Regrets and Revenge

He knew what he'd seen. And because he knew, he'd called in sick and avoided all contact with the Ministry. No one had bothered to check up on him, although Maud had sent a bottle of good whiskey and Agnes had Floo-ed him some chicken soup: in the hearth sat five, neglected and cold bowls. To keep their minds at ease, he was sending regular owl posts, and maybe his barn owl sensed the duplicity, for the bird nipped at his fingers when he offered treats in payment for deliveries. He knew he was right. The less they knew of this, the better.

The last glimmering strand tugged free from his temple and clung to his wand-tip like fine cobwebs. These silvery wisps, as beautiful as they were, contained dark and dirty memories. He was glad to be rid of them. Their loss made him lightheaded and he sat down heavily, wondering if it was just the enormous weight of terrible memories being lifted or his heart that was making him giddy.

A cynical snort burst past his lips: his brain may have forgotten but his heart would never forgive what he'd done. It thumped angrily at his ribs, as if trying to escape the bitter and corrupted shell that trapped it.

He plucked up Maud's whiskey, noting with a scowl that only a few more shots remained. Uncorking it and pouring a generous measure, he sat back in the worn but comfortable arm chair and watched the world pass by his front-room window. This had been his habit since Agnes had substantiated his claims of sickness, but despite her talents, he suspected a certain someone wouldn't be fooled by his excuses. A part of him hoped that his antics in the old interrogation rooms had passed unnoticed, but deep down where his nightmares bred, he knew he'd been seen. His enemy was playing with him. And maybe in some macabre way, this was meant to balance the score. Penitence was beyond him...he'd done too much to even try...and they knew it, so Norbert's slow torture was the closest to satisfaction they could get.

The whiskey...a fine Muggle one...burnt a path to his stomach, leaving hints of oak on his tongue. While he drank, he pondered his chances of survival. It didn't look promising. And maybe with the wounds that never quite healed and the memories that never quite went away, just maybe he was secretly glad that his end was coming. Perhaps, in this, there was penitence...and peace. A grim smile parted his lips and he saluted the future...whatever it would bring him.

A few hours later, when the streetlamps cast their amber glow and a drizzle blurred the outside into inconsequentiality, the future paid him a visit, sitting across from him and sharing a much better bottle of Muggle whisky. Norbert hadn't expected it to be quite so civil.

"I acquired a taste for Bowmore whilst enjoying the freedoms of a life with Muggles," the old man whispered, while pouring the precious whisky into Norbert's empty tumbler. "And given the occasion, I thought nothing less than a fifty-year-old would do."

Norbert snorted and nodded in complete understanding. "You're being remarkably generous."

His guest looked up, and Norbert stared into eyes the colour of storm-whipped seas, set in a face cracked with age and weathered by time and pain: eyes as endless and merciless as an uncharted ocean.

"I can afford to be," he replied sanguinely, before wry humour twitched his lips.

Norbert ignored the flicker of smugness on the face before him. He knew that in the man's victory there would be a bitter seed of dismay: he hoped so, anyway.

"We all got our desserts," he mumbled.

His guest flashed a harsh glare then settled back to watch the swirling bronze liquid in his glass. "That depends entirely upon what you deem palatable."

A warm flare of vicious satisfaction filled Norbert's belly. "Not as sweet as you thought, eh?"

His guest chose not to take the bait, instead taking a deep gulp. The haste made Norbert squirm, and it struck him as mad that he was marking off the last of his life with sips. He wished he had a bigger glass.

The barn owl, Penelope, ruffled her feathers and they both turned to her, startled that something else existed in the dingy and dusty, and ironically dubbed, living room.

"You have a new owl," the old man muttered idly.

"You killed the last one, Albert."

Silence fell heavily between them, its weight crushing down. With the name that had been kept off lips for over eighty years came a torrent of memories, and both men seemed to sink in their chairs until its echo died away.

"It's been so very long since anyone called me by my name," Albert Bagshot sighed. "It almost sounds...alien to me."

