A/N: Standard disclaimers apply. See Chapter I. Spoilers for all seasons of CSI:NY, but especially S2 and "Charge of This Post".

She washed Lessing by hand, all except for his prick, which she steadfastly refused to touch. She didn't want to look at it, either, and to that end, she had cast a Distortion Charm over it. It was now an indistinct blur whenever her eyes happened upon it. The water was cold, frigid, and his skin rose in angry, chapped gooseflesh as she drew the wet cloth over it. Her hands ached in sympathy, and her joints throbbed with the need for warmth. They would be frozen claws when she was finished, but she was not worried. Lessing would warm them up again soon enough.

Forward in the chair, and the seat farted daintily beneath her. The cloth reached his inner thigh and no higher. She would have to move to reach the hip. That was fine by her. She was in no hurry. Lessing shivered beneath the stroke, and his flesh retreated from it as if it knew what awaited it. She sat back, and the chair groaned indelicately. Another dip into the basin of frozen water, another deliberate stroke.

She could have cleaned him with a Scouring Charm; she had, in fact, considered it, loath as she was to touch him with the slightest hint of tenderness, but in the end, she had picked up the washcloth and done it by hand to appease her needling conscience.

Of all the sins you have and will commit in pursuit of this vengeance, hypocrisy will not be one of them. How can it be when that is the sin for which you have bound him to die? Vengeance can only be claimed when the motive is pure. Anything else is madness. But even that isn't true, is it? No doubt Lessing thought his motive was pure as he sat in his basement and created the bomb that ripped your love open. God and country ran through his mind in a holy refrain. He wasn't a murderer destroying innocent lives, but a patriot drawing blood in defense of his earth.

And isn't that what this is, my girl? The spilling of blood in the name of a greater good? If the law will not give you justice, then you will make your own, fashion it by might of wand and sheer force of will. You have wrested everything else from reluctant hands, so why not this?

Only Don was a gift freely given, offered without price. His love for you is guileless and bottomless and unspeakably sweet, and that makes this all the dirtier. What you do here in this room, sheltered from prying eyes by these moldering, damp walls, has made you a liar, tainted the most sacred of acts between you. While you sit here, wiping the pasty thighs of a lunatic, he's in the bed you share, dreaming of a brighter future or a happy past. You should be there with him, nestled in his arms and listening to his heartbeat in the dark.

You left with the taste of him still on your mouth, slipped from beneath the sheets with a last, lingering kiss on his clavicle. You had worked your magic well, and his eyelids did no more than flutter. The coverlet had slipped from his chest and pooled around his waist, and he was achingly vulnerable, smaller and more fragile than the swaggering, macho detective he plays during waking hours. The scar was a livid mark against the paleness of his skin, and it made your heart twist even as your mouth flooded with the taste of gall. You sat in your chair for a while and watched him, torn between the dim gleam of his badge and the angry mouth of the scar as it sank its teeth into the flesh of his hip and belly.

You should have stayed with him, climbed back into bed and turned aside your anger, but you couldn't. It was too virulent and festered inside your warped bones like leukemia. Each time you were tempted to let it go, it spoke to you in the language you knew best and enticed you to its service with the vivid memories of your love pissing into a bag while his mind wandered the fields of purgatory. It was bright yellow as it dribbled into its plastic bladder, and for many, helpless, absurd hours, you'd stared at it and thought it looked like Big Bird's feathers, unreal and gaudy. You know this memory isn't quite as it should be, that urine is the color of lemons and amber, but it doesn't really matter. What matters are the feelings it conjures-the suppurating rage without end, the yawning emptiness, and the ravenous, bitterly consumptive need for retribution.

If that isn't enough, it reminds you of that arraignment hearing, when you sat in the courtroom and watched the lawyers barter and dicker and try to assign a price to human lives. Lessing sat in his chair like an obedient puppet, eyes dull with a varnish of psychiatric drugs, and when his lawyer called him to speak on his behalf, he rose, clasped his shackled hands in front of him like a schoolboy reciting a book report, and spouted his pretty platitudes.

