I wasn’t always bitter. Fierce, yes. Passionate, without doubt.   Regardless of what happened understand that no man made me, not even a dark lord. I won’t say his name, not because it is He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but because it doesn’t matter. He’s long since had power over me. Nothing created me; I realized what I always was.  No, I wasn’t always bitter, but I was always cruel.

He first noticed me in school. We were but children, though our shadows attracted the darkness in each other. What began with simple boyish hair-pulling became my steely heel between his shoulder blades, his hips humping the cold castle floor, through classrooms, the Great Hall, our dorm–wherever I felled him. Even then he craved discipline, nurture fitted in pain and frustration, and I was perfect to give it in every bind, through every sashaying parade of my best frocks hugging his delicate, welting flesh. The sight of him in a corset and stockings, on his knees, bottom bared, panting, needy…  All delights that children shouldn’t know but once they learn can’t stop inflicting, craving.

Oh, I whipped him. Through school and years after I flogged him nightly, tethered him, and milked him by dawn. Were it not for my mastery he’d have brought down the wizarding world long before The Boy. Fucking hell, if he’d listened to me The Boy would’ve never happened.  But his fortitude flagged—despite his knob—in the vice of a polyjuice junky.  The young Crouch miscreant undid my years of hard work. With that ponce in the form of every creature known to Merlin, he’d go at it. What lash and feminine guile can top an insatiable centaur or frothing, rutting hippogriff? Even I couldn’t inflict that much pain.  Disciplining him was no longer a matter of framing psychological boundaries in emotional subjugation, tenderized will. Madness became his lover and he courted her through piles of corpses, wiles of hate.  He seduced everything he touched, though after his explorations he never touched me again.  I could no longer enthrall him, control him with thorny affection.

In my boredom I married a spineless man.  Our only true bond was shared affection for my dark love.  My husband, too, wore my gowns over blood-streaked shoulder blades and a jutting plug, happily laving street filth from my boots.  I felt nothing for his perfect devotion.  That was when I realized my fondness for my lord wasn’t rooted in his fetish for unbridled cruelty or in my desire to selflessly serve it.

Close, he kept me, and well.  Still, I languished among his followers as a relic, a dusty memento of his becoming.  After his first defeat I was to just go on as if there were no gaping emptiness inside, spur my groveling husband, play the dutiful wife… until new playgrounds for my talents arose.  In his absence I became the devoted vigilante.  Through the charred remains of muggles and entrails of mudbloods I kept his memory alive.  Then, from the confines of my cell I scryed the promise of his rule into the nightmares of the wizarding world.

When he returned I thought perhaps our time had come.  Trapped in that pathetic knot of flesh, defenseless and weak, my heart ached to see him strong, wicked again.  I named myself his caregiver.  My disappointment in his need for me thrummed between his greedy sucking mouth and my cracked, chafed nipples.  His hunger for me ceased there.  Nourished from my body and fed by my hope he rose to even greater power, though traversing the back alleys of the unformed void and plummeting back into flesh left him with no taste for sensual treats, only a thirst for death, destruction.  He wanted no part of me.

That’s why when that fat twat stood between me and her daughter leveling her wand at me, I let the curse pierce my heart.  What fresh pain could it stir?  None of this was what I wanted.  What I wanted could never be.

I was his most powerful other.  My survival ensured his own.  Without me, The Boy would prevail.

I made him, and I murdered him.

I loved him.