(no subject)
Title White Gardenias
Author: Sionnain
Pairing: Bellatrix/Narcissa, mention of Bellatrix/Rodolphus and Narcissa/Lucius
Rating: PG13 or perhaps R, but only for mentions of violence. The sex is only about a PG13, I'd say, not explicit at all.
Warnings: Angst, incest (mmm. Blackcest), femmeslash. Though really, the sex is not graphic. Sorry to disappoint.
Summary: Gardenias always remind Narcissa of her wedding day, when she wore white and envied the orchids that graced her sister's hair.
AN: Thanks to Jazzypom and Kaz814 for the beta. Written for Tarie's Flip-Flop Challenge.
White Gardenias
“How must I deal with grief? Hold, or give rein? See where my outcast limbs have lain! Stones for a bed would bring sorrow small relief. My heart would burst, my sick head beats and burns, Till passion pleads to end its pain!” -Hecuba in Euripides’ The Women of Troy
“Let me know if there is anything else you require.”
Narcissa Malfoy’s voice is cold, civil, as she addresses the wraith-like, dark haired woman standing in the shadows. It is not because she is angry, merely because she does not know any other way to be.
Having one’s long-lost sister show up after fourteen years in Azkaban is a rather difficult situation to adjust to. In all the years she’s been a member of high society, she’s never learned how to deal with this-should a retired judge of the Wizengamot require seating at a table at the last minute, or someone spill a merlot on her gown-these things she can take care of without a hint of worry crossing her features.
However, there was never a lesson on what to do in this instance, and because Narcissa is a proper witch in the highest echelons of society, being faced with a situation she does not expect and cannot handle is anathema to her, and she hates it. Her insides twist with nerves as she fights for the control that has been wrestled away from her far too often over the last few weeks. She has the wildest urge to throw a dinner party just to prove she is still competent- because that is what she knows how to do with ease and it would even out her shaken sense of equilibrium.
Bellatrix showing up at her door, wrapped in dirty robes and eyes burning with madness and delight, that she cannot fathom how to accommodate. It would have been preferable, to her, that Bellatrix appear during a dinner party, because she knew how to deal with this sort of unexpected surprise at a social event. On her own, with Draco miserable upstairs and Lucius…indisposed. She was removed from her comfort zone, and she blamed the wraith in front of her for it.
Narcissa had tried to be welcoming, putting on a stiff smile and pressing her cool cheek to her sister’s when she’d first arrived. Bellatrix’s face was all sharp angles and hard planes, and Narcissa feared she would end up sliced to bits from the brief contact.
In the years before Azkaban had taken her beauty, Bellatrix had been as glorious as a piece of art. She was lush and voluptuous, the very air around her pulsed with sinful promise when she entered a room. Thick and luxurious, her dark hair had been her crowning glory, falling over skin that was gleaming-white and the pale perfection of the very wealthy and purebred. No plebian tan graced the elegant, supple limbs of Bellatrix Black. Up until the very day they threw her into Azkaban, she had been a diamond of the first water and never let a single person forget it.
The only thing diamond-like that remains of her now is her harshness, the soul that still lives inside her ravaged body shattered by endless nights of darkness and death and the cruel, delicious torment of the Dementors. If she is a diamond still, the flaws have overtaken the beauty and only the slightest hint of glorious sparkle remains.
She stands in the shadows of Narcissa’s elegant guest room, radiating as much life as one of the weathered grey tombstones in the Malfoy family cemetery. Narcissa remembered her sister as pulsing with life, constantly in motion, a chaotic force of pure unadulterated energy. Now the darkness she has embraced wraps around her like a shroud and the chaos has taken over her sister’s mind, and Bellatrix no longer commands a room with her beauty but with her fear. Vibrancy and life has been transmuted into a quiet malevolence, like the proverbial monster hiding in the closet that no light or assurances from one’s parents could dispel.
Then why have you not been able to stop staring at her since the Dark Lord brought her to you and bid you shelter her?
Because I wonder if Lucius will look like this, if he ever gets free.
A pang at that.
Must not think it, no, not think about Lucius.
Narcissa is doing the Dark Lord’s bidding now, and while his Mark has never burned her skin, she is his creature all the same. Time to do what he has ordered her and shelter his faithful Death Eater. Narcissa tells herself firmly that Bellatrix is not her sister but a stranger with skeletal limbs and burning black eyes. Lucius, she will think of him when only alone in her bed, when the tears will come at last and stain her silk pillowcase.
Bellatrix has not made a sound, nor has she moved from her place in the shadows. Narcissa turns to go, not wanting this moment to last, wanting to forget about the sister she knew and loved so much, taken and destroyed by the man whose orders she follows. She has no choice anymore, not really.
“You look well, Narcissa.” Her sister’s voice is rough with disuse, and it is like the sound gravel makes when it’s crunched underneath boots.
Bellatrix’s voice startles her as she reaches the door, and she turns slowly to find her sister has moved soundlessly out of the shadows and into the spill of candlelight. She sees nothing on Bellatrix’s face that speaks of remembered ties between them.
There is nothing in that broken-glass voice that hints at the bonds of sisterhood once shared and enjoyed between them. Not sadness for the time they’ve lost, or even hatred that Narcissa and Lucius escaped the punishment she and Rodolphus endured for their loyalty. There is none of the burning fanaticism she has for so long associated with Bellatrix, and this is what frightens Narcissa the most-what is Bellatrix if her fire is gone?
