Interlude 4
17 May 2001, London England
When Harry entered the kitchen Hermione immediately set her Prophet down. Leaning into his chest she looked up at him through half-lidded eyes and husked her voice to announce 'Your tits are amazing, darling.' She blinked rapidly up at her friend, trying not to break into laughter and failing miserably.
'Are you saying you don't find me ravishing?' Harry inquired, grinnning. 'In your dreams, Potter.' Hermione supplied cheerfully while grabbing for her coffee mug and taking a great big swig of the sludgy liquid within. 'Really, Harry, it's undignified.' She grinned back at him, dragging her hand through his already messy hair. 'It's for a good cause! Everyone's always asking for photos anyway, might as well give the people what they want.' Harry grinned.
Kreacher and his new trainee Nell brought their Master his breakfast, and Hermione went back to her newspaper after setting out a few coins. She had taken to tipping them ('It's not a payment, it's an expression of thanks!') and they sported ornately decorated pillowcases. Harry smiled at them fondly, bidding them a hearty thank you as they left before turning to Hermione. Hermione thought the glow of the warm fireplace and the bright light of the kitchen at Grimmauld Place felt homely now he'd finally completed renovations and moved back in, and the now frequent appearances of an openly mischievous grin on Harry's face was another victory beyond her best dreams, whatever jokes they made between them set aside.
'Do you think' Harry begun slowly, 'I'd be less popular if I grew a beard? Maybe I'll bleach my hair to avoid the press. I've been thinking of starting a hippogriff breeding scheme with Hagrid, too. That would discourage anyone coming too close to me.'
'I think we all know it'd take more than that..' Hermione reached for her coffee.
'Dragon breeding scheme, then?'
'That's m'boy.' she boomed, slapping his shoulder and leaning back for a swig. 'Keeping the press at bay by any means necessary aside... Really, Harry, topless photos?' She laughed despite herself as Harry reddened considerably.
'They're not that bad! It's for a good cause.'
'It'll make a boatload, I've already ordered a dozen myself. I feel strongly that everyone I have ever met must have one prominently displayed in their home.' Hermione grinned widely. 'The Boy Who Lived To Strip For Charity – I know it's early but I'm nominating it now, headline of the year.'
Harry made a noise of disapproval and folded his arms over his chest. Hermione laughed. 'Oh, don't be such a grouch. Quality journalism is very important, you know.'
'Honestly, when they approached me for the calendar, I did not realize this was what they had in mind.'
October 24, 2003
'There's a precarity to the situation for Purebloods that I just don't think has really been considered.' Draco said, before taking a quiet bite of his food. When Hermione rolled her eyes, he persisted, 'I'm not saying it makes everything alright, but it sort of does explain how these politics get traction. You have the entire world on your side, and even during the war, the Ministry and the Order were always there to protect your interests.'
'The Ministry and the Order never protected my family, Draco, if that's what you mean by 'interests'. Most muggleborns knew, we knew deep in our bones, that Death Eaters could get a hold of our family at any time, and that if they found a reason to, they'd kill them. Of course we said nothing, we'd be risking our families if we did. Of course we didn't shout about the unfairness of the system, but that doesn't mean the system ever served our 'interests' as you put it. I don't think the Pureblood politics are really that different, you're just operating from a point of privilege that makes it difficult to see that the system did not privilege muggle-borns – it privileged muggles and it privileged power.'
'So you think it's easier to be a Pureblood?' he asked. Hermione found herself briefly marvelling at a world that had her and Draco Malfoy talking about politics over lunch. Draco continued, 'Your world is so much bigger. You have options I couldn't dream of.' He paused briefly, before looking at her curiously, 'You could go back. Why haven't you?'
'Setting aside that my whole life has been shaped by magic... I don't know that I could. I understand what makes you think I could, but I think it's your ignorance of the muggle world speaking. I don't have a muggle education or credentials, I have no muggle money or a bank account, and no real way to get one. I had a British passport but that's... there's no record of me in the system. When we enter the magical world the Ministry of Magic makes us disappear. As far as the British government is concerned I do not exist and I never did. That's without going into the way my magic might interfere with normal office equipment and how I'd have to live a very restrictive lifestyle to even function there.'
July 1989, Azkaban Prison
How long has it been? How long still to go? No Dark Mark. No Dark Lord. Is this, finally, the moment I will lose faith? Bellatrix wonders wearily, her hipbones chafing on the unyielding stone floor of her cell as she rolls over.
