A/N: Bellatrix vows never to let her heart be broken again.

Submission for:

There's a First Time for Everything Challenge: Bellatrix Black. First heartbreak.

Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter.

She had thought he meant them, all those words he had whispered into her ear when they met atop the Astronomy Tower after hours, those written in his elegant script across the dozens of letters he had sent to her. She was his world, his everything, the one he would choose above all others. She had let him in, left her heart open for him, began to think that in another life, they would get married and grow old together.

He had said he was in the library, studying for their OWLs. He didn't need her help, didn't want to bother her, didn't want to worry her beautiful mind. So why did she find him snogging another girl in the broom closet on the second floor?

"Bellatrix, wait," he cries when she steps away from the open door, stumbling into the hallway with the floozy still draped around his neck. She looks back, though she shouldn't have. She should have kept running, she should have been stronger, but she looked back.

"This isn't what it looks like," he says, his brown hair mussed as if nails had raked across his scalp, his lips swollen and bruised. She had seen it before, done it often enough, and the perpetrator was standing right there. He still thought her a fool if he hoped she believed him now.

She doesn't want to hear any more of his lies. She turns away and continues down the corridors, around the corners and shadows until she finds herself outside beneath the night sky, her body shaking with ugly sobs as she cries into her hands. The air is cool against her exposed skin, causing her to shiver but she doesn't care. Any feeling is better than the piercing knife through her heart.

Eventually when the crying stops and the ache within her chest dulls, she lifts her eyes and stares out across the dark waters. A black feeling begins to fester in her heart to numb the pain. She vows that night that Bellatrix Black would never have her heart broken again.