The restaurant was small but busy, its decor tastefully minimal, if a bit...overwhelmingly bright, splashes of sunny yellow and poppy red on the otherwise stark, white-painted walls. Even the most upscale muggle venues seemed to be falling prey to the new trend of such gaudy use of colour lately. (Not that she made a habit of frequenting such places, but it was impossible to not notice, even passing by on the street.) This particular establishment boasted a French-trained Italian chef, and was nestled into what was once likely a café, overlooking the Garonne at the very heart of Toulouse. It was newly opened and very exclusive. The fact that her dinner companion had managed to secure a reservation, presumably on short notice, spoke highly of her connections in at least one world. The atmosphere was light and refined, exactly the sort of dining environment she would have considered most conducive to a productive conversation about poetry and philosophy, in a former life. (To discuss local or even international politics directly with anyone not already an established ally suggested a certain lack of class. Not that anyone would say as much, but it would be assumed, and certain avenues of conversation consequently closed.)
That was, of course, some time ago.
Druella Rosier had not engaged in serious political maneuvering for nearly twenty years now. Returning to her own family after the "suspicious disappearance" of her husband — murdered, of course, by the daughter who was always more his than hers — had released her from the obligations of a society wife, and Uncle Luc had taken pity on the miserable, neurotic wreck she had become in the course of doing her duty to the family, leaving her home to become a bloody broodmare for the House of Black (despite her own loudly voiced opposition to the twin ideals of marriage and motherhood). He had promised on the day of her wedding that this was the final duty he would ever ask of her, and when she had returned from her exile he had remained true to his word, leaving her free, for the first time in her life, to do as she pleased rather than as she was expected to do. Free to dismiss the opinions of Society as entirely inconsequential if she so chose, to pursue her own interests, rather than advancing the interests of her House (whether that might be the Rosiers or the Blacks they had sold her to).
It had taken her some time to become accustomed to the idea, but she had, upon reflection, come to appreciate that freedom. (Immensely.)
And politics, while once her refuge from the madness and misery which was her life (her husband, her children), was not an area of particular interest to her. The delicate, dangerous dance was one at which she had learned to excel, and she was certain she would never — could never — forget the steps, but she would be pleased if she were never again obliged to take to the floor.
Instead she spent her days, now, surrounded by history, researching the impact of certain choices on the course of events which shaped their timeline, exploring the nature of temporal canalisation and the budding and branching of new universes. She kept abreast of the latest advancements in arithmancy and enchanting, of course, particularly those related to time travel and extra-planar exploration, and occasionally attended academic conferences on the subject. She had, after all, written a mastery thesis in that field. But history was her true passion. It was flattering to be asked to speak on arithmancy, but far more so to have been invited to discuss the mainstream human perception of the Italic Vampire Wars with a (relatively) young vampire exploring the history of relations between their peoples.
According to Grace, the mutual acquaintance who had arranged this meeting, Hela had decided to return to her now-classic anthropological treatment on werewolves, expanding upon it by placing their existence within the greater context of historical European human–non-human conflicts. Which was rather a tall order, a project which could take decades to complete, but one Druella found to be a fascinating proposal. She hoped she would still be alive to read the vampire's conclusions, when she finally reached them.
Or rather, she had hoped as much.
When she actually arrived at the restaurant, threading through the tables behind the host, that hope died a painful, fiery death. Almost literally — the sight of her dinner companion, who was most certainly not a vampire scholar, throwing her back to January of Nineteen Sixty-Nine.
She'd been standing beside her husband's dying memorial pyre, long after the guests (family, mostly, to conceal from the broader public the fact that there had been no body to burn) had departed, smoke irritating her eyes and the mourning veil draped over her face tickling her nose, such trivial physical inconveniences entirely overshadowed by low-key panic over the fact that she had no idea what to do with her life now. She didn't know how to be a widow! That and the fear that she knew exactly what had happened to her husband. The fear that, if Bellatrix had finally decided to rid herself of the parents she had always hated, Dru might not have much life left to her.
She was still embarrassed by the frightened yelp which had escaped her when her daughter materialised out of the flickering shadows. Bellatrix had smirked at her, enjoying her fear, that same triumphant expression she always wore when she succeeded in forcing a reaction from the woman who did her level best to be as non-reactive as possible. One should not fear one's own children, but it had been years since Druella had been able to look her eldest in the eye without a shiver trailing down her spine.
She recognised the eyes of a killer when she saw them.
Being boring, uninteresting, was her best defence against the girl — the woman — who had tormented her for the better part of two decades by then, both as an insufferably hyperactive child and as she grew into a ruthless, intelligent, terrifyingly competent battlemage — a Dark Lady in all but name, though most people had been strangely reluctant to acknowledge that fact when the witch in question was barely nineteen years old. Despite her relationship with the Dark Lord and her role in his...organisation being an open secret.
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"Dru. Good evening." Calm. Pleasant. Slightly amused. (Smug.) As though they weren't standing beside what ought to have been her father's ashes.
"Bellatrix."
The girl held her peace for a long moment, staring at the glowing coals as though mesmerised. When she finally spoke, it was in that same too-calm, too-pleasant tone. "You know, don't you?"
"I'm afraid you'll have to be more specific, Bellatrix."
"You know that I killed Cygnus." Light, pleasant — they could be discussing the bloody weather from her tone. A spot of holiday patricide? Hardly a matter of any consequence.
"...Yes. I suppose I do."
"Do you know why?" She turned to face her mother then, sharp, dark eyes fixed on hers, the better to judge her honesty when she answered.
"No," she said, as evenly as she could, doing her utmost to maintain a flat, disinterested mask. A twitch of the girl's lips said she didn't quite manage it. She should have taken another Calming Draught after dinner...
"For Andromeda. I made her a promise when we were children..."
She trailed off, staring at the coals again, coaxing them back to life with a touch of wandless magic. Druella did her best to hold her tongue, but curiosity got the better of her. "What promise?"
