Title: Danse Macabre 2/?

Author: [livejournal.com profile] laguera25

Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY

Rating: FRAO

Pairing: Don Flack/OFC

Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6

Disclaimer(s): All recognizable people, places, and events in the CSI:NYverse are property of Anthony Zuiker, Jerry Bruckheimer, CBS, and Alliance-Atlantis. No infringement is intended, and no profit is being made.


All recognizable people, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. In all cases, no infringement is intended, and no profit is being made. For entertainment only.


Part I





She didn't know what the dilapidated old ruin had been before local gossip and legend had re-christened it the Shrieking Shack. A millinery, she supposed, or perhaps a tavern that had fallen out of favor when The Three Broomsticks and the Hog's Head had opened their doors. Hermione Granger would have known, but Granger now resided in the secretive netherworld of the Unspeakables, and in any case, they had never been bosom buddies, not even when they were shoulder to shoulder in a trench run muddy with blood.

Besides, Granger's legendary intelligence was little more than the product of Slytherin cunning and Hufflepuff diligence, a regurgitation of obscure facts no one else cared to learn. It was not an inaccessible art. She had practiced the same art in her preparation for this dance. She had researched and turned her palsied fingertips yellow with the slough of ancient pages and parchments. She had inhaled the dust of untold pages, coated her throat and lungs with it, and her eyes had burned with exhaustion and raw determination. Hermione would scarcely have recognized her.

Neither, she thought as she molded the wet earth between her hands, would Don. Her Muggle clothes lay forgotten in the corner, her bra coiled atop her blouse like a dead snake. Her breasts hung freely inside her scarlet robes, and the absence of fabric against her crotch was a welcome change. Her hair, unfettered by plait or barette, spilled over her scrawny, hunched shoulders and down her thin back. It shimmered in the flickering, illusory light of the lone torch she'd lit, a beautiful nest of golden serpents slithering in a pool of blood.

He would have recognized her expression, though, that implacable, pitiless mask that heralded the march to war. She wore it every day, from the moment she rose to the instant she settled into his arms at night in temporary truce with the world. It was a look that yielded no compromise. It wasn't an expression she had purposely cultivated; it was simply there, her Patronus against the ignorance and unwitting cruelty of the world, and she was seldom without it. Even Charlie Eppes, with whom she had once spent three days at a math conference, had noticed it, and his colleague, Dr. Fleinhardt had once called it her "Amazonian scowl." Her mouth had laughed, had toed the expected social line, but her soul had capered with undignified glee.

Seamus Finnegan saw it, and he had a name for it, too, her grandfather said. He called it your Death mask. It was a joke the first time he said it, but not the second, and never again. Even when his mouth was laughing, his eyes weren't. They were dazed and sad and wary, as if he expected you to batten onto his throat and tear it out. Maybe he thought that to speak of it was to invoke.

Seamus was smarter than most people gave him credit for. He'd never be Hermione Granger, knower of all things and spouter of most; he knew the virtue of keeping his mouth shut. But he saw. He was a keeper of secrets just like you. He kept his eyes open for the shadows that lurked in daylight and could be seen if you turned your head at just the right angle. He saw your shadows, and he called you his friend in spite of them.

He was the one who told you that you wore the Death mask all the time, that it rippled and bulged beneath your skin like the malleable bones of a newborn. He understood that it was your true face, the one in which you were most comfortable. It was the face that had been molded over your bones by the rough, cold hands of circumstance and unkind experience, and he wasn't stupid or arrogant enough to think that he could change it. He just tried to convince you that life could be lived without it.

They all did. Even Harry, prat that he could be. He did, after all, owe you a life debt. The twins made their own contribution to your happiness with the broom they made for you the summer the war began. That old Comet, with its purloined Gryffindor Tower armchair bolted to the frame, was the closest you ever came to believing in Heaven. You could almost touch it in that miraculous, wonderful confabulation of ingenuity, kindness, and youthful optimism, and in the spring, when the blanket of ice retreated to Mother Nature's wardrobe, you'd strap yourself into the seat, grab the bicycle handlebars that served as rudder and grip, and slip the tethers of earth.

You'd let your toes skim the grass in a lingering farewell, and then you'd nudge the broom skyward, away from gravity and sour memories. On clear days, you'd tilt your face to the sun and bask in its warmth. You circled the turrets and the parapets, and you tempted the snapping flags and standards to slap your brazen face. Sometimes, they'd miss, cheated by scant inches. Occasionally, they'd find their mark and leave stinging, red heat on your cheek. You never faulted them their successes. The object of the game was always to win, and Hogwarts was a proud castle.

