Die Young, Leave a Pretty Corpse

Bent over the bed, pulling back the sheets and clearly preparing for an uneventful night of slumber, Dorcas paused as Rodolphus entered the room. The smirk on her face made his cock stand at attention. She knew what was coming. There were times when they could play around a bit before, they would banter and playfully insult one another’s lifestyle. He would comment on her poor financial standing and she would effectively call him a spoiled prat. They would have dinner or drinks or something more closely resembling a date than a booty owl. There were times when they built up to it all and then there were other times. It was completely barbaric they way could go at each other with nothing more than a glance between them before they were ripping at each other’s clothes frantically, usually not even bothering to undress completely before he was inside of her. The slight curve of her plump lips said she knew tonight was the latter sort of encounter and there would be no refusal.

Recently, Dorcas had shown an interest in his tattoo; begging to see it properly in the light and then tracing it mindlessly as they sat together doing fuck all. It seemed to get her going and so he had left it visible tonight. He would give her that little thrill of being a naughty Auror screwing a known Death Eater and in return he would take her body and use it as he saw fit. In every position. All night long. The adrenaline coursing through his body made him feel invincible and there was no way either of them would be laying down to sleep anytime soon. When sleep did come, it would be out of pure exhaustion and that pleasant pain of being well and truly fucked.

His hands undid the zip of his leather jacket as he walked purposely toward her, letting the jacket fall to the floor. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to elbows, as he often wore them, but the black ink of a skull with a snake protruding from its mouth was clear on his left forearm as he reached for her. One hand snaked around her waist, her tiny frame all too easy to pull against him, his other hand sliding up through her hair and gripping it tightly, slowly and forcefully bringing her head back and exposing her neck which Rodolphus nipped at rather roughly. A low, primal growl grew in his throat he bent lower, his mouth running over the smooth skin on her collarbone before tearing her shirt from the neck to just above her navel and taking her now-freed breast in his mouth, his teeth dragging over her flesh. Skilled with his hands in more ways than one, Rodolphus slipped his left into her pyjama trousers and his right began to unbuckle the belt of his own jeans. He used the heel of one foot to force the shoe off the other, his teeth now piercing Dorcas’ lower lip. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it. It wasn’t the slow seduction of a romance novel or the caring embrace of two lovers. It was unbridled passion and manic lust that drove Rodolphus to shed his clothes as quickly as possible without giving Dorcas even a second to think about anything else.

Pleasure was pain, at least the way Rodolphus delivered it. Every little moan was accompanied by a gasp of sudden surprise or a titillating whimper. Her noises only encouraged him to move a little rougher, to bite a little harder, and to pull a little tighter. Before long they were both naked, their bodies having fallen to the floor with a heavy thud that neither impeded their actions nor dampened the mood. If anything, watching Dorcas’ mouth part as a breath of air was thrown forcefully from her lungs only encouraged Rodolphus more. He liked seeing her in pain; not the sort of pain he had caused his earlier victim, nor the kind he wished upon his soon-to-be ex-wife, but pain nonetheless. She was gorgeous when she cried for him and the sounds of her screams only made him harder. His heart pounded in his ears like a tribal drum signaling war, urging him to keep the rhythm and the intensity and to claim victory over her body.

When it was over, Rodolphus would sleep soundly. His best nights were spent entangled with the petite brunette, naked, and usually in her bed, which he had paid enough for to ensure his comfort as well as hers. Sometimes the bed was simply too far away, and the pair would collapse where ever they were, so long as it was private, but even on the cold stone floor of her entryway Roddy managed to sleep well. He always awoke relaxed and ready to start the day, especially if that day started with another quick tumble with Dorcas, though often enough it just meant they prepared for work, exchanging suggestive or sometimes overt remarks with each other before going their separate ways. There wasn’t much more that could be said between them, other than compliments of one another’s performance – or in Dorcas’ case, thinly veiled compliments hidden behind a catty retort. They didn’t share much of themselves with each other beyond their bodies and that was fine. Whomever he found to marry next, to take his name and bear his sons, she would have to come to terms with his affair just as his first wife had. There was no need to become jealous when the relationship was purely carnal.

The rush of adrenaline from slaughtering that Ministry cow, mingled with the fury of his unresolved argument with Bella earlier that day, was enough to make Rodolphus a little more careless than he normally would have been. His muscular frame loomed over her in the darkness, pinning her to the ground as he let out a forceful groan of passion. The pale light in the room had shifted, a streak falling perfectly over Dorcas’ bare breasts as they bounced back and forth, the shadow of his arm breaking the heavenly image as his fist tightened around her throat. With every thrust his grip tightened. The screams of Lana Tyrell echoed in his head. Bellatrix’s twisted expression as she threatened everything he held dear flashed into his mind. Dorcas’ perfect breasts bouncing in the moonlight and her eyes widening at his grip around her throat made for a perfect culmination as Rodolphus let out another shudder of passion.

