Author's Notes: Written for bathtubblogger's "Hedwig, We're Not In Kansas Anymore" challenge on the HPFC forum.
"A character of your choice (or mine, if you want to be challenged) is on a trip somewhere and finds themselves entangled in events there (historical or current)."
Character: Bellatrix
Time period: Medieval England (we'll get there soon, I promise)
Enjoy. I own nothing.
)O(
It was easy to be afraid, in the driving rain and biting cold or the English moors. And it was especially easy when you were alone, and lost.
Which Bellatrix was.
Fortunately, she had her wand with her, but that didn't do much good when, no matter how many times she used it to find north, she was blown off her course in seconds. And in the rain, she could easily miss the Riddle House, and even Little Hangleton, entirely.
Bellatrix squinted into the rain, trying to make out lights from the village. She had come from Great Hangleton, where she had, on her Master's orders, procured a time-turner from the home of a certain aging witch. She had believed that she could make it back to the Riddle House before the storm really hit. Never having been to the Riddle House, she couldn't apparate, and now she was stuck out on the moors, with only her wand and the time-turner that she had stolen for company.
"Bloody Hell," she muttered as lightning forked across the sky, followed immediately by a boom of thunder. Bellatrix knew that the odds of being struck by lightning were slim, among these rolling hills and crags, but she didn't fancy being proven wrong. Briefly, she considered apparating back to Great Hangleton, but she had been walking for nearly two hours before the storm started and she didn't want to have to take the trip again.
Bellatrix hesitated, then shielded her eyes from the rain, and looked around for somewhere to wait out the storm.
There was a small cave some meters up the side of a rocky hill. If she could just get into it, she could wait until the storm was over and then continue on to Little Hangleton.
She stuck her wand into the holder at her hip, then looped the time-turner around her neck for safekeeping, dug her hands into the rocks, and lifted herself up.
For a moment, Bellatrix clung to the rock face, then she pulled one foot back, searched for a foothold, and lifted herself slightly higher. She reached up as high as she could, grabbed onto whatever she could find, and lifted her other foot.
Then her handhold gave out.
Bellatrix had been clinging to a clump of what she had thought was quite well-attached shrubbery, but when she tried to put her weight on it, it pulled out of the stones, and send her reeling. Her other hand was gripping tenuously onto a lip of rock, and at the sudden force, her fingers slipped off it.
Bellatrix flailed, grabbed onto a root, hung, momentarily petrified, watching the time-turner spin wildly on its chain, thanking god that she thought to put it on instead of just holding it.
A brilliant flash of lightning threw the rocks into relief, and then thunder crashed, and Bellatrix, stunned by the sheer volume, lost her grip on the root, and was sent tumbling to the ground. She hit hard, and blacked out.