Moths
Katie Bell + Marcus Flint
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"There's a hell you know and a hell you don't," he said, stroking his beard as if it were a favorite pet. He was always saying these kinds of things, and whether he was a truly wise man or a fool putting on airs, Katherine did not know. She didn't know; she didn't care, and frankly, she tried not to think about it. But what he said was true nevertheless, and it kept her on her toes, dangling in a birdcage not of metal, but fear.
"What's in the hell outside?" she asked, hating herself for the childlike quality of her voice. But she could not control that any more than she could control the weather or the wind. Captivity had a way of stripping the most essential characteristics from the captive, and without responsibility or choice, she had all but abandoned her adulthood, instead regressing to the soul of a young girl contained rather messily a body that had been taken long ago, along with her name.
Marcus Flint snorted. "I'm not about to tell you, are I, Katherine? Aren't you Gryffindors supposed to be brave? Go look for yourself."
She instinctively looked towards the row of windows lining the wall of the sitting room; each was fully covered by a single-pane blind that obscured all but the dimmest of light, and shielded her from the sights and sounds of the outside world. She wished that the windows were locked or barred or painted shut, but she knew that it would take her only a moment to open them, to run out and be bathed in the light of a sun she had not seen in over a decade. It was part of her torture, she knew. Marcus had been a bully on the Quidditch field, and time had only sharpened his commitment to cruelty. It amused him to no end that he had to do absolutely nothing to keep her by his side, and regarded her as some sort of tortoise flipped onto its back or a gerbil scrabbling at the sides of the kitchen sink. It was the worst kind of humiliation she had endured, worse than the auction block and Marcus's unwanted advances, worse than her lack of privacy or never-ending nightmares. She was her keeper, she was her jailer, and she was her judge, and Marcus loved this most of all.
"Doxy shit," he murmured, chuckling as the girl closed her eyes. "Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. Katherine, my darling little Gryffindor. What are you thinking about? What's on your mind?"
The auction block. A hundred people she knew and a hundred she didn't, staring as her clothes were removed and she was forced to her knees on the hard, wooden floor. Twelve Galleons, someone had called out. The price she had paid for her wand, which had been broken less than an hour after the Dark Lord had won the war.
"Dinner," she said.
"What are you making, Katherine?" He loved to say her name, far more than what was healthy; it was as if he thought that he could make Katie go away if he called her something different. It was pathetic, but effective.
"I'm not sure. Perhaps pasta. I don't know," she said.
"I'm in the mood for some wine. Something full."
"Alright," she said.
Thirty Galleons.
Forty Galleons.
Fifty. Sold to the young man in the green robes.
"Fine, then. I'm going to head over to the office. Got to finish that report for Theo. I'll be back by... Five? Six? Five, then. I'll be back by five. Have dinner ready. Good-bye, Katherine. Do yourself a favor and get some fresh air."
Katherine's face was unmoving as Marcus's laughter bounced through the hall, off one wall and to the other. It didn't have far to travel, though; the Flint family had been pure of blood, but never very wealthy, and Voldemort's regime had extended slightly beyond the reach of the war, but fizzled out when it came to implementing change in the wizarding career ladder. Marcus, whose only talent in school had been Quidditch, earned a low wage combining data from various sources to one condensed report, which was then given to Theodore Nott, a man several years' his junior. As a half-blood and a member of the now-defunct Dumbledore's Army, Katherine was not allowed to work.
She supposed that she was one of the lucky ones; those considered to be too dangerous to "keep" were disposed of in quick succession. "Undesirable" people, generally older witches and wizards, and those who were deformed or mutilated in battle were destroyed as well. In the end, she had fared relatively well. Marcus did not love her, that much was clear, but several years of competitive Quidditch had turned her into something of an obsession to the Slytherin, and so she was kept, polished and pretty like a trophy, admired and prized and disregarded as anything more than a trinket. But he did not beat her, and he no longer raped her; she found that once she had given up and stopped struggling, his ardor for her had cooled. She cooked; she cleaned. She was a wife in all but name and heart.
