A/N: All prior disclaimers and spoiler warnings are still in effect. See Part I. If you are squeamish, proceed with caution.
She'd planned on going home after she'd finished with Lessing for the night, but even after two showers and a soak in a tub whose waters had turned pink, the stench of blood and shit had still been strong in her nostrils, and so she had Apparated to Diagon Alley and taken refuge at The Leaky Cauldron. Not a room, no; she would sleep in no bed but her husband's. Just a table and a goblet of sweet, mulled wine.
He had screamed. Oh, how he had screamed when the Charm had begun its work and scraped flesh from tender muscle. He would have twisted away from the agony if he could, but Flitwick, bless his genial, thorough heart, had taught her well, and the Binding Spell had held him fast. Muscles had rippled beneath the skin in an effort to arch him from the table and close his rigid fingers into spasmodic fists. Only his head had been allowed the liberty of movement, and it had turned to and fro on the straining cords of his neck.
He'd talked when he could, pleaded with her to stop, to offer him the mercy he had never extended to Don. Sweet words, promises of remorse and acts of contrition. He'd go to the judge who'd sentenced him, he'd told her, go and demand to be sent to federal prison if she would only stop tearing skin from flesh in patient, methodical strips. He'd even offered to take the death penalty so long as the penalty came on the gentle bite of a needle. His life for a moment's peace.
She hadn't stopped. She couldn't. The dance was begun, its terrible, hypnotic music sunk deeply into her frozen veins, and it wouldn't let her go until the last of the music inside her heart had faded into silence. To stop was to expose herself to its treachery, to court the fleshless caress of bone against her cheek and feel rotten, eager breath against her ear. So she had laughed and sobbed by turns, and Lessing's skin had fallen to the floor, sloughed along with her innocence.
She had talked, too. It was surprising, the things you could tell a man when you knew he wouldn't live to repeat them. She had told him about her and Don's serendipitous meeting on 34th Street, and about the way the world had brightened and deepened with their first kiss. She had told him about dancing in the living room to the old boombox while she breathed in the scent of his cologne and learned the rhythm of his heartbeat. She had even confessed to him the fierce, unrivaled pleasure of surrendering her maidenhead in his bachelor's bed one sticky, August night. She had spoken of life and all the dreams that had shattered in the concussive wake of the explosion, of kissing her love goodbye on Sunday morning and watching Atropos' handmaidens roll him into surgery hours later. She had raged against the dying of her light, and each stripe that she'd laid with her venomous tongue had been punctuated with the wet, resistant pull of tearing flesh.
It was easy to torture him, wasn't it, Miss Stanhope? purred the voice of Lucius Malfoy inside her head, and she smirked in reluctant admiration even as her skin crawled. The elder Malfoy had possessed the forked tongue of an asp, it was true, but he had also nursed a well-oiled and perversely refreshing honesty.
You almost became his handmaiden instead of lady-in-waiting to the Serpent King, and sometimes in the months before you met your prince on a patch of dirty, cold sidewalk on 34th, you wondered how different things might have been had you cast your lot with him, her grandfather pointed out. Intellectually, you knew it would have been suicide, that once your purpose had been served, he would have cast you aside like so much chaff threshed from Pure wheat. Your impure blood would have left him with no other choice. But such cold truth did not preclude you from playing a lazy game of Mirror Maybe as you lay in bed and cursed the inhospitable Muggle world to which you had returned after the War. If anything, it encouraged you. You stared at the ceiling of your apartment or the blind, silver mirror of the moon and unthreaded the fabric of your life; you refashioned familiar scenes from your life into new and exotic possibilities, ones lost to you forever from paths not taken.
You spent the summer after your fifth year as a frequent guest of Malfoy Manor. If Hogwarts was the castle from a fairy tale, then Malfoy Manor was palace of crystal and ice. Everywhere you turned, you were greeted by crystal and marble. The floors were buffed to painful brilliance, kept pristine by house elves who polished it on hands and knees and were kept to the task until thin fingers and knobbly knees cracked and bled. Then they were made to lap up the blood under the pitiless watch of Narcissa Malfoy, the fabled ice queen who was as cruel as she was beautiful. The whiteness was broken only by the flares of gold from sconces and ornate braziers and the vibrant colors of the tapestries that decorated the walls of the sitting rooms and Lucius' study. They looked like bloodstains from a distance.
