Solve for X

Title: Solve for X
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Draco/Bellatrix
Summary: The seduction of Dracy Malfoy.
Warnings: Incest. Mild knifeplay. A bit of nongraphic violence. Lots of things that were uncomfortable to write. Cruel!Sane!Deliberate!Twisted!Manipulative!Bella; Insecure!Pawn!Draco



She Apparates to the end of the walkway and flicks her wand. Her trunk grows the legs of an arachnid and follows her down the path. On the step, she raises her hand to knock, but the door swings gently open.

"Bella."

"Cissy."

"I felt you coming." She did. The air had changed; grown thin and cold like the breath of a dementor. Narcissa wonders if her sister has brought one with her, tucked into her trunk like a talisman. It wouldn't surprise her.

They kiss.

"Let me see the boy, Cissy!"

~ * ~

Draco watches her from the upstairs window. She reminds him of a sparrow, small and black and light on her feet. He recognizes her from his mother's photographs. There is one of him in her lap as an infant. In it, he is staring into her face, his baby eyes wide and solemn. In it, she is ignoring him, watching something outside of the frame.

As she comes closer to the door, Draco can see the single spot of color in her face: her bowed, red mouth.


~ * ~

His mother calls to him from the sitting room.

"This is your Aunt Bellatrix," she says, and observes him closely when he takes his aunt's small hand in his own and brings it to his lips in greeting, the way his father has taught him.

When his lips touch her skin, she bends two knuckles just enough to push beneath his upper lip and meet his front teeth. "Bella," she says to him. "Call me Bella." Her voice is smooth and liquid and ink-dark, like her eyes.

"Bella," Narcissa says. "This is my son. Your nephew. He's sixteen now." She emphasizes certain words. Her eyes are keen.

"I know, Cissy," she answers, distracted. To Draco, she says, "You've grown. The last time I saw you, you were suckling your mummy's teat."

Draco feels his skin grow hot, and his mother sends him back upstairs.


~ * ~


An hour later, Narcissa knocks at her son's door and sits down on his bed when he lets her in. Draco leans against his wardrobe and stares down at her. She looks weary. She has looked weary since they took his father away, but now it seems that it's in her bones, because she has trouble holding her shoulders apart.

"You are to call her Aunt Bellatrix," she says.

"Why? She said..."

"I know what she said. You are to call her Aunt Bellatrix."

"Why?" he asks again.

"Because she is your aunt. We call things what they are. Do as I say, Draco." As she is leaving, she turns back to look at him and adds, "There is no man in this house."

When his mother closes the door, Draco sits down on his bed in the spot where she has disturbed the duvet and wonders whether she is right. He can't decide. He keeps pressing his tongue against the center of his two front teeth.


~ * ~

Bella spends a lot of time in the garden, and Draco assumes this is because she has spent the last fourteen years without light. He notices, though, that she always seeks the shade, and she shields her heavy-lidded eyes with her hand. He spends a lot of time watching her. He tells himself that this is because there is little else to do, and she is new, and everything else in this house is old.

When she is still, she reminds him of one of the sculptures his mother has placed on the grounds, angular and opaque. Sometimes, she sends sparks flying out of her wand and laughs, and then she reminds him of a fountain.

His mother comes up behind him while he's at the window one afternoon, and he doesn't hear her. "Busy yourself, Draco, or I will busy you," she says severely.

He goes to his room and reads a book.

Two hours later, his aunt comes to his door. She opens it silently and without knocking. When he looks up, he isn't sure how long she's been standing there, but he thinks it's awhile. The fingernail in her mouth is chewed almost to its quick.

"Dinner," she says, arching her eyebrows. "Are you hungry?" For the first time, Draco notices how little she blinks.

"Yes," he answers, laying his book beside him and closing it without marking his page. "Thank you, Bella."

She smiles broadly, and her eyes suddenly seem to swallow all of the light in his bedroom and send it shooting back out in fits. On the way down the stairs, she takes his elbow. "What are you hungry for?" she asks. Then, "And what else do you like to watch, precious?"

Draco doesn't answer. He also doesn't eat. His mother eyes him suspiciously and makes him clear the table.


~ * ~



Draco is back at the window. Bellatrix is in the garden. His mother is having a lay in. It's her third one this week.

He watches as Bella kneels. She reaches out her pale arms to something, and from the movement, Draco can see that it's a snake. He can't hear her, but her mouth is moving, and the serpent slithers toward her, brushing the grass aside.

