Warning: Incest, and other disturbing themes.
Pretty When You Cry by patchworkteddy
'Love' and 'Death' roll off her French tongue, hissing and spitting flames as they tumble through the air, blanketed by ashes and stone, beautiful. They sound perfect together, linking chains scraping across their luscious, silk-soft surface, binding them together by the similar phonetics. Dominique revels in the texture of the words on her lips, the bittersweet tang that stings on her tongue, the slight stab as it crawls out of her Pandora's Box mouth.
Dominique is special. Behind her teeth (shining and gleaming and perfection) are the wispy wise ghosts that swim and chatter things into her ear. Her eyes are lined with razor-sharp canine teeth, her lips stained with the poison of strawberries.
In her lust-coloured dreams, Dominique has kissed Victoire for every star in the sky. Victoire, devouring her sister whole watches Victoire she can lock her precious into her sacred treasure chest behind the teeth, if she speaks the ghosts will infect Victoire and Victoire will be hers. All hers, to rape with her eyes, to feast on with her hands, to rip her pulsating, scarlet heart out of her (lovely) chest and taste it.
Victoire is a beauty, a Snow White caged in a beauty-obsessed Queen's Kingdom, in the castle of a coffin, with the turrets looming over her, knowing smirk in place, her deathbed where the Queen will carve out art onto her lovely porcelain skin, savour her bite by bite, every scarlet drop of blood as precious as diamonds.
Victoire is beautiful, and Dominique just loves beautiful things.
—
Ceramic teeth clamp around her lovely body, entrapping her in a cage of calcium and knife blades. Dominique dances an elegant ballet in the darkness of her sister's shadows. It is beautiful, really, this supple chorography—every twist of the limbs, every retreating and dramatic exit out of the stage, every anxious breath passing through her lips. She is a huntress stalking her prey, pearl teeth prepared to be stained blood red by the poisonous apple.
Dominique has long burned every image of Victoire, twisted in different angles and tinted with the red of Dominique's desire and sin. She knows the length at which her sister's plaid skirt in hitched demurely over her milky, attractive knees, the way her slender pianist's fingers push back strands of silky, moonlight-drowned hair when she is nervous, the shape of the luscious pillow of her cherry blossom pink lips, the texture of her soft, porcelain skin. Dominique knows everything about her perfect sister.
(This is what she does not know—the line between love and obsession is a very fine one indeed.)
—
Jealousy and lust tremble and shake within her, crumbling into ashes and dust under the hatred that devours all. A supernova spins a star around and it explodes in a shower of fireworks and flames in loathing, leaving a black hole of anger that sucks her in, a maelstrom of irrational thoughts and twisted desires.
"—and this is my sister, Dominique. Domi, this is Gale, my boyfriend."
Boyfriend, a mocking tone injects in her mind, echoes bouncing off the tinny, cramped space in her mind that is not flooded with Victoire. Her eyes blaze and dismember the nervously smiling boy, her hands shake within her pockets. She pulls back her thin and white lips in what would have been a grin, but here it looks more like an expression of threat, a promise of danger. It is feral and wild, and brings out the predatory glint in her eyes, the twist of her mouth.
It teeters on her lips, ready to fall (as is she). Die.
—
Gale stays for the holidays. Dominique's rationale takes a vacation.
As Dominique shuffles to the kitchen table, the aroma of breakfast wafting to her, her eyes pick out the head of messy, brown hair. Gale the Hated has stolen her precious seat next to precious Dominique.
(Dominique reaches for her wand, and magic grasps the fragile wood in its destructive hand, and as the seat is unceremoniously flung across the room, the bastard's back is slammed against the wall. He slumps down, a limp doll, limbs bent out at awkward angles, bones jutting out of torn skin, and his head lolls before its cord is severed and it goes bounce bounce bounce across the floor. Dominique coats his head with the beetroot soup spilled across the carpet, and she tells Louis to play Quidditch with her.)
Dominique's jaw quivers as she sidles into the seat opposite a chattering Victoire (this is wrong, this is wrong, Victoire talks only to Dominique in the mornings. Wrongwrongwrong). She takes the small, metal palette knife from the tabletop and uses it to scoop strawberry jam from the glass jar, before dumping it on her soft bread.
(She pretends that she is slowly scooping out the pink, fat, juicy glow-worms squirming about in Gale the Loathsome's head, before presenting it to Victoire, plopping it into her lap, all wrapped in soft satin and red ribbons.)
Her eyes are drunk with disgust at the scene pressing against her red eyeballs, twisting the optic nerves and crushing the posterior chambers like a balloon—Victoire, her Victoire, planting a quick kiss on Gale the Soon-to-be-Dead's cheek. Her teeth (sharp and hungry and angry and wanting) slash through the soft wheat (and it seems so much like human skin). Her ears are burnt up in inferno as the nausea-inducing murmurs whir above the white noise blaring in her head like speakers. The nerves in her fingers writhe and digests herself from inside-out, as she withers away from the curdle of ugly feelings inside her.
Snap, somewhere a nerve breaks, severed forever.
With her shaking fingers, she slides the sharp, shiny butter knife into her skirt pocket, blade sliding along her fingers, whispersweet. Destroy or be destroyed?
(She is already so far gone anyway. Destroy.)
When push comes to shove, Dominique will stab.
—
Dominique just loves beautiful things. And it is beautiful—the press of syllables on her decomposing lips, the descent of syllables snatched up and scattered by the winds. She has practised it on the house-elves, over and over again, until the red river opens in her room. It is all about intent she knows, and it is so easy to imagine their sallow, drooping and wrinkly faces distorting to become his.
