Liberation

Liberation

Bellatrix had been sitting dully, with her head against the wall, as she did every day. Or night. Of course, she couldn't tell. She had tried, at first, to keep track of days through her own wakings, but that had been a long time ago. She was certain that her husband, his brother, and all the other men had no notion of how long they had been in their small, dark rooms, but Bella knew. At least so far as the month, Bella knew. Her courses still came with regularity, and though she could not see the sky, she always knew when the moon was ripe and heavy. And so she marked off time that way. It was a hollow victory over the Dementors; they could not rob her of it, for she certainly took no joy in laying on soiled straw like an animal, and it was certainly no comfort to know that 160 months had passed since she had breathed fresh air, to know that a third of her life had passed in this dismal place. But it was, at least, something.

In this way, she knew it was June. The word no longer provoked memories of warm air, bright sunshine, the laughter of her friends, or the tartness of lemonade. The Dementors had stripped her of all that years earlier. June meant nothing only the sixth month now. No more, no less.

Until she felt the burn.

At first she thought she was hallucinating, or dreaming. She had done much of both in her earliest days in Azkaban, when the Dementors were still a shock, trying to escape into her own mind, imagining that her Master was calling her again, only to find it a fancy of her own invention. But as the searing pain grew hotter and more intense, Bellatrix realised it was no dream. She leapt to her feet, unsteadily but with great passion, and crowed, "He is returned!"

There was no one to hear her but the Dementors, or at least no one that would care. There were no other Death Eaters in the witches' quarters, but Bella knew that in the wizards' wing of the prison, Rodolphus, Rabastan, Antonin, all of them would be feeling what she did. And she laughed, even as she knew she was drawing Dementors to her. She let peals of mirth spill from her, for she knew of no way to hold in the river of joy that this scrap of promise caused.

The Dementors wasted no time closing in on her. The sudden burst of pleasant emotion radiated through the prison like lightning from thunderclouds. Bellatrix kept laughing, laughing with sheer joy and jubilation, and the burning pain on her arm did not lessen. "He will come! He is returned, and he will come!" she shrieked, tears springing to her eyes. The chill of the Dementors passed over her, and she collapsed, still whimpering oaths to the Dark Lord as the Dementors siphoned off her glory.

The next few months were a battle for Bellatrix. She knew the Dementors were watching her closely, waiting for her to betray some emotion they could feed on.

Bellatrix both admired and detested the Dementors. Like her, their joy was in pain, and so she felt an odd sort of kinship with them, and they knew it. But this did not cause them to give her any reprieve. They knew her, knew her loves and hates, her joys and the deeply hidden sorrows that even they had difficulty dredging up, and Bellatrix felt sure they admired her, as well. But still they fed on her, and for this Bellatrix detested them. Dementors were not creatures with any sense of loyalty, or of alliance. She could not manipulate them, and so she hated them.

It was hardest on days when she felt the burning of the Dark Mark. She could not keep from crying out every time at the reminder that the Dark Lord was restored to himself, and always the Dementors swooped up on her, eager to drink in her pleasure. It became especially difficult by December, with the sharp pain almost constant, and with Bella's growing sense of urgency.

The worst came after New Year's, when Bellatrix dreamt, for the first time in nearly fourteen years, of something other than her own sordid past.

In the dream, the Dark Mark burned more hotly than it had since the day it was first emblazoned on her skin. And she heard a hissing whisper, his voice, telling her, "Be freed, my Bella. Be freed."

She woke shrieking, not in pain or despair as so many prisoners did when their sanity finally cracked, but with all the triumphant splendour of an angel's halleluiah. "He is coming for me! I will be free! I will be free!"

The Dementors closed in on her tightly, more of them than ever, more malicious, eager to feed off of this burst of delight and, even sweeter to their tastes, hope. Bellatrix fell unconscious, and from then on, no fewer than four Dementors stood guard at her door at all times. She was thus kept in a stupor, made worse by her own determination to fight it, by her spirit's sheer stubborn refusal to relinquish hold on the glowing light she'd been offered. The Dementors seized on this, and drained from her, siphoning off the good emotions if ever she let them surface.