Every second that passed, every motion he made, seemed to be clouded by the confounding emotions of the day to the point that Rodolphus didn’t notice Dorcas’ expression shift from pleasured pain to terror. Roddy loved watching Dorcas’ expressions change as turned from rough to gentler, from kind to depraved, but his mind was somewhere else completely. Somewhere he knew better than to be mentally when playing such a dangerous game as this. The clawing at his firm grip around her neck should have warned him something was wrong, Dorcas usually liked to blanket her hands atop his and feel the veins and muscle straining as he restricted her airway just the right amount. She didn’t normally try to pull him off like this, but he didn’t notice. Her thrashing underneath him only increased his pleasure as she struggled for freedom. It wasn’t until Dorcas’ movements stopped, until the arch in her back relaxed, that Rodolphus noticed that something was different. It instantly called him back.

The writhing ceased and Dorcas laid there, unmoving. Rodolphus hovered over her, his grip around her throat still firm as he looked down at her face, strewn with tears, her eyes blank. Suddenly he realized that his grip was still strong and he released his hand quickly, leaving a hideously bold handprint around Dorcas’ neck. “Fuck, I’m sor-” He began to apologize, something he rarely ever did, but it was clear before he even finished the words that she couldn’t hear him. “Dorcas?!” His own eyes grew wide, though not as wide as hers, and he moved out from between her legs. “Fuck, come on, love. Wake up.” He gave her a gentle shake at the shoulders, then put his hand to her cheek as he bent down to feel if she was breathing. “Fuck!” he raged. He looked around him for a moment, panicking, before he leaned over her and breathed into her mouth, tilting her head back to open up her lungs. He cursed between breaths but kept at it for nearly 30 seconds. It felt more like 30 minutes to him. Angrily he punched his fist into the floor beside her head, screaming in frustration, not even noticing the pain in his knuckles as the skin tore. “Hang on, love. Fuck. Fuck. Just – just fucking don’t die!”

Scrambling in the dark, Rodolphus found his jeans in a mess on the floor, and he fumbled with them until he found his pocket. He pulled out his wand and almost carelessly threw it aside as he dug deeper until he finally found an old, gold pocket watch. The chain had fallen off long ago and the inscription was nearly unrecognizable having been worn down with age. The watch had belonged to his grandfather and resembled the one his father and his brother had, though Rabastan’s was practically brand new with no sentiment or heritage to it. He was the extra son, after all, and there was little in the way of family heirlooms that would transfer to him over Rodolphus. Flipping open the cover of the timepiece, Rodolphus twisted the crown three times to the left and the clock face turned black. “Come on, you old codger!” Rodolphus hollered, turning to look at Dorcas who had not moved in the few seconds his back had been to her.

Soon enough the black clock face grew lighter and the inside of a room could be seen, the ceiling to be exact, then the room turned until an old man came into view. A tired old man, with wild white hair and thin framed glasses that sat lopsided on the bridge of his nose. “I need you now!” Rodolphus barked before the man had fully lifted his own pocket watch up to look at the little clock face which showed Rodolphus in a dark room, shirtless from the old man’s perspective. “Now!” Rodolphus pulled the crown upwards, into the locked position. It glowed red for a moment then Rod snapped the timepiece shut and turned back to Dorcas.

She still wasn’t moving and he pressed his lips to hers once more, breathing into her lungs as he tipped her head back. “Come on, baby, don’t fucking die!” He breathed again. “Come on!” he growled. Still there was nothing. He heard what sounded like a whip crack in the silence just outside the cottage. “About fucking time!” he bellowed at no one, grabbing his wand and casting a hurried spell over Dorcas that put her torn top and her knickers back on as he ran down the stairs in his birthday suit and yanked open the front door. “Upstairs!” he ordered at the old man, who moved rather quickly for someone of his age, a black medicine bag in his hand.