"She promised that if he ever used the Imperius on her, if he ever touched her like he touched me, or made her touch him, she would tell me. And I promised that I would kill him for her." She turned to look at Dru again, forcing her to see the flat, entirely unamused expression which accompanied her words. It was a face she imagined very few people had seen. Dru herself could not recall any occasion on which Bellatrix wasn't at least slightly amused by the idiocy surrounding herself. "You know I keep my promises, Dru."
"What do you mean, if he touched her? Are you saying—"
"That he used the Imperius to rape her? Yes." Her eyes narrowed as she examined Dru's entirely legitimate shock. "You didn't know."
Of course she hadn't! How Bellatrix could think that she might have and yet done nothing herself... "You said like he touched you..."
"I did, yes. Though I wouldn't have expected you to know about that. It did go on for nearly a decade, but it ended years ago—" Implying, what? That it had begun when she was— "—and children are so tedious, always making up stories for attention. Little wonder you didn't believe me, I suppose." Six. She had been six, the one time she had ever attempted to complain to Druella about Cygnus, and his approach to her education. "Though I should probably thank you for that. You might have helped me escape Cygnus, but given the most likely alternative, well... I suspect that Arcturus would have resorted to legilimency to bring me to heel, well before I grew old enough to defend myself. Trapped me as the scared, broken little girl I was back then, crippled my mind and forced me into the mold of a society lady, sold me off to some boring little lordling to bear his children and run his estate at the earliest opportunity..." She gave her mother a brilliant grin, madness lurking in the sparkling, fire-lit depths of her eyes. "I think we can all agree that would've been a damn shame."
Somehow, Druella suspected that Bellatrix would have burnt the House of Black to the ground before she submitted to such a fate, compulsions or no. "I— I'm sorry, Bellatrix. I– I didn't know, I thought, when you said—"
"You thought that it was entirely understandable that he'd use the Imperius to control a feral little hellion such as myself, and if I wanted him to stop I ought to learn to behave myself. Yes, I remember." Had Bellatrix taken a Calming Draught? Or did she simply know how positively unnerving that slightly absent, detached amusement was?
"Well, yes, but— I didn't know about— If you'd told me he touched you... I thought he was just– just making you sit still and pay attention to your lessons, or—" Honestly, if she could cast that particular curse, she might have been tempted to use it on the six-year-old Bellatrix herself, if only to get through a single music lesson without the girl reducing her to tears of frustration. It wasn't even that she hadn't wanted to learn, or hadn't any talent, she'd just refused to sit still and concentrate for more than a handful of minutes at a stretch.
"I was five the first time, Dru. It wasn't the sucking his dick part that terrified me — it was the being forced to like it part. Happy birthday to me." Dru felt ill, the world spinning around her. "Anyway, why are you apologising? I just said I ought to thank you, didn't I? If I'd had a mother to rely on, I wouldn't be the witch I am today, so."
Dru couldn't respond to that, too focused on not becoming physically ill at the thought of her husband... She'd known he was a horrible, sadistic man, but to do that, to a child — to his own child... She didn't even like children, but—
Bella shrugged lightly, and changed the subject. "You can go home, now."
"W-what?"
"Home. To the Rosiers? You know, those people whose company you consider superior to that of the Blacks in every conceivable way?" She shot the older witch a smirk and a side-long glance. "Don't pretend you haven't been miserable here. I may be terrible at people, but even I know that much. And Meda's far too soft for her own good." Oh, gods and Powers, he'd done it to Andromeda, too... "She doesn't want to see you suffer. So. You're free, Dru. You're welcome. Go home."
"I— Just like that? Just...leave?" She would be lying if she said she hadn't dreamed of doing exactly that for years when she'd first come here, but at some point the idea had become...
"...Yes?" Of course, Bellatrix wouldn't understand how terrifying the idea of simply walking away from her entire life — away from everyone and everything she knew — might be, even if she hated it. "I suppose you don't have to go back to the Rosiers if you don't want to. You could travel or something. See the world. Become a concert pianist or something. Make a life you actually enjoy. Just, do me a favour?"
"What's that?" she asked, only vaguely aware of her words through her shock.
Bellatrix chuckled, as though she hadn't just upset the very foundations of Druella's world, suggesting that she could simply leave — Was it a suggestion? If she stayed, would she find herself joining Cygnus on the other side of the Veil? — or perhaps as though it was slightly adorable that Dru had never considered that option herself. "Stop wasting your potential hostessing tea parties and pretending you haven't got a brain. I don't know, go get a mastery or six, we both know you could. Even if serious scholarship isn't particularly ladylike."
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Her hair was blonde and short, and she was wearing muggle clothing. (As suited the venue — Druella had herself worn dress robes which might pass for a muggle frock, albeit one slightly eccentric in taste). The blouse baring pale, unscarred — glamoured — shoulders was even blue, a brilliant, cerulean blue, rather than black and silver or red. (Bellatrix had never cared for fashion — she had ordered her tailor to make all of her clothing match from the age of nine, rather than put any effort into selecting complementary elements herself.) She cocked her head to one side as her mother arrived with that too-quick, too-precise motion and sudden lack thereof which was characteristic of vampires, natural or otherwise, and her pallor would almost certainly convince anyone who did not know her that it was entirely possible she had not seen the sun for decades, if ever (the glamour was only hiding her scars, she always had been deathly pale), but the smirk she wore was unmistakable.
As was her voice when she said, "Master Rosier, I see you decided to take my advice after all. I presume you do indeed find academia more satisfying than hostessing endless rounds of meaningless social tedium?"
She had, yes, which Bellatrix should know, she had been working on her Arithmancy mastery before the war ended — though it was possible, she supposed, that the girl hadn't paid her enough attention in their occasional, brief interactions at Rosier Family gatherings to realise that she hadn't still been indulging herself wandering through the lands of Assyria and Babylon and Carthage and Kush, seeing for herself places she'd only read about until then, learning their stories as their people — common people, living in the historical shadows of great empires — recalled them.
