First of, let it be known that this story comes from… nowhere. It just came and hit me in the head. The concept, I mean. Later ideas – various plot points, the involvement of several characters, and so on – were created over time.
This story will focus on Bellatrix and Severus, as it is with another story-in-progress of mine (Dead Letter) but, joy of all joys, Lucius Malfoy will also have a main role, along with countless others.
Story copyrights are the usual… ideas are mine, views on characters are half mine, characters and universe itself is JKR's. Hurrah, JK.
Story will include violence. Hell, that's the whole reason for the plot.
I
The car was hot and sticky because the air conditioner was not on. Before her imprisonment she had never been one for cars, but she had finally forced herself to drive after all those years, goaded on by the ease, the quickness of it all. Muggles could track cars. But wizards couldn't.
The fake id and license was in her jean pocket, made for her especially.
The window was rolled down. She could hear the noise of the cars outside the alleyway sweeping by, feel the stray breeze flicking strands of hair into her eyes. She put on her sunglasses and relaxed against the hot plastic seat. Fake leather; pleather. Clung to the skin, ripped itself away with the force of a snapped rubber band.
She was ageless. She was not young but she wasn't old, either; her face was unlined but her eyes were ravaged, her body was thin and elegant but no longer spry. Her age was impossible to guess. The id said she was thirty-five; but the id was fake.
Bellatrix closed her eyes and all she could see was shadow. She opened them again, checked her watch, turned up the radio, relaxed again. The sun through the open window was beginning to burn the pale skin uncovered by the tank top. It glinted off her wedding ring.
She checked her watch again, and then the rear-view mirror.
There was a face in it. A man was walking down the alleyway behind her. He wore black, even though it was summer, and his long coat seemed to shimmer in the heat haze.
She waited for him to come closer. He did.
He opened the passenger door and got in, shutting it firmly. He took off his sunglasses, and his eyes were black.
She looked at him. He was tall, and thin, and crow-like; his nose was savagely hooked, his skin milky white, and his hair was shoulder-length and greasy-looking.
"Hello, Bella," he said.
She turned the radio down. The cars were still sweeping past on the street. The alleyway was a haven, away from prying eyes. But Bella doubted the Muggles would see her even if they were looking right at her. "Hi." she said.
He looked uncomfortable. "I shouldn't be here," he stated.
Bellatrix shrugged. He was here. That was the end of the matter.
The man, whose name was Severus, took out a pack of cigarettes from his coat, and offered them to her. She waved it away, and felt a mix of revulsion and longing as she watched him light one and take a draw, tapping the ash out of the window and onto the pavement.
"You still smoke?" she asked, raising her eyebrows.
Severus chuckled. Silly question, Bellatrix realised; his voice was smooth and silky, and smoking would have destroyed that over the past twenty years. "Rarely," he said, blowing a ring of smoke out the window. "Only when I am nervous."
"Ah."
"You quit, I take it. Good for you."
"I couldn't really get them in Azkaban, Severus," Bellatrix muttered, flexing her fingers on the steering wheel. She'd been at two packs a day before they'd sentenced her.
He inclined his head to her in a somewhat gentlemanly manner. "True."
Severus was not rich. Not exactly. He was well enough on his own, though his family background had been less than stellar. The family had only the blood and the name to call its own - and a crumbling manor in Scotland.
But he was classy. He was dignified. At least, when he wanted to. Usually he was sweeping and dramatic and unpleasant, but when he was around her he was calm, and he was quiet, and he was amused. He was different from the boy she had known; he was older, an adult, and he had suffered.
"So why'd you come," Bella said after a moment of silence, where she could hear the tinny sound of the turned down radio, "if you knew you'd be in shit if you got caught?"
"You are blunt," Severus said. "I've always liked that."
She shrugged.
"I came," Severus said, "to pay my condolences."
"Ah."
"Yes."
"I see."
"Indeed."
"Severus," Bellatrix said, "you can shove it up your ass."
"I thought you'd say that," Severus said. He flicked the cigarette butt out the window and reached into his coat pocket again, and instead of cigarettes he pulled out a worn piece of paper.
"I know I am no longer on your side," Severus said, speaking low, "but I do love you and I always have. You were a sister and an ally when no one else was. I will not interfere, Bella."
She stared at him. "Interfere with what?"
Severus smiled tightly, and put the folded paper on the dashboard. "Good luck," he said.
"I never saw you," she replied.
