[From Samhain to the Solstice]: Tell Me Who Is Fair, PG-13, gen
Title: Tell Me Who Is Fair
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Background Druella Rosier/Cygnus Black, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Angst, violence
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3000
Summary: Bellatrix was born as mad as Narcissa was born fair.
Author’s Notes: This is one of “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year. The title comes from a line used in some versions of “Snow White.”
Tell Me Who Is Fair
Bella found her younger sister despairing of her hair in front of a mirror the day that Narcissa turned seven years old.
“What is it, Cissy?” Bella hugged Narcissa from behind, and Narcissa shut her eyes and turned away as if she couldn’t bear to see their reflections in the mirror together. Bella liked it, though. Cissy had dark hair almost exactly like Bella’s, except that it turned up slightly at the ends. And her eyes were grey, and her skin even paler than Andromeda’s. She looked a proper Black.
“I wish I was blonde.”
Bella paused at the odd words and drew back from Cissy, so that she could see her whole. Cissy stood with her head drooping, her hands braced in front of her as though she could keep herself from falling by holding onto the mirror’s frame. The mirror murmured some consoling words about how Narcissa was perfectly beautiful for a daughter of the House of Black, which Bella could see didn’t console Narcissa at all.
“Why do you want to be blonde?” Bella asked.
“All the stories, Bella, the stories!” Narcissa pulled back and stared at her with despair. “It’s the blonde woman who always wins the day and falls in love and has the handsome husband.”
“Well, yes,” Bella had to concede, because wizarding fairy tales often went that way. “But it’s the dark-haired witch who wins the duels and has the most money and can court any wizard she likes.”
“I don’t want that to do that. I want someone to want to marry me. I want someone to choose me, instead of me choosing him.”
Bella frowned. That didn’t make any sense to her. “You haven’t been at those wines that Mother and Father keep in the dining room for guests, have you, Cissy?” It would be shocking, because Cissy was only seven, but on the other hand, Blacks had done much more shocking things much younger.
“I knew it was no good to talk to you!” Narcissa wiped tears from her eyes. “You don’t care about me. If you did, if you really loved me, you’d help me become fair.”
“You’re prettier than all of us put together,” Bella said firmly.
“I meant blonde, Bella. You have no idea how much I long for it.”
Bella thought about it. Then she said, “Well, you know, there are rituals that can change your hair color. Or spells.”
“I don’t have a wand yet. And those rituals aren’t permanent. I want something else.”
And Bella, because she loved her younger sister, took Cissy in her arms and kissed her cheeks. “Then I will find something for you.”
*
Bella did find something. But when she did, the only thing she could think of was how much of an idiot she would be to use it.
She stared at the book in front of her, feeling her heart rate triple. How stupid would she be, to do what the book advised? It wasn’t the use of the salt or even the blood spells that were a problem. Bella had only gone to Hogwarts for the first time a year before, but she knew she could manage the basic magic this ritual demanded. She had learned most of the necessary spells before even getting a wand of her own.
But it said that someone had to sacrifice “more than blood” for the ritual, so that the hair color change would be permanent and the hair would grow the blonde color as if the person who had it had been born that way.
The book did not specify what that meant, but Bella knew what it meant. There would be a high price. It could be a limb, or someone’s sight, or their sanity. Bella shook her head until her own dark curls bounced around her.
She wanted to help Cissy, but no matter how much her sister wanted to be blonde, she wouldn’t use this ritual. She put the book back on the shelf and went to look for others.
*
“You will eat your dinner, young witch.”
Bella looked cautiously around the corner. Mother was standing over Cissy, her hands on her hips. Cissy, meanwhile, sat at the dining room table, staring at her reflection in the black-topped wood, what there was of it. Bella could only see a pale glimmer, but she supposed there might be more to it.
Cissy shook her head.
“Then you will eat it one way or the other.” Mother swished her wand, and Cissy gasped and folded her arms over her belly. Bella winced. She knew what had just happened. Mother had spelled the food directly into Cissy’s stomach. It meant something usually stayed down, but it also upset Cissy’s stomach more than it did either Bella’s or Dromeda’s.
Cissy sobbed, fastened a hand across her mouth, and then turned and ran for the nearest bathroom.
“Come in, Bella,” Mother said, without taking her narrowed gaze from the path of Cissy’s flight.