She wraps her hands around it, and it doesn't resist. She pulls it into her lap, like an infant, and Draco thinks briefly of the photograph his mother used to keep in the sitting room. It's gone now.

When she releases the creature, it curls around her thigh like a garter, creeping under her skirts. As she tugs them up to her waist, he can see that she wears nothing underneath. She pushes a hand between her legs as the snake coils around and around, contracting and releasing like a muscle.

Draco is too far away to see detail, but he knows what she is doing. Her orgasm is the first one other than his own that he sees. She throws herself into an arch, her hair falling down her back like an angry waterfall, and before he can stop himself, he imagines what it would feel like clutched in his fists, imagines himself pulling it until he feels her scalp resist, imagines himself wrapped around her thigh.

His stomach in his throat, he shuts himself in his bedroom and locks the door. He can't catch his breath. He comes so hard it makes him dizzy. The dizziness makes him sick. He staggers to the bathroom, trousers still undone, and vomits into the sink.


~ * ~


Two days later, she corners him in the kitchen. It's past midnight, and he's left his wand on his bedside cabinet. His mouth is dry. Every time he drifts into sleep, he dreams there is a snake crawling down his throat and wakes up gagging, and he wants water.

She appears behind him so fast that he thinks she must have Apparated, though he heard nothing. "Draco," she says, her voice cool and close. He turns on his bare heel. "Your name means dragon. In Latin. You knew that, yes?"

"Yes," he says automatically. As a child, he was reminded of this every time he cried.

"Little dragon," she smiles, leaning in and up so that their noses almost touch. "Tell me. Do you breathe fire?"

Everything goes still. The air between them is hot and pulsing and thick. The corners of her red mouth are tipped up slightly. Every hair on Draco's body prickles, and his knees are suddenly threatening mutiny. Her gaze is steady on his face.

Sucking in a breath they both can hear, he draws his spine straight and whispers, harshly, "Where is your husband?"

She laughs, and it's genuine. Her face transforms into bizarre, girlish delight. For a moment,. Draco can picture her as a child, spinning in circles, her arms stretched out like wings, and then she crows, "He does! He breathes fire!"

He stands rooted to the spot, anger rising in him like sick. His chest starts to burn, and his eyes feel like they have turned to seething embers in his skull. When she grabs his chin, he tries to jerk away from her, but her strength surprises him. She holds on sharply, and the laughter stops. The smile stays. "Do you think I'm a whore?"

"Yes!" he spits, before he can think. Again, he tries to throw his head sideways, away from her, and again, her grip is immovable.

She smiles wider. "Whores get paid. What do you think I'm worth, Little Dragon? What will you give me?"

He doesn't answer. His breath is coming quick and ragged. She is so close now that a stray strand of her hair is tickling his nose, and her hand has crept down his neck. Her thumb now rests against the fluttering beat in the hollow of his throat. It feels menacing.

"Do you know what whores do when they don't get paid?"

He closes his eyes. She leans even closer. Her body presses fully against him. He is hard even before her thigh settles between his legs.

"Tell me, Little Dragon, do you know?"

Silence. Breath. Heat.

"No?"

He opens his eyes. He looks defiant.

"Are you going to hit me, fire-breather? Did your daddy teach you to hit your whore?" He can smell her breath. It's metallic and sweet. "Do it."

He stares, his chest still heaving. There is part of him that wants to hit her. There is part of him that wants to fuck her. They might be the same part. Another part wants to cry into his mother's hair.

Bellatrix takes his clenched hand in one of hers and pries his fingers out straight. At first he resists, but her fingers are small and strong and cool. He eventually lets her. She brings his sweaty palm against the side of her face and goads him again. "Do it."

The tip of his thumb touches the corner of her mouth. Some of her lipstick rubs off on the side. His hand shakes, with rage or with fear or with desire, and he can't make it stop. "Are you a coward, Little Dragon? Are you a coward like your father?"

He slaps her clear across the face, and his heart stops beating, and she laughs with vicious glee into his mouth when she kisses him. "You are glorious," she whispers down his throat. "You are glorious." Her whisper is low and sexual and travels along his nerves until it reaches his spine and explodes.

He squeezes his eyes shut and kisses her back so fiercely that their teeth knock together like swords, both of his hands knotting in her hair.

She Disapparates to her chamber, leaving her lipstick smeared across his face and his cock throbbing against his roiling belly.


~ * ~



Draco doesn't come down for breakfast the next morning. His mother comes to his door.

