Fic: Jasmine and Butter and Bread (Rabastan/Tom, Rabastan/Bella)
Title: Jasmine and Butter and Bread
Author: spessartine
Pairing: Rabastan Lestrange/Tom Riddle, Rabastan/Bellatrix
Rating: Hard R
Warning: Graphic violence, apocalyptic sex. Huzzah!
Prompt: "the ballroom at midnight" from 7spells. Table is here
When colour goes home into the eyes,
And lights that shine are shut again,
With dancing girls and sweet bird's cries
Behind the gateways of the brain
from The Treasure, Rupert Brooke
Shivered with the dark light of candles, the gilded mouldings of the walls shift like aging cherubs, draw tight their dust-dry swags of old velvet that would tear in his fist, tear so easily. There, the mark of footsteps, one one one, too slow to be sequential in the crazed dusk of the dark room. One quiet cough. He strides to the centre of the room, scattering echoes in his wake, and stops.
At the far side of the room, the boy turns to face him. Oh, the beauty of him starts up that humming in Rabastan’s blood; that sour hum that makes him clench his fists at his sides, pale scars straining over his knuckles. The boy smiles slowly. It’s horrifying. Rabastan parts his lips, swallows, and the boy tilts his head back, just a little to show that white neck of his with its flame-lit skin and its delectable hollows; walks towards him. Click of his shined shoes on the parquet: one, one, one; the dulled hush of the white doves wooing one another in the dovecote above them.
Rabastan stays where he is: knows not to move, even if he can look down at the boy and imagine his fist in the boy’s hair and boy’s face cracking against gilded moulding and the boy’s legs spread and the tight twitched trembling of the boy’s arse around his cock, even if he can smell the cleanliness of obsession on the boy and wants to spoil it, even if he’s clenching his jaw tight as if to bite down on his own want. Even if he’s broken a hundred boys like this and groaned his deep release low beneath their failing whimpers.
Like this? Not quite. The boy stops before him, long white hand like a lily lifted to Rabastan’s jaw, trailed over the stubbled snarl of his face, one finger down slow behind his ear and to the hollow of his throat. Rabastan, nostrils flaring as if to catch the scent of fear, breathes hard. He’s locked the lazy beam of his gaze to the boy’s face, that cocky grin spreading across his lips slowly, slowly. When it comes down to it he’s stupid enough to try his luck. Look at the boy. Look at him. Who wouldn’t?
The boy’s face is tight as a wet knot. He says, I’ve heard about you. Rabastan nods. He knows what the boy is saying, how really he means I’ve heard what you can do, will do. He doesn’t bother to check the swelling pride that rises in him like dough thrown onto embers, instead blinks slow and looks down, right into the boy’s eyes. The boy smiles, and quiet settles over the room like wax over water, and he remembers.
**
One finger trailed through the come that’s spilling from her even now, his fist in her hair, the stubborn heat of her mouth as he forces his finger between her lips and no, back: the slouched cold of mist against his skin as he opens the window and startles up the rooks from their roost in the bare trees opposite, scratches the back of his neck and wonders if she’ll pretend to say his brother’s name when she comes, again, and back, back: his brother and the way he smiled as he introduced her, his fiancé, his face and the look of pride that had not slipped as Rabastan grinned his slow grin, had not slipped but grown hard, brittle and back, further: the whirled motion of his energy spiked into the jutting path of his fist, its connection slowed to the soft press of knuckles against Regulus’ cheek and the way he’d spun away, made that yelping noise that said he’d not been hit before, and how that had pleased Rabastan almost as much as knowing he’d not been fucked before, either but no, no, back. There. There.
The smell of damp plaster, some cheap guesthouse where the halfbloods rent their rooms. He knows it, knows them - has been to those damp rooms where even a wand and an incantation can’t get rid of the smell of poverty. He’s been to rooms like that when the expensive whores were too elusive, and the cheap ones only too plentiful. He’s been when a whore was not enough to make him forget how the smell of blood calmed his nerves.
He knows the way blood arcs onto peeling wallpaper, and the sequence of small, intimate clicks a shoulder makes as it’s dislocated. He knows the weight to put behind the swing of a blade to bury it three inches deep in a shin. He knows - oh, he knows, how a knife blade can reveal the ribs, slice through their connective tissues and let you snap back each in turn, unfurling the torso like a crab unclenching its legs. He knows how you can make a person watch as this is done to them, with the right spells.
There. That room, the family that lived in it. He remembers it - dusk in the lilac-lit room, the table pulled to the centre of the rug, four chairs, the meagre spread, the room smelling of tea and damp and futile hope; steam still rising from the teapot; jasmine and butter and bread.
He remembers them; how, as the dusk swallowed the city one shadow at a time, only the father and one daughter were left, only those two and Rabastan and his brother. They went out like that, sometimes, went out to kill. Rabastan's trembling. His teeth are gritted and there's a spatter of blood across his face, delicate scarlet against the fine skin of his eyelid and down over his cheek. He has turned away from the girl sitting at the table to look at himself in the mirror which hangs over the fireplace. His hand is moving through the father’s hair, absently petting the shaking man like a dog; his thick, callused fingers threading through the greyish strands. His brother is perched on the edge of the table eating cherries, conjured from somewhere and tossed one by one into his mouth. Slowly, Rabastan reaches out his other hand, knife tucked under his arm forgotten for a moment, and takes the last two cherries from Rodolphus with a slight distortion of his snarl into a grin. It's brief, a superimposed image that fails soon enough as if nothing could really hide that snarl beneath, not for long.
The red skin of the cherry breaks between his teeth, sour sweet flood into his mouth, and he releases the man. He’s broken, Rabastan can see it, and there's only the girl left now, stationary as if rooted to the spot. She hasn't dared run, and it sickens Rabastan. She does not want to live, want to fight. As he wraps his fingers around her upper arm she gasps, resisting for a moment as he pulls her to her feet and shoves her onto her back on the table before her father, crockery skidding across the polished surface to smash on the floor, her hair darkening in a spreading pool of tea. Rabastan dips his finger into it before raising it to his mouth. It’s weak, bitter.
To give her some credit, what little she deserves, the girl struggles feebly as he holds her down and rips open the front of her dress, her father moaning some ceaseless dirge as accompaniment in the seat next to him. Naked, she's like some desperate furless animal, legs kicking weakly, her nails useless against his hand. He presses the last of the cherries to her lips, smears its rouge across them and hefts his knife, his gaze locked to hers. It's just the two of them, then; the slow silence that surrounds a kill, even her high-pitched wordless moaning is reduced to a bovine bellow as he presses the knife to her collarbone. She jerks at that, but his gaze pushes her back down.
There's something in it that is just for her, some dark nameless thing that is exchanged. And it makes her lie still as he moves suddenly, pushing the knife through her flesh so that he can feel the grate of her ribs against it as he drags it down her chest, through the small mound of her breast, bisecting her nipple and slipping down into the cavity of her torso before reaching her pelvis with a faint click. He's almost wrist deep by then, painted with blood, his breath loud between his teeth and the girl’s last weakly horrified moan falling on his ears. He wonders if he should finish her off or let her bleed. These concerns are his only concerns now. He has forgotten, for the moment, the man beside him sobbing uncontrollably; forgotten his brother, the halfbloods, the reason he came here, the boredom that itched at him, made him yearn for idly spilled blood. Grunting, he shoves the knife up suddenly between the girl’s legs to its hilt and leans down to look into her eyes as they slowly fail, his fingers brushing over her lips just as hers lose their grip in the front of his robe. By the time he raises his head, shaking blood from his hair as a dog would water, he's forgotten himself, and remembers only blood.
