Universes of the Mind
Rodolphus/Bellatrix. Musing. Uncomfortable distances.
You've changed but not for the better, babe.
I'd tell you why, but what's the use?
Because it's the same kind of pity
A drunkard gives as his excuse.
You were sharp and ideal as a bobby pin,
Now your eyes are deserted and quiet.
We both look like those poor shattered mannequins
Thrown through the window in a riot.
--Elvis Costello, After the Fall
He would like to say he still finds her as beautiful as he did the day they met.
This is impossible. Then she was bright and dark and lovely, with sharp eyes that burned him like the sweet application of pain in a darkened room. Then she was pale the way warm milk is pale: alive and hot and feminine, sweet against his lips. Then she saw him when she looked at him, and her eyes held a wicked smile that was his alone.
These things no longer figure in her personal cosmos. Pain and despair have burned them out, seared them into nothingness. He does not believe that it is life that makes her move.
Now she is only darkness. Not his darkness, not even hers, but the well at the depths of the Dark Lord's soul. The darkness of the end of space. She has no brightness now, only the pointed flash of a weapon. What is left of her loveliness is untouchable by mortal hands. It has faded and festered and stagnated into beauty that is criminal, beauty that is mad.
Her eyes burn him now, cold like the drifting of dead universes. Cold like forgetting all that was ever pleasant. She looks at him now, and her eyes slide through him, as though he is some inconsequential ghost of a time and place long perished. As though he is meaningless as the other men she neither cares for nor despises. The smile that is his alone has died. Only he remembers it.
Her pallor is a thing of dead rooms, old paper, glacier snow. A thing incomprehensible to life. Her hair is a tangled net. She is the Witch of Dead Worlds. Her eyes look into dead worlds, except when they focus with the hate that makes her move, or fall upon her Master- the only creature left within creation which he honestly believes she loves.
He sits in his high, hard chair and muses over this, his hand curled around the fragile glass of a wine cup. Too much or too little already burns within him. He is a quick, small, startled man... but there is strength within him, if any would look.
He watches the coals die in the mouth of the fireplace. It is only a matter of time, he knows, before she's gone as well. And he thinks, It might as well be over.
He wonders if there's anyone left in the world with the brilliant darkness she used to have. Someone whose eyes could burn him like pain-gasping in the dark. Someone whose smile could make him tremble like a butterfly pinned to a page. Someone who would see him for what he was... and know how that sharp, agile mind could slice through the possibilities of a plan. How it could have more use than a rusted old trap in the corner of this room with the dying, dying... dead light.
You've changed but not for the better, babe.
I'd tell you why, but what's the use?
Because it's the same kind of pity
A drunkard gives as his excuse.
You were sharp and ideal as a bobby pin,
Now your eyes are deserted and quiet.
We both look like those poor shattered mannequins
Thrown through the window in a riot.
--Elvis Costello, After the Fall
He would like to say he still finds her as beautiful as he did the day they met.
This is impossible. Then she was bright and dark and lovely, with sharp eyes that burned him like the sweet application of pain in a darkened room. Then she was pale the way warm milk is pale: alive and hot and feminine, sweet against his lips. Then she saw him when she looked at him, and her eyes held a wicked smile that was his alone.
These things no longer figure in her personal cosmos. Pain and despair have burned them out, seared them into nothingness. He does not believe that it is life that makes her move.
Now she is only darkness. Not his darkness, not even hers, but the well at the depths of the Dark Lord's soul. The darkness of the end of space. She has no brightness now, only the pointed flash of a weapon. What is left of her loveliness is untouchable by mortal hands. It has faded and festered and stagnated into beauty that is criminal, beauty that is mad.
Her eyes burn him now, cold like the drifting of dead universes. Cold like forgetting all that was ever pleasant. She looks at him now, and her eyes slide through him, as though he is some inconsequential ghost of a time and place long perished. As though he is meaningless as the other men she neither cares for nor despises. The smile that is his alone has died. Only he remembers it.
Her pallor is a thing of dead rooms, old paper, glacier snow. A thing incomprehensible to life. Her hair is a tangled net. She is the Witch of Dead Worlds. Her eyes look into dead worlds, except when they focus with the hate that makes her move, or fall upon her Master- the only creature left within creation which he honestly believes she loves.
He sits in his high, hard chair and muses over this, his hand curled around the fragile glass of a wine cup. Too much or too little already burns within him. He is a quick, small, startled man... but there is strength within him, if any would look.
He watches the coals die in the mouth of the fireplace. It is only a matter of time, he knows, before she's gone as well. And he thinks, It might as well be over.
He wonders if there's anyone left in the world with the brilliant darkness she used to have. Someone whose eyes could burn him like pain-gasping in the dark. Someone whose smile could make him tremble like a butterfly pinned to a page. Someone who would see him for what he was... and know how that sharp, agile mind could slice through the possibilities of a plan. How it could have more use than a rusted old trap in the corner of this room with the dying, dying... dead light.