Fides in Culpa

Chapter One: Darkness Rising

Bellatrix Lestrange, lounging uncomfortably in the shadowy corner of her prison cell, felt the sting of her Dark burning in her forearm. A pleasant smile broke her tired face, and it met her haunting, dark eyes as she traced the snake slithering slowly into the empty sockets of the skull. So long had she waited for it darken, so long had she waited to feel its keen sting, and then—It had burned so brightly, so deliciously, that it could not have been mistaken for anything else but the return of the Dark Lord.

He was alive. Somewhere, he had risen, he had come back. Just as she had always said. Ever faithful, ever knowing that her master would return stronger as ever. It was only her unfortunate predicament that stopped her from returning at his side.

Never had she wanted more than anything than to be able to Disapparate from the very tile that she laid, to appear at His right-hand side. He would understand, though, why she couldn't show up to His revival. He would find her incarceration at Azkaban as a devoted sacrifice, unlike her other comrades—Lucius, the turncoat. Oh, he would find some way to weasel out of his disgrace; no doubt, he would always be up for a good Muggle lynching, but to openly search for the Dark Lord to retain some societal appropriation—The weasel.

Then there was that snake, Severus Snape, whom always stayed perched at Hogwarts perhaps under the guise of keeping an eye on Harry Potter, but—almost four years with Potter in his grasp, and not once had he tried to overthrow the boy. Make sense of that, Snape.

Then…Bellatrix paused her fond stroking of her Dark Mark with a look of cradled fondness laced with disappointment. Then there was Rita. She had certainly tried to walk the line as a defected Death Eater in the face of a sentence in Azkaban; she certainly had avoided it with the help of that Muggle-loving, Mudblood-coddling Albus Dumbledore. Oh, but with every passing year, Rita had come to visit Bellatrix in her prison cell, every year, with a small trace of hope for forgiveness. Sometimes, Rita would beseech some sort of desperation. Bellatrix, whom had hoped that the years they had spent together and the hours that they had put into her training, had hoped that Rita would have embraced her darkness. For what it was always worth, Rita was—and is—one of the best Death Eaters that the Dark Lord could have entrusted. And she certainly was quite attached to Bellatrix, an intimacy that she had enforced with her ritual—A very good contingency, apparently, Bellatrix thought lightly, though, one that might not have been necessary.

Rita portrayed a certain fondness toward Mudbloods, even adhered to the idea that the Dark Arts was a powerful and dangerous demonstration of the oldest magic; but whenever Rita entered Azkaban and came face-to-face with Bellatrix, she would mold that outer shell, the one she presented to her Hogwarts professors, students, and other friends—and Bellatrix saw that beautiful creature that she had been drawn to during their years at Hogwarts: the creature that the Dark Lord could fully appreciate—If she would just stop trying to suppress it. Whether or not Rita's adamant and love-sick behavior toward Bellatrix was coerced and confused, or if it was real—At a certain point, Bellatrix herself couldn't know for sure due to the curse—it didn't really matter at the end of the day. Loyal to a fault, a poetic price to pay for a Hufflepuff Death Eater.

But every year, whether petrified by a horrible prospect of a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher or nullified by her indiscriminant apologies, Rita returned to Azkaban with feelings of being alone, despite being surrounded by people, and a self-righteous temper. It was just in the beginning of the school year that surprised Bellatrix when, in the middle of winter—December—that Rita had entered Azkaban to visit for the second time.

She hadn't looked fair as she always had. No, Bellatrix recalled with a soft smile.Rita's deposition had fallen from grace, when she had come by with a desperation in her breaking voice, evidence all over that Bellatrix's star pupil and lover had dived head first into the Dark Arts with an almost sudden desire to find the Dark Lord herself.

"Oh…" Bellatrix cooed, stepping up to the slit opening of her concrete cell as Rita clung to it as if it were last life line. And for all she knew, it was. "Oh, my pet, what have you been up to?"

Without missing a beat, Rita let out an extinguished sigh of defeat, her voice broken by something more than her spirit, "I can't find Him. I can't find Him! I've tried everywhere I can think of…I can't see Him."

"How arrogant," Bellatrix chastised her, though still hummed in a loving voice, "you are to think that you alone could be able to find our master in hiding."

"Tell me how!" Rita cried out, banging a withering hand against the cell bar, and it echoed in response with a vibrating scream. Bellatrix raised an eyebrow curiously; it had been years since she had seen her unraveled as this, not since Rita had gone looking for Frank Longbottom. Although Bellatrix would have liked to revel in Rita's misfortune out of Azkaban, it struck her in the heart to see her in a weak, pitiful state.

"What have you done, Rita?" asked Bellatrix quietly. She clasped a gentle hand along Rita's white-knuckled grip among the steel bar, indicating her blackened fingers; it did look incredibly painful, though it seemed that Rita's mounting fear of her own mortality hung in the balance of searching for their master. She either couldn't feel the pain, or she had ignored it in spite of her plight. It might have become clear during the beginning of the year that the Dark Lord would not accept her absence as much as the others. And Bellatrix couldn't disagree with her.

"I left." Rita whispered. "The Auror, Mad-Eye Moody, he knows. He knows. He—"

"You sound hysterical," Bellatrix said.