Next time, says his brother, use your damn wand.
**
You’re a simple thing, really, aren’t you? says the boy, and pats Rabastan’s cheek: once, twice. Light taps of his palm gentler than Rabastan would bestow on one of the rangy hounds he keeps for hunting. Before Rabastan can do more than snarl he’s pacing away, one hand waved through the air as he speaks, his voice quiet. No surprise. You’re machines, all of you, less than efficient but you have your rough beauty, don’t you? He turns, pins his gaze on Rabastan like a scrap of light focused through a magnifying glass. With you, it’s all compulsion. You consume, all of you: eat your way through your lives, your souls always hollowing and needing to be refilled, muffled. Sickening.
The boy’s mouth is tight as he says this, his step fast as he closes the gap between them, and the chipped faces of the cherubs on the wall watch silent and Rabastan still does not move. The only difference is, since the boy patted his cheek, he knows he will, sooner or later. The snarl is still on his face, breath hissing just slightly between his teeth. The boy reaches up, wraps his long pale fingers around a handful of Rabastan’s robes, and yanks him down to bring his ear level with his mouth.
You’re different though, aren’t you? he breathes. Rabastan says nothing. He shuts his eyes and shakes his head just slightly at the boy’s gall. You consume, you’re like them there, but you’re no machine. You’re an animal, aren’t you? His chuckle echoes through the room, breath stirring Rabastan’s hair. A beast, a fucking creature. You feed on death like a rabid dog, don’t you, proud of it even, proud of how you can look into their eyes and feel fulfilled as the light goes out of them, when colour goes home into the eyes. You find your succour in negation. You - and he pauses once more, stroking his hand over Rabastan’s cheek and letting his perfect lips curve upwards into a small smile - are an eater of the dead.
Rabastan finds he is panting, the boy’s nearness, the boy’s perfect, unnerving beauty hitting the side of his face like light through a window. He says, Whatever the fuck you’re on about, you’ve lost me.
The boy smiles. No, he says. On the contrary.
**
He wakes to a cold room, cold rough sheets against his damp skin, and sits up with a groan. There’s a long moment of stretching silence, the ached press of his palms against his closed eyes, and the draught from the window making his skin wake faster than his mind. When he opens it, rooks startle up from the trees opposite; rise cackling into the air and scratch their black shapes across the grey sky. It’s foggy. The parkland surrounding the manor is blanked out, nearly, and indistinct beneath shifting layers of obscurity. He stands naked at the window, rubbing a hand over his face, and wondering if, when his brother’s wife visits him later, as he is sure she will, she will gasp her husband’s name as she comes, just to look him in the eye and smile her vicious little smile.
It’s a game they play, a point scored with each blood wound opened not in skin (though there are plenty of those) but in the spirit. He hates her. It’s as good a reason as any to fuck her, to make her beg, to ruin her slowly with his touch each day like the slow and certain erosion of the sea against cold granite. He does not ask why she comes to him. And if he thinks, sometimes, that he must serve some purpose to her also, then he chooses to believe that is it merely his cock that she cannot resist. He’s said as much to her, taunting her with his slow sneer and the white-light slip of his knife down between her breasts, laughing at her snarled repudiations.
Once, when she was reeling and blurred with the thrummed thunder of his fists and blood spilled, she said, he can’t give me a child, you stupid fucking bastard, what did you think, what did you… Then his hands tightened on her hips as he thrust into her once more, and her mouth was muffled against the mattress.
Leaving the window open, he scuffs his heels across the fading carpet as he dresses - carelessly, half-drunk still with sleep and the sinuous loom of a hangover held back with potions. In the mirror his reflection stares back at him as he does up his shirt, dark eyes shadowed and unflinching, only his fingers moving, fumbling slightly with the buttons. Afterwards he presses one finger to the cold glass, one finger against his reflection’s lips, and smiles.
**
She arrives at four, when already the light is dimming and the house elves have lit the fires. By then he’s slouched across the distressed and greying leather of a couch downstairs, tumbler resting on his stomach and his boot-soles hot from the fire. She says, breaking the hissed silence of firelight, you disgust me.
Rabastan snorts, raising his glass to his lips. And I like you better when you keep your fucking mouth shut, but we can’t have everything love, can we? He ignores her whisper (such wit) and hooks his foot around the leg of a chair, pushing it opposite his own and nodding towards it. When she settles, the crunch of her raw silk robe is like the sound of snow beneath a boot.
I’ve a friend I’d like you to meet, she says.
Rabastan grimaces. His brother and Bellatrix have done this before. I won’t marry your fucking sister he snaps. Either of them. The blonde one’s like a fucking twig, and she cried on me last time. Bellatrix raises her perfectly arched eyebrow as she regards him. Or your fucking friend either, he adds, his lips twisting into a smirk.
Bella taps her short dark fingernails on the carved walnut arm of her chair. With satisfaction, he sees the polish is chipped and imagines it happened as she scratched her nails down his back the night before. Lifting his arms and resting them along the back of the sofa, he hooks his foot beneath her chair and pulls it closer, until her knees are resting between his own. She ignores the movement, leans forward and says quietly, no no, it’s nothing like that, my darling brother.
Her nail makes a sound like a door opening as it scratches down the ridge his cock makes inside his trousers, and he catches her wrist, her white skin reddening in his grip, and tightens his hand until her feels her bones grind together. Bellatrix only smiles demurely. It’s what you want, isn’t it?, she murmurs, it’s what you always want.
He raises one shoulder, presses her hand hard against his cock. You’ve nothing else to give, he hisses, half-breathless with the way she hovers over him, the way she laughs, the way she looks into his eyes and makes him know that he is wrong.
He’ll come tonight, she says, and her red lips part and her hand wraps slowly and precisely around his cock and her hair brushes his stomach as she bows her lovely head.
**
The ballroom might as well be a canyon, a dark pit where beasts circled each other or where light filtered slow through a night time ocean to its shadow-drifted bed. The boy says, I told you earlier, Rabastan, that you could call me Tom.
It’s that, if anything, that makes him think perhaps the boy is right: perhaps he is lost, perhaps he has been lost for a long time - or maybe, maybe he has finally been found. He nods, shrugs one big shoulder and sniffs unconcernedly. Alright, he mutters. Ignoring the boy’s white-fingered grip in his robe he straightens; can’t stand the wash of warm breath between the boy’s lips and onto his ear any longer.
The boy smiles, murmurs, what do you want, Rabastan?
I know what you want he says, taking his chance and stepping back. He half expects the boy’s grip to keep him there, but it falls away easily. You want me to kill for you. Simple enough, I don’t - Pausing, he grins; shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I don’t know why you wanted to fuck about with midnight meetings and all this bollocks. Unless -
When it comes down to it, he’s stupid enough to try his luck.
His fingers spoil that perfect hair, tighten cruelly to yank back the boy’s head and bring their gazes together. Their footsteps syncopate as he pushes the boy back against the wall. Syncopated footsteps; their breath and its echoes and otherwise, silence. Rabastan feels the air go out of the boy as he’s shoved backwards, his chest against the boy’s as he pins him there, his hand tight around the luxury of that dark hair and his foot unceremoniously kicking apart the boy’s well-shined shoes. But the boy doesn’t resist. Instead, he laughs.
What are you going to do, Lestrange? he says, perfect lips twisting into a tight smirk. Try and fuck me?
Nope, says Rabastan, showing his teeth. I’m going to succeed.
