Disclaimer: J. K. Rowling is our queen, undisputedly. I'm just a petty thief who enjoys tinkering around in another's world.

Rating: M/NC-17. Graphic femslash all around really. Shhhh. Just go along with me and pretend it's permissible on this site. I'm hardly the only one.

Warnings: Sex. Violence. Quite possibly some of both together; I mean, we are talking about Bellatrix Lestrange, here.

Pairing(s): Hermione/Bellatrix, Hermione/Andromeda, Hermione/Narcissa.

Hermione sat up.

As her touch wandered across Bellatrix's lips, they pursed slightly, her eyes narrowing.

"What are you thinking?" she asked softly, not wanting to startle her.

"I'm… considering."

The words lipped at her fingertips. "Anything in particular?" She traced down the center of Bellatrix's throat, index and middle finger parting to follow the tendons to either collarbone.

"You. How I ended up here. Mostly you." The words were short, clipped, almost without inflection, but Hermione startled, glancing up to meet her eyes. They were equally inscrutable.

"Considering who I am?" Hermione asked, cautious. Her fingers had stilled in the hollow of Bellatrix's throat. She could feel a heartbeat, thin and fast. What I am?

"Considering what I want to do with you." A slow, deadly smile lifted the corner of her mouth. "Especially considering who you are."

Hermione swallowed, glancing down again, letting her hand settle more fully against Bellatrix's chest. There wasn't a part of that statement she felt safe pressing, no question she felt prepared for an answer to. "Is this alright?" she asked instead.

Bellatrix didn't answer. "I remember, now, when I first wanted you."

Hermione froze.

"After I tortured you, threatened you, tried to burn you right out of our lives… You came creeping up the stairs, entitled as could be, begging for a little lesson on healing."

Hermione was tempted to joke you do like me begging, but Bellatrix words felt too heavy for her to break their fall. She remembered the day all too clearly, the messy way Bellatrix's taunting instructional moment had blended in to her first time. It was an uneasy memory, steeped in physical pleasure and corrupted, now, by a betrayal that hadn't yet happened.

"I imagined it, just for a blink. Everything I could teach you. How easy it would have been to make you want me, in that moment. All new and scared and brimming with the sort of infatuation that could so easily be… redirected." She licked her lips, eyes distant, then blinked and picked up Hermione's hand. She led her to the single black cloth tie that held the half-robe closed over the corset, keeping her arms sheathed in cross-laced sleeves. "You're much more…" She trailed off, encouraging Hermione to undo the string with a squeeze of her wrist. "Now."

"More what?" Hermione whispered as she did.

Bellatrix shrugged free of the sleeves, letting the second layer at her back and sides pool about her waist. There was suddenly much more skin: full, pale arms to explore, lean lines of startling strength and dangerous trackmarks of gleaming darkness that always brought a lump to Hermione's throat. "More… difficult. More self-important," she added with something like a chuckle. "But mostly just… more."

Hermione's fingers stilled at the bend of her elbow, then continued, tracing slowly across her Cruciatus scars, following the start of one into the meet of another until she reached the grim overhatching fully obscuring the veins of her wrist. "Thank you?" She made it a question in the hopes it would make Bellatrix less likely to balk, but the warmth she felt at the words was very much present, very much genuine. This all felt very surreal, like sometime in the midst of her little explosion she'd knocked herself out and slipped into a dream, but Bellatrix's skin was very much warm, very much real, so her words must be real, too.

Bellatrix was staring down when she looked up, watching Hermione's fingertips at her scars. "You keep forcing me back into my own head," she muttered, a little bit angry, a little bit bemused. "Thought I'd lost track of it, sometimes, what with everyone else I keep in there."

Bellatrix shook her head and Hermione remembered to breathe, remembered to move, remembered she'd been given permission, however limited, to touch the skin on display. She dragged her thumb in circles, taking in the texture of the lines, a brittle, edgeless softness more vulnerable than skin.

"But you don't break. Everything I throw at you just… poof." Her fingers twitched as Hermione cautiously traded hands, studying the less-seen, less-dark scars from the Imperius Curse. "You'd've been a challenge." She shook her head. "Even then."

Bellatrix sounded disgusted at her own confession, but Hermione felt thrilled. It was half nonsense, no compliment like she'd ever heard one, but the cryptic, personal words made her twice as giddy as any grudging "pretty" or "smart" she'd gotten before. She knew better than to answer with a "thank you." That would only earn a defensive retreat behind insults and, quite possibly, the little bit of clothing she'd given up. Instead, one hand resting very softly against each of Bellatrix's wrists, she leaned in for a quick, gentle kiss.

