Disclaimer(s): All recognizable characters, places, and events in HPverse are the property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc.
All recognizable characters, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.
A/N: This story contains SPOILERS for S1, S2, and S3 of CSI:NY, and all current books in the HP series. Read at your own risk.
The events in this story take place between "The Ice Maiden" and "The Class Reunion and Full Confession of Rebecca Stanhope." Both can be found on this site. There are 16 parts to this story, 10 of which are complete. I will post one chapter a week.
If she were honest with herself, she had known that this was the course events would take since she had seen Thomas Lessing's face at an arraignment hearing a week after he had buried Don and six other lives beneath an avalanche of rubble with his dirty bomb. It was the only time she'd left her love's side during the eight long days of his slumber, and even that hour had been one hour too long.
The D.A. had assured her that her presence had a profound impact upon the proceedings, and she did not doubt it, though truth be told, she had precious little faith in his assurances. He was, after all, the man who was seemingly content to let the man who had blown up her husband and killed six others pay his meager penance swaddled in a blissful Thorazine haze of stupid unknowingness. Out of sight, out of mind. The D.A. could crow that he'd prosecuted a killer and gotten him off the streets. Good enough for government work.
Except it wasn't good enough. That knowledge had burned in her veins like lye and puckered her mouth with bitter, missed familiarity. Gall and wormwood and Communion wafers gone rancid on her tongue. She'd shaken with it, and it had brightened the austere colors of the courtroom to painful acuity. The inadequacy of modern Muggle justice was staggering, and as the lawyers had strutted and preened in their three-piece suits and pretended to greatness before a bored, myopic judge, she'd gripped the wheels of her chair and bitten the inside of her cheeks until she'd tasted copper to keep from cackling.
The irony of the situation hadn't been lost upon her. The old Puritans who had built these halls of justice had truly understood the meaning of the word, or at least been more honest in their interpretation and application of it. They had ascribed wholeheartedly to the notion of an eye for an eye, and they had made no apologies for it. The halls had run red with blood, and bones had been crushed to powder beneath pressing stones hewn from the earth by the zealous chisel of the righteous. Necks had snapped in the crushing embrace of the noose, and flesh had blackened and charred, licked by tongues of cleansing fire. Justice had been primal and pitiless and complete, and the victims could return to the remnants of their shattered lives with the small comfort of As I am, so you be. Those who persecuted them would not have the pleasure of revisiting sin upon them, and hated faces would return only in dreams.
The Puritans had understood that what the human soul craved was not justice, but retribution, and they had meted it out in bloody-handed glee. They had been steadfastly unmoved by the sorrowful tears of wives and children, and mercy had not lived within their granite hearts. They were speakers of God's voice, and they would not falter in His Divine mandate because of human frailty.
For all their claims to Gryffindor piety, the Puritans had been Slytherin to the marrow.
The Puritans had honored justice, had sanctified it with the harsh, smiting rod of Leviticus, but three hundred years later, their justice had been scourged from the walls, and the blood that doubtlessly cried out from the earth had been paved over with marble and hardwood that echoed its fairness with every well-heeled footfall. The measure of justice was determined by money and the worth of one's tears, and fates were decided on the strength of a lawyer's eloquence. The courts were easily seduced by honeyed tongues, and juries were cowed by the uneasy, looming specter of doubt.
But there were some who remembered the old justice, and who lived by it still. Wizards had not forgotten. Indeed, they had adopted the justice of their persecutors as their own, had honed it into a beautiful, Dark art without equal. There were tribunals, yes, and not every crime was punishable by death, but more often than not, the righting of a wrong was left to the victim, and if a murderer or a child molester disappeared with nary a trace, no one raised the alarm. He's gone to sit 'pon the lap of Hades, would whisper the ghosts who flitted in the damp, yeasty corners of pubs, and those barflies not too soused to hear the words and understand them would raise their grimy steins in sardonic salute and drink the knowledge away.
She had lived under the shadow or wizarding justice for three years as a girl, had turned its cruel lash to her own ends. She had pried pounds of flesh from writhing, tortured bones under the black shield of war and suffered no consequence, not even the pang of conscience. She had smiled with blood on her teeth like plum wine and bits of bone and brain in her hair. She had lied and manipulated and crushed weaker foes beneath her unsteady heel. She had killed men who had carried the titles of father and brother and lover and shed no tears. She had been judge, jury, and executioner, and in her more morbid moments, when Don was on the couch, nursing a beer and lamenting the loss of a dirtbag trophy on a technicality, she thought there was a cold pragmatism to vigilante justice.
