X
Bella used Mundungus' bathroom to clean her face. On further inspection, she saw her bottom lip had split nearly all the way to her chin. It would leave a scar, unless she decided otherwise with magic.
She used his materials in the kit beneath the sink to bandage up her arm and rub some medication into the scrape along her thigh. Her collarbone had stopped bleeding profusely, though it seemed to ooze out blood whenever she made too fast a movement.
She checked her duffel bag and found a long coat of a creamy, pinkish hue. Bellatrix favoured pink tones, but her skin didn't match it - it made her look pale and somewhat garish, like a dead body. But that was fine. It hid her body wounds, and that was the important part, though her face was starting to bruise horribly. She prodded it experimentally, and grimaced, and hoped her nose wasn't ruined.
Before she left, she went through a chest in Mundungus' bedroom. As she had expected, the only valuables she found were things Mundungus would have sold later, probably at a higher price. She kept a few things that she discovered - a pocket watch; a notebook filled with phone numbers; a small bag of cocaine. As she shifted everything aside, her eyes were invariably drawn to a scrap of paper in a zip-lock bag.
Her eyes fell on it for no particular reason; perhaps because she was looking for something to aid her, and it was presenting itself to her gaze. She picked it up, feeling tense.
She unfolded it. The Headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix may be found at number twelve, Grimmauld Place, London.
x
She remembered that place.
She remembered running up and down the stairs; she remembered her aunt grabbing Sirius by the ear and scolding him. She remembered Regulus, when he was still little; and her memory strongly recalled the scent of the lavender soap her mother always scrubbed her and her sisters with whenever they had to go and visit their aunt and uncle's home. You are all ladies and must look and act as such, their mother would say, and would then sigh in dismay when she saw the state Bellatrix was in at the end of the evening, covered in grime from wrestling with Sirius in the backyard.
This made sense. The house was Sirius', by familial right, and he was - had been - a member of the Order. And now that Bellatrix saw the words on the paper she knew the location, and she knew how to get in, and where to find it… everything. There had to be a Secret-Keeping charm on it, to make Bella forget for so long with no chance of recall - and here was the secret in her hand.
"What an asshole," Bellatrix said aloud, referring to Mundungus Fletcher. Mundungus had not destroyed the paper, as one was supposed to do lest it fall into the wrong hands. He had kept it, and perhaps he had wanted to sell it to the highest bidder when the time came, and it was right to make the move.
Criminals had a code of honour, this was true. But they were still grimy bastards.
Bellatrix stuffed the paper in her pocket, then pulled it back out for fear she had wrecked it. It was fine; she replaced it, more carefully this time, and then left the bedroom, and then the flat; her eyes lingering on the rope stretched taut across the room.
x
Voldemort was a God.
He had followers - a cult, in technical terms. He had power. He had people worshipping the ground he stood on. And, like all gods, he could be erased, and forgotten, and destroyed.
Dumbledore was a god as well, but in a less obvious way. And fellow gods never saw eye to eye - in ancient Greece they destroyed each other, devoured each other. In the Nordic religions, they chained half-breeds to mountains and poured snake venom in their eyes; stabbed other gods with stems of plants.
It was easy to kill a god, once you figured out how to do it. People thought it was difficult. In a sense, it was. Unfortunately, in another sense, it wasn't.
x
Voldemort was there when she got back. She was happy about this - so happy. And not just because he helped her get cleaned up.
Healing is not always a very comfortable process. Voldemort was not a healer, and untrained in the medical arts - at least, in the conventional sense. He had other ways that no one else alive was privy to.
Bellatrix would give anything to know what the Dark Lord had done, those years before she met him - silent and ageless years where he had traveled, and learned. He sat down with her on the bathroom floor and with a painful, crunching feeling, she felt him heal her nose. The bruises on her face were nicer to the touch - the brush of his lips smoothed them away, left her skin new and undamaged.
Bellatrix had the strange sensation that Voldemort was telling her skin to knit back together when his fingertips touched her collarbone and arm and mouth. He gripped her wrist in his hand and the pain went away, and stayed away when he let go.
She was so grateful that the look he gave her when she showed him the slip of paper made her stomach flip over with the combined feelings of euphoria.
"This changes things," Voldemort said, staring at the slanted handwriting. And he smiled.
x
There were things piled on the kitchen table.
When Bellatrix touched them through their gauzy black wrappings, she withdrew her hand with a touch of fear. They were cold, and dead, like her father's body lying in the coffin. But these had menace, and wickedness. These were made to kill.
Voldemort checked his watch. "His trial," he said, "is in less than ten hours. In nine hours, these things will be taken to the ministry."
"And I am to take them?" Bellatrix asked.
"No." Voldemort said. He looked less of a man than he had when he had gone to see Dumbledore. His hair was darker and more unmanageable, and he appeared about nineteen. His shirt had a yellow smiling face with crossed out eyes on the front that Bellatrix had seen on the clothes of several teenagers in her drives around London. "Others will take these. You have more pressing matters to attend to."
"What kind of matters?" Bellatrix asked. She had one more person to kill. But that could wait. Remus Lupin wasn't going anywhere.
Voldemort didn't answer. Bellatrix counted all the way to eight hundred and seventy-five before he finally did. His mind had obviously been somewhere else - Bellatrix had learned not to interrupt. He always came back in the end.
"You're going to Grimmauld Place," He said. "What will be going on at the Ministry will most likely leave the building deserted. You went there when you were younger. You spent summers pulling your cousins' hair and playing hide-and-seek."
"So I know," Bellatrix concluded, "all of the places they might hide something important."
Voldemort smiled thinly. "And what did you do today?"
"I went after Mundungus Fletcher."
"Did you kill him?"
Bellatrix thought for a moment. "I put the noose around his neck and pushed him out the window. He hung on, so I hit him. But he's the one that let go, in the end. Does that mean I killed him?"
Voldemort looked pensive. "That's a good question."
She didn't know if he was joking or not, but she didn't care.
x
Childhood memories are awful things.
They can be good or bad… in-betweens aren't often rampant. Most of Voldemort's childhood memories were bad - they involved lots of wishful thinking, and dirt, and grime, and concrete, and rats. He didn't think about them very often.
Bella's childhood memories were of another sort. Bella's memories involved vanilla and strawberries and pomegranate juice, and long walks in the forests and wrestling beneath the summer sun.
Her memories also included a lot of her family, because Bellatrix was raised to love family, and adore it, so long as they loved and adored her back. When Andromeda left her all alone, to forsake the needs of the family and pursue her own selfish wants and lusts, Bellatrix had not cried, even though she'd wanted to. Instead she'd sat on the bedroom floor with Narcissa, and held her while she cried, because crying made you feel better; and as an older sister Bella was forced to sacrifice her own needs for someone else's.
And Sirius was so out of reach by the time she'd managed to get to him, he looked at her as if he didn't know her at all; as if games played at number twelve didn't exist, and nights sneaking out of the house to camp in the fields were merely hallucinations and shadows of an alternate universe.
Bellatrix had lots of memories, and some of them made her hurt inside; others made her happy. Voldemort wanted her to go back and look at them. She believed she could do that.
She was the most suited for it, after all. She'd spent years in Azkaban, contemplating how to die, and then, how not to die, because she had to stay alive for Voldemort, and he would come and get her. And she'd spent years in number twelve, Grimmauld Place. Her childhood could not strike her down. Bella was too strong for that.
That was why she was going, and not Voldemort, and not anybody else.