Bellatrix walked like she owned the Alley and would hex anyone who suggested otherwise.
Andromeda walked like she was mentally drafting everyone's future therapy bills.
Narcissa walked like she was on a runway and the world was the audience.
It took Narcissa exactly four steps to realize something was wrong.
Her gaze dropped to Bellatrix's boots.
Those were not the heels Bella had left the house in.
"Bella," Narcissa said slowly, "were your shoes always that tall?"
"Yes," Bellatrix said, without even looking, because why would she check her own feet when she could replay Lord Voldemort touching her wrist in glorious slow motion.
They walked three more steps.
Click.
Click.
Click.
The heel ticked up a few millimeters with every stride, an almost imperceptible cheat.
Andromeda noticed it next.
"...No, they weren't," she said. "They're growing."
Bellatrix finally looked down.
Her boots stared back, elegant and black and now sporting aggressively sharp, much higher heels than she'd laced up with that morning.
She blinked.
Then she smiled.
"Oh," she said. "Fun."
Narcissa stared at the boots, then at Bella's backside, which was now absolutely illegal levels of lifted.
"Fun?" Andromeda hissed. "Your shoes are changing themselves. On your feet. In public."
"Jealous?" Bellatrix asked, taking another step just to feel the click.
Narcissa was absolutely jealous. Her brain went:
> Those heels.
That ass.
Rude.
Out loud, she said, "It makes you look unbalanced."
"It makes my ass look fantastic," Bella said. "Which, as we all know, is a public service."
The heels obligingly went up another hair.
Andromeda grabbed her arm and yanked her out of pedestrian traffic.
"Stop moving," she snapped. "Stand there. Do not pose. Do not wiggle. Just stand."
Bellatrix paused mid-wiggle, offended. "I am not—"
"She is," Narcissa said automatically.
Bella stuck her tongue out at her.
The three of them clustered in a little pocket of shadow between shops, already drawing looks because Black sisters + attitude + outfits = spectacle.
Andromeda shoved Bella's sleeve back and grabbed her wrist.
"Explain," she ordered. "From when we left you alone with him. Start to finish. No sighing, no squealing, no fading into erotic fanfiction halfway through."
Bella rolled her eyes so hard a weaker witch would've dislocated something.
"Drama," she said. "We talked. He tested us. He kept me. He touched me. He put his magic inside me. End of story."
Narcissa choked. "You can't just say things like that in the Alley."
"With his hand," Bellatrix snapped. "Not his dick, Cissy, honestly."
Andromeda pinched the bridge of her nose. "Specifics. Spellwork. Marks. Words."
Bella's expression turned dreamy.
"He said I don't pretend," she murmured. "He said I'll go further than the others. That I'll enjoy it."
"That is not a compliment," Andromeda said.
"He meant it as one," Bella said smugly. "And he grabbed my wrist and it was all cold and sharp, like being carved out and filled again, and then it was perfect."
Narcissa tracked that description straight back down to Bella's boots.
"And at what point in this highly spiritual violation did your shoes start violating physics?" she asked.
Bella shifted her weight.
Her hips adjusted automatically, finding a new center of gravity for the extra height.
The motion did unspeakable things to the back view.
Narcissa watched the line of her sister's legs and thought, sourly:
> I should've gone first.
Andromeda followed her gaze, realized where it landed, and groaned.
"Oh, no," she said. "We're not doing this. Absolutely not. You don't get to become a Dark Lord groupie and out-ass us in the same afternoon. It's indecent."
Bella snorted. "It's motivating."
"For who, exactly?" Narcissa asked. "The masses? Him? Yourself?"
"Yes," Bella said cheerfully.
Andromeda turned Bella's wrist this way and that, feeling for anything off. The magic there felt… wrong. Silent. As if something was under the skin pretending to be nothing.
She pushed with her own power.
It pushed back so smoothly it was like pressing on glass.
"Something's there," she said. "And it's rude."
Narcissa was still stuck in her own private heel crisis.
"I hate that it suits you," she muttered. "If I wore that height, Father would give me an hour-long speech on propriety. You do it and suddenly it's 'mysterious, intense, dangerous.'"
"You can borrow him," Bella said absently.
