Written for the 4th fic exchange on "The Dark Lord's Most Faithful" Forum. This a response to the "Write about a character dealing with PTSD" Prompt.
The bracketed numbers are in text citations which shall be listed below.
Please enjoy.
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter
Death's Other Kingdom:
Every tick of the clock is a shaking concussion, and the ground is shuddering.
She is shuddering, she is the earth.
The earth stares up at the sky and marvels. It touches it, the darkness and the light in something infinitely greater, a union of the ordinary and the extraordinary.
The sky has gone.
Life is an endless cage. The light is gone. [1]
Between one cataclysm and the next she breathes.
And the sweet little house with its sweet little gate and its sweet little garden where she shouldn't be implodes. There is green light in her eyes [2] and she grips the wooden gate so tight splinters push up beneath her nails. She sways, she is blind. It was the last light she saw.
The wind whistles against the sitting room window of her sister's ancient house and the autumn breeze rips her hood back from her face and she is a silver mask in a sea of silly children in masks and there are no faces. There is one face.
She can't remember the last time she saw him. Stars are white light, she remembers that much. She remembers the sun rises red. She remembers that between the dusk and dawn is darkness.
But she cannot remember the last time she saw him.
The clock tolls again. Time is passing without her, slipping through her fingers like a sieve. She loses minutes, hours, days.
She lives in a world of lost moments [3].
The past is falling away too, one night is swallowing her mind and its starving maw takes more and more every day. A broken jaw that covets their old dreams.
It wants that secret place where there is light. It wants the dying star inside [4].
She wants to be one with that fading thing within. She wants to empty herself of that valley of pieces of light in her heart.
Weeks pass and she stays unmoving and watches them go. One by one they go. Winking out of existence
She cries first because what she is losing is love.
Then she mourns because she is losing whatever is human.
When her tears have run dry on her face she watches from some desolate place as her sky goes out and she loses her eyes, and only feels their absence from a world she can no longer enter.
Voices come and go, they beg her to eat. But she does not mean to take anything in. Only to be purged. She has shed love, she has shed her humanity, she has shed her tears and now she will shed her will to live. It will peel away from her like an old snakeskin and she hopes against hope that whatever is underneath is the sky.
Then, even if she can not see it, she could feel the changing of the day and night and stars and know, without eyes, that it is there.
They beg her to sleep and she stares and fragments of her life pass away undetected in her room by her window, and trembles with self loathing for her exhausted bones. She hates them for planting it in her mind that she has still not become the sky and must sleep.
They force her to bathe and she watches and waits for stars while Narcissa scrubs at her like she is a crippled child. Her sister tells her she needs to come out of it because Narcissa doesn't understand that there is no light and there are no eyes here for her to look forward across time. Narcissa still sees and she hates her for it. Every time Cissy forces her from her place and strips away her filthy clothes with her slim, healthy hands and her nervous eyes scan her stick-like legs that do not touch one another and her ribs that show beneath her collar, above her too-small breasts, and her spine that stands like a mountain range from between her shoulder blades, she tells her so. She screams, and punches, and claws and says that her cherished baby sister could never understand.
Her sister combs the tangles from her damp hair and keeps it trimmed neatly at her shoulders. She cuts her nails into perfect little curves, so short she can not do harm with them. She grabs her wrist in one session and squeezes until the bones in her sister's dainty wrist buckle. She is weak, but she knows the magic of the night sky and how her soul is her body and it is strong. She applies crushing pressure until her beloved little sister cries.
In return she receives the patience of a mother.
She hates her.
But she hates others more.
She hates Severus, who hid where the moon couldn't see that night and walked past her into the ruined house where he held that hateful corpse and wept. She had no body to cry over that night, in an ultimate act of love. So she listened while he sobbed pitifully over the plain woman with her dull orange hair and her life with someone else, and when he finally seemed to have cried himself out he took his leave. He brushed past her on the garden walk with hollowed-out eyes that did not even see her and she knew that she looked the same.
She had clambered through the rubble, and every painful piece of glass, every fall she took over piles of destruction, the piece of splintered wood that had found it's way up between the bones of her arm (in one side and out the other) was a name on her tongue, the only one that mattered. And every noise she made she cursed for fear that he may still be somewhere in the wreckage after all and she had missed his hummingbird heartbeat.
Only silence met her in that house.
When her hope of finding him within those walls had faded she hunted the body of the woman. It was still soft from recently carrying a child, sweet smelling and tangible and she carved every spiteful word she could think of into that unfit, disgustingly domestic flesh. She did not leave until the filthy blood was on her face and on the walls and soaked deep into the warm carpet.
She turned to him then, the plain woman's child, and she stared long and hard at the jagged mark on his forehead. The only proof that above there were still shining stars and awesome darkness, but the child had put those damnable jagged lines through her vision of the sky and now it had shattered and was coming crumbling apart.
Her vision had been cracked forever, like damaged lenses and she had pressed her wand hard against the new scar on the fat baby's skull and burned magic into it until it produced that wretched scream she had heard from outside. Her nails dug in and marred those cherub cheeks, she held her fingers tight around it's throat until it was within an inch of suffocation.
But she could not find him, what she loved most of all, and this thing did not deserve to go to the same place after the heinous crime it had committed. She could not bring death because now to kill felt as if it would sully the passing of the light. No death should follow, he should be the last because what right had she to send something to that domain without his permission. Even if vengeance tasted sweet.
So she longed to, but she could not kill the baby because there was still green light in her eyes [2].
And after that night there can never be light again.
She doesn't kill for another fifteen years. It is an ache, a throbbing need in her blood, but like one who has been violated she cannot do it.
She seeks out Barty because he can no longer see either and it is not the sky she touches but he has touched the sky too, she is sure-and together they search for stars. They try to pry it from one another with tenderness and camaraderie and terrible pain and his cock buried tight within her until they are a sobbing heap, limp with inflicted hurt and slick with his seed between her fragile thighs. She is raw in her core and he is bleeding and still they can not find anything in the night sky.
She wishes the sky loved her.
She wishes Barty were her husband so that they could love the sky together.
She doesn't sleep and when Rodolphus does she stands over him and wants him to die, but she still can not bear the green light.
A year passes and words and actions whirl around, and she remembers less and less, and when she hears "Bellatrix, please drink", "Bellatrix, please lie down", "Bellatrix, I need you to stand", it always takes her some time to figure out that the word they keep using is her name.
Her name is a star.
She is not a star and she still has not found it within herself to become the sky.
And so there is no velvet blue and gold or white.
When Rabastan tells her that someone might know where to find light again her blind eyes are greedy and eager. They are sloppy and careless. They are zealots, deprived of their faith. And when the last of her people are caught she asks where to find him long after the mindless heaps on the ground can no longer make sense of her words. She pleads guilty.
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
She tells the Aurors the entire way to the island in the cold sea.
She tells everyone at the formality of a trial, because a queen is but a servant of her king and never forsakes her lord or kingdom. Their lost kingdom [4].
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
The stone walls of her cell go unmarred for thirteen years. There is a sharp rock, she keeps time on her wrists. Seven sunrises, seven sunsets, one bloody gash.
When she runs out of smooth flesh the earth trembles again for the first time in years and she rises on shaky limbs and the ceiling is gone and she sees the sky.
And she believes in the green light [5].
Thank you for reading. Please Review.
[1] "The Black Gates of Paradise"-Maiafay
[2] Over the Love-Florence+The Machine
[3] Final Fantasy XIII-2
[4] "The Hollow Men"-T.S. Elliot
[5] "The Great Gatsby"-F. Scott. Fitzgerald