"Bellatrix," she hissed, wary of being overheard, even here, in an entirely muggle space. Her eldest daughter was, after all, supposed to be dead — or at the very least on the run from the authorities and having the good grace to pretend to be dead. Certainly not inviting Druella to dinner under false pretences! "Why are you impersonating a vampire?!"
"Hmm, less than three seconds from recognition to disapproval. I should probably be surprised, but I'm not." She flipped an enchanted token across the table to Dru, a carved lead coin slightly larger than a sickle. The avoidance charm anchored to it was simple, but would certainly be sufficient to deflect the muggles' attention from their conversation. "And if you must know, it wasn't my idea. I'm quite certain I never indicated that Hela was a vampire at any point in the Observations. Some bright spark simply seems to have decided that she must have been while I was...away. As though it's patently impossible for a human to observe the werewolf transformation unmolested, honestly."
It was. Bellatrix quite simply wasn't human. (Despite having been there for her birth, and every miserable hour leading up to it, Dru occasionally wondered if she ever had been.) And that smirk said she was well aware of that fact — that she considered herself better than human, thanks ever so. For someone so generally unsubtle, her sense of humour always had been shockingly dry.
"While you were away." That was one way to refer to her incarceration, Druella supposed. Thinking on which, she had to note that Bella looked surprisingly well for having been in prison only months ago. Not that she expected the dementors to have much effect on her, but from the pictures she'd seen of Sirius in the papers when he had escaped, she would have expected Bella to be more wasted, to look older, rather than as though not a day had passed since Druella had last seen her face-to-face, in the autumn of Nineteen Seventy-Nine. (She wasn't certain she wanted to know how her daughter had managed that — some horrifying dark ritual, probably.) "And why, precisely, have you decided to come back?"
"Oh, well, I imagine you've heard about Lyra by this point...?"
"The name is familiar, yes." She had most recently heard it mentioned in relation to the Triwizard Tournament which was being revived at Hogwarts this year. That Bellatrix's "daughter" had managed to get herself selected as the Champion for her school despite being too young, and therefore technically not qualified according to the rules the judges had set, was not surprising in the least.
Before that, it had appeared in a letter from her grandson, unsubtly probing for information on his presumed cousin. Dru seemed to recall that, by the time her girls were fourteen, their minds had developed sufficiently to hold a conversation like the near-adults they were — certainly enough to write a letter requesting such information more obliquely, when they had plenty of time to choose their words with care. She hadn't seen him in years, of course, but Draco, she suspected, might be a bit slow. As further evidenced by the fact that he now feared for his life because he had apparently done something to vex a girl who could murder him in cold blood without batting an eyelash. Both in having done something to antagonise a girl he believed to be Bellatrix's clone — even if he hadn't known that at the time, he would have to be blind, deaf, and possibly part troll to have missed that she was dangerous — and in fearing for his life.
If Lyra were anything like Bellatrix, she wouldn't kill him for something as trivial as humiliating her. Dru would actually be willing to wager it had raised her opinion of him that he'd managed it.
Narcissa also seemed to be entirely unconcerned about the situation. She and Druella had corresponded fairly regularly over the years — more so, recently. Dru had simply had to ask what the hell was going on over there, with Sirius handing the Blacks' seat over to a muggle, and Cissa not only approving of this, but allying with the woman to make an unmistakable stand against any lingering influence de Mort might yet hold. (Your move, Alexander indeed!)
Circumstances being what they were, she hadn't had many options, Druella supposed, but her favourite daughter actually seemed to like the muggle woman who had so eloquently eviscerated the majority of every bloc in the Wizengamot in her very first session. In Narcissa's opinion, between the efforts of this American muggle and her former sister's influence, Sirius might actually manage to revive the House of Black from the brink of extinction (yet again) — which eventuality Druella was certain the remainder of the British nobility were especially thrilled about. (Many a Lord had breathed a sigh of relief to realise that the Blacks were gone, Uncle Luc among them.)
As Narcissa was somewhat unreasonably fond of her pointy, blond offspring, and the boy was pathetically unable to keep his opinions and trivial, childish news to himself — meaning she certainly was aware of the situation — Dru could only assume that there was no danger of Bellatrix's "daughter" actually murdering him for (as his letter had implied) arranging for some trivial humiliation months ago at the hands of her peers.
And before that, the name Lyra Black had filtered to her from a dozen or more other sources, friends and colleagues all curious to know whether she knew anything about the girl and her mysterious origins. It had become especially bothersome in the wake of the Quidditch World Cup riot, and the announcement that "Druella's granddaughter" would likely be inducted into the Order of Merlin for the role she had played in the arrest of the instigators thereof, but it had begun even before she had apparently "admitted" that Bellatrix was her "mother". She did, after all, bear an uncanny resemblance to the infamous Blackheart. (Albeit not at the moment — Bellatrix dressed appropriately, as a muggle, rather than in dueling robes or some fantastical, fae-inspired costume entirely unsuited to the occasion, with a halo of short, loose, Rosier-blonde curls softening the sharp angles of her face, and not a weapon in sight, looked very little like herself.)
"Rumour has it the girl is a blood-alchemy clone of you, raised by a travelling cursebreaker, or more plausibly that moon-cursed mongrel you insisted on associating with in the War—" "Fenrir Greyback" was possibly the worst of all Bella's former comrades — not only a werewolf, but a commoner and a muggle at that! Most of de Mort's followers had at least had some degree of class, but the werewolf was a churlish boor. He was crass and rude, deliberately so, and clearly hated all of them — mages and good, upstanding people in general. Dru was quite convinced that half the reason Bellatrix had gone to such trouble integrating herself into his "pack" had been to offend her own peers on every imaginable level. "—and one or more British nobles exiled after having been reduced to his ilk. I presume none of it is true."
Bellatrix gave her a coy smile. "Is it really so far outside the bounds of credulity that I might have wanted to have a child to carry on the legacy of the House, in lieu of other acceptable candidates?"
Was that supposed to be a joke? "Yes," she said drily.
