insecurity of the wicked
by patchworkteddy
one.
There is a secret that he knows. It creeps about like a Basilisk in this house, whips of wood-vines peppered with the blink-open-close eyeballs of bougainvilleas that twitch their starburst mandibles in hunger. It seeps through the cracks in the walls, rots the photo frames flying on ethereal wings. It sings in his bones and runs in his blood.
Albus sees it as a child, once, a little prince plucked from the feather of a fairytale too early. The wardrobe he opens, in his mother's room, hides not Narnia, but only the bramblebush of stems locking up a little boy in a cage of crimson petals.
His fingers skim over the velveteen visage of the doll. Those boot-button eyes, dulled by multiple coats of dead dust, fixate on him, staring into his impassive face. Worms of black hair wiggle from its tiny head, tickling his skins. It reminds him of Medusa, who could and will turn him into worthless stone with one glance.
But what strikes him is the overall likeness.
It's like looking into a reflection.
He descends into the curtains of fever that night, clutching the doll tightly between his fingers, his mother unable to pry it from him, and between those falls in the nightmarish fabric, hides the secret. The secret they all seek.
There is a secret that he knows. He will seek it out in blood.
two.
There is a secret that she knows. It is fluttering between their heartbeats, a little glass butterfly withering away in her ribcage. Bougainvilleas dye their mutual secret red, camouflaged in the crimson of their hair and disguised behind the river of blood that mingles in its similarity.
"Freddie. Freddie. Freddie…" Ginny murmurs hungrily, her eyes darkening with lust, as she chases after useless dust motes of hopeless memories, little moth trapped in the lamp light.
He leaves a path of kisses on her slender, pale neck, cold and slimy like reptile scales breathing atop her too-tight coat of skin. The back of her head bumps against the mouldy wall, and her eyes flutter shut, so she can think she is flying, no, dreaming and flying.
She feels hot, Fiendfyre licking hot ladder rungs up her body, boiling blood beneath the skin, melting flesh into Wicked Witch goo. She aches for the touch of his clever fingers, aches for the coolness which they will bring. She wants to drown; not to burn.
Someone hollers his name from downstairs, the noise floating up the stairways (the bastard). Teddy startles, banging against the wall of the cramped closet. She can smell the sweat off him; she can taste the dark in him.
He contorts his features in that funny way she likes, and Fred slides off his visage, and she smirks at the innocence of his metallic-blue hair, spiked up the way Victoire likes it, his eyes that look so much like his father's.
He leaves without looking at her.
Her body hums with desire and her skin itches with the need to be touched. She lays on the dusty floor of the small closet for a while, curling into herself like a cat, before scrambling up, fingers fumbling for her black truth.
"Hullo, Darling…"
There is a secret that she knows. It hums static electricity into her bones, licks her blood into molten gold. It rots the woods and peels the paint. It lumbers through the shadows of her dreams; it oozes desire into their reality.
It is the lick that she coats on her doll, salty from fucking and thirsty for more. A noose of red hair curls around the doll's neck, prominent against the paleness of felt, the electric-blue of too-long hair, grinning its smile at the familiar brown eyes.
It is waiting.
Old sins always come to roost; old debts must never be left unpaid.
There is a secret that she knows. She can taste it in her soul.
three.
He wanders the house with silent socked feet, careful not to wake the sleeping dragons, constantly in search of something to soothe his insatiable hunger that gnaws at his flesh and rips through his muscles like a wolf. He feels empty, craving something lovely and delicious and warm to fill him up.
"Al?" Mama calls his name from her room, her voice tinkling like the glorious bell of the ice-cream man. Albus pads into his parents' room, curiously blinking his wide, innocent, emerald green eyes. But he doesn't see his mother anywhere, and, dazed, wonders if he is half-dreaming, caught in the visceral folds of the in-between worlds (in between reality and unconscious consciousness).
He clambers onto his parents' humongous bed, fit for a king (and a queen, of course), tiny six-year-old limbs shuffling awkwardly. Flopping onto the soft, particularly springy mattress, he curls himself up like a cat, the thick duvet swathed around him. He breathes in the sudden, saccharine scent of bougainvilleas, that envelopes him in its hazy cover like a cocoon, dragging him under the dark waters of slumber.
He doesn't dream, doesn't swim. It's all darkness in the cover of cataleptic. He hears tinny headvoices, gasps and moans that shouldn't be. He hears screams from bloodied throats, laughter from eyeless disembodies, susurrus hissing that turns his ears to fire. He feels noxious slime creeping down his spine, down his thighs and legs and enveloping his body like an outer skin, disgustingly so. He hears whispers, musky with the smell of sweat, allure, lust.
"Ginny…"
When he wakes up, he throws up from the stench of flowers and blood.
four.
There is a secret that he knows. He hears it hissing in the walls, magic burning up the house. He tastes it on his tongue, green lollipop sizzle cranking out sparks, burning fiercely with the vicious, biting tang of snake venom.
