Magical We

Sweat dripped.

It stung his eyes and burned his lips pricked by sharp-toothed kisses. His breath sawed in sultry, ragged bursts through his open mouth. His hips pistoned faster faster faster-

“- yes, gods yes- do it hah-harder- Armita-hage-”

He fist knotted in her hair. He chased his heartbeat, the ripple of pleasure rising in the base of his spine like a bright burning sun-

“Fuck!” she wailed pitifully.

“Language, girl,” he snarled. Their bodies slapped; he strained the tendons in his white forearm and wrenched her up off the bed.

The bound body of Bellatrix Lestrange dragged in an arc, backwards and backwards, until their slick foreheads met.

Her beautiful black moon eyes shone upside down at him. He panted, watching her little breasts bounce, draped everywhere by her long, soft, dark-wild hair. “What do we say when we’re naughty?”

“Fah-fuck you, Daddy-” she whispered gleefully, adoringly, through her hitched, snagging breaths.

His heart thrashed. Inside her, his cock knocked viciously at the mouth of her womb.

“Ah-ah-ah,” he collared her throat and squeezed her, making the tendons in his forearms bulge up.

Their Dark Marks writhed together.

She wheezed laughing and stuck out her tongue. The pink, sleek-flexing muscle had hours before laved his cock. “Ooo, deeper, Daddy. Deeper deeper deeper! Mmn, please Daddy? Please please please-”

“Earn it,” he said, and slipped two long fingers down her throat.

She suckled him greedily, delightedly, as she gagged.

His cool eyes watched her taut, sweat-slick belly concave in the mirror by his bed.

She had always been exquisite to him, his Bella. Snow white and fragile. Juvenile. Viciously, viciously sweet. Her body a beautiful wasteland of small, round breasts and cruel-jutting rib bones; of thick, fleshy buttocks that slapped gratuitously against his thighs and hot, tight cunt. For decades, he had chased her devotedly, even rescuing her from Azkaban. Lapping up whatever crumbs she fed him from her cold, slender hands. Even after his pairing to the other witch, he could not give her up. Her insanity, her childish neediness, bewitched him.

She was his only, only vice.

“Bella, my Bella, do you love me?” he whispered, holding her tightly about her slender middle and dragging his fingers through her lips.

Her hot, hard clench around his cock bludgeoning inside her was his answer.

He fucked her madly, with abandon, as she shrieked and struggled with joy. Teeth bared, her white hands clasped elbow-to-elbow behind her and bound lovingly with red silk rope. The tips of her fingers turned whiter with every second he dragged out. His eyes closed, he relished the pitiful suckle of her pussy at his thick, veined cock.

His sweat dripped off his taut, fast-fucking musculature and soused her, making her skin shone translucent, like the moon. She was beauty beauty beauty-

He had asked her to marry him when they were children.

She had laughingly refused.

“Please,” she gasped now, with that insane, sweet child trembling smile on her glorious little mouth. She was weeping, cunt collapsing in and knitting all around him, strangling him with her lush, soft-quaking walls.

Ecstasy, ecstasy-

“Who is your master?” he murmured tenderly as his grip relaxed on her throat. He stroked her belly and teased her breasts softly and nuzzled and kissed her bruised neck.

“Nobody, nobody-” she cried hoarsely, gleefully, body clapping and rippling with the hard, racing pound of his thrusts, “I don’t have a master I- I- Armitaaage…”

“Who loves you, then?” he kissed her white shoulder with wet, parted lips and stroked the marks on her pulse with his thumb.

“N-nobody,” she grinned even more manically up at the ceiling. She was crying earnestly now.

She closed her beautiful, dark, long lashes and whispered, “Daddy loves the mudblood now.”

His pace faltered; he saw a flash of the face of the younger, sweeter witch. “You know that’s not true-”

His Bella came anyway laughing and weeping all over him, a warm liquid rush that sopped his still-slapping balls. He wound his arms around her breasts and belly and held her tightly with closed eyes. He mapped the feel of the rope binding her arms together biting into him. The hot, slick bounce of her tiny body. Her hair, soft and damp, floating all around him. Her beautiful, beautiful cunt-

His heart slipped through his grasp and fell down, down, down into darkness.

“Belle,” he came in slamming, violent strokes that made her choke and strain shuddering and pulse more. Scathing ropes of his seed filled her barren womb and drowned her.

Wasted, wasted hope.

“I do not love her,” he rasped, eyes still closed. His heart thundered, he kept her pinned and stayed deep, deep inside her, shuddering softly with each waning gush. “I do not. My darling-”

He would not, not, think about-

No.

Bella laid her head back on his shoulder, draping them both in a soft, mournful cloud of her curls.

“Don’t you dare go- s-soft on me- Daddy,” she panted wetly, still struggling for breath. She shook like a leaf in a black, wicked wind; her tears sparkled like jewels on her pale face and throat. “I only lah- love you when- you’re absolutely- awful. You know that…”

He laughed, a hoarse, wounded sound, and panted back, “And here I was- laboring- under the delusion- you didn’t love me at all-”

She turned and touched her nose to chis cheek and kissed him.

He caught her desperately by the mouth.

Their kiss was long and sensual. Delicate. They both were trembling. Her bindings on her arms and ankles slipped off and slithered away from them. His hands searched the soft, concaving planes of her body as she wound her fingers through his sweat-bright hair.

On her tongue he tasted tragedy, and emptiness, and past lives.

She would always, always be lost.

Ever since his night at the castle with the other, he had felt his Bella fading away more and more…

“Belle,” he held her like a child and rocked her. Cherishing her with kisses and tasting her tears. Whispering to her with shut eyes until she smiled into his kisses.

“It’s alright, Daddy. The Dark One is coming,” her tongue rolled around his mouth. She rubbed the tips of their noses together. “He’s going to make me his angel and forgive all my sins. You’ll see.”

“My sweet girl,” he laid his forehead on hers and held her more fiercely. In this moment, the other was completely forgot.

“He is never coming back.”

She did not flinch and she did not waver. She turned giddily towards him, letting his thick, softening column slip wetly from her warm body, and wound her fragile arms like twin serpents about his neck.

“Silly Babbity, he never, never left me. All the pretty pretty pieces he hid very well-”

She pecked his lips quickly, like the strike of a cobra, and bowed backwards, letting her hands float up, up and behind her as she hung from his strong grip on her waist. Her small brown nipples jutted at the ceiling; her body was liquid glass in the strong firelight.

The room was balmy and fragrant from their lovemaking, saturated in the clean earthy sent of her pussy and of her perfume, white oleander and tender nightshade flower, and of his powerful virile musk. It was intoxicating, the way she looked swaying back and forth on his bed like a pendulum, trailed by her beautiful hair.

He thought about having her again as she tittered in her little girl voice, “Can’t you feel him coming? He is whispering to me through the stars-”

She giggled at something secret and silent; he watched his come leach glistening from her red folds and run in pale, pretty rivers down her thigh.

His eyes creased with grief in their corners as they lingered over her deadened womb.

Still no one knew why so many of purebloods had been struck sterile in their generation and the one that followed. A cruel twist of nature which had broken his heart. For secretly, he still believed if he had caught her with child when they were younger, she would not have fallen to Tom Riddle’s sway. She would have stayed loyal to him.

She would have loved him.

“- he says he’ll let you keep your little mudblood cockpet when he comes back. He’s so, so generous, my lord,” she was sighing. Her eyes were closed, wrists hung crossed over her face and fingertips touching on her parted lips.

He winced.

He told her steadily, but graveling, “Don’t ever call her that.”

She giggled again, stroking lovingly all the marks he had made on her neck. “Oo-ooo, Daddy says no mocking the little mudbrat-”

“Bella,” he squeezed her warningly.

Her hands reached up above her, sliding on the thick, dark duvet. The rose petals he had spread that evening clung to her milky white body. Sumptuous silk lined her lush, blue-veined skin.

Her Dark Mark danced without him.

“Oh no, Daddy’s vewy angwey. Why don’t you punish me,” she whispered excitedly, watching him with those big, black-glowering eyes. She was so utterly captivating. Utterly insane. “Please, Daddy? I’ll let you pretend I’m your muddy little slut. Oh dear oh no, what’s wrong now, Daddy?” her lashes fluttered innocently, “You don’t like me to call her that either? Why, what a muggle-lover you’ve become.”

His chest strained. He wanted to choke her. He wanted to lay his head over her empty belly and beg her to forgive his unfaithful heart.

He thought of the child in her tower and his love-flowers she kept by her bedside. Her little drawing she had given him for Christmas still sat in its silver frame on his mantel above the fire. A portrait of herself done in muggle pencils that did not move. Set beside it like flowers on an altar, were all the small watercolor landscapes she had painted for him of the places they took their walks.

His heart grieved.

He kissed Bella’s shoulder, then her collarbone. “No more play tonight, my beauty.”

He lifted himself off her and slipped away.

For a moment she lay there staring blankly at the mantel. Then she rolled and gathered up her body and stretched like a cat. “Fine. Beselfish, if you please, Armitage.”

She slid down from the silk and lifted her sheer torn dressing gown from the floor. “You always are.”

“I see.” Slowly, he came to stand before her. His cock swayed heavily between his strong, lean thighs. “Is that why you keep coming back to my bed?”

His cold blue eyes glinted at her fondly. Smirking, he took her robe he ripped earlier that evening from her body and mended it wordlessly with his hands.

It was a beautiful dark wine velvet with thorned roses, fringed in black tassel and tied with a corded sash. Sheer enough he could still see her nipples and the gaunt jut of her ribs through the cloth after cinching it tightly about her waist.

Her hair fell around them, wild and feral and lovely. He watched as she wound it into a loose chignon with her black alder wand.

“You’ll see when he comes back to drown them,” she was petulant, wounded, refusing to look him in the eyes. “You’ll have to beg for her worthless life.”

The corner of his mouth coiled tenderly. He kissed her forehead. “Wouldn’t that would be a sight.”

Her lip tremored, she chewed it cruelly. Her face angled away from his to hide her eyes behind her hair.

She stared at the mantel, swaying softly to song he could never hear.

“She’s changed you,” she whispered.

He took her face, and she clung onto his wrists.

“Time ruined us, Belle,” he kissed her lips softly. “Not her.”

“I’ll ask him not to kill you, when the time comes,” her mouth trembled. “I promise I will.”

“Thank you.” His thumb brushed a tear on her cheek.

“You used to call me my angel,” she said as she slipped away from him.

Madness, beautiful beautiful madness, danced in her eyes.

“I’ll hate that little bitch until the day she dies…”

She took a pinchful of floo powder from the tin on the mantel and turned on her tiptoes into the flames.

“House of Black.”

She melted in a wash of green acid light.

He stood and watched her go.

Rey hated charms.

