HP Fanfiction - "Murderers"
Title: Murderers
Author: mr_mercutio
Characters: Madam Zabini, Kingsley Shacklebolt
Summary: The Minister for Magic and his wife have a quiet dinner together, and a bit of a chat afterwards.
Prompt: "The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched." -- Jo Coudert
Rating: R
Word count: ~2400
Warnings: Torture, bloodplay, genfic
Spoilers (Highlight to read): Character death
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's notes: This was written for the 2008 HP Darkfest: a fantastic fest of dark art and fic for the HP fandom. The original post can be found here. This is, minus the epilogue I suppose, canon compliant with perhaps one or two suppositions regarding the Battle of Hogwarts.
MURDERERS
She sits across the table from her husband, enjoying the quiet dinner that she’s spent the past few months planning for. They so rarely get the opportunity to spend an evening alone, constantly being in the public light, and he has promised her that the entire night will be about the two of them and no one else. No Aurors popping by to interrupt, no secretaries wanting this signature or that order, no Unspeakables muttering inaudibly about some ancient doom or terrible prophecy. That tonight he would not be Minister for Magic, just her husband.
They eat in what feels like companionable silence, an enchanted harp playing itself in the corner to provide some ambiance. She has cooked the meal herself, much to his surprise. In fact she’s ensured the house elves wouldn’t be around at all to protest. She brings out the various courses herself, pours the wine when his glass has emptied, spells the dirty china away when a plate is finished. He tells her that he never imagined she would do something like this for him, tells her how much it touches him. She smiles and pours him another drink and pushes a small tray of chocolates over to him.
As he samples a truffle, she rests her chin in her palms and watches him intently. He raises an eyebrow, not speaking while his mouth is full.
“This is the first time I’ve ever murdered anyone, actually,” she remarks casually, still smiling softly at him.
He snorts a little in surprise, coughing around the chocolate. “Beg pardon?”
She pulls out a small silk handkerchief and reaches across the table to dab at the chocolate around his lips. “Sorry, I probably ought to have waited for you to finish swallowing. Dreadfully rude of me, darling. Better now?”
Laughing a little he tries to reach up to take her hand in his, and finds that he cannot move his arm. “What are you doing?” he asks, willing his body to respond, his hand to reach, his fingers to twitch, even. They do not. “Isabella, what are you doing?”
“Now, Kingsley love, your ears aren’t affected by the poison. You heard me perfectly well.”
His breath hitches and he’s unsure whether it is from rage or terror, or perhaps from the venom starting to grip his body.
She begins to toy with a knife left on the table from dinner, idly twirling it between her fingers. “You should feel honoured, my dear. The poison is a brand new concoction of mine. I’ve spent the last few years perfecting it, just for you. Even old Slughorn would be impressed, I think.” Her fingers trace the edge of the blade, and his eyes cannot help focusing on them. He blinks a bead of sweat out of his eyes. “It’s a paralytic, mostly,” she continues, as though casually discussing a trifle over wine. “Took rather a lot of experimentation to make one that would freeze your body but leave you free to talk, to move your eyes. Eventually it will even stop your heart and your lungs, shutting down all your organs one by one. The pigs I tested it on died in agony. It took a few hours.”
“The rumours,” he bites out, disgusted with himself. “They were all true.”
She shrugs, a tiny movement. “Not really. I never actually killed a one of them.” At his bark of laughter, she smiles a bit. “Semantics, perhaps, but it’s true. You will be the first person I ever murdered, Kingsley. I just made sure the others would die when it was the proper time.”
He wants to scream, to weep, to laugh hysterically. “To think that it comes to this,” he mutters. “After the war, after all the aftermath, the cleanup, the hunts, that I’d be brought down by…”
“Your wife?” She rises from her seat and comes around behind him, draping her arms around his shoulders and nuzzling her face next to his. “The great Kingsley Shacklebolt, greatest Minister for Magic in three decades, hero of the war, lets his guard down to a woman who everyone told him would turn on him? Is that it, dear?”
