Chapter 29: In the Mind of a Lestrange
The Lestranges went directly home after dinner, promising to see Kreacher and Regulus again soon. They always visited frequently enough, but it felt all the more important to keep close now that HE was back...sort of. When they arrived at Raven's Nest, Lyra was quiet as they showed her around her family home. When they got to the second floor, Rod smiled. "Here is the part where you pick your bedchamber from any of these guest rooms. If you wish to redecorate, we'll have Harold, our house elf, take care of whatever you'd like done."
"Why bother? I am a guest so any guest room will do," Lyra said coolly. "I will only be staying a few weeks, after all."
Rodolphus stopped in mid step to turn and arch a brow at his daughter over one shoulder. "You don't strike me as the thick sort. You're a daughter of ours, after all. So why we need to have this conversation for the second time in less than an hour is beyond me. You aren't going anywhere."
"And as I told you less than an hour ago, I have a life and a job back in Australia," Lyra shot back, dark eyes flaring with sudden anger. "You're bloody mad if you think I'm just going to allow you to tell me what to do and control my life! I am twenty-three bloody years old. So sorry you didn't get to raise me, but I'm all grown up."
"That's interesting, because you're acting rather childish right now," Rodolphus shot back calmly.
"As for your ridiculous job," Bellatrix chimed in, giving her daughter a cold glare. "You have no need for a menial career. Working security? You are a Lestrange!"
At that, Lyra was happy to turn her rage-filled glare on her mother. "As it happens, I enjoy working with my man. It isn't about the need for money or a career! And considering you made a career out of being a bloody prisoner of Azkaban, I can't believe you're talking about the choices I've made. I'm sorry all of them were legal," she concluded, voice dripping with venomous sarcasm.
Bellatrix's hand twitched, where it hung at her side. It itched to slap her daughter until the girl's head spun, but a tiny...very tiny voice inside claimed that this wasn't the way to form a functional mother-daughter relationship. "Please let it be noted that I am struggling against every instinct to slap you silly," she announced.
"Oh wow, that really makes you seem stable," Lyra shot back, hostility radiating off her in waves.
"Hey, it really does," Rabastan defended lightly, his grin attempting, and even succeeding a bit, to break the tension of the moment. "Our Bella is never one to restrain herself from acts of violence when the urge comes upon her."
Lyra smiled at her uncle, but the expression faded quickly as her gaze returned to her parents. "See? That's psycho. It doesn't make me particularly proud to be your daughter."
"I really thought they would raise her well," Rodolphus said, giving Bellatrix a glance that was half frustrated, half apologetic.
This only served to make Lyra angrier. "They did raise me well," she practically shouted. "They gave me a happy childhood, and no thanks to you!"
Was she ever going to stop pushing it into their faces that they'd had to leave her? "Please, Lyra," Bellatrix said, anger suddenly draining away to leave her feeling cold and small inside.
"What?" Lyra demanded. As her eyes met Bellatrix's, they shared a look of honest frustration.
"Just let us get to know you... We need this time with you, and even if you don't understand that yet, you need it with us as well," Bellatrix said. Stepping forward impulsively, she reached to embrace Lyra. The girl stood stiffly as Bellatrix clung to her tightly for several seconds. When this grew too awkward, Bellatrix released her and stepped away.
"What do you want," Lyra asked in frustration.
"We want you to get to know us before you make any decisions. We want more time than a few weeks," Bellatrix said.
"But no matter what you decide, we aren't allowing you to go back to Australia," Rabastan told her. When Lyra glared he grinned. "Who will be my wing woman if you leave? You've got to consider my feelings in this too, you know."
"You're ridiculous," Lyra told him with a laugh.
"Yeah, but I'm awesome," Rabastan retorted.
"Fine," Lyra said with a sigh. "How do you suggest I get to know you?"
"There is so much you missed, and that you don't...probably can't understand," Bellatrix said. "Perhaps if we showed you some things in a Pensieve, you would understand a little more."
"I'll just go get it from the attic while Lyra chooses her bed chamber," Rabastan said. Bellatrix nodded and he Apparated away with a crack. Lyra took her time peering into each room before opting for the one decorated all in purple and black.
"We can go clothes shopping tomorrow if you like," Bellatrix told her daughter with a forced smile. "I am sure you will need more than you brought with you. If you like we can invite your Aunt Narcissa along as well so you can get to know her."
Bellatrix didn't miss the look of sympathy that Rodolphus sent her way. He knew she wasn't at all into girlie girl things like excessive clothes shopping. She enjoyed being fashionable, but didn't take hours over it as so many other women did. She had better things to do with her time and attention.
"Alright," Lyra said tentatively. "Thanks. I don't really have a lot of warm clothes, actually."
"We'll go after work," Bellatrix said. "I'll write Cissa in the morning, if not later tonight. I want you to come along with us to the Ministry tomorrow. Grindelwald may be interested in your Mind Ripping ability."
"Oh yeah," Lyra said. "He's the son of THAT Grindelwald, right? What's he like?"
Bellatrix frowned thoughtfully. "Well...he's human, which I suppose is good." Lyra gave her a strange look and she continued. "To clarify, what I mean is thanks to the Dark Lord, I have come to appreciate a great and powerful Dark wizard being human...real...approachable, and not someone we consider god-like."
Rodolphus nodded, slipping an arm around Bellatrix. "She's right," he told Lyra. "No man should appear to be a god. It is a definite mark of severe instability and not of the good sort."
