Chapter Thirty-Three: St. Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries
When the ragged trio arrived in London, they were surprised to find much of it already burned to ash and the rest of it still very much in flames.
"Well, that's no fun, is it, pet?" Bellatrix cooed to her wand as Inferius Ginsberg shuffled by her side, still snapping his corpse fingers, and Barty Jr. limped along, still gratefully propped up by Bellatrix
"Don't worry, we'll have plenty of fun in St. Mungo's." She continued with an evil grin as they arrived at the facade of the abandoned department store that concealed the super secret wizard hospital.
"What are we doing here anyway, Bella?" Barty asked as they crept stealthily through the halls, somehow magically managing to dodge the Healers in their lime green robes, even with Inferius Ginsberg making an almighty ruckus as he shuffled along after Bellatrix, nearly nipping at her heels like an excited puppy.
"Unfinished business." Bellatrix responded shortly. "Debts to repay."
Barty looked at her, noting the seriousness in her stormy, unfathomable eyes, and merely nodded in agreement. He'd known Bellatrix Lestrange long enough to know that it was always best to just let her take the lead - she was, after all, the smartest, most powerful witch he had ever met - and as mad as she seemed, he knew she never did anything without good reason. If debts needed repaying, they needed repaying - Merlin knew Bellatrix wasn't one to let a good deed go unpunished. And anyway who was he to complain or question her? Her insistence on repaying her debts was how he had gotten his freedom after all.
They turned a corner and almost walked right into three very startled Healers.
"Perfect!" Bellatrix cried, then she flourished her wand and shrieked, "AVADA KEDAVRA!" Killing them on the spot in a flash of brilliant green light.
"I told you we'd have fun." Bellatrix sang cheerily to her wand as she helped Inferius Ginsberg into his brand new Healer's robes.
Barty couldn't help but chuckle happily as he shrugged into his own slightly blood splattered lime green robes. After all these years, he'd almost forgotten how charmingly amusing Bella could be, even when she was slaughtering innocents by the dozens.
"Wands, comrades?" Bellatrix smirked as she handed two of the wands she had nicked from the dead Healers to Barty and Inferius Ginsberg, tucking the third into the the Healer's robes draped so majestically on her regal frame.
"Bells, you know I'd never question your judgement, but..." Barty gestured to Inferius Ginsberg, who was waving the wand around carelessly, grunting happily as he marveled at his new toy.
"Then don't, Barty." Bellatrix snapped sternly. A cold chill raced up Barty's spine but then Bellatrix's expression softened into a smile and he warmed right up again. Funny, that.
"Fourth floor! Tally-ho!" Bellatrix cried, fist raised, and they continued on their jaunty journey until they reached the doors to the Janus Thickey Ward, home to those souls who were unfortunate enough to be permanent residents of St. Mungo's due to incurable spell damage.
Instead of bursting in through the doors and making a grand entrance like Barty expected she would want to, Bellatrix stood by the closed doors and began waving her wand slowly, uttering an incantation so quietly that Barty couldn't hear a word she said, even though he was standing right next to her.
Suddenly the lights flickered, and as they went out completely, there was a disturbing sense of stillness and a deafening silence in the air, as though something fundamental to the very fabric of reality had been grossly disrupted and disturbed. Then Bellatrix took both Barty and Inferius Ginsberg by their hands and kicked the doors open with a deafening bang.
As the doors burst open the dark ward was flooded with a strange green light, and once Barty's eyes adjusted to it he realized that every single person on the ward, from the patients to the Healers, was completely frozen in space and time.
Out of pure habit, Barty's tongue flicked out of his mouth to taste the air, but it darted right back in quicker than you could say "oh hell no, fuck that!" The unmistakable stench of rotten eggs seemed to permeate the entire ward and it was all poor Barty could taste. He spat on the floor and was stunned as his righteous loogie started bubbling into a thick black foam as soon as it touched the linoleum.
"Uh...Bells...?" He questioned with an edge of concern in his voice. It was suddenly alarmingly clear to him that his companion was performing some form of dark magic as yet completely unknown to him.
"Shhh..." The woman known for her madness and cruelty shushed him by placing her wand to his lips and dragging it down roughly, then putting it back to her own mouth and licking it in an almost sensual fashion, winking at Barty as his heart hammered in his chest.