He apologized to the families of the lost, and to the family of the fallen police officer, and you wanted to lurch from your seat and scream at him, bury your fangs in his scrawny throat. He is more than a police officer, you wanted to shout, more than a meaningless title in your worthless prepared statement. His name is Don Flack, and he is my husband, and he was the first man to ever ask me to dance, to even accept that I could or might want to. He is my love, my tribe. Mine, and you tried to take him from me just because you could.

But you couldn't. Your palsied feet would never hold you, and the bailiffs and the stentorian bang of the gavel would silence you before the war cry was finished. If they cited you for contempt, you wouldn't be able to return to your vigil, and so you gritted your teeth, clamped your trembling fingers around the creaking armrests of your chair, and used that moment to replenish the deep well of your hatred. The water there is black as pitch and holds no reflection, and when you drink of it, it tastes like blood and alkaline.

He was so damn smug, oblivious to the magnitude of the words he spoke. Muggle wisdom holds that words have no power, but you know better. Even before you discovered magic, you knew they were powerful, indeed, capable of crushing dreams and breaking spirits. Freak and retard and missed abortion burned themselves into your skin and nested in your bones, and by the time your parents dropped you off at D.A.I.M.S. with a suitcase and a so long, they'd formed a leathery armor around your heart.

The wizards, now, they knew all about the power of words, and they had learned to harness them, to bend them to their will. They could be used as weapons or as panaceas to bleeding hearts. They could reduce a field to smoking ruins or blanket it in flowers bright as a child's rainbow. They understood the inherent danger of words and used them with care. Some they refused to use at all, lest their terrible power rebound on them a thousand-fold. Like Voldemort. Even Hagrid, ten feet tall and afraid of neither man nor beast, could not pass it from his lips, and Mr. Weasley, a man who ought to know better, flinched as though struck whenever the name was spoken in his company. Only Harry, who had reason to fear it, spoke it without quailing. Well, Hermione, could, too, damn her, but then, she always was an overachiever.

Avada Kedavra was another word they would not say, though their reluctance was pardoned by the knowledge that to do so carried an automatic death sentence. It was the forbidden fruit of magic, and very few had ever eaten of it. You did, though. Of course you did. You were a survivalist above all else, and when push came to shove on that godforsaken, blood-rotted moor, you were not about to forsake a tool because old men with uneasy consciences said you should.

You bathed the world in Slytherin green twice on that battlefield, and if pressed you would have done it twice more and twice more and twice more after that. Unlike most who tasted of the forbidden fruit, you were neither repulsed nor driven mad by it. There were no pangs of horrified conscience, no moments of doubt. Just the surety that you would live and they would die, and you were sorry for neither.

So, you were well-acquainted with the power of words, the destructive might of Avada Kedavra and the healing tenderness of an I love you in the dark, and to hear him speak your love's name as though it were of no more consequence than a notion in a writer's fancy infuriated you. A hatred so pure it was almost orgasmic flooded your veins in a warm, heroin rush. You tried to quash it, tamp it down and leave his comeuppance to the justice in which Don so stoutly believed. You went back to the hospital and did your best to let it lie.

And it did. For nearly a month. And then the D.A. called to tell you that they were considering a plea agreement that would send the monster to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life. He told you this as if you'd won a goddamned sweepstakes, as if it were enough that Lessing would never pass you on the street. You bit the inside of your cheek to keep from cackling into the receiver.

The other families were already considering the offer, he assured you, and were likely to accept.

Of course they are, you thought as you swayed in your chair with the phone clutched in one sweaty hand. The suffering of the dead is easier to forget than that of the living.

You must have said it aloud, because there was an awkward, guilty pause on the other end of the line. Then he was hemming and hawing and telling you to discuss things with your husband. He would call again in a day or two to see what you'd decided. Just then came the sound of Don heaving his guts in the bathroom, harsh and ugly and ratcheting. You knew then what your answer would be, but you paid lip service to the D.A. and hung up before he was finished saying goodbye.

