Like Flowers Continually Perishing

When his mother had appeared in the hallway outside of Barty's cell, he had scarcely been able to recognize her. Sunken was the first word he would have used to describe her- she had lost too much weight and her posture was slumped. Her eyes peered out over heavy bags, and they were watery with pain and prolonged suffering. He'd known she was sick, she had been for a good while, but to see how much she had decayed in his absence nearly broke his heart.

When the heavy barred door swung slowly open, he had hugged her and cried into her embrace and spilled out his heart before noticing his father hoovering just outside the doorway, looking on disapprovingly.

"My son!" his mother exclaimed tearfully. "My dear boy!"

His father was silent, and he remembered only too well his words on the day of his trial. Barty decided then that if he was no longer a son, then he no longer had a father. He returned his attention fully onto his mother, and asked the question that had been lurking in the back of his mind since hearing shuffling footsteps and peering through his window to see the mirage-like image of his mother. "How are you here?"

"Oh, Barty, I've missed you so," said his mother quietly. "Let me look at you."

Barty didn't know what sort of visage he would present, but he stepped back and allowed his mother to survey him lovingly. He knew that his tattered grey prison robes were worse for wear, his hair had grown unruly and tangled, his fingernails were gnawed unevenly and he was coated in a not-so fine layer of grime. Worse yet, he knew that he had lost what little extra weight and muscle he had possessed thanks to inactivity and the thin, sloppy food that was nourishing and little else. He was now little more than a shadow of the boy he had been.

Looking at his mother's wizened form again, he realized that he wasn't the only one who was only a shadow of who they had once been.

"Mum?" he said as she started to cry again, sadness etched onto her aged face. "I'm not that bad off, Mum, I'm fine really," he said, wanting her to believe the untruths. Wanting her pain to be eased suddenly took precedence, for once obscuring his own needs. In isolation all that had dominated his mind concerning his parents was to show them his suffering, to show his father what he had condemned his son to.

Now all he wanted was to make his mother stop crying.

"I love you, Barty, you know that," his mother said. His father glowered.

"I love you too, Mum," he said.

"I don't want this for you, baby," she said. "You deserve better. You're wasting away."

"I'm fine," he said weakly.

"You aren't. You can't lie to me," she argued, stepping further into the cell. His father took half a step, reaching towards her slightly. "No, Barty," she said to his father. "Remember what we talked about."

"Mum?" he said, confused.

"I can't let my only son die here," she said. "I can't bear the thought."

He remained silent, not knowing what to say. He didn't regret his actions for his Master, but he wished that somehow things might have been easier on his mother.

"That's why you're leaving here," she continued, trailing her hand along one cold wall. "Barty?"

He wondered for the briefest second what she was asking him before realizing that she was using the tone that she reserved for her husband. His father stepped forward and pulled two vials from his voluminous official robes, handing them both to his wife.

She reached up and jerked a few hairs from her thinning scalp. She dropped them in one vial, and held it towards him. It turned a murky mauve, and he knew it must be Polyjuice. He reached up and pulled a few hairs from his own scalp, dropping them in the vial she held in the other hand, the contents of which turning a dull slate grey, before taking the one she offered towards him.

"A-a-are you sure?" he choked out. He hated the thought of his mother feeling the cold tendrils of dread that accompanied the Dementors' rounds through the halls, of letting her remain in his cell while he roamed free.

"I gave you life once before," she said. "Let me do it again."

"But you'll be stuck here," he said. He couldn't manage to tell her that she would die in this cell if he let her stay.

"I haven't much time left," she said. "Not enough time to matter where it's spent."

It was easy for her to be stoic now. The terrors of Azkaban receded when visitors were present, when real human beings dressed in colors other than dirty grey dared to walk boldly where only Dementors were meant to glide.

"You don't understand," he said. "I can't let you... Go home with Dad, Mum. Don't do this to yourself. I'll be fine."

His mother shook her head and raised the vial of Polyjuice to her lips. "I love you, son, and I want to help you. I will help you. Please don't waste my sacrifice."

She downed the potion like a recovered alcoholic falling back on old habits, grimaced, and dropped the vial as her frail body bubbled into his own weakened form. She reached over as he was still staring in vague, distant shock, and carefully snipped a good portion of his hair. She tucked the locks into a pocket of her robes - robes he now noticed were deliberately grey and formless - and said, "Go ahead."

He wanted to protest more, he truly did, but he couldn't refuse his mother's imploring. He drank the potion, shuddering, and hunched over as he melted away and his mother replaced him. His thoughts should be different, to match his new familiar exterior, but he felt the same as before mentally.

"Come on," said his father gruffly.

"Good-bye, love," said his mother softly. He was vaguely shocked at how high and innocent his voice sounded under her direction.

His father nodded to her, but made no move to embrace her.

He stepped forward and embraced his mother one final time, marveling at how fragile her body felt and how much larger and imposing his own felt as his skinny arms wrapped around her frail shoulders. His lips kissed the top her head, and suddenly the warmth of his mother's presence was gone and he was standing unsupported in the center of his cell. Her cell, now.

He stared at his forlorn, crying face as his father lead him out of the cell, and began to cry himself as the door swung slowly shut, entombing his mother in her final resting place.

His father was silent during the entire trek out of Azkaban's bowels, into a lobby of sorts that Barty remembered from his arrival and even as he pulled a busted compass out of presumably the same pocket that the vials of Polyjuice had rested.