He tries to bite her, but she steps back languidly and chuckles. “You’re such a fool, husband.”
“Did it mean nothing, then?” he asks. “Five years together. Merlin, Isabella, you helped me rebuild our world! You’re just going to throw that all away?”
She trails the tip of the knife along his cheek, barely enough to draw a hint of blood. “I’m a patient woman,” she remarks. “I did what it took to gain your trust. It was just time and money, it was just swallowing my disgust when I held a Mudblood brat in my arms for the cameras. It wasn’t hard, and it was entirely necessary.”
“Why me?”
The knife cuts deeper now, along his neck behind his jaw. He bites back a yell, gritting his teeth as she drags a jagged cut down to his shoulder. In the corner of his vision he can see her face, no hint of a smile left on it now. Her eyes burn like green fire as they study his face, and he wonders if this is what rage looks like on her. The knife slips down further, cutting a line from his shoulder through his shirt and across his chest. Blood wells up, blossoming under the linen and seeping through the tear in the fabric.
She looks as though she would dearly love to keep slicing away at him, but she stops then, stepping back and returning to her seat across from him. She slips into the chair and lays the knife on the table in front of her. The cloth beneath it begins to darken with a small spreading pool of blood, and he finds himself expecting a house elf to appear at any moment to clean it up.
“You know, the first time was because I really didn’t have a choice.” She leans back, steepling her fingers beneath her lips. “He made me love him and then he took away something precious to me. He hurt me more than I’d ever been hurt before.”
“What did he do?” he whispers, stalling for time in the hope that someone, anyone would come.
She frowns, remembering. “He made me believe that I was inferior. He took away my dignity. Loving him, I let him do what he wanted to me, and I was so weak. So I had to make sure that he’d go away.” She looks him in the eye. “I changed the labels on his potions materials and then I left. Five days later the house exploded. It seems that he mixed Erumpet horn with sulfur. Alas. Peter always was arrogant enough to believe that he could make no mistakes.”
He tries to swallow the lump of fear that stews in his throat at the sight of her expressionless face.
“The second time I didn’t even have anything to do with it,” she continues. “It was a heart attack. I actually miss him still.” She smiles then, nastily. “The funny thing is that the first time the Aurors were so solicitous, so concerned for the poor widow, but the second time they were convinced I had done it. I spent six months defending myself before I was finally cleared of all charges.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” he offers feebly, knowing it won’t matter.
She laughs at him and pours herself a glass of wine. “Oh thank you, Kingsley, that makes it all better.” She downs the glass in a single gulp and then hurls it at his chest. He does scream then, as the glass shatters against the still bleeding cut. “After that,” she goes on, as though uninterrupted, “it just got to the point where it didn’t matter anymore. The third one proved to be a dreadful investor, so I made sure he had an unfortunate accident while visiting Germany before he could drive our fortune into the dust. The fourth turned out to have some tastes for the bedroom that he wouldn’t give up, so it was just as well that he ran afoul of that pack of wild Crups.”
She holds up her hands and actually counts them off. “Five’s family was absolutely dreadful, Six turned out to be an uneducated cretin, and Seven was a French politician that snored. Werewolf attack, nasty fall, spider bite. All terrible accidents, so hard on the poor widow Zabini.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” He stares across the table at her, and she smiles slowly in response.
“Do you know why I hadn’t been married for six years until you, Kingsley? Since One, I hadn’t gone for more than a year at a time without a husband, but then six long years.” She leans forward, clasping her hands in front of her. “Blaise.”
The way she whispers her son’s name makes the hairs on the back of his neck tingle, though he doesn’t know why. She never talks about her son, and all he knows about him was that he was lost in the war.
“He asked me to stop,” she goes on. “He wanted us to just be a family together, he and I. So I gave it up. I gave it up for him.”
“So why pick it back up?” he asks.
