The Loyal Servant
Nothing moved and I wasn't breathing.
The silence was not the most painful, but it was the most readily sensed. It came around me like a great wind, prodding all my deepest sores, scratching my eyes. The silence was so uninformative. I thought I had felt the boys leg against my flailing arm, thought I had heard a sharp intake of breath. But then again, that may have been me. I knew the Longbottom brat didn't know the Persequem Curse, and hadn't heard him say it. I realized that I had forgotten when sound had halted and sight had died. I had been too busy with pain. I had inflicted a good deal of pain over the years. And I was dying, a hundred times, dying in a moment but I could not hear, I could not breath, I could not see. I could not live and I could not die, not yet.
I felt cornered all of a sudden. The word exploded in my mind's eye, a shard of a diary never to be read again. I felt awful today, cornered. Yes, that's it… cornered… I hadn't felt cornered for years now, not even in Azkaban. I had been proud in Azkaban, for as long as possible. I never reached a point of feeling cornered. My confidence would hardly wane, even the dementors seeming sickened by such a dark rendition of happiness. I faded slowly, losing some hope and many dreams, but never my confidence. Once I was free all I had left was the knowledge of his power over me. It was at the back of a grimy hill, my body arched, my eyes bleeding, all things around me still that suddenly memories of old diaries drifted back to me. Old feelings. My distractions were gone.
I thought. I thought about my husband and about my home. I tried to think of things that were neither here nor there, things that would not resurrect my dead past or recall my sinful present. There were no such things, no things at all. My thoughts dragged themselves through hellish hours in the dark, through deaths upon deaths, through pain, through loneliness. And they dragged me with them. Eventually I reached the moment of our arrival here, the bursting of a hundred bubbles as we all appeared as something of a unit. And then we had dispersed. The boy was, as always, to be left for the Dark Lord. The werewolf was for the filthy traitor. The Headmistress of the School was for Snape, though I never trusted him. The Dark Lord claimed to have his reasons and he hid them from me, from us all. Rodolphus and I were to manage the predicted influx of students from the school howsoever we deemed most entertaining. The first to come had been Potter, and we had left him. The next had been Longbottom…
I tried to feel the pain intensify, as it ought to have done with this thought, but I could hardly feel beyond the memories and the darkness. The silence was oppressive, yes, the surroundings holding me quite immobile, but worst of all things was the blindness. I tried to see what color it was, tried to sense a solid black or white or red. I never considered blue, green, or yellow. They didn't seem appropriate colors for blind. Every so often I thought I felt a flash of maybe light or maybe dark but it was gone when I was ready to look, and I remembered that there would be no flashing in the stillness of the world.
There had been stories. Tales of the sixth sense which arose in the absence of all others. Legends I, myself, had never opted to believe. My Lord once told me that he had known the Sense in the days of his absence, and I had believed him. He was, however, quite different from any fool who would claim that as he had blasted off his ears, nose, and tongue and gouged out his eyes he was now blessed with a sense beyond reckoning. My Lord had described it as Knowing, but the pain stole it from me. I could not think enough to know my own name for it, the screaming demons racing through me at a speed unmatched in the immobile or mobile worlds.
For they were separate to me now, after such a long time of no time at all. The world which had been was quite over in my mind, and this dead time was the beginning of something new. I would have smiled when the thoughts coasted through the chaos of my head, grinned madly because the newness of the world would be the reign of Darkness. I was so sure of it, indeed, that I could feel myself suddenly desirous of life. I could never bring myself to regret the deeds that were being avenged, only to regret that the Longbottom idiot had managed such a curse. It was not one I had often used, for obvious reasons.
I wanted to live, I wanted to see it all come together, finally. I wanted to stand by the side of my Lord and my husband and to look down on a land which would be ours. The faith in anti-Muggle beliefs had been almost completely dissolved, but we had remained loyal. We had felt the scorn of those who could not understand us. I had been hurt by such a man, at a mere seventeen, hurt more deeply than any man can know. I relived those moments a thousand times in Azkaban, those same moments. And I relived them now... And my Lord lost his mother to the Muggle scum. My husband was himself almost killed, violently beaten at sixteen, beaten for having estranged himself. And some wizards say we owe the Muggles kindness, yet do they not also keep them ignorant? What is the kindness in modifying memories and letting fate get on with taking salvageable lives? All wizard kind would be better off for the slaying of Muggles, and of the Muggle-borns who betray those who share their gift, who taint the gift and detract from its credit. If only I could live to see this end reach, to see the fools who had claimed wisdom grovel and beg mercy, to see them thank us for the service we had done them, to see my own reflection in their glassy eyes. It was a thirst I had not quenched since those moments when I was seventeen and when I was lost. He had been my first victim.
An explosion of pain occurred somewhere near my leg. Then the stillness resumed as though nothing had happened. It was a few moments before I realized I had seen, seen nothing but seen. The dark sky was before my, devoid of any star. The moon I knew to be behind me, where the battles were. I was trying to remember if I had seen the idiot boy when the next flash of time took my breath away.
I was flat on my back now, my legs curling toward me. My eyes were frozen open and this time left with sight. The dark sky was there, and something blacker than the darkness hung just out of sight.
Then I was arched again. My very last sight was the nothingness of the sky. Then I heard something like glass shatter deep within me and sight was gone again. Sounds were starting to creep over me, feeding on me. They would not be last to do so. I exhaled.
And a thousand screams were loosed with the stars
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
~*~ A/N - Now, Bella actually died. As a follow-up to the last AN, I did sort of enjoy this chapter, especially offering even the feeble credit which I could to the cause of Darkness. PLEASE don't go all 'make love not war' on me because I'm not mean like Bella here. Persequem Curse is just revenge. The crime committed against her at seventeen is rape. The dark thing in the corner of her eye is… OH, wait… never mind. Hehe. Next up is the long-awaited, at least by me… The Potions Master. I must confess I am excited. I should get writing. Thank you for reviews. That means you, Daintress. You are very thoughtful! COUNTDOWN TO The Potions Master………….. ~*~