Scratch that, she loathed it. The lessons were all impossible – silly flicks and whishes and flitters of her willow stick wand. Pulling magic from her heart and the air around her just so she could make some stupid tea kettle whistle and jump. As if that might ever be useful.

She was failing, she had to be. She was the worst one in her house by far. It didn’t matter if it was spells or charms or divinations. Or potions. Gods help her, potions were the hardest of all. Everything about them had to be done so correctly. She was shit at it – at all of it. She couldn’t cast and she couldn’t fly. A whole year and she felt like she knew less about being a witch than when she started.

And now exams were here, and she was about to fuck the lot of them up.

She just knew she would.

“Chin up, Miss- er- Lady Hux,” it was almost the end of the school year, and poor old Professor Flitwick still stumbled each time he called her by name. Well, by her lady-name anyway. He wasn’t the only one; all her teachers hesitated, except for Snape, who said it forebodingly, and with a sneer. No one grown up would ever call her by her first name save for Armitage-

Just thinking of him and what he’d say when he learned she failed all her year-ends made her keen harder into her page.

She’d been crying a full two minutes into her textbook in front of everyone, all because her stupid kettle just wouldn’t whistle or dance. It just sat there, shivering and mewling at her like she was an idiot, while a group of Slytherin boy in the back row heckled and laughed.

Now it was midmorning and class was nearly over and she’d tried everything she could think of and still still still-

“It’s r-r-ruined, Profes-sessor,” she sobbed brokenhearted, “I’ll n-never pass my- zams….”

“Silly snorkacks,” Luna hooted sweetly. She wrapped her slight arm around Rey’s shoulders and laid her head on an incantation to make silver objects polish themselves on the opposite page. Her nose touched the tip of Rey’s wet and red one. Above her wreath of white cloud curls, her kettle was whistling a strange, mournful song. “You just have to pretend the kettle is already singing to you. A bit like imagining that your socks have turned up in your soup bowl at supper, so that when you look in your drawer properly, they’re already there. Do you see?”

Rey wanted to hang herself from the charmed chandelier. “I’m t-too thick, Luna-”

“Not at all, Lady Hux,” Flitwick clucked. He patted the back of her hand tenderly with his short, sharp-nailed fingers. “What we need is a pinch of perseverance. Why, isn’t that the Griffyndor way? Come come, we’ll make a spells mistress of you yet, my girl.”

“S’not likely to fail her anyway, is he?” One of the backrow boys, Roddy Ramaford, a champion muggle-hater, was whispering meanly to his friends. “None of ‘em will. They’re all too afraid of her old man-”

“Chut up, Roddy!” Rose turned and screeched, brandishing her pale willow wand at his chin like a blade. Her pearl drop choker bounced wildly at her throat, “or I’ll hex your stupid, ugly ass into next week!”

“Now Miss Tico-” Flitwick chided her affectionately, as she was his favorite.

“Sure you won’t be too busy suckin’ a Weasley off?” Roddy cut Flitwick off with a smirk, looking distinctly unimpressed by her threats.

Rosie blanched and Luna sang furiously, “What a rude little insect…” as Rey’s head shot up and she wiped her eyes.

Her chest burned; she would absolutely kill him. With the bloody tea pot, if it came to that.

Flitwick went as pink as a grapefruit and clutched his robes clasp. “Mister Ramaford, ten points from Slyth-”

But Rey was already out of her seat like a shot in the night.

“Shut up you loser!” Her face was beet red, wet and snotty from crying. The classmates in the row directly behind hers, between her and Roddy, leaned far out of her way on either side.

Her small body vibrated with a cold, electric fury that could set the room ablaze. She planted her palm on a desk and bore down at him, wobbling her new hairstyle she was trying. A treble of buns. “Pologize to her right now, Ramaford, or I swear to gods I’ll slap the silly wanker look off your face!”

“Lady Hux!” Flitwick now swayed as if he might faint from scandal. His spectacles were all askew as he blustered, “I am sorry but that is ten points from-”

Ramaford kicked back his seat to balance on its hindlegs. He tucked his hands behind his head with fingers laced together and looked Rey’s smart black school robes up and down.

“Dunno, Huxy,” he shrugged musingly, “How ‘bout you come kiss it instead?”

His cronies flanking him sniggering and oooed as Rey’s blood caught righteous fire inside.

She bared her teeth and raised her wand-

“Mister Ramaford,” a sharp, formal voice wound its way smoothly from the door of their classroom. As quiet and dark-scaled as an asp.

Rey jumped.

Roddy glanced then went pale as a ghost and scrambled, slamming his chair down on all fours and straightened up smart as he could as he whimpered, “Sir.”

The General stepped over the threshold into the classroom. He was dressed very lordly-like in his rich funereal robes. His black leather gloves gleamed like new ink under the bright candelabras, his hair slicked down severely against his skull glinted so darkly it looked like fresh blood. In his hand he carried a bouquet of lush, elegant flowers as pink as her angry little cheeks.

Her heart skipped maddeningly. He never, never told her when he’d come.

It had been a month since he last deemed to grace her; they had squabbled by the Black Lake before he Disapparated in a silent whirr of black robes. For the life of her she couldn’t remember what they’d fought about. In the beginning, before they quarreled, she had told him she missed the peonies that grew at Madam Beaux’s. There were none in the Highlands.

And now he had brought her a bushel-full in front of everyone. Completely unannounced.

His cool blue eyes weren’t looking at her. Rather, they had Ramaford pinned to his seat beneath a killing gaze.

“Are you propositioning my wife?” Armitage asked.

Her belly flipped; nervous sniggers and ooo’s rippled through the classroom. She would absolutely murder him once they were alone.

Behind him, Percival had to stand on tippytoe to peer anxiously over his shoulder. Her man was taller than ten Professor Flitwicks, with a very sharp, angular figure. He looked horribly mean just now.

She heard Roddy swallow like a scared gillygup before tripping over his tongue, “N-no sir never! no never I- s-sorry, Mister Lord erm- Lord Hux, sir-”

“I got it, thank you,” Rey punctuated her enunciations with a head wobble. Luna piped unhelpfully, “But no you don’t…”

Without glancing, Armitage raised to finger to her.

She crossed her arms beneath her barely-there breasts and huffed. “Insufferable ass…”

“I believe,” drawled Armitage slowly, “you owe the professor and Lady Hux an apology.”

“S-s-s-sorry, I’m sorry Professor, L-lady Hux-”

Rey rolled her eyes.

“What ‘bout Rosie?” she cocked her hip out. “How ‘bout you pologize to her?”

“Yeah yeah yeah, s-sorry Tico. Sorry,” he blathered on and on as his mates all stared pale-faced and wide-eyed out the windows or at their quills.

Rosie hmphed and stuck her pretty little nose up in the air. “Chht, whatevah.”

Then to Rey she whispered, “Thank you, dolly.”

“You’re welcome, dolly,” Rey whispered back.

“Filius-”

Rey’s belly dipped and buzzed. She had hoped, hoped, that terrible awful man had disappeared.

But he was still standing in the doorway, as black and smug as Death.

“- I fear I must borrow your pupil. Pray excuse my interruption.”

Flitwick’s hands flittered nervously around his wand. “Why not at all, not at all. Young love, and all that-” he winced at his own choice of words.

The dragon stretched out his hand to her. “My lady.”

She wouldn’t budge.

“I’m having my lesson,” she stuck her nose up in the air like Rose.

The peonies crinkled softly in their brown paper wrapping. Like the excited murmur of children before bed. His demure skeleton smile made her nervous.

“I trust I shall be able to fill the gaps,” he told her mildly.

Even though she was twelve, she blushed.

Furiously, she gathered up her books and green ink quills and parchments, making absolutely as much noise as she could.

“I hate him,” she hissed under her breath to her dollies.

Rosie fretted, while Luna whispered dreamily, “Oh, do make him snog you this time...”

Rey snorted viciously, but her legs tingled as they carried her through the classroom. She wouldn’t look at him as she took his big gloved hand.

Softly, he kissed her knuckles.

She rolled her eyes and tried not to cream her panties as he murmured, “You changed your hair.”

“Please, s’been this way for week,” again she folded her arms. “You’d noticed if you came ever.”

“Did you miss me?” his rumbled sounded dubious and good humored. He thumbed an errant tear from her cheek.

“Chht,” she flushed and muttered, “Fat chance.”

“So I feared.”

Wordlessly, wandlessly, he took her booksack and reduced it to the size of a galleon. With envy she watched him tucked it in neatly at his breast.

He slipped the swath of her peonies into her arms as gently as if they were an infant.

Their beauty hurt her, in all the good ways. She stroked their petals and cradled them lovingly to her chest.

“Thank you,” she yielded whisperingly. Her classmates, she knew from the other visits all year, would be straining to hear. “They are really lovely-” she nuzzled them with her cheek, “- but I really am put out.”

He offered her his arm. “Then I promise, I shall not keep you long.”

But why not just keep me forever, she would have said, if stupid Percy had the decency not to interrupt.

“You have one hour,” he warned them pompously, his prefect’s badge gleamed obnoxiously on his chest.

Bossy little germ.

“Fine.”

With a huff, she took her man’s arm and let him sweep her slowly, gracefully out into the torch-lit hall.

“But can’t you wait at least until the free period?” she pulled the sleeves of her soft, silver jumper over her tightly curled fingers and pinched it there with her thumbs.

She’d ditched her robes when they got out past castle lawn. She wore her favorite jumper she ordered through a muggle catalogue, a green tartan pleat-skirt and long dark tights. Her boots were velvet and tall as her thighs.

Armitage’s jaw had ticked when he saw her, he glared jealously at Percy until the poor weasel-boy backed well off. Still, he looked determined not to start a row with her today. Calmly, he offered her his long coat, and when she refused it, he clenched his teeth and smiled thinly and folded his hands behind his back.

Now her teeth were trying to tattle on her with their chattering. May in the highlands was like winter in London, and she was regretting not taking his coat. The cold made her mood all the blacker.

She crossed her arms over her taut, aching nips and snapped, “Or the week-end?”

“I see,” elegantly, he lifted one eyebrow, “An imposition on my lady’s schedule, am I?”

Oh. Her stupid belly dipped treacherously whenever he called her that.

My lady.

“It’s just- now’s my Magical History class and it’s the only one I have perfect marks in. I’m rubbish at all the other subjects- charms… transfigures… divinations-” she seethed at the last one.

He scoffed. “I should hardly consider Divinations a proper class-”

“Well you might not, but my report does,” she spat. “S’so stupid. She’s always going on and on about tragedy in my future and a dark omen looming over my love life. Like it takes a wet clump of tea leaves to figure out you and me are doomed.”

He snorted and smiled, as in actually showed a bit of white, straight teeth and some handsome wrinkles around his eyes.

Her heart skipped. Count that as the first time she ever made him laugh.