The manor was a monument to wealth, but its beauty was cold and bloodless, much like the people for whom it had been wrought. Everything was placed in accordance with the rules of taste. There were no personal touches, no hints of a home within the walls. The rooms were endless expanses of nothingness decorated in priceless art and rich brocades. The dining room in which you took meals was a vault fit for a royal court, and yet, no more than four ever ate at its long table with a dozen chairs like the markers of unfilled graves.
It wasn't the manor that tempted you; it was Lucius. Behind the haughty veneer was a man of startling frankness. Even his lies, so carefully constructed to draw you in, held the whisper of truth. In the privacy of his study or on the winding paths of his spectacular gardens, he spoke at length about the affairs of wizards and Muggles alike. Like his old friend, the Serpent King, he refused to treat you like a broken child and would tolerate no laziness or evasion in your answers to his frequent questions. He pointed out the hypocrisy of the side of Light, and you could not deny it. You would see it for yourself a year and a half later, when they locked you and fourteen of your fellow cripples inside Gryffindor Tower "for your own safety". You would have died like cattle in a killing chute if you hadn't destroyed the wards and fled to the moor to die as soldiers.
You learned the dark joy of cruelty at his hand. One summer afternoon under his watchful, grey eyes, you practiced the Cruciatus Curse on hapless garden gnomes who writhed and convulsed under your wand. He watched without comment, and when you had done a particularly admirable job of reducing one of the creatures to so much twitching tissue, he clapped, a polite pattering of three fingers against his smooth palm. A golf clap, as the Muggles called it.
You've always remembered that clap, as well the ensuing Well done, Miss Stanhope. You demonstrate an enviable aptitude for the art of discipline. Discipline, as if it were a spanking and not the vicious agony of obliterating a nervous system. They echoed in your head later that afternoon while you were unceremoniously puking your guilt into the elegant, porcelain washbasin held beneath your flushed face by a decrepit, trembling house elf. You craved his approval even though you knew who he was, and you were disgusted by your need for it. You swore to yourself that you would never invoke that Curse again, and for days afterward, you were haunted by the screams of the garden gnome, who had died without knowing why. But you did use the Curse again, just like Lucius undoubtedly knew you would. And that time, you were not sorry for it. In fact, you reveled in it.
He did not begrudge you your love of killing, and you might have cast your lot with him despite the inevitable end to which it would have brought you. After all, the doctrine he espoused was no different than the catechism of the Serpent King. The only thing that divided them was the side of the line on which they stood, and once, not so long ago, there had been no line at all. Both understood that killing was necessary to ensure survival, and both took pleasure in the task, but Mr. Malfoy made no apology for it.
Malfoy's only mistake was his dishonesty in his treatment of you. While he purported to hold you above the dirty Mudbloods he so loathed, he touched you only with the protection of leather or dragonhide gloves, and while he invited you to enjoy the bounty of his table, he always made sure there were at least three chairs between you and his family. If he had told you the truth in that as he had in all other things, if he had admitted that he thought you no better than the filth he thought to crush, you would have gone with him and turned the ground red before the favored Curse of his House removed your stain from his pristine hands. You would have embraced suicidal madness with a smile.
But he lied, and for that, you rejected him. Well, that and his derision for the Serpent King, who you held first and best, and who you had served long and well. So it was that you ended up on opposite sides of the War. And one day when he came for his reckoning, to dispatch you as he had done so many others, he tasted treachery in kind. You were weak and wounded and too spent to fight anymore, and he was possessed of an unholy, inexhaustible energy. He had but to raise his wand, but vanity moved him to speak, and while he waxed rhapsodic about his impending victory, the Serpent King sank his fangs into his throat and repaid a life debt.
