Warning: Severe gore.

Intermission: An Old Debt Repaid

The new wards on Tullianum hadn't really done much in the way of protecting the prison, Indigena thought.

The problem was that the people weaving the wards did not understand the earth their Ministry was built on. They conceived of it as emotionless, motionless rock and stone and soil, even after Indigena had burst in the first time by convincing her plants to grow up through it and the earth to bear the tendrils, vines, and flowers. They assumed stronger wards underground were enough.

But not when one can speak to the earth, Indigena thought. This time, it was even easier, as the last time she opened Tullianum she had still been mostly human. Now the soil felt her coming and began to reach out, currents of warmth traveling through the dirt, the stone rippling in tiny tremors that no other human would ever notice because they wouldn't reach the surface. They did not pull back simply because she willed them to, but they were ready and willing to listen to her, because she treated them like equals.

When they learned what she wanted, they pulled back in a long, smooth split like a skirt tearing, and took the wards with them. The wards could not float in air as wards in buildings could. Here, they were anchored to stones and dirt, a solid medium, rather like wards underwater, and if their anchors parted, they perforce parted.

Indigena turned and gestured down the tunnel her vines had opened behind her. The others followed her upwards, treating it like a mixture of corridor and ladder. Sylvan, Adalrico, and Hawthorn were a small force, but Voldemort hadn't felt the need to send a larger one. Only those with some need should go to Tullianum—with the exception of Indigena, who was doing it partially to prove to her Lord that she could lead a successful mission.

This one was going to be successful, Indigena knew, as Hawthorn and Adalrico climbed out of the cracked stone floor into a silent prison. The wards weren't sending out alarms, and Indigena's plants, seeking people not inside the cells, had taken the Aurors standing guard. The whole of Tullianum's central corridor was a mass of dancing green tendrils and disturbed dirt.

Indigena waited until both Hawthorn and Adalrico looked at her, and then nodded. "You know what to do," she said. "You have come for your vengeance. Go and claim it."

Adalrico closed his eyes and whispered a detection spell. A door a few paces away from him glowed, and Adalrico held out a ward-stone towards it. In moments, the protective wards were gone, and Adalrico had the door open with a simple Alohomora.

Inside, Pharos Starrise looked up, but only for a moment. Then his eyes shut, and his head tilted back so that the cords in his neck stood out, and his mouth opened in a silent scream as the magical weapon Adalrico carried exerted a punishing force that Indigena couldn't feel.

Hawthorn, meanwhile, had turned towards the Aurors caught in the tendrils. She could not readily identify her attackers from that night when she'd been arrested for being a werewolf, Indigena knew, but that didn't matter. She would slaughter Aurors, and that would hurt the Ministry, and give the woman a taste of vengeance satisfied.

That was the reason Voldemort had sent both of them on this mission, in fact: to strengthen the hold of their hatred over them by having them confront the objects of that hatred. By that alone, Indigena knew that Voldemort had decided to sacrifice Lucius Malfoy, though what he was going to do with him Indigena didn't know as yet.

"What prisoners can we have, cousin?" Sylvan asked her.

Indigena whispered a quick detection spell of her own, and a slender vine, threaded through with red in all its leaves, arched itself like a cracking whip and struck two doors. "Anyone but the people in those cells," she answered. "Those are mine."

Sylvan gave her a curious glance. "I was unaware that you hated anyone."

Indigena shook her head. "This is not for someone who wronged me. It is the only thing I can do to make up for a helplessness I once felt."

Her cousin nodded, and then turned, eliminated the wards on another cell, and pulled out the woman inside. For a moment, he cupped her cheeks between his hands. Indigena was unsure the woman actually saw him. After a few years here, with nothing to do but stare at blank walls for a majority of the day, most prisoners went mad.

Sylvan must have found what he was looking for in her eyes, however, because he sighed and closed his own, half-relaxing. A series of small cuts opened in a circle around the sides of his face, and out of them came glittering spikes that shone like, and might actually be, diamond, for all that Indigena knew. The spikes came down and fastened in similar places on the woman's face. Sylvan jerked his head back, eyes still closed, and tugged the woman's face off like a mask.

When her lipless mouth began to scream, he laid her down on the floor and went to work, chanting the words of a long Latin spell as he wove the blood magic.

Indigena shook her head as she pursued her course to the first door that her detection spell had indicated. Sylvan and Oaken maintained their invulnerability through an ongoing series of unwilling sacrifices. That was the reason they had joined her Lord in the first place; they knew that, if Harry won, the world he created would not be hospitable to them, and he would certainly never welcome them to fight at his side.

She removed the first door by the simple expedient of asking a few of the green tendrils in the hall to wrench it off its hinges. They did so, and then began tossing the door from one thicket to another, playing tag. Indigena smiled. They were among the most playful plants she had ever invented, a side effect of having the exuberance to break through solid stone.

Inside, Lily Potter started up from her bed and stared.

"Hello," said Indigena cheerfully. "I suppose you know already that I'm a Death Eater. Indigena Yaxley. And I've come to punish you for what you did to Harry in the past." She felt a slow green satisfaction uncurl in her. The reason her Lord had agreed to let her have James and Lily was so that their deaths would hurt Harry—he would kill everyone Harry had ever loved, excluding his brother—but Indigena doubted that would really be the case. Harry had loved his parents, but surely he did not now. And Indigena had wanted to do something like this ever since she saw Lily walk out of the courtroom with her life and illusions intact.

"You can't," said Lily, as if that would stop her somehow. She seemed to be watching around Indigena's sides, preparing to make a run for it, but the playing vines filled the whole of the door. "I've already been punished."

