Burn to Ash
Bellatrix is alone when someone crosses the wards and begins pounding on the door, hard enough to shake it to its hinges. Rodolphus is on assignment. He won't be back until morning, and five minutes ago she was glad of it, but as she descends the staircase, bare feet whispering over the cold marble, she thinks unkindly that he's only ever been useful for his wand, and now he isn't even that.
She sets her jaw as she pulls open the door, wand raised. There's an Unforgivable clenched between her teeth, but the sight of the person on her doorstep steals all the breath she would have needed to cast it.
She hasn't set eyes on Gideon Prewett since he walked away three days after graduation, and the two years feel like twenty, not just because the war has wedged more than time between them, but also because it's made them so much older than they really are.
Yet now he's standing right in front of her, leaning hard against the doorframe and letting rainwater soak his clothes dark. His breath is heavy with ash and whiskey, which makes sense, because to come to her now he must be drunk and out of his mind.
"Fuck, Bella," he says, meeting her eyes, blue on black. He's the only one who's ever called her that, and it catches her off guard. But then she detects the slightest twitch of his fingers, on the right side, where she knows they're inches from his wand, and whatever had wavered, just for a second, snaps back into place.
"I should kill you right now, Prewett," she hisses.
"David's dead." He says it with a little laugh, like he doesn't quite believe it yet, but just beneath the surface she hears the thickness of grief for his best friend lost, and deeper below that is anger, Prewett anger. Maybe he's come for revenge. It's too bad she's not afraid of him, or that thought might be enough to make her follow through on her threat.
Her arm is outstretched, wand point pressed against his throat, and she wonders if she could do it – murmur the spell to puncture his pale skin…watch his life bubble up red. She tells herself she could, but for all her faults, Bellatrix Black has never been a very good liar.
"We found his body two hours ago." His eyes don't leave hers as he shoves a photograph in her face. It isn't moving, and she sneers, seeing the form but not the people inside. "Leslie, his wife," he says, and now his voice is hard, the anger showing through, and she knows he's working himself into hating her like he's had to for two years, because it doesn't come naturally. His forefinger brushes the second figure. "Sam, his son."
"Muggles." Derisively.
"His family." Fiercely. "People."
She makes a contemptuous sound. "Hardly."
That does it. He grabs her shoulders hard, like he wants to shake some sense, or at least some sensitivity, into her, but a second later he realizes they're touching, and he shoves her bodily away. She falls back into the house, skidding on the floor, and her eyes are blazing as she yells "Diffindo!" before she's even on her feet.
He laughs, wiping the long, thin cut that's sliced across his cheek on the sleeve of his jacket. "Is that the best you can do, Bella?" he sneers. "I thought your precious Dark Lord would have trained you better than that."
"Don't you dare mock me!" she snaps. "If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead by now."
"Then do it!" he yells suddenly, deafeningly. "Just fucking do it and get it over with! David's death –" His voice cracks, and when he recovers it, he sounds like the words are strangling him. "All this fucking death – it's killing me anyway, you're killing me anyway, Bella, so just get it over with already!"
The words he says (you're killing me anyway, Bella) ring loud in her ears, and the ones he doesn't (how could you do this to me, to you, to us, Bella?) ring louder, and they amplify everything else, so that she can hear the rain thrumming against the house and her heart thrumming against her chest more clearly than ever before.
And now she knows why he's here – to have the conversation they should have had two years ago, when it actually could have mattered.
But now it's too late, so they don't have it this time either.
Instead, she watches his eyes fall from hers to rake over her whole body, the body of the girl (woman) he can't (won't) love anymore, and if he notices the ring on her fourth finger, he doesn't say anything about it. His gaze does linger on the mark on her arm, and the way his blue eyes blaze across its edges reminds her that when she got it, three days after graduation, it burned like hell, though not nearly as much as his words did when he saw it.
His eyes flick back up to hers, and there is a full second when she knows what's going to happen and does absolutely nothing at all to stop it, because she knows what he needs (wants), and she knows what she wants (needs), and for the first time in two years, those two things are exactly (right) the same.
She jerks forward to pull him into the house but finds she doesn't have to, because he pushes her back first, and then his lips crash into hers, and she tastes the ash and whiskey that is Gideon grieving, but also the peppermint and pumpkin juice that is Gideon kissing (her, in his Head Boy's room or in the corridor or under the stars, but always a little in secret).
He takes her right up against the wall by the stairs, his lips smearing against her neck and her fingernails raking across his skin.
They've done this before. First, in his bed, with moonlight spilling pale onto the garish cotton sheets and laughter (before it was haunted or ironic). But this time it's top full of anger and grief and maybe guilt and definitely nothing of innocence. It's much more Bellatrix, all friction and sharp edges, like the cutting corners of their born-to-break glass house, and it scares her that she doesn't prefer it.
When she goes to him three nights later, hood pulled up high to hide her face, he's sober. He pulls her in hard by the wrist, because it wouldn't do to linger on the doorstep, and hisses, "What the hell are you doing here, Bella?"
She sheds her cloak and shoots him a sardonic look. "What do you think?"
His laugh has a sharp edge, and he runs his fingers through his already-mussed hair.
"Fabian?" she asks, before he can answer.
"He lives with his girlfriend now." His eyes flick to her forearm, and she knows he's holding back the name (Dorcas Meadowes) and wondering who she'll tell (no one).