He sees it reflected backwards in his mother's looking glass eyes. The strange tick-tick-ticking countdown begins, here lashes blinking out the syncopation, as she feasts upon his face with her eyes, hungrily. Her eyes roll down his whole, small frame, head to toe, soaking in the crisp creases of the uniform hung onto his body, bought a size bigger at Ginny's insistence; the shock of hair that however messy and mussed-up, seemed somewhat immaculate by the regularity of the patterns; the sharpness of his chin, fairness of his skin, pale against the backdrop of the bright light.
She basks in the glory of the similarities.
"First year at Hogwarts," she says in a singsong voice, reaching forward to adjust his collar, to pat down the unruly mess of hair. Her fingers skim his beautiful, marble skin, sliding up and down the hollow of his cheek.
"Good luck," she murmurs, against his electrified skin, before she bends down and presses her lips to his, cold and chapped. Her tongue slides in, flicking viciously against his teeth, as he's still as a statue, green eyes widening. And some little voice in the back of his mind screams something vague about immoral and sick, but the tongue, unattached to any human farce, tames his reckoning hunger. It fills him up with the hot hearth of heated coals that he licks up with his tongue.
A gossamer thread of saliva strings their glistening lips together as Al pulls back, before it breaks by the bond of time and gravity, warbling through the air, the sickly merge of their respective sacrifices. His mother smiles sweetly, beacon of light framed by the delicate curve of her angelic face, and kisses him one, two, three more times, drunken and smiling in that motherly way.
"I love you, Al, remember that."
There is a secret that he knows. It is the final stanza hidden in her words, waiting. It is their casualness that shouldn't be easy in the after. It is the scream of the train, the rush of the winds.
It is everywhere and it is theirs.
five.
When Albus Severus Potter is born, Molly shrieks his name through the house like its plaster over the curses. She almost has to wrestle him from Ginny and Harry, a sticky little bundle clutched in a blue blanket. Her arms hug the baby to her bosom, near her heartbeat. His eyelids flutter open, staring, and already Molly can see the green that will tint them like the darkness of his hair that will be soon. The uncanny familiarity resonates within her, and that isn't something so uncommon with any Weasley, but there's just something about Albus Severus that twists within her.
She remembers a secret they've hid well, the secret of Ginny's first stillborn baby, withered and dead inside of her, plunged into a coffin in the outside world. The children don't know this; Molly doubts but still hopes Harry does.
She remembers a secret that isn't one, how children can be magically conceived. They wouldn't be the first, if Ginny has tried – it's a well-known fact that Astoria Malfoy should be barren, that Druella Black conceived at sixty – and the list goes on.
She would ask; she would chase, but Albus Severus closes a matchstick finger around hers, and she stays.
six.
There is a secret that he knows. He lines it with golden apples on a silver platter, bleeds it into all his sins with relish, plants seed of darkness splinched off from its poisonous roots.
He wraps it up in his cunning smile, gifted to his Little Red Riding Hood with the naïve trust and the pretty pink lips that blossom like fragile roses. Lovely.
Sweet perfume comes from crushing flowers.
Twisted graphite, ink like smoke. They taste of karma. These are his servants, right-wing men of the underworld, and he shall make her his.
He takes her innocence, smears it in blood on the dungeon walls that only cage demons. He takes her faith, twists and unlocks it into something grotesque – a flaccid hand that drips down hers. He takes her future, tosses it down the garbage along with goodness of the wicked. He takes her heart and shackles it down in his Pandora box he's lined with a wish to hear her scream, a suppurating wound that oozes putrid humanity. He takes her soul and she is his.
"Ginny, sweet little Ginny…"
Endearments and charm he doles out like sickles; gentle touches of his lips to her skin he offers, the raw meat the devil flings to his hellhounds.
Mockery of the insecurity of the wicked. Corruption bleeding into words writ in skin. Those strokes of a child's blunt quill, heavily marking down her sins.
She kisses him and he thinks of the best way to push his tongue down her throat to eat her heart out.
There is a secret that he knows. It is the spark he sees in her eyes. It is lost in translation, winding a literary path between the lines, scribbled down by a hasty hand. It flitters back-and-forth in the papery treasure trove of secrets and sins, creased out from the historical fiction bled onto parchment. It is the crime that is inerasable.
There is a secret that he knows. No one will forget.
seven.
This house could be empty, but Al can see the penumbra of a hanging tree, blazing up the walls in the fierce darkness of its bark, twisting and tangling its wicked witch nail branches within each other; a bird nest from a time-skip that roosts a burning future; pinkie twigs building up layers that slip between each other, holding a doll in its cage-like embrace, like a hug from a father sending his child off to a world of too-bright lights.
The bark is peeling, little scraps of parchment, time-weathered, inked by the hand of an ignorant youth. Letters and notes spun from cruelty and lust, skinned off a human coat.
He searches for the bowtruckle, the creature that guards the secret in the tree. He seeks it in search of refuge, of something to soothe him. The secrets glide with the roots that slide, creeping up into their souls and heads and hearts, tapping bones and licking copper. They whisper tantalisingly, with the voice of a boy he finds in Mother's muddy brown eyes. They promise him eternal; they promise him release.
He finds the secret, ensnared within the cage of humanoid, danger concealed by the softness of the mother-flesh, the refraction of sickening green light cast from a wand that glowers behind his eyes, the tangle of messy black hair which completes the jigsaw of a haunting familiarity.
