Vonne: Hello! This Bellatrix one-shot was done for the lovely Inkfire. Rated M for sex, sex, and, a little bit more sex. In my defense, it sort of came with the Bellamort package deal. I'm sorry that it's all so damn disturbing, but I sincerely hope you like it, nonetheless. Don't hesitate to leave me your thoughts!

The Devil's Daughter
"What a dark father to dwell in me."

I.

When they first saw the creature, it was 60 feet in the air and dripping something sticky.

It took ten grown men to retrieve it and, under the watchful eye of the entire bloody neighborhood, a common garden rabbit lie gutted in its place. But 'mauled', perhaps, was the more proper way to put it. Tiny and matted, the small, brown lapin stared wide-eyed in horror, seeing without seeing. There was a thick, unfathomable rope tied tightly around its neck and its stomach was sliced right down to the middle, exposed. Every single inch of it.

At first they blamed the night. Such atrocities were not supposed to happen in the likes of sleepy settings that rested quietly in the suburbs; and, in the darkness, they guessed, the demons had come out to play. Big, monstrous ones, some foretold. Horned figures with nine-inch nails, blood-thirsty fangs, and great yellow eyes. "A woman," said Abigail Oswald, who swore up and down that she'd seen a cloaked banshee in the bushes by the street lights. So husbands and housewives peered petulantly from their curtains to try and catch the killer in the act while, publicly, they remained adamant that such things could not reach them in the confines of their own homes.

And perhaps it had been a bit unexpected when the next two dozen rabbits wound up headless on the steps of every home owner within a quarter mile of the first. Anyway. Tenants moved out. The real estate market skyrocketed. Bunnies lost their limbs and summer thus sunk slowly beyond the hillside.

Then, in the summer of 1969, the entire spectacle stopped. Rather, love ran free and feet grazed gallantly to the great, glowing moon. It seemed, for the time being, that the tormented terrence had finally been put to rest. Still. The following year, a War broke out, an angry man fell, and the Muggles of St. Albans stayed peacefully none the wiser. When legend spread in all the months after and a culprit had still not been identified, they guessed for their own assuagement, that it must have been the doing of the Devil's daughter.

It hadn't been, but Bellatrix Lestrange thought she much liked the comparison.

II.

Everything was black and everything was gray. Everything was slate-like with stoney conviction, sculpted, engraved, and particular. She'd grown into a woman then, of forty-something, and she hadn't been the daughter of the Devil, but instead his Eater. Still. Bellatrix Lestrange knew not of the moments in which he would call to her, but instead of the bated breaths she held in anticipation of his presence. Lord Voldemort. "Lucifer," she thought, "incarnate."

He made Bellatrix's hares look sloppy like child's play, but she retained her envy and filled it back up with faithful adoration. Enthralled, she'd basked at the likes of the game that he'd dropped at her doorstep- eyes wide, lips parted, tongues out. In their soullessness they were beautiful and she'd heard the murmurs of their death through the whistles of the wind that whirled all around her. The utterances had said, "we are the hollow; we are the stuffed," and they were the sacrifices of the man that would make the world more pure and rich with blood. Still.

His name was Tom Marvolo Riddle.

When he walked it was as if the floorboards beneath him were littered with the likes of every skull he had not already crushed. When he talked, his voice carried the weight of wisdom that lasted long beyond his very years. He was strong, and he was powerful, and he was present. He'd organized a crowd of many and, from the shadows of the world they flocked to him in curious obedience to follow the teachings of his tongue.

When she first met Him, He was sitting on a bench in the park in the moonlight and she'd slipped through the brush, barefoot with a bunny.

She was young, too, torn between the stages of adolescent rebellion and an unnatural tendency to kill small animals; a deer in the bloody headlights except there'd been no highway, there'd been no driver, and there'd been no road. Yet He made not an effort to move at all. Rather, with the flick of the iris He watched, silent and simple in the still of the strangeness.

