Hello all! Thanks for reading and reviewing!
Firstly, I'm glad that a few people liked the last scene and the way Hermione is being portrayed. Her character written as a shrinking violet never really did it for me, especially when paired with Bellatrix. However... that scene was meant to come off kind of unsavory and pathetic, so I guess I didn't write it the way I should have. :(
A reviewer wondered why Evelyn is able to perform Legilmency and Occlumency; all I will say is that her back story will be developed in due course, and that 'squib' is only Hermione's assessment of the situation. But if you're having trouble suspending disbelief, remember that Scrimgeour found out almost immediately, and has essentially blackmailed Hermione into working for the Ministry. She is also hampered by her own moral code, which is only now starting to break down.
I'm posting two chapters. If you don't care about backstory, or it bores you, or whatever - feel free to skip this one. The next chapter will have another meeting between Bellatrix and Hermione, as well as a lot of general chaos.
But the thing is, I really like writing Bellatrix in what I imagine as the Wizarding World's bad imitation of the 70s. To me she is a character very much haunted by the past - imprisoned by it, almost - so I think it is important to develop her pre-Azkaban storyline.
Anyways, hope you enjoy!
After Agatha's death, Hermione had almost expected Heaven's Gate to be repossessed by the Ministry, but as the days passed without incident, she concluded that the old Manor had either been forgotten, or was considered totally unsalvageable.
Well, their loss is my gain, she thought, sitting on the floor surrounded by a ring of open books. She was going through them one by one, casting every ward and protective enchantment she could find. By the time she was done, this building would surely be the most secure in Wizarding Britain.
And it was critical that it be so, for hidden behind one of the many locked doors was something that could bring an end to the world as they knew it. And Hermione was determined to guard it at any cost.
Just then, a sudden tapping at the window drew her attention, and she saw that a tawny post-owl had taken refuge from the rain on her window sill, and was glaring haughtily at her through the glass.
Rising, she went to let the bird inside, but just as she unfastened the latch, it dropped its parcel onto the ledge and flew off, disappearing a moment later into the downpour. The owl, it seemed, had even less time for her than his mistress.
Hermione sighed, unfurling the note pinned to the top of the parcel. It read:
"Here is the file you requested. I hope you find what you need to find, so you can do what needs to be done.
And promptly.
PS. I want my key back."
The words were practically dripping with disdain, especially the demand at the end. Did Evelyn really think she needed a key to get into her damned apartment? Hermione couldn't even imagine why the woman had given it to her in the first place. Probably some sort of throwaway gesture.
Things had been decidedly frosty between them since the night of Vance's death, and though the squib would never admit it, Hermione suspected her ire had rather more to do with the subject of the file in question than with Hermione's rough advances. It was undeniable that Evelyn wanted the matter over and done with - 'and promptly' - so in the end, it wasn't difficult to convince her to nip over into the Surveillance Department and nick this for her.
But there at last, sitting deceptively innocent on the table, was the Ministry file of Bellatrix Lestrange. Hermione picked it up, noting with satisfaction that it had a certain heft to it that promised for many hours of reading.
Any problem is best approached through thorough research. I should have done this ages ago, she thought, shuffling around the mounds of scrolls on the table to clear some space. Her industrial-size cauldron of the Draught of Living Death was carefully levitated to a nearby shelf, where it continued to bubble merrily away above one of her famous bluebell flames.
Finally settling down to her task, a cup of tea at her elbow, she opened the cover. There was a sheet with some simple background information and a color photograph of Lestrange from the 70s, which - with only a moment of hesitation - Hermione lay aside to keep. What followed was a list of crimes in which the Death Eater's involvement had been suspected, and beyond that there were pages upon pages of encrypted text. Another witch might have been intimated by the blocks of hieroglyphics, but not Hermione.
It looks like someone went through a lot of trouble to keep your secrets, she thought, summoning a stack of Ancient Rune glossaries with a sigh of resignation. It was going to be a very long night.
1972.
"You can put your quills away," came the booming command as Moody stalked into the workroom, looking more menacing than usual with a bloodied bandage wrapped haphazardly around his head. "Today will be a … practical demonstration."
