January: Love Thy Neighbor

Author's Notes

Thank you to notsosaintly for her modly help. =)

THIS IS NOT A JOKE: If you don't like sex scenes, don't read this chapter. It's not explicit, but ... nevertheless. There. You have been warned. *grins* Oh, also, before I forget, this chapter also contains the usual smattering of "strong language." I don't talk like this (usually), but I'm writing like this for the sake of my characters. Those who are cruel or young with plenty of bravado cuss; those who aren't, don't, for the most part.

And, credit where credit is due: The song "Witches, Vamps & Slags" by Circe is quite obviously (I think) a parody of "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves" by Cher. And, um, the stanza that I parodied is as follows:

"Gypsies, tramps, and thieves

We'd hear it from the people of the town.

They'd call us gypsies, tramps, and thieves,

But every night all the men would come around

And lay their money down."

January: Love Thy Neighbor

1971

The light bulb was swinging again...back and forth, swaying back and forth...and Mamie Sparks looked up from her knitting in annoyance. Her sinking features, already grooved and sliding south, pulled themselves into a gargoyle-like scowl. "That slattern," she grumbled gravelly, reaching a shaky hand over the arm of her chair to grasp the broom lying on the matted, carpeted floor. Unsteadily, Mamie struggled to her slippered feet and shuffled into the quavering circle of light thrown off by the lone light bulb. Cocking a grizzled, salt-and-pepper eyebrow up toward the ceiling, she hoisted the broom off the floor...

Mamie hated her next-floor neighbor: the young woman was cold and dangerously pretty with too nice a wardrobe to live in Carnebie Flats and too unfriendly in demeanor to be a neighbor of any sort at all. Never a pretty woman herself, Mamie inherently distrusted those females who happened to be blessed with physical beauty; surely no good ever came of someone who looked like that. Mamie did not know her next-floor neighbor's name, but she had...upon the woman's arrival to the Flats...hacked and coughed her way up to the next floor, eager to catch a glimpse of the new tenant. It wasn't every day that someone new moved into the Flats. In fact, in the twenty-some odd years that Mamie had lived in the rundown area close to Camden Town in which Carnebie Flats was situated, no one at all had moved in. Of course, the building had lost occupants...there was that skeleton of a girl with a heroin addiction, and that boy poet who slit his wrists...but, overall, there was a lamentable lack of activity ... and Mamie thrived on gossip and scandals.

Of course, she would have adamantly protested otherwise, declaring herself a good woman who knew how to mind her own business, thank you very much. But, to be entirely truthful, Mamie had a deplorably nosy character. And, so, it was because of...or, rather, the fault of...her overly inquisitive mind that Mamie found herself on the fourth floor of the Flats, her knobby, arthritic hands clutching the stringy lengths of her upper arms as she leered at the fine physique of the moving men. Naturally, not one of those splendid specimens of masculinity deigned to glance at her, but Mamie more than made up for the lack of attention as her hooded, green eyes swept lasciviously over tight, toned buttocks, broad chests, and strong chins.

In and out of apartment number four-forty-two, back and forth to the erstwhile lift, the movers scurried, lugging huge, leather-bound trunks, an ornate, black walnut, queen-sized bed frame (Mamie, uneducated wretch that she was, fancied the priceless piece merely painted wood and nearly drooled in smirking, supercilious mirth), an unwieldy feather mattress, and a few other domestic necessities. Besides the bed and trunks, however, apartment four-forty-two appeared to be facing a fairly cold, stark future as far as apartments go. Why, even Mamie had more furniture in her apartment and, God knows, she was poor enough. Checks from the government hardly sufficed to pay for Mamie's rampant cigarette addiction not to mention her food and utility expenses.

Whay-el, now, Mizz Sparks, Mamie chortled to herself, absently clawing the dirty, pink cardigan closer to her bowed, shriveled self, this new 'un's a bloody beggar. Yah're pract'ly a duchy compared to the loikes of 'em whot's movin' in.

Wheezing in barely suppressed mirth, Mamie turned to shuffle back down the flight of dimly-lit stairs...it was rarely worth the trouble of waiting for the lift, which was usually as slow as Christmas and nearly as popular as that particular holiday with the residents of the eight-story high Carnebie Flats, so Mamie trudged the stairs instead...but as she did, a flicker of dark movement from the direction of the tetchy lift caught in the corner of her eye and she turned back in curiosity.