Bella took a deep breath and marched into the dining room. She should have known that Mother would sense her spying. She always did, no matter how quiet one tried to be. She knew what the snow was thinking as it fell.
“I want to tell you what you know about this mad ambition of Narcissa’s to be blonde.”
Bella blinked. It had been a week since Cissy had spoken to her about that, and she had assumed that her younger sister had given that up. “I don’t know much,” she hedged, but her mother’s eyes were waiting for her, so she continued. “I think Cissy-”
“Bella.”
Bella nodded. For whatever reason, Mother could put up with the nicknames that Bella and Dromeda called each other, but she hated Cissy’s. “Narcissa wants to be chosen by someone. She talked about the roles of blonde witches in fairy tales, and how she wants someone to choose her and marry her. She doesn’t think she’s beautiful, even though of course I tried to tell her that she was.”
“Hmmm.” Mother tapped her teeth with her wand. “This almost certainly comes of the tutor we have teaching her now. I am going to sack him and choose someone else.”
She swept out of the room. Bella watched her go with a frown, but she didn’t agree. If Narcissa was refusing to eat over this, then it came from something else, something that Bella wondered if she would ever be able to articulate.
*
“I want to know a ritual.”
Bella had confronted Cissy when she found her deep in the shelves of the Black library where their parents wouldn’t let her go right now-not until she was older and able to better protect her mind against some of the spells and books she’d find there. Narcissa clenched her fists in front of her, her eyes wide and trembling, with tears on the edges of the lashes. Bella sighed and laid a hand on Narcissa’s shoulder.
“I know you do, dearest,” she murmured. “But you have to remember that the rituals that would turn your hair blonde forever require sacrifices that you wouldn’t want to give up. That’s what the phrase ‘more than blood’ means.”
Narcissa lowered her head. “I don’t want to make them.”
Bella sighed and petted Narcissa’s hair. Privately, she had to admit that she couldn’t see the objection. Narcissa’s hair was fuller and darker than either Bella’s or Dromeda’s, and silky, and flowed so well either in plaits or braids. “I know, dearest. But there’s no ritual that exists like that.”
Narcissa looked up at her with those glossy grey eyes. “If you really loved me, you would perform the ritual for me.”
Bella dropped her hand from Narcissa’s hair and stepped away from her baby sister. “If you loved anyone but yourself, you would know not to ask that,” she retorted, and stomped away as Narcissa’s wail filled the air behind her.
The look in those eyes remained with her all the same, and frightened her. Bella had thought Narcissa was the gentlest of them, just because she was the littlest. But it was no soft or innocent craving that had peered out of those eyes.
Bella was starting to wonder if she knew her sister at all.
*
“I found a ritual that you can help me with. It would dye my hair blonde for a month.”
Bella set aside the book on Transfiguration she’d been reading and concentrated on Narcissa. Her little sister stood next to her table, her hands clenched near her mouth. “All right,” Bella agreed. “It’s not one that requires the sacrifice of more than blood?”
Narcissa shook her head, biting the inside of her cheek. “Just blood. But I need someone who uses a wand to perform it.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “And you know that Mother and Father would say no.”
Bella nodded. Father had been upset when Narcissa informed him that she didn’t like the way her hair looked, saying it was the traditional look of the Black line and someone who hated it perhaps wasn’t his daughter. That had started some kind of old argument between their parents that Bella only knew a little about and didn’t want to listen to.
“Thank you, Bella.” Cissy smiled at her. Her eyes had some of that glint in them that had frightened Bella the other day, but when she thought about it, it was only natural, wasn’t it? Someone of the Black line should have that ambition that drove them beyond all other people and regularly landed them in Slytherin House. “You won’t regret this.”
That last line had the sound of a promise, so Bella kissed her forehead. “Thank you, Narcissa. I’ll help you, since this is something you want so much.”
*
“I call upon the powers of the Black line!”
Bella lifted her wand high as she felt the power spiral lazily around her. She and Cissy were in one of the ritual rooms below the level of the main house, rooms that Mother had only shown her last year when she turned ten. Bella had ensured that Dromeda had a Sleeping Draught in her tea this evening-there was always something useful in treating house-elves well-and that Mother and Father were at a party they had originally been debating attending. One mention of “the status of the House of Black” had sent them rushing off.
