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Danse Macabre 12/?
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
laguera25
Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY
Rating: FRAO
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6
Disclaimer: 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 characters, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI
While her husband and Mac Taylor struggled with half-revealed truths and unspoken regrets, Rebecca opened her mouth and breathed in copper and blood and soured vengeance. Her hands were slick with it, and it pooled around her wheels and splashed onto her feet, where it dried to russet as she worked. It was dried and tacky on her elbows and wet and warm on her palms, and there wasn't enough coagulant to stop its flow.
She talked, mostly to distract herself from the numbness in her chest and the stinking silence broken only by the wet parting of skin from sinew. Lessing had stopped talking days ago, and she wasn't sure if it was because his vocal cords had finally ruptured from screaming, or if he had accepted that it would gain him no respite. She found she didn't care. Her hand stuttered on a stubborn strip of skin, and she gritted her teeth and gave a savage twist. Lessing's lidless eyes stared up at her, and his fleshless jaws creaked, but that was all. No screaming. Not even a broken whimper. Ruptured, then, and thank God for it, because his screams and pleas for mercy had long since lost their novelty.
Everything had lost its color, truth be told. The ache in her arms and lodged between her shoulder blades like a knife was no longer the sweet, thrumming burn of the righteous, but the dull ache of muscles and bones too old for the skin that covered them, of too much for too little. The gore under her nails and smeared over her hands was no longer the viscous, potter's clay of unmaking, but useless, blind waste.
Worse yet, she could no longer remember the fine, heady taste of her hatred. It had lost its shape with the careless shucking of Lessing's face and dispersed, diluted, into the stale air of the Shrieking Shack. Now there was only dirt and blood and sweat on her tongue, and they were neither sweet with justice nor bitter with disappointment. They coated her tongue like ash and made her grimace when she swallowed, as though she were taking a pill too big for her throat. She wished that she could taste nothing, but the more she swallowed in an effort to wash the taste away, the more her mouth filled with it.
She was tired, and the fire that had sustained her since that night in November when she had gathered damp earth from a necropolis beneath the impassive gaze of the moon had guttered to embers. She was acutely aware of every creaking joint and crackling tendon, and from deep within her back, she felt the fluttery quickening of a seizure to come, heavy and proprietary as a tumor at the base of her spinal column. God's eyes were watching her in the darkness of the house that love had fled or never lived in at all, and though she had forgotten the import of what her hands were doing, He had not, and later tonight or tomorrow, He would reach out with a steady, avenging finger and make her remember it inside her twisted bones. He would make her confess her sin a scream and a spasm at a time. Soon, there would be no forgetting, but for now, she could, and so she did, blotted it out with the mindless, efficient movement of her hands and the dull cadence of her voice.
"The hospital was the first time I'd ever held his badge in my hands," she told Lessing in that dead voice.
It was like holding his heart. Just as precious. Just as heavy. You'd never realized how heavy it was until it slid into your unsuspecting palm from the manila envelope in which the trauma nurse had put it. You'd only touched it in passing, to move it on the dresser or graze it with clutching, needy fingers when you were trying to suck him off or get him out of his pesky clothes. It was part of the sacred space that each of you had set aside from the other, as off limits as his service Glocks and the box of ammunition on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
You never suspected. It was air in his hands, lifted and flashed and tossed onto the bed or dresser by nimble, practiced fingers. He was accustomed to its weight, conditioned to ignore its presence at his hip or in the broad cup of his palm. And why not? He's lived with it since he was twenty-one, and before it migrated to those more comfortable niches, it had rested directly over his heart.
Maybe that's why you taste it on his tongue and in his come, that tart tang you assumed was natural to all men. It leached through his skin and slipped into his bloodstream, where it infused every part of him with the memory of copper and tin and tattooed its numbers into his breast. It's still there, that mark; not even the explosion could obliterate it. Nor could it cleanse him of the taste. It's still on him, still sharp and metallic and unapologetic as you skim his teeth with your greedy tongue. It's toxic-lethal. You know it is, heavy metal poisoning by osmosis, but you kiss him anyway. You wouldn't stop even if you could because in truth, you could think of worse ways to die.
It was strangely organic in your hand, cool but not cold, as though it carried residual body heat. It was dirty and spattered with his blood. Some of it had dripped into the crevices of the shield and settled there like an offering. The eagle wept scarlet, and the olive branch in its talons had broken. Captain Gerrard offered to take it for you, to clean it, he said, but you refused. Holding it was the closest you could get to cradling Don, and you couldn't let it go.
So you sat in the surgical waiting room and cleaned his badge with a swab and sterile water from Hawkes' field kit and Kleenex from the box on the table. The other cops who came to pay their respects and offer prayers couldn't look at it. O'Bannion sat in a chair across the room, thumbs lodged in his oiled gunbelt and teeth locked against the bile in his mouth. He was so queasy that you pitied him, and in the back of your mind, you wondered how long it would be before he either puked on his shoes or bolted for the bathroom. To his credit, he did neither, and you admired his guts.
There was incredulity in his face whenever he watched you dab at your husband's blood, laced beneath the worry like an errant thread. He couldn't understand why you chose to handle a task normally reserved for less personal hands, hands protected from the intimacy of the job by a dual layer of latex. It was morbid and masochistic and indecent.
He wasn't the only person to think so; Mac looked pained whenever his raw, haggard gaze flickered to your cautious hands, and Captain Gerrard pursed his lips in a moue of dismay and blinked back tears of compassion and helpless rage. His mother thought you were a ghoul and told you so, eyes puffy from weeping and tongue forked and dripping with venom.
How can you just sit there? she demanded, shrill and jagged with pieces of her broken heart. How can you sit there and dabble in my ba-my son's blo- bloo- like it's nothing? She pressed her shaking hands to her middle as though time had reversed itself and returned Don to her womb.
You never answered her. You just kept blotting, wiping and drying. There were no explanations you could offer to them to make them understand why you had devoted yourself so wholly to the sad duty. Could not make them understand that it was a duty, one that you had vowed to carry out on the day you took his name. It was scalding and wrenching, and grotesque to hunch in your chair and scrape at his tacky blood like an art restorer over a small canvas, but it was also inescapable, bought and paid for by the golden band on your left hand. It was yours, and you had grown up with the inviolate truth that a man tended what was his. You couldn't stitch his wounds or tear the bastard who'd hurt him limb from limb, but you could clean and protect his sacred space, and so you did.
His father had a glimmer of understanding. He was not surprised or offended when you refused to let him hold the badge. In fact, he seemed to expect it. He recognized duty in your shaking fingers and tear-stained face, and part of him admired it. He would have done the same thing if you had never taken his son's name, would have considered it another obligation to the thin, blue line of which he had once been a part.
There were times while you worked that you were tempted to smash the shield into pieces and scatter its shards over the floor. What good was it when it had failed to protect him? If you crushed it beneath your rolling wheels, it couldn't burden him anymore with its demands for slavish devotion and blood sacrifice. The pressure would be off, and he could breathe again.
But you knew better. Your love was bonded to the hunk of metal in your hands, and if you destroyed it, you crushed him, too. He thrived on the pressure even as it wrung him dry, an addict in the deepest throes of addiction. He would lose himself if he lost his shield, and so you fought your instincts and swabbed blood from the eagle's feathers and mended the broken olive branch with careful applications of water, and when it was as clean as you could make it, you curled your nerveless fingers around it and traced the ball of your thumb over the smooth, cool numbers in an endless loop. 8571. 8571. The anonymous digits that made up the whole of his identity in the NYPD, inked into your thumb with blood and water.
The badge was the first thing he asked for once he had established that you were all right and that he wasn't going to die. You were sitting at his bedside, wiping his parched lips with a damp cloth and cleaning the white scum that had accumulated in the corners of his mouth.
So dry, sweetheart, you murmured. You want water?
He turned his head and licked his lips. Where 's it? he slurred.
Where's what, love? You dipped the cloth into the plastic cup of water and pressed it to his lips. His eyelids fluttered, whether in pleasure from the moisture or fatigue from the morphine drip, you couldn't tell.
My shield an' gun.
Your tired brain processed the words as my shittin' gun before logic parsed the true meaning. Your gun is with Captain Gerrard. Probably in his desk drawer. You'll get it back as soon as you're on your feet again. You smoothed your hand over his cool, waxy forehead.