"Are you ill?" she asks. The lines around her mouth have become pronounced, and her skin looks dry and thin. Though Bellatrix is older and has spent years in Azkaban, Narcissa could be her mother.

"No, just tired," Draco answers, unable to meet her eye. "I didn't sleep well."

Narcissa looks at him appraisingly. "Dress. You have work to do today." She waits for him to pull his sheets back and runs her eyes meticulously over both the bed and her son before she leaves.


~ * ~

Draco's work is Occlumency, and Bella is his instructor.

"You will need this," his mother says wearily, though she will not tell him why and snaps at him when he asks. She insists on being present for the lessons.

They do not go well. Bella says, "I am going to open up your little egg." She taps him on the head with her wand and giggles like a little girl. "Resist."

But Draco thinks he can feel her fingers prising his skull apart the second her eyes meet his, and he keeps trying to look away, and she keeps grabbing his chin and forcing him back. His mother watches, her mouth growing thin.

"Stay," Bella commands. "You betray yourself when you look aside!"

But he betrays himself no matter where he looks. He cannot help it. He flushes with embarrassment, and Bella grows frustrated, but there is a hard light in her brackish eyes, like the moon reflecting off of them, and he knows that she is seeing what he cannot push aside.

When she declares, "Enough!" and shoves him onto the sofa, her nails rake the back of his neck. She heads for the kitchen, smirking.

His mother sits beside him. Her hand finds the marks that Bellatrix has left, and she grows as still and cold and white as a snowfall. "I would teach you myself," she whispers, sounding strangled. "But I am unskilled, Draco. You understand? I am unskilled."

Draco nods.

"But I will tell her she is not to touch you." Narcissa touches her wand gently to her son's neck and erases everything.

~ * ~


They argue in Narcissa's bedroom. Draco stands at the closed door.

"He is not your plaything!"

"This is not a game, Cissy! No one is playing! There are no children left here!"

"He is my child."

"He will not be yours for long. You will leave him to me, or he will fail, and all three of you will die like dogs. Is that what you want for your ickle boy, Cissy? Your strapping husband? To die like a dog?" Draco hears the disdain in her voice.

His mother begins to cry. He hears Bella's voice, louder as she heads for the door. "Don't think him innocent, Narcissa. He has thoughts like men." His mother weeps harder.

Bella's hand touches the knob, and Draco hears it rattle, but he cannot move away. "He is the only one who can save your skin now, your Little Dragon. And me."

The door opens. He steps aside, and Bella comes through the threshold and takes him roughly by the arm without looking at him. With her other hand, she closes the door and walks him silently down the corridor. "It's rude to eavesdrop," she says. "Have you no manners?"

In his bedroom, he turns to her. "Tell me what's going on!" he demands.

"Your mummy doesn't think I'm an appropriate nursemaid," she says. "Do you need minding, Draco? Do you need a nursemaid?"

"Of course not! Tell me why my mother is crying!" He draws himself to his full height, trying to intimidate with his size. He pulls his shoulders back. He looks down into her face, which is alive and amused.

"You've been given a job, precious, and Mummy doesn't think you've got the bollocks for it. Do you?" Her hand shoots out quickly and grabs between his legs. "Have you got yourself a decent pair?"

"Yes," Draco hisses through gritted teeth. His chest is tight and burning. His face is hot. He is worried about his mother. He feels himself grow hard under her hand. Her smile grows, too. She holds on. "What is it you want from me?"

"What do I want, fire-breather?" she laughs. Her voice drops to a whisper. "Oh, it's kind of you to ask, but I think you have been doing enough wanting for the both of us." She slides her hand up and holds him through his trousers, gripping tightly. "What do you want? Tell me what you want to do with this." She flicks the tip of her thumb against the head of his cock.

He closes his eyes at the contact and swallows. When he opens them again, she is still staring.

"Nothing," he whispers back, his voice suddenly thin and ghostly.

Her laughter rings out again. It sounds affectionate. It is maddening. "That's a good start, but you have to put the lie inside of you, see? Otherwise, I'm always going to know you want to shove it down my throat." She lets go and glides into the corridor.

Through the open door, she calls back to him. "I could swallow you whole."

He believes her.

~ * ~

That night, Draco makes himself small and rocks back and forth beneath his bedclothes, trying to soothe away the pain in his head and the angry, tangled desire in his belly.

He wonders, briefly, if he has been hexed. The fact that he wonders this assures him that he hasn't, and the thought makes him curl further into himself. He pulls his legs to his chest and presses his teeth into his knee through the fabric of his pajamas.