You would have stayed with him forever had he not sunk his fangs into your unsuspecting heart in turn, but he did, damn him unto world's end, and you exiled yourself to a world with neither the Serpent King nor magic. Was it worth it, you asked yourself as you lay in bed and kneaded the ache of a miles-long roll over uneven pavement from your arms. If you had chosen the other path, you might still have lived in the magical world, might have dodged Malfoy's curses and carved a life for yourself. Maybe you would have become an Arithmancer and spelled the fortunes of lovers and Ministry officials, or maybe you would have taken a post at Durmstrang and unspooled the numbers in the heart of Budapest, listening to the wolves howl outside the windows. If worse came to worst, you might have retreated to the frozen tundra of Siberia and become another Baba Yaga with a fence made of bone and a house that ever spun in the silence of the forest.
Don came along in February of 2001, and you had your answer. Yes, it was worth it to have walked the path you had chosen. His love was worth the fires of Hell. He restored magic to your life, albeit in a permutation you never expected. He never offered you a palace of crystal and ice. What he gave you was a home, a place cluttered with pillows and newspapers and takeout boxes that was nevertheless a clean, well-lighted place where you could be as strong or weak as you needed to be. There was no need for secrets or pretensions. It was for the love of him that you forsook the magical world, and it is for the love of him that you have returned to bathe your hands in blood. It is an irony the late Mr. Malfoy would have appreciated.
As I was saying before the unwarranted intrusion by this addle-pated rustic, Lucius sniffed imperiously, it's easier to torture a man than it is an animal or a garden gnome whose only crime was to sprint too close to my hedgerows in bandy-legged glee. A man carries indictments and sins, the Mark of Cain, as swotty vicars like to say. A garden gnome behaves as it does because it has no other choice, but a man behaves as he does simply because he can, because it gives him pleasure to kill his rival and stand over the twitching corpse with blood on his hands and hard evidence of his victory between his legs. Man's arrogance smothered your pity like a clamping fist, and you can torture a man and watch his guts hemorrhage from his nose without a twinge of remorse.
You learned that the day you chose your side for good and all and hexed Professor Vector in the back in the middle of a Hogwarts corridor. There was no moment of contemplation before or a period of reaction after. It was a reflexive action, muscle memory and undiluted hatred. You watched him shriek and thrash in the throes of Cruciatus, and there was no guilt. Vector was an abstraction, an aggregate of symbols and nothing more. You would have killed him but for your beloved Serpent King, who stayed your hand with a command that brooked no disobedience.
You acquiesced; of course you did, but for the briefest moment, you hated him for making you stop. The rush of power was an epiphany. Dumbledore and Moody and the other do-gooders had sworn that to cast the Unforgivables was to lose a part of your soul, but in that instant, you knew they were lying. To cast an Unforgivable was to understand the workings of the gods. It was life unfettered. You would not feel its like again until your filthy Muggle took your maidenhead and taught you the heady perversions of the flesh.
She was surprised to find that she missed Lucius. He had been a worthy and beautiful adversary, every bit the tempting satan that his name implied, and she would have liked to hear what he thought of her present course and the road to perdition upon which she had set herself, to listen to him paint the world with the elegant audacity of his forked, Slytherin tongue. But Lucius was dead, and all her old connections were gone, severed by time and distance and her silence in the face of the owls that had come for a while and then stopped. She drowned her sharp pang of disappointment in a sip of wine.
Not entirely dead, it seemed, because the voice of Lucius whispered inside her skull, the seductive rasp of silk on brocade. That feeling returned in force while you were torturing the unfortunate Mr. Lessing. That sticky, purposeful heat that pooled between your legs like the promise of completion. You were so wet that your scrawny thighs were slick, and your cunt throbbed with the need for release. Lucius sounded pained, and she suspected that it was an affront to his Pureblooded sensibilities to discuss the sexual proclivities of a mangled Muggleborn. She smiled around the battered rim of her goblet and tasted sweetness on her teeth.
Do keep your mind on the subject at hand, Miss Stanhope, he chided sharply, and she saw him in her mind's eye, tall and erect and gazing coldly down at her with his grey eyes. His robes were black and impeccably crisp, and one leather-gloved hand was curled around the shaft of his serpent-headed walking stick, a family heirloom that had been passed through ten generations of Malfoy men. He held it at shoulder-height in her imagination, and though he had never done so in life, she wondered if he was going to rap her knuckles with it. The thought prompted a girlish giggle.