“Anyway,” she went on, cheeks pinker and a bit more breathless, “less I can predict for her when Jupiter will succeed Venus in ascension or dissension or something, I’m going to get bad marks.”

“Shall I speak to Trelawney?” he asked her.

Her little tummy fluttered. She played unaffected at the thought of her dark Deatheater boyfriend taking up for her with her professor by giving her shoulders a shrug. “Don’t think it’ll make a difference. Honnesly, just the sight of you would prolly kill her.”

He tipped his head back and laughed.

Her chest swelled smugly as they crested the hill towards the outer grounds together.

She felt she was queen of everything, bugger the cold weather.

“Well then,” the smile he gave her was beautiful. Razor-edged. “There is your meaningful prediction, my love.”

Her smile slipped, the lightness she felt blew away on the next cold breath of wind.

My love…

He stopped at the rocky edge of the hillock and lilted his chin at the mammoth sprawl unraveling below them. Long, undulating fields of newborn heather and tall grass, like swathes of dusky emerald velvet and hunter-dark wool.

Wrapping her arms tightly about her middle, she stepped ahead of him, balancing her arches on the lip of a flat slate-stone, and stared sightlessly out at the grounds.

“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she said dully.

“How else should I call you?” he sounded guarded again. Remote.

She shrugged. “Dunno. How ‘bout, my fiancé I don’t like to see very much, or that annoying little girl a hat told me I had to marry, or my least favorite burden in life-”

He sighed tiredly, “Rey-”

“People like you don’t get what it’s like.” Beyond Hagrid’s comfortable little hovel, past his pumpkin patch near the forest, she could see the quidditch pitch and beyond it, the practice field. “I can’t even fly properly-”

She remembered the last time she tried. She practiced all of the lesson harder than anybody and never got but six inches off the ground. it was dark when Madam Hooch made her quit finally; at supper the Slytherin boys had mocked her until she left the great hall sobbing so bad Luna had to take her upstairs.

“The broom won’t come into my hand and even when it does- it’s like they can sense I’m not a real witch,” she was speaking wholly to herself now, looking miserably at the low wefts of white cloud in the blue sky, “my broomstick and my wand. Like they already know I’m a disaster-”

“You are not a disaster, my dear, surely-”

“I am though,” she croaked softly. Her lip tremored - in her heart there was a heaviness, like a load of stones she couldn’t lift. Bitterness rose burning up through her chest to her throat to choke her.

Her eyes stung. She wanted to go back her boarding school. Back to Madam Beaux. “I know that’s why you don’t like to come here. You can tell it, can’t you? That I’m a squib. That’s why the hat wouldn’t pick me for Slytherin, isn’t it? Because my magic’s no good-”

A pair of long dark arms enfolded her from behind.

Somewhere, she heard a little girl start to sob.

“Shh-shh-shh,” he soothed her. All around her, the creeping breath of the Highland spring was freezing, but behind her, he was burning.

A full-bodied kiss from the sun.

“There now, angel, hush your weeping. There now. You know I cannot bear to see you so sad.”

His hot breath and tender words in her ear made her whimper. She forgot about prissy Percy and her bad magic and low marks. The cold in her small, tremoring hands seeped away from her. She closed her eyes and saw dragons and fire and the grown-up bodies of beautiful witches dancing in their flames instead.

“Armitage,” she got a gorgeous, queasy feeling in her tummy, like she was free-falling through the sky, “you’re burning up-”

“Whenever you are near,” was his quiet, rumbling reply.

The wind bayed furiously around them and over the sleeping surface of the far-off lake, but it may have well been blowing in another country. Because in that moment, she was deep, deep underground. Somewhere rich and dark and secret, safe and sultry. Surrounded by trinkets and treasures that sparkled and white bone skeletons that gleamed in a fire’s hot glaze.

“Never doubt your magic-” he was whispering to her from that dangerous, secret place.

She looked up.

His eyes high, high above were watching her. Beyond them, she saw his bright-burning hair with its loose strands stirred by the winds across his forehead and the seething cool-grey skies. His lips moved when he spoke so that she saw his beautiful white teeth and behind them, his flickering red tongue.

His words echoed like cave drips inside her fast-beating heart.

“In all my life, I have never met another witch – nor wizard, for that matter – with a power such as yours.”

His mocking stung her. She felt her heart wring in her throat. “You’re making fun of me, aren’t you-”

“Hardly.” On a dare, he closed his eyes.

He nuzzled her deeply at her frantic pulse point.

Her neck tilted. Her lashes flickered shut.

“You ensnare me. Your magic subdues me, soothes me, every time-”

She was turning, whether by his will or hers, she had no idea.

The touch of his chest bathed her like firelight; she felt dark watercolor memories surface inside her. Dream-shadows of his long hot tongue sliding, sliding down her throat and through her tender slit.

Her legs shook, her belly twisted shamefully.

She wanted him lay her down in cold long grass and make her spread her thighs.

He took up her hips and coaxed her even closer. Like rocks sliding far, far away in darkness, his chest rumbled with his deep, imperial murmurs against her small, tender breasts.

“I find I am quite enslaved to you, despite my best efforts to prove the contrary. You haunt me,” his heavy black leather hands on her body thrilled her. His eyes hovered on her parted lips. “If that is not magic, I daresay I do not know what is.”

Her heart leapt and scattered; she felt it beating everywhere inside her as she pressed up on her tiptoes and stretched her arms tentatively about his neck.

She was warm now, the winter around her completely forgotten. Yet her hands shook for an entirely different sort of reason as her fingertips strained to touch behind his nape.

He was so unbelievably tall.

Out of the corners of her eyes, she saw Percy marching towards them from his lookout spot on the next hillock. His face was gravely stern.

“If you are my slave-” she ventured, watching her man through her lashes, trying not to giggle and not to shake. He made her weak and he made nervous. He made her… something she’d never been before.

Shy.

“Yes?” he drawled coaxingly. There was a small, sexy slant to his red lips and mirth glinting like knife blades in his eyes.

She took a breath and restarted. “If you are my slave, then you have to do what I say.”

It sounded stupid the way it came out – childish – and immediately she wished she could take it back.

But her Deatheater only smiled, as darkly amused as a skull. “Gods save me.”

Percy was still charging ploddingly through the high grass, working himself up into a lather to tell them off.

Her pulse trilled wildly; she unlaced her fingers and curled them in the high, rich collar of his long coat. “I want you to kiss me.”

She added whiningly, “You never do.”

His grin widened. Oh, she wanted him to eat her alive.

Very slowly, he lifted his long, heavy hand from her hip and raised it right at Percy.

Her breath caught; she reached up and snatched his sleeve, but before she could say stop, the world did.

It actually did.

Percy’s mad footsteps went soft and slow-motion. He caught mid-stride coming down the hill. The clouds streaming like torn wefts of wool across the cold skies wound down and held still. Even the Highland’s cold lungs ceased to breath. The wind died, the whole world held its breath.

For her.

“Armitage-” she looked back over her shoulder at the eerie stillness in awe. Beyond the bright grass caught mid-wave to the lake lying in choppy, stagnant layers with starlings suspended above. Like little bits on the end of a mobile.

His magic was like no one else’s in world.

“How are you doing this?” she breathed, still holding his collar.

“It won’t last long.” His hand at her waist wound around her. He drew their bodies together and cinched them tightly. His was blazing, hotter than he’d ever been. So warm it almost stung to touch him when she reached up and trailed her trembling fingers wonderingly along his jaw.

His eyes went hooded and indigo. He turned his head and kissed her palm. “Tell me, how should I kiss you?”

Hot slip dribbled past her slit and soaked the gusset of her panties between her thighs. His touch, his voice- Her heart tried beating through her breast to reach him. She felt a knot tighten at the base of her throat, making it impossible to breathe. She felt afraid, drunk and manic.

She felt perfectly high.

“Like you love me,” she whispered.

“Don’t I?” his soft smirk stole her last breath away.

Then he bowed and kissed her lips.

His were gentle, maddeningly chaste.

She clutched the lapels of his cloak and pressed into him. He groaned and crushed possessively with his arm behind her back. Her blood whirled and it pounded. She felt light as a feather. She felt as if she could sink through the ground.

She wanted her thighs around him. She could picture it, her little body naked as the pretty witches’ dancing around their dragons in her dreams. Her tanned knees climbing around his pale waist as he arched and fucked into her, harder and faster and for forever and ever-

He broke the kiss panting and laid his forehead against hers. “You wicked girl.”

The wind shrilled suddenly through the slivers between them.

His magic was over, his concentration lost.

Gods, can he see my thoughts?

“Of course I can,” he smiled crookedly. His tone dropped to something sexable and dark, “And I ought to lash you, young lady.” Through her tights underneath her skirt, he squeezed her. “Perhaps another time.”

Her heart thundered as he kissed her quickly then straightened just in time for poor Percy who came thrashing off-kilter through the high, lush grass.

“It’s getting late,” he shouted crossly. His horn-rimmed glasses were cockeyed and his hair was mussed by the wind.

He fixed his frames over his ruddy nose and scowled.

“Quite.” Her man folded her hand in his arm. He guided her back through the waxing twilight towards the castle already glowing with candlelight.

The skies were indeed dark through the mammoth crystalline windows when at last they topped the marble staircase and rounded on the Great Hall.

Inside, the children were just settling down to dinner with their House tables. They chattering amongst themselves in the subdued fashion usual for the week before exams. Only the Gryffindors were in high spirits, the Weasley twin most especially. They wormed like a pair of excited labradors in their seats and roared crass jokes to one another for the amusement of their House.

The General recognized their charade for what it was - brilliance’s rail against the arbitraries of institutionalized life. He had attended Hogwarts in the age of their father and knew Arthur Weasley to be a wizard of exceptional capability. Whatever the profession he choose to squander in now. In fact the broodmare, Molly, had been quite the shrewd and clever witch as well. That the two of them frittered away their gifts so capriciously on pedestrian life was, the General perceived, endemic of the very philosophies which had eroded the core of pureblood society.

Frivolity.

Individualism.

Self-indulgence.

He observed the sons to be no wiser than their sire and lamented. The decline of the pure bloodlines aggrieved him; he vowed within himself that the sons he sired would not fall prey to futile whims.

Whatever their mother’s mongrel origins were.

“Oh. It’s supper-time, then,” his bride’s little murmur wafted up from his side. She stood rather anxiously with legs crossed precariously at her ankles and both her hands tucked safely within his arm. Her hair was slightly windswept and troubled out of its unusual style. Her gold eyes were bright and her round cheeks had a comely flush.

She looked positively lovely.

And every bit her tender age.

Together they made an unlikely spectacle inside the bright, hollow mouth of the Great Hall. He with his pale, imperial appearance. She as radiant as a sun-goddess and dressed like a muggle slut.