She had put away those thoughts and longings when she'd left the world of dragons and Death Eaters, shunned them as unclean. Her Gryffindor love, with his belief in law and order and fairness, would not have understood them, would not have seen the warped beauty they possessed. He believed that justice was never for one man to decide, believed in the system he represented, no matter that it had disappointed him a thousand times and would do so a thousand more before the establishment he so loyally served stripped him of badge and gun and set him afield to totter and die. His was a world of black and white, and he would never concede that the only acceptable redress for a wrong came in the deepest shade of red.
So, that day, while he had dreamed his dreams in a place to which she could not follow him, she had tried, for his sake, to believe as he did. She had dragged herself to the courthouse in a suit that had fit poorly on her grief-ravaged bones and had sat in her chair beside the other victims of Lessing's madness-widows and widowers and hollow-eyed children temporarily stunned out of their grief by the grandeur of law. She had watched their solemn proceedings and listened to their motions and impassioned pleas. She had told herself that this was what her love would have asked of her if he could.
But it hadn't mattered, not when it had become increasingly apparent that the justice within those walls was not the justice of old, not the ravening beast of rending vengeance, but the toothless, milktoast justice of those who had never lost or even been threatened with the possibility. A scant week after her world had been rocked to the foundations, the anger aroused by the faint echoes of 9/11 was already cooling, fading into blissful forgetting. Her husband's blood had been squeegeed from the tile floor of the hospital, and even Mac, who had held his pulsing artery in his gritty, bloody fingers and held vigil with her at Don's bedside was conceding that Lessing was too mad to know that what he had done was wrong.
Then those shunned comforts had returned, hot and gnawing and narcotic as poppies. They had offered her serrated hope, and she had clutched them in her clenched fists while defense attorneys had lobbied for confinement to Bellevue rather than the needle their client so richly deserved. They had cut her fingers to ribbons and reestablished an equilibrium she had thought forever lost. The unexpected rediscovery of the bloodlust she had tried so hard to smother beneath the social niceties had startled a smile from her frozen lips, and the D.A., who had just finished delivering his initial list of demands for bail and confinement, had mistaken her expression for approval and smiled.
Fool, she'd thought sourly, and grinned all the wider.
She'd studied Lessing while the chess pieces droned. He'd grown large and vivid in her imagination, and even the grainy newspaper photo had made him seem a monster, a wraith that stole life from afar. In the flesh, he'd been sunken and sallow and insignificant in his bright orange jumpsuit, and for a while, she'd stared in gummy, raw-eyed disbelief. Nothing so pathetic should have been able to bring her white knight low, and yet he had.
He hadn't looked at her, the little man with the receding hairline and the gaunt features that spoke of a restless mind. He'd been too fixated on the men he'd thought to be deciding his fate. She had watched him in inscrutable silence, and the lines, juts, and sunken hollows of his face had become as familiar as the one she cupped every day in the ICU. She'd even known how his stubble would feel between her fingers, rough and prickling and brittle as dried grass. She'd wondered what it would be like to wrap her thin fingers around his pipestem neck and squeeze until his dull eyes bulged from their sockets and burned and guttered with the knowledge of approaching oblivion. The mole in the hollow of his throat would feel like a pebble beneath her palm, round and unexpectedly cool, and as his pulse grew erratic between her fingers, she would pry it from his flesh in bloody, ragged tribute.
She'd told herself that such musings were nothing but dark fantasies born of a feverish, exhausted mind, but even then, she had been planning, pondering the minutiae of retribution in savage, clinical detail. While the lawyers had bandied pre-trial hearings and psychological evaluations, she'd unearthed spells buried beneath thick layers of dust, considered and rejected places she could go and methods she could use. She'd descended into herself and gauged the magic that had gone fallow in her veins, flexed her fingers to coax it into her sleeping limbs. She had drunk from the deep and poisonous wellspring of her long-guarded hatred, and the water had been sweet on her parched tongue. By the time the judge had adjourned the season and remanded Lessing to his cell, she was already weaving his shroud.