Norbert inhaled shakily. He hadn't expected to feel this prickling remorse in his eyes and chest. "You should have stayed away from it, Albert," he mumbled sadly. "You could have kept yourself free and...clean!" he finished with a snarl. "Me and the others had stopped looking."

Pain flashed over Albert's face and he looked away. "You can't...shouldn't...lie to me, Norbert!" he uttered, his voice dead and cold. "You would never have found me."

"Maybe," he conceded kindly. "But what you started all them years ago was downright diabolical. And that you're carrying it on now is just plain inhuman."

The words stirred up wrath and those eyes turned dark and terrible. "Don't tell me what is inhuman!" Albert hissed out, exposing yellowing teeth and scarlet gums. "I've been studying it all my life, in her name and in her memory, because she kept telling me that only through history, through the lens of impartial recollection and examination can we ever truly be at peace with the incomprehensible."

The words hit Norbert like a Stunner, and he trembled, staring at a man who was either so insane that he had entered some bizarre sanity or stuck, humming the only sane notes in a mad cacophony. To his horror, Norbert felt his thoughts stir with the melody; he felt his sensibilities shudder as they shook off years of training and rigid idealism and vibrated in harmony with the new tune. He could see, understand, what Bagshot was sharing. But he knew it was false. Those memories he had recently pulled free would have made him retch at the possibilities. There were things that were best left alone until age or madness softly erased them.

"But how far do you need to go, Albert?" he pleaded. "There were eight of them jars. Eight!"

Gods! He could see them lined up like bottles of black ink. And if he'd been younger or naive, he would have left them as that: old ink bottles. But he'd seen their like before, a long time ago in Europe, when in thrall and under the whip of a madman, and he knew how many graves and souls had been violated to create just one bottle. His memory of that time was now safe inside jars, hidden where only Agnes would find them. He hadn't dared share them, but death made some decisions so very simple. Agnes and Maud would have to know... and he hoped they would at least consider forgiving him.

Albert smiled, a manic tilt to his thin lips. "Oh, there are more than eight...and I will have more," he added petulantly. "I'm close...so close to knowing the why of it all."

"Gellert had been short-sighted in his goals," Albert continued smoothly. "If he'd been keener, he would have realised that he hadn't need the stone at all."

"'For I will give you a mouth and wisdom, which none of your adversaries will be able to withstand or contradict'," muttered Norbert, the implications of Albert's plans chilling him.

Bagshot smiled, accentuating his stained teeth and cragged, grey skin, until Norbert thought he looked upon the face of a stirring gargoyle spewing not water but vile effluence.

"Yes," he agreed breathlessly. "Luke, I believe. Bible studies didn't feature heavily in my exile." And just as quickly, he changed back into an old man, bent with age and vulgar wisdom. "I will know...I will understand, and no one will be able to hide behind lies or madness."

Panic gripped Norbert's guts, twisting them, and a cold sweat burst from his skin. He'd been foolish. He'd seen his death as an end to it, as a settling of old scores. But it was all wrong! This wasn't about transgressions and horrors from a war that many had forgotten and many more had never known; it was about a man so lost in his desire to know that he was willing to become what he hated in some vain hope to attain understanding and peace through what he deemed pure retribution. Despite the poor chances, he should have stood his ground and done his utmost to kill Albert. At least the ruckus would have sparked an investigation, but as it stood, this would be nothing more than an old man slipping gently away.

A manic laugh erupted past his lips. "I suppose I should say that you'll never get away with it, but you already have been for...what? A decade?" Bagshot nodded slowly, as if sensing some trap in his resignation. "I wonder what you will be when you have found everything?" he finished thoughtfully.

"Nemesis," Albert snapped back.

The retort was too quick, too hot and the eyes too hard for it to be the truth, but Norbert knew he wasn't dealing with a man who cared for truth. Despite his claim that he existed solely for the purpose of finding it, it was his truth, his certainty he was after...his desperate answer to it all. Albert Bagshot had died a long time ago; what sat opposite him, sipping fine whisky and letting ideas slip from his lips like pus from a wound, was something beyond recognition.

