Author's Note: Greetings and welcome, thank you for clicking on this story, I hope you will enjoy it. Updates will come as regularly as possible, perhaps on a weekly schedule, perhaps sooner. This story is set immediately following the Battle of Hogwarts and the demise of Voldemort. It is both canon in some places, AU in others. Rating will increase as the story goes on and any trigger warnings will be posted accordingly. That being said, I suggest you all buckle up for the ride because I fear it will be a bumpy one. Happy Reading! -bellanoire over and out!
Disclaimer: I own no parts of the Harry Potter universe or its many beautiful and unique characters, I merely borrow them for whatever craziness my mind concocts.
Love's Odyssey in Death's Design
I
The white light was blinding, the pain intense. Time stood still as every fiber of her being was set ablaze. She could not scream for there was no air in her lungs to accomplish the desired feat. But she wanted to. She wanted to shriek until her vocal cords were shredded because all the agony needed somewhere to go. It was nothing like she imagined it would be. Death. There was no peaceful sinking into oblivion, there was no gentle separation of her soul from the vessel that had harbored it. Only this violent tearing, this blistering heat, the inability to move, to escape, to claw herself away from it all. Perhaps she had had good reason to fear it for so long despite adopting the title Death Eater.
And then it stopped so suddenly and completely that for a moment, all she could do was gasp, pulling in desperate mouthfuls of air so quick and fast that she felt as if her chest might collapse. But she didn't care. Even as she began to choke. At first she assumed that she was choking on air until she realized it was her hair; her sea of lackluster black curls that had been gleaming and silken at one point, wrapping itself around her neck like a noose, trapping the life giving oxygen that she had been so greedily sucking up mere moments before, drawing a strangled yelp from her throat.
She clawed at her neck, her nails breaking the skin as she tried to entangle the hair that only pulled itself tighter and tighter as if possessed by Devil's Snare. Some unseen force then struck her right in the center of her spine, causing her knees to buckle beneath her, sending her crumpling in a heap to a stone floor that was colder than ice. A pained moan breached her cracked lips as she writhed, trying to ease the intense ache. The moan rose to a sharp cry as another bruising attack was aimed at her ribs, once, twice, until a nasty crack rent the stagnant air.
She had been wrong. She was not dead. Someone or something was torturing her. Maybe she was in hell.
Cold, ringing laughter seemed to come from somewhere and everywhere all at once, caressing her ears with the melody of a thousand nails being raked across a blackboard. Resisting the urge to succumb to the weak whimpering that threatened to spill forth from her mouth, she tried to lift her head to see her attacker. But there was no one in the cold white room, chamber. Void.
"You filthy coward!" the words were harsh as they were pulled from her very soul, the effort nearly crippling, "Show yourself!"
"Well don't you look a fright?"
The voice was smooth and heady like a shot of aged Firewhiskey, laced with smoke that possessed the sinuous ability to wrap itself around the listener like a serpent. She would know that voice from anywhere though she could not remember how many years had passed since it had last been heard.
It was her voice. The voice she had possessed before the near decade and a half in Azkaban had altered it, warped it. It was the voice of her youth. A voice that had seduced and beguiled, a voice that men and women dreamed of, had yearned to hear their names spoken with.
"What have you done to us, Bella? Or do you go by Madame Lestrange now?" The last bit was spoken with a cheeky, almost coquettish simper, the question posed in rhetoric fashion, as if the speaker already knew the answer and did not require one. Not that Bellatrix had anything to say. She just wanted out of this, this place.
Footsteps cracked loudly against the stone, coming closer and closer. Obsidian eyes blurred as they took in the sight of a figure dressed in black approaching with an indolently swaying gait. As the figure drew nearer, the vision became clear, only foggy at the edges. But it was unmistakable. The pale, prominent aristocratic features, the mass of shining ebony curls, and those dark dark brown eyes brimming with fiery passion, ambition, and purpose.
Bellatrix recoiled, the motion wrenching another pained cry from her lips. She was staring at a ghost. She was staring at herself. Or, what she used to be.