You took to the broom the same way you took to the dance. You'd never play Quidditch-a single blow from a Bludger or a Beater's bat would shatter bone-but you learned to guide your improbable, wooden sky chariot with a modicum of grace. You did barrel rolls over the moat, and the fierce tug of the lap belt as it fought gravity for possession of your ramshackle body gave you an erotic, dry-mouthed thrill that made you light inside your robes.

Moonlight rides were your favorite. With no sun to illuminate the harsh, awkward angles of your body, you could pretend that you were lovely and loved. You could close your eyes and imagine that the wind in your hair was the gentle touch of a lover, and you could fashion his face in your mind's eye. Sometimes it was familiar-Seamus or George or even The Princeling-but sometimes, it was a face of your own creation. Never the face that you'd come to love more than the breath that sustains you. He was a gift beyond mortal reckoning. But they were enticing in their own right. In your most fanciful moments, you drew close to the moon and studied your reflection in its benign, silver mirror. Until Don and his little band of gold, the moon and its silver was the sweetest magic you knew, and you miss it still.

The broom was almost enough to convince you that life could be kind, and then the War struck the U.K. like pestilence and smothered the moon in a perpetual eclipse. Brooms became weapons of war or kindling for funeral pyres. There were no toys, no childhood, and no innocence. Voldemort corrupted everything to which he set his inhuman, decaying hand. You had always been a lily bloomed in shadow, but he showed you deepest black, and you developed a taste for it.

The broom that the twins built for you was one of the few things from your past that you couldn't surrender entirely. You consigned it to your vault in Gringotts, where it gathers dust and years. Had you left it at Hogwarts, it would've been burned or broken apart in the name of a conflict that no longer bears the legitimacy of war. Nine years after Voldemort fell to the Boy Who Conquered, his followers refuse to yield. They live in ragtag enclaves scattered over the world like pockets of virulent contagion, and no matter how hard the Aurors try, they can't scourge them from the earth.

Evidence of their survival is everywhere. Hogwarts had been restored shortly after Voldemort fell, and most of its scars have been smoothed away thanks to generous donations from anonymous benefactors and its Board of Governors, but Hogsmeade is still rife with scars. Some are old and toughened by years, but others-far more than you ever would have thought-are fresh enough to bleed. The thatching on Rosmerta's roof bears the blackened marks of a recent attack, and Honeydukes still smells of brine and old Curses beneath its sweet displays.

Magical London is no better. Florean Fortescue's is still deserted, untended and uninhabited since the proprietor disappeared in your fifth year. The sign hangs above the door, but it does not blink in merry invitation, and the windows are cataracted with dust and hairline cracks that mar the bleary panes like astigmatism. There is precious little laughter in the streets, and when it comes, it is rusty and faint, as though it dares not give itself away.

Knockturn Alley is more diseased than ever. It seethes with rats of all species and pulses with its vibrant, dark life. Its cramped alleys are thronged with people who never sleep. The whores and fruit peddlers ply their wares, and both are rotten-soft to the touch. Doors lead nowhere, and the cobblestones are slick with slime and blood. The air stinks of violence and sex and Curses not yet loosed. It is lawless and fetid and exotic, and you breathe deeply of its atmosphere even as your skin crawls in revulsion.

The Ministry would have you believe that the War is over, that it ended with the death of Voldemort, but you know better. You and every other wizard that fought in that War. You carry that smoking battlefield with you everywhere you go, tucked into the deepest recesses of your mind and the most withered cockles of your heart. You dream of those times now and then, though they have grown less vivid with the passage of time. You smell the smoke, taste the blood, and hear the screams, and then you awaken with a whimper and seek Don's warmth to keep the monsters at bay.

The War will not end until the last of you has died, and maybe not even then. Ghosts carry their memories with them into the afterlife in lieu of the cerements they have eschewed, and perhaps you and the others will spend your eternities flitting in the drafty corners of bars and brothels and lodging houses, reminding a new generation that here there was war. Even those who do not return as spirits may leave the War as a legacy to their children by repainting the squalid atrocity of war as heroic, grand adventure. War is an urge as primitive as sex, and it will never die. It only sleeps.


