Grief That Does Not Speak
Title: Grief That Does Not Speak
Disclaimer: None of the characters in this fic belong to me
Summary: A look at the relationship between Bellatrix Black and Narcissa Malfoy, from birth to death. Love is not simple, even when it turns on you.
On Narcissa's wedding day Bella woke her sister up, slipping cold hands (warm heart) under the blankets and pinching her toes. Her hair was damp and bloomed with flowers and leaves and her cheeks red and shiny. Narcissa had tutted, because it was expected, but she could never be mad at her fey, brilliant sister.
'Come and see,' Bella said, pulling her out of bed and wrapping her in transfigured furs. Boots for her bare feet and gloves for her hands. 'They will be gone by morning.'
Down to the garden they went, to watch sprites of ice and crackling frost dance on the frozen surface of the fountain. One of them spun over to Narcissa, stroking the ends of her hair (later they snapped off, withered like a flower) and cozening her with tales of forever-beauty and peace. Bella snatched it out of the air, sure as a cat, and murdered it in the warmth of her hands.
******
Druella loved being a mother, but had no heart for mothering. She loved to be fat and tight and round with evidence of her duty, fussed over and cosseted as the hope of a next generation. Birthed, the babies interested her less. She would pinch them pink and swaddle them in dramatic black linens to show them off. But the parts that no-one watched or praised she passed off on the house-elves.
Andromeda shrugged it off and grew solid and independent, a quiet state of one. She had seceded from the clan, with neither fanfare nor guilt, long before they tried to expel her.
The middle child, fierce Bella, ran wild in the gardens and eavesdropped in the attics. When love was not freely offered her, she demanded it with tantrums and rage. Once she scarred a boy - by accident, shoving in the rosebushes - and once she led her cousin astray in the maze and would not fetch him back.
He never forgave any of them for that, brave, bold Sirius who wet himself in the dark. Not for their seeing it or being the sort of family to have a magical maze that ate the lost.
So they feared for the third child when Druella waxed again. Her confinement was in Cornwall, at an ancient manor there, and afterwards they left the pale, odd girl with the house-elves while they spoiled Bella with sweets and toys. They gave her all the love she had demanded and, having it, she spat it back at them as false.
But the baby sister she loved and dandled and doted on.
**********
The healers thought that Narcissa would die of bringing Draco into the world. It was too soon and he was too small and she, burned to the bones with cold from a hex aimed at her husband, was too weak. Lucius, who she had thought cold and distant, clutched her hand in his and told the healers to save her. Her not the child. He soaked her sleeves with his tears.
They tutted in disapproval and shook their heads and said they could do neither. (Later, his head next to hers on the pillow, he'd whisper that he didn't think they'd tried. That Mungo's was Dumbledore's and while they would not break their oaths...)
Bella arrived on the wind, dark and terrible and stinking of magic. She kissed Narcissa with cold lips and breathed magic into her, the Black blood magic that ran in both their veins. There were ointments that stung and glittered on Narcissa's wrists and temples, a potion that tasted like raspberries on the night but rotted on the tongue for a month and a tight, desperate hug that exposed bird-bones and spare flesh under the wildness and velvet.
'Be well. Live well,' Bella whispered in her ear.
Even then she was wanted and the aurors arrived on the stroke of midnight. Once it would have been taboo for them to enter the healing place, but in this era the healers didn't try and stop them.
'Go,' Narcissa had ordered weakly, although she clutched at Bella's hand like she'd never let go. 'They'll take you away.'
And she had gone in a flurry of curses, her wand snapping the air, and mockery, leaving spitting, squirming wizards and a promise of death with the head healer if he failed Narcissa.
She sent a geas and a salamander for Draco's naming.
**********
Bella could not stay away from the cellars. She would slip down there, kicking aside wards that would stop Merlin with dirty bare feet, and spend hours talking to the little blonde Lovegood girl. Re-enacting a childhood that only one of them had experienced, but that the girl was wise enough not to deny.
When he needed Bella, he always sent Narcissa. There was contempt in his voice, a sneer at ordering a daughter of the House Black a Matron of the House Malfoy like a house-elf, but she knew he feared her sister. If Bella had not loved him so insanely - so Imperiously? - she would have ground him to paste and snakeskin for his insults.
Had he been like this before? Narcissa, deemed delicate by husband and sister and a new mother by the end, had never been at the heart of it. She had met though, at parties and rallies before his goals turned militant, and her memories were smoother. Oh, the contempt was there. She had a better ear of any of them for that, the weakest Black sister. He had been neither crude nor ignorant though, and oh what a way with words he'd had. He could have made severing your nose sound like it was in your own best interest.
Then she had understood her sister's infatuation. Bella had always loved best those things that didn't, couldn't love her back. Narcissa was the only exception.