"Borrow the Dark Lord?" Narcissa asked. "You want me to go up to the wizard planning to overthrow the government and say, 'Hello, my sister says I can have a turn being your favorite'?"
"Yes," Bellatrix said instantly.
Andromeda dragged her attention back to the wrist. "Focus. Your shoes are doing upskirting angles on the whole Alley, and your magic is humming like you swallowed a storm." She lowered her voice. "Honestly, Bella… are you sure this is what you want?"
Bella's face went still for a second.
Then she smiled, feral and bright.
"He looked at me," she said. "Like I wasn't just Father's daughter or a marriage contract or a loud problem. He looked at me like a weapon. And he used me. I have wanted this since I realized our fathers will never do more than polish us for display."
"That's very poetic for someone whose shoes are currently gaining altitude," Narcissa muttered.
Almost on cue, the heel ticked up again.
"Stop," Andromeda said to the boots, because she'd reached the stage of nervous breakdown where you try negotiating with footwear. "That's enough. You'll break her ankles."
"Maybe I like the feeling," Bella said, shifting again. The new stance made the little heart-shaped curve under her robes even more illegal.
Narcissa squinted at it.
"I hate you," she said.
"No, you don't," Bella replied. "You're just mad my ass got tenure before yours."
"Language," Andromeda muttered.
"Oh, do shut up, Prefect," Narcissa said. "Your first crush was that Ravenclaw girl with the hair, you have no moral ground here."
Andromeda colored. "Irrelevant."
"The hair was good," Bella said. "I support it. She had bottomless-eyes energy."
Narcissa pointed a finger at Bella's boots. "You trip in those and crack your skull, I'm telling Father you died of stupidity, not politics."
"He'll blame Andromeda," Bella said. "He always does."
"Fair," Andromeda said dryly.
---
Down the Alley, Eileen and Severus slipped out of a side lane.
Nico felt the Black sisters before he saw them: Bella's wrist anchor pinged like a needy app the second they got within range.
> Oh no, it's my dumb daughter, he thought.
Eileen noticed the three girls mostly as: expensive robes, expensive attitudes, and way too much eyeliner for this time of day.
Severus noticed them as: hot, terrifying, and extremely out of my league.
He glanced once, long enough to brand them into his memory, then yanked his gaze back to the apothecary so his face wouldn't give away anything.
As the Blacks and the Princes passed like two ships full of generational trauma, Nico's anchors brushed each other in the magical background.
Bella-wrist-goo and Eileen-arm-goo did a tiny, stupid handshake.
Settings synced again.
> Host A: heels max, choker yes, bitch energy high.
Host B: heels medium, choker yes, resting murder face unlocked.
Eileen's heel ticked up another half centimeter.
Nico felt it.
"Stop," she whispered under her breath.
"I'm trying," he whispered back. "She's leaking slutty into the network."
"You are not allowed to say that word in my circulatory system," Eileen said.
"And yet here we are," he replied.
Bellatrix felt a weird little buzz under her skin and a flicker of… something.
For half a heartbeat, she turned her head, eyes scanning the crowd like she'd just heard someone call her name.
Nothing.
Just people. Robes. A thin half-blood woman dragging a boy toward the apothecary.
Bella dismissed them.
Her attention snapped back to the important issue.
"Do these make my legs look that good?" she asked, twisting a bit to see her own reflection in a shop window.
"Yes," Narcissa said miserably.
"You absolute bitch," Andromeda said, but there was real fondness buried under the despair.
Bellatrix smiled at the glass, at herself, at the faint electric burn under her wrist where "her Lord's" mark hummed.
"I'm going to kill for him in these," she said.
Narcissa gnashed her teeth. "And I'm going to have to look at it."
Andromeda sighed from somewhere between horror and resignation.
"You two are going to be the death of me," she muttered.
Behind her eyes, Nico, in two different women, was having the time of his stupid, chaotic life.
He'd accidentally killed a Dark Lord.
Now he was glitching teenage pure-blood fashion, inflating heels, and making one of the most dangerous girls in the war walk around Diagon Alley with an ass that deserved its own wanted poster.
Terrible. Reckless.
Extremely on brand.