Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Does she think she's dead, that this is Heaven?

Bellatrix's hands were still chained to the broomstick, so it was only a finger that came up and pointed when she said, 'What is that?'

Harry followed the direction of her finger and saw... nothing in particular, actually...

Then Harry realized. After they'd gone up high enough, there hadn't been any clouds to obscure it any more.

'That is the Sun, dear Bella.'

It came out remarkably controlled, the Dark Lord sounding perfectly calm and maybe a little impatient with her, even as the tears started down Harry's cheeks.

In the endless cold, in the pitch blackness, the Sun would surely have been...

A happy memory...

Bellatrix's head kept turning.

'And the fluffy things?' she said.

'Clouds.'

There was a pause, and then Bellatrix said, 'But what are they?'

Harry didn't answer her, there was no way his voice could have been steady, would have been steady, it was all he could do to keep his breathing perfectly regular while he cried.

After a while, Bellatrix breathed, so softly Harry almost didn't hear, 'Pretty...'

Her face slowly relaxed, the color leaving its paleness almost as quickly as it had arrived.

Her skeletal body slumped down against the broomstick.

The borrowed wand dangled lifelessly from the strap attached to her unmoving hand.

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING -

Harry's mind remembered then, the Pepper-Up potion came at a cost; Bellatrix would ssleep for a conssiderable time, Professor Quirrell had said.

And in the same instant another part of Harry became utterly convinced, looking back at the chalk-white emaciated woman, seeming deader in the bright sunlight than anything Harry had ever seen alive, that she was dead, that she had just uttered her last word, that Professor Quirrell had misjudged the dosage -

- or deliberately sacrificed Bellatrix to guard their own escape -

Is she breathing?

Harry couldn't see if she was breathing.

There was no way, on the broomstick, to reach back and take her pulse.

Harry looked ahead to make sure they weren't about to run into any flying rocks, kept on steering the broomstick toward the Sun, the invisible boy and the possibly dead woman riding off into the afternoon, while his fingers gripped the wood so hard they turned white.

He couldn't reach back and perform artificial respiration.

He couldn't use anything from his healer's kit.

Trust Professor Quirrell to have not endangered her?

Strange, it was strange, that even genuinely believing that Professor Quirrell hadn't meant to kill the Auror (for it would have been stupid), thinking of the Defense Professor's reassurances no longer felt reassuring.

Then it occurred to Harry that he had yet to check -

Harry looked back, and hissed, 'Teacher?'

The snake did not stir within its harness, and said no word.

...maybe the snake, not being an actual rider, hadn't been protected from the acceleration. Or maybe coming that close to the Dementors without a shield, even for a moment in Animagus form, had knocked out the Defense Professor.

That wasn't good.

It was to have been Professor Quirrell who told Harry when it was safe to use the portkey.

Harry steered the broomstick with whitened fingers, and thought, he thought very hard for a small unmeasured length of time, during which Bellatrix might or might not have been breathing, during which Professor Quirrell himself might have already been not-breathing for a while.

And Harry decided that while it was possible to recover from the error of wasting the portkey in his possession, it was not possible to recover from the error of letting a brain go too long without oxygen.

So Harry took the next portkey in the sequence from his pouch, as he slowed his broomstick to a halt in the bright blue air (Harry didn't know, when he thought about it, whether a portkey's ability to adjust for the Earth's rotation also included the ability to match velocity in general with its new surroundings), touched the portkey to the broomstick, and...

Harry paused, still holding the twig, the mate of the twig he had snapped what seemed like two weeks ago. He was feeling a sudden reluctance; his brain seemed to have learned the rule, by some purely neural process of negative reinforcement, that Snapping Twigs Is A Bad Idea.