Woman\'s Time

Title: Woman’s Time
Author: Ivy-chan
Character: Bellatrix Lestrange
Rating: R
Warning: Masturbation, menstruation, description of a corpse.
Author’s Note: In response to violet_quill’s challenge, ‘The Voices and Vaginas of HP Women’. 1,339 words.

Rodolphus is dead, dead since the night before last and past the morning. I know this, I have seen them drag his body past my cell and prop it up before the bars of my cell. I have seen my husband’s eyes empty and rotting and covered in maggot eggs, his mouth gaping open in a final scream for the terrors that the nights here bring. The guards put him before my cage cell door and let him speak to me, but I knew they had cursed him to speak lies. My poor, dead Rodolphus would not speak this way to me, I know, I know. He spoke of blood traitor ideas, of we loyal servants of the rightful Lord, of how we were being punished and deserved to be. He, or rather the shadow men voices in his mouth hurled crude words at me. ‘Cunt. Bitch. Whore.’ The way he leaned against the door made him appear as a puppet made of bones and tattered white skin stretched fine. His arms were limp, draped bonelessly across the iron and wood bars, his neck rolled and lolled sickly as his jaw worked, flopping loose his tongue as he spoke to me of traitors and hell. And I smiled, mocking the fools who had cursed him to speak so, and raged at the way they were violating the man he had been.

I let the shadow men use him until they could no longer think of things to say to me, then walked to the bars and ripped the tongue from Rodolphus’s open mouth. I have always been one for dramatic gestures. It came easily, a yank and a sickening tearing of tissues. It was slimy and foul, coated with the rotting lies and slander he had been made to speak, would speak no longer. I laughed in triumph, my husband would rest in peace, would not be used or cursed for such things any longer. I laughed and laughed,. I think, until the shadow men came once more and threw pictures of rotting eyes and bleeding arms and spiders in my mouth at me, and I cursed them and cursed them as I slid to the floor as the cold. Stole. In. Always cold here, it’s always freezing cold in dead, dead winter, no skeleton trees, no ice, but blank, bare stone and dirt and nothing but hard and cold and stone.

Now they’ve gone from my window, the wretched things. They’ve stolen away my husband and left me here with the stones and the screams for company. I notice the feeling of stickiness, like holding a great slimy frog, and see that is tongue still in my hand and it is clammy and wet and horrid, but it is him and the only thing of him I will ever see again. He will be avenged, my mind is shrieking like metal grinding together and I feel myself smiling so wide as I’d promised never to do. Laugh lines, you know. They cause dreadful wrinkles, but now it no longer matters for all I have to dress up for are the stones and the shadow men and now for my husband’s tongue and perhaps even for the flies that will hatch out of it. Even for them, and they shan’t mind the wrinkles and rips and stains on my clothing. Only one suit of clothing they give us here, only one suit anyone ever uses before they die in a month, two months, three…blood clings to my single prison shift and the floor where I have dragged myself, unable to walk. Blood from my woman’s time, thin and black and aching.

Once a month, and never reliable as it once had been.

The shadow men always draw away when I am bleeding. Nothing to feed on, you see...they feast only on happiness, and these days I feel sharp as a blade and frigid as spelled steel. I close my eyes and give in to the Numb. For the first week in Azkaban, the dear and grief and terror are like steel and silver knives slicing apart the soul for the shadow men to feast upon. In the second week, it is the dull ache of a festering wound, and then the pus inside spews out into your brain and covers it in your decay. From that time on, there is nothing to feel inside but the Numb, something grey and hollow and dull.

I am still clutching his tongue. I shall present it to my Master when I am set free alone, but for now it is mine. It is mine and it nestles against my breast fondly, although Rodolphus himself never touched me there with hand, tongue, or even fingertip. He wanted to wait, I remember, wait until our Master had overcome, had begun his rule and his eradication of halfblood and mudblood filth. Had created a perfect world for our child, our beautiful, pureblood child to grow up and come into his magic. I will give birth to no child, and for this I am owed vengeance. Even if Rodolphus had lived, my body has been rendered barren. There will be no continuation of our line. One more ‘punishment’ for our loyalty to the Lord. I remember…faintly now, mixed in with the spiders and the rotting eyes, I had been enraged as the men had stripped me of my clothes, had crudely inserted a wand into me, and with one word and a flash of pain, destroyed my unborn, unconceived, unthought-of hope of a child. The physical pain bothered me little. I am a woman used to pain, in others and in myself. The violation, the humiliation of another man daring to lay hands on me in a place only my husband should touch had hurt worse, but only served to fuel my anger more. I no longer feel anger. I no longer feel grief.

My hands slide beneath the dirty cloth of my uniform, reach down to cup myself even as I remember. My fingers are icy, and when I explore deeper I find that inside myself is warm and soaked wet with blood. Rodolphus’s blood, mine, blood of my child. I move my fingers lightly, tracing the folds of skin outside of my vagina, a word considered as crude as several vulgarities one could name, to some...what is the matter, Rodolphus? You are dead, you can not give me a woman’s pleasure. Who is here to judge me? Who would dare? My mother is dead, the woman who taught me that the place between my legs is dirty and secret, a place only for the man I am to be married to. Now he is gone and it is mine, for better or for worse.

It is soft, and fleshy, and damp, as the inside of one’s mouth. And hollow, meant to accommodate the length of a man. Two fingers, three fingers I fit inside and probe, stroking the inside of myself. It tingles oddly when I stretch my fingertips inside…almost pleasurably, but more like an itch, a longing. My thumb, I use to massage my clit, sensitive and raw and…white-stinging as I close my eyes and moan. It comes very much like wave, this ‘orgasm’ I have heard giggled and whispered about in small huddled groups. A wave starting gently, clenching muscles inside of me around my fingers, and breaking, releasing…

I gasp and come back to myself, and I am lying on the filthy, straw-covered floor of my cell once more. I slide my fingers out, and laugh out of some feeling I can not explain. I feel shaky and weak and sticky and strong and white, white and stinging, and I grind my bloody fingers into my dress as I revel in my own private joke, for this is my bridal bed, and there is my husband’s tongue at my breast, and here is my honeymoon night among the shadow men and dead-eyed, gaping men who no longer understand what they see.