- Nothing From Nowhere -

- Chapter 2: I'm No One At All -

Bellatrix was rendered unconscious by the force of the spell.

Voldemort watched as she slowly woke. He watched as she sat up and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand. He watched as her expression changed when she discovered her cheeks were wet. He watched as she pulled her hand away from her face and looked at it, as if she were trying to discern whether the moisture she'd wiped from her face was actually tears. He watched as her gaze drifted to her wrist. He watched as she stared at the Mark on her arm as though she couldn't remember how it had gotten there.

And, like a lightning bolt, he realized she didn't remember it. He'd taken that away from her.

She glanced up and caught sight of herself in the mirror, and her confusion only deepened.

And in that moment they both realized that something was very wrong.

Then she turned and looked at him and he saw something in her expression that he had never seen there before. She was terrified. She had never looked at him with fear in her eyes, never. But something was different now.

She doesn't love me anymore. She doesn't remember that she ever did.

"What is the last thing that you remember?" he asked quietly.

Bellatrix tried to remember what she was doing in this room, how she'd gotten here, why she was here... and came up blank. She tried to remember anything that had happened recently. She only got brief flashes, fragments, bits and pieces that didn't make any sense on their own.

She started over again in the other direction, from the beginning of her life. Her memories of early childhood were fuzzy, but not unreasonably so. She remembered growing up with her sisters, the lessons she'd learned from her parents, going to school. But when she reached her sixth and seventh years at Hogwarts, the memories became patchy and disjointed. And after the memory of her wedding, there was nothing left but scatterings of tiny shards that seemed to be ripped from whole memories she could no longer recall.

Voldemort watched her expressions change as she slowly worked the answer out for herself. She did not look him in the eye as she repeated her findings.

"You've lost quite a bit," he informed her, his voice deceptively calm.

He could hardly believe it. In erasing the "love" that he despised, he'd completely removed all traces of himself from her memory.

- to be continued -