Warning: This chapter contains graphic gore. Sensitive readers take note. Also, Harry is very definitely not himself right at first.

Chapter Two: The Destruction of Bellatrix Black Lestrange

It was night.

Harry knew that, now, as he had never known it before. The sun wasn't above the world. Darkness was. It was only a pale copy of the glory to be found in the night behind the stars, below the earth, in the depths of them, for the sun would rise again. But it was night, and that was a joy and a pride and a comfort.

He looked at the two Death Eaters before him. Both women. The one speaking to Bellatrix was a woman he didn't know, but with the sneering lip and haughty tone of a pureblood. Harry could feel the Dark Mark on her arm. A pitiful effort of Shadow magic, truly, but closer to the true Darkness than most. Harry supposed he could admire that.

The other…

The other was Bellatrix, and at that moment Harry came fully into the place where the Death Eaters stood, and she saw him.

Her eyes widened, and a high shriek escaped her lips. Harry didn't wait to see if it was going to be laughter. His mind was full of veils and red light and falling godfathers, as it had been for every night of the summer. His sight multiplied and swam, until it seemed as if he were looking at Bellatrix through five pairs of eyes, and the Darkness rose up in him and roared like the night.

Harry held out a hand and gestured once. The five visions in front of him snapped back into one again, and he was able to see—though he didn't know if Bellatrix was—the long tendril of black that crept from his arm and towards her. It would drown the stars forever, and swallow the light of Avada Kedavra. It was magic that Voldemort would have killed to possess and Dumbledore would have paled to see.

The blackness touched Bellatrix and curled almost lovingly around her, fast and fluid.

The next moment, she screamed, and this time it was definitely a scream. Harry walked forward, smiling. He could feel that he was smiling, and yet it felt strange to do it. One part of him had never imagined smiling at something like this. The other was unused to human skin, and unsure if it had the muscles correct.

"Did you lose something?" he asked her. His voice was his own, still.

The tendril had enclosed her whole body, but was thickest around her left arm. Bellatrix didn't answer in words, just screamed again. Beyond her, the other Death Eater woman backed away fast enough to slam her shoulders into one of the stones, then turned and ran into the night.

Harry cocked his head, and waited.

The tendril drew away at last, and Harry blinked to see Bellatrix's arm still unaffected. She didn't seem to notice, panting in pain as she was, but that wasn't enough.

I thought you said—

Wait for a moment, whispered the Darkness's voice, within, inside, around him. Harry shuddered. It sounded as if it had spiraled out of the middle of his spine, actually. Now, sniff the air.

Harry did, and noticed the putrid, rotting smell then. He watched in fascination as Bellatrix's arm turned soft, the flesh becoming black and spongy. It ripped down the middle, then separated into twin sheaths of mold, falling and peeling from the muscle. Then the muscle followed, a rain of reeking slime. In a few moments, Bellatrix had nothing in place of her left arm but a bone, and that yellowed as Harry watched, blackened, and blew to dust.

Harry shuddered, once, and a surge of immense satisfaction flooded him. He found that Sirius's image, when he recalled it, seemed fainter than before.

Do you understand? the Darkness whispered to him. I have power over life and death. And more than that. Other things. Things that spells cannot do. We can strengthen your magic, or I can punish her in ways that Voldemort has not dreamed of.

I would like that, said Harry, with the part of him that found wearing human skin unusual, and human words confining for what he really meant.

Bellatrix was screaming, he realized as he came back to himself. She had probably been screaming for some time, but he hadn't heard it, so focused on his own handiwork was he.

"Quiet," Harry said.

And she was quiet, as her tongue slipped rotting from her lips and to the forest floor. Harry looked into her eyes. She was mad from Azkaban, he knew, but now she was truly mad. He didn't know if any sanity was left behind those shrieking eyes.

"I want her to know what she did to me," he said aloud. It felt unnatural, yes, but it also felt as if he knew what was Darkness and what was Harry more easily that way. "I want her to feel it."

Easily enough arranged, said the Darkness, in the green-eyed cat's voice. At bottom, all darkness is connected. We are night. I am dreams. In your dreams is enough pain to encompass her. Be it so.