Katherine glanced at the windows and then back to her hands. She stood; she sat, and stood again. She performed this strange dance every day, and had from the time that she had been delivered to this dirty, ugly house by the dirty, ugly man. The closest she had gotten was several inches from the blind. She hadn't touched it yet. She couldn't, really. What strange hell was waiting for her just behind the screen? It had been bad enough to see her friends sold to the highest bidders as if they were sweets at Zonko's. She had seen Susan Bones executed because she had dared to slap away a hand caught in an inappropriate caress. More than a decade had passed, and she knew that she had withered away to nearly nothing. She was not sure that she could stand the sight of the world of which she was once a part dead and broken.
She was terrified of finding herself alone in a world of green and silver, of seeing the ones she loved gone from this life. She was afraid she would be caught by someone worse, made to work in a brothel or some similar establishment. She was afraid that she would find herself outside and have nowhere to go but back to the house and to Marcus, who would laugh hysterically as she clung to him, desperate for familiarity. This life was indeed some kind of hell, but at least it was one that she knew she could endure.
A moth banged against the ceiling of the sitting room, and Katherine's fingers twitched as she watched it destroy itself in an attempt to escape.
She missed flying.
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"Still here, are you?" came Marcus' jaunty greeting from the entrance of the house, which was, of course, never locked. The words were the same every day, or some variation thereof. And she was there every day to hear them.
Marcus Flint threw his bag and outer robes to the floor before entering the tiny, kitschy kitchen and taking a seat at the table. "Things are looking up, Katherine. Theo invited me to the pub over the weekend to work on some things. Honestly, I thought he'd never talk to me again, after I compared his kid to a house elf. Really, the little lad looks just like one. But of course, Theo didn't see it that way."
She could never have children; Draco Malfoy's cursed necklace had taken care of that. She had been distraught, hysterical even, when she found out. However, enough time had passed that she was grateful to not be able to bring a child into a world ruled by Lord Voldemort.
Katherine flinched as a pair of fingers rudely entered her line of vision, snapping loudly. "Oi!" Marco said, furrowing his brow as he stared at her. "I was trying to tell you something. Pay attention, Katherine. Where's your head at today?"
Bt. Bzt. Btt. Pt. The moth was banging into the ceiling again. Curious. She had assumed that it was dead. It was a resilient little thing, never giving up.
"Katherine. Katherine. Katherine! KATIE! KATIE BELL!"
Her eyes snapped towards Marcus, whose face was now a particularly unattractive shade of crimson. "What?"
Marcus sighed, leaning back in his chair as he rapped his fingers on the table. "You're getting weird, you know. Weirder than usual. What are you thinking about?"
Katie, she thought. I'm thinking about Katie Bell and moths and the wind in my hair and air on my face. But mostly Katie.
"The wine," she said. Something had changed.
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The moth was dead. There was no way around it this time; she saw it lying on the floor, powder-soft wings folded into the shape of a V. She prodded it, only to find that there was no movement, and a small wave of grief washed over her. It was almost as if she had lost a friend. It was hard not to admire such an insignificant creature that spent its last breath searching for something it loved.
Katherine picked it up between her fingers, carefully balancing it on one finger so not to crush its tiny body. It seemed wrong, somehow, to throw it into the trash or to release it into the black abyss of the sink drain. It had tried so hard to break free, and she felt that it deserved the daylight it had been seeking for days, even if it was a little too late.
She looked at the window, and then at her hands. She stood, she sat, she stood. It was the dance. She crossed the floor, one foot before the other, until she was at the row of windows. It was not out of courage or strength that she touched the blind at last; it was for the moth, the brainless bug, that she opened up the window, and as she crawled out, eyes shut tight against the glare of sunlight, she let herself fall, not sure of what to expect. But her toes touched the tips of grass, and she laughed as the soft blades tickled her skin as if they were greeting a long-lost friend. She released the moth, smiling as its body was carried off by the breeze.
She had touched the sill, lifted the blind, opened the window, and crawled out for the moth. But as she began to run away from the tiny house and towards the lights of the nearby town whose name she did not know, she knew that it was Katie for whom she ran.
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A/N: I like this one because it's really depressing, but at the same time, she managed to escape! Then again, she could be running off to a place fifty times worse than where she was at before, but at least she's trying again, you know? I'd love to know your thoughts and opinions, so if you want to review, that would rock! I'm working on the third chapter now.