'Just go with it, Barty, old boy,' Barty cajoled himself as he looked at the vision of dark, evil, beauty in front of him. 'Do it for her. It's all for her.' He reminded himself.
Oh! How he wished he could pull her into his arms and kiss her as she had never been kissed before - by someone who truly loved and respected her for the magnificent woman that she truly was.
Hadn't it always been this way? Ever since they were in school at Hogwarts together she had been his driving force and he would have followed her into hell and back, even before she knew his name. Even before she he existed. And in a way, that's exactly what he had been doing their entire lives.
He'd joined up with Voldemort and the Death Eaters to fight by her side, only to watch his beloved queen get passed around between Rodolphus and...and...HIM...and had been forced to content himself in being her confidant, her lieutenant, her "idiot." But he would have done anything to be by her side, both then and now. Murder. Destruction. Azkaban. Revolution. Death. He would follow her anywhere.
Bonnie and Clyde. Thelma and Louise. Bellatrix and Barty.
They would take on the world together.
As long as she let him.
He and Inferius Ginsberg trailed along behind Bellatrix as she lead them, striding purposefully toward one of the patient rooms and opened the door.
The room was dark, but with the mysterious green light streaming in from the hall Barty could make out several beds divided by curtains, their occupants just as frozen as the rest of the poor souls on the ward. He instinctively held himself and Inferius Ginsberg back - he had the feeling that, whatever this was, it was something Bellatrix needed to do on her own.
Barty watched in tense silence as Bellatrix approached one of the beds, her wand gripped tightly in her fist. For a brief moment she reminded Barty of the shy, frightened Bella he remembered from his youth - the pretty black haired girl whose hands would tremble at the mere thought of confrontation - his wounded raven.
But that was silly - impossible, even - Bellatrix had no reason to be afraid of anyone anymore, everyone was afraid of HER.
Even Barty.
But he loved the way she frightened him.
Because he loved her.
When she reached her destination she picked up a water glass from the bedside table and calmly smashed it against the wall. Then, even more calmly, she dragged one of the shards of glass across the pale flesh of her palm, causing blood to bubble up to the surface.
Barty watched in stunned silence, his tongue darting in and out of his mouth rapidly in fear, as Bellatrix pointed her wand at the wound and began muttering an almost hypnotic magical incantation. The smell of rotten eggs grew even stronger and Barty had to cover his mouth and nose with the lime green Healers cloak, looking like a colorfully dapper young Dracula. The smell was absolutely putrid.
Bellatrix continued chanting as she placed her bleeding palm on the forehead of the male patient who lay frozen in the bed. With a flash of blood red light both Bellatrix and the man began convulsing violently.
Barty tried to run to her side but Inferius Ginsberg held him back in a crushing hug. "Ginsberg, I love you too, but this isn't the bloody time, mate!" Barty shouted. The lights flickered again as the room began shaking and an unearthly howl rose up on the black mist that had started filling the entire ward and was already curling around Barty and Ginsberg's knees.
Inferius Ginsberg held his wand to Barty's head with a maniacal grin on his corpse face. "Oh fuck." Barty muttered. Bellatrix may trust this...thing...but that didn't mean he did - especially not when the beatnik zombie had a bloody wand in his hand.
"Okay, okay, it's cool daddy-o," He tried to appease the reanimated corpse. "It's cool, ya dig?" Inferius Ginsberg nodded and grunted at Barty with a big dopey smile on his decayed face, but he didn't let go of him, instead, he just hugged Barty even tighter, almost choking the life out of him.
Just as suddenly as they had started, Bellatrix and the man stopped convulsing at the same time, but while the man dropped back to bed, just as frozen as he had been before, Bellatrix immediately got up and walked right to the next bed, swaying a little as she went but refusing to grab onto anything that she might have used to steady herself. As a result, she almost fell right into bed with the poor defenseless woman who was trapped there, paralyzed in an upright position with her hand still gripping the blankets, as if she'd been frozen in time trying to get out of bed.
Bellatrix dropped to her knees at the foot of the bed and reached out to touch the face of the woman almost tenderly, staring into her glassy, eerily dead looking eyes beseechingly.