Narcissa stood just inside the ring of the ritual circle, her hands clasped and her eyes shining. So far, she had done everything that Bella asked when she asked it.
Now, Bella reached down and lifted a black bowl of salt from beside her. The bowl was carved of obsidian, and Bella carefully slit her left palm with a silver knife and bled into it. “Here is the blood of the elder,” she said.
Narcissa looked at her with those eyes that continued to shine. She reached down and dipped her fingers in the blood and the salt, running them delicately through her hair in the next instant. The salt showed up as white flecks, but so dark was her hair that the blood blended right in.
Bella smiled, ignoring her own uneasiness. That was supposed to happen. She faced the edge of the outer ring and flicked her wand again. The small amounts of blood she had put on the outside of the ritual circle rose up as miniature red cyclones and danced with the power of her will. That was what made this ritual so simple, and the best one that Narcissa had located. It didn’t need a lot of fancy spells.
Bella closed her eyes. The next part was the delicate one, and she formed an image in her mind of how she knew Narcissa wanted to look: the same shining eyes and pale face, but topped by a mass of fair curls. Blonde curls. Golden-ice curls.
“I wish for my sister Narcissa Black to be fair!”
There was a whining sound in her ears, and Bella opened her eyes to see that the blood whirlwinds had risen into the air fully and were traveling towards Narcissa. Bella frowned hard, shaking in concentration. Everything had to be perfect. She had to keep thinking of the way she wanted Narcissa to look, even though it would only last a month, and the ritual circle would keep the power in so that it wouldn’t backlash on her, and-
She saw Narcissa reaching a foot out. Bella opened her mouth to shout a warning. If she didn’t stay perfectly still, there was the chance that the blood magic would affect her in some unplanned way.
But Cissy knew exactly what she was doing, Bella saw. She was erasing the edge of the ritual circle behind her with a foot.
And she was scattering dried plants on the floor in front of her.
Bella recognized them with a shock that was like a knife through the heart. Aconite. Deadly nightshade. Hellebore. The kinds of plants used in the permanent ritual that would cost much more than blood.
Bella looked up, eyes wide. Didn’t Narcissa realize that having blonde hair wasn’t worth sacrificing her sanity over?
And then she saw that Narcissa did realize that. Her foot had carried a trace of salt, which had sealed the ritual circle behind her. And she had been busy working on something else the entire time Bella had been standing there with her eyes shut.
An arrow of salt that led through the poisonous plants straight towards Bella.
The blood whirlwinds hit Narcissa. At the same moment, the power leaped from the salt sealing the ritual circle, imperfectly, straight down the arrow of it and through the poisonous plants and into Bellatrix.
Bella might have been proud if she hadn’t been so busy screaming. It was treachery worthy of a Black.
*
Bellatrix opened her eyes slowly. The walls around her scintillated in shades of black and grey.
She sat up and ran one hand through her hair. She had the feeling that something happened, that perhaps she had fallen and cracked her head, but she truly couldn’t remember.
“Bella? Are you all right?”
Cissy was squatting outside the ritual circle, her eyes wide. She reached out as if she was going to cross the circle, but Bella shook her head and then got up and went to her. She felt a monstrous anger rising up in her, a blood-hunger that hammered against her veins, and for a moment she thought of taking Narcissa by the throat and hurling her into the wall, staining her shining blonde curls with blood.
It was a strange thought to have. Bellatrix frowned in curiosity. Why would she have it? She wanted to hurt other people, but not her sister. Not family. One loved family, and kept them safe.
“What happened, Cissy?” she asked.
Cissy smiled a little, her hand rising as if she was going to touch her hair. She did that a lot, Bella remembered. Sometimes Cissy seemed to think that she wasn’t fair, but that memory was mingled and drifting in Bellatrix’s mind among a lot of other cracked-mirror thoughts, and she knew she couldn’t be sure about it. “You were going to perform a ritual to show off the spells that you learned at Hogwarts. But you used too much power, and you fell and hurt your head.” She paused. “You don’t remember/”
“No. It was a hard hit.”
Cissy nodded. “Well. It was. But everything’s all right now.” She reached out and took hold of Bellatrix’s hand. “You’re my big sister, and you love me.”
Somehow, in the drifting randomness and chaos of the desire to kill, that felt like something Bellatrix could cling to, something that was true.