While the role she had played in educating her younger siblings and cousins, going well beyond the bare minimum effort required of her, suggested that Bellatrix did like children, so far as Druella knew her eldest daughter had always had as little familial ambition as she did. She distinctly recalled fifteen-year-old Bellatrix challenging several of the more hide-bound Lords of British Noble Houses to public honour duels over their attempts to arrange her marriage into said Houses. ("Playing Atalanta," she'd called it.) If she recalled correctly, Bellatrix had given her reasoning to be that I have more important things to do than get married and have children, Pater. If you persist in this asinine attempt to use my body as a token to seal some alliance between our House and some other, lesser family, I swear by the bloody Dark, I will start killing the idiots who think their sons and grandsons worthy of my non-existent affections. (Which was an attitude Dru still rather regretted that she herself had not had the skill to carry off when the subject of her own marriage was first proposed.)
The smirk only broadened, suggesting that she was in fact joking, even as she noted that, "The whole reproduction process wouldn't be nearly as much of an imposition if I made someone else carry and care for the little nightmare throughout the most boring years."
Well, at least she recognised how awful a child she'd been. Dru sniffed. "As though you would trust the raising of any hypothetical child of yours to anyone outside the House of Black."
Quite honestly, Druella wasn't certain whether there was anyone outside of the House of Black who was capable of raising any version of Bellatrix. Cygnus might have been a horrible, sadistic monster, but Bellatrix had been a horrible, irrepressible ball of manic energy. She likely would have run rough-shod over the would-be authority figures in any other House.
"Yes, well, as I told a certain blood alchemist when last we spoke, if I were to do such a thing, I would certainly consider it worth my while to track down Cassiopeia and charge her with the task. She'd probably even enjoy it. I seem to recall her being the only adult in the House who actually liked me, so."
"Yes, well, Cassiopeia always was a bit...odd." Perhaps the single greatest understatement Druella had made since leaving politics. The youngest Black metamorph had, by the time Dru married into the Family, spent the majority of her time living with the outcasts on the edge of society in abject poverty — simply because they didn't look at her strangely for having wings — and the vast majority of her days pretending to be some sort of visiting fae. Though that wasn't nearly as strange as her affection for her insufferable, then-seven-years-old great-niece. "Have you forgotten that I taught you how to mislead people with the truth?"
"No. And, you're right, she's not my daughter. She's a wandering star." She slipped into Gobbledygook for a moment to pronounce the word.
Dru winced slightly. Most humans were such poor speakers of the primary (local) goblin tongue, it was all one could ask for that they even sound remotely intelligible. Bella's accent had never been that painfully bad — she was the only one of the girls who shared Druella's gift for languages — but that just meant it was even more obvious that she chose to speak like a common warrior rather than with the more precise enunciation of a poet or orator — which Dru knew she could, because she had taught her the thrice-cursed language in the first place! And if Dru said anything about her sounding like a bloody commoner, she would imitate Narcissa, dropping all of the clicks entirely. Though Dru rather doubted Narcissa even knew the term the goblins used to refer to a visitor...from...a different...timeline.
...What? No, that was the wrong question. How?!
Bellatrix sniggered at her shock. "She's a more academic, less destructive version of me, trained as a cursebreaker by Ciardha Monroe, from Nineteen Sixty-Three of a universe that diverged from ours around Grindelwald's revolution. You'd probably actually enjoy talking to her about enchanting. Or the nature of the multiverse, for that matter. Though, fair warning, she's more annoyingly energetic than I was."
Druella raised an eyebrow about the implication that she would go out of her way to meet the girl, eventually. She had no intention of doing so at the moment, wandering star or not. If the girl wanted to see her, Dru was certain she would simply show up one day (see: Bellatrix's presence on the other side of the table). But fascinating as dimension-hopping was, she was hardly masochistic enough to subject herself to the company of any fourteen-year-old version of Bellatrix. She had, of course, been mature enough by then to hold an intelligent conversation — for years, in fact — she simply hadn't been mature enough to do so when she could so easily bait Druella into a pointless argument instead. And just being in the same room for five minutes, listening to her endless, animated, flow-of-consciousness chatter and watching her fidget or pace in circles because she simply hated just sitting still could be exhausting. (Seeing her so very still on the other side of the table was almost unnerving in and of itself.) "You'll forgive my doubting that such a thing is possible."
Bellatrix smirked. "She's well on her way to becoming an Avatar of Eris, turned herself into shadow-kin on a whim, and is currently coming into her power, so she's in that peak-Madness period, and channelling more magic than I was at that point, so generally at a higher baseline. She was just blooded in the World Cup riot, so currently both a bit full of herself and not entirely accustomed to repressing the urge to try to bait people into trying to kill her — i.e. more intentionally annoying than usual, and has no experience with occlumency to speak of. Zee was having trouble managing her volatility over the summer." And Mirabella Zabini had been exposed to Bella's insanity for decades.
Perhaps Dru stood corrected. Wasn't that a horrifying thought.
"Say what you will about Thom, but he did teach me to control myself. Though I suppose she did make it to the age of fourteen without killing anyone—" Only an accomplishment when compared to having a record with the DLE for killing a man in "self-defence" at the age of eleven. "—and she's so far managed to do so only under socially-laudable circumstances, so maybe it's a wash? Oh! Also, I would be remiss if I failed to inform you that she has a muggleborn girlfriend." Which suggested that attitudes toward muggleborns were significantly different in "Lyra's" home universe...which would make sense if the populist uprising here hadn't successfully toppled the old Council... No, focus, Druella. "She likes to make a point of it, trying to be provocative."
Alongside the usual touch of amusement, there was a hint of condescension in her tone. A suggestion along the lines of, it's kind of adorable. Somewhat hypocritically — Dru seemed to recall that at that age (and every other) Bellatrix had also gone out of her way to be provocative at every available opportunity. Including by doing nearly exactly the same thing with the Zabini girl. "I presume she simply couldn't find an entirely inappropriate foreign commoner from a magical family to bring home?"
