Finding Peace

It was dark, a heavy suffocating black. She couldn't have seen her own hand in front of her. Sometimes she wondered if her physical eyes still worked at all.

The dark didn't bother her.

She had learned to see through it - to find the rough shapes with her fingertips, to smell the rich scent of decay, to listen to the screams and cries of her fellow prisoners.

Yes, she had learned to cope with the dark a long time ago. And it wasn't as if she was alone.

He was always here. Always around her. Within her.

And sometimes ... sometimes she would see him with her fingertips and smell him in that boy's body and listen to him through the labored breathing that tickled her ear.

When he was so near, she never trusted her eyes. She kept them closed. She understood that he wouldn't want her to see him like this. Well, both of Them, really. Both her Lord and the Boy seemed to feel ill at ease. So she didn't look. And she enjoyed Them with her other senses.

The two were at such odds. Yet They both came to her for comfort.

It was funny, really.

And They had such divergent tastes. They both rather taxed the range of her abilities.

Not that she minded. She had nothing but time here. For years, the Boy took great care with his preventative measures, as he liked to call them. She wanted to laugh each time he used that basic contraceptive spell - the very one she was taught in her own Seventh Year.

As if a new life could survive in here.

As if a new life could grow in her.

As if a new life could come from the three of Them.

And before the Boy left, he always healed her wounds. Every time.

He never missed a single bruise or cut. It made her wonder if he could see through the darkness, too.

For days after each visit, she would relive every moment... every gesture, every word, every breath.

All she knew was that it was both of Them with her. But she never knew where one began and the other ended. She didn't know which of Them liked to squeeze her throat. She couldn't tell who was laughing as she awoke to an Ennervate. She didn't know which one would lightly lick her lips, leaving the gentlest of kisses on the corner of her mouth.

She had been here for years. Her fingertips told her time and time again that the Boy was long since a boy. And the screams in the night were no longer made by her former colleagues. Truly, she was the last one. And yet They still came, still indulged in her. She suspected that she was the only thing that brought Them any peace.

And she loved Them both and didn't begrudge Them this use of her body. After all, it had been a long long time since she had used it.