Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter. Or much else for that matter. So it's probably not worth the effort suing me.
Thank you so much to everyone who reviewed, including the mysterious guest reviewer nono. I really appreciate everyone's feedback *hugs*.
Warning for torture, attempted rape, and non-consensual touching. If any of this material exceeds the ratings for this site, I'd dearly appreciate it if any of my readers or the admins could please let me know-I have read the guidelines, but as I'm still relatively new, advice on avoiding trouble is always appreciated. Thank you.
The basement of Riddle Manor was larger than it had any right to be. The prison began on the opposite end of the hall from the arena, and sunk at least another two or three stories below the house. Voldemort and Bella led her past the first floor, apparently the holding cells for those who were being persuaded to join the cause, or important hostages. The much larger second floor held ordinary prisoners of war. The third-
Voldemort hadn't released the chains' hold on her magic any, so she assumed the stink coming up the stairs was perfectly normal.
It was the second floor they stopped at. Bella moved impatiently, plying a thin blade through her fingers as went, turned a corner. Moments later, she heard the sound of a bolt being drawn, and a man screaming.
Not the kind of screaming she expected from the Cruciatus curse. More the kind she'd heard when Vernon announced Dudley's new diet. The Dark Lord drew the bolt of another cell, and she tried to ignore the yelling and focus on the issue at hand.
"So this is the bone Fenrir throws to placate us," he murmured. "Lupin said he was otherwise occupied dealing with infighting and that you had volunteered as my teaching assistant in his stead. Is that true?"
"Sire, of course if Lupin said it was true—"
"I do not trust Lupin," the Dark Lord told him, boredom evident in his tone, "and now, I do not trust you either. I asked—is it true?"
"I don't know—"
"You're lying," the Dark Lord said pleasantly. "No matter. We have means of finding the truth. Please follow me."
He left the doorway, and the wolfman followed him.
Heather didn't like the looks of this wolf any more than the other. He was just as unkempt—his hair and beard were a ragged, matted mess of yellow and grey that looked to have been cut with a knife at some point. His yellowed teeth jutted over his lip, and his eyes were the ghost blue of a husky's. He wore only a loose pair of trousers tied up with a drawstring. His fingers were stubby and clawed, and the hair on his chest and arms and legs and back was straight and coarse as a dog's. Skinny as a weasel, he slunk out, shoulders hunched, head down, and he stared at her, sizing her up.
She remembered what Aunt Marge had always said about not staring a dog in the eyes unless you wanted a fight, and avoided his glance.
He followed the Dark Lord, and at the prompting of her chains—the silver soles nudging her feet forward—she followed him.
Each block of cells on this floor surrounded a central room, which they entered now.
Heather swallowed.
She recognized some of it from touring the Tower of London. The rest wasn't difficult to figure out. But Dark Lord moved instead to the comfortable set of chairs at the opposite end of the room. The wolf made to sit, and a bolt of bright light appeared, followed by a yelp.
"You may sit on the floor, dog, but do not presume yourself to be on my level. Miss. Potter," he gestured to her, and she shakily took a seat in the chair at his side.
"Now, dog. The truth. Have you seen Fenrir Greyback lately?"
He remained silent. The Dark Lord sighed, and touched a hand to Heather's bindings. Feeling returned like blood reperfusing a limb, all pins and needles.
"Unfortunately, girl, legilimency and veritaserum are all but useless on werewolves, one of the many reasons their testimony is not accepted in court. However, there is one way to verify his word that is uniquely accessible to us. What does he smell like to you?"
She sniffed cautiously, senses newly heightened.
"Not like that. Open your mouth. Lap at the air. You've seen snakes girl. I killed yours, remember?"
She glared at him, and tried again, flicking her tongue in and out and working her jaw in a swallowing motion. She felt his presence overshadow hers a moment later. She threw him loose from her mind with a snarl before he came again, holding fast, guiding her consciousness.
*It's not just the physical motion you're looking for. Any man can make a mockery of himself behaving like a snake. Try to imagine the shape of a snake's tongue nestled up inside yours. You're not a woman, you're a snake in a woman's skin. Forms are fluid as water.*
The taste of the man caught on her tongue, sweat-salt and rancid grease and rotting meat, but she couldn't smell the lie.
