Chapter Sixty-Two: The Initiation
Lottie stood in the blinding daylight of the Muggle camps with the other recruits. She squinted as Shaula’s thick, black hair whipped into her eyes. It was unusually chilly for a September morning, though the strong wind was certainly not a surprise.
A circle of Death Eaters stood across from the candidates. Lottie watched their robes whip and brush the cobblestones in the breeze. They conversed in low tones as the recruits were left to just stand there and wait. Lottie glanced at all of the other candidates. Their nervous energy poured out from their eyes. Bran’s hands were quivering and his nose seemed to twitch as they stood in anticipation.
It occurred to Lottie that this might be the most exciting moment in these peoples’ lives. They had spent all of their school years studying, waiting and hoping for this. It also occurred to her that she too had been waiting for this”but not to support to the Dark Lord”to help take him down.
Finally the circle of Death Eaters disbanded. Each one walked across to the line of recruits and selected one; without a word, the two would depart. As soon as Lottie saw the tall, lanky figure approaching her, she knew who it was. Snape’s black eyes glimmered in the holes of his mask. Lottie kept her face impassive as he stood in front of her until he jerked his head to the side, and they went off through the winding Muggle camp.
“You can perform the Imperius Curse and the Cruciatus Curse, I assume?” Snape asked as they walked. He took off his mask and glanced at her.
Lottie had to move twice as quickly as she normally would to keep up with his long strides, and panted slightly as she said, “I’m a bit rusty, to be honest.”
Snape stopped moving. Lottie nearly ran into him, but managed to catch herself before a collision. He stared at her carefully, the corners of his lips rising into what might have been a smile. At that moment, it occurred to Lottie that he might know. What if he knew who she was? Surely, he would kill her on the spot”or maybe he would take her to the Dark Lord to be questioned. She breathed steadily and met his gaze. He was not able to break into her mind, she knew, but maybe he could just sense who she was.
“Okay, Carrow”we’ll start with the Imperius Curse first,” Snape said, finally breaking the silence. “Pick a piece of filth and try.”
Lottie moved slowly. Muggles littered the streets, all looking at her warily. She finally picked a boy who looked about her age and approached him carefully. He stared at her with wide, sunken eyes, but didn’t do or say anything. Lottie wondered if he thought he was going to die. She raised her wand and before the boy’s fear could grow any greater, she hissed, “Imperio.”
Not very much happened. She felt a surge of power run down her arm, but was unable to channel it through her wand to attack the boy. He just blinked once before turning around and starting to run.
“Impedimenta.” Lottie caught him in his tracks and approached his frozen form.
“A bit out of practice, I see,” Snape said scathingly. The Muggle boy was not able to move, but his eyes swiveled madly in his sockets as he awaited his certain doom. Again a smile crept onto Snape’s face. “The theory of the curse is to control completely,” he said, “to hold someone’s mind and not let it go. It is similar to the art of Legilimency”if you are at all familiar with the subject.”
Lottie pursed her lips. She did not turn to Snape and give him the clue he was searching for. She stared resolutely at the Muggle boy and said, “Not very familiar, no. But I’ll give it a try.”
She gripped her wand tightly and imagined herself breaking into the Muggle’s mind with Legilimency. Harnessing that same energy, she hissed, “Imperio.” This time, it was easy. Snape was right; it was blissfully similar to Legilimency. She poured her commandments into the Muggle’s brain.
He put up no fight. Calmly, he began to skip at Lottie’s commands and pranced in a circle, before Lottie just let him stand blankly. She turned to Snape with her eyebrows raised.
“It is all very well to make somebody look foolish,” he said, his eyes boring into hers, “but it is much more difficult to make somebody do something against their principles.” He spat the word as though it burned against his teeth.
Lottie watched Snape carefully as he surveyed their surroundings. She knew him well enough by now to have a grim idea of what he was about to make her do. Finally, Snape’s eyes lingered on a figure leaned up against the side of a building. It was an old woman, dressed completely in rags, who snoozed with her head lolling. Snape turned his gaze back to Lottie and said, “Make him attack that.” He jabbed a thumb at the woman, who slept on, unaware.
Lottie used Occlumency on herself”blocked her emotions and just told herself to do it. Sacrifices had to be made for the war. She instructed the Muggle boy silently, and with blank eyes he obediently got to his feet and crossed to the woman.
The old woman woke from her nap and turned her gaze to the young man towering over her. Lottie would have done anything to turn away and not watch, but she knew that she had no choice. The boy promptly leaned over and delivered a sharp kick to the woman’s side. Spluttering, she keeled over and groaned.
Lottie wanted to stop him here, but knew from the greedy look in Snape’s eyes that this was not enough. She jerked her wand, and like a puppet, the boy raised his hand and struck the woman hard against the face.
“Have him finish her,” Snape said, his voice barely above a whisper.