"I left," Rita repeated. "I left Hogwarts to find Him, I tried. I tried. But I can't find Him. I looked in the Riddle House, I can't find Him there. Where I got my Dark Mark, where you brought me—He's not there. I've been everywhere that I could think of…I can't f—" Her voice broke and she uttered a shuddering breath.

Bellatrix furrowed her brow. "Rita, honey—"

"Don't sweet talk me now, Bella!" Rita said angrily, slamming a second hand against the bar. "LOOK AT ME! Tell me how to find Him!"

Bellatrix stared at her, a bit taken aback that her ingénue believed that perhaps that she had known where the Dark Lord was this entire time and not divulged it.

"If I knew where the Dark Lord was," Bellatrix said calmly, abandoning any mockery in her tone, "I would tell you, my lovely. But I do not know where He is. What have you done?"

Rita shivered at the thought, and she glanced at either side of her as if she expected that the Dementors would be lurking by; no doubt, the memory itself would be enough to satisfy the dreaded monsters. Bellatrix leaned in, found Rita's face with a hand to point her gaze directly at her, "What did you do?"

"Necromancy…" Rita breathed.

"What?"

"I found Bertha Jorkins, the body," said Rita. "I found her. She was eaten by something, ravished by an animal. She was an official of the Ministry, she'd have known something that the Dark Lord would want. She went missing, her face was in the Daily Prophet, before the Quidditch World Cup. She'd have seen the Dark Lord, somehow. I don't know how, and I didn't know how—I—" She winced. "I took her body. I…I tried to bring her back to tell me where she'd seen—but…"

Bellatrix stared at her. A feat of necromancy… One of the Darkest Arts—

"But," Rita shrugged, "she fell to ash. She didn't talk, she just…Hobbled around the house—"

"You took her body to Spinner's End?" Bellatrix snapped incredulously. "To your house?"

SMACK!

Rita gasped, felt the sting of Bellatrix's hand against her cheek.

"You stupid girl!" Bellatrix said, albeit in a hushed, furious whisper: "Have you lost your senses completely? The body of a dead woman! The body of a missing woman! And you brought her back to where you live!"

"Severus didn't know, Severus doesn't know—" Rita began hurriedly and Bellatrix dismissed her with a shake of her head:

"I don't care about your husband, Rita, I care about you!" Bellatrix said irritably.

Rita frowned, "It doesn't matter, she broke into ash, she didn't tell me anything. I can't find Him, Bella!"

"If you cannot find Him," Bellatrix said, suddenly gentle, "then at the very least you must go to Him when you feel the Dark Mark burn." She caressed the reddening flesh of Rita's cheek where her hand had landed so hard. "You will make it up to Him by being one of the first to arrive. He will understand, He surely must."

"And if He doesn't, Bella?" Rita pleaded, placing her charred fingers along Bellatrix's comforting hand. "What if he doesn't? I, who have spent years trying to suppress what he was teaching me—"

"You will bear your punishment like the rest," said Bellatrix seriously. "And you will cope. As you always have," she added lightly.

"He will be so disappointed…" Rita uttered in soft despair, shaking her head. "He won't accept it. He won't hear of it. He'll kill me where I stand."

"Listen to me," Bellatrix hissed, when Rita still uttered her depravity, "Listen. You made your mistakes. You have—Listen to me."

"I'm a blood-traitor to Him, he will see me no different as any Mudblood," said Rita, louder over Bellatrix's coaxing. "I was at the school, giving them an education. I've taught them, I helped them, joined them. I slept with a werewolf, Bella—and at the time I didn't regret it, but—" She clenched her jaw hard enough that her hallowed cheeks sunk in, "The Dark Lord knows. He always knows. You've said it yourself. He'll know the bar I set. Remus Lupin—"

"Your jumping into bed with a werewolf is no different than gallivanting Albania with Greyback to recruit for Him," said Bellatrix. "Just as dirty, just as filthy, and below you. But you didn't intend on mating with him, did you? Pure blood is pure blood, and it only matters if it produces a child, doesn't it?"

Rita scowled at her, "That's not how the Dark Lord will see it!"

"You don't know what He will see it as!" Bellatrix said, trying to break through Rita's mental state. "He will give you as much leniency as he gives Severus Snape for his blood status. You've been warped by your years at Hogwarts under Dumbledore's nose. Even the Dark Lord poses Dumbledore as a threat, and why? Manipulative, cunning, soft! Those petulant children at that school made you soft, weak!"

Rita opened her mouth to speak to rebuttal Bellatrix's argument, but she didn't speak; though, she wasn't entirely convinced that her transgressions would go unnoticed. Bellatrix grabbed Rita firmly by her chin, to hold her head up high.

"I see you," said Bellatrix with deliberate adamancy in her voice. "I do. You told me to look at you, I am. You've been succumbed, once more, embraced by the Dark Arts. You've accepted what you're capable of, what you could do if you just let them go. This is the proudest of you that I've ever been. And you are capable of much, much more. When you are at His side, He will see it too, but when He summons you, you must go to Him. This is the only way to be accepted back into His good graces."

Rita slowly nodded. Bellatrix heard her whimper: "I'm…sorry…"

Bellatrix nodded, "That'll do."

"When the Dark Lord returns," Rita said, "I'll come back for you. I swear it."

"I know," Bellatrix said with a smirk.