The Last Lieutenant

And The Ashes Burn Us All

There are times where Audra forgets that things aren't okay.

Like, she'll be drifting of to sleep and have the audacity to forget the nightmares that haunt her and the memories that play horror movie scenes across the backs of her eyelids, and then she sits up in bed with fear clawing its way up her throat  Or she and Emmeline will be talking, and Emmeline will make a joke that wasn't really funny, and for a half second Audra will expect to hear Clary laughing, and its only in the silence that follows does she remember that Clary does not exist in their world anymore.  Or she wakes up, and in the muddled moments between sleeping and awake she doesn't think about what an awful person she is, just that she is tired and sore and wants ten more minutes of sleep, not the reasons why she had stumbled into bed at three in the morning or there was still imaginary blood caked in the lines of her palms.

It was the remembering that was the worst part.

Mornings were the hardest, having to drag herself back into the reality of who she was pretending to be (was she still pretending?  It's getting hard to keep things straight, separate who she is and who she has to be), forcing a smile on her face when she sits down across from Draco and trying to hide the mix of comfort and revulsion when Bellatrix bends down to kiss her on the cheek.

Today, she must have failed, because the look on Bellatrix's face goes sour, and that's never a good thing for anyone.  When that look is directed at you, it means that she's going to make your life difficult.  Audra is no exception.

"I don't believe you can kill something."  Bellatrix is staring at her over the breakfast sprawled out in front of them.  There's half a piece of melon dangling from her fork, the juice streaming down her hand and dripping off her wrist.  "Not for real."

"I already have."  Audra didn't have time for this, and she hoped it showed, making it seem like her reluctance to talk was from annoyance rather than resentment.  "Or have you forgotten?"

She'd killed a lot of things. A homeless man, that first time.  Her brother, the second.  And then others, countless ones, people that she had been sent to kill or collateral damage in battles or someone who fell in a duel that got out of hand.  There was more blood on her hands than she would have thought possible.

"Strangers."  The piece of fruit falls onto the table cloth with a splat.  "Trash hiding in the street.  Weak men who make the mistake of thinking they were strong."   Bellatrix leans forward, upending the goblet of pumpkin juice.  "They didn't mean anything to you.  What are you going to do when its someone you care about?  One of your old school mates, or the little Weasel girl?  What are you going to do then?"

Audra stared across the table at her, dug the point of her knife into the linen tablecloth.  "I kill them."  She stood up, the chair screeching as it drags across the floor, leaving a mark that someone will doubtless spend hours trying to scrub off.  "Isn't that what I do now?"

She kills things.  

A lot of things, actually, and there's no sign of it stopping, not with both The Dark Lord and Dumbledore sending her on increasingly dangerous missions, and the fact that she keeps getting into more fights at the dueling club and leaving more heaps of gold on the doorsteps of the poor people like some sort of twisted Santa Claus.  She comes away with split lips and scraped knees and the magic still stinging her skin like static, and Bellatrix knows it, which is why Audra didn't give any thought to their conversation from three days ago, until she walks into her room and finds her Falcon tied to the ceiling.

It's got a string twisted tight around one leg, so it could only go so far in every direction, but it was still trying, wings moving her around in a frantic circle, trying to get to the window and failing every time.