A/N: Round 3 for the Quidditch League Fanfiction Competition for the Chudley Cannons as Chaser 2, with the prompts, "When a war ends, what does that look like exactly?", bruises, and "He who does not understand your silence will probably not understand your words." Beware of my first ever attempt at cousincest. Hey, Toujours Pur, right? Anyway, enjoy!... hopefully.

These Lonely Towers

Love never ends war, but perhaps it starts it. Or, maybe, the truth of it all is that there is really no clear beginning or end to the mingling association of the two; rather, love and war are the very same. A synonym for the other. A perspective.

And, perhaps, when he thought of it, they'd always been soldiers fighting a war. Only that once they'd been fighting for each other, and not the other way around.

She had been different. Once. It was a long time ago now. Bellatrix Black was always cruel, really; at thirteen, she'd play a game with Sirius that she liked to call Crucio. She didn't actually curse him—not then, anyway—but she would have him pretend that she did, and he only played along a few times before he grew to think her wild laughter was a bit on the manic side.

But she was different. He called her Bells back then, because he thought Bellatrix sounded strange and his mouth was awfully lazy. He could have called her Bella, he reasoned, but she wouldn't have liked that, seeing as she was already someone else's Bella. His Bells used to plait her hair to the side because she couldn't tie it down her back by herself, and she'd never, ever ask anyone to do it for her. It would fall out on one side of her face and she'd always frantically tuck it behind her ear, as if it really mattered to him.

"Do you think I'm beautiful?" she'd ask, without ever looking too expectant or worried about his answer.

"I think you're vain," he'd say with a quirky little grin instead of answering.

"But am I beautiful, really? Sirius?"

Except, sometimes, he would tell her that she indeed was. But only sometimes. "Very much."

She joked. She joked a lot. So terribly, though, but it was wonderful in that familiar way. She made lots of jokes about his name—"When you were born, you were so ugly that your mother said, 'Is this serious?' and that was what you were forever thereafter called"—and they never grew old, not until the two of them did.

When they were children, they were aggressive. Close, but never affectionate. They said truly awful things to each other, in jest, sure, but awful things regardless. They wrestled like little boys—much to their parents' avid dismay—and chased each other around the house, shooting spells and hexes and jinxes and breaking things (and occasionally each other). Everything they were was a competition.

"Come on," Sirius would shout, and laugh even if he didn't think it was funny, "you can do better than that!"

And then, one day, somehow, they changed.

What was once joking and flirty bantering had escalated to bitter arguments and ruthless insults, and their aggression revealed something like passion. It was perhaps the only aspect of Bellatrix Black that he could not explain. Sirius told himself instead that when you needed someone, there were not enough words to explain what happened between the two of you. They would just happen, unprecedented or not, and you grew to accept them without words, because words could never fit against the skin quite like bodies did.

Even after long, angry, white hot nights together, Sirius often woke to the softer light of the morning alone. But not always. This was what defined them, he thought again and again, that not always. That sometimes.

And it was one morning that he opened his eyes and saw she was already there, already looking at him just as he looked for her. He smiled, really, honestly, genuinely, something he didn't always do with her. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head, and gazed at her through a sleepy, content haze. "And just what do you think you're doing here?"

She trailed little kisses on his hand and down his arm, a brief glimpse of rare affection. "You just looked lonely," she said. "I didn't want to leave you lonely."

Once she'd been beautiful, when she was still Bells to him. Once he could calm her rage by just breathing her name onto her lips, and once that had been every "I love you" he could ever have mustered.

But after every kiss, the fire only grew till it towered above them in billows of smoke. Then eventually the building collapsed and left them stranded on either sides of the wreckage, walls of heat and rage and choice forever between them.

"Bells," Sirius had whispered once, into her hair, the last time he would ever say it aloud, "what are we doing?"

"Whatever we want," she said, "whatever we need."

That was the thing about her, Bellatrix, her loneliness. Sirius was lonely, too, but that was different. She didn't admit it. She couldn't. Loneliness made the heart cruel, like how oxygen deprivation turns the face blue. The same manner. He had some of that, too. He accepted it, but it drove Bellatrix into madness.

And even then, when the name "Bells" stopped feeling right in his mouth, when their mingled breath became poison, when the touch of her skin left bruises on his own, he needed her. It was not the same thing as love. Close, maybe. Parallel. And in between the lines was a silence they would forever misinterpret as something possible, probable, evident, infinite.

The truth of war is that it does not end, not until every soldier has breathed his last.

And even then, not always.

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