Author's note: Just to be clear; radicalizing because you got dumped is bad 3 but this character study was fun since I usually write about Andromeda running away from the other perspective. Enjoy!
Disclaimer: J.K. Rowling owns the canon, world, and characters portrayed below and you can tell I'm not J.K. Rowling because #transrights
Beta: Thanks to Aya for beta-ing and for the title!
Content Warnings: Canon prejudice (blood purity); arranged marriage; slut-shaming; radicalization
Ashes to Fire
I saved every letter you wrote me
From the moment I saw you
I knew you were mine
You said you were mine
I thought you were mine
…
I'm burning the letters you wrote me
You can stand over there if you want
I don't know who you are
I have so much to learn
-"First Burn," Hamilton
Rabastan's senses were so dulled, that when he slammed the glass back onto the table before him, the crack of the glass didn't startle him. Thankfully, he still felt the burn of the Firewhisky smooth and steady and hot enough to hurt as it made its way down his throat. His father had always mocked how much of a lightweight Rabastan was, how small his palate for fine wines and liquor was, but honestly if that meant that Firewhisky burned this sharply and badly when he really needed it to… well, maybe it was a blessing. Something had to be, he supposed.
Glass empty, he focused his attention back to the task at hand—picking up the crisp sheets of parchment covered in beautiful script one by one and dipping them into the flame flickering atop the candle on his desk.
He took the letter from the top of the pile. September 18th. She had still been at Hogwarts when she had written to him. He remembered because he'd written to her first, asking if the castle had changed much and confessing that he missed it already, even if he had only graduated a few months before. In retrospect, he had always been the one to write first. Andromeda's replies had always been perfectly lovely—civil, more than proper for two young people of their ranks, and full of beautiful imagery and descriptions of the world around her and her day-to-day life… But he had always been the one to write first, from the moment he had first asked her father to enter a courtship with her to their engagement and to… well, to now.
When the fire had crept so far up the letter that it was about to snap and snarl at his fingertips, Rabastan let it for a moment before turning around and dropping it in the metal waste bin next to his desk. He watched the fire devour the rest of the letter before turning and choking on itself. Then there were only ashes in the bin, and quite a few of them from all the other times that he had gone through this process. He had, after all, twelve months of letters to get through.
He slumped back in the seat of his office chair for only a beat before sitting up again and reaching for another letter. This one, he remembered from the leaf that had been pressed and fixed to the parchment, had been written just as the leaves on the school grounds had started to turn. She had shared a poem written about the seasons in that letter and Rabastan hated that, drunk as he was, he could still remember every word of it and the warm feeling in his chest when he had thought I want to spend the rest of my life with the girl who finds this kind of poetry.
So much for that. He picked up the letter and burned it, leaf first, which was when his brother walked into the room, robes buttoned up to his neck and hair parted evenly down the middle and curling behind his ears.
"The House Elves said you had ordered them not to disturb you unless you needed them to fetch something from the cellar," Rodolphus said.
"Yes," Rabastan said, pouring himself another drink now that he had his brother to tolerate and reckon with. Rodolphus crossed the room to approach the desk and took the bottle from him.
"What are you drinking?" Rodolphus asked.
"I don't know," Rabastan asked. He had asked the house elves to bring him something expensive. He had no idea how aged and precious it was or where it had been made. He didn't care, and there was pleasure in wasting it now.
"Bella's message was brief but I heard they found her," Rodolphus said.
"So all is well, then, because I deserve a wife who wanted to start our lives together by running for the hills?" Rabastan hissed.
"I meant that you two can work it out," Rodolphus said. "Put the bottle down."
"Your dear Bella didn't tell you everything, did she?" he said, words bitter on his tongue and on his lips and to his ears even as he spoke them. "It doesn't matter that they found her. They can't bring her back."
"Why?" Rodolphus asked, frowning as if it had never occurred to him that Bellatrix could possibly do anything without him. He was likely the only person in the world under that impression.
"Because she is already married," Rabastan said, the edge to his voice as sharp as the liquor's burn. He snatched the bottle back from his brother and refilled his glass, downing its content like a shot. It was slightly too big and he sputtered on it, but the extra burn and the drops of whiskey on the letters was something for him to focus on for a moment, at least.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Rodolphus said.
"It means I was in love with a whore," Rabastan said. "It means I fell in love with a lie and got strung around like an idiot while she was with… while she…"
Rodolphus didn't seem to know what to do with that. He shook his head, as if to wake himself up from a particularly bewildering dream.
"But she…" Rodolphus said.
"But she is the good sister, of the three Blacks," Rabastan said. "She is the kind one, the gentle one, the soft one, the thoughtful one. I know. And yet… here we are!"
