#para:rod

[bloodstained-gentleman]

Come Together || Rod & Evan

Evan was fuming. He couldn’t believe the Dark Lord had paired him with the Lestrange. It had to be the Dark Lord’s way of punishing him for not telling him about Bella’s pregnancy. Although, to be fair, the Dark Lord had ripped it out of him through legilimency the night of the fight. But refusing the Dark Lord was never wise. Evan sighed, lit a cigarette, and walked into his cousin’s house. He ordered the house elf that greeted him to bring him a neat whiskey.

[bellatrix--noir]

aftershocks / rod and bella

It had been days, maybe even weeks, since Bellatrix had spoken to Rodolphus. The night she revealed to him she was pregnant, he didn't come back upstairs and instead stayed wherever he was in their home the rest of the night. He didn't want to talk about it but all she wanted to talk about was this. She wanted to figure out what the fuck they were doing and what they were going to do from this point on. Obviously, thoughts of terminating the pregnancy were the first things that came to mind, knowing that would have been the easiest thing to do. It was the first thing she thought of when she found out she was pregnant, to avoid having Rod find out that she was with child at all and get rid of it but now he knew and now they were in a fucked up place. 

There were barely words uttered between the two of them since he had found out. One word responses were all Bella would give to the quick, simple questions Rod would ask only for there to be silence between them again. She was still angry at him but for what she wasn't sure. Maybe it was his reaction, maybe it was how he continued to react or maybe she was just angry at how the entire situation turned out. Whatever it was, it led to the two of them sleeping in different rooms and avoiding each other, much like they did when something was wrong between them. That day, however, she was feeling particularly irritated with how things had been and she was determined to corner him in his study so that he would have no choice but to talk to her. So she went downstairs, waiting outside the door to the study before walking in and closing the door. "I need to talk to you."

[bellatrix--noir]

meet me at midnight... | bella and rod

Meet me in the common room at midnight. x B

That was all Bella had put on the note that she had stuffed into Rod's pocket while passing him in the corridor that afternoon. He was probably confused at first but Bella hadn't really explained anything before wordlessly walking away, as if there had been no interaction. 

It was five minutes til midnight when she made her way to the common room from the girls' dorms, sitting on a lush armchair near the fireplace. It was late, past curfew and the fire had been put out but there were still a few embers glowing, giving off enough light to just barely conceal Bellatrix from view. She pulled her legs up against herself and waited, knowing he'd would be down here in a few minutes. 

[bellatrix--noir]

conceal, don't feel // rod and bella

They'd been back to school for almost a week and Rod and Bellatrix hadn't talked since Christmas eve. Christmas day had been awkward and New Years even more so and it was all because Bella had to go and be an idiot. She'd been colder to Rod all break, giving him short clipped answers to his short questions, contributing to small talk and pretending everything was alright at meals only to separate from him as quickly as possible afterwards, locking herself in her bedroom. 

After they'd gotten back, she'd tried to avoid him as often as possible. She didn't talk to him in classes they had together, she didn't sit with him at meals, she barely looked at him while they were in passing in the halls or if they accidentally came face to face in the common room. It was almost like they'd acted before they'd gotten to her manor, only she was a bit more distant. The entire time she was trying to steer clear of him, she was trying to convince herself that the feelings she harbored for him were false, we just something that popped up in the heat of one of the moments and that they were just... not real but she couldn't. She couldn't get rid of them and she almost felt a pang through her chest whenever she passed him and had to ice herself over and pretend he wasn't there. She knew that they would end up talking eventually but for now she could pretend that she was in the clear and that, hopefully, they wouldn't speak until the wedding. 

[bellatrix--noir]

the engagement ball || bella and rod {past para}

The dark green dress sat on her bed, untouched, with the note from her mother, telling her to be ready by six. She was trying to wait until the very last minute, until her mother was pounding on her bedroom door and screaming at her to be ready, until actually putting it on. Once she put it on, it meant that the entire betrothal was final and she wasn’t ready to accept that yet. 

"Bellatrix, you’d better be ready or mother said she’d come up and magic the dress to your body." Narcissa’s soft voice was muffled by the door. Most of their mother’s threats were empty but she would still be angry if Bella was not ready… and one did not want to see an angry Druella Black. 

The dress slid down her body like a bath of emerald silk. It really should have been black, considering the fact that Bella was now mourning her freedom. She sighed at herself in her mirror, almost embarrassed how Bellatrix Black had succumbed so easily to an empty threat from her mother. She released one more deep sigh at her image in the mirror before leaving the safety of her bedroom to head down to the engagement ball that would surely be the death of her. 