Quiet since Bella left her bedroom, his mother is now keening and wailing into the darkness, sure that everyone has gone to sleep. Draco cannot tolerate it. He rises, heavy, from the bed and makes his way down the hall.

"Mummy?" he whispers. Narcissa goes silent. She has not heard this word from her son since he was four years old. "Mummy?"

"Draco? Draco, what's wrong? What's happened?" She is panicked.

He comes through the darkness like a phantom, tall and white and graceful, and climbs across her bed. Her hands take quick inventory of his body. She finds him whole, but cold and shaking.

"Mummy, don't cry."

Narcissa crushes him to her chest and begins rocking him herself, the way that mothers do without thinking. Though he is far too big, he crawls into her lap, shrinking himself somehow to fit. He lays his head against her shoulder. His hair is damp with sweat.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry, my baby boy." Her voice is as fragile and tenuous as a spider's web. She presses a kiss to his temple.

"What's happening?" he asks her, his voice low against her skin.

There is a long pause. She sighs hard, her breath heaving into his neck.

"Draco," she begins. "Your job... your task... it is an order. From the Dark Lord. It is... to atone for your father's mistakes."

"What do I have to do?"

"You... you are to listen to your Aunt Bellatrix. You are to do exactly as she says. You must obey her. I... I have offered myself in your place, but it... it is not possible. She can protect you now. I cannot. Do you understand me, Draco?"

"No," he answers immediately, burying his face harder in his mother's nightdress. She smells sour and hot.

"She has the Dark Lord's favor. He trusts her. She can do things that I cannot. She is here because she can help you. She can... offer you some protection. So you must do as she says. It is very dangerous for you to fail. Do you understand?"

He nods.

"Does she frighten you?"

He doesn't answer. He closes his eyes. His lashes brush the bare skin near his mother's collarbone. She rubs briskly at his back.

"No, sweetheart. To your own bed." Her voice is steeped in sorrow so deep that it fills his lungs almost to their tops. He lifts himself, leaden, from her arms and stands.

His question remains unanswered. He tries again. "What do I have to do?"

His mother's reply is so soft that he has to strain to hear it.

"The Dark Lord is asking you to take a life. There is a war coming. You have been chosen to start it."

The words hang like a body from the gallows, swinging through the darkness between them. He wants to ask her who, what life, but his throat has closed. Instead, he starts toward the door.

"Draco?"

His hand is on the knob. He turns back.

"You will also take the Mark."

He opens the door.

"Draco?"

He pauses.

"I love you. I'm sorry."


~ * ~


His dreams, when they come, are wet. They are filled with blood and spit and come and sweat and tears and piss and vomit. He wakes up covered in filth. Everything sticks to him.

He spends the morning in the bath, scrubbing at his skin until it is pink and raw and shriveled.

His mother spends the morning in her chamber, a pillow over her face to shut out the light.


~ * ~

When he emerges, Bella takes him to the garden. She is unusually tender. She holds his hand. He is surprised at the lack of demand he finds in her touch, and he doesn't pull back from it.

She leads him far from the manor, and they settle, side by side, in the shade beneath a tree.

"You've been told?" she asks.

"Yes."

"Everything?"

"No."

"Soon," she says. "I will teach you everything I know, Little Dragon." She twines their fingers together. Their skin is the same shade of pale. Draco's knuckles are larger, and his fingers are wider. She brings his hand to her lips and kisses it in imitation of his greeting. He pushes underneath and scrapes her teeth. She closes her eyes.

There, in the grass, she shows him how to kill without touching. She instructs him at first to hold her wrist, but to be careful not to touch her wand. They kill insects. She aims her wand and destroys them in a flash of Christmas green. They fall to the ground as if stunned, but they are not stunned. They are dead. She makes Draco check every single one to be sure, and she collects their small bodies in a box she pulls from her robes.

She kills butterflies and turns them into ornaments, pulling pins out of the air. She lets Draco wind them through her hair until she looks like a bush of black roses. He examines their patterns and calls them by the names his mother has taught him. Painted Lady. Peacock. Gatekeeper.

She allows him to handle her wand and practice, wordlessly, the machinations of annihilation until the movement is casual. The sun drops low, and the sky becomes bloodied.

She looks into his face and calls him by his names. Draco. Fire-Breather. Little Dragon. Then she kisses him again, licking slowly at his mouth until it opens for her and his heart stops like the wings of dead things.

