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Notes: 'Love's mysteries in souls do grow, But yet the body is his book.' Walden Macnair: executioner, inquisitor and aesthete. Written for the Three Kinks Challenge at Pornish Pixies. Warnings for rape, mutilation, bloodplay, knifeplay, sexualized torture, asphyxiation, sadism and bondage. The title quote comes from John Donne's The Ecstasy, of course.

The body is his book. The human body in all its complexities--its faults, its ugliness, its beauty. The arch of a foot, the curve of a calf--surprisingly clean and lovely, clean as the cut he makes to part the skin, revealing the pulse of pure red within. Muscle. Bone. Tibia. Fibula. The filth of fat beneath the sweet, deceptively sacred skin--a layer of frothing yellow, belly, arms, thighs. This is his temple. Sometimes the sacrifice screams; sometimes it begs. Prey. So pathetic and vulnerable--the soul trapped in this body, twisting as if to escape, a caged bird in the flutter of pulse under his hand, in the pain-glazed, open eyes that stare at him, unseeing as though dead, desperate as though alive. The words come as they should--confessions, bribes, curses--and the quill he keeps at the desk in the far corner of the room takes meticulous note of every syllable, and it is only when the words turn into gibberish, the promises into unrelenting screams, that he finally curves his knife around the sweat-slick neck and slits.

He used to play with animals as a child--squirrels and rabbits and small, trembling birds--creatures he caught and trapped in the vast grounds of his parents' mansion, in the almost-wilderness of the trees near the back. He used to pin them to the earth with spells, watch their shivering little bodies with cool, precise interest--cutting here, cutting there, flaying back layer after layer of skin, observing the stamina and behaviour of each species, the beautiful twining of pain that lead them to their deaths. His mother called him a monster, but how could he explain that his interest was scholarly, aesthetic--that he felt no remorse for what he did, because cutting these creatures was like cutting a salad--there was no need for compassion in it, and their pain was simply an accessory he neither flinched nor took pleasure from, because this was study, pure study, and their bodies were beautiful?

It isn't a surprise, after all, that he now works for the Death Eaters. The Ministry serves as a feeble front, a dissatisfactory arena for his talents--there he is only a tall, stropping man with a thin black moustache, a cold voice and a set of respectable professional robes; and the only thing he carries is his axe, heavy and silver-bladed and a pleasant stretch on his arms after the light, cool caress of his knife. Disposal of Dangerous Creatures. He still finds his executions satisfying, in some basal, brutal way--but the fall of the axe lacks the necessary finesse he has come to enjoy. The arch of wing and the shine of claw fascinate him, but he is given no time to play--it ends too soon, too soon, and the magnificent creatures lie bleeding at his feet. Silenced now; unable to speak their secrets.

No, it isn't a surprise that he works for the Dark Lord. Here he is utilized like the weapon he is--here he feels well-carried, well-used--the grip of Voldemort's cool hand lifting him and letting him fall like a knife, so that he alone feels the first joyous, heated burst of blood. And he is allowed humans, human subjects, whom he interrogates and tortures for information--and now he feels calm, feels sated, and no longer has to resort to Knockturn brothels, shadowed rooms, to the boys and women he used to carve on dirty, filth-ridden sheets. No: here he can keep it clean, keep it pure, with straps and scalpels and scissors that shine in the bright arcing of the high window's light--magicked to be straight when he needs them so, curved when not--sanitized and perfect and sharp--reducing, with a few ribboned strokes, the strongest wizard to a writhing Muggle.

He is exquisitely gentle at first. His knife moves shiver-smooth over small hairs at navel, scrotum, feet--and he almost lulls his subjects to sleep before the first cut, which always startles them so much that they forget, until the second one, to scream. Rectus abdominis. Obliquus internus. Lovely words--a constant chant he runs through his head, naming each discovery--the sound of them sibilant and sensuous, musical. Calming as meditation. He skirts along stomach and thighs carefully, drawing thin red lines just shy of major arteries, because he needs to control the blood loss and has no fondness, really, for fountains of blood that slicken the body and make his work difficult. What he ends up with is a carved lattice, a lovely tracery, which he has to stand back and admire while the subject jabbers on. The quill at the back of the room keeps up its near-silent scratch.