That’s when it hits him, one long scream of thought that bursts into being inside his head: chaotic, white with colours, agonising. And shot through it is the boy’s voice, the feel of hair in his fist, the boy’s voice and his body and its weight against his own as if the boy is pressing against him just as he’s pressing against the boy. Rabastan grits his teeth and holds on tighter, staring down at the boy; sneering, snarling, trembling.
**
Young. His brother and his brother’s quick smile and his brother’s quick fingers. Their nanny and how she cried so quietly their nanny and how when he was thirteen he ripped her dress and she slapped him and he liked that, in a way. The red spill of the deer as his father brought it to the ground, his father’s hunting knife and how he cut off the head and the balls before he dragged it to the edge of the clearing and how it left a pink smear on the snow and how he’d scooped up a handful to taste blood on the snow, how it had melted on his tongue. How it was good.
(the boy’s small smile the boy’s eye on him the boy saying call me Tom)
It was good and at school how the hat had said I’m not sure, you haven’t the ambition and he’d said I don’t fucking need it, I’m a Lestrange and his mother, her eye, the softness of her jaw and the darkness of her hair that curled like his, her frown and the way she said now, her frown and the way she brought her palm down slicing to the back of his head and said foul thing when he hit his brother or swore at the dinner table and how it made them both laugh though they had to do it silently, without showing it; his mother, her eye and the way soon she could not reach to slap the back of his head and stayed silent and turned in on herself and sat looking into the mirror for days of silence and how her eyes turned bruise maroon and how sometimes her hands shook and she said madness always ran in the family, boy, don’t let it get you, don’t -
(the boy watching him the boy’s face opening slowly as if in surprise as if in pleasure as if as if he means not to fight but the light in Rabastan’s head is scalding is a lever is a crowbar)
don’t let it take you too and his mother, her eyes and how they closed, her eyes and how she looked at him when her silence began to grate and he said stupid bitch when really he meant it won’t, I won’t and how he said stupid fucking bitch when her silence was thick as dust over everything and his father had begun to train them both to hunt. How he was sixteen before he realised it had taken his brother already.
**
Afterwards Bella wipes the semen from her inner thigh with his shirt and sits back, her lips swollen slightly and her dress askew, saying, Rabastan, Rabastan, Rabastan slowly: affectionate, condescending. He’s not interested in post-coital pleasantries, so he stands and makes himself another drink, summons a fresh shirt from upstairs, and when he turns back once more she’s immaculate and distant as she ever gets, that distance that pretends to be closeness and is all the more cold for it.
They watch each other in silence until Rodolphus arrives, striding in shaking snow from his hair and blocking the heat of the fire to warm his velvet robe. Its touch of sable fur against his jaw is a moment of softness that Rabastan hates him for; looks away from as Rodolphus tucks his fine brown hair behind his ear. He has always shown his softness as if it will not make him weak. It makes Rabastan want to take him by the hair and cut off his long silk cuffs and his mother-of-pearl buttons and his lips and their richness and their easy way with words.
Are you listening? repeats Rodolphus, his brow creased. He’s warming his back in front of the fire, one elbow resting on the mantel, like he did when he lived here too, before he was married, before Bella came along and before their father died.
Yeah says Rabastan, scowling at the far wall for a moment before meeting his brother’s gaze. Some bloke father knew at school is coming round to talk and no doubt we’ll all waste a lot less fucking time if I pretend I give a shit. On his feet, he steps up to Rodolphus, lowering his head slightly to level his lips with his brother’s ear. We’ve already gone through this, yeah? I know about it, I said yes: I’m bored as fuck already, it can only be something to do. I mean, fuck, why doesn’t -
Rodolphus has always been faster than him, has his long thin fingers wrapped around his wrist and is hissing quietly against his ear, because that isn’t how it works. Rabastan sighs, yanks his arm free, and shrugs. This is how it will be, then: him waiting up in the dark for some bloke he’s never met and not getting drunk, because this is important. Some part of him knows just how important this is, can see it in the set of his brother’s shoulders, the crease that shades the aquiline bridge of his nose. He says, yes, alright, and looks into his brother’s eyes. Rodolphus nods slowly and cuts across his wife as she opens her mouth.
No, he says, glancing over his shoulder at her, I’ll stay. Go home, Bella. Or better yet to your sister’s, I’ll see you there later. Please?
The set of her jaw is haughty as she stands, tossing the dark wave of her hair over her shoulder in a movement that seems half parody of herself and which makes him want to laugh. Of course, he doesn’t, for fear of hexes. I shall go out, she says, meeting her husband’s gaze, and during the silence that follows Rabastan wills his brother to deny her this, to tell her no, but he does not: only smiles slightly and inclines his head and looks at her as if this impudence is a charming by-product of her nature and not some terminal stubbornness that shames him in front of his brother, his blood.
Once, as they lay side by side, letting the air chill between them, Bellatrix had said,I hurt him, you know, just like you hurt me. He likes it. He had risen angrily from the bed and stepped hurriedly into his trousers, keeping his back to her and turning his grimace to the window and the damp grey landscape beyond, denying the lurch of sudden nausea that rose in him. And later when he fucked her again, he ground her cheek against the rough stone wall until it bled, took her by the hair and hit her until she laughed vaguely and drooled blood onto the floor, her mouth a crazy gash across her face. Eventually, she had drawn her wand on him and gasped out stop, stop, half a loose smile on her face and her wand drooping in her hand and slippery with blood.
Since that day his closeness with his brother had fallen away. They had never been close like other brothers were: to them their fealty, their affection, such as it was, was an understanding. A deal drawn up long enough ago that neither of them could remember it. He was grateful to Rodolphus, and could never forget it: Rabastan had been spared the inconveniences of heirdom and everything that came with it. Their father had never paid such close attention to his mistakes, had never drilled into him the lessons he knew Rodolphus could repeat by heart. He revelled in his lack of status in the house - after all, even the second son of the Lestrange family was a damn sight more important than the first of most others. His arrogance, his laziness, his decadent cruelties were allowed to grow unchecked.
And now here they sat in the fading echo of Bellatrix’s receding footsteps, in the sprawling manor they had grown up in, in the shifting dim space of candle light and the scent of sex, watching each other. He should feel uneasy, ashamed, but he doesn’t. They have their own games, founded long before marriage was ever spoken of. Rodolphus takes a silver case from the inside pocket of his robes and taps a thin cigarette against it, his movements languid. So, he says, looking as if he’s about to smile but never quite doing so. So, the time’s come, little brother. Aren’t you proud to be finally let into the secret? Aren’t you proud the time has finally come? I’m proud, Rabastan. His sharp teeth, a flame sprung from his gently stroked finger and thumb.
Rabastan says nothing. The silver case snaps shut. I’ve been talking about this to him for a long time, you know. I told him, my brother is very talented. Talented. A first for everything, hm? I told him and Bella told him and he knows what you are, little brother.
Could shut you up quick enough, skinny fucker, he mutters. Rodolphus smiles. It’s almost affectionate. His quick smile through the cloud of lilac smoke, his toe tapping against the leg of Rabastan’s chair, the glimmer of his mother-of-pearl buttons and his slate grey velvet tunic - all of him - hollows itself a neat space in the house again so quickly that Rabastan could almost imagine he never left. He could almost imagine, too, that it’s his father looking at him so steadily, eyes narrowed.
Embers collapse in the grate. Rodolphus says, was she good, today?