She says nothing, rising from her chair and going over to the fireplace. She stokes the flames, staring into the leaping and twisting shapes for a long moment. “Blaise was the best thing I ever did,” she says abruptly, still not looking at him. “He was my all. And then when the war came he was taken from me.”
He has the odd desire to come over and comfort her, despite everything, for the anguish in her voice is something he has never heard. It is a raw thing, impossibly real and consuming, and he cannot help but want to ease it away. The feeling lasts for only a brief instant, for then she turns away from the fire. Tears streak her face, though she smiles fiercely at him, the glowing poker in her hand.
“Not every Pureblood supported the Dark Lord, Kingsley,” she murmurs, stalking towards him. “Not all of us were insipid fools dreaming of an age without Muggles and their ilk. I thought Voldemort an idiot, and to punish me he took my son.” She raises the poker and brings it close to his face. He can feel the heat radiating from it.
“Isabella, please,” he gasps. “I’m sorry about your son, but why are you doing this to me?”
Gently she touches the tip of the poker to his temple, trailing it down the side of his face like a caress of iron. He grits his teeth and stifles his scream as the acrid scent of burned flesh washes through the room.
“He took my son and he forced him to do his bidding,” she continues, relentless. The iron traces a path opposite to that of the knife cut, across his chest and down his stomach, and he bites his tongue and tastes blood as he desperately tries not to cry. “He used the Imperius curse on my dearest. I saw it. He forced me to watch, and then he sent him into battle. The great Battle of Hogwarts, where the heroes of the Wizarding World proved their mettle and saved us all.”
She jabs the poker a final time in his stomach and then tosses it away, swooping down and seizing his chin. “My son was forced to fight for the Dark Lord in that battle,” she hisses, “while I watched in my mirror. He stood alongside other poor ensorcelled souls and was thrown against the brave Order of the Phoenix. I watched him try to resist, I saw him fall in the mud.” She rakes her fingers over the burn on his face, again and again. “And the great and noble Kingsley Shacklebolt, champion of the Order and defender of all that’s good, came out of the murk towards him.”
“No,” he whispers. “I didn’t know.”
“Came out of the murk,” she continues, shaking his chin in emphasis. “And he so bravely took advantage of the moment and he courageously cut down a teenage boy.”
He snarls at her, “It was a war! I did what I had to do!”
She slaps him once, then again, harder. “You murdered my son!” she keens. “He was just a boy, caught up in something he had no control over, and you, the great hero -” She turns quickly and grabs the knife off the table. “- you, the champion -” She rips open what is left of his shirt and begins to carve into him, and he cannot hold back the hoarse scream this time. “- the honourable Kingsley Shacklebolt, murdered him.”
“I didn’t know!” he yells at her.
Still carving, she cries and laughs all at once. “And that is your biggest sin,” she whispers as she works. “You didn’t even know who you destroyed, whose life you snuffed out. His and mine.” She finishes and steps back, surveying her work. In red, weeping letters, his chest now proclaims ‘murderer.’
“You’ll never be able to get away with this one,” he gasps out. “You can’t pass this off as an accident.”
She stares down at him and then smiles. “I told you, Kingsley. This is my first murder. I want them to know it was me.” She reaches under the table and pulls out a small chest, placing it in front of him and opening it. Inside is a small carven bowl of alabaster, and he recognizes it as a tiny Pensieve. A single silver memory swirls around inside the cup, and he knows it must be hers, from the night of the battle. “They’ll all know exactly why I did it too,” she says, looking at the memory in satisfaction.
“Blaise wouldn’t want this,” he says, grasping at one last straw. “He asked you to stop. He wouldn’t want for you to go back to what you were.”
“The first one was because I didn’t have a choice,” she remarks quietly, sitting back down. “It’s fitting that the last one is for the same reason. He took something precious from me, and so did you.” She folds her hands into her lap, watching him. “Goodnight, darling husband.”
It is then that he feels his heart begin to twist.