Death’s irreverent little summer child.

“Are you quite warm enough?” he asked her quietly, hoping she would at last take his coat. He had a private fixation with seeing her wrapped up in his clothing. Her warm, fragile skin in the coils of his dark, subtle damasks and smooth-grained wools. As he looked down on her impassively, he wondered not for the first time if it had pleased his ancestors to admire the delicate beauty of their witches against their hard scales.

Something in his eyes must have given him away, because she blushed and ducked her head.

“Yeah. I’m fine. Do you-” she hesitated. Her ankles uncrossed. She balanced on the outer edges of her boot soles and rubbed her lips together, stalling.

Their partings were almost always like this – uncomfortable. Long-drawn. Neither one of them knew how to leave the other.

Because, a voce hissed sensually from his hindbrain, you are not meant to be apart…

“Doyouwannasiddownwithme?” she said finally in a mumbling rush.

“I-”

It was his turn to stall.

His gaze ghosted over the tables and revealed a growing margin of others who were watching them. Nervous, sniggering students and wary faculty all stealing secret glances over their plates. At the high table, on the dais before the grand darkening windows, the Potions Master was regarding him closely. Grief and suspicion churning in the surface of his dark, damned eyes.

“- hardly doubt it would be appropriate, my angel,” the love-name came as naturally as the tenderness with which he refused.

Bella’s accusations came back to him.

He shook off their chill.

Her lip tremored before she chewed at it savagely. “Why not? Rosie gets to sit with all her boyfriends-”

She jutted her chin to where her little companion-sister was sat between the Weasley twins in scandalous delight. Her cheeks were bright as her namesake, pretty mouth grinning rapturously as she scolded each them in turn. It was obvious the boys took their pleasure in thrilling and vexing her. She threw her head back and shrieked out a laugh that filled the hall.

Never had he made Rey laugh so recklessly. Nor had she looked at him with so much naked affection before.

An ugly jealousy wound inside of him; he rebuked himself scathingly for being envious of a pair of feckless young boys.

“Armitage?” his beloved piped beside him. She was staring up at him and clutching his arm. “Please won’t you sit with me, please?” she begged him openly, “Just this one time- I promise I won’t ever ask you again-”

He kept his hands one folded behind him and other holding its lapel. “I’m afraid not, my dove.”

Her face crumpled.

“Whatevah, then,” she whispered, straightening her spine. Her jaw tremored, but she spoke without shaking, “Can I go now? I’m hungry and my friends are waiting for me. I’m sick of talking to you, anyway. It’s such a waste of time.”

He sighed through his nose.

“My dear must we always end like this? Taking one step forwards and two back?”

She snorted venomously, not daring to blink her wet eyes roving blindly around the hall. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You sound ludicrous- honessly, I can’t even lissen to you anymore. Just get away from me.”

Her hands still clenched his arm.

His mouth twitched, in spite of her backchatter.

He admired her pride.

More of the Great Hall had begun to notice them. The possessive ancestors in him bared their teeth and rattled their spines.

Shielding her with his body in a subtle sweep of black robes, he asked her, “Shall I call on you before examinations?”

She wouldn’t look at him. She glowered blankly at a corner of the great hall with wet, dazzling eyes. “I lit’rilly don’t even care.”

“Then I shall say good night.” He leaned down and kissed her temple.

Her hair smelled like the Highlands. Her skin was cool and soft. He memorized her little girl scent as he whispered, “Good night, my sweeting.”

She closed her eyes and forced herself not to follow his touch. “Choke.”

He stepped back and bowed.

She glanced at him. The look nearly broke his black heart.

He watched her dart away without another word towards her table, and take her seat beneath the gaudy red-and-gold banners between her friends.

His little Gryffindor. Of all the terrible wonders.

He left in a whisper of robes.

“Alright there, slim?” George asked her as she slipped into her normal place at the great table. Next to Luna, across from Rose and the twins.

“Yeah, how is the old Deatheater these days, slimson?” Fred followed up. Slim was the petname the boys had picked for her, on account of neither one of them thought she ate enough. The two were always passing along treats made for them by their Mum. They could be right gits sometimes, but normally she thought of them as sort of brothers. Big, stupid older brothers. With decent-ish hearts.

Her own heart hurt her cruelly – it did whenever her man left. She felt like the false skies swirling in the ceiling were pressing down on her. There was a heaviness in the pit of her stomach. It pulled her into a slouch.

“Whass wrong, dolly?” Rosie sat almost entirely in Fred’s lap with his freckled arm tight around her, smug as a bug in a pretty red lace dress that looked rich and totally posh. She had gold sparkles on her cheeks and a black velvet choker with a fake teardrop pearl. She had been eating double-handed dinner croissants dipped in syrupy butter while laughing as George did silly imitations of all the professors she didn’t like.

Now she was watching Rey attentively with soft, sympathetic love-eyes.

Rey wanted to leap across the table and slap her. She wanted to bury her head in her plate and cry.

Beneath the table, Luna’s soft, slender hand slipped their fingers together in Rey’s lap and held her.

Her lip trembled. She clucked haughtily and shrugged, “I’m fine. Well. Actually-”

She chose the absolute smallest bun from a bowl between them then maneuvered it very primly to her plate. “I’m rather furious. He’s so boring and stupid and inconsequential. A complete waste of my time-”

She plucked two green grapes from another platter and arranged them fussily beside her bun. “I told him so but he doesn’t lissen. I told him, you’re annoying and don’t think I’ll marry you at all. I think- I think the next time that he- the next time that he comes-”

Her throat gripped. She stared at the lonely arrangement on her plate and choked back a sob.

“Daddy says it’s perfectly normal,” Luna coo-whispered in her dreamy sing-song, “to feel a bit low after your soul-love leaves. Even if it’s just a very usual parting. There’s a song about it, the neebles used to sing. It’s very soothing. It goes like-” she started a low, mournful trill.

Rey winced and took her hand back. “I’m not low. Actually- every step he takes away from me I feel bettah.” She lilted her chin bravely. It made the candles floating above them catch the gloss in her eyes without her knowing. “L-like I was saying, next time when he comes, I’m going to tell him to get stuffed. In front of everyone. The whole school. Then he’ll be so humiliated he’ll never- never come back.”

Rose and Luna exchanged worried looks.

Rey ignored them because they were stupid. Viciously, she tore off bits bun without eating them and counted silently to herself, I hate him…

I hate him more…

I hate him…

I hate him more…

I hate…

I love…

His walk to the Headmaster’s office was an uneventful one.

By now the students were used to seeing him; they parted in groups around his wake like water flowing around a monolith and kept their faces cast down. The ghosts avoided him altogether, Peeves most especially, for the poltergeist remembered him well from his years at the school. Only the Grey Lady, the Baron’s would-be betrothed, would sometimes to follow in his wake. Always a ways behind him, watching him with her sad, still eyes.

However, when he came to the end of the long, cathedral-ceilinged hallway that lead to the Headmaster’s chambers, he was utterly alone.

The stone gargoyle leapt away as soon as it saw him, landing in a low crouch and backing away slowly as it hunched and bared its fangs.

He eyed it coolly before sweeping up the spiral staircase two-stairs at a time.

“Albus,” he said when he’d reached the top of the stairwell and stepped inside the circular room.

The Headmaster sat behind his great desk in his purple velvet chair. He was polishing something very delicately with a fine suede cloth, his half-moon glasses perched on the very tip of his long nose. The baubles and trinkets surrounding him glimmered and tinkled. Behind him, the hat snored softly on its shelf.

He looked decidedly engrossed.

“I trust I am not interrupting anything,” the General’s smart black boots moved soundlessly over the floor. His long coat swept behind him like a serpent’s tail.

On its perch the phoenix stopped preening itself and crooned a warning as, on a marble pedestal by its claws, an amethyst and citrine chess set played itself out.

“It’s alright, Fawkes,” the old wizard swept his long emerald sleeve gently in the familiar’s direction. In his hand was the fine polishing cloth. “He comes in peace. Don’t you, General?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” the General smirked. Precisely, he folded his hands behind his back.

The Headmaster let out a low, sad chuckle. “No, no I suppose you would not.”

Jeweled fingers winking, he put down the cloth on the desk. “Now-”

He steepled his fingertips together and studied the General over his glasses. “To what do I owe this dubious pleasure, General Hux?”

“To whom, rather,” the General drawled. Slowly, he took a turn about the room, pausing at length to examine the different artifacts as he spoke. “I have just heard the most fascinating rumor-”

“Have you?” the Headmaster asked very quietly

“Indeed,” the General nodded, bending to inspect a silver self-playing lute, “Quite a fanciful one, I assure you. The source of which is a- shall we say… unreliable one. Nevertheless-”

He had come to a glass curio full of tiny dancing figurines made of sapphire and cerulean flames. The girl-like figures held hands and danced in and around one another, oblivious. “- they give me pause.”

He straightened and looked across at the Headmaster.

The old wizard was staring gravely back.

“These rumors,” he tilted his chin down so that their eyes could meet without a doubt, “they concern Lord Voldemort, do they not?”

“Lord,” the General scoffed, sneering, “I assume you mean Tom. Of course Riddle never sounded much like a family name. Not our kind of families, at any rate-”

Prejudice, old and treasured, burned within him. Violent. Ever-bright.

“Of course Voldemort sounds just as ludicrous,” he paused, seeing through Albus’s face for a moment to the beautiful girl who not an hour ago had spoken that very word. Ludicrous.  

His beautiful mudblooded girl.

“I digress.”

He composed himself with a silent, subtle breath. “I came to see if there was even a granule of truth to this-”

“Rumor?” Dumbledore clarified. His eyes twinkled with a sudden, suspicious, nuanced delight. “From an… unreliable source.”

The General lifted his head high. He had the keen sense he was being adjudged. “Rather.”

As quickly as it came, the twinkle in the old man’s eyes went out.

He sat back. “I’m very sad to tell you, General, that the rumor is – without a shadow of a doubt – truth.”

Behind him, the General’s hands twitched. His Dark Mark throbbed.

How can it be possible?

“If anything,” the Headmaster continued, watching him somberly, “it is a gross understatement of what has already come to pass.”

Though he moved not a muscle, internally the General reeled. A thousand thoughts and memories raced one another for his attention, but one alone stood out diamond-clear from all the rest.

Her face, young and frightened. Staring out at him from the dark whirl of his thoughts.

“Are you very sure?” he asked softly. His voice was like a stranger’s to him. Dangerous, with a jagged, graveling edge. Something deep with him was waking, unwinding. Gathering to its great height and hissing smoke between its fangs.

Slowly, without looking away, the Headmaster withdrew the object he had been polishing when the General first arrived and placed it with a quiet click on his desk.

The General’s heart kicked up and roared when he saw it.

A unicorn’s horn.

“Infinitely,” the Headmaster said.

