The Stars Weep Tonight
For Riss, because I've been promising her this for a long time.
Thanks to Mad, Blue and Jenny for various prompts, some of which have been used.
The stars weep tonight, but her eyes are dry.
It is another job done. There is no pleasure any more. No joy. Only the fierce, burning knowledge that his work must go on. It is unthinkable that there could be a world without him in it, so she knows that he is still here somewhere. He will return, and even if all others lose hope and fade away, she will remain faithful to the end.
She has emptied their minds with pain, and it has quieted the passions in her heart. The screams of others are her release, and after her release, she is in control again. The only sound now is the wailing of the child left behind, which is strange because the child was not there; she has never set eyes on him, nor ever heard him cry. And he is certainly not here now.
There is a picture of another child in her mind.
A child who stands on a rickety wooden bridge, breaking icicles off the hand rail with small fingers that are almost blue with cold, and flinging them with violent passion into the waters of the river below; a child with wild black hair and storms in her eyes. The bridge is in shadow, so frost still lies on it, printed with the sharp marks of the child's footprints, and although the river is quite fast flowing, it is cold enough that ice has formed at the edges, paper thin.
And perhaps it is a sign that she is mad after all, as they say she is, for her first instinct is to picture – in an almost detached way – the effect of a swift explosion spell on the supports of that bridge. She can almost hear the sound of wood splintering; see the graceful shape of the child falling, in something like slow motion, her arms flung out to clutch thin air; feel the sudden spray of water droplets from the splash made by the small body as it disappears into the black waters; see the expression of mingled fear and fury – fury that someone has got the better of her – on that little girl's face.
That gives her a feeling of satisfaction, which is perhaps the sign that she is insane, because she knows that that child is herself.
She also remembers the occasion, and she knows how it ended, which was not with a sudden plunge into the water.
Perhaps it would have been better if it had ended that way.
She was a child of passion.
Conceived of passion, out of wedlock, – she can do the maths – she was the reason why her parents married. Her mother has never forgiven her for this, but she gains a certain perverse satisfaction from it. The family has been hers to manipulate since before she was born.
As a small girl, her own passions were wild and fierce. Love, hate, anger, joy; all were overwhelming and all-consuming. Too much for a child to bear, and resulting in wild outbursts that she could not control and which left her shaking, and often crying.
Too well she remembers her first use of accidental magic, when (she was only six, and so trivia became life or death) Andromeda was given the doll that she had wanted. She could recall, almost as if she were watching somebody else, standing in the middle of the drawing room and screaming and screaming, because was incapable of anything else and she had to do something. The windows shattered and the curtains burst into flames.
She remembers too, the mingled love, hate and jealousy that made her lose her head and throw Andromeda down the stairs, because Cissa said she liked Dromeda better.
And she remembers with terrifying clarity, the dreams – if that's what you could call those hazy, fear-filled places half way between waking and sleeping – that attacked her at night and made her scream endlessly into the darkness until she awoke, shaking and sobbing.
A well bred, pureblood girl was not supposed to have passions though. They wanted her to learn self-control, and they knew how to teach it, so she learnt.
She learnt to control her anger; to keep her hate within her, and hide her love, so that it all twisted inwards instead of escaping outwards. She learnt to stifle her screams even when she was not really awake. And eventually, she learnt that the screams of others could be as much of a release as screaming herself.
She feels no guilt, so the weeping child in her head is not a sign of that. Perhaps it is simply a reminder that the job could have been done more thoroughly; the brat could have been removed as well. Both brats, because there is another child who should be dead but isn't. Or perhaps it is the ghost of her own tears, which she choked off long ago.
The job is done though. There is a quiet satisfaction in knowing that; in knowing that the world, which was rejoicing in her master's downfall, is now in mourning once again. That elsewhere, there is weeping; there is anger; there is fear, while here in her heart, it is still.
He reignited her passions. Not Rodolphus – Rodolphus was an ally and a useful one, and she was the same to him. Nothing more.
It was him who took her and taught her that passion could be channelled. Taught her to hate again, and taught her to use that hate. Taught her the spells that feed off hate the way fire feeds off oil. Showed her what she could do when she really meant it.
She remembers the first time she used it properly, and she knew that she had found the spell she loved most of them all. This was power; this was passion controlled; this was release.
Crucio.
The word she has made into a song. The word she speaks as she might speak soft words to a lover. The word that draws the screams from their lips.
He hurt her first; the first passions that came back were pain and fear. Then anger and hate; not with him, for even then, she could not hate him. For herself, for her weakness. Burning, controlling hate of the kind she had not felt for so long.
And he turned her round and told her to use it; to feed it to the flames and let them burn bright.
It was just a filthy Mudblood. But his screams filled her with the final passions; joy and love.
The stars weep tonight, but she will not stop until they too are screaming.