Why should I blame her that she filled my days / With misery, or that she would of late / Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways/
Or hurled the little streets upon the great/ Had they but courage equal to desire?
From "No second Troy" by W.B. Yeats
I knew that it would come to this. Ever since this damned Daily Prophet article about her escape from Azkaban, I knew that it would be inevitable but yet I can't help feeling my heart stopping the moment I recognise the familiar figure in the Death Eaters´ round, can't help but cringing slightly when a pair of black eyes suddenly meets mine.
Bellatrix.
As soon as the realization hits me, I quickly turn away again and stare blindly at the Dark Lord who is punishing Avery for whatever stupid thing the moron has done wrong this time. It´s strange. In times past I could discriminate her arrival through the inferno of riots and the stink of death, but it had been too long, and I have become too weak, and I have ... forgotten. And there is always a price for the forgetting.
I already know that I won't escape this night. I might have been able to do so for the first weeks after rejoining the Death Eaters as a spy, might have been able to avoid any confrontation with the people I once called my friends, but not this night, not with Bella. Never with Bella.
If it wasn't for the time and place, I would sneer at the pure irony of the situation. Who ever thought that the hard thing about regaining my position as a faux Death Eater was to face the Dark Lord again, doesn't know a single thing about Bellatrix Black Lestrange.
And indeed, the moment the meeting is over and the Dark Lord vanishes into the darkness again, she approaches me and removes her mask with such careless elegance that I shortly suspect her to have practised the movement for the pure sake of irritating me.
She succeeds brilliantly.
For one moment I am speechless and just stare bluntly at her as though her face hadn't haunted my dreams every night for the last fifteen years, as though I hadn't rehearsed this moment countless times in my mind since the fateful day when she, Barty and the Lestrange brothers were thrown into Azkaban.
Nothing is like in my imaginary.
If you ignore the obvious loss of her beauty, she is just her old self, the same woman, as fiercely proud and exquisitely cruel as she was the day she introduced herself to me on the Hogwarts train, all dark waves and sea storm eyes and an obnoxious smirk that could tear you to pieces. Fifteen years in Azkaban and she´s still herself.
I don´t know why this thought enrages him so much.
Eventually I force myself to pull myself together. It's just Bella, for Merlin's sake. As much as I might have missed her in the beginning, as much as this terrible longing used to ache in every cell of my body, telling me with terrible certainty that without her I'd simply cease to exist, I'm beyond that today. I'm beyond the pain.
"Dear Merlin, if this isn't Bellatrix Lestrange herself." My voice sounds neutral, but I wonder whether she notices the deeply hidden enmity in the words. Bellatrix´s no simple Death Eater to me. No, that one was my personal Temptress, my very own Serpent whose apple-flavoured kiss I have once cursed and feared and craved and needed and I will never quite forgive her this.
Love must have been a Slytherin I suppose.
"Severus", she returns in a light tone that clearly betrayed the cold, merciless calculation in her eyes. "It's been a long time."
Not long enough. If nothing else the power her black eyes still hold over me teaches me that.
"Well, I would ask you how you've been but then Narcissa has already filled me in", she explains, playing with a strand of stingy hair. "According to her you have spent the last years holing up in the Slytherin dungeons to brood like an overgrown bat over the past."
"Narcissa´s hell's own bitch", I return, meaning it. I never got along well with Bellatrix´s sister, never felt comfortable under her frosty stares and her contemptuous smirks and I honestly doubt this will ever change. But Bellatrix adores the little slut and Lucius thinks that the world revolves in dizzy circles around her pretty blonde head, and who am I to contradict them?
She just smirks at my comment, her eyes still staring intently at me, perhaps searching for a flicker of the man she could manipulate so easily what seems a lifetime ago, and against my will, I feel the familiar constriction, the old mixture of affection and bitterness with a crush so painful that it could have screamed my lungs out. In spite of the pain and betrayal and sodding mind-games, I was happy with Bellatrix, happier than I was in any other time in my life and part of me will always ache for soft black curls and the overwhelming smell of her jasmine perfume, ache for the knowledge that all my sins would remain bound up forevermore in these endless pools of black night...
But then I'm not totally naive. Loneliness and cold dungeons, millions of idiotic students and the passage of time are bad, yes, but they aren't enough to wash my memories away; I remember her laughter when I asked her for help against her brutal cousin, her disinterest when she told me that she would marry Rodolphus, her betrayal when I did what was good for us instead of what was good for her cherished Master. Oh yes, my life may has been far from bliss for the last fifteen years, but at least I didn't have to walk along the abyss every minute of every goddamn day, always fearing what bloody insanity she would think of next.
Which brings me to my next question.
"Well, what are you going to do with your new-won freedom?" No doubt that she has made plans already. And no doubt that they will lead into disaster. They always do.
She laughs and for one moment she looks like the trouble-loving school girl I once fell so desperately and foolishly in love with. "Just having a little fun", she informs me with a mischievous wink. "I've been out of commission far too long."
I shudder. A little fun. It seems harmless enough but coming from someone who considers the Cruciatus one of the greatest entertainments ever invented...
"At least nobody could say that Azkaban has soften you, Bella", I eventually return wryly.
At this, she laughs loudly. "What can I say? I'm still me." As she comes closer to press herself up against me, I don't know whether this is a promise or a thread. Her brilliant black eyes laugh conspiratorely at me. "And I remember everything, Severus. Everything we did. Everything we can do and I know that we can go back there. You´ll see, it will be just like in the good old time."
The good old time?
I almost sneer.
Oh yeah, indeed. How could one forget the sheer fun it was to be bullied by James Potter and his fucking cronies throughout seven years of school? How could one not warmly remember the day no-one of my so-called friends turned up when I was dangled upside down and stripped half naked in front of almost the entire school because the holy Gryffindors were bored? The good time, fucking bullshit.
And yet a part of me, a part I wish to rip from my body and dash to the ground and stomp into bloody little pieces, wants to believe her, wants it so bad that it makes my insides ache. After this long the lines between loathing and affection have become blurred. But there is something more than that, something I cannot even admit to myself: where that familiarity lies. Because Bella is a whore and a sadistic murderer and a cold-hearted bitch and if I let myself remember that, even for a moment, then I might have to remember what I am, too.
For we are Death Eaters, me, Bellatrix, Narcissa, Lucius and all the others whose shadows are looming over us even now. We were built for Death, built to make it and fated to suffer it. We held the world cupped in the palms of our hands, a glimmering, blood-spattered jewel and this is why they are part of me, even now, as I am part of them, as we are all parts of the Dark Lord's crazy little family. Ties of blood and vows of eternity that we made had bound us together and I have been a fool to forget this.
Bellatrix still stares impatiently at me. "Well?" she prompts.
I look at her and slowly, very slowly a smile forms itself on my lips. "I missed you, Bella", I whisper.