Icarus Drowning

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
-Robert Frost

I.
It's late July and the violets are singing, and Bellatrix thinks Narcissa is a lot like the summer. Her hair is the sunshine and her eyes are the crystalline blue sky. Her smile is a warm breeze, her skin an afternoon rain, soft and smooth and slick and perfect.

Narcissa is summer, cheeks flushed with the static heat of innocence and unbreakable vulnerability.

So it would make sense then, that Bellatrix is the winter.

- -

Hands wrap around her thighs, pulling her apart, and she feels open, taken, whispering warm words into the cool night as she twists under her sister's hands.

"Bella, Bella... Merlin, yes..."

She shuts her eyes and gives her body for the taking, but she's already claimed, stolen bought received, and Bella's fingers feel so good right there, right there, like violets that bloom in January, early and beautiful.

Murmurs and moans swirl in the air, mixed, broken, blended and whole, and someone says-

"You're so beautiful,"

and Narcissa doesn't know who's said it.

- -

"I'm sorry I'm late, I couldn't--"

"Did anyone see you?"

"See me?"

"Did anyone see you?"

"I- I don't think so--"

"You don't think so?"

"No, no one saw me."

- -

Bellatrix has ghost's skin. White, white. Almost translucent. Her veins are greenish, violet lines of jagged riverbanks, coursing up her forearms and inner thighs, bundled at the folded junction of her legs. There are permanent shadows under her ribs and collarbones. The skin at her ankles is hard.

Narcissa's skin is also white. Endlessly, flawlessly white.

Narcissa is porcelain and Bellatrix is eggshells, cracked and broken.

II.
It is autumn, and the rain has just stopped.

The wind blows and scatters her newspaper clippings, words and pictures and more words fluttering up and away. Bellatrix doesn't reach out for them; that would be useless. She only watches as the cutouts rise into the chill autumn air and then fall as the wind dies, and then rise again.

Finally, the clippings land in a small gray puddle of rainwater. The words and pictures run together as they soak up the stale, dirty water, and the people in the pictures make disgusted faces at their sopping clothes.

Bellatrix picks up her scissors and begins cutting again.

- -

Her face is in the pillow, hands to her side, and her eyelashes make the most perfect sound as they scratch against the pillowcase every time she blinks.

"Shh..."

She bites the pillow and moans and hopes that the down feathers swallow every last decibel of her voice, because, Merlin, she can't hold back much longer, not with Bella's thumb circling the way it is.

"Shh..."

Her nerve endings are sizzling, toes curling, back arching, down feathers swallowing, and the silence is flat and hollow, like emptied rain clouds.

"Shh..." Bella says, and Narcissa must be screaming, only she's not, only on the inside.

- -

"Wait--Do you- do you want to stay?"

"What?"

"I- do you--"

"Never ask me that again. Never. Do you understand?"

"I only--"

"Do you understand?"

"Yes."

- -

Bellatrix loves the rain, everything about it. Gray skies, metallic roads and rivers that gleam in the cloud-draped sunlight, and the air, heavy with an ache she can feel in her bones. The rain is like pieces of crystal, wet and pliable, slipping, sliding, pouring over her cracked eggshell skin. Bellatrix thinks the world is weeping, thousands of teardrops falling for millions of sorrows.

Sometimes she thinks of herself as the rain.

But if Bellatrix was the rain, Narcissa would be the sun, and the idea of evaporating into nothing, into slight, invisible air is not appealing to Bellatrix, who already thinks of herself as invisible.

III.
It's snowing outside.

The trees are leafless boughs, spidery claws that stretch for the sky but never reach. Snowflakes whirl with the wind, floating down in soft spirals and wide loop-de-loops. There is ice on the leaves of the rose bushes.

This is when Bellatrix feels most at home.

- -

The fire in the hearth is hot, but Bella's mouth is still cold.

"Merlin, Bella..."

Her hands tangle in Bella's dark hair, pulling her closer. She hisses as Bella flicks her tongue over her clit and she can see the spark of the flames burning away the wood from behind her eyelids.

"Bella, yes, Bella..."

Outside the lake is freezing over, but inside it's burning up.

The same feeling washes over Narcissa when she comes with her sister's tongue between her legs.

- -

"Do you ever think about this?"

"No."

"Never?"

"No."

"...I do."

"Don't."

- -

Bellatrix knows that her heart is good for one thing: pumping blood. It is a simple organ, located in the chest. It is a muscle. It is hollow. Only one thing matters to the heart, and that is blood.

Narcissa thinks that the heart is used for loving.

Bellatrix wishes that her little sister knew better.

IV.
It's springtime, and the violets are budding in the garden while the tulips bloom.

The sun is in her eyes as she sits in the garden, a book open on her lap, Narcissa's legs thrown over hers. But Bellatrix can't concentrate on her reading. She stares openly at the pair of legs intertwined, so alike against the backdrop of green, green grass. The slope of her calves is the same as Narcissa's, and their thighs take identical turns, and the knobs and hollows of their knees are in the exact same spots.

They are identical, yet different, because how could porcelain ever be compared to broken eggshells?

Bellatrix pushes Narcissa away and goes inside, longing for the rain.

- -

She thinks she'll have bruises tomorrow, but can't be bothered enough to care.

"Harder, Bella..."

The side of her face is pressed against the window, lips mashed together, slurring her words and sounds. Her hands are splayed open on the windowsill for support, and the sun hurts her eyes, but she doesn't want to shut them. She wants to feel it all. The pain and pleasure and ache and rise and fall--

"Harder, Bella, harder..."

And it is harder, faster, better than everything else, everything--

"Yes, yes..."

There's a flash of white and heat, and Narcissa thinks the sun is exploding, and, oh no, that's just her.

- -

"Do you know what this is?"

"Not exactly."

"Not exactly?"

"No. No, I don't know what to call it."

"This is nothing, Narcissa. Call it 'nothing.' Nothing."

- -

Bellatrix doesn't understand what Narcissa means when she says that she loves her. The words are useless and dead on her ears, like the trees and grass buried beneath the snow, and trigger no feeling at all.

Bellatrix tells Narcissa that she's a stupid little girl, and Narcissa cries tears that aren't used for the rain, and finally Bellatrix understands.

Finis