The Pit
A/N: Okay, this is a quick tribute to The Dark Knight Rises. And why am I doing this, do I hear you asking? Because that's the film that taught me that Christopher Nolan has balls made of Uranium. Why do I think this? Well, it's because this is a superhero movie... where the bad guys win. That's right, win. Gotham is trashed, Wayne Enterprises is gutted and Batman is dead. But there is good news! Which you won't learn about until you watch the film. And this is not a spoiler, since it doesn't even tell part of the story.
Anyway, this is a quick crossover with Harry Potter because, well, fuck it. Everything can be crossed with Harry Potter. Am I'm a compulsive crosser, so there.
So, in this one, Voldemort wins before the prophecy is even uttered, James is killed and Lily is sentenced to the Pit, which is the part of Azkaban that houses those criminals immune to the Dementors' effects. Those that go down there have their magic ripped out of them before being lowered down into a cylindrical jail where the only way out is through the hole they entered. To get there, you have to climb the jail's walls until you reach the top, after which you still have to swim off Azkaban Island if you intend to escape. Lily gets sent down there whilst being pregnant with Natalie (Little Mouse) and gives birth in prison. The lack of magic and the stresses of pregnancy mean that she's barely clinging to life for her child's sake, teaching her what she can to survive.
Oh, and grab the OST to the film if you can. It rocks me socks.
Fear
Little Mouse looked up at the circle of blue the others called the sky. It was a cold day outside, whatever they meant by that. Little Mouse had never been outside, after all. The only reason she knew it was cold outside was because it was freezing in the prison she was in. When they said it was warm outside, The Pit was like one of the bread furnaces. When the others said it was cold, then the corridors and stairways became thick with hidden ice spots and black frost crystals growing out of the walls.
She didn't mind either way. If it was too cold, she tapped into the Red to warm herself. If it was too hot, she tapped into the Blue to stop herself from sweating. She even gave some to Mother when she felt that the older lady got too hot or too cold. She never told anyone about these colours she tapped into. Mother was too sick to care while the Doc looking after Mother didn't need to know. And she knew that telling the others living down here with her was a stupid idea, so she didn't. And how would she explain it anyway? It didn't sound like what Mother called magic. What was it?
Little Mouse laid such thoughts aside, concentrating on the bread dough on the table in front of her. Little Mouse and Mother shared a cell together, which meant that they only got enough food for one to feed two people. Doc would bring some more when he was sober enough to remember, so she had to make what little food they got count if she wanted Mother to be strong enough for the treatments.
The small table was just right for her size and made a decent enough surface for beating the dough, but she had to spend a lot of time picking bits of veneer out of the yellow-coloured substance when she was done. Still better than the floor though. Took longer to clean if she had to use the floor again. She sighed, looking over to Mother and the Doc.
Mother was once a pretty lady, according to Doc. She'd had to look up the word 'pretty' in Doc's dictionary, but she'd found that Mother was still pretty according to the definition offered by the dictionary. Red hair, high cheekbones, green eyes and freckless... if you looked past the wrinkles and bags uderneath the eyes, Mother was still very pretty in fact. Doc always called her Lily, which was silly. Mother was Mother. There was no other like her in The Pit apart from Little Mouse. All the others were what Doc called Males, which made no sense to Little Mouse. Weren't there supposed to be more Females than just Mother and her then, if they weren't unique? Doc had just shaken his head at her for that, telling her to focus on her maths work instead of being a brat.
Doc was a balding old man with toys and stuff Little Mouse could use to learn about things. Some things were just crazy. What was a tree supposed to be, then? What was its purpose? And meat came from these mystical things called 'animals'? Little Mouse was sure that they were making this up as they went along, but she indulged them so that she could get ahold of those travel books Doc passed around the Pit sometimes. She really liked the one about Austria. Apparently, they didn't speak her language! Language, that was a strange idea down here too. Mother, Doc and the others talked to her in something they called English, but nothing else. The strange mirror with pictures and sounds coming from it spoke a completely different language when it was switched on, but that didn't happen too often, so she just thought that they were talking in words she hadn't learned yet. She wondered what other languages would sound like if she could speak them. Her stomach focused her back on the task at hand.