Mamie's first impression was of a spider, elegant, long-legged, and venomously dangerous, and chills skittered up and down her spine. Her second was that the new occupant's furniture didn't really matter. Her third was of burning jealousy.

The new tenant was not only glamorous, she was also followed doggedly by the most beautiful man that Mamie had ever seen. He was tall, at least nine centimeters taller than the woman who was no cowering pixie, and he had the half-starved look of a male model. Dressed to the nines with long, shaggy dark hair and razor-sharp cheekbones, the man carried himself with a grace clearly born, not acquired. His lips were full, sultry, forming the kind of mouth Mamie only dreamed of ... had only ever dreamed of. No one that perfect had ever looked at Mamie, let alone actually kiss her. And he was trailing after the beautiful, terrifying woman like a puppy with an expression of intense misery but also a disgustingly ingratiated look on his godlike face.

As the regal pair strode swiftly by her without so much as a glance, Mamie felt the blood in her veins boil with hot envy. It really was unfair that anyone in the world could look so marvelous and be so unconcerned with anyone but him- or herself. The woman...tall, thin, completely smothered in black cashmere...had stopped in her doorway to pay the movers, and the man merely stood next to her...well, slightly behind her...his dark eyes locked on her lily-white face.

Satisfactorily compensated, the moving men...who had, poor blokes, lost Mamie's admiration and attention...departed in the lift, each dreaming his own, separate dream as he clasped his fee: a date with a pretty girl at the local pub; the prospect of big winnings at the horse races (he'd heard that Snapshot was a good bet); perhaps a doobie if he had enough money ... It had been far too long since the last.

But Mamie was unconcerned with the innermost thoughts of the movers, for her gaze was drawn like a magnet to the young pair standing in the doorway of apartment four-forty-two. The woman had turned 'round and was stroking the young man's sunken cheek possessively. Her long red fingernails left slight scratches on the pale valley, but the man didn't seem to mind as he only licked his lips furtively before darting down to capture the woman's thin lips with his own full mouth. Laughing softly, the woman pulled quickly back and shook her small, well-shaped head scornfully. With a commanding gesture of her gloved hand, she directed the man into her apartment and turned to follow him. Then, as the door creaked shut behind her, she glanced over her shoulder and her dark brown eyes glared menacingly into Mamie's narrowed green ones with such an expression of disgust and contempt, Mamie felt her claw-like hands aching to attach themselves to that thin, swan-like neck and just squeeze until the exotic brown eyes bugged painfully from the sockets.

Fury, bright, white fury as thick as winter snow flooded Mamie's gaze, and then the woman was gone, and Mamie was staring at a door with a brass plate on it: four-forty-two. Her new neighbors.

*

Mamie rarely saw the dark woman and man after that first "meeting," but she heard them often enough. They had sex nearly every day. Sometimes more than once in a day, which Mamie found utterly disgraceful ... And it was loud. There was next-to-no insulation in Carnebie Flats, so one heard everything in one's neighbor's rooms: quarrels, beatings, vocal performances in the shower, which were really awful. At first, Mamie had turned up her television to drown out the sound of the couple's lovemaking; it simply infuriated her to know that that gorgeous man was fucking that bitch, or was it the other way around? However, the inopportune visit of a rat and its nasty, sharp, yellow teeth chewing through Mamie's television cord soon eliminated her only means of covering up the moaning, and the screaming, and the squeaking of the damned bedsprings. So, she invested in a broom, and took to banging on the ceiling in hopes of eliciting some sort of response. The first time she used her weapon, there was a pause in the groaning and the squeaking, and then it started up again; the second time, there was no pause in the action, but Mamie lived in constant, delusional hope that one day, her efforts might, in fact, pay off. And, so, as she hoisted the broom from the floor and glared angrily up at the water-stained ceiling, her thoughts ran wishfully, crazily thus: Mai-be it'll be to-dai. Mai-be, some'ow, she'll act'chly die to-dai.