'...and we shall wear crowns of oleander and dance with all the most handsome men,' Bella recited in a wobbling sing-song voice. It was verbatim, as best Narcissa could remember, the conversation they had when they were 15 and 14.
Behind the door, Luna sat hugging her knees and watching Bella with huge, calm eyes. Her hair hung in tatted elf-locks and her face was bruised and grubby. The mother in Narcissa wanted to spit on a handkerchief - even society matrons, she had learnt, must resort to such when your child gets filthy five seconds before a party - and rub her cheek, tease the knots from her hair and comfort her.
She knew it was ridiculous, sick. It was her doing the girl was here, but that did nothing to quash the instinct. She restricted herself to a stiff nod and knelt beside Bella, smoothing her matted curls.
'Most handsome?' she said, filling her role in the conversation. 'Surely best-bred.'
Bella laughed, throaty and joyous, and flung her arms around Narcissa's throat. The embrace made the pulse flutter against Narcissa's skin, too aware of how easy it would be for those stringy arms to snap her neck.
'Blood is for marriage, Cissy,' she said exuberantly. 'Looks are for dancing.'
With gentle hands and lies, Narcissa got her up and sent her dancing up the stairs. Exhausted of it - all of it - she leant back against the wall and closed her eyes. If the prisoners wanted to escape, let them. Someone should.
'Everyone says she is evil and mad, and that therefore she always was evil and mad,' Luna said instead, her voice calm and steady. 'That her madness came first. A weakness in her character, a flaw in mind and morals.'
'She wasn't always like that,' Narcissa said, dragging her eyes open. She blinked at Luna, who had shifted to sitting cross-legged with her hands twisted in her lap. 'Don't you want to get away?'
'Where would I go?' Luna asked, eyes flicking upwards. 'To ask him to let me leave, pretty please?'
*********
Narcissa woke to a hand cover her mouth and fingers pinching her nostrils closed. Her lungs cramped behind her ribs and she tried to move, but she couldn't. In the dim moonlight she could make out Bella watching her with black, feverish eyes. All these years, she thought with a weird, strange humour, and her mother would be prove right about Bella not being left alone with the baby.
Then, abruptly, Bella let go, snatching her hands away and hiding them under her robes. Narcissa still couldn't move, but she could breathe, that was something.
Two quick, ragged lungfuls of air sated her body's panic. Next to her Lucius lay as still and silent, dead or hexed and it didn't matter right now.
'Did you visit me?' Bella asked, cocking her head like a bird. She chewed her thumb till it bled, suckling at the pad. Her robes hung open, revealing a hollow chest and ribs like slats. Bruises and burns decorated her pallid skin, fresh and raw.
'No,' Narcissa said.
'Why not.'
Bella leant in close to hear the answer, elbows wrinkling the sheets. She was barely human now, after all those years in Azkaban. More a poppet of bone and blood than anything real, but the blood was Black. That earned an answer.
'My sister died the day they locked the door on her,' Narcissa said. For the first time in weeks (months, years) she wasn't scared and trying to fool herself that she wasn't. 'You were bright and wild and fierce, Bella Black. You rode a thestral to your wedding and laughed when it made Mama blanch. And you died in Azkaban. The Dementors killed you.'
A crease pinched over Bella's nose. 'Then what am I?'
'A storm in her skin,' Narcissa said. 'A ghost of dark magic in the gaps where my sister lived. I love you for her sake.'
It satisfied her. She nodded and smiled, briefly sweet,, briefly Bella, and fled the room. Her spell held Narcissa till morning, when a furious Lucius dispelled it and rubbed the cramps out of her arms and legs with hard, strong fingers. Bella greeted her at breakfast with a smile and a croissant and they never talked about that night, or ghosts, again.
*******
Narcissa could not weep for her sister. She must appear penitent and humble, grateful for the mercy of her and her family's lives. So she wore dove-grey and doffed her jewellery and forswore her hairdresser. She donated her time, not the money that Voldemort had so wasted (goblins held no grudges and had more than one vault), to good causes involving orphans and old people.
No funerary rites for Bella Black. She was mourned with neither weeds nor ashes, her poor, wasted body unanointed and unattended. No blood watered the earth where she lay, no monument marked the passage of her life.
But she did not lie in Azkaban. Narcissa's sister had died there and sent her corpse out to harrow the world, and Narcissa would spit in Harry Potter's eye rather than dig a grave for her there. She dug her heels in and enlisted other mourners, they pushed behind the scenes.
'Amalthea Rowe is but six months old, must she suffer for her father's sins?'
'Permethe Greyback is 95. For all her son's sins, must she go to Azkaban to pay her respects?'
The minister folded eventually. No official rescinding of the order was made. Unless someone dug down through strata of red tape, the public perception was the corpses of the Death-eater dead were incarcerated along with the living.
