Authors Notes: All characters herein are intellectual property of JK Rowling, and Warner Brothers INC. I do not own any of them whatsoever. This is a fan fiction, inspired by a split-second of the Order of the Phoenix movie, has dates of birth changed to accommodate the flow of the story. Otherwise, I have tried my hardest to make things as accurate as possible. Enjoy. :

I Solemnly Swear.

Chapter One. The Caretaker's House

The pleasant darkness of the night was devouring the landscape of a foreboding village graveyard near Little Hangleton. A scant few skeletal trees did not move, though a balmy early-summer breeze blew gently through the tops and twigs. Everything was calm and quiet. The graveyard could have been mistaken for being ancient, though the truth was that the old caretaker's house was abandoned and the grounds of the graveyard were left to grow and erode unchecked. The gravestones of varying age stood, though some more so leaned, in the long, swaying grass, cracked and some missing large chunks, some profanely vandalized by village teenagers and children, and newer ones which stood the most resilient.

One grave, in particular, was marked by a terrible monolith: one of death itself, winged and dark, with the name "Tom Riddle" emblazed upon the stone and perfect base. This grave alone stood unscathed by time, the teens of the town and the lack thereof care. When the people of the town passed, they shuddered, wondering why in heaven's name someone would want that terrible thing to be anywhere near themselves, their friends, or relatives. Not far away from the monolithic monument to one Tom Riddle, stood the old and decrepit caretaker's house, or shack, really, barely withstanding the trials put against the obviously stronger and much more resilient tombstones of the village. Disturbingly long tendrils of grass repeatedly swayed against the sides of the building near where the deep green and veined ivy grew over the door which was slightly ajar, sealing off the opening in a web like tangled mass of fibrous vines and leaves.

Inside the derelict grounds home, the floors were covered in filth and animal droppings, and the place stank of cat urine. There were only four rooms: The bathroom, with a cracked toilet that was eternally out of order and unused, had a nearly-broken mirror with delicate hairline cracks throughout it, giving it the appearance of crazing lines in old and valuable chinaware. The kitchen doubled as a dining room, with an antiquated wood burning stove made of the blackest and dirtiest cast iron anyone had ever seen. The small card table that had once sufficed as a dining table was broken in half, and lay haphazardly discarded against several large dark-loving plants, poking their way through the makeshift floorboards that strangely resembled and had the thickness of old, wet cardboard. A shattered base-metal fold-up chair stood upright, with an eerie look as ivy of a black looking color curled elegantly around the legs and back, stopping at an abruptness where they joined and formed a solidly tangled rope of plant that ended in a vicious looking curve in the dank space above it. The room adjacent to it was a minute bedroom. There was a broken candelabra-esque light set against the wall, with several bulbs missing, and a few more smashed upon the ground under it. Only one of the small flame-shaped lights remained, and even then its filament had long since been burned up. The mattress on the floor on the opposite wall had neither frame nor headboard, and lay matted and diseased looking on the poorly made floor. It had several large rips in it, unnaturally cleanly made, and it was stained by something both black and crimson red. Huge bundles of mattress stuffing lay strewn throughout the entire house, and what used to be a goose down pillow was now just an awkward arrangement of feathers covered in a dingy grey sheet near a small, boarded up window.

The final room in the derelict old home was simply a sitting room, where a nine-inch black-and-white television stood on a moldering wooden box, covered in fuzzy growths of every nature and fungus. The television itself was unrecoverable, because the fungus had become like glue to the bottom of it. The screen looked as if a large baseball had been thrown through it, and shards of the glass stood outside the screen, even across the room. There was a beautiful loveseat on the wall near the television, which was ripped and shredded just as the mattress had been. It's once beautiful crimson color was now fading to a dull red, and gold threads that once ran through it now plagued it by glittering all too brightly in the damp and dark home. Across from the threadbare loveseat were a fireplace and a cracked hearth, which was made of either dusty stones of an unidentifiable nature or ones too insignificant to even think of. It was lumpy and nonfunctioning, as the chimney was blocked by a year's worth of ivy, twigs and leaves from the trees in the graveyard. The entire house was silent and unrelenting, as if any sign of life inside it had been long since forgotten. Nothing moved inside the derelict home, and yet nothing was still. Cracks seemed to grow larger around the base of the fireplace, and the fungus on the wooden box seemed to grow at an unnaturally quick pace. The stuffing of the afflicted couch and diseased mattress seemed to pour out of it, slowly, barely noticeably, and the crazing lined throughout the mirror in the broken-down bathroom grew like ice over a dirty, tiny pond.

Inside the stony panels of the archaic fireplace, a curious phenomenon took place, one that had not occurred since the night the old caretaker of the graveyard had died. A chilling fire grew, but from what tinder none knew, in the centre of the fireplace. The cold flame grew slowly, licking its way across the bottom of the furnace, and then rising on its haunches like some malicious animal, ready to strike. It grew madly and malevolently, throughout the fireplace until at last it was teeming with tendrils of serpentine green flame, pouring and screaming onto the floor and engulfing the hearth in its cold warmth. A stricken, gaunt face slowly materialized in the viridian fire.

Soon, an emaciated female body, a person, by some horrible stretch of physics and the laws of mass, spun hazardously out of the serpentine fire and sprawled, staring vacantly upwards, in the centre of the dilapidated and molding floor of the decrepit sitting room.