Yes, he answers, voice half-hoarse and low. I fucked her mouth and I fucked her cunt. I like her mouth better, though, I like the look she gets in her eyes. I like telling her to take it like a slut and I like it when she chokes.
Rodolphus is silent, nodding his head once and blowing smoke up towards the ceiling. Rabastan wants to say I fucking win, Rodolphus, he wants to take his brother by the scruff of the neck and punch his pretty face until it swells and the skin softens, wants to yell until his lungs ache I win. But Rodolphus is so still, so quiet and so knowing, that he lets his vicious smile talk for him. His brother lets out a breath, quickly exhaled through his nose, as if something is funny.
The clock on the mantle sounds its midnight chime.
**
His breath against Tom’s cheek. The boy isn’t moving now, not straining against him nor struggling nor pressing back against the wall as if he wants to escape. Neither of them say anything, but Rabastan gradually becomes aware that his grip in Tom’s robe and in Tom’s hair has strengthened, and it takes a moment for him to stop gritting his teeth. Sometimes as a child in the old dark house he would see shadows that moved wrong as he walked, that blurred themselves too easily, perhaps, and now he feels as if there is one lurking not just out of sight but inside his head, languid and velvet and heavy, but ready to change at any moment and shake off its dark mantle to reveal that bright light once more. He knows it is the boy, knows the boy is in his head. His skin crawls.
Tom says Really, Rabastan, do you miss your mother? How sweet. He doesn’t laugh, just rests one hand on Rabastan’s chest. How did she die? At least he asks, doesn’t pry it out himself.
Rabastan snorts. You think she’s dead? Stupid bitch went mad, I locked her in the south wing with her fucking decrepit house elf. Like something Rodolphus would... like something out of a book he’d… he’d read. He has to concentrate so hard to feel for the right words, to string them together correctly.
Mmm. Tom nods, shifts against him slightly and gives a little smile and fuck but he’s hard again, his cock jammed up against the boy’s hip and the dark thing that is Tom in his head shifts too, makes him shudder, brief and sudden. He looks down at the boy held fast against the wall, how he’s pinned there but not resisting, and his lips part slowly. When he presses them to Tom’s jaw, his heart thuds itself into a quick, awkward rhythm. When he lets his teeth press there, scraping along the skin harshly, biting down slowly, Tom’s palm against his chest slips upwards just a little, so that his fingers rest along Rabastan’s collarbone. He lets out a quiet noise, half gasp and half grunt, lets his tongue press to the gap of Tom’s skin between his teeth and licks along his jaw: only the slightest hint of stubble, the sharp tang of soap that is unnerving for being so real when he half expected the boy to taste of blood and incense and darkness.
His fingers tighten in Tom’s hair further still, and he fancies - can see it even with his eyes shut - the boy winces a little, with his head pulled so far back and Rabastan’s teeth digging into the flesh of his jaw that skims so tight over bone. Certainly his fingertips press harder against his collarbone, and as he shoves his thigh between Tom’s legs and grinds the arrogant hardness of his cock against the boy’s hip, Tom’s breathing quickens. He lets his smile slide across the skin of Tom’s neck before lifting his head to look down into the boy’s eyes, the boy’s clever, sharp, terrible eyes. The thing in his head stretches and before it can move, he takes Tom by the back of the neck and shoves him to the floor, shaking, dropping on top of him and grinding their hips together, tearing at the dark fabric of the boy’s robes and digging his fingers into any softness he can find to bruise that perfect skin.
There’s a moment when he thinks the boy with just lie there, that he’ll be able to roll him onto his stomach and fuck him rough and hard and bloody until he’s spent. One moment, no more, before he jerks his hips against Tom’s once more and finds another hardness there. Tom’s fingers are articulate as they curl around his chin and pull his head up. He smiles as he looks into Rabastan’s eyes, if you could call it a smile. Then the dark warmth of his mouth as he brings their parted lips together; the lurch of darkness as he spreads his grip into Rabastan’s mind.
Vertigo spirals above him into a sudden thick darkness of clouded sky where the ceiling should be. He clenches his eyes shut against the tug of sickness but the ballroom and its fading plaster bloom with sudden taint, are becoming something different, something other, and the dull parquet beneath his hands is softening to beaten earth and the boy’s mouth beneath his own is sour as acid and warm and sharp with teeth. He thrusts his tongue between them and lets loose a groan from deep in his throat, shoves the boy’s robes up to reveal the white skin of his chest. The boy’s mouth beneath his own is sour as acid and warm and sharp with teeth. He fumbles his fly open. A moment later his cock jars against Tom’s and Tom laughs and there’s a noise like the sky ripping that makes his stomach lurch.
They taste each other until sickness rouses their hearts to quicken their beats. The room becomes a pit, a mouth into the hill’s hard throat, and rain begins to fall, heavy with the sky’s slate grey. Rabastan does not understand, so he does not ask. His fingers dig into the black earth as he grinds his hips over Tom’s, smears of it washing from the boy’s cheek as he tips back his head and slowly, slowly arches his hips so that their cocks slide together. The air stinks of magic. Tom says quietly like machines, like animals, and reaches between them to wrap those clever fingers of his around Rabastan’s cock, stroking it, cupping his balls. Rabastan bites down on his cheek and grinds his teeth until he tastes blood and thrusts into the boy’s hand, and what can he do, what can he do but grit his teeth and shove apart the boy’s legs?
Open your eyes, says Tom. He opens his eyes: Tom’s face against black earth, Tom’s sharp smile, Tom’s lips in their nasty little smirk, the ache of the boy’s beauty spilling into him thunderous and inexplicable and terrifying. Tom’s smirk twists. He hisses like a cornered snake, power snapped through him whipcord fast and slitting the belly of the air surrounding them: the words foreign even to the darkness that runs in Rabastan’s blood; some half-forgotten incantation that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Then a pause. A silent detonation in the boy translates itself into reality. Even his vision shakes.
**
full of earth the air’s
ash in his mouth the sour taste of sweat, little pockets of darkness hazed through his vision look away look downlookawaylookawaylookawa yloo k
Tom rests one finger on his cheek Tom touches him Tom says open your eyes he closes his fist in Tom’s hair
ripping cloth the scent of his body his palms scraped raw pockets of black earth beneath the skin pockets ofbla ck be neaththe sk in Tom Tom traces one finger down the inside of his arm pockets of
rasp of his breath
hot stones raining down on them, hissing against his back
rasp of his breath gasped almost into a sob sounding against the smooth skin of Tom’s shoulder and oh
he pushes
he pushes apart the boy’s legs, rocking forward once so that the head of his cock presses firm behind his balls, before gripping the boy’s shoulder and thrusting into him: one smooth movement that makes the boy keen low and arch his back, arch his whole body against him. One moment of silence, one
Tom slips his arms around him, quiet and enveloping as
pockets of black beneath the skin Tom traces one finger down the inside of his arm pockets of black beneath spreading like ink spreading spreading
Tom slips his arms around him, quiet and welcoming. There, that scent. Jasmine and butter and bread.
Tom laughs.
**
In the breakfast room Rodolphus runs one finger along the polished wood of the old chiffonier that his mother had brought stuffed with bolts of silk as part of her dowry. He is smiling to himself as he removes the silver case from his pocket once more, taps one of his short, thin cigarettes absent-mindedly. The house is quiet, dark.
He is wondering, as he lights his cigarette and plucks a strand of stray tobacco from his bottom lip, exactly what is going on in the old ballroom. He could go and look, of course, but he knows his lord well; knows he would see nothing. He will wait until his brother comes out, just in case. Every initiation is different, he has heard. But of course, he knows only of his own.
