Chapter rating: M+ for the gore of birthing and Azkaban's effect on people's psyche.

The Doctor's Child

02. The Suitable Host

Bellatrix didn't exactly remember how she got pregnant. Not that she did not remember the act that lead to being pregnant, because whatever fault she could find to her husband, he still demanded marital rights nearly every night and being a good little pureblood wife, there was nothing that she wouldn't do for him, even if she sometimes fantasized of tearing his bits off with a rusty spoon. No, she knew how it came that she was pregnant, but she didn't know how it came that she was pregnant. For all she knew, she was unable to bear children since that misplaced Reductor curse she took to the stomach. But apparently, some deity thought it best to grant her this boon, and one day, just like that, she woke up and knew with absolute certainty that she was indeed pregnant, and most probably with a boy.

And for a reason that escaped her, she tried everything to prevent anyone from knowing her plight. She wore local notice-me-not charms around her belly so no one would realize that it was slowly but surely inflating as the months passed by. And soon enough, after the weird cravings and the morning nauseas, she just sort of forgot about it all, way too ensconced in her efforts to please her beloved Dark One.

If you'd asked anyone around Bellatrix Lestrange, during those few months before the Aurors finally got to her husband, brother-in-law and her, the woman has seemed to fall more and more into insanity. A number of times, a junior Death Eater or another member of the Inner Circle would catch her cackling madly or speaking to thin air and she became wilder and more savage as the raids and the attacks went by. But only a certain Mad Man in a Blue Box, far away, could have explained that her descent into madness was a result of her magic fighting itself and her instincts as it tried to decide whether to eliminate the presence within her or register it as survival of the species.

Soon, 7 months had passed since she realized a foetus was growing in her womb, she'd successfully hidden her little mystery from everyone. Maybe a bit too well, as her beloved Lord was not one to go easy on the Cruciatus curse, but no matter, because 7 months had passed. And after all those months, the Aurors found her laughing hysterically above the prone forms of Alice and Frank Longbottom. Rabastan and Rodolphus tried to flee the scene, but she stayed there, tall and proud and oh so unimaginably insane, laughing and taunting the Aurors and leering at them and positively dancing around while they dragged her. Her trial was swift, as she continued just ignoring them all, proud of her deeds and unmovable in her convictions. Her sentence to Azkaban came nearly without a surprise.

It was the first contraction that was like a bucket of cold water on her mind. Her magic had continued maintaining the notice-me-not charm all the way through the processes, even when they publicly smashed her wand in two, it never failed and she had been getting so used too that extra weight that she couldn't see that it just stopped being there for her. But the contractions reminded her of everything, the unsuspected pregnancy, the raids, her Lord, her downfall, but most of all, it brought back the tattered, half-erased totally instinctual givens of an expecting mother. She took in the ratty and mouldy cot on which she was lain, the tattered thin robes she was adorned with, the dark, damp and cold little cell she had been thrown into and the presence, so close and so terrifying of those despicable wraith-like creatures that guarded the most secure prison in Wizarding Britain.

The contractions were still distant from each other and relatively less painful that they could be, so she bade her time, trying to find the most suitable position on that old cot.

Soon enough the contractions were cruelly painful and in unfathomable pain, she tried to put her mind to other thoughts, if only to at least ease it a little and not cry out loud enough to alert any of the guards. But those thoughts were far from light as she couldn't help but think about what would happen to an infant behind the walls of the prison. A prison guarded by fear and despair was not a place to raise a pureblood child but who would be able to help her free the child? She noticed absently that the blood staining her robes and her cot seemed to sparkle almost, like little lights fading in it as it left her body. Would someone be able to help her? Could anyone save her baby?

Her trail of thoughts stopped when a spike of hot, searing pain invaded her loins, fast as a flash of light before a curse and she had to muffle another scream, only for another voice to cover her breathless panting, the sound of a weak cry of life.

Covered in blood and gunk, crying weakly in the midst of her tattered robes, was a tiny being with his eyes screwed shut, sniffling and coughing and alive. Weakened by the act, confused and dazed, Bellatrix looked at the small infant and gathered him in her trembling arms, trying to regain control of herself. Letting her instincts direct her actions, she took hold of the last strand of flesh that linked her to this tiny little thing and bit into it, ignoring the horrid taste of raw flesh and a little something else, she cut through it and separated the umbilical cord. This done, she stood up on unsteady legs and brought the infant to the small bowl of clean water that was put in the corner of the cell and cleaned his face and mouth and nose and body as best as she could, cooing slightly and trying to ignore the images in her head that showed her an unmoving, stiff little body, pressed tightly against her as she rocked back and forth.

"This is not a place for little boys like you, why are you here, Little Unknown?" She whispered to him as she bathed him as best as she could. "A new life in a place that robs it, hm, the suffering will never end…"

She cooed at the baby as it continued moving weakly and scrunching its little nose, his eyes staying stubbornly closed. She cut a length in her robes and rolled it around the tiny body, trying to give it a bit of warmth, even as her mind conjured images of what could happen in the thrice damned walls of Azkaban the prison, Azkaban the place where hopes died. A small infant in a length of tattered robe, held by a silhouette shrouded in black as it leaned its face closer and closer to the tiny face for a despicable kiss. A little body wasting away without proper nutrition, leaving life in a whispered sigh after having experienced it but for a few days.

"It can't be. I can't let it be." She muttered as she went back to sit on her cot, taking no mind of the blood continuing to seep through her thin clothes as she rocked the baby, presenting him a breast to feed. "Please somebody out there. Please help him. Help my baby."

She kept muttering those three sentences as she rocked the newborn, her mind coming up with more and more horrifying outcomes to this small gift of life.

Unbeknownst to her, her prayers flew into the evening sky, reaching for the stars and more precisely for a Mad Man and his Blue Box.

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