Bellatrix is halfway through her third glass of wine when someone slips onto the barstool beside her. She doesn’t look over, just runs a finger around the rim of her glass and hopes not to be recognized. It’s always a fifty-fifty shot. Most people care about her the least of all the Black sisters, because something about her disturbs them, but there’s always the chance that someone wants to get to Narcissa through her.
“Dirty martini, please,” the person beside her says, and her voice is startlingly British. The bartender only looks at her with a small amount of disdain before proceeding to make her drink. She definitely isn’t the first person to speak English at the hotel bar that week, and she won’t be the last.
Bellatrix raises her glass to drink the rest of her wine when she feels some kind of tickle on the side of her arm. Forgetting that she’s ignoring the person beside her, she sets her glass down and looks right at her.
She recognizes the woman, which throws her off guard for a second. She’s that blonde journalist who’s always in the front row at the hottest shows, right in between the a-listers of the world. She’s drawn Bellatrix’s eye a couple times. Not enough for her to fuck up her runway walk, but enough to remember her.
When she’s watching the fashion shows, she wears a pair of jeweled cat eye glasses, but those are currently absent, and she has these great big green eyes, haloed by the longest eyelashes Bellatrix has ever seen. They’re probably not natural, but it’s still hard to look away.
She’s holding some kind of feathered quill in her hand, which must have been what brushed Bellatrix’s arm, and she has a notebook open on the bar. She’s looking at Bellatrix like she’s been caught, and it all comes together. She’s looking for an interview. An insight into the least favorite Black sister.
Bellatrix supposes she was asking for it, sitting in the hotel bar all alone during Paris fashion week.
“I’m not giving you an interview,” Bellatrix says, and earns a glare from the bartender when he hears her speaking English. She rolls her eyes at him. If he doesn’t know that she’s one of the most sought after supermodels in the world, born and raised in Nice, that’s on him.
Instead of balking, like Bellatrix expects, the blonde woman’s lips curl into something of a smirk. “Yes, you are.”
“And what makes you say that?” Bellatrix asks.
“The fact that you’re on your second— no, third— glass of wine, and the fact that I’m going to keep it off the record,” the woman says.
Bellatrix raises a brow. “Off the record? What’s in it for you?”
“No one knows a damn thing about you. I want to be the one who does.”
Bellatrix taps a finger on the stem of her glass. “What’s your name?”
“Rita Skeeter, Daily Prophet,” Rita replies. She digs in her small purse for a moment, then pulls out a business card. Bellatrix looks at it, but doesn’t take it, so Rita sets it awkwardly on the bar after a long moment.
“Daily Prophet, huh,” Bellatrix says, “Not very dignified.” The Daily Prophet is little more than a gossip rag, the last place Bellatrix would ever give an interview, if she were to give one.
“Not all of us had the world handed to us,” Rita says. And yet, she’s the one rubbing elbows with the rich and famous, then going home to write little stories for her tabloid.
“If you’ve already decided who I am, what do you want to interview me for?” Bellatrix asks, clenching her jaw. It’s not like Rita’s wrong in her assumptions about Bellatrix’s life, but it’s not like said life has been all sunshine and rainbows either. Not that she would expect anyone to understand or care. She doesn’t even care herself, really. The past is passed.
Rita tucks her hair behind her ear and smiles apologetically. “That’s not— why don’t we start over? I don’t want any tension between us.”
“I still haven’t agreed to anything,” Bellatrix reminds her.
“Then let's just have a conversation,” Rita says.
Bellatrix scoffs. “With your pen and paper on hand?”
Rita looks at her notebook for a long moment, then shuts it and shoves it back into her bag, along with the gaudy feathered quill. “No pen, no paper, just you and me.”
Maybe it’s the three glasses of wine talking, but Bellatrix sighs and says, “Fine. What do you want to talk about?”
“The first thing that comes to your mind. We can go from there,” Rita says.