Rabastan Apparated back, Pensieve in hand. "Library," he asked his brother, and Rodolphus nodded.
Lyra studied the Pensieve her uncle held with interest as Bellatrix and Rodolphus led the way to the library. There was a large table in the middle of the room where they could all sit. That way everyone can look into the Pensieve and travel memory lane together.
"Where should we start," Bellatrix asked as everyone settled into chairs around the circular oak table. "I think showing Lyra Uncle Orion's murder is a bit...graphic, but I do want her to understand what we were up against. Perhaps something like that, but not exactly."
"I can watch a murder, I am no longer two," Lyra huffed. "I'd rather not, though."
"How about how it was with the Dark Lord in the end when he was unkind even to his favorites?" Rodolphus suggested.
"Yeah, I was just really uncomfortable back then," Rabastan said, and Rodolphus nodded. "Bellatrix was always more...reactive, so hers would probably be more illustrative."
"Fine," Bellatrix said, and closing her eyes, she focused her memories on the summer of nineteen ninety-eight. Drawing her wand from the right sleeve of her dress, she began extracting memories from her head and placing them carefully into the Pensieve.
The first memory showed Bellatrix, Rodolphus, and Rabastan readying to depart Australia. They all hugged baby Lyra in turn, Rabastan and Rodolphus tickling and playing with the baby as they told her farewell. A happy natured baby, Lyra giggled and clapped, enjoying the attention. Bellatrix was last to hold her and when she put her down, the child must have sensed something for she began to cry. Reaching out her arms for Bellatrix and Rodolphus, she wailed in a way that affected everyone. Rabastan looked miserable, Rodolphus scowled to keep his lip from trembling, and Bellatrix snatched the child up again, holding her close as tears sprang to her eyes.
Standing in the background, Rodolphus's cousins, Agrona and Jehan Lestrange, looked uncomfortable and sympathetic.
"Do you see how difficult it was to leave you," Bellatrix asked and Lyra scowled.
"I see how heartbroken I was when you did. I don't remember that, though. You seem to expect me to feel all loving now, but I don't remember that! I don't remember loving you so much I could feel that something was up, and that something was going to take you away from me."
Bellatrix sighed and shook her head then moved to the next memory, a meeting of Death Eaters.
"Wait, where is this," Lyra asked. "I like the decor."
"That's Malfoy Manor, where your Aunt Narcissa lives with a dull prick named Lucius to whom she is married," Rodolphus answered. "Your mum and I call him Lucy...because...well, you'll see when you meet him if this memory isn't telling enough." He smirked.
Together they watched the meeting unfold. Bellatrix was nearly bored until the Dark Lord turned his attention onto her family. He was obviously displeased with the Malfoys, but her own reaction...she'd forgotten a lot of that. The Dark Lord's displeasure actually made her CRY! She could remember the horrible feeling of abject misery that squeezed at her insides whenever she thought he was displeased. At the time she'd believed it was a normal reaction. One was at terrible fault to displease one's god, after all. However, with her memories now intact, she understood and saw it all for what it was!
What everyone else saw as an insane reaction was her mind attempting to follow the compulsion that Voldemort had laid on it to worship and adore him no matter what. When he appeared displeased this was even more distressing because it meant that she was not following this order, and thus she was at great fault. Nearly like a bloody house elf, she thought with a shudder! The feeling of adoration was so vast that it could also bring her to tears with the sheer intensity of it. The sheer abnormal intensity, but, of course, none of the motherfuckers gathered at those meetings ever noticed or cared that something was a bit too off with the dear old Lestranges!
When the two feelings combined, misery at his displeasure and extreme adoration, it made her feel as if her skull would explode. That never mattered, though. At those times, he was the only thing that mattered... He was the world, the sun, the storm that could sweep them away. In the memory, it broke her heart when the Dark Lord indicated that no one wanted him at Malfoy Manor. How could he think that? Seeing her own over the top reaction made her cringe now, because she understood exactly why she was moved to bloody tears. She was moved to tears because of how hard he'd compelled them to worship him!
Bellatrix was a badass bitch who liked it rough, who loved to torture and kill and party, and she wasn't the sort of girl who cried! Of course, that was taking into account who she was before he'd twisted all three of their minds. In the Pensieve, the Bellatrix at the meeting insisted that having the Dark Lord staying at Malfoy Manor was the highest of pleasures. Indeed, having him in the room with them, bestowing his vast amounts of wisdom was, in fact, a religious experience and, as such, the highest of pleasures, quite literally. So she was speaking nothing but the truth as tears of worshipful adoration spilled down her face.
That amount of feeling wasn't normal for anyone under any circumstance, Bellatrix thought with a shiver. She continued to stare in horror as the Dark Lord turned to her and spoke in a cold sarcastic tone that she, nonetheless, ate up gratefully as though it were candy.
"No higher pleasure? That means a great deal, Bellatrix, from you."
As the full implication of his words hit her, Bellatrix wanted to scream. Everyone else present would've simply seen the Dark Lord being sarcastically cutting to one of his top favorites who was slipping in the ranks. With her memories restored, though, Bellatrix saw it for exactly what it had been.
"That was him reminding himself that we tried to kill him, while verbally spitting in our faces," she whispered. "He was saying it right there in front of everyone, knowing that only he would understand... Basically telling us and knowing that we wouldn't remember! It meant a lot coming from me considering I was one of the six who had once tried to kill him!"
She let out a hysterical laugh. Only then did she realize that Lyra was squeezing her hand hard.