featherxquill

Title: Wings Of A Butterfly
Author: featherxquill
Rating: PG-13
Genre: AU, femmeslash, angst
Summary: Bellatrix Lestrange is imprisoned in Azkaban. What if things could have been different? A visitor offers her a chance. Bellatrix/Sybill
Notes: AU, written for hp_whatif's "What if characters were sorted differently?" challenge.

The Dementors have been in again. They seem to have some kind of notion that they will one day defeat my spirit, take from me that which defies them. They think that the sight of their crusted lips will break me, that their grey and deformed cocks and cunts thrust into and over me will destroy my will. They are wrong. I may lie in dampness with cockroaches in my hair, these robes on my form torn to tatters, but it only makes me stronger. My Lord is somewhere dark and cold, and in these moments, when I ache and burn after they leave, I know I am closer to him than any other time.

I have no power here. My wand was destroyed long ago, and the Dementors are blind in all human ways. All through my younger years I utilised the very thing that others would have seen as a disadvantage: my womanhood. Eyes, breasts, thighs; weapons all. They know that I am a woman, and certainly they know what that means, and they know how to hurt me, but their desires are base, animal, carnal. They no more desire me for how I look than they desire my cousin Sirius, three cells down. Perhaps that is why they do not allow men to guard us. If men had been my captors, I would have escaped long ago.

One day, I will be beautiful again. I know the Dark Lord will return, I have seen it in my dreams, and my dreams have never lied to me before. He didn’t believe me when I told him he would fall, but then my sisters never believed the things I told them about their lives, either. I see him, and I see myself beside him. I see a wand in my hand, and hear Crucio on my lips.

One day. One day we will stand together and I will kill all of those who imprisoned me here.

_________________

There is someone here to see me. The Dementors have opened the door of my cell. I have not had a visitor in years, not since that coward Malfoy claimed to have been acting under Imperius and stopped my sister from coming. If there is one thing I miss, that is it. Human contact. The Dementors are like phantoms – they have no faces, they do not speak. Their intelligence is minimal.

When the woman enters, for many moments I do not recognise her, and even then I think I must be hallucinating. She is draped in shawls, and her untamed mop of curls explodes from behind a bandana. For but a moment I remember being in fifth year, straining in my seat during Transfiguration to see over that wild mess.

I do not move from my position, seated on the floor. She stands above me, but even so, she looks afraid. Good friends with the woman who became Alice Longbottom, she was. I smile.

“Sybill Trelawney.” A name I have not tasted on my tongue for many years. It has a strange sourness to it. In the past, I may have tried to hurt her, despite not having a wand – there are many things I could do without one. But the Dementors are strong, and although they do not sap me of my loyalty, my will to live, they have subdued me enough that I am too tired to bother hurting her. There is a Dementor outside the door, anyway, beyond my sight, and any violence would give it an excuse to kiss me. Instead, I speak.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She regards me from behind those enormous glasses for a time, just staring down at someone who must appear to be a completely different person. There are no mirrors here, but I can feel that my face is dry, sallow. We do not get to see the sun.

She twists her fingers about one another. “I have seen something that concerns you.”

I snort. “What, a revelation? Death and destruction? The Dark Lord rising again? I’m already ahead of you, Sybill.” She was theatrical; she’d never been as good as me. Some said she was a fake, but she wasn’t. She only saw the unimportant things, fixated on death and pain, not on the ways things could be gently manipulated to her own ends.

“No.” She shakes her head. “For once, no.”

And the she is down on her knees before me, on the dirty floor of my cell, and she is fumbling with her shawls and taking something from around her neck. A gold chain with something dangling on the end that looks like a remeberall.

“They wouldn’t let me bring my wand in, of course, but they didn’t check this.”

Once, I would have lashed out at her just because she was there. Once, I would have delighted in seeing blood on her cheeks where my nails scratched her. But when she reaches out toward me with the orb, I do nothing but take it from her.

And there was a black haired girl that I recognised as myself, only she wasn’t at the Slytherin table, and then there was a woman that had once been me, standing at the teacher’s table in the great hall with a smile on her face and everyone loving her, and then sheets, covers and heat that I almost felt on my skin right then, black hairs fanned across a pillow and pale fingers raking through thick, wild curls. Fingers and warmth and wetness and happiness and sunlight, oh Merlin, sunlight and warmth and something that hurt in my chest like it could have been love, and a glimpse of some other life that was mine, but wasn’t.

And then just me, staring at this woman who looks more like an insect, this woman who has come into my cell to show me pretty pictures of something that can never exist. I hate her. I hate her more than I have ever hated anyone before. I hurl the glass ball across the room, and it shatters on the far wall.

“When the Dark Lord rises again, I will kill you.”

But there is no glee in her eyes, nor any fear, only something almost broken, but not quite. “There is a spell.” She whispers.

