My thoughts on how Bellatrix's mind would have soured while in prison. This might turn into a two-shot concerning her death, but that hurts me to write about, so we shall see. Leave a review if you liked and especially if you didn't! This is stream of consciousness, and again, there is some pretty heavy gore. Cannabalism and such.
Okay, let's go.
It's dark.
Dark, and the scribble-scrabble rats have emerged from their holes to bite at her feet and search for the remains of her cellmate.
They find them rather quickly (the remains, not her feet. She's half convinced she doesn't even have feet anymore, she's just the floating, tattered remnants of a soul). The click-click teeth gnaw trenches across his shattered ribs, divesting Henry's skeleton of any meat.
Flashes of her shackled hands, dirty and broken-nails, locked around his throat as he weakly scratched her hands away. Bellatrix remembers how his voice came out in those last moments, raspy and pleading, Let me go…
But he wasn't, she thinks, talking to her.
Bellatrix wonders, watching them enjoy their impromptu meal, if these skittery rats have been specially trained to befoul this prison. If the Ministry has given them a taste for the flesh of the darkened humans.
One of them breaks off from a pack of five and explores her foot with some curiosity. When it bites her, it hurts, which is good because that means she's alive.
She seizes it by the tail. It's scaly and slidy, but she grabs it and dangles the rat in front of her face. It squeals. None of its family comes to help.
Thank you, she says to the rat, very loud because that's allowed.
Bellatrix remembers when everyone was scared to talk loud because they were afraid it would trigger something bad. But she was never afraid because she knows that whatever happens in here happens in here and never leaves and that's it because people go into this place and they come out broken and she was already broken so she's half convinced that she will be merely a fragment by the time she escapes.
She thanks the rat again, even louder. She thanks the scrabbly jabbly rat because with the pain, it reminded her she's alive, and it deserves a reward for that.
The skittery jittery rat twitches a lot lot lot in her hands before she bites the head off, spraying her chin and nose with clumpy scarlet blood.
It tastes good. It tastes a lot lot lot better than the slimy chunks of translucent something that the wardens slide through the slots every week.
Maybe every month. There are no windows, so the slippery light has no way of slipping in. She is always bathed in complete darkness.
Her eyes have adjusted, though. She has a front row seat as the rest of the rats finish dining on Henry.
There's a cramp in her chest, near the rib she broke last week, when one of the scratchy-patchy rats drags his left eye out into the middle of the cell and begins inviting others to feast on it, too. Henry was the longest lasting of any of her cellmates.
After the dementors left, he would tell her tales of his childhood, of green hills and blue skies blotted with white. He poured himself into her.
When he asked her to kill her, she had to say yes. She was bound to it. Bellatrix always honors her agreements. Bad things happen when she doesn't.
A scary thought flits across the back of her mind. She remembers the conversations that Henry forgot and how his face would screw up when he tried to remember and she remembers when he finally began to move away from her at night because he said her head was skewed.
No, he wanted to die. She knows he asked her to kill him. Because she would have asked him first, had he not beaten her to the punch.
The body of the skitter-jitter rat, gray with thick fur and a twisted spine jutting out from its torso, is still twitching on the ground. The legs have gone limp because she severed its nerves, but the front paws still beat gently on the ground.
She picks it up and eats the rest. Sucks the marrow from the bones when she's done. She's so hungry.
Bellatrix knows how she must look. In her tattered black robes, her head cleaved open by the darkness, eyes wild and frantic as blood drips down her neck and across her body. She is stained, sweating and crying angry, hot tears.
Henry showed up in Azkaban wearing his best robes, with regret on his breath when she bit him and laughter in his eyes when she learned that she couldn't anymore.
She showed up with her chest split open.
With a surgeon's precision, she slithers across the floor and licks the rust on the shackles that she stole the key for. Tastes bad. Bad, bad, bad. Like being alone.
After a while, she can't tell when she blinks and when she doesn't. The darkness is that complete.
A few hours pass, or a few days, or a few years. In any frame of time, a woman comes. A woman with blonde hair and gray hair and the twinkly-sparkle blue eyes that Bellatrix remembers from something better than this.
It doesn't take long for the woman to be on the floor. The dementors rip her apart as if they expect her to strong.
A few hours pass, or a few days, but definitely not a few years, and the woman never speak except in choked half-sounds and gentle prayers, until one night she splays herself on the ground and the skittery-jittery rats poke their heads out and this blonde-gray woman begs with glittering eyes, Kill me.
Bellatrix doesn't want to but she hears the order in the woman's voice. She unshackles herself, her dirty hands with broken nails reaching out in desperation—
But then the woman is sitting, looking at her with blank blue eyes, saying nothing.
Bellatrix blinks again and there she is, begging for death on the ground.
When presented with an ultimatum like this, Bellatrix lets the side of her that Azkaban has created win out, most times. She's never been very good at chaining the animal inside her.
The woman's blood tastes exactly like the rat's. Maybe it is because they eat the same things and maybe it is another eason. Her skin is softer and nicer, though, and this time Bellatrix doesn't let the scrabbly-trabblies get to her entrails before her, she takes what she deserves, strewing them in sagging pink ribbons across the floor to get to the best parts.
She can taste her blood and her bones and her used to be's.
Bella is always hungry, though. She's always hungry for something.
When the light floods in across the heaps of rotting, reeking bones in her cell a century later, it burns her eyes but she deserves it. She fights against the slipper, slippery light but it is everywhere. She's drowning in it.
She loves the pain. It reminds her she's still alive. And in this case, it reminds her that her Lord is still alive, and that she is free.