Not that she'd admitted it at first. Not when her love still slept. She'd set vengeance aside in favor of holding his cool, limp hand and professing her love for him in endless entreaty. She had sung it like a song: I love you. I need you. Stay. Stay. Come home, love. Love, love, love. It was a refrain interwoven with scraps of the life he was missing-Letterman and Sportscenter and the Rangers' standing in the Stanley Cup hunt. It was whispered between sobs that were breathless, soundless screams as she rocked in her chair with her hands clamped around her bony knees. She had sung the song until her voice was raw and scoured, had willed him to hear it and follow her home.
And then he had, and though the melody remained the same, the words had changed. Now it was Hello, love and I've missed you, love, and It's all right, love. It had been rehab sessions and shrink sessions and listening to him curl in on himself in their bedroom and retch against the pain because he was too damn stubborn to take the pills. It had been days and weeks of stony, wounded silence wrought by a misplaced hand. Coldness had crept into the gentle warmth of their bed, and she had become reacquainted with the merciless hour of none.
You know all about that hour, don't you, girl? said her grandfather, gruff and forlorn inside her head. It's what's driven you to sit out here in front of this godforsaken nuthouse in the middle of the night with venom in your mouth. You learned about it as a little girl, felt its cold caress in the darkest watches of the night while your parents drew blood with whiskey-soaked tongues. It was your childhood companion when the lights went out, and it curled beneath the coverlet and tickled your skin with its clittering claws. There was no hope of escaping it, no hope at all, and you could only draw yourself up into a protective ball and pray for it to go away.
But it never did. It followed you to D.A.I.M.S., grew stronger there despite the watery sodium lights that never let the darkness deepen to true black, lest the children who lived within its diseased walls lose themselves. Sometimes, they were lost anyway, there one night and gone the next, and you knew why. The hour of none had gobbled them up. It had slipped into their rooms on fat, panther feet and swallowed them whole.
Except for Judith Pruitt. Even the hour of none couldn't stomach her rancid porkfat-weakness, and it vomited her up on a wet gout of blood. You waited for it to come for you in the nights after the paramedics had wheeled her out the rear entrance of the school with the mournful squeal of unoiled gurney wheel. Why shouldn't it come for you, come for all of you? After all, you had offered her up as a sacrifice so that it would pass you by.
So you waited with bated breath to hear the stealthy creep of its entrance, to hear the raspy, meaty pant of its breathing. You watched for its long, lean shadows from the corner of your eye, and your nostrils flared as you searched for its primal stink beneath the astringent reek of Pine Sol and Clorox.
It never came for you, at least not to strike the killing blow. That was reserved for everyone around you. It stole your best friend, Brad, in the pre-dawn hours, left nothing behind but wisps of hair strewn over the pillow, pennies tossed into a stagnant wishing well. It came for the fourteen of your friends who had once danced in its lair, and it left them stacked against Hagrid's hut like cordwood. Broken dolls. It left you unscathed, because by then, you were its most intimate partner in the dance, and though its touch was still cold, you reveled in the dance.
You learned the most intricate steps and its most secret face at Hogwarts, in the dungeon classroom that became your crucible. It taught you the rhythm in the slow, exacting quill strokes you repeated night after night and hour after hour while the sand sifted through the hourglass and the torches popped and spit in their brackets. Nuance was found in the endless stirring of potions in their cauldrons, drummed into your aching wrists and forearms by repetition.
Your amorphous, universal hatred was shaped in those damp, cold rooms in the bowels of the castle. It was focused to a hard, cruel tip and tempered with a loyalty so strong Muggle psychiatrists would doubtless call it mania, and they would be right. What is love but an acceptable mania? You bled for the hour of none, lied for it and killed for it and would have died for it had you not fled before its callous rejection.
Before the end, it offered you its fleshless arm and invited you to its darkest cotillion. You danced in its bloody ballroom of hillocks and cratered dunes and bloody, broken bodies, and your feet, which did not move, were the most graceful of all. You had danced long before the others had learned the steps, and your feet were surest on blood-soaked ground. You whirled and pirouetted and dipped as low as your creaking spine would allow-lower when bare-balled determination demanded it-and you were exhilarated. You smiled with blood on your teeth and misted over your face like freckles because for once, you had no equal. This was the maddest dance, and you were its mad queen.
Others fell, broken children of the dust, but not you. You rode the howling winds and opened your mouth to receive the mud and blood that splashed your face. You sang in concert with the maelstrom, poured your rage and your bitterness into it, and it loved you well. It made you strong and hard, sheared away the excess of wish and sugary expectation, made you forget compassion and love and even the luxury of hesitation. Decisions were made in the blink of an eye and the flick of a wrist, and you were as insubstantial as smoke inside your clothes.