He takes his time with the men, more so than he does with the women, because the softness and roundness of female bodies is too amorphous, too imprecise, and he prefers preciseness in things like this. The male body can also be played with that much more easily--sometimes, for subjects who seem to become more vulnerable at this, he rubs the cold flat of his knife back and forth over the scrotum until it warms, until the sleeping penis begins to waken. It's remarkable that the confessions speed up at this--as though shame makes the pain worse, for some unforeseeable reason. Sometimes, when they seem only shocked into silence by it, he decides to teach them that silence doesn't pay--he whispers a spell that binds around their necks and tightens, tightens, until the wet eyes bulge and the tender skin of the throat begins to bruise.

Asphyxiation. He always watches with a strange sort of wonder when the nascent erection hardens completely, a side-effect so irrational and inexplicable that he recreates it in every subject he can afford, as if to find a reason for it through observation. What a ridiculous reaction to death; he smiles at it thinly, this madness in otherwise sane machinery, when he sees the first clear drops of pre-ejaculate emerge. Impregnating the void. He wraps a clean hand around the erection then, stroking out of pure interest, and releases the throat-binding so that the subject gulps and wheezes on air--and it is only when all that lost breath is regained that the gasps of No no no no become apparent, but he ignores them and continues, until the pleas turn into wordless, sobbing moans--and then the bound hips rise slightly, and pulses of sperm warm his knuckles and forearm and wrist in milky, glowing strands, stray drops landing on the subject's thighs and mixing with the blood there, red threads branching in flawless white. Marble. The confessions that come after that are astonishing. He only has to walk to the nearby basin and wash his hands while the subject reveals everything, begging for release, for this to not happen again, no please please please.

He never has sex with his subjects, of course--that would be dirtying what he does, ruining the purity of it. And he never liked men for activities like that anyway. Hours later his job is done, and he ignores any part of him that isn't satisfied. He only takes off his apron, delicately streaked with blood, and lays it aside for the house elves--and shrugs on his cloak, clean, heavy wool, opening the door and walking out of the inquisition chamber. He leaves the corpse behind him for the junior Death Eaters to dispose or for Snape to extract ingredients from--and the last thing he hears, before shutting the door, is the dripping of blood onto the spotless, self-cleaning floor.

No. He never has sex with his subjects. Instead he heads out into the cold night and Apparates home once he's beyond the wards--back home to his wife, his unknowing wife, who is soft and warm and thinks that he's had another long day at the Ministry, or another evening with his somewhat sinister but charming friends. His wife, who listens to Muggle music and likes to make love in the mornings--at least that's what she calls it, the slow moving of their bodies while he closes his eyes and thinks of blood. She is the perfect Ministry wife, loyal and politically correct and pliable--she makes him approachable and trustworthy at parties. A family man.

He returns home and enters their bedroom, the falling of his robes and the clinking of his undone belt announcing his presence--and when she shifts in the bed, murmuring 'Walden...?', he only slips into the sheets, penis still hard from his restraint in the inquisition room, and slides his hand between her legs.

She arches easily, bringing to mind another arch of hips earlier that day--and then she smiles, sleepy and half-lidded, and that doesn't remind him of anything at all. He always takes great care with her, like he does with all his subjects--he is precise and patient, waiting until she moans, and she's so happy with him, so satisfied, because he knows the human body so well. Knows where to soothe. Where to press. He rocks inside her gently while reaching out to touch her--labia, clitoris--and her pleas are familiar to him by now, stretched as though with pain, and they sound so much like the pleas he's heard all day that he begins to thrust just that bit harder. She is wet and hot and tight, a slippery birth channel that has yet to bear him an heir--and he sifts through her hair and cradles her breasts, watching with detached interest as small muscles lead her nipples to contract--hard, warm pebbles under his thumbs. When he ejaculates he's quiet, apart from a sigh of relief--and she orgasms only slightly more loudly, moaning into his ear.

She relaxes into sleep not long afterwards, her smooth back against his chest--her body whole, unharmed, unexplored. He slips out of her warm sheath, but he's never really been inside her--he doesn't know her, she's a stranger, and her skin is too whole to reveal her inner truths. He strokes the curve of her arm thoughtfully, and she murmurs quietly in her sleep. He'll have more subjects tomorrow, as Voldemort had promised, and he finally traps and lifts her hand gently up to his ear, where he can hear the bones of her wrist make quiet music as they shift. The hand itself too, when her fingers curl around his. Carpals. Metacarpals. Phalanges. A familiar chant, one he'd said only earlier today, and it's to those words that he falls asleep.