Chapter Text
Oh shit, I died, I'm dead.
How embarrassing, that did not go according to plan at all...
Not that I had a plan, per se, but if I had had one, it would have been to not get taken out by the Weasley woman..
Bellatrix had a severe headache. She had been man down for half an hour before the west wall of the Great hall had collapsed. The falling rock and support beams had landed just so to pin her to down without entirely crushing her body against the cold floor and broken furniture, where she had continued to lie unconscious, for a further three hours.
Wait, what sort of fuckery is this? Why can I still hear myself think? Oh, it hurts...
Why does it hurt?
Fuck this! Are you kidding me? Is death exactly the same as life except in the dark?
Bellatrix's eyelids fluttered sluggishly, only opening enough to let in a densely dusty ray of light. Still, it was enough to blind her momentarily with its intensity. She shut her eyelids tightly, moaning to herself.
Argh fuck off...
Not dead am I? No, can't be, way too much clutter and bruising for this to be the work of Death. I've seen death at work, I've even helped him out on the weekends a bunch of times and this just doesn't have his signature on it. Death is an eerily gracious force, isn’t he... Like a swan. He is as seductive and clean as a skater on ice. His work is crisp and clear, smooth and true - not to say he isn't passionate, sometimes he is a vengeful and twisted fucking vampire swan but even then, he still manages to be elegant when he performs.
There's something squishing into my left tit and my ankle is for sure crushed, my eyes are still working and so is my damn brain. There's nothing graceful about this. This reeks of the awkward and muddled experience of life.
Can't be dead. Nope.
"Fuck you Death... " Bellatrix muttered aloud, playing at the dryness in her mouth between her tongue and her upper palate, "after all I've done for you... What more do you want from me - fifty souls, a hundred? "
Bellatrix was making micro movements with her arms and torso, testing the gap between the rubble detaining her, trying to orientate herself, gage and weigh the risk of moving in any particular direction.
She sent a wandless, wordless spell to summon her wand and another in quick succession to lift the collapsed wall off her body. Before she had even completed the second spell she knew that the first wouldn’t work. Something felt disturbingly foreign, or rather it was the intense absence of something – her magic.
Maybe I am dead, she mused again.
She was trapped, no way out, each movement was sure to just hold her down more firmly. She tried irking her fingers in between the pockets of air in search of her wand but she ran out of places to search, she looked internally for her magic and willed it to shift the debris off of her but nothing happened.
Suddenly, she recognized the spell the redhead had sent her way.
“Fuck you Weasley, I know that you didn’t learn that spell in your defense against the dark arts classes. That is some dark-ass magic you two-timing, meddlesome little..”
She began coughing in bursts against the thick clouds of ash and dirt inside the pile of wreckage, keeping her eyes closed against the bright, granular air. Each forceful contraction of her chest, allowing the sharp object pinning her breast down to push deeper into her body with its colossal weight.
I can't move. She thought to herself, suddenly laughing lightly at the sick game Death was trying to play with her. She eased her chuckle into a smile with a wince and focused her thoughts internally.
Bella, stop flirting with Death and think for moment! What the hell has just happened? Where is everybody? How much time has passed? Why did they just leave me here?
The excited voices of two young men and their hurried footsteps approached Bellatrix and then past her as she listened in with baited breath.
"I can't believe You Know Who just died like that. Dissolving into ash like a piece of parchment in the fire."
"It was really quite pathetic to wage nearly two decades of war, taking so many lives on both sides just to kill Harry. Voldemort couldn't even kill him when he was a baby, did he really expect to do any better against an armed opponent?"
"Oh Harry was so amazing, the boy who lived - twice! It's bloody brilliant you know, the courage it must have taken to stand opposite Him, not even McGonagall stepped in alongside Harry to challenge You Know Who, he faught totally alone, and he didn't falter... They couldn't exaggerate this in the history books without making it seem less impressive. "
The voices and footsteps grew distant and then faded completely into the sound of her breath. She bit her tongue as tears involuntarily pooled around and then ran from her tightly secured eyelids, she counted to twenty, only making it to seventeen.