Author: spessartine
Pairing: Rabastan Lestrange/Tom Riddle, Rabastan/Bellatrix
Rating: Hard R
Warning: Graphic violence, apocalyptic sex. Huzzah!
Prompt: "the ballroom at midnight" from 7spells. Table is here
When colour goes home into the eyes,
And lights that shine are shut again,
With dancing girls and sweet bird's cries
Behind the gateways of the brain
from The Treasure, Rupert Brooke
Shivered with the dark light of candles, the gilded mouldings of the walls shift like aging cherubs, draw tight their dust-dry swags of old velvet that would tear in his fist, tear so easily. There, the mark of footsteps, one one one, too slow to be sequential in the crazed dusk of the dark room. One quiet cough. He strides to the centre of the room, scattering echoes in his wake, and stops.
At the far side of the room, the boy turns to face him. Oh, the beauty of him starts up that humming in Rabastan’s blood; that sour hum that makes him clench his fists at his sides, pale scars straining over his knuckles. The boy smiles slowly. It’s horrifying. Rabastan parts his lips, swallows, and the boy tilts his head back, just a little to show that white neck of his with its flame-lit skin and its delectable hollows; walks towards him. Click of his shined shoes on the parquet: one, one, one; the dulled hush of the white doves wooing one another in the dovecote above them.
Rabastan stays where he is: knows not to move, even if he can look down at the boy and imagine his fist in the boy’s hair and boy’s face cracking against gilded moulding and the boy’s legs spread and the tight twitched trembling of the boy’s arse around his cock, even if he can smell the cleanliness of obsession on the boy and wants to spoil it, even if he’s clenching his jaw tight as if to bite down on his own want. Even if he’s broken a hundred boys like this and groaned his deep release low beneath their failing whimpers.
Like this? Not quite. The boy stops before him, long white hand like a lily lifted to Rabastan’s jaw, trailed over the stubbled snarl of his face, one finger down slow behind his ear and to the hollow of his throat. Rabastan, nostrils flaring as if to catch the scent of fear, breathes hard. He’s locked the lazy beam of his gaze to the boy’s face, that cocky grin spreading across his lips slowly, slowly. When it comes down to it he’s stupid enough to try his luck. Look at the boy. Look at him. Who wouldn’t?
The boy’s face is tight as a wet knot. He says, I’ve heard about you. Rabastan nods. He knows what the boy is saying, how really he means I’ve heard what you can do, will do. He doesn’t bother to check the swelling pride that rises in him like dough thrown onto embers, instead blinks slow and looks down, right into the boy’s eyes. The boy smiles, and quiet settles over the room like wax over water, and he remembers.
**
One finger trailed through the come that’s spilling from her even now, his fist in her hair, the stubborn heat of her mouth as he forces his finger between her lips and no, back: the slouched cold of mist against his skin as he opens the window and startles up the rooks from their roost in the bare trees opposite, scratches the back of his neck and wonders if she’ll pretend to say his brother’s name when she comes, again, and back, back: his brother and the way he smiled as he introduced her, his fiancé, his face and the look of pride that had not slipped as Rabastan grinned his slow grin, had not slipped but grown hard, brittle and back, further: the whirled motion of his energy spiked into the jutting path of his fist, its connection slowed to the soft press of knuckles against Regulus’ cheek and the way he’d spun away, made that yelping noise that said he’d not been hit before, and how that had pleased Rabastan almost as much as knowing he’d not been fucked before, either but no, no, back. There. There.
The smell of damp plaster, some cheap guesthouse where the halfbloods rent their rooms. He knows it, knows them - has been to those damp rooms where even a wand and an incantation can’t get rid of the smell of poverty. He’s been to rooms like that when the expensive whores were too elusive, and the cheap ones only too plentiful. He’s been when a whore was not enough to make him forget how the smell of blood calmed his nerves.
He knows the way blood arcs onto peeling wallpaper, and the sequence of small, intimate clicks a shoulder makes as it’s dislocated. He knows the weight to put behind the swing of a blade to bury it three inches deep in a shin. He knows - oh, he knows, how a knife blade can reveal the ribs, slice through their connective tissues and let you snap back each in turn, unfurling the torso like a crab unclenching its legs. He knows how you can make a person watch as this is done to them, with the right spells.
There. That room, the family that lived in it. He remembers it - dusk in the lilac-lit room, the table pulled to the centre of the rug, four chairs, the meagre spread, the room smelling of tea and damp and futile hope; steam still rising from the teapot; jasmine and butter and bread.
He remembers them; how, as the dusk swallowed the city one shadow at a time, only the father and one daughter were left, only those two and Rabastan and his brother. They went out like that, sometimes, went out to kill. Rabastan's trembling. His teeth are gritted and there's a spatter of blood across his face, delicate scarlet against the fine skin of his eyelid and down over his cheek. He has turned away from the girl sitting at the table to look at himself in the mirror which hangs over the fireplace. His hand is moving through the father’s hair, absently petting the shaking man like a dog; his thick, callused fingers threading through the greyish strands. His brother is perched on the edge of the table eating cherries, conjured from somewhere and tossed one by one into his mouth. Slowly, Rabastan reaches out his other hand, knife tucked under his arm forgotten for a moment, and takes the last two cherries from Rodolphus with a slight distortion of his snarl into a grin. It's brief, a superimposed image that fails soon enough as if nothing could really hide that snarl beneath, not for long.
The red skin of the cherry breaks between his teeth, sour sweet flood into his mouth, and he releases the man. He’s broken, Rabastan can see it, and there's only the girl left now, stationary as if rooted to the spot. She hasn't dared run, and it sickens Rabastan. She does not want to live, want to fight. As he wraps his fingers around her upper arm she gasps, resisting for a moment as he pulls her to her feet and shoves her onto her back on the table before her father, crockery skidding across the polished surface to smash on the floor, her hair darkening in a spreading pool of tea. Rabastan dips his finger into it before raising it to his mouth. It’s weak, bitter.
To give her some credit, what little she deserves, the girl struggles feebly as he holds her down and rips open the front of her dress, her father moaning some ceaseless dirge as accompaniment in the seat next to him. Naked, she's like some desperate furless animal, legs kicking weakly, her nails useless against his hand. He presses the last of the cherries to her lips, smears its rouge across them and hefts his knife, his gaze locked to hers. It's just the two of them, then; the slow silence that surrounds a kill, even her high-pitched wordless moaning is reduced to a bovine bellow as he presses the knife to her collarbone. She jerks at that, but his gaze pushes her back down.
There's something in it that is just for her, some dark nameless thing that is exchanged. And it makes her lie still as he moves suddenly, pushing the knife through her flesh so that he can feel the grate of her ribs against it as he drags it down her chest, through the small mound of her breast, bisecting her nipple and slipping down into the cavity of her torso before reaching her pelvis with a faint click. He's almost wrist deep by then, painted with blood, his breath loud between his teeth and the girl’s last weakly horrified moan falling on his ears. He wonders if he should finish her off or let her bleed. These concerns are his only concerns now. He has forgotten, for the moment, the man beside him sobbing uncontrollably; forgotten his brother, the halfbloods, the reason he came here, the boredom that itched at him, made him yearn for idly spilled blood. Grunting, he shoves the knife up suddenly between the girl’s legs to its hilt and leans down to look into her eyes as they slowly fail, his fingers brushing over her lips just as hers lose their grip in the front of his robe. By the time he raises his head, shaking blood from his hair as a dog would water, he's forgotten himself, and remembers only blood.
