Flames

We stood in a confused darkness after he had left, tension ringing through the room like the deranged tingling of a sick-bed bell. My newly branded arm felt heavy and sore, I could sense the shape of the Mark patterning my skin like sunlight through poison ivy. The only illumination in the room was the proudly glowing silver

Amour Pur. Rodolphus twitched. I could imagine his beady eyes darting ferverently for an escape route. With a sigh, I sat on the bed. Let's get this over with.

Like all wealthy, pure blood families, the Blacks owned a crumbling country retreat to spend the summer months lazing in. The manor was situated half a mile from Little Hangleton, my father's hometown, and was in close proximity to my own country retreat, the dilapidated Riddle House. I liked the dark, winding corridors of my father's home, liked the smell of rot and canned fear, liked the echo of my fathers screams as I advanced upon him, wand ready. Sometimes I would stand in the centre of the room where my father and grandparents were murdered and allow a slow, watermelon smile to split my face in half. Other times I just laughed for hours on end.

I spent summers alone, only making contact via owl. For once, I felt it important to rest and plan in peace, allow my mind long, languid hours to meander like a lazy snake in thick grasses. Only occasionally, when I bored of setting fire to local stone-throwing vandals, would I leave my happy labyrinth and walk, blinking, through sunlit meadows and wooded glades, looking for something new to maim. Often I would pass the Black's abode and wonder what it would have been like to grow up in perfect, pure blooded peace instead of the grimy hole of the orphanage. I would watch the children fly broomsticks over manicured lawns while the adults sipped expensive blackberry cocktails from silver goblets, imagining myself fitting right in, with my dark hair and pale skin. They probably wouldn't even notice the new addition.

It was on one of these hot, stifling days many summers ago, before the war and before my appearance had altered, that I noticed a pair of Black children break from the rabble and cut across the fields towards Hangleton Forest. They made an exceptionally pretty pair, with their sweet monotone colouring and their unmarred youthful features. They couldn't have been more than fourteen. One, a boy whom I had only seen once before and knew to be named Sirius, seemed to half lag behind, half trot to keep up with the other, as if he dearly wanted to follow her though not in the direction she was leading him. The girl I was certain I had never seen before, feeling sure that if I had, I would remember it. Her jet black hair wreathed a luminous, heart shaped face set with heavy lidded eyes, shining like jagged, unpolished diamonds.

I set off in pursuit, my fingers curving around my wand.

Sirius and I, we were closer than he would ever have let on. I look back on those summers at the country manner with what may be called happiness by a simpler mind. To me, happiness can never be the unadulterated feeling of self worth that others feel, my happiness will always be linked with dominance and control over another. To be happy, I will have to have orchestrated events to my disposal. And that's what I did.

Sirius grew to hate me long before I killed him. In those carefree, androgynous days before adolescence, we were the greatest companions, sleeping in the same bed and waking long before everyone else to roam the empty, dew-soaked grounds. We played endless, secret games away from my sisters and their dolls houses, and for that short time I allowed him to be equal. But we grew, and I began to soak in the meaning of being pure blooded, while Sirius stayed steadfastly ignorant. I had already started my search for a greater power and was shrewd enough to notice Sirius's continuing isolation from the Black's ideals. I now used the time we spent together to assert my new dominance, to harp at him about our blood and how he was going to disgrace our name if he carried on the way he was going. Although he argued back, telling me how cold I'd become and how I disgusted him, something in his eyes suggested to me that although he disliked me, he still wanted to

look at me. At first, I was confused. His words did not faze me, I already knew that he was going to reach miserable end on the path he was travelling and nothing I could say in reply would turn him back. What fazed me was the way he would stare when he thought I wasn't looking, a new hate and hunger grappling for space in his eyes like a duel of wills. Then I realised. He fancied me. And the more I watched his handsome face watching me, the more I wanted him too.

Voldemort is right. Power is a beautiful thing.

I follow the cooling footprints, fitting my own feet into their moulds and noticing they are only a little smaller than my own. I reach the handprint on the bathroom door and pause to hear the hollow splashing and rumble of running taps within. Her scent has seeped from under the door, a musty, unclean, burnt aroma, mixed with the perfume of the bubbles and bathing potions. She's washing Azkaban, and Rodolphus, away. With the curl of one thin, colourless lip, I push on the door and enter.

Her gasp echoes from the vaulted, scalloped ceiling like that of an actress who has been through her lines too many times. She knew I'd come, she just doesn't know why. Well. I'm here to do, not to explain.

The room resounds as I stride purposely across the flagstones to the sunken stone tub. Shivering candles throw fearful, blood sprayed shadows across the spinning walls, metal pours into the perfumed air. Her face, fresh, luminous, fourteen years old again. Long dark tendrils of hair fan across the choppy, foaming surface of the bathwater like dead seaweed. The rest of her body is submerged under a foot of cloudy bubbles, again I am plagued by a distorted, shining outline.

-Come on, my dear. Just pretend you're in a stream again.

I leave no time for her to scream as I plunge into the water, robes black and billowing, pulling her slippery, struggling form to my chest and not letting go.

Never? I asked.

Never, he replied. I shaped his thin, breathless form around the reedy voice emanating from the darkness beside me and found it hard to muster surprise.

You'll need this, then, I said, passing him the bottle marked 'confidence'. It sloshed and dribbled as he gabbled at its neck. I hoped he'd be a little more adept when his moment finally came.

-You...you have? Isn't it a Black tradition to not sleep with anyone from other pure blood families until you are married?

I smiled a dark, invisible smile. The rule never mentioned anything about members of the Black family, I thought. To Rodolphus, I simply replied that I might need a little of the 'confidence' myself.

He ignored my request and finished the bottle, letting it jangle to the floor, and groped his trembling hands around my waist, roughly tipping me backwards into a lying position. I closed off my mind, waiting for oblivion.