He was handsome like her father or the pictures, even, of the photo-brushed men in the magazines that her silly sister, Andromeda, secretly loved. Under the street lamps He wore a suit and His hands were folded in His lap with all the patience of a divinity. Yet, on the other end of the pavement, she couldn't move, couldn't even breathe; for, for the first time in her life, Bellatrix Lestrange felt every single one of the fifteen years that she'd been- weird, awkward, and abnormal. It crashed chaotically with all the strange looks that the children at school gave her, fumbled forcefully with that annoying Albus Dumbledore and the way he'd suspected the things of her that she hadn't yet accomplished.

"Such a fine evening it is," The Dark Lord had said to her, and His voice was an ice block that slid slipperily down her spine- all seriousness intermixed with a smile that she found to be both breathlessly beautiful and bewitchingly beastly. "Is it not?"

She was a girl, then, in that sublime second and stood bare between the line of immaturity and adoration, caught up with the desire to curl carefully into His lap or allow His all-consuming analysis to persist. But still she did neither- or, at least, not intentionally- for the calm in his figure feigned fawningly in her feet and she shifted them, lightly, to agree. Yes, the night was incredible.

Bellatrix didn't utter a word, so the marvelous man did all the talking for her. "I can show you," He breathed, "a game far greater than rabbits." And He did.

Then everything was wonderful and everything was good. She loved him more than life and loved him more than death. Behind every single flash of every single green lit bloodbath, Bellatrix Lestrange surged in the ways of his enchantment. Entrapped, she knew, within the likes of his rotting, rusted, fingers.

Though, everything, everything, dwindled down to the specifics- to the longing looks she'd so often given him beneath the light of the Luna and the spectators that surrounded His figure. So she'd listened and waited, patient behind the mask of what was a calm that she never actually felt; certain of the desire that resided foreignly in the vines of her veins. And it was not a schoolgirl crush and it was not an incessant interest. Rather, it was an infatuation that intwined within her innards like that of a tapeworm; for it ate from her very meals and feasted from the contents of her gut. It left her lying upon the mattress of her cot to stare at the ceiling above in the nighttime where, in the blackness, it contorted the shadows into shapes of His image, molding each unidentified line into that of His carefully cloaked figure.

Anyway. It excused nothing except the likes of her lust- quite obvious behind the thump thump thump of her ever pounding pulse. It'd been the surge of electricity she'd been longing for, aching for; for if Voldemort truly was the Devil, then Bellatrix Lestrange was graciously his humble servant.

He'd had her before she'd even given herself up. Possessed her before she was really anyone's to give away. And it didn't matter that she was somebody else's wife, because she thought, more than anything, that she was His- Voldemort's, who existed in every waking pore of her being and breathed through the very lungs of her sleek and slender frame. So when He called her in the night from her chambers to lead her to the flash of the fireplace, she'd known that perhaps it hadn't been love, but it had been something nonetheless.

Still. To His hand she'd offered her arm, while to her flesh He'd given her his Mark. And when the moon rose rampantly before the great, glowing sun, there, on the slate of her previously perfect canvas, rest a lovely little skull- permanently in the place of her heart.

III.

When Bellatrix thought of her husband, she thought of the man that he wasn't, and the man that he was, all with a surge of pity and petulance that made her eyes itch and her nails break. His name was Rodolphus Lestrange, and he was weak. Weak like a rabbit, weak like a human, and weak like a man. Anyway.

He couldn't command attention with a flash of his teeth or carry his voice across a room filled with people. Rather, Rodolphus' useful aspects stretched to the limits of being both the bane of Bellatrix's existence and the key to her social status. She could sense every emotion that oozed from his skin from a distance, could pinpoint each affliction from the back of her peripheral vision. Nonetheless, it was common, still, for her to relish in all the wonderful ways that she could break him. Because he was easy- too easy- and she could feel the pain from his posture as he stiffened, frozen with every sway of her hips and purse of her pout.