My badge? Where's m' badge? Did they take it? His eyes were wide and frantic with the possibility, and the steady chirp of the heart monitor increased.
Hey. Hey, you soothed. Nobody took it. They gave it to me with your-with your things. You swallowed the urge to weep and banished the recollection of the nurse bringing his possessions in that small, sad envelope. It's fine. I took care of it for you. It needed to be cleaned up a little. It was…dirty.
Your throat worked at the memory of bloody feathers and broken branches, and you turned from the remembered stink of copper and tin and well-tended leather. It's here in the night table. You opened the drawer and pulled out the badge. See? You pressed it into his lax, upturned hand.
His fingers closed convulsively around it, as though it were a lifeline, and he raised his hand. He blinked at it in an effort to focus his eyes, and the relief in them was so profound that your chest ached. He was a little boy who had found his cherished talisman against the darkness. He brought it to his chest and circled his thumb over the crevices you had so painstakingly cleaned.
You felt a stab of vicious jealousy towards that badge, furious that it could relax his face like none of your caresses and reassurances had managed. You were seized with the childish, ugly impulse to tear it from his hand and hurl it across the room, but you smothered it, ashamed and frightened by its sudden intensity.
What kind of wife would I be to let them take that from you? You'd meant to be breezy, but it was cracked and wavering beneath too many unspoken truths.
His hand snaked over the bedrail to cup your face. You're a good one, doll, and don't let anyone tell you different. Furry with exhaustion and painkillers. Now gimme a kiss.
You leveraged yourself upright by the bedrails and dusted kisses over his forehead and along his jaw until you reached his lips. They were still dry and sticky and tasted of eight-day breath and medical tubing, but you closed your eyes to savor the delicate frisson of contact and the sensation of his breath passing your parted lips.
I'm going to go ask the doctors when I can give you real water. I'd give you ice to suck if I wasn't worried you'd fall asleep and choke on it, you said when you pulled back, and your breath tickled his cheek.
You gonna have dinner with me later? he asked, and his eyelids drooped with weariness.
I wouldn't miss it, you promised him. Now rest. I'll be here when you wake up. You eased the badge from his tenuous, softening grasp. I'm going to put this on the night table, and if anybody gets any bright ideas about taking a souvenir for their booger-eating nephew, they'll be using their undergarments for dental floss.
An indistinct rumble from deep within his chest. You shouldn't make a guy who's just had abdominal surgery laugh, he chided gently, but his eyes were more alert than they had been since they had opened.
Sorry, babe.
Less than a minute later, he was fast asleep, and you trundled into the hallway in search of a doctor to berate. You cornered Dr. Singh as he was coming out of the surgeons' lounge and chewed him for the mindless catharsis of the deed, all bared teeth and cutting tongue, and you only stopped because you were running out of air. Dr. Singh waited for you to finish, and when you did-red-faced and stiff with indignation-he told you he could have room-temperature tap water if his barium swallow and CT scan the following day revealed no perforations or adhesions.
You circled the hallways for a while to clear your head and slow your racing heart, and with every meandering circuit, you stopped outside his room to look in on him and make sure he was only sleeping. You left at dusk to pick up a tuna melt and container of chicken noodle and pea soup from the deli down the block, and then you went back to keep your dinner date.
The nurse brought his food packet before Wheel of Fortune, and you sat beside him and scarfed the sandwich while Pat Sajak cajoled giddy, bug-eyed contestants through the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the quadrillions of combinations into which they could be pressed. He watched as well as he could, but the effort of healing exacted a heavy toll, and he nodded and drifted for most of the night, lulled by the mundane mutter of the talking heads and the familiarity of seeing you on one side and his treasured badge on the other. He was surrounded by his favorite things and slept easily.
His badge was the golden carrot for which he drove himself to get better, and though you were glad that he was healing, you couldn't help but resent that he had eyes only for it. Once he came home from the hospital, it resumed its rightful place on the dresser, polished properly by his expert hands, and sometimes when he was at his rehab sessions, you'd fantasize about flushing it down the toilet or dropping it down the sewer grate outside the building. You never did because you knew how much it would hurt him, but there were days, especially after the silence fell, that it was a matter of inches.
It wasn't fair or becoming. It was puerile and ugly, your jealousy, but you couldn't help it. You had watched over him and loved him and flouted magical law to soothe him, and yet, his only concern was the hunk of gold the blast had torn from his hip. He talked endlessly of the day he could get back to the job, but never spoke so lovingly of the day when he could stroll arm-in-arm with you through Central Park or stop for paper bowls of hot dim sum in Chinatown. It was a return to the job he wanted, not a return to his life with you, and that knowledge was salt in your myriad wounds.
Then one morning, he was summoned to the precinct, and when he came back an hour later, his Glock was in its holster and his badge was clipped to his hip. He was pale, but his eyes were shining. He swept you into his arms and held you tightly, face pressed into the crook of your neck.
The Captain put me back on the active-duty roster as of this mornin', he crowed, and he was vibrating with ill-concealed happiness.
Congratulations, you answered with a heartiness you didn't feel, and kissed his cheek.
He pulled back and surveyed you with those lovely eyes. Hey. What kinda kiss is that, mm? I was thinkin' I deserved one more like this.
And he laid one on you, all warm lips and possessive, stroking tongue. He cupped the back of your head in his palm, and when you gripped his shoulders to stay upright and thwart your buckling knees, he cupped your face in his hands, and made deep furrows in your hair with gentle fingertips. His breath came in an unsteady rattle through his nose, and when you lurched closer, his heartbeat fluttered against your scrawny breastbone.
He didn't break the kiss until black spots exploded behind your eyes and drool trickled indecorously from between your locked lips. Then he parted with a sputter of laughter, red-faced and tousled and delirious with the simple joy of life. He locked his arms around your waist to support you, and then he just studied you, triumphant and panting.
You know how beautiful you look when you're like that? he asked quietly.
You blinked. Like what? Drunk and wobbly?
A soft huff of laughter. Naw. Just…like that. Like this. Happy.
I bet you said that to all the drunks and nodders when you were on the beat.
Rebecca, I'm serious, he murmured. You're gorgeous, and I couldn't've done this-," he let go of you long enough to tap his badge with a forefinger, "-without you."
Your throat constricted with a mixture of shame and love, and you tried to turn away before he saw the jealousy that had surged in your veins when he'd announced his return to duty, but he held you fast, oblivious in his love and adoration.
I'm not actually goin' back on shift 'til Monday, so I thought that maybe we could do some catchin' up-a little dinner, a little dancin'. A movie if you want. We could even get a hotel room for the weekend, rattle the walls, you know? He waggled his eyebrows.
The tears came unbidden then, accompanied by a hitching bray that surprised you both with its ferocity. He carried you into the living room, settled you onto the couch, and asked you what was wrong. You couldn't tell him, but not because you didn't want to. There were simply no words to explain how lucky you were to have his love, and how ashamed you were to have doubted it for a single instant. So you coughed and sputtered and choked on salty snot, and when you could talk, you told him that you were glad to have him back, glad that he was still yours to hold. It was enough of the truth to satisfy him, but not enough to damn you.
He took you out on the town that night, sat through a bad horror movie for your sake and split a mammoth plate of steak fajitas and pico de gallo. He drank beer and loaded his fajitas with sour cream and guacamole. He laughed often and loudly and left a big tip for the waiter, and then he kissed you down by the river, with the smell of Irish Spring and wet earth in your nose. He tasted like beer and sour cream, and when he went down on you later that night in a strange, hotel bed, you came so hard that your thighs ached the next day.
The day after that was a trip to the zoo, where you watched the penguins and the monkeys and carefully skirted the lions and tigers. You watched the elephants and inhaled the rank stink of dung, and you sat on a bench and split a funnel cake piled high with cinnamon apples. He wrangled a runaway balloon for a crying toddler, and when you teased him about it being his first heroic deed since his recall to duty, he blushed, but he also preened and strutted for the rest of the day; when he fucked you that night atop rumpled bedsheets, he was possessive and feral and full of his old swagger.
