A/N: In case you've forgotten, Sturgis Podmore is the Order member that Lucius finds under an invisibility cloak, Imperiuses, and has arrested and sent to Azkaban. JKR doesn't say that Sturgis dies in DH. But then, she doesn't say he DOESN'T die, either. I also took a few liberties with the Imperius Curse, but JKR only shows us Harry's POV as a caster, and he does it horribly. I think that casting would take a little more than what Harry does in Gringotts.

Dirge

Chapter Seven: Lucius

It is strange how close the Imperius Curse can make you feel to somebody. That's something they don't teach you at Hogwarts, nor at Durmstrang, nor even at those Death Eater training sessions he attended when he was seventeen, eighteen. They don't tell you how you half-live in the other person's mind, learning their lives so as to properly control them, how the blank space from which you make your commands sometimes brushes against the living thoughts of the victim, closer than Legilimency. How you might come to regard your victim not as a friend, because friends don't obey you unquestioningly, but fondly, as a small child, or a pet.

Which is why Lucius Malfoy is somewhat sorry to recognize the thick blond hair of Sturgis Podmore, who is lying dead on the staff table.

He and Sturgis have never spoken, but somehow he feels connected to him – in his thoughts, he even calls him Sturgis instead of Podmore. Sturgis has preceded him in so many things – failing the Dark Lord (albeit unknowingly on Sturgis's part), getting arrested for breaking into the Department of Mysteries, rotting away in Azkaban. His and Sturgis's similarities have become so prominent that Lucius would not be surprised to learn that he himself will die a few months from now.

They even had the same cell in Azkaban – Lucius knows, because it was his influence that placed Sturgis in such a high-security cell, which itself had once been Antonin Dolohov's, who (Lucius knows from his journeys through Sturgis's memories) killed Sturgis's father.

Lucius has always had a taste for irony. So, it seems, does life.

The Dark Lord ordered Lucius to keep Sturgis under the Imperius Curse for as long as he could, which meant that Lucius had to occasionally go through Sturgis's recent memories, which consisted entirely of iron bars, smooth black walls, and an increasingly unhinged feeling of despair. Eventually Sturgis's mind became so fractured that it was impossible to hold the Imperius any longer. But even after the curse was broken, the sight of monotonous walls and the sound of screaming haunted Lucius's subconscious, surfacing in dreams. In hindsight, it feels like foreshadowing.

His own year in Azkaban, staring at those same unbreakable walls, trying to keep from screaming, Lucius began to feel the slightest twinge of guilt for what he had done to Sturgis. After all, without Lucius's influence, Sturgis would have been placed in a cell with less security, would have faced only the occasional dementor. Without Lucius, he wouldn't have been there in the first place.

So after the battle is over, after he finds Narcissa and Draco and his wife tells him what she did in the forest, assures him that they were safe and he is never going back to Azkaban, implores him to begin making the right sort of connections now, Lucius considers, in some small corner of his mind, actually speaking to Sturgis Podmore. It's doubtful that Sturgis will place Lucius – they never saw each other (Lucius recognizes Sturgis from photographs and from Strugis's own reflection in the mirror, gleaned during the time their minds were so connected) so Sturgis need never know that Lucius Imperiused him. They could be – well, not friends, because Sturgis is a half-blood, but friendly.

But Sturgis is dead. And Lucius has been inside his mind, still carries some of Sturgis's half-thoughts and memories. It's an odd feeling, but he ignores it with expert grace. Sturgis is far from the first person he has Imperiused, far from the first person he's Imperiused who's been killed.

Still, as he sits with his wife and son at the end of what used to be the Slytherin table, Lucius's eyes and thoughts occasionally stop to dwell on the square jaw, the light freckles, the thick blond hair of Sturgis Podmore.