A/N: Holyhead Harpies, Chaser 3 fic. Prompts: evasive, launch, "Never bring your heart to a witch fight." The text in italics are English translations from Monster by Big Bang.
Your existence is a chronic disease, a repetition of pain.
No one is brought into this world with the capacity or desire to cause harm. No child is born with cruelty in its heart. Darkness, like a seed, must be planted in order for it to grow. Like a creeping vine, it starts at the foundation and climbs skyward until it has claimed its host.
The stark stone walls of Azkaban have seen their fair share of creeping vines in their time, both inside and out. The great, oppressive prison still stands, though it has been empty these long years since the banishment of the old government. Bindweed has grown its sticky way over and across the walls, idly threatening to reclaim the structure in the name of mighty Mother Earth, and the cells are forever marred by the shadows of fever-drawings and desperate claw marks.
It was not properly torn down, this old place. This house of nightmares. This asylum of the damned. It remains to remind us the depths to which we are capable of descending, and to warn us of the price of ignorance and pride. It is looked on from afar, now; no one comes here anymore.
No one, that is, save for her.
She wanders the abandoned halls at night as though in a trance, disappearing when the early morning light spills over the horizon only to return at dusk. She checks the barred rooms, looking for something long lost. Thin and pale with soulful, sad eyes and a gentle frown, she retraces her steps over and over, but she doesn't know the truth.
She doesn't know she's dead.
I think I'm sick.
Druella Black was sitting up in her canopied bed, a stack of pillows propping her up and her bedspread bunched around her waist. She was reading aloud from an old, dusty Proust novel, and three young girls who had spread themselves over whatever surfaces were available were listening. Druella, however, hardly noticed the children, for it wasn't her daughters to whom she was reading. She would pause at the turn of each page to look up and blink wearily around, then smile vaguely before continuing.
Andromeda, who was barely six, didn't know why her mother did this, but didn't think anything of it. Druella had always, in Andromeda's memory, behaved this way. Narcissa was only three, so didn't comprehend much of anything, especially the words her mother reciting, but she would launch herself into breath-holding, fist-clenching, teeth-gnashing tantrums whenever she was separated from her mother, and the toddler was currently buried halfway under the covers herself.
Bellatrix, however, was eight years old and nearly properly grown, in her own opinion. She knew that her mother had a tendency to see and hear things that no one else could. She knew because she had spoken during one of these silent moments during which Druella seemed to be waiting for audience participation, and Bellatrix had been resoundly scolded for interrupting. She knew because her mother would begin conversations in the middle, answering unasked questions or graciously receiving ungiven compliments. She knew because her father wrote about it openly in his journal, which she frequently knicked. How else was she to find out the truths behind her father's constant and elaborate lies?
Admittedly, she had already discovered the root of all his lies. Her father's numerous sordid affairs explained his recurrent absences and the stutter he developed whenever questioned about most recent 'business trip'. Stealing the diary now was merely an exercise in rebellion for the young girl, and a good way for her to stay up to date just what her father considered reasonable forms of treatment for his likely-insane wife.
Bellatrix didn't understand all of the words in Cygnus' journal, nor did she fully comprehend her mother's disconnect with reality, but she knew enough about love and loyalty to know that there ought not be any excuse for her father's infidelity. She knew there was shame in what he did when he was away.
What he did while his ailing wife read to his children and to the silent listeners who didn't exist.
If even you throw me away, I will die.
A curious word appeared in Cygnus Black's journal around the time Bellatrix turned thirteen. It wasn't a word she had ever heard before, and she'd certainly never read it. From context, she could assume that it was a word associated with her mother's continued treatment, but Druella had undergone so many unusual, unorthodox, and sometimes ridiculous therapies that Bellatrix had lost count. Fueled by what Bellatrix assumed was a burning need to assuage his guilt over his extramaritals, Cygnus had desperately clung to the word of any Healer, shaman, or medicine man who claimed he could cast the demons out of Druella.
But Druella wasn't possessed by demons, Bellatrix knew. She was crazy, and her madness had only grown over the years. She no longer read Proust to her daughters. In fact, she no longer recognized the girls, except Bellatrix who had hardly changed in five years. She was a little taller, and her face less round, perhaps, but Bellatrix had the almost disturbing complexion of a porcelain doll, and her wide, round eyes were exactly the same as they always had been.
Bellatrix visited her mother often; these days, she was the only one who did. The room wasn't sunny or welcoming as it had been when she was younger. Now, it was more like a tomb. The curtains were always drawn, and much of the furniture had been removed due to her mother's penchant for restless pacing in the dead of the night. During her waking hours, and some of her sleeping ones, Druella muttered endlessly, inaudibly most of the time, and incomprehensibly the rest of it. Being the one place her father hardly ever ventured, it was also the one place where Bellatrix went to read her father's diaries.