The General did not take his eyes off the horn as he asked with deadly calm, “Where did you get that?”

“The Forbidden Forest,” the Headmaster’s answer was equally falsely serene.

The General’s gut kicked, he felt his heart fall through him as he whirled around and looked out through the lead-paned windows at the black shape of the forest looming beyond.

His face broke into a snarl. “Tom Riddle rises from the ashes so close to this school, and you didn’t think to warn anyone- to tell me-”

“My dear boy,” the Headmaster was back to his insidious sideways smiling, “I thought you would be delighted. You and your anonymous source-”

“That’s enough!” In a flash of whirling black motion, the General seized the glass curio cabinet and sent it shattering thunderously to the floor.

The tiny dancing jewel-girls inside it screamed and ran scattering through the shards of glass.

The phoenix shrieked and beat its wings at him, but he was too incensed to care.

“This demon hides himself here, on your grounds - the very grounds upon which you hold my muggleborn bride hostage – and it does not occur to you that it is in every way intentional? That he would not seek out his most powerful enemy at the epicenter of his stronghold unless he was driven - compelled by – the will to exact his revenge?”

The General’s heart clenched and wrung him, as violent images from the days of the Deathly Revels slashed themselves across his eyes. Women and girls torn apart like paper. Their screams drowning out the night.

He menaced towards the Headmaster surrounded by fissures of white-crackling light. His hands shook with rage.

“Do you know what a depraved animal like Riddle does to such a one as she? Do you have any idea, the torment? The violation. You- self-righteous scum,” he bore down. The shadows of his ancestors rose behind him with open maws. “You dangle her off a ledge as an incentive for my acquiescence. Hoping to tame me with love. I can assure you, Albus, you win no favor from me by putting her in peril. The exact opposite, in fact-”

“I do not seek your favors, General,” the Headmaster peered him down mildly over the rim of his spectacles, “nor to put your girl in any harm. Do please calm yourself.”

But the General’s face was burning, the vein on his forehead dancing a devil’s revel as he snarled through his immaculate teeth, “She is not yours to gamble with- She is my bride, my future. The mother of my bloodline. Whatever her filthy origins are.”

His hands on the desk sparked more white lightning as the phoenix thrashed and screamed frantically on its perch.

“She belongs to me, and you do not risk her. Or I shall rain fire upon this place the likes of which you cannotconceive.”

“Tell me something, General-” the old fool folded his hands calmly over the unicorn’s horn on his desk.

This close, the General could see every constellation patterned in his bright-shining eyes.

“Why should Riddle want to harm young Rey for his revenge? She is a muggleborn witch of unremarkable origins, shall we call them? Her magical acumen is unexceptional. Pedestrian at best. We share no personal connection, she and I. She carries with her no ties to the wizarding world at all, in fact- oh except to you, General. And you, well you were Riddle’s most devoted follower. A true believer in his cause. So then would he want to harm her, particularly? It’s a most peculiar assumption.”

Too late, the General realized he had stepped in and sprung a trap.

Slowly, he withdrew himself. His powers receded under control. They left behind a trace scent of burned sulfur and seared ozone. His heart tatted maddeningly; suddenly all the innocuous trinkets and tinkling music surrounding him seemed a sinister conspiracy.

He had played himself a fool.

The Headmaster’s eyes twinkled up at him demurely as he waited for his answer.

“His most devoted follower, was it? I see,” the General rearranged the rich, dark cuffs of his dress robes around his white wrists. “Is that what one reads in the Defense Against the Dark Arts- the life and times of Armitage Hux?”

“Certainly his deeds,” the Headmaster smiled, “although, my suspicions are informed by a much more reliable source-”

The General’s eyes narrowed dangerously. His gut went coldly still.

“Who, pray?” he asked quietly.

The Headmaster dismissed his question with a frugal wave. “The dementors’ fear was not the reason why you were acquitted from Azkaban-”

“The details of my trial were sealed by the Ministry and locked away in Department of Mysteries,” the General adopted his usual, rigid posture. His voice was back to being cold and composed. “Therefore I’ll thank you to spare me your suspicions-”

The Headmaster continued, unperturbed, “- though there was testimony - compelling testimony, I gather - about what really took place that night in Godric’s Hollow. The night Tom Riddle was killed. There was a great light in the sky over the Potters’ townhome,” his jeweled fingers wavered the air above him, trailing glittering emerald robes, “It eclipsed the Dark Mark completely. As bright as the sun at midday. So they say.”

“People often have an imaginative way of remembering these things,” the General sneered.

“Oh certainly,” the Headmaster agreed with a convivial smile, “It is also said that, one could hear a sort of… roaring,” he shut his eyes. He concentrated intently, as if straining to hear the sound. “It was a fearsome thunder. Some described it as the roar of a lion-”

Over the rims of his halfmoon glasses, he met the General’s eyes. “But I wonder, if in this instance, a dragon might be more apropos.”

Something dark and hateful churned within the General as he remembered that fateful night.

“Is this your grand theory?” the General spoke imperiously. But inside him burned that dark, ravening hate. “That I – an Arkanian, of the line of Hux – halted the great purge of this diseased, mottled generation? I killed Tom Riddle outside the Potters’ house that night? I?”

“It makes for a wonderful twist, doesn’t it?” the Headmaster sat back and folded his hands over his chest.

“It is an absurd fiction,” the General spat.

His heart raced; he desired more than anything in that moment to escape the mad, knowing gaze of this old man.

The Headmaster gave a little shrug and smiled. “The more important question one wonders is – what will you do now that he has returned?”

The General’s jaw clenched.

He did not have an answer for that.

With a rageful little sniff, Rey snapped her spellbook shut.

She and Rose and Luna had been kneeling around the Turkish ottoman in their common room for hours, spellbooks open, supposedly studying for exams.

Really they’d been talking about Armitage and why Rey couldn’t marry him – he was cruel and cold and never told her he loved her – when the weasel-brothers showed up. Immediately they coaxed Rosie onto the sofa to sit with them. They were a couple of randy hippogriffs and Rey was sick to death of them.

Of course Rosie did pretend to keep listening even after that they snatched her, but it was obvious she wasn’t. George’s hand kept creeping up her red lace skirt to tickle her; Rey could see now he was making gentle, circling motions on Rosie’s thighs. Meanwhile, Fred’s thick, harsh-looking fingers ghosted up and down Rose’s arm. Every once in a while, he’d nuzzle her with his big beak and peck her neck softly. Rosie’s eyes were half-closed now and her head kept lolling. She was falling asleep between them, and it made Rey positively mad.

How dare she rub her nose in her happiness, when Rey was just saying how hopeless she was.

Even Luna, good dolly Luna, who always took Rey’s side, was staring lost-fuly into the fireplace. Barely blinking and humming low and tuneless to herself.

Rey felt like she was speaking to no one. So what if she’d talk about Armitage a hundred billion times? She had to- he was everything. Her husband, her future. Her family. After Hogwarts, Luna and Rosie would go off with their soul-loves and leave her. She’d have no one but him, and she didn’t have him at all.

She’d never felt so alone.

“You okay, dolly?” Rose asked her froggily as Rey stood and shoved books and quill viciously into her bag.

Fred kept Rosie pinned with his arm around her belly and smiled over her shoulder at Rey. “She’s fine then, aren’t yah slim?”

“There’s a good girl, slimson, off to bed,” George nodded. His hands, Rey noticed, were working deep under Rosie’s skirt. “No sense losin’ any sleep over that silly troll. In the mornin’ you can send him a howler. That’ll teach him. Won’t it, Fred?”

“Absolutely, George.”

Rey looked one last time to Luna, but Lunabelle had made a triangle with her arm on the ottoman and laid her head down. Delicately, she traced the same section of brocade over and over. Completely lost in her own strange, beautiful world.

Rey’s heart ached. She took in everything for what it was.

Dismissed.

Eyes stinging, she turned on her heels and clopped towards the stairs to their turret without another word.

“Rey, wait-” Rosie called after her weakly. Halfhearted and tremoring, she tried to push George’s hands away and sit up, “Stop, can’t you see she’s sad-”

But Fred rubbed his nose in her hair and whispered against her ear and slipped his hand in to join George’s. Rosie let out a shuddering little exhale and whimpered and then went very still.

Rey trudged the staircase alone.

Godric’s Hollow was very much a place time had forgot.

It was raining furiously; water sloughed off the eaves where the General stood and beat a violent rhythm against the cobblestone. Wizards and witches with close-gathered collars hurried past him with only the occasional halfhearted glance.

But he had drawn the hood of his black cloak over his long coat to avoid being recognized.

Behind him, the pub that sat across from the Potters’ townhome was warm and alive. Its crude-paned windows glowered pleasantly, bright yellow light cut a vivid slash across the cobblestone from its open mouth. Inside he could hear wizards crowing greetings and bits of petty news to one another, as witches with shrill voices flirted and cackled back. The air roiling out from the bar was roasting and thick with the scents of fresh ale and rich home cooking. It charged out into the cold, shrieking gales that buffered the rain in sheets and dissipated into cool wafts of steam that drifted over him, disguising him further from view.

He peered through the fast-falling rainfall at the Potters’ residence, tracing its gaunt, grey shapes as he remembered a very different sort of night. When the air was cool but not cold and the sky clear and full of far-blinking stars. Back then the streets were empty, the windows of every shop and house and even this pub deadened and watchful. As if the buildings themselves could fear.

That night he stood under that very eave in his long black coat and observed Tom Riddle pouring down the narrow steps of the Potter house. He watched Riddle raise his right arm and summon a Dark Mark, triumph and madness dancing all around him as he threw his head back and laughed.

The memory of him sickened the General even now.

But Riddle’s laughter was not what the townspeople of the Hollow remembered about that fateful night. It was the cool, clear skies churning up a fire that swallowed all the white shivering stars. A roaring like thunder, like a thousand thunders. A devastating flame that tore through this very street like rapids over a fall.

And against their bright-orange violence, the shadow of a wingspan. A single dark figure in an imperial coat with a burning white skull.

Purge indeed, thought the General as he took one last look at the dark windows staring back at him like a pair of sorrowful eyes.

If he was to do what was required, he would see he had something to gain from it.

And he had to visit her first. To see her…

He Apparated into the night.

Rey woke up sort of all-at-once and really not-at-all. She was still in her jumper and pleat skirt and boots, her bag spilled next to her. Bits of loose hair stuck to her still-drying cheeks. She’d cried with her face in the comforter until she was too exhausted to cry. Now her head throbbed. She couldn’t exact use all her limbs at once.

Straining against the thick, suede darkness, she peered through the canopies to see if her dollies were asleep in their beds. Luna was tucked in beneath her covers with her knealze-doll under her arm and her thumb between her pale lips. Her blonde hair looked pearl-silver in the slivers of pale light sieving through the cracks of their door.