*
Bellatrix opened her eyes. There was the sound of a furious argument happening downstairs, and that attracted her like a shark to blood. She seized her wand and crept to the top of the stairs.
“How could you do something like this?” Mother was hissing. Bellatrix paused. That was the voice she used to Father when he had caused some scandal in the family. Bellatrix bit back a sigh of disappointment. That wasn’t interesting.
But Cissy’s voice was the one that answered. “I wanted it.”
Silence in response. Bellatrix tensed, trembling, and wondering if she would have to dash down the steps and defend her younger sister.
“So considerations like concern for your sister’s sanity didn’t interfere at all?” Mother finally whispered. Bellatrix tried to imagine what she could be talking about. Cissy respected Andromeda’s sanity more than it deserved, or she would have tried to intervene in their sister’s disrespectful comments before this.
“I wanted it. I wanted to be pretty.”
Silence, and then Mother said flatly, “Go to bed. You disgust me.”
There came the light sound of Cissy’s footsteps on the stairs. Bellatrix thought about trying to shrink out of sight, but then Cissy was in front of her, her eyes bright as she extended her hand. “You heard everything, didn’t you, Bella?”
Bellatrix didn’t see the point in trying to deny it. She put her hand on Cissy’s and murmured, “Do you want me to speak to her?” She knew it wouldn’t be speaking, but Cissy didn’t need to know that.
“No. Just let her think whatever she wants.” Narcissa smiled at her from within the cloud of her shining hair, so unlike the hair of any other Black. “But you’ll always protect me, didn’t you, Bella?”
“Yes,” Bellatrix said softly. She watched her sister go up the corridor to her room, brow slightly furrowed.
She knew something had changed, but not what. And she knew that she would always protect Narcissa, but there was something else struggling to the surface of her mind, something she couldn’t put words around until she got to bed and lay down. Then she knew.
She would always protect Narcissa, but that didn’t mean she would always give her the highest allegiance. She would give her highest allegiance to someone who let her kill and torture, to ease the fire burning inside.
Bellatrix cackled to herself in satisfaction, and went to sleep.
The End.
This entry was originally posted at https://lomonaaeren.dreamwidth.org/1079932.html. Comment wherever you like.
Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.
Pairings: Background Druella Rosier/Cygnus Black, otherwise gen
Content Notes: Angst, violence
Rating: PG-13
Wordcount: 3000
Summary: Bellatrix was born as mad as Narcissa was born fair.
Author’s Notes: This is one of “From Samhain to the Solstice” fics for this year. The title comes from a line used in some versions of “Snow White.”
Tell Me Who Is Fair
Bella found her younger sister despairing of her hair in front of a mirror the day that Narcissa turned seven years old.
“What is it, Cissy?” Bella hugged Narcissa from behind, and Narcissa shut her eyes and turned away as if she couldn’t bear to see their reflections in the mirror together. Bella liked it, though. Cissy had dark hair almost exactly like Bella’s, except that it turned up slightly at the ends. And her eyes were grey, and her skin even paler than Andromeda’s. She looked a proper Black.
“I wish I was blonde.”
Bella paused at the odd words and drew back from Cissy, so that she could see her whole. Cissy stood with her head drooping, her hands braced in front of her as though she could keep herself from falling by holding onto the mirror’s frame. The mirror murmured some consoling words about how Narcissa was perfectly beautiful for a daughter of the House of Black, which Bella could see didn’t console Narcissa at all.
“Why do you want to be blonde?” Bella asked.
“All the stories, Bella, the stories!” Narcissa pulled back and stared at her with despair. “It’s the blonde woman who always wins the day and falls in love and has the handsome husband.”
“Well, yes,” Bella had to concede, because wizarding fairy tales often went that way. “But it’s the dark-haired witch who wins the duels and has the most money and can court any wizard she likes.”
“I don’t want that to do that. I want someone to want to marry me. I want someone to choose me, instead of me choosing him.”
Bella frowned. That didn’t make any sense to her. “You haven’t been at those wines that Mother and Father keep in the dining room for guests, have you, Cissy?” It would be shocking, because Cissy was only seven, but on the other hand, Blacks had done much more shocking things much younger.
“I knew it was no good to talk to you!” Narcissa wiped tears from her eyes. “You don’t care about me. If you did, if you really loved me, you’d help me become fair.”