You went into the bedroom and sat in the doorway of the bathroom, where Don knelt in front of the toilet with arms braced on either side of the bowl. He retched again, and his back strained with the effort. Yellow bile splashed into the toilet, and he rested his forehead against the cool ring of the seat.

You wanted to go to him, to smooth the sweat-dampened hair from his burning forehead and press soothing kisses to his nape, but he had told you weeks before what he thought of your bumbling attentions and clumsy affection. He didn't want them, and so you stayed your ground and loved him from afar.

Do you need anything? you asked as he spat bile.

He shook his head.

I'm going to leave a glass of water on the nightstand.

You rolled into the kitchen and got his glass of water, and as you returned to the bedroom with it clamped firmly between your knees, you gave up on his justice. You unearthed the plan that had taken root in your mind the day of that first hearing, and you were not at all surprised to see that your subconscious had been working at the loom and treadle all while, fashioning the means of Lessing's demise. That he would spend his life tended and cared for while you and Don rattled the bars of your bone cages and thrashed in the grips of nightmares of which neither of you could speak was a monstrosity too cruel to contemplate.

By the time you made it back to the bedroom, Don had regained his feet and was rinsing his mouth in the sink.

Here's your water, you announced, and held it up before putting it on the nightstand. You turned to go.

Hey, doll? Wait.

You pivoted the chair and looked at him. Yes?

You wanna come have a nap with me? He nodded in the direction of the bed. Quiet, hopeful.

You wanted to hold him more than anything in the world, to soothe and comfort him the way he comforted you when the spasms came and reduced you to a helpless, shrieking crab on the floor. But you remembered all too well the last time you tried to get close to him, the way he writhed when your stupid hand planted in the wrong place.

You've done enough damage, he had said, and broken your heart.

You stiffened at the memory. I think it's best if I keep my distance, don't you? I wouldn't want to jostle you again and set back your rehab. I know how much that means to you.

His face registered confusion and raw hurt. You knew you had struck a hard blow, but you didn't really care. One week later, and the wound left by those words still smarted and bled and shifted like shards of glass inside your heart.

His beautiful, expressive eyes filled with misery, and he ran his fingers through his hair. Are you sure, doll? There's plenty of room.

Your slurry will be ready when you wake up.

He followed you to the door of the bedroom, and just before you crossed the threshold, you felt his fingers brush your hair. He watched you for a minute as you rolled toward your office, and then he closed the door. You managed to get inside your office and close the door before you burst into hysterical, guilty tears. Huddled behind your desk with runners of snot dripping onto your blotter was where you first saw the Shrieking Shack in your mind's eye. It was all you could think about once it had settled into your head, and you were still pondering its grim beauty while you made his pineapple and mango slurry.

You told him about the D.A.'s offer, of course. The next morning over another slurry and toast softened in milk. You were not so blind as to think that the decision rested solely with you. After all, it was his body that had been torn apart. You set his slurry and his plate of softened toast in front of him, and after a few sips of tea strong enough to grow hair, you told him the news.

He picked unenthusiastically at his toast. I want the bastard to hang by his fuckin' balls, but I don't think that's gonna happen, he admitted after a long silence punctuated only by the lonesome, unappetizing squelch of his soggy toast. I just want this to be over, for us not to have to think about it anymore. He reached across the table and took your hand. What do you want, doll?

It's not enough, you said bitterly. Nothing is ever going to be enough.

He squeezed your hand and brought it up so that he could kiss the knuckles. Okay, he said simply. No deal.

But that was the deal. You were the lone holdouts, and in the end the D.A., like so many, took the path of least resistance. At the sentencing hearing in early September, Don took the stand and delivered a dissenting opinion of such startling eloquence that you wondered if he had been possessed when he wrote it. He spoke of the nightmares, and of coming home to find you sitting in the shattered remnants of your dinnerware. It was an elegy of sorts, and it was as much an indictment against himself as it was against the sad, little man at the defense table.

His testimony was a wake-up call and made you realize that he had not forgotten you in his race to rejoin the urban steeplechase. He had been watching and hurting and reaching for you, but you were so ensnared in your own darkness that you couldn't or wouldn't see his proffered hand. You met him outside the hospital four days later with your heart in your mouth, and like he always has, he led you into the light.