Bellatrix deepened it without hesitation, all smooth, eager tongue and warm, demanding lips, but still softer than most—urgency without teeth. Hermione's head was going all melty again, her eyes had long since closed, and she all but forgot her mission until she felt her own hands crawling up Bellatrix's back, the hot-slick sheathe of leather still bricked up between them. "Will you let me…" Hermione whispered against her lips, running her hand along the top of the corset, under her arm, until she lingered just beside the laces.

To her surprise, this time, Bellatrix just smirked and shook her head. "You're going about it all wrong."

Hermione's brows drew together.

Bellatrix chuckled. "I did it up by hand. It's loose enough you only need to undo these." She reclaimed Hermione's fingers, running them across three clasps dotting the corset's front—one just below her breasts, one just above her navel, and one lower, where the bottom V nestled into her skirt.

"Oh." Hermione fingered the first: black-painted metal invisible in the green haze. She flushed, a little embarrassed over how much time she'd spent batting at threads like a kitten with a ball of twine. "I've had no experience with corsets, you know."

"Pull the sides in together and it'll pop right off," Bellatrix said dryly, then her voice slid into a higher, teasing drawl. "The sort of servant my sister hires, really… Never even helped her mistress out of her corset."

Hermione rolled her eyes. "Once again, wrong century."

Bellatrix let out a dramatic, long-suffering sigh. At the same moment, Hermione figured out how to grab the thing right. She found herself clutching an armful of ribbing and drinking in an eyeful of pale, flawless, naked-from-the-waist-up Bellatrix Black. She gulped, blinked, then groaned. "Merlin, you shouldn't be legal."

Bellatrix's answering laugh was utterly shameless.

She was more full-figured than… anyone else Hermione had been to bed with; all smooth, mesmerizing curves patterned with tiny reddened ridges and dimples where the corset had left its mark. She wanted to touch each one before it disappeared, but forced herself to move slowly, crawling forward to drape the corset over the end of the bed before returning her hands to Bellatrix's soft, waiting skin.

Closer, now, she could see flawless was an imperfect assessment. She drank her in, inch by inch, with eyes alone. The scars on her arms were the newest, darkest, but they were not alone. Faint, shimmery lines marred two tracks on her left shoulder, a starburst under her right breast, a fraying nebula low on her stomach. Against her skin, tea-candle pale, the scars gleamed like white gold, gilding her with old pain. Her fingers lingered beside the first, then slowly slid from one raised ridge to the next, moving up across her shoulder against the grain, feeling the faint resistance of flesh that had been torn from end to beginning, the rippled self-stitching of human skin.

Bellatrix had gone very still.

Slowly, Hermione leaned in, pressing her lips between the two lines. She lingered, laying another kiss over her collarbone, then rocked back on her heels again, letting her fingers trail down between her breasts until she could circle the outer edges of the radiating circle beneath. It was deeper than the ones on her shoulder, like something had imploded inside of her and dragged the skin around it down and in. Magic had done this.

She saw Bellatrix's stomach contract when she slid towards the middle of the scar and stilled. "Does this hurt?"

Glancing up, she watched Bellatrix slowly tilt her head. "It's… sensitive," she confessed, but when Hermione went to draw back, her hand snapped closed around her wrist, stilling her a centimeter from her skin. "I didn't say I mind."

There was something in her eyes, then. Something Hermione couldn't look away from. She let her hand extend again, exploring the ridges and dents by touch alone, spreading out all five fingers to see how far she could feel the damage. Bellatrix looked away, breathing slow and deep through her nose—controlled, but barely.

Her thumb found the edge of the lowest scar before her fingers had reached the outermost edges of the last. She looked down again, feeling a swell of quick, hot anger roil through her, unexpected and demanding. At its deepest point, this scar was three fingers wide, tapering to a rounded crescent over her right hip and a thin, sharp point just past her navel. It looked like someone had ripped her open and poured hot, unfinished flesh back in, leaving an inch all around cloudy and starburnt. She could feel Bellatrix's eyes on her as she traced its length with shaking hands. Had she been the one under inspection, this would have been a ticklish spot; she couldn't have kept still. Bellatrix didn't so much as shiver.

"You can't feel this at all," she said.

It wasn't a question, and Bellatrix didn't answer.

When she'd finished taking measure of the last edges of puckered skin, she bent, kissing just above it, in the veil of pinched edging below her last rib, feeling it ripple against her lips. She let herself slide higher, spreading her palm over her side, guiding her lips back to the circle of the one she'd left unkissed.