"Our memory has not failed us yet I see," the tone was pitched low though mocking, "Glad to know you haven't completely snapped your wand. Despite everything."
"This isn't real," the battered witch on the floor groaned, wheezing as the pain in her cracked ribs made it difficult to talk. Because of course it could not be real. There was no way she could be having a conversation, albeit a bit one sided, with whatever this apparition of her former self was. Perhaps she really had gone as loony as all those tongues had claimed, regardless of what the thing had just uttered.
The laughter sounded again, low and throaty, nothing like the cackle it would later become. "Oh, but it is. Purity of magical blood you have preached with the surest of convictions and yet, you doubt the oldest magic? Tsk tsk," her younger self tutted around a full mouthed pout, "Don't tell me the years have dulled our senses? Madness we can take but stupidity, never. Right?"
The ghost, spirit, poltergeist whatever knelt so that their eyes were now level and through the haze of pain, Bellatrix could finally fully take in the flawless visage of her tormentor. It was like looking into a mirror of the past. The skin, white and smooth as alabaster stone, unblemished and free of wrinkles, the regal features cut diamond sharp, those eyes, so dark from a far but ringed with chocolate brown, almond shaped and heavily lidded, the straight nose, plump lips tinted rose even without the aid of cosmetics – the influence of her Black heritage, so vivid, so clear. And all of that hair, unbound and endless, the curls gleaming like wet ink. It was almost enough to make her want to weep. Even in such a broken state, however, she could not display such weakness, it simply was not in her to do so, but the stark contrast to who she had been and what she had become, a shell, just the barest hints of her former beauty visible, it sent a poisonous wave of anguish and envy that broke somewhere in the center of her chest.
"What the fuck do you want?" The words were spoken on a growl, a jaw set in a show of strength summoned from the depths of her core, menacing, laced with acid. But it did not have the desired effect, her ego taking a heavy bruise that ached more than what she now realized were the self inflicted injuries to her body.
"What do we want you mean?" The childlike cadence was utterly cringe inducing, "Well, that's a heavy question, is it not? And I shall answer it. Right after you answer mine. I think that's fair, yes. So again, what have you done to us?"
Had her head not been pounding, her brain not scrambled, and the damned sharpness in her ribs not been present, making even the smallest effort to draw breath result in the spread of fiery pain, Bellatrix would have screamed out her frustration until her ears bled. As it was, she had barely enough energy to raise her voice any louder than the growl she had used moments before, so it was a bit of a lost cause.
She said the only thing she could say. The truth.
"I saved us."
"You destroyed us!"
There was that volume, that rage, everything she wanted to feel and exude, rolling in waves off of the whelp of herself and then the vicious sting of her hair being roughly yanked, her head jerked back, forced at an angle that made her cry out in pain mingled outrage.
"You destroyed us Bella, you saw to that when you made me!"
"What does that mean 'when I made you'?" she spat scathingly.
Lush lips curved into a sneer of disgust, the voice lowered to a hiss. "Don't you remember? Your first kill. No, not any of the depraved acts you committed playing pawn for that demon you devoted yourself to. The first murder that was uniquely yours and yours alone? How much you enjoyed watching the life leave his eyes?" A pale hand grabbed at the pendant around Bellatrix's neck. The pendant she had never taken off until she had been forced to do so fifteen years ago, the pendant that she had hidden under over a dozen protective wards and enchantments during her bid in Azkaban. A hard tug and the silver chain broke. It felt like a powerful blow to the heart and a strangled sound rose from her throat.
"You remember when you condemned me here to this void, don't you? Don't you?"
Terror in its purest form surged through Bellatrix now, like a dragon unleashed wreaking havoc and devastation which each flap of its mighty wings. The ghost of her former self was no ghost at all. It was her soul. A piece of her soul, the soul she had willingly split in that moment of carnality and blood stained release that seemed like both eons ago and yesterday all at once.
This was her Horcrux.
