FIC: "A Dream to Take You Away" for hp_lovebirds
Title: "A Dream to Take You Away"
Recipient: hp_lovebirds
Pairing: Bellatrix/Andromeda
Rating: R
Warnings: incest, dubcon, bondage
Summary: As madness swirls with the salty wind, Bellatrix sees her sister's face and hears her sister's laughter.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated people, places, and things are not mine.
Author's Notes: Thanks to R and L for looking this over.
Mod note: Due to my lovely pinch hitters, we have an extra story. Take this as an extra gift to all of you for being so patient and understanding with your fellow participants!
Bellatrix's dreams are lined in black velvet, stained with blood, backlit by daylight and memory as her eyes flicker opened and closed. The once-lush fabric goes sticky on her fever-sweaty skin and she wakes to skin rubbed raw on the rough stone floor. She wraps her fingers round her wrists, feels them cold, clasps them tight. Her hands go numb, and she imagines black ribbons, stolen from the waists of school-robes. They're knotted tight, and cutting off her blood as she moves against them.
She thinks of her sister.
Her eyes close and she can feel the cold gliding watch of the guards. She can feel the dirty-eyed glare of the other prisoners, the men who scrape their fingernails raw against iron and leer across the darkness with primal eyes. One breath, deep, and two, against the sound of the sea beneath her. She frees her hands and clasps them, says a silent prayer to the Lord she knows -- she knows, she knows, she knows, echoes the sea and taunts the scrape of barely-there rotting hem on prison floor --
A silent prayer to the Lord she knows will save her.
She screams when the Dementor passes her by. Not out of pain: it doesn't hurt much, not anymore, not this sucking of hollow against emptiness. She screams, and hears the echo of her voice, shrill and feral against the wind-smoothed stone.
I'm still alive, she's saying, though she's lost the form of words.
She sleeps -- she dreams -- she thinks she's dreaming. The salt of the sea in her hair, the feel of the sand ground from stone on her cheek, the rise and fall of the faint shards of sunlight over Azkaban. It's barely enough to discern waking death from nightmare.
So she doesn't bother.
Andromeda stands before her -- starlight in ice-winter sky. She's smiling.
Bellatrix, she says, I always knew you were the one in chains.
Bellatrix spits at the ground. Dust and dirt to mud, and she's laughing through the tears in her eyes. "Come back," she says, the words find, and there's a rattling in the cell across the hall, a barely-comprehensible shut up, bitch from some petty criminal. "Go away."
"This should be you," says Bellatrix, gritting her lips. She's backed up against the wall, faint and swirling, and when the next swell of cold swoops by, Andromeda is gone.
She closes her eyes and slips backwards.
Backwards, towards the dark-night star that guides her home, backwards as her scalp scrapes against sandstone. Backwards, and time and night are swirling against the sounds of the sea.
The wind sweeps through the oak trees out behind the house, and Bellatrix is eleven. Andromeda wanders the house like a nine-year-old snake about to claim her prey, to strangle. The wind sweeps at her hair as she frees it from the braids that mother made.
Bellatrix put-put-putters on the old toy broom. A stray branch catches her in the face. A twinge of pain, of blood -- it's nothing. She puts her finger to her cheek and tastes it. Tart and salty, and she smiles. Andromeda looks at her. She looks back, blushes, embarrassed.
"Mother says I can have the broom," says Andromeda.
"It's mine, even if I'm leaving," Bellatrix says petulantly, flying another foot off the ground. Her toes can barely touch it now, and if she doesn't stretch her legs out, she can swear she's almost really flying.
"It'll be mine soon enough anyway. I want to try it." Andromeda stands with her hands on her hips, her lips pressed together. "While you're still here," she adds with soft-voiced tenderness. Bellatrix can't decide if she's faking.
With false nonchalance, Bellatrix shrugs. "I'll put a charm on it. It'll claw out the skin between your legs if you try to ride it."
Andromeda looks at her with all the gravity one can feign at nine. "You can't do that," she says.
"I'm going to learn." Bellatrix tries to soar upward in punctuation, but the wind and her weight are stopping her, and the broom doesn't listen to her commands. Andromeda's hand is on her back.