But Bella's body had been put to rest where only those whose loved her could find it.
Disclaimer: None of the characters in this fic belong to me
Summary: A look at the relationship between Bellatrix Black and Narcissa Malfoy, from birth to death. Love is not simple, even when it turns on you.
On Narcissa's wedding day Bella woke her sister up, slipping cold hands (warm heart) under the blankets and pinching her toes. Her hair was damp and bloomed with flowers and leaves and her cheeks red and shiny. Narcissa had tutted, because it was expected, but she could never be mad at her fey, brilliant sister.
'Come and see,' Bella said, pulling her out of bed and wrapping her in transfigured furs. Boots for her bare feet and gloves for her hands. 'They will be gone by morning.'
Down to the garden they went, to watch sprites of ice and crackling frost dance on the frozen surface of the fountain. One of them spun over to Narcissa, stroking the ends of her hair (later they snapped off, withered like a flower) and cozening her with tales of forever-beauty and peace. Bella snatched it out of the air, sure as a cat, and murdered it in the warmth of her hands.
******
Druella loved being a mother, but had no heart for mothering. She loved to be fat and tight and round with evidence of her duty, fussed over and cosseted as the hope of a next generation. Birthed, the babies interested her less. She would pinch them pink and swaddle them in dramatic black linens to show them off. But the parts that no-one watched or praised she passed off on the house-elves.
Andromeda shrugged it off and grew solid and independent, a quiet state of one. She had seceded from the clan, with neither fanfare nor guilt, long before they tried to expel her.
The middle child, fierce Bella, ran wild in the gardens and eavesdropped in the attics. When love was not freely offered her, she demanded it with tantrums and rage. Once she scarred a boy - by accident, shoving in the rosebushes - and once she led her cousin astray in the maze and would not fetch him back.
He never forgave any of them for that, brave, bold Sirius who wet himself in the dark. Not for their seeing it or being the sort of family to have a magical maze that ate the lost.
So they feared for the third child when Druella waxed again. Her confinement was in Cornwall, at an ancient manor there, and afterwards they left the pale, odd girl with the house-elves while they spoiled Bella with sweets and toys. They gave her all the love she had demanded and, having it, she spat it back at them as false.
But the baby sister she loved and dandled and doted on.
**********
The healers thought that Narcissa would die of bringing Draco into the world. It was too soon and he was too small and she, burned to the bones with cold from a hex aimed at her husband, was too weak. Lucius, who she had thought cold and distant, clutched her hand in his and told the healers to save her. Her not the child. He soaked her sleeves with his tears.
They tutted in disapproval and shook their heads and said they could do neither. (Later, his head next to hers on the pillow, he'd whisper that he didn't think they'd tried. That Mungo's was Dumbledore's and while they would not break their oaths...)
Bella arrived on the wind, dark and terrible and stinking of magic. She kissed Narcissa with cold lips and breathed magic into her, the Black blood magic that ran in both their veins. There were ointments that stung and glittered on Narcissa's wrists and temples, a potion that tasted like raspberries on the night but rotted on the tongue for a month and a tight, desperate hug that exposed bird-bones and spare flesh under the wildness and velvet.
'Be well. Live well,' Bella whispered in her ear.
Even then she was wanted and the aurors arrived on the stroke of midnight. Once it would have been taboo for them to enter the healing place, but in this era the healers didn't try and stop them.
'Go,' Narcissa had ordered weakly, although she clutched at Bella's hand like she'd never let go. 'They'll take you away.'
And she had gone in a flurry of curses, her wand snapping the air, and mockery, leaving spitting, squirming wizards and a promise of death with the head healer if he failed Narcissa.
She sent a geas and a salamander for Draco's naming.
**********
Bella could not stay away from the cellars. She would slip down there, kicking aside wards that would stop Merlin with dirty bare feet, and spend hours talking to the little blonde Lovegood girl. Re-enacting a childhood that only one of them had experienced, but that the girl was wise enough not to deny.
When he needed Bella, he always sent Narcissa. There was contempt in his voice, a sneer at ordering a daughter of the House Black a Matron of the House Malfoy like a house-elf, but she knew he feared her sister. If Bella had not loved him so insanely - so Imperiously? - she would have ground him to paste and snakeskin for his insults.
Had he been like this before? Narcissa, deemed delicate by husband and sister and a new mother by the end, had never been at the heart of it. She had met though, at parties and rallies before his goals turned militant, and her memories were smoother. Oh, the contempt was there. She had a better ear of any of them for that, the weakest Black sister. He had been neither crude nor ignorant though, and oh what a way with words he'd had. He could have made severing your nose sound like it was in your own best interest.
Then she had understood her sister's infatuation. Bella had always loved best those things that didn't, couldn't love her back. Narcissa was the only exception.
