Chapter Fifty-Five | The Jury
"The girls are safe?"
"Catherine."
"Are the girls safe?" she barked, standing on the moor and whirling to face Albus just as soon he'd returned. The manor blazed ahead of her, Sirius standing a few feet away and stubbornly refusing to look at her, face pale even in the ember glow.
"Yes. They were obliviated and I took them to a hospital. Now tell me what happened in there."
"Must I?"
"It was awful," came Sirius' choked voice. "I've never seen anything like that, and I never expected it from you."
"You saw what they'd done. A girl, hardly ten, and I can't even begin to imagine the horrors they subjected her to. You're going to sympathize with them?"
He threw his arms in the air, shouting. "We're not them, Catherine! Don't you understand that? You didn't just torture him, you ripped him to pieces! Why couldn't you have just killed Rabastan and been done with it? And don't forget Bellatrix got away!"
"We got the information we needed, and now there's fear in the Death Eater ranks. Some will leave, and the rest will make stupid decisions."
"But like that-?"
"Sirius, Catherine. Stop." Dumbledore raised his hands. "This isn't the place. We need to get back to headquarters, then we can discuss this. And mark my words, this will be discussed."
Catherine put out her arm, Sirius ignoring them and whirling on the spot, disappearing with a crack. Albus let out a weary sigh before grasping her wrist, pulling the two of them through a whirlpool to then be dropped in the foyer of Grimmauld place.
Eyeing Albus, she frowned at the disappointment in his gaze. "What?"
"What happened tonight was beyond even my most macabre imaginations, and I cannot begin to express the horror I felt witnessing but the aftermath of your ministrations."
Letting her hammer fall into the mist, Catherine reached down and took a bottle of blood wine from the Messengers, before pausing and muttering for them to pinch some more, their little gray hands reappearing with a pack of cigarettes, marked with Yharnam script.
Walking into the kitchen, she took down a glass and poured her wine, sipping once before setting it down.
"You knew exactly what you were going to see when Sirius came running for you."
"I prayed that my assumptions were incorrect," he said, sitting at the end of the table. "They were not." Albus took a watch from his pocket, an old-fashioned thing. "I've called a meeting to discuss what happened."
"I told him not to stay."
"You never needed to do it in the first place."
"They suffered, Albus. Suffered unspeakable horrors. You've seen through my own eyes what I've had to witness, what I have done, and you act as though this isn't exactly what you expected of me." Drinking deeper, she sat at the other end of the table, staring him down. "What? Did you, or did you not watch my fight with the monster that became of Umbridge? Did you know that she was still in there, a small part of her still conscious and of sound mind, fully aware of what she had become yet powerless to stop it?"
"You never needed to do it, no matter how much they had suffered. Kill him if you must, I myself would pull the trigger, but torture, Catherine? That is beyond even me and the depths I have already stooped to." Pinching his brow, he sucked in a greedy breath, before letting it out. "What you did in there was barbarism, and I fear even Bellatrix herself would not have been able to imagine such horror nor have the creativity to inflict it."
"Then what's this meeting for? To decide if you should go on without me? If I should be left alive?"
"Yes. Not to the latter, of course, but whether or not your involvement is worthwhile." His shoulders sunk, chewing on one cheek as he looked her over. "My eyes have been opened, truly, to the horrors that Yharnam has wrought. Have you always fought like this and I chose to look past it, or was I simply blind?"
Her jaw clenched, teeth grinding together, the corner of a molar chipping off and landing on her tongue. "You witnessed me tear a man's throat out with my teeth, like an animal. I can promise I won't do to anyone like what I did to Rabastan, but that won't change anything, will it?"
"No. No it will not. What happened with that man atop the tower was fueled by a sudden, catatonic rage. Tonight? That was methodical. Purposeful. Depravity the likes of which I've scarcely witnessed in my very long life."
"Then-"
A knock at the door, a pop, and a few of the Order could be heard milling in, grumbling about the hour and the suddenness of their call. Upstairs she could hear Sirius pacing the halls, waiting until the last moment to come downstairs.