Within thirty seconds, he was home.

Barty enjoyed his freedom, jumping up in elation and lavishing in the feeling of not being confined by grey walls and cold fear, not even allowing his mother's death or his own recovery from the rigors of Azkaban dim his enthusiasm. Before long, though, a silvery cloak was shoved in his direction.

"You must wear this at all times," his father said. "You must not be seen."

He thought it was a reasonable request.

When his father put the Imperius curse on him for wanting to return to his Master, he did not have the will to think it was unreasonable. He just was, and enjoyed being. He was paying his due, and he would not, could not refuse.

He was paying his due.

They all have ways to make you pay, he knew, and had submitted to the reality of paying. His father's method was more frustrating, in the beginning, than Azkaban had been, but mercy or perhaps practicality had lead to the Imperious haze that had held him captive for so long, longer than Azkaban. He had time to do nothing but reflect on what his life had been.

His childhood was wrought with strict rules and stricter punishments, with his smiling mother and sweets, with childhood friendships based on age and adventure, on learning his place and learning about the world.

His childhood was freedom.

He would play with the other wizarding children, and they would hunt dragons and defeat inquisitorial Muggles set upon destroying the magical world and try to fly on broomsticks that had long since lost their charm. He would run crying home, where his mother would mend scraped knees and wounded elbows while his father watched his histrionics with a derisive sneer.

When he went away to school, things changed. Hogwarts, for all her majestic beauty, became his first prison. No more could he run and play amongst the trees, unencumbered by rules and deadlines and decorum. At Hogwarts, within the walls of Slytherin, he found himself bound and fettered by the sort of order his father had fondly imposed upon him, and he hated it. For years, he hated school and his classmates and the rules and stone walls that bound him.

Bellatrix had freed him.

She was the older, dark beauty he by all rights should have fallen in love with, but his heart did not ache for her. He knew her cruelty too well to want her to turn her attentions on him exclusively, and she knew his meekness too well to want to bother with him. Love was not destined for him. Freedom was what he yearned for, not more chains, no matter what pleasure might accompany their presence.

But Bellatrix had freed him from the prison of Hogwarts. Not physically- he knew that he needed the education, the credentials it offered to achieve any of his father's high expectations, those outwardly-imposed ambitions that had earned him entrance into Slytherin House. But she had shown him that rules needn't dictate his actions and that just because he was supposed to do something didn't mean he had to. She showed him the path of anarchy and rebellion, and he embraced the freedom that it offered.

Dark magic was freedom.

The subversive lure of the forbidden and the orgasmic surrender to temptation sent his soul flying ecstatic through the clouds, pulled the stars and the moon and the midday sun into his heart and made him embrace the burn that resulted from their scalding heat. This was stuff that should be beyond the ability of wizardkind to handle, but they did. They held the magic within themselves and did not surrender to it, did not bend and did not fall, and he was stronger for it. They were stronger for it, the ungainly Slytherins, all of them, and no one could ever defeat them. They were not to be trifled with, they would not break.

When he had been caught, he had been with beautiful Bellatrix and had not feared for himself. Her influence reminded him that his Lord's opinion and respect was the only one that mattered, and that even his supposed downfall was only a test to discern the loyal from the sheep.

Azkaban had been a cold shock. His loyalty had faltered, his spirits dampened and his body weakened.

His mother had freed him from all that.

He gripped tightly to the memory of elation that had followed stepping outside of Azkaban's embrace. His father had made him pay, trapping him in the house, binding him with a curse as Unforgivable as the one that had lead to his imprisonment.

Prison was his life. Prison was his adulthood. Prison had dimmed his soul and had wrapped around his thoughts, prison had formed his body and his personality and his soul.

His soul was important. His soul kept him alive, kept him from becoming the drooling fate-less living corpse that by all rights he should be. His soul was the only thing within this decaying, moldering body that mattered.

The past few years were a hazy, pleasant blur, and that made it all the more unbearable after the seemingly endless period of agony that had been his time in Azkaban. Few incidents stood out in sharp relief to the muted, impressionistic haze that most of his memories had faded to.

The first was the moment when he realized that he was free from Azkaban.

The second was that first day of freedom. The obscene pleasure of eating fresh fruit, rich chocolate and savory meat, and the wicked indulgence in bathing, wearing sinfully soft and luxurious clothing and resting in the heavenly softness of his bed.

The final moment was awakening, as if from a fuzzy, half-remembered dream, from Imperius.

His fervor and his passion for his Lord was the only sharpness in his life, the only clarity he had left. Memories were faded, his life confined but he still had faith that his Lord would return to him, and return him to his former state of glory.

He would seek out those who had not believed, who had not been proven themselves to be amongst the loyal. He would make them pay as he had paid. He would no longer be shrouded into insubstantiality and drugged into submission. He would become real again, and prove to the world that he existed. To show the world that he was no longer dead, but a living, free wizard.

When the house-elf mentioned the Quidditch World Cup, Barty saw an opportunity. When she convinced his father to allow him to go, he knew things would fall into place.

When he heard about the Tri-Wizard Tournament, he began to plan. The insincere and the traitors could not hide for long. He would prove himself, prove that he alone was loyal beyond measure, that he alone was worthy of his Master's Mark.

Where there's a will, there's a way.