Furor Concarno
Word count: 2 276
"Bella, Bella," sang Sirius. "Bella ciao…"
He had not startled her; Sirius walked with all the grace of an eager puppy. Besides, the timbre of his footsteps on the floor of her home was all too familiar.
"How can you stand that foreign shit," she snapped. A year ago she might have laughed at his off-key voice. Now she did not bother to look at him.
"Don't tell me you hate the Italians too, now," said Sirius with mock surprise. He smacked his forehead, exaggeratedly. "Of course, how could you not. Those damned Italians, with their exotic tongue and barbaric… pasta dishes…"
"What are you blathering on about?" she said with disdain. He opened his mouth. "Never mind, I don't care."
Bella turned another page of her book. He strode across the study and flopped into the armchair opposite her, tilting his head as he scrutinized her reading material.
"Magick Moste Evile? Ho ho. Does Uncle Cyggy know you've gotten into his stash of contraband?"
At that she looked up. He was grinning at her in the most irritating fashion she had ever seen. "Don't call my father that. I'll ask again. What do you want?"
"Why, merely the pleasure of your company. We've not seen each other in… oh… it must be – hours… therein lies the endless joys of an entire winter break spent with my dear coz…"
"If you're bored," she interrupted, "I'm sure Dromeda will be more than pleased to entertain you. The two of you can talk about your own inflated senses of self-righteousness or whatever it is you two have in common."
The bark-like laugh he emitted made her teeth clench.
"No such luck for either of us. Our dear mothers have got their claws in her for the afternoon."
"What?" The book was momentarily forgotten. Sirius grinned as she looked up, reluctant with curiosity. "Whatever for?"
"Fuck if I know. Probably plotting to set her up with some poor halfwit with the correct family tree. A rite of passage for us Blacks."
Despite herself, Bella smirked. "Ha! Perhaps that's true for you. Andromeda will marry when she's good and ready, and not a moment sooner. Her match will be as befitting a lady of House Black, to a proud and strong man of pure blood."
"Oh, Bella," said Sirius, shaking his head, his smile hardening. "If you could only hear yourself. Have you ever considered that she might want to marry for love?"
She found herself rolling her eyes at the expression on his face. "Now who's the halfwit? Merlin, Sirius. If I didn't know any better, I'd say you'd gone soft. It must that Potter boy's influence. Or is it that other one, the little scruffy one you're so protective of?"
"He's got a name," he said brusquely, any pretense of a smile vanishing. Bella thought that she much preferred laughter over this serious, unsmiling Sirius.
"I don't care," she said flatly. "He is nothing to me. And you're making a vast mistake if you think your associations with him and Potter have gone unnoticed."
"And here we are again," he said, voice soft. "I was wondering how long it'd take you to bring that up. Can I ask you something? Don't you get tired of the same old arguments, day after day? The same stale proclamations of superiority, passed down from generation to generation like some fucked-up heirloom?"
"What are you talking about?" she demanded. "We are Blacks. We are better."
His voice took on a cruel cast. "Will you tell yourself that when your father sells you to the highest bidder? To some ancient bloke with the right name and the right amount of money – and you know he'll have terrible breath, they all do –"
"No one is selling me to anyone," she proclaimed heatedly, "and don't you dare talk about my father that way. What is the matter with you? You're being a dreadful bore."
"I know about the engagement," he said quietly.
Bella was thrown off, for only a moment. No one outside the immediate family knew; Mother was planning to announce it at their family's next Midsummer's Eve Masquerade. Andromeda must have told him.
"That's right. Congratulate me, cousin," she said, grandly. "I'm to be a married woman."
"You'll be a trophy wife, that's what you'll be. Who would have thought that of all the women in the world, Bellatrix Black would end up a housewife to some rich tosser. You know he's in deep with You-Know-Who, don't you? Him and his entire family. But that doesn't bother you. It's probably the one thing you like about him, isn't it, that he's a follower of that freak –"
"Do not," she snapped, "speak of the Dark Lord in such a manner. I tolerate your attempts at wit when directed at others, but I will brook no disrespect –"
"He's evil! Why can't you see that? It's downright creepy, your obsession with him."
"Those who oppose him are unworthy – the Mudbloods, the blood traitors! Come now, Sirius."
His eyes blazed. "He murders people, he tortures them when he doesn't get his way. Are you telling me you're alright with that? He's so evil it's changing the way he looks! Do you know how fucked up you have to be to get like that?"
"He's the most powerful wizard in the world, Sirius! Everything he does is for the greater good. For us, for our family. Why can't you see that?"
"You're serious?"
"Without a doubt."
He looked at her for a moment, as if seeing her plainly for the first time.
"Right," he said. "Right then. I don't even know why I – forget it."
Sirius stood up. So did she.
"What's going on with you? Have you been fighting with your parents again?" she demanded.
"Nothing," he spat. "Nothing that you'd care about. Well, I'm off."
The dull finality of his tone was all wrong. She put a hand on his shoulder as he turned away, which he promptly shrugged off.
"I forgive you," she said magnanimously. "Whatever teenaged period of angst you're going through, I understand. And so will the rest of the family, in time. You're an idiot, but you're still my cousin."
He turned, one hand on the doorknob, and bowed low, the elegant gesture made mocking by the scorn on his face. His gaze traveled up and down her form as she stood there, increasingly uncomprehending, and came to rest on her face. She had the sudden odd thought that he was memorizing it. Quietly, he said: "It'll be a while before we meet again, I expect."