The one that came on its heels throttled laughter in her throat. Merlin knows what you would have done had you used an Unforgivable instead.
No, but she did. She would have come her brains out in the chair. The knowledge that a forbidden curse could inspire the same ecstasy as Don's gentle touch sparked a hot, ugly spasm of shame, and bile rose in her throat in a greasy clot.
Oh, come now, Miss Stanhope. There is no need for shame. Pleasure is only a sin because tight-arsed clerics deemed it so. Why shouldn't you enjoy the task of vengeance? Your Muggle deity certainly does, and He makes no apology for it. In truth you've often wondered why He kept the best jobs for Himself-creation and vengeance and destruction-while He left his supposed favored creations with the will to do anything, and the power to do nothing. Your Muggle indoctrination does you no kindness, and you would be better off without it.
You were without it for a while, there in the Shrieking Shack. You were drunk on the ambrosia of retribution. For the first time since your Muggle fell, you could breathe easily and move without the rough, tugging recollection of apprehension in your gut like a blade. Your bones weighed what they should inside your skin, and not an ounce more, and the notion of bearing him a child was not so incredible without the hatred lodged inside your empty womb like a tumor. Ripping the flesh from your quarry's leg from shin to toe was cathartic, and absolutely more cleansing than a useless hour spent on a pong-infested Muggle sofa, recounting meaningless horrors to keep the real ones far out of reach.
You didn't even mind when the hapless Mr. Lessing's bowels betrayed him in a hot, stinking rush and shit streamed down his legs and off the edges of the table to pool on the floor. In fact, you sympathized with the indignity of it and stopped your work long enough to banish the mess. You understood all too well the humiliation of sitting in your own filth and waiting for judgmental, indifferent hands to restore your besmirched dignity at their leisure, and try as you might, you could not sink to that level of inhumanity.
Besides, puddles of shit are of little consequence to someone elbow-deep in blood and gore, someone who has seen allies torn in half by Severing Charms and led fourteen friends to certain death to save just one. After that, shit is an afterthought. You served as handmaiden to the Serpent King for three years, and for the last two of them, you scrubbed shit and sick from the floor with sponge and wooden pail. You stank of his weakness, and by the time the War came with its torrents of shit and blood and entrails unmoored from their bodies, you were inured to it. It was simply another truth to be accepted, and while the firsties and school prefects were heaving indelicately onto their shoes, you were wondering to whom the parts had once belonged.
"You bitch," Lessing had called her when the ripe, rancid smell of shit had blossomed beneath his ass. "You bitch." She'd stripped another measure of skin just to shut him up, but she hadn't really blamed him. She'd thought the same thing of the white-smocked attendants who had left her out of reach of either wheelchair or bedpan and then scolded her when they returned to find her twitching feebly in a stew of her own shit. You bitch. Succinct, and capable of carrying as much hatred as a heart could hold.
So, she didn't begrudge Lessing his impotent venom, but she no longer wanted to think about it, either. Instead, she turned her attention to Professor Snape, the Serpent King. She had seen him for the last time in the castle vestibule, looming over the straggle of departing students and Professor McGonagall, who had been organizing the exodus from the castle with weary, despairing eyes. She had been seventeen and delirious with disillusionment and suppurating hurt, and when his lovely, inscrutable black eyes had passed over her without the merest flicker of interest or recognition, love had curdled into an equally fierce hatred. She had left the castle, dragging her trunk behind her, and rather than join the line for Apparition to Diagon Alley and the room here in The Leaky Cauldron, she had closed her eyes and flown away home.
She wondered what had become of her old mentor since both of his masters had turned to dust. He had despised the pupils in his charge and made no secret of it, and she thought it unlikely that he had remained chained to a post he had never wanted. Then again, she doubted there had been many prospects for a turncoat twice over after the War. Slytherin that he was, maybe he had evaluated his meager choices and decided ignominy was preferable to penury. His skill as a Potions Master was undeniable, and McGonagall, for all her craggy bluster, had a soft spot for the lost and the wayward. Perhaps Headmaster Dumbledore had passed it to her along with his office and his bowl of sherbet lemons. She could imagine him ensconced in his frigid, damp dungeons, striding the corridors and cursing the realization that not even death had ended his obligation to Albus Dumbledore.