"It's mine," she says, and pulls downwards. Bellatrix falls from the broom -- hits the ground -- her head is sore and spinning.
"I'm sorry," Andromeda says automatically, without emotion, as she climbs on the broom. She starts to soar, but Bellatrix kicks a leg out. Andromeda slips off the broom, to the ground, stands upright.
"I'm not," says Bellatrix. Her head hurts, and her robes are torn -- the fancy robes she'd planned to wear on the train ride. She stands, uncertain, and pulls at Andromeda's robes, at her dark hair as it whips in the wind.
Andromeda looks devilish, and sad, as she pulls the ribbon from her robes. The formal fabric hangs free, uneasy. Her figure is lost in its weight; she looks like a madman gone to seed in poverty, or Azkaban. Bellatrix pulls out the wand she's been carrying in her pocket for four days straight now. Impedimentia, she shouts, remembering the spell from one of her bedtime stories. She swings her wand in a wild motion, and feels the spell shoot backwards. She's half-stunned and angry, but mostly at herself.
On the ground, her legs seem to move at half-speed beneath her, and she can do nothing as Andromeda ties the ribbon round her wrists, her arms bound upwards around the trunk of the tree. She holds her palms to the heavens without choice, and watches as Andromeda steals the broom back and soars off in the wind. She barely clears the shrubbery, but her feet don't touch the ground.
And all Bellatrix has is the sound of wind in her ears, the soreness of her limbs, and her very first prison. Her fingers tingle, her head aches, and she's dizzy --
Spinning: world spinning, head spinning, brushing hard against the wall as she falls free from the bounds of the memory, falls through the years.
Andromeda comes to her in the evening. She's down in the basement with the steam pipes and the rats, practising curses where Mother won't dare come find her.
"I'm busy," she says, out of the corner of her mouth. A rat slips into her vision. Wand raised. Quick movement, no sweeps and swirls now, just a drawn-up anger and simplicity. It falls, dead, in its own path; she turns to her sister.
"Well, what is it?"
"That's an Unforgivable," Andromeda says simply.
Bellatrix nods.
"You'll get yourself into trouble, one of these days."
Bellatrix laughs. "Dirty, dusty laws. The world is changing."
Andromeda nods. Her eyes are downcast, but her posture tall. "It is," she says simply.
Bellatrix looks up, puts a hand on her shoulder. "You should join me," she says. "You should join us. The Dark Lord… you can atone for your mistakes, you can be who you were meant to me. We're setting things right, slowly."
"You're killing rats and speaking heresy," Andromeda says with a sad smile that looks out of place on her teenage face.
"I know about your mudblood boy," Bellatrix says, as she spots another rat in the corner. "And I won't always be able to save you."
There's the uncomfortable thudding of a small animal trying to die as she casts the Cruciatus curse. She can sense Andromeda recoiling behind her, but if she can only show her, show her the sense and the reason, and what happens to rats and filth and blood traitors--
"I'm leaving tomorrow morning," Andromeda says.
"Avada Kedavra." And then the rat dies. Bellatrix looks up slowly.
"I'm getting married."
"To the mudblood," Bellatrix says. She turns quickly -- tangled hair whips behind her. Her robes are dusty and dishevelled, and she walks slowly -- step by step -- towards her sister.
Andromeda nods. Her voice is barely a whisper as she stares at the ground, at the dirt and dust and rat droppings. "I'm pregnant," she says.
"You absolute whore," shouts Bellatrix. The careful, measured cruelty of practised spells is gone now, and all she can feel is the hurt, and the desire to hurt. Her fingernails are sharp and jagged, as she presses them into Andromeda's wrists as she stands flush against her, tight to the dank cellar wall.
Andromeda's breathing is faint and awkward. She's trying to back away, she's trying to twist free as Bellatrix's nails dig deeper in her skin. Twirling her wand, Bellatrix draws forth a conjured ribbon.
Black satin shimmers softly in the dirty-dim light, and she twists it around her sister's wrists, the faintest trickle of blood staining the magicked fabric.
"Dirty and awful," Bellatrix is saying. She can feel Andromeda squirming against her, and can feel her blood -- her pure, pure blood -- beating beneath her skin. Generations are pressing on her, generations and lore and a society that's fading, a world that's rotting between her fingers, smelling of dung and muggle chemistry.