Bellatrix's hand slid into her hair, holding her still. Hermione could feel her breathing faster beneath her, ribs rising and falling in short, shallow waves. Taking a chance, Hermione slid her tongue along the outer ring of scar tissue. Bellatrix's breathing stopped. Her nails tightened against Hermione's scalp. Exhaling, slow and shaky, she pressed her closer.

Moving on instinct, Hermione laved the ridges with the flat of her tongue, tasting salt, exploring an unfamiliar landscape of volcanic skin, hot and hard and forever changed by the passage of molten power. Bellatrix made a strangled sound in the back of her throat and shuddered. Her grip went slack as Hermione continued to move her tongue, letting Hermione slide higher, run her lips over every texture of the crater in her flesh. When she felt the soft give of a breast against her nose, she couldn't stop herself from tasting it, sucking her own faint mark to the surface. She made another, higher, then felt one wine-red nipple shrink against her tongue.

"Oh," Bellatrix said, voice low, raw. "Mm-hmm."

She didn't have to rip or tear to shape this skin.

She curled her tongue again, and Bellatrix whined in the back of her throat, pressing her breast against Hermione's mouth. Hermione realized, then, that she wanted to do a lot more of this. She wanted to map every place on Bellatrix's body to the sound she could earn from kissing it, wanted to memorize the texture of every one of her scars, wanted to taste her… taste her everywhere…

If her danger bells were pealing, now, she couldn't hear them over the beat of Bellatrix's heart next to her ear.

She began to suck, lips pressed tight, and Bellatrix groaned and grabbed her hair again, guiding her up into a hard, messy kiss. Her mind blanked at the feeling of skin pressed to skin, breasts against breasts. Bellatrix's breaths seared through her as she gasped against her lips. Her blood raced, every inch of her skin tight with anticipation. She kissed down Bellatrix's throat, faster now, harder, brushed her hands down and over her breasts, feeling her nipples—hard and ready—against her palms. Bellatrix arched into her with a growl, grabbing her ass hard enough to bruise. Hermione gasped, dizzy with a punch-drunk urge to laugh. I don't like it, she almost wanted to tease. Bollocks you don't.

Instead, she stole down to the nipple she hadn't tasted, daring to graze it with her teeth before sucking it in between her lips. Nails dug deeper, low enough in the crease of her thigh that Hermione could feel the tugging in her clit. She shivered and moaned into the skin under her mouth, slipping down the curve of her breast, mouthing lower, kissing lower, allowing herself one last detour across the starburst scar that had Bellatrix panting, hissing—

Her arms came up around Hermione's waist, pulling her along as she tipped them backwards. Before Hermione could do more than gasp, she'd reversed their positions, rolling over on top of her, eyes wild.

"Wha—"

Bellatrix's hands molded to her sides, seared up to her breasts, grabbed her by the shoulders and turned her again, her hands branding her skin like hot steel, will deserting her as she was laid prone, face down in the sheets at the foot of the bed, impossible to fight, impossible to resist. She heard Bellatrix moan behind her, felt her breasts pressing into her back as she ground down against Hermione's thigh, her own hot and hard between them. Hands gripped her wrists again, holding tight against the mattress, far enough above her head that she could feel Bellatrix's abandoned corset and the footboard beneath it grazing against her knuckles. Teeth raked down the back of her shoulder and sank into skin stretched thin over bone.

As Bellatrix panted against her, Hermione felt her go limp. She seemed to be gathering herself, breathing slowing, hips stilling, hands unclenching from her wrists to rub up and down her arms. "I want you," she breathed into Hermione's hair. "I want more."

Hermione trembled, a jolt of desire stabbing through her at the words. She heard herself say "Oh" very quietly, heard her blood pounding through her skull. "Oh, but I thought—"

"I can feel you," Bellatrix rasped. She ground her hips slowly, yanked her skirt up past her thighs so she could press Hermione's wetness against her bare skin. When Hermione immediately let out a sharp, high whimper, she hissed, "You want this."

Hermione squeezed her eyes shut, pressing backwards. "I want you, too."

Bellatrix laughed. "You want this more."

It was silly, childish, and Hermione couldn't help responding in kind. "You, you've done something to me," she whined. "I can't help it."