Bellatrix shrugged. "She claims this Granger girl is actually clever enough to keep up. Not that Sirius minds, anyway, he did appoint the girl's mother as his Wizengamot proxy. The funny part is, aside from her intelligence — and the fact that she wants to have a romantic relationship with Lyra — this girl is supposedly perfectly normal. I'm predicting confusion and frustration all around."
Yes, Druella could see how Bellatrix would find that amusing. Dru herself was morbidly curious about what "Lyra" thought a romantic relationship entailed. She was quite certain that when this Bellatrix was that age, she had thought it meant letting Mirabella Zabini be as physically affectionate as she liked, and/or doing anything de Mort or the Zabini girl asked of her — certainly in part because she liked them, but also largely because she had nothing better to do with her time and no ambitions of her own. (For all Druella knew, she might still think that, despite obviously realising that "normal" people would disagree.)
"Anyway, Eris dragged Lyra here to reverse the compulsions Tom used to domesticate me as a child—" Wait, de Mort had done WHAT?! "—which they did manage, though it was a miserable experience, you might have heard the Aurors moved me to an Unspeakable facility—"
Okay, leaving aside for a moment that placing compulsions on a young child was Unforgivable because they were impossible to reverse, "Bellatrix!"
"Yes?"
"Are you telling me that nameless, thrice-cursed bastard mind-molded you as a child?!"
She shrugged. "Yes? Is this surprising? I mean, you have met Tom, right? And I know you tried to avoid me as much as possible when I was five, but—"
"You could at least make an effort to act appropriately offended over someone using Unforgivable magic to affect your very personality, Bellatrix!"
"Why? It's not like he can do it again, and in case you've forgotten, using Unforgivables to try to moderate my behaviour wasn't exactly uncommon when I was a child." Dru flinched at the oblique reference to Cygnus's crimes against her. "Besides, Lyra's offended enough for both of us. I told her she could kill him if she likes, I'm just not terribly interested in helping. I mean, I'm not a fan of deep compulsions on principle, but having recently re-lived literally all of my memories, I can't really say that I find his enthralling me to be terribly different from the House brainwashing me or Eris dis-enthralling me. And I think the compulsions mostly affected my priorities, anyway. Maybe tipped me a bit more toward destruction than chaos, made me more willing to actually listen to him, but honestly, if I'd met Tom when I was seven or eight rather than five, I'm not sure how different our relationship would ultimately have turned out to be. After all, Zee didn't enthrall me, and Lyra obviously has a notable degree of respect for Tom's counterpart from her own universe — she didn't meet him until she went to school.
"In any event, the D.L.E. used my temporary memory loss and general disorientation as an excuse to let the Mind Division have a crack at getting into my head, and you know how I feel about the Department of Mysteries. So, obviously, I left."
She shrugged, catching a server's eye, entirely oblivious to Druella's momentary inability to comprehend...anything. She'd known, of course, that de Mort had been a devious, ruthless fucker, but enthralling a child? Some things were simply beyond the pale! And for Bellatrix not to want some sort of vengeance for his trespass was simply... She'd gone to Azkaban for him! Even if she didn't mind him using her to run his bloody war, Dru would think she would care about the thirteen years she'd lost just sitting around...
She couldn't even say what she ordered, aside from a bottle of the house red — a sweet Shiraz, apparently. "It is a bit difficult to move about as Bellatrix Black, though. Hazard of being a notorious war criminal, I suppose. So, since I've been staying with Mickey anyway, I decided to revive the Hela identity to make it easier to avoid Meda's daughter while I organise the Resistance into an actual revolutionary organisation."
Druella made a concerted effort to concentrate on the conversation at hand, rather than abuses the would-be Dark Lord had committed nearly forty years ago.
That...wasn't actually surprising, she found, focusing on her daughter's words. If she had had to guess what the hell Bellatrix was doing on the Continent, that she was attempting to lay the necessary groundwork to overthrow the Statute of Secrecy was not entirely outside the realm of projects she might plausibly have suggested. She had spent the majority of her life fighting for a Dark revolution, after all, and outside of her decision to endure her incarceration rather than simply leave the dementor-infested island — which sounded rather absurd, but then so did casually escaping one of Mysteries' experimental facilities after thirteen years in a prison cell and what sounded like a significant degree of mental trauma — Druella had never known her to simply stop and relax. In fact, she wasn't entirely certain that Bellatrix was constitutionally capable of relaxing. She suspected that Azkaban was her way of paying some obscure penance for failing to do the impossible for de Mort, willingly submitting to the torture that was unrelenting boredom, rather than any sort of actual break.
She was equally unsurprised that Bellatrix had taken up with that bloody werewolf again. She would say that she could not comprehend the basis of their eventual friendship — not that she had been witness to that development, but an entirely baffled and repulsed Narcissa had written to her of it — but it was obvious enough given a moment's thought. Bellatrix, much like Cassiopeia, had always been somewhat...inhuman. Unable to relate. If she truly had written Hela's Observations — and despite the marked dissimilarities between those essays and her earlier forays into theoretical arithmancy, Druella could think of no reason for her to lie about having done so — it would seem that she found the underlying curse-borne instincts of "the Wolf" to be more comprehensible than the complexities of human motivation. (The sympathy with which she had described the phenomenon was one of the details which had led a significant proportion of the academic community to believe Hela a ritually-created vampire, her apparent empathy presumably predicated on her familiarity with the eternal hunger for life which afflicted them.)
Druella really had been absurdly slow to realise that the metamorph had likely recognised the difficulties the unique aspects of the sacrifice entailed in the Blacks' Covenant and their Choice might cause earlier than the rest of them. She had almost certainly been attempting to help her great-niece, in her own peculiar way, by introducing her to the creatures and degenerates beyond the boundaries of polite society. A community held together by their mutual struggle for subsistence was likely far more rational in Bella's eyes than the senseless, superfluous frivolities of Society, as she called their elaborate displays of wealth and power. Druella had, on occasion, regretted banning Cassiopeia from her daughters' lives, fearing that she would be an even worse influence on Bellatrix — by the time she had realised that the metamorph might have been an invaluable asset to the collective efforts of the House to manage the impossibly rebellious child, she had moved on.
