Author's Notes: Written for the second round of DobbyRocksSocks' Ultimate OTP Competition on the HPFC Forum, with the prompt "situation: a death".

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Bellatrix was ever eager to please. While other Death Eaters would carry out the Dark Lord's orders with unobtrusive expediency, Bellatrix expected and sought to achieve congratulations for her hard work. At the very least, she required acknowledgement of her success, and never was that desire to be recognized more notable than when she brought her first corpse to him like a cat bringing a dead mouse to its owner. She laid the corpse before him and gazed at him hopefully, as if she wanted or expected a pat on the head for bringing him a dead body.

He couldn't have pulled his eyes off the body for long enough to congratulate her, even had he wanted to. It was just a Muggle, no one of any importance, but its wide, empty eyes stared at him nonetheless, accusing as the glass eyes in a stuffed animal's head.

"What do you expect me to do with this?" he asked coldly of Bellatrix, who was hovering hopefully beside the body. He wanted to stoop and turn the Muggle's head away from him, but the thought of touching it made him sick.

"I thought that you'd like to see it." She wavered slightly. "I killed it for you, as you told me to. Aren't you pleased?"

Pleased? By the filthy corpse that she laid before him? He wanted people to die, not to see the gory effects of their death.

"I am pleased that you did it, Bellatrix, but I did not need you to show it to me," he told her, and she wilted. Her head sagged forward and her shoulders slumped. A reprimanded child could not have looked more pitifully disappointed in himself.

"Yes, Master."

"Get rid of it," he ordered her, and Bellatrix drew her wand so quickly that she fumbled with it, so eager was she to please. The corpse rose off the ground, its head lolling limply back, and its blank eyes fixing on him again. He suppressed a shudder.

When Bellatrix returned – having disposed of the corpse somewhere where he would never have to see it again, he hoped – she gave him a nervous look.

"I thought you would like to see it, Master," she said, and he averted his eyes from her. She looked too pathetic, too desperate for approval that he would never truly give. "I wanted to prove to you that I could..."

"I had no doubt that you could kill," he told her. "But the sight of a Muggle's body when it is dead is only slightly less disgusting than the sight of a living Muggle."

"I feel differently, my Lord." She spoke with appropriate deference, and he was pleased that she was no longer acting like a wounded dog, but he wished that she would drop the subject. "I think that there is nothing quite so satisfying as the sight of a dead Muggle. Dead is the only way that they should be."

"Did you enjoy killing him, Bellatrix?"

"Profoundly." Her voice shook slightly and her pupils dilated visibly. "To be able to cleanse the world of one more of his sort, and to be in control of his life... the pleasure was enormous, my Lord. I assumed that you would share my feeling. I did not realize that it would trouble you."

"It does not trouble me, Bellatrix," he told her, though that was nothing more than a boldfaced lie. "It revolts me. Muggles revolt me." Death revolts me. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, my Lord," she said, and lowered her head to a half-bow. "I meant only to please you."

"You please me," he said, "by keeping the filth of your work away from me."

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Fin