Chapter Fifteen: The Prisoner of Azkaban
Voldemort lost track of time. He didn't even realize Ariel had left the garden until Greyback had lost control of his bowels which was usually around this time that he found the task of torture tedious. When he idly glanced out into the garden to discover the small white round table was empty, he told Greyback, as the werewolf writhed in his own waste against the kitchen floor, "Today's your lucky day, Greyback." He planted his blood-speckled foot onto Greyback's throat and pressed down until he felt the man's Adam's Apple flatten under his weight. "I've decided not to kill you. Better yet, I've decided not to tell Ariel of the horrible things you said about her."
Greyback could only whimper submissively as Voldemort lifted his weight from the man's throat. Greyback gasped, coughed, trembled, then gaped as painful oxygen rushed to his bruised lungs. Voldemort crouched down, slowly, relishing the fear and agony that surged within the werewolf's face as he desperately, but ineffectively, tried to thank the Dark Lord for sparing his life.
"Know this," He said, hanging his head above Greyback's terrified eye line, his face dark with guaranteed violence. "From this day forth, you will serve me. With nothing less than absolute devotion."
"Yes—yes, my lord." Greyback stuttered in a croaky voice of someone who just had their throat stomped on. "I swear—I swear."
"Oh, I know you swear. Because make one mistake—one tiny mistake and…" He chuckled darkly then told a terrified Greyback, "Well, let's just say. If you think I'm scary…wait 'til you meet her."
Greyback nodded vigorously with tears in his beady eyes, looking so utterly frightened it brought a smile to Voldemort's face.
"Good," Voldemort whispered, frowning. He rose to a standing position and told him, in a harsh, unforgiving voice, "Leave."
Greyback nodded, then bowing frequently, thanking the dark wizard profusely as he dug inside his robes for his wand.
Voldemort didn't watch him leave, his head was turned to the garden, wondering with small worry, did she leave?
No, he argued inwardly. Ariel doesn't leave without saying goodbye. Besides, Narcissa would have…
Then it dawned on him. The laboratory.
Narcissa paced the laboratory a thousand times in their absence. Her racing heart bashed against the inside of her chest as her mind circled back to every possible worst-case scenario: What if Lucius gets caught? What if they all get caught? What if she made a critical error and got them all killed? And what fate worse than death would await her and her family should something happen to Ariel? She white-knuckled the neck of an unopened bottle of wine, convinced at any second, death would come for her and everyone she loved.
Just when she thought her heart could take the wait no longer—a small tornado appeared in the center of the room. And from that small cyclone appeared Ariel, Bellatrix and, to her heart-pounding wonder, Lucius.
She almost dropped the bottle when she saw him but Ariel swiped it from her trembling hands with the unconcealed glee, saying, as she walked by the stunned witch, "Yoink!"
He looked so withered and pitiful like a deer during the food-barren winter months. All his dignities, his pride, were gone.
Then they locked eyes and for a moment neither of them moved. They merely stood there, staring at the other as if frozen by their incredulity. They were breathless with nerve-rattling fear, insurmountable joy, tremendous agony, and heart-pounding relief.
You wouldn't have guessed this couple didn't believe in public displays of affection the way they rushed to another with arms opened wide. Ariel awed loudly as the spouses shamelessly showered the other's face with a thousand kisses. Even Bellatrix, who never cared for Lucius, couldn't help by be endeared by the utter happiness in her little sister's face as she cried tears of joy and clutched her husband close, whispering, "I never thought I'd see you again."
"Nor did I," Lucius croaked out with a convulsive sob as he squeezed Narcissa until his weak arms shook. He buried his head in her hair and whispered, "I missed you so…"
"I missed you too…" Narcissa murmured, blinking away tears as she tightened her embrace, afraid that if she ever let go that would be the last thing she ever did.
"We should give the married couple some privacy," Bellatrix said to Ariel, feigning annoyance at their affections.
Ariel nodded. She turned to leave, telling Bellatrix as she headed for the door, "Grab that other bottle. And we'll go find—" Her sentence was cut short when she discovered Voldemort was standing on the threshold, silently observing the four of them.
Ariel was the only one who didn't freeze under his impenetrable gaze. Bellatrix didn't dare breathe, let alone move. Narcissa and Lucius clung to another, refusing to let go, but didn't dare stand as the Dark Lord's eyes scanned over them with an unreadable expression.
"Heyy, perfect timing!" Ariel remarked as she brandished her newly-won wine bottle with a deep-purple-stained smile. "Look what I got." She stepped towards him adding mischievously, "Figured we could poet-up our tea time."
He was slow to pull his gaze away from the quaking Malfoys but when he did eventually turn to Ariel, they changed instantly. No longer indecipherable, he regarded her and her bottle with the round-eyed patience and the closed-lipped grin of someone who indulging their obviously intoxicated friend.
"Sounds splendid," he replied his voice so uncharacteristically airy and warm it sent a chill down Lucius's spine. He looked up at Bellatrix and told the stony-faced witch, "Come along and join us, Bellatrix. We should give the husband and wife some precious alone time." Bellatrix compiled without hesitation, following Ariel into the hallway. Voldemort lingered in the doorway and said, without breaking eye contact with Lucius, "Welcome back home, Lucius. I can't wait to hear the details of your daring escape."
