Bella Morte
By Aine Déande
Chapter I: Label Me Rot
Bellatrix Black. Her one-time last name suits her better than her husband's.
The air whistles around her face in a shrill note, is careful not to scrape her high cheekbones, her heavy eye-lashes... as my darling would bite back, and not nearly as gently. She tastes like sand... Scorching the tongue, she brands the taste of the wind with a mark of her own. No doubt if hers wore any tint, it would be black.
Everything in the room testifies to her love affair with the absence of all light. Not a candle is alit, yet the air carries a scent of burnt wax, and I know she has extinguished them all. It is difficult to discern what she likes better: the feel, or scent of her skin, burning.
The only light infiltrating the room comes from the windows, thrown wide open in Bella's pursuit for the voyeurism of the stars. In actuality, it is a trinity of sorts: my Bella, her Darkness, and the Stars.
She does not possess them, therefor they alone may touch her, illuminate her limpid skin, where the light does not. The touch of darkness eludes her, and serves only to accentuate the vision of her, but also the clarity of the stars.
It would, after all, never do to have her rise above her gods.
She splits her tongue in two before I even come near her mouth. That way she may pretend she is a succubus, and I merely another sacrifice of her nocturnal sprees.
She always liked her little plays. Insists they really aren't. Flicks with her forked tongue over the bite-bruise she made, just above my navel. Laughs hoarsely in her throat. Brings her mouth down, she is dry as sandpaper inside her lips.
We retreat to the land between our separate worlds, between solace and despair, as the fire overtakes us both. The one thing I could never resist in her was her eyes as they burn. The delirium that comes with being the sole focus of her angry passion - she is never just on fire, she brings down the universe with her eyes alone - is almost too overwhelming to return to.
Which is why I only bathe in our common breath in passing once, maybe twice a month. When Narcissa proves too frigid. When my need for dominance overcomes my desire for control. When Bella calls me like a siren, and I have no choice but to succumb to my own cravings. Our future sins already carved out before us.
Succulent, succubus.
You can't help but think of Nietszche and his abyss when making fire in her heat. She inspires emptiness. Bellatrix does not envelop me like my wife, she does not overtake me; I would never allow for such a thing. Instead, it feels as though I'm falling into satin, something sweet and flowing, yet I fall through this fine cloth, this nectar divine, as though it were made of air alone.
A draft of wilderness incapacitated. It is indeed as though making love to a void, and so instead of falling into her, I find myself falling into me.
She could never remind of the ocean: water is refreshing, nourishing, and salt brings forth the emphasis on the sweetness, rather than obliviate every other taste but her fire and her bone. Her hate in spades of flames.
She hates it when I say making love', loves it when I say making hate'. I prefer neither.
She tastes of the desert because she is the barren solitude herself; a ruin, wasted, emptied, contaminated with too much aridity. Our Lord drinks of her, drains her of her self. She finds the experience intoxicating.
His taking of her essence is an opiate for her mind... makes her see swollen stars, and strangely turns her lucid. She talks to the sky as it extends outside of herself, and the waste within her speaks not back. The more drained she is, the more contented she becomes.
It is her blood that calls for purity, and faithful as she is she would never deceive what keeps her alive. She understands blood, pays it with the proper respect. I alone may drink from her. Not her other lovers, as she cannot know how pure their blood is. Mudblood playthings she deems too lowly to be of notice: yet I can touch the river of her life, for I am family.
She has her tools: her tongue, her dagger, her wedding ring with the ruby at the centre, ever containing a new dose of poison, often rendering remarkable results.
The skin of her boytoy lover shrivelling up like a baby's in his first hours, or after having laid in the bathwater for too long and your fingers become wrinkled and parched. Her every touch sparking fire in his veins, flicking at the wounds she makes with her fingernails, long and polished and painted blood-red. Pain bending to pleasure, as true weakness bends and not breaks, as she locks the two emotions that rule her being together in her entertainment of the night.
I am not her toy, nor am I her lover. I am convenient, yet she cannot rule me. I stand outside of her usual manner of digression, for I am flesh of her flesh and blood of her blood. Metaphorically speaking, in our case. Bound by blood and sacred marriage.
Though not to each other... yet family in veracity. Why else would she mark me? A brand saying Mine, acknowledging ownership.
Who could have known the extent of my possession when her sister Narcissa married into the Malfoy patriarchy? That I should receive two women and not one. My Lord would have been very pleased, had he suspected I arranged it this way. Yet the fates had another surprise in store for us all, things I did not speak of, yet they would come into play soon enough.
