DISCLAIMER: All things Harry Potter belong to J.K. Rowling.
A/N: Another snippet from the cancelled fic "Sugar". Takes place about a week after "Vanilla Lace".
"She's got the world in her hands
She's got a hole in her head
Black curdled blood running down her arms
Covering the Earth." -Red Animal War, "The Sky Above The Sky Below"
-- The Sky Above The Sky Below --
That red bottle on her dresser. Where had it come from? It was expensive, he knew that. But the reason she'd moved into this shithole apartment in the first place was so that she wouldn't have to live by her parents' rules anymore... or depend on their money.
But he didn't really care where it had come from. Rodolphus hated that perfume. It was dark and sensual and addictive - a dangerous scent that encompassed all the things he didn't want Bellatrix to become.
Of course, those things had always been there, waiting beneath the surface unawakened. He wanted to prevent them from ever awakening.
Without quite realizing what he was doing, he reached for the red perfume bottle. His hand knocked against one of the many small jewelery boxes that littered the dressertop, sending it crashing to the floor. The box's contents spilled everywhere, tiny white pearls flying off in every direction.
"What was that?"
He turned and saw Bellatrix standing in the doorway.
"I think I broke something," he answered sheepishly, embarassed at having been caught messing with her things.
Bellatrix summoned the toppled jewelery box and its contents with a flick of her wand and settled it carefully back into its place among the others of its kind on the dresser.
"You didn't break anything," she informed him. "Those are the pearls I wore at my sister's wedding."
He frowned, struggled to recall... and realized he'd never once looked at her during her sister's wedding. He'd been staring at Narcissa the whole time.
He saw Bella's eyes flick to the dressertop and he followed her gaze to a silver picture frame. The picture in the frame showed the two of them dancing at Malfoy's wedding. In the photograph they were laughing and smiling at each other, but he knew it hadn't happened that way in real life. He'd been staring at Narcissa over Bellatrix's shoulder while they danced, but only the two of them existed in the tiny world of the picture. Both of them were dressed up in fine clothes, and Bellatrix's hair was strung with pearls.
For a moment he was stunned. He'd almost forgotten that she was beautiful.
-end-
A/N: I didn't mention it before, but in "Sugar" Bellatrix moved out of her parents' house and is living in a shithole apartment and working a crappy job to pay her rent. At one point in the story, Rodolphus has to help her pay her bills because she got her water cut off... But the water thing was part of one of the icky parts of the story that I'm not going to tell.