She moves like a ghost—her feet glide across the floor, the hem of her thin cotton nightdress drags across the carpet, her inaudible footsteps further muffled by the wicked cackle of the evils circling her right wrist. Her heart thrums out the syncopated rhythm of a bashed-up clock—tock, tock, tick, jing. But she only fears the coming of failure.
Her fingers skim across the mahogany surface of the door, tracing the elaborate, hypnotic swirls. She imagines they are hurricanes, and she has been ensnared in one, violent winds ripping through her hair, impaling her shell of a body like spears, razor teeth unforgiving.
"Alohomora," the murmur spills out from her lips, falling to the carpet which laps it up eagerly. The door unlocks with a click (it is music to her ears, and even the shrieking and blaring collapses into mindless black holes of frightening magnitude and gravity), and a ribbon of luminous glow connecting this world to the ethereal radiance of the beautiful moon whooshes through, a single silver thread unwound from a spool constructed of metal bones, leading Dominique back to the entrance—or exit? Yes, exit—of this love labyrinth.
Milky feet sink into a soft rug, and her Veil of blood-red hair swings back and forth, like the chime on Death's clock, as she dances the unearthly, corpse-choreographed waltz to her lovely first time's bed. Anger and hatred swell and fall with the dynamics of a classical piece, little molecules trickling into her blood and veins and bones.
Cold sweat clings to the fine hairs crawling across her skin, pearly beads that intrude upon the carefully woven network of soft thread. Her breath hitches in her throat.
The light from her wand casts sickening half-shadows on Gale the Living Dead's face, and by this faint glow emitted by her wand, she muses on the similarities between the sickly green glow of Avada Kedavra and the humble Lumos.
Images, splintered and captured in the red miasma of abhorrence and fury, spiral through her mind, a scroll of negatives that unravel to the ground. Blood-drenched fingers slip between the webs of skin between her pale, long ones, and they guide the movement of her wand. A transparent butterfly beats its glass wings against her hesitant lips.
"Stupefy. Sectumsempra."
The notes float up, lyrical and lilting, as if sung by a lust-drunk witch (for it is, for it is), and stick to surfaces as spider silk, sprawling out the cob webs as the magic digs into him, thorns penetrating skin and rooting upwards everywhere, manipulating his blood to sing a poison.
A curse that bleeds the sleepers.
Dominique waits for the show to start.
This is how the stage opens—bright red fireworks bursting across the scene, scarlet sparks splattering everywhere. The plaids of the red unfurl and the grand, gold-bordered drapery tumbles downwards, the redness more blinding than the Gryffindor hangings. Everything is stained in red, preparation for the tiny red weevil performance artists, with their red apple teeth, to make their ostentatious entrance via jagged, Glasgow smile doors.
It is all so mesmerising in its beauty.
Red slobber is drooled all over the cool, wooden floorboards as the maws pant and sprint towards their host's heart, the beating machine central. Dominique dips in a single finger in the oozing pool, it swims forward, licks blazes up against the floorboards, red as the fanged trees in evening, red as an apple skin. She untangles the conglomerate of life-spun threads, opening chasms and chasms for the ghosts to fall through.
In the moonlight filtering through the windows, the mesh of hemoglobin and plasma winks enticingly at her with its mercurial gaze. Beautiful.
The taste of strawberries on her tongue—explodes with the sour and sweet. Mixes and pleasures.
Dominique is a performance artist, with her languid grace, her easy fakery, her beautiful magic. Her beautiful kills.
The performance artist departs from her spindle, licks the delicate pattern of red lace off her fingers, and exits the stage, where the darkness floods and drowns.
—
He is sent to St. Mungo's the next day, where they declare him a permanent vegetable. The Aurors shake their heads, for they cannot even figure out what spell has damaged the boy beyond repair. Poor thing, they sing, boogying to a creeping-in theme.
Dominique only smiles (behind the other fingers) because at least she did not kill him. Let him live.
Victoire, who does not understand what Dominique has saved her from (but Dominique will forgive her, poor little chéri), cries into Dominique's shoulder, her lips (lickable, delicious as strawberries) pressing hard against the thin material younger girl's sleeve as her tears drench the fabric.
Beautiful. Oh Victoire, you are so pretty when you cry.
Dominique pets her and strokes her and rocks her like everyone else, but Dominique is special because she is the best at loving Victoire, and, and of course Victoire loves her back, surely, she won't be so sad after a while, right?
And Dominique crushes the sapphires speckled into her eyes with the dagger point of incisors cutting across her eyelids.
—
The air tastes newer and fresher now, like the addictive scent of strawberries. Dominique inhales deeply, as she locks the door like Gale the Corpse has never done (she giggles just at the thought—oh, Gale, oh silly Gale, he has never deserved Victoire).
Dominique is a beauty, and beauties must have pretty rooms (like Victoire? Just like Victoire). This is Dominique's room—four hospital walls, walls no longer, buried under myriads of Victoires in their two-dimensional cages.
There is one her mother snappedclicksealed for them, a lovely little memory where Victoire, oh sweetlovelybeautiful Victoire has her arms wrapped around Dominique protectively (I'll protect you now, sister dear), duplicated thirty-four times. This is her favourite, taken from a dream, both girls young and pretty (Victoire more so, of course), backs touching the apple tree in their back yard, sweet scent of summer as heat on their skin. They made a promise back then that we'll love each other forever.
Forever.
There is one where Victoire has her back (her smooth, glorious back) inclined against a squashy armchair, as her eyes stumble through the warren of text (rabbit, freeze, catch you unaware, and you're beautiful). There is Sleeping Beauty, beautiful Victoire sprawled out across her duvet, eyes closed as her chest rises and falls to the tempo of Dominique's heart (they always look so beautiful with eyes shutter-tight closed).