She laughed again. "Why should you?" Sliding her palm flat between Hermione's body and the sheets, she teased her with a finger across her clit. "When I want you. Just like this. Again, and again, and…"

"Ohh," Hermione sighed, straining against the onslaught of low, heady words and thought of how close she had just come to touching her everywhere, to seeing all of her, to tasting her—

Just the thought made her hips twitch, drove her further into Bellatrix's hands. "Damn you," she gasped. Her skin felt slick with desire. "Oh, please."

"Yes," Bellatrix breathed. "Yes."

"But— I want to— I still want—" She felt swollen, heavy, like her legs would never hold her again. The pressure of Bellatrix's thigh between her own threatened to overwhelm her. Even while part of wanted to whine—My turn!—the rest of her was demanding selfishness, demanding another release. "I can't win," she whimpered.

"No," Bellatrix laughed.

"I can't fight you."

"No," Bellatrix said with dark glee. "You can't." The hand around her waist caressed her clit again, three fingers settling into slow, heavy circles that made Hermione's hips strain and sway to follow their rhythm, fighting the bracing pressure of her thigh. Her lips began a blazing path up the ridges of her spine, chuckling in muffled pleasure when Hermione buried her face in the mess of sheets with a sharp cry.

Bellatrix's voice slid over her, low and smooth and soothing, as unruffled as though Hermione had never touched her, fully back in control. "Hush, little Mudblood. You're mine, now."

She came twice like that, on her stomach, on her knees, the first quick and wrenching, the second slow and almost worshipful, Bellatrix's fingers driving pulses of pleasure all the way up her spine and out her lips in slow, raw gasps of yes, yes, yes. And when Bellatrix flipped her over, shoved her up against the footboard, yanked her knees over her shoulders and dove in, one hand protecting the thin, delicate skin stretched over her tailbone from breaking itself open against the wood behind her, Hermione came like life itself was spilling out of her over the bedsheets, drained and undone.

"Do it," Bellatrix growled. "Now. Do it."

Somehow, even though a haze of bliss like death, Hermione knew what she meant, knew what she wanted. She reached blindly for her wand, too spent to push for any more connection than this. Bellatrix had it waiting, dangling from the tips of her sticky, shiny fingers. She dropped it on Hermione's chest, clattering—harsh and real—against her breastbone. It yanked her back to earth.

Gripping it tight, she reached for Bellatrix with her hand and her mind and her magic, wanting, more than anything, to dive into her, fall into her, kiss her scars with her magic as surely as she'd kissed them with her lips. Wanting— Reaching—

Nothing. She could see nothing. She felt like she'd kissed a brick wall, startled, for a second, by the instinct to rub her lips like she'd bruised them on something solid.

"I'm… sorry."

Bellatrix looked stunned. Then, a thundercloud descended over her face. "You will be if you do not try again."

"I did!" Hermione gasped. "I am!" She clung to her wand, pushed colorless magic through it until she felt like her body had run out of water pressure and her skin had been scoured with sand. "I'm sorry!"

Hermione watched the rage building in Bellatrix's eyes, saw her hands begin to shake, her lips contort into a snarl. It broke all at once. "Useless!" Bellatrix screamed, reaching behind her, finding only a pillow, flinging it halfway across the room. "Defective!" she spat. Her voice dropped gutter-low, her eyes gleaming with taunting, fanatical cruelty that made her face seem hollow, made it seem as though she no longer saw the room around her, but something beyond. "You dare defy me?" she hissed. "You dare—"

"I'm sorry!" Hermione cried again. She piled apology on top of apology, first in gasps and sobs, then screams, working herself up past the point of coherence while Bellatrix just stared in a way that made her skin crawl. It isn't my fault! I tried! I'm trying!

Bellatrix's fingers twitched against the sheets, found another pillow, and looked poised to rip it in half. Unthinking, Hermione followed Bellatrix's instinct to throw things, flung her wand against the headboard in a crack of green and purple sparks. "I don't know what to do!"

Her impotent rage seemed to provoke something in Bellatrix, something dark and furious that hadn't been buried by apologies. She dropped the pillow and spat insults Hermione had almost forgotten, filthy, unworthy, pathetic, and Hermione realized they were both speaking at once, mangling their words, her own apologies giving way to defensive anger as Bellatrix spun into accusations, hissing bruising, incomprehensible words like temptations and lies. Hermione knelt, naked and spent and boiling over with an unholy mess of feelings she couldn't untangle, words that wouldn't come together, tears stinging at the corners of her eyes as she said words she never would have wanted to at any other time—you mad, life-ruining torturer!

And Bellatrix stood in her fury, jerking herself off the bed, tripping on her skirts and—finally—kicked free, fully unclothed in a majesty of wrath, pale skin trembling with rage, pacing away.