Barty's heart skipped a beat as Bellatrix climbed into bed with the woman and leaned in closer to her, tangling her fingers in her lank, greasy hair and kissing her softly, urgently, before placing her bleeding palm to her forehead as a single tear slid down her cheek.
When Bellatrix touched the woman the room shook so violently that Barty lost his footing and fell over, taking Inferius Ginsberg down with him, his head bouncing off of the linoleum with a loud crack.
Then everything went black.
After what might have been seconds or hours, days or years, images started swimming to the surface - a dream? A vision? Reality?
Bella.
Always Bella.
Bellatrix and the woman convulsing violently as lightning lit up the room and thunder crashed, causing the hospital to shake even harder. A shrouded figure creeping silently from behind one of the curtains and making it's way slowly toward the two women, seeming to get closer between the flashes of light.
Immobilized as he was, crushed beneath Inferius Ginsberg, Barty was in no position to help Bellatrix as the figure drew closer, closer, ever closer, finally reaching out and placing its hand on Bellatrix's shoulder just as the convulsions ceased.
Bellatrix jolted at the touch and she quickly turned to the figure, wand pointed right in its face, but then her own face lit up with a smile that made Barty's poor heart weak with longing. "Gildy, you clever boy! I was just about to wake you!" She cooed as she pulled the shroud (which, it seems, had been a bedsheet all along) off of the figure, revealing none other than Gilderoy Bloody Lockhart.
Fuck.
Of course.
Barty had heard rumours that their handsome but stupid old classmate had earned himself a permanent residency in the whack shack due to that insufferable idiot Ronald Weasley and his inability to cast a spell without half-killing someone, but somehow he'd completely forgotten about those rumours until now.
His blood was boiling, the flames of jealously licking his flesh like his reptilian tongue.
"Are you my mummy?" Gilderoy asked Bellatrix stupidly with a huge grin plastered on his big dumb idiot face.
To Barty's chagrin, instead of cursing the fool, Bellatrix just laughed. "Sure, Poppet - at least until we find a way to fix that silly scrambled brain of yours."
Gilderoy clapped his hands and then jumped onto the bed, throwing his arms around Bellatrix and knocking her onto the floor. She continued laughing hysterically as he scrambled after her.
'It's okay, Barty, old boy, remember, you're the only one in this merry band of magical gangsters who has a brain besides her, that's gotta count for something...' Barty thought encouragingly to himself as he watched Bellatrix laughing with her arms around their gorgeous old classmate turned hero turned international best selling author turned dumb as a stump asylum inmate.
'Anyway, some spell damage really IS permanent - and if it isn't, well, that can always be remedied.' He thought, inwardly fuming as Bellatrix ruffled Gilderoy's luscious curly blonde locks playfully and the grown man nuzzled against her chest like a small child.
"Come on, Ginsberg, you lazy old sod, shove off!" Barty grumbled as he struggled out from under the Zombie King of the Beatniks, who reluctantly got up off of Barty and shuffled across the room to join his mistress and her new pet, who were giggling on the floor together like children. Inferius Ginsberg plopped his reanimated corpse body down onto the floor next to them and started grunting out a bone chilling mockery of human laughter.
To Barty's surprise Bellatrix pulled out the third stolen wand and handed it to Gilderoy Alpha Chad Lockhart, who merely stared at it as if it were a toy, much like Inferius Ginsberg had done. "Uh, Bells, are you sure about that?!" Barty couldn't help but blurt out in protest. "Isn't he...y'know...?" He made a circular motion to his head with one of his fingers in a gesture to indicate insanity.
"He's just as useful as Inferius Ginsberg!" Bellatrix fired back angrily, "Or you." She spat cruelly, then burst into merry hysterics again as Gilderoy and Ginsberg began booping one another's noses with their wands and laughing like brainless children.
Barty took a deep breath and looked up to the heavens. 'Merlin, give me strength.' He thought as he heaved a sigh as heavy as his burden and then quickly licked the side of his own face for comfort.
He was just about to join them when Bellatrix bounced up cheerfully, pulling Inferius Ginsberg and Gilderoy Cockblocker Lockhart up along with her. "Come on, boys! Onward! We have one more stop to make!" She winked at Barty and his heart melted all over again.
'For her. It's all for her.' Barty chanted to himself in his head.