She leans into Andromeda, closer and closer until she can smell her sister's minted breath, until she can feel her lips quivering against her own.
Bellatrix presses her lips tight against Andromeda, tastes and conquers. Andromeda is trembling in fear, shuddering in disgust against her, and Bellatrix takes it in, presses tighter to absorb the fear, make it her own.
She pulls back. "You're leaving in the morning, to be a dirty muggle wife."
Andromeda nods. Bellatrix leans into her again, and kisses her once more. Wand in her pocket, she reaches out and feels Andromeda's breasts beneath her robes. They're small and taut, like her own. The excitement is in the way Andromeda cowers away. "Stop, please stop," she's begging in a hush, and in answer, Bellatrix slips her fingers between the buttons of Andromeda's robes. The lower her fingers drop, the closer Andromeda is to tears, to begging.
"Do you fall to your knees before him, too?" she says, as she slips a dirty finger inside her sister. Andromeda's shaking her head furiously, and Bellatrix responds with another finger. Tight and deeper, as if she can reach upwards with dirt beneath her fingernails and kill the little aberration of a child, wipe the bloodline clean.
Andromeda's breath is ragged and faint, she's twisting against Bellatrix, but it's different now. Desperation and fear and disgust and desire, and Bellatrix wishes she could hold this moment in, keep it close and pull it out to make the rats, the muggles -- the filth scream at her power.
When Andromeda screams, Bellatrix clamps her other hand over her mouth until she goes teary-eyed silent. "Filth," Bellatrix says, and Andromeda leans back against her bonds.
"I'm leaving in the morning," says Andromeda again. She turns her head, and all Bellatrix can feel is dignity. She spits on the ground.
"I thought you would anyway. At least now you'll take this with you." She forces up a smile. Bellatrix closes the door behind her, and leaves Andromeda alone, pretending not to hear the hushed I will, a whispered threat behind her.
Without her effort on the magic, the ribbons fade back to nothing as Bellatrix sleeps in measured, angry peace, and Andromeda is gone come daybreak.
The next morning, Bellatrix kneels before her false-named Lord and begs him to mark her as his own.
Beneath the stars, he presses her to the earth and to his will. The ground is wet with dewy grass beneath her knees, her robes sodden and her body sore.
When she closes her eyes in Azkaban, if the guards aren't on their way, she can kneel against the iron bars and tell herself the pain in her bones is the Dark Lord making her his own.
The clang-clang-clanging of madness come to Azkaban rattles in her mind, draws her out of prayer. The guards walk the halls with blind, scarred eyes, and her saviour, her meaning, is gone. All she can see is her sister, bound up in ribbon and breaking free while she sits, useless, in chain.
As the door slams shut and the prisoners are left alone, a measure of salty warmth returns to the air. She can hear the jeering of prisoners. Those who came here wandering -- for petty, meaningless crimes. Those who count the days until death takes them away, having lost their faith in madness. She glares out at them and tries to make out faces in the darkness, tries to remember who they are and hold it tight for later. She still knows that she'll be saved.
But the world's fuzzy, and so is she. She opens her eyes, wide and wider, and feels the salt and the cold on her skin. She feels the pain in every joint, the ache from stone-floor sleeping, the pounding in her head. The piercing glare of the sunlight as it seeps through the cracks, and the cold of the darkness when it doesn't.
Categorising, memorising, holding to every one, for in the aches and pains and scratches, in the pure, pure blood spilled in the dirt and the waste of this dank, dusty place, she will find the name of her Lord.
And if she can hold tight to him, he can save her.
She clutches her hands tight around her knees and digs her fingernails into flesh. The blood, the pain, the memory. Sharp against the dullness that beats against her days, beats against her nights, until smooth and time-worn, they're all the same. Salvation, she thinks, trying to remember what her Lord looked like beneath his night-black cloak.
As the pain fades, the beating of the sea withers to silence and backdrop. The stone walls seem to bear down until they consume her, and as she looks up at the face of her Lord, his hood falls away. She is alone save for her sister, who stands over her and laughs, saying: Oh, Bellatrix, you always were the one in chains.