Everyone held their breath as he limped over to his desk, throwing down his leather satchel and omnipresent silver flask.
"Um...what happened to your head, sir?" dared one of the new recruits, breaking the overwhelming silence.
A gruesome smirk flittered across Moody's face, and he took out his wand, twirling it with casual ease - though the whole effect was deeply unsettling. "I walked into a door."
"Really?" the boy wondered stupidly, and over in her corner Bellatrix rolled her eyes, knowing exactly what was coming.
"No. I busted a cabal of Dragon-egg smugglers, apprehended three Dark Wizards, and tracked down a rogue Dementor," Moody said, in a tone one might use to read a grocery list - which of course, only made it that much cooler. "Then, I had my lunch. And now I'm here with you nitwits."
A round of astonished gasps went through the room, followed by a wave of awestruck whispers: "three Dark Wizards?", "a rogue Dementor?"
"Shut your infernal traps, all of you!" Moody snarled, banging his cane against the stone for emphasis. "Now, as I was saying, today we will begin our study of one of the most important parts of your job as an Auror."
He let the tension build, let them all speculate what fresh horrors this lesson had in store, as he walked over to the blackboard and slowly scratched a single word by hand: Interrogation.
"Interrogation, you say? Isn't that just for namby-pamby lawyers and the old farts on the Wizengamot?" he imitated their imagined reaction in a high-pitched whine.
Meanwhile, in the very back row, the gaze of an incredibly bored Bellatrix somehow found Fawley's, and they shared a look of commiseration over Moody's penchant for theatrics.
"No, you snot-nosed little screwballs, it is not! Now, if I had my way, this badge," a single gnarled thumb prodded his Auror crest proudly, "would be a license to kill, but in these supposedly civilized times, every miscreant, crook, and villain is entitled to a little something called 'due process'." He said the last words with a shudder of disgust.
"Now, don't ask me what the hell that means, because I've never stayed awake in a staff meeting long enough to find out," Moody went on, drawing a round of nervous chuckles from his audience. "But as far as we're concerned, it means you need to hand in a signed confession with every arrest you make. And today, we're going to learn how to get it."
Right below 'Interrogation' Moody wrote 'The five techniques'.
"Can somebody tell me what they are?" His beady eyes scanned the room, finally settling on the lone hand in the air, the one that was always the first to rise. "Fawley?"
"Deprivation of water and food, deprivation of sleep, prolonged stress positions, sensory overload, and … making them wear a hood, I think," Fawley recited eagerly, as if she was reading from a book, and clearly desperate for approval. And just like that, Bellatrix was back to despising her again.
"Correct," Moody nodded, and with a wave of his wand, a list appeared on the board. "These five are the only methods of interrogation we are legally entitled to use," he explained, perhaps a touch resentfully. "Now, once in a blue moon, maybe your hand slips, and maybe some low-life ends up with a broken jaw - accidentally, you know - but I repeat, these are the only officially sanctioned techniques. Now, does that mean they're less effective than the more... hands-on version?"
Fawley's hand was in the air before he'd even finished speaking, and Moody nodded at her. Bellatrix, determined to ignore the both of them, pulled out a scrap of parchment and began to doodle. She drew a giant serpent crushing a pathetic-looking lion, a scraggly bird, and a misshapen badger in its monstrous jaws.
"Well, as a matter of fact, recent trials have shown," Fawley began self-importantly, "that these methods are actually more effective, because they cause psychological distress, and can thus be used over a long period of time. So even the most determined eventually break their resolve. Also, the subject potentially becomes suggestible, open to reindoctrination."
"Well done, as usual," Moody praised, an ominous sing-song lilt in his voice and a twinkle in his eyes. "Now that we've covered the basics, I have a little... treat for you all. Today, we're going to see the five techniques in action! It's time for you lazy sods to get off your arses - were going on a field trip..." He looked around at the assembled faces, saw that most were looking back at him with dread, and grinned.
"To Azkaban."
...
