Disclaimer: I don't own these characters. Unless, that is, we include the dead Muggles, and one of THOSE was played by a very anachronistic Ron, in a wig and lipstick, trying to look sufficiently dead. We fired him after three takes for making faces at the camera.
A/N: This is an updated rewrite of the original Chapter One, which was rather poorly written. While the original still exists on Slytherite's computer, she tries not to look at it, think about it, or acknowledge its existence.
FURTHER A/N: This is an updated rewrite of the original updated rewrite. The person responsible for rewriting the original rewrite has been sacked on the grounds that she, to her utmost horror, left notes on the revision process in the middle of a perfectly good paragraph.
Warnings: This story contains many rather depressing things. For instance, it contains Lucius Malfoy. A depressing thing if ever I saw one. It also contains character death, Death Eaters, mild-to-moderate blood, frequent swearing, Dark magic, sexual innuendo, slash, strongly implied incest, plot, snide remarks, and a rather casual attitude towards many unnerving things. It also contains twice your daily requirement of Vitamin A.
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It's like an arithmetic problem. Four plus four. The sort of thing they teach in the first grade. Of course, they're thinking of moving it to the fifth grade for all of you, the lost generation, you poor students whose brains have been rotted by television. Even you could probably tell me that four plus four equals eight.
They don't teach everything in schools.
Sometimes, for instance, on the night that I'm going to tell you about, four plus four equals four.
There had been four people in the house at first. Then there were, briefly, eight. Now there are four again.
Unless you count corpses. Corpses are very important.
The corpses are the main problem with our cozy circumstances, actually. Blood can be siphoned off the walls and the floor until you'd never suspect that there might have been a murder. Probably the entire neighborhood heard them: there was screaming and yelling and, at one point, even a gunshot. But who cared enough to investigate? Maybe those sods next door are watching a movie. There are a million reasons why the neighbors won't get involved, or even think about getting involved, until it's far, far too late.
Stop the narrative. We need to get something straight.
You should know, boys and girls, that I'm not telling you a nice story. The four people in the kitchen are a smug snake who cares not a whit for your sick children and your tales of woe, all hell personified in a pretty face, the poster boy for violent insanity, and Jonathan Avery, a man so vile that even the other Death Eaters call him a slimy bastard. The four people scattered around the house, some of them in multiple rooms, don't matter. Don't pay attention to them. They used to be people, but now they're corpses, and their only relevance is as set-pieces for the real action.
In this story I'm telling you, there are bastards and there are corpses. There are no bunnies, no cheery flowers, or whatever you probably haven't been expecting. I can dress it up in all the pretty words you like, but I'll get it out of the way now. Don't try to like these people. Don't expect them to have any shreds of heroism about them. They have none. (Bellatrix, in particular, would be quite offended by your assumptions.)
They're Death Eaters. You know as well as I do exactly what that means about their morality, beliefs, and general modus operandi.
They kill people. They're going to kill more people. And they killed the four in the house. I don't think I need to tell you how. Your fertile imaginations can conjure up far more, dear readers, than I could ever tell you in words. All you need to know is that the victims are dead now.
"She struggled," Avery gripes. He's rubbing a bruise on his arm. His sleeve is rolled up to reveal a nice collection of them. Never mind that he was fighting a three-year-old child. That tells you more about Avery than it does about poor Suzy, may she rest in peace and not too many pieces. "The girl struggled. What was I supposed to do?"
The other three ignore him. It would look suspicious if Avery's body turned up with the others, and they want to resist the urge to kill him. They've felt that urge many, many times before, not least tonight. But they have other things to do now, anyway.
Lucius is tidying up the place a bit. Only a fool would try. Quite apart from the blood, the house is almost unrecognizable as the pretty piece of suburbia it was before the Dark wizards arrived and shot the place all to hell. It's amazing how much damage a misaimed Avada Kedavra can do. He isn't trying to hide their presence; even Lucius Malfoy can't do the impossible. The Death Eaters always leave their sign, and if a giant glowing Dark Mark doesn't scream "Wizards did this," nothing does. There's no need to hide that. They leave it there for a reason.
All the evidence of the struggle is more or less still there. He's a tidy enough person, true, but all that means is that he appreciates living in a neat environment: he's too aristocratic and well-bred to do his own housework, and he's even less likely to do some Muggle's housework for him (especially when Lucius's own dear sister-in-law made damn sure that that Muggle is never going to appreciate it). But he wants something to do, something that might distract him for only a few minutes, before he has to go home and wash off the blood before his loving wife sees it.