Recipient: hp_lovebirds
Pairing: Bellatrix/Andromeda
Rating: R
Warnings: incest, dubcon, bondage
Summary: As madness swirls with the salty wind, Bellatrix sees her sister's face and hears her sister's laughter.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter and all associated people, places, and things are not mine.
Author's Notes: Thanks to R and L for looking this over.
Mod note: Due to my lovely pinch hitters, we have an extra story. Take this as an extra gift to all of you for being so patient and understanding with your fellow participants!
Bellatrix's dreams are lined in black velvet, stained with blood, backlit by daylight and memory as her eyes flicker opened and closed. The once-lush fabric goes sticky on her fever-sweaty skin and she wakes to skin rubbed raw on the rough stone floor. She wraps her fingers round her wrists, feels them cold, clasps them tight. Her hands go numb, and she imagines black ribbons, stolen from the waists of school-robes. They're knotted tight, and cutting off her blood as she moves against them.
She thinks of her sister.
Her eyes close and she can feel the cold gliding watch of the guards. She can feel the dirty-eyed glare of the other prisoners, the men who scrape their fingernails raw against iron and leer across the darkness with primal eyes. One breath, deep, and two, against the sound of the sea beneath her. She frees her hands and clasps them, says a silent prayer to the Lord she knows -- she knows, she knows, she knows, echoes the sea and taunts the scrape of barely-there rotting hem on prison floor --
A silent prayer to the Lord she knows will save her.
She screams when the Dementor passes her by. Not out of pain: it doesn't hurt much, not anymore, not this sucking of hollow against emptiness. She screams, and hears the echo of her voice, shrill and feral against the wind-smoothed stone.
I'm still alive, she's saying, though she's lost the form of words.
She sleeps -- she dreams -- she thinks she's dreaming. The salt of the sea in her hair, the feel of the sand ground from stone on her cheek, the rise and fall of the faint shards of sunlight over Azkaban. It's barely enough to discern waking death from nightmare.
So she doesn't bother.
Andromeda stands before her -- starlight in ice-winter sky. She's smiling.
Bellatrix, she says, I always knew you were the one in chains.
Bellatrix spits at the ground. Dust and dirt to mud, and she's laughing through the tears in her eyes. "Come back," she says, the words find, and there's a rattling in the cell across the hall, a barely-comprehensible shut up, bitch from some petty criminal. "Go away."
"This should be you," says Bellatrix, gritting her lips. She's backed up against the wall, faint and swirling, and when the next swell of cold swoops by, Andromeda is gone.
She closes her eyes and slips backwards.
Backwards, towards the dark-night star that guides her home, backwards as her scalp scrapes against sandstone. Backwards, and time and night are swirling against the sounds of the sea.
The wind sweeps through the oak trees out behind the house, and Bellatrix is eleven. Andromeda wanders the house like a nine-year-old snake about to claim her prey, to strangle. The wind sweeps at her hair as she frees it from the braids that mother made.
Bellatrix put-put-putters on the old toy broom. A stray branch catches her in the face. A twinge of pain, of blood -- it's nothing. She puts her finger to her cheek and tastes it. Tart and salty, and she smiles. Andromeda looks at her. She looks back, blushes, embarrassed.
"Mother says I can have the broom," says Andromeda.
"It's mine, even if I'm leaving," Bellatrix says petulantly, flying another foot off the ground. Her toes can barely touch it now, and if she doesn't stretch her legs out, she can swear she's almost really flying.
"It'll be mine soon enough anyway. I want to try it." Andromeda stands with her hands on her hips, her lips pressed together. "While you're still here," she adds with soft-voiced tenderness. Bellatrix can't decide if she's faking.
With false nonchalance, Bellatrix shrugs. "I'll put a charm on it. It'll claw out the skin between your legs if you try to ride it."
Andromeda looks at her with all the gravity one can feign at nine. "You can't do that," she says.
"I'm going to learn." Bellatrix tries to soar upward in punctuation, but the wind and her weight are stopping her, and the broom doesn't listen to her commands. Andromeda's hand is on her back.
