Digging deeper into her own private duelling training, she rose to her feet. There was no way she could block his attacks - they were much too powerful. There was no way she could run around him to take his back, either - all he had to do was pivot to keep her in his field of vision. He had the proverbial high ground. Her heart pounded as she contemplated what she was going to do next - Harry had his head cocked to the side, a sneer on his face as he watched her with a level stare, waiting for her to make her next move.
" Attonbitus !" she shouted, exaggerating her wand motions deliberately. Harry didn't flinch and raised yet another shield with a mere wave of his wand. Bellatrix grinned. She finally had him.
" Perditio !"
When Harry returned fire, Bellatrix was waiting. Instead of dodging or shielding herself, she slid a half-step backwards and turned her body sideways. Her wand flicked through the air as she muttered the incantation. " Intertio !"
Her spell flew true, intercepting his in mid-flight, causing a cascade of light that she would have thought pretty under other circumstances. With a smug grin, she realized that Harry hadn't been expecting her to counter his attacks.
" Reducto !"
" Intertio! "
Once again, her spell intercepted his, but this time she didn't wait for him to cast again. Using the flashing of the two spells impacting each other as a distraction, she sprang forward, stunners and blasting hexes flowing freely from her wand. She didn't expect any of them to actually get through, but that was not what she had been aiming for. The barrage of spellfire blasted Harry's shields, turning it opaque as light washed over it in waves.
And behind his shield, he never saw her coming. With a triumphant yell, she thrust her wand arm forward, knocking his wand to the side as she brought her arm around in a wide circle that ended with her wand pointing right at his nose. It was one of the basics of advanced duelling, one she barely remembered because she had nearly discarded it as useless. After all, the times when wizards fought close encounters and had need of ways to block an enemy's wand movements were long gone.
She was about to utter the incantation for the spell that would end this fight when his reflexes saved him. The left hook caught her utterly by surprise, and she could hear her nose break with a sickening crack. Stumbling backward from the blow, her vision swam from the viciousness of the attack. She scrambled backwards as Harry raised his wand, its tip glowing with barely-restrained energy. She tried to look defiant, glaring at him, but realized that the only thing she resembled was a very frightened young girl as she hugged herself, having lost hold of her wand when he'd struck her.
"Die." It was the first word he'd said during the entire battle, and it sent a cold shiver down her spine.
I don't want to die, not like this, not yet…
" Evito ."
It was an odd choice, to use a variant of an ancient predecessor to the killing curse to finish her, Bellatrix realized in what probably was the last instant of her life. She closed her eyes, waiting for the yellow light to wash over her. Does death hurt?
The crack of thunder echoed around the trashed classroom, and Bellatrix carefully cracked her eyes open, staring in disbelief at the scene before her. The wand had apparently misfired, because it was now a charred lump lying in the corner. The front of Harry's robes were singed, and he was lying ten feet away, knocked out cold.
Bellatrix let out a relieved sigh, refusing to admit to herself how terrified she had been. She kicked him in the ribs to confirm he really was unconscious and slumped against the door to the classroom tiredly, her thoughts racing. Don't ever attack him, ever. Not if you want to stay alive.
.....
Consciousness slowly returned to Harry, though his memory was sluggish. He couldn't quite remember why he was unconscious - had he been knocked off his broom again by Malfoy during a Quidditch match? Slowly, he groaned and opened his eyes to look around, expecting to find himself in the hospital wing. The grey walls that were identical everywhere in the castle didn't tell him much, but the fact that he wasn't lying on a comfortable bed did. Craning his head to the side, he realized that he was in the empty classroom he had been using to teach Snape and Lily, but, for some reason, it now looked like a war zone.
"Finally awake?"
Blinking his eyes, Harry craned his head back to look straight up, and found himself staring into Bellatrix's face point-blank. "What happened?" he croaked, his throat uncharacteristically dry. Her face was smeared with dried blood and there was a nasty burn mark on her chest, just below her collarbone.
"I took a shot at your back just for fun and you reacted as if I'd tried to kill you."
"Oh." Harry coughed, closing his eyes again as the memory of the duel returned. How could he have let himself loose control like that? Confusing Bellatrix with her older counterpart was stupid. She wasn't the same person - hell, she didn't even look the same! The older Bellatrix was a gaunt, tired, sickly looking woman whose eyes glinted with insanity and madness. The girl was young, her hair shimmering with the same life that seemed to have abandoned her older counterpart. More importantly, her eyes were alive, lacking the crazed, depraved, and cruel look that would enter them sometime in the future, brought on by years of violence and torture.
"How're you holding up?" he finally asked.
"Been better," Bellatrix tried to snort, but clutched her nose in pain.
"I'm sorry about your nose and everything. I guess my reflexes got the better of me."
Bellatrix arched a skeptical eyebrow, but he sounded so miserable and sincere that she was almost tempted to reassure him that it was all right. Almost. "You're going to have to make it up to me, Ashworth," she said instead, trying to milk the situation for what it was worth, even more intrigued now about the young man whose mystery was growing by the minute.
"Am I?"
"You'll let me practice with you whenever I want," she replied evenly, having already rehearsed her list of demands while he was unconscious. "I don't know if you were paying attention, but neither of us performed anywhere close to professionally." She smartly kept her mouth shut about the fact that if his wand hadn't backfired, he would easily have been able to kill her, never mind his unrefined dueling skills.
"No way," Harry said. "You saw what just happened."
Bellatrix glared at him. "Maybe I'll just tell Dumbledore that you assaulted me." She hated resorting to blackmail - it was so… primitive. She much preferred the more elegant approaches of tempting or seducing people in order to get what she wanted, or simply outsmarting them, but if it worked, then she was going to use it.
"Fine," he said after a moment. "We'll practice. It might come in useful." Harry wasn't pleased at all, though Bellatrix's demand wasn't all that unreasonable. He supposed he could bring up the point that she had used dark magic, but he also knew that it wouldn't hold up against the basic fact that he could have killed her.
"Excellent." Bellatrix was surprised at his suddent change in attitude, but she wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, she let out a contended sigh and leaned back against the door of the room.
Harry decided that he wouldn't mind leaning against the stone wall, himself, and dragged himself over to join her. Sitting up was better than lying prone on the ground, after all. They sat quietly, mostly tring to come to grips with what had just happened. Harry couldn't help but wince when he saw her dabbing at her nose to stem the bleeding.
"I'm sorry," he repeated.
Bellatrix waved him off. "At least I can see how you survived all the fighting, even if your dueling is lousy. Your reflexes are pretty sharp, and that one caught me by surprise."
They sat silently, Harry not really feeling up to responding. However, he eventually found a need to speak. "Err… did you see my wand, by any chance?"
Bellatrix produced a charred lump of wood from her robes. "You'll need a new one," she deadpanned.
No kidding, Harry thought as he turned it over in his hands, parts of it instantly crumbling under his touch. "Think it can be fixed?" He briefly thought back to Ron's tape-and bubblegum fixed wand.
Bellatrix gave him an are-you-kidding look. "Why, yes, I think a little water will wash that soot right off, and there's nothing a little wood glue wouldn't fix."
Harry stared at her unusual display of humor. When he remained silent, she shook her head with a sigh. "What? Don't tell me they didn't teach you sarcasm? Anyway," she waved the conversation on, "it's a piece of crap regardless."
"How so?"
"For starters, just look at it! I mean, who wants a wand that has been carved with stupid designs like this one has? Then, of course, there's the source of your wand - Wanda and Wandel's."
"What about them?"
....
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