Other than that, the room was pitch dark.

Rosie’s bed looked cold and lonely.

Rey lit a small candle by her bedside with her wand and hid its flame from Luna’s face with her hand.

She wondered where Rose was.

The windows were black-paned and pattered by rainfall. The steady, pittering tattoo paced Rey’s jumbled heart. She couldn’t stop picturing Armitage and the way he looked against the grey skies this evening. It made her livid that he was the last thing she thought of before she fell asleep and the first when she woke up. She even dreamed of him, strange dreams of him standing in a dark cloak with the hood drawn against a bright window, watching rain fall from the eaves onto the walk.

She licked her chapped lips and decided she needed a drink of water.

She’d cried herself dry.

With a silvery hush, she slipped down the comforter, wincing when her boots made a dull sound on the rug.

Luna didn’t wake, though.

Rey’s ever-lasting roses on their pedestal in the center glimmered in the passing candlelight like fresh blood.

They made her ache for him. She rubbed her flat, tender chest as she blew out her taper and slowly creaked open their door.

He felt… near her, somehow.

She crept on shaky, sleepy legs down the stone turret steps.

The great room was silent as a tomb.

Low-glowing ruby light from the fireplace’s last embers made long shadows of the furniture against the walls. The air inside the common room was warm and thick and smelled like reams of parchment and ink quills and sweet cakes. And something else delicate and humid Rey couldn’t guess.

Her heart pounded strangely. She kept swallowing as she crept blindly down the spiral staircase, until at last she could see properly from the around the curved wall at the fourth stair.

What she saw on the sofa made her heart stop completely.

Her Rosie, red lace skirt shucked up around her bellybutton, panties off. Round, white thighs wide open. Her smooth, perfect body glowed in the ember light. The neck of her dress was stretched down beneath her pink nipples. Fred – Rey was almost sure it was – was kneeling on the cushion between her calves with his hand on her waist. His thick, rough fingers were moving in and out of her between the smooth, puffy lips of her glistening sex. His mouth was open, curved upwards at the corners. He was working her slowly, deeply, pressing and holding up to his knuckles as Rosie’s round belly tremored and she whimpered and whined.

Her panties were shoved into her mouth, Rey realized. Her stomach dropped, she felt her blood buzzing in every vein of her body at the blissed-out look on Rose’s heart-shaped face. Behind her, George – Rey knew it was George – was playing with her tenderly, like she was a tiny kitten with just-opened eyes. Stroking his own big fingers at the top of her shining slit in a gentle back-and-forth motion, as his other huge hand fondled and teased her breasts two at a time. Rosie’s hands were clenched tight in his hair and in her skirt bunched over her belly, her sweat glittered in the low ruby light. She looked like a painting. She looked porcelain and precious.

Rey had never felt so frightened and or so jealous. Her heart skipped, murmuring as she listened to how they talked to Rose. All soft-clicking tongues and breathy bits of good girl and that’s it, sweetheart and just gettin’ started, aren’t we, luv?

“Love me a little muggle girl, don’t you, Fred?” George teased her sweetly, rawly, tugging one pink swollen nipple as the other hand lifted her skirt a little higher and strummed lazily across her quaking ribs.

“Def’nitely,” Fred was fucking her faster with his big fingers, holding her weak-struggling thighs apart with his huge paw and kissing them between pants. Her cunny squelched loudly around him, slick dripped between her thick, pink cheeks into a dark pool on the sofa and covered him past his knuckles down to his wrist.

Rosie’s eyes rolled back suddenly, she squealed and kicked softly and tried to worm trembling out of George’s grip.

“Coming again, isn’t she?” George murmured grinning.

“Yeah,” Fred breathed, bewitched.

“How many’s that now, mate?”

“Seven.”

“Seven,” George nuzzled Rosie’s neck and nipped her earlobe, “spoiled rotten’s what you are, pretty girl.”

“Fuck she feels good when she comes,” Freddie groaned lowly. He laid his forehead on Rose’s chest and took one of her puffy nipples in his mouth. His fingers fucked her even faster when she moaned for him.

Her muffled cries through her panties climbed higher and higher, her eyes flickered and rolled around and around her skull.

Rey’s thighs squeezed tightly and her eyes went wide, as Rose locked up like a statue and came sousing Fred in crystal-bright slip. Her head swam listening to her friend squeal in earnest. Her mouth felt full of cotton and she couldn’t remember the last time she took a breath.

She watched Fred lift his head up and pull the panties out of Rose’s dry mouth in time to stick his sleek tongue down her throat. Just as George pulled his brother’s fingers out of Rosie’s swollen, overworked little slit and replaced them with his own. Fred broke their tongue-fuck and leaned back on his haunches while George took his fingers not buried in her pussy and gently turned her face towards him. He kissed her softly, greedily, lapping at her insides as Fred’s cock finally came out.

It was red, glistening and purple-crowned, weeping precum. Throbbing and massive in the grasp of his huge hand.

“Jaysus,” he gasped, big shoulders shuddering as he stroked himself, “I need to come.”

Rey’s eyes went wide and wider till they hurt from stretching; her heart hammered like it was going to explode. She was hot and cold all over, and shaking. She wanted to leave, now. She wanted to stay forever.

Most of all, she wanted Armitage to lie her down next to them and do the exact same thing.

“C’mere, poppet,” Fred coaxed Rose whisperingly, as George helped mold her boneless, quaking body up onto her hands and knees, fingers still buried deep in her cunt. Rosie’s eyes were glazed and glossy, her cheeks bright red, mouth wet and slack.

Her palms and knees dug into the soft cushions of the sofa. Her red dress was like a ballerina’s skirt gathered around her waist.

Fred took her shining black hair in his fist and tipped her head back to kiss her, a long filthy kiss as his brother pressed in close to her round, gleaming bum and fucked his fingers again.

Rose moaned and whimpered and rode back at him. She didn’t seem the least bit frightened of Fred’s big cock bobbing against her chin.

Not even when he drew his tongue from her mouth and guided her to it.

Rey’s gut clenched; her horror and fascination and envy reached fever-pitch as she watched her dolly greedily lick and suck. The brothers were stroking her all over her small body and praising her. Their love was clumsy and gentle, instinctual and adoring. Two brother lions clambering all over their baby-cub mate.

Rey’s chest ached. She pictured Armitage and his ever-cold, distant demeanor. She blinked and felt her lashes were wet.

She glanced away from them into the corner. Then everything went wintery white.

Her blood rushed, roaring like a far-away waterfall. Her heart stopped and wouldn’t restart.

There, inside the shadows, with his long arms crossed elegantly and leaning one shoulder against the wall, was her dragon. He was watching her watch the scene on the sofa with dark amusement glinting in his cold blue eyes.

Dressed in long, sleek, imperious black, he looked exactly the way he did in all her dreams.

Dangerous.

And beautiful.

“Armitage-” her breath snagged. Her stomach dropped.

He put his finger to his lips.

She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t blink, as he ghosted across the room with his smooth, elegant stride. Inside the ember light, his hair slicked down against his skull was blood red, his face shone like polished bone. He flowed soundlessly past the lovers on the sofa totally unnoticed, his long, sensual mouth wet at the seam and coiling like the tail of a scorpion into a smirk.

Her heart beat in her throat louder than any sound she’d ever heard before as seamlessly he mounted the first of the turret’s stone steps.

Immediately, his great height blotted her view of the great room. Like a plague swallowing up the sky. He seemed to fill the narrow stairway with his hot, dark-crackling energy. His magic wound around hers jealously, caressingly-

She gushed shamefully between her thighs.

The wet, sensual sounds of the trio were beginning to filter back to her as tenderly, almost contemplatively, he took her hand in his black leather glove.

Slowly, he turned her wrist and pressed a soft, peeling kiss to her rabbit pulse.

She made an absolutely humiliating sound.

“Missed me, my sweeting?” his dark murmur shook the world and her with it. Her hand slipped through his leather with a hush. “I thought I might find you sleeping-”

He glanced over his shoulder.

Past his beautiful wraith figure, she saw in soft-focus Rosie sucking Fred’s cock on the sofa as George bowed over her, still fucking her roughly on his fingers, and kissed her nape.

“- but I see you decided to take in a show.”

She was touching him without realizing, her small hands sliding trembling up his chest. The smooth grain of his black robes and his tight definition below them made her cunny gulp mercilessly. As if to suck him inside. Her breath sawed scattered and raw past her dry tongue; she tugged pitifully at his shoulders and whined. “Armitage-”

His big hands taking her little waist made her feel weightless.

Calm.

“My poor girl,” he bowed his head and kissed her one cheek. Then the other. His body drifted closer, sealing out the light. “You ought to be in bed, my angel.”

Her lashes flickered at his low-roiling voice. “I- couldn’t go back to sleep, I- missed you.”

“Ah.” He arced a trail of lingering kisses across her brow.

Her arms wound him. She closed her tired, aching eyes.

His leather hands began to pet her exhausted, tremoring body. His touch was so gentle; she forgot all her promises never to speak to him again and burrowed her face in his neck. He was burning up like usual and smelled wonderful. Like rain and forests on fire. Like secrets and expensive cologne.

She held onto him tightly and whimpered, “Please can’t you stay?”

“If you like. But only tonight. And I won’t take you,” he nuzzled her temple, “you’re still far too young.”

Puzzled, she asked, “But take me where?”

He smiled against her hair. “There now, no more chatter. Let me look at your pretty face.”

She tipped her chin up, and tried to flinch at his hot blue gaze.

His hands hypnotized her with their firm leather touch; he stroked her everywhere, lingering where she needed him to without her having to ask. Her breasts. Her belly. Her wet little thighs. He made her legs go to jelly and her heart beat frantically everywhere at once. He kissed her too as he touched her, long, chaste kisses on her lashes, the bridge of her nose. Like he was mapping her face with his kisses.

She hung limp off his neck and panting rawly. A tiny kitten in the hands of her owner as he stroked her soft, downy mound with his thumb.

“My little girl likes to spy, does she?” his words that made her belly twist and shiver. His hot breath bathed her neck. “Naughty thing-”

He kissed her throbbing pulse.

Her lashes flickered; she made a breathy, needy sound.

“I could do things to you that would make their amateur display look like a child’s animation,” he spoke directly into her ear.

Her cunny gulped and slicked shamefully. She clung on for dear life as her knees gave out.

“Shall I give you a preview? Oh I think I will-”

Finally, he took her mouth.

His kiss wasn’t like George or Freddy’s. It was slow and controlling. Deep and dominating and smothering.

Like she wanted his love to be.

His tongue slipped greedily inside her and stroked every part of her. She suckled him anxiously, instinctually, hoping to please him. Her lips moving out of tempo in a scramble to keep up.

He took the last step below her so that their bodies mimicked the sensual slotting of their mouths.

