The voices were distant, vague, like bugs through a pane of glass. Ebbing and flowing in waves that reminded her of the Black Lake. They were insistent, but she could not - would not - hear them.
There were only her hands in front of her. Trembling lightly and covered in grime, they still felt naked without her ring. Without thering. They'd taken it from her, because they would not rest at taking him.
Something cracked twice and the buzzing chatter died, replaced by a single cutting voice. It was all sharp syllables and harsh inflection, and it shattered her reverie like a hammer to glass. "Criminal Trial on the seventh of July, nineteen-eighty-two into offenses committed by Bellatrix and Rodolphus Lestrange residents at number thirty-seven-seventy-seven Oftlen Drive, Heartfordshire, Emma Rose Black resident at number twelve Grimmauld Place, London, and Bartemius Crouch Junior," the man's voice didn't catch once, and he barely raised it to counteract Bella's raving. "Resident at number ninety-five, Swinderby Road, London. Interrogators: Bartemius Crouch Senior, Head of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. The charges are as follows," a pause and a breath. She could feel his eyes on her even if she couldn't see them.
Her knees shifted towards her and her hands curled into fists before opening again. Open, closed. Open, closed. She watched them, let the movements fill her thoughts and squeeze the room into static.
Until they got to her.
"Emma Rose Black stands accused of aiding and abetting all present on trial, orchestrating the murder of the aurors Frank and Alice Longbottom, resisting arrest through the use of unlawful dark magic including sixteen confirmed casts of Unforgivables - those being the Cruciatus and Killing Curse." A shaky breath and her fists closed, knuckles white. "She also stands accused of being an inner member of He-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named's circle of followers and confidants named as Death Eaters." Dread silence filled the room and clamped itself firmly around her chest.
Somewhere above her a quill scratched into parchment and her mind wandered toward homework and letters. The way his tongue peaked between his lips when he was focusing.
"Do you deny these charges, Black?" She could feel the eyes on her again. They raked over her, hateful and deliberate. Scouring every detail of her hunched form. Reveling in it.
Muscles leapt all along her jaw.
"Silence will be interpreted as consent, Black," the voice ground out, each syllable stoking her anger like wind on a house fire. "But names could reduce your sentence," she could hear the reluctance in his voice to even mention it. He wanted to see her rot. "Earn you privileges."
She looked up at him then, her face a rictus of rage. The man, the famous Barty Senior looked just like his son. Though where her Barty had had sandy straw hair this one was balding. Where hers was clean shaven this one had a wilting, graying mustache. Where hers wore an easy smile or brows knit in concentration, his face was carved like a block of stone with hard lines of disgust.
Her mouth remained closed, and Bellatrix continued laughing beside her.
Another sneer, and Crouch's ugly little voice came back. She tuned it out and shifted her attention to the room itself. Black stone walls and dark wooden chairs, it was packed to the point of overflowing: reporters, cameras, and the wizengamot filled more than three quarters of the room. The rest were a mishmash, unlabeled and out of uniform - anything from witnesses to simple spectators. Death Eater trials had become quite the public circus, not that she was surprised.
Only a few held eye contact: veteran aurors and faces she recognized from Dumbledore's Order.
"Speak of the devil," she muttered, eyes landing on the ancient man himself. He was tucked away in a corner seat far from the cameras and the court, hunched forward with one hand supporting his chin and the other drumming idly on the oaken rail.
His eyes narrowed; they watched each other.
Then the gavel fell and the moment passed, and she shifted in her cage to stare back down at her hands. Open, close, repeat.
Crouch droned on and on, bringing witnesses forth with clipped orders or silent waves. They stayed only long enough to speak their piece before being shuffled off the stand to make room for the next. No questions, no examination - speak, condemn, and step away. It was all a show. The only reason they allowed those in the Family trials anymore was to wrench out names or flaunt their win.
However long that would last. After all… her eyes trailed back to Dumbledore. "You know, don't you?" she muttered, more to herself than the wizened old man. Then, just loud enough to be heard, "He'll be back."
Crouch's voice ground to a halt and, for the second time today, the room was as quiet as a graveyard - the only sound a scratching quill. She didn't care, she just sat there, holding Dumbledore's gaze, watching his placid face crack when his brows shifted down and his fingers stopped their drumming.
"Lord Voldemort," Amelia Bones spat out from beside the old fop, ignoring the cringe that rippled through the room at his name, "is dead, Black. His armies routed, his followers gone." The woman's glare and the venom in her tone would probably kill a muggle outright, "and you will be spending the rest of your days in a cell."
It took everything she had not to rub it in the woman's face there and then; because she knew. Regulus had found out and told her - even found one. He'd hunted for the rest while she had covered, and then the Order killed him.
And they had no idea. They never would, not when they'd been the ones to take Regulus from her, to stab them in the back after all the information they'd fed the Order and all the operations leaked and plans of the Dark Lord foiled.
No, they'd never know from her.
But still… she could have a little fun.
Her eyes drifted back to the shining blue of Dumbledore's. She watched his brows furrow and his hand move up to rub his chin. She felt her face twist into something manic. "Not quite dead. Not yet."
Bella wailed, Emma's gaze drifted away, aimless; the Lestrange didn't - couldn't - stop, ranting and raving and describing in graphic, precision detail just how she would kill each and every person in the room.
Emma scanned each and every face she could find in the audience that had come to watch them convicted, to see her life end as much as the law would allow. Slughorn was here, the walrus of a man caught in an oscillating storm of terror and pity, so were McGonagall and McKinnon whose faces were filled with equal parts loathing and disgust. Moody, who she'd dueled thrice before the end, watched them like a hawk, eyes twitching to follow every minute movement of her hands.