“What are you talking about?”

“There is a spell. A wandless spell that can only be achieved by those with the strongest powers of the mind. You were always better than me.”

“I know. What spell?”

She closes her eyes behind those enormous lenses, and for a moment I think she is not going to tell me. I don’t know what I plan to do with the information. Use it to escape the prison, to free myself so I can find my Lord?

“If you can pinpoint the precise, pivotal moment in history when things changed or became, use your inner eye to send a fragment of yourself back to that moment, and convince yourself to do things differently.”

She sees me lean forward, the first enthusiastic movement I have made since her arrival, and she sees the glee in my eyes. She knows it is not for her. If this is true, then I can alter my actions after leaving the Longbottom’s home, and prevent myself from being imprisoned in this hole altogether.

She knows she has made a grave error, and she is shrinking back, climbing to her feet, backing toward the door. She turns to look at me before she leaves, and when she speaks her voice is choked with tears. “I’m so tired of being lonely.”

And then she is gone, and the door to my cell slams closed and I am plunged into darkness once again.

I sit there for a long time, listening to my own breathing, the rhythm of it, feeling the rhythm of this place, its dark churning heart. Could I change this? Could I twist my actions back all those years ago and stop myself from even coming here? Could I press the Dark Lord, and force him to believe that he would fall? Could I prevent that entirely?

I smile in the darkness.

But the memories from the orb will not go away. A cockroach crawls through my hair, and my fingers trace over my right forearm. I am the only left handed Deatheater, the only one to have my right arm burned instead of my left.

What if my dreams have lied? What if the Dark Lord does not rose again? What if I twist my actions and walk a different way when I leave the Longbottom’s home, and there are Aurors in that street, as well? Do I spend the rest of my life in here, being drained of my desire to live while I wait for my Lord to return?

What if I am not sorted into Slytherin in the first place?

_________________

“Bellatrix Black.”

Professor McGonagall lifts the hat above her head as the proud, dark haired girl takes a seat upon the stool. She has a momentary glimpse of everything – the sea of faces before her. Amelia Bones is next in line; Malfoy, peering at the Slytherin table as if choosing his seat already; the wisp of a girl called Sybill that Bellatrix met on the train, hovering a little way away from the others. Then McGonagall drops the hat over her eyes.

“A Black, hmmm, you’re the first we’ve had in a while.”

I’m going to be the best.

“Ambitious, are you? Loyal, I can see that. And what’s this? Quite the talent for divination. You would prosper in Slytherin.”

Slytherin. Generations of Black’s had been sorted into Slytherin, it was what everyone expected. Malfoy, in the crowd, she could picture him staring, waiting for the hat to announce the inevitable. But there was something… what was it?

There, in her mind. Who was that woman, sallow and gaunt, covered in filth, muttering to herself? What was that mark on her arm, and why was there something like fear in her eyes? A flicker of darkness. A figure. A Dementor. Azkaban.

Oh. Oh, Merlin, it was her. No, she thought, with all her heart. Not Slytherin. Not Slytherin.

“Well, all right then, if you’re sure. Better be HUFFLEPUFF!”

_________________

Sybill Trelawney’s eyes flickered open. Sun was streaming in through the window, and it had caught in her hair. The bed was warm, but her lover wasn’t there. She pushed the sheets away and saw her there, standing by the window. She was already dressed, wrapped in a blue robe, that luscious mane of black hair unbound and hanging in a sleek curtain down her back. She stared out the window, down onto the grass area by the lake, where students were already enjoying the morning sun.

“What is it, Bella?” And she turned, and those dark eyes caught Sybill’s blue ones in their intense, bottomless pull.

“I’m worried.”

It was understandable. Two nights before she had dreamed of the Dark Lord rising again, and Bellatrix did not have dreams that meant nothing. Sybill rose, approached her lover who had turned once again to stare at the grounds, and lay her hands on the woman’s shoulders. She leant forward, breathing in the scent of her hair, trying to be what little comfort she could be.

Bellatrix Black was worried about her students. The best Defence Against the Dark Arts professor the school had ever known, she was fiercely protective of those under her wing, seemed to love each of them equally, to believe in them and nurture their potential. She worried for their lives and their loyalties, for the promises that darkness could make to those who desired power.

She had never forgiven herself for what had happened to Andromeda. When she turned away the dark side, the family had cut her off completely. Her baby sister Narcissa had married, and married well, even if her husband was a Deatheater. But not a day went by when Bella did not wonder if she could have been there to change things for Andromeda – perhaps if she had done something differently, her sister would not be locked in Azkaban for killing the muggle born man, Ted Tonks. Perhaps she could have prevented that.

Sybill traced her fingers over her lover’s cheek, down her throat, wrapping the other arm about her, hugging her tightly.

“Whatever will be will be, Bella. You know there is nothing we can do to change the past.”