What I would be, if the ice melts.
Narcissa cannot answer. She stares for a moment, and their eyes meet, a jolt of black on blue and she turns away, leaving Bellatrix in the shadows where she belongs.
When she arrives in her room, she strips her elegant garments and looses her hair from its tight French twist. Her eyes are lost in a pale face, and when she climbs into bed, she cries not for Lucius, but for Bellatrix.
***
She dreams of her wedding day.
“Cissa, don’t be silly. Of course he loves you. Now be quiet and stand still so I can put this in your hair. Honestly, Cissa, flowers in your hair? You’ve made mother so happy with this wedding of yours I suppose she’ll have to forgive me mine.”
How vividly her mind remembers Bellatrix affixing the gardenias in her hair, the flower she hates, the cloying sweetness choking her and making her shiver in revulsion. She has given in to her mother’s wishes for her wedding merely to make her happy. She hates gardenias. She wanted something else, more appropriate to her and Lucius.
Something exotic, that burned like he made her burn beneath his cruel fingers and elegant mouth.
She has to do this, though, for Mother. Andromeda ran off with the Mudblood, and Bellatrix…she was not sure what her sister had done to celebrate her marriage, but she came home one morning with Rodolphus in tow and a ring on her finger. Beneath her gown was his Mark, fresh on her skin.
Her mother had been horrified, three daughters and the money to throw the most lavish weddings for each.
All but Narcissa had denied her.
“Such a good daughter,” Bellatrix had said fondly, with that edge of madness that had always been there, just beneath the surface, even then.
Narcissa remembers in her dream what she has always forgotten in waking life in the rare times she thinks of her wedding day. Bellatrix had worn a flower in her hair, too. “For solidarity,” she said as she affixed it in her midnight locks. It had not been a gardenia like Narcissa’s.
Bella’s had been an orchid.
***
She awakens in a rage.
It is not unusual for her to be in a rage. It is unusual for her to sleep.
In Azkaban, she slept very rarely. She’d climbed into the bed when Narcissa had left her, but the silk sheets were so decadent and soft it hurt her after years sleeping on the stone floor of the prison. There was no wailing to sing her to sleep like in Azkaban, where she took a curious comfort from the sobbing of her compatriots. A gruesome lullaby, to be sure, but one she found she rather missed.
Perhaps if I listen closely enough, Narcissa will sing me to sleep as did my prison-mates.
She arose from the bed and curled up on the floor beneath the window. It reminded her of Azkaban, the light spilling just-so inside the window, and there she slept, for a time.
Now she is awake, and there is nothing to do but endure the night and the rage that it always brings.
She thinks for a moment of Rodolphus, of their sublime moment together in the Department of Mysteries, fucking in some Ministry officer’s room before they set out after Potter. He had pushed her against the door and it had been so filled with hate and want and long denied desire that she had come from his hands around her neck and nothing else, and the pleasure from his body driving into hers had nearly accomplished what years of prison had not done and driven her completely mad at last.
She touches herself in the darkness here on Narcissa’s polished floor as she remembers that moment with Rodolphus, the way he’d snarled at her in rage, the way he’d backhanded her and fucked her and then held her afterwards, as if he never wanted to let her go.
“So long, Bella, my love, my beautiful, beautiful witch…hate you, want you, you, always…”
His hands on her face, her hair. She had pressed frantic kisses to his mouth, tasting tears, salty and delicious, their nectar of pain. She had pressed her skeletal frame to his and for a moment, she was beautiful again.
Alone now, she comes with a gasp and his name on her lips, and if the Dementors were there in Narcissa’s elegant and cold guest room, they would have had a feast of her, so happy is she in that moment.
Bellatrix does not go back to sleep, instead she glides like a ghost through her sister’s house. Her fingers brush against the polished mahogany wood tables, the elegant velvet draperies; her bare feet pressing on the cool, wax-shined wood that gives way eventually to soft, elegant tapestries.
She stares at her feet for a moment, trying to recall the last time she’d paid any attention whatsoever to her body. Her toes had been painted, she remembers, when they’d taken her to Azkaban. The paint has long since chipped off. She tries to remember what color they had been, but cannot. Probably red.
She smiles.
Her hands are the same; long-fingered, elegant, minus her wedding ring. They took that from her in Azkaban, and she wants it back. Strange, she’s not thought of it in almost fifteen years, but she has not thought of anything about her body in so long. In Azkaban, she retreated into her mind and that is how she survived. Her body had become a nuisance that she was able to ignore-hunger, filth, rape. All of it was meaningless.
She wants her ring back now. Her body burns with desires-for Rodolphus, for vengeance, for pain, for torture.
There is a light on through a set of double doors at the end of the hallway, and Bellatrix is drawn there, moving to push at the doors and feel the smoothness of the wood-grain beneath her palms. her sister reclines on the divan, dressed in a simple white cotton nightgown, staring into the bright, cheerful orange flames of the fire, idly twisting her wheat-blonde hair around the fingers of her left hand.
Bellatrix sees the light flash off her diamond wedding ring, and narrows her eyes.
“They’ll have taken Lucius’, you know.”
Narcissa knows she is there, has heard the door open, and she knows it isn’t Draco. She does not turn around, but continues staring in the fire, though her back frissons with fear at the knowledge of who-what-is standing behind her. “Taken what, Bella?” The old nickname slips easily from her mouth - far too easily.
