Bellatrix had dozed off upon the pew with her arms around her head and knees curled to her chest. It was the heaviest sleep that she had been able to have for some time, and it displeased her to be, as she was, awoken by an unfamiliar sound.
Her eyelids, heavy and sticky with sleep, fluttered slowly and stuck before she managed to open them. Almost immediately, she had to press her palms over them again, for the world around her was brighter than any day that she had endured in years. She had become so used to the usual blackness of her cell in Azkaban that the sudden brightness was physically painful.
Bellatrix's mind felt sluggish and slow. It seemed dreadfully unwilling to work or receive for her the signals of what was happening around her, and she shook her head slowly as she tried to think what could have lit up her cell so.
Perhaps she had died in her sleep. Perhaps everything had finally become too much for her body and it had given up, and was now at the gates of Heaven to await her judgement – but if that was the case, why had she not already been sent down to Hell? Surely there could be no argument over whether she was worthy of eternal damnation or not. Heaven could have no reason to take her, could have no reason to even consider taking her, and if she had finally been freed from her body, then why did she feel so terribly sore and stiff…?
Very slowly, Bellatrix lifted one hand from over one eye. She kept the other covered to preserve it, and she looked around only beneath one lowered eyelid, but look around she did.
She was in a church… she was in Heaven, then?
If it was Heaven, then Heaven was a dismal place indeed. She could tell that she was in a church, but it was a dull little Parish one of the sort that she had been forced to attend a handful of times throughout her youth, not the lavish cathedral that she would have expected God to command.
No… no, not Heaven…
Perhaps she was in Hell – or Purgatory, at the least – and was awaiting an audience with the Devil, and this was where she had been sent. Yes, that was a far better explanation, for it would account for the corpses littered about the church. They were sprawled over each other on the ground and the pews, like the remnants of some town after a massacre…
But they were not dead… just…
Sleeping?
They were moving ever so slowly, some of them, twitching a bit and shifting in their places.
Bellatrix stared at them for a long time with a perplexed expression while she tried to gather what might have happened.
And then the memories came flooding back to her and tears of relief spilled down her cheeks.
Bellatrix pulled herself to her feet, her legs weak but her will strong, and she dragged herself to one of the stained glass windows through which coloured light filtered. She pressed her eye against the glass so that she could stare out at the landscape beyond the window.
So much sunlight…
It pained her eyes, but she stared out still in a perhaps vain attempt to drink it all in. She felt as though it was being absorbed into her skin. It filled her with light, with life. She had never been so very fond of sunlight, but it had been so long and it was so beautiful…
Bellatrix let out a quiet cry of happiness. Last night, there had been a part of her that still suspected that everything that had occurred might have been a hallucination or a dream, or, perhaps, some cruel vision that God sent upon her to make her imprisonment all the worse, but now she was certain – now she really was free.
"Praise God," she whispered, then lifted her voice, so that all might hear. "Praise God, and praise the Dark Lord!"
Immediately, voices echoed from around her, "Praise the Dark Lord," and she turned to see who else she was sharing this glorious escape with.
There were bodies on the ground, some sleeping, but some with their eyes open. They looed up at her and at the window, and all of them were wearing beatific smiles that matched those in engravings of souls that were being invited at last into Heaven upon the Day of Judgement.
There was Rodolphus, upon the ground not far from the pulpit. He looked so joyous that Bellatrix would have thought that he had been touched by the hand of God himself. And Rabastan – it had been Rabastan who she had seen the Dark Lord heal, had it not? Rabastan was in Rodolphus's arms, his head upon his shoulder and tears running down his face, but there was a smile upon his face that looked as though it had not been there for a very, very long time. There were sores upon his skin that Bellatrix could see, but they looked old and more like scars than real wounds.
"Praise God, and praise the Dark Lord," Rabastan echoed. He looked so very like Rodolphus, so different from how he had been last night and so very happy in his arms (his brother, and they are close as they should be), that Bellatrix felt a pang of jealously.
Rodolphus is my husband, he should not hold anyone else that way – only me!
She ran her hands through her hair, doing her best to cast away jealousy. Jealousy was a sin, and she did not want to be stained with sin now, not after all of this. She wanted to be pure for the Dark Lord. She wanted to be untarnished by such human sins as jealousy, so that she might be worthy of calling herself his servant.