Next time, says his brother, use your damn wand.
**
You’re a simple thing, really, aren’t you? says the boy, and pats Rabastan’s cheek: once, twice. Light taps of his palm gentler than Rabastan would bestow on one of the rangy hounds he keeps for hunting. Before Rabastan can do more than snarl he’s pacing away, one hand waved through the air as he speaks, his voice quiet. No surprise. You’re machines, all of you, less than efficient but you have your rough beauty, don’t you? He turns, pins his gaze on Rabastan like a scrap of light focused through a magnifying glass. With you, it’s all compulsion. You consume, all of you: eat your way through your lives, your souls always hollowing and needing to be refilled, muffled. Sickening.
The boy’s mouth is tight as he says this, his step fast as he closes the gap between them, and the chipped faces of the cherubs on the wall watch silent and Rabastan still does not move. The only difference is, since the boy patted his cheek, he knows he will, sooner or later. The snarl is still on his face, breath hissing just slightly between his teeth. The boy reaches up, wraps his long pale fingers around a handful of Rabastan’s robes, and yanks him down to bring his ear level with his mouth.
You’re different though, aren’t you? he breathes. Rabastan says nothing. He shuts his eyes and shakes his head just slightly at the boy’s gall. You consume, you’re like them there, but you’re no machine. You’re an animal, aren’t you? His chuckle echoes through the room, breath stirring Rabastan’s hair. A beast, a fucking creature. You feed on death like a rabid dog, don’t you, proud of it even, proud of how you can look into their eyes and feel fulfilled as the light goes out of them, when colour goes home into the eyes. You find your succour in negation. You - and he pauses once more, stroking his hand over Rabastan’s cheek and letting his perfect lips curve upwards into a small smile - are an eater of the dead.
Rabastan finds he is panting, the boy’s nearness, the boy’s perfect, unnerving beauty hitting the side of his face like light through a window. He says, Whatever the fuck you’re on about, you’ve lost me.
The boy smiles. No, he says. On the contrary.
**
He wakes to a cold room, cold rough sheets against his damp skin, and sits up with a groan. There’s a long moment of stretching silence, the ached press of his palms against his closed eyes, and the draught from the window making his skin wake faster than his mind. When he opens it, rooks startle up from the trees opposite; rise cackling into the air and scratch their black shapes across the grey sky. It’s foggy. The parkland surrounding the manor is blanked out, nearly, and indistinct beneath shifting layers of obscurity. He stands naked at the window, rubbing a hand over his face, and wondering if, when his brother’s wife visits him later, as he is sure she will, she will gasp her husband’s name as she comes, just to look him in the eye and smile her vicious little smile.
It’s a game they play, a point scored with each blood wound opened not in skin (though there are plenty of those) but in the spirit. He hates her. It’s as good a reason as any to fuck her, to make her beg, to ruin her slowly with his touch each day like the slow and certain erosion of the sea against cold granite. He does not ask why she comes to him. And if he thinks, sometimes, that he must serve some purpose to her also, then he chooses to believe that is it merely his cock that she cannot resist. He’s said as much to her, taunting her with his slow sneer and the white-light slip of his knife down between her breasts, laughing at her snarled repudiations.
Once, when she was reeling and blurred with the thrummed thunder of his fists and blood spilled, she said, he can’t give me a child, you stupid fucking bastard, what did you think, what did you… Then his hands tightened on her hips as he thrust into her once more, and her mouth was muffled against the mattress.
Leaving the window open, he scuffs his heels across the fading carpet as he dresses - carelessly, half-drunk still with sleep and the sinuous loom of a hangover held back with potions. In the mirror his reflection stares back at him as he does up his shirt, dark eyes shadowed and unflinching, only his fingers moving, fumbling slightly with the buttons. Afterwards he presses one finger to the cold glass, one finger against his reflection’s lips, and smiles.
**
She arrives at four, when already the light is dimming and the house elves have lit the fires. By then he’s slouched across the distressed and greying leather of a couch downstairs, tumbler resting on his stomach and his boot-soles hot from the fire. She says, breaking the hissed silence of firelight, you disgust me.
Rabastan snorts, raising his glass to his lips. And I like you better when you keep your fucking mouth shut, but we can’t have everything love, can we? He ignores her whisper (such wit) and hooks his foot around the leg of a chair, pushing it opposite his own and nodding towards it. When she settles, the crunch of her raw silk robe is like the sound of snow beneath a boot.
I’ve a friend I’d like you to meet, she says.
Rabastan grimaces. His brother and Bellatrix have done this before. I won’t marry your fucking sister he snaps. Either of them. The blonde one’s like a fucking twig, and she cried on me last time. Bellatrix raises her perfectly arched eyebrow as she regards him. Or your fucking friend either, he adds, his lips twisting into a smirk.
Bella taps her short dark fingernails on the carved walnut arm of her chair. With satisfaction, he sees the polish is chipped and imagines it happened as she scratched her nails down his back the night before. Lifting his arms and resting them along the back of the sofa, he hooks his foot beneath her chair and pulls it closer, until her knees are resting between his own. She ignores the movement, leans forward and says quietly, no no, it’s nothing like that, my darling brother.
Her nail makes a sound like a door opening as it scratches down the ridge his cock makes inside his trousers, and he catches her wrist, her white skin reddening in his grip, and tightens his hand until her feels her bones grind together. Bellatrix only smiles demurely. It’s what you want, isn’t it?, she murmurs, it’s what you always want.
He raises one shoulder, presses her hand hard against his cock. You’ve nothing else to give, he hisses, half-breathless with the way she hovers over him, the way she laughs, the way she looks into his eyes and makes him know that he is wrong.
He’ll come tonight, she says, and her red lips part and her hand wraps slowly and precisely around his cock and her hair brushes his stomach as she bows her lovely head.
**
The ballroom might as well be a canyon, a dark pit where beasts circled each other or where light filtered slow through a night time ocean to its shadow-drifted bed. The boy says, I told you earlier, Rabastan, that you could call me Tom.
It’s that, if anything, that makes him think perhaps the boy is right: perhaps he is lost, perhaps he has been lost for a long time - or maybe, maybe he has finally been found. He nods, shrugs one big shoulder and sniffs unconcernedly. Alright, he mutters. Ignoring the boy’s white-fingered grip in his robe he straightens; can’t stand the wash of warm breath between the boy’s lips and onto his ear any longer.
The boy smiles, murmurs, what do you want, Rabastan?
I know what you want he says, taking his chance and stepping back. He half expects the boy’s grip to keep him there, but it falls away easily. You want me to kill for you. Simple enough, I don’t - Pausing, he grins; shifts his weight from one foot to the other. I don’t know why you wanted to fuck about with midnight meetings and all this bollocks. Unless -
When it comes down to it, he’s stupid enough to try his luck.
His fingers spoil that perfect hair, tighten cruelly to yank back the boy’s head and bring their gazes together. Their footsteps syncopate as he pushes the boy back against the wall. Syncopated footsteps; their breath and its echoes and otherwise, silence. Rabastan feels the air go out of the boy as he’s shoved backwards, his chest against the boy’s as he pins him there, his hand tight around the luxury of that dark hair and his foot unceremoniously kicking apart the boy’s well-shined shoes. But the boy doesn’t resist. Instead, he laughs.
What are you going to do, Lestrange? he says, perfect lips twisting into a tight smirk. Try and fuck me?
Nope, says Rabastan, showing his teeth. I’m going to succeed.