The last day before he returned to the grind of the streets was spent in the lazy comfort of home. You slept past noon and padded around in your socked feet, and you spent all day making dinner together and watching TV. He screamed himself hoarse at the Rangers between bites of lasagna and sips of red wine, and you watched in bemusement from the corner of your eye. He went to bed with a full belly and slept the sleep of the just, and when his alarm clock sounded the call to arms the next morning, he bounded out of bed in bright-eyed anticipation.
That three-day weekend was an epiphany. It made you realize the enormity of the bond between Don and his shield. He wasn't whole without it, wasn't the man with whom you'd fallen in love. It was like the loss of a limb. That was why he was so distant from you and so obsessed with being declared fit for duty. Not because he loved you less, but because he could not love himself without its heft tugging at his hip and heart. From that day on, you vowed to love it as you loved him, honor it as you honored him, and when he gave you a coffee-flavored kiss on the way out the door, you were savagely proud to see him go.
It was his badge she thought of as she reached for the ebony-handled knife on the table beside her. Right now, she supposed that it was in pride of place on his hip, snug against his body and intimate as a lover. Perhaps it was winking in the bleak, December sun as he chased a suspect down winding streets and through garbage-strewn alleys, or maybe it was tucked in the bunched fabric of his pants as he sat at his desk in the bullpen and smudged his fingers with bleary lines of ballpoint ink.
It was a terrible, twisted irony that she had once swabbed blood from its reliefs and crevices, only to cover it in a cloying deluge six thousand miles across the sea. It was brilliant and cold in her mind's eye, and she winced as she brought the knife to rest on the line of Lessing's collarbone. It was another grotesque irony that the only part of Lessing that had been spared the Peeling Charm was his torso. It was smooth and obscenely white against the raw, wet redness of flayed flesh.
It was not an omission of mercy, but of necessity. She needed the smooth canvas of skin for the Binding Runes. Her lips thinned as she carved the first shallow line, and Lessing's mouth opened in a soundless scream. Blood seeped from the cut in mournful accusation, but she was numb to its pathos after so many nights spent bathing in it to the elbows. She paused, re-established her grip on the hilt, and guided the blade through the next cut. She lifted the blade from the skin, blinked sweat from her eyes, took a deep breath, and returned to the intricate work. All the while, Lessing screamed without sound.
She laid the knife across his chest, the steel blade cold and biting against his bloody, flushed skin. "It's a Binding Rune," she told him tonelessly. "Once it's finished, it will bind your soul to your body and prevent it from escaping. There is an identical rune engraved in the amulet I bought for the occasion. Knockturn Alley, for all its well-deserved and sordid reputation, is remarkably useful. When I complete the rune, your soul will be trapped inside the amulet and your body. There will be no death for you; not unless either your body or the amulet is destroyed. And I assure you, they're never going to find your body."
A Horcrux. Once upon a time, the fate of the wizarding world had hinged on the destruction of seven Horcruxes scattered across Europe. Diaries and lockets and swords that had kept their secrets well. Lives had been lost for the sake of paper and forged steel. Rivers of blood had been shed in pursuit of them, and Harry and the dynamic duo had braved Romania and Bulgaria on the merest wisps of rumors.
They had found them all in the end, guided by luck, Gryffindor bravado, and the sage advice of Albus Dumbledore, dispensed from the rich, oiled canvas of his Hogwarts portrait. The last, Helga Hufflepuff's cup, had been sundered on Harry's birthday in 1997, and Voldemort had collapsed in on himself and left nothing behind but a pile of earth infested with worms. Ding, dong, the Dark Lord was dead, and hysteria had come trailing after.
Horcruxes had always been forbidden, but now their creation or possession carried a sentence of death without trial, to be performed by an Auror on the spot of the offense. All information pertaining to their use or creation had been stricken from the record, purged from wizarding libraries across the continent. The libraries at Nice and Versailles had broadcast the burning of the relevant texts on the Wizarding Wireless Network, and she had listened to a copy of the burning at Versailles at the archives in London, where they had been preserved as a defining moment in British Wizardry.
But the libraries in Eastern Europe, China, the Middle East had not followed suit. The proprietor of the library at Alexandria had refused to burn the books on principle, and so they still adorned the shelves that rose toward a vaulted ceiling adorned with hieroglyphics that told the story of the pharaohs. They were restricted, but access could be bought for a few Galleons pressed into a dry, brown palm.
And what the books hadn't told her, Hermione Granger had. Inadvertently, of course, parceled out over the weeks and days of sixth year, when she, Harry, and Ron had researched nothing but. For all her cleverness, Hermione had been remarkably lax in casting Muffling Charms. Maybe since she had solved the mystery of Harry's long sleep in fifth year, they hadn't perceived her as a threat, or maybe they simply hadn't noticed her, slouched haphazardly in her chair and skulking in the flickering shadows cast by the common room fireplace. They'd had eyes only for each other then, and Harry's had been distracted by the specter of failure.
She doubted Hermione had ever intended her information to be used like this, but what could she expect from a woman who had gladly stood on the backs of house elves? Hermione would call this a natural progression of her lunacy. She chuckled in spite of herself. As far gone as she was, she knew there was nothing natural about this. It was wicked and perverse and the only way she would be able to bury the image of Don's guts laid open to a dusty, lightless ceiling.
"I'm not going to close the rune yet, though. I wouldn't want to give you a painless immortality. Just enough life to know you're dying, but not enough to grant you release. I want the light from both worlds to taunt you for eternity, always out of reach. I want you to wish for the end as hard as I wished it would never come for him, as hard as he fought to come home. I want you to long for it. When I brought you here, I told you I owed you an hour for every minute that he was away, but I lied. I'm a Gryffindor, what can I say? We're chronic overreachers. So are Slytherins, come to think of it. Gets us into trouble."
"It won't be long now." Tender, and filled with the dust of her husband's would-be tomb. "I promise. Don't worry; I won't let you go too far." She picked up the knife and sat back to wait.
It was as much promise to herself as to him. She was tired of the stink and the cold and the damp of the Shrieking Shack, tired of the dust that reminded her of Don's accident, settled and heavy as a shroud over the furniture. It had even settled over her in a fine mist when she had sat too long in one place, light as spidersilk. She was Mrs. Haversham in her rotten bridal veil.
The thrill of what she had done had disappeared after the first night and left behind a hollow brittleness in her bones, and she had wanted nothing more than to be finished. She had even considered abandoning her scheme, just snapping his neck, Transfiguring the body into a bone like Barty Crouch, Jr. had once done to his own father, and burying it beneath the front step like a housewarming gift. She'd thought of washing the dirt from beneath her fingernails and going home to her life, her revenge exacted.
But to do that would've made all her careful planning and burning hatred worthless, and she had been taught by a long line of honorable men to finish what she began. Anything less was weakness and cowardice. So she had trudged doggedly on, cutting and peeling until blood lost all ability to move her, until Lessing was as irrelevant and inhuman as cured hide. It wasn't a man she was slicing, but a piece of breathing meat, and she no longer wondered about his wife and daughter or if he had a mother to mourn him.
At first, her detachment had terrified her, and when she had felt it stealing over her like stuporous melancholy, it had so shocked her that she'd rolled into the furthest corner from Lessing and cried until she vomited in a wet, sticky splatter that had drawn a rat from its hole in a crumbling baseboard. Its mangy, grey fur and fat, pink tail had reminded her of Peter Pettigrew, who would later come to be known as Lord Voldemort's Wormtail. Thinking of him had inevitably led to thoughts of his master, and she had clapped her bloody hands to her mouth and sobbed in hysterical terror at the thought that she was becoming like him, cold-blooded and inhuman. She'd cried harder still at the thought that Don had touched her, and worse yet, had entrusted her with his heart and soul.
She'd been horrified at the possibility and had sworn that she was going to kill Lessing and bury the evidence of her breakdown in the thicket behind the Shack, but ten minutes later, she'd left the rat to his feast and returned to her work. It would be better, she had decided, to finish an atrocity and claim it than to leave it undone and disavow it. The Lucius Malfoy inside her head had rolled his eyes and sniffed daintily at the mangled nobility of the thought, but she had simply refused to become the filth that Don risked his life to catch. When the coldness had overtaken her again while she was filleting Lessing's flaccid prick, she had simply accepted it.