Eventually, you wearied of the dance. Exhilaration soured to mindless adrenaline, and you longed to feel the sunshine on your face and taste things that didn't coat your mouth like ash. The first Georgia peach that you ate after you touched down in St. Augustine was so sweet that you cried and tipped your head back to let the juice trickle down your throat. You sucked the pit until there were no traces left and scoured your sticky tongue over the woody wrinkles. It was a glimpse of sanity, and you hadn't tasted it in three years.
You did your best to remember what it was to be human. You used your intelligence for something other than savagery and deceit, turned its power to the mundane comfort of term papers and theses and dull words on bonded paper. Numbers became beneficent once more and sat innocently upon the page. One plus one was two unless it was zero, and duels gave way to harmless if vociferous debates over tea and hot chocolate.
You exchanged bloodstained, black robes for clean garnet ones, and at twenty-one, you made your home in New York, the great stone dragon where you could live and never be noticed. You learned that happiness was not anathema, and in the months before you met Don on 34th, you trundled to Central Park with a good book and sunned yourself while you watched the world go by.
Then there was Don, your love, and the world regained its color, bright and bold and beautiful. You found emotions you had buried and discarded as useless and dangerous. You found wonder in your first glimpse of him as he straddled a screaming, struggling suspect on the sidewalk. Attraction was hidden in the warmth of his palm as he shook your hand outside the hospital, and in the way he smelled as he drove you home-polished leather and wool and cologne. It was heady and masculine, and you closed your eyes and let your head sag against the backrest, lulled by the smell and the motion of the car.
Want was in his lips on that first kiss, as was hope, fragile and beautiful as butterfly wings. Without a word, he told you that there was more to life than simply holding on with both hands until they were bloodless and numb and your nails were ragged from clawing at unforgiving walls. It was all right to just breathe, and the fact that you walked the earth wasn't an error in need of justification.
Love was unearthed in a grotty diner on 34th, that street of miracles. You reached for his hand and found it in the spaces between your interlaced fingers and in the way he chattered as if talking to you was the highlight of his day. It was in the quiet, comfortable silences when no words were needed and the conspiratorial grins of happy companionship.
Desire was in all those places and a thousand others, in the bed you would eventually share, and it gave you the courage to plan for the future, to dream recklessly. By 1997, life had broken you, and by 2003, when you shed your name like unwanted skin and became another, love had rebuilt you and rounded your sharpest, most poisonous edges. You were still dying, but it was a gentle death now, a death of degrees, and it was made sweeter with every shared look in a crowded room and every I love you spoken over morning coffee and burbled between mouthfuls of shower water.
But the knowledge of the dance never left you entirely. You had danced it for too long and too well, and it was ingrained in the tissue and sinew of your spindly arms and bony legs. It echoed in every heartbeat, and sometimes, when you least expect it, you feel its clawing tug in your veins. Copper and venom flood your mouth, and the world bleeds its colors from a mortal wound.
On those blessedly rare days, your restored humanity chafes like an unwanted binding, and your jaws ache with the desire to rend and snap and fill with blood and retribution. You long for the brutal simplicity of black or white, life or death, and you wonder why you ever allowed yourself such a killing weakness as love.
Then you look at Don, padding to the bathroom in his well-worn boxers and trying to yawn and talk at the same time, and you remember. The music that calls you to the dance fades into insignificance, and by the time he's relinquished the bathroom, the color has returned to your world. The single-minded drive that has dominated your life for so long has been tamed by the milk of his kindness and the sweet harmony of marriage.
Oh, there have been a few times when you almost succumbed to the temptation. When Gavin Moran bet his badge and lost, it broke your heart to see Don grapple with the realization that even heroes can have feet of clay. You watched him as he sat on the couch, eyes fogged with the temporary anesthesia of whiskey, and the need to take up the dance was an overwhelming compulsion. You knew the exact steps it would take, that dance, and your cold, blue feet twitched with them. You would begin by visiting the sins of the son unto the father, and then you would end it by paying a visit to Hector in his cell. You would mete out a more fitting punishment than life in a cold, grey box.
