Nothing Like The Sun
NC-17, kids. This is some weird stuff.
Draco has grown up cursed with a ferret's exploratory nature in a family of locked doors. Sometimes people told him why they were locked. But mostly he gets patted on the head and shepherded away by a nervous elf chattering how Master Draco must never go in there, that Tiffy or Dobby or whoever would be in such trouble if Master Lucius knew Draco was even close to it.
Draco waits.
Some rooms open to him as he gets older. The library, when he did not eat books and knew how to replace them on shelves. The music room, when he learned how to read music and wanted to play the antique harpsichord in there. But he discovers there are other locked doors...the ones made of words. They are the conversations ceased with a soft murmur in French about the child listening.
When his sister dies unborn, Draco wonders about his mother's sisters. They are both People You Don't Ask About. He hears snippets and fragments, and they only fire his curiosity.
"...betrayed her blood with a Mudblooded nothing..."
"...stupid of her, what could they tell her, and now she's rotting there..."
There are family pictures. Sometimes he opens the album and looks at them. Three girls in a garden, one with roses growing up stone walls and carved benches. He can recognize his mother, even at thirteen. She is thin and fair, like he is, looking ethereal and lovely. She drifts around the picture, smelling the roses, dipping long fingers in the fountain. The other two, though...They are dark, but not similar otherwise. One stares up at the sky above her, kicks a rock in the grass with her toe. Sometimes when she thinks no one is looking she pulls a book out of her robe and sneaks a page or two. She never leaves the picture the way the other two do. But the other....the other he noticed first because she stares out of the picture with a falcon's fierce gaze, looking right at him with challenge in her eyes. She is the one who walks the top of the garden wall, lands in the thorns and laughs, licking the blood off her hand, the one Draco wishes he'd got to know.
Time passes. Draco is not a boy anymore. His voice has deepened, he has to shave every day, and his shoulders have broadened. His house is silent when he comes home, and he keeps wandering into the library, thinking, hoping, his father might be there. He hears his mother crying in the night, and throws things at the wall, repairing them afterwards, because one doesn't do that.
And there is a locked door, a place where he does not hold the key and he thought passing by it one day that he heard someone singing. He asked his mother about it at dinner, and she didn't meet his eyes when she said there was nothing there.
His instincts have led him to learn unlocking spells. The third he tries makes the knob glow briefly before it moves under his hand. There is a dark-haired woman in there reading a book with the air of someone who would rather be somewhere else.
"Leave it....Lucius!" she says, and then laughs. "Not Lucius. Not Lucius as he is now."
"I'm his son, Draco," he says, uncertain.
The woman smiles. "Then we are kin, you and I, Draco. I am your mother's sister, your aunt."
"Which...I have a picture. You're the one that likes to walk the wall," he says. "But she never said your name."
"Bellatrix," she says quietly. Draco nods. It fits her. Warrior woman in Latin, and she has the air of someone who has always been bating at the jesses of her life.
"What are you doing here?" he says. She quirks her mouth in a bitter grin.
"Hiding. The house I grew up in is warded against me, for all I had thought it deserted. Your mother and I are not friends, but she does not deny her duty to her blood."
She turns her eyes to the ceiling. "Narcissa, Narcissa. You speak so eloquently but when all is said and done, you'll not give this up, will you?" Her laugher has a strange note to it, her falcon's eyes a fey look, and Draco realizes that she's ten degrees off sanity.
"She didn't tell you about me, did she, my dear sister?" Bellatrix says. "How awful for her. The other sister is Andromedra, blood traitor, marrying and bearing a mudblooded whelp. No, she'd not be discussed in these halls. But how embarassing when they both pretended to be good upstanding citizens that her sister had the guts to go to Azkaban for the Lord they professed to serve!"
Draco thinks of asking how long. His aunt has the pallor of one who has lived in the dark, and she moves like a falcon used to the jesses.
"All your life, nearly, little one," she says. "I was afraid of the sun when I saw it again, merciless sun, like my Lord...my love is nothing like the sun," she says, and laughs. Abruptly, she sobers.
"You don't belong here with me, lovely boy," she says. "I am corruption walking."
He doesn't know what he would have answered. His watch chimed, reminding him that he had just time to go wash and appear at the dinner table, and he was there before he thought about what could be said.
That night in his bed, he dreamed, stepping into the picture. There was only Bellatrix there, hand still bleeding from her tumble off the wall. She painted his lips with it, then kissed him, tongue pushing blood into his mouth. He woke achingly hard, and shivering. It took a long shower to warm him, and when he thought he'd rinsed the cold menace of the dream from his mind, it flowed back in just at the moment he took his cock in his hand to relieve the pressure so he could sleep again. But the wrongness was a charge as hot as an imagined mouth around him, an imagined voice whispering to him, and the girl of the picture laughed behind his closed lids, mouth dripping blood, falcon's eyes insane as he shuddered and came.
Surprisingly, he slept well that night.
The memory fades over three days of normality until he passes the door again, and unlocks it and enters. His aunt is there, pacing her prison, her sanctuary. She does not look so very different from the girl in the picture. Except, perhaps, more so. He cannot speak when he sees her, and she laughs.
"He is surprised, this bright boy, lovely thing, why are you so surprised? Your father was never surprised, surprising though he was, ah, Lucius, Lucifer, brightly burning," she says, eyes focused into the past. "He's fallen now, fallen from grace. The house elves do bring me the Prophet," she adds. He nods, unsure of what to say.
"And why have you come to me?" she says, turning to face him. "Answers, questions, want, need, desire?" The last word comes out weighted and slow, and Draco shivers. She laughs.
"Do you like to dance on the edge of the knife, Draco?"
"I don't know," he says.
She laughs, a fey cackle, and turns from him. "Do tell me when you figure it out," she says, in an imitation of Narcissa's cool tones, but her eyes flash over her shoulder as he turns the knob, fingers unsteady.
That night he tosses and turns until finally he rises from his bed, belts his silk robe about him, and walks barefoot through silent corridors to the door he's not supposed to open. It swings wide at his touch.
She speaks a word, and light flares in the room, and he can see her sitting up in her bed. In the candlelight she looks barely older than he is. Her hair spills like ink over one white shoulder, and her eyes look almost sane.
"I know now," he says.
She laughs, and rises from the bed, the nightdress like a whisp of cloud over the full moon. She is just a bit shorter than he is, and her kiss tastes of sleep and black dreams and heats his blood like stolen firewhiskey.
She is not gentle with him, though when he pins her hands and sets his teeth just over her jugular, she relaxes almost voluptuously into the motion of their fucking, a moan coming from her that lances fire over his skin. It is hot and it is so good it hurts and he feels his orgasm sheet down his spine and gut him from the inside out.
He rises from the bed like a moth from its cocoon. Her last kiss tastes like the grave.
"You are not like your father," she says, color in her face, life in her eyes.
"You're right," he says, belting his robe back about him. "I won't return."
"That's what you think," she says, and laughs.
And late at night in the innocence of the dorm room, male snores harmonizing up and down the scale, he smells camellias and rot, and wakes sweating and hard. When he cries, he tastes blood in his mouth, and remembers her kiss. Pansy slips her arm through his, and he looks down at her and feels the poverty of what he's going into, and he remembers mad falcon's eyes backlit with defiance, and inwardly the balance shifts. Outwardly it is imperceptible. He smiles, kisses her precisely and correctly, and watches the girls' dormitory door shut between them.
"You understand, of course," Dumbledore says, tilting the vial over the cup of tea, eyes not twinkling. The portraits watch from their frames, silent witnesses.
"I understand," Draco says. "But I'll tell you anyway."
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