There is Victoire with her arms slung around Gale the In-Dirt's shoulders, her beautiful face frozen in laughter. Dominique's fist clenches and unclenches.
Her fingers close around her wand, and with a spell that lights up this world, flames crackle from the point of her ebony wand and devour Gale's face like Dominique has.
—
On a heap of sea-spun bones, an apple, red as rivers, sits atop, a queen high and regal on her pedestal. Shards of glass, splintered from the whole and encased in capsules of sin, embed themselves into the pearl white frames, sinister stars of an ashwinder's eggs.
Dominique picks apart the threads, one by one, and she falls to the ground, a tumble of needles and soft filaments. With her lips she sews herself back together, with tighter skin and teeth-mark eyes and knits Victoire into the fold, an ensnarement. For Dominique gets braver each night, her doll feet dancing the same pulse. The voices rise like a wave breaking over a previously placid ocean, and surge inside her, sloshing her insides, squeakingbitingscratching.
Her blood sings like a river washing over glossy stones as she curls into a sleep-drugged Victoire, cotton sheets scratching (not gliding, never gliding, not anymore) against her paper-thin skin (one cut and she will ooze out, pooling a disfiguration). Victoire, sleep rubbing her face and paralyzing her limbs, merely sniffs and shifts slightly. Dominique breathes out, ribcage expanding to accommodate the growing number of shadows starting to solidify (she can't see their faces, she can't).
The voices ebb and flow like a tide drawn by the ghostly apparition of a moon, phantasmal forms of birds cawing in the background. They peck at her ribs, one ledge after another, they want to break her.
But she is safe, because Victoire is here. Victoire, who is beautiful. Beautiful enough to erase all the ugly things inside Dominique. And Dominique needs this, because she thinks she will drown without Victoire.
(She never realises she is drowning because of Victoire.)
—
The second time it happens, Dominique tapes on her split banana skin smile, and shake Tom's hand while cheerfully wishing a slow and painful death upon him. She has marked him as a new target, a black ring circling his monochrome head in her picture frame, where his hand is linked with Victoire (how could he, how could he, how could he?)
She goes up to her dormitory, locks the door with her wand (what's the use—doors cannot stop ghosts), and sets his paper body on fire, flames hissing, spitting sparks, a visual arts display that is beauty. The banana skin slips, clatters to the ground with the last remaining crumbs of her sanity (was it ever there, was it ever?).
Dominique loves her sister. She will do anything for her.
—
Midnight. The butter knife swims out from her pillowcase, whispering promises of beauty, and feels like heaven in her hands.
—
The spiral staircase unfolds, a coffin awaiting her at the bottom. Dominique descends like she is in her dreams, with reality fading and waking in the wallpapers. The flickering flame from the lamp shrouds her pale face in darkness, and she is aware of how beautifully eerie she looks, descending down the steps with perfect posture and elegant grace in her white laced nightdress, and minefields for eyes.
Her lips practically tingle with anticipation, eager for the kiss of syllables on her lips, for the magic crackling in her bones to seek their mark. Her fingers curl around the large ring of the eagle knocker, but a quick Silencing Charm prevents the knock from echoing through the silent castle like a thunderclap.
Waiting, with her heart in her throat, Dominique carefully removes the charm. The majestic bird (suddenly she remembers that the eagle is a predator) clacks its wooden beaks open, looking irate, before asking, beady eyes fixated on her face, "What is the downfall of all humans?"
Dominique leans in so her forehead touches the wooden paneling of the door. Her words form a puff of coldness as she answers the too-easy question.
"Death."
The eagle knocker looks smug. Head shaking, it says, "Wrong."
Dominique regards it with her curious gaze for a few moments, thinking hard, before she says (this is what she knew so long ago) what has to be the wrong answer.
"Love."
The door swings open, as another one closes.
—
In the darkness there is a single candle flame. Dominique blows it out with a single breath, and extinguishes the lamp so the moon becomes her only source of light. The only witness to all her sins.
The wand slithers out of her pocket, into her hands and it pushes against her, drawing magic out from her. Dominique's bare feet tap out a slow beat against the carpeted floor, and in her head crackles ominous music. A soft giggle bubbles up from her throat.
This is the one, where he lies asleep, so unaware of the danger looming right over him. Dominique stretches her arm and caresses the hollow of his cheek almost tenderly, whispers spilling across the cold ground and sinking between the floorboards. A simple Silencing Charm seals his fate.
In the strange, beautiful glow of the moonlight, the beauty of innocence basks in it all. Dominique could, could leave him, and walk through the door. But…
That would not be fair, right?
She smiles, and casually swings one leg over the edge of the bed as she sits on the thick quilt, considering her options. The last one was fast, and she had never quite gotten the chance to appreciate the beauty of pain. She thinks she will do it slower this time. She wants to hear screams this time, lovely, beautiful screams to fill her up like Victoire does.
She leans across the four-poster bed, blood-red hair brushing the sleeping boy's face. Just looking at his innocence, his hand that held Victoire's, makes her want to destroy him. She wants to stain her hands with the red of strawberries. She wants to taste the curse on her tongue, loll it around in her mouth.
Wisps of faint breathing curl around his ear as she whispers, quietly. "Boo."
He jerks upright, eyelids springing open. She has to give him credit for that, for being alert in the middle of the night. After all, you never know the dangers the night brings, hmm?
"Dom'nique? Wha're you doin' here?" His voice is dry and gritty and vague from sleep, and she knows his mind is working too sluggishly to comprehend the gravity of this situation. She gets on her knees, and inches closer until her face is a single hair width's away from his, and her words thread through his skin like barbed wire.
