Round 8 - Dystopian Future
CHASER 1: What happens to Muggleborns?
Prompts:
(word) allegiance
(quote) 'An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind' - Mahatma Gandhi
4. (word) revolution
Words: 2188
1998. Harry Potter mysteriously vanished and the Death Eaters took over. (Unbeknownst to anyone but Draco Malfoy, Harry Potter had been burnt to death attempting to save Vincent Crabbe. Draco Malfoy was now a stuttering husk with night terrors that left him staining the bedsheets, however, so he didn't truly count.)
A month after the Death Eater Revolution, the Muggleborns attempted to flee from death.
Donaghan did not, because he thought his music, fame, and fans would save him. Surprisingly, it did not. Death, which was synonymous with Voldemort, did not enjoy let alone listen to music.
"For the crime of stealing magic from the True Wizards, we sentence you to Azkaban."
Donaghan shifted. He felt a trap, a pitless abyss coming along, but he asked anyway, "Yeah, but what about my music? I've got fans, don't I? They're waiting for my next album."
"Your music?" The woman at the podium tittered.
"Well, yeah?"
She smiled—it was not pretty. There were lipstick stains on her teeth as if she was a shark that had just eaten. "Your music is not yours. It was a talent stolen from its rightful Pureblood owner by you, filthy Mudblood."
A pause.
"As such," she continued, her eyes bright with some cruel thought, "you will be stripped of all ability to perform your music."
The woman shuffled from her podium to the chair where he was bound. She had a limp, he noticed. Unsurprising, considering how old she looked.
The woman brandished her wand, and aimed it at his left hand. "Diffindo."
Donaghan screamed.
"Incendio." The gaping wound spilling blood in rivers, and the place where his hand used to be, was cauterized by a small flame.
She did the same for his right, and in the end, he was bawling like a baby. The wrinkles on the woman's face had been drawn into a twitchy smile.
It looked smug but horrified—shocked almost. As if she hadn't recognised the depths of her own depravity.
'Good,' Donaghan thought, inordinately satisfied by the miniscule agony that his own pain had caused. 'Let her hate herself for the monster she has become."
Perhaps he should compose a song about it; it did sound awfully poetic. Then he remembered that because of her, he had no hands to play the bass with, and he certainly didn't want her as a muse after that.
For a moment, the woman was still, and she stared at his stumps. Then she turned to the guards beside her podium and ordered, "W—Well, what are you waiting for? Get him to Azkaban, you morons!"
The guards grabbed him by the armpits and pushed him along towards the golden door.
"Next! Come in, Mrs Tremlett. We have much to discuss."
Donaghan glanced back, unable to believe his ears.
A lady in Muggle attire with shoulders hunched to her ears was led in.
"DIANA! DIANA!" he shouted, desperately reaching for her—he felt his hands move but he didn't see them do so—grabbing—punching—kicking.
Her eyes met his. They were brown and accusing as if she was asking why he hadn't saved her like he had promised all the damsels in his songs.
That was all Donaghan saw of his wife before he was finally stupefied and dragged out.
His days in Azkaban were wet and sleepless. Diana was weak, had been fragile ever since she caught meningitis in childhood, without the superior medical treatment available to wizards to cure it.
The cold could kill her.
Her inmate could kill her.
The food could kill her.
Anything here could kill her, really. But what he was most afraid of was the Dementors and what they would twist her mind into.
He had met Diana in St Mungo's after getting into a car accident. "Brought in for attempted suicide," she had confessed to him, lying limp on her hospital bed, which was beside his.
"Why did you do it?" he had replied and stared with morbid fascination at the stitches on her wrists.
"What else can I do?" she answered bitterly. "I'm a Muggleborn. No job, no money, no Muggle degree, and my parents are dead."
'That's a bit weak,' he had wanted to say, but dared not. He was always a coward, and maybe that was why he had fallen in love with Diana. She was a weak, dependant martyr, a lovely contradiction, perfect to stroke the ego of a rock star like him.
But that was alright. He loved her for all her flaws; so did she him for his.
"I just hoped that my death would warrant at least a small section at the back of the Daily Prophet and persuade the Wizengamot to help the other Muggleborns before it's too late. But they've taken even that from me," Diana continued.
And now, they had taken even more, mused Donaghan.
'From me too,' he thought, the three-month old ache in his stump pulsing again.
But at least this time, there would be no newspaper article or obituary with a cause of death listed that would further motivate her to die.
His stomach roiled at the thought of Diana bashing her head against the prison bars until her head leaked.
Eight months later came the announcement that all cells in Azkaban were so full that the Muggleborns were packed in like chickens in crates headed for the slaughterhouses, and no cells were left to imprison actual criminals.
Donaghan laughed at that. He so rarely got to laugh that he was oddly pleased by the sound it made, no matter how hoarse, croaky, and dry it was. Azkaban was a dank place surrounded by a sea, but ironically, he felt dry there. Like he was a dessicated corpse: empty, like a glass without water. A shell without sweet, sad Diana.
Then the guard told them that due to overcrowding, some of them would be put to sleep, and some would be sent away as slaves.