When she watched him, she watched him with gentle affection, her eyelids half hidden beneath the thick dusting of her long, spider lashes. They'd spun webs of trickery like strong, ghostly chains, and there'd been a smile on her lips that stayed present at the knowledge of what power she had over him. It was cruel the way that she looked at him, and cruel the way she was; but the world was cruel, and Bellatrix Lestrange thought it was only in fair game to be cruel, as well. Still. Her smile was painted with crimson colored lips that bit and tore and deceived him with kisses. Her eyes, seductive and dangerous, could play innocent as easily as they could play fair. The skills her hands possessed- the way they could cradle and caress- matched merrily in the barrier of her nail polish, shielded from all the dirt and the grime that rested there.

And her laugh was sometimes playful, like a giggle or a mock, but she could twist and bend and fracture it to whichever way she so desired. For he fell in deep, too, that Rodolphus. Like a board or a rock or a plank. He wanted her so badly that it hurt- not Bellatrix, of course, but his health, and his sanity, and all the little bits and pieces that came along with it.

They were married on a Thursday, in the evening, and it'd been raining. In her absolutely disbelief, Bellatrix Lestrange solidified her pureblood heritage with the likes of a pretty little ring and a passionate kiss on the mouth that she didn't bother returning. Still. When she fucked him, she did so in the dark.

It wasn't adoration, but she mused in the ways that she could shape him without light, surrounding him with the wave of her skirts and the strength of her thighs. Then she smoothed out the age lines on his face and erased the extra bulk of his waist; for Rodolphus became Riddle and for the first time in her life, Bellatrix Lestrange knew the likes of true purpose.

And in the night, she crawled over his body to give him exactly what he wanted- a tiny glisten of hope, perhaps, for the foolish creature he'd made of himself.

He didn't seem to mind it much during the moments that she pressed her full lips to his, biting and lashing and devouring him. Rather, he whispered back words of what he thought had possibly been sweet, saying, "God, you're beautiful," as if Bellatrix were some sort of milkmaid that thrived on silly little things like the incessant proclamations of his very own weakness.

She didn't love him, but he sure loved her, and the fact made her reel with the pleasure of being able to hold him, not in her arms, but instead in the palm of her dainty little hand. Anyway. When Rodolphus said her name between bursts of his own ecstasy, Bellatrix let her fingers grip greedily into the likes of his very flesh so hard that she'd once almost strangled him; simply, she thought, to see the light in his eyes when he supposed, for a second, that she'd set out to kill him.

He whimpered often in tiny bouts of pain, but he permitted the slip of her fingers, only really noticing when the sharp of her nails grazed close against his neck. And God, he was just so weak, for she could almost literally see his long, lengthy ears, his short, squashed up nose, and his round, fluffy tail. And so her hold on his outline tightened. Her smile in the darkness broadened. When his toes curled and his pelvis lifted, Bellatrix properly pressed her hand to the front of his ever gaping mouth and silenced his affection in an instant.

So panicked, petrified grunts sounded out into the darkness. Widened and tearful eyes welled up next. Rodolphus tensed underneath her, but Bealltrix leaned down to his ear and considered, quite quickly, how nice it might feel to tie a rope around his shoulders and display him upon a telephone wire in the nearest Muggle housing complex she may so come across. Anyway. In her moment of strength, Bellatrix really only relished for men in dark robes with the likes of giant green snakes and narrow white eyes. She thought of the ways in which they'd fallen and the ways in which they'd risen, too. For through Hell, He'd been, and back; but she had never really left His side and, despite everything, she'd have liked Him to know that Rodolphus Lestrange, he made not a difference in anything.

Still. When Rodolphus came, it was riddled with exhausted integrity. He breathed harshly at the release of her hand and when Bellatrix stood to make her exit, he said nothing to the image of her fleeting, flowing figure. Nor did he in the early morning after, or in the red-orange light of the dawn that followed. Rather, when the sun sank finally beyond the veil of the mountains that blanketed them, he crawled cautiously to her cot in the midnight and placed a needy, nuzzling kiss there, on the stretch of her cold, comfortless cheek.

