Chapter Title: Jealousy.
Character(s): Rodolphus Lestrange.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. Not that I'd do any better of a job with him if I DID own him. I'd mess around with the Death Eaters too much, and forget about Harry. Shoot, I'd forget about that whole generation, and just focus on the old one!

Recommended Listening: "Witches' Sabbath" from Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. This a wonderfully visual dark piece has a story behind it of a young artist madly love-stricken by a beautiful women (based on Berlioz's own amours for a French actress) who later deceives him, feigning death to result in his execution, at which he discovers she is really a witch. Appropriate here, I do believe.

I love her. Herhair, black as nothingness, curled devilish tendrils both wild and tame, as inexplicable as a woman's tongue, smooth as her charm. Her eyes, dark and burning, red-hot and ice-cold, a pure oxymoron; eyes of depth, eyes of passion. Her skin, smooth olive. Her lips, bloodred. Her stature like that of an Amazon; imposing and intense, as strong as a man's-- and yet undeniably female, the perfection of female. Her features high and proud, haughty and aristocratic and yet with that lingering brazen edge of a Celtic history not yet inbred out, a sharpness, a remain of that ancient society of female power. Her blood, the carrier of her history in deep red, of ancients and diviners and warriors, all powerful, all awesome. Her voice, the low, deadly whisper of serpents and the shrieks of banshees, terrible and wonderful. Her mind, inexplicable. Her heart, incapable.

So I hate her.

I knew her as a child, and we loved and hated each other in the way that all little children did. Confined to the nursery with the various House Elves to attend to us as the parents of our respective families dined or balled with one another, I would watch her and her cousins and closest companions with jealousy, wishing she would show as much attention—even if just wrath—to me.

I was polite. Lucius and Sirius would torment her, both provokers of that brilliant wrath. I, however, would take her side. Sirius tripped her; I would yank on Sirius's hair and hold it, hard against his back, so that he could do nothing but stare upward, barely breathing, until he pleaded properly for me to let him go. Lucius shut her skirt in the door and smirked, waiting for her to leap away with tragic, embarrassing results; I found reason to go through the door and slammed it on Lucius's hand. She would look to me, and I would smile. She would know—but she would never smile back.

She, Lucius, and I all began at Hogwarts together, a trio of firstborns from the finest of the upper-tier pureblood families, a veritable triumvirate of no less reputation than that after the fall of Caesar. We had power. Our skills crossed the map. Lucius was the most ambitious outright, and most systematic in the execution of his plans and high goals, but it was she who was really in charge—she, the woman, the carrier of a power Lucius and I could only bow before.

It was that womanly temptation that drove us. We learned quickly, in first year, away from the watching of our outwardly-conservative families, how powerful a kiss as a reward could be, when it came from the lips of her. We learned who was in her favor by which of us was allowed to sit closest to her. When her hand slid down the leg of one, it was a sure, spiteful sign to the other that they had fallen out of the light. She refused to give us any more than this.

"Bella—"

"Don't call me Bella, Lucius; I have not given you that privilege."

"—Trix," Lucius finished the name heavily. "I only mean to ask you . . . do you ever intend to follow through with your promises?" he asked, eying with interest the long fingers that stroked temptingly his thigh. I sat on the couch across from them, enduring my punishment for having gotten a better grade in Charms class than she.

"I do," she said shortly.

"You're a liar," Lucius whispered, smirking.

She turned to him, her eyes flaming, and the hand disappeared behind her. "I do not lie. I have never lied, Lucius Malfoy." She picked herself up and sat pointedly next to me.

"I know you don't lie," I assured her. I did not even say it to spite Lucius. I wanted her to genuinely know that I believed her.

She did not trust this, as was clear from her arrogance face. She smirked, however, at Lucius's bewilderment. "Aww . . . widdle Wucius's upset that Bella chose 'Dolphus over him."

I finally possessed—or she possessed me, allowing me to think otherwise, as she would always do— her in fifth year. We began on the thin rug before the fire of the Slytherin common room, she sitting cross-legged in her skirt as I sprawled against the legs of one of the carved wooden chairs. She looked at me, smirking periodically, the tip of her quill to her lips. I would raise my eyebrows and return to my reading—which quickly began to go nowhere fast.

She scotched closer, eying me still. Soon, her hand was on my leg and the reading was abandoned. She leaned in me first, and then came the kisses—reserved not, withheld not—passionate kisses. She pushed me over, came over me, attacking me with passion I had forced into subtlety for years. I responded.

She was ready to carry on right upon the Slytherin rug, but I scooped her up as she began to undo my belt, carrying her haplessly from the common room, empty at near midnight, into the dormitory. She wound her legs and arms around my waist and neck as I carried her, seeming not to care that she was suspended.

I threw her onto the bed, undid the rest of my trousers, and attempted to climb on top of her, at which she pushed me off, pulling herself back into her desired position on top of me—and it happened.

I was surprised at her ease and debonair; I became anything but suave.

As we fell apart, collapsing unto the pillows against the curtains which we had only barely thought to shut, I heaved in great, thirsty breaths and gazed at her. She smiled mysteriously, quiet, her chest heaving though her breath made no noise. Her eyes, beneath their dark lids like a '20s vamp, were flaming and her skin was flushed with radiance, her hair spread across the trappings like a blanket. I whispered to her, "Not bad for our first time."

She smiled at me, her eyes aglow, and I knew that this was not the case.

