Disclaimer: So not mine.
A/N: I have a bit of an obsession with the Black women, so here's my take on their loves. So far I have four planned: Bellatrix, Narcissa, Andromeda, and Nymphadora (Tonks!), and a different color to go with each. One more thing: this is my first attempt at a chaptered fic, and I have a commitment problem, so reviews will be my inspiration to get this finished. (And yes, that is my desperate plea for reviews.) I hope you like it!
Her life was full of black. It was her hair, her eyes, her clothes (with green and silver), her name. She was proud of it, as she'd been taught to be. Bellatrix Black was a proud name, and Bellatrix Black was a proud women. She was born Black, and she loved it, and she vowed she would remain so . . .
. . . until the day she married Rodolphus Lestrange. Suddenly, Black was second to Lestrange, and she hated it. She hated him for it, for taking herself from her. Bellatrix had always identified herself as Black, and she didn't know how to be Not Black, and she hated her husband for not being Black. She was barely out of school when she married him, a good Pureblood Slytherin boy (man, she supposes, but really boy) whom her parents had arranged for her. She didn't have to marry him, not really; even the Purebloods, who clung so fervently to the old ways, had given that practice up years before. But she didn't see an alternative: there was no reason not to marry him, other than the fact that he wasn't Black, and she knew she wouldn't love anyone. She wasn't the loving kind; she doesn't know when she learned that, but it's always seemed a part of her, and she gave up long ago on any kind of hope she might once have had for love.
So on her wedding day, she wore a gown of silver that she thought made her look sick (and what's more, Narcissa and even Andromeda did, too) but on which her mother insisted. She wore her magnificently Black black hair down around her shoulders, the last bit of enjoyment she could pull from being Black, and to show everyone who she truly was. She did not smile, but neither did her groom. It was a very Black wedding.
A year later, she drifted into a group of her old classmates, older Slytherins whom she'd known (and who had respected her), and those even older whom she had not known before. They did not call her Lestrange. They did not call her Black, but they did not call her Lestrange. They called her Bellatrix, and there was a certain ring in their voices when they did. Her classmates were afraid of her, in that lovely cowering groveling way people fear those from whom they want something. The others respected her, for she had the ancient Black power and the Black hair and the Black eyes and she terrified those around her. (She thought that the fact that she was slowly going mad might have something to do with it, but perhaps they did not know.) And it was here that she fell in love.
It was silly, really. Ridiculous. Ironic. That she should love Him, who was even more incapable of love than she was. She knew He could not love her, but she loved Him anyway, and He rewarded that. He gave her power, and she devoured it, and she drove herself ever closer to Him. Rodolphus didn't care (if he even knew), except in the slinking jealous fearful way the others had as well. But she continued to feed off His power, and the more she fed the more she loved, and the more she loved the more He told. She was only nineteen when she joined, twenty when she fell in love, and twenty-one when He took her into His confidence. She was His second-in-command (as much as a twenty-one year old girl in love with Him could be), and He knew He could trust her, because He knew her. He knew that the more He told her, the less she'd want to betray Him, and that was, perhaps, His own sort of coldly calculating love. And she took whatever she could get, because she was in love.
She knew that it was doomed, would be even if she were not married (even though her marriage was a joke and a lie), because of Him. He could not love her, would not love her, could not, would not even try. And her love was Black, as she was Black, as her name and her life had always been Black. And she loved the Blackness.
So, there you have it: Bellatrix Black Lestrange. Next up: Narcissa Black Malfoy.