In an entire year of sharing a flat, neither Bellatrix nor Andromeda had ever managed to master the art of cooking - and with Kreacher forbidden by their father to so much as launder a single dirty sock of theirs - were forced to frequent the Leaky Cauldron for their meals.
Making her way down Diagon Alley in the fading light, Bellatrix cast sidelong glances at the posters which seemed to plaster every storefront. Some warned passerby to be vigilant of becoming victims of the Imperius curse, while others offered a reward for information about a group called the 'Death Eaters'. There were also bills bizarrely titled 'WANTED: You Know Who", with a giant question-mark below, in the space a photograph would usually fill. Nobody knew what his name was, or what he looked like. Bellatrix wondered why they bothered.
She pushed roughly though the queue outside the pub, flashing her trainee badge to anyone who dared protest. Aurors were enjoying a sudden uptick in status in these dangerous times, as trouble seemed to lurk on every corner and the people, for the first time in recent memory, were eager to believe that the Ministry was capable of keeping them safe.
"Bella! Over here!" someone called to her above the din. Turning, she scowled into the eager faces of Longbottom and Fawley, who were waving her over to a table across the room. It seemed that her thrice-damned sister had invited her friends again, but couldn't bother to come in time to meet them. Seeing no escape, Bellatrix walked over and sank into the proffered chair with a long-suffering sigh.
Fawley started in on her at once. "So, did they pull you in for questioning again today? Did they try to trick you into drinking Veritaserum again? Do they still want you to spy on your Uncle?"
"Yes all around. Now would you please shut up," Bellatrix ground out, desperately searching the crowd for a waiter.
"They want you to spy on Orion Black?" Longbottom asked, probably wondering why Andromeda had shared this juicy gossip with her friend and not her fiancée. "Isn't he the rich one who does all that export-import stuff with the Goblins? What do they want with him?"
He stared at Bellatrix, but when it became clear she wouldn't answer, he turned to Alice, who was only too eager to elaborate. "Well, we think the Ministry suspects he's supporting You-Know-Who financially, and helping him smuggle Dark artifacts and creatures into England. Now, nobody has ever been able to prove it, but I overheard Moody say that they're bound to catch him red-handed one of these days - "
Bellatrix couldn't hold in her irritated grunt. "Pure speculation. I don't know when you and Andy find the time to come up with this tripe."
"Well, if there's nothing going on, how come they're trying so hard to find out what you know, hmm?" Fawley said, crossing her arms defensively. Bella's answering glare was so darkly menacing that most would have flinched away, but the girl merely raised a challenging eyebrow.
"The House of Black has always been envied, admired, and - most importantly - feared. And rightly so," Bellatrix warned, palming her wand and rolling it in her fingers. It was an obvious threat.
Frank looked back and forth between the two of them helplessly, opening his mouth and closing it again, clearly at a loss for words. Fortunately, Andromeda's sudden arrival cut the tension like a knife. She bustled in, oblivious, grinning ear-to-ear, and plopped into the last remaining seat.
"Hey! You wouldn't believe the day I just had," she gushed. "But how was training?"
"Fine," Bellatrix and Alice chorused, sparing each other a brief, awkward glance.
"It was boring and awful," Frank added sympathetically, with a comforting pat on Andy's shoulder."You're not missing a thing."
Andromeda laughed, brushing off his gesture with a shrug. "Well, then, I'm sorry for your sake, because mine is going great! Healer Crickerly's just started a unit on Muggle medicine. It's all about their tools and methods and ideas - the things they manage to do without magic are really quite extraordinary!"
"That's so far out!" Alice exclaimed, the previous conversation all but forgotten. "Is it true they actually stitch people up? Like with needle and thread?"
"Surely not," Longbottom cut in with a disbelieving huff.
"It's true alright, although Ted says in the future, all of that will be done by lay-sers and um, roh-bots!" Andromeda went on excitedly. "I'm not really sure what that means, but I think they're kind of like house elves made out of metal…"
How do these three manage to amuse themselves for hours over the most ridiculous things? Bellatrix wondered, sullenly munching on her chips.
"Stop talking rubbish, Andy," she snapped at last. "You sound like an idiot. And who is this mysterious 'Ted' you're always going on about?"
