Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or any related characters, settings, or plots. I make no money from this or any other work based on the ideas of J.K. Rowling.

Warnings: Sexism, classism, and discussions of murder, torture, mutilation, and general nightmare-fuel.

Contains: Fingering, het, vaginal intercourse, virgins, and pre-marital (thought only barely) sex between two people who do not really love each other.

Author's Notes: I'm going to be honest: I haven't written het in ages. I haven't written virgin sex in ages. I haven't written penetrative sex in ages. This fic contains all three. As a result, it's not seeing any communities, at least not for a very long time. (Ignore the fact that the vast majority of the communities of which I am a member are slash-specific communities anyway.) Con-crit (especially of the 'Heterosexuality does not work that way!' variety) is welcomed. Snarking me on weeping_cock is slightly less preferable, but I'm a big girl and I'll get over it.

On paper, Bellatrix Black was perfect for Rodolphus Lestrange. She was a pure-blood, and at twenty-four years old they were both among the Dark Lord's most favored Death Eaters. She spoke fluent French, much to the delight of Rod's father. She was gorgeous, but most men were far too terrified of her to tell her that. Her family was quite poor compared to his, but her father was well respected throughout English pure-blood society and, although they were only just recovering from losing of one of Bella's younger sisters a year ago, the family was generally known as being quiet and pleasant to visit with. No one would object to nice, pure-blood boys marrying down a bit to restore the Black girls to their family's former glory.

They got along, too. That was always preferable when choosing a wife. They both loved horses and disdained poetry. They were both obsessed with the Dark Arts and geneology, and their views on blood-purity were almost identical. They both enjoyed Quidditch and they even played the same position. They read the same sort of books, they had the same sense of humor, and they hated almost entirely the same people. They were friends, to the extent that a man and a woman could possibly be friends.

She had, against incredible odds, gained Rod's respect, and Rod had gained hers against even greater odds.

They'd met when they were eleven, but they hadn't really got to know each other until they were fifteen. Quidditch tryouts rolled around and Rod, who'd been playing since his second year, was as amused as anyone when a girl tried out, not only for the team as a whole but for beater, of all things. They'd tried to laugh her out of the pitch, and she'd responded by hitting a bludger with near inhuman force right into their captain, cracking two of his ribs and breaking his arm in three places. It only took one night to heal his physical injuries, but he spent and entire weekend nursing his pride. When he finally came out of his dorm on Monday morning, he got the entire house's—and most of the school's—attention at breakfast and gave Bella the position. Bella had looked as shocked as anyone.

The chasers and keeper had all urged Rod to refuse to work with her, but their captain had assured Rod that it really wasn't worth the injuries. After considering the matter fairly extensively, Rod sided with the captain. In a flash, Rod went from barely speaking to Bellatrix Black to spending at least ten hours a week with her at practice and many more on projects for class. (It was considerably more convenient for them to work with each other than to make another partner work around their training schedules.) Somewhere throughout all of that, they'd realized that Quidditch wasn't the only thing they could ever possibly talk about, though throughout the year Bella remained cold and downright nasty at times toward Rod.

When the year ended, the captain decided to put who would replace him up to a vote: Rod, or the keeper. The keeper promised to kick the girl off the team. Rod had to grudgingly admit that he liked his current partner, and at any rate she'd proven herself to be a competent player in every match that year, and he'd promised them all the latest Silver Arrow model instead. They'd seemed unconvinced, until word reached them that the Ravenclaw team was upgrading to Comet '67s. After that, it hadn't taken them long to decide that there were greater evils than having a girl on the team. Rod won captain, and Bella remained the only girl on the Slytherin quidditch team.

Bella had been sweeter to him after that. It was a good thing, too, because they hadn't quite been able to shake each other after Hogwarts. Shortly after leaving school, Bella accepted an internship with the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures at the Ministry and, as a pure-blood man about to come of age, Rod was spending nearly every day at the Ministry with his father, getting the feel of things. A week couldn't go by without them running into each other. Then Bella joined the Dark Lord. Rod had been marked less than a week after leaving school, and on a pure chance they were placed right next to each other in the circle, and suddenly they were seeing each other four times a week. They'd started talking, whenever they had a spare moment or whenever Bella had something that she had to say to a Death Eater and no other Death Eaters she was comfortable saying it to. They started talking about raids, the Ministry, their master's plans, muggles, and eventually they started talking about everything else. Very slowly, they started to see each other as friends.

