Entente Cordiale
Bellatrix listens and Bellatrix looks. There isn't much else to do.
What caprice lured her here? The reflection in the mirror returns a face worn by waiting, waiting, waiting, and the strain of a tightening chest and stammering heart each time she throws a haphazard glance out the window. Then the anticlimactic cessation as the emotion is sieved away, and she is left listening and looking again. The city, she realizes, is not far away. A day's walk, maybe. The tourists sometimes walk past her house, but her house is far from the main roads. Any tourists that would get this far do not talk very much. Day and night, her world is wrapped in a frozen silence.
She sleeps and wakes and eats in this silence. She thinks in this silence. She runs her fingers through the sands outside her shelter in this silence. It used to be oppressive, the white buzz that is nothingness. People do not know how loud it is until there is nothing but that silence, that silence that drives men to madness! But it is her constant companion now, if not her friend. She has conformed to it and it to her, usually. An entente cordiale, she thinks wryly. A ceasefire since peace cannot be made.
A wisp of a smile -- what passes as a smile for Bellatrix -- appears on her face. Hers has been a life of constant struggle. Hers has been defined by struggle. Why would she ever accept peace as an alternative?
Then she looks at the haggard robes strewn on the floor, the dark fault line across the mirror, the crevasse that cuts her reflected face into staggered halves. And she looks at the walls there, there, there, there and realizes she is much too large for this place.
-
She remembers how moon and darkness blended together as one behind the cruel metal grate. She remembers the humidity and salt accrued on that grate. She remembers the grains beneath her nails and the water soaking her clothes.
You made it through then.
She remembers the dementors and says nothing.
Outside, the waves tickle the sand before retreating -- how different it sounds now, the undulating rhythm of ocean.
-
Bellatrix takes walks. She is always careful to obscure her face, lest anyone recognize her. Her shoes lay dormant by the doorstep; she likes the variable sands between her toes. Her wand hasn't been touched for years; she has no need of it here.
When she walks, she thinks. Her mind is a multi-planed map: she unfolds one quadrant this day, and tomorrow she will open the next. It is not possible to progress in her map reading unless each square inch is carefully examined, each contour carefully traced. It is a slow sojourn, Bellatrix's map.
Yesterday, she thought about her schooldays, how she always found it ironic that her parents had sent her and her siblings to Hogwarts, that horrid bastion of filth, they used to rail. She stole kisses during the day, engaged in passionate debate as the fire in the common room died. Years ago, she would ruminate for hours on why it was her parents decided on Hogwarts when other options were clearly available. It had been much, much too easy to point a finger at their family friends and yell, "Well, she went to Durmstrang! Why did you send me to Hogwarts?"
She had walked on the sand before with a former sweetheart whose name she has forgotten from a time that grows ever dimmer. It wasn't like this sand, almost water beneath her soles, but littered with cracked shells and slivers of used vodka bottles. She took her shoes off then as she takes them off now, and she ignored the wincing of her feet as she strolled before the onset of night against the shoreline. She has forgotten the boy's name, but she does not forget the scars of once-embedded glass and the dizziness of joy and pain.
She walks on smoother sand and quieter days now. It is, she evaluates objectively, one of the better results that could have been dealt to her: a beach recluse rather than a prison cell, a sea breeze rather than a public interrogation. Bellatrix looks across the water -- the white foam crashing against the lime-white cliffs stings her eyes almost as much as the salt coming off the channel.
-
The solitude tempers her impetuousness. Irrationality needs space and an audience, and she hasn't got either one of them. Her bed will only take so many tossed pillows. The air is not responsive. The solitude has taught her something. It has taught her patience.
She can't erase from her mind Lucius Malfoy, bedraggled and bleeding, throwing himself into her London apartment. She can't push away those words, those words Bellatrix he's gone Bellatrix he's gone Bellatrix we've lost. She can't forget her own fury and disbelief -- how could the Dark Lord, so close to immortality, be defeated?
