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- How is she? The Dark Lord is asking for her.
- She’s still unconscious.
- Yesterday you told me she had woken.
- For an hour or so, she did. But she was barely coherent and I couldn’t get her to eat anything. She drifted out again shortly after.
- She probably needs rest more than anything else. Look at the state of her.
- It is her state that I am worried about. Derwin has examined her. He says it could be serious. The fever hasn’t dropped yet. He gave her something for it but he told me that, depleted as she is, her body might simply not have the resources to combat the infection.
Bellatrix’s lids fluttered, letting in a thin ray of light, sharp as a white-hot needle. All she could see was the vague outline of a room bathed in an acidic glow. No matter how much she squinted her eyes, she couldn’t make out anything. Her skull throbbed painfully in the vice grip of vertigo.
- Bella?
A dark shape came near, slowly taking on human form. Leaning over her, stood Lucius and Narcissa. Bellatrix wondered confusedly at how alike they seemed. Their pallid beauty, the cold glint of their golden hair, the overcast shade of blue of those two pairs of eyes, trained worriedly on her. Never before had their resemblance struck her so. But, in the devouring glare that filled the room, she could hardly tell them apart. After all, the distance between them was so very slim: six inches of height and slight variations in their features. The harsher line of a jaw, a less rounded forehead, a thinner mouth. These few details set aside, they seemed two bodies out of the same mold.
- Bella?
- I don’t know that she can hear you.
She felt something brush lightly against her shoulder.
- Bella, look at me.
With some effort, Bellatrix turned her attention towards Lucius who was looking at her with such naked concern. He lifted a hand to her forehead.
- She is still burning up.
Bellatrix felt her lips stretch and crack in a feeble smile. Lucius’ palm was so cool against her face and his voice so soft.
- I should let the Dark Lord know that her current state won’t allow her to appear before him, said Narcissa in a tone that anxiety rendered oddly hoarse.
- Do you think he might come here?
A shrug and a sigh were all the answer Lucius got, but he pressed on shrilly.
- I really don’t think that is a good idea. She’s not thinking clearly, and she hasn’t seen him since… well, she… she could be even more… unsettled by his… appearance.
- Surely you understand that, if that is what he desires, I can’t stop him and even less suggest that his new body could be a source of distress for her.
Lucius bit his lips, a tearful anguish glistening in his eyes.
- Yes, yes, of course but, try to have him wait, will you? As long as you can.
Narcissa nodded gravely and cast a last glance towards Bellatrix before disappearing into the dark hole that must have been a door.
- Cissy, whispered Bellatrix in a painful, reedy voice.
But it was no use. Her sister had left. Bellatrix swallowed with difficulty. Her throat felt horribly parched.
- Shhhhh, hushed Lucius as he ran a hand through her hair.
He then held a glass to her lips and she drank avidly.
- Careful, not so fast, you’ll make yourself sick.
- The Dark Lord…
- Don’t worry, he will wait for you to be feeling a bit better.
Bellatrix shook her head, but the words she would have needed refused to pass her lips. Her tongue felt heavy. Her eyelids felt heavy. Her whole body, so impossibly heavy.
- Don’t you worry. Lucius will talk to him. All you have to do is rest. Everything is going to be all right, Bella. Everything is going to be all right.
Lucius’s whispers had to travel farther and farther to reach her as the room slowly dimmed around her.
When she opened her eyes again, she was standing in an arid, empty landscape. The diffuse reddish light seemed to rise from the earth rather than fall from the leaden sky. As far as her eye could see, there was no discernable landmark, just the unbroken fiery line of the horizon. She could barely feel her legs beneath her, but, step by slow step, she managed to walk some distance without her knees buckling. Inexplicably, her feet left no trace on the sandy ground. When she looked behind her, everything was exactly as it was in front. Time stretched on, with no sign of her approaching or getting farther from anything, no change in the light, no way of knowing whether she'd been walking for minutes or hours.
- Bella.
The call, carried by some unfelt breeze, was unplaceable. Impossibly far and pressed flush to the shell of her ear, rippling through her as a shiver. She turned around. The same nothingness everywhere. But, as she was about to resume her aimless shuffle, he was suddenly there, in front of her, a few paces away. His silhouette, oddly backlit even though no visible sun shone over the dusky wasteland, was unmistakable.
He was facing away from her, towards the elusive horizon. She tried to approach, hastening her steps despite the numb tingling that shot up and down her legs. He, on the other hand, was walking at a leisurely, regal pace. Yet the distance between them never seemed to narrow.
