"Who are you, and how did you get here?" she demanded.
Harry stared at her in surprise. Before him stood a young, a very young, version of the woman whose suicide he had just witnessed. Violet eyes pierced him with a stare that would have left him incapable of rational thought in his younger years as the wand she leveled at him crackled with barely restrained magical energy. Her dueling stance was good, certainly better than he had expected from a teenage witch, but then again, this was the Bellatrix who would go on to become one of the most feared master duelists in his time.
Now that was a strange concept. His time. Did that mean he was in the past? From her appearance, it certainly seemed that way, because he sure didn't feel any younger. Out of reflex, he reached for his own wand before realizing that he no longer had it. Uh, oh, he thought.
"I said," she repeated slowly, dangerously, "who are you, and how did you get here?"
"I don't know?" he said, spouting the first thing that came to mind.
"Pulsus!"
Hampered in his movement by the heavy chains, Harry was unable to dodge and caught the banishing hex full on in the chest. He flew through the air, wincing in pain as he crashed through a bookshelf. Part of his mind took note that he no longer was in his cell, which was a good thing . . . something he reconsidered when he barely managed to roll away in time as several hexes splashed against the ground where he'd been lying.
"Look, can't we talk about this?" he began, only to catch a bludgeoning curse in his left shoulder. He could feel and hear the joint snap as it dislocated while he spun with the force of the blow. Apparently not, he thought to himself as he threw himself forward, rolling when he hit the ground on his good shoulder. Glancing around, he realized he was in a vault that looked suspiciously like the Black family vault at Gringotts. The place was lined with shelves and cabinets and drawers. He hastily took cover behind one of them.
"Whoever you are, you just made a big mistake!" Bellatrix shouted. "Reducto!"
The blasting curse blew the cabinet Harry was hiding behind to pieces, and he barely managed to get his back turned to the explosion to protect his face from the high-velocity shrapnel that constituted the remains of the wooden container. The force of the explosion sent him sprawling forward onto the ground.
His hands groped around the floor for something, anything, to use as a weapon as he tried to rise to his feet. His body, already injured from his capture, undernourished, and dehydrated, was hurting. His back was on fire from the wooden splinters that had embedded themselves there as well as from breaking through the shelf, and his left arm hung limply. Footsteps echoed loudly through the vault as she approached his prone form and he knew that unless he did something, and did it now, he was dead.
The fingers of his right hand found a smooth piece of wood. He grasped it and flung himself around to face her. Their eyes met, and he realized what he was holding in his hand as they faced each other. Her, standing over him, wand leveled at his throat. Him, lying on the ground on his back . . . and a smooth black and silver wand pointed straight at her heart.
"You can't use that," she declared haughtily once the surprise on her face wore off.
"We'll see," he muttered, hoping that she wouldn't call his bluff. He still distinctly remembered Ollivander's warning about never using someone else's wand.
"Incar-" she began, forcing the issue.
Harry closed his eyes, prayed, and hoped that for once he would have luck holding someone else's wand. "Impedimenta!"
A sudden warmth spread through him as he cast the spell, similar to the binding he had undergone with his first holly and Phoenix feather wand, and a jet of red light tore itself loose from the tip of the wand. The body-binding hex didn't quite work the way it was supposed to as Bellatrix cancelled her own spell and brought up a shield, but it gave him the time he needed to roll away from her and behind another cabinet. He muttered a quick transfiguration charm on the chains that bound his wrists and ankles, turning them into paper. He tore them off, then returned his attention to his opponent.
"Damn you," he could hear her swearing. It caused him to smile inwardly. One thing he had learned the hard way during the war was that taunting your opponent in a situation like this was the worst possible thing you could do. It generally gave away your position and your frustration – things the enemy could capitalize on. He held his breath, listening to her footsteps as she walked around, and waited for the perfect moment.
There, he thought. Swinging himself around the cabinet, he raised his wand. "Expelliarmus! Compescor!"
The two spells hit her in quick succession, faster than she could react. The disarming hex threw her backwards, into the wall, even as her wand went clattering deeper into the vault. The binding hex secured her against the marble rock of the vault wall with an invisible force, but that didn't stop her from struggling.