This time, Harry couldn't see the black tendril at first, but felt it as a pendant drop of sweat, suspended between his eyes. He blinked and shook his head, and it oozed out. It seemed to take a long time to fall, even then. Harry wrinkled his nose when it finally hit the ground. It shimmered with the shades of Muggle petrol, and it was viscous enough to take long moments to work its way to Bellatrix.

"What is it?" he whispered.

That is your grief, said the green-eyed cat. That is your pain at the loss of your godfather. That is what you have felt because of her. Shrill giggles sounded in Harry's ears as he watched the drop trace its way over to Bellatrix and climb up her knees to her face. She will feel everything that you have felt, the Darkness continued, in a dreamy fashion. Little shadow-dancer. Let her look into us, and see if she still relishes the thought of following the one who dares to name himself Dark Lord.

The grief had touched Bellatrix's jaw by now. It turned in a circle like a tiny snake, then sank into her eyes. Harry found himself leaning forward, wondering what would happen. He had taken away her tongue. Would she continue screaming? Would he see any change?

Bellatrix shuddered, once, and then looked up at him.

What Harry saw there was what he had seen reflected in his own eyes, night after night, as he stared into his mirror in a desperate attempt to convince himself to go back to sleep. Pain, anguish, defeat, despair, helplessness. Emotions that Harry had thought, until he saw the color of the drop that had put them in Bellatrix's eyes, were the blackest things in the world.

Bellatrix began to weep.

Harry, who could not even have imagined the sight, drew a long sigh and sat on the ground. He watched as she cried, and the cats watched with him. Harry could almost feel them as separate personalities again, sliding and fluid, sometimes nudging about as though they wanted to investigate his stomach or his legs. Luckily, they had calmed down by the time Bellatrix ceased to rock back and forth and simply stared blankly in front of her, because Harry wanted to know what to do next.

Do you wish her to die? another voice asked. Harry thought it was the golden-eyed cat this time, the one who had seemed slightly more dignified than all the rest. It sounded like what Lucius Malfoy might have been, had he ever achieved true elegance.

"I do," said Harry. "I've made her suffer, and I've made her scream in agony. I think I want her to die."

Then watch me, said the golden-eyed one's voice. Lift your hand and hold it forward. We will teach you to cause death by causing life.

Harry cocked his head, curious, and held his hand out. He rotated it so that the palm faced Bellatrix, at the cats' brief instruction, and then bent his second and fourth finger inwards. The Darkness did not need the gestures, but they were the best approximation of what it would normally do while it was in Harry's body.

Bellatrix gasped and arched off the ground slightly. Harry could feel her heart beating like a small, frightened thing under his palm.

"What did you do?" he whispered.

Watch.

Harry did, and noticed that the beat under his palm was getting stronger and stronger, faster and faster. Bellatrix was gasping in time with it now, her one remaining hand rising to her chest, her lips fluttering as though she would sing a tune.

The heartbeat rose until it sounded like music. It was, in a way, Harry thought through a gentle haze, the music of life, the music that turned a human's life into time.

Time spiraled faster and faster for Bellatrix Black Lestrange, and then it exploded.

Harry blinked and looked at the motionless body slumped in front of him. Dawn was coming, and he was sitting in the scattered leaf-litter of a stone circle where the Death Eaters killed Muggles, and Sirius's murderer had just died of a broken heart.

Harry began to laugh. He wasn't sure what he found funny, and he was still wheezing when the clearing vanished from around him and he sat in his bedroom in Privet Drive again. Light crept through the window, and he slumped forward like Bellatrix had, laughing until his chest hurt.

The Darkness drew back slightly.

And the knowledge of what he had just done rushed in on Harry.

He would have screamed, but that would let the Dursleys know he was up, and he couldn't have that, not just yet. Overwhelmed, he leaned forward instead and let his head fall into his hands. His breath was fast enough to hurt his throat as the laughter hadn't. He wanted to weep, but at the same time, what he had done was so far beyond weeping that he couldn't manage it.

"What did I do to her?" he murmured.

"Caused her exactly the pain that she caused you."