The long sleep was coming to an end. She felt the nascent stirrings in her bones. Nine years away, and she could still read the rhythm and pulse of this world as easily as she had once read the shimmering, Arithmantic threads of fortune. It was in the air, a furtive restlessness that spoke of old ideas renewed. Voldemort hadn't been the first to espouse the purity of blood; before him, there had been Grindewald, and while he had terrorized the Wizarding world and left villages and lives in smoking ruin, Hitler had matched him step for step in the Muggle world. Nor would he be the last.

She'd heard the whispers in Knockturn Alley as she'd wended her way through the narrow, claustrophobic streets towards Borgin and Burkes. She'd seen black-toothed youths passing out leaflets outside seedy pubs and boarding houses, and some passing hands had accepted them. She had even taken one as a matter of course, but it remained unread inside the pocket of her robes. Matters of war no longer interested her. Her only concern was the task at hand.

She sat propped against the moldering, plaster wall, supported by Stabilizing Charms. Beside her was an enormous pile of dirt that she had taken from the cemetery and a pail of water. The water was cold enough to burn her fingertips whenever she dipped them into it, which was often. They were red and numb as she smoothed the mud into the discernible shape of a human body.

Tonight wasn't the first time she had undertaken the project. There had been practice runs since she'd first gathered the dirt under the cold, lidless eyes of the stars on the Day of the Dead. She'd brought the dirt here in the endless hour of none and heaped it on the rotting floorboards. The first night, she'd merely gathered the dirt in her hands and sifted it through her fingers. She'd wanted to familiarize herself with its consistency and texture and train her recalcitrant hands and fingers in its handling. Four hours of lifting and drizzling and packing and tamping, and then she'd spent another half an hour scrubbing her hands in the freezing, dirty water that splurted from the spigot in the kitchen. Then she'd gone home to Don and crept into bed, and he'd turned in his sleep and gathered her cold hands beneath his body, nurturing her even in dreams. The unthinking tenderness had inspired a brief, savage spasm of guilt and what she was doing in his name, and she'd wept, face pressed into the pillow to muffle her sobs.

There was no guilt now. It had been washed away by the agonizing recollection of sitting outside his pre-op room with her hands pressed to the glass because minds that had forded the fierce waters of medical school hadn't been able to find a way to sterilize her chair so she wouldn't kill him with her presence. That single, lonely hour had been as terrible and wrenching as the eight days that followed it. Now there was only the serenity of purpose and the effort of marshalling twitching limbs to delicate detail work.

She'd begun the grunt work of forming the body on the third run, ensconced here in this derelict house without history. It had been long, laborious work, and her muscles had ached and burned, unaccustomed to such prolonged strenuous activity. She'd cut away the excess dirt and set it aside for use as patch and shaped the body with her hands and her wand. Her hands, mostly. The texts had emphasized the importance of infusing the end result with sufficient familiarity of its creator to ensure obedience.

It had taken her five visits and twenty-five hours to fashion it to her satisfaction, and there were still details to be considered. Like its genitalia. Were it up to her, it would remain sexless, but fitting as it might be, a missing penis was out of the question. Even the thickest dolt would notice a missing dingus, and she was a perfectionist at heart. She paused in her construction of an ear to survey Lessing, who lay inert upon the sofa on which she had deposited him upon arrival. Her lips pursed in contemplation, and then she resumed her toil, suddenly resolute. She might not be able to get away with no prick, but no one ever said it couldn't be a miniscule one. Her lips twitched in satisfaction, however petty.

The mud was thick and cool beneath her manipulating fingers, and she indulged in a brief, sardonic smile as she wondered what her physical and occupational therapists would think of how she'd chosen to employ their endless hours of simpering, bull-necked training at an oval, laminate table in a cheerless room marked simply PT/OT. No doubt they'd assumed that their endless, soporific dexterity exercises would serve her well in her job as a coin roller at a local bank. Certainly they had never foreseen the unhallowed acts in which she was so earnestly engaged.

Unhallowed acts, she thought absently. How very Frankenstinian. And how apt. She tittered to herself and used the tip of her wand to shape the nautilus of the ear.

There was a gurgling groan from Lessing, and she froze and studied him intently. One hand reached for her wand while the thumb of the other continued refining the shell of the ear. She had restrained him with a Body Bind, but there was no harm in caution. Arrogance toppled kingdoms. She had seen as much with her own eyes, watched murderers and pedophiles pave the way to Hell with one mistake. If he so much as twitched, she'd make him scream until his vocal cords ruptured.