Author: mr_mercutio
Characters: Madam Zabini, Kingsley Shacklebolt
Summary: The Minister for Magic and his wife have a quiet dinner together, and a bit of a chat afterwards.
Prompt: "The more deeply the path is etched, the more it is used, and the more it is used, the more deeply it etched." -- Jo Coudert
Rating: R
Word count: ~2400
Warnings: Torture, bloodplay, genfic
Spoilers (Highlight to read): Character death
Disclaimer: All Harry Potter characters herein are the property of J.K. Rowling and Bloomsbury/Scholastic. No copyright infringement is intended.
Author's notes: This was written for the 2008 HP Darkfest: a fantastic fest of dark art and fic for the HP fandom. The original post can be found here. This is, minus the epilogue I suppose, canon compliant with perhaps one or two suppositions regarding the Battle of Hogwarts.
MURDERERS
She sits across the table from her husband, enjoying the quiet dinner that she’s spent the past few months planning for. They so rarely get the opportunity to spend an evening alone, constantly being in the public light, and he has promised her that the entire night will be about the two of them and no one else. No Aurors popping by to interrupt, no secretaries wanting this signature or that order, no Unspeakables muttering inaudibly about some ancient doom or terrible prophecy. That tonight he would not be Minister for Magic, just her husband.
They eat in what feels like companionable silence, an enchanted harp playing itself in the corner to provide some ambiance. She has cooked the meal herself, much to his surprise. In fact she’s ensured the house elves wouldn’t be around at all to protest. She brings out the various courses herself, pours the wine when his glass has emptied, spells the dirty china away when a plate is finished. He tells her that he never imagined she would do something like this for him, tells her how much it touches him. She smiles and pours him another drink and pushes a small tray of chocolates over to him.
As he samples a truffle, she rests her chin in her palms and watches him intently. He raises an eyebrow, not speaking while his mouth is full.
“This is the first time I’ve ever murdered anyone, actually,” she remarks casually, still smiling softly at him.
He snorts a little in surprise, coughing around the chocolate. “Beg pardon?”
She pulls out a small silk handkerchief and reaches across the table to dab at the chocolate around his lips. “Sorry, I probably ought to have waited for you to finish swallowing. Dreadfully rude of me, darling. Better now?”
Laughing a little he tries to reach up to take her hand in his, and finds that he cannot move his arm. “What are you doing?” he asks, willing his body to respond, his hand to reach, his fingers to twitch, even. They do not. “Isabella, what are you doing?”
“Now, Kingsley love, your ears aren’t affected by the poison. You heard me perfectly well.”
His breath hitches and he’s unsure whether it is from rage or terror, or perhaps from the venom starting to grip his body.
She begins to toy with a knife left on the table from dinner, idly twirling it between her fingers. “You should feel honoured, my dear. The poison is a brand new concoction of mine. I’ve spent the last few years perfecting it, just for you. Even old Slughorn would be impressed, I think.” Her fingers trace the edge of the blade, and his eyes cannot help focusing on them. He blinks a bead of sweat out of his eyes. “It’s a paralytic, mostly,” she continues, as though casually discussing a trifle over wine. “Took rather a lot of experimentation to make one that would freeze your body but leave you free to talk, to move your eyes. Eventually it will even stop your heart and your lungs, shutting down all your organs one by one. The pigs I tested it on died in agony. It took a few hours.”
“The rumours,” he bites out, disgusted with himself. “They were all true.”
She shrugs, a tiny movement. “Not really. I never actually killed a one of them.” At his bark of laughter, she smiles a bit. “Semantics, perhaps, but it’s true. You will be the first person I ever murdered, Kingsley. I just made sure the others would die when it was the proper time.”
He wants to scream, to weep, to laugh hysterically. “To think that it comes to this,” he mutters. “After the war, after all the aftermath, the cleanup, the hunts, that I’d be brought down by…”
“Your wife?” She rises from her seat and comes around behind him, draping her arms around his shoulders and nuzzling her face next to his. “The great Kingsley Shacklebolt, greatest Minister for Magic in three decades, hero of the war, lets his guard down to a woman who everyone told him would turn on him? Is that it, dear?”