The ones with family and friends, if they had any tears or sanity left, sobbed harder.
'This will be the one to break us all,' thought Donaghan.
The ones without were cautiously determined.
One day, his cell door opened.
"Dona—" the guard couldn't even get a word out before he was tackled.
A hoard of inmates stumbled at the guard—there was no space, so everyone had to sit all the time, and as a result, muscles had atrophied over time. They tried to bite the guard, claw the guard, poke out the eyes of the guard. Even the crazy and the silent joined in. They were particularly vicious, and Donaghan thought that it was probably because they knew they were mad and knew that their ever-slipping sanity was the wizard's fault.
The guard's wand was broken in the fight for a piece of the wizard. In just a few minutes, the wizard had been butchered.
'His eyeballs now bear a consistency similar to crushed jelly,' Donaghan noted hysterically, frozen at the back of the cell with the saner ones.
An eye for an eye?
Was this what it had come to? Vengeance? He wished he could call it petty, but. But—
(He saw the wizard's tongue get ripped off.)
—this utter brutality could never be called petty.
'An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind,' he thought but did not dare say it to the people—with blood painting their faces like a mask, he struggled not to think of them as monsters—who were now haggling for a finger, an eye, a toe or two.
Soon, someone stole the guard's keys and unlocked everyone in the neighbouring cells. The area around his body had become a market place.
"A nail in exchange for a sketch out of blood!" a boy shouted. Donaghan vaguely remembered the boy from the Hogwarts Yule Ball he had performed at years ago. The boy had asked for an autograph—Dean Thomas, was it? The one who had bragged about how he "drew Harry Potter's Quidditch banner."
"His toe stinks. His fingers don't. Two toes for a finger, or no deal," someone declared.
"What about his wand?" a small female voice rang.
There was silence.
No one wanted a wizard's wand, not really. Not now, when it was magic that had caused them this torture. Besides, they had been living as Muggles for almost a year, so the only ones they called wizards now were their enemies.
"Okay, I'll just use it to cut the guard's body parts then."
Donaghan winced. The casual, rhythmic tone of the voice was so similar to Diana's.
"Diffindo," the voice continued.
"Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo. Diffindo."
Donaghan flinched with every Diffindo spoken. The crowd, too, had scattered from her like mice, and through the space between them, Donaghan recognised the girl with the wand.
"Diana," he whispered.
"Anyone want his spleen?" the female voice asked again, deceptively polite.
So weathered had his memories of her been by the daily nightmares, that he had forgotten her voice.
"The change is in the air
And nothing will ever be the same
You still look good to me
Oh but you're no good for me*," he sang, or rather, croaked. He was the bass player, and he was never any good at singing, especially not now that Azkaban had ruined on his vocal chords.
"When all is dark and there's no light,
lost in the deepest star of night,
I see you," Diana sang back, upbeat, looking right at him.
"Your hands are shaking, baby.
You ain't been sleeping lately.
There's something out there.
And it don't seem very friendly, does it?
If I could help you, I would help ya.
But it's difficult," he said shakily. He hoped Diana would not Diffindo him.
"Your voice keeps haunting me.
I cannot eat or sleep.
I'm going crazy in this hazy fantasy," she confessed, singing.
"There was a time.
I would have walked on burning coals for you.
Sailed across the ocean blue.
Climbed the highest mountain.
Just to call your name," she continued.
"But you never came," she said, and it cut him to the quick.
"So take your hands off me.
Tonight I'm breaking free," she finished and smiled sharply.
Diana had not died. Or had she? Either way, she had become stronger. She was no longer the poor, sickly damsel in distress he loved to save.
"This is the night.
This is the night," Donaghan lamented.
A Hogwarts-age child with filthy blonde hair giggled beside him. "It's a nightmare."
"Did you, Donaghan Tremblett, cast the Di,"— the woman's breath caught and Donaghan felt pleased again—"Diffindo that severed every part of Theodore Nott's body from its joint?"
"Yes," Donaghan replied before his own mind could frighten himself enough to stay quiet.
"Very well. Take him to be executed by a Sphinx's mauling."
The guards dragged him up by his stumps, and Donaghan hissed.
They were at the door when suddenly, the woman said in a very small voice, "Wait. Let him have the Kiss instead."
The guards paused and eyed her.
"Oh, for goodness sake—I have been supporting Lord Voldemort before you were even born," she hissed. "You will not doubt me now."
The guards did not and resumed their dragging.
"Next. Mrs Tr—oho! Soon to be Ms Newbury?" the woman said with gleeful malice as the door opened.
Diana stepped in, escorted by guards, having heard all that had been said. But her eyes were still as accusing as ever.
'LOOK! LOOK, DIANA! I SAVED YOU, DIDN'T I?' he wanted to shout.
The doors slammed close.
And Donaghan realised that she had not wanted a hero to bring her only temporary relief from death. She had expected a messiah who owed eternal allegiance to her in her girlhood fantasies of him: a servant god whom he was not.
Sometimes, Donaghan really hated that he was a rock star.
Fin.
*Song is titled, This Is The Night. It was written by JK Rowling.