Then there was the day Aiden Burn came home to the lab in the backseat of a burned-out car. God help you, but your first thought-before decency reared its head with more acceptable fodder-was that she had lived up to her name. It was a macabre thought that stank of bitter gallows humor, and you hated yourself for it, but you couldn't help it and wouldn't disown it. So there it sat, lodged like a popcorn hull between your teeth while Don sat on the couch and nursed a beer to drown his sorrow.
Mac caught D.J. Pratt and consigned him to the pretty box where he hid all his monsters, and you knew by the quietly smug expression on his face that he considered the matter closed. Right was right, and done was done, and beneath his clothes, he wore Lycra underpants. But for the others, the cut wasn't so clean. You know because it was your job to see. Don drove a wasted Danny home and came to you with the sickly-sweet odor of another man's vomit on his clothes. He drank too much and spoke too little, and he came to you after midnight, listing and smelling of yeast and fermented sorrow. His hands were rough and clumsy, and if it wasn't the best you've ever had, you could hardly fault him. Hiding was seldom a graceful business.
You went to Aiden's funeral and watched your husband and Danny Messer as they carried her to her final rest, grave and possessed of cold beauty in their dress blues, tin soldiers who had learned to walk. Don's eyes were dry but anguished, and Danny's were wet and furious. Mac, who had proclaimed himself her mentor, did not join the march, and his eyes were blank and guarded as marbles. They refused to look at Aiden's casket, but focused instead on the muted gleam of polished buttons and meticulously shined shoes.
You'd learn later about Mac's ever-shifting loyalty, that Slytherin sense of self-preservation lurking behind his carefully-applied Gryffindor façade. Danny could have told you, and Aiden, too, now that you think about it. He abandoned them both when push came to shove. But you didn't want to believe it, not after that May, when he held Don's pulsing artery between his fingers.
In May, he was your hero, imploring your love to open his eyes, and in October, he turned on the life he had saved and tore it out again. You don't know exactly how because Don won't tell you. He just came home and got plowed and came to you to soothe the pain away with the balm between your open legs. Some of the light he had regained since returning to the beat has guttered and died, and you know that it will never rekindle. Some flames burn only once.
But Aiden was before the pall fell over you and your house, and you stood beside your husband on that April afternoon and watched him mourn. Aiden had never been your friend; she had been kind to you, and on your wedding day, she'd painted your toenails and made you laugh to keep you from throwing up, but she was part of his world, not yours. Part of his landscape was no more, and the ruthless, new topography cut deeply. He was stoic and proud, but he was still looking for her even as they lowered her into the earth, and for that you would cheerfully have killed D.J. Pratt.
You didn't, though, because in your heart, you knew it wasn't your vengeance to take, your right as friend or lover. That lay with Danny or Flack or Stella. Besides, you couldn't stand the thought of how he would look at you if he found out what you had done. He has spent his life defending the weak from the predations of murderers and rapists, so how could he love you if you spat upon his life's work and came home with iron and vengeance on your clothes?
You set the bloodlust aside then, but you can't now. Lessing blew a hole in his gut and let the darkness in, and you cannot resist the call to the danse macabre. It's too strong, too seductive, sex and sweat in a darkened room with currant wine on your lips and arsenic on your tongue. You have to drink from the poisoned river one last time, slake the thirst that will never die, and that burns in your belly like vinegar. It's either that, or succumb to the madness that threatens each time the D.A. flashes you a distracted, disingenuous smile and assures you that he's vigorously pursuing his bland, paper justice.
You began to make plans without really knowing it. You found yourself missing magic with an inexplicable, blinding ferocity. You'd be folding Don's boxers in front of the TV, and the need for it would strike like a cramp and claw your fingers in the thin fabric. You'd grit your teeth and double over in your chair, and the voice of Bill Kurtis and his Investigative Reports would be drowned beneath a ravening need to hex and Curse and feel the authoritative heft of a killing wand in your palm. Sometimes you'd retch, and impotent rage would burn on your tongue, sweet and deadly as a mouthful of antifreeze. You never said a word to Don; you just swallowed the taste and let him heal and hurt in his nest on the couch.
You started making trips to Knockturn Alley in October to buy ingredients for Potions. Healing Potions, you told yourself, never mind that Knockturn Alley was a place were goodness and mercy did not follow. You gathered bunches of nightshade and jimson weed, bought phials of powdered aconite and unicorn blood. You paid stupendous sums for bone fragments from a stillborn child's skull, and the knowledge of what it was failed to arouse disgust or shame. It was a means to an end. Just in case.
