneliness, that she never expects Rodolphus to find out.
When he does, Bellatrix stays in her seat while he screams at her. He calls her all sorts of horrible names, threatens to do all kinds of horrible things, and through it all, she sits there, staring him straight in the eyes. When he finally leaves to go drink himself sick, Bellatrix is different.
Her smile is not sweetly complacent, not anymore. Instead, it's morphed itself into a twisted sort of grin, the kind that does not even try to hide how unhinged it's become. She shirks her strong sense of duty like a cloak, throws the love that's driven her every decision over her shoulder and out the window. Everything in her vision has been soaked in an awful, bloody shade of red, and in that moment, she realizes what she has always known.
She really is crazy. And it's time she starts acting like it.
seven.
Her father dies a year later, and then Bellatrix is queen, and she is terrible at it.
Everything is hers to command, the armies, the politicians, even the bloody tides seem to bend to her will. And oh, she is an expert at bending them.
It is the bloodiest time in the nation's history. Bellatrix leads pointless wars, commits pointless executions, gives pointless demands, and through all of it, she wears that cruel, unhinged grin.
The poor get poorer, and so do the rich, until the kingdom is in shambles at her feet while Bellatrix stands above it all, watching with delight. Rodolphus fades into the shadows, a mere shell of a man that is powerless against his wife's relentless assault on the world that betrayed her.
Unrest grows with every day.
She's crazy, they whisper, she's absolutely mad. She's going to ruin us all.
Bellatrix drinks in the whispers like liquor. They keep her alive.
six.
"Bellatrix!"
Bellatrix sits on a golden throne adorned with ornate roses, the kind that have thorns longer than their actual petals. They creep up the sides of her chair, twisting themselves around the back of it and threatening to jump right off of the gold.
They should add some snakes, Bellatrix thinks. Snakes among the flowers. Just like Adam and Eve.
"Bellatrix, they're coming!"
She looks up from the flowers to see Rodolphus kneeling at the bottom of her throne, a wild, almost animalistic terror in his eyes.
"Shouldn't we add some snakes to this throne, Rodolphus?" Bellatrix taps one of the roses pointedly, dragging her fingertip lazily along the metal. "We should call back that goldsmith. What was his name again? Oliver?"
"Listen to me!" Rodolphus wrings his hands helplessly, looking around the throne room with that wild gaze. "We have to get out of here. The royal guard- they've turned against you. They talk of murdering you, for God's sake! We have to take you somewhere safe, somewhere-"
"Oh, it was Ollivander." Bellatrix frowns, taking her hand off the golden roses sharply, as if they've suddenly become scorchingly hot. "I killed him, didn't I? How funny. Ha. Ha." The words begin as simply words, but then they slowly shift into a giggle, and suddenly she's sitting there laughing her head off, her cackling ringing through the throne room like the howl of some kind of crazed wolf.
"Bella." Rodolphus has never before said Bellatrix's nickname, but she is too enthralled in this twisted irony to notice, and she laughs as Rodolphus tries to grab her hand. "Please. I'm begging you to move."
Bellatrix's laughter is unwavering, and suddenly, the door to the throne room explodes, wood splinters and orange fire and smoke going in all directions, and Rodolphus is giving her a sad look, tearing into the shadows, screaming you brought this upon yourself! and then soldiers tear Bellatrix from her throne, pressing a silver blade to her throat.
Bellatrix doesn't stop laughing.
five.
She's crazy.
Crazy. Crazy. Crazy.
Bellatrix turns the word over and over again in her mind, staring blankly at the cement wall in front of her. Little cracks have made a spiderweb-like pattern in the stone, twisting themselves into knots and centering around a round crater right smack in the middle of the wall. There are round indents near the top, like someone tried to punch right through it.
She sighs, leaning back against the equally cracked wall behind her. Three weeks as a prisoner in her own dungeon have finally ceased her laughter.
"Knock, knock." The voice is horribly cruel and it makes Bellatrix straighten immediately. She slowly turns to face the speaker, taking as long as she can. Maybe, if she takes long enough to meet his eyes, he will go away. "Come on, your highness. I don't have all day."