*

"Oh, my God, YES! Oh, more... Right there, yeah. More, more, MORE, GODDAMMIT! Oh, fuck, yes!" Crying out in ecstasy, Bellatrix flung two sweaty palms convulsively across the heaving back of the man lying atop her slight form, digging her sharp, cat-like nails into him. She clung to his roiling form, her teeth embedded firmly into the rippled muscle of his shoulder, her legs clamped vice-like about her lover's slim waist, her eyes squeezed tight shut as deep tremors rocked through her body again and again.

"Bella... Oh, baby..." the man groaned, pounding, pounding, pounding as the bedsprings squealed angrily and the headboard thumped insistently against the wall. Luckily the next-door neighbors were an ancient, quite deaf couple who had, collectively, two legs in the grave, and a nymphomaniac who watched porn when Bellatrix and Rodolphus were not making love and listened eagerly at the wall when they were. Letting out a truly porn star-worthy moan, Rodolphus pulled Bellatrix's body flush against him as he found his own release.

As the mind-blowing high of her orgasm subsided, Bellatrix sank down into the bed, her face losing its ecstatic rigidity, her legs relaxing and slowly falling to the soft, feather mattress where sheets and quilts lay wet, tangled into ropes of fabric. The only sound in the room was the heavy breathing of Bellatrix and Rodolphus as their heartbeats quietly thumped into a less frenzied rhythm. In the chill January air outside, sleet frosted the dimly lit street and pattered insistently against the grimy windowpanes of Carnebie Flats, clearly seeking to enter the sex-scented atmosphere of Bellatrix's bedroom and dispel the steam.

Rodolphus, his perfectly chiseled mouth widening in an arrogant, self-absorbed smile, leaned down to capture Bellatrix's thin mouth with his own, and she did not resist, pressing herself into him as their tongues dove and swirled around each other in a sensual, unhurried dance. Soon, though, she pulled back, licking her lips as she smirked into Rodolphus's face with feline guile. "Fancy another fuck?" she asked, snaking a hand down to grab Rodolphus's arse suggestively. But Rodolphus merely raised his eyebrows and stared stupidly at Bellatrix, utter exhaustion in every shadow of his sculpted face. In brutal retaliation, Bellatrix pinched him fiercely, her lips pursing in sudden anger. Grunting in surprise and shock, Rodolphus flinched, his own mouth twisting in pain as her filed nails pierced the sensitive skin of his bottom. "No?" she demanded, and pushed him roughly off of her, turning instead to the bedside table near her where Rodolphus's long apple-wood wand lay, conveniently placed for pre-coitus rituals.

"Tergeo," she muttered, angling the wand towards her nether regions and yawning unconcernedly as the spell quickly cleaned her up. Still yawning in a rather painful, jaw-cracking manner, Bellatrix rolled back onto her side to replace the wand, but was stopped by a muffled exclamation and the tentative touch of Rodolphus's smooth hand against her bony back. Smiling acidly, Bellatrix rolled in the opposite direction, bringing herself face to face with her lover. "Say something?" she asked sweetly...too sweetly.

Swallowing, Rodolphus tried unsuccessfully to mask the quick flash of fear in his eyes. Bellatrix, he knew, was a tiger in bed and when she wasn't satisfied...as she so often was not much to his embarrassment...anything he said could set her off. It was, for him, a dangerous and, yes, exciting game, but sometimes he wished that his girlfriend (after all, she was his girlfriend, wasn't she?) wasn't so ... vicious. "I, uh, I need to ... well, to clean up, too," he said, clearing his throat manfully in an effort to regain his composure.

Bellatrix glanced primly, dismissively down at the wand in her hand and, making a small mew of unconcern, made as if to turn back towards the table eliciting another protest from Rodolphus. Smiling her first true smile of the early January morning, Bellatrix flipped back over and gave the wand to Rodolphus, her fingernails grazing his delicate hands as she did. "Of course you do, darling," she purred, reaching up to stroke his high cheekbone as her cruel, humored eyes met his serious, defensive ones. "I like you so much, you know," she jibed. Shrugging in ill-contained mirth, Bellatrix sat up and swung her thin legs over the edge of the bed.

Bellatrix stretched her arms high over her head, moaning as her outstanding vertebrae aligned themselves to a cacophony of pops and cracks. For a moment, she simply sat on the edge of the bed, hands clasped between her bony legs, chewing on her lower lip and musing. Rodolphus, bless his stupid, little soul, was not good for much more than mind-blowing sex. Bellatrix sighed and smirked in satisfaction. Hmm... Her own little boy-toy...