After tonight, done was done. She was going to scrub the blood from her hands and the beds of her nails and rinse it from her lips and teeth. She was going to shatter the mortar and pestle and the potion phials they had helped to fill and destroy the cauldron in which they been brewed, and then she would Banish their pathetic remnants to the shapeless void reserved for those things and people for which wizards had no further use. Hey, Evanesco, and all traces of her within these walls would cease to exist. She'd make sure there were no stray bits of Lessing trapped in the strands of her hair or the folds of her robes and remove what she found with a Scourging Charm. Then, she'd go home, and if there were any mercy left in God's breast for her, his most wayward child, the only red to stain her hands for the rest of her days would be the blood of cherry tomatoes sacrificed for Don's dinner salads or the juice from the roasted red peppers piled high on his red pepper, provolone, and pastrami sandwiches.
Lessing drew a deep, shuddering breath, and she sat forward, fingers curled tightly around the hilt of the knife. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, and his eyes slid out of focus. He was sliding into eternity. She aligned the tip of her knife with the unfinished rune.
"I'm sorry," she said, but she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at Don, lying in his hospital bed in pre-op, robbed of his mind by the morphine and whiter than the sheets that covered him.
She completed the rune with a stiff flick of her wrist.
The force of the spell, when it came, was so intense that the world burned green. There was a thunderous roar, and the Shack rocked on its foundations. Masonry fell from the ceiling, and she remembered her last night at Hogwarts, when Seamus Finnegan had crawled into her infirmary cot and shielded her from dust and falling masonry as the great castle had trembled to its cornerstone.
The concussion from the blast rocketed her into the opposite wall and pitched her from her chair, and she sprawled on the cold, dirty floor and blinked dust from her stunned eyes. Her chin was warm and wet, and when she touched her fingers to it, they came away red. Her teeth were spongy when she prodded them with the blade of her tongue, but they were all accounted for, and none of them fell out at the gentle inspection. Her chest was too light, and her stomach clenched in a vicious spasm. She rolled clumsily onto her side and vomited a bilious, black tar, thick and throttling as pitch.
"Well, no wonder they don't want people fucking around with that shit," she warbled, and scuttled away from the mess, propelled by a clawed, scrabbling hand and a trembling foot. She laughed, and sour, black bile hung from her chin and marked her passage.
She collapsed halfway across the room and sprawled where she had fallen. Her chin throbbed, and she realized that the air smelled of ozone and singed hair. She tittered and gulped lungfuls of metallic air, and her chin throbbed and stung. She spit to clear her mouth of the sour taste and only succeeded in drooling onto her cheek and chin. She raised her hand to wipe them clean, but decided it wasn't worth the effort and let it flop bonelessly to the floor again.
Magic had sucked all the heat from the room in the execution of the spell, and she shivered at the cold that crept beneath the thick wool of her robes and seeped into her bones and internal organs. She was frozen on the inside, and each breath that emerged from her blue-lipped, black-gummed mouth was a whirling, beautiful wraith that danced upon the heavy air with nimble feet. Each inhalation plunged a slender stiletto into her breast.
She was tempted to lie there and succumb to sleep, but the primitive portion of her brain that had colored her a ruthless survivalist from the cradle refused to let her lay her burden down, and so she forced her heavy-lidded eyes to remain open and fumbled in the sleeve of her robe for her wand. It occurred to her that her magic was gone, taken in tribute for the success of the spell, and as she drew her wand, she was surprised to feel no sorrow at the thought. Magic was a means to an end, and now her task was complete. If it was gone, she wouldn't have straddle two worlds and fit comfortably in neither. She would just be who she'd pretended to be all along: Rebecca Flack, wife and teacher. No more secrets, and no more dreams of dragons and broomsticks silhouetted against the belly of the moon.
But no. There was the magic still, called forth by the Warming Charm she cast. It surged again as she cast a healing spell on her chin, and then she lowered her arm to her side and scissored her arms and legs and formed a snow angel in the thick blanket of dust and ash underneath her. Blood and warmth trickled into her chest and extremities, and when the worst of the pins and needles had passed, she rolled onto her stomach, pushed herself to her hands and knees, and resumed her trek towards her wheelchair.
As she drew near, she realized that the heat from the Binding Rune had warped the spokes and melted the rubber tires to the floor. She could only laugh and snort uncontrollably with her tousled hair hanging in her face and drool caked on her chin. Of all the contingencies for which she had planned, a mangled wheelchair had never been one of them. In retrospect, she couldn't remember why not. Vanity, she supposed.
She Levitated herself into her dangerously-listing chair and added a ruptured gel cushion to the growing list of casualties. The silicone gel dribbled from the cushion in a warm, milky foam that reminded her of come, and she grimaced as it coated the backs of her thighs and knees.
"Reparo totalus!" she muttered, and the spokes and bent frame righted themselves with a groaning, comical spang. The rubber tires peeled from the wooden floor with a viscous, alien slurp. The cushion, however, remained misshapen. There was no replacing the lost gel, which obediently plumped into shape beneath her chair. She heaved a rueful, exhausted sigh. "It'll be fun filling out the Medicare forms on this one."
She stowed her wand inside her robes and rolled to inspect her handiwork. Lessing was black as coal, and for one panicked moment, she was certain the spell had incinerated him, but when she came alongside him, she saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest. She reached out and touched the blackened bowl of his stomach, and grit shifted beneath her fingertips. When she removed them, there were five white dimples in their stead. He was covered in soot.
The rune on his chest was a livid, raw red on a field of black, and she understood instinctively that while the soot could be removed, the rune would always glow with the same infected, blood-boil heat. She passed her hand over it, and diseased warmth brushed her cold palm. Her fingers snapped closed in a gesture of protection, and she withdrew her hand and pivoted to the worktable where she had left the amulet.
It, too, was blackened, and she rubbed off the soot with the hem of her robes. The amulet was a cat's-eye marble made of ambergris. She had picked it because it had reminded her of a serpent's lidless eye, with its lifeless gaze and narrow, vertical pupil. She had thought it appropriate.
The serpent's eye glowed green on the end of its pewter chain, a hypnotic, pulsating emerald.
Killing Curse in a bottle, she thought, entranced, and turned the amulet this way and that in the scant light.
She dangled the bauble in front of Lessing's blank, unseeing eyes. "Your gilded cage, Mr. Lessing. Isn't it lovely?"
Lessing did not blink, but awareness flickered in his eyes.
Good Lord, girl, her grandfather grunted. You and Bellatrix Lestrange could have a merry High Tea and discuss fine vintages of madness over Earl Grey and scones.
She crammed the back of her wrist into her mouth to stifle a heehaw of laughter at the image of her and Bellatrix Lestrange sipping from china teacups with their pinkies raised in proper fashion. And then she was laughing, howling around the flimsy barrier of flesh and bone like an animal in a snare. One long, ululating bawl after another, and tears streamed from her gritty eyes, so that she was unsure if she was laughing or sobbing. Soon, there was no difference, and she rocked back and forth in her chair, hands clamped to the hard, sharp pikes of her knees and legs outthrust like a broken exclamation point.
It was over. The weight of obligation had been lifted from her bowed shoulders, and the niggling tugs from her emaciated conscience had ceased, as had the voices of remonstrance. There was nothing to discuss or plan or justify. She had carried out her wizards' justice, had finished what she had started, and now it was between her and God. All that was left was to bury the bones, kick the dirt from her aching, eggshell heels, and go home to Don. She slipped the amulet over her head and tucked the serpent's eye inside her robes.
She cast a Concealment Charm on Lessing and lurched outside into the cold December air. The rest of the cleanup could wait, or maybe she wouldn't bother with it at all. In the unlikely event that someone summoned the courage to visit the Shack, they would find only empty phials and a dented cauldron, and who could say what they had been used for or how long they'd been there? She'd have to clean herself up and clean or burn her robes, but right now, she only wanted to breathe the fresh air and bask in the cleansing light of the moon.
She closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sky, palms thrust outward and spread in silent entreaty to the cosmos.
"God in his Heaven, Rebecca, but what have you done?"
Seamus Finnegan emerged from a thicket, wand at the ready. In the moonlight, his blue Auror's robes made him look like a ghost.
Author:
laguera25Fandom(s): HP/CSI:NY
Rating: FRAO
Pairing: Don Flack/OFC
Spoilers: S1, S2, and S3; HP to Book 6
Disclaimer: 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 characters, places, and events in the HPverse are property of J.K. Rowling, Scholastic and Bloomsbury Books, and Warner Bros., Inc.