Knead, knead, thump. Knead, knead, thump. Thump, thump, turn over. Pick out splinters. Roll, roll, roll until you get a ball. Knead, knead, thump. She felt herself sweating underneath the heavy coat she was wearing. Mother groaned in pain. Doc packed up his gear, his gait showing that he was under the influence of whatever it was he was taking. He nodded once at her and once at Little Mouse before leaving. Little Mouse just raised a hand and waved goodbye, her mind on other things a million miles away from her little world.
She's drawn out of her daydreaming when Mother gasps in fear. She turns to look at her mother when she, too, starts to pale.
The door to her cell was unlocked.
Every single denizen of The Pit deserved to be lowered there. Murderers, rapists and torturers were housed in Azkaban proper, feeding the dementors day in, day out. The Pit was designed to be a worse sentence than that.
Prisoners of The Pit have such black souls that there is nothing there for the dementor to feed off, granting these people an immunity of sorts. The worst deeds and memories are happy ones to such people, their very humanity shrivelled away by whatever acts put them down there in the first place. Such people deserve a special sentence, something that makes Azkaban the preferred option with or without dementors patrolling the prison. They came up with the Pit.
Whereas Dementors prey on your guilt and your despair, The Pit preys on your hope. The entrance is open, unguarded and inviting. There are even tools available to help you on your way. All you have to do is get there. And it looks oh so easy from your cell! There are plenty of handhelds for you to hold onto and the jump looks manageable. Hell, the rope will stop you from dying if you make a mistake too! Nothing to lose, right.
Except nobody has managed to make it out, not since the days of Grindelwald anyway. And the more the inmates try (and boy, do they try), the more the whole prison falls into despair at their failure. Dementors only fed off your despair. This prison generated it, amplified it, honed it into a razor-sharp edge that hacked away at the prisoner's sanity.
But fear of failure is not on Little Mouse's mind as she stares down at the man who'd just thrust her onto the climbing platform, his veiled face turned to look at her as she stares back at him in horror.
"Goodbye" he says before being overwhelmed by the mob he'd been stopping. The mob that had come for her mother. The mob that was now coming for her.
No, failure was not on her mind right then. Fear of death was.
She climbed.
Her first breaths as a free girl overwhelm the small amount of Red she was tapping into not sufficient to shield. The very air seemed to freeze her lungs, causing her to gasp in pain at the ice forming in her throat. But how! The sky had been clear! The massive amount of Red she reflexively draws into herself sets her coat on fire, causing her to yelp and roll around in the waist-deep snow that bordered the hole in the ground she'd called home less than an hour ago. She dared not cry. Not now. Not while any tears she shed would freeze over and hurt her face. She forced it all down and looked around.
Everywhere she looked, all she could see was just a vast field of white. She closed her eyes, looking for a Colour, any Colour, that would tell her where to go. She saw a large castle outlined in Black, a colour far darker than the mere lack of colour she could see behind closed eyes. The Pit was a yawning hole of Red and Grey surrounded by what looked like a field of Beige. All around her, she could see a vast field of deep blue, the colour of water. Maybe it was buried under the ice, just like it was down home? Mother used to scold her whenever she walked on the water when it was covered by ice, though the Pit's water's Blue was lighter than the Blue she was seeing around her. Mother...
She shook herself, straining her not-eyesight for the slightest hint of a Colour she could head towards. Suddenly, she caught a glint of yellow on the horizon. Trusting her feet-senses, she set foot on the ice, slowly walking towards the yellow as she finally allowed herself to think of Mother, Doc and the Goodbye man.
Mother's last words rang through her skull. Find Sirius Black.
A/N: If I make something out of this, it's not going to be for a while. For one thing, I'll have to wait until more people watch the movie before they actually get who I am talking about. For two, I have no idea about when this fic will take place. Before or after Little Mouse is 17? For three, this is set in a post-Voldemort dystopia that, even while it now tolerates Muggleborns as necessary, the purebloods rule and everyone else is pretty much stuck in crime-ridden slums. If you've watched the film, take the rhetoric ushered by a lot of people and transpose them into a neo-feudal society... See how this muddies the waters? And, finally, there's the problem of just how close a cross we'll be talking about here. Do you simply transplant the HP characters & setting into the TDKR plotline, plain vanilla style? Or do you pick and choose what happens? Do you pick other events & characters to drop into the story (Joker vs Voldie, Rhas-al-ghul as hidden enemy etc) or go off the deep end by turning HP characters into the Rogue's Gallery? So many questions to be answered...
So feel free to copy this and use. Hell, ask nicely and I'll make a formal challenge out of this. 'Til later Possums! Toodles.