It had been embarrassingly easy to convince Rodolphus of the benefits of having an open "relationship." He had just been so desperate to fuck her that he had jumped when she suggested that very thing during their seventh year. Bellatrix had never been fond of him, but he sure beat a dildo when it came to satisfying sex. Yawning again,...God, where was the coffee when she needed it?...Bellatrix flicked on the radio (upon which Circe, apparently the "radio choice" of early 1971 not to mention late 1970, was soulfully belting out "Witches, Vamps & Slags") before reaching down to the poorly carpeted floor and snagging the sleeve of one of her thin acrylic cashmeres. She shrugged one thin arm into the jumper as she stood, crimson-painted toenails glittering devilishly in the lowest, darkest recesses of her room, then froze suddenly as Rodolphus spoke, his words at the same time an accusation and a supposition.

"I thought you hated me."

Turning back to the bed, Bellatrix looked at the beautiful, sullen face of her lover, his dark eyes underlined with smudges of gray standing out in his pale face, a faint shadow on his jaw where five o'clock shadow was beginning to sprout. Smiling indulgently as one does to a favorite, though mistaken, child, she shook her head disparagingly. "I do hate you," she said simply. With that, she yanked her jumper over her head, smoothing the material down over her flat, barely-there breasts, and padded out of the bedroom, leaving a bewildered Rodolphus staring after her.

"Witches, vamps, and slags. We'd hear it from the Muggles of the land. They'd call us witches, vamps, and slags, yet for a very short time they'd us stand, for the fortunes in their hands." Bellatrix sang quietly to herself as she padded barefoot into the drab kitchenette that was rarely used except to make coffee.

Laughing quietly as the song played on in the background, she reached for the small carton of cigarettes that lay on the Formica counter-top. Lazily, she pulled one from the pack, poked it between her thin lips, and raised her wand. "Incendia," she mumbled incoherently as the fag dangled precariously from her mouth. With a minuscule sizzle and a brief puff of burned paper ash, the fag flared to life and Bellatrix took a deep drag, closing her eyes in bliss as the smoke filled her thin chest cavity. God, it felt good to smoke. Besides sex, smoking was one of life's finer pleasures, and Bellatrix indulged whenever she had the chance. Food, furniture, all that could wait, but smoking... Bellatrix laughed softly and took another lung-filling draw, holding her breath to feel the smoke swirling dizzily, pleasantly, magically inside of her before releasing it into the room. Oh, this whole, unsatisfactory arrangement was only temporary, anyway, to everyone's satisfaction, she was sure.

Her parents, for instance, hated the way she was living. After all, she was a highly privileged member of the noble and most ancient house of Black as well as the proud and beautiful Rosier bloodline. Blacks...and Rosiers...simply did not live that way as her "dear" mother took the most delicate pains to remind her of whenever she visited Rosier Manor perched precariously atop the wild, rocky, windswept cliffs on the blustery Cornish coast.

"Bellatrix, dear," Druella would tell her as they sat together in the austere, stone sentry-guarded gloom of the well-sheltered North Garden, teacups of Earl Grey and Lady Fingers ever before them on the hideous, Rosier family heirloom garden table. "You should be getting married. You're not getting any younger, you know,"...this, with a surreptitious yet clearly disapproving glance at the lines forming around Bellatrix's thin, cruel mouth; wrinkles hastened in their deepening by the constant cloud of acrid cigarette smoke that swirled 'round and cloaked Bellatrix's thin person...."and I was married when I was your age." Then, with a predictable and well-practiced semblance of deep thought, Druella would frown, tilt her head to one side rather like a wading bird, and utter the kicker: "Well, actually...if one really wanted to be specific about it all...I was married when I was much younger than you are now, and,"...she'd pause and smile charmingly at her daughter..."you were born when I was twenty."

Oh, God. It was the same spiel every time, and Bellatrix would smile with her mouth and raise her arched, over-plucked eyebrows condescendingly, lift her dainty teacup to her lips with the same hand that held her cigarette, and think, Yes, Mum, you did marry young, but only because the Blacks threatened to disown Father if he didn't marry you after you two were discovered banging in the garden shed, you old cow.