But she was back in a second, back at the side of the bed. And Hermione was rising to meet her, maybe with hands, maybe with fists, but Bellatrix was pushing her back into the sheets. Take it, her eyes seemed to say. Want it, her teeth hissed. Give, give, give—her fingers as kind as claws, Until you give it back! And still she smelled of juniper, sharp beneath the scent of sex now all mixed up with Hermione's own scent, everything rich, impure, and violent. She was so strong, so determined, Hermione thought the orgasm would break her, so fast and hard it hurt, but she wasn't saying no, she was still saying yes, and please, and yours, because the one after was different, slamming through her, the sharp bite of nails digging into her thigh distracting from the duller throb of sore, overused muscles inside of her just enough for the pleasure to pierce through exhaustion as spots of blackness danced all over the ceiling.

Hermione knew, then, as Bellatrix continued to grasp at her like the edge of a cliff, staring at her with need so painful she shook in the face of it, that she couldn't take another. She would drown in green light and the unaccountable agony of this failure unless she fixed this mess. And this would not do that. She could see with a clarity that came only when she was empty, when she'd flung herself up against an invisible wall enough times that she finally understood why she was trapped and bruised and aching all over.

With a grunt of effort, she hauled Bellatrix up by her shoulder, crushing their lips together in something that was nothing at all like a kiss. She clawed at her back until she had them locked together, both sitting upright, legs tangled, knees at all the wrong angles.

"You're wrong!" she gasped against Bellatrix's skin, dragging her teeth down her shoulder. She craned her neck, pulled a nipple between her lips, laved it with the flat of her tongue, panting around it while Bellatrix's fingers knotted in her hair, tugging hard, but tugging her nowhere. "It's you!" she whispered, and pulled the scar into her mouth before she could protest, giving Bellatrix the harsh, instinctual pleasure she didn't seem capable of pulling away from. Bellatrix let out a cry that was almost a scream; her hands didn't seem to know whether they wanted to yank Hermione away, or force her closer. It was Hermione who let go, staring down at her navel, holding herself back long enough to insist, "It's you."

She dug her nails into the top of Bellatrix's hips, holding her close as she slid her forehead across her chest to take the other breast in her mouth. She hummed with the nipple between her teeth, breathing through her nose, struggling to make her shattered thoughts crystalize the way they had in that last moment of annihilating pleasure. "You threw me out," she whispered. She pulled back, running her hands up Bellatrix's sides quickly, roughly, to take over where her mouth could no longer be. "You threw me out! Before, every single time I try this with you, you're—you're just as enraged as I am terrified, you're as furious as I am sorry, and— And now look at us! I'm here! I'm giving you everything you asked for and you won't—" She had to gasp in air between words, digging her nails into the sides of Bellatrix's breasts. "—even—" She choked on air... "—let me—" ...breathed in again... "—touch you!" …and pulled back far enough to stare at her, begging for her to understand. "You have to let me in!" Realizing she was almost sobbing, Hermione shook her head, sucking air deep into her lungs before breathing out, softer, "You have to let me heal you."

Bellatrix's eyes were dark and wide. She squirmed under Hermione's touch, under her words, then cursed, loud and furious. "Fuck," she hissed. "Oh, for fuck's sake!" She yanked Hermione up to her lips, kissed her in a hard press of closed mouths, then pushed at her again, like she wanted to shove her away, or possibly shove her down between her legs.

So Hermione chose the latter, closing her eyes as she caught the rise of Bellatrix's stomach with her lips, grazed the plane below her navel with her teeth, breathing so fast her head was spinning. When she felt the scratch of warm curls against her cheek, she didn't open her eyes, not needing to see, not needing to think. She wanted this. She slid her hands up the outsides of Bellatrix's hips, slid her cheek lower, and sank her teeth into the thick muscle of her inner thigh.

Bellatrix howled. Her hips bucked, another set of curses spilling from between her teeth. Her hands in Hermione's curls threatened to pop her skull out of her skin, but Hermione didn't let up until Bellatrix ran out of air, until her hands were clawing at her scalp instead of squeezing it in a vice, until Hermione tasted the sharp tang of copper on the inside of her teeth. Finally, she drew back, opened her eyes, and leaned in.

She licked slow, steady, instinctively following the pulse of Bellatrix's hands clenching in her hair, the harsh, piercing gasps of breath, rewarding the smaller sounds between curses with the curl of her tongue over her clit. She was full and ready, tasted like salt and skin and desire, and Hermione wanted so, so much. She wanted to give that to her—the easy thing, pleasure; and the harder thing, magic, too. But Bellatrix had to let her.

