Chapter 5 – Holy Water and Hellfire

October 1993

There hadn't been a single reported sighting of Black since August, neither in the magical world nor the muggle world. If she didn't know any better, Daria would have said Sirius had fucked off to Bermuda for a bit of much needed sunshine.

Daria did know better. Unfortunately, so did Minister Fudge. Thick as he was, he wasn't so stupid to realize that Sirius escaped not long after the dementors heard him start mumbling in his sleep, "He's at Hogwarts…" He was still in Great Britain, she'd bet her left tit on that.

Fudge was beginning to lose his patience. In some fairness, it was his name getting dragged through the mud in the press. Though the Prophet was gagging for a comment from the Auror department on the subject, it was Ministry policy to keep press out of ongoing manhunts. Every screeching headline in the papers – 'A MONTH ON, BLACK STILL AT LARGE'– was accompanied by an unflattering photo of a squirrely-looking Cornelius Fudge.

Thankfully, Scrimgeour was still in her corner, as was the rest of the department. They'd all been working overtime for two months chasing down every single lead that came through floods of letters from Wizarding Britain, as well as hundreds more through muggle communications like phone calls and emails. Now that Clara was back at school, Daria had a cot set up in her office to grab a few hours of sleep a night before getting right back to work in the morning. It wasn't for lack of trying that they hadn't located Black yet.

In the interest of crossing all their i's and dotting all their t's, Daria decided to go back to the beginning. Not the real beginning—not Godric's Hollow or that blasted out street in London—but the one everyone thought was the beginning.

Azkaban.

Though five years younger than Daria, Kingsley was the better Auror by far. Unlike Daria, he'd actually gone through the full rigorous qualification process to become an Auror—earned plenty of OWLS, gotten plenty of NEWTS, completed years of specialized training, and muscled through examinations specifically designed to wash out the faint-hearted. Beyond his training, he had a preternatural talent for it. Kingsley had a keen eye for detail that couldn't be trained, and an unwavering sense of morals that couldn't be taught.

Despite all of this, he deferred to her seniority without complaint. He did not protest when she selected him for the unenviable task of doing their due diligence at Azkaban. If he thought the exercise pointless, he didn't say it aloud.

The only way on and off of Azkaban was a bracing three hour journey by small dinghy that set off from Lindisfarne's shore. A perverse sense of irony must have motivated Minister Damocles Rowle to make this the gate to Azkaban back in 1718. The sadistic bastard that he was, he probably enjoyed the idea of profaning the muggles' Holy Island.

From the Holy Island to the damned.

Azkaban was a triangular prism of black stone in the midst of the frothing autumnal North Sea. Azkaban's capacity came from its size and though the island itself was small, it stretched all the way up into the grey clouds. Uniform rows of slits marked the outer walls—sad windows into sadder cells where Wizarding Britain's most wretched souls whiled away the hours until their debts were paid in full.

Muggle Christians believed that hell was hot with fire and sulfur, that it was a place that awaited sinners in death. But truly hell was cold and wet, slick with seawater, sick with despair—and took the living, righteous and sinful alike.

A few dozen dementors circled around the prison, impervious to wind and rain. They didn't even appear to be wet. Daria knew that within the walls, hundreds more glided through the veins of the prison.

Two dementors hovered over the rotting pier that accepted their boat. As the boat shuddered to a halt, one moved forward. Daria tried not to shiver as the cold air became decidedly frigid.

"Prisoners?" it hissed expectantly. Dementors were blind, so they could not see the badges displayed prominently on both their chests.

"No. Aurors. Investigating Sirius Black's escape," she rasped back.

The second dementor screeched. "Black! His soul will be ssssweeet to eat."

Kingsley shifted uncomfortably next to her. Dementors weren't usually this chatty, nor this openly ravenous for souls. Daria bit her lip hard enough to draw blood. The sharp pain interrupted her increasingly dour train of thought.

"Leave us."

The first dementor hissed. With some difficulty, Daria thought back to the first time she could remember her father teaching her how to knead dough for baguettes, her mother standing in the doorway cradling her baby brother in her arms—

A smoky white wisp burst from the tip of her wand. Though small, it was enough to buffet the dementors back to shore, howling.

"I said leave."

They hissed once more before launching into the skies with the others.

"Wand out, Kingsley," she said, relishing the slight warmth their absence brought rushing back. "Don't be stingy with your Patronus here."