There aren't any corpses in the kitchen, either. The woman ran through here once, thinking, perhaps, that she could escape. However, even if Rodolphus isn't a fast runner, when he catches you he makes very sure that you won't get away from him again. I'll spare you the details. You don't need to know. Lucius himself wishes he didn't know. There was no plan, or no plan that didn't last past the confusion of the first charge, and Lucius had been coming down the stairs, right in the middle of what he had thought was a momentary break in the confused slaughter, and he had seen it all.
He dabs a few drops of blood (is it blood? There are broken jars everywhere: it might be jam) off of the counter with a paper towel. A Muggle implement. Ergo, not something he ever wants to use again. But doesn't it suffice?
Rodolphus, the poor sod, isn't doing anything nearly so useful. Well, maybe it's useful for him. Maybe even the crazed killers need some way to block the blood and screams and fresh memories out of their minds. Rodolphus has a few of those ever-reliable methods. Right now it's alcohol. He assumes that he's drinking alcohol, anyway; it's a bit dark in the kitchen and he's banking on the Muggles having been sensible sorts who didn't store drain cleaner in those rather tempting old bottles. Most of the bottles were broken at some point, and he's already halfway through the ones that aren't. Even if he's in for a painful death, the adrenaline is wearing off and he's tired enough that, just maybe, he doesn't care.
And he's already in pain. Lots of pain. He was sadistic, as usual: he played cat-and-mouse with the poor woman for a while before he killed her. Moreover, Rodolphus isn't too bright. He doesn't, of course, know anything about gun control laws, but he's used to Muggles being unarmed. This Muggle had, legally or not, a gun, and he'd given her just enough time to run and grab it before he closed in on her again.
It's, sadly, not a lethal wound. Actually, it didn't hit anything remotely important. There are a hundred ways to kill with a gun, and Mrs. Smith had learned a few of them from the movies. However, and this is important, she'd overlooked the sad fact that what you see in the movies just doesn't work. Or it doesn't work on a wizard, anyway.
Rodolphus isn't easy to kill. He's the big strong bugger without any brains or ideas or beliefs of his own; there's one in every group. He's been hurt before, and his sole concern was that his brother didn't find out where he'd been. These days, he comes home splattered with someone else's blood almost every night. Someone, and I'm not naming any names but hell, I'll tell you that it was Avery, started a nasty rumor a few months ago about Rodolphus's particular...proclivities. You know what I mean, don't you? Of course.
Who knows if it's true?
Bellatrix probably knows. Hell, they've said the same thing about her. Her particular brand of sadism, vicious and mocking and utterly depraved, playing people like pianos as she ushers them into death, tends to invite such comparisons. Murder, dear readers, is almost a sexual act for her. The rumors, in another month or two, will spread to imply that she and Rodolphus, after they cut short another mortal coil, don't bother to wash off the blood before they go to bed. (These are distinct, please understand, from the rumors that she prefers the Dark Lord's bed.) There are a lot of sick motivations behind these nasty, mean-spirited rumors. Bellatrix is a woman, and an attractive one at that. Sexism would be an easy answer. Certainly the Wizarding world, or at least the part of the Wizarding world that Bellatrix frequents, the upper-class circle that knows her by reputation, is a reactionary, traditionalist, set-in-their-ways kind of place. But that's an academic answer, not the answer anyone who's seen Bellatrix kill might stammer to the police. That terrified, half-hysterical answer is probably truer.
Sadism was invented, it seems, by Bellatrix Lestrange. (That's her husband's surname—sexism again.) There's no way to explain the extent of her cruelty on paper. It would be tasteless, and it would be utterly pointless. You can't transcribe a deranged laugh, a twisted grin, without losing everything that makes them so nightmarish in the first place.
Not, of course, that I'm implying that anyone who's been on the wrong side of that smile, that laugh, ever survives to have nightmares.
The other three are all wondering if she even notices she's been stabbed. Somehow one of the knives in the kitchen found its way into Mr. Smith's hand during the melee. Shortly thereafter, it found its way into Bellatrix. Her wrist is bleeding. It's only a small geyser of blood, though; of all the vulnerable things in a woman's wrist that Mr. Smith could have hit, he missed every single one of them. Unfortunately for him, he didn't get a chance at another strike. It's unfortunate for the rest of the Wizarding world, too.
And then there's Avery.
"It hurts," he says disgustedly, as if the whole world is to blame for his horrendous misfortune. "Look what she did to me. It hurts."
Avery is a whiner. He's nothing more, nothing less. There's no complexity to his character. He doesn't need any. He can do one thing, and he does it perfectly: Avery complains.