Over the years, the contents of these stolen memoirs had grown darker and more twisted while Cygnus grew more distant and evasive. Her father's obsession with fixing his wife, rather than bringing Druella back into the realm of the sane, seemed to be drawing Cygnus further into her world instead. Bellatrix, oddly, found a sort of comfort in her father's descent into the shadowy territory of her mother's disease. It made him feel somehow closer to her, there in the darkness.
Bellatrix thought this as she sat at her mother's bedside, reading the journal by candlelight and puzzling over the new word for which she had no meaning. Before she could begin even guessing its meaning, the sound of footsteps in the hall sent her scurrying into the deep shadows of her mother's room. Her father and another man entered, and as she watched the two approach her mother, she felt the sensation of impending danger.
Druella must have also sensed it, for even in her foggy mental delusion, she turned wide, frightened eyes to the girl, and reached out to her as though begging to be saved. Bellatrix stared at her mother's outstretched hand, the spindly fingers grasping despairingly for the child, but she couldn't move. She feared her imposing, half-wild father in that moment, and not even Druella's unintelligible cries could budge her.
Hidden from them by the darkness she had embraced throughout her youth, Bellatrix learned through observation the meaning of that mysterious and condemning word written in her father's journal. The definition of it slid into the girl's brain as easily as the doctor's long, steel needle slid into her mother's.
Lobotomy.
The greatest pain to me is the fact that you became the same as them.
There were twelve hundred eighteen tallies on the wall of Bellatrix's cell, though they were no longer an accurate indication of how long she'd been in Azkaban; she'd stopped counting months ago. Counting had been a a distraction for a time, but even she had begun to succumb to the soul-bleeding song of the Dementors. She, who had danced on graves and bathed in blood, couldn't resist their silent wailing.
The insanity inherited from her mother and nurtured by her father threaded with the siren's call of the Dementors, and Bellatrix no longer knew whether she was alive or dead or somewhere in between. She saw visions of her past—relived the horrors of her youth—time and time again until she was sure she had finally arrived in the hell she deserved.
It was to these constant hallucinations that Bellatrix first attributed the pale, wispy woman who drifted into her cell some four years into her permanent residency. She looked slightly confused, as she always had in life, and her movements were slow and deliberate. Her eyes fells on Bellatrix, who was sprawled across the stone floor, lying on her back and counting the cracks in the ceiling for the thousandth time. Their eyes locked.
For a moment, there was no recognition in either of them, but it was the ghost who reacted first. The crease in her brow softened for a moment, and a faint twitching at the corner of her mouth accompanied a pathetic half-smile. It wasn't until the ghost spoke that Bellatrix did anything other than stare blankly at this new manifestation of her captors' twisted sense of justice. The voice of Druella Black cut through the fog of Bellatrix's daze as quickly as if someone had poured ice water over her. She blinked, felt the solid stone firmly at her back, saw the ghost of her mother hovering above her, and reabsorbed the full memory of the past twenty-five years within an instant.
Bellatrix gasped as real, physical pain gripped her heart and her head, threatening to rip her apart. Bewitched by the Dementors, she had not needed to bury those thoughts, and it took her several minutes to remember how. During those moments, she wasn't a murderer or torturer. She wasn't a Death Eater. She wasn't the Dark Lord's most faithful servant. She was an eight-year-old girl who had murdered and tortured and reveled in the most evil of pleasures, and she couldn't breathe around the tightness in her chest. In a fit of panic, her tormented mind began slamming shut against the emotional onslaught. Bellatrix, who knew the secret to surviving and thriving at the Dark Lord's side was to never bring your heart to a witch fight, writhed on the floor as she fought to regain control over the rapid beating of that very organ.
Her mother spoke to her while she clawed for air and relived every depraved detail of her life to that point. The ghost spoke nonsense while somehow making herself completely understood. She told Bellatrix things that frightened and delighted and wounded all at the same time. In her soft, girlish whisper, she forgave Bellatrix, and then cursed her.
Only when Bellatrix's moment of perfect clarity ended did Druella stop speaking. Desensitized once more, and every inch the witch who had joyfully executed innocents in cold blood, Bellatrix took a deep breath in and released it slowly. Then, she laughed.
Bellatrix laughed from her gut, a slow grinding sound that started low and progressed steadily into the high-pitched cackle of a madwoman. She laughed until exhaustion took her and forced her into fitful sleep, and the ghost of her mother watched over her.
You're a lingering attachment in my heart.
The pale figure of Druella Black came every night to unwittingly haunt her increasingly-insane daughter, fanning the embers of her nightmares and whispering half-remembered quotes from Proust. The lucidity that accompanied her visits drove Bellatrix further and faster into the embrace of madness, but Druella wasn't capable of understanding that. She saw only the little girl who had sat at her bedside every evening after the rest of her family had abandoned her.
Even after Bellatrix escaped, Druella came to Azkaban to look for her. Even now that the unhinged murderess is dead and gone, the ghost returns each night to aimlessly wander the corridors in her disoriented manner. She never speaks, nor indeed makes any indication that she is aware of her surroundings at all. She only searches.
She searches for the child who grew into a monster, because she was her daughter.
Her Bella.