IV.

Love was blind and love was stupid. Love was petty and irrelevant.

Love did nothing to shape the twist of her fate or mold the outcome of her trouble; for it sat incessantly upon her shoulders like a weight that was annoying, and persisting, and heavy. Still.

As Bellatrix stood over the writhing wreck of her latest formless face, she chose not to consider the silly emotion whatsoever. Rather, in the chaos of the evening she listened to the sound of their screams that ran hoarse in the hallway, powerless and all the more pleasant. And she basked, then, in the fire of the mantle place that warmed and welcomed her; for she was calm, and content, and collected in the course of her kill.

"P-Please!" the bloody lump beckoned.

It was sometime in the night when their throat had already run coarse and their hands had turned shaky with the lack of strength needed to hold themselves upright. "P-Please... d-don't..." as if she'd perhaps take them up on the offer.

And funny (wasn't it?) how Bellatrix liked it most when they begged. It awoke her body in ways that she couldn't describe so she bent low to survey the panic behind the flick of their ever leaking pupils to wonder, "What, of all things, gave them the impression that they were special?"

It made sense, nevetheless, how every itty-bitty thing started with just the right amount of desperation- the type that flowed fantastically from their figures and bled in crimson towards her sister's favorite granite. Some weren't pretty, others weren't wealthy, and most weren't even pureblood. Yet every single one of them asked her to spare them the lives that she thought, in reality, weren't even worth living.

Still. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust- wasn't that it? In the times that they finally stopped begging, Bellatrix Lestrange felt content with the notion that they'd perhaps sensed their demise some time ago."Ah," breathed her inner conscious, "sweet serenity." She found it most in the wails and the gurgles that slid from the walls and stained at the carpets to make images that smiled and sparkled and remained there forever.

Bam. Somewhere in the back, a loud thud dared to break her concentration. When a pale, blond head shone out over the shadows of the curtains and the unconscious body of Draco Malfoy was hoisted up to the moonlight, a low, keen gurgle jetted out from the bulge of Bellatrix's lips. "Leave him," she commanded and they did; two burley arms released the boy and he fumbled, face first, to the ground beneath her feet- not dead, of course, but sure as hell not living.

At least, not in the way that Bellatrix Lestrange had been living; for she had lived in the life of the Lord that thrived in her body and spoke in her bones. In his absence, she had heard Him- had felt Him- and He leaned over her shoulder and nudged His chin at the nape of her neck to breathe, barely, below the end of her earlobe. He whispered, "How greatly I admire your bloodlust, Miss Lestrange," and upon the end of her wand, the witch's grip tightened. "Reminds me of someone I know quite well."

Then her head felt heavy and knees grew weak. The fire in the mantle drew in on itself and the cluster of the demons behind her fell small in the blackness. "Who's that?" asked Bellatrix.

And the answer came smooth, like the call of the wind and his mouth against her jawline. "Myself."

Thus, under the poignant paste of atmosphere she breathed, careful and cautious unlike always, for the lining of her core was unfathomable then and she knew not of the moments she stood to break, but instead of every capricious kiss that the moonlight reflected to her. Wave-like with illusion, each sideways stroke moved her body not in ease, but eagerness. And still, the demons around her sat steadily back as both bodies on the floor remained two crumpled messes. A pair of pretty pathetic puddles; nevertheless untainted in the blatancy of their youth and their innocence. Something that Bellatrix might have had once, too; though then she found she could not recall.

Still, she basked despite the obvious wrongness, her head hazy in the moments of the euphoria that existed there within his the depths of her compacted being. What mattered then was His presence; so heavy beyond the weight of the world He'd so single handedly crushed. She already knew it then, but the span of her existence had already found purpose. "Now," He said carefully, without caution to the wind or the earth or the things in between, "let's end this."