"Praise be to the Lord," Rabastan continued. His eyes were glazed over, and he rocked slowly in his brother's arms. "Praise be to the Lord, for delivering us…"
There were murmurs from the other men too, murmurs of praise and of the Dark Lord, and, again and again, God, but Bellatrix paid no mind to them, now that her eyes had lit upon Rodolphus and Rabastan. There were bruises upon Rodolphus's skin, and she could only think that she must have given them to him last night, when she had pushed him upon the cold and frozen ground.
She stared at him, transfixed.
A long time ago – so long ago that Bellatrix could barely remember when it had been… twenty years back? Longer?
She was dressed all in rosy silk that rustled against her legs, and laced so tightly into her corset that she could not breathe but in small and feeble gasps that left her breast heaving and her vision starry. The whole world was a sea of flickering candle flames that glinted off a hundred thousand cut diamonds and crystals that decorated the chandelier. All around her, men and women in handsome robes and gowns swept around the ballroom floor, all moving with such perfect, choreographed grace.
They were dancing.
And she was dancing.
Even as the memories came back to her, Bellatrix was vaguely aware of swaying from foot to foot, a half-remembered waltz sweeping through her mind. Her toes curled automatically, perhaps from the memory of how badly the shoes that her mother had made her wear hurt, perhaps because she wanted to dance. The instruments in her thoughts played with tinkling and off-key notes that were barely recognizable as a dance, but still she moved to it.
A man's hand, broad and strong and powerful, pressed against her back, pressing her against a muscular chest. Her lips brushed lightly against the shell of his ear, and she heard a light, alien laugh.
Was that her laugh?
One… two… three… one… two… three… waltzing forever, dancing forever, into the galaxy of shimmering lights, cut into rainbows by the prisms of the chandelier…
She felt breath, hot on her cheek, the scratch of a small beard upon her neck, and heard a low, masculine voice whispering.
"We ought to go upstairs, Bella – people are staring…"
"Let them stare."
Let them stare at the happy couple.
One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three…
His hand tightened upon her waist and he laughed. "Cheeky, Bella."
She blinked, and the glimmering gold light shattered. She was not in a ballroom, and there was no glimmering chandelier that splintered candlelight into millions of shattered rainbow pieces. She had no man's powerful arms around her, no breathless and carefree whisper in her ear. Her body was not laced stiffly into a corset, and the memory of silk against her legs was far away and vague. Her hands moved automatically to her thighs, rubbing the coarse fabric of her prison dress against her skin. It caught on her, and she knew not whether it was because the fabric was rough, or because her skin was.
Slowly, she sank to her knees, turning her face up and closing her eyes, trying to recapture the memory.
He had taken her arm, pulling her away from the party, and the two of them had laughed. She had picked up her skirts so she did not stumble, and ignored the reproving glares of her parents. She pushed past them, out the door, into the corridor.
The corridor.
Long, wood panelled corridor. So familiar a corridor. A corridor that she had walked down so many times that it had become nothing to her, but everything was new and beautiful and bright tonight. His arms had wrapped about her and he had pressed her against the wall, his mouth pressing over hers. Her hand had moved to stroke his hair and her eyelids fluttered shut…
Something touched Bellatrix's arm, and she jolted violently, slapping out at it. Her eyes flew open in time to see Rodolphus retracting his arm, looking hurt.
"Bellatrix?"
"Do not touch me," she told him in a small and raspy voice. It sounded unconvincing even to her – she sounded too weak and wistful, still half-lost in the memory of kissing…
God, had it really been him?
She shut her eyes slowly, trying to conjure the man of her memory to mind that she might compare him with the man kneeling before her now. She could not call his face to mind, no matter how hard she tried, but those hands… those warm and powerful hands that had cupped her and pressed her to the wall…
Opening her eyes once more, Bellatrix looked down upon Rodolphus's hands. They were scarred, the fingernails so caked with grime that they looked black, and ragged all around the tips, but there was something that was a touch familiar about them. Perhaps it was the blunt, square shape of the fingertips, or the way he held them, the littlest finger curled up and the index finger almost straight, as though he was holding the stem of a long wine glass, or perhaps the neck of a violin.
Had Rodolphus played the violin? She thought he had, but perhaps…
She closed her eyes again, trying to summon to mind an image of him with the instrument in his hands…
Bright sunlight streamed through a window, which afforded a view of beautiful gardens and far-away hills, but Bellatrix was not looking there. She had eyes only for the man who sat upon his stool, a music stand before him, head bent so that long, dusky auburn hair fell over his forehead. He had a violin in one hand and the bow in the other, and he was studying the music upon the stand with such intensity that she would have thought it a spell book.
