CHAPTER 7
LOWER YOUR WAND, LESTRANGE
"You did this!" Bellatrix said.
She raised her wand and took a step.
Her focus was unwavering, her calm unperturbed; her wand was pointed at Severus' heart.
All the times he had witnessed her destroy, torture, kill — always in her frenzied fury — he had never seen her like this. Calm, she was more terrible than ever.
"You believe I didn't see what you did?" she said, approaching him. "You believe it could have gone unnoticed… that you left the door wide open for Sirius Black's escape?"
Bellatrix didn't smirk, nor did she scowl. Her face set in stone, she took another step. Her magic unwound before her, magnificent and maniac like the shimmer in her eyes, and Severus had to hold down the impulse to tread back one pace.
He remained outwardly calm. His wand was held low, his heart pounding, his mind – racing.
Their orders had been to capture Black alive. Severus had acted on those orders. Maybe he could fool her into believing that. And then fool the Dark Lord? He could try — and end up a sobbing mess before the night was over. Or he could take the lazy way out: provoke Bellatrix to grant him a swift death before all hell broke loose. As of late, lazy was beginning to sound conspicuously tempting.
One more step and she stopped before him. "The Dark Lord," she said, "trusted you with the honour of bringing Sirius Black before him."
Her unseen magic was thrumming over his heart, unforgiving. He clutched his own wand tighter, didn't raise it, though. Wounded, he was no match for Bellatrix, and as much as it pained to admit, the wand in his hand, for now, was nothing but a fancy stick.
"This is how you repay him?" She lifted her chin, her tangled hair falling away from her face. Her glare, burning into his, had never unnerved him as now. "This is how you honour his trust? Too arrogant to prepare the attack, too self-assured to cut off the escape routes? This… this failure is your doing. The result of your negligence."
Her glare was fierce, his face inscrutable, and the air around them was standing still. No one spoke, no words followed, no accusations were coming forth. She hadn't heard Severus block the Killing Curse, neither had Yaxley.
Not his treachery infuriated Bellatrix, but his negligence that had dragged her into deceiving the Dark Lord.
"Answer me this," she said. "What should hold me from killing you where you stand?"
He scoffed bitterly. Nothing . After the night's fiasco, she could kill him, and the Dark Lord would not begrudge her for it.
She frowned. Her magic stirred like the wind in a storm, and Severus' arm twitched to raise his only defence against her — the fancy stick that it was. He disregarded the impulse stubbornly.
If he stood any chance before Bellatrix tonight, it was not by magic. Though by what else, he couldn't tell. Where her thoughts had been an open playground for him in the past, volatile and helter-skelter — an invitation to toy with her will as he liked, she now stood before him impenetrable as marble. Her fury and anguish channelled into one single, immovable intent: to end his life.
"I've never seen you this quiet, Snape," she said with a cold smile. "What's the matter… Cat's got your tongue?"
For the first time facing her — probably. He could find no fissure to breach her mind, and besides magic and his mind, Severus had nothing else to fight with.
"You climbed your way up in the ranks a little too high, a little too quickly, haven't you?" she said. "It got to your head, and you got haughty — even more so than before. Look at you now... in all your blazing arrogance, you became careless — lost your footing along the way." She smiled, suave and jarringly cold. Her smile was gone a moment later. "Lose all you want, Snape. But don't drag me into it. You should never have dragged me into it."
She gripped her wand tighter, and Severus barely caught himself before flinching. Come to admit, his makeshift bravado was ridiculous by now. He feared her, and she must have known. For someone of her power, to feel unfeared must have been unthinkable. Unconceivable.
Unphasing, maybe…?
Could it?
Well…
She stood straighter, pulled back her shoulders, preparing to impart the final blow, no trace of hesitancy on her face. And Severus, standing before her — no armour, no wand, with a confidence he didn't feel — tried his best to act amused, and smiled. Though, with everything going on, he must have ended up looking rather deranged. All the better.
Holding on to his imagined confidence, he moved his free hand to open the front of his cloak, and unknowingly, Bellatrix played into his hands.
She glanced at the shifting fabric, then down at his wand, held low, and by the lines that suddenly creased her brow, she was only now seeing that his wand wasn't trained on her.
She watched wordlessly as he holstered it with deliberate calm, and she frowned. Her glare shot back up, burned into his, silently impelling him to raise his weapon.
He did not grant her the favour. Was he beginning to feel it... that confidence?
Bellatrix's frown deepened, fazed to be refused, distraught to see him unarmed, unarmoured, yet unflinching before her terrible power.
"Raise your wand, you coward," she said. "I will not hesitate to strike you unarmed."
Instinct thumped madly inside him, shouting, just as she, to raise his wand, albeit instinct wasn't calling him a coward, but a fool. Severus was neither, and he knew it.
He matched her stare, cold and ruthless. "I have no need for a wand against you."
She scowled, her calm perturbed. Her magic swirled and bubbled, no longer centred but explosive as the sun. He seized her hesitation.
"Lower your wand, Lestrange." Her breath stuttered. He did not blink. "Or I will lower it for you."
