Thirty-two? For Merlin's sake, why did everyone insist on coming back older? These thoughts rang loud in her mind. She'd always been at least a little older than most of her constituents. She might throw her youth in Cissy's face, but with men it was different. And the last time she'd seen Barty he'd been fourteen. He'd been noteworthy then, though she'd found his cleverness the more interesting trait, and his social mannerisms just... sometimes he'd seemed to squirm in a lovely sort of way. Or made other people squirm. Sometimes it was hard to tell.
"Regulus is eighteen," she mentioned. "And I'm twenty-seven."
All of her thoughts fell silent when his hand found hers. Bella let him direct her grasp, more out of sheer curiosity than anything else. It struck her as starkly surreal. He touched her so... casually was the wrong word. Easily. He touched her so easily. How far had that progressed? Were her fingers slipping through his hair routine for him? Painfully few people left alive, or had ever even been alive who actually touched her. The names Bellatrix Lestrange and Barty Crouch often found themselves well acquainted in history books. He'd become her colleague, a close colleague, she recalled as his grip encircled her arm. Something about him seemed still so young, like little had changed except for his body. The idea of a little innocence rattling around his mind seemed positively, deliciously sinful.
The box in her hand felt so... appropriate. Fitting. Like it was made for her to touch. Magic seemed to pulse through her fingertips. It was hard to sort out if she actually remembered it, or if its magic simply called out to her as its owner. An undercurrent seemed to resonate on the frequency unique to her family, like-
When talk Dark Lord broke over his eager lips a new thought came crashing through her mind. She set the box on the nearby round table that stood in the center of the foyer. The back of her mind told her the ought to move to a sitting room, but she interest was too quickly sparked to pay it much attention at the moment.
"Dead," she answered after a heavy moment. "He fell before," she said as though she were simply musing aloud to herself, though her eyes crawled up to bore into his. Disclosure of the Dark Lord's secret, fraudulent past was barely even considered at that moment, though her mind seemed to constrict, shying away from a vague sort of openness that hung in the air between them. It wasn't unthinkable that he'd return, and if he did, for him to be aware of her dissent in advance would be inconvenient. "I have no memory of it. But you..." Just a little push, the gentlest press of her mind against his. A nearly thrashing want to simply unhinge his mind and rifle through his thoughts was held in check. "Could you feel him, sense him in any way?" She meant the first time he fell. The two of them, they had been certain of his return. How had they been so sure? "Or did it feel.... hollow?" Like her Mark did at that very moment.