"Time's up, pretty boy. I'm here to deliver your worst nightmare."
—
Dominique has always wanted to be one of those Muggle plastic surgeons slicing up flesh and sewing back skins, making people beautiful. Great thing she gets to show her expertise soon.
She lies down next to him, in a position that might have been intimate if it is not for her intentions. He eyes the blade warily as she runs it up and down his cheek, stroking soft skin with sharp metal. She hears his shallow, raspy gasping, that faint breathing tying him to this life, this life that involves Victoire.
Only her. Victoire belongs only to Dominique, and no one else.
Dominique flicks the razor-sharp tip of the blade against his cheek (fingers cold against hers), and cranberry juice trickles onto the sheets, dying them the red of berries. He whimpers, not daring to scream. She wants to hear him scream.
She thinks even the ugly people look most beautiful with their eyeballs rolling on the floor, irises goggling and swathed in noxious pus, with their broken body speared by knife-javelins pinning them to the ground, garnets twinkling as they mingle with the woven threads of a lush carpet below, with the ivory of bones torn out of normal stature, with the dirt ready to clog their eyes and mouths and lungs.
The first scrape of metal against skin is the elegant glide of bow against string, drawing out a melodious tune. She hums along happily, as she slices into the contours of his lips.
His screams fill her up fill her up fill her up, pour cement paste into the cracks that Victoire has created by not being here. Little bubbles that glow red swell and pop on his face before dripdripdripping onto the sheets and floor and pajamas (teddy bears—she finds it ironic and laughs, with her head thrown back). They remind her of the holly berries Victoire decorated the house with last year, and she switches track, singing Christmas songs as she cuts him up.
She cuts him up, cuts along the imaginary dotted line, serrated edge, sharp claws of a vulture ripping into him. Oh but he is grinning, grinning widerandwiderandwider look she is making him smile! She smiles.
She swallows the screams, beautiful screams, drinks in the sight of beautiful crimson spill from his wine-dyed face, an art critic examining a sculptor's work. No, not quite enough—the silver slashes across his face again, curving and lengthening the laceration sketched out in red ink by the fingernail point.
The more he screams, the more she laughs.
—
At the breakfast table, Victoire sidles into the seat next to Dominique's, yawning sleepily (enchanting, enchanting, enchanting).
(This is what they say, ignorance is bliss. Ignorance is beauty, Dominique disagrees.)
"What'cha drinkin'?" Victoire queries, swirling her coffee around in the porcelain cup with her spoon, as she eyes Dominique's beverage curiously. Dominique takes a while to answer, as she is furthering her good mood by observing the slight pout of Victoire's lips, the soft curves under her pajamas, the peach tinted cream of her lovely complexion—
"Oh, nothing," Dominique replies airily, taking another swig as she taps her feet to a steady, cheerful beat.
"Red wine?" Victoire lowers her voice (lovely, silky, addicting) in a conspiracy. Her lilting, mellifluous voice is a siren song (that sends her crashing to the cliffs, wingless).
Dominique only laughs.
They find the grinning boy an inch away from death (no, Dominique has never meant to kill, never, not really, that is such a crude and unprofessional ugly thing to do), insanity cutting into his mind as he blinks and screams and points at things that are not there.
(She never wonders who is her murderer.)
Victoire is distraught, as are the classmates. Oh, what do we do, we're so blue, they sing, dancing onto stripped off skin. Her sister performs the speech at dinner, oh what a good friend he was.
Dominique smiles as a snowman's fingers thread though the tangled veins of her heart.
—
The door slams behind her, louder than the caw of fanged, graveyard-ravens roosting in her skull. Dominique slumps against the wall and sinks to the ground, the falling out beginning. Her willowy frame is wracked with shudders, the insatiable, animalistic craving for Victoire encasing her in teeth.
Fingernails dig into the peeling appleskin wallpaper, and the word soon is ground out slowly and half-heartedly, trapped between her flicking tongue and the burnt backs of her teeth. A breath lifts and dies in her throat, like a bird with plucked-off feathered wings.
Furtive glances strike the scene with increasing fury of a thousand pointed spears. Dominique's heart rings louder. Fingers knead her shoulders painfully, manicured fingernails pulling out her bone marrow like a spool of silken thread. Her gears crank mechanically, silver hands greased in blood clicking buttons with the hilt of a dagger somewhere in the world's end. The moon has its jaws around her. Stars, forever twinkling and ne'er-changing (what is this insanity?). Glass whispers against the fabric of her skirt pocket as she glides towards the bed of white roses, the tinkling laugh of the message in the bottle tickling her ears.
Dominique leans down, until she is this close to Victoire (how close? As close as she is to the edge). Breath like smoke sneaks out from her frozen lips. Her hand plunges into her pocket, and she winces at the crash of cotton against her hand, crackling like firecrackers. Her eager fingers close around the glass vial, and swish and flick, she is holding it in front of her.
Hesitation and impatience convulse within her, gripping her with a confusing force. Her body is all herky-jerky movement as she justifies—this is just more proof of her love for Victoire, and anyway, Victoire loves her too, she would be overjoyed. A smile forms on Dominique's lips, as she thinks that Victoire would go a little red, the cherry blossom pink blush beautiful on her Snow White skin, and she then she would—
Shivers skitter down her spine, leaving her body is trembling in anticipation. Heat on her skin and on her heart. The bottle is unstoppered with icicle fingers, and a bitter tang of copper licks her lips. With a gentle touch reserved only for the cursed princess frozen in ice in front of her, sleeping so innocently like a childhood dream, Dominique tilts her head back. Transparent fingers, shrouded in a strange, dizzying whirlwind of scarlet, float down over hers. Dominique gently pushes her lips open, adrenaline screaming for release in her veins, dancing the boogeyman's ballet with the poison. The bottle is tilted, and with it, the mind of Dominique Weasley.