He snorted and smacked his lips, but that was all, and after a few minutes, she let go of the wand and reached for the deep hood that bunched at her nape. She pulled it over her head and luxuriated in the concealing darkness that hid her face. The scarlet balaclava had cost a pretty Knut at Madam Malkin's, but it was an indulgence well worth the cost.

Knut. She had been back in the wizarding world for little more than six weeks, and already the old language was returning, pushing up from beneath the assiduously packed layers of Muggle speech like a triumphant weed once thought vanquished. Hallways were becoming corridors, and serving carts were trolleys. The Queen's English was stealthily reclaiming her American tongue, and she wondered how long it would be before she asked Don to take out the rubbish. She snorted at the thought. He already thought her mad for preferring hot tea to coffee or soda. A request to take out the rubbish might well cause a fatal aneurysm.

That's one thing you can thank Lessing for, hissed a leering, sibilant voice that reminded her of hourglass sand that had learned to talk. Without him and his bloody Sunday boom, you never would have set foot on Scottish soil again, never would have tasted the ambrosia of magic on your tongue.

Her eyes narrowed, and she removed her hand from the smooth head of the mud-man, lest her fingers spasm and crush the work of precious days. She would be grateful to Lessing for nothing. She had spent the last nine years burying her past and the person she had been, and with the press of a button, he had resurrected the uneasily-dreaming dead and brought all her old sins and shameful passions to light. He was a damnable Muggle Necromancer, and Necromancy carried a sentence of death. She was only giving him his just desserts.

So, no, there would be no gratitude from her lips. There were, however, a litany of accusations to lay at his feet, and she intended to pile them up, brick by brick, until they sealed his fate. She had catalogued them with loving exactitude since the explosion, and they were as familiar to her now as the mud beneath her fingers.

There was the solemn retinue that had descended upon her doorstep that Sunday afternoon. Mac and Danny and Captain Gerrard and a uniform she never knew and never cared to know. They were pallbearers with no coffin, ashen and silent and taut with worry as they escorted her down the hall, out the door, and into the waiting SUV. She still remembered the shrill howl of the siren as Captain Gerrard had cut a red and blue swath through the city traffic, and the bone whiteness of Mac's fingers on the steering wheel. She remembered Danny's pinched face and the musky reek of his cologne and the rasp of his jacket against her frozen skin as he lifted her out of the passenger seat.

There was the stink of the hospital, Hell clothed in Pine Sol and rubbing alcohol. It was an old friend, come to smother her in broad daylight. There was the softly undulating smoothness of linoleum under her wheels, and monsters with green-masked faces that told her she could not go to her prince, who lay dying in a bower of white.

There was the hopeless, endless hour spent outside his pre-op room with her hands pressed to the glass and her heart full of memories that she held like totems against the encroaching shadow. He couldn't leave her; they weren't finished yet, not finished building and dreaming and doing. There were children to bear and places to see and jokes to hear that no mouth had yet thought to tell. He was her prince, and that wasn't how the fairy tale was supposed to end.

They'd fed him an ocean of drugs through the plastic tubes that had clung to his arms like leeches, and his eyes, when they'd opened for a brief, terrible instant, had rolled mindlessly in their sockets. He'd turned his head on the pillow, as though he were looking for her, and her soul had wailed. She'd pressed herself to the glass with a desperate expulsion of breath, as though she were willing herself to pass through it, and here in the conscienceless confines of a werewolf's den, she could admit that she had been. Apparition had throbbed in her stomach like a contraction, and she'd been a breath from passing through the glass in a feat of osmotic magic. Only the doctor's voice, warning her that her presence would be lethal, had held her in check. She'd whispered a hoarse I love you to the indifferent pane of glass as the OR nurses had rolled him into surgery and tried to console herself with the belief that marriage forged a bond that spoke the sacred language of silence.