“You’re prettier than all of us put together,” Bella said firmly.
“I meant blonde, Bella. You have no idea how much I long for it.”
Bella thought about it. Then she said, “Well, you know, there are rituals that can change your hair color. Or spells.”
“I don’t have a wand yet. And those rituals aren’t permanent. I want something else.”
And Bella, because she loved her younger sister, took Cissy in her arms and kissed her cheeks. “Then I will find something for you.”
*
Bella did find something. But when she did, the only thing she could think of was how much of an idiot she would be to use it.
She stared at the book in front of her, feeling her heart rate triple. How stupid would she be, to do what the book advised? It wasn’t the use of the salt or even the blood spells that were a problem. Bella had only gone to Hogwarts for the first time a year before, but she knew she could manage the basic magic this ritual demanded. She had learned most of the necessary spells before even getting a wand of her own.
But it said that someone had to sacrifice “more than blood” for the ritual, so that the hair color change would be permanent and the hair would grow the blonde color as if the person who had it had been born that way.
The book did not specify what that meant, but Bella knew what it meant. There would be a high price. It could be a limb, or someone’s sight, or their sanity. Bella shook her head until her own dark curls bounced around her.
She wanted to help Cissy, but no matter how much her sister wanted to be blonde, she wouldn’t use this ritual. She put the book back on the shelf and went to look for others.
*
“You will eat your dinner, young witch.”
Bella looked cautiously around the corner. Mother was standing over Cissy, her hands on her hips. Cissy, meanwhile, sat at the dining room table, staring at her reflection in the black-topped wood, what there was of it. Bella could only see a pale glimmer, but she supposed there might be more to it.
Cissy shook her head.
“Then you will eat it one way or the other.” Mother swished her wand, and Cissy gasped and folded her arms over her belly. Bella winced. She knew what had just happened. Mother had spelled the food directly into Cissy’s stomach. It meant something usually stayed down, but it also upset Cissy’s stomach more than it did either Bella’s or Dromeda’s.
Cissy sobbed, fastened a hand across her mouth, and then turned and ran for the nearest bathroom.
“Come in, Bella,” Mother said, without taking her narrowed gaze from the path of Cissy’s flight.
Bella took a deep breath and marched into the dining room. She should have known that Mother would sense her spying. She always did, no matter how quiet one tried to be. She knew what the snow was thinking as it fell.
“I want to tell you what you know about this mad ambition of Narcissa’s to be blonde.”
Bella blinked. It had been a week since Cissy had spoken to her about that, and she had assumed that her younger sister had given that up. “I don’t know much,” she hedged, but her mother’s eyes were waiting for her, so she continued. “I think Cissy-”
“Bella.”
Bella nodded. For whatever reason, Mother could put up with the nicknames that Bella and Dromeda called each other, but she hated Cissy’s. “Narcissa wants to be chosen by someone. She talked about the roles of blonde witches in fairy tales, and how she wants someone to choose her and marry her. She doesn’t think she’s beautiful, even though of course I tried to tell her that she was.”
“Hmmm.” Mother tapped her teeth with her wand. “This almost certainly comes of the tutor we have teaching her now. I am going to sack him and choose someone else.”
She swept out of the room. Bella watched her go with a frown, but she didn’t agree. If Narcissa was refusing to eat over this, then it came from something else, something that Bella wondered if she would ever be able to articulate.
*
“I want to know a ritual.”
Bella had confronted Cissy when she found her deep in the shelves of the Black library where their parents wouldn’t let her go right now-not until she was older and able to better protect her mind against some of the spells and books she’d find there. Narcissa clenched her fists in front of her, her eyes wide and trembling, with tears on the edges of the lashes. Bella sighed and laid a hand on Narcissa’s shoulder.
“I know you do, dearest,” she murmured. “But you have to remember that the rituals that would turn your hair blonde forever require sacrifices that you wouldn’t want to give up. That’s what the phrase ‘more than blood’ means.”
Narcissa lowered her head. “I don’t want to make them.”
Bella sighed and petted Narcissa’s hair. Privately, she had to admit that she couldn’t see the objection. Narcissa’s hair was fuller and darker than either Bella’s or Dromeda’s, and silky, and flowed so well either in plaits or braids. “I know, dearest. But there’s no ritual that exists like that.”