Tears from a near-by faraway future trickle out of the bottle, an open third eye blinking out thick, black venom. Blanketed in the silver petals of moonlight, Victoire is a goddess splayed out on the bed, creamy skin like the marble of an angel's coffin, lily-white fingers Dominique longs to have intertwined between hers, eyelids fluttering like a struggling butterfly, synchronized with the desperate clanging of Dominique's heart against her mind.
This is the first time Dominique feels grateful for the Death of Living Draught.
Holding her breath like how she holds Victoire in her dreams, Dominique slides into the bed. This is her place in the world, by her sister's side, where everything is right. And this is, this is, for how can it be wrong when it is all that Dominique has wished for? There is nothing for with loving your sibling, right? And Victoire is just too beautiful, intoxicating, heart-stopping to resist.
(Aren't all heartbreakers?)
Dominique presses her body against the sleeping girl's, their bodies moulding against each other, fitting together like interlocking pieces of a showcase puzzle, limbs entangling in an increasingly intricate network of deception and desperation.
She cups Victoire's lovely, sleeping, angel face between her hands, and her eyes skim the work of art in front of her—flawless skin, unmarred and unmarked, soft like an apple's baby flesh, sweet and tender and juicy. Delectable.
Fingers sketch out a railway track of half-shadowed lines, lips crash and burn and dissolve into sprinklings of a dream, skin ends with skin on skin on skin, and touches grow desperate and bold. Dominique locks Victoire into her ribcage, little jar girl with her heart eaten out, blood red of cherries dripping down Dominique's neck and collarbone.
Heat erupts on her skin. She loves Victoire, loves her sister more than enough to encase herself in sin, over and over, rolling in the mud, just to be with her. Victoire must love her too—how can this be so wrong?
She loves her.
It burns her.
—
Her dreams are haunted by silky lace curtains, soft and smooth like Victoire's skin. Crimson moonlight, red as Nightshade in the dawning of morning, twists and spirals, sweeps across the strange drapery ominously, catching long-legged blood-spiders suspended by gravity.
Networks of skeletal serpents weave themselves together in an elaborate patchwork of the unfathomable darkness, intricacy and beauty going hand in hand together, as blood-dyed, pinwheel cherry blossoms, once white with blooming innocence, spin throughout psychedelically, hypnotic with the thirty-seven-second loop, petals unfurling to reveal crushed and bloodied eyeballs, eerie in the dim half-light, irises black as crow's feathers, sucking her in, drowning her. Watching. Waiting.
Someone laughs, a high-pitched, maniacal laugh. The curtains billow and dissolve into rotting flakes of human skin, and Victoire, bruised and battered, is behind the curtain and she
—
She startles awake, to clay and mud filling her lungs, trapping her in herself, suffocating her—no, it is just the sheet, crumpled with contamination. Dominique draws her knees to her chest like the child she used to be, and rests her chin on her knees, pajamas clinging to her body, damp from sweat.
Victoire. Victoire would make the nightmares go away—she has always done so.
But tonight, Dominique sleeps alone.
(Further and further apart.)
—
But even in her nightmares, they never got this worse.
(And start the breaking, all this shattering, for gone is the world, child.)
—
Her voice crackles, gritty and dry with the effort of choking down tears, fractures marring her throat and breaking her vocal cords like a glass tube, cut shrapnel arrowed at her heart (they fall), cracks spider-webbing across her skin, the start of the end.
"Why?" A desperate plea for denial—this is not true, this can't be true, God, don't let it be true…
Victoire rakes her beautiful, perfect hand through her moonlight-dyed hair, teeth worrying her lip (Dominique remembers how she kissed her, and SHATTER) as she searches for the answer Dominique hates to listen.
"I… I love him, Domi, I—"
And they say love is the downfall of all that is human.
—
And she cannot look at Theodore Lupin anymore, no, and it hurts, breaks her, kills her, she is dying on the inside, over and over again, Sisyphus' martyr.
All she can see when she locks her gaze with him is—hand on thigh, lip on lip, tangled bed sheets, clothes all—
And all she can see when she locks her gaze with him is—girl, gone.
—
NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. PLEASE. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. HELP. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. ME. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. PLEASE. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. HELP. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. ME. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. NO. PLEASE.
—
She stands in front of the mirror, and she knows they have lied about how the skeletons rattle their chains and moan and creak and groan for retribution in closets, about how the monsters ready to eatslurpswallow innocence like apples hide under her bed—the real, truly terrifying beast takes residence quite comfortably inside her rib-not-cage, curling its roots around the wrinkled, pink tentacles of her brains, working it teeth at her, eating her out from the inside, until her face will only be but a shriveled mask.
And she feels it, hot claws licking up her ribs, milkweed stalks of lacerations spinning cartwheels up her paper-plate stomach, diverging into bloody branches with apples arrowed at her eyes, the bombs like dandelion puffs spitting sparks and fire in her head, the poverty of lucid thoughts she tries so hard to deny.
She is an intangible fragmented work of art, held together by the glue of desperation and by Victoire's Spell-o-Tape wound over and over herself, knotted by the many times she has sinned, a gathering of cut diamonds and glass apples. But she does not want to think of that, and tightens the knots with the make-up she dabs on her face, the kit Victoire bought for her on her birthday.
It makes her beautiful.
(That is what, somebody whispers, you like to think.)
