Irretrievable

Written for and winner of the Author's Choice round at Death Eater Drabs on LiveJournal. Prompt: "It is a fact that cannot be denied: the wickedness of others becomes our own wickedness because it kindles something evil in our own hearts." ---Carl Jung

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They captured her the night Snape killed Dumbledore.

Out looking for Crookshanks, she saw a flash of white-blonde hair, Snape, a hulking man who sniffed the air, a few more men, a woman…

Before the turn of a heel, Draco had spotted her, some strangled cry in his throat enough to alert the others. The hulking man cast a quick Incarcerous, grin feral, his gaze penetrating like a knife through ripe fruit. He’d shoved Draco over, and, sniveling, he’d practically clung to her as he tugged her along with them, out into the night. Snape had done nothing but look annoyed at her presence, as usual.

At Malfoy Manor, surrounded by them, Voldemort’s flat face and red, slitted eyes glinting at her close up, she’d steeled herself for the worst, waited for the Unforgivables to come hissing out of mouths and wands.

None came.

Instead, they put her in a cage—an actual, metal cage, round like a globe—the bounds of her world now. Except for what she could see through its bars.

And what she saw.

Cruelty, torture, sexual perversions—these the Death Eaters performed not only upon the parade of captives brought in over the days and weeks, but upon each other. And they made sure she was there to see, levitating her cage from room to room. If she closed her eyes or stopped her ears, she was restrained, her lids clamped open and magically hydrated.

Here was a young Muggle boy, naked, shrieking, running round the dining room as the hulking man—Fenrir Greyback, she learned—salivated after him, pouncing and clawing into the soft parts below the boy’s rib cage, eager teeth searching for a fat artery as he bent the child over the long, dark table, full moon several nights past.

Here was Lucius Malfoy, sprung from Azkaban, hair stringy and greasy, eyes as lively as a stagnant lake, made to kiss the Dark Lord’s feet and beg for the privilege of him in his home. Made to kneel and endure faceful after faceful of come as those he’d once considered his inferiors in the ranks wanked gleefully above him, his wife and son looking on.

And there was Charity Babbage, Hogwarts Muggle Studies Professor, suspended, terrified, pleading with Snape, who did not listen. Snape, who only once “indulged” himself, with a green-eyed woman whose gaze he would not release as she buried her head in his lap, arms bound behind her.

In the beginning, she’d cried for days, tried reasoning with them between sobs, then threatened them with what Harry would do, what she would do when this was all over.

But no one paid any attention. They wouldn’t even look at her.

Except Draco.

When no one was watching, sometimes he’d look at her. She saw fear, curiosity, pity. Mostly fear, like he expected her to help him. Like he was the one in a cage.

She knew better than to signal him, ask his help. He was never alone, and he’d never been brave, never his own person, always selfish. After his failure to kill Dumbledore, the others treated him like the cowering little prick she’d known him to be since he was eleven, threatened punishment for his inadequacies, made lurid advances in front of his parents. He clung to his mum like a firstie.

She lost track of the weeks. Months? No Harry, no Ron, no Order. But the prisoners, the torture, continued. She found herself amazed by the way the most seemingly harmless spells could be made cruel in their hands. Aguamenti cast in the throat of a victim would drown them. Repeatedly Rennervating someone not Stunned could cause a heart attack.

She watched. She saw. She listened: to the screams, the whimpers, the moans, the laughing. Her insides gone hollow then wrong, like a Pensieve filled with foul red memories. A repository of wizardkind’s most monstrous degradations, should anyone care to look, should even one fellow captive raise his eyes and see beyond his own pain.

But she discovered something: she was unbreakable. One can’t crack, snap, or shatter what’s fluid, what shifts and sifts like moonlight on a werewolf’s blood-matted fur. She couldn’t—didn’t—care about these people anymore, these victims still crying fresh tears. She had no tears left, not a drop to spare for the interchangeable broken bodies crying out to anyone for shreds of salvation. She took a moment to mourn the shell of old self she’d shed—for that’s what it was, a bowl that once cupped a silvery pure substance—but couldn’t make herself hold on to the regret.

And Voldemort’s red eyes saw her, she felt him in her mind, withdrawing, letting her feel it, and the cage was opened. Her wand placed in her hand.

Her eyes went to Draco, his open mouth, pink and wet, that familiar, grey gaze searching and needy as she cast the Killing Curse.

And they let her go.