"Caught on have you?" The Horcrux spoke again, the voice dripping with malice, "All of these years, all those evil deeds, the blind faith in the man that would only bring about your demise. You plowed through life under the pretense of ambition, pursuing this unattainable, impossible goal and dream that never existed. You have forgotten yourself, you have forgotten me. You forgot what we always wanted, what we truly yearned for."
The words stung like vicious slaps to the face but Bellatrix did not wince nor flinch away from the onslaught. Memories flashed through her mind like lightning, rolled like thunder until it felt as if she had tumbled into the mind of her former self. The child who had desperately longed for parental affections, the older sister who had purposely provoked the ire of a tyrannical father to shield the two youngest Blacks from his wrath, the student whose sharp intelligence and wit had very nearly landed her in Ravenclaw, who had broken Hogwarts records with her grades and magical skill, the young woman who had wanted nothing more than to follow her own dreams, forge her own path, who had sought out love and happiness, longing to be free from the shackles that had bound her. The venomous betrayal from one of the few people she would have given her life to protect. The warrior who had waged the battle against the forces holding her back, the same warrior who had conceded defeat; a ring encrusted with precious stones slipping onto her finger, cold as ice, an unbreakable lock for a new kind of binding chain. The solace she had found in the Dark Lord, the one individual who in her whole life had made her feel free, unbound for the first time ever. The carnage. The raw power, the fear, the torment, the ruthlessness, the casting aside of her old faiths and desires, the embracing of a new destiny. The bone chilling, desolate wasteland that was Azkaban prison. The madness. The loss of the last tendrils of sanity, of hope, of all pleasant feelings and emotions. The loss of herself entirely.
"But what if I could give it back to you? To us?"
Dark eyes widened and then narrowed. The pain in her body seeming to evaporate. Bellatrix regarded the Horcrux with an expression of wonder, suspicion, and the tiniest touch of what could be described as longing.
"How?"
"Your hatred Bella, our hatred. It consumed us, fooled us, condemned us. The only thing that defeats hate is love."
She would have laughed, hell, if she had been capable, she would have hexed the Horcrux to an oblivion, ending it and herself in one fell swoop. "Love? Love is weakness." And Bellatrix knew this to be factual. Love dulled the senses, made one blind to obvious truths. It was unnecessary and useless. The Dark Lord had taught her that, had drilled it into her mind, effectively breaking the last traces of the worthless emotion that had lingered within her into a thousand pieces and throwing them onto a raging pyre to burn. It could not save her now, nothing could.
"Hate is weakness and this you have learned, even if you don't care to admit it. You know."
Bellatrix felt herself being lifted to her feet and she was now standing before the Horcrux, trying her hardest, she realized with revulsion, to not turn away from the piercing and relentlessly steady gaze that seemed to go right through her.
"One year," the Horcrux said, finality lacing the statement, "You have one year to fix this, to save our soul. Should you managed to open that Black heart of yours to another and have them see you for who you really are, who we really are, and love you for it, you shall have your second chance. Should you fail? Well then, Death shall claim his rightful prize.
Bellatrix uttered a snort of incredulity as she slowly shook her head. "My very name strikes fear and disgust in the hearts and minds of the entire Wizarding world. It is impossible. I am dead anyway." No one could ever love her. And she could never love anyone else. She didn't even want to, and the chance to live was not incentive enough to even make her want to. After all, what sort of life would she lead, could she possibly lead? Despite the fear that accompanied the thought, she would rather be dead than to live a life that would only be chains and isolation in a cold cell, surrounded by Dementors and the triumphant sneers of those who would relish in the thought of her defeat.
But the Horcrux laughed again, the sound wrapping itself around them both, placing her hands on Bellatrix's shoulders as she pressed herself closer and closer, her lips capturing its dull and cracked counterparts. Her own voice filled her head, louder than a whisper, softer than a scream. Only the one whose heart you are destined to claim shall see you for who you truly are. No one else shall know your true face. Save yourself Bella. Save us.
The embrace was suddenly broken by a rough shove, the blinding whiteness fading to black and Bellatrix was falling.