She kept her eyes trained on his back, marching on stubbornly and, again, losing all sense of time. At some point, she realized the landscape around them had changed and they were now descending towards a hollow amongst the dunes. Some sort of crater. The ghostly imprint of a long-gone sea. The soil shimmered white with salt deposits, bright as glittering flames in the distance. Bellatrix raised her eyes to the sky, still dark but slowly filling with incandescent light. Every cloud aglow as if a blood-red sun were about to break through. She was breathless. From the effort and from the sight. From his torturous nearness after so many years. It was all so beautiful, so bright, so vivid as to be painful for her eyes which had hardly seen color in so long.
When she turned her attention to her master once more, she saw him enter the circle drawn by the banks of the dry basin. She attempted to follow but her legs suddenly lost all strength and sensation. She fell to her knees. She could only watch as he kept walking until he reached the center of the dead lake. There, he started undressing. He let his cloak fall to his feet before slowly opening and shedding his robes. Stunned and enthralled, Bellatrix gazed upon that body, the memory of which remained unaltered by the fourteen years that had passed since she last set eyes upon it. Lithe and strong. The pure, pale, unwavering beauty of a marble statue.
However, as she let her eyes run down his back, she noticed a strange undulation. At first, it was a slight rippling beneath the skin, nothing more. But an instant later, the odd twitch recurred. He leaned forward. Soon, he was convulsing, deep grooves appearing between each of his ribs as the bones shifted out of axis, his body bending at absurd, broken angles. Bellatrix, horror-struck, was forced to watch, helpless. She struggled and strained against her torpor but she couldn’t tear herself away, rooted to the dusty soil as surely as if she had begun to merge with it
- My Lord!
He couldn’t hear her. Even her voice could no longer reach him now. He was wracked with wild spasms, the muscles writhing and carving terrifying furrows into his flesh. Yet, he did not seem to be fighting what was happening to him. His arms hung limply along his flanks, as his fingers grew longer, the skin stretching like oversized gloves slipping to the ground.
A terrible cry was lodged halfway up Bellatrix’s throat, too dry and constrained to let out more than a panicked, wheezing breath. She wanted to scream. She wanted to tear at her own flesh, which kept her anchored deadly to the bank. But she could do no more than bear witness to the monstrous process. The spine protruded and, suddenly, came undone, like a string of pearls, each vertebra rolling down the curved, crumpling back as the neck could no longer support the weight of the skull. The skin was ripping apart from the flesh and the flesh from the bone. He was disintegrating before her eyes. The tissue, once melted, poured down his legs and the thick, waxy matter was pooling at his feet. Soon, the whole crater was filling with the milky liquid he was sinking into. Helpless to save him, she stretched her whole body towards him, towards the basin she couldn’t reach, the water receding as if to evade the grasping tips of her fingers.
There was no sign of him left, not a ripple on the surface, when, at last, Bellatrix managed to wrench herself from the ground and throw herself towards the center of the lake, where he had stood. The pearly water was strange — gleaming like molten metal, but pleasantly warm and impossibly soft, clinging to her with every stride, caressing. She knelt there, scouring blindly beneath the surface, through the silky silt at the bottom, but her hands always came up empty. At last, they closed on something but, when she opened her palms, she found nothing but a few teeth in her palm which quickly dissolved as he had, slipping through her fingers and leaving only a viscous shimmering residue.
Still, instead of the mounting despair she expected, what she felt was a curious, blissful calm rising within her. If he truly had been returned to the void, she would have wanted to follow him there, to drown as he had drowned and be nothing. But she could not believe him gone. He was everywhere: under the ember-red sky, in these bright, murky waters, in the whistling breeze that had suddenly picked up.
The fatigue, the terrible weakness that had wasted and whittled her, was vanishing, melting away as the satiny liquid lapped soothingly around her. She could feel a new vitality thrumming through her veins, her flesh tingling as if coming to life after a long, bloodless sleep. Looking down to her own body, she could see she had regained the strength she had once had. Her hands no longer showed the horrid weaving of veins and sinews and bones. Where she had had emaciated limbs, horribly gnarled by the crooked protuberances of her knees and elbows, she once again had arms and legs, capable and strong, fit for battle.
The surface of the lake was perfectly smooth, as though she had never disturbed it with her frantic search. Smooth and glimmering, alight with the mirrored sky. As for Bellatrix, she cast no shadow nor reflection upon the water. She stood, waiting, without knowing what for, as time, once again, lost all consistency and the water, so still and peaceful, filled her with a strange vertigo. As above so below. The sky and earth inverted or merging, closing around her like an embrace. She did not know whether she was falling or rising. Floating there, untethered. A rapturous warmth taking hold of her, filling her with the irrepressible urge to lie down in the basin, to curl and sink to the bottom of this pool. All she needed was rest. Everything would be all right. Everything would be all right.