"It's mine," she says, and pulls downwards. Bellatrix falls from the broom -- hits the ground -- her head is sore and spinning.
"I'm sorry," Andromeda says automatically, without emotion, as she climbs on the broom. She starts to soar, but Bellatrix kicks a leg out. Andromeda slips off the broom, to the ground, stands upright.
"I'm not," says Bellatrix. Her head hurts, and her robes are torn -- the fancy robes she'd planned to wear on the train ride. She stands, uncertain, and pulls at Andromeda's robes, at her dark hair as it whips in the wind.
Andromeda looks devilish, and sad, as she pulls the ribbon from her robes. The formal fabric hangs free, uneasy. Her figure is lost in its weight; she looks like a madman gone to seed in poverty, or Azkaban. Bellatrix pulls out the wand she's been carrying in her pocket for four days straight now. Impedimentia, she shouts, remembering the spell from one of her bedtime stories. She swings her wand in a wild motion, and feels the spell shoot backwards. She's half-stunned and angry, but mostly at herself.
On the ground, her legs seem to move at half-speed beneath her, and she can do nothing as Andromeda ties the ribbon round her wrists, her arms bound upwards around the trunk of the tree. She holds her palms to the heavens without choice, and watches as Andromeda steals the broom back and soars off in the wind. She barely clears the shrubbery, but her feet don't touch the ground.
And all Bellatrix has is the sound of wind in her ears, the soreness of her limbs, and her very first prison. Her fingers tingle, her head aches, and she's dizzy --
Spinning: world spinning, head spinning, brushing hard against the wall as she falls free from the bounds of the memory, falls through the years.
Andromeda comes to her in the evening. She's down in the basement with the steam pipes and the rats, practising curses where Mother won't dare come find her.
"I'm busy," she says, out of the corner of her mouth. A rat slips into her vision. Wand raised. Quick movement, no sweeps and swirls now, just a drawn-up anger and simplicity. It falls, dead, in its own path; she turns to her sister.
"Well, what is it?"
"That's an Unforgivable," Andromeda says simply.
Bellatrix nods.
"You'll get yourself into trouble, one of these days."
Bellatrix laughs. "Dirty, dusty laws. The world is changing."
Andromeda nods. Her eyes are downcast, but her posture tall. "It is," she says simply.
Bellatrix looks up, puts a hand on her shoulder. "You should join me," she says. "You should join us. The Dark Lord… you can atone for your mistakes, you can be who you were meant to me. We're setting things right, slowly."
"You're killing rats and speaking heresy," Andromeda says with a sad smile that looks out of place on her teenage face.
"I know about your mudblood boy," Bellatrix says, as she spots another rat in the corner. "And I won't always be able to save you."
There's the uncomfortable thudding of a small animal trying to die as she casts the Cruciatus curse. She can sense Andromeda recoiling behind her, but if she can only show her, show her the sense and the reason, and what happens to rats and filth and blood traitors--
"I'm leaving tomorrow morning," Andromeda says.
"Avada Kedavra." And then the rat dies. Bellatrix looks up slowly.
"I'm getting married."
"To the mudblood," Bellatrix says. She turns quickly -- tangled hair whips behind her. Her robes are dusty and dishevelled, and she walks slowly -- step by step -- towards her sister.
Andromeda nods. Her voice is barely a whisper as she stares at the ground, at the dirt and dust and rat droppings. "I'm pregnant," she says.
"You absolute whore," shouts Bellatrix. The careful, measured cruelty of practised spells is gone now, and all she can feel is the hurt, and the desire to hurt. Her fingernails are sharp and jagged, as she presses them into Andromeda's wrists as she stands flush against her, tight to the dank cellar wall.
Andromeda's breathing is faint and awkward. She's trying to back away, she's trying to twist free as Bellatrix's nails dig deeper in her skin. Twirling her wand, Bellatrix draws forth a conjured ribbon.
Black satin shimmers softly in the dirty-dim light, and she twists it around her sister's wrists, the faintest trickle of blood staining the magicked fabric.
"Dirty and awful," Bellatrix is saying. She can feel Andromeda squirming against her, and can feel her blood -- her pure, pure blood -- beating beneath her skin. Generations are pressing on her, generations and lore and a society that's fading, a world that's rotting between her fingers, smelling of dung and muggle chemistry.