The really sad thing is that this is his first murder. He's the same age as Rodolphus and Bellatrix, but while they've got senseless slaughter down to a science, and then refined it into an art, he's still a complete amateur. A large portion of the chaos and destruction tonight is attributable to him and his blundering, panicky incompetence. He couldn't even perform a proper Killing Curse, strong enough to kill a toddler; he dropped the girl and tried to run, but Bellatrix stopped him. She stopped him violently. You wondered about his bruises, didn't you?
In the twisted world they live in, the first killing is an event. A marker that a boy (or a girl, I suppose, though society might not agree) is growing up. It's a mark of Avery's shallowness that he doesn't even appreciate that. He just wants to go home, finish that letter he was writing to his girlfriend, and get a nice eight (hell, I'll be realistic—a nice ten) hours of sleep.
If only the Death Eaters had standards, better standards than shaky, unreliable pure blood, Avery would have failed them.
There always has to be one character that the readers hate.
They're existing in their own separate worlds right now. Ignoring one another. If they could have chosen who they'd slaughter innocents alongside, they wouldn't have chosen each other.
Bellatrix is getting bored. There's only so long that someone like her can be reasonably expected to go without stimulation, and now her main sources of entertainment are dead. Rat-ta-tat-tat goes her wand on the kitchen table: a cheery little rhythm. Rat-tat-ta-tat-whack-whack-whack. The others turn to look at her. Only Bellatrix, they think in their varying mental vocabularies (Rodolphus manages to slot "bitch" into it somewhere) would do something like that. They're probably wrong. Plenty of people would do the same thing in those circumstances. If they were in those circumstances. No sane person would want to be in those circumstances, anyway.
The noise pulls Lucius out of his reverie. He's been scrubbing the same spot on the counter for several minutes now, and it's a tribute to the grand, important thoughts he's been thinking that he hasn't noticed.
Sadly, they're not such grand thoughts. They only seem grand to him, and if they'd occurred to him in the middle of the day, while he was taking a nice walk around the grounds of Malfoy Manor, he'd have scoffed at them. He puts one of them into words anyway.
"You do realize, don't you, that I have things to do tomorrow?"
Rodolphus's vacant brown eyes widen a bit. He's taken off his mask for the express purpose of drowning his conscience in hard liquor, and Lucius can see that his normally ruddy face is going a bit pale from blood loss. Probably he's drunk enough to replace the volume of lost blood with the champagne that Mr. Smith planned on giving his wife for their fifteenth anniversary. (It might be relevant to note here that Rodolphus failed any class he ever took, and there's no way in hell that he understands basic biology. Particularly while intoxicated.)
"Crap," he mumbles. The alcohol hasn't had time to take much effect, so his deep voice is still perfectly understandable. I can't say he's coherent, though. He never really is. "Bella?"
Bellatrix gives them both a disgustingly pitying look.
"Put your mask back on, Rodolphus, if you aren't too drunk—and you are, aren't you? Oh, yes. We're leaving."
Avery is gone in ten seconds flat, Disapparating directly out of the kitchen. No one really misses him. They have other things to do now, and Avery is not part of the plans.
The other two gentlemen follow Bellatrix out of the house. She's cocky, and she doesn't put much faith in the abilities of Muggles to notice or remember the hooded figures on their recently murdered neighbors' front lawn, and she doesn't consciously consider it anyway, so they go out the front door. Rodolphus nearly trips on the body of the family dog on the way out. Lucius, right behind him, shudders and makes a pronounced effort to avoid it. It's dark, and his foot comes down right on the dog's back. He'll sacrifice another precious half hour of his sleep tonight, lying in the bath and scrubbing until he feels clean enough to risk sleeping without worrying about arrest or vengeful ghosts or even that Narcissa will sense his filthiness and be appalled.
The night sky is beautiful. Too beautiful. Wide-open, with the stars distributed in clumps like the sprinkles on a cupcake. The part they're standing under seems to have the most.
Bellatrix raises her wand, smiling, and her breathing is quick and excited.
"MORSMORDRE!" she screams, far louder than she, strictly speaking, had to.
The skull and snake emblem of the Death Eaters and all that they stand for is burning in the sky again.
I'm sorry.
The killers vanish into the darkness within five feet of the house, and by the time the police get there, which isn't until the morning anyway, it's too late for justice.
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J.K. Rowling is going to flay me alive for writing this.
I'd threaten you with something comical to get you to leave a review, but frankly I think you need a dose of something nice.
So I'll threaten you POLITELY. Good fellows, if you don't wish to review, that is entirely your business.
It will, however, result in death by maniacal cupcake.
Just a friendly warning.