He drank straight from the bottle this time and picked up another letter, lowering it into the flickering flames and tossing it aside. Rodolphus stood still, arms hanging at his side, as if he wasn't entirely sure what to do about this situation or with himself.
"Any wisdom, big brother, or are you simply here to stare?"
"Drinking will not make it better. You should slow down," he said, finally.
"Well nothing else made it better, so I might as well do this," Rabastan said. He picked up his glass again but then, at the last minute, threw it across the room so it crashed against the wall and shattered. "Actually, that was satisfying. Perhaps I will do the same to the bottle when I find its bottom."
"You need sleep," Rodolphus said.
"I need you to shut up," Rabastan said. He dropped the burning letter in the waste bin so it could join the rest of the ashes. The paper collapsed onto itself and crumpled as its edges darkened and as it burned, like a hurt and wounded thing.
"I suppose you do not know what the worst part of all of this is either, then," Rabastan said. "Do you?"
"No," Rodolphus said. "Tell me brother."
"She left me for a Mudblood boy," Rabastan said. "A boy in her year, some Hufflepuff prefect training to be a Healer at St. Mungo's. A filthy fucking Mudblood. That is who she fell in love with, when she was supposed to be falling in love with me. That is who she decided to give herself to, after it had already been decided that she would be given to me. And she wanted to give herself to him so badly, she went and married him in a ministerial courtyard and defiled herself to annul the marriage contract that had been signed."
"I am sorry, Rab," Rodolphus said. "Truly, I… I don't know what to say."
"Then shut up already," he said.
Rodolphus sighed but poured Rabastan a new glass and took a swig of Firewhisky himself. They sat in silence until a series of footsteps in the hallway of Lestrange House announced another presence. Soon it was Bellatrix who swung into the office, shrugging off her cloak. She tossed it on the chair by the door as she swept into the office, dress swirling around her ankles, hair tightly bound back in a bun. Rabastan had noticed some time ago that she always dressed much more conservatively and demurely when she went back to her family.
"Rabastan told me," Rodolphus said, stretching a hand out towards her. She took it, but her locked jaw did not relax and her knit eyebrows did not unfurl.
"I burned her fucking face off the family tree myself," Bellatrix said. She turned to Rabastan. "My father will be generous and gracious, with the reparations for her broken contract."
"I do not care about that," Rabastan said.
"You should," Bellatrix said, crossing her arms. "It makes my sister a traitor, a whore, and a thief."
"Do not tell me what I should care about, Bellatrix," Rabastan said warningly.
Bellatrix arched an eyebrow before meandering over to the desk and plucking the bottle off the oak surface.
"What a productive use of your time and energy," she commented.
"Bella, he said no," Rodolphus said quietly.
"I can speak for myself," Rabastan snapped—just because he could and wanted to, not because his brother necessarily deserved it.
"Like a big boy, yes," Bellatrix said. "Because this is what big boys do when faced with adversity. They drink themselves into stupors."
She put the bottle down with such ferocity, even Rodolphus startled back. Even through his own drunken haze, rage, and wound-licking, Rabastan saw the ferocity in his eyes. While he was still mourning the poetry and possibility in the girl who had run away, Bellatrix had no trace of longing or hurt in her eyes. They were steel and fury alone. It was as if she had never loved Andromeda at all, which… was unthinkable, to Rabastan. It made him even angrier at her for no clear or specific reason.
"I suppose you have a better idea, Bellatrix?"
"Yes," she said. She leaned on the desk. "A Mudblood stole the girl you were promised. She was going to be yours. She was supposed to be yours. But a Mudblood got her because Mudbloods are not taught their place the way "
"I am very well aware," he said through a locked jaw.
"There is nothing to be done about what is done," Bellatrix said. "But there is a way to stop the way our people, our world, is degrading itself by the minute. This is bigger than you, loverboy. This is bigger than the bitch who used to be my sister."
"You mean that it's about the old ways," Rabastan said. "The ones that kept the world sane. The ones that kept filthy Mudbloods from so much as looking at people like us."
"Ted Tonks," Bellatrix said. She spat in the waste bin. "That is his name. Ted. Tonks."
Rabastan burned the name into his mind.
"What do you suggest?" Rabastan asked.
Bellatrix pulled back and leaned away from the desk, and then rolled up the sleeve of her dress. She revealed her forearm, marked by the skull and the snake that Rabastan had heard rumours of at soirées and balls and functions.
Bellatrix shot Rodolphus a look and, though he had been silent thus far, he stepped up and raised his own sleeve. His arm matched hers.
"Join us," she said simply. "Join him."
WC: 1913