Bellatrix considers, again, for what must be the thousandth time, that she might be wrong. The Dark Lord could be gone forever. His cause could be lost. It could be that it does not even matter, this waiting, this sacrifice. This life. The most likely outcome, if she's honest with herself, is that she will perish in this prison along with every other damned soul in here.
She raises herself, standing with the last strength left in her frame. No, she thinks. 'He will come for me. I know it.' she speaks it clearly, waiting for a lingering echo that never comes. The walls of Azkaban do not answer. She raises her mental walls again in an attempt to shield herself. At least this keeps her magic strong, although it seems to only exhaust and further fracture her mind. Nevermind that. She will not fail her Lord. She will not die in this place.
November 1995 Azkaban Prison
The walls of Azkaban are shaking. She feels the vibrations in her feet. Could he have come for her, finally?
'My Lord...' she whispers it, reverently. She has waited so long. 14 years, almost precisely. 'My Lord!' she tries to shout it, but cannot manage. When did she last shout, anyway? Her voice feels unnervingly raw and her vocal chords unusually tender. Everyone has long since gone quiet in Azkaban.
She knew when He disappeared it was only a matter of time before they would come for her. And now... now. She has spent 14 years listening to their cries, feeling their pain, waiting for them to go quiet. She watches again and again as Frank and Alice Longbottom go insane, taking all information they have with them, all her hopes and her dreams. She sees again and again the death of every worthless Muggle, every blood traitor piece of filth, every mudblood that she has personally seen die. Everyone she has personally murdered. She feels everything breaking her soul apart and it shoots her through with a despair unparalleled by any of her nightmares. At least when she wakes up from those she can convince herself it was only a dream.
It is all there is left now, an endless shifting between waking and sleeping nightmares. She knows it means the Dementors are slowly eating her soul, but she is helpless to stop it. This is how she is to be punished for everything she has done. This is, when done to her, what the Ministry considers justice. Or so she has been told.
The happy memories were all taken first, then the painful ones. For a long time there has only been horror left. Horror and a shame that burns coldly in her bones.
She cannot remember the faces of anyone she has loved, nor the feeling of love itself. But she remembers He will come for her. She knows this for a fact, and so it stays with her. It isn't a happy thought, exactly, just the truth. The only thing she has to do is not die, and then he will come for her.
The thought that she will be free, reunited with her Lord, that she will live on after Azkaban fills her with nausea. She no longer wants life, nor does she long for death. All she wants now is peace. The Dementors fill her with memories of what she has done so that she knows, every moment, that she will never attain that peace.
Her actual time with the Dark Lord disappeared from her memory after only a short while. Her marriage, her friendships, Narcissa, they all disappeared quickly, as well. Her parents, her education, the Dark Lord's speeches, the world they were going to build together, all gone by the time she could reach in and count the spaces between each of her ribs. Everything went before the end of her 4th year, and by then it had become terribly painful and tainted and angry. Distorted to reflect only humiliation, failure, and rejection onto herself. She was almost glad when it disappeared, but now she misses what she knows must have existed before - her memories, her life, her emotions.
She remembered Andromeda for a slightly longer time. The pain of losing her kept the Dementors happy enough to keep it around. She sees the hurt in her sister's face, feels the sting in her soul all over again, and she knows she was wrong. She feels so very sad about it, she feels the chasm of an irrevocably broken relationship so deeply that she decides something must be done. So she focuses her energy on convincing herself that it was a good thing she did what she did, that she sent Andromeda off for a better life. Then, she doesn't remember it anymore. The Dementors have taken it and replaced it with something gruesome, finally done with her life. Only the violence, from then on.
Everything she has done to tarnish her soul now haunts her unrelentingly as the Dementors feast on the scraps of those wounds. It is as if they claw to open them wider, to make them bleed more. Of course, she cannot see any of it, all she knows is that burning shame, that pain of having done something unforgivable. She tears at her hair to distract herself, claws at her legs. She counts her ribs again and again, digs her nails into her hipbones. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. She knows, distantly, that one isn't supposed be able to survive very long around a Dementor, that her soul eventually will move beyond a breaking point of what it could possibly endure without fracturing entirely.
They have taken too much from her already. Her life, her emotions, everything up to this point in time seems entirely meaningless, wholly incoherent and incomprehensible to her now. She wonders often why she did not kill herself long before her imprisonment, and considers often that perhaps she should amend that mistake. But she knows he will come for her, so instead she waits. There are no other alternatives, really. Death will not grant her peace, she can feel it in her soul, not after what has been done. No one else will save her. It is this or her Lord. He will rescue her.