Narcissa looked up at her with those glossy grey eyes. “If you really loved me, you would perform the ritual for me.”
Bella dropped her hand from Narcissa’s hair and stepped away from her baby sister. “If you loved anyone but yourself, you would know not to ask that,” she retorted, and stomped away as Narcissa’s wail filled the air behind her.
The look in those eyes remained with her all the same, and frightened her. Bella had thought Narcissa was the gentlest of them, just because she was the littlest. But it was no soft or innocent craving that had peered out of those eyes.
Bella was starting to wonder if she knew her sister at all.
*
“I found a ritual that you can help me with. It would dye my hair blonde for a month.”
Bella set aside the book on Transfiguration she’d been reading and concentrated on Narcissa. Her little sister stood next to her table, her hands clenched near her mouth. “All right,” Bella agreed. “It’s not one that requires the sacrifice of more than blood?”
Narcissa shook her head, biting the inside of her cheek. “Just blood. But I need someone who uses a wand to perform it.” She leaned closer and lowered her voice. “And you know that Mother and Father would say no.”
Bella nodded. Father had been upset when Narcissa informed him that she didn’t like the way her hair looked, saying it was the traditional look of the Black line and someone who hated it perhaps wasn’t his daughter. That had started some kind of old argument between their parents that Bella only knew a little about and didn’t want to listen to.
“Thank you, Bella.” Cissy smiled at her. Her eyes had some of that glint in them that had frightened Bella the other day, but when she thought about it, it was only natural, wasn’t it? Someone of the Black line should have that ambition that drove them beyond all other people and regularly landed them in Slytherin House. “You won’t regret this.”
That last line had the sound of a promise, so Bella kissed her forehead. “Thank you, Narcissa. I’ll help you, since this is something you want so much.”
*
“I call upon the powers of the Black line!”
Bella lifted her wand high as she felt the power spiral lazily around her. She and Cissy were in one of the ritual rooms below the level of the main house, rooms that Mother had only shown her last year when she turned ten. Bella had ensured that Dromeda had a Sleeping Draught in her tea this evening-there was always something useful in treating house-elves well-and that Mother and Father were at a party they had originally been debating attending. One mention of “the status of the House of Black” had sent them rushing off.
Narcissa stood just inside the ring of the ritual circle, her hands clasped and her eyes shining. So far, she had done everything that Bella asked when she asked it.
Now, Bella reached down and lifted a black bowl of salt from beside her. The bowl was carved of obsidian, and Bella carefully slit her left palm with a silver knife and bled into it. “Here is the blood of the elder,” she said.
Narcissa looked at her with those eyes that continued to shine. She reached down and dipped her fingers in the blood and the salt, running them delicately through her hair in the next instant. The salt showed up as white flecks, but so dark was her hair that the blood blended right in.
Bella smiled, ignoring her own uneasiness. That was supposed to happen. She faced the edge of the outer ring and flicked her wand again. The small amounts of blood she had put on the outside of the ritual circle rose up as miniature red cyclones and danced with the power of her will. That was what made this ritual so simple, and the best one that Narcissa had located. It didn’t need a lot of fancy spells.
Bella closed her eyes. The next part was the delicate one, and she formed an image in her mind of how she knew Narcissa wanted to look: the same shining eyes and pale face, but topped by a mass of fair curls. Blonde curls. Golden-ice curls.
“I wish for my sister Narcissa Black to be fair!”
There was a whining sound in her ears, and Bella opened her eyes to see that the blood whirlwinds had risen into the air fully and were traveling towards Narcissa. Bella frowned hard, shaking in concentration. Everything had to be perfect. She had to keep thinking of the way she wanted Narcissa to look, even though it would only last a month, and the ritual circle would keep the power in so that it wouldn’t backlash on her, and-
She saw Narcissa reaching a foot out. Bella opened her mouth to shout a warning. If she didn’t stay perfectly still, there was the chance that the blood magic would affect her in some unplanned way.
But Cissy knew exactly what she was doing, Bella saw. She was erasing the edge of the ritual circle behind her with a foot.
And she was scattering dried plants on the floor in front of her.
Bella recognized them with a shock that was like a knife through the heart. Aconite. Deadly nightshade. Hellebore. The kinds of plants used in the permanent ritual that would cost much more than blood.