She leans into Andromeda, closer and closer until she can smell her sister's minted breath, until she can feel her lips quivering against her own.
Bellatrix presses her lips tight against Andromeda, tastes and conquers. Andromeda is trembling in fear, shuddering in disgust against her, and Bellatrix takes it in, presses tighter to absorb the fear, make it her own.
She pulls back. "You're leaving in the morning, to be a dirty muggle wife."
Andromeda nods. Bellatrix leans into her again, and kisses her once more. Wand in her pocket, she reaches out and feels Andromeda's breasts beneath her robes. They're small and taut, like her own. The excitement is in the way Andromeda cowers away. "Stop, please stop," she's begging in a hush, and in answer, Bellatrix slips her fingers between the buttons of Andromeda's robes. The lower her fingers drop, the closer Andromeda is to tears, to begging.
"Do you fall to your knees before him, too?" she says, as she slips a dirty finger inside her sister. Andromeda's shaking her head furiously, and Bellatrix responds with another finger. Tight and deeper, as if she can reach upwards with dirt beneath her fingernails and kill the little aberration of a child, wipe the bloodline clean.
Andromeda's breath is ragged and faint, she's twisting against Bellatrix, but it's different now. Desperation and fear and disgust and desire, and Bellatrix wishes she could hold this moment in, keep it close and pull it out to make the rats, the muggles -- the filth scream at her power.
When Andromeda screams, Bellatrix clamps her other hand over her mouth until she goes teary-eyed silent. "Filth," Bellatrix says, and Andromeda leans back against her bonds.
"I'm leaving in the morning," says Andromeda again. She turns her head, and all Bellatrix can feel is dignity. She spits on the ground.
"I thought you would anyway. At least now you'll take this with you." She forces up a smile. Bellatrix closes the door behind her, and leaves Andromeda alone, pretending not to hear the hushed I will, a whispered threat behind her.
Without her effort on the magic, the ribbons fade back to nothing as Bellatrix sleeps in measured, angry peace, and Andromeda is gone come daybreak.
The next morning, Bellatrix kneels before her false-named Lord and begs him to mark her as his own.
Beneath the stars, he presses her to the earth and to his will. The ground is wet with dewy grass beneath her knees, her robes sodden and her body sore.
When she closes her eyes in Azkaban, if the guards aren't on their way, she can kneel against the iron bars and tell herself the pain in her bones is the Dark Lord making her his own.
The clang-clang-clanging of madness come to Azkaban rattles in her mind, draws her out of prayer. The guards walk the halls with blind, scarred eyes, and her saviour, her meaning, is gone. All she can see is her sister, bound up in ribbon and breaking free while she sits, useless, in chain.
As the door slams shut and the prisoners are left alone, a measure of salty warmth returns to the air. She can hear the jeering of prisoners. Those who came here wandering -- for petty, meaningless crimes. Those who count the days until death takes them away, having lost their faith in madness. She glares out at them and tries to make out faces in the darkness, tries to remember who they are and hold it tight for later. She still knows that she'll be saved.
But the world's fuzzy, and so is she. She opens her eyes, wide and wider, and feels the salt and the cold on her skin. She feels the pain in every joint, the ache from stone-floor sleeping, the pounding in her head. The piercing glare of the sunlight as it seeps through the cracks, and the cold of the darkness when it doesn't.
Categorising, memorising, holding to every one, for in the aches and pains and scratches, in the pure, pure blood spilled in the dirt and the waste of this dank, dusty place, she will find the name of her Lord.
And if she can hold tight to him, he can save her.
She clutches her hands tight around her knees and digs her fingernails into flesh. The blood, the pain, the memory. Sharp against the dullness that beats against her days, beats against her nights, until smooth and time-worn, they're all the same. Salvation, she thinks, trying to remember what her Lord looked like beneath his night-black cloak.
As the pain fades, the beating of the sea withers to silence and backdrop. The stone walls seem to bear down until they consume her, and as she looks up at the face of her Lord, his hood falls away. She is alone save for her sister, who stands over her and laughs, saying: Oh, Bellatrix, you always were the one in chains.