"How mysterious! What on earth are you talking about? Honestly, you were never very funny, but this is just sad –"
"I'm leaving," he said. "I'm going to stay with James. I've already packed. I'm going to tell Mother and Father right now – they won't make a scene in front of your parents, I expect."
She had stopped listening after the first few words.
"Bella? Did you hear what I said?"
"What?" she whispered.
"I can't stand it anymore. This whole – this whole blood supremacy thing – I just can't. I'm sorry. I meant to tell you earlier –"
They were family. Blood never broke; it ran smooth and thick and strong, and family was everything. He could not leave. They had been together since the beginning of memory.
"If you leave –" she said in a trembling voice. "I will –"
Hunt you down, she wanted to scream, and make you pay.
"I will never speak to you again."
"I know," he said sadly.
Without thinking, she raised her wand. The doorknob clicked shut beneath his fingers, but that was all she managed before he pulled out his own.
"Expelliarmus!" he shouted, at the same time that she screamed, "Stupefy!"
They both dodged out of the way; Sirius's spell hit a bust of Cepheus Black, which toppled to the floor and shattered. He spun away as she shot curse after curse at him.
"What the fuck, Bella –" His long dark hair had fallen all over his face, his voice rising in a shout, but the counter-curses he sent her way seemed to miss all too readily. They were both aiming at everything but each other. It's all a game, he had once told her, laughing as he did so.
"Take it back," she shrieked. "How dare you – how dare you – Reducto!" The curse sailed past him and shattered a floating glass orb that housed a miniature working model of the solar system. It had been passed down in the family from her grandfather – their grandfather. Shards emptied themselves into the flesh of his face. He bellowed in pain, clutching at his eyes, and fell to his knees. Triumphant, she disarmed him with a flick of her wand, and walked up to him, breathing hard.
"You utter lunatic," he spat through shredded lips. "You're getting more and more like my sweet Mother everyday…"
"How can you leave us for the unworthy, blood traitors and Mudbloods, barely better than dirt –"
"How can you still say that?" he roared. "How can someone so brilliant be so wilfully blind – when you look at someone like Lily Evans –"
"That red-headed whore you all slaver over? Are you fucking her? Gods, that would be just like you –"
He struggled to his feet and spat out blood.
"No, see, we're different like that, I don't fuck people as a matter of course –"
Wand forgotten, she raised her hand to strike him, and he caught her wrist. The moment hung there.
"Oh, Bella," he said, looking down at her, and laughed suddenly, low and deep in his throat. "You are chaos incarnate."
He looked like a wild, mad thing himself, bleeding onto the expensive carpet. She wondered when he had gotten so tall. His fingers tightened on her wrist and his eyes danced, and something inside her was tightening with heat. He was her cousin Sirius, bold and unafraid and laughing, and she wanted him. She wanted to pin him in place and tear his wretched Muggle clothing from his body and make him surrender, body and soul. The knowing look in his eyes enraged her as much as it inflamed her.
"Unhand me, cur –"
Instead he laughed again, and kissed her, not on the cheek as he had often done in their youth, but full on the mouth, hard and passionately. She felt herself kissing him back. When they separated it was she who pulled away first. His arms had found their way around her. They were intertwined, body and soul. She struggled to find words.
"You'll break your brother's heart," she said, "and Cissy's. And Dromeda's."
"And yours?" he said, grinning, so sure of himself. She didn't reply. "Come with me," he said. The skin beneath his right eye was already darkening with a hematoma. Her handiwork. "We could go, right now, the two of us."
I want rainy nights and dark street corners, no one waiting for me, the wind blowing me to the four corners of the earth. For us there would be hot summer nights in the jungles of Myanmar, dusky Eden amidst the twilight gardens of Rome, chasing sand in the dunes of Morocco. We'd have laughter and fury and a love so vast and searing it would bind us in this life and carry us through to the next.
"I would rather die," she told him steadily. "As should you."
His eyes flashed. This time his teeth cut her lip, and she tasted the burnt iron of her own blood. Her hands tightened in his hair, pulling painfully, and he wrenched himself free of her, surveying her with a savage expression.
You are the dread dragon's wrath; you are the supernova before implosion; you are an angel in free fall; you are my every hatred coalesced and I wake alone each night with your name on my lips.
"The noble house of Black," he murmured. "The taste of purity was never so sweet."
She understood that he was mocking her, and all of her rage flew back and nestled in her breast, spewing acrid poison. Her wand pressed hard into his ribs, and he winced. She pushed him away, her loathing choking her.
"You'll regret this," she snarled. "Leave if you want."
"I have to. I'd rather die than stay."
She watched, hatred burning in her throat as he backed away. He had chosen this, had chosen the Mudbloods and the blood traitors of the world over them. Over her.
"You were never a true Black," she shot at him. Sirius was already lost to her, as good as dead. Perhaps he had never been hers at all.
They looked at each other. She realized why he had come today; to say goodbye. But he said nothing as he slipped out, as she grabbed the nearest vase and hurled it against the door swinging shut, shrieking obscenities and tasting his blood in her mouth.
She did not know it then, that it would be twenty years before they meet again. By then there are a thousand things she has said to him and that he has said to her that crawl and shriek and flutter in the edges of her memory, and somewhere in her mind a door slams, over and over. Azkaban had made a wreckage of the woman who was once Bellatrix Black, or so he taunts her, gaunt and wild and undeniably beautiful. Sirius laughs at her as he dies, eyes wide and surprised, as a curse sears her cheek, smoke tearing at her throat, mingled rage and joy flowing through her like a river of blood.