The Dark Lord stared at her, unblinking as a snake himself. "I had assumed that your senses would be more acute. Muggles barely smell like anything. After smelling nothing but them for a decade, you should be able to find a needle in a haystack."
She'd never smelled anything before coming here.
"What did you use your snake for then?" he demanded, and then, unexpectedly, looked pained at her next thought.
"Get the fuck out of my head!"
He backhanded her and hissed as his hand burned an angry red at the contact. "Language, girl. Perhaps your talents lie in a different area, but you will not be using Nagini for… for that." He removed a wand from his pocket with his unburned hand.
"Now, this man—what is your name again, dog?"
"Susi," he grunted.
"Susi," the Dark Lord continued, "has been sent to me with Fenrir's apologies that he himself was unable to come. Of course, since it is some insult to me for the Alpha to send one of his underlings to help with the lessons, he naturally does not expect the messenger to return in one piece. So the question is, what has this man done to make him expendable?"
Susi was silent.
"Fenrir didn't tell me, since in the game of knocking off pawns, it's considered gauche to admit you're offering up a sacrifice. But Remus Lupin—he was quite talkative on the subject."
The wolf bristled at the name.
"Oh, yes. It was you and your brothers who decided to massacre that little village, wasn't it? Knocked on the doors as travelling salesmen to start with. Ran in, killed them husband, wife and children, every one, until blood dripped out every doorway. There were the mangled, half-eaten corpses of toddlers in the playgrounds. Except you were stupid, weren't you? The whole pack wasn't a kilometre away at the time, didn't know you were busy entertaining yourselves, and a squib managed to send off an owl before you gutted her. The Aurors took a good quarter of you that day, didn't they?"
He was still silent.
"What did Fenrir do with your brothers?"
Still silent. The Dark Lord turned to Heather, smiling viciously.
"Now, girl. Is what I said true?"
She breathed hard, smelling, and the smell was as strong as ever, and it told her nothing. He could be lying, the Dark Lord, and with that, she knew how to get the truth. She took his hand, and met his devil's eyes, and hating him for it, lifted his hand to her forehead and leapt between them.
She hated them, all of them. They were all so stupid, so easy to play, so weak. Dumbledore alone provided any challenge, and the man had done everything to quash him as though he were one of these bugs, grovelling like the filthy wolf stinking like fear-sweat. He could open him up slowly with a scalpel, tease every artery out from the trappings of its flesh, empty its still-beating heart of blood. A waste though—Severus would have use of a werewolf, and they needed funding, wolf products sold well on the black market—but really, he should send him back alive to raise resentment against Lupin-
A feeling like a shock, and she was back in her body, gasping for breath, with a splitting headache.
"You wouldn't let me see," she choked, wondering when her vision had gone black.
"You stopped breathing," the Dark Lord explained drily. "If you would prefer to end up comatose, however, you have my permission."
"You never—stop breathing," she gasped, heart pounding.
"I don't leave my body completely when I use legilimency," he told her, eyes glinting strangely.
"How?"
"I have no idea. Your soul is tethered to your body. You can't just leave it during legilimency."
"Then what did I just do?"
"A question for another time," he told her. "For now," he passed the wand to her, and she saw it was Dorea's. "I am curious as to what our guest has to say. Please," he flicked the wand, binding the man to the floor, "Do anything you want to him, short of killing him. I'll ask the questions."
"And I'm just supposed to play your sick little game?"
He looked bored again, and she wondered when the expression would become permanent. "He's a murderer, a rapist, and a cannibal. Much like some of the men who killed her family. And this is the only opportunity I will be giving you to practise your spellwork."
She threw a cutting hex at his arm, mostly as an experiment, and was unsurprised to find a thin line of blood welling up from her own.
"You see why I cannot practice with you," he said ironically. "Now, please. Do it. Or I shall call Bellatrix in to do it for me, and she does hate to be interrupted while she's visiting her favourite prisoner."