You went to Borgin and Burke's and traded for a Hand of Glory, that most illegal and coveted of Dark artefacts, and you slipped into the forgotten, labyrinthine aisles of the library at Alexandria to peruse the scrolls of the dead and read the legends more prudent souls had tried to banish forever. You inhaled perversions not seen since Euripides, ground them into the ridges and whorls of your fingerprints, and it was good.
You studied the reflections in magic's darkened pools, but never at home, where your love might find it and wonder, and never at NYU, where an enterprising student might chance upon your calculations and Runes and archaic formulas and set out decipher their meaning. You took your books and cauldrons, mortars and pestles and ensconced yourself in a secret lair where no feet have disturbed the dust in twelve years. The people of Hogsmeade still think the Shrieking Shack is inhabited by ghosts and gibbering ghouls, and after tonight, they'll go on believing it for another thirty years. Maybe forever.
Your love doesn't suspect a thing, not even when you come home with Egyptian sand in the creases of your skirt, smelling of dust and crumbling papyrus. He should, God knows, but love is blinding. You could confess your sin with the bloody proof of it still on your hands, and he would deny it because he refuses to believe you capable of such an infernal atrocity.
You go while he sleeps, slip from the bed while the cold light of the moon still falls over the bedroom in a silver curtain. You do not depart with a kiss. That would smack too much of Iscariot's treachery, but you draw your fingers over his face like settling dust and flee before the dull gleam of his badge on the dresser pricks your dying conscience like a needle. You close your eyes and wish yourself into another world, and when you open them again, you stand in a Ninth Circle of your own making.
You fuck him to rid yourself of the taint. That's the worst of it. Sometimes, it's before, to make him sleepy and pliant and too numb to ponder why there is no trace of sleepiness in your eyes. Most of the time, it's after, expiation wrung from hands and mouth and possessive, pulsing prick. You go to him with sand in your mouth and embedded beneath your nails like a curse, and he never questions why you are so hard and rough around the edges. He just takes you in his arms and arches into you, convinced he's helping you heal the festering wound of May and maybe-just maybe-planting the seed for his future family. He looks up at you, guileless and beautiful in his vulnerability, and you can only turn your head and cry in breathless gasps in time to his thrusts.
It's not fair. He deserves better, and there is a part of you-perhaps the deeply-buried kernel that prompted the Headmaster to place you in Gryffindor in spite of your twisted, serpent's heart-that shies away from the deeds that draw you from your bed at the hour of none. What you do now, here on this sidewalk, is an abomination that has no place in this happy, well-ordered life you have made for yourself. It flies in the face of everything in which your love believes, and for it, there can never be any pardon. You would stop if you could, even now at the hour of none, because it is an Unforgivable more heinous than any Curse you could ever utter. But you can't, and you won't. You're too far gone, and hatred has always been stronger than mercy.
You know the precise moment when maybe and just in case gave way to absolute certainty. It was the day he came home with weariness smudged beneath his eyes and confusion in them. It was in the clink of the whiskey bottle and the tart sweetness of booze on his tongue when he kissed you. It was in the mindless roughness of his hands as they pulled off your clothes and kneaded delicate flesh.
I'm a good cop, he said in the darkness when it was over. You've never forgotten it. A damn good cop. Over and over again, as though there were doubt upon the matter. The tumblers clicked into place, and you knew. You waited and watched and you loved, and on the first of November, you fucked him into glassy-eyed complacency and visited Mount Pleasant Cemetery to gather grave dirt. The Day of the Dead has a power all its own, and you intended to harness it.
Maybe you could have made peace with the memories of the eight days he spent drifting between the present and the hereafter. Maybe you could have lived with the knowledge of what your husband looks like with a nasogastric tube jammed up nose and an adult diaper on his ass. Maybe you could even have reconciled yourself to the hateful, ugly scar that will be with him to the end of his days. What you couldn't abide was the uncertainty you saw in his eyes, the sneaking, incredulous suspicion that he wasn't good enough to carry the badge he holds so dear. Lessing had robbed him of his light, introduced him to the terrible power of the hour of none, and for that, he had to pay.
She sat on the sidewalk, concealed from passersby by a Disillusionment Charm. To anyone who might have looked in her direction, she would be nothing more than a fragment of shadow cast by the arc-sodium lights over the hospital entrance and the neon lights from the all-deli across the street. It was bitterly cold, and the air was thick and sharp with the promise of snow; her breath cut the roof of her mouth and made her teeth ache.