Her house was full of people: Rod’s family, Bella’s family, other families that were in the Black family’s good graces… Bellatrix wasn’t even sure she knew everyone. She was sure, however, that other Slytherins from school had been invited and this was sure to be the most humiliating thing until her wedding. She tried to avoid the eyes that turned to look at her as she scanned the room for the person she’d end up being forced to spend the rest of the night on the arm of.

[kingmebellatrix]

Cracks Begin to Show | Rodolphus + Bellatrix

At first, it had been a joke. She'd slouched in the chair across from her frustrated legal counsel like a petulant child and ultimately refused his help. Her stoic, uncooperative behavior was a facade masking the intense fear she felt over being in this place. Her counsel's patronus, a dog, roamed the small room freely, a sure sign that dementors were close by and needed something to keep them away while the pair of them spoke. After that, they sent her through processing. They took her wand, her clothes, combed through her hair (much to her annoyance), then gave her a long, striped, shapeless gown to wear. It was like that they lead her to a cell. After being in a holding area and processing for hours, some of the anxiety had waned, but once the guards and their patronuses left her presence, the fear sank in again.

First she noticed it wasn't quiet. The weak minded lost it quickly in Azkaban, and those individuals did anything from whisper almost inaudibly to themselves, natter incoherently, or shriek at the top of their lungs. She wished she would numb to it. The worst of it came when a dementor finally made its rounds sometime in the very early morning. It was completely dark, but she knew it's presence by the way she felt. Cold, miserable, terrified... And there it was. She felt it pull at her chest, like it was drawing the air from her lungs directly through her body rather than out her mouth. That's when something broke. The talking intensified. It told her things... They knew her name. For a while she shouted, trying to get the attention of whomever knew her name, whomever seemed to have a plan...

That's when she realized it wasn't happening. The incoherent whispering noises, the rushing in her ears, they now formed actual words. Bella spent the entire night curled in the corner of her cell, her eyes closed and her forehead pressed to her drawn knees with her hands clamped over her ears. The dementors came at regular intervals, she realized, each cracking at her psyche a bit more with each pass.

It must have been a day or two later when one of the guards had to shout to get her attention to notify her that she had a visitor of high importance. She looked at him blankly and nodded, but didn't move. Her limbs ached from holding her fetal position against the wall for nearly the entire time she spent in her cell, but she couldn't bring herself to move. She wasn't sure she wanted a visitor.

[kingmebellatrix]

Old Broken Things | Rod + Bella

While she didn't necessarily sleep well after her return to Wales, she couldn't deny that being somewhere comfortingly familiar helped a little bit. Nights spent tossing and turning gave way to those where she slept longer and deeper with fewer nightmares and fewer occasions where she flew awake covered in a sheen of sweat. Unfortunately, her sleep schedule was still irregular, which meant that after sleeping for a few hours, she awoke sometime around two in the morning and couldn't do anything to fall asleep again. Restless, she slid out of bed and made her way to a trunk of her belongings that some elves delivered earlier that day and silently opened it.

When they were fighting, he sent her his copy of Wuthering Heights, and she'd returned a package of ashes just to hurt him with the idea that she'd incinerated it. She didn't have the heart to do it, however, and simply burned a different book, one she knew she wouldn't miss. Instead, the muggle novel remained tucked at the bottom of her trunk until now when she dug it out and inspected it with a sort of reverence. Muggle books were a secret weakness of hers, once a means to infuriate her supremacist mother and now a way to escape on a lazy Sunday afternoon. After she turned it in her hands a few times, she stood and made her way out of the room and towards the wing of the house she used to inhabit with her husband.

It was quiet, as expected. She silently walked to his bedroom--their bedroom, technically--and pushed the door open as quietly as possible. Much to her surprise, the bed was empty. Bella placed the book on his bedside table and sat on the edge of the bed, both comforted and upset by now normal everything felt. Despite everything, it was like this house wanted things to return to what they had before.

After sitting for a few more minutes, Bella stood and began to wander the halls again. Rodolphus had probably nodded off in his armchair somewhere and likely wouldn't find her out of bed at this hour. Much to her surprise, she saw a thread of gold shining across the runner carpet in the hallway, glowing out from the just barely open doorway of what they decided would be a nursery when they first moved in together. Of course, she always felt like the room was more for him than it was for her, like something to look forward to throughout the war. However, the door remained closed and the room gathered dust like some silly lost pipedream that neither of them dared to mention.

Curious, the woman moved closer and peered through the crack in the door in hopes she could figure out what exactly he was doing in there.