Bellatrix meets the soldier's eyes with fire in her own, blinking rapidly as her eyes adjust to focus on his large smirking form.
"We're going on a little trip, you and I." The soldier jabs his wand at the wall of bars that keep him out of the little cell and keep Bellatrix in, and she languidly rises to her feet. "Where are we going?" she asks, the words dancing through the shadows of the dungeon in an eerie sort of song.
"Somewhere for crazy people like you." The soldier grabs her elbow tentatively and drags her out of the cell, pulling her down the cobblestone walls of the dungeon she once owned like she's nothing but a rag doll. "You're going to pay for your crimes, you witch."
"Witch, hm? You know, someone else once called me that." Bellatrix stumbles after the soldier, nearly tripping, and he holds her at arm's length, like she's some kind of wild animal. It's almost enough to set her off laughing again. "You know what I think? I think it was your mother, right before she got in the way of my axe. Such a shame, such a shame, such an awful shame."
"How. Dare. You." The soldier is livid, and Bellatrix prepares her grin just in case he punches her right across the face, but suddenly daylight hits her eyes for the first time in three weeks, and she's stuffed into the back of a black carriage, her hands tied behind her back. All around her, people jeer and hiss as she's carried away, undoubtedly thrilled to see her finally meet her fate.
Bellatrix presses her face against the window and grins, watching the soldier whose mother she once killed until he disappears from sight.
four.
The asylum is the one place in the kingdom Bellatrix had never dared to go.
It is far at the outskirts of town, disguised as a "Rehabilitation Center for Troubled Individuals," but Bellatrix is not stupid. She's always known what it was. A place to throw crazy people, the people that everyone else is finished with. People like her.
"Welcome home, my liege." It's another soldier, equally as cruel and equally as justified for it, who throws her into a padded room, every wall lined with ghostly white cushions. It makes her grin slip a little.
The soldier turns to leave, his hand on the door, but he turns back to Bellatrix at the last second, staring at how small she looks in the middle of that vast white room. Something like regret flashes across his eyes, but then it's gone.
"You're never getting out of here. You know that, don't you?"
Bellatrix blinks. Once. Twice.
"He was a snake, you know." Bellatrix relishes the soldier's frown, the way he's unable to understand her rambling. "I thought he was a flower, but he was a snake."
"Who?"
"You all think you're so much better than me, but it was you who made me this way." Bellatrix's grin returns, sharp and wolf-like in that awful, padded room. "You snakes."
"You really are crazy." The soldier scoffs, shaking his head, and then he's gone, and Bellatrix is alone. For the first time in ten years, she starts shaking.
three.
Minutes into hours. Hours into days. Days into weeks. It is all the same, all of it white and cushioned and bland bread and stale water. Bellatrix is a prisoner of her own mind.
She does not cry until the third month of captivity in this asylum of hell. It stuns her even then, to touch her cheeks and feel tears, and it makes her cry even harder.
Through it all, she grins.
two.
Bellatrix isn't sure when it is that starts singing.
"Snakes among the flowers, snakes among the flowers." She hums the words, twisting them into a bitter tune, and wonders what blood would look like against these white walls. What Rodolphus's blood would look like.
She wonders where Thomas is until she realizes that he is never coming.
Oh, how funny it is, to love and to lose one's mind all at once.
one.
The fallen queen stays in the asylum for three years.
Some villagers say she was forgotten, abandoned in that room to talk to herself until the end of eternity. Others say she lost her mind (if she had any left of it to lose in the first place).
The truth? Well, the truth is much worse than any morbid tale a few disgruntled villagers could spin.
It had been three years on the dot when Bellatrix clawed her way out of her padded prison, tearing the walls to shreds under fingernails grown long and filed sharp. It's said she slit the throats of her captors with those very nails, tearing her cell door off its hinges and escaping into the night.
As for what they told the villagers, well, they made sure that everyone rested comfortably at night knowing that the mad queen was finally dead. If she ever turned up in the kingdom, the new queen Andromeda and her royal guard swore to eliminate her before she could do any real damage.
Ah, If only they'd been able to. If only they could've found her before it was too late.
As they say, hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. And Bellatrix had been scorned by that whole kingdom.
Snake among the flowers, snake among the flowers.