The first few floors were clearly for short-timers. Long ago, this must have been the part of the fortress where the dark wizard Ekrizdis made his home. The cells on these floors opened periodically to allow the prisoners to walk around, warm themselves beside the torches, and heat their food. Most pleasantly, it was relatively dry in here—thick glass-paned windows blocked the ocean spray from seeping into stone.

Kingsley cast his first Patronus of the afternoon to cut a path from the front door to the narrow switch-backed stairwell. Only one stairwell stretched up the height of Azkaban like a spine. He noted the disadvantage of this design at once.

"Black would have been able to escape without many witnesses. He would have passed through three halls to get out, at most—one or two from his cell to the stairs, then one from the stairs to the exit."

Daria studied the prisoners here as they walked by. None of them looked like hardened criminals. Some of them were still in their civvies, as though they'd been plucked straight from the pub. She could guess why they were here—petty theft, public intoxication, possession of illicit substances. The Ministry loved pelting the book at people convicted of minor offenses.

These lot looked miserable and cold but peered back at Kingsley and Daria with awareness alight in their eyes. Dementors could torment anyone with enough time and proximity. These prisoners were the lucky ones.

"We'll split up. You question the prisoners here. They're the most likely to remember something. I'll take Black's floor," said Daria.

Kingsley nodded grimly. "Whatever gets us out of here faster."

It wasn't like Kingsley to complain, however implicitly. Azkaban appeared to shake even his unflappable mien.

For her part, the cold, hollow sensation dementors engendered wasn't foreign to her. Depression was an old friend of hers. There were times it kept her prisoner in her own home, her own bed—her own body, even. She supposed that's why dementors made such effective guards.

Every level Daria climbed was colder and wetter than the last. By the seventh level, she blasted drying charms up each step she climbed to avoid slipping on slick stone. By the eighteenth, Daria conjured a steady incorporeal patronus to ward off the dementors on each floor.

The top floor was where Death Eaters serving life sentences were held. The dementors here were starving for a bit of happiness to feed on, even her pathetic atrophied happiness. They descended on her the moment her foot touched the floor.

She inhaled cold air through her nose and thought back to the very first time she held Clara in her arms… she couldn't stop crying for how happy she was. Lily was there on her right, tears streaming down her face—and on her left—

Daria raised her wand with a steady hand. "Expecto Patronum!"

A furious white dragon burst from her wand. Its mouth yawned open in a silent roar. Rearing back, it breathed bright flames over the mob of dementors surrounding her. Shrieking, they scattered—some flew down the stairwell, others squeezed out through the knife-wound windows like octopi, their black cloaks swirling like ink clouds.

Within moments, the entire floor was free of them. The only sounds that remained were the rain lashing against stone, the wind howling louder, and the mutterings of madmen.

Every prisoner on the first floors were unknown to her. But here, on the top floor, Daria knew each and every one of them.

She started down the corridor on her left. In the first cell by the door was her old schoolmate Megaera Flint. Beside her, her much older husband Crabbe.

Dolohov, who killed the Prewett brothers. Daria remembered Fabian used to carry photos of his nephews that he liked to whip out in social settings. Gideon was a relentless flirt who always tried to make Daria laugh whenever he greeted her.

Travers, convicted of murdering the McKinnons. Lily cried for days when they got the news about Marlene.

Rabastan Lestrange—and a few cells down, his brother Rodolphus. With Rodolphus's wife, they had tortured the Longbottoms into insanity. The Auror office was palpably empty without Frank and Alice, even 11 years later.

Daria paused in front of Bellatrix Lestrange's cell. The witch inside was awake and upright, swinging her head from side to side as if to entertain herself. On the third pass, she came to a sudden halt, her eyes glittering at her through a curtain of wild black hair.

Daria had nothing to say to her. Frank and Alice had always been kind to her, but they weren't her dearest friends. The only real issue Daria had with Bellatrix was that she was a Death Eater.

Shakily, Bellatrix got to her feet. Her face was pale and skeletal. The tendons in her neck trembled with wrathful tension.

"MUDBLOOD!" she shrieked, lunging for the bars.

Wordlessly, Daria jabbed her wand. Bellatrix flew back, her head smacking against the cell's stone wall, and collapsed onto her sleeping mat with a dull thud. She did not stir again.

Daria continued on.

At the last cell on the first row, she paused. A pile of rags on a threadbare mat in the corner breathed.

Picking up a stone from the floor, she slammed it against the iron bars.

Clang!

