Cavity
Fandom: Katekyo Hitman Reborn & Harry Potter
Summary: On Bermuda and the creation of Dementors.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Katekyo Hitman Reborn and Harry Potter.
AO3
Warnings: Graphic violence, some cursing.
Once upon a time, Bermuda was a lovely little boy, who liked the gleam of steel and the red, red, red of blood against the white of bone. Then the murders began.
He’d never liked the taste of human flesh- too similar to chicken, he’d tell his prey. But the rats? Oh, they loved the feast.
Nibble on it, they did, in the corners of his little alley with their yellow teeth gleaming in the low light. Disease crept through their fur like a vulture swooping down on a carcass. They hunched like birds of prey too- signs of imminent death all over them.
The rats were ravenous, but Bermuda only needed dead men’s gold to pay for his meal. He slid his grabby hands into their pockets and fished the clinking coins out with quick fingers. It left brown smudges on the silk.
He could’ve taken his victims’ wallets, but he liked stealing better.
It kept him on his toes.
Checker Face rips his flame from his body, and it’s like lightning, like fire, like his every inch has been set aflame, nerves screaming, crying, keening at what has been done to them. Agony courses through his veins. Acid burns them through.
His skin is crumbling, his lips dissolving, sucking the air out of him like a vacuum until he can’t breathe. Oxygen leaving his cells and he’s drowning a thousand miles underneath the sea, the water pressure’s weight so heavy he can’t even describe what it feels like. Or perhaps he can- like starved rats gnawing on corpses and the will to live.
Humans do not last long without a soul, and he isn’t foolish enough to think it was anything else Checker Face stole. Flames are curious, so irrevocably bound to their owner that their bodies decay, unable to continue existing, when they are ripped away.
He wants to hack. He wants to slaughter. He wants to take Checker Face’s neck, choke him, and break it with a snap so loud, so harsh that it will pulverize into pieces so little his moronic, ever-smiling servant could search for his bone slivers for the next thousand years and still not find them.
He thirsts for slamming nails into his tormentor’s hands, making him wail in wretched pain. Bermuda wants to pierce the masked man’s skin, steel through soft flesh, and watch the blood seep out the festering wound, staining the man’s white clothes forever.
He’d wait for the blood to dry- to watch his victim’s unmasked face twist in agony, before gouging his eyes out with his very own hands and spit in the cavities left behind.
And he is going to no matter what.
His skin quits flaking off, his blood continues to boil, but he gets up and crawls, stalking Checker Face at every turn.
He’s hungry, so hungry, and he fashions himself a soul made of dolls left behind in pools of blood, pacifiers trampled beneath heavy feet, a little boy’s anguished cries and the nibbling teeth of the rats in a New York alley way.
He is a demon, but he’s not satisfied with that. He’ll be the goddamn devil by the end of the day.
His stomach is empty. A cavern, so hollow, so endlessly echoing only hunger.
They all feel it, he and the ones he rescued from their own rotting corpses. He knows the smell of decay, and gunfire powder sure as hell ain’t it.
Decay smells like autumn leaves under a tree- wet, damp and dark. It’s green, then brown, until the flesh has turned to dust and only bones are left. Decay is an infection, it crumbles from within and leaves nothing behind.
But they don’t die.
Bermuda made sure of it.
It makes the Vindice hungry, all of them, and some days, Bermuda thinks his stomach is going to rise up from his throat and devour him alive (he’d gorge on his own damn stomach if it tried to feast on him before he got his revenge).
They’re so empty, lacking even the desperation to fill it. The hunger is an instinctual drive, but no food can sate it, because the dead don’t digest, and the cavity stays empty. Their stomachs are bottomless pits. Try throwing a stone down there- you’ll never hear it land.
Flames are delectable, echoes of the souls they no longer have. The Vindice run off white hot anger, the embers in the hearth, burning their fingers all the while, but still holding on to the scorching coals, blisters coating their palms.
Flames, souls, maybe…. Maybe they would fill the void.
Sometimes he wonders how it would taste- just a little lick of flame, just a small bit of juicy, sweet life-essence. But he doesn’t.
The Vindice who do taste the forbidden fruit lose their minds, chasing their hunger ever more. Sucking out humanities happy memories by their mere presence alone, a black hole, all empty, never completely filled.
They’re still dressed in tar-colored cloaks, their corpses remain maintained by the eight flame, but they’re lost, abominations. Not Vindice anymore. They call them insane, dēmens, and eventually, Dementors.
They guard a prison because they have been doing so for eons- just as instinctual as the hunger by now.
…Bermuda does not know anything other than vengeance and hate. The idea of happiness is foreign to him. He craves, famine spreading through his tiny starved body with every breath he takes.
(They suck souls. He loathes them, the animals they are)
Hunger is a monster, hiding in the closet, like the secrets he buried in Azkaban.
But Bermuda?
He only hungers for revenge.
