Disclaimer: Cliffhangers add suspense.

A/N: Away we go…

*~*~*~*

Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time

Chapter 23 – Living Is Easy With Eyes Closed

The laws of Time are mine!

And they will obey me!

~The Doctor

*~*~*~*

“Are you done, Harry?”

“Oh no... if anything I’ve been far too passive, far too merciful. That ends today. Today and yesterday and all the time in between... Let’s take things up a notch.”

*~*~*~*

It hurt waking up. But that was nothing new. It was supposed to hurt, I guess.

“So you’ve found a way to live with yourself… Somehow that will have to be enough to save the world.”

A hand reached for my throat. It was my own. I could still feel the blood, feel the numb pain. My neck was whole, yet my fingers brushed against a thin, ropy line of what I assumed must be scar tissue. Damn… I was still in the game. My head was killing me.

“I’m tired of trying to save the world. Let someone else do it…”

“That’s the problem. There is no one else. There’s just you, Harry. And one broken human is simply not enough.”

So I was alive.

Although it felt like I was about to die. There was no peace in death – not for me. To die would hurt more than the rest, more than the headache and the way it felt like I was swallowing liquid fire every time I drew a short, shallow breath. Through bleary eyes I could make out a twilit sky framed against a narrow window. A cool viridian wash of eternal twilight. Forever-light. Still alive and still Atlantis.

Time fled away from me, as is its desire. Sometimes I think it fears me.

“You’re supposed to be the hero, Harry Potter. Quit the smoking and the drinking and step up. Fate seems to see something in you, despite what the rest of us think…”

I took a swig from the bottle. It had been a long time since Firewhiskey burnt on the way down. “I’m sitting this round out, buddy. Time was I’d be all over that ‘hero’ shit, but I’ve lived so long that it doesn’t seem to matter anymore.” I laughed. “Apathy. That’s the real killer here. As much a demon as any you’d find in Atlantis.”

“Merlin, not this Atlantis nonsense again!”

“It’s real, Minister. Voldemort is going to unleash an army there, and it’s going to eat the whole wide world.”

“Then stop him, for Merlin’s sake!”

“I… I don’t want to.”

Time came crawling back, like a loyal mongrel dog to the cruellest of masters…

I opened my eyes and although the sky hadn’t brightened or darkened I had the sense that some hours had gone by. Falling out of memory was easy, as I shrugged away the lingering thoughts of my stupor, yet it was sticking the landing that really hurt. I always fell into regret.

And I had enough of those to make the devil weep.

There was very little to take into account in the room about me. It was a box. Stone walls and a dusty brick floor barely ten feet across. A slit of a window looked out on Atlantis. I managed to stand and lean against the wall, gazing down at the ruined city. I was some height above it, locked in Voldemort’s Tower of Doom. Despite the fancy new scar slashed across my throat, all was going according to plan.

And of course I’d been disarmed.

Wandless and shirtless. Scuffed and torn suit pants, my glasses, and a pair of black shoes in need of a good polish was all I had at my disposal. My chest was caked in dried blood. Not a lot of options for escape. I took a deep breath, stretching my sore throat, and let it out slowly.

“Last time counts for all…” I whispered, and turned to face the heavy iron door opposite the window. I stood with my hands clasped behind my back and began to wait.

*~*~*~*

Raise up your fists and scream bloody defiance into the abyss…

*~*~*~*

Still standing before the window, a look of eternal calm on my face, was how Voldemort found me some time later.

The heavy door swung open on silent hinges and the Dark Lord stepped into the cell, regarding me with his head held back, his nostrils flaring. Robes of darkest midnight concealed his hands, yet I imagine he gripped his wand at the ready, awaiting any surprises from the Chosen One.

I started strumming on my air guitar. “’You can’t start a fire… you can’t start a fire without a spark…’” I hummed Springsteen at his best. “’I’m dying for some action – I’m sick of sitting ‘round here trying to write this book!’”