The compact box click shut (on top of her, a lid falls, a key turns), and she flips her hair like the beauty she is. Victoire is the end result, because Victoire is beautiful and Dominique is beautiful and Dominique needs Victoire like how she needs being beautiful.
(And she thinks still she is beautiful, and she will win this twisted game, because long her eyes are broken, mere shrapnel, jumbles of nerves and blood and truth, irises like falling petals, crushed by fingers dyed with the red of cherry flowers.)
So she buries herself, under the faked innocence of white lace and pull of silk on skin, the kill-point of the cotton buds, the ground flaked-off corpse skin scattered amongst perfect foundation, the scent of gravel and bones of her (noxious) cloud of perfume, the metallic sting of her laser-red lipstick kissing her soft lips in a shriveled heart shape reminiscent of rotten apple cores.
Just like she could have never seen the end.
—
Two Dominiques. Fighting for control inside her, shaking her walls as they battle. Dominique One only wants Victoire. Dominique Two… wait, does she exist? Maybe it's just her (but is it not the same?)? Or… maybe she is already dead and gone (somewhere, faraway—). Dominique cannot remember.
(Or so she pretends.)
—
Victoire is not hers anymore.
—
Theodore.
Remus.
Lupin.
Must.
Die.
—
A splattering of imaginary red on stained bed sheets—because this is the last coming. A swear crossed upon a laughing photograph of Victoire hugging Dominique. The shearing of hesitations long gone, the climbing in of Victoire into her fractured skull. Blood—so like Victoire's, so like Victoire's—pounding in her arms, as fingers of steel close around her wrist (a distortion of pain) in its vice-like grip.
This is how it ends.
—
The first scream slides from under the door where the blinding light gets in, ballets across her carpeted bedroom floor littered with skewered half-formed daydreams of Victoire, climbs into her warm mouth, all soft spikes (and it is an oxymoron, Dominique knows, just like how Teddy&&Victoire is) and sweetness, a puff of childhood cotton candy on her tongue, before it falls off into her throat and she gobbles it up, ribcage-monster purring.
Beetles scuttle upwards, scaling all the disgustingness, a conglomeration of mud-brown dried blood, to scavenge remnants. Ants bear into her eyes, teeth clicking in a fuzzy kind of melody as they feed on her flashbacks, slimy little critters they are (oh the irony, for who is the slimiest one of them all?).
The second scream crashes through her skeletal system, shattering bones into smithereens consecutively like a falling pack of carefully set-up dominos. Gnaws on her toes and sinks into her skin like a fungus, plaguing her body, some virus feeding her beauty.
The third scream sings a hymn accompanied by a church bell as it stretches on the hearth, roasting (mouth, it is watering, girl), before it folds into itself like an elaborate origami on her stomach, mimicking Dominique.
The fourth scream is a lullaby that drags Dominique into the darkness of
—
cage fermé des fantômes. A curse to wield darkest nightmares of one's greatest fears.
—
"Why, Teddy, you look utterly dreadful this morning."
"Dominique… I just… had… some nightmares…"
"Dear me. I do hope you have better dreams tonight, then."
—
Victoire frets, and it breaks her heart (but then, it has, for so many times she cannot remember), but Dominique only sits and watches, Teddy—Theodore—no, Lupin—mussing his hair up in frustration. Insomnia lines his eyes in heavy bags of blackness, but then it smudges like eyeliner and lunges towards her, swallowing her up.
"Teddy, I think you need to have a check-up."
"Alright, love, we'll go tomorrow."
Teddy, in that all-too affectionate manner, laden with a different kind of endearment than what Victoire expresses towards her (no, sister dear, DON'T look at me like that, you burn me). Love, and she does not even mind. Pencils in her skin, Dominique exits the scene, fists burning with magic.
She will stop at nothing but utter destruction.
—
Screams run rampant in the night air, and Dominique, dressed in Victoire's old shirt (how it smells like her), lounges on her bed languidly, smiling contentedly as the lovely screams weeps a melody, counting the beats in between each verse of misery as she taps her feet, blood obscuring her eyes, a blindfold of red (of love, of obsession).
The screams, lovely, skitter down her spine with the intensity only Victoire could bring. Dreaming, Dominique smiles, and smiles, a Chesire cat grinning in response to Alice-doll's increasingly desperate bids for answers. This is what Theodore Lupin deserves. Theodore Lupin, who stole Victoire away from her.
Victoire is hers, and hers only.
—
Morning light sheds hope on the day, because the golden rays, trapping specks of dust in its grasp, never reaches the corners where the darkness lurks. Dominique wakes to the sounds of Victoire weeping, and the clatter-bang of hustle. She opens her bedroom door and peeks out. Words unravel from a spool of murmurs, snaking their way into her ear.
"Poor boy, so young, yet—"
"—horrible, he's never going to be the same again."
"—insane, I'm afraid…"
She smiles, satisfied, and goes back to sleep.
(When she wakes up the world has fallen into shadows.)
—
Victoire starts taking sleeping pills, and she cries all the time. It makes Dominique angry—why cry over him, why, I'm here, look at me look at me LOOK AT ME and it hurts her.
It makes her feel ugly.
(It makes her want to hurt someone.)
—
She never stops the curse, keeps repeating it for three weeks straight after Teddy (yes, Teddy-boy) is sent to St Mungo's.
Monday morning, she holds a rose to her nose and inhales the sweet scent, thinking of honeysuckle, maybe, for some reason.
Later, she hears that poor ickle Teddy has committed suicide.
—
Victoire gets worse, a crumbling home-made apple pie, caved in from all the grief and tears and confusion. She has to take Sleeping Draughts to be able to sleep now, and Dominique lovingly prepares every one for her dearest sister. By day, excuses are found for chapped lips to touch her cold skin, for sly touches to roam her sister's body, for intense stares to lick her up.