“You really don’t know how to do this, do you?” Bellatrix says, but obliges the request. She ponders, and as she does the bartender sets Rita’s drink down in front of her. There’s a single olive floating in the clear liquid, and it reminds Bellatrix of something.
“I’ve been having dreams,” Bellatrix says, “I’m outside of my body, watching from above.”
“Watching what?” Rita asks.
“I don’t know,” Bellatrix replies, “I never know, when I wake up. It could be anything. All I know is that it feels like floating, the whole way through. But not like I’m flying… like I’m suspended in water, breathless.”
“Like you’re stuck?”
Bellatrix thinks about it. “No,” she decides, “I’m not the type to be stuck. It’s like I’m falling, so slowly that I’ll never touch the ground, but I can never float my way back up to the surface.”
“You’re drowning,” Rita says, and Bellatrix laughs, a sound she’s not used to making.
“I don’t think I’m that lucky,” she says.
Rita looks at her with pity latent in her expression, and it sets Bellatrix’s nerves on edge. She doesn’t want pity from anyone, ever. She’s fine with people hating her, she likes it to an extent. But pity? It makes her want to drive a knife into Rita’s spine and split her open.
“I don’t think this is fair, you know,” Bellatrix says, narrowing her eyes the way a predator would. “You get to listen to me talk, interjecting with nothing but questions. Who are you, Rita Skeeter?”
“I’m not here for me,” she says quickly.
“Neither am I,” Bellatrix reminds her, “But since this isn’t a formal interview, I thought it was a conversation?”
Rita takes a wordless sip of her martini.
“Why the Daily Prophet?” Bellatrix asks her.
“That’s what you want to know about me?” Rita asks, looking surprised.
“It’s the only thing I know about you,” Bellatrix says with a shrug.
Rita looks down at her blood red fingernails. “I don’t think prestige journalism is the only valid form of it. I think the work I do is just as interesting, just as important, as the guy who writes for the New York Times.”
“You think petty gossip should be onstage with global issues?”
“I think more people care about petty gossip than global issues,” Rita says, and Bellatrix sees something in her eyes, then, that has her wondering if Rita hadn’t wanted the conversation to end up here all along. Maybe she’s just as much a narcissist as the rest of them. It intrigues Bellatrix, makes her want more.
“Your sisters are out together you know,” Rita carries on, “I’m surprised you’re not with them.”
Bellatrix shrugs, nearly rolling her eyes at the mention of her sisters. “I don’t care.” They knew who she was, better than anyone. She didn’t ask for an invite to their fabulous displays, and they never offered one. It was an unspoken deal.
“They never bother to make time for you, do they?” Rita presses, as if she knows anything at all.
“I don’t care,” Bellatrix repeats. It was the other way around, actually.
“And Narcissa took your place in the Dior show yesterday.”
“I don’t care,” Bellatrix says, again, and means it, again.
“You have to care, you just have to,” Rita says. “No one’s this droll about their life, especially a life like yours.”
Bellatrix looks at Rita sharply. “My capacity for carelessness would shock you. Would shock everyone, but my sisters. Things don’t bother me, people don’t mean much to me. Everything I’ve done is just a blip on a radar I don’t keep track of. I could spend my entire life without a single care for anyone or anything, and end up just as happy as the millions who crave love and sunshine. What I do means nothing to me, my sisters mean nothing to me, the world means nothing to me. It’s just a rock that we’re floating on against our will. I’m not drowning in my dreams because that would require some kind of feeling. I’m drifting, experiencing, without having to deal with the intense complexity of who I’m supposed to be and what I’m supposed to feel. You could walk away right now and I wouldn’t spare you a passing glance. Nothing makes an impact or an impression, and I don’t care that it doesn’t. I’m content in my careless existence, and I especially don’t care what you have to say about that.”
Rita looks at her, one hand on her purse, and she looks excited. She looks like Bellatrix finally gave her everything she came here for. She supposes she did.
Rita reaches for Bellatrix, settling a hand on her bare thigh. “Let’s keep this conversation going.”