The Rosiers, though slightly less influential in recent times, were, and always had been, a fiercely proud bloodline and were one of the oldest pureblood families in England. Such a match between the noble Black line and the arrogant Rosier family was not, therefore, something to be sniffed at, and, certainly, a loss of love between the two allies would have been disastrous. Thus, Cygnus had married Druella at the forceful "request" of his parents, and had, to his immense pleasure, managed to maintain his lecherous lifestyle as well, though he did dote amazingly affectionately on his daughters, especially his eldest whom he found to be gratifyingly like himself.

Druella, a willowy, colorless woman with pale blonde hair, loved her second daughter, Narcissa, best, but she did care for her eldest and wished the girl would make a good marriage as she herself had done. Thus, each time Bellatrix visited the Rosier Manor...passed down to Druella, an only child, and her husband for their pleasure, although such a Gothic and ornament-laden estate could hardly succeed in giving one true pleasure...Druella would set about the arduous task of making her blasé daughter admit to being in love with Rodolphus Lestrange and to setting down a wedding date. So far, Druella had not succeeded, but she had great guile...after all, she had made Cygnus marry her (she had been no more pregnant at nineteen than Bellatrix was now)...and although her daughter now seemed disinterested in marrying and perpetuating the pure blood of English wizardry, one day Druella would find a way to convince her eldest child of the importance in such a task.

Ah, yes... Bellatrix would cave one day. She was, after all, living with the Lestrange lad, wasn't she? It was a start. Small, a touch ungodly, but a start nonetheless. So, Druella never faltered in her quest to match Bellatrix with Rodolphus Lestrange, and if her eldest daughter's reticence to speak about such matters ever registered with her, she was quick to push down such inward intimations with excuses involving goodwill and happiness on her daughter's part. She was very good at making excuses for herself.

And as the two...white, calculating mother and dark, austere daughter...would sit among the formal statuary of the North Garden, the boom of the surf smashing into the high, craggy cliffs of Cornwall echoing beyond the garden walls, dark clouds scudding by above the high, railed battlements of Rosier Manor, Druella would launch into yet another diatribe against Bellatrix's chosen lifestyle. Bellatrix should be living at home. Or, better yet, living in Rodolphus Lestrange's family keep in Scotland beside the quiet Lestrange Loch. What was Bellatrix doing living among Muggles? Didn't she find them vile?

As her mother droned on, Bellatrix would inevitably stand and amble distractedly toward the garden wall until she could peer out of the small windows cut into the stone and gaze into the gray of the Atlantic Ocean. Fresh, salt-scented, biting wind would snap energetically around her, tossing her black hair violently as Bellatrix would watch the snow fall lightly into the water below. The North Garden was charmed against snowfall within, but without was a different story. One could have garden parties at all times of the year at Rosier Manor, but garden parties did not interest Bellatrix just as her mother's wishes and hopes did not interest her at all.

Yes, she did find them vile. All of them. Her mother, Rodolphus and his snake-eyed brother, Rabastan, whom she had fucked out of boredom once and who now watched her in a way that was simply pathetic, her younger sisters, her cousins, even her father, sometimes, and, of course, the Muggles.

Sighing, Bellatrix would raise her cigarette to her lips and find that it was merely the burnt remains, a butt, but she would still take one last drag before pitching it into the ocean below. It's only temporary. And she would suddenly turn back to her mother and mumble, "Well, smashing visit, Mum," as she fished out her carton of cigarettes and, placing a fag between her thin lips, lit up. "Unfortunately, I've got to dash."

Then, she would Apparate swiftly away, and Druella would stare, open-mouthed, a little stupidly, at the spot her chain-smoking, independent, oh, so infuriating daughter had momentarily occupied. With a sigh of her own, however, she, too, would rise from the table and wander towards the far garden wall, touching, as she passed, the heather that grew, weather-be-damned, quite rampantly beside the stone-flagged pathway, perhaps picking a sprig to tuck behind her ear. She would reach the wall and the widows cut jaggedly into the rock and, hands folded before her prayerfully, gaze out into the open ocean, watching and hoping for a miracle as the fog of winter twilight rolled suffocatingly inland.