Voldemort was not amused – he never was – but then only one of us was really born to run.

“You didn’t let me die,” I said, slinging my six-string over my shoulder.

The Dark Lord nodded. “Obviously. You live so long as you are useful to me, Harry Potter. You will tell me how you come to be here, in the Lost City, how you knew of the Vault in this tower, and what you know of its combination.”

I tapped my chin with one of the fingers left on my bad hand. “And if I refuse?”

“Does any part of you doubt that I will do what I must to make you speak, Harry?”

I shook my head. “No, you’re a prick, I get that. What you need to understand, though, is that I won’t break despite what you throw at me. That’s not why I’m here, anyway.”

“Oh?”

“No, I come with a proposition. We open the Vault, you and I, and descend into the depths of Atlantis together. I want to see what’s down there as much as you.” I knew what was down there. A clock, a bridge and eternal (can ya say infernal?) damnation. “Together, Voldemort, or not at all.”

“I think not. Your position is hopeless, Harry. You are far from home and the protection of Albus Dumbledore. Do you even understand what following me here means? This is not the world you know – we are in a realm of magic beyond your flawed understanding.”

It was a strange grin that bared my teeth. “I understand we are going to do this the hard way, dickhead. So bring your torture and your mind games – let’s get on with it.” I laughed, rocking back and forth on my heels. “You won’t break me.” I’m already broken. “And we’ll talk when you’re ready to see sense and want the Vault open.”

Voldemort held his silence a moment longer than was entirely comfortable. It had been some long years since I had been nervous or downright afraid in the presence of this murderer. In all honesty, he was no longer worth the worry. He had to be stopped. He had to be put down – destroyed. But only to save the world, or rather, to stop it form going straight to Hell.

“Harry, Harry…” Voldemort laughed. It was a short, rasping sound. “The world has chosen you to defy me, has it not?”

“Something like that.”

“You’ve always made an admirable job of it. Your father would be so proud.” The Dark Lord paused. “He would have let Travers drop, too, I believe. Merely to spite me.”

“He was better off dead. One less wand against me.”

“The forces aligned against you, Potter, are more powerful than you can comprehend. Your defiance will cost you nothing but suffering.”

“Looking forward to it.”

Voldemort removed his wand from within the folds of his robes and spun it slowly. A trail of sparkling yellow light formed in the air. I knew what was coming. It was magic similar to the star curtain I had forged through beneath Mt. Everest in order to gain the manuscript for the Gates – way back at the start of this journey, this life. Not quite as dangerous, but still unnerving.

“Think of what you have already lost.” The stream of yellow mist solidified and took form. The colours swirled, a shape shimmered into being. It was a man – a man screaming without voice.

Sirius Black fell to his knees before me, begging for mercy through silent lips.

Other phantoms smoked from the tip of Voldemort’s wand. My mother. My father. They begged for compassion in a terrible, deafening silence. It was all a trick – I knew that. But to see the dead again, even if only in falsity, made me twitch. These were people I had failed, oh more than once.

Voldemort disappeared behind his creations and the apparitions spun around me, pleading that same horrible pity. I stood steady, keeping my half-grin firmly in place. I wanted to look detached, uninterested. A band of sweat broke out across my forehead at the tears on my mother’s face.

Fate had never been kind to my family. If there is a price to pay to defy the darkness in this war, then the Potters can claim to have paid their fair share. The fickle bitch exacted a price in blood heavy enough to sink the Titanic.

“The dead are dead, Voldemort.” Except for me. Up until this life I had been immortal in the worst way. “Not even the magic you and I can wield will ever change that.” To this degree at least. I never could explain the eight-year limit on travelling back from the future. Perhaps one day…

It grew cold in my cell. Alone with the Dark Lord and the ghosts of the past. Fresh, clear lightning bolt cuts appeared on the foreheads of my mother and father. Sirius looked on in abject misery, his withered face a mask of life gone wrong – of the cost always being to high to resist.