A man's head burst from the rags, gasping, wildly pivoting from side-to-side. Dark eyes finally settled on her silhouette. As his eyes adjusted in the dim storm light, recognition dawned on his face.

"You—?"

The noise from the rock jolted the sleepy floor to maddened rage. She raised her voice over the growing cacophony to speak to Tarquin Avery for the first time in eight years.

"Mad-Eye says hello."

With shocking energy, Avery leapt at the bars. "Fucking—BITCH! I'LL KILL YOU—"

"I'm sure you'll get it one of these days. Third time's the charm, right?" She reached up to unclasp the necklace around her throat. "Second time stung a bit, I'll admit."

Even in the throes of mad rage, Avery stopped short at the sight of the scar on her neck.

Daria rarely removed the gold and alexandrite necklace that masked the dark magic scar on her neck, but she knew the sight of it well. A twisted angry scarlet burn rippling out from a violet crater on the left side of her throat, tendrils of scar tissue wrapped around her neck. Her face was mostly spared, but the corruption had crept under her chin and onto a finger-pad's length of her right cheek.

She stroked the rough underside of her jaw with the back of her index finger.

"You did a right number on me. Though I suppose maiming me wasn't your intention."

"Die."

"Oh, I will. But not now. And certainly not because of you." She crouched down to bring her face close to his. The scent of him was foul but the prospect of tormenting was sweet.

"Do you recall our housemate Asma Greengrass? Blonde hair, blue eyes? Gorgeous girl. Spotless pedigree. You quite liked her, I recall."

Avery bared his still-crooked front teeth. They were brown with rot now.

Sotto voce, she continued, "I thought you ought to know: she ended up marrying some Romanian pureblood. Miserable marriage—until he walked in on her fucking a Muggle and beat her to death."

He roared. He cursed her. He spat at her. But it was all in vain. Ultimately, he collapsed into body-wracking sobs on the floor and did not move again.

All the while, Daria laughed and laughed and couldn't stop. She was drunk on his despair.

"You always were good for a laugh."

Her smile died when she beheld the huddled body lying on the floor of the next cell.

"Mulciber."

No response. Avery had some of his wits about him even after a decade. Mulciber was far gone.

She needed him to look her in the eye. She needed to see some recognition of who she was, some regret for his crimes against her.

With a flick of her wand, Daria turned his head her direction. His eyes rolled towards her, but there was no acknowledgment, no old hatred—nothing. She leveled her wand with his chest.

"Crucio."

He began to scream.

Agony, at least, was satisfying. Agony wrought by her was a genuine pleasure. The knowledge that she could torture him, offer him up to the dementors, even kill him—all without repercussion—well, that was ecstasy.

Fleetingly, Daria wondered if Mulciber had felt so high murdering her father. Her grip on her wand tightened and twisted. His screams rang in her ears, as sweet as the songs her father hummed in her ear when he tucked her into bed every night.

The corridor outside of Mulciber's cell was wet and freezing and the dementors' cold settled into the cracks of her soul but at least here Daria could remember her father free from helpless grief.

Reluctantly, she finally tore her wand away. Mulciber collapsed, panting and weeping, and crawled into a ball in the corner of his cell.

Daria spat on the floor. "You're pathetic," she hissed. "You thought you were so much better than a mudblood—well, look at where you are and look at where I am. You're a fucking worm. Azkaban is better than you deserve. You deserve to burn."

The storm swallowed her last word. Only the sounds of rain and wind buffeting the black stone walls remained.

Helpless grief settled in again.

Having studied the prison's layout beforehand, Daria knew that Sirius's cell was as far from the stairwell as you could get. The one slit window was high up so while the inhabitant would be mostly shielded from rain and wind, the cell was uncommonly dark even for Azkaban. Daria lit her wand with a silent lumos and waved her wand over the bars. They swept to one side to allow her entrance.

The cell probably looked the same as it did the day he escaped. The rotting straw mat in the corner with a paper-thin blanket neatly folded on top. Sirius had never been so neat when she knew him.

Daria flopped onto her back on the mat and stared up at the high ceilings. This was where he slept every night for 12 years. It was dark and cold and cramped. Sirius had loved light and warmth and open spaces. On sunny days, he used to spend hours laying on the grass wherever they were, soaking in sunshine to the point of painful excess. He never remembered to periodically recast the sun shield charm on his pale skin, but never complained when Daria made fun of him and smeared smelly healing salves over his burns.

"I'll take any excuse to get your hands on me," he teased once. He tried to rub his cream covered face against her cheek to make her cross, but she laughed instead.