With that, the Dark Lord left but Lucius and Narcissa waited, holding absolutely still, until the familiar sounds of apparition winds told them they were alone and, temporarily, safe from his wrath.
"What did he mean by 'I can't wait to hear the details to your daring escape'?" Lucius asked, desperate with fear. When Narcissa didn't answer quickly enough, he asked, "Did he not send the drunk damsel for me?"
"No, I sent her," Narcissa admitted, tearfully, as his fear became her own.
"Nar, have you lost your mind?" Lucius said in a terrified whisper. His pale face lost the little bit of color it had at that moment. He hoped against hope that the Dark Lord had forgiven him for his trespasses at last summer. He thought the red-headed woman was his gesture of clemency. But if he didn't send for him, then that means the Dark Lord still hadn't accepted his failure to retrieve the prophecy. Which only meant one thing. "You've doomed us both."
Narcissa shook her tear-streaked face. Her eyes were red but resolute. "No, we're not. Trust me."
"Nar…"
"Trust me."
"But what am I supposed to say when he asks me how I escaped?"
"Let Ariel do the talking."
Lucius waited for her to explain but she never did. Instead, she got up, retrieved a set of clean clothes that she hid inside the Deluxe Circe Self-Stirrer 5000, handed them to him and told him, her fingers brushed against his pale backhand, "We should go. You know how much he hates waiting."
Lucius rested the clothes on his lap and leaned forward to give, what he believed in his bones to be, the last hug he and his beloved would ever engage in.
The Malfoys eventually made it to the kitchen where they overheard the last bit of a story Ariel was telling:
"…So, I wake up. The skeleton monkeys are everywhere. Jack's making out with Cthulhu. I got a cake in my hair. My hand is still stuck inside a tortoise's shell. And I just turn to the high priestess and say, 'If this is how you celebrate summer equinox, I gotta come back for Saturnalia!'"
Lucius and Narcissa watched in befuddlement as the Dark Lord threw his head back and unleashed a hearty laugh into the sky. Crows fled their nests in swarms, camouflaging the dull blueish grey sky with their black feathers. Lucius turned his head to ask Narcissa, who the hell is this drunk woman that the Dark Lord looks at like she's his dearest, but he only watched as his wife bravely emerged into the backyard. He followed her, his chest constricting the closer he stepped towards the white table. He overheard the Dark Lord, who pretended not to notice their presence, tell the red-headed woman, "You never told me you used to hang around with pirates."
"You never asked," Ariel said with a sly wink as she dipped her head to steal a sip from her teacup. "Besides, you were way too young to hear about my pirate days."
"Young?" Lucius blurted out, unhinged by the surrealness of the scene: this red-headed woman, who looked young enough to date his son, talking to the Dark Lord like she knew him for years, sharing a drink and a laugh with the man like he wasn't the most dangerous apex predator to walk the face of the Earth, and most bizarrely, all the while Bellatrix sat by without so much as a hint of jealousy in her eyes, like all of this was normal.
His outburst caused the three seated adults to turn their attention to him and Narcissa who was quietly conjoining seats for them.
"Lucius," Voldemort said in a lukewarm voice that Lucius knew, from a previous life, often foreshadowed the calm before the raging storm. "Sit."
He looked to his wife but she was already pulling her chair beside Bellatrix's, her eyes averted to the glass surface of the round table. With his heart beating in his feet, he forced himself to the table. The Dark Lord's gaze scorched his soul.
"So, tell me," Voldemort began slowly his voice speciously pleasant. Lucius opened his mouth to speak but Voldemort cut him at the wick. "Not you." He then swerved his head to Ariel and said, sweetly, "Ariel. Tell me. What happened in the thirty minutes I was gone?"
"Well, I—"
"Start from the beginning." Voldemort interrupted encouragingly. "Whose idea was it to start day drinking?"
Ariel sniggered. "Mine."
"Any special reason?"
"Because…I'm a hundred and ninety-nine-years-old and I can do what I want?"
Voldemort gave her an amused chuckle. "Fair enough. And what happened after that?"
"Well, I asked Narcissa for a tour of the house. And she took me to the laboratory—which by the way—why didn't you tell me they had a Deluxe Circe Self-Stirrer 5000?!"
"It must have slipped my mind," Voldemort replied patiently. "And then what happened?"
"Well, I was telling Narcissa and Bellatrix about my potion recipe that got published and then that lead to me telling them the story about how I broke my friend Jack out of Azkaban last year and these naysayers—" Ariel turned her head at Bellatrix and Narcissa who was secretly holding each other's hand under the table. "Tried saying I was bullshitting about being able to break someone out of Azkaban without setting off the alarms." She turned her head back to Voldemort and said with a scoff, "Like it's that hard to get past a bunch of floating smoke clouds in dishrags, anyway. Pfft."
Voldemort gave her a broad smile. "I've been saying that for years."
"Right?" Ariel agreed. "But yeah, anyway, I walked in, grabbed Lucy over here, and then I was out like the wind." She one-shoulder shrugged the ending, like what she did was as commonplace as closing a door.
Bellatrix and the Malfoys waited with bated breath as Voldemort digested her story. Though all of it was true, it wasn't a matter of getting him to believe in you as much as it was about the truth pleasing him. Sometimes, it was just as bad to lie to the Dark Lord as it was to be the bearer of bad news.