Magic crackled and vibrated against her skin, and she couldn't resist a small smile at the comforting familiarity of it as it thrummed in her veins. As a girl, she had lived and died by its power, spent hours swaddled in a protective cocoon of shielding and concealing spells. She had prowled the halls of Hogwarts on silent wheels, a ghost-child who had never paid the penance of flesh. She had slept behind wards and been lulled to dreamless sleep by its gentle vibrations. It had been her constant companion, her conduit to equality, and she had missed it.
That's not all you miss, is it? You miss the bloodletting. You miss the killing.
She pushed the thought away and watched the entrance to the hospital, where an orderly was indulging in a smoke break. His face was haggard and lined in the unforgiving light on the street, and there were stains on his wrinkled, green smock. Blood. Vomit. Shit. The hallmarks of lost dignity. He turned his head and released a puff of smoke, and for an instant, he looked right at her.
She smirked when he dropped his gaze without hesitation. Of course you didn't see me. Your kind never did, even when I was right under your noses. You knew me by condition and number, and the use of my given name was a rarity reserved only for the psychotherapists who wanted to catalogue my every thought. They tainted it, made it sound lewd and dirty, and I wished they would use the number instead. Even if you could see me now, I'd be another scrap of breathing meat to be kneaded and massaged and pounded into submission.
His gaze flitted over her again, and she fought the urge to giggle. Peek-a-boo, and I see you.
He took a final drag from his cigarette and stubbed it out against the wall. "Shit," he muttered disconsolately, and trudged toward the door.
She darted forward, lips pressed together in concentration. The chair glided soundlessly over the pavement, its wheels buoyed by the Levitation Charms merry Professor Flitwick had taught her a lifetime ago. It responded to the merest brush of her hands on the rims, and her teeth bared in an unconscious snarl of triumph.
Athena has risen, she thought savagely, and swallowed a spate of mindless laughter.
The orderly slipped through the glass door, and she followed close on his heels, a fetch once more, chest light and mouth sour with adrenaline. He passed the information desk and a bored receptionist who wore a floral-print blouse and shuffled to another desk tucked discreetly out of sight. Another receptionist sat behind it, filing her nails and chewing gum. The orderly reached over the desk and picked up a clipboard.
"Heya, Doreen," he grunted, and his mouth was full of smoke and ash, grating and phlegmatic.
"'Lo, Jack," she answered, and her emery board sped up.
"Anythin' excitin' on the floor tonight?" Jack asked. He picked up the pen that dangled from the clipboard and scrawled his name on the sign-in sheet.
"Nah. Some cops from the 31st brought in a tweaker for overnight observation, but the Screamer has been quiet, and nobody's tried to shiv themselves with a goddamn bedspring."
"Well, will wonders never cease?" he retorted wryly, and Rebecca smothered a bark of appreciative laughter. Oh, Jack, my friend, I think your night is going to pick up considerably.
He dropped the clipboard onto the desk, gave Doreen a jaunty salute, and stalked down the hallway, crepe soles whispering sullen secrets to the scuffed, linoleum floor. This close, she could smell the nicotine on his clothes and skin, and her nose wrinkled in disgust. He scratched idly at the seat of his pants and whistled tunelessly as he walked. Somewhere, a patient began to scream.
"Ain't that a peach?" he grumbled, and she bit the inside of her cheek.
She accompanied him on his rounds, and with each step and turn of the wheel, the music of the dance grew louder. She could hear it beneath the squeak of crepe soles and the screams of damned souls trapped in dreams from which they would never awaken. It was discordant and hypnotic and graceful, and her limbs twitched with desire to relive the steps she told herself she had foresworn.
She made herself wait. She was so close now, and there could be no room for error. If she were discovered now, there would be no plausible reason for skulking around the nuthouse where her husband's assailant lived in the middle of the night. She measured the revolutions of her wheels and counted the tiles of linoleum over which she passed, and from her vantage point, she watched the familiar rhythm of life behind the walls.