Albus and Catherine sat in silence, eyes locked over the table as people came in only to see the two of them warring in a noiseless battle, their jaws clapping shut and fingers ticking nervously as they took their seats.
Five, perhaps ten minutes was spent in this contest, Catherine eventually drawing her attention away to continue drinking, wondering if her stolen cigarettes would do anything to dampen the little favour she had with the Order as of now. She decided better of it, instead sipping at her wine and studying the faces that slowly trickled in, hardly able to suppress a smirk as Severus took his seat near Dumbledore, casting wary glances her way.
His fingers were ever so faintly stained with blood, and she could smell Bellatrix on him from here, all musk and rot and dusted things reclaimed after her stint in Azkaban.
"Have you told them why they're here?"
"Not yet."
Finally, Sirius walked in, sitting in an open seat as far away from Catherine as possible, and she'd be lying if she said that didn't sting.
Didn't they get it? He made them suffer. Horrible, unimaginable things. Both Rabastan and Rodolphus had ruined innumerable lives, ended more, and because she subjected him to a fraction of the suffering he had inflicted throughout his life she was now a villain?
Catherine told Sirius to leave, lest he always remember her as the woman she had become. It was he that chose not to listen. It was he that stayed. It was he that ran to Dumbledore quaking like a child and bringing the man over to offer her his stern gaze and even sharper words.
Yes, she felt guilt. She'd be a fool not to. Oh, the horror she had wrought, but horror wrought all the same. There was no taking such a thing back. It felt justified, still did, something cold and necessary and far too vindicating to ever make her truly question herself. But she understood their horror. She'd just assumed they knew hers.
Catherines horror was not in witnessing the blood and gore of Yharnam that was now so commonplace to her as to be likened to a particularly repulsive painting. It could be ignored if she so chose to. But the concept of it all? The pillars that made Yharnam what it was, the suffering dusted on every tier of that crimson cake that rose high, high above them all?
That was what made her veins run cold.
To know that the bodies and blood she had happened across in the Orphanage were but a speck of the true wrongs Yharnam had committed. But an end note to mark their long list of crimes, all inked in red. More bodies had been funneled through that place than she could begin to picture, almost a century of such all plucked from the underbelly of that city and dragged up to see slugs made of stars with scars etched into their guts, every single one barely a taste of the horrors that would visit them.
So, no. Gore and the mundanity of pain was not something that made her twist in her seat. Not any longer. It was the philosophy of it all, the knowledge and the knowing that the momentary disgust was only a hint of the untold suffering of hundreds of thousands of nameless, faceless people that never knew a moment of kindness their entire lives. That was why the pits of Hemwick struck her so, because of the story behind it. The images of cattle carts and screaming voices, women kicked lifeless into a hole in the ground as the baby torn from their belly cannot even wail, for it does not yet have a voice.
"Oh, Catherine dear."
Lost in thought, she glanced up to Miss Weasley, the woman tutting with a worried air about her. Catherine hummed. "Yes?"
"You've got, ah- well," she gestured to Catherine. "Blood on you."
"Don't worry, it's not mine."
The woman squeaked, nodding fervently before tucking herself against Arthur's side, unable to fully tear her wide eyed gaze away from Catherine's blood-soaked figure.
She did nothing to clean it off, instead fermenting in the gore torn away from Rabastan's shuddering corpse. This was what Yharnam had made of her, and if it took looking upon her painted guise to realize what exactly was required of her to win this war, both here and beyond the veil, then she wasn't sure she wanted to work with them.
Courtesy would dictate she tidy up, of course. Change into a nice shirt, perhaps a skirt or plain trousers, tie up her hair and remove the knots from it that made it look more a ravaged bird's nest than her usual ragged locks. She could do all those things, sip at her wine as if a debutante fresh from the ball and there to plead her case before a court of her peers for some uncouth happening or another.
But she didn't.