Before she turned to the Dark Lord, little Bella would steal roses from our garden. Our family homes' territories adjoin at the border, there where the grass seems tainted by too little sun. Our rosebeds aligned neatly with theirs, so there never would have been any notice of the stealing had she not made it intentionally obvious.
So young, yet her eyes betrayed her old blood, even then, and it showed through her actions. She never took the healthy blossoms, full in bloom, but rather the withered, and never another tint than red. The red she had fallen in lust with the moment she had bitten her own tongue at age three and tasted something familiar, herself in her own mouth. She could swallow her essence. She understood the power of blood, even then.
A powerful witch in her own right, her flowers were her carmine treasures. Each and every single rose petal she'd take into her mouth, soak it with her blood, then pinprick them with a needlepoint and hang them round her neck. She always loved her style.
She would sneak out of her bedroom late at night and chatter away at the stars. She had always believed, and still does believe she hears them faintly whispering to her, telling her stories, stories of to come and to be and to have, of to-morrow and to-day. She especially liked the to have' part. Bella has always been very possessive.
The stars never spoke to her of to-night as they feared this would discriminate their stature. Their own domain was to remain inscrutable to her. And she accepted this. Even as life threw its nasty trickery into the game that is Bella against inevitability, she never blamed her elevated friends. They are her wishes, drawn into the sky, too small to be remembered and too bright to be forgotten.
I stole a rose from her garden once after a night spent in her company. Payback for old times, I suppose. No one steals from a Malfoy and escapes penalty, even if it took two centennials to finalise. I deny it to have been an act of wrath, as she had denounced me a thousand times before and I was not more or less affected in the aftermath of that encounter than I had been any other time. Yet, the idea of crushing those petals in my hand granted me a sick satisfaction nevertheless.
I had miscalculated the extent of time on my hands before the lady of the manor returned home, however. When Narcissa found it on the pillow of our king-size bed as I rinsed the scent of Bella from my still-heated body, she mistakenly presumed it to be for her. At the following family gathering she wore it proudly in the upturn of her braid.
I will never know how Bella knew the rose to have been hers: maybe she smelled it, maybe the stars had whispered it into her. Her partners-in-crime, they surely would have betrayed me. Perhaps as I refuse to believe in their power, and Bella begrudges me this. It matters not. But she didn't speak to me, were it not for the custom of courtesy, for a year and six months.
I remember a cut running across my left cheek from where she had slapped me with the hand bearing her then-engagement ring, because I had taken a picture of the stars and handed it to her, as her engagement gift. The silver-serpent framework, a beautifully intricate pattern of a manifold of Ourobosos intertwining that had taken months to perfect, framed the live photograph magnificently.
She had smashed the photograph with one fluid movement to the floor, and opened her mouth to let out a howl that would have darkened the moon.
Back then the ring did not contain poison yet. It was in fact her voice that spoke venom.
"The stars belong in the sky, to me, where I can see them! Otherwise they belong to themselves! How dare you," she had shrieked at me, Medusa's maiden taking a stand even if it made her even more desirable to my Bella-starved eyes.
I had not seen her for three weeks. . . I should have realised the breach of conduct, but I had been angry, irrationally so, with the knowledge of her impending marriage. I had wanted this, and her outburst filled me with equal parts despair, return-anger and hopeless lust for what I expected never to have again.
She had spit at my feet, eyes ablaze as her hair came down from its bun – how could they ever have thought to tame that mane? – and she poked a long-nailed finger into my chest. I would still see the imprint of her half-moon there, just above my heart, three days after.
"I alone collect the stars to my chest, you cannot bring them down! You have not the power! Petty imitations –" Casting the photograph in the fire as casually as she'd dispose of an incompetent house-elf – "Bringing down the stars for me! What makes you think you have the right? I alone!"
She screamed, incoherent with rage now, beating on my chest as I tried miserably to calm her. "I alone! I alone!"
The Dark Lord understands this about her, her need to possess yet not have the things she own lose their inherent power because of her ownership. The stars give her presents of tomorrow, therefor they have a power of their own: she wishes not to take it from them, and the Dark Lord knows this. He knew exactly how to make her see that, in his owning her, she would gain more power than she had ever had before, more significance in the eyes of the stars and the bleeding roses and the Lord she adored than any other way could have bought her. She is sealed by her own demandings, my darling sister-in-law.
When she comes to me with blood on her teeth and stardust in her hair, her eyes blazing like the madwoman she is, she wishes only to return to what she knows is hers alone. My power over her is that I know Bella, through and through, and on nights as this she wants a hand familiar with her body to coax her to oblivion.