But, even as she was giving in to this wonderful darkening sensation, a vibration tore her from its grasp. She could feel a curious pulse under the sole of her feet, sunken deep into the silty sands. The tremor intensified, wrinkling the surface until the whole pool hummed softly. But the ripples were not widening and disappearing towards the bank, instead, they converged around her, returning to their source, to the place, just before her, where the water bubbled as if suddenly boiling. It then rose above her, forming a strange, towering wave that remained frozen above her, poised to break. Mesmerized, she watched the water retreat, as a veil pulled back, leaving behind a stone pillar. As it trickled down to return to the lake, the water carved into the limestone block, rounding it, giving it a vague outline and, gradually, a much more distinct silhouette. Centuries of erosion in a handful of seconds. Before her now stood a shape, white as enamel, as pearl, as marble. And Bellatrix knew it so very well, that shape, even covered as it was with the thin iridescent cloak that masked its features.
- Master?
- Not quite.
The voice was perhaps slightly higher than she remembered but it was undoubtably his, cold and melodious, laced with a note of irony. The edge of his tongue as sharp and caressing as that of his hand.
He reached for the hem of his hood and, with painful slowness, drew it back. Bellatrix stepped back abruptly and nearly lost her balance. Where she had been so sure she would find her master stood a woman. A thin-lipped, sardonic smile illuminated her beautiful face, chiseled in ivory-pale flesh.
- Well. Do you not recognize me?
- Of course I do.
She had answered thoughtlessly, to appease the hint of reproach in the playful remark but, oddly, she had not lied. The inquisitive way that woman arched her brow, the eyes widening with feigned surprise, that dimple that gave every smile a derisive edge. Beneath those redrawn features, the same expressions. In her voice, the same inflections. The same smell. The same presence. The same gaze upon her. In spite of everything, yes, she did recognize him. She recognized him despite the dark curls that framed his face —her face—, and streamed down her back, sticking to her skin, still imbued with the lustrous shine of the lake’s water. She recognized the high cheekbones, the curve of the upper lip, the ember that burned deep within the dark eyes, the intensity that lurked just beneath the quiet surface.
Somehow, this woman resembled both the Dark Lord and Bellatrix herself, who looked up to that face, so strange and so familiar, the confusion slowly making way for a relief so immense it crushed her lungs as it bloomed within her chest. She had waited so long to see him again. And now, now she could touch him, this mirage, this miracle. Yet she dared not reach for him. She feared he might disappear, fall into dust — a handful of ash cascading through her fingers. Besides, since it was well and truly him, she dreaded his reprimand for the daring gesture. Never had she made the first overture. He had always been the one who dictated when certain lines could be crossed.
She also wished to speak to him, to press him with questions, to uncover the secret of this new, puzzling appearance and, more importantly, to know at last what had become of him all these years. But what words could she use, after fourteen years of silence? Fourteen years of whispering to him, so very quietly, from the depths of that bottomless pit they had thrown her into, the darkness mocking her with deformed echoes of her own voice.
As if to answer all the troubled thoughts that raced through her mind, he held out his hand to her. She made to take it but he stepped forward and grabbed her by the elbow instead, lacing their forearms together. His pulse pressed so close to her own. Again. Again after so long. A shiver ran through her. The same shiver as always. That he now appeared to her as a woman changed nothing. She had heard Lucius and Narcissa speaking in hushed tones and ellipses about what had happened to her master. Was that what they had meant? As if it could possibly matter. She would have loved him if he had come back disfigured, deformed, defaced. A woman was a comparatively small sidestep. If a woman was what he now was, she would love him as a woman. She would love him regardless of the vessel. What she cherished lay so much deeper. And it was there, unchanged, roiling beneath. Unchanged and returned to her.
He took her hands in his and guided them towards his neck, where the ribbon that kept his cloak closed was pressed to his throat. She looked into his eyes, uncertain, and he nodded his assent. Bellatrix, entranced, obeyed and drew gently on the satiny tie, watching it snake through eyelet after eyelet, slowly opening the neckline. She was taking off that robe as he had once taken off her wedding dress, replaying the scene in the distorting mirror of this pearlescent pool.
The fabric was light and cold, liquid silk gliding from his shoulders and falling to the water at their feet where it dissolved, coming apart slowly like webs of spun sugar. Bellatrix could hardly look at him. At her. Yet she couldn't tear her eyes away either. If the stature was similar, towering and slender, this nakedness made the changes undeniable. Under her collarbones, the once pure unbroken line from chest to stomach was interrupted by the swell of breasts, level with her eyes, and then, underneath, the hollow of the waist and the curve of the hips and, lower still, the mound of the pubis. Bellatrix felt a hand close on her nape, forcing her to look up and into her eyes. His eyes. She held that searching gaze defiantly. He could scour her mind if he pleased. He would find no dread, no disgust, no doubt.