They'd never planned to be anything more than friends. They'd certainly never planned to get married. One day they were having an idle chat after a meeting, and the conversation turned to dating, their mutual hatred of everything to do with romance, and their parents' ridiculous expectations. Somewhere along the line it had occurred to them both that while neither of them was at all what the other wanted, largely because they both wanted no one, they were both exactly what the other needed. Within a year, they were choosing a wedding date.

In the meantime, Rod had been putting off invitations to stay with Bella's family. He knew Bella's parents and he got along well with them. They'd stayed over at his house several times, in fact. Rod just hadn't seen any reason why he should stay with them. Rod had larger rooms, better food, older wine, cooler sitting areas, and a house elf. It seemed logical that he should play host whenever they met. Bella had tried everything from blackmailing him about his schoolboy crush on their Care of Magical Creatures teacher to bribing him with the muggle corpses she swore she had hidden in her room. He'd held out on every attempt. He could only prolong the inevitable for so long without looking terribly rude, though, and now he found himself seated uncomfortably next to Bella on a love-seat in her living room, smiling pleasantly and nodding occasionally as Mrs. Black prattled on about her latest charity event. Dinner had been over for several hours now, and Narcissa was at the opera with Antonin Dolohov, so Bella and Rod had Cygnus and Druella's undivided and ever-suffocating attention.

Just as Rod was starting to get twitchy, Bella stretched and yawned loudly. "Mommy? Daddy?" She paused until she had everyone's attention, then continued in her sweetest voice. "I really think that Rod and I should get to bed." Druella opened her mouth to object, but Bella cut her off, this time in a sterner voice. "It's nearly eleven. How mortified would Narcissa be if she came home and found us all waiting up for her?"

Cygnus glanced at the clock on the wall and nodded slowly. "She's right, Druella. You three should go to bed. I will wait up for Narcissa."

No one argued with him. There really was no point in it. Though Narcissa was nineteen and, in Rod's mind, far too old to be coddled like that, he knew very well how protective Cygnus Black was of his daughters. Bella was twenty-four, and Rod still occasionally got the feeling that Mr. Black was on constant alert for signs that they'd done anything inappropriate. Rod really wasn't surprised when he stopped them.

"Rodolphus?" He paused for a moment, then sighed. "I let Bella talk me into letting you stay in her room tonight, but I want to make myself clear: You are to do absolutely nothing under my roof that wouldn't be considered appropriate for an unmarried couple. The two of you decided for yourselves that you wanted a long engagement, and the two of you can live with that."

Rod had never been so red in all his life. Yes, they had chosen a long engagement—seven months, in fact—and they'd chosen it specifically so they would have plenty of time to get used to the idea of being married to each other before they actually had to do it. They were certainly not in a rush to have sex. "Of course," he said, smiling awkwardly. "You have my word."

Bella looked ready to murder her own father. She hurried Rod up the stairs without a word to him.

"Sorry about my parents," Bella whispered when they were out of ear-shot.

"You're mother's a charming woman—"

"You were bored half to sleep."

Rod blushed.

"It's okay. She has that effect on a lot of people."

"And your father was only looking out for us. We should thank him."

She rewarded him for the suggestion with a fresh bruise on his arm. He decided to drop the issue.

Bella lead Rod down a rose colored hallway on the second floor, then into the last room on the right.

Rod froze as soon as he stepped through the door.

"Something wrong?" Bella asked. Rod couldn't tell if he was imagining the hint of a laugh in her voice.

Yes. Something was quite wrong. Rod was so in awe of how wrong it was that he couldn't even think of a way to soften his complaint. "...It's pink."

Bella snorted. "Yes, well, what of it?"

Rod stared blankly at her for a moment as he struggled to put just what about that bothered him into words. He failed, and decided to rely on redundancy to get his point across. "It's pink." In a brief moment of lucidity, he tacked on, "Are you positive that it's really your room?"

Bella smirked. "Quite." She yawned and undid the clasps on her robes. "Girls have pink rooms quite often, or so I've been led to believe." She smiled up at him as she let her robes slip off her body. "I am a girl, you know."

"Merlin, yes." She stood before him in nothing but a black push-up bra. He stared, almost reflexively, as her cleavage moved slowly up and down with every deep breath she took. His pants suddenly felt very small. It wasn't until she turned around that he examined enough of the rest of her body to realize that she wasn't wearing any knickers.