“I tire of this, Riddle!” The edge in my voice spoke of command far beyond my supposed sixteen years. The faux-ghosts vanished in a hiss of sparkling yellow smoke and the freezing air warmed.

Voldemort stepped forward as the darkness receded, regarding me from behind his crimson eyes. He sensed the change in me and was at a loss to explain it. I held his eye contact for a moment and allowed the gentle probe into my mind.

An accomplished Legilimens, the Dark Lord cast his thoughts along the outer reaches of my mind, heading towards the chaos. He wouldn’t push it too far, not after what had happened in the Ministry some weeks ago. The agony of possessing me was something Voldemort feared.

Keep going, I thought. Dig a little deeper.

Voldemort did so, in his arrogance, and struck the chaotic fire and madness that was long decades of trying and dying. The memories of futures past, of futures yet to be. It was like being struck by a tsunami of seething fire, of raw tempered emotion. Voldemort screamed and his hand jumped to cover his eyes. He fell back against the iron door, breathing hard, struggling to compose himself. He shook and hissed dismayed anger between his teeth.

When he rose back to his full height, composed enough to meet my eyes again, he found me unmoved, hands still clasped firmly behind my back, and that shitkickin’ grin on my face. It was enough to break his forced calm, his posturing. Voldemort drew his wand against me and cried, “Crucio!”

My memories may have caused a fraction of the pain flowing into me now, as my nerves erupted in white-hot daggers of agony, yet I knew the bastard would not have been able to make any sense of the chaos he had glimpsed inside my head. The pain was real enough that I dropped to one knee, grunting under the weight of my boiling flesh.

Pain I could manage. Better than anyone. I’m an expert in detaching my mind from the madness of this curse. I fled into deeper madness, into the torn and ruined wastelands of time that I could call my mind. I merely jumped from one fire into another. The pain made no difference.

It was just a different brand of the same old shit.

The curse went on for some time, and it hurt. I could withstand the agony – and trying to drive me into insanity was fairly redundant (ha-ha!) – but it weakened me, sapped my resolve. I would not give in, not this side of death, but nor could I allow this weakness to show.

I began to chuckle in the conflicting arenas of pain battling for dominance inside my head. I began to laugh out loud, and Voldemort withdrew his wand with a snarl and glared down at me on my knees. I was laughing so hard that I almost cried.

“Potter?”

“I’m still here…”

Voldemort paused. “Are you ready to tell me what I want to know?”

I had bitten my tongue at some point during that curse. I spat a mouthful of saliva and blood on the floor at the Dark Lord’s feet. That was answer enough.

Voldemort did not seem surprised. “Very well. Remember this, Harry, in the long hours ahead. I gave you the chance to save yourself unimaginable suffering, in my mercy, and you refused.”

I sighed. “Just bring the bitch on.”

Voldemort narrowed his eyes and turned back to the open iron door – the only real way out of the cell. At some unseen signal, Bellatrix Lestrange stepped into view, bowing deeply before Voldemort and entering the room to my left.

“Hello, sweetheart.” I winked. “You, me and the fuckin’ Dark Lord makes three.”

Bellatrix’s eye twitched and her lips pulled back from her teeth in an unconscious snarl. Then she chuckled, placing the tip of her wand against her tongue and kissing the wood.

“Bellatrix has been instructed on what information to extract, Harry.” There was no regret or emotion on Voldemort’s face. My eternal tormenter had me dead to rights, and he knew it. To him it was only a matter of time before I cracked. “And she is very good at this task.”

“Any whore worth a damn knows how to make you scream.”

Voldemort actually smiled. It was a terrifying sight to behold. Watching the Devil and his tricks always is. He turned and stepped out of my cosy little cell.

“Far from home, little Harry…” Bellatrix whispered. This bitch was as insane as I was – and not in the good, happy-go-lucky way.

