Poppy's Bonfire Spread

Through rain and through storm
And with you in your cold grave
I cannot sleep warm. ---Dead Can Dance

She's taken him outside.

He can't recall when he was last permitted out of the cell, and he gulps at the sweet night air as his eyes threaten to crack from the sudden burning light and the knifelike sting of the rain as it lashes his face. The moisture makes his lips tingle, and his legs shake with the effort of finally walking for the first time in ages.

Iron bars, cold, dirty floor. Rats in the corner, they bite at night. Sometimes I can hear an owl, and the sound shatters through me- sharper than the Cruciatus with which I am always awakened.

As they walk, he sees a grove of oaks with a clearing in the middle; the trees are like crooked old men, hunched over and twisted with gnarled and tangled bones, and the rustling branches sound like laughter as they approach. He recoils at the sound of her robes snapping in the wind as she marches with focused intent, and he falters as he tries to keep up with her.

When he trips over the hem of what remains of his robes—tattered, rat-chewed things—he falls to his knees and it is horrifying because-

Proud, you were proud once and they promised, he promised me, everyone would bow to me and I would not be---

But the press of something soft against his knees is a forgotten pleasure, so abrupt it is almost agonizing.

The teeming smell of dirt and mortality is everywhere around him and the rain slides slickly over his grimy skin. She wants him to rise, but he can't, so he—

Crawls, yes, feel your scrabbling fingers pulling at the grass. Taste the dirt, on your tongue, it tastes of life and sings to you, and the trees still mock you as they sway to the whistling of the wind. They live, past this night, and the rain will be gone and the sun will rise, and all I'll ever see is this.

When he reaches the center of the clearing he stays on his knees and turns his face to look up at the sky. There is no dizzying expanse of stars, nothing but sulky, thick thunderheads that pour down rain upon the wretched excuse of what he has become.

Her face peers down at him; eyes black hollow pools of nothing in a face smoothed by the impassivity of her mask.

She used to serve me tea with her dolls and pretended to be a dragon when we swam in the pond.

He has not strength left enough to try and fight her, though it will probably be painless and fast—no ceremony; it's a traitor's death, after all, and he's been broken so much already, sharp red bursts of screams torn from his throat. One day he finds he cannot scream anymore and he only sees the colors in his mind, what they would be if he could still scream, if the pain hadn't ripped his voice away and left him a mute, trembling thing.

I only see red. The blast of that dreaded curse, the horrifying, slitted eyes of the Dark Lord, the blood that spills out onto my skin and makes lazy swirling patterns in the dirt of my cell.

The rain washes down over his body and cleanses off the filth, and it sinks back into the earth. When the lightening cuts through the sky, he can see bright flashes of green from the trees around him and the earth stretched out beneath.

Tonight I will see green, and that will be the end of it. Pain is red and death is green and nothing is blackness and that is the end of it all…

“Dig.”

Overhead the wind sighs through the trees and the sound no longer sounds like laughing but crying, and that is almost worse to him.

Never liked pity, not from anyone.

The soft wet earth of the ground below him yields moving things as he digs with fingers made claw-like from the cold, dirt caking under the nails that have grown back after being ripped from finger beds in the early days of his torture. Tiny creatures that burrow into the dark to feast upon fetid things writhe happily in the dirt, waiting—

Ridiculous to dig for a long time, when all he does is prolong the agony of it; he can feel death, it presses in on him like the night around him, slithering in with the gusts through the trees, and it tastes sweetly like the rainstorm.

His strength gives out and he cannot continue, and he collapses with his forehead pressed against the damp grass next to him and sucks at the water with his parched dry lips. He is eating the clover covering the ground and the dirt beneath, not for the water but for the lingering taste of life.

She used to win all the time when we raced because she was not afraid to fly higher than we were allowed. I would try and follow her but I would lose my nerve at the last minute and hover just underneath her. I wanted to follow her but I never could, and I'd watch her vanish in a swirl of robes and raven hair, and bite my lip in consternation that I was never good enough to go as far, fly as high, be as reckless and brave…

She sends a spell out towards where he lies prone on the ground; murmurs some sharp incantation that echoes through the grove, and the flare of magic prickles across his skin—how long has it been since he's felt that, the tingling wash of magic?

Spells end in screams, and that is all he can remember, and it seems absurd to think he once commanded magic, made it sing for him, as she does now.

The oaks are thirstily devouring the water, and so is he as he digs with the strength of twenty, thirty men—but he cannot get off of his knees, no, she has trapped him there with nothing but the furious desire to dig and the ability to do what she wants though his mind rebels against it.