Part I Part II Part III Part IV Part V Part VI Part VII Part VIII Part IX Part X Part XI
While her husband and Mac Taylor struggled with half-revealed truths and unspoken regrets, Rebecca opened her mouth and breathed in copper and blood and soured vengeance. Her hands were slick with it, and it pooled around her wheels and splashed onto her feet, where it dried to russet as she worked. It was dried and tacky on her elbows and wet and warm on her palms, and there wasn't enough coagulant to stop its flow.
She talked, mostly to distract herself from the numbness in her chest and the stinking silence broken only by the wet parting of skin from sinew. Lessing had stopped talking days ago, and she wasn't sure if it was because his vocal cords had finally ruptured from screaming, or if he had accepted that it would gain him no respite. She found she didn't care. Her hand stuttered on a stubborn strip of skin, and she gritted her teeth and gave a savage twist. Lessing's lidless eyes stared up at her, and his fleshless jaws creaked, but that was all. No screaming. Not even a broken whimper. Ruptured, then, and thank God for it, because his screams and pleas for mercy had long since lost their novelty.
Everything had lost its color, truth be told. The ache in her arms and lodged between her shoulder blades like a knife was no longer the sweet, thrumming burn of the righteous, but the dull ache of muscles and bones too old for the skin that covered them, of too much for too little. The gore under her nails and smeared over her hands was no longer the viscous, potter's clay of unmaking, but useless, blind waste.
Worse yet, she could no longer remember the fine, heady taste of her hatred. It had lost its shape with the careless shucking of Lessing's face and dispersed, diluted, into the stale air of the Shrieking Shack. Now there was only dirt and blood and sweat on her tongue, and they were neither sweet with justice nor bitter with disappointment. They coated her tongue like ash and made her grimace when she swallowed, as though she were taking a pill too big for her throat. She wished that she could taste nothing, but the more she swallowed in an effort to wash the taste away, the more her mouth filled with it.
She was tired, and the fire that had sustained her since that night in November when she had gathered damp earth from a necropolis beneath the impassive gaze of the moon had guttered to embers. She was acutely aware of every creaking joint and crackling tendon, and from deep within her back, she felt the fluttery quickening of a seizure to come, heavy and proprietary as a tumor at the base of her spinal column. God's eyes were watching her in the darkness of the house that love had fled or never lived in at all, and though she had forgotten the import of what her hands were doing, He had not, and later tonight or tomorrow, He would reach out with a steady, avenging finger and make her remember it inside her twisted bones. He would make her confess her sin a scream and a spasm at a time. Soon, there would be no forgetting, but for now, she could, and so she did, blotted it out with the mindless, efficient movement of her hands and the dull cadence of her voice.
"The hospital was the first time I'd ever held his badge in my hands," she told Lessing in that dead voice.
It was like holding his heart. Just as precious. Just as heavy. You'd never realized how heavy it was until it slid into your unsuspecting palm from the manila envelope in which the trauma nurse had put it. You'd only touched it in passing, to move it on the dresser or graze it with clutching, needy fingers when you were trying to suck him off or get him out of his pesky clothes. It was part of the sacred space that each of you had set aside from the other, as off limits as his service Glocks and the box of ammunition on the top shelf of the bedroom closet.
You never suspected. It was air in his hands, lifted and flashed and tossed onto the bed or dresser by nimble, practiced fingers. He was accustomed to its weight, conditioned to ignore its presence at his hip or in the broad cup of his palm. And why not? He's lived with it since he was twenty-one, and before it migrated to those more comfortable niches, it had rested directly over his heart.
Maybe that's why you taste it on his tongue and in his come, that tart tang you assumed was natural to all men. It leached through his skin and slipped into his bloodstream, where it infused every part of him with the memory of copper and tin and tattooed its numbers into his breast. It's still there, that mark; not even the explosion could obliterate it. Nor could it cleanse him of the taste. It's still on him, still sharp and metallic and unapologetic as you skim his teeth with your greedy tongue. It's toxic-lethal. You know it is, heavy metal poisoning by osmosis, but you kiss him anyway. You wouldn't stop even if you could because in truth, you could think of worse ways to die.
It was strangely organic in your hand, cool but not cold, as though it carried residual body heat. It was dirty and spattered with his blood. Some of it had dripped into the crevices of the shield and settled there like an offering. The eagle wept scarlet, and the olive branch in its talons had broken. Captain Gerrard offered to take it for you, to clean it, he said, but you refused. Holding it was the closest you could get to cradling Don, and you couldn't let it go.
So you sat in the surgical waiting room and cleaned his badge with a swab and sterile water from Hawkes' field kit and Kleenex from the box on the table. The other cops who came to pay their respects and offer prayers couldn't look at it. O'Bannion sat in a chair across the room, thumbs lodged in his oiled gunbelt and teeth locked against the bile in his mouth. He was so queasy that you pitied him, and in the back of your mind, you wondered how long it would be before he either puked on his shoes or bolted for the bathroom. To his credit, he did neither, and you admired his guts.
There was incredulity in his face whenever he watched you dab at your husband's blood, laced beneath the worry like an errant thread. He couldn't understand why you chose to handle a task normally reserved for less personal hands, hands protected from the intimacy of the job by a dual layer of latex. It was morbid and masochistic and indecent.
He wasn't the only person to think so; Mac looked pained whenever his raw, haggard gaze flickered to your cautious hands, and Captain Gerrard pursed his lips in a moue of dismay and blinked back tears of compassion and helpless rage. His mother thought you were a ghoul and told you so, eyes puffy from weeping and tongue forked and dripping with venom.
How can you just sit there? she demanded, shrill and jagged with pieces of her broken heart. How can you sit there and dabble in my ba-my son's blo- bloo- like it's nothing? She pressed her shaking hands to her middle as though time had reversed itself and returned Don to her womb.
You never answered her. You just kept blotting, wiping and drying. There were no explanations you could offer to them to make them understand why you had devoted yourself so wholly to the sad duty. Could not make them understand that it was a duty, one that you had vowed to carry out on the day you took his name. It was scalding and wrenching, and grotesque to hunch in your chair and scrape at his tacky blood like an art restorer over a small canvas, but it was also inescapable, bought and paid for by the golden band on your left hand. It was yours, and you had grown up with the inviolate truth that a man tended what was his. You couldn't stitch his wounds or tear the bastard who'd hurt him limb from limb, but you could clean and protect his sacred space, and so you did.
His father had a glimmer of understanding. He was not surprised or offended when you refused to let him hold the badge. In fact, he seemed to expect it. He recognized duty in your shaking fingers and tear-stained face, and part of him admired it. He would have done the same thing if you had never taken his son's name, would have considered it another obligation to the thin, blue line of which he had once been a part.
There were times while you worked that you were tempted to smash the shield into pieces and scatter its shards over the floor. What good was it when it had failed to protect him? If you crushed it beneath your rolling wheels, it couldn't burden him anymore with its demands for slavish devotion and blood sacrifice. The pressure would be off, and he could breathe again.
But you knew better. Your love was bonded to the hunk of metal in your hands, and if you destroyed it, you crushed him, too. He thrived on the pressure even as it wrung him dry, an addict in the deepest throes of addiction. He would lose himself if he lost his shield, and so you fought your instincts and swabbed blood from the eagle's feathers and mended the broken olive branch with careful applications of water, and when it was as clean as you could make it, you curled your nerveless fingers around it and traced the ball of your thumb over the smooth, cool numbers in an endless loop. 8571. 8571. The anonymous digits that made up the whole of his identity in the NYPD, inked into your thumb with blood and water.
The badge was the first thing he asked for once he had established that you were all right and that he wasn't going to die. You were sitting at his bedside, wiping his parched lips with a damp cloth and cleaning the white scum that had accumulated in the corners of his mouth.
So dry, sweetheart, you murmured. You want water?
He turned his head and licked his lips. Where 's it? he slurred.
Where's what, love? You dipped the cloth into the plastic cup of water and pressed it to his lips. His eyelids fluttered, whether in pleasure from the moisture or fatigue from the morphine drip, you couldn't tell.
My shield an' gun.
