Written for the 'mental illness' challenge at xoxLewrahxox's Bellatrix Lestrange forum.

Prompt: write about a character or characters dealing with, coming into contact with, or otherwise engaged with some form of mental illness.

Word count: 600 words, divided into two equal parts.

XXX: Azkaban

Delusional parasitosis

Bellatrix begins to realize she's getting old when blood no longer drips in dirty tracks down her legs. The spell she had used to keep her from bleeding stopped abruptly when her wand was broken, and for those first few months she had been a fretful teenager again.

Eventually she had begun to use the blood to paint the Dark Mark on the walls, but when the blood stops coming, she loses the one thing she had looked forward to.

She stares at her cunt, day after day, clawing at the tangle of hair, willing herself to bleed. But no blood comes anymore, and she screams as she drags her nails along the rough stone walls until they chip and break.

The flies come slowly.

As the days pass, she begins to feel their tiny legs dancing over her flesh. She swats them away, but they always return, until she swats one and three land in its place, and by the end of the week she's covered in a swarm of flies, all buzzing, humming, crawling over her, no matter what she does.

She doesn't dare to open her mouth, for fear the flies will crawl in and multiply inside her. But no matter how careful she thinks she is, it isn't enough, and soon she can feel the maggots writhing inside her.

Bellatrix screams and thrashes and tries to get the flies off her, but they don't – they won't. And the maggots continue to squirm inside her, burrowing from the inside out, until one night she wakes up in a cold sweat and sees that the flies have gone, but her flesh is bubbling and undulating from the larvae just under her skin.

And she shreds her skin, trying desperately to get them out as she screams and screams.

•••

Le Délire de négation

In the cell next to hers, Rodolphus Lestrange is dead.

He believes his death began some weeks earlier, when, in a fit of agony as a Dementor spread its fetid, empty body over him, he hit his head against the jagged walls. He had had a chance to inspect the gash afterwards, and there was blood. Blood everywhere, staining his hands and matting his hair and slicking the ground.

He had torn apart his dirty clothes to dress the wound, but the blood seeped through, seeped through everything until eventually he is naked. He sits and cannot sleep because he bleeds so much – he wants to be awake when the bleeding stops. But it never does.

As the days pass, he begins to realize that he has died. No one can survive that much bleeding. His death blooms before him, engulfs him, and he suffers.

He has neither moved nor slept in nearly a week; when his limbs seize he barely notices – putrefaction, however, he does.

It starts slowly. He can see himself swelling, ballooning to absurd sizes as his skin bubbles and blisters. He passes his days watching the changes in his body, horrified and sickened and complacent, all at the same time. His nails fall off, one by one, leaving soft, discoloured flesh in their wake. They hit the ground and resonate quietly.

His body rots as he watches it, falling apart. When the Dementors visit him, he welcomes it as a brief reprise from his disintegration. He is dead, and as he stares at his increasingly unrecognizable corpse, he is certain that he deserves every agony of it. He doesn't enjoy his death, but he welcomes it.

So he sits naked in his cell, staring unblinkingly, unseeingly, sleeplessly, out the barred window, understanding that this is eternity.

This will mark the final installment I'll be posting of 'Every Flavour'; I think 30 chapters is long enough, lest it become too daunting to look at. For everyone who's read and enjoyed this, thank you. Any final remarks will be accepted with love.

Those of you who have been following this, and who may be interested in reading more of my shorter works, should be on the lookout for my next, as-yet unnamed collection, which will be posted ... eventually. (Though hopefully sooner rather than later.)