#i actually can't decide if i hate this or not so if it's deleted tmrrw. it may be actually. but i've already got bellatrix's part written

[otrtbs]

hello trying smth. a bit. different under the cut?

Druella

Bellatrix is born on Halloween. On October 31st 1951, she becomes the eldest daughter of Druella and Cygnus Black, and she doesn’t cry. She just peers up at Druella with wide-round eyes and a calm, unaffected disposition. It’s eerie. It’s haunting. That’s something that always worried Druella– the Halloween birth, Bellatrix’s refusal to come into the world kicking and screaming and fighting for air like a normal child would. Druella worries that Bellatrix is cursed, born on the day of skeletons, death, evil spirits, and darkness. She tried to hold out a few more hours, she begged the mediwitches at St. Mungo’s to delay the birth somehow through grunts of pain and the sweat forming on her brow. She attempted to not push through her contractions, but it was pointless. 

“They say babies born on Halloween are immune to evil spirits,” the mediwitch whispers to Druella as Cygnus sleeps in a chair in the corner of the room, arms crossed and shoulders slumped. “The veil between the living and the dead is thinnest tonight. So she’ll probably have a strong connection with the spirit world. She might even be given the gift of second sight,” she adds sagely, attempting to calm Druella’s fears. “A blessing.”

Druella holds Bellatrix in her arms, she’s sleeping and swaddled in a soft blanket, a peaceful expression on her face, but Druella can’t escape the feeling of hesitant fear bubbling beneath the surface. A bomb waiting to explode. “She didn’t even cry,” she lets out an exhausted sigh. 

The mediwitch gives her a soft smile. “It happens. Her heart rate is stable and she is breathing normally. She’s perfectly healthy.” The witch finishes cleaning up a few things around the room and removes her gloves. “Be sure to let me know if you need anything. Someone will be here to check on you shortly.” As she turns to leave, she pauses for a moment with her hand on the handle, debating something. Then, with a quick look back and a sharp breath she says, “It’s going to be okay.” 

Druella wishes she could believe her. 

Bellatrix grows a little every day. She’s healthy, she never cries, her bones aren’t weak, her limbs aren’t mangled, her cheeks are pink and fat and not sallow. She looks nothing like a cursed child, acts nothing like a cursed child, except for the small birthmark just below her left cheek. A bad witch’s mark. 

Walburga and Orion come to the house to see the new baby. A cruel, satisfied smile overtakes Walburga’s features when she sees it’s a girl, confirming with her own eyes that the chance to have the next heir is still within her grasp, but Druella takes her own pleasure in Walburga’s still slender frame.

At least Bellatrix proves that Druella isn’t barren. She can have children, healthy children. She could provide an heir. It was only a matter of time. Walburga and Orion had been married nearly three years before Druella married Cygnus and yet their house remained empty. 

Walburga always hated Druella. Hated that Druella and Cygnus got to live in 12 Grimmauld Place with the family heirlooms the libraries, the portraits, and the tapestry detailing their lineage. She always believed it should belong to her and Orion. Druella was a Rosier by birth. It was only right that true Blacks lived in Grimmauld. She had married Orion earlier. It was only right that she reside there. The next heir to the Black family name got to reside in Grimmauld. So it wasn't just a race to bare a male child, but also a claim to the family residence.

Because Druella can't help herself, she takes Walburga to the drawing room with the tapestry for tea and revels in the looks Walburga casts at the family tree.

Druella was barely healed from her first pregnancy when Cygnus demands that they try again. One child was only enough if it was a boy. She counts the cracks in the ceiling and does her best not to shout in pain in those early days after Bellatrix’s birth. She washes too many bloody sheets before anyone else can see them. 

She tries to spend time in the nursery, but baby Bella, as the house elves had taken to calling her, hardly interests her. Cygnus never goes to the nursery to see Bellatrix, he couldn’t be bothered. Rather, he immerses himself in his work. Druella knows it is her job. It's her job to dress Bellatrix and feed her and bathe her and sing to her, but she leaves most of those tasks to the house elves. 

Bellatrix feels like a stranger in her home. A thing rather than a person. Something haunted and hard to bond with, even if she looks just like a normal child. However, there was still a sense of pride, even if Bellatrix wasn’t a boy. Druella had given birth to a child. She could be a mother. She could do what was expected of her. She just needed a boy.

More days pass. 

Druella busies herself with planning Christmas parties and elaborate dinners and pruning her winter garden of Christmas roses and Goose Grass. She attends charity meetings and plans galas for the Museum of Modernism and Moda. The mediwitches assure her that Bellatrix’s witch mark will fade as she grows older. 

Days turn into months, and just after Bellatrix is ten months old, Druella finds herself pregnant once more. Cygnus’ once stormy mood had shifted to one of gentle ease. He comes home earlier, he speaks softer, and he scowls less. All of the ladies drop by to place their hands on Druella’s growing stomach, to offer their well wishes, to bring gifts. 