I unslung my air guitar and hummed a few chords. “’Johnny said: ‘Devil just come on back if you ever wanna try again… I dun told you once, you son of a bitch, I’m the best that’s ever been!” 

Voldemort paused at the door to issue a final command as Bellatrix trained her wand between my eyes. He met my gaze and held it for a long moment, trying to discern the change he saw, and felt, in me. Trying to understand just what I had become… what I had gained and lost since last we met.

It was beyond understanding. There was no measure for what I had become. And they would all learn that the hard way in the long days ahead… Beyond understanding. Always had been.

“Do not kill him,” the Dark Lord said, and then was gone.

*~*~*~*

So close now… can you feel it?

The universe is on fire! The Infernal Clock skips another beat and a thousand worlds – a thousand thousand – fall screaming into the darkness beyond oblivion.

*~*~*~*

Time.

Every effort I had made to shift the course of history had gone desperately – horribly – wrong…

Invisible cords bound my wrists to the floor and stretched my arms out to the walls of the cell. Similar restraints cuffed my ankles. I lay spreadeagled in the dust, able to glimpse a sliver of twilit sky on the edge of my sight.

But then the universe has a way of course correcting, does it not? Was I damned from the start? Perhaps death was the right choice, and not just the easy one…?

Soft footsteps circled me and I didn’t bother to track Bellatrix’s movements around the cell. I was already detaching myself from this room, walling away the parts of me that could feel and betray. It was a simple task – I had a lot of practice at this part of the game. My torturer giggled softly as she pressed the heel of her boot down across my throat, still chewing on her wand.

The cost of my detachment was one of the few things that could still terrify me. To flee from the physical pain was a simple matter, but to flee from Bellatrix’s particular brand on insanity – a fetid, disgusting thing – required a jaunt down memory lane. And the memories in my head were of the whole wide world burning.

It would be fair to say I had picked up a few damaging scars along the way. And not all of them were marked as clear as a lightning bolt on the forehead.

“Dear baby Harry Potter…” Bellatrix whispered. Her tone was a shiver, a thrill. I gasped for breath through my damaged throat as she shifted her weight against my neck.

I was trading one method of torture for another. Bellatrix knew her trade, no doubts there, but then so did I. I could withstand the horror show in my head – you can dig it, boss – but just barely.

“All alone in the lost, lost city.” Bellatrix removed her foot from my neck and knelt down next to me. Her wild hair and furious, uncaring eyes were all I could see. She trailed her wand, slick with her saliva, up my cheek and across my forehead. “Are you going to tell me what I want to hear?”

“No,” I said. “But then that is what you want to hear, isn’t it?”

She giggled again – an annoying sound made all the more so by the way she smacked her tongue across her lips. “I do so like it when they resist, Harry. It makes the cries when they break that much louder.”

“Sweetheart, you’re insane.”

I knew how to push her buttons. I’d been here before – more than once. The memories only just surfacing in my mind spoke of long days that may as well have been years spent in this cell. I would do my best to hurry things along.

Bellatrix scowled. She did not like the word insane. “Understand, Harry Potter, that you have absolutely no control over your situation here. You are helpless… and you are mine.” Insane. “Crucio!” It was said as an afterthought, but she did mean it.

The pain struck me but I was already too far detached for it to matter. A tired grunt escaped my lips and I bucked, arching my back up high, before mastering the feelings. I was hard. I was unbreakable. This torture was pointless.

A memory broke through to the surface to make sure it stayed that way…

The sky was on fire.

I sat slumped against the base of a forgotten cliff face, somewhere in the world, gazing up at the vast jets of green flame that crisscrossed the heavens, disappearing in vicious arcs over the horizon. A lance of blackened bone pierced my side, pinning me to the wall.

My wand was in reach but I was spent. Hideous creatures of bone and dust marched across the land at the bidding of their Dark Master. I could hear Voldemort laughing in my mind, sure in his victory.