Lottie took the command and translated it to her victim. She did not let herself linger on it, but instead just leapt over all emotions and based herself purely in fact. She held her wand steadily at the boy and kept her eyes solely on him as he dealt several more sharp kicks to the woman’s side.
The woman lay on her stomach, groaning and coughing. Lottie vaguely wondered what the most painless way to do this was, but eventually decided.
For the first time, the boy hesitated after Lottie issued her command. ‘Finish her,’ Lottie told him, but again, he stopped. His thoughts were racing”Lottie could hardly distinguish one from the other”but she held firm in her own message.
Lottie swirled her wand slowly, using her power to wipe his mind clear. In a calm tone, she again told him, ‘Finish her.’
It took a surprisingly long time. The boy seemed to reach down in slow motion, and as he wrapped his fingers around her neck, he did so delicately. The force he exerted was powerful, and he held true through all of the woman’s flailing and writhing. Eyes bulging, she gave one last convulsion and then became still.
“Good,” Snape said. His voice was low, almost reverent. “Leave him.”
This was what Lottie had been dreading most. It was fine to make a mindless body do something, but when the boy came to his senses and realized what he had done”Lottie couldn’t even imagine the immensity of what he would feel. Obediently, though, she lifted her wand.
It took the Muggle a second to snap out of it. He blinked, still crouched over the woman, and turned his gaze downwards, to where his fingers were laced around her throat. Lottie saw the change in his eyes instantly as he began to realize. She turned her back.
“Shall we move on?” Snape asked. Lottie nodded mutely and they continued through the camp. She tried to block what she had just done out of her mind. It had to happen, she knew. Her job was more important than one Muggle’s life. Snape walked ahead of her, and again, Lottie struggled to keep up. “Now the Cruciatus Curse is one you will be good at, Carrow,” he said after they walked about a mile. He stopped and turned to her. “It was a specialty of your cousins’.”
For one wild moment, Lottie thought he actually had realized it was her and was talking about Harry. After half a second of panic, she realized that he meant Amycus and Alecto Carrow and slowed her breathing. “I see,” she finally said.
“It takes hatred.” Snape glanced around at the surroundings as he spoke. Lottie noticed that the Muggles who were out were slowly retreating into buildings or other places. “You have to mean it to perform the curse well,” Snape went on. “You have to want to hurt someone more than they’ve ever been hurt before. Why don’t you try on that?” Snape pointed behind him with a long index finger, where a young girl was peeking out from behind a dumpster.
Lottie pulled out her wand and tread over to the girl. All she could hear was her own pulse and dry breathing. The girl looked far too scared to move, her emaciated limbs quivering. As Lottie looked at her, she thought the girl looked vaguely familiar, but could not think how. She was no older than twelve or thirteen, and looked even younger due to malnutrition.
“Crucio,” Lottie hissed. She knew right away that it was not right. The girl shook and winced in pain, but that was it. Lottie knew what the Cruciatus Curse did”and this wasn’t even close.
“You have to mean it,” Snape whispered in her ear. Lottie jumped slightly. She had not even heard him approach. “Focus all of your energy on causing the most pain possible.
“Crucio,” Lottie said again. “Crucio”Crucio!”
It was like something in the girl had snapped. She collapsed like a ragdoll and lay rolling and twitching on the ground. Her screams were so earsplitting that it seemed like many people were shouting all at once. Lottie felt the Dark Magic through her wand and held it there.
“Do not relent,” Snape hissed. “Do not let up.”
Lottie kept her wand straight, but had to block the girl from her vision by looking forcefully ahead. The child wasn’t screaming anymore”her agony had gone beyond that. Her eyes were thrown open wide and her mouth gaped open. Her muscles were still contracting impossibly and every now and then a spasm would run down her spine, causing her whole body to shake, and her head to slam against the pavement.
Finally, Lottie raised her wand. The girl stopped twitching, but her face remained the same, expressing the impossible amount of pain she felt. Darkness stained the back of her head, and blood began to pool on the cement.
A sound to her right drew Lottie’s attention. Snape was chortling. Not once in her entire time of knowing him had she ever heard him laugh, but now he was”it was disturbing. He surveyed the Muggle as though it were a piece of garbage that he had stepped on. “Finish it,” he commanded.
This Lottie found easier to do. For some reason, the finality of death seemed less cruel than what she had already done.
“Avada Kedavra.” A burst of green light emitted from her wand, and a rushing noise rang in her ears. It overtook the unknowing Muggle. Her expression did not change at all; her eyes remained wide and her mouth continued to sag. She was dead before she even realized what had happened.
“Good,” Snape said as he continued again across the road.
Lottie took a moment and looked down at the body before her. Realization hit her like a wave. She had known the dead girl now before her. In the six years she had been gone, Lottie had forgotten this face. The girl had only been six years old the last time she had seen her, and had grown dark and melancholy since then. But now Lottie knew without a doubt that this was Pip who lay before her”Pip who she had known and been friends with. Lottie’s stomach curdled.
“Carrow.” Snape’s clear voice broke her focus. Lottie looked up. He stood several feet away and watched her with raised eyebrows.
