Back to the Cradle of Your Tomb

Or Bellatrix following Narcissa to the moon. . .

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"If I could put you in a frame I'd draw you smiling... with a cigarette in your mouth and your... hands reaching out for... something if I could..." ~ K's Choice, Winners

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Make me your friend. Make me believe. I'll do it. I'll do anything.

Anything.

Her eyes are like twin daggers, corkscrews spiralling into me, bleeding down, down... mischievous and compliant, fierce with the taste of my arousal visual and their hunger open in their surface shine. Make me bleed, they tell me, make me bleed and make me weep. Do it all over again.

I swear if those cold diamonds would cut even deeper, I'd be bared to the bone. Crisp still, snowflakes rising, blinking, must I come to her? I can barely move my fingers.

Make me. Make me.

A mating game of make-believe, of making and of grasp. She and I on the flowerbed, crushing the petals under our bodies. I can feel my one closed fist drawn into the earth by its grasp, grass damp and I'm sure the yellow of the flower core will stain the inside of my fingers, as will there be dirt under my fingernails. Ha. Flower yellow on my fingers and rising teardrops to my eyes. Have you ever wanted, needed, before this moment come?

Bear me on your lips, she begs me with those eyes corrupted. Bear me, bear me, take me into morrow with the barest of recollections and impressions clear on naked flesh.

Is all I ask. Is all I need. Want. Need. Anything, anything. Make me yours and I'll be anything at all. Your morning light fading fantasy image on the hind of your eyelids, I'll leave the teeth marks on your shoulder. I'll be the bed of your bones. I'll be substantive; I'll be sustained. I'll break loose in fire. Make me. Break me open.

So many requests, and it's all in her eyes, plain for me to see and read and interpret, and take to my mouth in return. My body, traitorous has at last begun to move, at long last, her body coming closer, end destination within reach. My fist has not yet unclenched; I take the grass with me, and a bit of the earth.

How will it look smeared over those breasts, small and blossoming, like rose buds? Make her as of the earth, when in fact she is mine, and forsake her I shall not, for what is mine shall remain so.

Lips twin sweeps of a rotten mouth... She makes me weak and lucid, she turns my hands to fire. Before I move to take her mouth, her wrist receives a bite. A brand. A birthmark, as I engendered her, as will our mouths. I tear the skin with my teeth, just because I can.

Oh yes, I'll break you. I'll make your screams corrupt the edges of your vision, turn it flat and cushioned, and filter it with my colours, grey, green and brown. The colours of your eyes. I'll corrupt you into me. I'll break loose in thee, I'll make love to your skin and your tears and your freckles, and the lies of your mouth will turn to ashes and dust as your body tells me truth. Break love to me, you ask, I'll give you back yourself.

Eventually she turns me dominant. Eventually, she turns me sexual.

It is that moment frozen as two mouths bend to the touch when everything could die, does die, and death makes a prism of your self-evoked communal prison. The light is communal, the air, shared between your lips, back and forth, as though moving in and out of a windstorm. It is when your nerve endings reach out of your skin and reach forward to touch her flesh, even though completely metaphysical. To get closer than skin, they call this.

Rest for a moment. Peace in composure. Calm in movement, calm in touch. Let's not shatter the mood yet. Enough time for passion, later.

Back to the night of your eyes... slit and swollen, like the moon high above us, voyeur to nightly escapades, the black fire of our desire bathing intimately in the absence of the sun.

Time is functional merely in times of slow-motion, else moving over us in circles as though a mockery of itself. When I slow time down to my very own leisurely pace I can somewhat appreciate its value. My darling is impatient, wet and slippery under my touch, gasping, prone integral and demanding of gratification intemperate. It is a gentle art, a death in the small, to extend duration here when it is all but absent.

She is the beggar and I the insane. I offer her everything as I take her in vain. If I were a holy man, she would be the lamb sacrificed at the altar, and I'd cry bitter tears as I cut the knife into her pelt and wool, before she'd beg me pleadingly to do it again. She professes and I cleanse away the tears of old sin, before I make her commit them anew.

I move down to her breast, her headlong gasp, escaping her lips before she caught her tongue beneath her teeth, vitalising me afresh. Her knees buckle and she is almost on her back as my tongue draws circles into the peaky goosebump flesh of her nipple.

Her aroma sweet, the coral corona offset against the cream of her breast, it's the sort of tableau vivant that would make a painter weep. Or a base lover such as myself smile. I proceed slowly, achingly, make her stir deliberately, and she will wail for my fingers and tongue before the end. Just as I wish it. Her at my command, for she dictates me whole.

The flower yellow leaves a stain over the breast I'm not cradling, as I trace my finger back up her collarbone. She sighs under my touch, shivers a little, as the wind makes the scenery stir. I remember for a moment that my sister was named after this now-dead summer blossom, the narcissus. I would almost forget, as she lies here so dainty and white.

Her bloodless complexion seems the furthest thing away from light, yet her paleness outshines itself, as one gemstone eclipses another. She makes the moon, her lawless partner-in-crime, that ever-present watchful eye and sidelined attraction to our bi-nightly passions, grow dim in comparison. But I have command over her responses to my ministrations. If I want her to breathe fire, I alone can make her.

I turn my attention to her other nipple, suckling like a new-born, and she laughs and lets the fingers of one hand entwine in my hair while placing the other above her head, her eyes hot in her face, and decries me the dearth of haste in my movements as I evoke response from her. Calls me lazy. Calls me lackadaisical.

Lackadaisical. I love that word. Lack of daisies... Lack of narcissi, of Cissa. Of sister.