Indigena cocked her head. "That might be true, and if that's the case, then you shall only have a painful death. Painful, but quick. I am not at home to drawn-out torture." She looked over her shoulder and nodded, and a beautiful vine crept forward, bearing a red flower that still made Indigena's heart swell when she looked at it. Her giant variation on the sundew was a shining thing. "But first, I must see if you have been punished."

The sundew lunged forward and wrapped its gently fringed tentacles around Lily before she could react, holding her motionless in a wet cocoon. Indigena nodded when she felt the flower's attention shift to her. "Now, love."

The ordinary sundew was a predatory plant whose juices dissolved the insects it captured. Indigena had adapted it so that the juices sought another prey than flesh. They trickled into Lily's body now, climbing into her bloodstream and ascending swiftly to the brain.

There, they raced into her thoughts and mingled with her memories. Indigena waited, now and then touching the sundew's stem when it wriggled at her for reassurance. Each sundew had to be made to respond to a limited range of memories, so far; it was her one regret that she hadn't been able to breed them so that they would work for many types of prey.

But then, it was not as if she had cause to use them very often, either, since they were made to dispense justice and not vengeance.

The tendrils gave a sudden and violent flex. Indigena could feel a cold smile working its way onto her face.

"No, you have not been punished at all," she said softly. "I was afraid not. Your death will be full of emotional pain, then. I am sorry," she added, while letting her expression show that she wasn't sorry at all.

"I don't know what you mean," Lily whispered, and tears were trickling down her face. "I've been punished. Let me go."

"No," said Indigena simply, and sent the second sundew in the hall to fetch James. While they waited for him, she smiled at Lily, and explained. "I was looking at your memories to see if you understood what you had done. And you did not. You've been stripped of your magic, left to rot here, denied contact with your children and your husband, and still it's not enough. Still, you don't understand that what you did was wrong. So." She nodded at the sundew. "This flower shall make you understand, before you die."

"You can't do that," Lily whispered. "You can't."

"My dear," said Indigena gently, "many things about me are supposedly impossible. And yet I survived triple-linked blood curses, and I have come this far into a darkness that should have destroyed me. I trust that you will at least leave me this contact with the possible that I enjoy."

She looked up as the second sundew dragged James in, flexing all over. Yes, he did not understand, either.

"Probo memoriter," she whispered, and flicked her wand.

Normally, the spell displayed a person's memories about a specific subject to the caster. But Indigena had adapted the sundews carefully, and at the command, they released the prepared memories into Lily and James's head. Her Lord had been more than glad to lend her memories of Harry in pain, including the graveyard and what he had seen in the boy's head of his past while the scar connection between them was still open.

Indigena poured those images into them—and more than the images, the feelings behind them. She let them feel every single thing they had done to their son, and, through him, to their second son and to other people. Though this justice was mostly for Harry, Indigena had some fondness for Connor as well. If they could understand how they had nearly made him useless by spoiling him so much, then she would be even more satisfied than she felt right now.

Of course, it would be hard to top the satisfaction she felt as she watched them writhe, their faces wrinkling, or as she touched the sundews and briefly caught a glimpse into the chaos of their minds. They were swirling amid black-red pain. They were face-to-face with the consequences of their actions, and the knowledge that those consequences had caused immense grief and suffering.

Indigena felt no need to let up on or modify the intensity of the memories, even when she heard Lily screaming again. Let the silly woman scream. Indigena could not change time and make her fall on her knees uttering the cries for pardon that she should be giving, but she could at least make her understand before she died. If Indigena had simply killed her, then it would have been a hollow victory. Lily would have died believing herself a martyr.

She was not. Nor was she an innocent victim. Indigena had felt the longing to make her understand that ever since she'd gone to the Potters' trial in the guise of Iris Raymonds.

And now she had. The sundews had stopped pouring memories. James was staring at the far wall with eyes that looked as if he had seen the world shatter into black ash and poisonous rain. And Lily's face looked as if she had seen the Dark Lord reign triumphant and rearisen, and the Dark Lord was herself.

"Now you are punished," Indigena said softly.

James turned his head away. Lily uttered a sick sound of pain, as if she had blood stuck in her throat.

Indigena whistled.

The sundews clamped down harder, and their tendrils snaked around Lily and James, smearing their faces with sweetness, making them breathe in deliberately poisoned honey. The digestive juices in the flowers themselves simply sensed or gave memories. The tendrils acted like those of an ordinary flower, attracting and then trapping their prey.

Lily and James drowned behind a mask of honey, much as they had lived, but this time, they were aware of the rottenness that lay behind it. Indigena nodded as she let her sundews feast, and partially digest the bodies. She didn't let them have the heads. The bodies needed to be left recognizable.

That done, the sundews slithered out after her. Indigena joined Hawthorn, who was covered with blood, in the hall, and Adalrico shortly after. He was clutching a set of fingerbones. Indigena didn't ask. She knew Pharos wasn't still alive, because their Lord had forbidden Adalrico to bring him back to the burrow as a hostage.

"Where is Sylvan?" she asked, glancing around.

"Here, cousin."

Indigena turned, and saw him jogging up behind her, brushing aside ferns as he came. His face and hands dripped red-black gore thick as marmalade. His green eyes shone more brightly than they had in some time, and now and then he paused to chew something in his mouth. He nodded to her, graceful and composed even behind all the blood. "Shall we go?"

"We shall," said Indigena, and led them down again, the sundews and the vines slinking gracefully around her. The tendrils brought Lily's cell door along as a toy, partly in a reflection of Indigena's mood.

She felt better than she had in some time, and convinced there could be justice even in darkness.

Even if the recipient does not know it.