You gave her father your word. You gave her father your word. You gave her father your word. You gave her father—

"Aren't you going to change?"

Somehow, Rod managed pick his jaw up off the floor and give the first answer to come to his mind. "Aren't you?"

Her response was casual. "Oh, if you like." She plucked a hairbrush from off her desk and began running it through her hair. Rod watched as long black locks rose and fell from her back, their tips just centimeters above her arse. "It's terribly hot, though. I was hoping to just sleep in this." She paused for a moment.

Rod couldn't find it within himself to object.

"You can wear whatever you like, of course. I just thought that—well—We're going to be married in a month..." There was a silence as they both let these words sink in. "...we should get used to... to seeing a lot of each other, if you catch my drift." She raised a single dark eyebrow and turned to watch his reaction.

Rod nodded slowly.

"Good." Bella walked back to her robes, scooped them up from the floor, and fished out her wand. She waved it over her hair once, vanishing any tangles that the brush had failed to remove. She tapped herself on the head and muttered a spell that Rod didn't quite catch, and her hair twisted itself into a tight braid. With her free hand, she gestured to the far corner of the room. "You can leave your robes in the hamper over there. I'll bring them by your place after the maid washes it."

Rod's nose twitched up instinctively, and he was glad that Bella had turned away to dispose of her own robes. Rod had never cared for human maids. Rationally, he knew that not everyone could have a house-elf, and he supposed that hired help was certainly better than nothing, but he'd always found the work of human servants... lacking. Humans in general were terribly flawed, and poor humans were usually even more so. He didn't quite trust the work of a human.

"Thank you," He said as he undressed. Bella was trying to be polite. It would be cruel and extremely improper to insult her. He'd just smile and thank her when she returned it, and then have his elf wash it again when she left.

As he carried his robes to the hamper, he forced himself to think about Bella's bedroom, in lieu of thinking about her nearly-naked body. She certainly hadn't decorated it herself. That was obvious from the floral print and the color tone alone, but she'd as much as said it, too. 'Girls have pink rooms...' That was an interesting way to put it.She didn't have a pink room, but girls did. She happened to be a girl, so her room happened to be pink. It really was that simple. Someone, five, ten, twenty, possibly even twenty-five years ago, had been told "It's a girl!" and he'd set to sketching without asking further questions. The result was flowery and pink and very much unlike Rod's fiancée.

There were traces of Bella in it, though. One simply had to look very closely. Her old beaters stick, which after three years of very hard use would probably snap in half if it were so much as flicked in the wrong way, had been lovingly polished and placed carefully on top of her gear in an open case next her broom stick, which was just as well-cared-for as it had been when she was in school. There was an entire bookshelf filled with Bella's favorite murder mysteries. Ornate snake figurines had been placed on the window-ledge where there had probably once been cats. When Rod bent down to lift the lid of the hamper, he noticed that the words 'Toujours Pur' had been carved into the wall by someone with very sloppy wand-work. Beneath it was 'Bella Black.'

He laughed.

Bella didn't ask why. "I was eleven, okay? I'd only just got my wand and I... I wanted to try it out." Rod turned around to find her sitting on her bed, likely waiting for him. She laughed.

"It's a good thing you did. Without it I'd still be waiting for you to take me to your real room."

"Still hung up on the pink?" She rolled her eyes. "It's a place to keep my stuff. What do I care if it's pink?"

Rod sighed. "Well, it's a place to keep most of your stuff..."

"Hm?"

"I don't see that stash of dead bodies."

She smirked. "Are you disappointed?"

"Terribly," he confessed as he moved toward her, "I had my heart set on gouging out muggle eyes after dinner. Or hearts. You know, in primitive wizarding society, it was good luck for a wizard to make his bride jewelry using bits of muggle heart. Anything you'd be interested in?"

Bella laughed. "You're a twisted man, Rodolphus Lestrange."

"I have to be," he said coolly as he settled down next to her on the bed. "I'm marrying you."

"That you are..." She slid in close and brushed their lips together.

Rod was shocked. They'd been engaged for nearly six months and this was the first time she'd ever kissed him in private. Their relationship didn't work—No. Their relationship hadn't worked like that. It was going to now. He was going to marry her in a month. They would have to have kids and that would involve them doing things a bit more serious than kissing in private. Their relationship would have to work like that now.

She was succumbing to the inevitable.