In any case, it was hardly more surprising that Bellatrix had returned to the familiar savagery of her pet werewolves than that she had chosen to focus her time and energies on another absurdly ambitious revolutionary goal. But... "Andromeda has a daughter?"
That she hadn't known. She had made a point of not caring about the life of her middle child, the cruel, selfish girl who had disowned her and run off to the Americas rather than do her duty to the House and marry as she was bid. (It was possible that this was also an option she wished she had had the moxie to seize, when Uncle Luc had insisted on Cygnus, but that didn't mean that it didn't still hurt.) She had liked Andromeda! Quiet, biddable, soft-hearted and clever; careful, and so very, very good at the political dances which Bella had never even deigned to learn — she had been a proper little lady from the age of seven or eight. Bellatrix had been Cygnus's daughter. Even more so than Narcissa, whom Druella had really only come to know as an adult, Andromeda had been hers.
And she had left.
"Yes. A metamorph." Really? "She's about twenty years old, trained as an Auror straight out of school, though she's obviously not any better at it than...well, any of the other Blacks who've attempted to serve law and order. Do you remember Alastor Moody? mad ex- Black Cloak?"
"Vaguely."
"Yes, well. He's convinced Meda's Nymphadora—" She'd named her Nymphadora? Perhaps she wasn't quite so set on abandoning them after all... If she wrote to her, Dru wondered, would she answer? "—to join him in his entirely extralegal attempt to track me down and kill me. Which on the one hand is vaguely amusing. I might be somewhat out of practice now — never really appreciated having an army of recruits around to train against until they were gone — but I'm pretty sure I can still handle a single baby Auror and a half-lame old warlock in direct combat. But on the other hand, having an investigator following one around does make it a bit difficult to convince your average would-be revolutionary to take the step from simply talking about how shite the Statute is to actually doing something about it. Even if she is an obvious vigilante, no resources or official support, she could still pass critical information to local law enforcement. All the more easily given the metamorph thing, I suppose. So until I manage to turn her, I'll be conducting my more sensitive business as Hela. It's all very, well, Black Cloaks and Warlocks." Her eyes tipped toward the ceiling, a wry smile inviting Dru to share in her daughter's exasperated amusement.
Somehow, Dru found she didn't feel like laughing. "And what is that business, precisely?" she asked, making a concerted effort to draw her attention back to the conversation at hand, rather than the former daughter she hadn't seen since January of Nineteen Seventy-One.
Grace had obviously set her up, though it was impossible to say whether the metamorph knew who Hela truly was. She was somehow related to the Zabini girl who had so firmly attached herself to Bellatrix at Hogwarts, after all, it was hardly out of the question that they had met through Mirabella. But then, it was equally possible she'd simply gotten caught up in this Resistance conspiracy Bella appeared to be brewing. Her primary persona these days was a notorious jewel thief, it wasn't impossible that they'd met in the course of the attempts she assumed Bellatrix was making to establish a new network of contacts outside the reach of the law. (Druella had met the metamorph through a friend of a colleague she'd been collaborating with a few years ago — Grace was one of those people who seemed to know everyone, somehow.) It was equally uncertain whether she knew that this was, in fact, a set-up. Bellatrix was an unnaturally good occlumens, and did make a surprisingly convincing vampire. Grace could legitimately believe that "Hela" was nothing more than the harmless scholar she appeared.
"Ah, well, I need a favour."
"Why does that not surprise me?"
"Presumably because you know I have as little interest in catching up and making small-talk about our various relatives as you do." Dru couldn't help but let slip a small smile at that. It was true, one of the few things Bellatrix seemed to have inherited from her was her lack of patience for banal idiocy. (Looking back on those years, Druella was far more surprised that she hadn't entirely cracked attempting to be the perfect Society Lady than she was at how incredibly miserable it had made her.) "I understand that Monsieur Moreau of the Confederation's diplomatic corp will be hosting a certain gala event the weekend after next. I need an invitation."
Druella suppressed the urge to groan. Marcel Moreau was the director of a sub-department within the diplomatic bureaucracy of the CIS. Specifically, the sub-department which dealt with the various non-human clans and nations which shared territory with the predominantly human CIS states. He was hosting a party on behalf of a candidate running for election for some regional office or another — almost certainly not something that he ought to be doing as a man in his position, but the CIS was as corrupt as the British Ministry in its own way. There was to be an art auction as well as the usual dinner, dancing, and desperately dull political speeches which were to be expected at such things.
Druella herself was no longer involved in politics, but one of her former apprentices had somehow been pressed into arranging for a panel of suitably respectable academics to talk about the merits of various pieces up for auction, and she never had been able to tell Vivienne no, despite her habit of allowing herself to be drawn into far too many committees and organisations such as the one to which Moreau and his pet politician belonged. So, despite the fact that Druella was hardly an expert on the art of animated portraiture, she had agreed to go make some suitably vague comments about the works on offer.
"Do I even want to know why you want to attend this particular social event?"
"Is the election campaign of a staunch human-supremacist—" Was he really? She hadn't even looked into the designated beneficiary of the event... "—hosted by a so-called diplomat who actively opposes and suppresses the anti-Stautarian sentiments expressed by members of his own office not the sort of thing a scholar writing a book on the history of human–non-human relations might be interested in? Especially one who, as a vampire, has very little insight into the human perspective on such topics, and wishes to present a well-rounded exploration of the—"
"Bellatrix," Druella interrupted firmly, trying not to smile at her perfectly innocent expression, her impression of a wide-eyed, naïve academic spot-on, though it did contrast rather strangely with her sharp, vampiric body language. (Not entirely an act, she realised, if somewhat more abrupt than her usual gestures — generally such sharp, sudden movements were unexpected breaks in the fluid, graceful, near-constant motion which had eventually replaced her constant fidgeting.) "As entertaining as it might be to watch you pretend to be a vampire historian, we both know that you have as little patience for society events as you do for small talk."