Hanley, the healer the Lestrange family kept on call for undocumented emergencies, knelt beside Dorcas as Rodolphus paced behind him. “Your clothes” the healer remarked calmly to Rodolphus as he got to work. He had a thick German accent but when he spoke his words were clear. Grabbing his jeans from the floor, Roddy watched over Hanley’s shoulder and stepped into his trousers and fastened them, then scooped up the pocket watch from the floor and pocketed it. “She had better not fucking die, Hanley!” Rodolphus yelled at the man as if it were his fault that Dorcas was in her current state and not Rodolphus’. “She’ll need some water,” Hanley said, his voice still even and relaxed as he dug around in his medicine bag for something. Rodolphus snarled. He didn’t like that his threats weren’t met with fear, but Hanley had been with the Lestranges since before Rodolphus was born and he was one of the only people Adolph had punished Rodolphus for treating poorly in his youth. Looking over Dorcas before turning to leave, Roddy took the stairs two at a time and crossed the tiny cottage to the kitchen where he got a glass of water. When he returned to the top of the stairs, Rodolphus saw that the door had been shut behind him; Hanley’s polite way of telling Rodolphus he was not welcome at that moment. Rodolphus growled and clenched his fist at his side, then turned and sat himself on the top step and waited.

How long Roddy waited was unclear, the cottage was dark and Rodolphus hadn’t bothered with the lights in order to see a clock. He sat for a while, then paced along the hallway of the first floor, then listened at the door to the bedroom. He had shooed away the kittens when they came to pester him, to no avail, and finally he picked them both up and carried them down the stairs, setting them on the kitchen counter and conjuring a saucer of milk for them to keep them occupied. The other option, to get the little nuisances out of his hair, would have been to snap their necks but he’d already potentially killed his mistress tonight. He would at least wait to see if that stuck before he took his frustrations out on her annoying little pets.

After what seemed like ages, the bedroom door opened and Hanley appeared, a disapproving look on his face. “Well?” Rodolphus demanded but instead of answers he got a lecture. Or, as close to a lecture as anyone would dare give Rodolphus Lestrange. “You had ought take better care of your playthings, master Lestrange. Humans aren’t as easily repaired as stuffed dragons.” Handing a bottle of tonic to Rodolphus as he passed, Hanley added, “give her this when she wakes up.” Rodolphus didn’t wait to see Hanley out, instead he brushed past the old man without thanks and found Dorcas resting in her bed, a shallow rise and fall of her chest signaling that she was in fact breathing.

The rise and fall of Dorcas’ chest was the only movement in the room for a long while. Rodolphus watched her, not considering that if anyone else walked in on this scene it would look utterly perverted and stalker-like; a tall man standing in the shadows of a woman’s bedroom watching her sleep. If he had considered it, he wouldn’t have cared but there wasn’t anyone to walk in on him. If he had left Dorcas to fend for herself instead of calling his family’s private healer she would be dead right now. Who would come by in the middle of the night to check in on her? No one. There was no one else to keep watch over her now, so Rodolphus took the task and stared at her, his mind racing with a thousand horrible what-ifs.

If she had died, how would he have felt about that? It was odd, the panic her lack of breathing had caused him. Did he have feelings for her beyond their physical affair? So many times he had casually thought of Dorcas as “the perfect wife” is she were more of this or less of that. The thoughts were meaningless and simply an affect of being content in the moment in which he had had those thoughts, but despite being able to reason such emotions away, he couldn’t explain the panic. He had killed before, this wouldn’t have been anything new for him. He had even killed women who looked remarkably like Dorcas; taking out his frustration of her extended absence on what he referred to as her doppelgangers. Hell, Rabastan had even found him a whore that looked remarkably like Dorcas as part of his stag night before his wedding to Bellatrix. She had survived longer than the other women that night but in the end she had spent her last hours in much the same manner as Dorcas just had. If she died, it shouldn’t have been a big deal. And yet it was.

A gentle rustle of the sheets shook him from his thoughts – thoughts he didn’t want to focus on at the moment but could think of nothing else. A hoarse voice passed between Dorcas’ lips as she lay in the bed and Rodolphus stepped closer to hear her. "I didn't want to be a mum. You should never have existed." What in the actual fuck was she on about?! “Who do you think you’re talking to, love?” he asked, his voice much gentler than it had been when he was speaking with Hanley. This was the tone he used on those nights when they didn’t shag, when they just ended up spending time in each other’s company and often right before Dorcas would fall asleep on him. It was the voice he used when he came ‘round after Valentine’s Day knowing she was in a piss poor mood and needed something other than a good, stiff pounding. There was an ounce of compassion in his voice but a barrelful in his chest, but there was also something else beginning to nag him as Dorcas’ words echoed in his head.

Watching Dorcas make miniscule movements that tormented her wholly when they would have normally gone unnoticed without any effort at all, only made Rodolphus that much more aware of how close they had come to an end. She looked frail and not the least bit like the feisty witch that had caught his eye so long ago and kept his attention after all these years. He had broken her, broken her so much more than he had ever done before. This wasn’t the hedonistic passion that had caused them both such pleasurable pain over the course of their affair. He had quite literally broken her bones before. She had melted his skin with a red hot poker and claimed him as her own. Those were enjoyable times before but Rodolphus had gone too far this time. Watching Dorcas struggle to turn her head to look at him was like a thousand knives piercing his heart.