But when Bella pulled away, she was smiling. "I'd like a bracelet."

"You'd never wear it," Rod breathed. He was very aware of her breasts pressed against his chest, and the small traces of perfume that still lingered around her neck.

"But it's good luck," Bella breathed, "So I'd like one."

Rod nodded slowly. "Then you'll get one."

Her lips brushed against his throat. "And eyes? You like gouging out eyes." Her teeth nipped at his neck. "Would you get me a pair of blue eyes for earrings?"

"Blue?" He gasped as she gnawed gently on his jugular. "Yes. I'll watch out for a good shade." It occurred to him suddenly that his hands were gripping her sides, and he wasn't sure how they'd gotten there. "Would you like eyes and the heart from the same muggle?"

Kisses trailed down toward his chest. "I'd rather they weren't. One more muggle dead, you know..."

"Yes, yes, of course..."

Her trail of kisses reached his shoulder, and she stopped.

Rod felt her hands cover his. His hands were guided away from her sides, raised slightly, held in between them for only a moment, then placed on her breasts.

All of England seemed to go silent.

They stared at each other for a moment, neither of them moving. Bella did nothing to either encourage or discourage taking things further.

Then she spoke. "Well, do you like them?"

Rod could only glance down at the bulge in his pants.

"Then... then take them already..."

"What?"

"Take off my bra, Rod."

Another tense moment passed, then he nodded. He reached behind her and located the clasps fairly easily. The main strap fell loosely to her sides, and Rod helped her out of the shoulder straps. For the first time in his life, Rodolphus Lestrange saw Bellatrix Black completely naked.

She sat there and let him stare.

After a long two minutes, Rod lifted a hand and ran it over her left breast, feeling the soft, smooth skin and the bump of her nipple. When he was done, he cupped it, and ran his thumb back over her nipple almost experimentally, rubbing and working it until it hardened.

Her eyes were closed.

He smirked. He pinched the hardened flesh lightly, and felt himself grow even harder as she jumped and gasped.

Her eyes were open now, bright and glued to his.

He pinched harder.

A slow, labored breath turned into a soft moan, and Rod would later swear she leaned into it. When he finally let go of her, she waisted no time getting closer to him than ever and straddling him. Even through his pants, he could feel she was wet.

"I want you to take me," she told him sternly. "Tonight."

"Tonight?" he echoed. "Bella, the wedding isn't for another month—"

"And we'll do it again next month, but—" she took a deep breath, "But I'm ready now. I want this to be the first time."

Rod's mind could've outraced the entire English quidditch team. An intense debate raged for a small eternity.

Then he nodded.

She backed off him and ran a manicured nail down his side before helping him out of his pants. She tossed them in the general direction of the hamper and stared at him for a second until he pulled her in for another kiss. He slowly eased her down until she was lying flat on her back on the bed, then he pulled back slightly and trailed kisses down her neck.

He supported himself with one arm and kneaded her thigh with the other, starting just an inch about her knee and working his way up her thigh as he kissed her neck and chest. She jumped when his fingers first brushed her dark curls, but she was quick to catch his eye and nod. He ran his finger over her clit, and she bucked into his hand. They shared a daring smile, and she gasped as he shoved a finger into her pussy. Rod ran his thumb over her clit several more times and watched for a moment as she squirmed in pleasure before he stole another kiss from her lips and worked another finger inside of her. He scissored his fingers while she tried to get comfortable. It wasn't until he added a third finger that she gave a barely audible grunt of pain. He paused and gave her a small smile, and when she returned it he finished stretching her.

When he was sure that she was as ready as she was going to be, he removed his hand, buried it in the sheet next to them, and entered her quickly. With some guidance from Bella, Rod managed to set his thrusts at a pace that was neither too fast for her nor too slow for him, and as they both worked to remain relatively quiet, Rod cursed them both for not thinking to silence the room.

It didn't take long for Bella to reach her first orgasm, and the feeling of her shuddering all around him sent Rod over the edge right along with her.

When they collapsed next to each other on the sheets, the smile they shared was not one of lovers. It was one of friends who were sharing a very bad secret, and loving every moment of it.

Their second time was better, of course. The entire point of the first time had been to get to the second time. At least half of the awkwardness of getting married was gone, and both of them were quite happy about that. They'd been nontraditional and reckless and generally stupid but, when all was said and done, they'd both committed far greater evils than breaking a promise to Bella's father.