This time, it was going to be a boy. Druella can feel it in her bones. All of the divination midwives say as much. She dreams about it. 

“Of course, we’ll name him Sirius. Something strong and commanding. The brightest star in our sky,” Druella was saying over tea as Walburga pursed her lips tightly. 

“I think that’s a wonderful choice,” Irma nods in approval. “Lots of Sirius’ in our family history. He’ll fit right in. Splendid.” 

Druella catches Walburga’s eye and grins wickedly. This house is hers, this life is hers, the family favour is hers. 

They decorate the nursery blue and paint constellations on the ceiling that glimmer in the dark. By the time April comes, Druella doesn’t even mind that it’s raining when she goes into labour. Torrential, thunderous skies and rolling black clouds. Another bad sign, but one she ignores happily.

Cygnus meets her at St. Mungos. He stands by her side and holds her clammy hand through the hours of painful birth. She hears the mediwitches buzz around her and whisper nervously as she screams in her potion-dulled pain. She worries about all the blood staining the sheets and feels her head heavy with Merlin knows what. 

She struggles to keep her eyes open as hospital staff swarm around her and wheel her to another room with bright, artificial lights. She tries to listen to what they’re telling her, but their voices sound gargled and warped like they’re talking underwater. It’s too hard to keep her eyes open anymore. She lets herself drift off and she dreams of her son. 

When she wakes, she’s in a new room. A quieter room. A mediwitch rushes in and places a swaddled baby in her arms. She talks in slow deliberate sentences. 

Druella barely hears her. 

Complications with the birth. Postpartum haemorrhage. Beautiful baby girl. So lucky. 

Through chapped lips and a dry throat, she asks to see her husband. 

The mediwitch informs her that he left shortly after the baby’s birth. She hands Druella some water. 

Alone in a private room at St. Mungos, she decides to name the baby Andromeda. She holds the small infant to her chest, only hours old, and she weeps. 

Cygnus barely looks at her. The days pass and Druella watches over the girls in the nursery and tiptoes around her husband as she tries to ignore the walls of the house closing in on her. She tells herself there is still time, though the doctors at St. Mungos disagree. They all tell her another pregnancy is risky. Fatal. Nearly impossibly in her state. 

Druella doesn’t breathe a word of this to Cygnus or to anyone else. She shuts herself up in Grimmauld Place and avoids everyone’s prying eyes, their disappointed looks, and Walburga’s triumphant sneers. 

As days turn into weeks that turn into months, Druella grows more and more desperate. She finds herself under the guise of heavy glamour charms, back in Knockturn Alley, begging the shopkeeper for more fertility potions. Pills that will ensure a male child. She swallows down glowing green vials of bitter liquid that smelled faintly of baby’s breath. She crushes up black beetle eyes and crunches into the red bulbs of Witch’s Ganglion with wild abandon on the smooth tiles of her bathroom floor, and she waits. 

She leaves the family Christmas dinner early as she feels the familiar trickle of warm blood run down her leg. She stays in bed for days at a time. She leaves her two daughters to the house elf. 

Her third pregnancy nearly kills her as all the doctors had promised. She tries to hide it from everyone as best as she can. Cygnus doesn’t bother showing up to the hospital with her. 

On a cold and bleak day in early January, Druella gives birth to her third daughter. The chill from outside worms its way around her heart and solidifies in a sickly, icy, frost. Narcissa takes what little Druella had left with her that day and keeps it for herself. 

Three daughters. Their little lives just beginning. Girls who will have hopes and dreams and ambitions. Druella feels all of hers dwindle as she hands her third child to the house elf once more. Their stories begin as hers ends. Druella thinks that it’s unfair, having girls. She married Cygnus to give him sons. Not to love him or to look after him in his old age. She was made to produce heirs. What use would she be to him now? 

He’ll want to keep trying, even if it kills her. Without a boy in the family, Druella was better off dead to him anyway. She was plagued by awful visions of her own mother, shut up in a room all alone after the death of her brother. Too old to produce any more male heirs, her father left her mother to claw at the walls and floorboards of her bedroom. Allowed her to be shut out and ignored by every family member who was once so warm towards her. He locked her away in a dark, stale room somewhere for failing him, and acted as if she never existed. 

She felt the frost seep in. Her daughters, her own children had damned her to the same fate. Even if they didn’t know it. How could she hold them and be happy? How could she wipe the tears from their face and act as if everything was fine? 

She’d like to swim in the ocean, or work at the ministry, or travel the world by herself. She’d like to go out at night and not worry about a home she’s obligated to come back to. She closes her eyes and lets herself dream these dreams for a while until Narcissa’s shrill cries wake her up and she feels her fate close in on her all at once.

#uhm this is almost 2k words so no pressure to give that a read on tumblr dot com #and so unedited. guys it kinda goes w/o saying that everything i do is unedited unless otherwise stated #i actually can't decide if i hate this or not so if it's deleted tmrrw. it may be actually. but i've already got bellatrix's part written #up until sirius' birth. it's bella's pov at least #nat writes