You used to captivate me

By your resonating light

But now I'm bound by the life you left behind

Your face it haunts my once pleasant dreams

Your voice it chased away all the sanity in me.

-My Immortal, Evanescence

*

For a long time, a blank. And then it all shifts, as lives often do. The inside of my skull splits, fingers of light lewdly probing the vacuum, and I feel a palpable sort of panic spread through me. I am alive. I am conscious. I will have to open my eyes and look upon his face and worship him as before.

Voices.

One a damp, stumbling, dripping tap, the other high and cold like the pluck of a thin, frosted wire. I build their owners around them with sickening familiarity and heave. My master and my husband, exchanging pleasantries as if I'm not even here. In fact, to them, I'm probably not. I must have been sedated for days, given the depth from which I have arisen. They do not know I'm awake.

-…secure areas?

-Yes. We all escaped safely…I came here as quickly as I could, Lucius said you wanted to speak with me.

I sink under again, drowning and colourless. It is several minutes before I emerge, scraping the fuzz from my clarity with a determined, metallic screech.

-My Lord….it is a great honour that you chose my wife to bear the child…

-I did not do it for you, Rodolphus. Basking in her reflected glory is an act as weak and pitiless as I'd expect from a follower such as you. Do not protest that you searched for me when others did not, you were only chasing at the heels of Bellatrix and Crouch. Yet another attempt at stealing glory.

I imagine his eyes, pools of arctic blood boring into Rodolphus in that way he has. Plunged back under, I see a montage of irises, baby blue, fracturing and bleeding red until all traces of human has been obliterated. I think of those eyes, punctured, melted, smashed like boiled eggs, and am brought sharply back to the surface.

-Lucius informs me that our raid on the ministry may not have been as fruitless as I feared. He says you have interesting information regarding the Prophesy.

-Yes, Master. I heard it. The Longbottom boy broke the Prophesy during our battle with the Aurors. I saw that nobody else had noticed, and I was duelling so I wasn't able to move closer. Instead I performed the Auralis charm, enabling me to hear what it said.

-Yes? And what was that?

Even through the blur, I can hear his voice crack with excitement.

- the part of the Prophesy you had not heard goes as follows: and the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not…and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives…the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord will be born as the seventh month dies…

A long pause. So long I almost drift away.

-I gave him life, so it is only I who must kill him. Very well. It was a mistake to have acted so hastily, all those years ago. Harry Potter will not escape from me again.

-Do you know what the power he possesses is?

-A fool such as Dumbledore would call it love…but love will be no match for the force of my greatest possession that I will unleash upon him. Rodolphus, you know that love is a delusion. You know there is only power to be gained from other humans.

-Yes, master. You have taught me wisely.

And I know they've glanced towards my broken form, though with different intents playing inside them.

Bellatrix never needed to be taught, my master says in a voice he seldom uses. With those words resting on me like small white birds, I slip away.

I'm by an empty fireplace in an empty room, the ghost of Bella uneasy at my feet. A foreign book lies open on my lap, a muggle artefact that makes me feel demeaned to consult. Yet I cannot help that nagging tug from my childhood that draws me to it, that makes me feel as if some kind of truth is contained between its soiled pages.

The book, naturally, is about power. A power that gripped the people, with those who worshipped saved and those that didn't condemned. But even the worshippers were flawed, and people lost faith in the Source. So, He sent them a son. And the son taught them all, and he died for them to ensure the rise of his father. To this day, the power remains, omnipresent, followed by countless minions. The father can only grow in strength.

The book grows heavy in my hands, I let it slip to the floor. I can only hold an object that preaches love for so long. The message is spoiled by this incessant muggle braying of it. I regard the Potter boy, so full of this implausible spell that I could not possess him. The prophesy suggests love is a power in itself, not the weak confusion of a mind that wishes to hide form the stark truth of the world. I cannot accept this. If love were a power, I would possess it.

With Rodolphus, it was about endurance. I used sex with him to connect with the Dark Lord, gritting my teeth and bearing his fumblings for something higher, tangibly electric in its intensity. I felt closer to Him than I could ever be physically, as if I was buried deep in his mind, intoxicated. Afterwards, I would lie in a stupor, filled with knowledge that would leave me as the heat wore off. The next session would be about regaining those precious few minutes, where the scope of a lifetime's worth of information would be filtered into my body like the easiest thing in the world.