That was the beginning of your reconciliation and your reawakening, a return to awareness forged by hands and lips and hard conversations gentled with endless patience. You could sleep again and taste food and smell the flowers he brought to remind you that there was brightness in the world. You could see his naked body in the moonlight and not be drawn to the livid, red scar that so neatly bisected your life. You could even allow yourself to dream of tomorrows with red-cheeked infants in sagging diapers. You remembered the sun.

Yet your spirit never settled completely. The blood in your veins cried out for vengeance richer than that provided with paper and ink, and so you are here, and let us make no mistake, my beloved girl, you mean to see this to the end. The pull is too hard, and your rage is too hot for either reason or love to talk you down. It has already made a liar of you, and now it will make you a murderess, and there is no war or holy cause to shoulder the blame. It is the simple, blind, greedy need to hurt he who has hurt you. It is as selfish and fraught with madness as Lessing's bomb on a peaceful Sunday morning. If you go through with this, you'll be as big a hypocrite as he is. More so, because you know it and don't care.

You can still stop, even now. You can exact a kinder, less ruthless revenge if you must. You can twist his bones inside his skin with a liberal application of Cruciatus. You can feel the sizzle of God's fury in your veins and slake your bloodlust. He will scream and gibber and plead for mercy while his joints dislocate with the wet, grinding pop of gristle, and you can continue the punishment until his outside matches your inside. When enough is enough and the monster is silenced, you can shred what remains of his mind with a Memory Charm and return him to his cell. You can go home to Don, and Lessing can rot in his ossuary.

For a moment, she was tempted. She saw Don in her mind's eye. Her sweet love who thought she was loving him to create a family, and who never suspected the ulterior motive that lurked beneath her awkwardly-rocking hips and ardent kisses. How could he when he had no motive himself? He came to her because he loved her, and he wanted her to be happy. He was blissfully unaware of the darkness he caressed so willingly, and his innocence broke her heart.

But every time mercy and prudence crept into her heart on timid feet, she saw the scar and felt the cool, barring press of double-sided glass against her palms. She saw his mindlessly rolling eyes and lolling head as he lay in pre-op alone, and the darkness returned in a ravening, roiling tide that swept reason aside with a swatting, dismissive hand.

Oh, my love, she thought sadly. You deserve so much better.

"He was the first man to ever ask me to dance," she told Lessing softly, and picked up the cloth again. "We'd gone to dinner and come back to his place. I don't think he'd planned to, but The Temptations came on the radio, and who could resist The Temptations?" She rolled alongside the crude, stone table to which she had Bound him until she reached his hip, a pale, hairy spar of bone. She slipped her wand from the sleeve of her robe, pointed at the basin she had left behind, and murmured, "Accio basin!"

The bowl floated through the air and settled onto her lap like a well-loved pet. Her lips curved in a fleeting smile at her macabre sense of whimsy. Even when blood had fallen like rain and ash had swirled around the castle ramparts like snow, she had possessed a twisted knack for finding humor in the midst of madness. When Ginny Weasley had met her end at the hands of Draco Malfoy, her throat cut by a Severing Charm, she had lain in the trench a few yards away and cackled, raw, dirty knuckles crammed into her mouth to stifle the sound.

All that time spent teaching us to fear Dark Curses like the Killing Curse and Corpus Mortem, and Ginny Weasley meets the dirt on the heels of the same spell her mother uses to open the post, she had thought, and then, Pop! Just like a Pez dispenser. It had been horrible and undeniably true, and she had swallowed her guilt and self-loathing with mouthfuls of mud.

She dipped the cloth into the bowl of water, wrung it out with somnambulistic precision, and began to wash Lessing's hip. "I don't think anything had ever made me feel so lovely. Not even the lacy, itchy stockings I wore underneath my wedding gown."