No, she had yelled back. We might be gone, but he will never be. They tried to destroy him before and failed. Yet even as she protested for the Cause, Lucius pulled at his robes, trying to wipe away the blood on his face.
Her wand grew limp in her fingers.
Save yourself. That is what he begged of her. She was unnerved to see him so unsteady. This is not 1981.
Don't tell me to save myself, she spat. I am his steadfast and loyal servant. You are the turncoat and traitor. Heed your own words and save yourself, Lucius Malfoy. They did not catch you then, and if you run now, they will never catch you in a thousand years.
She sees that look everywhere, patterned in the stars and traced in the wind. No, Bellatrix cannot escape the mania and desperation alight in Lucius's eyes and his last words, mouthed so quietly.
I have already been caught.
-
The sun rises in the east and sets in the west. She has known this since childhood -- even Muggles, hopeless as they are, know this -- but she has never fully appreciated the grandiose arc it forms, stretching from one side of the world to the other until now, now as she lies on the beach and watches the last remnants of light disappear.
She, after all, has plenty of time to waste.
-
What was it that kept the fire lit during those years in Azkaban? When the world was losing its mind, how did she keep hers? How could she, after freedom, still look again at herself and say I am Bellatrix Lestrange, the Dark Lord's faithful? Why did she fight then and why does she hide now?
The answer: This is not 1981, this is not 1981, this is not 1981.
The Dark Lord had not perished at Godric's Hollow on that Halloween night. She had known as much when she was thrown behind bars. It is a difficult thing to put into words, but Bellatrix could merely sense that her master was pulsing and alive still. He could not be dead unless her intuition told her differently.
It was her decision to flee to France when she could have remained, when she could have persisted. For a time, she did persist, taking refuge in remote English hamlets and hoping for news that he and his supporters lived still, that Lucius had been jesting. Days and nothing. Weeks and nothing. Months and nothing.
The Dark Lord had not perished at Godric's Hollow on that Halloween night. The Dark Lord had perished when Bellatrix at last came to understand that he was gone, that she was the last adherent to a crusade long disbanded.
-
An otherwise nondescript city, Calais's history is an interesting one. Though on located on the Continent, it was long held by the English monarchy as an important port city. By virtue of possessing Calais, the kings of England were also crowned the kings of France, though it was but a tiny portion of France proper.
It is here that Bellatrix lives. It is here that Bellatrix waits. The cliffs of Dover are the first things to greet her eyes in the morning, eliciting in her a pull so strong she wants to strip off her clothes, dive into the ocean, and swim home.
The solitude tempers her impetuousness. The Bellatrix of old, the Bellatrix with hope would have offered her life if it meant she could uphold her beliefs until the end. Bellatrix of Calais sees a different option. If the Cause could not live in England, then it could reside in her, not ashes but kindling, exiled but alive.
-
Bellatrix looks and listens. There isn't much else to do, and slowly, she finds matters at full circle. Hasn't she already relived that first exam, that first kill? Yes, yes, of course she has, so she leaves her rooms and walks to the water's edge.
But she's already done this. That is irrelevant.
She wrings her hands and kicks the waves. It is the first sign of impatience she has shown in…
Well, whatever the time is, that is irrelevant as well.
She has not allowed herself to wonder, to allow imagination and what-ifs to populate her mind, but now the wall has been breached. How long will she be condemned to wither away? How long will she remain no more than capsule for the Dark Lord's fight? When will she ever know -- will she ever know that the standard and the battle cry can be taken up once again? She paces a length of the shoreline and turns around, glaring at the cliffs before burying her face in her hands.
From across the channel, a whisper -- Bellatrix raises her head. A plume of red sparks fly. In an instant, she dashes back inside and scrambles for her wand. Would the locals notice and report it to the authorities? She rolls her eyes. Muggles, they'd never notice a thing. She puts too much faith in them.
A few kilometers away, a little girl points up at the sky. She and her mother marvel at the beautiful fireworks and wonder what people must be celebrating at the beach.