When the nails slowly gave up their demanding grip, giving way so Bellatrix could wrap her fingers around her own breast, Hermione dared to stray, pressing softer, gentler kisses over the red welt her teeth had left, over the unmarked other thigh, then back over her sex itself—kisses, just kisses, and the strangled sound that clawed its way up the back of Bellatrix's throat was the best response she could have imagined.

"What are you doing to me," Bellatrix groaned in a frozen moment. Then her nails tightened again, spine bowing as she sought to press more of herself against Hermione's mouth, asking, pleading, even, for Hermione to keep going.

So she did, circling the ridges of the bite over and over again with one thumb as the other pressed against her lower stomach, nestled in the valley between her hip bones, gliding lightly back and forth in time with the tongue tracing circles between her legs. She could feel the throb of blood under her lips, feel the frantic flutter of her orgasm straining to break free as her tongue brushed over Bellatrix's clit. Over and over, again and again. "Oh, you can't," Bellatrix groaned as her hips strained upwards, and Hermione hummed You can against her, granting permission for nothing she understood, but granting it gladly. Because this? This would be hers, now. This, if only this, would happen at her command. It built under her hands, her lips, quivering energy moving faster and higher and harder than she could chase it until Bellatrix went still. She fell back against the pillows with a gasp, fingers pressing Hermione hard against her, biting her own forearm as she closed her eyes and sobbed out her orgasm.

Hermione didn't pull away. With her cheek still pressed against her left thigh, she watched a single drop of blood trickle down from the point where her canine had been in the other. A little giddy, the word mine danced around in her head, and she thought she suddenly understood why Bellatrix liked it so much. She marveled at the beauty of her, struck by a startling delicacy seen nowhere else around this utter force of nature of a witch. She licked her lips, tasting her, brushing flesh on the way, drawing out a tiny sound of something like protest, something like contentment. She realized with a jolt she still wanted to touch her, wanted to touch her so much it hurt, so much she could think of nothing else. She kissed away the blood before it could stain the sheets, kissed higher, licked, gently, keeping her every motion soft, not building towards anything, just… staying, warm and present, against Bellatrix's sex.

It took her a long time to understand why Bella's arm had moved from covering her mouth to her covering her eyes: she was blinking back tears.

Hermione stilled when they locked eyes, and Bellatrix let out a ragged laugh. "I'm broken, pet," she gasped out. "Don't you know it by now?" She breathed in, harsh and shaky. "Ruined. Over."

Hermione sat up and slowly lowered herself back down beside her. She kept quiet but slid the fingers of one hand into Bellatrix's hair, stroking the curls at the nape of her neck as she propped herself on one elbow. It was an open pose, a listening one, and Bellatrix seemed only able to stare at it for a few seconds before a groan spilled out. "You just had to, didn't you?"

Hermione tensed at the seemingly rhetorical question, then gradually relaxed again. "Was I terrible?" she asked, hoping to steer them somewhere lighter than the moments that had led them here.

"Huh. Fuck. No," Bellatrix said, though she sounded stilted, uncertain.

"You really dislike it that much?"

This time, the pause lingered. "No," she admitted at last.

Hermione had a feeling she'd only managed the conversation thus far because the picture before her—Bellatrix, naked and striking and bleeding a little and teary-eyed after sex—was so surreal she'd gone right out of her body, and whatever was left talking in her place obviously had a better grip of things than she did, so she let it say exactly what it wanted. "Then why shouldn't you have it."

Bellatrix laughed, then. A pained, tired sound eerily on the edge of fresh tears. "There are things you give up," she said softly, "when you become someone like me."

Hermione's fingers stilled in Bellatrix's curls, resting behind her ear where she could feel her pulse. "I thought the goal of being someone like you was to have everything," she said.

Bellatrix offered another bark of low, dark laughter. "Oh, pet."

Hermione, deciding to live dangerously, ran one finger down her nose. "I know. I'm only teasing. No one has everything." Sometimes I think the someones like you least of all. "But why not this? Why give up this? When this is so…" She sighed, the blissful lethargy weighing at her every limb finishing the thought, unspoken. She had never felt so well and truly and thoroughly fucked.

Bellatrix shook her head. "I don't expect you to understand, girl." The sudden sharpness in her voice drove Hermione's hands back to her own pillow. At the reaction, her tone softened, much to Hermione's surprise. "I chose this, do you understand? When I was very, very young."