Telling the story brought the memory back, and she forgot her cold, cramping hands in favor of the night Don had made her feel like a queen with a simple invitation to sway to the music coming from his clunky boombox. She had relaxed, secure in the gentle hands that had cupped her hips and in the enveloping, spicy scent of his cologne. She had rested her head on his chest as they moved in a strangely graceful wobble in the middle of the living room, and had listened to the steady thump of his heartbeat. He had seemed invincible then, her white knight in a Yankees t-shirt, and love had bloomed in her gut like nightshade.

Lessing, who had been watching her in wary silence, licked his lips. "Who are you?" he asked hoarsely.

She uttered a short bark of laughter. "I told you screaming was useless. I should have known you'd have to test that theory. As to who I am, we'll get to that. We're getting to it now, actually, and you might have figured that out if you weren't so spectacularly self-absorbed." She gave his hip a last swipe with the cloth and dropped it into the bowl. Water splashed onto the backs of her hands like tears. "Oh, but that's one character flaw I intend to correct forthwith. Oh, my, yes." She Banished the bowl with a careless flap of her hand.

"I don't-,"

"No doubt your keepers in the land of Topsy Turvy patted your head and told you that what happened wasn't your fault," she said as though she hadn't heard. "We both know that's bullshit, and that will stop immediately. There is only room for the truth here. You blew up that building because you could, and because you got off on the idea of brainless city officials kissing your ass for exposing their weakness. You killed six people on your little crusade and almost stole the light from my world, and all you got for it was a dosed cookie and a standing reservation at the Short-Sheet Hyatt."

Comprehension finally flickered in his eyes. "You lost someone in the bombing."

She studied the tip of her wand. "Yes, but I was lucky. I found him again."

"You have to understand-,"

"I'm not interested in your reasons," she spat. "I only care about what you did."

She had planned on exacting her recompense with an array of Dark curses, each more perverse and forbidden than the last, but a new idea had taken root at the base of her brain. A better one. She kept seeing Ginny Weasley wilting gracefully to the mud, laid low by a household Charm she had heard a thousand times before. She thought of the Hogwarts house elves who had worked in the kitchens, and of the Charm that they had used to peel potatoes. She smiled.

"You can't do this," Lessing pleaded.

"And why not?"

"Because I was motivated by-,"

"A higher calling?" she snarled, and her rage boiled over. She pressed her wand to his ribs. "Do you think you're the only one who's ever been willing to die for a cause, you son of a bitch? Do you? I've got a cause, too, and his standard rides on the third finger of my left hand." She was shouting now, and she leaned forward in her chair until she was inches from his sweat-beaded chin. "Tell me something, Lessing. If you were so fucking convinced of the rightness of your cause, why didn't you blow yourself up instead?" Her face burned with fury, and she was dimly aware that she was crying. She gulped cold air into her lungs, and her thin chest heaved. "Why?" she demanded, and drove the wandtip into his ribs. When there was no answer, she flopped back in her seat with a disgusted, furious sob and wiped snot from the end of her nose with the back of her hand. "Fucking coward."

She didn't speak again until her hands had stopped shaking, and when she did, her voice was eerily calm. "You know, ever since I brought you here, the voice of my dead grandfather has been in my head, telling me I'm a hypocrite, that if I do this, I'm no better than you."

"He's right." Lessing swallowed with an audible click.

A noncommittal shrug. "Maybe." She snorted. "Probably. But the difference between you and me is that I'm willing to shoulder the responsibility." She raised her wand and pointed it at him with a steady, dry hand. "My name is Rebecca Flack, and on May 9th, 2006, you nearly killed my husband, Detective Don Flack, Jr. But I'm not doing this for him. I'm doing this for myself, because I want to, and because I can, and because I owe you an hour of pain for every minute he was away. I'm going to hurt you, and I'm going to enjoy it, and when I'm done, I'm going to go home and sleep without nightmares for the first time in seven months."

"You can't."

"I'm righting a wrong, Mr. Lessing. That's all. Isn't that what you were doing?"

She took a deep breath, focused her will, and thought of Ginny Weasley and of house elves peeling potatoes in the Hogwarts kitchens. Shortly thereafter, David Lessing began to scream.