“Oh laugh it up, you bastard,” I whispered. I couldn’t feel anything below the neck. Except the cold, always the cold, but even that was secondary to the voices in my head. “You can kill me but it only gives me another chance to destroy you…”

Why did I need so many chances? Why couldn’t I get it right? Bellatrix stopped cursing me and stood frowning down at my slack face, void of any real feeling.

“No one can resist screaming under that curse,” she said. Her face split into a wide grin. “You are special, aren’t you, Harry?”

“Insane,” I said, forcing the nerve spasms down. Was I talking to Bellatrix or myself? Perhaps it didn’t matter. I twitched and resisted the urge to moan.

“Have it your way then… Crucio!”

“Honey, I’m home…”

“Dear Merlin, ‘Arry, you’re bleeding!”

Fleur looked great in the light of the moon. Pale and aloof, untouchable and yet, in some impossible way, mine. Through the trees danced sparks of silver magic, falling like snow from the midnight sky. It was the burning ash of a hundred thousand exploding demons.

I’d managed, at long last and however many lives, to vanquish Voldemort’s demonic army as it broke through from the realm of Atlantis. It was all for naught this time round, however, as I was bleeding to death…

“T’is just a scratch, sweetheart.”

I fell into her arms. My blood marred her otherwise flawless skin and light blue robes. Fleur grasped her wand and ran it over my body, assessing the damage. It didn’t take her long to realise…

“Oh, ‘Arry… you are barely seventeen. Zis is not fair.”

“It’s cold and lonely in the deep dark night,” I said. “Ain’t no doubt about it.” Then I laughed.

Then I died.

Memories of dying were always festering just beneath the surface.

I was aware that the world’s worst pain curse had once again been lifted. It was like falling when I blinked and found myself back in the cell, looking up at Bellatrix, the memories abating for a time.

“Do you have something to tell me, little Harry?” Bellatrix’s tone was sickly-sweet.

“’I’ve been looking for an original sin’,” I laughed and sang. Tears pricked at the corners of my eyes. “’One with a twist and a bit of a spin. And since I’ve done all the old ones ‘til they’ve all been done in—

“Crucio!”

There’ll be Hell to pay someday – put it all on the bill, I guess.

“There he is…”

In the ruins of our crashed Atlantean battle cruiser – the Reminiscence – Ron and Hermione, accompanied by Neville, found me slumped in the command chair, one leg snapped clean off. I’d managed to stop the bleeding, but there was a lot more going on inside. I felt like dying.

“Harry, your leg!” Hermione cried.

“Hello, my friends.”

Ron was pale enough to be sick. “Sit tight, mate, Luna’s gone for help. The Healers are just up the street.”

“You Know Who’s collapsed the Ministry in on itself,” Neville said – relaying a moot point now. “Those bone-creatures are tearing London apart.”

“You three always stand by me,” I said. It was getting cold now – a familiar cold. Death, my old friend, send me back. “You better watch that… it’ll get you killed.”

The minutes began to melt into hours… and already the hours might have been days. Bellatrix did not seem to tire. She never left. But then I couldn’t trust time, I could never trust time, now least of all.

“You are mine, Harry,” she whispered. There was an edge of vicious torture in her voice, underneath the giggles and the frustrating way her teeth chattered together. “The Boy Who Lived, the Chosen One, has no power, does he? No, no, no… Harry Potter is nothing.”

She wanted me to feel fear – to let it mingle with the pain both psychological and physical – and reduce me to a quivering, helpless mess susceptible to coercion. It was an effective tactic, one that had never failed the evil bitch, but Bellatrix had met her match in the fuckin’ Chosen One.

She relented on the Cruciatus – just for a moment, I was sure – and instead set to cutting me open with a thin, infinitely sharp purple curse light. I raised my head enough to see my chest sliced open, my wrists slit, and the blood begin to flow… I was dizzy all at once.