Hermione stretched out tentative fingers again as Bellatrix looked away, encouraging her words with a soft, meandering trail brushing up and down from her shoulder to the bend of her elbow.

"I had more than myself to mind. Hogwarts," — she spat the name — "was the eye of a storm. I could have a fling for each day of the week and still be the perfect daughter when I came home for holiday. That never lasts. The real world is always waiting. Mine meant choosing between the power to protect… the things that mattered. Or turning traitor for a bit of this." She waved her arm over the length of Hermione's body where it rested beside her own.

Even if Hermione hadn't already known exactly what—or, rather, who—Bellatrix had been protecting, known from her own half-spilled stories, known from Narcissa's quiet gratitude, known from the way Andromeda couldn't fully hate her even after the loss of her own daughter at her sister's hand, Bellatrix's next words would have made it abundantly clear.

"In the end, not even I could protect them from their own stupid choices."

Hermione's hand reached her shoulder again, and Bellatrix dropped her own atop it, pressing her tight against her skin. Her words had gone angry again, but Hermione knew this wasn't an anger directed at her. This was an anger thick with regret. An old anger, the oldest, the heaviest kind any one witch could hold, the anger at the ones who'd made you and left you the mess you had to live in. It was an anger impossible to give up, even when it stemmed from the most well-intentioned of guardians, the most responsible, reasonable of parents. Hermione knew it well. Even among the best of families, there always came some new agony impossible to find the right blame for; that was the pain of living.

And, for all the few short years it had lasted, Hermione knew she'd had it very, very good. For Bellatrix… for someone whose family had dedicated themselves day after day to nothing but making more misery… Hermione could only imagine an anger that deep. She had some idea, more every day, why pure-blood fanaticism had such power. Bundle up obligatory love with delusions of grandeur greater than any one mere lifetime of cruelty and, well…

This.

The result was right here. One sister beside her, wrapped up so tightly in pain and anger only she'd had the power to make, unable to let it go without giving up the meaning that had made it worth bearing for so long. And out there… one sister who'd lived half her life as the vision of high society perfection while locked out of her own mind, and one sister turned traitor for freedom. For it was freedom between Bellatrix's hand and her skin, Hermione knew. This was that; not sex, not passion, not someone warm beside you in the middle of the late morning. This was more. This was... the opposite of hell: of pain and fire and regret.

And this wasn't something she could come at like she'd barged into Narcissa's office with a house-elf's poem and a spell of righteous anger. This likely wasn't something Hermione could fix at all. But she could listen. And she could offer… anything she could. She'd already given her forgiveness—what were a few attempts on her life, after all; a few moments of violence, a few misunderstandings, a lot of cruel words… Hermione wanted to laugh that these things felt small, now. Besides forgiveness, she'd given her trust, too. A lot of it, considering where they were. And Bellatrix had given a bit of her own. Just now, yes, and a few times before. That felt bigger.

"They don't need protecting anymore," she said at last. "You've helped them both get everything they wanted." Stillness stretched, and Hermione could feel Bellatrix's pulse in the wrist pressed to her hand. "You can have… more," she whispered.

Bellatrix's eyes fell closed as though the weight of the world clung to her long, dark lashes. "At what cost."

Hermione shivered, suddenly cold. She knew why that hadn't been a question. She knew the answer. They both did. At the cost of her magic. She suddenly wanted to laugh again, an awful, biting laugh, a laugh to mock herself for thinking, even for a moment, that Bellatrix would choose something like this.

"When it's done, I'll go," she said quietly, fighting to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

Bellatrix rolled towards her, looking down at her with a shadow of that insufferable smile on her face, the one that, sometime in the past month, had become more… endearing. She ran a finger down the curve of Hermione's jaw. "Oh, pet. What have we done to you."

Hermione's eyes widened. She recoiled, shrinking back in on herself into the sheets. "I'm okay," she said, voice wavering. "Really. I know why— I understand why we're here."

"No, no. You're not. You're stuck somewhere in your own head." Unexpectedly, she pulled Hermione into her arms. "You don't get to talk about healing and pretend you haven't been hurt."

Hermione felt herself choking on the lack of anger in those words, in that gesture, and realized she was about to start crying. One of Bellatrix's hands went into her hair, the other pressed tight against her back, stroking, soothing. Hermione clung to her, burying her face against her throat, wanting to say something, anything, but all that came out was a strangled sob.

Bellatrix shushed her. "Hush, pet. This isn't the end. We're two of the damn smartest witches in the world." Hermione cried harder through a pained burst of laughter. She realized, as Bellatrix's nails dug a little unkindly into her back, that Bellatrix's breath was uneven, too. "We're close to something. I can feel it."

