Voldemort swept out of the room with Rodolphus on his heels, leaving Sirius alone with Rosier, forgotten in the corner.
Sirius forced a grin again, wide, obnoxious and off-putting given the circumstances as he could manage. "That went well, didn't it? Thanks again for all your help." Rosier shook his head at him slowly and stalked out. Thank Merlin. Sirius had to put that strengthening charm to good use while it lasted, before his energy levels crashed back down to where they should be after so many curses and so much blood loss. He dug in his pocket and pulled out his watch. He had cracked it open earlier when he was at the Averys'. He was relieved to see Moody had, fortunately, checked in, heard strange voices, and stayed put to figure out what was going on. The surly little figure was crouched by the stream, pretending to fish as per usual. He put the watch back in his pocket as he heard footsteps in the hall. Two Death Eaters rushed back into the room, Bella and presumably the 'Theodosius' she had gone to fetch. They closed the door behind them, and both de-masked. It was indeed Bella, and her companion was Lord Theodosius Nott. Sirius recognized him now, from the photographs Moody had shown him of Death Eater suspects a few weeks ago. He hadn't been able to place the name before.
Nott ignored Sirius for the moment and moved about amongst the shelves selecting various potions, utensils and ingredients; like Fleamont, he seemed in his natural environment in a potions laboratory. Bella returned to Sirius' side. She knelt by the bed and reached out to run one hand over his silver fingers and one along the side of his face. When he did not immediately shove her away, she beamed at him and moved both hands to his cheeks. "Oh, Siri, I'm so glad you're back!"
"Me too," Sirius said quickly. "I'm lucky they only left Pete to guard me this afternoon after the rest left." That was all he dared to say about it so openly, but hopefully Portrait Moody took the hint and made sure Peter wasn't seen anywhere that would poke holes in his story until he could give a fuller report. "Can you tell Reggie and Narcissa I'm back, and I'll be okay? And my parents, I suppose."
"Of course I will. Have you forgiven me, Siri?" Bella asked, her voice flavored with hope and desperation. Didn't take her long to move on from concern for him to concern for herself.
"I... I don't know, Bella," he said after a brief hesitation. "I'm not as angry as I was, I think, but now... I'm just too tired to think about it."
"I didn't mean it, Siri. I didn't. You have to believe me! I even stopped dueling the aurors to put out all the Fiendfyre looking for you."
"Bother him on your own time, Madam Lestrange," Nott said coldly from above them. "I will not listen to a woman's simpering."
Bella's happy expression darkened. "Bitter old misogynistic creep," she muttered. "It's no wonder the Dark Lord had to Imperious your fiancée for you," she said, louder. Sirius bit back a grin, which Bella shared readily.
"Keep your rumors to yourself, woman, and get out of my way. I have work to do." Bella obediently, if reluctantly, moved aside. Nott did not kneel but rather loomed over Sirius' bed, staring down at him. His stern expression was eerily reminiscent to Sirius' father's, who was a similar age, although Nott otherwise bore little physical resemblance to Orion Black with his short-clipped and yellow hair and scraggly yellow-grey beard. Perhaps it was the disdain. Neither his hairstyle nor his wardrobe flattered his squat and slightly hunch-backed frame, yet this clearly did not indent his pride one bit. He looked at Sirius as if he were an irritating distraction from much more important work. "What else is wrong with you beyond the obvious?"
"Depends. What's the obvious?"
"The hand. The eye. The burn. The fever. The attitude."
Sirius laughed. "I doubt you'll be curing the familial madness. But I think you spotted everything important. I'm finally over the Cruciatus spell damage from last month, I think. The last person who was treating me stopped the nerve regenerator anyway. They still had me on a muscle relaxer and calming draught but were tapering them. The Dark Lord's attentions today were mild in comparison." Bella struggled to hide a smirk from behind Nott's shoulder. She would take a perverse pleasure in that comment, regardless of her professed regrets.
Nott frowned and summoned a piece of parchment and a quill over from the work bench. "You'll need to resume the nerve regenerator to reinnervate your missing fingers, once the musculoskeletal framework is restored. Tell me about all the potions you've been exposed to for the past two weeks. The Dark Lord will be displeased if I accidentally poison you."
"Sure. Some of them were experimental, though."
For the first time, Nott's eyes showed a spark of interest. "Then tell me what you remember about them - their appearance, their application, any ingredients you were made aware of."
"You might want a chair. This will take awhile."
As predicted, Sirius' energy dropped precipitously halfway through the conversation with Nott as the Dark Lord's strengthening charm ran out. He went from alert to groggy and confused so quickly, Bella even checked him over again for more wounds the Dark Lord might have forgotten to close and talked Nott into giving him an extra blood replenisher. That didn't help, and he sank into a dead faint.
Lord Nott did not believe in coddling patients, so he offered nothing for Sirius' pain. He also believed the dregs of Sirius' post-Cruciatus regimen were now causing more problems than they were worth through their interactions with other treatments, thus he decided to taper off both the muscle relaxant and calming draught as quickly as possible, in less than a week. Nott also prescribed a new treatment for wound poisoning with a particularly foul-smelling brew that seemed more of a purgative than anything else from the way it affected Sirius' bowels. The older Death Eater swore it was effective though, and standard treatment for those bitten by Nundu, the jaws of which were notoriously foul. He unsympathetically stood over Sirius as he drank it down without offering anything but a glass of water for the side effects.