Catherine was born of the blood, made warrior by it. In the adage of the once great Willem, she was undone by the blood. Upon Hemwick she had seen corpse camps and more organs than she could shake a stick at, all bottled with factory precision and prepared to ship off for the usage of the remainder of Yharnam in their debauched dealings with godhood and all things petty. Perhaps it wasn't the systematic execution of those they considered lesser, not the plights that Dumbledore had witnessed of his youth and waded through as if a sickly pool, clawing at his legs - but no one could walk into such a thing and come out relatively sane as she had.
Even Gascoigne had lost himself to that fervor, and he had been a career hunter. Those like Eileen or herself were far and few between, and Eileen had lent some idea to the fact that she was a Dreamer, once upon a time, and that offered her some level of protection against the blood that her companions did not. It was inevitable that were a hunter to live long enough, at some point they would find enjoyment from their work. Not the satisfaction of a job well done but true entertainment in the way the blood could scatter against the walls, perfect pin-drops and polka-dots of shining red, going about their work as if an artist given a blade and told to sally forth, to do their city proud.
To go out, and kill a few beasts. It's for your own good, after all.
"Is everyone here?" Catherine asked, breaking the solemn silence that had fallen over the room.
No one was chatting, no one whispering to one another and catching up since last they spoke the other day. No, they only cast curious glances about the room wondering what it was they had been called for, making some small connection between Catherine's armour, drenched in blood, and the stern expression upon Dumbledore's face.
Dumbledore nodded along as he counted heads, ticking each off the box as he looked around the table. "I believe that's everyone."
"Shall we, then?"
Weary beyond belief, Dumbledore adjusted his glasses. His gaze once more returned to Catherine, brow furrowed and jaw rigid. "We're here today to discuss Catherine's actions."
"Actions," Severus drawled, sneering at her across the table. "She butchered a man. Pulled him apart until he finally succumbed to blood loss."
Shocked gasps resounded across the kitchen, Molly looking at Catherine with ill-disguised horror. "Is this true?"
"Yes." Catherine nodded. "It's true."
"Catherine… why-"
"Molly, I'm afraid the Catherine you remember is very different to that of the one that sits before you." Albus' hand wavered towards her, as if to comfort the woman, before he brought it back and steepled his fingers together. "Tonight marked our raid on the LeStrange Manor, in which both Rabastan and Rodolphus were killed, Bellatrix escaping under Catherine's eye. The reason she escaped was because Catherine was too intent on, as she put it, punishing Rabastan for what we found in the cellar of their home."
"Women. One dead, one alive, as well as a young girl, maybe ten, eleven years of age. All of them had been tortured and possibly worse, Albus. Don't pretend you didn't come to the same conclusion I did."
"I would argue nothing of the sort, Catherine. What I will argue... is that repugnant as their actions were, yours are comparable."
"He deserved to suffer," she stated, matter of fact. Taking another sip from her glass, Catherine glanced down into the murky liquid, far too thick to be regular wine and undoubtedly noticed by the other attendees.
"He deserved to die, I would argue, but suffer? To suffer as he did? No."
"What happened?" Tonks spoke up, face twisted in consternation.
Blank-eyed, Catherine turned her attention towards her. "I took him apart, piece by piece, and Bellatrix got to watch."
"You don't mean-"
"I started with his teeth, then when he wouldn't admit to what he did I decided he no longer needed a jaw. After that came his fingers, hands, his feet, until there was nothing left of him." Her hand curled into a fist, before flattening out across the tabletop, pressing harshly into its surface. "I don't know how many women, girls, were brought to that place for their 'fun'," she spat, the claws of her gauntlet dragging lines through the wood. "But trust me. What I did to him was barely a taste of the suffering he inflicted on those they captured."
"He look like me when you were done with him?" Moody asked, looking torn between disgust and praise. Although, she couldn't much tell against his scarred visage, inhuman as it was.
"Worse."
He let out a reproachful laugh. "Struck some fear in them, eh?"
"Alastor."
