Fic: Symphorophilia (Bellatrix, pg-13)
Title: Symphorophilia
Author: spessartine
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/characters: Bellatrix (with a little bit of Bella/Rodolphus)
first:
There goes your mother and her plague
What a terrible display
Of a charcoaled tongue
She opens herself to the crack of dawn just as a fissure in rock opens and breathes light and bright poison, and she's opened her arms to the sky and shouted up into it her own name and the pierced beam of light that answers has called it back. This is as it should be.
She's knee deep in mud, slick of it up her shins and onto her knees, one dark crescent of it on her white thigh and her skirts all tattered as the flags that snapped on the battlements of Azkaban. Her small feet send spatters of salt-water across the black slabs of the rocks. She's running, oh running, and has always been running - never away but towards, such a simple stretch of language but so true, her laugh dopplered in the thin clean air and the salt in it could turn milk to butter, oh, Bella.
She's listened for that sigh behind her, is it the wind, is it? and it does not come. She's thinking of him in his high-neck tunic no doubt blooded to the elbow, and her skin dyed red as a fox, some hapless cub gone to ground and cornered, that's the snarl on her lips that rises to the surface like ink weeping from forgotten paper (they found him in the cupboard, her pretty cousin, his smile trailed across a thousand scraps of vellum like a red lily blooming unseen, unseen, and how he cried, how he cried when they took him and gave him the knife and turned the key - sound of a lock clicking into place and his silence escalating) but it's only time that's cornered her here:
At the black shore of some northern rock that juts plate-like into the sea's rolling sussurrus; shadow of a rock face behind her is the broken facade of the prison and her husband at last at last at her side those nights when her deep moans shattered the black rock of the walls and the sadness entered her, rougher than a splintered stick and she'd begged, begged for sensation other than their grey, misted numbness, but they dealt only in negation and tall still, Rodolphus tall still and not so sickened by time as she might have thought, but his skin is grey as the circling gulls that call out their paths of rough-spun light overhead. It's morning. The world can't hold them anymore. The world can't contain them: nothing can. The sky calls back her name.
second:
Bite down on your tongue
What does not wither will pry away
A fruitless title bestowed
She's coaxing the strays to her pocket once more, her lovely smile, her lovely bitter smile and her mouth that opens wider than death when she laughs: black laughter like the swallowed silence of an open grave and sister?
Sister? Rainwater soaks the blonde curls plastered to Narcissa's collarbone. Hideous and wrong for her to be so unravelled and Bella sneers contempt and hisses in her ear weakling even as she stroked back the ringlets wet against her brow and soothes her frown with kisses. It was always this way, wasn't it? Always the two of them arms crossed behind them their hands resting on the backs of one another's waists (Narcissa's thin arm hard and sharp-elbowed, Bella's lush and round with blood) the two of them smiling cuts at Andromeda, who will not be mentioned; who is not.
And that great pressure like a bruise against her that was her sister's weakness, the stone that grew inside her, that weighed her with another man's blood, oh, Cissa, the stone is sharp and bitter; the stone is silent, turn away, leave it in the arms of the nurse and let it leech from her. Sister, she answers, even though it is bitter in her mouth, because there are things she does not forget, like the sheen of red on her fingers when Narcissa did not understand her own body and Bella had to show her; like the cheek-shaped dab of sweat against her shoulder as the nurse urged push and her sister deigned to scream, just once.
Bella knows the ways of her body. In Azkaban she was stripped of herself, nearly; stripped of the flesh that she wore like a decadent dress: her breasts and their topped-out fullness shrunk to nothing, her thighs and their white heated weight lean as a greyhound's and showing their tendons, her wrists thin and perfectly articulated. Bird bones and the breath of dust all through her, even her womb dry and stopped with silt and sadness.
What is it that other women do when they are no longer women, she wonders. Her belly is concave; empty as it ever was. She thinks of Narcissa and the weight hung around her neck and she smiles. She forces herself to smile
third:
You shall be rinsed out of your state
Confine yourself to the light
And burrow your tepid shame
There, little nephew. There's your goal. Watch, boy, and remember. The aim, and the wrist, and the glory will come. One burst of red light, little Draco, and your hardest, cruelest thought.
That goaded thunder of its approach, her high laughter and the beat of hooves, his nervous smile and the horse rears and
Crucio. White of its rolling eyes and her moan. Afterwards he's sick, over by the hedge onto the half-frozen earth of the paddock. She looks at him with such hatred. Such beautiful, benevolent hatred.
fourth:
Bring yourself up to the light
You shall be burned senselessly
Clutch the flag to your chest
Flicked extension of the body is the arc of his blood, spattered across the porcelain of her mask like laughter, perhaps, or like a moment of noise before music germinates. He's nameless; they are all nameless.
Each death is a word uttered into being. Her sermon is her song; her benediction. Oh, it is beautiful. And the very highest notes, those tones she offers up like bowls of light, they are the best, she knows. She can feel his eyes on her and resting on her like a soft hand on her shoulder and Rodolphus' palm on her thigh and the rasped heat of his tongue leaving stripes of cold across her skin and the rattling of the cupboard door and her cousin's pretty voice calling calling calling sobbing and oh, she is singing for him now.
She is singing, wand trailing bright shadows and they fall at her feet, fall at her fucking feet and give themselves to her, their blood is their gift and the light that illuminates her. It is so beautiful it forms an ache inside her, so beautiful she cannot stop for fear of weeping; each death is a word uttered into being, and she deals only in affirmation. The noise of it hums the bleached note through her body: she is here, she is here, she is.
What is the stone in her chapel? What is the blank altar stone she lays her supplication on? Nameless thing that is not what you think. She stands over the churned bodies and opens her arms, calls up her name into the rasped sky, arms bloody to the elbow, and she is.