"How quaint," she replies, and they both freeze. The onslaught of memories nearly knocks her flat, tearing all the warmth from her body and leaving just ice in her blood. Those were the first words she ever said to him, and by the look on his face, he remembers too.
But it wouldn't do to linger on that either, and anyway she came for heat, for fire scalding through her veins and flames searing across her skin, and if his brother doesn't live here anymore, then they're all alone and there's nothing to stop her from getting it.
So she fists her hand in his hair and pulls his lips down to hers, and he doesn't have time to protest before they're stumbling back into his bedroom and she's pushing up his shirt and he's ripping all the buttons off her blouse. And she's finally getting the heat and the recklessness and the out of control, and there's no time to think about death or Death Eaters when she feels so damn alive.
After that, they meet often, mostly at his flat, and late. Rodolphus isn't stupid; he notices when she's gone all night and comes home in the same robes next morning. She doesn't try to hide it, and she muses that he probably thinks that's to spite him, though the truth is that she simply doesn't care. He never confronts her – he wouldn't dare – but she watches with vague amusement as their male friends begin to contract mysterious illnesses. He never thinks of their enemies.
One night, Gideon goes to answer a knock on the door, and from the bedroom, she hears a voice she was almost certain she would never hear again.
"It was, wasn't it?" Andromeda (wild, rebellious Andromeda, who ran away with a Perseus named Ted) says, and before Bella can button her dress, her sister has stormed into the room, jaw slack. Bella doesn't say a word, just throws on her cloak and pushes past her.
"Bella, wait!" Andromeda calls, catching the front door as it swings back and following her out into the cool night air. "Bella, I can help you!"
At that, she whirls, eyes hard as flints. "I don't need your help, you traitor!" she spits. "You were dead to me the moment you left."
A pause, then, "Do you love him?"
She laughs cruelly. "You always were hopelessly naïve."
"He's seeing someone, you know." She didn't. "Marlene McKinnon."
After a moment, she manages a smirk. "Not afraid I'll kill her?"
"I thought you didn't love him."
"I've killed for less."
It's a lie. For the Dark Lord, Bellatrix has kidnapped and tortured and maimed, but she doesn't kill until three months later. The six syllables slide off her tongue more easily than she expected, and she turns away with (what she hopes looks like) careless triumph as the phoenix turns to ash.
Three hours later, she is at Gideon's.
They are lying hip to hip on his garish cotton sheets, and suddenly he says, "Let's run away from all this, Bella." It's seven words he can only say when he's not thinking and believe when they're alone. But her laugh sticks in her throat, and when he turns his head to look at her, she nearly (nearly) agrees.
But the sound of the fire in his grate crushes the moment underfoot, and the grimness of the voices when he goes to answer it tells her it was already broken anyway.
He's discovered what she's done, and when he comes back to bed, he lies down just a little farther away, and she knows he needs to hate her again. So she helps him along. "Yes," she says, "let's run away."
"I think it's too late for that," he replies, already mourning.
He doesn't sleep a wink that night. She knows, because she doesn't either.
She thinks as she leaves next morning, that though he really didn't want revenge the night he came to her, leave it to Gideon to get it anyway.
She's there when he dies. His eyes find hers in the last moment, because he'd know her anywhere, mask or not. Ironically, it's Rodolphus who does it, so he gets his revenge after all. She supposes they all do, in the end.
This time, she doesn't turn away, and she doesn't blink as his light (her light, their light) flickers out.
A week later, she kills Marlene McKinnon. She takes one look at the girl and thinks wryly that Gideon must have wanted women with jet hair, bright black eyes, and dark red lips. (She should have known that he only ever wanted her, and settled for a shadow.)
Only Andromeda will wonder, when she hears days later, if the crazed laughter that bubbles from her throat when the house shines green is for jealousy.
It isn't. As she watches those black eyes go blank, she thinks that it's just so damn hilarious, because she would murder a thousand Marlene McKinnons for one Gideon Prewett, and she was right all along. Some lives are worth more than others.
She laughs the next night too, and the next, and the next, until nights turn into weeks then into months, until her laughter has mingled with so many other people's sobs that she can't hear the difference anymore. Later, people will say that she lost her mind in Azkaban, but it's nothing so poetic as that, as slowly surrendering her rationality behind iron bars. It happens long before the cage. She simply wakes one morning to find that everything is different, colors blinding and edges so sharp they hum in the sunlight, and she knows she's gone insane.
Years pass, and she doesn't think of Gideon again until she's facing his sister across the crowded hall. It's almost too easy, the Prewetts were always so alike, and now his features press up against the smothering cloth of faded half-remembrances and slip between the seams. Bellatrix is so shocked that she doesn't see the jet of green light until it hits her. And this time, it's her eyes that go blank.
Her last thought is that he won't be where she's going, but it hardly matters.
He wouldn't recognize her anyway.
"Merlin, you're beautiful, Bella."
They are seventeen, and the curtains of his four poster are drawn and draw them close. The skin of her forearm is smooth and white, and his eyes, so bright, bright blue, skim her lines, setting her aglow. They haven't burned up yet.
Author's Note: This was a lot of fun to write, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Please review! Oh, and I should have an Allegiance update done in a few days, for anyone reading that.