And strangely hungry for a Pot Noodle.

Bellatrix could heal the physical damage she caused as adeptly as any competent witch or wizard. After a time I found myself tiring of her all-too-gentle touch and set to laughing in her face, calling her increasingly inventive variations of ‘insane whore’. That always got the old favourite pain curse out of her, which sent me reeling into blissfully torturous memory.

I had to remind myself that this was necessary to the plan. But oh how I hated the plan. The hours bled away.

“All things must change.”

“Save you, Harry Potter. The cost you’ve paid ensures that you never truly die… that you exist, you remain – you go on, Harry.”

It had been such a small price at the time. A fuck in the woods, my life and my soul, and I was more immortal than Voldemort would ever be. Time herself had made the deal, the Infernal Clock had signed off on it… and I had my second chance.

“How do I undo this curse?”

The spirit of water refused to answer me. Deep in the realms of the Forget I was denied, ignored. Raw fury, ignited by the arrogance of my many, many years, made me lash out.

I drove my wand through the suggestion of a creature before me, slashing it open. Unforgiving light, as bright as the sun, spilled from the gash. I screamed. My eyes burst in their sockets and my skull shatter—

My hair lay in clumps on the floor of the cell all around my head. Bellatrix hovered over me, her boots on either side of my neck, to admire her handiwork. She had shaved me bald and was running the tip of her wand across my exposed skin.

“Daft harlot!” I was running short of insults.

Bellatrix ignored me now, caught in her own little world of blood and flesh – and desire. Desire to make me scream. “How did you get that scar over your heart?” she asked.

I raised my head enough to glimpse down at my bare chest. There were several open cuts, some shallow, some deep, bleeding onto the floor around me. Bellatrix had either neglected to heal them or the thought simply hadn’t occurred to her. I gazed at the scar on my chest, the thin white line that had followed me through time.

It had been Tweedledum or Tweedledee – one of Chronos’ Orc-Mare creatures – that had given me that. Merlin, it had been a busy few weeks…

It was an impossible scar that had followed me through death and time itself. The sheer inability for me to explain it in any way that this deranged tramp could understand made me laugh and sigh.

“Honestly, I don’t know.”

“Tell me.”

“Or else what?”

Bellatrix walked around me and sat at my side, running her wand over the heart scar. “You have to ask?”

“How many hours have we been at this, you stupid bitch? What makes you think more of the same will make any difference at all?”

“Everyone has their limit, Harry. I admit you have withstood more than any man I have ever known, but your resolve won’t last forever. Indeed, already cracks are forming in that arrogant façade you wear so well…”

Fucked if they were. I was indestructible. “Blow me.”

Bellatrix’s smile promised malice and worse than malice. “I can make you want it, Harry. I can hurt you so much that it becomes vital to you – you’ll beg me for more… and if you tell me what I want to know, you shall receive it.”

I had to grin. I imagined it looked quite the part with my teeth stained red. “Tell me, what was it you wanted to know?”

“How did you find Atlantis? Where are your friends hiding? What is it you know of the book that fool Travers died with?” Bellatrix jabbed me hard in the side with her wand. I grunted. “Can you open the room at the heart of this tower?”

“Persistence, fuck you, quite a bit, and yes, yes I can.”

“Are you lying to me, little boy?” Bellatrix’s grin turned feral. “What would mummy and daddy – or dear old Sirius, for that matter – think of you lying, Harry?”

“To you and Voldemort?” I laughed. “Don’t be stupid.”

“Do not,” Bellatrix whispered, “say his name.”

“Which one?” I sighed.

Bald, bleeding and hurt I closed my eyes as Bellatrix regarded me in maddening silence. This was never a happy story, not by far, and the hero was an insane kid with a god complex. I knew that. I knew it. So why did I try so hard? Why resist what had been inevitable across so many lifetimes? Right then the only reason that came to me was blonde and French.