“Sorry.” Lottie wrenched herself away from Pip’s broken body and caught up with him.
“Could it be true?” he said, watching her shrewdly. “You actually feel for the filth?” Again, the corners of his lips hinted at a smile. “It seemed you have learned nothing at all.”
Lottie glanced at him, frowning. She thought, in the back of her mind, that she understood what he meant, but it would only make sense if her had been talking to her, to Lottie. But he was talking to Shaula”wasn’t he? “I feel confident now that I remember those curses,” she said carefully.
“Good.” Snape spun around and began walking in the other direction. “We have been here for nearly an hour, and we need to meet up with the others.”
Her memory jogged, Lottie reached into her pockets and took a quick sip of the Polyjuice Potion. She glanced at the strands of hair in her face and saw them darken slightly.
Lottie collapsed onto her bed when they reached headquarters again. Physical pain wracked her body as though she had been the one to be hit by the curse. Her stomach churned slowly. All of her Occlumens’ training still was not strong enough to prepare her for this. Even her most effective mental block could not prevent these images from emerging in her mind repeatedly.
She watched the Muggle boy forever strangling the old woman. Her eyes bulged out of her sockets as she tried to gasp for help. Pip’s staring face burned into Lottie’s memory. Her eyes were wide, confused”why was this happening to her? And she had died like that. She had tied in terrible agony and had no idea, would never have any idea why.
Lottie was shaking. Her fingertips twitched as if she, herself, was under the Curciatus curse. Her eyes widened and narrowed maniacally. As if to confirm that she hadn’t killed herself, hadn’t destroyed her own soul, she held her palm against her neck. The quick pulse was steady, but uncomforting. Her stomach churned further.
Lottie rolled over, leaned over the side of the bed and vomited on the floor. Still shaking, she wiped her mouth with her sleeve and Vanished the mess with a wave of her wand.
Something in her mind and heart seemed wrong, off. It was as if the act of torture, the act of murder had destroyed a part of her. It was almost a physical pain. Andrea had once told her that there were things worse than death”could this be it?
And despite all of this, her eyes stayed dry. Lottie sat up in the bed and took a few steadying breaths. Whatever she had lost with that act was gone forever”there was nothing she could do about it now. She listened to the rattling of her own sighing to calm herself. She knew that she had to compose herself in order to remain here”and if she could not remain here, there would be no justifying what she had just done.
There was a knock at the door. “Hang on,” Lottie said. Calmly, she unscrewed the lid of her flask, took a swig, and opened the door.
Again, Bran stood in the frame looking a little worse for wear. His eyes bulged”Lottie suppressed the memory of Pip’s dead face. His fingers shook and twitched, and though Lottie’s were finally still, she sympathized with this feeling. Predictably, he said, “I’ve never killed anybody before.”
Lottie watched him darkly, her expression never changing. “Get used to it.”
“It just seemed so wrong,” Bran went on, rushing inside and sitting on the ground across from her bed, where she had just cleaned up the pile of sick.
“You are going to get us killed talking like that.” Lottie flicked her wand and made the door slam shut. “Do you sympathize with the Muggle filth?”
“No”but”” Bran looked around for something to help him. In that moment, it struck Lottie how very young he seemed. “They hadn’t done anything”the ones I killed.”
“None of them have done anything,” Lottie said roughly. “A few here and there try to start a revolt, but for the whole, they’re just trying to survive.”
“Then why do we kill them?” Bran asked. His eyes gleamed in the candlelight and he contorted his face to suppress tears. “I get why we kill the filth that tries to ruin our world”but why the innocent ones? They’re just kids.”
Lottie, who had known this harsh reality since the day she was born, watched him carefully. He had probably grown up in a comfortable mansion, had probably heard fairy tales of wicked Muggles and how terrible their world had been before the Dark Lord liberated wizard-kind. This might have been the first time he had ever actually seen a Muggle.
“Well what did you think you would be doing?” Lottie finally asked. “Massaging the Dark Lord’s feet?”
Bran shrugged miserably, staring at the ground.
Lottie was at a loss for what to say. It seemed to be ridiculous to console this boy”to convince him to do the very thing she was fighting against, but it was the only way to end it in the long run. “If you want to keep the world the way it is,” she finally began, “this is the way to do it. You have to show them who’s in charge.”
Bran opened his mouth to speak, but Lottie interrupted him. “You know what the world was like before the Dark Lord’s reign, don’t you? Why would you want that again?”
“I don’t, but I don’t want to kill people.”
Lottie looked at him carefully. Bran winced. She imagined that Shaula’s glare was hard to hold your own under. “Well,” she finally said, “You have to sacrifice something.”
Halfway to Infinity by Eponine
Chapter Notes: I'm updating one more time before the holidays. Have a great New Year, everyone! Thank you to coolh5000 for helping me like always! This chapter is dedicated to JRR Tolkien, because he's a pretty awesome guy!