The smile that graced Bellatrix's dark face lit her features up marvelously and, though she didn't quite move, she allowed a moment for the numbness in her limbs to die down. Still.

Every little thing came back to her in spots. First the window panes, and then the office chairs, and finally the mess of Draco's white-yellow head. They were chuckling, the others, and from the darkness Bellatrix heard the broken breaths of the burley bastard that clawed at her heels and screamed for salvation. "W-Why...?"

Why finish him? Why deliver him? Why, of all things, send him early to the fiery pits of Hell that would devour and consume and envelop him? "... W-Why?" Perhaps he'd had a wife. Perhaps he'd had kids. Perhaps he'd just got a promotion at his work or a raise in his pay. Either way, none of it made a single ounce of a difference because nothing changed and everything persisted. The Devil was ready and his demon was too; so she opened her arms and revealed him the pearls of her pointed white teeth.

Why? Well love, of course. Love of the sport, love of the reward, and love of the Man. Love that drove people mad and forced their hand to do the things that were awful and insane and unimaginable. Love that lifted the ends of her mouth and tweaked her expression into a slip of a smile. Love; the great and glorious and glistening kind.

She did it for love, all for love; because, after all, it truly did make Bellatrix Lestrange just a little bit crazy. Anyway.

V.

Sometimes Bellatrix dreamed.

Silly little occurrence that it'd been, she'd seen the line of brush-bundled benches and suit clad dead men as, "Come," they called from the depths of the darkness. "My, dear sweet Bella. Come."

Sometimes, she wasn't dreaming.

There'd been a night, before the war, and Bellatrix Lestrange stood under a moon that was round and glowing and omniscient. It trickled light down from the sky and parted thickness from the clouds like a ghost- the essence of a planet as it gave way to a clearing. And Luna was perfect in a way that was busting, and bold, and brutal. She captivated all of space and surrounded the night with rays that outdid the very stars. "Showing off," thought the demon; but the act was, strangely enough, understandable. Anyway. Bellatrix liked it most when she was pregnant.

Still. She heard Him first when He called out to her from the bushes. "Bella."

The sound was short and swift. Dire and direct. It sliced through the air and cut apart the muskiness with a knife that was sharp sharp sharp. "Bella."

They were losing the War. The Death Eaters knew it, the Malfoys knew it, and Bellatrix knew it. Somewhere along the line, a collection of horcruxes had been found and slowly, Voldemort was losing His confidence. And what that meant was late nights for the others, tougher punishments for the disobedient, and grueling tasks for the left-behind. Only the dead slept. Only the corpses remained at bay. All the while, a chilling sense of impossible doom dawned deceitfully upon the shoulders of the wicked and, for once, Bellatrix felt frantically unsure.

Then a small brown rabbit hopped quickly past her heels. She felt the pressured beat of its tiny little heartbeat but made no move to attempt at stopping it. Rather, Bellatrix stared solemnly at the diminishing little creature and remained statuesque- a weary, wallowing shadow in the distance. Bella Bella Bella Bella Bella. She heard him like the wind and the rain and the hypothetical things that had existed there in the depths of her heated, hammering heart. Slowly, and softly, and simply. My dear, sweet Bella.

When Bellatrix moved her body forward, she thought theoretically of a ship and its pier, masts cast out in the likes of her limbs intermixed with the trails of her matted, black hair. In the Nothingness she watched her breath and in the Darkness she surveyed her monotony; for the thrill of the unknown lasted longingly inside of her, all leering, and looming, and living like a parasite or leech or a phantom.And then from the back came a figure in the dark that grew great in the distance and massive in the catastrophe. At the invasion, a twig snapped strikingly in two. The wind rushed rapidly without rhythm.

By the time Bellatrix spun around to the eternal emptiness, the figure of her Lord had her held there by the neck.

His eyes were wide and wonderful and yellow. They glistened with something that lacked simplicity and instead riddled completely with hunger. And He looked like nothing more than a fraction of a man, half intertwined with the likes of the bodies he'd dropped at her feet and the snakes that slithered by the marble. But the moment was short and the seconds ticked by. Careful not to let another pass, the dark man closed the gap between them and breathed heavily at the pale of her face.