This time, down his throat, she whispers, "Tell me, precious. Tell me, do you come fire, too?"

At these words, Draco coughs. Or sobs. Or moans. He doesn't know which; he can't tell the difference here, now, with the red light spilling over him, caught between her hands like a firefly. He can't make words with his tongue, because it is tracing the sharp edges of her teeth, but he thinks, Do you want to find out?

He has forgotten, for a moment, that she can slip inside of him so easily. He is reminded when she answers aloud. "Yes."

Everything comes undone. Their bodies crush together. Under his clumsy hands, butterflies turn to powder and sift into her hair like the ash from an explosion.

She pushes him backwards into the grass. His elbow upsets her box, and their collection of corpses scatters. She is rough with his clothing.

When her lips surround him, the backs of his eyelids flash like a camera. He hisses and spits like a snake when he feels her teeth. But she doesn't hurt him. She just laughs and presses his nerves until sparks fly out of them, then swallows him whole.

She stops when there is sweat pooling in his navel and his hips are hovering above the ground and his fine-boned face would break his mother's heart in half. She licks a slow path up his belly and speaks against his chin. "Remember this," she whispers. "This is what it will feel like when you end him."

She kisses the head of his cock, parts her lips, and he comes with a sharp noise like the bark of a kicked dog. She swallows the first pulse of it, and then the second, but he feels the rest of it spill across his belly, feels the heat of her disappear.

It's a struggle to open his eyes. They will only go halfway. He sees her in silhouette and watches her withdraw a blade from beneath the skirt of her robes. She uses it to notch the swell of her breast and bleeds onto her fingers.

Drawing slow circles, she mixes her blood with his come, using his hipbone as a palette. Having adjusted the shade to her liking, she carefully repaints her mouth.

She transfigures a dead spider into a button and replaces what she has torn from his trousers.


~ * ~


"Why do you hate my father?" he asks one night over dinner.

His mother has stopped joining them. Bella brings her tea and toast on a tray.

"Because he has no spine," she answers idly, peeling the skin from a potato. "Because his only loyalty is to himself. He ran and hid behind the Ministry's skirts. And he dares to fuck my sister," she laughs derisively, "with his worthless cock."

She lifts her head to find Draco's eyes wide and his fork paused halfway to his open mouth. She smiles. "Oh, don't fret, Little Dragon. I suppose it wasn't entirely worthless, was it?"

Draco lowers his fork back to his plate. "What else was he supposed to do? He would have..."

"Been sent to Azkaban?" Bella raises her eyebrows. Draco falls silent. He casts his eyes aside.

"Look at me!" she commands suddenly. He obeys. "He is a worthless, spineless, filthy coward. But you are not. You will show yourself to be better than that. Yes?"

".... yes."

"You will show me to be better than that, yes?"

"Yes."

Bella's voice lowers and grows a layer of frost. "If you do not, you will fail me. You do not want to fail me, Draco. Come and give me a kiss."

He rises slowly from his seat and takes her face between his hands. They kiss, and she bites down until he bleeds.

"Tomorrow you will take the Mark. Be awake by seven."


~ * ~


Draco spends the night pacing his room until his bare feet wear a circle into the carpet. What he forced down at dinner comes back up. One minute he cannot get warm; the next, he is wiping sweat from his upper lip.

He wants to go to his mother again, wants to curl into her lap and smell her hard, hot sleep, but he does not think he would survive being turned away.

He considers going to Bella's room and asking her to suck him until he is empty and exhausted, but he is worried that if he sleeps, he will dream. He doubts that even her mouth is powerful enough to suck his nightmares out.

He wonders if his father was afraid.

~ * ~

At six thirty, Bella walks into his bedroom to find him in his shorts, bouncing on the balls of his feet, quaking and wired and making the air around him light up in shades of green and gold. "Nervous, precious?" she asks. At the sound of her amused voice, he turns.

She is still dressed in her night things, barefoot and soft-looking and almost ordinary. For a moment, she stands in his doorway and smiles at the accidental magic. "How long has it been since you've made that happen?"

"Five years," he says. The night before his first day at Hogwarts, he'd put on a veritable light show in his bedroom after everyone had gone to sleep. He'd worried about into which House he'd be sorted. He'd worried that he would get sick on the train. He'd worried that he would disappoint his father.

"Turn it off," she says quietly. "It doesn't suit you."

Draco swallows heavily and takes a deep, trembling breath. The air begins to sparkle and fade a bit, and it seems to satisfy her. Offering her hand, she says, "Come wash."