The doll is limp in his hands, but it might have been the other way round.
His back thuds against the wooden paneling of the wardrobe, breath hitched in his throat. He can hear them again, ghostwhispers that prick acrid into his ears, oozing sin. A cold finger grasps at his neck, twists and carves a wormwood trail down his spine, and he hears it again, the secret.
"Ginny…"
This poison treat spreads its root, anchoring down into all their hearts.
Mother always says to just trust.
eight.
There is a secret that she knows. It takes her blood and weaves a red thread, a trailing path of fate that binds her to her son's grave, sinking its teeth of frayed ends in to meld seamlessly with the shadow-genes to spit out red filth that mirror hers too much. It weaves a crimson net that ensnares them all, cruel thread biting into unwary flesh, bleeding the poison of dark curses into their veins, imprinting upon each soul the bloody handprint of a child.
Her silver hands stain Albus' with mercury as he lies prostrate, on his parent's bed. For a moment, it strikes her to think how sick this all is – he's her son for Merlin's sake, and who fucks their son on the bed they share with his father? – but there's something about the Grim in his eyes and the danger in his smile that makes her think of Tom, oh Tom.
Going around in circles, manipulating manipulators, who will deceive the deceiver? But the greatest lie is the words with twist around in our minds until it's a blindfold to shut out the truth – self-deceit of the harmless.
Their bodies writhe on too-thin, crisp sheets, the monochrome chessboard they dance across on stilted legs. Ginny is the Queen, regal and the most powerful piece on the board, true magic concealed by the King's check. And Albus is the rook, the best way to destroy the King with a checkmate.
Albus is the rook, most powerful when endgame looms near.
There is a secret that she knows. It is the cat-eyes that grin back from the shadows, luminous from the depths of darkness. It is the layers of irony that overlap in their shadows, the parallels that run on forever in a train track. It is the miniature of a human, the magic condensing in the chasm within the doll with hair like death's raggedy cloak and eyes like that of the world's end.
It is the crimson milkweed that spurts out the poisonous sap when Albus plunges the dagger in.
There is a secret that she knows. She will follow it to the grave.
nine.
The poison tree, it roots up from the grip it holds around his core, swimming in a sea of consciousness. It unknots itself from a single grain of cold hard stone, spiraling out darkness that licks at the soul, swelling as it clambers up the ladder rungs of his steel ribcage, stretches out its branches like a festering spider web, pushing at skin and pinching at flesh. Soon they rapture, and the branches burst forth, silver hands dripping in mercurial sin, each droplet a poison diamond to be polished as it ravages humanity.
The twigs tear at his ears, drum out static and hypnotic beats onto his eardrums, till his voice comes on like a broken record, haunts him again from the sickliest dreams, a piteous swell of human greed, ethereal in his wraithe-like form, cold and untouchable as he sinks through his flesh, strokes down Al's skin, sticks his rotting tongue down the boy's throat to throw up slugs and maggots.
He tells Al to kill Ginny. Because Al was a goodgood boy and boys like that should never get punished.
He tells Al to kill Harry. Because they look too much alike, these wizarding genes have always been trouble, yes?
He tells Al to kill James. Wrong name, wrong time.
He tells Al many things. Feeds him reels of the receipt to pay lies through his eyes, laps up blood like it's ketchup.
This poison tree, it bursts out from his mouth and lacerates his tongue as it tumbles down and blankets the house in sin, nets of branches woven in darkness, catching the good and devouring them, slaving the wicked to themselves. They will never catch him though.
The one behind the other fingers.
ten.
There is a secret that he knows. It is the pieces of the moon, scattered by the moonlight into his dead aunt's hair. It is the shadow cast upon the creaking floorboards. It is the blood that bubbles in his veins, frothing forth from hunger. It is the prize that lurks in the wardrobe.
It is the dark grey of his eyes, dominant of intelligent luster. It is the smooth part of his hair, immaculate. It is the paleness of his skin, single shard of parchment.
He opens the door, and it creaks open, revealing the wardrobe that stinks of must and rotting things. These invisible roots that creep he sees them all, but pushes them apart for his secret he's stashed.
And he's found it. Teddy Lupin smiles wolfishly, baring teeth, as his features dissolve into his own. He takes the doll, a snapshot of Albus Severus, hair blacker than his soul, charred from the burning of desire, eyes green from the Avada Kedavra that grows like a plant within him.
His wand. He taps it gently on the doll.
"Sectumsempra."
He licks up the screams that spill from the outside. He drinks in the sight of a grey boy, the slender, long fingers that grip the wand, the dark eyes that commence the ominous.
"Hullo again, Theodore."
There is a secret that he knows. He will remember it in time.
A/N: For the Deepest, Darkest Secret Competition. It's a bit rushed; I had to ask for an extension! I know it's a bit too ambiguous, sorry, therefore you can assume anything you like. I like to think that Teddy has MPD, but that's boring XD
Oh yeah, this fic is hugely based on There is a Secret that He Knows (Time and Again), by snarkyscorp, among others.
Review? ^^