That’s when it hits him, one long scream of thought that bursts into being inside his head: chaotic, white with colours, agonising. And shot through it is the boy’s voice, the feel of hair in his fist, the boy’s voice and his body and its weight against his own as if the boy is pressing against him just as he’s pressing against the boy. Rabastan grits his teeth and holds on tighter, staring down at the boy; sneering, snarling, trembling.
**
Young. His brother and his brother’s quick smile and his brother’s quick fingers. Their nanny and how she cried so quietly their nanny and how when he was thirteen he ripped her dress and she slapped him and he liked that, in a way. The red spill of the deer as his father brought it to the ground, his father’s hunting knife and how he cut off the head and the balls before he dragged it to the edge of the clearing and how it left a pink smear on the snow and how he’d scooped up a handful to taste blood on the snow, how it had melted on his tongue. How it was good.
(the boy’s small smile the boy’s eye on him the boy saying call me Tom)
It was good and at school how the hat had said I’m not sure, you haven’t the ambition and he’d said I don’t fucking need it, I’m a Lestrange and his mother, her eye, the softness of her jaw and the darkness of her hair that curled like his, her frown and the way she said now, her frown and the way she brought her palm down slicing to the back of his head and said foul thing when he hit his brother or swore at the dinner table and how it made them both laugh though they had to do it silently, without showing it; his mother, her eye and the way soon she could not reach to slap the back of his head and stayed silent and turned in on herself and sat looking into the mirror for days of silence and how her eyes turned bruise maroon and how sometimes her hands shook and she said madness always ran in the family, boy, don’t let it get you, don’t -
(the boy watching him the boy’s face opening slowly as if in surprise as if in pleasure as if as if he means not to fight but the light in Rabastan’s head is scalding is a lever is a crowbar)
don’t let it take you too and his mother, her eyes and how they closed, her eyes and how she looked at him when her silence began to grate and he said stupid bitch when really he meant it won’t, I won’t and how he said stupid fucking bitch when her silence was thick as dust over everything and his father had begun to train them both to hunt. How he was sixteen before he realised it had taken his brother already.
**
Afterwards Bella wipes the semen from her inner thigh with his shirt and sits back, her lips swollen slightly and her dress askew, saying, Rabastan, Rabastan, Rabastan slowly: affectionate, condescending. He’s not interested in post-coital pleasantries, so he stands and makes himself another drink, summons a fresh shirt from upstairs, and when he turns back once more she’s immaculate and distant as she ever gets, that distance that pretends to be closeness and is all the more cold for it.
They watch each other in silence until Rodolphus arrives, striding in shaking snow from his hair and blocking the heat of the fire to warm his velvet robe. Its touch of sable fur against his jaw is a moment of softness that Rabastan hates him for; looks away from as Rodolphus tucks his fine brown hair behind his ear. He has always shown his softness as if it will not make him weak. It makes Rabastan want to take him by the hair and cut off his long silk cuffs and his mother-of-pearl buttons and his lips and their richness and their easy way with words.
Are you listening? repeats Rodolphus, his brow creased. He’s warming his back in front of the fire, one elbow resting on the mantel, like he did when he lived here too, before he was married, before Bella came along and before their father died.
Yeah says Rabastan, scowling at the far wall for a moment before meeting his brother’s gaze. Some bloke father knew at school is coming round to talk and no doubt we’ll all waste a lot less fucking time if I pretend I give a shit. On his feet, he steps up to Rodolphus, lowering his head slightly to level his lips with his brother’s ear. We’ve already gone through this, yeah? I know about it, I said yes: I’m bored as fuck already, it can only be something to do. I mean, fuck, why doesn’t -
Rodolphus has always been faster than him, has his long thin fingers wrapped around his wrist and is hissing quietly against his ear, because that isn’t how it works. Rabastan sighs, yanks his arm free, and shrugs. This is how it will be, then: him waiting up in the dark for some bloke he’s never met and not getting drunk, because this is important. Some part of him knows just how important this is, can see it in the set of his brother’s shoulders, the crease that shades the aquiline bridge of his nose. He says, yes, alright, and looks into his brother’s eyes. Rodolphus nods slowly and cuts across his wife as she opens her mouth.
No, he says, glancing over his shoulder at her, I’ll stay. Go home, Bella. Or better yet to your sister’s, I’ll see you there later. Please?
The set of her jaw is haughty as she stands, tossing the dark wave of her hair over her shoulder in a movement that seems half parody of herself and which makes him want to laugh. Of course, he doesn’t, for fear of hexes. I shall go out, she says, meeting her husband’s gaze, and during the silence that follows Rabastan wills his brother to deny her this, to tell her no, but he does not: only smiles slightly and inclines his head and looks at her as if this impudence is a charming by-product of her nature and not some terminal stubbornness that shames him in front of his brother, his blood.
Once, as they lay side by side, letting the air chill between them, Bellatrix had said,I hurt him, you know, just like you hurt me. He likes it. He had risen angrily from the bed and stepped hurriedly into his trousers, keeping his back to her and turning his grimace to the window and the damp grey landscape beyond, denying the lurch of sudden nausea that rose in him. And later when he fucked her again, he ground her cheek against the rough stone wall until it bled, took her by the hair and hit her until she laughed vaguely and drooled blood onto the floor, her mouth a crazy gash across her face. Eventually, she had drawn her wand on him and gasped out stop, stop, half a loose smile on her face and her wand drooping in her hand and slippery with blood.
Since that day his closeness with his brother had fallen away. They had never been close like other brothers were: to them their fealty, their affection, such as it was, was an understanding. A deal drawn up long enough ago that neither of them could remember it. He was grateful to Rodolphus, and could never forget it: Rabastan had been spared the inconveniences of heirdom and everything that came with it. Their father had never paid such close attention to his mistakes, had never drilled into him the lessons he knew Rodolphus could repeat by heart. He revelled in his lack of status in the house - after all, even the second son of the Lestrange family was a damn sight more important than the first of most others. His arrogance, his laziness, his decadent cruelties were allowed to grow unchecked.
And now here they sat in the fading echo of Bellatrix’s receding footsteps, in the sprawling manor they had grown up in, in the shifting dim space of candle light and the scent of sex, watching each other. He should feel uneasy, ashamed, but he doesn’t. They have their own games, founded long before marriage was ever spoken of. Rodolphus takes a silver case from the inside pocket of his robes and taps a thin cigarette against it, his movements languid. So, he says, looking as if he’s about to smile but never quite doing so. So, the time’s come, little brother. Aren’t you proud to be finally let into the secret? Aren’t you proud the time has finally come? I’m proud, Rabastan. His sharp teeth, a flame sprung from his gently stroked finger and thumb.
Rabastan says nothing. The silver case snaps shut. I’ve been talking about this to him for a long time, you know. I told him, my brother is very talented. Talented. A first for everything, hm? I told him and Bella told him and he knows what you are, little brother.
Could shut you up quick enough, skinny fucker, he mutters. Rodolphus smiles. It’s almost affectionate. His quick smile through the cloud of lilac smoke, his toe tapping against the leg of Rabastan’s chair, the glimmer of his mother-of-pearl buttons and his slate grey velvet tunic - all of him - hollows itself a neat space in the house again so quickly that Rabastan could almost imagine he never left. He could almost imagine, too, that it’s his father looking at him so steadily, eyes narrowed.
Embers collapse in the grate. Rodolphus says, was she good, today?
Yes, he answers, voice half-hoarse and low. I fucked her mouth and I fucked her cunt. I like her mouth better, though, I like the look she gets in her eyes. I like telling her to take it like a slut and I like it when she chokes.
