Hey everyone! This story was brought to you by Beauty Therapy assignment, and Insane Prompt List on Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
Beauty Therapy assignment: Task 12 - Write about losing something.
Insane Prompt List: 386. (Romantic Relationship) Rodolphus/Bellatrix
Warning for canon torture of both Muggleborns and the Longbottoms. Word count is 2,085 words. I hope you all enjoy A Decline of the Mind.
Bellatrix Black first realized that something was definitely wrong with her in her sixth year of Hogwarts. Her grades were good. She was acing everything she took except for Muggle Studies which had been forced on her by that goody goody headmaster Professor Dumbledore. She still doesn't understand why he had done that to her anyway. She'd only done what her parents taught her was right when she tortured that Mudblood Ravenclaw.
But the thing that truly set her off was when her sister Andy, Andromeda Black, started to go missing for long periods of time. She found this strange because as long as Andromeda had been in Hogwarts she had always told Bellatrix where she was going and who she would be with.
Bellatrix walked, no sauntered, over to Andromeda's group of friends that she had in Slytherin house. She could tell that the small group of girls was terrified of her. Almost everyone she encountered was with good reason too after the Mudblood incident.
"Ladies," Bellatrix said, feigning a smile as she watched Alison Macnair, Livia O'Shannahan, and Andrea Kilmeany stop their whispering together, "I was wondering you could tell me where my sister Andromeda was?"
It was Alison Macnair's, pale face and quavering voice that answered the question, the blonde girl's frightened blue eyes looking into soulless grey ones. "She went out to the library," the girl stuttered out, as though Andy didn't go to the school library on a daily basis. "She's tutoring someone."
"Ali, shut up," Livia elbowed Alison. The redhead had the temper out of Andromeda's friend group. "Not that you probably didn't know that Andromeda tutors people…."
"She's tutoring a Mudblood," chimed up Andrea. "I told her not to but she never listens to me. These two were all for it…"
The friends dissolved into a heated argument as Bellatrix stormed away. She didn't want to believe it. She couldn't. Her sister wouldn't willingly help a Mudblood. She would never do such a terrible thing. But Bellatrix soon found out how wrong she was.
As soon as she walked into the library she could see the table that Andromeda was sitting at. A sandy haired Ravenclaw boy was sitting across from her. Bellatrix knew this boy. He was the Ravenclaw prefect, Ted over to the table she glared at Tonks while turning to her sister.
"What is going on here, Andy?" Bellatrix snapped.
"Bella…"
"Because it looks like you are tutoring a Mudblood to me. Do you know how mother and father would look at this?"
"Bellatrix could you please let me explain…."
Explain. She wanted to explain why she being a blood traitor. This had better be a good one. Bellatrix folded her arms over her chest and pretended to be interested in whatever lie Andromeda was about to tell.
"Go ahead," Bellatrix nodded. "Explain."
Ted cleared his throat nervously looking like he wanted to be anywhere but there at the moment. Andromeda, however, was alight with a fire from within. One that Bellatrix had never seen but one that she would hate Ted Tonks for creating for the rest of his life.
"You know very well that I tutor people to get a higher grade in most of classes…."
"This is just for grades? If that's the case then why don't you stick to tutoring Purebloods or Slytherins only?"
"I can't…"
Bellatrix never heard what Andromeda couldn't do. She stormed off angrily before Andromeda could another word in edgewise. She did however stop and see another thing would fuel the fire of her hatred of Muggleborns even more.
Andromeda was sitting where Bellatrix had left her sobbing her eyes out. They'd gotten into fights before as all sisters do but never one that bad. Never one where Andromeda had never gotten a chance to defend herself.
Ted's lips moved as he spoke words Bellatrix would assume were meant to comfort Andy. But then he took it a step too far. He put his arms around Andy and she didn't rebuke him or push him off. She allowed it.
Later on Rodolphus would tell her that she had tortured Ted Tonks in a soundproofed broom closet. The screams of pain ringing in her ears make her smile.
Bellatrix doesn't remember the next time her descent into madness is publically made known but her mother proudly tells her of the day. It's while they are planning her wedding to Rodolphus Lestrange.
"Every bride has a registry, Bellatrix," her aunt Walburga tell the dark haired girl in question. "What can we get you for yours?"
Bellatrix, as she is told later, laughed at the question of what they could get her. The only thing she wants is to bring honor to her family's name and to be married to a pureblood. She doesn't even love Rodolphus but she will marry him because he is a pureblood.
"A Muggle or Muggleborn to torture," Bellatrix said.
The planner gasps in surprise. She, obviously, wasn't from a pureblood family or for that matter didn't hold pureblood ideals.
"Wouldn't you much rather something nice to start your household off with?" the planner asked. "A cauldron to do your cooking in? Table linens? Anything of that sort?"
"Anything of that sort?" Bellatrix sneers in an approximation of the grey haired witches voice. "I told you what I want in this registry thing. If that's not good enough I don't want one."
"But…"
The screams of pain come to her mind, reminding her of when she tortured Ted Tonks at Hogwarts. The screams mix with laughter and become a vile approximation of the loathing Bellatrix has for Muggles and Muggleborn.
It takes both her mother and Aunt Walburga to stop her torturing the witch. The planner never returned after that, even going as far as to return the money she'd taken already from the event.