By night, her skin peels, her mask clatters to the floor, swallowed up by her pretenses. Her feet map out an inescapable fate. Dominique engraves marks into Victoire, invisible wolf tears at skin, sinewy threads of transparency glossing fragile fingers, light touches feathering over her body, lipstick like warm mouths on delicate collarbones and Dominique tears herself into fractions, for Victoire.
It is not a sin. It isn't. It is just the reason for Dominique's existence.
—
It happens one night, when the morning moon screams a rabid dream.
Tangled bodies (tangled thoughts) on a bed, both minds not in this world. Maman by the door (she said she was taking Louis to the Medi-witch!) a shadow so black it looks white (if I shut my eyes). She sees the clothes on the floor, sees the nakedness and sins and lies; she is Dominique from back then.
"What… Domi…?"
She bolts upright in a panic, limbs at jutted 'k's and thoughts at knotted 's's. Light gets in again, from the wide open door (like a mouth, she has to remind herself, and Louis is a fang).
Horror spreads its wiry branches over Maman's face, and her fingers grab wildly at Dominique's shoulders in a jawed trap, and she is shaking her, shaking her, shaking her (maybe she was shaken at birth, maybe that is why everything has turned out so wrong) and spittle flies like thoughtless bullets, as she screams, "Dominique! Dominique! My God! Dominique!" Over and over again, each word shaking Dominique more than the fingers.
And Dominique cannot say a thing, because it must be disgusting, to be talked to by a derogation of your daughter, woman eater. Disgusting.
Her mother is all sparks and confusion and tears glittering in split moonlight, flurry of movement as she shakes Dominique and screams in anguish.
"I—I'm calling your papa!" Her distraught stutter-stop screech is frantic as she jerks away from the two girls, footsteps pattering towards the door.
Dominique, caught in that visceral instinct, tackles her mother to the floor. "No, Maman, no! PLEASE MAMAN! NO!" And there are screams and stars burningswallowing everything and whiteness that is all-consuming and explosions cackling by her ear.
No, Maman. NO.
And she—she panicked, okay! And it is just a moment caught in bone-white, and flashbang maman's prone on the floor, limp and warm (warm!) and empty eyes, red ribbons extending tentacles to imprison Dominique.
"No…" She backs away. Horrified.
"No!" Nothing can undo these sins.
"NO!" A scream.
And Dominique sees Victoire, innocent on the bed, a delicious meal for her, and Maman, on the floor, bloodied and battered.
"…I said no."
—
"What the—"
Dominique looks up from Maman's still body, and smiles at Louis' face. Open close open close, his mouth goes, like a goldfish. Haha, goldfish. She remembers the one Victoire had back when she was six, before she started paying too much attention to it and Dominique flushed it down the toilet.
How funny. She giggles and no, she is not crying, no.
"Dominique…" Louis looks so funny. Backing away from her like she has got leprosy (maybe insanity is an illness, too). He takes Victoire's shoulder and shakes her (funny, how funny). Dominique giggles, "Oh, you can't wake her up. Maman's asleep too."
Louis looks so funny, his face is all twisted like he is torn between screaming and crying. Tears pepper his eyes. Dominique laughs.
"Maman's sleeping," she says, and the world goes looped-up upside-down mixed-up as she slides down next to Maman, galaxies spinning away from her red fingertips. "Doesn't she look all pretty when she sleeps?" Strange, her words are coming out all slurred…
"Oh, God, Dominique," Louis cries in grief, touching his wand to Victoire to dress her, to wake her. Dominique hugs her knees to her chest and rocks back and forth, back and forth.
"I killed her, brother dear, I killed her…"
Something snaps inside of her, a single cord severing her from this reality and hers.
"I KILLED HER!"
That night, in the Delacour-Weasley household, three screams are heard.
—
Victoire twists away from her, shaking like a leaf buffeted in winter wind (and winter is a beautiful time). "Domi, Domi, ohmygod please no!"
Dominique cocks her head like a curious child and giggles, giggles. "Oh, Victoire, you and your games. You're funny," she says lightly, before giggling again. Victoire sobs and beautiful tears drip down like melting wax (melting wax). Dominique's eyes narrow.
"Imperio."
Victoire sobs, each tear falling like apples tumbling from a rowan tree (and it does not makes sense, does not), leaves all gold from twisted redness, why did it happen. Oh Victoire, Dominique smiles sweetly, fingers tainting barbed wire onto her sister's skin, you're ohsovery pretty when you cry.
Her hands are everywhere, lust burning them like fire, flaming upwards. Hungry touches and desperate kisses (that is what she tells herself) are exchanged with increasing fervor. Dominique burns.
Victoire burns her, makes her fire.
And later, when Victoire is crying, crying, beautifully crying, Dominique eats her up.
Cherry blossoms are more beautiful when the blood of the dead stains the flowers from graves below.
—
"You're sick," he manages to gasp out, "She's your fucking sist—!"
She takes his tongue, and his ears and his hands. Guts them up and boils them into broth, bone or two floating around like a little lost island. She laughs.
She does love her brother so.
—
She has warded the house with layers and layers of magic, and she knows no one shall come, because Papa has gone on a business trip, and Maman is well asleep in her bedroom, taking an afternoon nap. Her uncles and aunts are far too busy.
Dominique cleans the house, singing cheerily to herself, a quaint little Muggle song. "If you knew how much I love you, you would run away / But when I treat you bad, it always makes you stay." Church bells jingle by her ear, shooka shooka shooka as she sashays to some imaginary song, other fingers drumming out the rhythm on her heart.