She had received an owl from him not long after she had married. It had come with all the others, and she had recognized the distinctive, elegant script at once, along with the green ink he had always favored. She had been tempted to open it, to see what he could possibly have had to say to her so long after his cruel dismissal on the moors, but in the end, it had been burned with all the rest, unopened. It had been far too late for apologies by then, and what was more, she had discovered as she had stood by the stove with the sealed parchment in her cold hand that it no longer mattered. Wounded loathing had cooled to bland indifference. She had Don now, his kindness and his steadying hands, and she no longer cared what Severus Snape needed or wanted from her. She had fed the parchment to the greedy flames in the steel belly of her oven, and then she had cried in simple, unapologetic relief.
Everything was the same. Everything was different. Faces she did not recognize had conversations she very well did, and the old wizards sat in the same posture as other old wizards before them, hunched and wary, ancient snapping turtles whose shells had eroded with the cruelty of years. Younger wizards, yet unbowed by years and the unyielding cruelty of war sat straight in their chairs, ankles crossed beneath the tables and eyes alert for enemies or prospective lovers in the dark, dingy room. There were no doubt plenty of the former and precious few of the latter. The only other witch in the pub was a heavy-bosomed witch with heavily shadowed eyelids and lipstick smeared on her lips in vampiric invitation. Young witches of good repute knew better than to come here, and if they did, it was never alone.
She had spent her summer holidays here as a student, paying for her room with money from the monthly stipend sent to her Gringotts account by the U.S. Treasury and by performing various odd jobs. She had washed tankards and dishes and bussed tables in exchange for the room, and on busy nights, she had lurked behind the bar and watched as the pub filled with raucous wizards eager to part with their pay. Sometimes women, but mostly men, and more often than not, Ministry officials who wanted to carouse in relative obscurity. She had seen fights and quick trysts in the cramped bathrooms, and on one memorable, weltering night, the deposed Cornelius Fudge had vomited on her feet in the midst of apologizing for a sin she could not remember.
There had been two other girls employed by Tom, the proprietor, pretty barmaids who sashayed to and fro with tankards in their plump hands, and they had endured catcalls and whistles and the occasional grope with the good-natured bat of eyelashes. Their patience was rewarded with shiny Galleons, and now and then, one or the other had disappeared with old Tom into the supply room. She had rarely waited tables, and on the rare occasions she did, there were no catcalls or golden coins, just terse grunts and hastily averted gazes. She had never been into the storeroom, either, but there had always been an extra twenty Galleons in her pay envelope at the end of the week. She had dropped the coins into the alms box outside St. Mungo's without fail.
Even here in the land of Not, some things will always be the same, she thought bitterly, and drained her goblet. She hesitated for a moment, then raised her bony finger and signaled for another. If there were ever a night to break her hard and fast limit of one, it was tonight. She had, after all, peeled a man's leg like a potato.
She was still nursing the second drink when a familiar figure stumped into the bar. Not Professor Snape, but Seamus Finnegan, who stamped his thick-booted feet on the wooden planks of the floor and shook the snow from his heavy traveling cloak. Adulthood had broadened his chest and back, but his face was unchanged, square and honest and overlain with wry mischief. He was Don before she had ever known Don Flack existed, and once upon a time, she had dreamed about what it would be like to live with him in a cottage by the North Sea.
She flushed at the memory and fixed her gaze on the splintered tabletop. It was only when she heard the familiar, Irish brogue that she realized that her cowl was still bunched at the nape of her neck. She had spent so long in the dark and cold of the Shrieking Shack that she had taken it down to experience the warmth of firelight on her face.
"Rebecca?" the voice said incredulously. "Rebecca Stanhope?"
She looked up and was met with a pair of sparkling brown eyes. "Seamus Finnegan," she said by way of confirmation.
"Well, I'll be buggered," he exclaimed gaily, and then he was barreling into her. "It's been too bloody damn long," he declared as he crushed her in a bear hug. "Merlin's tits, but let me grab a pint and a chair."
His enthusiasm after so long surprised her into sudden tears, but they were careful and fleeting and stolen by the wool of his robes, and he did not notice them.