'Til Death Do Us Part

Bellatrix Black.

Those two words will haunt me forever. They are a spell that cursed me to a life of love and misery. Sweeter than the best Honeyduke's chocolate and more potent than the Draught of Living Death. But Merlin, how I love the woman who goes with the name, enchantress that she is. I love the strands of black hair curling down to the small of her back, the heavy-lidded grey eyes, and the lines of arrogance around the corners of her mouth. I love the sweet smell of her skin when she stepped out of the shower, the smile of sleeping contentment that greeted me every morning, the taste of her tongue in my mouth. I love her fierce determination, her conviction that she is always right, and her unwavering loyalty. I know every one of her quirks: the haughty flick of her hair, the impatient tapping of her nails, and the half-secretive look in her eyes. She's a flirt, a harpy, a monster, a whore, a delusion of damned perfection reincarnated. How can I ever hope to find her equal in charm and attraction, in lies and deceit, in life and death?

I will never quite understand how someone like her could love someone like me, the little fucked up oddity with his head screwed on the wrong way and the wrong parts in the wrong places. I paled to the transparency of a Hogwarts ghost in comparison to her beauty and talents. But somehow, when I managed to stutter out a desperate invitation to Hogsmeade after six years, she accepted.

And she stayed. She put up with my idiocy and indulged my hero worship without complaint. She let me dog her footsteps from the Common Room to the Great Hall to her classes to the Quidditch pitch back to the Common Room. For two blissful years, her perfection lit up the darkest corners of my life and brushed away the dust and spiders in my brain, and I was happy. Ecstatic. I wanted nothing more than to stay petrified in time forever and never have to leave.

When we left Hogwarts, I knew I should propose. Bella was impatient, always had been, and if I didn't find a way to make her mine forever, she would laugh as she ground my face in her dust. Spineless Flobberworm that I was, it took three bottles of Firewhiskey to drown my fears and loosen my tongue enough to spew out a jumbled up proposal that even I could barely understand. And I never thought to buy a ring.

At school, in the brief moments when we had talked of the future, Bella was always determined to join the Dark Lord's cause. I was not half as adamant as she was, but I was willing to follow her through each and every circle of hell if she asked me to. The first thing we did after our marriage was to beg the Dark Lord to accept our services. He burned the Dark Mark into our skin and just like that, we became Death Eaters. Servants, until death do we part.

The tasks he set us were simple at first: terrorize a few Mudblood cities and knock out some Ministry officials. Grunt work for new recruits. But Bella's obvious zeal and talent propelled her rapidly through the ranks, taking me with her. The higher we rose, the more fanatic she became. The Dark Lord's name was forever on her lips and she was full of his praises to the skies. If he'd asked her to cut off her own head and present it to him on a platter of goblin-wrought silver, she would've done it, no hesitation and no regrets. In fact, she would have been bloody well euphoric.

The Mudbloods say that a rose by any other name would be just as sweet. They know nothing. Bellatrix Lestrange was not the same woman as Bellatrix Black. She wasn't my darling Bella anymore; she was his Bella, his general, his most trusted advisor. And still I loved her. She consumed me with a hopeless, empty love that no sparks and no return, just a dull, aching stove of dying embers. I would've given anything if I had been given the grace to hate her, but I didn't have the heart to loathe the woman that had been, and still was, my life.

But the Dark Lord I was free to abhor, if not openly than at least in the secret depths of my mind. With every step that Bella took away from me, I hated the Dark Lord more, until I would've been quite glad to see Dumbledore blast him to pieces. I never stopped doing his bidding for Bella's sake, but it became a labour that I dreaded every morning when I woke up and damned every night in my dreams. I was helping to build an empire that I would have rather seen burn and crumble into flames.

And then the impossible happened. A miracle that almost saved me. The Dark Lord disappeared, shattered by a mere toddler by the name of Harry Potter. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted from my chest. What I did care that James and Lily Potter were dead and that the Death Eaters were going the same way? Finally I could breathe again. I was quite prepared to denounce anyone and everyone to the Ministry of Magic and go free. There was plenty of suspicion but no proof to tie me to the Death Eaters. I would take Bella and we would start again somewhere else: France, Germany, America, wherever she wanted to go, I would take her, and we would be happy. I would win her back from the Dark Lord's grip. We were still young; it wasn't too late for us to live out our dreams. But Bella had different plans. Even though he was gone, he was still locked in her heart like a poison, drowning her in obsession, and she was determined to find him. She took to torturing Aurors for information and I followed her blindly because I couldn't bear being separated from her. It was too late for me to turn back; she was my heart and mind and soul.

The rest is history. We were caught and sent to Azkaban. It was almost a relief in a way. I could live safely in all my memories of past love and splendour. I suppose at one time, the Dementors would have taken them from me and driven me to the brink of insanity, but not anymore. You can never go back to a moment when you were truly happy, and I had long ago passed the dividing line between passion and psychosis. Bella was so full of utter wretchedness in my heart that even those happy memories from Hogwarts had become a burden, another load to bend and crack my already distorted body.

Bellatrix Black.

My life started with those two words and it will end with them. She trapped me, poisoned me with her love and left me for dead. I'm breathing still, wasting away in Azkaban, but I've been dead for years. When Bellatrix Black died, she took the pieces of me with her and left behind an empty shell, a pathetic excuse for life. I couldn't be hollower if the Dementors embraced me as their own. Kissed me. Fucked me.

I don't want to leave Azkaban unless it's in a body bag. I don't want to go out and meet the shadow of the woman I love. I would see the Dark Lord looking out of the windows of her eyes and I'd want to kill her, but I wouldn't because her body would still belong to Bella, my sweet, darling, intoxicating Bella.

Bella, Bella, Bella. If I promise not to fuck up again, will you save me in the end? Will you cleanse my heart of all memories of you, only you, because there hasn't been room for anyone else for a long time. Will you give me back at least a fragment of that perfection, that innocence, that deluded fucking lunacy that used to be ours? Will you press your mouth to mine and suck out your poison? No, I think not. You will leave me to suffer and suffer, and never ever die.

And I would love you for it.