Disclaimer: The characters mentioned and used below are the property of Joanne Rowling and copyrighted by Warner Bros, Raincoast Publishers and a bunch of other rich people. Not me. Don't own, don't sue. Oh, and reviews make the sun shine brighter.

Degrees of Desperation

I. too late to ask if end was worth the means.

She would have, she supposes, lied to save herself from this hell had she been given the chance. Loyalty only goes so far in this world, or what she remembers of it anyway. Then again, after fourteen years, Bellatrix Lestrange's ideas of the world have changed drastically. She was society, fourteen years ago. Fourteen years later, however, she sits against a rough stone wall in Azkaban, as if it were a throne for a long-forgotten queen. She is above contemplation now; though what she is doing can be called nothing else. It is, of course, causing her enough pain that the dementors pay no heed, and continue gliding glass-smoothly across the dirty stone floors, and this is one thing to be thankful for.

II. believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Sometimes she is overcome with such a hopelessness that she can't bear to think of rescue or escape for fear of the frustrated, hopeful tears it'll bring. The dementors feed on hope, and she tries desperately to hide and quash it if it ever appears. Other times, she begins again to count the days that she has been in locked in her cell, attempting to carve a record into the rough stone wall above the bale of hay serving as her bed. Sometimes she'll use her fingernails; but the stone is hard and unforgiving. The jagged lines are instead drawn shakily in blood from what remains of a nail, and she chides herself for this as well: the dementors love blood and can smell it from one side of the fortress to another. They often come once a new line has been drawn on the wall, swooping into her cell as if the iron bars were a mere suggestion, lowering their heads so that Bellatrix's mind is filled with their gaping, graying faces.

III. within these mirrors the world inverts

In the early years, she would hide if they came for blood, because the thought of reliving her darkest fears and memories was frightening, and she needed to keep her sanity if she was to serve the Dark Lord once the fortress was broken open. Now she waits for the dementors, holding out bleeding hands as an offering, because the dementors respond, at least, to this. She imagines that if the dementors could smile they would, because this isn't any blood, it's the pure blood of Bellatrix Lestrange. It is the simplest offering, what her entire world is built on, was built on before the end of the First War, culminating in the fall of the greatest Dark wizard there ever was…

IV. my hours are married to shadow.

She shouldn't have let herself get caught, she thinks, and this is so absurd that she needs to laugh, needs to hear something come out of a mouth that went mute a decade ago. Not having let herself get caught was as much a possibility as it was fourteen years ago. Faith to the Dark Lord was something to be proclaimed at trail, not to be hidden and webbed over in lies. Scores of wizards and witches before her had lied to save themselves. But would he reward them as highly? She has spent fourteen years in Azkaban, fourteen years and counting of unimaginable horror, all for a Lord presumed dead…

V. and an image looms under the fishpond surface.

It was an honor to go to Azkaban, she tells herself, to know that whatever exile her Lord was enduring, she could sympathize, understand, and keep her favor. It hadn't happened that way, and a bitter voice in her head says of course. She had been foolish at the trial, had been stupid not to lie, to live underground until the Dark Lord resurfaced. It had been ridiculous, in retrospect, not to have claimed bewitchment at the Longbottom trial and continued to search for her master, to nurse him back to health. She runs a bony finger over the Dark Mark on her forearm, and realizes that it has turned a jet, inky black, but her thoughts to this effect are suddenly jolted and slashed away by a prisoner in a nearby cell screaming in his sleep.

VI. obscure the scalding sun till no clocks move.

The prisoners always shriek words, names, perhaps of lovers or enemies, masters or jailers, or phrases completely incomprehensible unless she is that prisoner, trapped inside their own mind and scrabbling at the walls. She is not, and she believes this is not as a result of luck or good fortune or talent, but more a matter that the shrieking prisoners have all lost faith whereas she remains lucid, faithful and a prisoner between walls instead of within thoughts. She raises her head a few inches, noting that the iron bars on the tiny hole in her wall are now drawn against an inky sort of blue, instead of a light grey as they are during daylight.

VII. the stars are flashing like terrible numerals.

That night, Bellatrix dreams of red and black, broken promises and the words dark lord presumed dead flashed across surfaces and signs and invading her mind until she becomes the shrieker who the other prisoners take notice of in a rare moment of lucidity. Her shrieks are not words; do not take the shape of names like Crouch, Rodolphus or Voldemort. They are instead pain encapsulated into one sound. Fearhurtdreadpanicfaith. She hears more shrieks, because Azkaban has never been quiet at night. It has always echoed with the sounds of prisoners rattling bars, taunting their own reflections in the pools of rain that occasionally dot the stone sills of the tiny window-holes.

VIII. all the actors halt in mortal shock.

Her eyes narrow in the darkness. Everything is oddly still and it must be extremely early or fairly late, because the dementors are not gliding among the rows of cells but strangely out of sight. For a moment, she sees a crack of light, wand land, and then she sees that it's only, again, a trick of the dark, this time a piece of glimmering rock within the stone walls lined with dark blood red. Her shriek is primal and the silence of the prison has been torn in half. Bellatrix realizes that dreams are but dreams, and the strange, resounding shock is more painful than any long-endured starvation or rusty iron manacles clamped around wrists too thin to hold them. Within two hours, she wakes up sobbing because the lines between fiction-fantasy and lucid, stone grey reality have not even given her the grace of blurring; they have disappeared entirely.

IX. And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.

Twenty six hours and eighteen minutes later, Bellatrix Lestrange is broken out of Azkaban, following nine other escaped Death Eaters back to their Lord and straight to salvation. Salvation doesn't come; not in the thin, spindly arms of a Rodolphus she doesn't recognize anymore, and not in the godlike presence of the Dark Lord. He has become serpentine, deathly white and frightening, and Bellatrix finds this even more appealing, even more inspiring. Rodolphus does not, cannot understand this, and hardly hides his surprise when they Apparate to Riddle House and see the red glowing eyes illuminated in the dancing firelight. Salvation does not come for Bellatrix Lestrange, not in fighting to retrieve a prophecy she'll never hear, not in returning to Lestrange Manor, overrun with cobwebs and fourteen years worth of stifling dust, and not in knocking on Severus Snape's door, watching her sister fall to her knees and beg for help the way she has seen others beg for death.

Salvation never comes for Bellatrix Lestrange, but she is too far gone to realize it.

Author's Note: Well, this is a weird bit of fic. I guess I just wanted to try and capture the desperation and sadness and all encompassing fear that someone would probably feel, were they locked in a cell for 14 years. I guess by the end of it, Bellatrix is truly crazy: she's lost favour with her lord and her husband is presumably just as insane as she is. Obviously this Bellatrix is a different one than in Poisonous but I wanted to play with her character, and maybe understand a bit more about her inherent craziness. The headings for the different sections (degrees?) of this fic are all lines from Sylvia Plath poems. Definitely adds a depressing edge, non? Anyway, Review! Flames are tolerated, but concrit's better.