He tries to bite her, but she steps back languidly and chuckles. “You’re such a fool, husband.”
“Did it mean nothing, then?” he asks. “Five years together. Merlin, Isabella, you helped me rebuild our world! You’re just going to throw that all away?”
She trails the tip of the knife along his cheek, barely enough to draw a hint of blood. “I’m a patient woman,” she remarks. “I did what it took to gain your trust. It was just time and money, it was just swallowing my disgust when I held a Mudblood brat in my arms for the cameras. It wasn’t hard, and it was entirely necessary.”
“Why me?”
The knife cuts deeper now, along his neck behind his jaw. He bites back a yell, gritting his teeth as she drags a jagged cut down to his shoulder. In the corner of his vision he can see her face, no hint of a smile left on it now. Her eyes burn like green fire as they study his face, and he wonders if this is what rage looks like on her. The knife slips down further, cutting a line from his shoulder through his shirt and across his chest. Blood wells up, blossoming under the linen and seeping through the tear in the fabric.
She looks as though she would dearly love to keep slicing away at him, but she stops then, stepping back and returning to her seat across from him. She slips into the chair and lays the knife on the table in front of her. The cloth beneath it begins to darken with a small spreading pool of blood, and he finds himself expecting a house elf to appear at any moment to clean it up.
“You know, the first time was because I really didn’t have a choice.” She leans back, steepling her fingers beneath her lips. “He made me love him and then he took away something precious to me. He hurt me more than I’d ever been hurt before.”
“What did he do?” he whispers, stalling for time in the hope that someone, anyone would come.
She frowns, remembering. “He made me believe that I was inferior. He took away my dignity. Loving him, I let him do what he wanted to me, and I was so weak. So I had to make sure that he’d go away.” She looks him in the eye. “I changed the labels on his potions materials and then I left. Five days later the house exploded. It seems that he mixed Erumpet horn with sulfur. Alas. Peter always was arrogant enough to believe that he could make no mistakes.”
He tries to swallow the lump of fear that stews in his throat at the sight of her expressionless face.
“The second time I didn’t even have anything to do with it,” she continues. “It was a heart attack. I actually miss him still.” She smiles then, nastily. “The funny thing is that the first time the Aurors were so solicitous, so concerned for the poor widow, but the second time they were convinced I had done it. I spent six months defending myself before I was finally cleared of all charges.”
“I’m sorry that happened,” he offers feebly, knowing it won’t matter.
She laughs at him and pours herself a glass of wine. “Oh thank you, Kingsley, that makes it all better.” She downs the glass in a single gulp and then hurls it at his chest. He does scream then, as the glass shatters against the still bleeding cut. “After that,” she goes on, as though uninterrupted, “it just got to the point where it didn’t matter anymore. The third one proved to be a dreadful investor, so I made sure he had an unfortunate accident while visiting Germany before he could drive our fortune into the dust. The fourth turned out to have some tastes for the bedroom that he wouldn’t give up, so it was just as well that he ran afoul of that pack of wild Crups.”
She holds up her hands and actually counts them off. “Five’s family was absolutely dreadful, Six turned out to be an uneducated cretin, and Seven was a French politician that snored. Werewolf attack, nasty fall, spider bite. All terrible accidents, so hard on the poor widow Zabini.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” He stares across the table at her, and she smiles slowly in response.
“Do you know why I hadn’t been married for six years until you, Kingsley? Since One, I hadn’t gone for more than a year at a time without a husband, but then six long years.” She leans forward, clasping her hands in front of her. “Blaise.”
The way she whispers her son’s name makes the hairs on the back of his neck tingle, though he doesn’t know why. She never talks about her son, and all he knows about him was that he was lost in the war.
“He asked me to stop,” she goes on. “He wanted us to just be a family together, he and I. So I gave it up. I gave it up for him.”
“So why pick it back up?” he asks.
