Who: Rodolphus & Jo What: Some intense conversation. Where: Lestrange Library When: 14 May Rating: PG Status: Complete
It was not, Josephine thought, as if Rodolphus's library was closed to the public. He welcomed people (not her kind of person, certainly, but people) to partake in the knowledge he had collected and something about that character trait piqued her interest. She knew the torturer, the Death Eater, the sociopath. The intellectual was, however, a stranger to her and it didn't seem right that she would not have a very intimate knowledge of this, her most despised enemy.
Her hair, tangled and windswept from her excursion to Tintagel and Glastonbury with Bill even days later, hung in a black cloud about her face as she drew herself up to stare at the austere face of his building. The personal style she had come to know (and analyze) so well hung in diaphanous curtains that seemed to keep her from reaching the doorway and pushing her way inside. The silence filled her chest (but for the banging of the door) as she reached behind her and twisted her hair at the base of her neck with a green ribbon.
Where to start? Her quiet footsteps lead her around the massive shelves wreathed in dust motes and light. She might as well start at the beginning. Turning her back to the front entrance, but keeping the rest of the first floor in her peripheral vision, she began to scan the shelves ...
The dogs sensed her first, and two wolfhounds fled down the stairs from some upper level to sniff the intruder. They were huge, bigger than a person ought to have been, and precisely the kind of dog that Rodolphus preferred. One whined as it wrapped around her legs, as if assuring itself she wasn't a vagrant, and then totted off to slump down upon the floor - a well worn guard position if the state of the stone there was any evidence. And from up above there was a stirring. Rodolphus had set Gideon to some task upon the fifth floor and had set himself to reorganizing a shelf on German eugenics periodicals - rescued from destruction after the war with Grindelwald for posterity's sake. He heard the tapping of dog's claws as they escaped, heard the whine that indicated human presence, but did not bother himself about it until having finished shelving the last of his journals.
Finally, he descended, broad frame imposing as he stepped across the threshold of his library, and noted the visitor. Who should it be but little Josephine, whose blood was not pure enough to glance at his library, much less step foot in or appreciate the titles these weighted shelves bore. "And what would an auror want within these walls?" His deep voice rumbled across the spacious silent, traces of amusement tucked so deeply into syllabic corners that they were almost immeasurable. "Or perhaps you have come to check out Die Lage vom verdammten." He tapped a thin book in the shelf nearest him, not yet broaching the space between them.
The wolfhound's lithe body did little to upset her balance as she continued to scan the titles, silently thanking the sentinel of its master's arrival. Ah, there was the voice she had been waiting for. She felt like a speck in his presence, a small bird within the talons of a hawk. Don't misjudge the sparrow. "To seek knowledge, as is the occupation of any library." She paused, almost amused as she inclined her head toward him. "Damned or not."
Rodolphus's eyes were surprisingly keen,though the grey-green shone a malevolent amber in the afternoon sunlight; though the library appeared to happily soak up the May sun, Rodolphus seemed to repel it, muted blacks and greens of his clothes seeming to defy the very light and remain stubbornly matte. A quirk to his lips suggested a humour that did not extend to his eyes, eyes that watched her mirthlessly, mercilessly. "Sprichst du Deutsch?" It did not take a student of the language to recognise the lapse in formality, and it amused him on some intellectual plane - which was really the only plane Rodolphus would ever his indulgence in. "The German section is quite diverse; relics of a crushed society."
"Only as much as a child of the Continent," she replied briskly, quick to make that vague jab as she was more interested in his description of German society than in her mediocre ability to speak it. Crushed. "You take interest in the destroyed, do you? The undermined?" Insomuch as the undermined belonged to his own ideology. She crossed her arms tightly across her chest.
Child of the continent, tch. As far as Rodolphus was concerned, the French and any other damned member of the continent gave up their rights to whatever snobbery they believed themselves entitled to once choosing a home and career in the Empire. He believed himself far more adept at language than most members of the continent, and the sneer that crossed his eyes - if not his lips - made this tinge of superiority obvious to one so learned in observation as his companion. "I take an interest in the history of my kind," he replied cooly, and though he put no emphasis on my, it was there all the same, in undertones and insidious thought.
"I find it no wonder that you would look no further than Gellert Grindelwald's reign of terror." Pausing, she smirked. Polite conversation didn't seem to do for them. She wanted to push his buttons, to discover what would cause him to react here, in his most beloved space. "Bravo, Rodolphus. You're predictable."
"Oh, little Josephine. Are you so very eager to seem a big girl that you would insult without thinking first?" He gestured vaguely toward the rest of the library. "Seven stories and tens of thousands of books and you assume I am so limited?" He shifted his weight into one step forward, bridging much of the space between them. "I knew your faculties were impaired when you dared make such baseless accusations against me - but to this degree? What a pity."
"If not that, then your Master-work is ... what?" It worked and she laughed, clear and bell-like, rollicking through the nooks and bouncing off the polished stone. "Do you know your Candide, Rodolphus?" She was no longer sensitive to his displays of physicality and as he moved forward, she merely stood her ground. " ... to look upon oneself with horror and yet to cling to oneself; in short to caress the serpent which desires us until he has eaten our heart?" You have taught me thus.
"Master work?" And in Rodolphus's repetition was a warping of her syllables, a twisting, so that even such benign words became malicious, cruel. Her tone did not mesh here - it was cacophonous, at odds with the richness and depth of the library, of its owner. She desired to quote muggle garbage at him? He could have laughed, but that display of emotion might have led to darker things - things that were unacceptable with company so close by. "I do not seek within for the sublime." Ah, the double entendre; Rodolphus found the philosophical notion a fascinating one, but he had no desire for intellectual discourse with a mudblood. Another step forward, the warmth of his body radiating away from him and into her. "I have far more interesting pursuits should I desire a catharsis of the soul."
