Harry wishes more than anything he hadn't looked for those photographs of Sirius. It was when it started. He'd been looking in the boxes and boxes of old and tattered photos that sat in the library. They had smelt musty and old as if no one had looked at them since they'd been put away. They probably hadn't.
Photos of Sirius were hard to come by. Harry had a lot of photos of his parents by now. Hagrid's book, and the albums Sirius had left him meant he had plenty. But he didn't have any of Sirius. And… Sirius was gone. He wasn't coming back no matter what Harry said, or how much he screamed at Ron and Hermione and Dumbledore and Professor Lupin. The most common photographs of Sirius were the screaming ones of him in prison, where he looked mad and deranged, and Harry didn't want to remember Sirius like that.
So Harry had gone in search of old school pictures. Dumbledore had basically told him where they were after Harry had refused to go to class for the fourth day in a row. Maybe he had hoped they'd help. Maybe he thought that the kitchen knife Harry owned would stop looking so attractive, like it was the only option. He'd come across pictures of Remus, looking younger but still with streaks of grey that led Harry to wonder whether he'd been born with grey hair. There was a pretty red headed girl with his eyes that he recognised as his mother, although she was with Severus Snape more than he'd like to believe. Then were the ones he didn't know, but he had a suspicion about. The couple that reminded him of Neville, the boy who acted like a young Gilderoy Lockhart and the girl who had glasses like beetle. Then the pretty, dark haired girl that Sirius, after he finally found a picture of her, had been scowling at.
Harry hadn't been surprised to find himself thinking about the girl as he touched himself later that night. He was a teenage boy, he got aroused if the wind blew too strong. This girl had been beautiful. Long, thick dark hair, slightly lidded eyes, which were darker than anything Harry had ever seen before. He hoped he didn't know her now, that it wasn't the mother of someone he knew.
The next day he nicked the photo from the library, and asked Hermione who it was. She looked at him darkly, and asked him whether he was joking. He wasn't. It's Bellatrix Lestrange, or Black as she was known as then, she said.
Harry had to restrain himself from spilling the bile that rose in his throat. He'd been… over… Bellatrix Lestrange… The knife began to look a lot more attractive again.