I would visit Sirius and the stream in my dreams, when Azkaban could be blotted with sleep for a few meaningless hours. Wandering through my childhood idylls of purity and freedom was a relieving diversion, though I attributed nothing more to it. I was not trying to recapture a lost past. There was scarce amusement or subterfuge to be found between those maddening walls, and any that came to me I would embrace and clutch at under the cover of sleep.

But Voldemort did not did not allow me my fundamental freedom that one time. He did not let me into his mind. Instead, he got into mine and he stayed there, though not like before. He left me wracked with shame. If I were in Azkaban, this memory would be what haunted me.

I watched her after that. I came to know her moods, her relationships, the scent of cold mornings and silver she left in her wake. I began to think of her as my little Dark pupil and marvelled at the fresh deceit and lust for power she displayed in everything she did. I plotted her future.

At my silent, black-gloved magician's hand she would experience all the corruption life had to offer, revel in it until she slowly over dosed and longed for stability, a control to her wickedness. On her wedding day (to the weak, respectable man I had impressed upon her parents to introduce her to) I would reveal myself, give her what she thought she wanted. I would have her in my power forever, as a rescuer as well as a master.

Sometimes my hope wavered, like drafts sending a candle flame into its giddy dance. I gazed into her mind and saw what I wasn't looking for: love. A distorted, frugal love, but love nonetheless. I realised it was an emotion that even she did not realise she possessed. If, on the rare occasion she felt a flicker of that sweet, swooping sickness, she would shake it off in panicked disgust and forget the whole horrible experience. It was this reaction that kept my faith in her, that she could realise a false emotion when she felt it. Love may arrest her from time to time, but it would not hold her captive for long. Still, I was pleased to see that becoming a Death Eater killed any remainder of what might have been her downfall. She developed a taste for violence. She killed muggles in the street, whispered avada kedarvras escaping from her hood as she passed them by. Not many people know that the female Longbottom was pregnant when my faithful followers descended, and this gave Bellatrix an increased vigour in torturing her. I believe her words to Mrs. Longbottom when she felt the baby die were 'my dear, I wouldn't worry, children cost the earth nowadays'.

I looked into her core and found it black and barren and full of me. What had once been Bellatrix was now an extension of Voldemort - power-hungry, loveless, only concerned in the rise of the Dark Order. Yet another crushed rival. I allowed myself to smile.

So here she lies, Sleeping Beauty, sent to slumber by a kiss from her prince. Only hate can wake her now.

I drift without the will to open my eyes, face the glare of the world that is waiting to pounce into existence once again. They know this. They are careful what they say around me. Yet, they do not try to drag me back. I did not expect them to show compassion for my well-being, of course, but it is curious that I have been allowed to use my own free will, that I have not been Imperio-d into functioning normally. It seems they are content with letting me lie here, rotting in my own fear and shame, a shadow of myself too scared to open my eyes.

Once, I felt his hand on my cheek. I lay still, the motion of his dry, brittle fingers evoking a new stirring inside me. I hated him. He had achieved the ultimate power over me and broken the illusion he had so preciously created. Power, as he had always asserted, is not beauty. It is not the only force that exists. I can see that now, because power can be used for what they call good, or what they call evil. Those forces, they are not delusions that are used to blinker us by the foolish Ministry, as he always said. I know it because I have experienced unforgivable evil at his hands, something that, if it had happened to anyone else, I would have supported as it ensured the Dark Lord's ascent to power. But it happened to me, and I know the truth now. Not some garbled device he used to brainwash his followers into getting him what he wanted. My truth.

I have followed him, followed his lies, for 16 years. I have spent half my life believing that all that mattered was chasing power, grabbing at glory for somebody else, never living a day for myself. Yes, It brought me pleasure. Yes, I liked to kill and torture and bring suffering, all at his control. I am not a saint, I will never be a good person. But the person I want to be is my own, and that does not involve letting my body, my soul, slip away to validate his unworthy scheme.

I think all these things, crouched terrified and violated behind my eyelids. A savage sort of strength begins to grow inside, a knowledge that he has made a gross mistake in his quest for power. He went too far, too deep, and he unwittingly opened the eyes of his greatest follower. He set her free. And now, she's going to kill him.