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Making love to Bella was like making love to himself, Sirius had sometimes thought. It was something to do with how they’d reacted to each other, something connected to the chemistry perhaps, something in the way their dark hair mingled damply. When he’d looked into her eyes, with her pupils dilating into black, he’d found his own eyes looking upwards. Their faces, too – he’d glimpsed their expressions when they came, mirrored back at him twofold from a window reflecting candlelight inwards. Outside, the rain had beaten down but inside, wrapped in the warmth of their blankets and their bare skins, the pair of them had been abandoned to la petite mort in exactly the same manner.
La petite mort. Bella had used the term often, laughingly, impishly, with a gleam of amusement in her oh-so-dark eyes. It was a mockery of Cissy, of course, a gentle, teasing poke at her sister's airs and graces. Sirius had caught the blonde girl using the term in a rather intimate set of circumstances – which is to say, wrapped up moaning between Lucius Malfoy's pale legs in the Black's spare room – and neither he nor Bella had ever intended on letting her live it down. That was how it had begun, anyway, but if truth were told, the pair of them had grown rather fond of the term. The little death¸ Sirius’s beginner’s French had translated it to him, and it seemed more than perfectly suitable. There were times, gasping seconds, breathless minutes – when she arched against him, her nails in his chest – when he buried himself deep into her warmth – when they rocked against each other in a mess of sweat and pleasure – there were moments when time itself seemed to fracture and la petite mort was the best way to describe it. What he and Bella had had together--
The fact that she was his cousin had never bothered him. He was a Black and so was she. Blacks had always had their own modus operandi. Sirius even suspected that James would have understood: despite their red-and-gold declarations the Potters too were Old Blood, and Old Blood has ancestral memories of nobility carved in its bones. The others were different, though, and there were moments, lying sleepily in her sheets, when Sirius thought to look at himself and her through Moony’s eyes, through Peter’s eyes, and knew that they would never have understood.
But then, the thing was, he had never needed them to.
Because Bella and himself, they did. Despite it all, despite her age, despite his Gryffindor ways, they had known that they were the two sides of the same coin. It was more than the mere fact that the heat in their veins pulsed with the same rhythm. It was something deeper, something more intuitive. They had never needed to speak when their skins brushed – never, unless they desired the sound of the words on their tongues – they just did and breathed and rocked, one body against the other.
And when it was she who’d killed him, he’d been glad.
Love, death, what's the difference?
Cissy hadn't been so far off when she'd called it la petite mort.