Bella looked up, eyes wide. Didn’t Narcissa realize that having blonde hair wasn’t worth sacrificing her sanity over?
And then she saw that Narcissa did realize that. Her foot had carried a trace of salt, which had sealed the ritual circle behind her. And she had been busy working on something else the entire time Bella had been standing there with her eyes shut.
An arrow of salt that led through the poisonous plants straight towards Bella.
The blood whirlwinds hit Narcissa. At the same moment, the power leaped from the salt sealing the ritual circle, imperfectly, straight down the arrow of it and through the poisonous plants and into Bellatrix.
Bella might have been proud if she hadn’t been so busy screaming. It was treachery worthy of a Black.
*
Bellatrix opened her eyes slowly. The walls around her scintillated in shades of black and grey.
She sat up and ran one hand through her hair. She had the feeling that something happened, that perhaps she had fallen and cracked her head, but she truly couldn’t remember.
“Bella? Are you all right?”
Cissy was squatting outside the ritual circle, her eyes wide. She reached out as if she was going to cross the circle, but Bella shook her head and then got up and went to her. She felt a monstrous anger rising up in her, a blood-hunger that hammered against her veins, and for a moment she thought of taking Narcissa by the throat and hurling her into the wall, staining her shining blonde curls with blood.
It was a strange thought to have. Bellatrix frowned in curiosity. Why would she have it? She wanted to hurt other people, but not her sister. Not family. One loved family, and kept them safe.
“What happened, Cissy?” she asked.
Cissy smiled a little, her hand rising as if she was going to touch her hair. She did that a lot, Bella remembered. Sometimes Cissy seemed to think that she wasn’t fair, but that memory was mingled and drifting in Bellatrix’s mind among a lot of other cracked-mirror thoughts, and she knew she couldn’t be sure about it. “You were going to perform a ritual to show off the spells that you learned at Hogwarts. But you used too much power, and you fell and hurt your head.” She paused. “You don’t remember/”
“No. It was a hard hit.”
Cissy nodded. “Well. It was. But everything’s all right now.” She reached out and took hold of Bellatrix’s hand. “You’re my big sister, and you love me.”
Somehow, in the drifting randomness and chaos of the desire to kill, that felt like something Bellatrix could cling to, something that was true.
*
Bellatrix opened her eyes. There was the sound of a furious argument happening downstairs, and that attracted her like a shark to blood. She seized her wand and crept to the top of the stairs.
“How could you do something like this?” Mother was hissing. Bellatrix paused. That was the voice she used to Father when he had caused some scandal in the family. Bellatrix bit back a sigh of disappointment. That wasn’t interesting.
But Cissy’s voice was the one that answered. “I wanted it.”
Silence in response. Bellatrix tensed, trembling, and wondering if she would have to dash down the steps and defend her younger sister.
“So considerations like concern for your sister’s sanity didn’t interfere at all?” Mother finally whispered. Bellatrix tried to imagine what she could be talking about. Cissy respected Andromeda’s sanity more than it deserved, or she would have tried to intervene in their sister’s disrespectful comments before this.
“I wanted it. I wanted to be pretty.”
Silence, and then Mother said flatly, “Go to bed. You disgust me.”
There came the light sound of Cissy’s footsteps on the stairs. Bellatrix thought about trying to shrink out of sight, but then Cissy was in front of her, her eyes bright as she extended her hand. “You heard everything, didn’t you, Bella?”
Bellatrix didn’t see the point in trying to deny it. She put her hand on Cissy’s and murmured, “Do you want me to speak to her?” She knew it wouldn’t be speaking, but Cissy didn’t need to know that.
“No. Just let her think whatever she wants.” Narcissa smiled at her from within the cloud of her shining hair, so unlike the hair of any other Black. “But you’ll always protect me, didn’t you, Bella?”
“Yes,” Bellatrix said softly. She watched her sister go up the corridor to her room, brow slightly furrowed.
She knew something had changed, but not what. And she knew that she would always protect Narcissa, but there was something else struggling to the surface of her mind, something she couldn’t put words around until she got to bed and lay down. Then she knew.
She would always protect Narcissa, but that didn’t mean she would always give her the highest allegiance. She would give her highest allegiance to someone who let her kill and torture, to ease the fire burning inside.
Bellatrix cackled to herself in satisfaction, and went to sleep.
The End.
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