And then she was screaming. She barely noticed the increasing pressure of the rubble crushing her like a constrictor with each flex and twist of her excruciating cries before darkness and silence descended on her mind and she passed out again.
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Bellatrix blinked accidently as she woke once more from her comatose state.
Argh fuck! That's painful. She pulled her head back in reflex, breathing in a sharp breath of dust. Her arms were weighed down; not quite pinned but still she couldn't reach her face to wipe the dirt from her eyes and nose, she pushed the soot and sand to the front of her mouth with her tongue and then spat as much as she could over her bottom lip, feeling it drip down her chin at a slight diagonal.
She had failed him, failed herself. Her world had died and she had survived caged, practically dead but alive enough to feel her life up to that point had also collapsed on her.
Her world had disappeared and her life had suddenly become impossibly meaningless and empty. Her mind was blank and answer-less. She was about to shuffle her body against all pain adamant to crush it under the weight of the settling stone, tired now of Death's games, but the sure sound of footsteps approaching the pile of rubble in which she lay stole her attention.
Bellatrix stilled, she knew that gate, recognized those footsteps immediately, the exact weight and sound, and she supposed it was fitting…
Ms Granger was sad, maybe even angry.
Well, it was this or death by being crushed. She preferred the imagined honour of dying in battle - or it’s aftermath at least - to suicide, even if the pain would be worse. One way or another, she doubted she would have long before she could slap Death in his arrogant, dumb face.
"Hey Mudblood, ugh.. I have a ickle present for you." The footsteps froze. "I have Bellatrix Lestrange in a pile of rubble. All yours, wrapped up in a bow. Couldn't care less what you choose to do with me; dig me up and kill me or dig me up, torture me and then kill me. It's up to you entirely. My treat. Promise.”
Bellatrix smirked as she sensed the shudders in Hermione as her feet turned to face the carnage lying over her body.
A whimper escaped Hermione's lips as she raised her wand, not quite sure what to do and looking around the hall for the glassy, silver whisper of a ghost." Madam Lestrange, is that really you? Are you dead?"
"Mhmm," Bellatrix choked out, "The Weasel did her best, but it appears her best was sub-standard as usual."
"But I saw you die. Your body had no pulse when I ran up to you" Hermione stammered confused.
"You ran up to me?" Bellatrix chucked, half-heartedly." Why on earth did you do that?"
"Because I had a feeling you were still alive, I don't know why but your face looked too tormented to be dead, there was no sense of peace or rest from your body, it looked… but you had not pulse, I don't understand."
"Look Pet, if after all your running around saving the bloody world, you didn't realize that I was a horcrux, too, then that's on you. Now, kill me or whatever you want. I... I am asking nicely."
"You were a horcrux?" Hermione asked with wide eyes, more to herself than to Bellatrix, "but Voldemort only ever split his soul into seven, well eight if you include Harry but we were sure that was a mistake."
"Harry was a horcrux?” Bellatrix said under her breath, Of course the boy who lived, twice - Harry survived because he was a horcrux. “Yes, well obviously that was an accident," Bellatrix said, now almost hissing, "I on the other hand was not a mistake, there were always going to be seven, plus one for good measure – insurance, it’s a pureblood thing."
“I would have thought that seven horcruxes was a good measure of insurance.” Hermione blurted out with sarcastic amusement, before freezing again at the realisation that she was questioning the logic of a Death Eater and a cult leader.
She quickly became quite sure that she should run away and alert McGonagall or perhaps Harry and Ron at least. She was still so upset with Ron for swooping in to kiss her mere moments after dozens of her loved ones had lost their lives, as if that had removed the need for consent, or perhaps made her lust after any of the single people who had been left standing.
She subconsciously wiped the back of her hand against her lips again, alleviating her disgust and deciding against alerting the boys.
"Okay, Madam Lestrange, just wait here a minute, I'm going to get McGonagall.” Hermione responded assertively.