Bellatrix and Rodolphus had been married for a few months when the next descent came to her. They were sitting around the dinner table with one of their old friends from school, Theodore Nott when they learned of the Dark Lord's rise.
"He's very powerful," Nott told them. "He's looking for people like you that uphold the long traditions of pureblood supremacy."
"People like us?" Rodolphus asked perplexed.
"Our lord has heard that both yourself and your wife have a talent for making the wrong kind feel the pain they cause others. Your wife especially."
Bellatrix beamed with pride at hearing that she was an example of someone to be looked up to. An example of the right kind.
"Was the torture of Ted Tonks that did it?" Bellatrix allowed the pride in her work that day to speak volumes in her voice. "It was only the right thing to do."
"Our dark lord agrees with that sentiment and would like it if you and your husband were to become part of our group."
Bellatrix turned to Rodolphus a gleam in her grey eyes. The first sign of light since she'd found out that her sister Andromeda was marrying that fool Mudblood Ted Tonks. The dull grey becoming a lively storm could.
"We have to join, Rodolphus," Bellatrix tells him. She knows he won't argue with her. He never argues with her.
"Bellatrix," Rodolphus chides her.
"Don't Bellatrix me," she snarks. "Anyone who went to school with me knows I get what I want. Isn't that right, Nott?"
Nott nods.
The discussion lasted long into the night. Long after Theodore Nott has gone home to his wife and unborn child. They yelled and screamed but in the end Bellatrix ended up getting her way like always.
The feel of the dark mark being burned into her skin makes the steady laughter coming from the woman it's being burned into seem even more off her rocker than usual. The scent of the scarring flesh bringing a new life to Bellatrix. A life where she is right and people like her sister Andromeda are wrong.
"Rise, my new Death Eaters and recieve your first assignment for your dark lord," Voldemort said, his eyes resting on Bellatrix.
The next thing Bellatrix knows she is standing over the screaming forms of Frank and Alice Longbottom. Her wand is drawn and she doesn't remember drawing it. But that doesn't matter. The screams of the couple are like a music she could dance to all day if given the chance to.
Rodolphus is by her side smiling proudly at her. Like he can't believe that he is lucky enough to call this woman his own. This is the moment when she thinks that their marriage of politics and becomes a friendship.
"I've never seen you look more beautiful," Rodolphus tells her, pulling Bellatrix into a bruising kiss. He's never shown this much passion towards her ever. "My turn."
Rodolphus takes Alice and aims his want at her. The way he works his spells is like a choreographed dance to Bellatrix. The screams of Alice Longbottom the music that he is dancing to.
"Maybe we should stop," the boy with straw blond hair says, looking like he is about to get sick to his stomach. "We should stop."
"Why stop, Barty, when this is so much more fun?" Bellatrix laughs and picks up her wand aiming it at Frank.
She doesn't hear when the Aurors come into the room but she knows they are there. She can see the revulsion on their faces as they see what she and her small group have done to the Longbottoms.
"Someone get the baby and take him to his grandmother's house," the lead Auror says.
Bellatrix watches as the crying baby is taken off into the unknown. It wasn't right that this pureblood child should have to suffer for his parents wrong doings. She goes to apparate away when she feels herself being cuffed by someone.
"You're coming with us, Mrs. Lestrange," the young dark haired Auror tells her.
She doesn't try to escape. Why would she try to escape? A stint in Azkaban is a sign that she's made it to the big times. She isn't just one of those people who talk about hating Muggles and Muggleborns, she acts on it.
Bellatrix can hear them, all of them, while she waits for her trial to begin. The dementors effect is quick and she doesn't like it. She had thought she'd been happy all those times she'd tortured or hurt someone. Wasn't she happy then?
"You are here by sentenced to life in Azkaban prison with no hope of parole," the Minister of Magic himself pronounces the sentence.
She hears the boy, Barty Crouch Jr., crying and begging with his father to do something. A laugh, mirthless and devoid of joy, that doesn't reach her eyes escapes her lips. She won't let them see that dementors are getting to her. She is Bellatrix Lestrange and she isn't in the wrong on this.
It isn't until she's in her cell in the actual prison that they voice of her victims begin to torture her in their turn. A cruel fate, indeed, if you ask her.
"You don't like Muggleborns," her brother-in-law, Ted's, voice crows in her head. "We both want the same thing don't we, Bellatrix?"
"We don't want the same things, Mudblood," she snaps, making the guard come to check on her with his Patronus. She glares at the man from the bed of her cell. "Why would we want the same things? I hate you."
"You can hate me all you want," Ted's voice in her head says tauntingly, like her own voice had been the day she'd tortured him. "But we do, or I should say did, want the same thing at one point."
"What is that?"
"Andromeda's happiness."
"Happiness is a good thing to want," the voice of Beatrice, her graying wedding planner says. "It makes the world go around, doesn't it, dearie?"
"It does," Alice Longbottom's voice floats to her ears.
"It truly does," Frank's follows soon after.
The voice had been talking to her for what feels like a hundred years or more before her Dark lord comes to get her. But by that point she isn't sure how much of her is her. For that matter she's not sure how much of her is them either. She's just sure that she wants revenge on all the people who did this to her. And she will have her revenge if its the last thing she does in this life or the next.
I hope you all enjoy the character study of Bellatrix Black Lestrange that was A Decline of the Mind.