"Why do you not simply enchant the violin to play the music for you, Rodolphus? Would that not be so much easier?"
"There can be no satisfaction in that, Bella. Don't you know?"
"I see no reason why effort should be more satisfying than lack of effort."
"Spoken like a woman who is not a musician."
He laughed as he said it, and she did too, for their teasing was all in the best of nature. Rodolphus raised the violin to his chin and it against his neck, and placed the bow to the strings, and then he was dragging it over and over them, playing and playing and Bellatrix had to bite her lips to stop from smiling too widely.
She was so happy…
"She is ill," she heard someone say from a very great distance away. There was no panic in their voice, only dull acceptance. "She is ill. She is going to die."
"She is not going to die." Passion was there, but only the slightest blush of it, just enough for whoever was speaking to sound quite sure that she wasn't going to die, but not enough to destroy all doubt from it.
"Who's going to die?" Bellatrix could barely conjure words, but if someone was dying…
"You see? She'll be well soon…"
"What's happening?" Bellatrix blinked three times before the church came into focus in her eyes again. "Who's going to die?"
"No one is going to die."
Rabastan was leaning over her… leaning over her… she had ended up on her back, she supposed, for she was staring straight up at the rafters, and men were crowded all around her. Rabastan and Rodolphus were the closest – close enough that she could seen the scars covering Rabastan's skin from the leprosy – but when she turned her head a little bit, she could see other people all hovering around her.
"Am I dying?" she asked, a note of panic rising in her voice. She reached out and grasped at Rodolphus with clawed hands. Her nails tore through his shirt, pulling him down nearly on top of her. "Am I going to die?"
"You aren't going to die," Rabastan told her softly. "None of us shall die, now that the Dark Lord has saved us. We are all safe, and you most of all…"
"Why her most of all?" demanded someone from a distance away. It was a voice that Bellatrix thought that she remembered, screaming in Azkaban, but it sounded different when it was not a hoarse and high-pitched wail. "The Dark Lord cannot care for her more than the rest of us!"
"Oh, but he can."
Bellatrix sat up slowly, but stars sprung into her vision again and she collapsed. Were it not for Rodolphus, she would have cracked her head upon the floorboards, but he caught her, cradling her head and setting her down gently upon the floor. She stared up at him, vision going in and out of focus.
And now he was the man with the violin, and now the ravaged and destroyed creature from Azkaban, and now the man with the violin again.
"Rodolphus?" she whispered.
"Bellatrix."
"Did you play the violin?" she asked, reaching up to touch his cheek. His face was all hollowed, his cheeks as concave as a skull's and the skin every bit as white as bone. He blinked down at her, wiping something pale and crusty from his dark eyes.
"The violin?" he asked blankly.
"The violin," she repeated, then lifted her hands, mimicking the stroking of a bow upon violin strings to indicate her meaning to him. "Did you ever play the violin?"
He stared at her, and she stared back, and panic rose in her throat. If he didn't? If he had never touched a violin in his life? Then she was mad, and that memory, which had seemed so vivid and clear inside her mind was all a concoction of her brain, and if that was so, then was this real? If she could believe such things to be so completely true and have them be false, then how did she know that she was not still upon the wooden slats of the board-cot in Azkaban, and that this was not just some elaborate dream or fantasy – perhaps one that her mind was concocting before she slipped into death…
"I played the violin…" he said quietly, then raised his own hands, to mimic what she was doing, and hummed under his breath. Bellatrix watched him with wide, relieved eyes, and the way that his hands moved was ever so slowly, shaking a bit, but in perfect time to the tune that he was quietly singing. And if Bellatrix closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that he was playing his violin for her again…
"You play far better than Narcissa," she told him, a teasing note in her voice as he set the violin down and closed his music book.
"And that is no compliment. Your sister sounds as though she is strangling a sparrow when she plays."
Bellatrix laughed, for it was true. She said as much to Cissy next time the two of them were alone – God help Bellatrix if she dared to insult her sister in her parents' company – and Narcissa looked haughty and said that Bellatrix was only jealous, and perhaps she was, for she could not play the violin at all… she did not even try…
But music was the realm of those who had not the strength for other tasks. And Bellatrix did have strength.