Bella began to laugh; Crouch's voice swelled back alongside half the room's in a wall of noise that swept her up and swallowed her whole. She spent the remainder of the trial in silence.
It took two days to finalize her transfer to Azkaban. Two days curled in the corner of a permadark cell beneath the Ministry. It was not a question of mistrial or visitations, just the issue of too many to move all at once.
The Death Eaters themselves received priority. It didn't help, she supposed, that they had all become rather infamous before the end. The known ones, at least.
Those days were like standing at the foot of a scaffold and staring up at your noose - they were a long, sunless purgatory. Her only solace was that Bast had never been identified; he and Lucinda deserved some peace and quiet to raise their children in, even if it was bought with defeat.
That happiness withered and died when the dementors came to escort her away. One Ministry handler was all that they had to watch them, and from the way the man sneered at her and hurried his footsteps, she doubted he'd make any effort to fight the creatures off if they got hungry. He'd probably just run.
It was black-green stone and dark old wood from then on out. When they emerged out into dusk she watched the sun until her eyes watered.
The trip out to the island was quiet and cold. There was only the odd thunderclap or scream on the prison boat to shake off the monotony that began to seep into her bones.
Somehow though, Azkaban exceeded its reputation.
The complex was an endless, unwavering gray stained with patches of ice and permafrost from the constant presence of dementors and water. There were no trees, no bushes, no hint of green - or any colors at all other than gray. The clouds, the ground, the walls, even the ocean morphed into a roiling, angry black the closer they got, until it was indistinguishable from a stormcloud and the horizon blended into a smear. There were no people but the prisoners, no beings but dementors and shambling, ancient golems that shuffled to and fro to deliver food. Corpses, bloated and rotting, dotted the landscape and prison yard like boils, and more than one cell they trooped past oozed the sickly sweet smell of decomposition.
Her cell was entirely stone and barely large enough to fit her. A single, barred window opened out to the sea: a permanent entry for the ice cold spray of the ocean and biting wind to slash through. Not once did the sun shine through it.
There was no way to tell time in Azkaban. The sun never showed itself and the moon followed suit - the light, like everything else, was a constant, ruthless grey.
Some days were worse than others. Some she woke up and scratched at the walls until her fingertips bled, babbling, raving, pleading. Others she paced and paced and paced until her legs gave out beneath her and she passed out on the floor. Others still she woke and did nothing, just…laid there, staring at the ceiling, listening to the waves break and the wind howl, the grey sat on her chest like a night terror as she tried to force her mind somewhere far, far from Azkaban.
But every day she woke with one less good memory, one less image of her mother's smile, or Regulus' laugh, or James' pranks. Her memories bled into the walls like water into sand and every day felt more and more ilke the moment she'd realized she was holding his corpse, stretched on and on until there was no end. Nothing but the brittle sound of his breaths and then an interminable quiet.
Sometimes she would scream or weep just to break it. But the wind and sea - they always drowned her out.
She dedicated every lucid hour to Occlumency and fitness to stay some brand of sane. Sat with her knees against her chest and her arms around her knees she would assemble endless plates of dinner by composition, books by title, spells by name and color in her head. When her mind was neatly segmented and numb she would exercise until it hurt to breathe, and then she'd push a little more. Finally, at the end, she would run her unrecognizable hand over the doorframe and warp it with wandless magic. A hair, a millimeter, if that. Not enough once, but enough eventually. One day.
Those hours though, were rarer than she'd like to admit.
Seven times she woke up to ragged bite wounds on her wrist, bleeding in that little oozing trickle way that puncture wounds do. Holes from human teeth, she would watch the blood trail over years of grime and drip onto the floor, the aftertaste of copper lingering in her mouth.
Days were mush. Time was mush. It dragged on like a corpse across the ground, smearing together. And steadily, she found herself more and more in bad moments. Moments where she couldn't tell memories from the iron-cold walls of her cell, where she looked at the hard stone corner of her bed and thought about just how many hits it would take to bash her head into paste. Then she could be free, then she could be with Regulus and she wouldn't need to wake up crying because the only way she could remember his face anymore was if it was on his corpse.
And yet…
And yet.
She endured. And when her chance came, when a wave cracked the doorframe of her cell so that the door no longer fit, she took it.
A/N: This fic does not endorse, encourage, or promote fascism or the acts taken by fascists.
This chapter is old, two years old. First thing I wrote in four years at the time old, cut it it some slack - I promise it gets better. Some words in regards to the sequel aspect. Essentially, there's a story here titled A Tale of Two Sides that follows one Emma Potter - a twin of James Potter - through her school years up to the death of her husband, Regulus Black. You don't have to read that story to understand this one - anything essential I will do my best to explain as it becomes relevant - and this story is essentially an AU 'What if?' twist on the ending of that story. I won't spoil what happens precisely - if you want, you can go read the final chapter - but the premise of this story is that, instead of the canon end of A Tale of Two Sides Emma dealt with the death of her husband at the hands of the Order by fully committing to Voldemort in an effort to both avenge him, but also protect what found family she had left (it's a bit more of a tortured descent than that implies, but w/e). Her actions from that point on gradually lead her to now, wherein she is sentenced to Azkaban for coordinating the torture of the Longbottoms, taking Rabastan Lestrange's place in canon HP.
There are other aspects of A Tale of Two Sides that I have changed as well, after all, this story is essentially an AU of another fanfic, but I won't bore you by going through them here. If you want, you can comment with questions and I'll answer, but again just trust me that anything essential I'll go over. If you feel I miss anything just lemme know or ask for clarification and I'll do my best to answer.
That's all. Hopefully y'all didn't find this chapter too terrible to slog through. Again, I promise it gets better.
Also trans rights.
