Harry thinks Bellatrix is his mum. Written for Chapter 179 of The Bunny Pool, which has been since removed from Archive. Warning for spiders, scars, and the general things that one would expect to happen with any child risen by Bellatrix Lestrange.

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"Harry!" Bellatrix yelled, marching through the tiny rooms of the house that she, her husband, and the kidnapped Potter infant had been forced to live in since the hunt for leftover Death Eaters had begun shortly after the Dark Lord's fall.

She hated the house and all that it stood for. But one small mercy was that there weren't a lot of rooms for a boy to get lost in.

She found the three year old under the kitchen table, covered in spiders, looking out between the table legs at her with a happy smile on his squishy, scarred face.

Okay, so maybe she'd dropped him or lost track of him a few times over the years. So what? He was still living, wasn't he? And he did have most of his fingers and toes.

"Harry!" She snapped , and stalked forward. "I've been calling for you! Why didn't you come!" It was more of an accusation then a question, and Harry knew it.

"Mumma!" He burbled anyways. "Tommy says tha spiwer aren't the killers. The Chamber is bedder den dat."

Bellatrix rolled her dark eyes and dropped onto her hands and knees, crawled halfway under the table, and dragged him out from under it, giggling along with him when spiders skittered over her hands and up her arms.

"Tell Tommy to stop dragging you off for secrets at nap time, then, you little brat!" She crooned, and scrambled clumsily up, keeping the little boy tucked to her chest as she rose. "He can haunt you while you dream instead."

"I don't have a naptime!" Harry exclaimed, and looked at her with big green mudblood eyes on a face that screamed Black.

"Don't you?" Bella asked, surprised. "What do you have, then?"

"We hurt any da people who knock onna door and eat sweets." He told her seriously, with three year old frankness that only the extremely honest or extremely manipulative toddler could manage.

"...of course. My mistake." She told him indulgently.

Clearly he had the Black spirit, too.

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I actually want to write a longer fic along these lines because, well, I think it would be fun. But for now, this seemed like something doable. And vaguely realistic, in that odd way that fictional characters can be. I mean, honestly, did you really think anyone Bella raised would walk away unscathed?

Anyhow, thanks for reading, have a nice day, and please feel free to drop a comment or a request for me to consider! Byeeeeee!