She had never looked at a woman that way. But, then again, neither had she at any other man.
Beneath the changed mask, beneath the unchanged eyes, lay decades of memory. The stifling corridors of her childhood home. The first corpse she had lain at his feet. Her wedding. All her rage. The oath sealed in the shadowy waters of the fountain. The refuge he had offered her by his side, away from the grasp and demands of the world she came from. Everything he had taught her — told her beyond even the reach of words, in that particular silence they shared. In those eyes, as in no others, she met an image of herself she could recognize.
She took a step, closing the last slither of distance between them and pressing her whole body against his and a kiss on the taut smooth plane of his throat, where there once had been an Adam's apple. She would have wanted, if possible, to stand even closer.
She felt the hand leave her nape and slide lower, under her dress. He made to tear it but the fabric simply evanesced between his fingers. Once she was naked before him, he placed his index into the hollow at the base of her throat and, without his eyes ever leaving hers, traced a slow line. The same line that hunters and butchers draw with their sharpest knives, running between her breasts and across her stomach before stopping between her thighs. It curved and hooked there, drawing tight circles, rippling as the water had. As Bellatrix's breath turned to panting, she felt his other hand catch hers, interlacing their fingers and guiding her towards his chest, letting her caress the porcelain skin, finely veined with blue where it was at its thinnest. That body which shimmered as mirages do in the distance, she could feel it, so close, solid and live and warm beneath her hands, rising and falling with both their breaths.
Leaning over her, he kept his lips pressed to her temple, repeating over and over that hissing phrase, that whispered mantra, those words that she could not discern but which had always had the ring of a promise to her. She had not forgotten. So much else had been lost to the maddening despair of Azkaban, but not that. Struggling for breath, she said it back to him, her tongue tripping other her teeth as she pursed her lips around that secret sound. He straightened to look at her, a changed look in his eyes. He leaned again and kissed her forehead. She could feel by the movement of his lips that he was smiling, her teeth pressed to the curve of her skull.
- My dear. My dearest. My most precious.
That last sibilant sound stretched as he lapsed back into that tongue that evaded her and his caresses turned more passionate still. The more he spoke, his voice curling around her, the more the coil of pleasure tightened inside, building towards release.
He cast his immense shadow over her, obscuring the sky and the pearly shine of the lake. She buried her face against his neck. It did not matter. There was nothing more in the world she yearned to see now that she had found him again. Nothing but him. In that shape or any other. His hand on the small of her back, on her breasts, between her thighs, reaching so far inside her. It seemed to her that his arms were everywhere, countless and caressing, as they slowly sunk together into the soft shifting silt, and into each other, intertwined. Nothing could tear them apart now. Boundless and undistinguishable. One and the same. Coming undone and coming together, fusing.
As soon as Bellatrix opened her eyes, the sharp blinding light darted at her and she winced painfully. The leaden weight of fatigue had descended upon her once again, pinning her to the bed. Far from the iridescence of the dream, she was still burdened with that sickly, wilted body. She was lifting a hand to shield her eyes when a shape to her right moved, stepping between her bed and the glare from the window. Her vision swam with troubled afterimages. Pulsating rings of light, ripples that circled the hazy silhouette with many halos. She couldn’t make out his features but she knew, of course. She knew it was him, this backlit figure whose sheltering shadow she lay in. Him. Well and truly this time. Yet, she could already see signs that another metamorphosis had taken place. The light caught on his bare skull. Neither the neatly combed hair from before, nor the mane of dark curls, so alike her own. The shadows gradually receded as her eyes grew accustomed to the bright room and, slowly, they gave him a new face. Hairless and smooth, without eyelash or eyebrow. A lipless mouth. Eyes nearly devoid of pupils. The bridge of the nose, flattened. The skin, waxy and bone-white. As she took in every detail of him, his own eyes searched hers for fear, for horror, for revulsion.
Nothing. There is nothing that could turn me away from you.
She raised her hand again, this time reaching for his face, but he recoiled and grabbed her wrist to stop her. He lay her hand back down on the cover, pinned under his own.
- I was told you were ill. If I had thought their word anything to go by, I would have expected to find you half-dead. I came to see for myself proof they were lying.
She breathed in and wetted her lips, not wanting to answer with that hoarse, feeble voice she could feel lodged down her throat.
- I will be back on my feet in no time, my Lord, and ready to serve you.
I would never leave you, never fail you in that way.
He nodded.
- No. I know you wouldn’t.
With his thumb, he caressed the back of her hand. Her eyes were slowly closing once more and the red sun rose again through her eyelids, as vivid as the wasteland they had crossed together.
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