Author: spessartine
Rating: PG-13
Pairing/characters: Bellatrix (with a little bit of Bella/Rodolphus)
first:
There goes your mother and her plague
What a terrible display
Of a charcoaled tongue
She opens herself to the crack of dawn just as a fissure in rock opens and breathes light and bright poison, and she's opened her arms to the sky and shouted up into it her own name and the pierced beam of light that answers has called it back. This is as it should be.
She's knee deep in mud, slick of it up her shins and onto her knees, one dark crescent of it on her white thigh and her skirts all tattered as the flags that snapped on the battlements of Azkaban. Her small feet send spatters of salt-water across the black slabs of the rocks. She's running, oh running, and has always been running - never away but towards, such a simple stretch of language but so true, her laugh dopplered in the thin clean air and the salt in it could turn milk to butter, oh, Bella.
She's listened for that sigh behind her, is it the wind, is it? and it does not come. She's thinking of him in his high-neck tunic no doubt blooded to the elbow, and her skin dyed red as a fox, some hapless cub gone to ground and cornered, that's the snarl on her lips that rises to the surface like ink weeping from forgotten paper (they found him in the cupboard, her pretty cousin, his smile trailed across a thousand scraps of vellum like a red lily blooming unseen, unseen, and how he cried, how he cried when they took him and gave him the knife and turned the key - sound of a lock clicking into place and his silence escalating) but it's only time that's cornered her here:
At the black shore of some northern rock that juts plate-like into the sea's rolling sussurrus; shadow of a rock face behind her is the broken facade of the prison and her husband at last at last at her side those nights when her deep moans shattered the black rock of the walls and the sadness entered her, rougher than a splintered stick and she'd begged, begged for sensation other than their grey, misted numbness, but they dealt only in negation and tall still, Rodolphus tall still and not so sickened by time as she might have thought, but his skin is grey as the circling gulls that call out their paths of rough-spun light overhead. It's morning. The world can't hold them anymore. The world can't contain them: nothing can. The sky calls back her name.
second:
Bite down on your tongue
What does not wither will pry away
A fruitless title bestowed
She's coaxing the strays to her pocket once more, her lovely smile, her lovely bitter smile and her mouth that opens wider than death when she laughs: black laughter like the swallowed silence of an open grave and sister?
Sister? Rainwater soaks the blonde curls plastered to Narcissa's collarbone. Hideous and wrong for her to be so unravelled and Bella sneers contempt and hisses in her ear weakling even as she stroked back the ringlets wet against her brow and soothes her frown with kisses. It was always this way, wasn't it? Always the two of them arms crossed behind them their hands resting on the backs of one another's waists (Narcissa's thin arm hard and sharp-elbowed, Bella's lush and round with blood) the two of them smiling cuts at Andromeda, who will not be mentioned; who is not.
And that great pressure like a bruise against her that was her sister's weakness, the stone that grew inside her, that weighed her with another man's blood, oh, Cissa, the stone is sharp and bitter; the stone is silent, turn away, leave it in the arms of the nurse and let it leech from her. Sister, she answers, even though it is bitter in her mouth, because there are things she does not forget, like the sheen of red on her fingers when Narcissa did not understand her own body and Bella had to show her; like the cheek-shaped dab of sweat against her shoulder as the nurse urged push and her sister deigned to scream, just once.
Bella knows the ways of her body. In Azkaban she was stripped of herself, nearly; stripped of the flesh that she wore like a decadent dress: her breasts and their topped-out fullness shrunk to nothing, her thighs and their white heated weight lean as a greyhound's and showing their tendons, her wrists thin and perfectly articulated. Bird bones and the breath of dust all through her, even her womb dry and stopped with silt and sadness.
What is it that other women do when they are no longer women, she wonders. Her belly is concave; empty as it ever was. She thinks of Narcissa and the weight hung around her neck and she smiles. She forces herself to smile
third:
You shall be rinsed out of your state
Confine yourself to the light
And burrow your tepid shame
There, little nephew. There's your goal. Watch, boy, and remember. The aim, and the wrist, and the glory will come. One burst of red light, little Draco, and your hardest, cruelest thought.
That goaded thunder of its approach, her high laughter and the beat of hooves, his nervous smile and the horse rears and
Crucio. White of its rolling eyes and her moan. Afterwards he's sick, over by the hedge onto the half-frozen earth of the paddock. She looks at him with such hatred. Such beautiful, benevolent hatred.
fourth:
Bring yourself up to the light
You shall be burned senselessly
Clutch the flag to your chest
Flicked extension of the body is the arc of his blood, spattered across the porcelain of her mask like laughter, perhaps, or like a moment of noise before music germinates. He's nameless; they are all nameless.
Each death is a word uttered into being. Her sermon is her song; her benediction. Oh, it is beautiful. And the very highest notes, those tones she offers up like bowls of light, they are the best, she knows. She can feel his eyes on her and resting on her like a soft hand on her shoulder and Rodolphus' palm on her thigh and the rasped heat of his tongue leaving stripes of cold across her skin and the rattling of the cupboard door and her cousin's pretty voice calling calling calling sobbing and oh, she is singing for him now.
She is singing, wand trailing bright shadows and they fall at her feet, fall at her fucking feet and give themselves to her, their blood is their gift and the light that illuminates her. It is so beautiful it forms an ache inside her, so beautiful she cannot stop for fear of weeping; each death is a word uttered into being, and she deals only in affirmation. The noise of it hums the bleached note through her body: she is here, she is here, she is.
What is the stone in her chapel? What is the blank altar stone she lays her supplication on? Nameless thing that is not what you think. She stands over the churned bodies and opens her arms, calls up her name into the rasped sky, arms bloody to the elbow, and she is.