Your tired brain processed the words as my shittin' gun before logic parsed the true meaning. Your gun is with Captain Gerrard. Probably in his desk drawer. You'll get it back as soon as you're on your feet again. You smoothed your hand over his cool, waxy forehead.
My badge? Where's m' badge? Did they take it? His eyes were wide and frantic with the possibility, and the steady chirp of the heart monitor increased.
Hey. Hey, you soothed. Nobody took it. They gave it to me with your-with your things. You swallowed the urge to weep and banished the recollection of the nurse bringing his possessions in that small, sad envelope. It's fine. I took care of it for you. It needed to be cleaned up a little. It was…dirty.
Your throat worked at the memory of bloody feathers and broken branches, and you turned from the remembered stink of copper and tin and well-tended leather. It's here in the night table. You opened the drawer and pulled out the badge. See? You pressed it into his lax, upturned hand.
His fingers closed convulsively around it, as though it were a lifeline, and he raised his hand. He blinked at it in an effort to focus his eyes, and the relief in them was so profound that your chest ached. He was a little boy who had found his cherished talisman against the darkness. He brought it to his chest and circled his thumb over the crevices you had so painstakingly cleaned.
You felt a stab of vicious jealousy towards that badge, furious that it could relax his face like none of your caresses and reassurances had managed. You were seized with the childish, ugly impulse to tear it from his hand and hurl it across the room, but you smothered it, ashamed and frightened by its sudden intensity.
What kind of wife would I be to let them take that from you? You'd meant to be breezy, but it was cracked and wavering beneath too many unspoken truths.
His hand snaked over the bedrail to cup your face. You're a good one, doll, and don't let anyone tell you different. Furry with exhaustion and painkillers. Now gimme a kiss.
You leveraged yourself upright by the bedrails and dusted kisses over his forehead and along his jaw until you reached his lips. They were still dry and sticky and tasted of eight-day breath and medical tubing, but you closed your eyes to savor the delicate frisson of contact and the sensation of his breath passing your parted lips.
I'm going to go ask the doctors when I can give you real water. I'd give you ice to suck if I wasn't worried you'd fall asleep and choke on it, you said when you pulled back, and your breath tickled his cheek.
You gonna have dinner with me later? he asked, and his eyelids drooped with weariness.
I wouldn't miss it, you promised him. Now rest. I'll be here when you wake up. You eased the badge from his tenuous, softening grasp. I'm going to put this on the night table, and if anybody gets any bright ideas about taking a souvenir for their booger-eating nephew, they'll be using their undergarments for dental floss.
An indistinct rumble from deep within his chest. You shouldn't make a guy who's just had abdominal surgery laugh, he chided gently, but his eyes were more alert than they had been since they had opened.
Sorry, babe.
Less than a minute later, he was fast asleep, and you trundled into the hallway in search of a doctor to berate. You cornered Dr. Singh as he was coming out of the surgeons' lounge and chewed him for the mindless catharsis of the deed, all bared teeth and cutting tongue, and you only stopped because you were running out of air. Dr. Singh waited for you to finish, and when you did-red-faced and stiff with indignation-he told you he could have room-temperature tap water if his barium swallow and CT scan the following day revealed no perforations or adhesions.
You circled the hallways for a while to clear your head and slow your racing heart, and with every meandering circuit, you stopped outside his room to look in on him and make sure he was only sleeping. You left at dusk to pick up a tuna melt and container of chicken noodle and pea soup from the deli down the block, and then you went back to keep your dinner date.
The nurse brought his food packet before Wheel of Fortune, and you sat beside him and scarfed the sandwich while Pat Sajak cajoled giddy, bug-eyed contestants through the twenty-six letters of the alphabet and the quadrillions of combinations into which they could be pressed. He watched as well as he could, but the effort of healing exacted a heavy toll, and he nodded and drifted for most of the night, lulled by the mundane mutter of the talking heads and the familiarity of seeing you on one side and his treasured badge on the other. He was surrounded by his favorite things and slept easily.
His badge was the golden carrot for which he drove himself to get better, and though you were glad that he was healing, you couldn't help but resent that he had eyes only for it. Once he came home from the hospital, it resumed its rightful place on the dresser, polished properly by his expert hands, and sometimes when he was at his rehab sessions, you'd fantasize about flushing it down the toilet or dropping it down the sewer grate outside the building. You never did because you knew how much it would hurt him, but there were days, especially after the silence fell, that it was a matter of inches.
It wasn't fair or becoming. It was puerile and ugly, your jealousy, but you couldn't help it. You had watched over him and loved him and flouted magical law to soothe him, and yet, his only concern was the hunk of gold the blast had torn from his hip. He talked endlessly of the day he could get back to the job, but never spoke so lovingly of the day when he could stroll arm-in-arm with you through Central Park or stop for paper bowls of hot dim sum in Chinatown. It was a return to the job he wanted, not a return to his life with you, and that knowledge was salt in your myriad wounds.
Then one morning, he was summoned to the precinct, and when he came back an hour later, his Glock was in its holster and his badge was clipped to his hip. He was pale, but his eyes were shining. He swept you into his arms and held you tightly, face pressed into the crook of your neck.
The Captain put me back on the active-duty roster as of this mornin', he crowed, and he was vibrating with ill-concealed happiness.
Congratulations, you answered with a heartiness you didn't feel, and kissed his cheek.
He pulled back and surveyed you with those lovely eyes. Hey. What kinda kiss is that, mm? I was thinkin' I deserved one more like this.
And he laid one on you, all warm lips and possessive, stroking tongue. He cupped the back of your head in his palm, and when you gripped his shoulders to stay upright and thwart your buckling knees, he cupped your face in his hands, and made deep furrows in your hair with gentle fingertips. His breath came in an unsteady rattle through his nose, and when you lurched closer, his heartbeat fluttered against your scrawny breastbone.
He didn't break the kiss until black spots exploded behind your eyes and drool trickled indecorously from between your locked lips. Then he parted with a sputter of laughter, red-faced and tousled and delirious with the simple joy of life. He locked his arms around your waist to support you, and then he just studied you, triumphant and panting.
You know how beautiful you look when you're like that? he asked quietly.
You blinked. Like what? Drunk and wobbly?
A soft huff of laughter. Naw. Just…like that. Like this. Happy.
I bet you said that to all the drunks and nodders when you were on the beat.
Rebecca, I'm serious, he murmured. You're gorgeous, and I couldn't've done this-," he let go of you long enough to tap his badge with a forefinger, "-without you."
Your throat constricted with a mixture of shame and love, and you tried to turn away before he saw the jealousy that had surged in your veins when he'd announced his return to duty, but he held you fast, oblivious in his love and adoration.
I'm not actually goin' back on shift 'til Monday, so I thought that maybe we could do some catchin' up-a little dinner, a little dancin'. A movie if you want. We could even get a hotel room for the weekend, rattle the walls, you know? He waggled his eyebrows.
The tears came unbidden then, accompanied by a hitching bray that surprised you both with its ferocity. He carried you into the living room, settled you onto the couch, and asked you what was wrong. You couldn't tell him, but not because you didn't want to. There were simply no words to explain how lucky you were to have his love, and how ashamed you were to have doubted it for a single instant. So you coughed and sputtered and choked on salty snot, and when you could talk, you told him that you were glad to have him back, glad that he was still yours to hold. It was enough of the truth to satisfy him, but not enough to damn you.
He took you out on the town that night, sat through a bad horror movie for your sake and split a mammoth plate of steak fajitas and pico de gallo. He drank beer and loaded his fajitas with sour cream and guacamole. He laughed often and loudly and left a big tip for the waiter, and then he kissed you down by the river, with the smell of Irish Spring and wet earth in your nose. He tasted like beer and sour cream, and when he went down on you later that night in a strange, hotel bed, you came so hard that your thighs ached the next day.
The day after that was a trip to the zoo, where you watched the penguins and the monkeys and carefully skirted the lions and tigers. You watched the elephants and inhaled the rank stink of dung, and you sat on a bench and split a funnel cake piled high with cinnamon apples. He wrangled a runaway balloon for a crying toddler, and when you teased him about it being his first heroic deed since his recall to duty, he blushed, but he also preened and strutted for the rest of the day; when he fucked you that night atop rumpled bedsheets, he was possessive and feral and full of his old swagger.