She considered walking out. She considered beating on him, hands and fists.
She considered sitting down and curling up into a ball, and crying.
Somehow, she did none of these things.
Bile rising in her throat, she cast the cutting curse again. This time, at the wolf. It was weaker than the first, a bare thread of blood rising up along his chest, and the wolf finally made a sound, that might have been a grunt.
Or a laugh.
It healed before her eyes.
"What was that?"
Heather pursed her lips. "It seems unwise, my Lord, to torture a man and then release him. It occurs to me that this is the way one makes an enemy."
The Dark Lord looked unimpressed. "Is it? And yet, is that not exactly what you did to those young men the other night. One of them lost an eye."
"They attacked me first!"
The man leaned back idly. "So that is what it takes for you to use your skills, is it?" he mused to himself. "Very well." He motioned at Susi, and the binds fell loose.
"What are you doing?"
"Yes, I suppose some precautions should be taken." A muzzle fit itself over the wolfman's face, a second spell, and the claws looked much cleaner than they had been a moment before. She glanced back at him nervously, but he wasn't paying attention.
"Wolf, the young lady requires some persuasion. You are entitled to give it to her by any means you feel necessary. Please note that I shall be taking over your session should I believe you are holding back for any reason."
The wolf, loosed, advanced on her, and she tripped back behind her chair, her long skirts—all made by alien hands—for once hampering her movements. Susi slunk towards her in a hunting crouch, ghost-blue eyes hypnotic as a snake's.
"Don't be afraid, silly girl," he breathed, low and guttural, as she continued to circle the chairs, like some absurd child playing tag. "It won't hurt—much."
He sprang forward, and without thinking, she dropped the wand, and spun her fingers through a warding sign. The wolf hit the ground as though he'd run into a concrete wall, and she felt suddenly exhausted.
"No!" snapped the Dark Lord. "No basic forms! They take too much energy! Use the wand, fool!"
But the wolfman had recovered, and had snatched Dorea's wand up from the ground.
"Petrificus totalus!" he snapped, casting the spell. Her arms snapped to her sides and she fell backwards. Susi came up to her. Beyond the man, she could see the Dark Lord. Her eyes looked to him pleadingly, but he just continued to watch.
The wolf kicked her in the side, before straddling her. She could smell his fetid breath through the holes of the half-mask that muzzled him.
"There," he snapped his jaws, once, twice, and she refused to shut her eyes, desperately felt for the Dark Lord through the link they shared. The man's clawed fingers flickered down her neck, found the ties to her bodice, shredded them. "What's a pretty bitch like you doing with the Serpent Lord, hmm?" His mouth came close to her ear. "I'd never heard he took women like every other man. They say he sleeps with his snake."
His hand pressed close into her bodice.
"Are you really a woman? I guess we'll see-"
She saw red.
He snarled and pulled back, his hand burnt an angry red, with weeping blisters. The jinx broke, and she tried to kick the man off.
"The wand, you fool," spat the Dark Lord.
She paused to remember the spell, and the wolf smashed his hand against her throat, choking her. She had no words, but the wand came anyways. She slashed down in what could hardly be the right movements, and pulled the Dark Lord, and his hate, out of her memory and into the spell.
*RELASHIO*
The man was flung back. He spun back onto his feet, fingers curving into the claws of the nightmare wolves beyond memory, back elongating into his half-form. She sneered, feeling the well of power that was the Dark Lord lapping at the rim of her consciousness, and before she could think better of it, siphoned off a little of that strength, added it to her own.
"Imperio."
The spell seemed to slide off his mind like water, but enough of it went through for her to try a hold on the man's mind. It bucked and slithered in her grasp, and her vision wavered. Wary of losing her consciousness again, she relaxed her hold, spinning off the same jinx he'd hit her with. The petrification bounced off, and he rushed her, slamming her back to the ground before the Dark Lord's throne. He scrabbled for the wand and she felt her wrist bend back, break, as he took it from her again, slashed his fingers down her clothes, again, and she desperately pulled at her exhausted magic again to try something, anything.
