Note: Originally written in response to a 'bondage' challenge, interpret as you like.
Grave Robber
Humanity is a spider's web, complex and far-reaching and always searching for anchors. Thin, pliable, and uncommonly strong, the threads exist for the purpose of rendering prey wholly captive within the confines of the trap. Silk is ejected elegantly from the mind's own delicate spinnerets, and woven chaotically to fulfill necessity and expectations, or artfully in attempts to plait emotions into elaborate orbs and funnels that deny the imagination. Still, even the first hazy filament can be dangerous in its potential, tying two people together with deceptive ease and lying dormant until the moment of recoil and realization.
These threads are sticky, tenacious fibers that defy the common sight of an eyeball and the touch of a fingertip. Like phosphorescent strands of arsenic-laced flypaper—untouched by the intervening years and not subject to the predators of age, decay, and demarcation—they outlast their mausoleum counterparts and put even the busiest recluses and widows to shame. The heat of hatred and love and the ice of indifference don't touch them. They remain in a perpetual stated of limp apathy, as any relaxed strand of yarn or twine or fishing line is wont to do when dropped or discarded. Haphazard snakelike parabolas define the space between for years, until the day when the strings become taut with motion and tension, as if the absentee puppeteer was readying his finest marionette for a command performance by cruelly plucking its many strings and watching it dance.
The boy is lying, so young and fragile, on the plush seat in their tiny, dark cabin on the train; the sudden jerk as the mechanized beast roars to life once more, like Aslan arising from the shattered remnants of the great Stone Table, causes the other children to gasp. One of the girls stifles a scream. The scene is tainted with unreality, and when he feels as if he is being jerked down to crouch uncomfortably on his haunches beside the limp, still body of a boy he has never honestly met, he is not surprised. The windows rattle, and the small room is thick with the tension and fear that oozes from the pretty littleboy doll's friends and schoolmates. When the hollowed manikin finally opens his eyes and lifts his head, it is with the perfectly synchronized deliberateness of a plastic baby with weights for brains.
The eerie sight of this action causes something to tug at his throat, stomach, pelvis, wrists, knees, while yet leaving his heart untouched. Glassy, moss-green irises target him with an undisguised curiosity that leaves him cold; that stare is so familiar that the eyes could have been plucked straight from her skull, preserved from a memory within a glass jar of formaldehyde and inserted where appropriate. For the sake of recognition, it doesn't matter that his thick, dark hair falls over his forehead and covers his indicative scar. No, it doesn't matter at all, because he has his mother's eyes.
He is jerked from his convalescent's stoop to his feet by the imperative force of his invisible fetters, and those eyes, with their intimate secrets, follow him solemnly; his chest aches with the hysterical giggles of lifetime exhaustion and momentary surprise which he has swallowed. He gives them chocolate, passing it judiciously among the cluster of frightened micechildren and trying not to feel the special warmth of young fingertips as they brush against his own.
Lily Evans is dead, and her ethereal son has stolen her eyes. He wears them with brazen pride on his long, pensive face, with no other feature so resembling her in the slightest. The rest is James and elements unknown, but those most vulnerable and venerable organs that march a'front of the gelatinous grey matter, harnessed by the thickly corded optic nerve, are purely Lily's. The impulse to pierce them, to reclaim and rend them till they are useless is tremendous, so much so that he honestly wishes the unknown operator of the useless effigy of his body would allow him that simple, animal pleasure of licking away the pink-tinged tears the boy's empty sockets would cry afterward.
When he steps from the compartment with no blood on his hands or visceral tissue beneath his fingernails, he is surprised to find himself choked by the separation. Strangled, not by threads or strings or chains this time, but by a noose blackened by metaphor and rough with the weight of a thousand broken necks. Someone else holds tightly onto the opposite end and rations out the never-ending ephemeral rope. At the thought, something acidic rises in his chest, something that is not bile, but a quietly malevolent sort of hatred he does not recognize. He watches a candle flame that night within the stone safety of the castle walls, and dreams uneasily of red hair.
Webs can stretch like taffy and never break, and even the swing of a preternatural scythe cannot sever a bond that has been made, thick or thin though it may be. Swing, swing. In the dense foliage of the sprawling forest, the boy's eyes lose their power of sheer vulgarity and become, instead, the drifting dead wood of memory. He looks down with heavy lids, and suddenly a scrawny young man with a wolfish smile is licking his way up the inside of one soft thigh, tentatively clutching the bony ridge of skinny, girlish hips as he moves awkwardly to their apex. He is pushing his fingers down to ghost over the soft, sticky flesh, so smooth in an imperfectly human way. Slim folds of skin—dressed expensively in a fine pelt of fox-red curls—easily give way to coral pink insides that grasp hungrily at his slender and phallic fingertips, like a toothless baby closing its gums over the rubber nipple with satisfaction. And as he begins to move his hand, pushing and rubbing in slow circles, he rests his downy, pubescent cheek upon the slight swell of her belly and listens as her heartbeat pulses like the beat of a loud bass drum.
Her son has captured him, trussed him up in an emotive straitjacket, but it is she who placed the noose around his neck and gave the other end to this little boy she had not lived to know. And despite that truth, he hates this dark, solemn little stranger who deceives him with witch's eyes and demurred boldness. When the boy looks up at him, he can only taste sweat and resentment, adrenaline and the thin, sweet film of mucous that sticks to his fingers after her climax. He can even taste the bitter copper from the one time she allowed him to touch her while blood seeped slowly through the cotton of her underpants. It's all there, somehow, and he wants to open his mouth and let it out, lest he be forced to swallow it the way he swallows his pride and anger, the way he swallows the foul and painful potion that keeps his inhuman restraints in place. He wants to possess this boy who is not so innocent, to wrap him in a cocoon woven from the love he felt for the funereal flower he saw buried. He wants, really wants, to be honest and tell those wide green eyes that the yoke he stumbled beneath for Lily Evans compels him now to both hate and desire her blessed offspring.
But when he does open his mouth, in the oppressive quiet of the sheltered wild, what comes out is simply, "You have your mother's eyes."