The upside of this plan was that Sirius should be back on his feet and ready to resume terrorizing muggles and so on in perhaps two weeks, maybe three. The downside was that Sirius was extremely miserable and had to stay in the infirmary. Yes, the burn healed, finally, but Sirius felt incredibly nauseated and feverish (Nott said that was his imagination, but the shivering and sweats were real enough), weak, off-balance, jittery alternating with panicked and disoriented, and completely unable to sleep after that first exhausted stupor. At least for the first four days. He continued to feel miserable but fell into a kind of uneasy doze on the fifth day. Still, he was tormented by anxious thoughts and waking dreams: that Voldemort discovered his duplicity, that Bella tried to teach him to resist the Cruciatus again, that his mother and father came to headquarters to drag him back to Grimmauld, that Regulus had a Dark Mark on his forearm, that Bella killed the Potters for the temerity of believing him to be better than he was... He awoke screaming to the vision of James strung up by his entrails, Bella urging him to turn the corpse into a wine glass for her.
His strangled yell quickly morphed into a coughing fit; the infirmary was thick with astringent fumes. Sirius squinted to see Lord Nott, wearing a bubble head charm, bending over a cauldron that emitted brilliant green sparks. The potioneer shot him an irritated look. Sirius quickly fumbled for his wand and conjured his own bubble of clean air. He sat up and breathed deep for a minute, waiting for his racing heart to slow down. Merlin, his throat was parched. He reached for the glass of water on the floor and refilled it with his wand. He drank three cups before the strange thirst was quenched. "What in Merlin's name are you making?" he asked eventually.
"An experiment of the Dark Lord's," Nott answered curtly. He added a few drops of something-or-other to the potion, stirred it, and reduced the heat of the flames. He then turned to Sirius with an expression of peculiar excitement. "Why did you scream? What did you see?"
"Uh...that's sort of a personal question. Why do you ask?"
Nott gestured impatiently. "This drink the Dark Lord has designed to cause perfect despair. It is an ingenious thing! He has been working on it for months, though only recently delegated the experimental brewing to me. One good outcome of the Malfoy debacle." The last sentence was an annoyed mutter.
"Yeah? Thanks a lot for brewing it in a poorly-ventilated infirmary where I was sleeping, then," Sirius said grumpily. He wondered if Nott had been assigned to brew this potion because he had taken over someone else's role, who had been captured or killed in the raid, or because the Dark Lord had no time to do it himself. Or perhaps because the events at Malfoy Manor meant this brew was needed sooner?
Nott laughed coldly. "Next time, I'll charm your head first. Or retire to my proper laboratory and leave you alone to suffer your withdrawal unsupervised. Perhaps you would be fine, but perhaps you would suffer a seizure and choke to death on your own tongue. Who knows? But tell me, Sirius, what did you see? All my other test subjects died unable to speak of their experience. I would like at least to be able to tell the Dark Lord we are on the right track!"
Sirius was silent a moment. He was contemplating what on earth the Dark Lord could be designing such a foul potion for. Unfortunately, he was unlikely to find out by alienating Nott. He sighed. "I saw...visions of futures that I fear. Hurt to myself. Hurt to people I care about."
Nott frowned. "It was supposed to cause the drinker to relive their worst memories, not imagine new scenarios," he muttered. "I wonder why..."
"Well, I didn't actually drink it, did I?"
"True. Perhaps because you were already asleep and dreaming, the fumes merely influenced your dream content, since one does not usually relive memory in dreams in any case. Hmm. At least I will be able to tell the Dark Lord something promising if this batch again proves to be lethal."
"I'm not volunteering to test the final product for you."
"No, we have muggles for that," Nott said absently, turning back to his evil elixir. He stirred it three times with a long bone.
"What kind of bone is that?" Sirius asked, just to keep the conversation going. It looked disturbingly like the leg bone of a human child.
"Femur of a Pogrebin," Nott answered.
"Oh. That's a Russian gnomic subspecies, right?" Sirius asked, vaguely recalling his Care of Magical Creatures O.W.L.s.
"Yes, one that causes unwary travelers to sense the futility of life, sink into an existential fugue, and eventually become incapable of fending off even a gnome."
"Right, right. What else is in the potion?"
"You do not need to know, nor do I have any interest in explaining to a mediocre potioneer such as yourself."
Sirius huffed. He had acquitted himself poorly in the potions interrogation the other day; Nott would not take his fever and exhaustion as an excuse either and declared him a halfwit. "Fine. Does that thing at least have a practical purpose in mind, or is it just a new way to torture those who deserve it?" Sirius asked. "I mean, there's way more cost-effective means to-"
Nott snorted. "Such concern for the treasury. Of course the Dark Lord has a purpose! Think, fool. What is the advantage of a potion over wandwork? Once brewed, it is always ready to be used, no matter which incompetent carries it. Moreover, most wizards are fools like you who wouldn't recognize the subtle threat of a novel potion like this one..." he smiled deviously. "Imagine it, Sirius. A thief comes and sees a treasure - unguarded! He need only reach out and take it, yet the act of reaching, the act of touching, that itself is the trap. And unlike a mere poison, the thief will still be salvageable for interrogation..."
"You're making it to absorb through the skin? That sounds hideously dangerous to more than just the 'thief.' Hope you you've got a method to clean it off if you ever want to touch the 'treasure' again."
Nott shook his head, smiling indulgently. "Not yet, and perhaps not ever. We must first obtain the desired effect before tinkering with the delivery system. There are other means to ensure the trap is sprung if it must remain oral. Now be silent. This next bit is sensitive."
Sirius watched quietly, mulling over the conversation in his mind. He wondered what else did the Dark Lord need to guard, now that his most precious treasure was destroyed? And where was he planning to build this 'trap,' assuming Nott was speaking of more than a hypothetical? He probably wasn't going to find out anytime soon though.
Author's note: Technically, Delirium Tremens is a withdrawal syndrome specific to alcohol, but it's what I'm basing Sirius' symptoms on. Thanks for the reviews. Continue to look for updates on Saturday.