"He's nobody!" Andy blurted, though she could not disguise the flush which spread across her cheeks. "He's just a friend I made in the program. He's really very clever, he wants to get certified as a 'doctor' too, which is a Muggle type of healer."
Bellatrix let out a barking laugh. "My gods, why?" But just as she was about to take another bite, realization dawned, and she let the chip drop dramatically onto the table. "Oh, please tell me he's not a mudblood…" she whispered, regarding her sister in horror.
"I don't know. It's never come up," Andromeda replied primly. "And I don't see how it's relevant, anyways."
Bellatrix was thoroughly appalled. "You 'don't see how it's relevant'?"she repeated in disbelief. "Are you completely daft?"
"Ughhh Bella, quit being such a square," Fawley chided, coming to her friend's defense as always. "Last time I checked the Middle Ages were over. Welcome to the 20th century. Here - " she shoved a glass into Bellatrix's unwilling hands. "Have another pint."
Longbottom chose this moment to climb unsteadily to his feet and raise his own glass. "Let's have a toast to Muggles, the inventors of beer!" He hiccoughed. "And underpants too! Say what you will, but they're a useful lot!"
"To Muggles!" the others sang in agreement. Then, Andromeda caught sight of Bellatrix, who was looking about uncomfortably, as though afraid someone she knew would see her with the lot of them. "What?" she snapped, exasperated.
"Oh, nothing…" Bellatrix shrugged in a poor imitation of indifference. "Just trying to understand how I ended up with a bunch of filthy blood traitors for mates."
"Aww, did you all hear that?" Fawley cooed delightedly. "She called us her mates! D'you reckon she fancies us, Frankie? Here - give us a kiss, then." She leaned over, and Bellatrix, caught like a deer in headlights, could only await the inevitable.
As Fawley's lips grazed her cheek lightly, Bellatrix grimaced. But the moment before she wiped the kiss away was longer, perhaps, than it ought to have been.
...
"Two more years," Bellatrix muttered to herself for the umpteenth time as she stepped out of the Floo, toeing off her boots and sinking gratefully into the sofa by the fireplace. "Just two more bloody years and it'll all be over." She'd be a full fledged Auror. Nobody would dare to question her then, let alone imply that her entire family were nothing but a bunch of mercenaries and criminals.
Bellatrix sighed, wanting to put her feet up, but unwilling to stoop to using one of Fawley's 'beans-bags'. She refused to accept those garish multicolor sacks as furniture, though Andromeda assured her that everybody who was anybody owned one.
It was all part of the insufferable incursion of Muggleness into every quarter of Wizarding society, and the still-more-insufferable incursion of Alice Fawley into Bellatrix's flat. 'Just think what we could save on the rent,' Andy said. 'It's only for a little while before Narcissa moves in,' Andy said. 'She's really not so bad when you get to know her," Andy said.
Andy, Bellatrix had to conclude, was either a sadist or an idiot.
She had agreed, with the proviso that the girl be neither seen nor heard in the common spaces; but day by day, hour by hour, Bellatrix had unconsciously ceded more and more ground to the united front of Fawey and her sister. The weeks wore on, and tacky purple flowers slunk silently onto the wallpaper, kaleidoscope rugs sprung from the floor like weeds, and everywhere she seemed to look, there was a lamp full of some sort of floating incandescent blobs. Fawley claimed that they were made of lava, but Bellatrix had her doubts.
Still, the girl was not completely useless. Her cooking was...passable, and she was the only one who bothered to tidy at all. 'In the real world world, people don't have house elves to wait on them hand and foot,' Fawley told her cheekily, and only her promise to Andy kept Bellatrix from hexing that self-righteous smirk off her face.
The door opened, drawing Bellatrix from her thoughts. It was her least-favorite flatmate, carrying an enormous sign proclaiming support for the "Magical Maintenance Workers' Strike" - which was already eye-roll-inducing - but to top it off, Fawley had donned another one of her bizarre costumes.
"Were you really out in public like that?" Bellatrix burst out, looking the girl up and down as if her clothes were a personal offense.