"Poor you," she teased back. "Stuck with a cold girl you have to beg for affection."

"You're not cold where it matters." He pressed his palm over her heart and smiled as her heart beat faster. "Your heart is warm, even though you pretend it isn't," he said softly, his eyes so gentle. Of course, he wouldn't be Sirius if he didn't immediately ruin the moment by squeezing her breast. Daria smacked his shoulder gently, rolling her eyes at his waggling eyebrows.

His eyes burning, he leaned in and spoke against her lips, "Your mouth is hot." He kissed her, slowly at first then with increasing fire. When she moaned, he slipped his tongue past her lips. He pulled away enough to murmur, "I start sweating every time I kiss you."

"Charming," she replied, her sarcasm blunted by her breathlessness. When he kissed her again, she felt his mouth trying not to grin. She nearly missed his fingers moving from her chest down to her belly, then further down still.

"And of course, there's your—"

"Sirius!"

She thought she'd never tire of his barking laughter or his impish smiles. He leaned back but kept his hand on her cheek, fondness so evident in the way he stroked the line of her jaw. Uncertain, hopeful yearning so clear in his words.

"You give me all the affection I need, love, but I'll always want more."

Then they put him in a place with no light, no warmth, no space, and no love. A place where men rotted, forgotten, as the world passed on outside. It was a miracle that he survived, with his wits sharp enough to escape even after all these years.

Daria looked to her right. She shifted her back just enough over to slide over a water-warped newspaper from beside a filthy bucket in the corner.

Fudge had mentioned how "normal" Sirius had been just before his escape. All he had done was ask for Fudge's copy of the Daily Prophet. Printed on the front page was a family photograph of the Weasleys on holiday to Egypt. The other headlines were equally dull. It was enough to constitute a lead in as cold a chase she was leading.

She sighed. There was nothing else to glean here and it was freezing, but Daria wasn't ready to leave. This was the closest she had been to Sirius in 12 years. This cell had been the entirety of his world for 12 years.

His world used to be James and Remus and Peter, motorbikes and open skies, good whisky and the after-party. For an ephemeral moment, Daria shared his world with him. For an even shorter one, Clara had been their world entirely.

Daria was too young and stupid to know then what she knew now. Daria and Clara were only ever a part of Sirius's life. Sirius was not a part of theirs. The war swept him away so easily, James and Lily and Harry even easier. He became furious when Daria suggested Sirius should step back from Order duties for the good of their family.

"James is my brother!" he shouted. "You want me to abandon my brother and his son!"

Daria could never match his fury. She replied coldly, "I want you to remember your wife and daughter. What will happen to us if you die?"

"Merlin, Dare, I won't die—"

"And what if something happens to us while you're out saving James? I can't protect us like you can."

"I've warded this house against every curse and spell you could think of. You're safe here without me." He glared at her. "So don't ever ask me to step back from protecting James. I owe him everything."

Daria had bitten her tongue then. Don't ask you to choose between James and your wife and child, you mean? she had wanted to snap. But she had feared his answer more than her own death those days. Back then, she had no one to rely on but Sirius. She couldn't even rely on herself.

It was only by losing him that she learned she could rely on no one but herself.

Daria traced her fingers against the wall once, twice, and then a third time before she started to stand up. It was on one last run over the stones that her fingers caught a strange ridge. She bent down to take a closer look. Her breath hitched.

There—so faintly, but unmistakably there—was carved the letter 'D'. The stone around it was polished smooth, as though someone had rubbed it every night for a decade. She studied the blank expanse of stone around her letter. There should be a 'J' for James or an 'H' for Harry, even.

"Do you still love him?" Remus asked her not long ago.

Did I ever love him? was the retort that sprang to mind at once. 12 years without him made it easy to believe what they had was youthful infatuation. His cruelty, passion, and fury burned everything else out of her memory. But this, seeing her initial dug into the wall of his cell—this felt like it had when his hand reached for hers beneath the table at Order meetings to give her a reassuring squeeze. Or when his eyes would always seek hers to share a secret laugh after Moody said something particularly outrageous. His wordless gesture to hold Clara when he got home. His buoyant smile when they reunited after a few hours apart.

I did love him once. She withdrew her hand, stood, and left the cell without looking back.

But can I still love anyone who isn't Clara?

"Anything up there?" asked Kingsley when they were reunited outside the gates of the prison. The storm whipped about them as fiercely as it had when they arrived.

"Nothing at all," said Daria.

Reviews?