She says nothing, rising from her chair and going over to the fireplace. She stokes the flames, staring into the leaping and twisting shapes for a long moment. “Blaise was the best thing I ever did,” she says abruptly, still not looking at him. “He was my all. And then when the war came he was taken from me.”
He has the odd desire to come over and comfort her, despite everything, for the anguish in her voice is something he has never heard. It is a raw thing, impossibly real and consuming, and he cannot help but want to ease it away. The feeling lasts for only a brief instant, for then she turns away from the fire. Tears streak her face, though she smiles fiercely at him, the glowing poker in her hand.
“Not every Pureblood supported the Dark Lord, Kingsley,” she murmurs, stalking towards him. “Not all of us were insipid fools dreaming of an age without Muggles and their ilk. I thought Voldemort an idiot, and to punish me he took my son.” She raises the poker and brings it close to his face. He can feel the heat radiating from it.
“Isabella, please,” he gasps. “I’m sorry about your son, but why are you doing this to me?”
Gently she touches the tip of the poker to his temple, trailing it down the side of his face like a caress of iron. He grits his teeth and stifles his scream as the acrid scent of burned flesh washes through the room.
“He took my son and he forced him to do his bidding,” she continues, relentless. The iron traces a path opposite to that of the knife cut, across his chest and down his stomach, and he bites his tongue and tastes blood as he desperately tries not to cry. “He used the Imperius curse on my dearest. I saw it. He forced me to watch, and then he sent him into battle. The great Battle of Hogwarts, where the heroes of the Wizarding World proved their mettle and saved us all.”
She jabs the poker a final time in his stomach and then tosses it away, swooping down and seizing his chin. “My son was forced to fight for the Dark Lord in that battle,” she hisses, “while I watched in my mirror. He stood alongside other poor ensorcelled souls and was thrown against the brave Order of the Phoenix. I watched him try to resist, I saw him fall in the mud.” She rakes her fingers over the burn on his face, again and again. “And the great and noble Kingsley Shacklebolt, champion of the Order and defender of all that’s good, came out of the murk towards him.”
“No,” he whispers. “I didn’t know.”
“Came out of the murk,” she continues, shaking his chin in emphasis. “And he so bravely took advantage of the moment and he courageously cut down a teenage boy.”
He snarls at her, “It was a war! I did what I had to do!”
She slaps him once, then again, harder. “You murdered my son!” she keens. “He was just a boy, caught up in something he had no control over, and you, the great hero -” She turns quickly and grabs the knife off the table. “- you, the champion -” She rips open what is left of his shirt and begins to carve into him, and he cannot hold back the hoarse scream this time. “- the honourable Kingsley Shacklebolt, murdered him.”
“I didn’t know!” he yells at her.
Still carving, she cries and laughs all at once. “And that is your biggest sin,” she whispers as she works. “You didn’t even know who you destroyed, whose life you snuffed out. His and mine.” She finishes and steps back, surveying her work. In red, weeping letters, his chest now proclaims ‘murderer.’
“You’ll never be able to get away with this one,” he gasps out. “You can’t pass this off as an accident.”
She stares down at him and then smiles. “I told you, Kingsley. This is my first murder. I want them to know it was me.” She reaches under the table and pulls out a small chest, placing it in front of him and opening it. Inside is a small carven bowl of alabaster, and he recognizes it as a tiny Pensieve. A single silver memory swirls around inside the cup, and he knows it must be hers, from the night of the battle. “They’ll all know exactly why I did it too,” she says, looking at the memory in satisfaction.
“Blaise wouldn’t want this,” he says, grasping at one last straw. “He asked you to stop. He wouldn’t want for you to go back to what you were.”
“The first one was because I didn’t have a choice,” she remarks quietly, sitting back down. “It’s fitting that the last one is for the same reason. He took something precious from me, and so did you.” She folds her hands into her lap, watching him. “Goodnight, darling husband.”
It is then that he feels his heart begin to twist.