Beyond Saving

"Don't let him have me."

You take careful, measured breaths as you look down at him from two inches advantage in height and the elation of victory.

A white face, with a thin burn scar cutting a dark streak over one cheekbone to mirror the more famous one on his forehead. Eyes so wide they're almost black, with palpable fear flickering in them. And he does well to fear. The Dark Lord, victorious, is not inclined to mercy, least of all for this one who would style himself his nemesis.

"Don't give me to him," he pleads again. "Take me yourself, kill me, do what you want, just don't..."

He falls silent under your gaze. Crabbe and Macnair brought him in, felled by a Petrificus of all things. Oh yes, you could do what he asks. The Dark Lord need never know.

You recall Azkaban, a place you had never set foot in before, not to visit any of your former associates, not as a prisoner. Even the period before your trial after your Master's fall was spent in comfortable confinement at Marchbanks House. Before him, no one in the Ministry would have dared to treat you like this. Potter, who made himself into the instrument of your destruction. And now, offers himself as the object of your vengeance. Voluntarily.

THE DEMENTORS HAVE ABANDONED AZKABAN, the Daily Prophet had blared in three-inch headlines. And so they had. All except for those chained by habit, the stragglers, the few who would have a certain if meagre meal rather than the lavish banquet promised to them by your Master. The professedly human guards of the fortress give their Death Eater prisoners - old and new - over to those few stragglers. And compared to your old comrades, used and familiar as old bones the Crup dug up in the yard after long neglect, you are unspoiled by their sick attentions and therefore the preferred victim.

Macnair, who shares your fate, fights them like a wizard possessed, sending dark-robed wraiths flying until they wear him down by sheer numbers, swarming him like a tattered flock of crows. How he can bring himself to touch those abominations remains a mystery to you - perhaps there is barely a happy thought to be found in that thick head, bent on carnage and dismemberment.

Bellatrix Lestrange, too, had shared Macnair's predilection for cruelty even before thirteen years in Azkaban honed that inclination to a cutting edge. Perhaps it makes them more resilient. Bellatrix, whose mad antics cost you victory in the Department of Mysteries, and who still walked free to wreak her merry havoc at the Dark Lord's right hand...

You never considered yourself an emotional, even less sentimental man. But there are memories you treasure. Andromeda Black's mouth opening sweetly under yours at a birthday party in the Malfoy gardens, long before her name became anathema. Your first kill in a wizard's duel, relief over having survived as acute as the thrill of power. The first time you made love to Narcissa; the day the midwitch put the furiously pink bundle that was your newborn son into your arms, and then, years later, that blond head disappearing for the first time into the brilliant scarlet carriage of the Hogwarts Express...

Those final images make you scream after all when the monsters come for you. You thrash and bite and struggle like a mad thing, until they pin you to the floor, mouldy, dust-ridden robes half-smothering your face, trapping your limbs, and their touch spills ice right down into your bones. They feed on the memory of the day as if they were sucking your love for your infant son out of your very soul.

A few weeks more of this, and you'll still have an heir, blood of your blood, but no longer a son.

When they have stuffed themselves, they leave you on the floor in convulsive sobs and twitches. You find Rodolphus Lestrange's vacant eyes trained on you through the bars of both of your cells, and you don't know what cuts deeper, the glimmer of contempt or pity in them.

You pass the nights sitting under the tiny barred window of your cell, knees tucked under your chin and unmoving except for an occasional hitch of breath, and picture in loving, gory detail Harry Potter's fate should you ever lay hands on him. Only when the grey veil of morning flutters up the walls, when the spray hits the lower parts of the fortress' walls and your eyes burn from lack of sleep, you realise how time has slipped by.

And when the Dementors again glide in with the sunrise, their skeletal hands open and close in mute greed as they sense your satisfaction, but then they hesitate to approach their feast for a blissful moment when they realise how steeped your pleasure is in revulsion. As much as you hate Potter, your own imagination in devising how to punish that child for his transgressions sickens you.

Whatever you're reduced to, you're not Bellatrix yet!

But at night, it feels so, so good to picture him screaming, blood running over that pale skin, fingers gouging until those arrogant eyes turn into bloody, dripping holes...

Under that little window, shivering in too-light prison robes despite the one thin blanket you've pulled around your shoulders, you listen for hours to the cries of the few seagulls that have returned to the island once the majority of the Dementors were gone.

Through the first weeks, their mournful cries are soothing, reflecting your state of mind as the memories of your family, your triumphs and your loved ones slowly run through your fingers like sand trickling down into the depth of the ocean rolling below.

But in time you come to loathe the creatures which glide freely in the breeze over the cliffs, screaming out their fluttery protests when the path of a guard disturbs their circles.

They make themselves familiar with the presence of the solitary wizard huddling in front of his window. Perhaps your sharp features, the tangled pale hair, remind them of one of their own, or of weeds to build a nest with. You don't know, and neither do you care as they dare to fly closer and closer outside the bars, and finally to land on the rough stone of the sill, scuttling a few bird steps back and forth and cocking their small heads in ridiculous suspicion, their beaks scavenging for food. Inevitably they are disappointed. You would not dream of sharing your meagre rations of bread with those feathery pests that every so often throw themselves off the sill to dance in the air outside the castle walls as if to mock you.

