I used to be beautiful.

There are no mirrors in Azkaban, but the Dementors show me my reflection whether my eyes are open or not. Day and night have no meaning here; it's just one endless grey existence, a backdrop against which my wasted self is illuminated far too clearly. Here, I am not a woman. I am barely a person. I am food. They tear juicily into me and gnaw down to the bleached whiteness of my bones, leaving me to rot. Then they renew me and start all over again.

It's the kind of thing I used to do to others.

Tears won't prove my humanity to them, nor pleading assert my innocence. They don't care about all that; they don't care about anything but stretching out your soul until its fibers break. They offer a cocktail of stimuli, forcing me to choose which one to experience first, and then disconnect me from my senses, slowly, one by one.

What they leave behind is far worse than what they take.

They draw out my memories through their blood-darkened claws, distorting my finest moments by showing me as the crumpled, sniveling loser instead of the effortlessly triumphant victor. They leave me poisoned dreams laced with painful deception, where I keep believing that this time I will escape over the wall, even after the jaws of the inevitable beast sink through my squirming, soft flesh and eat their way up until there's nothing left to scream about.

They send burningly cold whispers through my mind that Lord Voldemort has turned from me – forever. That he sent me here to be forgotten.

Oh, they're clever, these Dementors; they never miss a trick…but I know better. I know my Lord heard me at that mockery of a trial, where I, unafraid, proclaimed his glory and his power. I was magnificent that day, my gleaming black hair alive with the tension in the air, my ghost-pale skin taut and firm, my graceful hands impassioned and compelling. If I am guilty of anything, it is of bothering to instruct those bloody fools at all.

So my Lord called the quivering, puling Crouch his favorite; ha! What a marvelous ploy to hide the fact that his sole beloved servant was I, Bellatrix Black. He didn't raise a sculpted finger to save me, but he didn't have to; he let me be dragged off to Azkaban because he knew it would only make me stronger.

For it's not enough to be intoxicated by the Unforgivable Curses, where you give a little precious bit of yourself each time you cast them, and you dance on the brink of burning out like a dying star. No, one must be willing to bathe in the dark fire of Voldemort's regard; for like an ancient god, he demands his sacrifices. Only his true supplicants could withstand his tests of loyalty and strength. Only I could withstand Azkaban.

My husband and I were kept apart, but I could always sense him yearn, embrace his unaltered devotion to me, discern his fervent loyalty for our Dark Lord. In turn my sworn oaths to break us out of here resounded in his mind, bolstering him when he faltered. The Dementors let our bond go on long enough for us to think it didn't matter to them.

They brought him to me, severing our connection in one snap. A great cloud of them nearly suffocated us in my cell, thrumming eagerly in their own peculiar vibe. They stripped me of every sense except touch and sound; they only took his sense of touch and, oddly, the ability to make nothing more than formless sounds. So overjoyed was I to be with him again that I didn't pause to understand the implications of that. It would have been better had I never understood.

The Dementors watched me hear him choke down the pity and bile he felt at the sight of me even as he reached for my groping hands. My roughened fingers caught on all the unhealed runnels on his body, and on the fragments that were left. I mourned for the nerveless, papery skin that I caressed over and over, increasing the pressure in my need to make him feel me. His hands grew frantic on me as he strove to tell me something. I tried to soothe him in my cracked voice, thinking he was distressed at not being able to speak. I know now that he was trying to stop me. The dry skin beneath my hands began to turn stickily wet, and I started in horror as I realized that my hands, my once-beautiful hands, were tearing him apart. I tried to stop then but the Dementors compelled me to continue. I think it was then that we both realized that I was his final torture.

They let me hear him break. Afterwards, my sight was given back to me.

It really is better not to use your eyes in Azkaban.

This fortress is stocked with people I used to know, every single one of them crying and pleading and decaying. Sometimes you think you can hear the whole of Azkaban screaming. The Dementors themselves have their own sound, a pitch, a tremor of something that would be a chord, if it were ever as joyous as real music.

And then there's that one voice. I heard it when I first came here; I hear it still. We all start to sound the same here after awhile, but from the beginning, that voice was always different.

It caterwauled down the corridor, all rough and raspy, with overtones of sobbing panic, and undertones of shocked betrayal. There was laughing hysteria, desperate anger, and blood-cold wariness, and all the usual things one would expect from a prisoner except for one thing: there was no real fear. Here was someone who believed in his own righteousness and innocence, completely excluding any of us from the same regard. I was instantly angered by his presumption.

The Dementors sensed my interest and were onto me like black flies. In my mind grew an image of the fiend who gibbered and wailed, screaming of James and Lily, of Remus and Peter, and weeping for Harry.

Ah. Sirius.

I was wondering when I'd see that filthy blood-traitor.

I wouldn't have ordinarily recognized his gaunt figure, with his matted hair, ashenface, and wild, haunted eyes that looked only inward. He paced like an animal and tore at himself with nails that had been worried razor-sharp. I could see Dementors around him, eagerly feeding off his anguish. The bars of his cell were slick with blood.

My anger increased to rage. So what if Sirius were in Azkaban, tortured as we all were? Somewhere my Dark Lord was lying festering, oozing from the wounds he'd received, with only that idiot Pettigrew acting as a handmaiden. My family was forced to wear pride as a shield instead of a right even after all the trouble of disowning that miserable toad. Mudbloods everywhere thought they were safe to live as they wanted. That runt of a Potter still lived, no doubt cosseted and lauded as a hero every second of the day. And I – I who could have stripped the remaining Potter of his humanity with a single flick of my wand; who would have brought him to the feet of my Dark Lord for his pleasure – I had to stay here, rotting in this hellish existence, with a squalling madman for company!

I nearly died in my incoherent fury. The Dementors had quite a harvest from me before I finally learned to submerge that particular emotion. Oh, how I resented him for that, too. He should have been burnt off this earth when he was burnt off the family tapestry.

Did you ever fathom that, Sirius? Did you ever know the price you still had to pay?

His voice never blended in with the others, and even now resounds in my mind from time to time before I can catch it. Back then I heard it all the time, and eventually learned to feed off of his terror as the Dementors feed off of me. His being in Azkaban may only have been a small measure of justice for the Black family, but it was justice all the same.

And then one day, his voice stopped.

It was not a good day for us here; the Dementors had to compensate for their failure, after all.

But if that treacherous bastard, that hairy git, could so impossibly shirk out of here, then so can I, Bellatrix Black, Bellatrix Lestrange, the Dark Lord's most loyal subject. Let insanity reach for me. Let the rabble that follows him doubt my ingenuity. The real test of Azkaban is the ability to escape.

But your escape will not have saved you, Sirius, as you will see when the Dark Lord returns to reckon up the costs.

I am coming, Dark Lord.

And I alone will avenge you.