bellatrix (mypetsnake) wrote in triumphic, @ 2014-04-15 22:10:00 |
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Entry tags: | !scene, 1991 : 04, lestrange bellatrix, lestrange rabastan |
WHO: RABASTAN LESTRANGE, BELLATRIX BLACK
WHERE: ON BOARD A BOAT, SPEEDING TOWARD LAND
WHEN: AFTER BREAKING THE FAITHFUL OUT OF AZKABAN, TODAY
WHAT: DETERMINING IF RABASTAN IS READY TO FIGHT
***
After the tower had been put behind the small boat -- after it, a line upon the horizon, shrunk to a mere needlepoint that blended into the slate landscape -- Bellatrix permitted the luxury of a breath. With no intention of interrupting whichever intensely personal reacquainting was happening below decks, she knew her place was at the read. Her wand, loose and pliable in her fingertips, was prepared to assault the sky in order to protect the veracity of her expectations.
The Dark Lord bade her free the faithful. The Dark Lord chose her -- swore to speak only to her, for as long as he was incorporeal -- and so she would be his hands and his feet.
But when there was nothing between them but sky and sea (when the sun gave the edges of the sky a rosy hue), she lowered her wand to relax her arm. Even if (especially) she did not relax her vigil. Not with the years standing so stark upon Rabastan Lestrange’s once smooth face.
Feral animals which had been locked away for unceasing years of gloom, expecting little more than the wet drip of mold and nightmares slicking down the old stone walls, would have reacted with more emotion when freedom was returned to them. Rabastan -- certainly feral once, certainly dubbed animal by those he’d fought against, by father and brother and the woman he’d foolishly permitted himself to love -- did not.
The sky and sea, the rolling of the waves: these were things that would have brought light to his eyes, quickened the pulse. Now, as Bellatrix relaxed her guard -- though never her vigil -- as the boat continued its path, he sat quite motionless, couched up against the frame of the vessel with his knees brought to his chest, arms looped around them, and eyes strangely unfocused -- except whenever Bellatrix happened to cross his line of sight.
The only indication that he was, perhaps, relishing any of this is that his mouth hung slightly open, as though tasting the alkaline air.
And how he made it to the deck, how he made it askant her gaze, she would later fathom. She had determined in the very moment they saw one another, that her heart would remain hidden from him. From a creature she had come to love in the wasted years on the continent, now freed because of his decree.
She stepped closer to him, dropped to one knee.
“Rabastan.”
Her voice had long been a thing of memory -- sharply sweet, then twisted so incomprehensibly that the only way to preserve it was to lock it deeply away -- and hearing it now had a slower effect on him than it once had.
Bellatrix. This is Bellatrix. You know her. You love her.
He pulled his gaze from a knot of rope and resettled it on her.
The wasted years were an itch in the heart of her palm that longed to press against his cheek. But instead of allowing maudlin thoughts to take hold of her -- for years with freedom, disaffected from the influence of that which caught him in its iron jaws -- she offered him an arched brow.
“Nut up.”
Once, he’d been a vain man, putting up a front of careless pride in his appearance whilst maintaining the quiet fastidiousness demonstrated by many athletes: his knuckles might have been bruised and raw, but his heart beat as though a temperate meter, muscles well stretched, worked well, maintained. He was more gaunt now, but the hollowness reached somewhere just past his bones. He supposed he should be wondering what he looked like to her, sitting here like this, filthy and wretched and less.
He supposed he should be rising to her taunt.
“Year.” It was a question.
“1991.”
The vast stretch of time would either be a wasteland in which Rabastan lost himself or a motivator which drove him to the estimable rage she knew well. The rage she relied upon when the shade impressed next steps upon her. And she found herself in the grips of fastidious hope - she found herself yearning - that his rage would not be extinguished. “Rabastan …”
Vise-like, her arm slid beneath his elbow.
“Get up.”
A decade. He’d lost a decade. This neither surprised nor saddened him; ten years was a fact, a marker with which he could gauge where he was, and when. This was not Azkaban anymore, this was no dream-turned-nightmare bled from him by the spectral wardens of the prison as part of his sentence. The thought did not come with an overwhelming sense of relief or gratitude. It just was.
He moved as commanded, perfunctory and sparse. “Why now?”
Some inborne part of her wished to support him, to bear him grimly and wait for the salt-laden air to take hold. But his questions remained. And when her palm itched to find the curve of his jaw, she held it firmly by her side. Two breaths -- four heartbeats, enough space to identify the avian circling over their heads -- passed.
Salazar, but she forgot his height. And his breadth.
“You are needed.”