“I have no inclination to do that,” Bellatrix says. “I have nothing more to say to you.”
“We don’t have to talk,” Rita says, sliding her hand into Bellatrix’s pocket, pulling out the key to her suite. “We can be discreet.”
Bellatrix doesn’t care about anything, wants for very little, but she wants this. She wanted it the second she saw Rita’s wide eyes, looking so paralyzed, so romanticized.
Reaching into her other pocket, she throws a hundred euro note on the bar and stands, barstool scraping the floor. Rita follows, allowing Bellatrix to pay for her drink as well. They make their way to the elevators, saying nothing. They don’t even look in each other’s direction.
The ride up to the sixth floor doesn’t take long, and they exit the elevator like business partners, meeting in passing. Bellatrix stalks down the hallway to her room, and she barely hears Rita’s footsteps on the carpeted floor behind her, but she knows she’s there. Where else would she be?
“So,” Rita begins, once they reach the suite, her fingers turning the keycard in her hand, long nails scraping against the plastic. Bellatrix lets her eyes trail from her red nails to her collarbones, then her perfectly laid blonde hair, then her wide green eyes, looking completely unbothered and uninterested, saying something completely different than the last thing Bellatrix looks at: her lips, and the way her teeth bite her bottom lip, inviting. “Open up the door for me,” she finishes, and it sounds like begging. Bellatrix does like it when they beg.
Bellatrix plucks the keycard from her hand and presses it to the door. The green light flashes, and Bellatrix pushes Rita through the door, one hand gripped so hard on the handle it's a wonder she doesn’t rip it off.
They’ve known each other for an hour, but Rita already knows Bellatrix better than anyone in the world. She pulls Rita deeper into the suite, mouths connecting in a kiss with the bang of the door slamming shut behind them.
The next morning, Bellatrix is unsurprised to be alone in her suite, hardly an indent in the mattress to provide the memory of Rita lying beside her. She doesn’t think anything of it as she gets ready to go to work, ready to be whoever the designer wants her to be for the day.
She almost forgets about Rita’s touch by lunchtime, but then she has another show, and the makeup artist makes a big fuss of covering a bruise left on her neck. In that moment, she feels a phantom wandering beside her, looking her up and down with catlike green eyes.
Everyone watches her walk up and down the runways, and she pretends not to see them, as she always does, but their gazes are fiercer today, crawling under her skin. They aren’t looking at the clothes she’s wearing, they’re looking at her.
It’s her publicist who finally makes sense of it all, by sending her a link with the attached message: What the hell were you thinking?
Front page news at the Daily Prophet, a source of petty gossip that everyone cares about, more than Bellatrix ever gave it credit for, Who is the Real Bellatrix Black?
All of her off the record answers, musings, the things she said, the way she looked, everything but the way she tasted, written for anyone to read. The details so specific that Bellatrix realizes with a jolt that Rita must have been recording her all night. She didn’t say much, alone in the suite, but those words are printed as well, exactly as she said them. All the people she hates, all the opportunities she takes advantage of and spurns in equal measure. Words about her sisters, who do care, and shouldn’t have their names dragged into any of it.
For the first time in a very long time, maybe even forever, Bellatrix cares.
She wants to rip Rita apart. She wants to tear the skin from her bones and wear it down the runway, making her a spectacle in turn. She knows better than to care what people think of her, because she never has, but that’s not what this is. She doesn’t want people to know anything real about her. Real gets you into trouble. Real has people thinking they’re entitled to a life that doesn’t belong to them.
Rita Skeeter has made Bellatrix real, with the stroke of a key, and in doing so, she’s probably ruined her life.
As Bellatrix muses on all the ways she will have Rita dealt with, fantasizes on all the ways she wishes she could deal with her herself, cracking her skull in two, stabbing her in the eye with her own bejeweled glasses, she also feels a tug in the pit of her chest. She feels a tug that tells her she’d do anything to be ruined by Rita again, and that might be the worst of it all.