Yes, you come to hate the birds; you follow their flight with sullen, greedy eyes while their screams echo in the confines of your skull, shrill to the brink of pain. What reason have they to scream, being able to evade the vaguest hint of Dementor presence with the mere push of a wing? You want peace, peace to sink inside your mind and bar up the tattered remains of love and happiness behind boards that you hope will keep the monsters away and mislead them. Except that whenever they come, they push down those feeble walls with no more than a brush of a scaly, scabbed claw. They wrap your soul in ice, taking their pleasure and leaving you with a parting brush of putrid lips on your frozen cheek, like the most supremely callous of lovers.

But they don't care, those infernal birds, they just jump and peck on that sill, oblivious to the wizard burning in the fever dreams of revenge next to them, until one morning you open your eyes to find a raw lump between your hands, blood stains and feathers scattered all over your robe and face, and the skin of your fingers pecked raw.

The stench is immediate, foul and sweetly-metallic despite harsh salt of the sea breeze all around. You stare down at the minuscule carnage with glazed eyes that refuse to register details. Even your hands are strangely numb, as if pain was just another memory, the reality of which has been sucked away. There is what looks like a bird foot on the floor, like a twig tied to a red rag, and precious little to link the remains to a gull - there doesn't seem to be a head left, just greyish-pink matter that might be gull brains squelching between your fingers.

I'm not Bellatrix! something howls inside you.

It is the last time you cry, that day, and over something as ridiculous, as minor as a dead bird. You sacrifice the entire contents of your water jug that morning, scrubbing bloody clumps off your fingers, and go thirsty for a day.

The birds don't come to your window again, and when they swirl over the ramparts, feathers sleekly shining in the breeze, their cries assume a mournful air as they pass by.

Or so it seems.

You lose your soul in that cell, piece by piece, and know someone will have to pay for it.

When the Dark Lord sweeps to the rescue, leading his remaining Death Eaters into the weakly defended fortress that is Azkaban, you step out of your cell with no shadow clouding the tinny brightness of your eyes. You do not revel in the screams torn from the bleeding mouths of the guards who had the misfortune to escape the first wave of Avada Kedavras, although satisfaction curves your lips into a grim little smile.

But only one kind of scream will ever satisfy you now.

After that, the road to victory is smooth. It's Severus Snape whom the Dark Lord sends into Hogwarts, to disable its formidable wards and to assassinate its equally formidable headmaster.

You were there during the three days it took to break your old friend, Draco's godfather. It was you who informed the Dark Lord of his questionable loyalty. Years ago, after you learned of his activities as a spy shortly before your Master's defeat, you struck a deal: you would keep Severus's secret, and in return he would protect you and your family from the wrath of the Ministry and his Order. A bargain born of pragmatism and a history of companionship.

After Azkaban, you can still recall to mind the familiar images - young Severus's hero-worship as a first-year, shared Death Eater battles and late-night discussions in front of the fireplace, the two of you teaching Draco to ride his first broom - but nothing more. You need something to buy your way back into the good graces of the Dark Lord, and so you give him Severus. It was he who broke the compact first anyway - he failed to protect you from hell.

Very few of the Order and of Hogwarts' protégés make it out that night, although, predictably, Albus Dumbledore's young weapon Harry Potter is among the few spirited to safety. To temporary safety, as it turns out.

And so you have come to stand in this street in front of the Diagon Alley shop your allies have dragged Potter out of at last, and look into those eyes that are shimmering brightly with fear. Fear of the wrong thing entirely. And he begs you, of all people, for mercy.

"Are you offering your questionable charms in bed?" you ask bluntly, and watch the pained face go bone-white at that, eyes turning so dark they could just be his father's. His Adam's apple bobs painfully as he swallows around the pebble that seems to be lodged in his throat.

He just lowers his head to gaze at his feet. "Even that," he whispers, in a subdued, rough voice. And then hesitantly, because he can't quite believe you mean it, "If that's what you really want..."

So focused on the Dark Lord, so very afraid is that foolish child, too occupied to take note of the others who fall to the wayside before him. He would be far better off with your Master, the other half of himself. They complement each other, forces of destruction both.

This self-professed innocent took your son from you, and your wife, and yet he lays those dilated, uncomprehending eyes on your human face and believes it offers him refuge against the monster that haunts his nightmares. He made you what you are, and does not even understand. How could you not do his bidding?

And yet, there are some depths you refuse to sink into.

"No," you tell him, very coldly. "I will not have you."

The words dash whatever frayed hope he's been clinging to right out of his face. His lips tremble.

"You will go to the Dark Lord, to serve his pleasure."

You draw your cloak more tightly around your shoulders against the sudden chill that seems to have sunk into the evening.

Not Bellatrix, no. Not yet.

"I will not have you," you repeat, as if to convince yourself. "And you may thank your maker that I won't."

~ finis ~