The last day before he returned to the grind of the streets was spent in the lazy comfort of home. You slept past noon and padded around in your socked feet, and you spent all day making dinner together and watching TV. He screamed himself hoarse at the Rangers between bites of lasagna and sips of red wine, and you watched in bemusement from the corner of your eye. He went to bed with a full belly and slept the sleep of the just, and when his alarm clock sounded the call to arms the next morning, he bounded out of bed in bright-eyed anticipation.
That three-day weekend was an epiphany. It made you realize the enormity of the bond between Don and his shield. He wasn't whole without it, wasn't the man with whom you'd fallen in love. It was like the loss of a limb. That was why he was so distant from you and so obsessed with being declared fit for duty. Not because he loved you less, but because he could not love himself without its heft tugging at his hip and heart. From that day on, you vowed to love it as you loved him, honor it as you honored him, and when he gave you a coffee-flavored kiss on the way out the door, you were savagely proud to see him go.
It was his badge she thought of as she reached for the ebony-handled knife on the table beside her. Right now, she supposed that it was in pride of place on his hip, snug against his body and intimate as a lover. Perhaps it was winking in the bleak, December sun as he chased a suspect down winding streets and through garbage-strewn alleys, or maybe it was tucked in the bunched fabric of his pants as he sat at his desk in the bullpen and smudged his fingers with bleary lines of ballpoint ink.
It was a terrible, twisted irony that she had once swabbed blood from its reliefs and crevices, only to cover it in a cloying deluge six thousand miles across the sea. It was brilliant and cold in her mind's eye, and she winced as she brought the knife to rest on the line of Lessing's collarbone. It was another grotesque irony that the only part of Lessing that had been spared the Peeling Charm was his torso. It was smooth and obscenely white against the raw, wet redness of flayed flesh.
It was not an omission of mercy, but of necessity. She needed the smooth canvas of skin for the Binding Runes. Her lips thinned as she carved the first shallow line, and Lessing's mouth opened in a soundless scream. Blood seeped from the cut in mournful accusation, but she was numb to its pathos after so many nights spent bathing in it to the elbows. She paused, re-established her grip on the hilt, and guided the blade through the next cut. She lifted the blade from the skin, blinked sweat from her eyes, took a deep breath, and returned to the intricate work. All the while, Lessing screamed without sound.
She laid the knife across his chest, the steel blade cold and biting against his bloody, flushed skin. "It's a Binding Rune," she told him tonelessly. "Once it's finished, it will bind your soul to your body and prevent it from escaping. There is an identical rune engraved in the amulet I bought for the occasion. Knockturn Alley, for all its well-deserved and sordid reputation, is remarkably useful. When I complete the rune, your soul will be trapped inside the amulet and your body. There will be no death for you; not unless either your body or the amulet is destroyed. And I assure you, they're never going to find your body."
A Horcrux. Once upon a time, the fate of the wizarding world had hinged on the destruction of seven Horcruxes scattered across Europe. Diaries and lockets and swords that had kept their secrets well. Lives had been lost for the sake of paper and forged steel. Rivers of blood had been shed in pursuit of them, and Harry and the dynamic duo had braved Romania and Bulgaria on the merest wisps of rumors.
They had found them all in the end, guided by luck, Gryffindor bravado, and the sage advice of Albus Dumbledore, dispensed from the rich, oiled canvas of his Hogwarts portrait. The last, Helga Hufflepuff's cup, had been sundered on Harry's birthday in 1997, and Voldemort had collapsed in on himself and left nothing behind but a pile of earth infested with worms. Ding, dong, the Dark Lord was dead, and hysteria had come trailing after.
Horcruxes had always been forbidden, but now their creation or possession carried a sentence of death without trial, to be performed by an Auror on the spot of the offense. All information pertaining to their use or creation had been stricken from the record, purged from wizarding libraries across the continent. The libraries at Nice and Versailles had broadcast the burning of the relevant texts on the Wizarding Wireless Network, and she had listened to a copy of the burning at Versailles at the archives in London, where they had been preserved as a defining moment in British Wizardry.
But the libraries in Eastern Europe, China, the Middle East had not followed suit. The proprietor of the library at Alexandria had refused to burn the books on principle, and so they still adorned the shelves that rose toward a vaulted ceiling adorned with hieroglyphics that told the story of the pharaohs. They were restricted, but access could be bought for a few Galleons pressed into a dry, brown palm.
And what the books hadn't told her, Hermione Granger had. Inadvertently, of course, parceled out over the weeks and days of sixth year, when she, Harry, and Ron had researched nothing but. For all her cleverness, Hermione had been remarkably lax in casting Muffling Charms. Maybe since she had solved the mystery of Harry's long sleep in fifth year, they hadn't perceived her as a threat, or maybe they simply hadn't noticed her, slouched haphazardly in her chair and skulking in the flickering shadows cast by the common room fireplace. They'd had eyes only for each other then, and Harry's had been distracted by the specter of failure.
She doubted Hermione had ever intended her information to be used like this, but what could she expect from a woman who had gladly stood on the backs of house elves? Hermione would call this a natural progression of her lunacy. She chuckled in spite of herself. As far gone as she was, she knew there was nothing natural about this. It was wicked and perverse and the only way she would be able to bury the image of Don's guts laid open to a dusty, lightless ceiling.
"I'm not going to close the rune yet, though. I wouldn't want to give you a painless immortality. Just enough life to know you're dying, but not enough to grant you release. I want the light from both worlds to taunt you for eternity, always out of reach. I want you to wish for the end as hard as I wished it would never come for him, as hard as he fought to come home. I want you to long for it. When I brought you here, I told you I owed you an hour for every minute that he was away, but I lied. I'm a Gryffindor, what can I say? We're chronic overreachers. So are Slytherins, come to think of it. Gets us into trouble."
"It won't be long now." Tender, and filled with the dust of her husband's would-be tomb. "I promise. Don't worry; I won't let you go too far." She picked up the knife and sat back to wait.
It was as much promise to herself as to him. She was tired of the stink and the cold and the damp of the Shrieking Shack, tired of the dust that reminded her of Don's accident, settled and heavy as a shroud over the furniture. It had even settled over her in a fine mist when she had sat too long in one place, light as spidersilk. She was Mrs. Haversham in her rotten bridal veil.
The thrill of what she had done had disappeared after the first night and left behind a hollow brittleness in her bones, and she had wanted nothing more than to be finished. She had even considered abandoning her scheme, just snapping his neck, Transfiguring the body into a bone like Barty Crouch, Jr. had once done to his own father, and burying it beneath the front step like a housewarming gift. She'd thought of washing the dirt from beneath her fingernails and going home to her life, her revenge exacted.
But to do that would've made all her careful planning and burning hatred worthless, and she had been taught by a long line of honorable men to finish what she began. Anything less was weakness and cowardice. So she had trudged doggedly on, cutting and peeling until blood lost all ability to move her, until Lessing was as irrelevant and inhuman as cured hide. It wasn't a man she was slicing, but a piece of breathing meat, and she no longer wondered about his wife and daughter or if he had a mother to mourn him.
At first, her detachment had terrified her, and when she had felt it stealing over her like stuporous melancholy, it had so shocked her that she'd rolled into the furthest corner from Lessing and cried until she vomited in a wet, sticky splatter that had drawn a rat from its hole in a crumbling baseboard. Its mangy, grey fur and fat, pink tail had reminded her of Peter Pettigrew, who would later come to be known as Lord Voldemort's Wormtail. Thinking of him had inevitably led to thoughts of his master, and she had clapped her bloody hands to her mouth and sobbed in hysterical terror at the thought that she was becoming like him, cold-blooded and inhuman. She'd cried harder still at the thought that Don had touched her, and worse yet, had entrusted her with his heart and soul.
She'd been horrified at the possibility and had sworn that she was going to kill Lessing and bury the evidence of her breakdown in the thicket behind the Shack, but ten minutes later, she'd left the rat to his feast and returned to her work. It would be better, she had decided, to finish an atrocity and claim it than to leave it undone and disavow it. The Lucius Malfoy inside her head had rolled his eyes and sniffed daintily at the mangled nobility of the thought, but she had simply refused to become the filth that Don risked his life to catch. When the coldness had overtaken her again while she was filleting Lessing's flaccid prick, she had simply accepted it.