“Be thankful the Dark Lord is not conducting your interrogation himself, Harry,” Bellatrix said, and a shiver of true fear rippled across her face. “His understanding of the mind… his genius… You would beg for my gentle touch.”

“Oh you may make me moan, Bella, but you’ll never make me beg.”

Her smile returned. She shifted her leg and her weight came down on top of me. I lay between her legs and she sat astride my chest, just above my stomach. “Before you were marked for death, Harry, your mother and father had already openly defied the Dark Lord more than once.”

Prophecy demanded as much. “Good for them.”

“They were fools and the price of their defiance cost them their lives – and has brought their only son to this end.”

“It also cost Voldemort thirteen years of a wraithlike existence cowering in the forests of Albania.”

Bellatrix leaned forward, thrusting her legs into my sides, until her face was hovering just over mine. It may have been in my head, but I was sure I could smell the madness radiating off of her. A stink like burning electrical wire. Her breath was cold, as were her eyes.

“You are going to scream for me, Harry.”

She moved her lips down and kissed my neck.

It was soft at first, then harder… until she was sucking on my skin over the new ropy scar. I tried to buck her off but she giggled and wrapped her legs harder into my sides. Then she bit me – hard. I felt the skin of my neck break and warm blood began to flow.

Bellatrix sucked on my throat a while longer, savouring the moment, no doubt, before sitting up, thrusting herself back and cackling around at the barren cell. Violet sparks spewed forth from her wand. She rubbed herself against me. Her lips, drooling down her chin, were slick crimson with my blood.

“Now it’s time,” she said, a monster of Azkaban – a monster long before that. She squeezed my cheeks, pursing my lips, and then shoved her tongue into my mouth. To her credit, she was careful to mind my teeth, lest I bite her tongue off, but that would serve no real end. “Give me what I want, Harry Potter,” she whispered, breathing hard. She placed her wand into my mouth. “You will give me what I want.”

A terrible pause, a single heartbeat, and then,

“Crucio!”

It was a tired, oh so tired, agony that ripped me apart as the curse exploded between my teeth and inside my skull. The pain was beyond measure, beyond endurance, but then I did not endure the pain, I rode it like a wave. It flayed the flesh from my bones, it scraped white-hot daggers into my soul and it liquefied all but the most basic of thought.

But believe it or not I had been here before, and this was the best Bellatrix Lestrange had to offer.

I used my detachment now – not to fall into memory – but to keep silent through the pain, to maintain defiant eye contact with the Death Eater bitch as she gave it her all. I bit down hard on her wand, forcing a fierce, bloody grin. Yes, my grin said. You’re crazy, Bella, but you’re not even close to playing in my league.

A flash of that same fear she had felt when speaking of Voldemort’s torture methods appeared behind her eyes and I knew, after the long hours, that I had won.     

I wouldn’t give her what she wanted – what her twisted and ruined mind needed. I would not scream.

Her expression slumped into something petulant and angry. I wasn’t playing the game – not by her rules anyway.

Bellatrix broke the connection to the Cruciatus Curse and spat in my face.

*~*~*~*

A/N: So… crazy bitch, huh? There was going to be another scene but it felt good to end it here, and I didn’t want to leave you guys hanging after that cliffhanger in this last chapter any longer than necessary. Not when there are so many more excellent cliffhangers on their way. Also I wanted to end it with Harry kind of winning for once. He’s been getting his ass kicked this entire story – I felt a victory, no matter how small or how it was cruelly earned, deserved its own end.

For fans of my writing, I have a new story up and at ‘em. Check out Of Harry and Harry on my profile page. A Potter/Dresden Files xover. Yeah, it is awesome and you should read it.

Okay, you got two options – review, or send me a beer so I can keep writing Harry at this insane level. (Note: It takes a lot of beer.)

All the best,

Joe