'...and we shall wear crowns of oleander and dance with all the most handsome men,' Bella recited in a wobbling sing-song voice. It was verbatim, as best Narcissa could remember, the conversation they had when they were 15 and 14.
Behind the door, Luna sat hugging her knees and watching Bella with huge, calm eyes. Her hair hung in tatted elf-locks and her face was bruised and grubby. The mother in Narcissa wanted to spit on a handkerchief - even society matrons, she had learnt, must resort to such when your child gets filthy five seconds before a party - and rub her cheek, tease the knots from her hair and comfort her.
She knew it was ridiculous, sick. It was her doing the girl was here, but that did nothing to quash the instinct. She restricted herself to a stiff nod and knelt beside Bella, smoothing her matted curls.
'Most handsome?' she said, filling her role in the conversation. 'Surely best-bred.'
Bella laughed, throaty and joyous, and flung her arms around Narcissa's throat. The embrace made the pulse flutter against Narcissa's skin, too aware of how easy it would be for those stringy arms to snap her neck.
'Blood is for marriage, Cissy,' she said exuberantly. 'Looks are for dancing.'
With gentle hands and lies, Narcissa got her up and sent her dancing up the stairs. Exhausted of it - all of it - she leant back against the wall and closed her eyes. If the prisoners wanted to escape, let them. Someone should.
'Everyone says she is evil and mad, and that therefore she always was evil and mad,' Luna said instead, her voice calm and steady. 'That her madness came first. A weakness in her character, a flaw in mind and morals.'
'She wasn't always like that,' Narcissa said, dragging her eyes open. She blinked at Luna, who had shifted to sitting cross-legged with her hands twisted in her lap. 'Don't you want to get away?'
'Where would I go?' Luna asked, eyes flicking upwards. 'To ask him to let me leave, pretty please?'
*********
Narcissa woke to a hand cover her mouth and fingers pinching her nostrils closed. Her lungs cramped behind her ribs and she tried to move, but she couldn't. In the dim moonlight she could make out Bella watching her with black, feverish eyes. All these years, she thought with a weird, strange humour, and her mother would be prove right about Bella not being left alone with the baby.
Then, abruptly, Bella let go, snatching her hands away and hiding them under her robes. Narcissa still couldn't move, but she could breathe, that was something.
Two quick, ragged lungfuls of air sated her body's panic. Next to her Lucius lay as still and silent, dead or hexed and it didn't matter right now.
'Did you visit me?' Bella asked, cocking her head like a bird. She chewed her thumb till it bled, suckling at the pad. Her robes hung open, revealing a hollow chest and ribs like slats. Bruises and burns decorated her pallid skin, fresh and raw.
'No,' Narcissa said.
'Why not.'
Bella leant in close to hear the answer, elbows wrinkling the sheets. She was barely human now, after all those years in Azkaban. More a poppet of bone and blood than anything real, but the blood was Black. That earned an answer.
'My sister died the day they locked the door on her,' Narcissa said. For the first time in weeks (months, years) she wasn't scared and trying to fool herself that she wasn't. 'You were bright and wild and fierce, Bella Black. You rode a thestral to your wedding and laughed when it made Mama blanch. And you died in Azkaban. The Dementors killed you.'
A crease pinched over Bella's nose. 'Then what am I?'
'A storm in her skin,' Narcissa said. 'A ghost of dark magic in the gaps where my sister lived. I love you for her sake.'
It satisfied her. She nodded and smiled, briefly sweet,, briefly Bella, and fled the room. Her spell held Narcissa till morning, when a furious Lucius dispelled it and rubbed the cramps out of her arms and legs with hard, strong fingers. Bella greeted her at breakfast with a smile and a croissant and they never talked about that night, or ghosts, again.
*******
Narcissa could not weep for her sister. She must appear penitent and humble, grateful for the mercy of her and her family's lives. So she wore dove-grey and doffed her jewellery and forswore her hairdresser. She donated her time, not the money that Voldemort had so wasted (goblins held no grudges and had more than one vault), to good causes involving orphans and old people.
No funerary rites for Bella Black. She was mourned with neither weeds nor ashes, her poor, wasted body unanointed and unattended. No blood watered the earth where she lay, no monument marked the passage of her life.
But she did not lie in Azkaban. Narcissa's sister had died there and sent her corpse out to harrow the world, and Narcissa would spit in Harry Potter's eye rather than dig a grave for her there. She dug her heels in and enlisted other mourners, they pushed behind the scenes.
'Amalthea Rowe is but six months old, must she suffer for her father's sins?'
'Permethe Greyback is 95. For all her son's sins, must she go to Azkaban to pay her respects?'
The minister folded eventually. No official rescinding of the order was made. Unless someone dug down through strata of red tape, the public perception was the corpses of the Death-eater dead were incarcerated along with the living.
But Bella's body had been put to rest where only those whose loved her could find it.