Chapter rating: M for the twisted mind of one Bellatrix Lestrange.
A/N: This is more of an interlude than a chapter but yeah. And it's the last time we hear about Bellatrix for a long time, I think.
The Doctor's Child
06. I Dreamt A Bitter Miracle
It was years before the Dementors, stubborn and sadistic as they were, relented their constant pression on her. For the longest time, Bellatrix lost the notion of time and of pretty much everything. And then one day, it quieted down. It wasn't that they left her alone, no, they were always there, at the corner of her eyes, breathing down her neck with their thrice damned mouths and their unholy screeches. But to her it felt like she could think again, like the despair and the hate and the loop of endless darkness wasn't all there was.
Of course, her thoughts were not that bright but she could now think of the little things like the flowers her husband used to give her during their courtship, or the smell of the dew in her mother's gardens.
She didn't know how long it had been since that strange time when she met that impossible wizard and his two pet muggles and they stole her life from her. No, not her life, but something important, something cherished and something hidden.
From her hazy memories, she could remember that it took the human guards another full week before they got around to visit her and realize that she was dying of septicaemia. She was then sent to the prison's rarely used Infirmary and they discovered that she'd given birth. But how could she? She wasn't pregnant when she arrived! Did that Death Eater Whore try to spawn a Heir to her beloved Master? If so, better hope the tyke be a stillborn.
The excitation around that affair endured for another week, the time it took her to be better. Well, relatively better or rather, good enough to go back to starving and going mad in the solitary cells. And after that week, it was like the whole thing never existed. No one investigated, no one wanted to know, not even her, too dazed on potions and groggy with hunger and melancholy. And then it was the waltz of the Dementors, at least 2 a day for so long, they would come into her cage and just lean on her as she laid on her cot, hoping for a quick death rather than that excruciating agony.
And from time to time, she would imagine a little infant boy, covered in gunk and grim, abandoned under her cot as she laid there, singing children's tunes about Beedle the Bard.
And now that the Dementors were relenting, she could remember a bit better, the odd wizard with his cursed muggle dohickey and his blue box. The man who wanted to help her runaway, but instead, he stole it, he stole everything!
And some nights, while she lay awake, straining her ears to listen past the moans and the cries, to hear the sea and the waves crashing on the walls of this Pit of Hell, she wonders if the man in the blue box even existed. If she really gave birth to a tiny little thing, ugly and covered in blood. On those nights, she reflects that it might just be the vagaries of a failing mind. The vagaries of a failing mind, what a nice way to say she was going completely batshit insane. Just a day before, she was discussing the subject with Mother… but no… Mother died by a cursed book in the Black's Library when she was 17. Who was she talking to? Maybe the man with the bowtie, the one who took her little star!... the one she sent away from the soul-wrenching place. The one that got away…
So sometimes she wondered and wondered some more. And sometimes, when the moon is at its highest, that the snarls of the beasts caged below reverberate in the hallways and the wind seem to stand still, she thanks the stars that the man with the blue box took her little unknown and hopes that she will never see him again. Because if she did, she might have to kill him. She is realist enough to know that if that tiny ugly little thing that came out of her ever ended in an orphanage, it will be a muggle one, and how would she recognize her own flesh, when the only company she has is the dead and the unwilling… So she prayed never to cross his path, never to have to chose. Because between a vague recollection of a boy that has a chance to be hers and the Master she swore on her life and magic to serve, the choice was so easy it should be forbidden... Long Live The Dark Lord, after all...