Barely perceptible, a shiver ran through her, and she pulled back her wand a fraction of an inch. For a moment, she stood frozen, lips parted though she wasn't speaking, and Severus nearly found himself reflected in her eyes — he could make out one thing: he looked not unarmed. It unsettled her and left her mind open to treacherous games. No magic could have brought him this advantage tonight.
As her mouth turned to a scowl and she pressed her wand once more into his chest – not pointing at it, but physically pressing into his ribcage – Severus knew he was one word away from either victory or a swift death.
He played his only card.
"I said: lower – your – wand. Whatever my fault…" he searched her face for the shimmer of a reaction. "It is for the Dark Lord to decide the just course of action. Unless, of course, you do not trust his judgement. Perhaps you believe to know better than him."
Brown eyes glinted bewildered, and her lip quirked in disgust with the doubt besmirching her fanatic devotion to the Dark Lord.
He held her gaze as it flitted deranged, watched the battle she was fighting inside. Her eyes darted from his face to his chest, to his hand that held no wand, back to his face.
The incommensurate power she had summoned was dissipating like a pile of sand swept away by the wind. Then, as if something unseen had burned her, she withdrew her wand briskly and tottered back four paces.
They stared at one another without words. The silence between them felt thick and heated, like the fog of war poising over a battlefield.
Disarrayed and taunted by her inner demons, she was but a shadow of the witch that had, only seconds ago, conjured a power so great it would have made Albus Dumbledore shudder.
Where Severus had found the strength to stand before her undaunted, he couldn't tell. But that strength was now fleeting as if it had never been his.
The prodding ache in his injured side was digging into his breaths just to spite him, and he found himself suddenly yearning to lean against something for support.
Despite his best efforts, Bellatrix must have noticed his growing weakness because her expression morphed from bewilderment to inquisitive interest. She searched his face for an answer, eager to learn what powers he kept hidden.
Her glare travelled down with unnerving thoroughness, sizing him up, inch by inch, by inch, until it stopped, affixed to his right side below the ribs. And Severus regretted not having had the wit to pull his cloak closed over the ugly injury. To do so now would only incite her curiosity further.
"You're wounded," she whispered, as though to herself, and when she lifted her head, something was playing on her face, an emotion, or more, that Severus couldn't discern. "You — You were bluffing."
For a moment, Severus had no answer for her and simply stood, taking her in: her heavy breathing, the hard lines that edged her face, her chin lifted to appear taller despite the exhaustion weighing down her shoulders. He wasn't the only one that the botched battle had taken a toll on, Severus realised, as an inexplicable sense of defeat overwhelmed him.
"Don't rejoice," he finally said, no longer fighting to hide the fatigue from his voice. "You're looking at nothing more than dried blood on fabric. It's healed."
Bellatrix cast another look. In the dim light, it wasn't easy to make out the bloodstain on the dark fabric, but she took her time.
"That? I doubt," she said with cold humour. "Even for a man of your talents, Snape."
"You've got things to concern yourself with other than my wellbeing, Lestrange. He won't lay a finger on you tonight — it wasn't your mission. You're already aware of that." She flinched at his words. Maybe she wasn't aware, but it was Severus' bid to take her mind off of carrying their quarrel any further. He was tired of it. "It doesn't mean this whole mess will buy you any favours in the long run, either. Perhaps you want to consider that. But who knows? If you play your cards well, maybe you won't lose the high ground — might even find yourself alone up there… for a short while."
He'd get back at the top, he knew. He had no doubt.
Her gaze was flitting, taking him in — still , as though she was trying to decipher something, and Severus was beginning to feel like a blackboard full of quantum entanglement calculations before a committee for Arithmancy. She wouldn't make sense of anything. He was growing more and more uncomfortable under her stare nonetheless.
"Those few minutes ago," Bellatrix said. "If I had killed you — I'd have done you a favour," she concluded drily, and Severus found that he couldn't disagree with her entirely.
Without another word, she turned her back to him and walked away, and Severus was left staring at her and at the desolate mess around them. Quite something.
From a safe distance, Yaxley was gaping with a sour look on his face – disappointment, probably, with the anticlimactic denouement. Undoubtedly, the ladder-climbing cur would have gladly watched the Dark Lord's first lieutenants tear each other apart and free his way up in the ranks. Like he'd know what to do if he found himself at the top.
It's the edge of a knife up here, not a seat in an office.
Well, Severus probably had other concerns, more pressing than Yaxley's disgusting opportunism. Walking back to the Apparition barrier with a freshly sutured injury, to begin with. Answering to the Dark Lord for a sloppy failure to continue.
He tried not to dwell too much on that first inconvenience. After all, in Muggle hospitals, patients were up and walking hours after surgery, which involved, literally, cutting and sewing them back together like patched-up coats.
For what his pride was worth, Severus liked to think of himself as no less resilient than a fifty-year-old Muggle lady with a freshly removed appendix.
With such inspiring thought to keep him going, he gritted his teeth and headed out of the door, doing his best to ignore the pain in his side and the awkward wobble as he walked to meet the Dark Lord.
It would be a long night.