“His ring. They took mine. And Rodolphus’.” Bellatrix moves into the study and yet she will not walk into the light, does not want Narcissa to see what she has become.
Pain lances through Bellatrix at the thought, as things so long forgotten begin to resurface. She makes a noise perilously close to a sob, and presses back against the door. The wood seems familiar, and she remembers being tethered to something and tortured, and she rubs against it hoping for splinters. The wood is too perfect and polished for that, and she is denied the pain she so desperately seeks.
Narcissa hears her half-sob and turns, it is the first sound she has heard her sister make that has some sense of emotion behind it. Narcissa sees her there, a dark shape pressed against the door, lank dark hair covering her face.
“I know. They sent them to me, since I was-am-your sister. I have them, in the vault at Gringotts. I will find a way to pick them up, if you like.” She can not have them sent for, that would arouse suspicion. She is watched all the time by the Ministry, who do not trust her though they have no reason to toss her in Azkaban with Lucius.
Lucius. Is he awake, staring at the walls, going slowly mad? She presses the back of a trembling hand to her mouth, not caring that her sister might see. Bellatrix does not remember her, Bellatrix is no longer Narcissa’s sister but instead a mad, crazed wraith of a woman filled with dark magic and fanatical hate, eaten up by Azkaban. Narcissa squeezes her eyes closed and tries to banish the picture of Bellatrix she has carried around all these years, reconciling it with the banshee that remains in Lucius’ study.
Bellatrix looks up slowly, and she sees the wedding portrait above the mantle. “You wore gardenias in your hair.”
Narcissa’s eyes fly open, and now she is the one to sob. “And you wore an orchid.” Her eyes fill with hot, sharp tears. “I wanted the orchid.”
“I know. You hate gardenias.” Bellatrix is trembling against the door as a thousand memories, forgotten and locked away, pour forth in a tidal wave that sweeps over her, of anger and pain and love and the remembered joys of sisterhood. “Oh, Cissa…”
Narcissa moves quickly across the room, pulling her sister into her arms. She no longer cares that Bellatrix is so bony it feels as if she is hugging a skeleton, or that her sister is no longer beautiful as all the Black daughters were. “I missed you,” Narcissa sobs, clinging, her face buried in the vee of Bellatrix’s neck and shoulder. “So much, Bella…”
Bellatrix’s arms are thin and wiry but they close around Narcissa like a vise. She is overwhelmed by scent and touch, the press of Narcissa’s breasts against her chest, soft arms clinging to her neck, hot tears washing against her throat.
“I would have missed you too, if I didn’t make myself forget,” Bellatrix says, trembling. Her robes scratch against her flushed skin, and the pain she sought from external sources rises up and threatens to drown her from within.
Narcissa pulls back and her blue eyes, awash in tears, search Bellatrix’s face. Her elegant, smooth fingers push Bella’s hair back from her face, and she moves close and presses her soft lips to her sister’s, which are dry and chapped.
“You forgot me, Bella?” Her voice is softly strained with sadness.
Bellatrix kisses her frantically, hands digging roughly into Narcissa’s back. She has forgotten how to be gentle…if indeed, she ever knew.
“I had to,” Bellatrix whispers, trailing kisses down Narcissa’s smooth skin, which is unblemished satin beneath her dry, chafed lips. “The Dementors…”
Narcissa thinks of Lucius, imagines him huddled in a cell and hiding beneath the fall of his platinum hair, as Bellatrix surely must have done. She imagines him staring at the bars, forcing himself to sneer at the Dementors, and wonders if he will forget her, too.
She touches her sister’s hair now, running fingers through the strands that have been robbed of their lustrous shine and thickness. Will Lucius look like this when he is returned to her? Will his white-blonde hair hang filthy and matted in his patrician face? Will he stare at her with vacant eyes and forget the love they shared?
“They were like ghosts and they moved so quietly, and they wanted to steal me, but do you know what?” Bellatrix’s voice is thick with that fanatical madness Narcissa remembers so well, and as horrible as it is, the sound makes her feel joyful, happy. Bellatrix is returning to herself, and Narcissa wants that desperately, even if Bellatrix is a lunatic.
“What, Bella?”
Bellatrix’s hands wrap in her hair and there is a sharp blinding pain as she yanks her head back, but Narcissa says nothing. She has been married to Lucius Malfoy too long not to appreciate the finer points of delicious pain, but it is more than her cultivated masochism that allows her to accept Bellatrix’s brutal caress.
Bellatrix has never been anything but brutal. Her moments of love and adoration are dark and heavy with sadistic intent, and this is who she is and always will be.
“I think maybe I gave them just enough so that they loved me, those Dementors.” Her voice rings with frenzied pride. “I think maybe I was one of them, at the end.” She looks down at Narcissa and lowers her head, and Narcissa tilts hers up to meet her.
All she thinks of at night is Lucius, and the Kiss he is destined for, and if Bellatrix will make her forget, then she will love her as she did long ago, when they’d danced at her wedding. Narcissa remembers how Bellatrix took the gardenia from her hair and replaced it with the orchid, before leaving with Rodolphus on some sinister, unknown mission where death likely followed.
Bellatrix kisses her and Narcissa forgets everything, that it is her sister, that it is wrong, that her husband languishes in a cell for pledging his soul to a madman. She clings to her sister, who smells of something exotic and spicy-dark magic, danger, devotion-and her body presses eagerly to hers and she inhales it, drinks it in, lets it fill that empty space inside that has ached and tormented her since they took Lucius away.