"No!" Bellatrix cried out. "You can't do that, they will send me back to Azkaban. Please I just want to die. If you run away to fetch someone, I will crush myself under whatever the fuck is on top of me and then you will have missed your chance to kill me yourself."
The contemplation of Hermione’s response softened her tone involuntary, "You really would rather be tortured to death by a mudblood than go back to Azkaban?"
"I would rather you skinned me alive and rolled me in salt," came Bellatrix's voice.
Hermione flinched at the mental image and paused to think. What kind of atrocities are happening at Azkaban that the greatest, most loyal and most powerful Death Eater would rather die than live there?
"Wait! You can do wandless magic - I've seen it, why are you still trapped it's been hours since anyone has been in here? You could have escaped. What do you want with me? Were you waiting for me?” A chill ran over her shoulders as she asked.
"Don't flatter yourself," Bellatrix said through a cackling laugh. It was short lived and interrupted with a desperate bout of dry coughing and heezing for breath," I've been mostly unconscious and if I could have used my magic, I'm sure I don't need to convince you that I would have - something is wrong with me, the Weasel's curse destroyed my bond to the horcrux… You can bond a horcrux to anything you like but to bond it to a human being you need magic. Can't make a horcrux out of a muggle or a squib. The Weasel conducted dark magic back there, so dark, Death Eaters don’t even use it out of respect for the integrity of magic itself. She ripped the magic right out of me, - didn't destroy it, you can't destroy or create magic as I'm sure you know, but - she flung it away from me in all directions. It is a temporary condition, my magic is already making it’s way back into my system, so if you want to kill me you're going to have to do it soon.”
Hermione was only half listening; she was just waiting, astonished for a chance to interject, "Did you just say that the horcrux is still intact, that it is simply not bound to you anymore?"
"Hmmm, guess I did and it is technically, but it's unbound, do you know what that means? Doesn't even have the freedom of a ghost, formless, lost, unredeemable. Still alive but forever dying... As if existing eternally in the kiss of a dementor" she said, a hint of softness or perhaps sadness in her voice as it trailed off
"Well then how do I know you won't try bind it to something?" Hermione asked?
"Aren't you listening," Bellatrix said through a groan as the pain in her body and heart caught up with her. "The brightest mudblood of her age? - I wouldn't have thought I would need to repeat myself. The horcrux is Un.Re.Deem.Able. it can't be summoned or contained, can't be contacted and can't make contact - it exists now not in thought or in action or in form only in feeling, only in its own loneliness and emptiness and disorientation, it will never know life ever again and it will never know death. Just pretend it doesn't exist if it's easier for you to understand" she said finding herself angry and yet too crestfallen and bewildered to spit the words out as she had intended.
Hermione calmed… "Your heart is broken, isn't it?"
"What heart, you fool?" Bellatrix spat, indignantly.
"Oh, you know, the one that literally stopped beating for a moment when it sensed the horcrux, Voldemort’s presence leave your body."
"Oh... I, Fuck off! You have one minute to kill me or I'm going to off myself under this heap of fucking rock."
"Okay okay, relax, I just, I don’t know, I guess I just needed to make sure that there was a human in there."
Hermione cast an all-encompassing Wingardium leviosa around the pile of rubble, hesitating for just a split second before motioning to lift it off the Death Eater. The monstrous heap mirrored her movement, finally settling down again nearby with a soft, crumbling sound.
If Bellatrix had not sat up, leaning on one arm and wiping her face with the other, the young witch wouldn't have seen her. Hermione raised her wand immediately pointing it at the Death Eater and frantically questioned her own sanity. She examined Bellatrix’s body, as well as her clothes. Everything was the light grey colour of ash mottled like camouflage with a grimy, darker grey colour of where the dust had congealed with her blood.
Bellatrix raised a corner of her lip in a gestured smile, too weak to follow through with the crazy. She sat there in resigned, if not peaceful contentment, using the inside of her sleeve to clear the worst of the dust off her face and tongue, nonchalantly expectant that the young woman would bring about her demise as soon as she had registered that Bellatrix had been telling the truth.