Without waiting for her to release his elbow, he moved towards the edge of the vessel, planting his forearms into the damp, sturdy wood. “Funny,” he said, and there was no flicker of emotion that was congruent with his assessment of her statement. Ten years was a long time to wait to be needed, even if he had been needed, once.
“Bellatrix.” He hadn’t said her name in a long time; his mouth now rendered it strangely, as though it were a foreign word.
Her arm, congruent with his own, slid the length of the edge before it plunged over the prow to be buffeted in the foam and salt-spray. Reminding me of my purpose. Keeping me sharp. For a pang (empty and unique, more than all her long years of Spanish solitude) clutched her, and then faded. She waited for him to continue.
“I hadn’t the resources.”
What should have come next was a toxic remark about how convenient it all was, to be needed only when said resources were available, how it had always been thus between them -- Rabastan could do what his brother could not, could provide what Bellatrix asked for because it pleased him to do so, and yet was only called on when suitable for her.
Look at her too closely and you will see a truth you do not want to accept.
Without glancing down, Rabastan turned his arm, the twisted skin beneath just visible beneath the rags. “Burning for a while now. Resources?”
Would that she could tear his gaze to the Mark upon both their forearms. Would that it could wake him from his decade of terror. Her thumb mashed against the rags, pulling them aside to bear the soiled skin and the brightly pulsing Mark to the light. “You are faithful, Rabastan, and Evan is faithful. He bade me to retrieve you. And He caused the dementors to toss the guards into the sea so that you could be released.”
His inner-monologue was lost on her, and had it been uttered it would still be lost on her. Voldemort set the precedent. Voldemort ordered the world now, and later. There was no turning back, for if he ordered an invasion she believed in their righteous cause. And besides, she wanted to go home again.
“He is not corporeal. But his spirit remains.”
In this moment, in this place -- with the sea wind a cold bite along a spine in which cold had long since settled -- he could not think of happiness, of gratitude; of the joy that was meant to fill him that the Dark Lord had returned and would be remade. The joy that was meant to swell his heart at the thought that his faith would be rewarded.
A decade in Azkaban was not faith.
“Bella, Bella. Bellatrix.” He pulled his arm away, acknowledging the shudder that ran rigid up his spine from the touch of her fingers against the Mark. As though to correct her -- “You are faithful.”
“So too shall you be,” was spoken confidently, though the hand that once pressed itself against his Dark Mark now directed his gaze to her for assessment. She took a breath, fanning her palm to the nape of his neck.
“Shall you not?”
Whatever was still Rabastan was ashamed enough to falter at the piercing weight of her gaze -- ashamed not because of his doubts, but because of the state he found himself in, now held up to her unfaltering attention. A pulse of tension in his jaw betrayed the tensing beneath.
“If you wish.”
“If. If.” Her fingertips pinched against his skin, bearing him within a hair’s breadth of her starkly pale face. “I did not dare damnation for if, Rabastan.” She dropped her grip on him and turned away, only to fling another statement at him, over her shoulder. “If I wish, you can swim back to England.”
“Yes.” He, likewise, turned away, eyes sliding back to study the waves, the foam that beat against the hull as they sped on and on. “You don’t.”
“I don’t.” A look over her shoulder, meant to briefly gauge his response to her threat. And she found herself let down when he did not rise to it.
“I don’t what?”
Simply: “Wish.” The seaspray was in his hands; he rubbed his face, tasted the clean salt of it, drew his tongue against a split in his lip where the brine stung. He was alive and this was real. “You don’t wish.”
“You wish for me not to wish …” and focusing on an indistinct point on the horizon (perhaps a black mass indicating land) she sighed. She waited. Then, with relish.
“I have your wand.”
His smile was a feral slash of teeth, filthy strands of hair clinging damp to his cheeks as he glanced back at her. "Among other things." Rather than elaborate, however, he lingered on the sight of her, a muscle working in his jaw -- before he turned away again.
"Back to the fight then."
“ … what else is there?” Faithful unto death, Bellatrix knew that supporting Tom Riddle one last time would serve her family by pressing down every good aspect and shaking them together as avenging angels. Once upon English soil, their vengeance would be swift.
“Unless you’d like to know the taste of saltwater.”
"Death by drowning would be the best thing that's happened to me since..." His voice abruptly cut off, as though the flow of his very thoughts had been interrupted, cleaved in two and irretrievably lost.
Then, after a long pause -- "Kill me or use me, Bellatrix. Don't threaten."
“I’d rather use you.” With pursed lips, she turned away from him and concentrated her focus upon her white-knuckled grip on the bow.
“We’ll die later.”