He got out of the car, slammed the door, and walked away.
x
The paper said, Kinglsey Shacklebolt.
x
Bellatrix grit her teeth.
x
She did not know if he had died fighting.
All she knew was that he was dead. The Dark Lord refused to talk about it, but it wasn't like she had asked.
They cremated him, and his ashes were stored in the family vault. Bella spent the next two days after the burning in his bedroom, lying on his bed, inhaling the old smell of him from his pillows, still there after all those years.
She had loved him very much and nobody was quite sure why.
x
Voldemort was tapping his pen impatiently against the kitchen tabletop, a little fold between his eyebrows. The coffee at his elbow was cold. That was fine, since he hadn't touched it once since it was made at nine in the morning.
Bellatrix entered in a fury, tossing her coat onto a chair. The keys to her car fell out of the pocket and clattered to the floor the same time she took the untouched coffee and tossed it into the sink.
"I'm sorry," she said immediately, setting the cup on the counter and moving to collect her keys.
"For what?" he asked, and scratched something out on the notebook in front of him.
"The keys," Bella said, putting them back in the coat pocket, "and being late."
"There is nothing to be late for," Voldemort said. He was tall, and thin - not a sickly thinness, but more a thinness that came of energy. Voldemort burnt so much of himself up each day that it was almost as if his body was unable to catch up at times. The irises of his eyes were scarlet and slit like a cat's, and he had the hands of a pianist. "The keys interrupted nothing. So you are forgiven."
"Ah." Bella said.
The house was an old house. No luxury, just some comforts. That was all a base of operations needed. Once you got the marble floors and the gold bathrooms and the imported spring water disaster came down on your head like a big flaming piece of shit. Bellatrix knew this. Almost all the Death Eaters knew this. This was why Voldemort chose a somewhat shabby house in a somewhat shabby neighbourhood with regular tap water as his base of operations. He was respected for it.
Besides, if your leader couldn't abide a little dirt now and then, what use was he?
Bellatrix said, "I'll be upstairs."
Voldemort shrugged, which meant that she could go. Her eyes lingered on his hair, long and black and soft like a baby's, before leaving the kitchen, going down the hallway, and taking the stairs slowly, one step at a time.
Bellatrix went into her room. She was one of the few Death Eaters that lived in residence - everyone else was in Azkaban or in their own homes. She closed the door behind her, and instead of turning on the lights opened the curtains.
The streetlamps burned outside, bright and yellow. She opened the window to let in the balmy summer air and leaned out to take in the night.
Behind her, her bed was empty.
She took the note Severus had given her out of her pocket. She went to her desk and rummaged through the shelves for a tack. Then she pinned the paper to the wall above her bed.
Kingsley Shacklebolt, it read in the yellow glow of the streetlamps.
She stared at it for a long time. Then she went to bed, not bothering to close the window.
x
"Smoking, eh, Snape?" Moody said in his growling sort of voice, leaning over the table at Number 12 Grimmauld Place.
Severus snapped his lighter shut and pocketed it. "Your ability to point out the obvious is astonishing."
"Ah, Snape," Moody chuckled, "sometimes it is the obvious that people refuse to see, and it can make all the difference in life. You only smoke when you're nervous, see."
Severus' expression, one of mild scorn, didn't waver.
"So why're you nervous, Snape?" Moody pursued conversationally. He was mocking Severus; he always tended to do that, because while Moody trusted few people Severus had to be near the bottom of the list, which was quite an achievement. "Anything particular?"
Severus' lips twisted into a bit of a smirk. "What if I sad you were making me nervous?" he replied, in the same conversational tone that wasn't conversational at all.
"I knew you'd be lying," Moody replied. His normal eye and his magical glass eye were both fixed on Severus, which unnerved people more than it did when the glass eye was continually moving around. "Because I don't make you nervous."
Severus tapped ash onto the tabletop and didn't answer.
"It's the trials, isn't it," Moody said, frankly, as a statement rather than a question. "I know for a fact it is. Well, Snape. I don't give a damn how you feel about them, but I know they were your friends, and I know that you might be thinking about lying at the trials. Don't even think about it."
"Moody," Severus said, "go fuck yourself."
"Severus," Molly Weasley snapped from the doorway, "Please, kindly do not smoke in this house, and be a bit more civilised, won't you? I have children in residence."
"Gladly, Molly," Severus said. He stood up and left, leaving a grimly smiling Moody and a thin trail of cigarette smoke behind him.