There was the airless, fraught tension of the waiting room, where she, his colleagues, and his parents had twisted old magazines in their restless hands and choked on words they had left unsaid. Mother Flack had cried endlessly into her disintegrating tissues and moved her fingers like she were holding an unseen rosary and dropping the small, scraping beads betwixt her shaking fingers. Rebecca had very little truck with God since the requisite catechism required for conversion to Roman Catholicism; she'd preferred to ignore the demands of a deity who was, at best, a well-intended fool, and at worst, a narcissistic, cruel son of a bitch. But sitting in the waiting room with nothing but People's Ten Best-Dressed of 1998 to comfort her, she had envied the old woman the distraction. For his part, Papa Flack had been made of stone as he sat beside his wife with his arthritis-knotted hands fisted on his thighs, dressed impractically in his dress blues.

Other cops had come, too, cops whose brass buttons hadn't tarnished, and whose beat uniforms still carried the grit of the street. They'd filed in to offer their well-wishes and genuflect before the specter of their own mortality. They'd crouched in front of her to touch the brims of their hats and speak in soft, consoling voices. She hadn't recognized most of them, and it hadn't mattered. They'd been blue cogs that had smelled just enough like Don to hurt, and not enough to comfort. They'd rotated in and out of the room in pairs, blurred faces beneath clear, blue caps, had set up an ancillary beat around the hospital, one not found on any duty roster.

She had recognized a few, though. Like Scagnetti, who sidled in with creases in his suit pants and perspiration in his close-cropped hair. He'd lumbered over and hunkered awkwardly in front of her chair, a winded bull breathing through the agony of a matador's picador. For one ridiculous moment as he'd squatted in front of her, she'd been reminded of Grawp, with his muddy, vacant eyes and slack, stupid face, and she'd had to cram her hard, fleshless knuckles into her mouth to keep from cackling.

He'd smelled like vinyl upholstery and nicotine, but his enormous, leathery, bear-paw hand had been light upon her rounded, aching shoulder. His voice had been gravelly when he'd spoken.

"'S gonna be fine, Mrs. Flack. You'll see. Don's a tough kid, and he ain't goin' out without a helluva fight." He'd nodded his square head in brusque affirmation, as though the matter had been settled and there was no more discussion to be had.

New York in his mouth, just like Don, and it had prompted a moan. Scagnetti had slunk away, sure that he'd stuck his foot into his thick-lipped mouth, and others had come after him. O'Bannion had come, sweet, rookie O'Bannion, who had hair like a Weasley and the freckles to match, and who had appointed himself Don's second. He had a sister with Spina Bifida, and he was familiar with the customs of the Chair People. He'd come to fret over her and bring her too many cups of water, and when she'd been too tired to hold herself upright, she'd slumped against his shoulder and let unshed tears scald her eyes.

There was the smothering indignity of watching Mac Taylor be the first one to see him after he came out of surgery, using his badge and credentials to shunt her aside. She had hated him for that, still hated him for it, and there would be a reckoning someday. Not as severe as this one, of course. Mac at least had the excuse of doing his job, but hate was hate, and it couldn't be mastered. It could only be satisfied.

There were the eight days he had traveled upon his own River Lethe without her, when she had clutched his hand and pressed kisses to the knuckles. There was a desperation so great that she had swallowed her pride and gone on bended knee before a God she despised to plead for his life, for the simple, overlooked grace of time. The smell of hymnals and wood polish in her nose and the orchestrated gravity of the cross mounted upon the wall, backlit to inspire reverent awe. All she had ever felt was a sad, mutinous anger. The gritty, bitter, burnt-umber taste of No-Doz on her tongue.

The first hours after his awakening, and that gummy, fumbling, dry-mouthed kiss. It had been beautiful for what it promised-more time in which to hold him-but wrenching in the weakness it had revealed. His kisses had always been decisive and possessive, but he'd barely had the strength to lift his head from the pillow, and he'd bobbed helplessly as he'd sought her lips. She'd had to guide his hand to the back of her head, and his fingers had grasped weakly at her nape.

"'Ssss'okay now, doll," he'd whispered, slurred and thick and dazed with heavy doses of painkiller. "'S gonna be okay now…" Lying on a bed with his guts held together by medical stitching, his first thought had been for her.

Sss'okay now, doll. So much like the last coherent words of the stupid, idealistic Auror who died in a trench with guts gone septic. Your equilibrium faltered, and you wept, buried your head in the crook of his neck and sobbed. He mumbled words of comfort and tried to pull you to him, but the bedrail was in the way, and then a nurse bustled in and chivvied you away. He tried to give her the finger, but he was too stoned and could only flap ineffectually at her. You laughed at that, and it settled him. He closed his eyes and drifted into healing sleep, but that was all right. You knew he was going to make it. You pillowed your head on your folded arms and surrendered to sleep for the first time in eight days.