His was log, hard and slender. Terrifyingly tall. She was soft, tender femininity. Fragile. Small.

His hands snuck around her waist and sought her bum beneath her skirt.

He groped and squeezed her mercilessly, groaning into her mouth.

The sensation and his obvious pleasure made her belly swoop and flutter. Their kiss was never-ending; he pushed deeper and deeper inside her, filling her with slick, flexing muscle in the back of her throat. She whined and mewled and pressed into him harder. His hands on her bottom through her tights was boundless, almost too rough.

He bowed her back in a seamless motion and reached deep between her thighs from behind. His thick leather fingers pressed into her crease and she-

She cried out into his mouth.

He kissed and stroked her. Back and forth…

Back and forth…

She was quaking; the shake in her belly was building and building into something. Her eyes slipped open; she stared glossy and unseeingly past him at the black-shadowed ceiling as he teased her plump, swollen folds and tongue-fucked her mouth.

This is heaven, her heart whimpered. She wanted it to go on and on and on and on-

Her small body jerked and trembled violently as one of his hands her traced up her waist and palmed her tiny rosebud breasts.

He squeezed her gently, testing her softness, then thumbed her nipples. The sensation was liquid, electric. Tingling-fissuring-bright.

He was killing her, killing her with goodness. She wanted- she wanted-

Against her belly, she could feel a shape of something big and beautiful. A heavy pillar of hot stone.

His cock…

She had made him hard for her.

In the great room, Rosie suddenly cried out.

Rey’s eyes rolled back; she came all over herself like a shameless little slut. Letting her big, mean Deatheater fuck her mouth and rub her pussy.

She hung slack and conniptioned in his arms.

His tongue withdrew from her trailing thin crystal stands of saliva. He watched her come gasping and whining with a soft, satisfied smirk.

“So beautiful,” he whispered, tracing her face adoringly with his blue stare. “I have the loveliest little mudblood in all the world.”

His slur should have hurt and humiliated her. Instead her blood crackled and sparkled at his praise.

Slowly, he dipped his head and loved her pulse leaping wildly against her neck with his wet lips.

“Again,” she whimpered greedily. Her fingers twisted in his tightly slicked hair. “I want it again. Please-”

“Careful, my angel,” his gloved hand working her breast slid dangerously down her body and up her skirt in the front.

His voice was black velvet midnight, “Begging so prettily is an excellent way to end up with a bellyful of my heirs.”

He cupped and squeezed her throbbing mound.

Her eyes were moving behind her eyelids; she saw specters of white fizzling lights that weren’t there.

Sugar plum visions of cradles and prams and pretty blankets full of darling babies swam in time with her heart pounding. She loved, loved dollies and playing mummy. And Armitage would never go away from her again. He’d hold their babies and let her crown him with chained daisies; she’d wear white dress and always be beautiful and thin. He’d gather up her skirt whenever he wanted and put his big, big cock inside her and fill her up with more babies on a blanket under the blue sky. She wouldn’t be allowed to tell him no-

“My my,” he rasped suddenly, sounding hoarse and barely-controlled, “What an active imagination you have, little girl.”

His fingertips traced strange shapes into the sopping gusset of her leggings, making her shudder and flush as he asked, “And what would Madam Pomfrey say, I wonder, when she sees you’ve split your little first year pussy open on a grown wizard’s cock?”

“Artimage,” she shuddered into another forbidden glimpse of heaven.

Suddenly, there was a cool draft between her thighs.

They were slick with hot slip from her gushing cunny. Her tights had fallen down her legs sighing as if they were too big for her and were now puddled around her boots.

She choked on nothing as he sucked her pulse and stroked her throbbing, naked slit with his thick gloved fingers.

She stared open-mouthed at the shadow-ceiled sky and felt her heart beat at the base of her throat.

“Y-yes,” she whimper, as his black leather fingertip circled dangerously around her tight clenching opening, “oh yes- please, yes- uhhn…”

His fingers - his thick, beautiful leather fingers – pressed two together inside her hot virgin cunt.

She was wet, so wet, but it didn’t matter. He had to force his way in as her body resisted. She clenched and bit her teeth and shook as he wormed and shoved deep inside.

The stretch, the white hot aching stretch, made her feel like she was floating.

“That’s it, there’s my sweetheart,” his hot breath on her neck was electric. He kissed lovemark he’d made, then the tender indent in front of her ear, then her temple. He caught her trembling tear falling down her cheek. “You loved it so well the last time, as I recall-”

His thumb made a soft, pendulous sweep across the top of her slit, rasping her aching bud.

She bucked, flashes fluttering helplessly at the smothering sensations. His fingers slowly fucking in and out of her. His leather thumb teasing her clit back and forth. The wet shape of his smirk against her pulse point. His liquid whispers pouring down her ear.

She panted and whimpered like a pup, “What you mean- lah-last time- ahnn!”

Her legs trembled, caught in her tights wading around her boots, as his fingers fucked her a little harder. Making obscene sounds in her wet baby cunt.

“Don’t you remember-” he stroked her a little faster and teased the lobe of her ear with his tongue.

She mewled and convulsed and clung to him.

“- when I kissed your little cunt-” his thumb made a purposeful circle around her clit throbbing like a second heartbeat, avoiding the little dip where she needed him most to touch-

“- right here?”

“N-no…” her voice sounded so pathetic. So small and far away.

To her shame and confusion, her belly clenched trembling and she felt a wad of slip too big to be normal trickle hotly out of her cunny between the knuckles of his glove.

“What a shame. It’s one of my most favorite memories,” he bent his head to examine his black hand sliding inside her pink, swollen folds, “your little thighs on my shoulders, pink first-year pussy open for my tongue. I remember you wearing black crinoline-”

Her mind scrambled, reeling, but it was useless. All she knew was the sharp leather slide of his big, big fingers fucking her tight little hole. She was dripping- everywhere- and it was pattering. Onto her clothes and the stone step behind her as she rocked, clutching onto him, legs shaking like a newborn lamb’s.

She was so close to coming again, and wanted it to last forever. Wanted the hurt inside her walls to stop. The tighter her tummy clenched, the more his big fingers hurt her. She drooled slick tinged the faintest bit pink onto his wrist.

“Worked ourselves into quite lather, have we, my angel?” his tone was so misleadingly mild. He was panting, the barest profile she could see with his head bowed down was open-mouthed.

He looked like a demon. Like an angel-

Her thighs quaked violently. She wished he would lay her down so she could-

“Armitage,” her breath shook as she whimpered, “I- you’re going to make me come-”

“So come then,” his sweet acid coax turned her insides to liquid fire. He fucked her harder on her fingers, relishing her wince, and smiled like a skull. “Spread your little thighs and come.”

Her boot soles made a hushed, desperate scratch on the stone grit as she buried her face in his dark shoulder and strained her legs apart against her tights.

“There’s a good little mudblood. Do what I tell you. Hold onto me-”

She wound her arms around his neck and clung to him as something molten and vicious wound her up.

She felt weak, dizzy. Like she was falling. Like she wasn’t, couldn’t be real.

She squeezed him everywhere, afraid to let go of him.

I’m unraveling-

“Amh’tage, it hurts-”

“My sweet one,” he fucked her harderfasterharderharder- “My precious little love-”

Love.

Her legs caved completely.

He caught with her his long, hard arm around her waist and cinched her tightly as she came crying and choking into his neck. She soaked his fingers, shivering and seeing starlight in the darkness of her eyelids.

He stroked her over and over-

“So much pretty slick,” he whispered, watching her pussy shudder and gulp at his black leather touch.

“Stop,” she whimpered, almost sobbing. She didn’t know why she was crying, except that her cunny hurt and felt too sensitive and wonderful. Her head swam like a lake for of shimmering stars.

“I know, I know,” his gloved hand not fucking her stroked her back tip to tail. He was still moving his fingers inside her, very slowly, very gently, in time with her clenching.

“It hurts-”

“Shh-shh-shh, my adored one. Sweeting. I only want to stretch you a little. That’s all. There you are, stay very still. Good girl…”

Good girl-

Finally, he lowered her to the stone steps with his hand behind her head. She was shivering, feverish and now completely naked without knowing how. Her body was wet with slick and sweat and her weeping.

He pulled back and admired her, his bright white-blue eyes trailing covetously over every inch of her flushed, glistening skin to where his fingers still twisted slowly in and out of her cunt.

Her silver sweater, she saw fuzzily out of the corner of her eye, lay in a pile of unwound yarn by her side.

Her belly flexed and concaved and trembled with each time he pushed into her. Her collar bones stained up, up, up against her skin in an arch.

“Spread your legs,” he whispered.

Shaking, she touched her heels together and opened her thighs.

“Very good, Rey.” He leaned over and kissed her tremoring mouth.

Over the sound of it, she heard the quiet whip of laces being pulled through their eyelets- then felt a heat like the sun brand her slick inner thigh.

She licked her chapped lips and croaked, “Wh-what is tha-”

“Shhh. No more tears, angel,” he slipped his fingers from her cunt.

She felt raw, aching and empty. Stretched open.

She wanted him to fill her back up.

Slowly, he lowered his body to hers until they touched.

His thick, heavy cock fell like a burning column across her split-open slit and she whimpered. He cupped her face with his ungloved hand.

“Look at me,” he whispered.

He started to rock the solid, rigged length of himself through her swollen pussy lips when she did.

“Yes, that’s it-”

He kissed her cheeks, her lashes, her open mouth.

The pressure on her pussy felt tremendous, almost hurting. His veins stimulated her oversensitive clit.

She clung onto his shoulders as the stone staircase became sweltering. Hot and humid as a greenhouse while he made soft, gentle love to her mouth. His kisses were ecstasy. They were magic.

She loved him.

She loved him.

She did.

He was panting, stroking himself faster, when she got up the nerve to slip her hand between their bodies and touch the head. It was broad – too broad to ever fit inside her – and spongey. It leaked hot, wet slip onto her skin.

He hissed like a snake and nuzzled her. When she squeezed him, he chuffed and bathed her with his fast-flickering tongue. “Good witch, please your master-”

She came in a sudden, soft-sparkling rush.

He groaned and came all over her. Hot, scalding streaks of cream from his slit that coated her tiny, abused little opening as he braced himself on his forearm above her and painted her pussy white.

She felt dizzy, dazzling. Glazed in something dangerous and beautiful and alive.

He watched with cold sparkling eyes as she touched it tentatively with her fingertips.

“My little witch likes to play in cum, does she?” he smirked, and kissed her when she nodded frantically, “Yes-”

Her body tingled. His tongue touched hers way back in her throat.

Their lips pulled away trailing thin, glittering strands of saliva. He panted, “Put it in your pussy.”

Obediently, she gathered up a gob from her bellybutton with her fingers, watching the glossy white web between them in ropes, and slipped it inside her sore, aching sex.