Somehow, they are on the couch, and her sister has stripped her of that prim and proper cotton nightgown. Narcissa hates it, her mother had it made as part of her trousseau, but Lucius took one look at it and laughed and it had been banished to the back of her dresser ever since. She does not sleep in the sensuous silk and sinful satin that she always has before, it seems a betrayal since she is alone in her bed.
Bellatrix has stripped her robe and her body is thin, horribly so, skeletal. She looks down at herself, prompted by this new awareness of her body, at what remains of her once lush curves. Her eyes rise to meet Narcissa’s; challenging, as if she is aware she is no longer the fruit but rather the core, rotten and dead inside, no future but burial in the soft, wet earth.
Narcissa pulls her sister’s mouth down to hers. “You are still beautiful to me, Bella.”
The room is filled with sighs and exclamations of pleasure, and Narcissa moans loudly when Bellatrix scratches talon-like nails down her stomach, leaving long red welts in her wake. They are tangled together on the divan, a mass of pale skin, dark black hair mixing with blonde.
Bellatrix is cruel with her, as Narcissa expected. Her voice is gentle as she coaxes her to pleasure beneath her fingers, but her caresses are not. Fingers that feel like knives slide inside of her, but Narcissa does not want her to stop.
She forgets Lucius, she forgets everything.
Bellatrix pleasures her, worshipping the sister she had to forget to survive, pouring her sorrow and her guilt over what her life had become as she kisses her reverently, as she strokes and caresses Narcissa’s heated flesh.
When Bellatrix has her mouth between her thighs, they link their fingers together and squeeze solidarity between them. They are the Black sisters, and they are together, and when they are finished they are as strong as they have always been.
Later, Narcissa bathes her sister with gentle hands, delivering pleasure that is sweet and kind, and it is so different that Bellatrix sobs when it is over. She draws her bony knees into her chest and drops her flushed face to rest on them, and cries as she has not done since she was a little girl.
To make her stop crying, Narcissa holds Bella’s flush body to her own in the bath and rocks her like a child. When she stops, they fall into bed wrapped around each other.
Toujours Pur.
***
When she awakens, Bellatrix is dressed and standing by the window, staring out at the bleak overcast sky.
She is wearing a set of brilliant scarlet robes, and her hair looks healthier than it did before the bath and Narcissa’s tender ministrations. She is still thin and quiet as a spectre, with an indescribable look on her gaunt features. “Rodolphus will be here soon to collect me.”
Narcissa does not ask how she knows, merely watches as Bellatrix approaches her bed. There is a determined set to her mouth, a gleam in her eyes that worries Narcissa. Then she smiles, and it is like an orchid opening to the sun, this smile.
“He’s bringing Lucius.”
Narcissa feels a surge of joy and then tempers it, remembering Bellatrix as a child, how she used to pull the wings from butterflies and laugh as they struggled to fly.
“Why do you do that?”
“Because it amuses me to watch them struggle, and hope, then die at my feet.”
Bellatrix had been twelve.
Bellatrix laughs softly, and the sound raises the hairs on Narcissa’s neck because her laugh is madness laced with sadistic pleasure. There is something…warm and inviting beneath it, and that frightens Narcissa more.
“I’m not playing with you, little sister. Rodolphus was sent by the Dark Lord to free Lucius from Azkaban. And don’t worry,” Bellatrix says, reaching down and trailing finger tips that are cold and rough down Narcissa’s smooth cheek. “He won’t be quite as mad as I am.”
Bellatrix’s touch had made her weep with joy last night, but today, she feels a sick twisting in her stomach and shudders imperceptibly under the caress. Bellatrix leans down and presses her lips to Narcissa’s head. “Your husband has returned to you. You should be happy.”
Narcissa struggles between the desire to embrace Bellatrix and the equally strong urge to shove her away, to retreat, to hide somewhere deep in the garden amidst the roses and surround herself with beauty instead of darkness and death.
She does neither, merely allows the caress. Bellatrix pulls away and her limpid dark eyes bore into Narcissa’s. Intensity washes off of her and Narcissa feels she will drown in the undertow of her madness.
“And has my sister?”
Her words are soft and yet filled with meaning, and they drift between them like a feather floating to the ground.
Bellatrix gifts her with another mad smile, and sweeps away to disappear through the door. She turns in an elegant motion, a swirl of scarlet and shadow, and says, “I left you a present on your pillow. Wear it for Lucius.”
She is gone, the door closed firmly behind her, the sound echoing far longer than it should in the room. Narcissa turns, not knowing what to expect, to face whatever present Bellatrix has left for her.
Draco had a cat that liked to bring him dead baby rabbits to show affection. What has my sister, deadly and graceful like a panther, left for me?
Resting on the soft, pale ice-blue pillowcase is a single, blood-red orchid.
Narcissa reaches out to touch it, both amused by the symbolism and repulsed by the lush, overt beauty of the flower. As much as she might secretly long for it, this is not her. Perhaps the gardenia suits her better, after all.
When she goes to meet her husband, who has indeed been brought home with Rodolphus-dirty and furious at the indignities he has suffered-she does not wear it.
Narcissa does charm the orchid to keep it fresh. She places it on her dresser under a glass jar where it will never wilt. Every day she sees it and remembers, and thinks of Bellatrix, and it is a sad sort of smile on her face as she brushes her hair.
The flower will last far longer than Bellatrix, and perhaps she’ll bury her sister with it when the time comes.