Her daughter gave her an unrepentant grin. "I'm going to kill him, obviously. Moreau. And you should call me Hela."
For a long moment Dru simply stared at the witch calmly sitting across from her, sipping at her wine as though she hadn't just admitted that she was planning to murder a relatively important member of the international community — in his own home, in the middle of a political gala, while disguised as a vampire historian. It was too easy to forget, sometimes, that her daughter was entirely mad. "I suppose it won't do any good to remind you that assassination is hardly the answer to all of life's problems."
"Shockingly enough, I am aware of that fact. Sometimes, for example, one is forced to ask one's estranged mother for an invitation to an enormously tedious social function. Highly-placed diplomats tend to have relatively sophisticated wards, you see, which assassination is entirely incapable of circumventing — it's terribly inconvenient when one is trying to assassinate someone on the other side of them."
"And sometimes, one is forced to tell one's" (terrifying) "estranged daughter that one refuses to be associated, even indirectly, with the death of inconvenient politicians."
Bellatrix smirked at her. "You won't be. No more than any other horrified onlooker, at least."
"I don't suppose it would do any good, either, to remind you that an apparent vampire assassinating an influential and well-regarded diplomat is hardly likely to advance your cause."
"Do you really think that I would be so clumsy as to suggest to the authorities that Moreau's death might not have been entirely natural? Far less allow them to connect it to me. I am fairly skilled at this sort of thing, you know. After all, Arcturus never managed to figure out that I was killing off the cadet branches of the House. Thom didn't even realise that I was responsible for eliminating the majority of his original Inner Circle, and he was actually aware of the full extent of my abilities."
"You did what?!"
"Well, I wasn't about to let anyone else be a closer, more trusted advisor to him, simply because they were older, more experienced, and had known him longer. And before you say it, yes, I realise that was incredibly immature of me, but I was fifteen at the time, and Thom was mine." She shrugged.
"Not that!" Though it was somewhat disturbing that Bellatrix had apparently been so obsessed with her Master that she'd killed everyone too near to him out of some twisted jealousy. Even on a scale of her daughter's other mad exploits. In fact, it was nearly as disturbing as the fact that he had apparently used compulsions on her to shape her personality as a child — which of course she hardly considered worthy of comment, skimming over the detail as though it hardly mattered, when so far as Dru was aware breaking free of such compulsions was supposed to be impossible — and her newfound objectivity on the subject of Thom de Mort. "You murdered the House of Black?!"
Bellatrix's head twitched a few degrees to one side again, her face blankly disinterested. A silent, Is this important? "Well, not all of it. But yes."
"Why?!"
Sigh. "Because I was young and stupid, and Thom asked me to prove that I was loyal to the Cause above even the Family. Besides, most of them were hardly worthy of the name. The House was overdue for a culling." Druella was absolutely certain her horror was showing on her face, but she found she couldn't force it back. Bellatrix gave her a rather rueful smirk, suggesting that she did, in fact, understand that this, both the action and her callous discussion of it, was a bit shocking. "Yes, Lyra isn't very happy with me over that, either. But you didn't even like the Blacks. What do you care?"
She hadn't liked the Blacks. They were a savage, bloodthirsty pack of barbarians at best pretending to be civilised people, and at worst...well, Bellatrix. She hadn't realised exactly how sick they were until she'd already been wed to Cygnus for an entire year — they had been married on Yule, so their first anniversary had been marked by her introduction to their tradition of bloody human sacrifice— What sort of monsters actually did that?! And when she had, she'd seriously considered betraying them to the Aurors over it. (The fact that nothing would likely come of such an attempt aside from her own demotion from wife to blood traitor — and likely subsequent murder — was the only thing which had stopped her.)
But they were your family, Bellatrix! I thought you cared about that! About your duty to them, if nothing else.
Though she realised almost as soon as she thought it that Bellatrix had considered her primary duty as the First Daughter of the House to be to its children. Their parents she would likely have found it only too easy to justify killing, given the way the Blacks habitually treated each successive generation — in much the same way, she supposed, that she had disposed of Cygnus for proving himself a danger to Andromeda.
It took her a moment to find her voice, but when she did, it was a matter of habit to fall into a cool, disapproving tone, unimpressed and equally unintimidated. (Like most terrifying, predatory creatures, Bellatrix was far more likely to attack if she sensed weakness — she knew, of course, that Druella was scared of her, but she at least respected that Dru tried to pretend otherwise. She thought it was funny, because of course she did, this was Bellatrix.) "Has anyone told you lately that you're a monster, Bellatrix?"
Bellatrix grinned at her, showing far too many teeth. "'Audacia solum namque nos separat,'" she quoted. Daring alone divides monsters from men — she always had liked Montreve, Druella recalled suddenly. "But no, not recently. Not since...Tuesday? Maybe Wednesday." So, four days. Or maybe three. Not recently at all. "Mickey's mellowed in his old age. Doesn't want me teaching the pups how to hunt." She clicked her tongue in mockery of his disapproval. "So disappointing."
"Oh, yes, how dreadful, that he doesn't want you teaching children how to kill people. Do you even hear yourself when you talk, Bellatrix?"
"Yes, actually. I'm even aware that other people hear me when I talk. One might almost say that's the entire point of the exercise. I'm just saying, for a violent werewolf revolutionary, he's gone awfully soft over the past fifteen years. Anyway, my point was, I've been making assassinations look like natural deaths since I was little more than a child myself, under the noses of men far more suspicious than any investigator the Swiss are likely to assign to it. I'm well aware that if Hela is linked to Moreau's death it will be highly counter-productive, which is why I have no intention of being caught. You have nothing to worry about in terms of getting a bit of blood on your name by association. And if you are somehow implicated, you can simply tell them I coerced you— Oh, thank you." She cut herself off as the waiter approached with their food.
