Afterwards
The girl lies in a timeless dungeon. She doesn't know how long she's been incarcerated, or where, or why. Food and water appears at irregular intervals; there's no pattern. Nothing to allow her a semblance of day and night.
That's what gets to her. That, and the silence.
She's very cold. She stopped crying a while ago, or maybe it was just a moment since, or perhaps years have passed. Does it matter?
Friends, fellow students, professors; she watched them die that day. People she'd known for years. She'd expected to die too. Prepared herself to fight tooth and claw against rape and torture, to kill herself before letting her body and mind be violated. (Such passion seems alien to her now.)
Instead, she was Stunned and when she awoke she was here, in this stone walled absence of time.
The girl thinks: Soon I will go insane.
At some point after her realisation the girl hears the heavy wooden door creak open. Flickering torch light bleeds into her cell as she watches with slitted eyes. The girl lies still on her mattress. Why get up? She has no wand, strength or spirit with which to fight.
The man walks towards her slowly, as if approaching some fragile wild animal. She looks at him without surprise.
- I suppose it was inevitable, you becoming a Death Eater.
Her voice is cold but without rancour. She speaks again, because she feels she owes it to the girl she once was, but she cannot muster any true defiance or interest. -I hope you realise you've picked the losing side.
-The war's long over, he replies.
She raises herself from the pillow.
-Why am I still here? Who won?
The man gazes at her inscrutably as he approaches her mattress. Face unmoving and eyes brittle. Last time she saw him, he was still a boy.
(But time doesn't exist in this room.)
-You can make up your own mind, he offers. -The Dark Lord conquered and you're a prize I was given. Harry Potter was victorious but everyone believes you and me to be dead. I betrayed Voldemort to Potter and you were my thirty pieces of silver. Voldemort won and keeping you here is the only way I can protect you.
-I don't suppose it matters, she replies eventually. -Whichever way it is, you're going to fuck me.
She lies down and looks up into time. – I suppose it was inevitable.
The bed-springs moan as he eases himself next to her; she doesn't flinch as he leans forward onto the mattress and covers her body tentatively with his own, (which is heavy and scarred and strangely gentle).
-I'm sorry Katie, he says as he plants kisses along her collar bone. -But this was the only way.
-I know, she states blankly; compliant and yielding beneath him.–Marcus?
He looks up.
-Will I ever fly again?
He doesn't reply.
Afterwards, he is the one who cries, and she comforts him with the little tenderness she has left.