"What, Albus? I've done the same in the last war. You know what I did to good old Crabbe's father. I regret it, mind you, but I did do it."
"That was different."
"Don't see how it is. I got him alone for a few hours and decided to do to him what he'd done to ours. Not my fault you don't see it the same."
"Perhaps it's because I didn't see the aftermath of what you'd done to Crabbe, only heard tale from you after the fact. All the same, I would never have approved if I'd known that to be the case, and we would have had much the same meeting then as we are now."
"Are we genuinely considering torture?" Severus roared, fist striking the table. "Worse than torture! Only Voldemort and his ilk have committed such baseless violence, and they're the ones who kill as easily as they breathe!" He turned his iron gaze towards Catherine, fury in his eyes. "I refuse to work for the Order if we do nothing about this… this thing masquerading as her daughter. We might as well start making inferi and march them down Diagon Alley!"
"I never thought I'd be agreeing with Snape on anything, but… here I am." All heads turned to Sirius, and he shrugged weakly, chin resting in his hands. "What I saw tonight was by far the worst thing I have ever, ever seen, and I was the first to find your parents bodies, Catherine."
"I told you not to stay."
"You shouldn't have done it! Not in the first place, not ever. It was… it was absolutely horrific, watching you pry him apart like a- like a bloody doll!"
Raising his hand, Severus cleared his throat. "I say we be rid of her once and for all. This isn't my… previous distaste for Potter speaking, this is me having heard from Bellatrix LeStrange, a shaken Bellatrix, what she witnessed in LeStrange Manor. Not once have I seen the woman fearful of anyone but the Dark Lord himself, except for you." He directed his gaze across the table, staring meaningfully into Catherine's eyes, no longer full of ire but a deep seated disappointment and… was that regret?
Curious, she looked deeper, dredging up the Truth and honing it in on him.
She almost reared back at the onslaught of information, how awfully self-flagellatory and bitter the man was. Bitter she knew, but the hatred he felt for himself ran deep. So very, very deep.
Running off to Voldemort after a painful childhood, beaten and starved by his muggle father for the sake of his magic, having to watch as his mother took blow after blow for his protection, only to run off a few years after he had gotten his first letter to Hogwarts, never to be seen again.
He killed his father in a pique of rage some time before graduation, scattering his transfigured bones in the Thames so that not even the birds could pick him clean, left as aluminium and copper salvage to be melted down and reused in some manner of contraption after being reclaimed from the river.
But he had joined Voldemort, and he had told him of a prophecy, eavesdropped in the Hog's Head Pub some evening in the early winter of 1980.
He had told him, and Lily and James Potter had met their end.
It was only then that he felt regret for his actions, only then that he took the obsession he felt with Lily and harnessed it into an undying need for revenge against the man who took her away from him, as if she had ever belonged to him - or anyone - in the first place.
"It was you," Catherine growled, lurching to her feet and looming over the table, finger pointed towards Severus and shaking with her anger. "It. Was. You."
"Catherine-"
"Quiet, Albus!" A sneer worked its way across her face, ferocious, full of teeth. "He sold them out. He was the one who told Voldemort!"
"Catherine, what the hell are you talking about?"
"It was him the whole time, Sirius! Him who put me there, him who led Voldemort to that door! You told him about the Prophecy! You're the one who put him there!"
"What?"
The table blew into uproar, Molly, Sirius, and Tonks staring at Snape with obvious disgust, while the remainder looked on in confusion.
"Quiet!" Dumbledore roared, a mighty bang letting off from his wand, smoke curling through the air. "Enough! I will not let this devolve into petty squabbling!"
"Petty?"
Her voice, so terribly cold, whispered across the room like the touch of death. Slowly, Catherine pulled back from the table, standing as tall as she could, chin raised as she looked down on all of them.
"You call it petty, me confronting the man who sold my family to Voldemort. It was only after they died that he felt anything, and know what that feeling was?"
Silence.