Stop-whiteness wedged in the gap between floorboards, and for some ridiculous reason she almost thinks it is an angel feather. She does not think much of it, just bends down and curls her fingers (nerves and bone and spoon and forks) around the blinding whiteness, and tugs.
She screams.
The photograph flutters to the floor, a butterfly with torn page wings. Dominique casts an Incendio and watches it burn, because it has to be a lie, a lie, a lie.
The flames wrap around the frozen frame, a fiery envelope to be sent back to hell (but maybe that is where she is going). And Dominique can see it, see Maman's effervescent laugh cast into a sinister role by the unmistakable sickly glow of the Imperio on her wand, and the glazed, obsessed eyes of Grand-père through the languor of the blood-red mockingbirds, the fine filament of each feather arresting her eyes so she cannot pull away.
Veela blood and curse, scrawled out screaming, in the red ink of a goner.
The feathers turn to fingers, blood burnt away and charred into the near-transparency of corpse-white, and she sees the skeletons, interrogating flashbulb white, and the grin marked out in jagged slashes of red mascara.
—
She stops using Imperio. She just loves to watch her sister cry—maybe because she just looks so beautiful, maybe because Dominique is so soulless that she cannot.
—
"Avada Kedavra." And she laughs, slamming her skull (no, it is not hers, is it?) against hard, paneled wood as her brother pisses in his own pants, foul stench roiling down his filthy pant leg as he vomits, watery eyeballs mingled with the chunks of blackened finger-meats. Hilarious.
She jams the toy wand down his throat, he gags and she sees dirty, disheveled, madness, lost hope, destruction, gone.
Herself, the past, the faraway near fate.
—
Midnight. Fingers prod inside her, and she wakes, all sweaty and heat-ache body, sheets twisted in a distortion of a human face around her lissome frame, to the sound and smell of death.
Her feet pad across the floor, so reminiscent of back then. Fear cracks its shell in her, adrenaline-yolk, all gooey and sticky, spreading under her dusty skin.
Dammit, not Victoire, no.
Empty light. Louis the human origami, shoved into the wooden closet (and she thought there was a Narnia), sticky blood and fluids. And she does not know why (because she smells death, hears it coming on horse-shoed palms) but she—
"Avada Kedavra."
—kills him.
Ah, well, anyone who stands in the way between her and Victoire must perish. PERISH.
She hums as she skips to Victoire's room, and quite calmly suggests to herself that yes, it would be good to rape her sister again.
—
Victoire. A beautiful, fucked-up mess.
—
She buries Louis under the apple tree, kicking dirt over his prone body, watching redness dye the pushing daisies.
She rips out his eyeballs and cuts up an apple to put in his sockets.
—
Breakfast is an apple, balanced on a golden platter, jack-o-lantern face carved into it because we all do these things yes. Dominique does not hear it at first, she is stabbing apples with her butter knife, strawberry jam still nibbling the metal, and she watches as fountains of sticky juice pitter-patter-rain onto the nice, tiled, perfect floor.
Apples never mask the perfume of death though.
And this is how Dominique finds her—lips (she touched them once with her own, only know she knows they are mandibles) finally split into a twisted grin as she lies in a pool of artificially-coloured apple juice (they were never red—!), face banged in, eyeballs dug out with the silver knife Dominique sees lying on the ground next to fingers. A soft, luxurious bed of white and red posies caught in their efflorescence across her serpent-entrails, climbing up her ribcage like fire engine ladder rungs, blooming, blooming.
Dominique blinks, once, twice, thrice, the world, a stacked-up glass plate of elongated claws of humans, fucking up.
Victoire does look so beautiful when she is dead.
—
Tastes better too.
Feels better too.
Screams less.
Too bad dead people don't cry.
—
And now there is hot sauce, yes, she remembers it—Dominique loved it, she would always lick off a bit from Victoire's sandwich after her sister had taken a bite—hot sauce all over her body, and someone wants to eat her up, take a bite.
Dominique wonders why she never thought of killing her sister before. Fucking her would have been so much easier. And she would have found the secret to beauty, eternal beauty, immortality which is so easy, just death.
—
But then—why?
Victoire loved—loves—Dominique, her sweet little sister, she would not kill herself to get away from Dominique. Even if she had killed their younger brother, Dominique admits.
Victoire loves Dominique. Loves her.
Right.
—
Oh! She has figured it out! Dominique smiles.
Of course, Victoire must have realised how the world was unworthy of their beauty, and how all the ugly people would come between two of them. She must have realised that they would be happier if they went to heaven together!
Dominique traces out the heart-shape.
—
The knife is still coated with Victoire, red and sticky and appleskin. Dead people taste like apples. Dominique runs her tongue over her teeth before she kisses Victoire, but she can only taste the sharp, hard punch of porcelain after apple juice.
She plunges the knife into the apple she has plucked from their tree and watches the red, red, redness paint her. And with Snow White's teeth raking appleskin (bitter bitter bitter), she feels two grinning blood-drenched hands in hers as a giant, pulpy maw gets her.
—
Death is beautiful, and Dominique just loves beautiful things.
A/N: Do not own Harry Potter or any other affiliated materials. Written for OCDdegrassi's Controversial Challenge, with the theme murder/suicide. Okay, admittedly, I drifted off-tangent-ish again... Ambiguity and vagueness done on purpose, I wanted to show how Dominique was obsessed with Victoire to the point that her other family members were hardly mentioned... Um, this was inspired by a variety of fics on NextGenDarkFest.
It was a lot of fun writing this, but it's kinda my first go at horror-ish (it's not that scary, sigh...), so reviews will be appreciated!
It'll get beta'd by Giraffes Will Rule The World. But I guess she's busy now.