He takes it and lets her lead him to the washroom. There, she runs his bath and perches on the edge of the tub. "I can bathe myself," he says, his voice thin and sharp. "I'm not a child. I'll make sure to get behind my ears."

She ignores his petulance, though her eyes take on a strange gleam, and she simply says, "No fire-breathing this morning. Let me." When she drops her robes to the floor, he goes quiet.

She cups water in her hands and pours it down his shoulders. She uses her own shampoo in his hair. It smells like herbs and honey and smoke, and it's the color of amber. It lathers thickly under her fingers as they move in hard, tight circles, and he closes his eyes.

She pulls his neck back across her sloping thigh to rinse. The soap runs into his lashes, and she wipes it away like tears.


~ * ~


She insists upon dressing him, as well. It's a strange sensation, her hands pulling his collar straight and his belt tight across his hips. It feels maternal, and it feels proper, but she is not wearing clothes, and she bites along the bones in his neck before sending him downstairs to wait with his mother in the sitting room.


~ * ~



His mother is dressed and washed and very much awake when he brings her her tea. She thanks him. "You look handsome," she says quietly. "You look like your father."

She doesn't let him sit beside her; she says it will wrinkle his trousers.


~ * ~


When Bella comes down the stairs, every muscle in Draco's body goes still.

Like him, she wears all black, but there is pale skin everywhere: over the top of her laced-up bodice, above her stockings where her skirt is split, at her arms where her sleeves fall halfway down before cascading into billows of sheer. The heels of her boots make her nearly as tall as he is.

At first, he isn't sure if she has glamoured herself or if she has simply painted her face the way that women do. Her lips are dark, and her eyes are ringed in heavy kohl. Her skin is white and perfect. He decides it's a glamour when she comes close and he sees that the lines in her forehead are gone.

He doesn't care that she hasn't done this for him. She is beautiful and dangerous and stunning and terrible. For a moment, he can think of nothing but pinching her flesh between his teeth; for a moment, he can do nothing but imagine himself inside of her.

He realizes that she knows this when she turns her back to his mother and winks. "Are you ready?" she asks him coolly.

"Yes," he lies.

His mother comes up to him and straightens his collar, though it isn't necessary. She leans up and presses a kiss to his lips. When she grabs his hands, hers feel small and desperate. "Be good," is all she says, her voice strained and dry.

Bella reaches out her long arm, and Draco takes her elbow, his skin stark against the darkness of her cloak. "You will keep your head down," she instructs him, succinct and clear. "You will kneel when I kneel. You will rise when I rise. You will not speak unless you are asked a direct question. If My Lord gives you instructions, you will follow them. Are we very clear?"

"Yes," he says.

"Drop your gaze."

He feels the pull of nothingness, and they are off.

~ * ~

When their feet touch solid ground, he staggers, and Bella pulls him harshly back to her side. She drops to her knees, and he follows. She thrusts his hand out of her grasp.

"Ah, Bella, you've brought me a present!" The voice is nothing like Draco imagined it to be. It's tinny and hollow and full of amusement.

"My Lord," she responds, subdued as though in prayer.

"This is Lucius's son?"

"Yes, My Lord."

"Well, stand up, boy, and let me have a look at you!"

Draco stands. He stares at the ground. He has no idea where they are. There is grass beneath his feet, and it is light, but that's all he can see. Underneath his layers of clothing, there are goosebumps on his skin.

The shadow prowls around him in a silent circle. Bella remains on her knees.

"Oh, stand up," the voice says. "Aren't we old friends?"

Bella rises.

"Bella, Bella," the voice laughs. "Why, he's nearly as pretty as you are! Unless you've charmed the ugly off of him, as well?"

Beside him, Draco feels Bella stiffen. "No, My Lord," she responds.

Draco feels an alarming indignation fill his chest, temporarily pushing aside his terror. Fleetingly, he thinks she is beautiful; she did this for YOU, and then his stomach sinks to his feet in horror.

He is even more distressed when he realizes that his misstep has been noticed. Cold, metallic laughter echoes all around him. It sounds as if it's coming from inside of his own head. "You've brought me a little bit of fire, have you, Bella? Much more fun than his father. But I must say, it was rather poor manners on your part to play with the present before gifting it, don't you think?"

"Yes, My Lord," she whispers.

"No matter. You may borrow him. But do try not to break him, Bella. I'd rather keep that pleasure my own."