She twists and turns her emotions, trying again to turn horror into happiness. Only then will the Dementors take the memory completely. Turn everything good into pain, turn everything painful into happiness. A lesson learnt too late, or perhaps the mistake is to learn it at all. But she knows it will not be long now. She is stronger than the others. She will fight the Dementors until there is nothing left.
The Dark Mark has been back for a while. It is more beautiful than she remembered (she thinks she remembered, at least). She holds it against her cheek, huddles against it's unnatural warmth. He will come for her, she knows. Soon. In the meanwhile, she will concentrate on making Frank and Alice a comical memory, like the things she cannot remember but knows have been taken from her. She thinks of their shrieks of horror and tries to laugh. It doesn't quite work yet, but she still has time.
January-August 1996
When he does finally come for her it is glorious. He takes hold of her and Apparates her away from her nightmare. She has never been more grateful to anyone. He holds her close and examines her, puts her up for the night in a warm room. There is food and drink. There is a bath. There are clean robes. Her heart swells with love for him that night like it never has before, nor will ever again, for anyone. Her saviour.
When she is reunited with her husband and her sister, it is nothing. She has trouble remembering them at first, but the memories return to her after a while, in a way. Rodolphus flinches away like she does, not sure who they are to each other anymore. She does not love him any longer. It seems her ability to love has been dimmed overall, though she does not notice yet. She loves her sister, she thinks. And her nephew. She loves nothing else that she can think of. She worships her Master.
She concentrates on getting healthy again, for her Lord. Perhaps before she would have considered his plans more, considered the advisability of them. But now she has nowhere else to go, and he has saved her very soul. She will follow him to death, to insanity, to Hell. He is all that matters now.
As time passes and she remembers more, she notices he is different. The way he looks and the way he is has changed. He pays little attention to her, doesn't want her to serve as a strategist, nor does he ask her advice. His charm has gone, as has his leniency, and the warmth he once showed her. His vision of a new world seems to matter less to him. Only his immortality, achieved through the death of the Potter boy, matters to him now. And so, it is all Bellatrix cares about too. She will follow him blindly off a cliff if she must.
He doesn't inquire much about her skill as she trains herself up again, he only observes casually as she duels everyone in turn. For every duel she loses by a smaller margin until, finally, she wins.
Time passes quickly and before she has fully remembered herself yet, she is sent to the Department of Mysteries for her Master. Lucius is in charge of the whole ordeal. She loathes him. It is odd, the degree with which she loathes anyone who has led a life of relative comfort for these past 14 years. She knows she will never fully heal from what has been done to her, and here is this man flushed with wealth and comfort and he is supposed to lead her? Lead Rodolphus? It is disgusting.
A part of her recognizes that it is the sort of mission she should not be sent on. Nor should Lucius. The chance of being caught is too great for either of them to be sent headfirst into the Ministry. Neither of them are worth sacrificing. Not for this. She says nothing. Her Lord is not the same man she loved, the one who would welcome her counsel. She is only a pawn on his chess board now. A pawn whose soul he once rescued, and the memory burns again in her blood as she duels for her life inside the Ministry.
It all goes wrong, and her stupid cousin trips and kills himself. She duels a woman she realizes, when a look too familiar crosses her face, must be Andromedas child, suddenly grown. She cannot bring herself to kill her. She doesn't kill the children, either, though it is only because she worries the shock might lead Potter to drop the prophecy. If she captures the children Potter might trade them for the prophecy, she hopes. She doesn't catch them, either, though.
Everything is going all wrong, but her Lord saves her again. She knows what to expect, she knows what he will do. She opens her mind to him, shows him the whole fiasco. He sees her mercy, and he is angry. She will have to pay the price for her own mistakes, as well as those of her fellows. It is so easy to take it, now. His torture feels so mild, his anger like a caress - he only does it because he cares. The Dementors would break her, and think nothing of it.
He tells her she is to stay behind from now on. She is to lay plans, to keep everyone else in line and on task. She knows it is meant to be a demotion, and wonders briefly if he even remembers that this is what she has always done for him. This was her purpose, to be a strategist and occasional mercenary. She decides to work harder so He will notice her again. He is the sun around which she revolves now.
The Dark Lord decides to sacrifice Draco as Lucius' punishment. Narcissa is crazed with despair and turns to Snape, the traitor. Bellatrix knows Severus, after all. She taught him Occlumency and Legilimency, taught him Dark magic way beyond what he had learnt on his own. He is a gifted man, but he has lived under the wing of Dumbledore too long. She cannot trust him any longer. She teaches Draco Occlumency. It is all she can think of to keep him safe. Not from her Lord, but at least from the traitor.