~Finis
Author: Sionnain
Pairing: Bellatrix/Narcissa, mention of Bellatrix/Rodolphus and Narcissa/Lucius
Rating: PG13 or perhaps R, but only for mentions of violence. The sex is only about a PG13, I'd say, not explicit at all.
Warnings: Angst, incest (mmm. Blackcest), femmeslash. Though really, the sex is not graphic. Sorry to disappoint.
Summary: Gardenias always remind Narcissa of her wedding day, when she wore white and envied the orchids that graced her sister's hair.
AN: Thanks to Jazzypom and Kaz814 for the beta. Written for Tarie's Flip-Flop Challenge.
White Gardenias
“How must I deal with grief? Hold, or give rein? See where my outcast limbs have lain! Stones for a bed would bring sorrow small relief. My heart would burst, my sick head beats and burns, Till passion pleads to end its pain!” -Hecuba in Euripides’ The Women of Troy
“Let me know if there is anything else you require.”
Narcissa Malfoy’s voice is cold, civil, as she addresses the wraith-like, dark haired woman standing in the shadows. It is not because she is angry, merely because she does not know any other way to be.
Having one’s long-lost sister show up after fourteen years in Azkaban is a rather difficult situation to adjust to. In all the years she’s been a member of high society, she’s never learned how to deal with this-should a retired judge of the Wizengamot require seating at a table at the last minute, or someone spill a merlot on her gown-these things she can take care of without a hint of worry crossing her features.
However, there was never a lesson on what to do in this instance, and because Narcissa is a proper witch in the highest echelons of society, being faced with a situation she does not expect and cannot handle is anathema to her, and she hates it. Her insides twist with nerves as she fights for the control that has been wrestled away from her far too often over the last few weeks. She has the wildest urge to throw a dinner party just to prove she is still competent- because that is what she knows how to do with ease and it would even out her shaken sense of equilibrium.
Bellatrix showing up at her door, wrapped in dirty robes and eyes burning with madness and delight, that she cannot fathom how to accommodate. It would have been preferable, to her, that Bellatrix appear during a dinner party, because she knew how to deal with this sort of unexpected surprise at a social event. On her own, with Draco miserable upstairs and Lucius…indisposed. She was removed from her comfort zone, and she blamed the wraith in front of her for it.
Narcissa had tried to be welcoming, putting on a stiff smile and pressing her cool cheek to her sister’s when she’d first arrived. Bellatrix’s face was all sharp angles and hard planes, and Narcissa feared she would end up sliced to bits from the brief contact.
In the years before Azkaban had taken her beauty, Bellatrix had been as glorious as a piece of art. She was lush and voluptuous, the very air around her pulsed with sinful promise when she entered a room. Thick and luxurious, her dark hair had been her crowning glory, falling over skin that was gleaming-white and the pale perfection of the very wealthy and purebred. No plebian tan graced the elegant, supple limbs of Bellatrix Black. Up until the very day they threw her into Azkaban, she had been a diamond of the first water and never let a single person forget it.
The only thing diamond-like that remains of her now is her harshness, the soul that still lives inside her ravaged body shattered by endless nights of darkness and death and the cruel, delicious torment of the Dementors. If she is a diamond still, the flaws have overtaken the beauty and only the slightest hint of glorious sparkle remains.
She stands in the shadows of Narcissa’s elegant guest room, radiating as much life as one of the weathered grey tombstones in the Malfoy family cemetery. Narcissa remembered her sister as pulsing with life, constantly in motion, a chaotic force of pure unadulterated energy. Now the darkness she has embraced wraps around her like a shroud and the chaos has taken over her sister’s mind, and Bellatrix no longer commands a room with her beauty but with her fear. Vibrancy and life has been transmuted into a quiet malevolence, like the proverbial monster hiding in the closet that no light or assurances from one’s parents could dispel.
Then why have you not been able to stop staring at her since the Dark Lord brought her to you and bid you shelter her?
Because I wonder if Lucius will look like this, if he ever gets free.
A pang at that.
Must not think it, no, not think about Lucius.
Narcissa is doing the Dark Lord’s bidding now, and while his Mark has never burned her skin, she is his creature all the same. Time to do what he has ordered her and shelter his faithful Death Eater. Narcissa tells herself firmly that Bellatrix is not her sister but a stranger with skeletal limbs and burning black eyes. Lucius, she will think of him when only alone in her bed, when the tears will come at last and stain her silk pillowcase.
Bellatrix has not made a sound, nor has she moved from her place in the shadows. Narcissa turns to go, not wanting this moment to last, wanting to forget about the sister she knew and loved so much, taken and destroyed by the man whose orders she follows. She has no choice anymore, not really.
“You look well, Narcissa.” Her sister’s voice is rough with disuse, and it is like the sound gravel makes when it’s crunched underneath boots.
Bellatrix’s voice startles her as she reaches the door, and she turns slowly to find her sister has moved soundlessly out of the shadows and into the spill of candlelight. She sees nothing on Bellatrix’s face that speaks of remembered ties between them.
There is nothing in that broken-glass voice that hints at the bonds of sisterhood once shared and enjoyed between them. Not sadness for the time they’ve lost, or even hatred that Narcissa and Lucius escaped the punishment she and Rodolphus endured for their loyalty. There is none of the burning fanaticism she has for so long associated with Bellatrix, and this is what frightens Narcissa the most-what is Bellatrix if her fire is gone?