"Yes, My Lord."

Draco's head swims and swims and swims.

"Put out your left arm, Lucius's son."

Draco lifts his arm and offers it. A sudden, searing heat rips his sleeve in two, and his forearm lays exposed.

"You are mine now, little blond thing. Yes?"

"Yes, My Lord," Draco echoes Bella's words. His voice sounds small and frightened. He swallows.

"You will follow my orders, or you will die. But only after you watch your father die, and your mother. And your pretty girlfriend." The last words are mocking. "It will not be quick."

"Yes, My Lord," Draco whispers.

"You will return to Hogwarts, that bastion of filth, and you will dispose of Albus Dumbledore. You will open its doors to my Death Eaters."

"Yes, My Lord." Lightning strikes behind Draco's eyes, and then lightning strikes his bare skin, and the world goes black.


~ * ~


The first thing Draco notices when he wakes up naked in his own bed is the dull ache spanning the width of his forehead and the peculiar prickle in his arm. The next thing he notices is that he is not alone. He is skin-to-skin with Bella, who is pressed bare against him, her arms wound around his body, wand in hand. He can smell her shampoo.

As he stirs, he hears her voice at the back of his head. She has clearly not been sleeping. "Morning, precious."

It isn't morning. Draco can tell from the gray of his room that it is twilight, or past. He tries to calculate how long he has been asleep, but the edges of his thoughts are still blurry. Bella cuts through the haze with her next words. "We're going to have a little chat, Draco." The palm of her hand smacks at his cheek. "Wakey wakey."

She tugs at his shoulder to roll him onto his back, and as he follows her, her wand comes to rest at his throat. His eyes go wide in surprise, and he can do nothing but nod dumbly when she asks him, "Are you listening?"

She stretches her sharp, lean body out beside him, her wand still digging his flesh, and runs her knee up to rest against his thigh. "You are not my master," she hisses, low against his ear. "I know your Mummy and your Daddy have given you every sparkly thing you've ever had a little yen for, darling, but you do not own something just because you find it beautiful.

"You are a spoiled, covetous little boy. You play at being a man? You take the Mark on your arm? Men work for what they covet. Not pants-wetting patsies like your father, Draco. Men. And now you will work. You will work for your own life. You will work for your Mummy's life, and for your Daddy's life. And because you are stupid; because you are weak; because you think you have license over all that you desire, you will work for my life, now, as well."

Fury buzzes around Draco's head like a swarm of bees, stabbing at his brain and swelling him to a fierce, tight, throbbing pitch. His fingernails dig into his palms, bringing half-moons of blood rising out of his hand.

"You have no idea what I am," he snarls. "A little boy? Do you like to suck the cocks of little boys, Auntie Bella? Is it because my father wouldn't have you? Or because your husband won't have you? Or because your Dark Lord won't have you?"

"No one has me," she says, her voice going lethally quiet. "Least of all you, little fire-breather. You own nothing. Not even yourself, now, see?" She nods at his left arm. "You belong to Him. And to me. I've got you by the bollocks, little one." The hand not holding her wand creeps between his legs and seizes him roughly. "And you can't help it, can you? You can't help it. You want to empty them inside of me."

She is fondling him, not gently, and his body is responding with traitorous greed. Her smooth leg is running up and down the inside of his thigh. His heart is rattling furiously at the bars of his ribcage, trying to escape through his chest. He closes his eyes against the sight of her, still red-lipped and heavy-lidded and the most beautiful bitch he has ever seen, and swallows around the wand at his throat.

The leather strap in which she keeps her knife -- even naked, even in bed -- is digging into his flesh, and in a flash of desperation, he opens his eyes and grabs for it. Too late, he realizes that she is not startled, not angry, not going to try and stop him, and then he is holding it in his hand. Her eyes light up, and she has rolled him over on top of her before he can react.

"Well?" she says.

His fist shakes around the hilt, and he almost drops it. Her wand now rests against the underside of his chin. One of his knees is between her thighs on the bed, and he can feel her humid heat on his skin.

"What are you going to do with it, Little Dragon?"

The silence trembles and sparks. She is smiling with something that looks to Draco like pride, triumph, desire.

"You don't ever touch a weapon that you don't intend to use. So basic, precious. You've got it, and now you've got to use it. So what are you going to do?"

She slides down so that her cunt sits against his knee. He is so hard that he aches. His whole body aches: his head, his arm, his heart, his cock, all howling and quaking and terrified and needy, and she won't stop pushing him, won't shut up.