" ... I know them well," she murmured, watching his mind click through these phases with wary eyes and tensed muscles. She too stepped in, face turned upward to turn her brazen countenance upon Rodolphus as one lip curled over her teeth. Let him levy the first blow. She would be ready. "Torture, perhaps? Does that enlighten your soul?"
He towered over her and they were so near a bookshelf it might seem to the outsider that he was doing nothing more insidious than helping a lady reach a book - but this battle between them was so very much more dangerous than that. "Torture?" He repeated smoothly, and though a dark look spilled over his sharp eyes, his mouth pulled into a smile. It was not amused so much as... content. Utterly content. "What a barbaric suggestion, little Josephine. Do they enjoy such things in the muggle wilds of France?"
"Or in the civilised parlours of England," she spat back, willing herself to remain calm in the face of his rank patronisation. The tips of her fingers grazed the back of the bookshelf, finding purchase there (and close to her wand) to steady herself as she continued to gaze into his face with unbroken intensity.
"We have been through these accusations before, have we not? I believe the official ruling was 'no evidence or credibility whatsoever.'" And at this he smiled, a hollow mockery of an emotion that was more macabre than comforting or even amusing. How he desperately desired to rip into her, to tear her from the inside out. But he was a man of fifty years experience and inexorable patience. He would wait. He would have another opportunity.
"The courts," was a scoff. "Are a sham. Paid by you and yours." Carefully, she pulled one hand away from the wall and drug the tips of her fingers over the carved marble outline of Rodolphus's jaw. She smiled.
"Just think what atrocities a man could commit with such power," he replied smoothly, and though he did not flinch away from her fingers, his palm twitched - fingers aching to feel her throat, to wrench her breath from where it lingered. Oh but how he could defile her. It shone in his eyes - every rampant, vicious thought.
" ... you mean what atrocities man is committing." Removing her touch a minute distance from his face, she brought it back to bear with two firm taps of palm to cheek. She wondered what would bring him to the edge of violence, it intrigued her in the most clinical of senses.
"Legally baseless accusations do not go well with your eyes, little Josephine..." and his voice was dangerously low as he scooped her fingers up with one of his massive palms, bone-crushingly hard, and guided them toward a book upon the shelf she defiled by her very presence (and though it was a presence that amused him for the moment, how very wrong it could go with the correct stimulus). "Here, you may read about the consequences of similar actions perpetrated by your brethren in Italy."
She wanted to bury her fist into his gut, she wanted to wipe the smirk from his face and relieve the pressure upon her fingers. "How benevolent, how kind," she murmured, closing her hand around the leather-bound crimson spine he selected. "To be under your tutelage is the core of enlightenment." Removing the book from the shelf swiftly, she caught the spine deep in her palm and used the hard front cover to buffet his face. "It is the greatest sublimity!"
Oh, but she should have known by now how little acts of violence ruffled him; no, at the worst they enticed him, excited him - indeed there was very little else about Josephine that excited him than her propensity for violence (and how he liked to draw it out of her - it was the most exquisite form of control). His hand shot upward, not to stop the book in its path toward his face (a shot that echoed across the first floor, eliciting a sharp growl from one of the dogs that lingered in their periphery), but to relieve her hand of one of his many prized possessions. "I know you are not an intellectual, little Josephine, but you must tend more carefully to literature." He tutted, and replaced it upon the shelf. "If you cannot play nicely, I shall have you escorted out." Amused calm oozed from him, if only because this was HIS space, HIS territory. He could not be cowed within these walls - not by all the aurors the ministry had to offer.
"Is there anything else you need to teach me?" her lips drew into a thin, colourless line as he spoke, patience soon at an end. Was she foolish to come here and expect him to act differently from every other time she had engaged in combat with him? This time, oh it was merely on the intellectual field. And she hated head-games almost as much as she hated Death Eaters. Her arms crossed over her chest and she swore to herself, one day she would see Rodolphus Lestrange in shackles. For good.
Another shadowed smile (frightening, given the canvas it was set upon) and Rodolphus leaned more deeply in. Surrounded by dogs and books, there was no one to bear witness to their conversation, precisely as he preferred it. Couldn't have purists getting the wrong idea - and couldn't have the law getting the right idea. "Do you miss our lessons?" He murmured, voice painfully low. "Do you ache for them, Josephine? For me?" And those final two syllables could not express the goading mirth buried deep within him, for if she found him as repugnant as he found her, she could not help but take offense (and Rodolphus delighted in offense).
"For you?" She knew what he was trying to do but as usual, he seemed to misjudge her. With crooked, smirking lips she stood on the tips of her toes to grasp the nape of his neck and pull his face down onto her level. Her deep, even breaths filled the silence between them as she prepared to speak. "You are a sadistic, murdering sociopath who thinks that genocide makes for positive change in society. How could anyone but the most deeply insane ever care for you?" A smile. "You woke something in me, Rodolphus Lestrange. A bit of my soul that I would carve out would it not kill me but no - I do not ache for you. I ache to end you ..."
Wide fingers wound around her own, and Rodolphus pulled her, carefully, slowly away from him (lest he lose that thin barrier of control and do something far more foolish than his conscience would allow). "Sociopath?" Oh, he knew the words of these muggle 'doctors' - he was far better read than anyone, even his peers, could give him credit for. "Do I lack affect, Josephine? Do I not feel? Do I not judge?" Ah, but what could such a shallowly reasoning creature do but make assumptions of her betters? He would pity her, were he capable of compassion. No, that emotion had long ago been excised. "I tire of your presence." He replied sharply, tossing her hands back into her. "The dogs will see you out."