What I would be, if the ice melts.
Narcissa cannot answer. She stares for a moment, and their eyes meet, a jolt of black on blue and she turns away, leaving Bellatrix in the shadows where she belongs.
When she arrives in her room, she strips her elegant garments and looses her hair from its tight French twist. Her eyes are lost in a pale face, and when she climbs into bed, she cries not for Lucius, but for Bellatrix.
***
She dreams of her wedding day.
“Cissa, don’t be silly. Of course he loves you. Now be quiet and stand still so I can put this in your hair. Honestly, Cissa, flowers in your hair? You’ve made mother so happy with this wedding of yours I suppose she’ll have to forgive me mine.”
How vividly her mind remembers Bellatrix affixing the gardenias in her hair, the flower she hates, the cloying sweetness choking her and making her shiver in revulsion. She has given in to her mother’s wishes for her wedding merely to make her happy. She hates gardenias. She wanted something else, more appropriate to her and Lucius.
Something exotic, that burned like he made her burn beneath his cruel fingers and elegant mouth.
She has to do this, though, for Mother. Andromeda ran off with the Mudblood, and Bellatrix…she was not sure what her sister had done to celebrate her marriage, but she came home one morning with Rodolphus in tow and a ring on her finger. Beneath her gown was his Mark, fresh on her skin.
Her mother had been horrified, three daughters and the money to throw the most lavish weddings for each.
All but Narcissa had denied her.
“Such a good daughter,” Bellatrix had said fondly, with that edge of madness that had always been there, just beneath the surface, even then.
Narcissa remembers in her dream what she has always forgotten in waking life in the rare times she thinks of her wedding day. Bellatrix had worn a flower in her hair, too. “For solidarity,” she said as she affixed it in her midnight locks. It had not been a gardenia like Narcissa’s.
Bella’s had been an orchid.
***
She awakens in a rage.
It is not unusual for her to be in a rage. It is unusual for her to sleep.
In Azkaban, she slept very rarely. She’d climbed into the bed when Narcissa had left her, but the silk sheets were so decadent and soft it hurt her after years sleeping on the stone floor of the prison. There was no wailing to sing her to sleep like in Azkaban, where she took a curious comfort from the sobbing of her compatriots. A gruesome lullaby, to be sure, but one she found she rather missed.
Perhaps if I listen closely enough, Narcissa will sing me to sleep as did my prison-mates.
She arose from the bed and curled up on the floor beneath the window. It reminded her of Azkaban, the light spilling just-so inside the window, and there she slept, for a time.
Now she is awake, and there is nothing to do but endure the night and the rage that it always brings.
She thinks for a moment of Rodolphus, of their sublime moment together in the Department of Mysteries, fucking in some Ministry officer’s room before they set out after Potter. He had pushed her against the door and it had been so filled with hate and want and long denied desire that she had come from his hands around her neck and nothing else, and the pleasure from his body driving into hers had nearly accomplished what years of prison had not done and driven her completely mad at last.
She touches herself in the darkness here on Narcissa’s polished floor as she remembers that moment with Rodolphus, the way he’d snarled at her in rage, the way he’d backhanded her and fucked her and then held her afterwards, as if he never wanted to let her go.
“So long, Bella, my love, my beautiful, beautiful witch…hate you, want you, you, always…”
His hands on her face, her hair. She had pressed frantic kisses to his mouth, tasting tears, salty and delicious, their nectar of pain. She had pressed her skeletal frame to his and for a moment, she was beautiful again.
Alone now, she comes with a gasp and his name on her lips, and if the Dementors were there in Narcissa’s elegant and cold guest room, they would have had a feast of her, so happy is she in that moment.
Bellatrix does not go back to sleep, instead she glides like a ghost through her sister’s house. Her fingers brush against the polished mahogany wood tables, the elegant velvet draperies; her bare feet pressing on the cool, wax-shined wood that gives way eventually to soft, elegant tapestries.
She stares at her feet for a moment, trying to recall the last time she’d paid any attention whatsoever to her body. Her toes had been painted, she remembers, when they’d taken her to Azkaban. The paint has long since chipped off. She tries to remember what color they had been, but cannot. Probably red.
She smiles.
Her hands are the same; long-fingered, elegant, minus her wedding ring. They took that from her in Azkaban, and she wants it back. Strange, she’s not thought of it in almost fifteen years, but she has not thought of anything about her body in so long. In Azkaban, she retreated into her mind and that is how she survived. Her body had become a nuisance that she was able to ignore-hunger, filth, rape. All of it was meaningless.
She wants her ring back now. Her body burns with desires-for Rodolphus, for vengeance, for pain, for torture.
There is a light on through a set of double doors at the end of the hallway, and Bellatrix is drawn there, moving to push at the doors and feel the smoothness of the wood-grain beneath her palms. her sister reclines on the divan, dressed in a simple white cotton nightgown, staring into the bright, cheerful orange flames of the fire, idly twisting her wheat-blonde hair around the fingers of her left hand.
Bellatrix sees the light flash off her diamond wedding ring, and narrows her eyes.
“They’ll have taken Lucius’, you know.”
Narcissa knows she is there, has heard the door open, and she knows it isn’t Draco. She does not turn around, but continues staring in the fire, though her back frissons with fear at the knowledge of who-what-is standing behind her. “Taken what, Bella?” The old nickname slips easily from her mouth - far too easily.
“His ring. They took mine. And Rodolphus’.” Bellatrix moves into the study and yet she will not walk into the light, does not want Narcissa to see what she has become.