"Put it to my throat."

He doesn't move. He watches himself leaking onto her narrow hip and remembers her mouth, rouged in blood and come.

"Put it to my throat, you glorious little thing. Put it to my throat and take what you want." She reaches for his elbow and guides his hand down towards her neck. She arches it back, slender and pale, and he is fixated on the pulse he can see thrumming inside of her. When the flat of the blade touches her skin, she lets go.

"Hold it steady," she whispers. "Be a man, Draco. Don't let anyone see your hands shake."

He breathes ragged and harsh. When he closes his eyes, all he sees is blood, so he stares at her and takes in her body, white but flushed, her nipples hard and dark, all angles and planes, and he thinks, absurdly, of the mathematics of Astronomy, thinks solve for x, and his hand stops trembling.

"Beautiful," she whispers, twirling her wand so that it spins against his flesh. "Now take what you want."

He hesitates, his chest hitching and pulling, his stomach falling, the muscles in his thighs twitching. She jabs her wand insistently.

"Take it," she says again. "You covet. You want. Now take it." She draws up her knee and spreads her legs until he is kneeling in between them.

He starts to move the blade away from her, but she presses her wand sharply against his throat. "Hold it there until I tell you not to," she spits. She wraps her legs around his waist, running a foot up his spine.

She is so close to him that he can feel the heat from her on the head of his cock. Without warning, he leans down onto his free hand, and she reaches to line their bodies up, and his hips come forward, and he is inside of her.

He gasps, stunned at himself, stunned by the feeling of her, hot and slick and closing in around him. For a moment, he can't move, can't breathe, and he starts to shake all over again. "Stop it," she hisses, squeezing him tighter and making him blink and moan. Her legs are coiled around him like a serpent, her ankles crossed at the small of his back.

"Fuck me," she whispers, and it comes from low in her chest. "Fuck me, and make it hurt." She lifts her hips, shoving him deeper, and he makes a noise like a sob, bites his lip, and finds a vicious, savage rhythm in his guts.

She doesn't take it. She pushes back, like she might be trying to throw him off of her, but she's not. Everything inside of her is clamped down hard and tight, making him feel like he's too big, like when he pulls back, he might not fit again, and it makes him push forward even harder, his eyes trained on the hand he holds at her neck.

The sounds she makes surprise him. They are high and ecstatic and dreamy, like she doesn't have a wand in her fist and a blade at her throat, like she hasn't tortured and killed and mutilated her way through a thousand creatures weaker than she. She sounds like a woman, like a sorceress, like something sacred, and he wants to destroy her underneath him and hear her scream.

She comes first, frotting herself against his pelvic bone every time he thrusts, and he feels her around his cock, impossibly tight, then tighter, then releasing, her body shuddering, her mouth calling him by name, her back arching and her wand bouncing off of his shoulder as she drops it and claws her way down his chest.

It is then that Draco knows, without a doubt, that he will fail what has been asked of him.

As she falls apart around him, he knows for certain that he will never be able to come holding a knife to her throat. He is terrified to see her bleed, terrified to lose control and slice her open, terrified to kill what is warm and vulnerable and human.

He tosses the blade to the carpet, crushes himself down against her body, and pulls her hair as he comes, half wailing in rage, half pleading for mercy, inside of her.

He lays empty across her, sticky with sweat and the smears of blood from the scratches she has dug into him.

She growls into his ear. "I didn't say you could drop the knife."

He whispers back, "Did I hurt you enough?" and fingers the spots on her thighs where bruises from his hips are blooming like flowers in the snow.


~ * ~


He wakes to find the house deserted and quiet. He moves from room to room like a ghost, picking things up and putting them down. After he breaks one of his mother's vases doing this, he goes outside to lay in the grass.

He kills things under his heels and under his thumbs: ants, spiders, a tiny green inch worm. He finds pictures in the clouds the way he did as a child, but they all turn menacing and ugly, and he rolls onto his stomach.

This is how Bella finds him when she returns, sprawled flat with his head in his arms.

She toes him in the ribs, and he sits up to look at her.

"School in two days, Draco," she says.

"I know," he answers.

"When you are there, you are to listen to Severus as you have listened to me."

Draco laughs. It sounds like his mother's vase breaking. "Do I have to fuck him, too?" he says bitterly, sitting up.

Bella drops to her knees beside him and grabs the collar of his shirt, pulling his ear to her mouth. "We are all fucked, precious." She sucks his earlobe into her mouth. He moans.