Only a single word came in response and even that seemed to hurt her, and her response didn’t answer his question, leaving Rodolphus feeling guilty as well as confused. Why had she been talking about being a mum? Who wasn’t supposed to exist? Rodolphus? Perhaps she was remembering some time when he had teased her about having his babies. Of course, that was all it had been; teasing. He didn’t really expect that Dorcas would bear him a son, especially while he was married to another woman. It wouldn’t be a proper heir as a bastard, and in any cases there had never been anything between them to suggest that they would be together in any way other than a physical one. They weren’t a couple. They weren’t dating. They shagged. No, really they fucked. Hard. It wasn’t loving or romantic or anything of the sort. There was no chance of the pair bringing a child into the world and yet here Dorcas was talking about being a mum and leaving Rodolphus feeling lost. He wanted to push it, to ask her more about it, but then she started to move again.

Rolling away from him and closing her eyes, Rodolphus watched as Dorcas made another series of excruciating movements that only served to kill Roddy a little bit more. His side of the bed was empty, he hadn’t touched it since he’d arrived some hours ago, and Dorcas had rolled to her side to face it. There was a small patch of mattress open nearest Roddy at Dorcas’ back and without thinking Roddy moved onto the mattress and pressed his still bare chest against her back, wrapping his arm around her, careful not to put too much pressure on her. He was wearing his jeans but that was all, and he slipped easily under the covers and curled up next to Dorcas, offering her some sort of comfort and hoping that his presence wasn’t causing her any additional pain. Her hair was a tangled mess of soft waves and he buried his face into it, whispering gently in her ear, “I’m so sorry, love.” And he meant it. His goal the for the night was to break her and break her he did. But he had lost control of himself and Dorcas had paid the price.

This was all new to Rodolphus; bringing someone back from the edge of life, apologizing, whatever this feeling he was experiencing was. All of it was new and though he had a lot more life experiences than the average 28 year old wizard. He had travelled all over the world, experiencing different cultures and customs. He was aligned with a powerful man who commanded him to partake in illegal, sinister acts for their cause of which Rodolphus almost gleefully accepted. He had killed. He had cared for a daughter. He kept a mistress, commanded a global enterprise, and literally held a foreign noblewizard’s heart in his hands, but this act of apologizing had him stumped.

It was a rare occasion when Rodolphus had ever actually apologized before. He had said the words a few times to his brother or to Aurora if his work kept him when he had told her he would be home, and a handful more times to his parents. Typically if Rodolphus ever realized he was in the wrong, he simply paid his way out of any potential feelings for guilt. A new toy for his little princess. A bottle of bourbon for his brother. Any sort of liquor would do for his mother, or a new hat or some accessory that he had his assistant pick out for her. Dorcas had, of course, received a new bedroom set after he had accidentally broken her last bed a while back, but his favorite method of admitting wrongdoing without ever actually admitting as much with words, was sex. In his defense, Rod was pretty sure Dorcas did the same thing when she needed to apologize to him for whatever reason. Neither of them were very talkative people, not when it came to anything of substance. They acted or reacted, but communication wasn’t a big thing in their relationship, and sex had a way of smoothing any feathers that the other might have ruffled.

Dorcas asked what he was sorry for. How the fuck was he supposed to answer that? For killing you. It didn’t stick though, so don’t be mad. That wasn’t an answer that would likely receive a calm reaction in response. She needed to remain calm. She needed to rest, take the tonic healer Hanley had left for her, and then rest some more. Rodolphus could avoid her question by hiding behind that fact at least. “Nevermind,” was all he had to say, an utterly shit response when you’ve just accidentally killed your mistress while still inside of her. The alternative was to say nothing at all, to just ignore her, and in hindsight perhaps that was what he should have done but it was late, emotions were high, and he was in uncharted waters.

If she was awake enough to be attempting conversations, despite sounding like her throat was full of gravel, Roddy figured she should take a bit of the tonic Hanley had left with him for when she woke up. He had read the label three times over while she slept, the first time out of curiosity but the second and third times more out of boredom. The liquid inside the bottle smelled like cucumbers, not a scent Rodolphus particularly enjoyed but he imagined it would have a crisp taste to it. Still, just to be sure he kept the glass of water he had been sent for when the healer first arrived on the night stand to wash down the medicine. “Your voice sounds like shit, doll” he remarked with a forced chuckle in his words, trying to act naturally so as to not raise her suspicions and get her worked up. “Take this tonic, it’ll help with the pain.” He pulled his arm back that had been draped over her body and twisted himself to reach the bottle that was waiting on the bedside table.