Rodolphus is silent, nodding his head once and blowing smoke up towards the ceiling. Rabastan wants to say I fucking win, Rodolphus, he wants to take his brother by the scruff of the neck and punch his pretty face until it swells and the skin softens, wants to yell until his lungs ache I win. But Rodolphus is so still, so quiet and so knowing, that he lets his vicious smile talk for him. His brother lets out a breath, quickly exhaled through his nose, as if something is funny.
The clock on the mantle sounds its midnight chime.
**
His breath against Tom’s cheek. The boy isn’t moving now, not straining against him nor struggling nor pressing back against the wall as if he wants to escape. Neither of them say anything, but Rabastan gradually becomes aware that his grip in Tom’s robe and in Tom’s hair has strengthened, and it takes a moment for him to stop gritting his teeth. Sometimes as a child in the old dark house he would see shadows that moved wrong as he walked, that blurred themselves too easily, perhaps, and now he feels as if there is one lurking not just out of sight but inside his head, languid and velvet and heavy, but ready to change at any moment and shake off its dark mantle to reveal that bright light once more. He knows it is the boy, knows the boy is in his head. His skin crawls.
Tom says Really, Rabastan, do you miss your mother? How sweet. He doesn’t laugh, just rests one hand on Rabastan’s chest. How did she die? At least he asks, doesn’t pry it out himself.
Rabastan snorts. You think she’s dead? Stupid bitch went mad, I locked her in the south wing with her fucking decrepit house elf. Like something Rodolphus would... like something out of a book he’d… he’d read. He has to concentrate so hard to feel for the right words, to string them together correctly.
Mmm. Tom nods, shifts against him slightly and gives a little smile and fuck but he’s hard again, his cock jammed up against the boy’s hip and the dark thing that is Tom in his head shifts too, makes him shudder, brief and sudden. He looks down at the boy held fast against the wall, how he’s pinned there but not resisting, and his lips part slowly. When he presses them to Tom’s jaw, his heart thuds itself into a quick, awkward rhythm. When he lets his teeth press there, scraping along the skin harshly, biting down slowly, Tom’s palm against his chest slips upwards just a little, so that his fingers rest along Rabastan’s collarbone. He lets out a quiet noise, half gasp and half grunt, lets his tongue press to the gap of Tom’s skin between his teeth and licks along his jaw: only the slightest hint of stubble, the sharp tang of soap that is unnerving for being so real when he half expected the boy to taste of blood and incense and darkness.
His fingers tighten in Tom’s hair further still, and he fancies - can see it even with his eyes shut - the boy winces a little, with his head pulled so far back and Rabastan’s teeth digging into the flesh of his jaw that skims so tight over bone. Certainly his fingertips press harder against his collarbone, and as he shoves his thigh between Tom’s legs and grinds the arrogant hardness of his cock against the boy’s hip, Tom’s breathing quickens. He lets his smile slide across the skin of Tom’s neck before lifting his head to look down into the boy’s eyes, the boy’s clever, sharp, terrible eyes. The thing in his head stretches and before it can move, he takes Tom by the back of the neck and shoves him to the floor, shaking, dropping on top of him and grinding their hips together, tearing at the dark fabric of the boy’s robes and digging his fingers into any softness he can find to bruise that perfect skin.
There’s a moment when he thinks the boy with just lie there, that he’ll be able to roll him onto his stomach and fuck him rough and hard and bloody until he’s spent. One moment, no more, before he jerks his hips against Tom’s once more and finds another hardness there. Tom’s fingers are articulate as they curl around his chin and pull his head up. He smiles as he looks into Rabastan’s eyes, if you could call it a smile. Then the dark warmth of his mouth as he brings their parted lips together; the lurch of darkness as he spreads his grip into Rabastan’s mind.
Vertigo spirals above him into a sudden thick darkness of clouded sky where the ceiling should be. He clenches his eyes shut against the tug of sickness but the ballroom and its fading plaster bloom with sudden taint, are becoming something different, something other, and the dull parquet beneath his hands is softening to beaten earth and the boy’s mouth beneath his own is sour as acid and warm and sharp with teeth. He thrusts his tongue between them and lets loose a groan from deep in his throat, shoves the boy’s robes up to reveal the white skin of his chest. The boy’s mouth beneath his own is sour as acid and warm and sharp with teeth. He fumbles his fly open. A moment later his cock jars against Tom’s and Tom laughs and there’s a noise like the sky ripping that makes his stomach lurch.
They taste each other until sickness rouses their hearts to quicken their beats. The room becomes a pit, a mouth into the hill’s hard throat, and rain begins to fall, heavy with the sky’s slate grey. Rabastan does not understand, so he does not ask. His fingers dig into the black earth as he grinds his hips over Tom’s, smears of it washing from the boy’s cheek as he tips back his head and slowly, slowly arches his hips so that their cocks slide together. The air stinks of magic. Tom says quietly like machines, like animals, and reaches between them to wrap those clever fingers of his around Rabastan’s cock, stroking it, cupping his balls. Rabastan bites down on his cheek and grinds his teeth until he tastes blood and thrusts into the boy’s hand, and what can he do, what can he do but grit his teeth and shove apart the boy’s legs?
Open your eyes, says Tom. He opens his eyes: Tom’s face against black earth, Tom’s sharp smile, Tom’s lips in their nasty little smirk, the ache of the boy’s beauty spilling into him thunderous and inexplicable and terrifying. Tom’s smirk twists. He hisses like a cornered snake, power snapped through him whipcord fast and slitting the belly of the air surrounding them: the words foreign even to the darkness that runs in Rabastan’s blood; some half-forgotten incantation that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand on end.
Then a pause. A silent detonation in the boy translates itself into reality. Even his vision shakes.
**
full of earth the air’s
ash in his mouth the sour taste of sweat, little pockets of darkness hazed through his vision look away look downlookawaylookawaylookawa yloo k
Tom rests one finger on his cheek Tom touches him Tom says open your eyes he closes his fist in Tom’s hair
ripping cloth the scent of his body his palms scraped raw pockets of black earth beneath the skin pockets ofbla ck be neaththe sk in Tom Tom traces one finger down the inside of his arm pockets of
rasp of his breath
hot stones raining down on them, hissing against his back
rasp of his breath gasped almost into a sob sounding against the smooth skin of Tom’s shoulder and oh
he pushes
he pushes apart the boy’s legs, rocking forward once so that the head of his cock presses firm behind his balls, before gripping the boy’s shoulder and thrusting into him: one smooth movement that makes the boy keen low and arch his back, arch his whole body against him. One moment of silence, one
Tom slips his arms around him, quiet and enveloping as
pockets of black beneath the skin Tom traces one finger down the inside of his arm pockets of black beneath spreading like ink spreading spreading
Tom slips his arms around him, quiet and welcoming. There, that scent. Jasmine and butter and bread.
Tom laughs.
**
In the breakfast room Rodolphus runs one finger along the polished wood of the old chiffonier that his mother had brought stuffed with bolts of silk as part of her dowry. He is smiling to himself as he removes the silver case from his pocket once more, taps one of his short, thin cigarettes absent-mindedly. The house is quiet, dark.
He is wondering, as he lights his cigarette and plucks a strand of stray tobacco from his bottom lip, exactly what is going on in the old ballroom. He could go and look, of course, but he knows his lord well; knows he would see nothing. He will wait until his brother comes out, just in case. Every initiation is different, he has heard. But of course, he knows only of his own.