She felt lips against the top of her head. Bellatrix's breath was fast and ragged through her nose, and Hermione felt one tear of hot, helpless anger fall into her curls.

Just as Hermione felt like she might actually get a grip on herself, breathing in juniper and salt like a tonic for her soul, she felt something else, too. A thread of truth in Bellatrix's words like a fine, golden string. She turned her face until she was staring at the underside of Bellatrix's jaw, the pale, translucent skin of her throat, the scars on her shoulder gleaming like distant streetlights at the end of a dark alley, and the golden thread slowly stretched into a golden door.

"You see it," Bellatrix said, voice soft, trance-like. "You have to open it."

"No," Hermione whispered, suddenly more sure of anything than she'd been in her life. "We do."

She watched as, without question, Bellatrix's fingers quested beneath the one pillow they had left and slowly withdrew the curved length of her wand. Hermione found her own beside her, up against the headboard where she'd flung it, and pulled it up between her breasts, never taking her eyes off the pulse of blood beneath Bellatrix's skin or the light building there.

"Now, then?" Bellatrix whispered.

At Hermione's tiny nod, she closed her eyes, and she pulled Hermione in.

Hermione took in the wreckage, unafraid. She carried no weapons and no winter. She carried not even her skin. A black field stretched before her, the earth as fragile as glass. Overhead, the lone crow wheeled and dove beneath an unforgiving sun. Its beak opened wide, screaming without sound.

Hermione reached out with unseen fingers, questing through the scope of the place for a speck of green, a sapling, a seed, any trace of the vines that had once filled this many-acre void. She found nothing but a distant row of fence posts. Even if she had, there was no soil, nowhere for new growth to root. She felt a distant tugging, a pull to return to more forgiving pastures, but she refused its call, flinging herself up into the sky.

Racing towards the only sign of life in this barren, desolate place, she chased the crow on its currents of air. It dodged her, far more at home in these empty skies than she. But she was nothing, so she could be everything, here, and she spread herself thin above it, a kite, a net, driving them slowly down to earth. They stared at each other once they landed. It cocked its head, beak parting as though to give a warble of curiosity, but nothing emerged. Hermione found herself lost in rich, red-clay eyes, unnaturally beautiful and strange, and she reached out a finger—which was not a finger at all—and slowly stroked down the contour feathers at its throat.

When she withdrew, the crow shrieked.

It flung out its wings, racing back into the skies, loosing high, angry caws and great bell-like tones that reverberated through every part of Hermione's non-being. At last, it landed in a graceless heap, rattling in the back of its throat as it bent its head over the center of the garden and closed its eyes.

Clay tears bled down its beak, crawling across the char like a thousand tawny pill bugs loosed from under a stone, scrabbling, scrambling, spreading to fill every flat and furrow long after the crow retook to the skies. It wheeled, dove—feathers shed behind it, falling over the clay in a blanket of rich, dark loam.

Hermione laughed in joy, the sound echoing around her in a topsy-turvy shower of golden light, running back up into the clouds until it stained the sun as warm and welcoming as her happiness.

The crow whirled in midair, flinging itself towards the ground again. Hermione gasped sparks as the distance closed between its neck and the soil—

Fifteen meters…

Ten…

Five…

Its beak pierced the ground in an explosion of silver light. Argentate tendrils burst free, flinging the bird back into the sky even as they swelled and grew, clawing into the topsoil and then up... over... everywhere. Hermione felt herself caught up in the maelstrom, carried in a thousand pieces of buzzing magic between a thousand vines of power, spread across the field until she, too, was a growing thing, spilling herself green and throwing out leaves to better drink in the sunlight, sprouting thorns to wield against the threat of a distant frost, shrouding the earth in a living tomb.

And everything was still.

She lazed, dizzy with inhumanity, a many-limbed creature of bliss and swords and light. She'd stay here… forever… This was where she belonged. This…

She felt the tug in every part of her, every disparate speck between the vines. No, no, she thought. I like it here.

But it was a thought, and it did not belong. She resisted for a moment longer, then allowed herself to fly, to crystallize back into one non-entity at the edge of the garden, staring out as the crow cawed its goodbye…

Goodbye…

Then there were nails in the tug, nails in her back, she had a back, a spine, two arms, two legs, two eyes…

And Bellatrix, staring down at her, kissing her forehead, her cheeks, her lips, the backs of her eyes…

Because her eyes were closing, and Hermione was going to sleep for a while.