Instantly, she felt soothed there, where his big mean fingers had stretched her too much.

They kissed lazily on the staircase until her eyes grew too heavy to open and her body went slack and pleasantly numb. She buzzed faintly everywhere his come touched her. She sensed his big bare hands trailing fingertips all over her breasts and her thighs. She felt wonderful. She felt like royalty.

She felt beautifully, beautifully stoned.

In the common room, Fred and George were snoring softly. She could hear Rosie mumbling in her sleep like she always did.

“Time for bed, I think,” her man whispered. His voice seemed right up there with the stars.

She tried telling him, I’m not sleepy, but she couldn’t speak and yawn at the same time.

He cleaned her and carried her measuredly up the turreted like a baby bride, her boots still caught in her tights dangling over his arm. The ruby light of the great room got fainter and fainter until they turned the last corner into darkness.

She wouldn’t let go of him as he touched her down to the covers. She clutched his neck so that he had to pry them apart.

“I don’ want you to go,” she whined softly, so that she wouldn’t wake Luna.

“There now, I’m only removing my clothes.” He had to coax her by running his big hands all over her body so that she’d lay down.

Outside her tower, the rain had stopped and the clouds were parted like silver curtains. Moonlight shone a thin bridal veil through the beveled panes of glass.

She laid back slowly on the comforter and watched every move he made as she bargained whisperingly, “Will you please stay till I fall asleep?”

He toed smoothly out of his boots then stepped out of his trousers. Her heart skipped watching them fold themselves neatly into a pile with his cloak by her bed. He wore only a long black silk undershirt that laced across his chest.

“I fear that shall be any moment,” he grasped her boots collared in her tights and panties smiling. Gently, he pulled the lot off and set them down.

Her small tan body shone naked at him from the red coverlet like a pearl.

“The gods made you too beautiful,” he whispered, looking down on her. He sounded choked. “Poor little girl.”

Her belly buzzed and fluttered sublimely. He did love her. He must.

“It’s you who’s poorly, Ahm’tage-” she goaded quietly, almost too tired to get out the words.

She wasn’t a fairy girl… or a paper doll…. she was a Griffyndor.

A lioness.

She lilted her little chin. “- cause I own you now.”

“Do you?” he eyed her red, swollen pussy slit and smirked.

“Yeah,” she breathed. Everything about him glowed in the wan moonlight. He was beautiful. She was falling asleep. “You’re… my dragon…. The hat says so…. so you’re stuck….”

His big, tall figure folded over. He gathered her into his arms and laid them down. “Oh, I like it very much.”

She smiled into his chest.

“I had to see you tonight,” he whispered. In the darkness, his voice sounded strangled. “Our squabble- I had to earn back your good graces. Before-”

Her eyes were so heavy she couldn’t open them; she reached up slowly, blindly, and stroked his face.

“Shh, go sleep, Tage.” She yawned.

Her legs stretched. Her toes curled and cracked like a kitten’s and relaxed. She wound her arms around his neck and nestled in for the sleep of her life.

“I used to hate you,” she murmured, “But now… maybe… we’ll be… alright…”

“I hope so.”

Like a leaf floating softly, she sawed back and forth, down and down, into sleep.

Night held the Forbidden Forest inside its black, mist-toothed maw.

The General stepped soundlessly through the wet slur, able to make his way without the moonlight. His pupils pressed out against the boundaries of their cold irises; they showed him in spectrums the bodies of the trees and the creatures that crept in their midst.

Liquidly, he slipped amongst their shadows.

Darkness draped him like a veil so that only his hair glinted preternaturally against the night. His long coat swung pendulously around his boot heels like a great black tail, leaving a trail of whispering leaf rot in his wake.

Owls screamed in their nest above him. A centaur’s hooves pounded nearer and nearer then halted, and canted away. He felt the eyes of the beasts and the nigh birds watching him from the canopy and from the shadows.

He made his way towards the heart of the forest, letting the mournful trail of his ancestors’ counterparts be his guide.

The purity of unicorns and their magic was as well-known throughout the wizarding world as the dragons’ perversity and greed. Their tremors lured him through the darkness; he could taste their grief in the air.

Through the thickening darkness, he saw an enclave.

There, in the mossy basin swathed by mist, was a wraith.

It was feeding off the neck of a still-living mare.

She shrieked and thrashed when she sensed him coming through the thick mist. Her hooves tore at but could not find purchase in the soft, wet moss.

“Tom.”

He drew to the top of the basin and stopped his boots on a flat stone.

His gloved hands he folded behind his back.

The figure whipped up its face and hissed at him. From its stretched, lipless mouth, it dripped silvery blood.

“So it is you,” the General smiled. “Tom Riddle, rapeson. Heir to absolutely nothing.”

“Generallll…” the figure hissed seething. It had no limbs to speak of; it gathered its black mass spread out in the shallow moss well and rose up through the mist.

Its eyes were like a serpents, it bared its fangs and hissed it him hatefully. “Commme to killll me, dragonsssson?”

“Haven’t I already? Or would you call this-” the General gestured with one hand, “alive?”

The wraith flinched at his motion, then hissed again. “I wasss never gone…”

“Oh I’ve heard,” he inspected the knuckles of his glove.

High above him, far away from the horizon, beyond the forest’s trees, the sky had begun to redden like a false sunrise. Darkness bleeding to light.

“And why have you come here now?” he asked the figure.

“I sssseek resurrection,” its slit-nostrils flared at the gathering scent of sulfur. It cowered lower into the mist and turned its hood up warily at the sky. “I ssseek the Ssssorcerer’s Stone….”

Ah.

So that was what the old sap was hiding here in the castle. Behind the General’s bride.

“Clever fool,” he murmured, as the sky above them began to churn.

A hot breath blew seductively through the body of the forest, carrying with it the stench of ruin and char.

“We could rule togethhhher, thissss time…” the wraith drew closer. Inside its hood, its pale face was strained and taut. “Our kind, the mugglesssss. We can rule allll of them, you and I…”

Armitage smiled the grim, fanged smile of his ancestors. The last thing seen by so many great wizards before they met their fiery end.

“I have no desire to rule the unclean masses. Nor you, filthy mudblood wretch.”

The wraith rattled and sank sharply back.

“Oh I do hate them,” his fist still behind him closed slowly, so that the leather creaked in his palm. “The magicless. They are a pollution, a cancer. They destroy everything they touch. Their kind must be purged, before our race drowns in their infection-”

He thought of his own pretty mixedblood he left sleeping in her tower. His little mudblood queen.

The skies cracked and fissured.

“-and we shall not be led by any more of their mongrel aberrations. Least of all you, Tom. The half-blood hatechild of disgraced witch-”

The wraith lunged snarling.

Another breath blew suddenly through the forest, this one faster and hotter than a flash of lightning. It scorched the mist and set the wraith on fire.

The General reached his hand towards the sky.

His long coat billowed in the hellwind that whipped around him. It rose up behind him like a pair of great black wings.

“As I told you in Godric’s Hollow-”

He brought his hand down like a gavel.

Fireballs shrieked screaming like the roar of dragons from the churning, flaming night. They struck one after the other, after the other into the moss well before the wraith could escape their wraith. Their forked-tongued flames climbed higher and higher.

The General blazed in their light.

“There can be only one king.”

Rey woke to the predawn. The sky was smoky, rosy-orange at its hem. It glowered beautifully on the wet surface of the glass panes.

Rosie was in bed with Luna. The two girls held each other, bare as kittens, wrapped up in the covers Rose had drug off her bed.

Rey climbed down sleepily and trod over. She kissed Rosie’s cheek, which was tacky with dried tears, before she slipped into bed behind Lunabelle.

Luna turned in her arms and burrowed closer, her hands folded together against her thin, pale chest. Rose shuffled closer too and laced her fingers together with Rey’s.

Her eyes opened. They were dark and frightened and secretive. They were only eyes Rey had known all her life.

“I think I did something horrible,” she whispered, lip trembling.

Rey smiled and nodded eagerly. “S’okay. Me too. We’re bad girls, now. It’s brilliant-”

Rosie didn’t smile back.

“Go to sleep, we’ll have puddin’ for breakfast,” Rey closed her eyes, “We’ll sort it all out, I swear.”

“Really?”

“Double-swear.”

They both nestled into Luna’s soft white curls spread out of her pillows and drifted off.

“The pest in your woods is taken care of.”

The General was unsurprised to find the Headmaster watching the sunrise over the forest. Nor to see Minerva waiting anxiously at his side.

“I suppose you’ve come to name your price,” the Headmaster said gamely, without taking his eyes off the window.

The General stopped at the top of the staircase and lilted his chin. “You are correct in one.”

“This is outrageous,” Minerva’s mouth quivered with fury. She clutched the neck of her dressing robe and her wand. “It is an injustice, Albus-”

“I beg your pardon,” the General inclined his head to her politely, “I have an engagement, and therefore do not have time. You shall have to shelve your histrionics. I want her for the summer, at my manor in Derbyshire.”

“Absolutely not,” Minerva blustered.

He smiled. “It was not a request.”

“What will you do with... your young lady?” the Headmaster asked him.

“Albus, you’re not considering-”

“Protect her,” he spoke over the blathering witch. “As you so clearly cannot.”

The Headmaster made a quarter-turn and regarded him. There was sadness, and resolution, in his eyes.

“What else?” he asked quietly.

The General’s indignation flared.

“You mean do I intend to breed her?” he snarled.

Minerva looked faint.

“As she has only barely begun to cycle, and is still a little child, I should think not. Do you honestly believe for even a moment that the inappropriateness of this arrangement escapes me? Putting her polluted bloodline aside. Hear me when I tell you, no one feels more keenly the wrongness of this union than I do. Nevertheless-”

He stepped inside the room.

“She is my lady, the bearer of my namesake and mother of my future children-” he regarded Minerva glaringly, “however far-off they may be. You people are so woefully ill-equipped to protect her it is an embarrassment. It is laughable. She belongs. To me.”

He fixed Dumbledore with a razor stare.

“I killed the specter. My price is the girl.”

The Headmaster smiled ruefully. “I thought we did not bargain for her life.”

“I said gamble, if you remember,” the General said dangerously, “And the next time you hide your precious artifact behind her, know that I will consider it just that – a gamble. On your life, not hers.”

“Artifact?” Minerva looked to the old wizard. “Wha-what is he talking about, Albus?”

“Never mind that now, Minerva. Never mind that now…” again, the Headmaster was staring out the window at the Highlands. Where the wind stirred gently the tops of the forest’s trees.

“You have your summer, General Hux,” he said finally.

Minerva gasped, “No, Albus, please. Think of the girl.”

“I am,” was all he said.

“Headmaster. House Mistress,” the General inclined his head to both of them before retreating, triumph roaring in his heart. “Good day.”