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the edge of some crazy cliff
We went mad together, all four of us.
The traitor went mad for mud. Could be a nursery rhyme.
Yes, she went mad for mud – for mud! – aye, she went mad for mud!
Might have been Head Girl once upon a time, might have overlooked some slippery little Slytherins in a faraway land, but she married mud, and she gave birth to mud and she so she always was mud. Last I heard, the little mud-brat was shape-shifting mud. Freak.
The other one went mad for the man with a mane to match hers. Oh, she was as pure as pure can be, but she went mad for him anyway. He didn't deserve her, she who came to him smiling and gleaming and happy. He was proud. All the worthy ones ought to be proud – but they were proud to bleed, proud to show their blood to the world in his name, all for him, all for power, all for the glory they craved. But that idiot – that stupid, arrogant, stinking idiot – he was cowardly and gutless and didn't deserve to be in the house of Salazar Slytherin.
She didn't turn her boy over when he was born. I couldn't understand why she looked so happy, so warm. I still can't. He will grow up spineless, he will, like his maggot-infested father. Serves him right.
But she loved them both, she said, so she was mad too.
I? I went mad because I could. I did. I went mad. I exploded across our star, broke free of that sliver of a silver cage. I turned on your paper-thin wall next, ripped it to bits. You started the words and I didn't wait for the shrieks to finish. The screams must have been getting louder and louder, but I could only hear the tinkling of silver anklets in my ears.
We didn't need a wand, sometimes. I used the bluntest knife to rearrange bodies, organs, limbs, faces. I knew how to drain life as slowly as possible, how to keep the life and hate and anger show in their dead eyes, how to smile a soft, soft smile as they stared into my eyes and died.
My hands dripped with the blood of a thousand people and my hair was matted with the filth of Azkaban, and I never ever bothered to comb it out. I was up there with the stars, soaring above the earth, untouchable. I had only to whisper and I'd light up the world around me with my dark eyes and a stick of wood.
I was drunk.
And that's why I tried to lick my way out once, I suppose. I ran my tongue over the stones lots of times. I think I was looking for a crack, but I can't really remember now. The walls tasted of madness, though, so I didn't anymore. If I became any more mad the Dementors would eat it away until there was nothing left, and I couldn't have that, now, could I?
They ate it anyway. You were eaten up by them, did you know that? I suppose you don't remember that. I suppose I was too mad to tuck you all away, and I suppose when they got a little piece of you they liked it and ate you all up before I could save you.
I got you back, though, when I found a hole in the wall. I bet you remember that.
We saw the world under our feet and laughed at it.
Do you remember me? Do you remember when we looked up and got the gleam in our eye and screamed the words into the wind?