Muttering a quick thank you to whoever had listened to him and made the wand work and filing that oddity for later reference, he slowly walked over, picking up her wand in the process, until he stood in front of her, an arm's length away.
"Now, could we please start this over?" he asked wearily. He was tired, he was hurt, he was hungry and thirsty, and he was in no mood to deal with anyone at this point.
"Are you kidding me?" she snarled, "you're the one who randomly appeared out of nowhere and attacked me!"
"I did no such thing!" he protested. "If you'll recall, I said 'I don't know', to which you took to blasting me through that shelf over there!" he waved over in the direction of the broken piece of furniture. "That hurt, by the way!"
"Good!" she retorted. "That'll teach you a lesson to attack Bellatrix Black!"
"Black…?" he wondered for a moment, before he realized that she probably hadn't married Rudolphous Lestrange yet. "Look, can we start over?" he asked with a weary sigh.
"No."
"What! Why in Merlin's name not?!"
"Because, you moron, you still have me tied to a wall, unarmed, and defenseless! What's a girl supposed to think in this position?"
Harry considered his options for a moment. He could let her down . . . but then again, he wouldn't put it past her to make a grab for her wand and renew the battle once he did. If he didn't, he wouldn't get anything out of her. He sighed. Why couldn't things be easy for once? He glanced around, hoping for a divine sign that would tell him what to do. Of course, there was none.
But his eyes came to rest on something very familiar. A black onyx hairpin, four inches long, which was glittering in the light of the vault. "Where did you get that?" he asked, prodding it with his foot. After what had just happened – for him, anyway – there was no way he was touching it.
"None of your business!"
That sounds like Bella, all right, Harry thought in resignation. He decided to take a different approach. If she didn't respond to polite questioning, maybe she would to the threat of force. Not that he ever would resort to actually using force, but he'd come to realize that the threat of it could be quite effective at times, though it always left a bad aftertaste in his mouth.
"Look, your situation isn't looking too good right now," he began.
"Gee, says Mister-I-have-a-dislocated-shoulder-and-can-barely-stand," she shot back defiantly.
"At least I'm the one holding the wand. And if I beat you in this condition, you don't want to know what I'd do to you if I was healed," he snarled, leaning forward and holding the tip of his appropriated wand dangerously close to her throat. "I have had a bad, a very bad day, so I would suggest you don't push me. Now, what did you do with that hairpin, and where did you get it?"
A brief look of guilt crossed her features before she schooled them back into neutral indifference. "I found it in the vault here."
"And?" he prodded.
"I cast a few spells on it. Just to see what it did."
"And?"
"And nothing!" Bellatrix replied haughtily, but there was a hint of frustration in her tone. "It didn't do anything! Not a damn thing!"
Harry signed in frustration, himself. "And you've never seen me before?"
"If I had, I wouldn't have asked who the hell you are, you braindead idiot!"
"I hate talking to you." He really did. Her tongue was just as quick as her wand. Just like Flitwick had told him.
"The feeling's mutual, I assure you!"
"Just answer the goddamn question!"
"I just did, you son of a hobgoblin!"
Harry paused for a moment, before realizing that she had, in fact, answered his question. "Oh." He blinked in embarrassment.
"Look," Bellatrix sighed, apparently getting over her initial anger as her innate curiosity took over. "I just wanted to see what the damn thing did, so I case a few magic detection spells on it. Then one moment I was holding it, and the next, boom, you were standing over there."
Harry frowned and stepped back, trying to work his mind through what he'd just learned and piece together everything he knew. It didn't take long for him to come to at least one conclusion. Here, before him, was a young Bellatrix Black, untouched yet by the insanity that would define much of her later life. She was also still a Black, which meant that Lestrange hadn't entered the stage yet, and while she showed some prowess, she wasn't nearly as good a duelist as she had been during her time with Voldemort. No, it couldn't be . . . he thought.
"What's the date?" he finally asked her.
"December twentieth," she told him evenly, more intrigued than annoyed now.
"Year?"
Bellatrix's expression of irritation returned, indicating with quite a bit of certainty that she believed he wasn't the brightest fireball in the shamanic repertoire, but she replied anyway. "Nineteen-seventy-five."