Bellatrix Lestrange sat up. Her hair was positively a mess of fantastically piled dark and dusty curls that had once contained the beauty and elegance her pureblood family was so well endowed with, and her scrawny figure was heavily cloaked in forest-green velvet dressing robes. She opened her fearful, flashing silver searching eyes and looked wildly around her. The sharpness of her features and bleakness of her faded eyes, from lack of nutrition and sunlight, gave her the appearance of a something like a mad-eyed wolf, starved by the winter. She hadn't noticed before, when everything had happened, but she was shaking, trembling, and badly at that. She brought her slender fingered nimble hands to her pallid face and watched them tremble in both horror and surprise. The shocking events that had occurred that inevitable night were ones that would haunt her darkest moments and deepest nightmares forever, forever. She barely noticed the rivers of tears streaming down her face until she laughed, bitterly and madly, and tasted an awful combination of salt, sweat, and blood. She sobbed, guilt-stricken and hopelessly, as every minute detail of the night came flooding into her mind, rendering her nearly helpless. She made a strong and strangled attempt to swallow everything, but only succeeded in making herself choke and sob once again. A strangled, horrified noise escaped her scarlet, elegantly-lipped mouth, one that echoed tragedy and a terrible loss.

Bellatrix Lestrange's self-consolation that this was exactly what she promised was in vain. Echoes kept running through her mind, his voice, racing and as she tried to catch onto them to hear, they simply slipped away. Memories came flooding into the forefront of her brain in a heartbreaking jumble she could not sort through. Bellatrix screamed tragically in frustration and stood, her once becoming robes flapping at her feet. She thrashed about the room, tearing at her hair and her pale and emaciated flesh.

"NO!" she screamed, and fell to her smooth and bony knees. "No! I promised you, I know I did, but I never… He never…" She cried, talking to herself from the insanity of it all.

She tried hard to find something, deep inside her racing mind by sifting through her heartbeat. Bellatrix rose, stumbling, and smashed her way to the wall where the ancient fungus-covered box stood with the old, broken, black-and-white television sat. She whipped out her elegant black wand and flicked the television, effortlessly, into the wall, after it made an odd squelching noise from where the fungus had been ripped from the bottom. It made a terrible smashing noise. Sparks flew and shards of glass seared into her skin and hair when she screamed something that sounded like a sob and Reducto. The fungus-covered wooden box seemed to swell and then exploded, bits and slivers of the ancient wood flying everywhere in a terrific burst. Setting lower than the cardboard like floorboards, in a magically-cut out hollow in the ground was a large, deep basin, filled with what looked like liquid silver. Bellatrix quivered a bit as she slunk low to her knees and on her hands and leaned close to the basin. She smiled her first sincere smile since that night, revealing a perfect row of sharp, white teeth, and took her wand and pressed it deep into her temple. She felt stirring, deep in her mind. Her wand was like a new, catching onto a singular something, echoing through her as she isolated it with difficulty. She closed her eyes, and pulled her wand away from her temple and near the basin. A cold, silvery substance, neither gas nor liquid was almost resonating, was trailing from the tip of her beautiful wand. It wove around itself as Bellatrix brought it near the liquid silver like stuff that filled the basin, and then stirred itself into the mixture. Bellatrix felt her focus return slightly and her mind clear a fragment of a tiny bit.

Hours passed, and the once beautiful Bellatrix Lestrange was still depositing her memories into the Pensive, hidden beneath a box in the deceased caretaker's home in the graveyard in which her master's muggle father was buried.

The sun rose gently after several, treacherous hours, and unfolded like a brilliant rose against the pale pink morning sky. At this, Bellatrix paused the process of placing her most dear and precious memories in the Pensive, and rose to her feet, stumbling from a lack of movement. She went towards the door to the outside, and reduced and transfigured the ivy covering the space between the door and the wall into nothing more than the silvery silken threads of a spider and pushed it open. The beautiful clean scented air hit her full force, forcing her senses to wake, after what seemed an eternity of enslavement in Azkaban and servitude to her master. Sweet, golden rays of sunlight hit her skin, warming it and calming her nerves. The sky struck her dead silent, and she gazed longingly at the sun's beaming colors cast on the delicate clouds of the sky around her. She looked across the overgrown graveyard grounds. The lengthy grass no longer looked as malevolent and gnarled as it did in the night. The gravestones seemed welcoming and unthreatening. Even the dark monolith of death by night looked more like a pleasant angel in the golden and rose colored light. A movement in the grass caused Bellatrix to focus. She paused, stricken, at a faraway dog, running in the long grass of the grounds in enormous bounds. It was large and nearly bearlike, shaggy and raven-black, with its tongue handing out of the side of its mouth. Its mate, a slender, elegant looking dog ran near it, with erect ears covered in a mottled deep grey, and it's slender, but beautiful black and grey body covered in thick, wavy, airy fur that made it look like an odd sort of crazed wolf. Both dogs were romping happily, playfully across the grounds, stopping only to fall into the grass and let loose a happy bark, and nuzzle each other gently. Bellatrix let a shallow breath escape her, and smiled painfully as her bitter tears came once again. She returned, regretting at once what she had seen, to the Pensive, where she dutifully continued depositing her memories of the one dodgy dog, Sirius Black.