Then He kissed her, hard, on the mouth.

Bellatrix's back hit the soil and her head scattered the brush. He crawled carelessly on top of her and wound His long fingers around her wrists, pinning them without patience to the top of her skull. And He did not wait for permission to repeat the act. Rather, the Devil smashed their teeth together in a way that was more painful than pleasurable, face consuming hers without the need to breathe or think or act. Yet she worked her mouth back in feverish passion, thinking, "God, finally," as His nails found her skirts and hitched them way up past her thighs to reveal a pair of legs that were thin and white and scarred.

She almost told Him she loved Him, but found it most difficult when he pressed his wand to her throat and she felt the air run absent in her lungs. Anyway.

Every messy moment clashed considerably into one. She was pinned beneath Him and He reached down to position her limbs against the robes of His waist, still and unspeaking. Then He possessed her with His lipless form, dentures striking sharply against the interior of her mouth in a demanding sort of sense that both riddled and ravaged her. And she clamored then, for the likes of the breaths that'd escaped her while fingers fought frantically between the desire to either claw desperately at her throat or pull herself readily into the opening of His arms. Yet she did the latter, chest bobbing up and down briskly to compensate for the arch in her back and the curl in her toes. And finally when the the whispered counter curse came, it came slowly as if prolonged. When her hands gripped the leaves that surrounded her, she inhaled jaggedly with a gasp that filled her lungs and expanded somewhere in her stomach.

Oh, pure, persisting patience; oh, everlasting, evading endurance. She'd thought she'd waited a lifetime, but then felt in her gut it was worth it. Still. Her mouth formed the name as the air carried the word to the branches and the birds beyond the blackness. "My Lord..."

"Silencio!" Above her, two slit-like eyes sparked with a sense of something heinous. She thought perhaps He'd devour her, but decided that she'd appreciate the act nonetheless.

It wasn't butterflies, but spiders that erupted in her intestines and spread through her organs like wildfire. They tickled at the depths of her belly and rose rapidly at her throat to pour invisibly from the part of her lips. And she rocked against the ground with a sway, a mere instrument to Satan and the way that He pulled and paved her with the cords of tiny strings. A puppet, perhaps, interlaced inevitably to the conductor of her soul- had she one to begin with. And yet she moaned, thrilled, in the sense of His enormity; for He consumed her in captivating coldness and slid heavily between her legs like a puzzle.

And it was a mass of maggots dancing delightfully in her abdomen, a thousand lovely knifes tracing circles to her arms in the instant. Against the slight of her frame, she let rock the foundation of her being, caught up with the fire lit choir of the burn in her arm and the hold on her wrists. He knew her in ways that she didn't, saw the pieces of the bits that she'd lost. When the sky fell dark and the moon glowed grand, He could claim without permission the expanse of her. "Like a conqueror," she thought, "of the wizards, and the witches, and the filth at their feet." Anyway.

It ended more quickly than it'd started.

The earth shifted slightly beneath her back like a rug, pulled out underneath her to shake the skeleton that existed behind the barrier of her flesh. She watched Him next as he lifted, ascending away from her sweating form like a ghost. Yet He watched her all the while with His eyes like the night and His face like the moon- so universal beyond the chill of the evening and the creatures that existed there, too.

When He left her, Bellatrix didn't move. Rather, she stared in her silence to the Luna and the glow that surrounded it- a halo, perhaps, but she strove not to think of the irony.

VI.

The world fell apart on the second of May in 1998.

It ended in falling skies and exploding clouds and flashing green lights. It ended with a plump, old, ginger woman calling Bellatix Lestrange a bitch and stalling her heart for the last time in all her forty-nine years of living. And they'd been right when they'd said that a person could see the likes of their lives pass them by in the seconds before their death because, though it lasted only a moment, Bellatrix saw it all. She saw the late nights and the long days and the moments in between. She saw the Devil at the park bench and her nephew on the granite, unconscious and breathing in fragments. He didn't move a muscle, save only to moan sleepily as someplace in the blackness, a formless figure asked her, "Why?"

