teeth sinking into heart

Bellatrix tried to swallow the vast plane of the night sky with her being, tried to suck it into her body, the stone jar of her heart. Particularly the moon she wants to devour, but only because it reminds her of Him and the lovely bones of his pale skull. She imagines Him turning to her, she imagines bathing in His vermilion gaze. His eyes are melting -

Were I with thee - were, if , might. Desire, crave, yearn.

There it is. Mars. She has to narrow her eyes. She observes the tiny orange ball. A sandstorm that tears across the expanse of eight million square kilometres; looks like spores on a fuzzy peach from here. She lets her foot twitch and it splashes up the black water at whose shore she is seated at. Light moves across the lawn as a door opens.

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Rodolphus confronts people. He is quite good doing that, and so is Bellatrix. They've been in the Dark Lord's services long enough to know when it is time to gather information and when it is time to ditch the talk and get their hands bloody. However, Rodolphus cannot tell if the time was quite right to shrivel up and die. Instead, he watches himself being kept on pins and needles by the one who was meant to warm his mother's heart. Which she does not, of course. Not even if his mother was still alive. She barely graces his bed anymore to keep him warm. But tomorrow, maybe tomorrow, maybe she will, his tired heart's sinews pipe up, hopelessly; Rodolphus is not a masochist - well, at least he is no idiot - he can spare himself the suspense by accepting the answer is not fucking hardly.

Shame. He rolls in it. Smelling, mad with fear and loss, ultimate shame, self-hate. He watches from afar as his wife desecrates herself before a man that does nothing but exploit her. He hears her giggle, breathily, a girl in love, with iron particles in her lungs only he can see. Rodolphus laughs, and it is a terrible laugh, a laugh that means death inside. As Bellatrix looks at him with her feverish eyes, only descending from the high of the kill, her husband's blood a tiny speck on her sleeve (he cut his cheek accidentally. It had been a battle - someone must get hurt), there was never anyone as far away from him as her, his own woman. They've grown up together, they've grown living with each other, and now, he feels, they have started to grow apart. Sometimes he hates his ability to feel. Sometimes, times that have been few and far between earlier, he wants to shut his eyes and ears and simply not care anymore.

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He dreamt he was treading on dry brown grass, looking down on Bellatrix's form who was sitting in the cool dusk in the garden. He remembers frowning down upon her, since she was sitting on the shore of a black stream with her feet hanging over the edge and dangling in the water. "Embrace me", he says. As Bellatrix doesn't turn he looks down on his disappearing fingers in the mist. He is standing on Titan, far away, his feet shrouded in methane.

He is noticing the smell of flesh on the night air. He leans over Bellatrix's shoulder to take a look at the water and sees himself reflested on its surface, brightly ablaze like a straw dummy at St. Patrick's Day. He does not feel the pain. He does not feel himself burning. Then, he feels himself extinguish.

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Rodolphus knows how to hurt people. He does know how to protect himself from hurt. He knows his ways. He is still laughing. All this is useless to him now. He functions with his ancient lizard brain stem whenever they look at each other. He pulls himself together, knowing it is never healthy to show weakness in front of Bellatrix, because she will take advantage of it - not because she really and whole-heartedly wants to, but because that is what she always does. He decides to play on till tomorrow. He decides to not make a statement, about not being what he should, about feeling ill. He turns his head, silently, slowly, and now hates not himself but his entire inescapable race. Never showing the way it looks inside, he seethes. Never doing what the inside wants. How dumb we are, we humans, how stupid. "Tell me something, honey", he drones, "do you love the damned?"

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Bellatrix raises the newspaper to her face, raises it so close that her nose almost touches the paper, scrutinizing it, absorbing it, the tiny ink dots branded into her irises, She wants his image to be emblazoned on the inside of her skull, on her retina where the sun doesn't shine to bleach it and the stares don't reach to see it. She is treading along the familiar lines, the little indentions like a blind man would run his faithful finger along braille script to lead his way, she wills them to form His face, frozen forever in the movement that repeats itself like a broken record.

In the picture, He turns, looks over His shoulder; she tears her head up abruptly. She wheezes and lays on the bed. She can't bear to see His face. It is too unbearably beautiful. A wall of fire shoots into her head. She embraces the pillow, squeezes it with all her strength, pushes her body into His, melanges their atoms. For always. For always. Eternally.

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Disclaimers:

"stone jar of [my] heart" - by Emily Dickinson

"teeth sinking into heart" - by Rachael Yamagata (it's an album, one I've never even listened to, but i thought the title was beautiful)

Review please!