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Chapter 7 – The Lonely Princess of an Impenetrable Fortress
There had been a lot of joy in my life, a lot of marvel and happiness, and fear and sadness, too. I carefully arranged memory after memory in my head in the following days, when a terrible routine started to set in. In the morning I would wake up, my body sore and hurting, my skin a bit paler, the circles under my eyes a bit darker, with more cuts and bruises on my body than the previous day. Someone seemed to keep healing some of my broken bones and bigger wounds when I slept, though I didn't think it happened out of mercy but instead to prolong my agony. Right now I was more useful to them alive, but that did little to cheer me up. Occasionally there would be stale food on my table, not enough to leave me satisfied but enough to keep me from starving. Narcissa entered my room one more time and brought a new dress, for mine was stiff with dried blood and old sweat by now. This time I had no doubt that I had seen a hint of regret in her face, underneath her cold and lifeless face, but she had cast a hesitant look in my direction and her face had hardened again as she quickly retreated.
After that, someone, usually Bellatrix herself, would drag me off to the drawing room that was so painfully familiar by now. Sometimes Lucius Malfoy would join her, but he would seldomly participate in the torture. He'd look at me in a calculating way, and while Bellatrix seemed to have lost all interest in questioning me ("She'll soon beg us to let her tell us what little she knows, anyway," she had cackled), Lucius' focus remained on obtaining knowledge on Harry's whereabouts, our plans, our knowledge. If you think I'm gonna help you to crawl back into your bastard Lord's favour, you're wrong, I thought, hanging on to what little satisfaction I could get these days. Apart from Bellatrix Lestrange, Lucius, Draco and Narcissa Malfoy and Fenrir Greyback, no one seemed to know about our presence. I assumed they were deathly afraid of disappointing Voldemort once again, who was still strangely absent because of that. Surely they would have told them they had captured Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger by now, even if they were not sure of Harry's identity, had there not been something very important keeping him busy. I started regretting the vehemence with which I had discarded Harry's theories about the Deathly Hallows. What if he had been right, and Voldemort was close to finding something that would increase his power even further, make him even harder, if not impossible, to defeat?
Lucius had come to visit me twice more. One time I had asked him about Voldemort, then about my friends, and told him I would take revenge, and he would suffer even if it was the last thing I'd do in my life and he had slapped me hard and had left me lying on the floor with a thin flow of blood escaping my lips. When he had come the second time, I had refused to say anything at all, to look at him, to react to his presence. He had called me a foolish girl and left my dark chamber and hadn't come back, and somehow that scared me.
During the torture sessions I had started to retreat into my mind palace. I had discovered something that was close to, but still not exactly like Occlumency. It allowed me to escape into the depths of my mind, where I'd go through memory after memory, building rooms and gardens. Some memories I revisited many times, like the one where I had received the letter that had told me I was a witch, that I was special, but for the first time it hadn't been the kind of special adults used to justify why other children wouldn't play with me. One of my other favourites was the Yule Ball. I had never thought myself to be vain, but it had certainly felt good seeing everyone looking at me in amazement, even admiration. The look on Ron's face had been one of so much astonishment that it had almost been insulting, but it was in that moment that I had, for the first time in my life, dared to think that I could be beautiful.
There were memories of my parents, of my mother reading bedtime stories to me, of my father telling me I he was proud of me, even before I had gotten the letter from Hogwarts that made me think that there was something he could actually be proud of. How I had broken one of my mum's favourite teacups one time as a child, without knowing how I did it. I had been so afraid of her anger or disappointment that I had started to cry, and then she had just hugged me and said that no cup was as dear to her as I was and had wiped my tears away. They were happy memories, but I rarely looked at them, because they always went along with the nagging sadness of knowing that I was the only one who remembered.
Like that, I retreated deeper and deeper into my palace. It didn't make the pain go away, didn't stop me from screaming and crying and begging for it to stop (if maybe less than before), but it allowed me to keep my sanity (or some of it), and it would make me remember who I used to be before pain and desperation had replaced all of my other feelings. But the other images became more and more frequent, too. There were days where I fell asleep with violent thoughts keeping me warm. I built a basement in my palace where I kept those dark images that weren't memories but started to feel just as vibrant and real. There was me, torturing Bellatrix the way she was torturing me, approaching her left arm with a small knife, because if she was allowed to leave a mark on me it seemed only fair to take hers away. There was me, with an arrogant sneer on my face, kneeling down as I tore into Lucius Malfoy, who was now lying on the floor instead of looking down on me, slapping him until he started to spit blood that would somehow look so beautiful on my hands. The moments were those dreadful thoughts would scare me became rarer and rarer. Sometimes I pictured Greyback getting eaten by wolves, screaming in agony as I watched him die. The irony of it did not escape me.
Speaking of Greyback, I started to notice him turning up for my torture sessions from time to time, staring at me with obvious lust and hunger (he probably didn't know the difference between the two), his face distorted into a wide, wolfish grin as he saw me quivering on the floor. When I would refuse to answer Lucius' questions he would lick his lips greedily and bark in laughter as I would inevitably be punished for it. He never participated in the torture, which I didn't quite understand but somehow I was almost happy for Bellatrix's presence and obsession with me if only because it meant that I wasn't left alone with that degenerate werewolf.
In the afternoons I would be dragged back to my room, tend to my wounds and pace up and down in the confined space of my chamber, trying to think of something that could save us or apathetically sitting in one corner of the room, walking through my fortress, raising walls and digging a trench around it, until I was sure not even Voldemort would be able to enter it. Though he could still tear it down, I thought darkly. Eventually I would fall asleep, which was bad, because it meant nightmares, or pass out from the pain and exhaustion, which was bad, because it meant a painful awakening. By now I had spent almost two weeks like that.
It was amazing what human beings could get used to, because it took a lot of effort to remember my life hadn't always been like that. But the overwhelming fear that had torn up my heart at the beginning had started to become a dull shadow on my mind instead. I knew now that I could endure whatever they threw at me, which didn't make it less painful, didn't take away the fear or the anger or the desperation but it was reassuring, in a way.
Apparently, Bellatrix or Lucius or whoever had come to the same conclusion, because one day, after I had woken up from an especially terrible nightmare, I had been dragged to the drawing room and there was Ron, in the middle of the room, staring at me with wide eyes.