"It's called a mini-skirt, darling," Fawley chirped as she hung up her bag. "And I'll have you know that it's the height of cool right now."
Bellatrix crossed her arms, determinedly studying a patch of grimy hardwood to avoid the temptation to ogle Fawley's legs. Sometimes she almost thought the girl did it on purpose to taunt her. "What it is, is indecent," she snapped. "You might as well be selling it on the street for twenty galleons a go!"
"How very dare you!" Fawley cried in mock outrage, throwing herself on the sofa next to Bellatrix. "Thirty at the least!"
A smirk somehow found its way onto Bellatrix's face, and before she knew it, she was staring unabashedly at Fawley's thighs. "Well if I'd known that's all it took, I'd have coughed up ages ago."
To her surprise, the girl drew a sharp breath and looked away. For a long time now, the pair of them occasionally took breaks from being at each other's throats to flirt, at least whenever no one was around. And Fawley was always the first to initiate it, though it seemed that Bellatrix had gone too far this time.
"Hmmm," the girl turned back after a moment of uncomfortable silence, eyeing the glass held loosely in Bellatrix's fingers. "I see someone started without me again."
"It's Friday," she said by way of justification. "I assumed you had another, uh, suitor. Gibbons? Or was it Dawlish?"
At that, Fawley crinkled up her face in distaste. "No, I had to ditch the pair of them. You know, people can be so unbearably tedious with their jealousy. I mean, it's like nobody's ever heard of Free Love! No - it's all marriage proposals, left, right, and center!"
Bellatrix glowered into her whiskey, trying to stifle her 'tedious' jealousy. Not that she wanted … anything from Fawley. Let alone marriage. "Better than being betrothed by your parents, believe me," she said bitterly.
"Ah - you're right, of course." Fawley eyed her sadly, no doubt having heard the story from Andromeda, that incorrigible gossip. Then, with the air of having finally decided something, she moved imperceptibly closer on the sofa and placed her hand on Bellatrix's.
"You know, I really admire you Bella. It takes a lot of guts to do what you did - and I know you don't see it like that - " she waved away the protest on the tip of Bella's tongue. "But I bet that deep, deep down…underneath that tragically stuffy pureblood exterior…" Bellatrix gasped as Falwey carefully traced the buttons of her robe with a single finger, "...there's a rebel just clawing to get out."
"Don't toy with me, Alice," she growled, grasping the finger painfully and twisting it back. It was the first time she'd used Fawley's given name.
The girl winced, but made no effort to withdraw. Her eyes gleamed with mischief as they danced across Bella's features, finally coming to rest on her frowning mouth. "Me?" she whispered, all smirking innocence. "I would never."
A blind fury, forever simmering right below the surface, rose in Bellatrix... and the next thing she knew, Alice was sprawled beneath her on the floor with Bellatrix's wand jammed painfully into her jugular. For months, Fawley had been picking at her defenses like a scab, wearing her down with fleeting touches, crawling under her skin to spread her slow poison. Never mind that she'd sworn herself to lifelong solitude; never mind the tortuous measures she took to bury her desire; never mind the walls she'd built around her heart in order to survive -
It was all undone as Fawley deliberately arched her back beneath her, thrusting her breasts invitingly upwards. The sudden intimacy of the contact made Bellatrix drop her wand in shock.
"But aren't you going to have your way with me?" Fawley murmured, gazing at her from beneath her lashes.
Jagged breaths ran like tremors through her body, but when Bellatrix spoke her voice was even. "You're not disappointed, are you?"
"Yes," came the heated reply, and in that moment, Bellatrix thought she saw another crack in Fawley's shining, brittle mask. Was it possible that beneath that airy, taunting indifference there was something… something real? The girl was so full of spirit; so irrepressibly, unapologetically alive. Bellatrix wanted to burrow right beneath her skin, her flesh, and steal just a bit of that fire.
She had flown too long in the valley of shadows, and the first glimpse of the sun was blinding. Even the dim awareness that it would burn her alive couldn't stop Bellatrix as she was drawn irresistibly in.
