Somewhere in that slow accretion of nights and silence, she became Bellatrix to me, and I became something she no longer dismisses.

Rodolphus never objects to her speaking to me. Devotion makes men generous in strange ways. He seems to consider my proximity simply another facet of her proximity to the Dark Lord. He knows her loyalty runs in one direction, and that the Dark Lord shares no one. The rest is arrangement.

When He lived inside me, in my thoughts, in my nerves, in the pulse of every decision, the hunger quieted. It was not healed. It was answered. Directed. Given meaning.

After He tore free of my body and left me dying on the stone floor, the silence He left behind was unbearable. Not for its pain, but because the world became thin. Flat. Without gravity.

The hunger rushed back immediately, sharper for having known its cure. It has lived in me ever since, rasping gently against my ribcage, reminding me I once contained something greater than myself.

Something that wanted. Something that used me. Something that made sense of me.

Here in Azkaban, that hunger feels ordinary. Everything drains you, so my own hollowness simply blends in.

Until tonight.

Something shifts under my breastbone. A tightening. A throb. A pressure. Recognition.

A vessel remembering its occupant.

I feel it in the space He carved out inside my soul.

And the ravenous need that has gnawed at me for months suddenly knows the direction of the one thing that ever filled it.

The air in Azkaban shifts in the hours before dawn. Not the Dementors, not the tide. Something finer, sharper, a thread of heat drawn tight beside my heart, as though something far away has breathed in and I am the thing expanding to take it.

My hands tremble, not in fear, but recognition.

From the next cell comes the faint clink of Bellatrix's chains turning toward me, a sound too intimate for a place like this. Awake as well, she feels it too.

Her voice slips through the stones, low and reverent.

“There it is. It’s coming.”

There is a note in her voice I have only heard once before, when she spoke of her search for the Dark. Praise coiled with longing, like a woman touching the edge of a lover’s silhouette.

I rise from the battered remains of my cot, dragging my shackles, and stand across from where I think she is inside her cell.

The hunger flares, hot and bright, burning straight through scar tissue.

Heat climbs in a slow, merciless sweep and I hitch in a breath against the rise of it.

My knees quiver, not from fear, but weakness, recognition wearing a mask of pleasure. Every scar He left brightens inside me like struck metal. For a moment I cannot tell where my body ends and the call begins.

“What is it,” I manage, though my voice barely survives the exhale. “What is happening.”

“You already know,” she whispers. She sounds aligned, as though the world has finally tipped to place her where she belongs. “You broke under Him. Of course you feel Him first.”

The thread in my chest pulls hard. My breath catches as if someone else is drawing it out of me.

My scars prickle again. Then more heat. Then finally a delicious burn. Not the brutal agony of possession, but something unbearably beautiful. Like being enlightened. Like being chosen again.

I brace my hand on the wall. The stone vibrates beneath my palm.

Bellatrix inhales sharply, ecstatic. Her breath breaks at the same instant mine does, as if the same unseen hand tightens around our throats. “He rises.”

Ecstasy transforms her. I hear it in her breathing, the way her laugh catches and breaks, as though resurrection itself has touched her skin.

The words strike like both curse and benediction. The pull inside me intensifies until I am shaking and my vision blurs. My fingers curl against the wall as I sway against the roar in my body.

“Bellatrix.” It is all I manage.

“Yes,” she breathes. Awe and devotion and hunger braid through her voice. “Do you feel how He reaches for His pieces?”

The burn surges, a claim as much as a summons.

I arch involuntarily, breath torn from me. For one humiliating heartbeat, the pleasure of it burns hotter than the fear, and the realization only drags me deeper into His pull.

Her answering sound travels through the stones, a tremor of heat that strikes the base of my spine. My fingers curl hard against stone.

Her breath falters in the same rhythm as mine.

Her chain-links scrape, a low metallic cry that travels straight through the stone into my marrow. The prison itself seems to lean into us, greedy for the heat we cannot touch.

The walls and the air and my own skin all strain toward the distant place where He is reforming Himself out of blood and bone and will.

“It is Him,” I choke. “He is calling.”

“Not calling,” she corrects. Her voice trembles with exaltation. “Gathering.”

Her Mark must be flaring black by now. I can picture her head tipped back, lips parted. She would bare her arm to Him again in this moment if stone and distance did not intervene.

I sense my body mirrors hers without meaning to. The scars pulse molten beneath my skin. Her breath breaks again, and through the wall it reaches me like heat.

The wall between us stops being a wall. Not physically. But spiritually. Sensually. Devotionally.

The stones warm under my forehead, and for a moment I cannot tell if the heat is mine or hers. The structure leans back into us, greedy for the collision of our devotion, as if Azkaban itself were listening with parted teeth, ready to bite.

Two bodies in the same rapture.

Two worshippers kneeling toward the same unseen altar.

Her devotion sharpens around me like a blade. She has no desire for the man I am, only for the echo I carry. For what He left in me. For what she longs most to serve.

“I do not. I… cannot.” The words are dragged out of me, stripped to their quick.

“You can,” she whispers. “You have always been His. Even before you understood the shape of that belonging.”

The pressure crescendos and I gasp. The hunger fills with light. Religious, unbearable, too much meaning forced into too small a vessel.

I shudder. My breath stumbles. Hers stumbles in answer, I can hear the movement of her feet.

Two lungs, one rhythm.

My vision tightens to a single point of white, hips rocking forward helplessly, seeking something that isn’t there.

The wretched sea-darkened limestone burns beneath my palms, and Bellatrix’s exhale breaks into a soft, ruined cry. The sound drags another tremor out of me. Pressure inside me peaks, one pulse, shared, delivered through two bodies as though we are one vessel.

Then Bellatrix makes a sound I have never heard from her. A soft, broken exhale. The kind that would be obscene if it belonged to anything but devotion.

“He rises,” she says again, voice bright as steel dipped in honey. “And we rise with Him.”

Something inside me snaps open. Purely. Willingly.

I press my forehead to the wall again. My scars ablaze in response. Her chains shift with the same surrendering weight.

“If He wants me,” I breathe, “I will go. I will go anywhere.”

Her answer shivers through the stones.

“Little vessel, this is your consecration. Not your ruin. He is making use of you again.”

Though the Dark Lord is not present, the very absence of Him fills the spaces in our our cells to bursting.

The pressure inside the whole of my body lashes once more, triumphant and distant, then releases, leaving my whole body shaking.

On the other side of our barrier, Bellatrix sighs, sated. The sigh of someone whose faith has finally been rewarded.

“That,” she murmurs, “is the closest either of us will come to touching Him while trapped in these cages.”

My knees buckle and I collapse, panting ragged and quick. Through the wall I hear her chains shift again with the same surrendering weight.

For long seconds I cannot form a word. My body is loose and shaking, emptied and overflowing all at once. The echo of Him rings through my ribs like an aftershock.

“Bellatrix,” I whisper, half prayer, half confession.

“Yes.”

“He filled me,” I breathe. The words shame and steady me in equal measure.

“Yes,” she echoes. “He filled me too.”

The silence between us hums, luminous and intimate, and I wonder if this is what it's like for Bellatrix. To burn all the time.

Two penitents. Two conduits. Two bodies trembling with the same divine echo.