Apparently Druella had ordered the quail. Bellatrix, of course, had ordered the langoustine, likely simply to annoy her. Regardless of trends in muggle haute cuisine or the degree of effort put into preparing it, lobster was not and would never be anything other than a cheap sea-insect masquerading as proper food. Even miniature lobsters. Perhaps especially miniature lobsters.
"In any case," Bellatrix resumed as the young man retreated, "denying me an invitation will hardly stop me removing Monsieur Moreau from his current appointment. Doing so at this event in particular, however, offers an opportunity to draw attention to the Confederation's hypocrisy as well. Appointing a man who supports human supremacy to manage diplomatic relations with non-human groups throughout Europe? Imagine the scandal. And the host dropping dead in the middle of the party will almost certainly mean you get to leave early. So, there's that."
Well, yes, there was that, she supposed. She sighed. "Very well. You may accompany me to the gala." More because she knew Bella would simply assassinate the man on some other occasion if she truly wanted him dead than because it would get Dru out of the party earlier, but she couldn't say that wasn't a nice side benefit. "Formal dress. We can meet at my offices beforehand." She assumed that Bellatrix knew she'd taken a teaching position at le Collège de Sorcellerie in Paris, given that she'd concocted this particular ruse to enlist Dru's assistance. "Say, seven."
"Lovely." Her daughter smirked, then raised an eyebrow at her. "Well, that was easier than I anticipated. Honestly, I expected that conversation to last us through dessert. I see Mickey's not the only one who's gone soft while I was away."
"Yes, well, I find not worrying about whether one's children are off starting wars and the like tends to make life far less stressful."
"Oh, of course. And retiring from the tea parlours and ballrooms full of petty bitches which make up the majority of polite Society has had no impact whatsoever on your general state of mind, I'm sure. So! What have you been working on lately?" she asked, changing the subject brightly.
"Hmm, potential points of historical deviation over the course of the muggles' Great War. Nothing that would interest you, I'm sure."
Druella was not unaware of Bellatrix's contributions to the development of modern time-magic. Her interest, however, had always been more on the front of exploring alternate timelines — she must be positively green over Lyra actually having managed to escape her own universe — while Druella found the nature of time itself and its development to be far more fascinating. There was an area of overlap there, of course. But it was poor conversational form to seem too enthusiastic about discussing one's own interests, especially obscure, technical, academic interests which involved a good deal of scrying and therefore uncertainty, and had a tendency to bore potential dinner companions to tears. (Even if it would serve Bellatrix right for the horrors she had put Druella through over the years.)
"Oh, I don't know, I've been developing an appreciation for muggle warfare lately. Though I have to say, I prefer the sequel. The American campaign in Vietnam sounds like it was fun, too. Did you ever work out a solution to the focal uncertainty problem you discussed in your thesis? Because I have to say, it might be more a problem of relativity and perspective, in which case—"
"You read my thesis?" Well, her first thesis — she hadn't actually gotten six masteries, as Bella had once facetiously suggested she might, but she had taken one in History and one in Political Philosophy in addition to Arithmancy.
"Was I not supposed to? It was referenced in Clarence Weigand's most recent essay on temporal and dimensional mechanics, and I had a free afternoon... Surely you didn't expect me not to catch up on the work that's been done in my field over the past decade and a half."
Well, no, it was just...odd, holding a civil, academic conversation with Bellatrix, of all people. If she started wanting to talk about Classical composers, Dru was going to start questioning whether someone was impersonating Bellatrix impersonating a vampire scholar. (That did, in fact, sound like the sort of thing Cassiopeia would find amusing.)
Bella, of course, gave her a look which suggested Dru was the one acting peculiarly, before returning to her own academic ramblings (completely eschewing any trappings of polite conversation, because politeness is for people who are afraid of offending people, Dru). "Anyway, I'm starting to think that the direction we should have taken with the Sandstone Project ought to have been extra-planar, rather than creating skip-backs exclusively in the fourth dimension of this plane — not that the time-turner was completely useless, but, well, even if the blibbering idiots have managed nothing else in the past fifteen years, I think the Unspeakables have proven that there's only so far that direction will take us..."
['Audacia solum namque nos separat']
"Daring alone separates us." It's possible I have too much fun coming up with poetry for various characters to quote. This would be from the same poet Lyra quoted at Dumbledore over the summer, when they were trading vaguely threatening bits of Latin. The 'monsters from men' Dru added would be from its context within the poem.
Dru, like Lyra at the beginning of the story, is unaware that she's an omniglot. She thinks she has a good ear for accents and a knack for picking up grammar, and memorising vocabulary is more or less the same as memorising anything else. Which largely comes down to her learning most of the languages she speaks from books, rather than by speaking to others directly. Bella gets her intelligence from her as well, and her sense of timing. They have similar views on children and homemaking, and share an interest in enchanting and arithmancy. (As well as a loathing of small talk.) They actually got along fairly well after Dru went back to the Rosiers, though they only saw each other a few times a year, at various Rosier family functions.
Much of Lyra's underestimation of her own abilities and the absurdly high standards she holds are due to Dru being kind of absurd, and Lyra comparing herself to Dru when she was very young. Obviously it's not weird that she speaks seven (non-magical) languages fluently and however many others somewhat less than fluently — most Blacks speak at least five, and she doesn't actually know how many Dru can read. Sure, she's clever, but compared to Dru and Meda, she's not exactly a genius. And compared to someone who could have been a world-class musician in another life, she really is shite at piano.
Please join me in imagining Siri and Lyra at three in the morning deciding WE SHOULD START A COVER BAND! With Sirius as lead vocalist/frontman/guitar and Lyra on drums/back-up vocals, because obviously. (Edit: Alex, Michael Cavan's assistant, is their bassist, and they call themselves the Flying Motorbikes. This may actually need to be a thing. Edit 2: This is now a thing. Just wrote it into a later chapter xD)
Please ignore my previous note on chapter timing. I wanted this to be a thing Sirius could already know about in his next scene, but I fucked up the timeline. This chapter has to have happened sometime in the first week of November at the earliest, so the gala probably hasn't happened yet.
—Leigha