Our father wanted a son, lord of and heir to the legacy of the Black House. Instead, we were born. Two girls, fraternal twins; misfits, right from the beginning. Neither of us fit into the original planning our father had foreseen for his firstborn. Our names became tokens of disappointment, turning sour on his tongue even before they would call for us, and always he kept us at arm's length. So we turned to each other, black sheep to black sheep, to counteract our coupled curse.

Bellatrix and Narcissa Black. Misfits from the start.

Perhaps that is why we both strove so hard not to be feminine? Until my adolescence I climbed in and out of trees like a regular monkey, and Cissa could ride harder than the tide. She would often bet with me, those early days, that she could make it back on her steed across the beach before the waves collected on shore. She lost as often as she won, but considered this a triumph nevertheless. Our elder sister Andromeda used to roll her eyes at what she considered to be our tomboyishness'. The irony of this still makes me laugh, low in my throat. In my arms, she is ever so womanly.

Others see my sister as graceful yet angular. But rocked to my chest my lithe darling is all curves and soft and sweetness. She is nectar down my body, like the rainfall in the forest that we'd run through on hot summer days, when the shower would surprise us, and we'd laugh and soak ourselves and already I found myself attracted to the nipples straining against the fabric of her clothing.

I love her name. Cissa, secret, still. Silent. Cissa summertide. She brings about the sun to me. Though she goes dead under my nimble fingers, as she never breathes when I'm touching her. I nicknamed her Suneye in a long forgotten past; sometimes I will think of it and even call her by that hidden name. She finds it is dear to her.

Her full first name is even more precious: Narcissa. Of the eye ever staring at the sun. She reminds of the flower, of the summer, and of spray. Of summer rain. We were born in mid-July, she came out first, and she cried so loudly the neighbours thought our parents' servants had begun the annual farm young slaughter early.

We were born under the same rising moon. It is how we met, again, a full decade and two turning spans of time after that moon had risen to the sullen sky. I followed her out that night, as she ducked away from under her blanket and walked barefooted into the woods. The stars above glinted in her fair hair. We were not yet lovers.

She sought out her mate of reflected sunlight as I sought out her; I could smell her old menstrual blood better than usual, it left a trail on the leaves. I sniffed it out like a little dog.

She turned to me in the moonlight, white and naked and made of porcelain. She smiled a wolf's grin at me. We became, not only sisters of the blood, but sisters to the blood, under the glaring eye of the moon. Cissa was the one ever fascinated with the moon. I, with blood. Blood on the moon. Always and ever the third party. I wish by God I could shoot him down.

If I put fire to the moon, would she then love the heat in my eyes?

She is beautiful like this. Raw and carnage desirous of demeanour meltdown. She enjoys it most when I push back her sanity to within the brink of her being, possessed of but a margin of the inner world, and then pull her back as though she were dangling from a piece of string, puppet of strings, and I a puppet master. Dominant, yet defiant of my dominance. Ultimately it is two making one in this battle of forlorn sobriety folding.

Hum into my skin... hum into my skin. Cissa... She makes my deathbed, she pulls me down from normalcy into her wicked underworld, grazes my lips with her tongue and knife and Gods, when she moans, it is as though the world gives way from under me.

Blood humming, siren's call. Need to have you, now now now. Have to have you, now, now, now. Blood pulsing, stretching out of my skin. Our very bone trembling in the wind-flown air, throbbing itself, heavy in anticipation. The stillness of dusk croons a shrill note out of the shadows that reveal the edge of night. The fairies come out to watch this private heaven unfold. In this common darkness, roses black bleed softly open in the wake of this new dawn. A dawn made of stardust and tears. I taste you.

Thought incoherent, bliss obedient, and in the midst of this sobbing ecstasy, our common treachery, one truth breaks loose, and strands upon the waves of my zenith crashing me into flames:

You are my oldest sin.

But also my youngest breath, as we lie entwined, and come out in tandem into the stronghold of each other's arms, back from where the angels cough up bones and the fire breathes in stone. Back home, as the cliché goes.

And then the hate returns. When she turns her back to me as she falls asleep. Even in slumber, she is shielding her self from me. Fearful of my wrath. Not realising as she hides, she ignites it.

I know this feeling; it is an old friend of mine, like the bottle to our father, the Draught of Peace to our mother and the whip to my darling's horse. She shuns me. She belittles me with her lack of care. She screams for me in ecstasy, then where am I left to her when the waves of climax come to rest in slumber deep?

I am Bellatrix, born from the same womb, the girl who plucked the stars from the heavens to set them square-cut into your eyes. I am the one who painted the moon black for you. I am the one who woke you, screaming into midnight, from your decided self-deception of satisfaction. I made you wither. I made you soar. I made perfection bleed on you, I made you detest the very smell. You drank from my lips. I nurtured your wounds.

Do I not deserve recompense in return?

She sighs in her sleep. My arm, still around her waist, is wrapped more securely around her as she inadvertently tucks my hand beneath her. Just a thing to be held. The eyes that burn me in wake and nod are shut. Shut-eye Suneye, won't you ever unshutter the world behind your lids to me?

How must I love you to gain you. I watch you from the tree house as you ride your horse, hair free in the roaring wind. Wood under my feet creaking with the force of the breeze. I was ever the one climbing, rising up to meet the stars, ironically, while you preferred to ride. I watch you at dawn, challenging the waves, crystal laughter breaking even on the tide as you decry them their incompetence. I watch you every night, as you sleep, and still I know nothing of what goes on behind your eyes...

Gods, she won't let me breathe even in memory. She is breakable as china, indefinite as storm. My twin sister, my mystery. And as I break her, she breaks me. Inhales me in her sleep.

Can I kill you? Can I kill you, please? But even if I'd close your eyes, they'd swallow up my vision.

But I tuck your hair behind your ear. And let my own lids fall shut, to have all the world drop dead.

I'd rather dream of you, instead.

~*~

And all is indefinite in you...

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