Then there was the rehab and his anguish reflected in her bones. He had always been there when she'd needed him, had eased her through the humiliation and pain of the involuntary spasms that occasionally wracked her and twisted her muscles on their shoddy framework, but she couldn't do the same for him. She could only sit and watch as nausea turned him inside out and tortured his mending abdominal muscles. Don Flack, who had been kicked repeatedly in the face by fleeing suspects and grinned, had wept from the pain, and she could do nothing but watch him endure. She had respected him too much too offer useless platitudes, and her silence in the face of his suffering had prompted his mother to call her a heartless bitch.

But you did do something, her grandfather reminded her. You broke magical law and murmured basic Healing spells to ease his pain and help him sleep when the morphine refused to touch it. You leaned in under the pretense of kissing his forehead or smoothing his hair and whispered the incantation against his waxy cheek. His body relaxed, and his breathing deepened, and you thanked the Fates that the brief burst of magic hadn't shorted out his monitors. It was your unheralded gift to him, and the act that kept you from being nothing more than a living set piece in this terrible drama.

Sometimes, she'd wondered if Mother Flack were right, if she had forgotten her compassion. Sometimes, Don had turned away from her, curled in on himself and closed his eyes to hide from the indignity of having a nasogastric tube up his nose and a diaper beneath his buttocks, and she was sure that he resented her presence, her wordless, comfortless witness to his vulnerability. But when she'd tried to leave, he would invariably reach for her hand and say, "Stay," in a ragged, exhausted voice.

And stay she had, immutable and immovable as the bedrock of the sea.

And so were numbered the seven sins of David Lessing. It was ironic, she mused as she etched eyebrow detail into the face of the mud man, that seven was both the number of Divinity and the enumeration of the deadliest depravity. The Church fathers had certainly possessed a black, devil's humor for all their claims of piety. Lessing had been perfect in his depravity, and she had made for him a perfect penance.

He came to while she was retouching the nose, and she ceased her tinkering to watch him come to the realization of his captivity. It came by degrees as each of his senses registered his surroundings. He was calm at first, logy with the remnants of deep unconsciousness, but as awareness set in, so did his fear. She watched his frozen muscles fight the unbreakable bonds of the Body Bind. His eyes widened, his nostrils flared, and he cast his head from side to side, as though searching for escape. The cords in his neck stood out as he tried to arch off the couch and pry his rigid arms from his sides. He grunted in alarm when his limbs refused to obey his commands. He whined deep in his throat, and the sound reverberated between her legs like a lascivious flutter of tongue. This was going to be exquisite.

"H-hello?" he stammered, and twisted his head as far as it would go in either direction. "Hello? Is anyone there?"

She held her tongue and waited, and his fragile composure shattered.

"Help!" he screamed. "Help! Somebody, please, help me!"

"There's no one to help you here, either," she said, and resumed her work on the nose.

He jerked his head in the direction of her voice and struggled futilely to rise from the couch. "Where are you?" he demanded.

She did not answer him right away. Instead, she dipped her chapped, dirty fingers into the frigid water and dripped it into the blank eyes of the face. She pursed her lips in consideration and made a minute adjustment. She clucked in approval.

"I said where are you," he howled, and banged his head on the lumpy cushions.

"I'm not inclined to bow and scrape to your every whim," she answered drily.

"Where am I?"

Another long pause while she moistened the mud. "Accursed ground. Or so the townspeople say. They won't hear you, and even if they do, they won't come near. It's just the two of us."

"You're crazy."

"Well, then," she countered cheerfully, "I suppose that means that everything I do here will be excused, won't it?"

"What do you mean? What do you want with me?" Panicky.

No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die, she thought suddenly, and tittered. It was from an old Bond movie she had watched with Don shortly after his return to active duty, curled against his sturdy body that had felt softer than it should have in too many places. She had laughed then, too, because it had been possessed of a gleeful, villainous honesty. She had, in fact, laughed until she'd cried, until Don had begun to spare her wary, sidelong glances. Later that night, she'd awakened from nightmares in which Lessing had stood over Don's convulsing, bleeding body and crowed, I want you to die, while dust and ash had settled over them both in an insubstantial shroud. She'd returned to awareness with vomit in her mouth and burning the lining of her nose, and then she'd cowered on the cold, tile floor of the bathroom and gargled with Listerine for twenty minutes so Don wouldn't smell terror on her breath the next morning.