Abruptly the man was pulled away, and she scrambled backwards, clutching at her gaping vest with her unbroken hand. The Dark Lord had the man grabbed by his greasy yellow hair, with a strength unexpected of his slim frame, and threw him backwards into a wall. The man's skull cracked against it with a hollow thud. A gesture of the yew wand, and manacles bound him hand and foot. He hung suspended.
The Dark Lord removed the mask, and the wolf spat—though even now, he seemed careful to aim anywhere but at the Dark Lord.
"Now… Susi," he addressed the wolf distastefully. "What would you have done to the girl here had I not intervened? Be honest."
The wolf grinned between his broken teeth. "This your new Bella? Got a way to go."
"Bella, fortunately for all mankind, is completely and wholly unique," the Dark Lord replied drily. "Answer the question."
"I'd of fucked her, of course," he shrugged, still openly leering at her where she lay staring back. "Fucking hoity pureblood bitch like that? Most of us don't get within a foot of their precious majesties. Turned her if I could. Cunt like that needs knocking down a peg or ten, preferably with fists. What is she, Lord? Never heard you taking a concubine."
"I ask the questions here," the Dark Lord responded, summoning his chair up before the man on the wall. "Now, girl, come here." She trembled, but obediently made her way to him and the leering wolf. "What did you do wrong?"
She considered, and he shook his head.
"No. Besides the obvious. What did I tell you about werewolves?"
"They're resistant to legilimency and veritaserum."
"And from this, you failed to extrapolate that they have resistance to the Imperius curse?"
She swore inwardly, and he laughed at her.
"The mindscapes of other species are often too dissimilar to our own for them to be accurately controlled with mindmagic, and most potions are compounded specifically for human metabolisms. There could be a dosage, or a modification, of truth serum that works, but I've never found it worth the time or energy to pursue. Now again. Where did you fail?"
There was really only one thing he was waiting for her to admit.
"I refused to take advantage of an enemy's weakness, and in turn he exploited mine."
"Good," he said with some satisfaction. "In time, I expect you will be able to handle as pathetic a wolf as this without intervention, and using only your wand, but in the interim—you will practise as I direct, and obey my orders."
She flinched.
"Now," he settled back in his chair. "What will you do?"
He waited, expectant.
It came to her with an ease that should have horrified her, if her clothes weren't shredding and her baps gaping out from her underclothes, and the dirty smell of the wolf's arousal hanging in the air.
"Given what he tried to do to me," she said slowly, "I think there is only one thing to do."
Voldemort smiled darkly as she gathered what she needed into a kidney basin. Outside, the prisoners would hear the begging and the screaming, and then the sobbing, before the wolf would stagger out, limp and naked, before the stone-faced girl with the tattered clothing. They'd see what he had lost, and wonder, not for the first time, what new devil the Dark Lord was making.
She barely made it to her rooms before the shock hit. She moved in a daze. Stripped off her torn robes, considered sleeping, slid into the bathtub instead. It was bright and lovely up here, the bath filled with warm water and rose soaps, and she scrubbed and scrubbed with her right hand, until the soap slipped out of her hand under the water and she cried silently. Her left wrist was purpling and swollen.
She laid there, until the water cooled and the soap clung in a greasy film on the surface of the water, and she eased deeper into it, until her head bobbed like a dead thing. She wondered how easy it would be to fall asleep here, for the water to flush into her lungs, driving out all breath and thought and memory. She almost did fall asleep, and the room was dark, when she felt Nagini's snout tickling along her hip, and heard Bellatrix enter.
"Oh," she said, lighting the candles. "Oh-oh. The beauty hurt herself."
She stared back, glassy-eyed. It didn't matter what she did now. Nothing mattered.
"Poor baby girl," Bella murmured. "Poor Heather."
It had been the first time the woman had ever called her by her own name.
The bathwater drained, then refilled. Nagini swam into the tub with her, and Bella forced an awful potion down her throat that made the pain in her wrist ten times worse, and still she was silent. Bella washed her again, and sprayed the scratches down her chest with a disinfectant, and gently dried her, before putting her to bed.
She left the lights on.
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