"Nothing but lust and misplaced affection, if it could even be called that… no, little Severus Snape here had nothing but unholy feelings for my mother. Ownership, most of all, superiority, a love for her attention even though it was the same kindness she offered anyone deserving of it. You lusted for her, wanted her so badly, and when James Potter was the one to win her heart what did you do? Called her a mudblood and blamed it on him." She took her wine and drank the last of it, throwing it against the wall and smirking when Severus winced at the crash, so much louder in the quiet room. "My father was not a kind man, that I know. He was petty, he was a bully, but to blame your hate, your disgusting thoughts on him? Then to take it out on his child and hundreds of others, me, solely because I look like my father? You're a repugnant man, Severus Snape."
"I have had enough-!"
"Quiet!" Her finger twitched, leather bonds wrapping around his mouth and lacing to the head of the chair behind him, yanking him back with a crack. His eyes slammed shut as his head smashed against the chair, a small noise of surprise choked out of him. "You sold someone to them. A family, and you couldn't have cared less until the moment you found out it was dear old Lily. Then you begged, begged and pleaded, 'Oh please, my Lord, not her. Let her live, please.'
"And did he listen? No, of course he didn't. Because you threw your lot in with a maniac who wishes for genocide and the subjugation of an entire peoples. So you've sat on your lust, and your obsession, some delusional fetish that only my mother - my dead mother - could ever hope to stoke in your addled mind, and you directed it outward. You bullied and berated children because your life was such a misery that the only enjoyment you could ever gain was through the damning of others. You sold an innocent family to a madman, and then you have the gall to sit here and judge me for doing unto a monster like Rabastan what he deserved."
Her whole body quivered with fury, Catherine's head snapping over to Dumbledore's like that of a predator, eyes faintly glowing with unfettered magic. "I will not kill him, Albus. I wouldn't dare to butcher your dog. He's very well behaved, isn't he? Isn't it amazing what feeding the fire of delusion can do for a man's motivation?" She shook her head, teeth digging into her cheeks. "No, I won't kill him. He's below even a monster like me. No, if this is who you want to throw in your lot with, a betrayer and a coward no better than Pettigrew, then I'll deal with Voldemort on my own. What I did was wrong, yes, but I can already see that this meeting will go nowhere, and only end in me being shackled or tossed away because you can't bear to lay eyes on what's become of me."
"Catherine, we don't intend anything of the sort," Albus pleaded. "I wanted to set a standard, to remind all of us that we mustn't lose our humanity in this war."
"I don't care." She threw her head back, sighing loudly and counting the cracks in the ceiling. "I'll take care of this on my own, and then none of you will ever have to see me again."
"What do you mean?" Molly croaked, fidgeting with the button of her cardigan.
"Just that. Once this is done, I'll disappear. You won't have to worry about the next Dark Lady or any other nonsense, which I know is already brewing in the back of your minds. And don't lie to me," she uttered, looking back at Dumbledore. "I can hear it, whizzing about your head. Whether I'm turning into him because of Yharnam. It's always been there, constant, just tickling at your thoughts and reminding you of how much you stand to lose if the last remnants of my mind scatter into nothing."
"What will you do?"
"Does it matter? I'll be gone."
"That sounds an awful lot like death," Tonks said, hair a pale gray.
"It does, I suppose. I'll be dead to you, in name, body, and soul."
"Catherine-"
"No, I'm done. I'm sorry, but this has to end before it's even started." She swallowed heavily, collecting herself before walking around the table, everyone except for Dumbledore and Severus avoiding eye contact. Her hand flickered, and Dumbledore flinched as she cut a shallow line through his cheek and brought her finger to her lips, drinking of his blood and all the knowledge and experience held within.
Leaning down, so only he could hear, Catherine rested her lips next to Albus' ear. "Once this is done, you may find my body in the Shrieking Shack. Do with it what you will. Bury me, burn me, I don't care. I hope it gives you all some sense of closure. And please, take care of Hedwig for me."
With that she walked past him, slack-jawed and teary-eyed, hoping she would never have to see any of them again.