Pain lances through Bellatrix at the thought, as things so long forgotten begin to resurface. She makes a noise perilously close to a sob, and presses back against the door. The wood seems familiar, and she remembers being tethered to something and tortured, and she rubs against it hoping for splinters. The wood is too perfect and polished for that, and she is denied the pain she so desperately seeks.
Narcissa hears her half-sob and turns, it is the first sound she has heard her sister make that has some sense of emotion behind it. Narcissa sees her there, a dark shape pressed against the door, lank dark hair covering her face.
“I know. They sent them to me, since I was-am-your sister. I have them, in the vault at Gringotts. I will find a way to pick them up, if you like.” She can not have them sent for, that would arouse suspicion. She is watched all the time by the Ministry, who do not trust her though they have no reason to toss her in Azkaban with Lucius.
Lucius. Is he awake, staring at the walls, going slowly mad? She presses the back of a trembling hand to her mouth, not caring that her sister might see. Bellatrix does not remember her, Bellatrix is no longer Narcissa’s sister but instead a mad, crazed wraith of a woman filled with dark magic and fanatical hate, eaten up by Azkaban. Narcissa squeezes her eyes closed and tries to banish the picture of Bellatrix she has carried around all these years, reconciling it with the banshee that remains in Lucius’ study.
Bellatrix looks up slowly, and she sees the wedding portrait above the mantle. “You wore gardenias in your hair.”
Narcissa’s eyes fly open, and now she is the one to sob. “And you wore an orchid.” Her eyes fill with hot, sharp tears. “I wanted the orchid.”
“I know. You hate gardenias.” Bellatrix is trembling against the door as a thousand memories, forgotten and locked away, pour forth in a tidal wave that sweeps over her, of anger and pain and love and the remembered joys of sisterhood. “Oh, Cissa…”
Narcissa moves quickly across the room, pulling her sister into her arms. She no longer cares that Bellatrix is so bony it feels as if she is hugging a skeleton, or that her sister is no longer beautiful as all the Black daughters were. “I missed you,” Narcissa sobs, clinging, her face buried in the vee of Bellatrix’s neck and shoulder. “So much, Bella…”
Bellatrix’s arms are thin and wiry but they close around Narcissa like a vise. She is overwhelmed by scent and touch, the press of Narcissa’s breasts against her chest, soft arms clinging to her neck, hot tears washing against her throat.
“I would have missed you too, if I didn’t make myself forget,” Bellatrix says, trembling. Her robes scratch against her flushed skin, and the pain she sought from external sources rises up and threatens to drown her from within.
Narcissa pulls back and her blue eyes, awash in tears, search Bellatrix’s face. Her elegant, smooth fingers push Bella’s hair back from her face, and she moves close and presses her soft lips to her sister’s, which are dry and chapped.
“You forgot me, Bella?” Her voice is softly strained with sadness.
Bellatrix kisses her frantically, hands digging roughly into Narcissa’s back. She has forgotten how to be gentle…if indeed, she ever knew.
“I had to,” Bellatrix whispers, trailing kisses down Narcissa’s smooth skin, which is unblemished satin beneath her dry, chafed lips. “The Dementors…”
Narcissa thinks of Lucius, imagines him huddled in a cell and hiding beneath the fall of his platinum hair, as Bellatrix surely must have done. She imagines him staring at the bars, forcing himself to sneer at the Dementors, and wonders if he will forget her, too.
She touches her sister’s hair now, running fingers through the strands that have been robbed of their lustrous shine and thickness. Will Lucius look like this when he is returned to her? Will his white-blonde hair hang filthy and matted in his patrician face? Will he stare at her with vacant eyes and forget the love they shared?
“They were like ghosts and they moved so quietly, and they wanted to steal me, but do you know what?” Bellatrix’s voice is thick with that fanatical madness Narcissa remembers so well, and as horrible as it is, the sound makes her feel joyful, happy. Bellatrix is returning to herself, and Narcissa wants that desperately, even if Bellatrix is a lunatic.
“What, Bella?”
Bellatrix’s hands wrap in her hair and there is a sharp blinding pain as she yanks her head back, but Narcissa says nothing. She has been married to Lucius Malfoy too long not to appreciate the finer points of delicious pain, but it is more than her cultivated masochism that allows her to accept Bellatrix’s brutal caress.
Bellatrix has never been anything but brutal. Her moments of love and adoration are dark and heavy with sadistic intent, and this is who she is and always will be.
“I think maybe I gave them just enough so that they loved me, those Dementors.” Her voice rings with frenzied pride. “I think maybe I was one of them, at the end.” She looks down at Narcissa and lowers her head, and Narcissa tilts hers up to meet her.
All she thinks of at night is Lucius, and the Kiss he is destined for, and if Bellatrix will make her forget, then she will love her as she did long ago, when they’d danced at her wedding. Narcissa remembers how Bellatrix took the gardenia from her hair and replaced it with the orchid, before leaving with Rodolphus on some sinister, unknown mission where death likely followed.
Bellatrix kisses her and Narcissa forgets everything, that it is her sister, that it is wrong, that her husband languishes in a cell for pledging his soul to a madman. She clings to her sister, who smells of something exotic and spicy-dark magic, danger, devotion-and her body presses eagerly to hers and she inhales it, drinks it in, lets it fill that empty space inside that has ached and tormented her since they took Lucius away.