“Please, just tell Mama it was you. I can't get in trouble again, please, they'll send me away, they think I'm bad…” Her tears always were so pretty because they made her eyes shine.

He wants to ask her if she loves him, but he doesn't. He has been tortured enough. And he doesn't know which answer is worse, not really. So he refuses to ask, and he strangles on the words as he wails.

The earth collapses slowly underneath him as the crater he digs grows deeper.

She is impatient and does not let him finish. He is pulled away, a false moment of pure hope. The spell she uses flashes a vivid blue as the muck flies into the air and stacks up into a mound behind her. When the last flash fades from the night sky, he tilts his head down.

There is a chasm there; a deep, gaping maw waiting to devour him.

She stands across the divide with her head bowed like some mad penitent in front of a tomb and yet he does not think she will consider him a martyr, somehow. When she jerks her chin up to look at him, he knows then that it is time, and he wants to be brave…like his brother or his cousin, who defied them.

He has never had her audacity—she who flew so high she vanished into the burning bright sun and he could not follow, and only shield his eyes from the burn as he watched her disappear.

“Join him, and I promise you, everything you want, he'll see that you have it…” promises fell from her lips like poisoned licorice and he sucked at them and took them and ate them all without thinking. She gave him the seeds of the sickness that grew inside him and he wanted to give them back but it was too late.

There is nothing left to do but plant them in the earth…that is what you do with seeds.

The shame of begging her—prostrate on his knees like a penniless beggar—heaves his stomach and if there was anything left inside he'd be sick all over himself. Her harmful intent rains down on him like the monsoon the storm has become—and it's cold and hot at the same time, and he wants to escape this and wake up, be in his bed and have it all have been a nightmare, but she's pointing that wand at him and why can't he stop crying?

When the world tilts he realizes what has happened; he's fallen into the abyss— not grave, no, no… and then he is bucking and howling and the water pours into his mouth and he chokes, half-blinded by the darkness, and the taste of dirt is there, too, pungent on his lips and covering him and oh God he can feel those insects now, a great mass of them, swirling beneath the mud and pressing up, up, to where he lies---

Devour. Devour. Nothing left of you but bones.

She stands at edge of the gorge in which he reposes and pulls her mask off. The wind wrenches her dark hair and it lashes around her face and resembles snakes writhing about her head, tongues tasting the air around them.

Like Medusa. Turn me to stone, please, oh god, don't throw the dirt on me while I still have my eyes open, please, no…not while I can scream, I am so tired of screaming…please…

“Regulus.” She speaks the language of the night itself; insinuative and vaguely malevolent while her magic gathers like a tempest around her.

The limbs of the trees were flinging themselves down at the ground as if trying to escape, leaves flying into the air and falling around him like some peculiar snowstorm, tangling in his hair. He can barely see her through the relentless, heavy wet, but he knows finality and has to accept what this moment is. This is the delusion for which there is no cure; no childish game of hide and seek, but the end.

He's lying in the grave she forced him to hollow out, that she finished for him while he watched.

“Bellatrix.” Her name, a lament; then he stretches himself out and lies quieted. “Will you come visit me?”

She nods frantically—her serpent-like hair spirals with the motion—and utters a subdued moan. “Do it right,” she whispers, and through the howl of the wind and the cry of the owl somehow he hears her, and he understands.

When we played tag, as children, you were dead when the other caught you.

Bellatrix was cross if I was not properly dead; she would tell me how I should be, how my hands should be folded over my chest in the grave, and I did it because she said to. I always did what Cousin Bellatrix said.

He folds his hands on his chest and waits, and listens one last time to the steady thump of his heart as it beats out a final, sorrowful tattoo in his chest.

****

She fights her way through the furious gale, arriving home with grime and tears smeared in streaks on her face. She does not shower, but climbs into bed and sobs herself to sleep in Rodolphus' arms.

Bellatrix dreams of him when they were children, when he wanted so much to please her and belong.

In the morning, she washes the mud that has caked on her body away and takes poppies to his grave. The trees are still. They are sentinels – tall and silent- and the sun shines bright in the sky as if in apology for what the moon witnessed the night before.

The poppies are a deep scarlet red; they look like droplets of blood spilled fresh on the emerald spread of grass. No sound but his name escapes her lips, and she does not cry.

She comes back the next day, and the day after that, until she cannot remember exactly where it is under the earth he lies. There are times she sleeps in the warm afternoon sun with the poppies cradled in her arms.

Before they send her off to Azkaban, she makes Narcissa promise to take the poppies to that spot, though she never tells her sister why.

~ Finis