After tonight, done was done. She was going to scrub the blood from her hands and the beds of her nails and rinse it from her lips and teeth. She was going to shatter the mortar and pestle and the potion phials they had helped to fill and destroy the cauldron in which they been brewed, and then she would Banish their pathetic remnants to the shapeless void reserved for those things and people for which wizards had no further use. Hey, Evanesco, and all traces of her within these walls would cease to exist. She'd make sure there were no stray bits of Lessing trapped in the strands of her hair or the folds of her robes and remove what she found with a Scourging Charm. Then, she'd go home, and if there were any mercy left in God's breast for her, his most wayward child, the only red to stain her hands for the rest of her days would be the blood of cherry tomatoes sacrificed for Don's dinner salads or the juice from the roasted red peppers piled high on his red pepper, provolone, and pastrami sandwiches.
Lessing drew a deep, shuddering breath, and she sat forward, fingers curled tightly around the hilt of the knife. His eyelids fluttered rapidly, and his eyes slid out of focus. He was sliding into eternity. She aligned the tip of her knife with the unfinished rune.
"I'm sorry," she said, but she wasn't looking at him. She was looking at Don, lying in his hospital bed in pre-op, robbed of his mind by the morphine and whiter than the sheets that covered him.
She completed the rune with a stiff flick of her wrist.
The force of the spell, when it came, was so intense that the world burned green. There was a thunderous roar, and the Shack rocked on its foundations. Masonry fell from the ceiling, and she remembered her last night at Hogwarts, when Seamus Finnegan had crawled into her infirmary cot and shielded her from dust and falling masonry as the great castle had trembled to its cornerstone.
The concussion from the blast rocketed her into the opposite wall and pitched her from her chair, and she sprawled on the cold, dirty floor and blinked dust from her stunned eyes. Her chin was warm and wet, and when she touched her fingers to it, they came away red. Her teeth were spongy when she prodded them with the blade of her tongue, but they were all accounted for, and none of them fell out at the gentle inspection. Her chest was too light, and her stomach clenched in a vicious spasm. She rolled clumsily onto her side and vomited a bilious, black tar, thick and throttling as pitch.
"Well, no wonder they don't want people fucking around with that shit," she warbled, and scuttled away from the mess, propelled by a clawed, scrabbling hand and a trembling foot. She laughed, and sour, black bile hung from her chin and marked her passage.
She collapsed halfway across the room and sprawled where she had fallen. Her chin throbbed, and she realized that the air smelled of ozone and singed hair. She tittered and gulped lungfuls of metallic air, and her chin throbbed and stung. She spit to clear her mouth of the sour taste and only succeeded in drooling onto her cheek and chin. She raised her hand to wipe them clean, but decided it wasn't worth the effort and let it flop bonelessly to the floor again.
Magic had sucked all the heat from the room in the execution of the spell, and she shivered at the cold that crept beneath the thick wool of her robes and seeped into her bones and internal organs. She was frozen on the inside, and each breath that emerged from her blue-lipped, black-gummed mouth was a whirling, beautiful wraith that danced upon the heavy air with nimble feet. Each inhalation plunged a slender stiletto into her breast.
She was tempted to lie there and succumb to sleep, but the primitive portion of her brain that had colored her a ruthless survivalist from the cradle refused to let her lay her burden down, and so she forced her heavy-lidded eyes to remain open and fumbled in the sleeve of her robe for her wand. It occurred to her that her magic was gone, taken in tribute for the success of the spell, and as she drew her wand, she was surprised to feel no sorrow at the thought. Magic was a means to an end, and now her task was complete. If it was gone, she wouldn't have straddle two worlds and fit comfortably in neither. She would just be who she'd pretended to be all along: Rebecca Flack, wife and teacher. No more secrets, and no more dreams of dragons and broomsticks silhouetted against the belly of the moon.
But no. There was the magic still, called forth by the Warming Charm she cast. It surged again as she cast a healing spell on her chin, and then she lowered her arm to her side and scissored her arms and legs and formed a snow angel in the thick blanket of dust and ash underneath her. Blood and warmth trickled into her chest and extremities, and when the worst of the pins and needles had passed, she rolled onto her stomach, pushed herself to her hands and knees, and resumed her trek towards her wheelchair.
As she drew near, she realized that the heat from the Binding Rune had warped the spokes and melted the rubber tires to the floor. She could only laugh and snort uncontrollably with her tousled hair hanging in her face and drool caked on her chin. Of all the contingencies for which she had planned, a mangled wheelchair had never been one of them. In retrospect, she couldn't remember why not. Vanity, she supposed.
She Levitated herself into her dangerously-listing chair and added a ruptured gel cushion to the growing list of casualties. The silicone gel dribbled from the cushion in a warm, milky foam that reminded her of come, and she grimaced as it coated the backs of her thighs and knees.
"Reparo totalus!" she muttered, and the spokes and bent frame righted themselves with a groaning, comical spang. The rubber tires peeled from the wooden floor with a viscous, alien slurp. The cushion, however, remained misshapen. There was no replacing the lost gel, which obediently plumped into shape beneath her chair. She heaved a rueful, exhausted sigh. "It'll be fun filling out the Medicare forms on this one."
She stowed her wand inside her robes and rolled to inspect her handiwork. Lessing was black as coal, and for one panicked moment, she was certain the spell had incinerated him, but when she came alongside him, she saw the shallow rise and fall of his chest. She reached out and touched the blackened bowl of his stomach, and grit shifted beneath her fingertips. When she removed them, there were five white dimples in their stead. He was covered in soot.
The rune on his chest was a livid, raw red on a field of black, and she understood instinctively that while the soot could be removed, the rune would always glow with the same infected, blood-boil heat. She passed her hand over it, and diseased warmth brushed her cold palm. Her fingers snapped closed in a gesture of protection, and she withdrew her hand and pivoted to the worktable where she had left the amulet.
It, too, was blackened, and she rubbed off the soot with the hem of her robes. The amulet was a cat's-eye marble made of ambergris. She had picked it because it had reminded her of a serpent's lidless eye, with its lifeless gaze and narrow, vertical pupil. She had thought it appropriate.
The serpent's eye glowed green on the end of its pewter chain, a hypnotic, pulsating emerald.
Killing Curse in a bottle, she thought, entranced, and turned the amulet this way and that in the scant light.
She dangled the bauble in front of Lessing's blank, unseeing eyes. "Your gilded cage, Mr. Lessing. Isn't it lovely?"
Lessing did not blink, but awareness flickered in his eyes.
Good Lord, girl, her grandfather grunted. You and Bellatrix Lestrange could have a merry High Tea and discuss fine vintages of madness over Earl Grey and scones.
She crammed the back of her wrist into her mouth to stifle a heehaw of laughter at the image of her and Bellatrix Lestrange sipping from china teacups with their pinkies raised in proper fashion. And then she was laughing, howling around the flimsy barrier of flesh and bone like an animal in a snare. One long, ululating bawl after another, and tears streamed from her gritty eyes, so that she was unsure if she was laughing or sobbing. Soon, there was no difference, and she rocked back and forth in her chair, hands clamped to the hard, sharp pikes of her knees and legs outthrust like a broken exclamation point.
It was over. The weight of obligation had been lifted from her bowed shoulders, and the niggling tugs from her emaciated conscience had ceased, as had the voices of remonstrance. There was nothing to discuss or plan or justify. She had carried out her wizards' justice, had finished what she had started, and now it was between her and God. All that was left was to bury the bones, kick the dirt from her aching, eggshell heels, and go home to Don. She slipped the amulet over her head and tucked the serpent's eye inside her robes.
She cast a Concealment Charm on Lessing and lurched outside into the cold December air. The rest of the cleanup could wait, or maybe she wouldn't bother with it at all. In the unlikely event that someone summoned the courage to visit the Shack, they would find only empty phials and a dented cauldron, and who could say what they had been used for or how long they'd been there? She'd have to clean herself up and clean or burn her robes, but right now, she only wanted to breathe the fresh air and bask in the cleansing light of the moon.
She closed her eyes and tilted her face to the sky, palms thrust outward and spread in silent entreaty to the cosmos.
"God in his Heaven, Rebecca, but what have you done?"
Seamus Finnegan emerged from a thicket, wand at the ready. In the moonlight, his blue Auror's robes made him look like a ghost.