Only the name had changed. The methods and madness were the same. The same grey walls, the same soulless wards devoid of color or hope. The same piss covered by the chemical stink of disinfectant. When Jack peered into the square portholes of patients' rooms, the same squalid, hopeless lives greeted him. The disorders on the charts hanging from every plastic bedframe like toetags for the prematurely discarded were different, but the faces were the same, broken and vacant and wholly disinterested in the joyless acts of breathing and pissing and shitting and swallowing pills that looked like candy to mask their stupefying poison.
That wasn't to say that there wasn't resistance to the regimentation. Even madness longed for freedom of expression, and in Pod 3D, a madwoman still had the strength for insurrection. She clawed at the walls with bloody, ruined fingers and left gaudy smears of defiance on the grimy, white plaster. She spoke in the language sane minds called gibberish.
The sacred chord that pleased the Lord, she thought, and smiled.
The insurrection ended as all the others had before it and as all those that came after it ever would-with needles and restraints and brute force wielded against the weak. Soon, the woman's guttural screams of defiance became glottal, watery moans of defeat, and eyes that saw the secret face of God were blinded by Haldol and Thorazine, and Rebecca watched it dispassionately from her place beside the door. It was a familiar outcome, and it brought no horror, only a dull, simmering anger that coiled around her heart like a fist.
She found Lessing in Pod 5F, the ward for high-stakes offenders. Blowing a hole in her husband's gut and taking six other lives had cost him dearly…and yet, not so dearly as he deserved. He still lived and breathed, and aside from a loss of liberty, he suffered no hardship. His cell was clean and private, and when she peered through the porthole in the door, she saw that the walls were lined with pictures of his family-a woman and child who smiled beatifically at him from the creased photo paper.
She stared at the photos for a very long time and told herself that there was still a chance to let go, to go home to her own husband, who slept and dreamed of bouncing babies in swaddles and of houses with white picket fences. She tried to place herself in the shoes of the woman in the photograph, who had done nothing but marry a lunatic. It was useless because she had been in that woman's shoes, had committed no sin but to marry a police officer, and she had found herself clinging to his limp, cold hand and bargaining with God to let him stay. There had been no pity for her then, and there would be none from her now.
She took a deep breath and raised her wand. She pointed it at the heavy, iron hinges of the door. "Muffliato!" A flick of her wrist, and the delicate, wavering tip pointed at the lock. "Alohamora!"
The tumblers surrendered with a ratcheting click, and the door swung open in mute invitation.
She rolled inside and beckoned to the door, which closed behind her. It was stale inside the cell, and it reeked of unlaundered clothes and unwashed body. Lessing lay on his cot and gazed at the pictures taped to the wall. His fingers grazed a dog-eared photo of his wife with reverent yearning.
You want to fuck her again, Lessing? Never again. Not on this side of Hell. She murmured "Muffliato!" again, and the silence fell like smothering dust.
Lessing shifted on his cot. "Is someone there?" he called uncertainly, and peered at the door in anticipation of movement. When none came, he returned his attention to the photograph.
"Look all you want, because that's as close as you're ever going to get," she said.
Lessing whirled on his cot, and his bare feet struck the floor with a meaty thud. He shot to his feet. "Is someone there? Who is it?" he demanded, and his eyes bulged in their sockets.
"I'm right here," she answered mildly, and laughed, a cold, mocking caw that had once come from the throat of Bellatrix Lestrange.
Lessing danced from foot to foot and turned in a haphazard circle. "Where?" Spittle flew from his lips.
"Right here, Mr. Lessing. Finite incantatem!" The Disillusionment Charm evaporated, and she shivered at the sudden release of pressure.
Lessing's mouth sagged in a boneless gape. "Y-oo-uu," he said slowly, a warped record on its last feeble revolution. "How did you-? Guards! Orderly! There's a woman in my cell!"
"They can't hear you, Mr. Lessing." Patient, bored. "No one can."
"How do you know my name? Do I know you?"
"No. But you will. Oh, I promise you will." Before he could reply, she raised her wand. "Stupefy!"
Lessing crumpled, and a small, satisfied smile curled in the corners of her mouth. There was no hurry, not with magic to protect her and hide her from prying eyes. She could even toy with him if she wanted, make him writhe and bleed while his screams echoed off the walls. But no. She had waited too long, planned too carefully to squander her plans at the eleventh hour.
She bent and seized his bony wrist in her burning fingers, and then she began to laugh. The dance had begun, and it was glorious. She Disapparated with a thunderclap. Outside the hospital, the wind wailed as though in mourning, and inside, the receptionist's clock struck the hour of none.