I alone may share her solitude, because I helped create it. Was it not I who married her sister instead of her? Was it not I who gave our Lord an heir, born from my wife's womb, an honour Bellatrix still believed was entitled to her? The stars had promised her, she had whispered into my silken hair one night. It was the only time they had let her down.
I did not marry her not because I did not desire her, or because I desired her sister more than she. I merely chose not to own her. And in doing this, I became less close to her than the stars, and she less valuable to me than Narcissa would become.
The only fact of our relation hides in the core of her wedding ring, as the lie reflecting her marriage: the ruby was my wedding gift to her. To make up for the stolen rose, and the mistake of an engagement present. I am ever at the heart of her marriage. Just as the poison in the gemstone comes from me. After every meeting between us, she receives a new phial.
Bella marks me with her forked tongue as I raise bruises on her pale skin. The blood of her own on the white marble of her skin looks like a tainted chessboard to me. My playground.
Yet the tables are turned, as she poisons me with my own toxin, inside the ring betraying her adultery. Her loyalty to me... as I readily fall into captivity; into her.
We are a strange pair, Bella and I.
Her rose-painted nails scrape across the nape from which my hair drops to my waist. She likes it long, so she can tug on the locks and tie it as a knot around my neck, asphyxiating me, taking my breath before she gives it me in a rough, covetous kiss. Then she pulls away and laughs ruggedly.
I never tell her she is not the only woman who likes to see my hair long. There is enough cold blood between them, without me adding to the frozen water. When I speak of Narcissa to her, the air I exhale becomes visible in the suddenly chilly room. Bella goes out like a candle in the dark, her eyes dimming, her hands lowering.
I never stay until daybreak on such visits. It is... fine with me. When Bellatrix turns into her sister, there is no reason for me not to seek out the original, instead.
I remember a Christmas morning at Malfoy Manor, shortly before the announcement of my engagement to Narcissa. The family was either huddled in small groups and getting reacquainted, handing out presents to each other, or standing collectively around the Christmas tree of that year... grander, greener as the House tradition demands and more lavishly decorated than any year previous.
In a corner of the room, Bella sat quietly with a collection of silver-coloured paper before her and a pair of scissors in her hand. Her hands were folding paper stars, to put on a string and hang in the tree. She was always creative that way. The scissors cut her in the fingertips, but she seemed to like the blood on her creations. And as I moved closer I could have sworn I heard her whispering thankfully to the paper, for wanting to become a star.
Bellatrix does not have the ability to hurt me. If she did, I wouldn't continue this rendezvous with her. She can aggravate me, yes, to a fault. She can drive me wild with passion, and absolutely out of my mind with frustration. But she can't put that dagger she loves so much through my own heart.
Her value to me is not as Narcissa's, who gave me a child, an heir, a Malfoy prince with hair as fair as mine and eyes as steely cold. Had I chosen Bella, the heir to the dark destiny would indeed be dark, dark-haired as our Master, which no doubt would have pleased him... but the child would be submissive by nature.
No matter how strong, how defiant, the child would wish to be owned. And I cannot have that.
The blood of a Malfoy shan't live on through the son of Bellatrix Black. The risk of contamination by that sullen emptiness, passionate in manner yet devoid at the core, would have been too great. And my son's first loyalty should be to me, his father, the Dark Lord's second-in-command... something my dear Bella would never have understood.
Though submissive to her Master, and, to a certain degree, in all her haughty coolness and fury in the dark, also to me, she would never have granted a creation of her own – her own bright and vibrant star in the Black heavens – that sort of casual admission.
She would have marked him, owned him, dominated him, the way she simply cannot do with me... and then the Malfoy heritage would have been lost. No, I chose the right wife, and also, the right mistress.
She sleeps in my arms because she fears nothing from me, as there is nothing I could take from her. Her only fear is that I might give, and she knows by my own nature I won't. My giving is not reserved for her. Her hair is black against my chest, black against my chin as I rest it upon her scalp. The black of her name.
Narcissa, of course, wasn't allowed to retain her natural colouring. A Malfoy has hair the shade of the sun at its brightest, or the moon at its peak. In our wedding night I put a permanent hair dye charm on her hair, so that it may appear as liquid gold to me whenever I see her. And whenever I don't see her, as well, just as the moon is invisible during the day but ever watchful, ever present. My possession mark.
Bella remains Black. Always. Possessed, alone, her own perfection. My own possession.
Always.
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