By the thirteenth of January - though Bella could not have known the precise day - she had nearly no sense left whatsoever. Sight failed her, she could not trust if the sounds she heard were real or in her head, and her body lay limp on the ground, too flaccid to move. Dimly, through her grey haze, she heard shouts, blasts, shrieks, but could not move to respond. Then there were hands on her, and her eyes would not focus to see who dared to touch her, nor would her arms obey her commands to fight, to struggle.

"Careful, you idiot! That's no way to--" She was handed off to another pair of arms. "You don't carry a lady like she's a sack of dragon dung." These hands were gentler, and she realised she'd been lifted off of the floor. As a hand supported her head to keep it from lolling back, she tried to focus both her eyes and her mind.

"L-Lucius?"

She could not see it, but he smiled. He had so rarely heard her voice anything but sharp and strong. It was strange, to see her brought so low, weak and malnourished and defenceless as a child. It was too dark to see just how damaged she was by her years in Azkaban, but Lucius knew she would not be the ravishing beauty he remembered, and could tell by her slight weight in his arms that the impact had been severe. It's strange... he thought, that Azkaban could have a humanising effect on anyone. The Dementors are supposed to reduce people to animals, but... "Yes, Bella, it's me," he said. "Can you put your arms around my neck?" She tried, weakly, but found she didn't have the strength. "Crabbe, make yourself useful, for Salazar's sake." Somehow her weak arms found their way around Lucius's arms. Later she would be shamed to realise she'd been in such a state, but for the time being she was too fragile to put up any resistance for the sake of her dignity.

"What are you going to do with her?"

Another voice. She couldn't place it without a face. Nott? Greengrass? Bulstrode?

"I'm taking her back to the Estate. To her sister." The last phrase was hissed, apparently in response to some sort of skeptical look from the other Death Eater. "Get all the others to the hiding place. You have the healing potions they'll need. Try to see who you can get back in their right senses."

The next thing Bella could make sense of, she was being laid carefully on a bed. A soft bed, with plush pillows and silky sheets, and a female voice was ringing. "Is she--oh dear... she's not..."

"She'll be fine," Lucius said curtly. "Eventually. Don't pester her."

Bellatrix tried to blink her eyes open, but could see only hazy shapes. Lucius's, tall and dark-robed, and another, Narcissa's, smaller and slighter but just as fair, a blur of blonde and blue. Lucius swept from the room, but Narcissa's form came closer, dropping down beside the bed. "Bella, darling, can you hear me?" Bellatrix wanted to snap out some sort of sarcastic response, but the best she could manage was a feeble nod. "Oh, good!" Bellatrix felt a slight pressure in her left hand, and guessed that Narcissa had taken it. "Do you think you can drink something, if I bring it to you?" Bella nodded again. "I'll be right back." A moment later, Narcissa returned, and held a goblet to Bellatrix's lips. "There we go," she said soothingly, sounding much like what Bellatrix had always assumed a mother ought to sound like. Their own never had, of course, and Bellatrix dimly wondered what sort of a mother Narcissa had turned out to be.

Bellatrix coughed. "That... is vile..." she said weakly. Her vision was starting to come more into focus, and she could tell Narcissa was smiling.

"It's a restorative potion," the blonde explained. "It may take a few days, but it'll get you on your feet again."

"And here I thought... you fixed everything... with tea..." Bellatrix murmured. The reference, somewhere in Bella's barely connected mind, was to a willow bark tea Narcissa had always made when they were younger, when Bella would test out curses on her little sister for practise. If Narcissa understood the reference, or even heard her, she gave no sign of it, but slipped her white arm around her sister's shoulders.

"It'll be alright, Bella. Cissa's here. Everything's going to be just fine. You're free now, and it'll be all better soon."

And Bella let herself believe it.