Harry jerked his head up. For some reason, he had imagined that Dumbledore said that last, and that the Headmaster would be sitting in the room with him. Harry didn't think he could bear to meet the older man's gaze just at the moment. But, instead, it was the golden-eyed cat, who sat beside him and reached out a paw when Harry stared at it. The paw rested lightly on his arm. Harry stared down at the claws in turn. They looked sharp enough to tear someone's face off, but they didn't break his skin.

"I know it," said the golden-eyed cat. "She suffered as you did. No more, and no less."

"But her arm, and her heart…" Harry said, and then shook his head. His voice was hoarse and thick with tears. He wouldn't have understood himself if he didn't know what he said.

"Matched the pain of the Crucio spells that she has cast," said the cat. Its eyes understood, but did not pity, either him or Bellatrix. "No more, and no less."

"How can you be sure of that?"

"Because the Unforgivable Curses are the most powerful of your vicious little spells, the closest to true Darkness, as we told you," said the cat. It leaned closer to him, and Harry felt a little shock of warmth as its head rubbed against his chest. He hadn't thought the cats would be warm., but cold as the wind that blew around him when they showed him their true forms. "I can feel them. We can feel when they are used, and when I look at a Death Eater, we can tell how much pain they have caused. I can feed that pain back into the Death Eater. We can make them suffer for what they did."

"But that's not justice," Harry whispered. Dumbledore's voice was echoing in his mind, the words he'd spoken at the end of second year. It is our choices which make us who we really are…

Harry shivered again. What kind of a choice have I made?

"A good one," said the cat, and Harry started slightly. "And no, it is not justice, nor is it mercy. It is balance. The Unforgivable Curses cause command or pain or death to hover around the person who casts them. They are the darkest part of the shadows that I see. It is a simple matter to push the balance back to true, as we did."

"What if I don't want this?" Harry asked. "What if I changed my mind, and told you all to go away?"

"It would disappoint me very much," said the golden-eyed cat.

"But you wouldn't take revenge on me?" Harry remembered the way that Bellatrix's arm had turned black, and shivered. No, he told himself. I have to be strong. I'm brave. I'm a Gryffindor.

That didn't stop the memory from terrifying him anyway.

"We cannot," said the cat, its voice rueful. "You are my only entrance to the game. We must have you intact, your blood and mind and magic intact, or I cannot face Voldemort and punish him for what he has done."

Harry thought about that, and what the cat had said about balance, and something went click in his head. "That's why you didn't just go and punish Voldemort right away," he said. "He's caused so much pain and death…"

"It will take a long time to set the balance back to true," said the cat. "Oh, yes. It will take a very long time." Its eyes shone in the sunlight, so brilliantly that Harry had to look away. "This was the first step. But it will take many more." It butted its head on his chest again, and Harry looked down to find it still staring at him. "We must have you to do it."

"It will end the war?" Harry asked, hovering on the very last vestiges of his resistance.

"Yes. It will assure the prophecy," said the cat, with absolute certainty. "I cannot know how it would fall out without us. You might survive. But with me, you certainly will. And when we have punished Riddle, the pale, sniveling shadow of a snake, then I will depart. You have our word."

Harry shuddered, once, and then nodded.

"You accept?" the cat said.

"I have to," Harry whispered back. It was horrible, but he had to. He was thinking of the Muggles he had watched die so far this summer, four Muggle families altogether. Ron and Hermione, and how they would suffer for being Harry's friends. Snape, holding his left arm in fourth year. His father and mother, dying to save him.

And Sirius. Always, first and last and at the end, Sirius.

If I had had this power before, how many deaths could I have prevented?

The guilt was an old, familiar friend, but this time, it was lessened by the warmth of the cat against him. After a moment, the great animal began to purr, steadily.

Harry put an arm around it.

"You may call me Sirrmonsiir," said the cat at last, opening its golden eyes and blinking them at Harry. "In no tongue humans ever spoke, it means solace. Call the name when you have need of that part of us, and I shall answer."

Harry nodded, and the cat wafted into Darkness and back into him. He felt a faint gliding sensation against his neck, and then mental and physical silence.

It was a strange sensation, to sit on his bedroom floor in the morning light and know that the war with Voldemort would end, decisively, in his favor, no matter how much pain he had to cause to do it.

But Harry thought he could get used to it.