"You must have had help," Norbert mused, trying to find faults and flaws into which he could wedge doubt and weakness.

Albert grinned. "Of course I do, and I know your brain is dredging what's left of your memories to discern who." He knocked back the last mouthful of Bowmore. "And as you're about to die, I'll set your mind at ease."

Albert paused to genteelly wipe away the thin smear of alcohol on his upper lip with a nicotine stained fingertip. In the heavy and expectant silence, they could hear Penelope's talons clicking against her perch and the distant rumble of heavy traffic.

"I have my support and my dearest ally in the Ministry, and he in turn has the scapegoat," he declared simply before a wry laugh erupted from his throat. "He even made himself fit for the role; we didn't have to do a thing to place the noose about his neck."

Possibilities bloomed and withered in his head until he found two faces that fit: Cross and Burke. And as it grew in his skull, he saw how deeply into the Ministry Bagshot had delved and secured himself. He had become a lamprey. His teeth must have burrowed deep into the security arm of the Ministry, and then nibbled at the fiscal offices. He was the patron of RID! Bagshot was the 'old man' who was funding the whole department.

It was delightful in its execution: no one would suspect the staunchest seeker of justice for the survivors. No one would question he who had done so much to make sure the innocent were freed and the guilty punished. But Cross...well, Cross had benefited most from the 'old man's' generosity; he had been...perhaps naively, in horrified retrospect...granted access to those who had destroyed his family and life. And Merlin knows what he'd done with that privilege. Then there was Burke: a thoroughly dislikeable man who had spent far too long in Azkaban, where the Dementors had sucked out any human qualities he may have possessed. In short, Bagshot would walk away, wounded and offended at how his kindnesses had been used against him, whilst Cross and Burke took the fall and the Kiss.

Norbert sobbed and collapsed into the chair. "I should never have refined and taught him the process," he cried. "I should have told him it was impossible and suffered his wrath."

"Grindelwald would have found another to do his bidding."

Perhaps he meant it as a final kindness...to ease Norbert's guilt over something that happened a life-time ago and could never be undone, or maybe he was digging the knife in at how commonplace and replaceable he'd been.

"One thing I will never forgive you for," Bagshot uttered thickly, his eyes glittering in the meagre light and some of the harsh cragginess leaving his features, "is choosing me to be your apprentice."

Norbert tensed and leant forwards. "That's as may be," he snarled. "But you could have walked away like I did. You chose to carry on extracting Black Memories."

"My choice?" Albert whispered, leaning forward to meet Norbert's disgusted gaze. "You are so...wrong!" he spat out, thick spittle arcing like ribbons in the air. He breathed heavily between bared, clenched teeth: silvery beads bursting at the corners of his mouth. He stood, towering over Norbert, and aimed a trembling wand between his eyes.

"I can never forgive you for showing me the possibilities," he sobbed. "You showed me how to get the answers to unanswerable questions. After that, I no longer had choice." He paused and one tear tumbled down his cracked and pained face. "You made me."

Penelope screeched in alarm when a bright green light flooded the room, and she made mad circles on her perch, flapping her wings as if trying to bat away the terrible image of her master sprawled on the floor. But then, soft croons and gentle fingers soothed her, and she settled, satisfied to click her beak and flex her talons while her fear unravelled.

"I know he cast a dedicated Obliviate to stop me collecting his memories," he muttered softly. "Such a waste of effort, for you saw what he did with them, didn't you?"

And then she too was bathed in emerald light.

As the ambulance turned the corner, the neighbours began to shuffle back into their waiting homes and normality. One lady stayed on the street, her moccasins darkening in the rain and a cardigan pulled taut around her thin body. Before the closest neighbour slipped through the gate, she grabbed their elbow and smiled disarmingly.

"Did he...suffer?" she asked tentatively, her eyes piercing more than just her glasses.

The question disturbed the poor woman, who paled and shuddered. "I don't know what happened," she mumbled. "But I'll never get that scream out my head." Her wide eyes glanced over to the darkened windows of Norbert's empty house and she hugged herself. "Full of pain and despair it was: haunting and terrible."