The merry band of magical gangsters ran out of the room and fled the eerily frozen ward together, laughing hysterically and almost tripping and falling all over each other as they went, slipping and sliding on the polished floors all the way to the stairwell and then almost breaking their necks as they raced down the stairs, still laughing all the way.
When they reached the second floor Bellatrix went dead quiet and raised her wand to her mouth, silently shushing them. She exchanged a look with Barty, who nodded in knowing agreement, though he actually had no clue what was about to happen, he just knew that staying back and shutting up was probably the best plan.
As jealous as he could get, there was no one he trusted more than Bellatrix. There was a reason he always followed her into every battle and revolution that struck her fancy, after all.
Once more she began uttering an almost silent incantation while waving her wand, and then, also once more, she kicked the doors in - this time managing to kick them right off their hinges with the force of her rage, if not the strength of her scrawny, prison starved body.
Healers in lime green robes were frozen in a chaotic scene, more than half appeared to have been running towards a single room in a horrified panic.
Clearly they had interrupted some sort of emergency.
"Fuck!" Bellatrix exclaimed, and she ran headlong in the same direction the paralyzed Healers had been, Barty, Inferius Ginsberg and Gilderoy The Annoyingly Good Looking Bastard Lockhart bringing up the rear.
As they ran into one of the rooms after Bellatrix, she put out a hand, causing the three hapless minions to skid to a stop and almost fall over. She raised her wand to her mouth to shush them and then waved her hand to to indicate for them to hide in a corner.
"It seems you've started without me," She said, pointing her wand with steely rage at the almost unrecognizable figure frozen in a state of extreme medical distress in the bed. "Now, that's no fun, is it, Cornelius?"
Barty's heart thundered in awe of his queen as she flourished her wand and screamed, "CRUCIO!" causing the Minister for Magic's body to writhe violently in an agony so ball-kickingly severe that it actually awoke the terrified man from his frozen state.
"SECTUMSEMPRA!" Bellatrix shrieked at the still convulsing and absolutely awake, 100% aware and pants-shittingly horrified Cornelius Fudge, flaying the flesh right from his bones and making Barty fall in love with this stunningly cruel woman all over again.
"Buh...Buh..." The Minister garbled through the blood hemorrhaging from his lungs and bubbling out of his mouth in thick waves, as he struggled to say the name of his attacker.
"You don't get to die from a virus, you sick son of a bitch!" Bellatrix screamed into the weeping, pleading, bleeding gash that used to be the face of the most powerful man in wizarding Britain and her many magical realms. "AVADA KEDAVRA!" She ejaculated with a shrill screech, killing him instantly.
"Holy shit..." Barty moaned, wiggling his tongue like a reptile.
Oh yes, there was a reason he always followed this woman into hell, all right.
Bellatrix looked up at him through her wild tangle of filthy, matted black curls and winked as she snapped her fingers, causing the hospital to immediately roar back to life.
Suddenly the Healers who had been frozen in the hall came flooding into the room, only to find Bellatrix Lestrange standing over the brutally mutilated corpse of Cornelius Fudge. They immediately raised their wands to curse her but Bellatrix just threw her head back and howled with laughter as Barty, Inferius Ginsberg and Gilderoy Girlfriend Stealer Lockhart all flourished their wands and shouted, "AVADA KEDAVRA!" in unison, murdering the Healers before they knew what hit them.
Bellatrix laughed harder as she surveyed her kingdom of corpses and then she bounded happily over to Barty, Inferius Ginsberg and Gilderoy Goldfish Brains Lockhart and pulled the three of them into a group hug. "Good job, boys." She said, beaming at them approvingly.
"Now, let's see what the bastards will admit to first - that I escaped from Azkaban and murdered the Minister for Magic, or that he died from the Muggle Virus." Bellatrix spat angrily. Then, with another shriek of mad laughter, she grabbed Barty's hand and began running again, with Gilderoy and Ginsberg tripping along right behind them - also hand in hand, of course.
With the sound of horrified screams following them they ran out of the room, out of the ward, out of the hospital, cursing, but not killing, as they went, and into the burning ruins of Muggle London.
There was still so much more work left to be done, but if anyone could lead a revolution, it was Bellatrix Lestrange.
And Barty would be right by her side every terrifying step of the way.