Yet I continued to lay beside her. Always her hair splayed in tight tendrils across the strewn pillows, her skin caressing the smooth green Slytherin sheets of my bed, yet there became more of her— larger, fuller, more belonging to a woman. The curtains still hung shut around us, the air thick and hot, steaming with the passion I felt for her. Both of us grew older, more experienced. It was no great affair, these nights. The magic of her body and the smooth sheets and thick air soon would dissolve into her slipping into her blouse of the uniform, I pulling on my trousers and my Hogwarts vest, kicking books out of the way on the floor in an effort to find our shoes that had been lost in the scuffle. She shrieked irritably about the mess of boys' dormitories, and the other boys snickered, occasionally giving the lude remark about the state of the sheets or a comment on the need to use a stronger Silencing Charm. She would toss her hair back and glare at them, or, if she were particularly a bad humor, shoot a Stinging Hex or worse at one of them.

Lucius always managed to keep from the room on those nights—and I learned that some nights, Lucius's Silencing Charms weren't all they were cracked up to be, either.

One night in seventh year, there were small moans and deep sighs that I had never heard before, never in all my nights with her. I couldn't take it.

"Curse you to the fate of fucking Grindlewald, Malfoy!" I cried, pushing back the charmed-shut green velvet trappings of his four-poster bed.

There was a scuffle, but, lying on the tousled sheets before me was none other than Narcissa Black in her bedmate's arms. Her hair, ethereal white-blond, did not curl as tightly as her sister's, her skin was pale porcelain rather than olive, and her eyes, staring widely in shock, were pale blue and shallow, framed by dark eyelashes that flickered fearfully. She was not her.

Lucius smirked, pulling the girl wrapped in sheets closer to his bare chest. "How uncouth of you, Lestrange. Loud as you are, I have never interrupted you."

"You're—you're—you're sleeping with Narcissa!" I shouted, amused, astounded, unbelieving all at the same time.

"Excellent conclusion, Rodolphus. I'm glad that a Hogwarts education has taught you so much."

"But not Bellatrix—not Bella?"

"Oh, has she given you permission to call her Bella?"

I grinned this time. "I daresay she soon will."

There was no question my parents approved of my union with Bellatrix. I merely needed to make my love out to be economics—she was of fine family, she had connections, she had power, she had money, she had beauty that would carry on into children. She even had talent and ambition—qualities not imperative in a wife, but useful nonetheless.

I was lucky to be in love with someone of such standing. It didn't matter Bellatrix's feelings in the matter, anymore than it did mine—but as I was the male, I had the power to see my whims through to the end, as long as I took the right measures.

Still, I longed to woo her. I would have no unwilling wife. I wanted love.

"I'll marry you, 'Dolphus," she grinned when I asked her. "Mother and Father told me this would be the case. My options have always been—favorable," her lips curled into a smile that echoed that of one who has just drunk blood. "Yet my dear sister cares so for Mr. Malfoy . . . and I do care for my sister's feelings—foolish girl as she is. And you, Rodolphus," here it was she paid me my first, last, and only compliment, "are much more to my complement. You need not be in charge of me as Lucius does. Let Narcissa deal with his petty whims." She threw her head back and scoffed, and I knew it was yet only another act of spite on my behalf and at his cost—but it brought me my ends, and the ends are what has always mattered to the Slytherins.

Marriage was nothing, I knew. It was only, yet again, a win for the moment. It meant nothing. At any moment Lucius could have her in his arms again, and I could do nothing do stop it but slander his reputation—a poor compensation that will fall upon mine. He could have her as easily and as appropriately as any lady in the wizarding world—in secret, in silence.

Yet Lucius withdrew from the race. Narcissa, though three years our junior, married only a year after Bellatrix and I—and Lucius would have none other than her.

"Foolish, both of them," she would laugh. "Love, ha! It was love that did the other one in; it's love that will do them in as well. Such illusionary lies!"

Yet with the exit of Lucius came a threat even greater. She had found a passion.

He was a figure called Lord Voldemort whose influence was greater than even Grindlewald's had been. He spoke of great political things, things pureblood society wanted to hear, taking them in as easily as Hitler, crushing his opposition as thoroughly as Stalin. He spoke eloquently to all who would listen—which were many, amongst my friends and their families.

She could not get enough of him. Bitterness at her divided family inflamed her senses, and I wished I received half as much loyalty as the cousin and sister who had left her without a word. They captured her attentions once again, leaving me only to watch politely, consolingly.

"He'll take care of our fallen way off life . . . he'll bring us back to glory . . . he understands—oh, Rodolphus, he understands . . . I've never felt so strongly about anything in my life . . . we have to join with him, we have to!"

I grasped her wrists, angered at her shows of passion that were never for me. "What, so you can lay with him, the way you used to whore with Lucius Malfoy?" Though I had to admit, in the depths of my mind, that there was something irresistibly erotic about the thought, I was painfully jealous.

"You're repulsive," she frowned at me. "The Dark Lord does not succumb to low human desires. You're the weak one, Roldolphus."

She was right. The Dark Lord was above all such human needs. The only emotion, it seemed, that he possessed, was anger.

I was not. Through everything, I followed her, desperate to keep her from choosing another, more worthy candidate over me. I followed her right to prison, killing and shrieking with laughter along the way. I was never mad like she was—only mad for her. No matter where she went, what she did, I forced myself.

. . . and then, that night, in the Department of Mysteries, he grabbed her—and I was left alone to face the opposition. She was gone—and happily so. She was safe. She was free. She was with him. I doubt she even thinks of me, not even in her dreams—even though I spend every waking moment thinking of her.

. . . and my relief must be to loathe her.

Author's Note: The final line would be a quote from Othello, of course.