"What do you want with me?" he repeated.

"I told you: I'm not inclined to care what you wish to know. It's my party, and I'll speak if I want to." She put her wand on her lap and scrubbed her muddy palms on the stone floor.

"They'll notice I'm missing," Lessing babbled. "At the hospital. They do hourly room checks."

"No, they won't, and even if they do, you'll be back soon enough."

"Kidnapping is a federal offense. You'll go to jail."

"No. I won't." Flat. "Do you know what a golem is, Mr. Lessing?"

"Gollum?"

"Golem," she repeated patiently. "I wasn't familiar with them, either, until I stumbled across a text in the Alexandrian library. There are all sorts of levels and classifications. According to some texts, a chest of drawers can be a golem if you infuse it with animus. But you, Mr. Lessing-," She picked up her wand and waggled it roguishly at him. "-You are special, indeed." She pointed the wand at her chest. "Automous Wingardium leviosa!"

She Levitated herself into her chair, stowed her wand inside her robes, and rolled to a nearby workbench. She picked up a large, granite mortar and a finely-honed knife. She balanced them on her lap, careful to point the blade outward, and rolled to the couch. Lessing stared at her, cheeks flushed and eyes rolling wildly in their sockets.

"A golem is an inanimate object animated by the will of its creator. It has no mind, no soul of its own. Only God can grant a soul, and even the holiest of mortals can never hope to mimic the feat. A golem is a parody of life, the work of apprentice gods, if you want to be arrogant. It can be a rock with feet, or it can be made in the image of Man. A considerable amount of skill is required to master the latter, of course, and I still can't claim that I've managed it." She cast a critical eye over her mud man. From a distance, it looked far lumpier than she would have liked. "I guess we'll find out." She reached out picked up one frozen arm. Lessing grunted.

"Pull all you like. You won't move unless I allow it." A cool precision had crept into her speech.

Cruelty carries a British accent, she thought absently. No wonder Lucius Malfoy sounded the way he did.

"It was the Jews who discovered the secret," she said. She fell into the same brisk, lightly formal tone she used in her lectures. "Not surprising since the Jews were God's chosen. No one knows when, though some theorize it happened during their enslavement by the Egyptians as a means to escape the brutal treatment of their overseers." She pursed her lips as she inspected the flesh of his arm for a vein. "Whenever it happened, it didn't take them long to perfect it. Traditional wisdom holds that the art could only be performed by holy men blessed with the favor of Yahweh. I'm afraid I disprove that theory."

At Lessing's expression of abject incomprehension, she said, "Nothing holy about me. At all." She held out his arm and positioned it over the mortar balanced on her knees. "You know, I've always wondered if Jesus weren't a golem. It would be par for the course, really. Two thousand years of organized religion built upon a mound of dirt. Gives a whole new meaning to Saint Peter vowing to build his church upon a rock doesn't it?" A wry, bitter laugh. It would certain explain a lot."

Lessing said nothing.

"As I said, you are very special, Mr. Lessing, and so is the golem. It's going to take your place in that posh little shithole that you call home, serve the sentence imposed upon you by the State of New York. And in the meantime, you and I are going to have a very long talk." She positioned the blade over his skin, which puckered into hard knots of gooseflesh.

"You're crazy," he said, and the cords in his neck stood out as he tried to will his limbs into motion.

"Mmm. I believe we've covered that."

Lessing switched tacks. "It's never going to work," he gibbered, shrill and brittle.

She chuckled, mud bubbling through tinderbox straw. "Fortunately, Mr. Lessing, your faith is not required. Just mine, and I have plenty."

"Please. Please, don't. Please…"

She leaned forward until she could smell his fear, jungly and tart in her nostrils. "Goodness and mercy do not follow me," she murmured mournfully, and patted his hectic cheek. She left her fingers there in long, muddy weals like broken crosses.

She made a long, parallel cut, and blood sluiced into the mortar in a dark freshet, warm and sharp with copper. The smell was rich, and it eased the cramp that had been massed in the center of her chest since that Sunday morning in May.

Sunday, bloody Sunday, she thought, and smiled. It was genuine and beatific in the grimy darkness, and she hummed as she set the mortar aside and reached for a compress with which to staunch the wound. It wouldn't do for Lessing to die. Not yet, at least.
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