Somehow, they are on the couch, and her sister has stripped her of that prim and proper cotton nightgown. Narcissa hates it, her mother had it made as part of her trousseau, but Lucius took one look at it and laughed and it had been banished to the back of her dresser ever since. She does not sleep in the sensuous silk and sinful satin that she always has before, it seems a betrayal since she is alone in her bed.
Bellatrix has stripped her robe and her body is thin, horribly so, skeletal. She looks down at herself, prompted by this new awareness of her body, at what remains of her once lush curves. Her eyes rise to meet Narcissa’s; challenging, as if she is aware she is no longer the fruit but rather the core, rotten and dead inside, no future but burial in the soft, wet earth.
Narcissa pulls her sister’s mouth down to hers. “You are still beautiful to me, Bella.”
The room is filled with sighs and exclamations of pleasure, and Narcissa moans loudly when Bellatrix scratches talon-like nails down her stomach, leaving long red welts in her wake. They are tangled together on the divan, a mass of pale skin, dark black hair mixing with blonde.
Bellatrix is cruel with her, as Narcissa expected. Her voice is gentle as she coaxes her to pleasure beneath her fingers, but her caresses are not. Fingers that feel like knives slide inside of her, but Narcissa does not want her to stop.
She forgets Lucius, she forgets everything.
Bellatrix pleasures her, worshipping the sister she had to forget to survive, pouring her sorrow and her guilt over what her life had become as she kisses her reverently, as she strokes and caresses Narcissa’s heated flesh.
When Bellatrix has her mouth between her thighs, they link their fingers together and squeeze solidarity between them. They are the Black sisters, and they are together, and when they are finished they are as strong as they have always been.
Later, Narcissa bathes her sister with gentle hands, delivering pleasure that is sweet and kind, and it is so different that Bellatrix sobs when it is over. She draws her bony knees into her chest and drops her flushed face to rest on them, and cries as she has not done since she was a little girl.
To make her stop crying, Narcissa holds Bella’s flush body to her own in the bath and rocks her like a child. When she stops, they fall into bed wrapped around each other.
Toujours Pur.
***
When she awakens, Bellatrix is dressed and standing by the window, staring out at the bleak overcast sky.
She is wearing a set of brilliant scarlet robes, and her hair looks healthier than it did before the bath and Narcissa’s tender ministrations. She is still thin and quiet as a spectre, with an indescribable look on her gaunt features. “Rodolphus will be here soon to collect me.”
Narcissa does not ask how she knows, merely watches as Bellatrix approaches her bed. There is a determined set to her mouth, a gleam in her eyes that worries Narcissa. Then she smiles, and it is like an orchid opening to the sun, this smile.
“He’s bringing Lucius.”
Narcissa feels a surge of joy and then tempers it, remembering Bellatrix as a child, how she used to pull the wings from butterflies and laugh as they struggled to fly.
“Why do you do that?”
“Because it amuses me to watch them struggle, and hope, then die at my feet.”
Bellatrix had been twelve.
Bellatrix laughs softly, and the sound raises the hairs on Narcissa’s neck because her laugh is madness laced with sadistic pleasure. There is something…warm and inviting beneath it, and that frightens Narcissa more.
“I’m not playing with you, little sister. Rodolphus was sent by the Dark Lord to free Lucius from Azkaban. And don’t worry,” Bellatrix says, reaching down and trailing finger tips that are cold and rough down Narcissa’s smooth cheek. “He won’t be quite as mad as I am.”
Bellatrix’s touch had made her weep with joy last night, but today, she feels a sick twisting in her stomach and shudders imperceptibly under the caress. Bellatrix leans down and presses her lips to Narcissa’s head. “Your husband has returned to you. You should be happy.”
Narcissa struggles between the desire to embrace Bellatrix and the equally strong urge to shove her away, to retreat, to hide somewhere deep in the garden amidst the roses and surround herself with beauty instead of darkness and death.
She does neither, merely allows the caress. Bellatrix pulls away and her limpid dark eyes bore into Narcissa’s. Intensity washes off of her and Narcissa feels she will drown in the undertow of her madness.
“And has my sister?”
Her words are soft and yet filled with meaning, and they drift between them like a feather floating to the ground.
Bellatrix gifts her with another mad smile, and sweeps away to disappear through the door. She turns in an elegant motion, a swirl of scarlet and shadow, and says, “I left you a present on your pillow. Wear it for Lucius.”
She is gone, the door closed firmly behind her, the sound echoing far longer than it should in the room. Narcissa turns, not knowing what to expect, to face whatever present Bellatrix has left for her.
Draco had a cat that liked to bring him dead baby rabbits to show affection. What has my sister, deadly and graceful like a panther, left for me?
Resting on the soft, pale ice-blue pillowcase is a single, blood-red orchid.
Narcissa reaches out to touch it, both amused by the symbolism and repulsed by the lush, overt beauty of the flower. As much as she might secretly long for it, this is not her. Perhaps the gardenia suits her better, after all.
When she goes to meet her husband, who has indeed been brought home with Rodolphus-dirty and furious at the indignities he has suffered-she does not wear it.
Narcissa does charm the orchid to keep it fresh. She places it on her dresser under a glass jar where it will never wilt. Every day she sees it and remembers, and thinks of Bellatrix, and it is a sad sort of smile on her face as she brushes her hair.
The flower will last far longer than Bellatrix, and perhaps she’ll bury her sister with it when the time comes.
~Finis