Why risk it all? Why follow this course?

She could have been a nice girl, after all- a pretty, proper one with a husband in business and two little ones to keep her busy. She could have had a nice life, a normal life, far away from any of this business someplace in France, or Tuscany, or Rome. She didn't have to tumble in with the dark side, didn't have to flock forth to it like a heard. No one put a wand to her throat or a potion to her lips. No one threatened her life, her family, her future. On the contrary because Bellatrix Lestrange, she chose this.

She chose this when she was fifteen and frozen, still atop the pavement in her bare feet and black nightgown; chose this when thirty and rotting away in Azkaban like a vegetable. She chose this despite the possible results, despite the inevitable consequences, despite the patient years. She chose this. And she lost not an ounce of sleep over it, either.

Still. When Bellatrix closed her eyes, she dreamed of all the glistening green and all the iron-laced aftertaste in the whole wide world. She dreamed of headless wood animals and clustered trees and men that made something like love in dark clearings. "Voldemort," she thought, "the one and the only." The Snake Man who'd observed her, and who'd known her, and who'd trusted her. Who'd held up his arms and spoke prophecies with his tongue. Who killed an old, wise man and then sent him to space, to stars, "To Heaven," she thought. Oh, how quaint.

And Bellatrix didn't need Heaven. She didn't need pearly gates or endless fields or golden-haired angels. She didn't need harps. Rather, Bellatrix had everything she could have possibly ever needed in the form of the heir, straight down to his rotting nails and icy irises. So she did not mourn death, not really, for she was far too haunted by the likes of the shadows that crept up behind her and the awful imagination of the man that perhaps would not even know that she'd died. And she wondered if he'd avenge her, if he'd snarl from the smoke of the burnt down school and track down the blood traitor that had done this to tear her apart- limb to ever-bleeding limb. Anyway. "No more steps," she'd thought, "on the road to this oven filled Hell." She'd been knock knock knocking, but the Devil was away in the corridors of that glistening, Great Hall. In the fall of the final battle; at the end of the end of the end of the end.

"But what did it mean, then," she wondered, "to die in the death of the dammed?" When the fires of Hell climbed slowly past her knees and tickled tauntingly at the end of her dress skirts? What did it mean to leave earth and leave life and then enter in the land of the lost and thereafter? "Where," she wondered, "did the evil people go?"

Anyway. When a flame roared in the roast of her organs, Bellatrix opened up her soot tainted eyes. Bunnies, fifty thousand of them, hopped gleefully about her corpse and in the moments of her passing she glared, for around her ran the fleeting figures of those that'd survived and those they just wouldn't. But God, it was grand to be caught up in it. Despite the hallucinations and the hares and the half of the limbs that lie without luster at her feet. Still, the heat hummed hastily in her ears and like a great, big bonfire it crack crack cracked 'till she cooked.

So when her last breath escaped her, Bellatrix Lestrange thus braced herself for the plunge- for the never ending dive into the vast and vengeful unknown. It was a pull and a process, a daunting, daring destiny that she struggled to succumb to, despite the evening's inevitables. Yet, "Come," sang a voice that all of Riddle's and no one else's she'd ever known at all before. "Come to the post life and dance with the burner of the bad and the boastful. Come to the desert land of the fast and flaming cactuses, to the fiery bushes of the soulless and the empty. I've been waiting for you here for decades and centuries and lifetimes of many. Come, my dear, sweet Bella. Come."

And Bellatrix thought she wanted to go down that road. It was one to Hell, of course, but He sure did paint it pretty and perfect with colors.

When the flames reached her neck, Bellatrix did not scream. Rather, in the wake of her roast she wondered what it'd be like to live in a hole with the rest and the rabbits.