What He Has
Her hair is a stream of red wine invading our darkness. You would notice it before anything else, even before her absurdly vivid yellow nightdress, slender figure, expressive hands, or furtive blue eyes. She stood out like a dandelion in an ash field, yet had the audacity to think we would ignore her. He had the audacity to think his hypocrisy could remain secret forever. We would have followed him through trails of cruelty, mockery, betrayal and broken heroes. We would have, without a question and with raucous laughter.
She destroyed us. She ate us from the inside, wrinkling her freckled nose and licking her pale fingertips.
Thus, I feel justified when I grab her as she walks past my chair one evening. Her hair falls in disheveled waves to a point below her shoulder blades, which peek out from the poorly tied bodice of her nightdress. If canaries had red feathers atop their nervous heads they would look like she does.
"Parkinson," she says stonily, resenting my icy hands gripping her wrists. She can resent me with her whole tiny being and she will never realize the war tearing me apart. The war that makes me want to tear her perfect skin in retribution. Fucking Gryffindor.
"Virginia Weasley. What a pleasure."
She knows the dulcet sarcastic tone too well, and merely lifts one corner of her lips. For a moment I think of just talking with her, of afternoons of birdsong and radiant sunshine.
Fuck, she is obviously making me insane.
I drag her with me into the dormitory, feeling my strength increase at her every pathetic whimper. She is a kitten, a bouncy mewling cub. The room is even darker than the previous one, but my eyes don't have to adjust to see her moon face floating above that yellow slip. Her eyes spark doomed embers of defiance. Embers that before long will feel the crushing tide of my wrath and obsession, will bleed their fury into my sweating palms. They are warm on her wrists now, no longer icy and indifferent.
"What do you want?"
"Oh, Virginia…" I release one of her wrists, and my hand caresses her head, twines its way into her fiery hair. "Don't you know?"
The silence is pained, but she trembles under my insistent hands. I don't really expect her to anything anyway.
"I will have what Draco has."
I pull her close to me; kiss her smooth forehead. Can the lioness be all that he demands? Does she claw and bite in ferocious desire? I want to laugh in anticipation.
I let go of the other wrist to untie the laces at her back, to push the thin straps off her shoulders. Her body makes a timid resistance to my hands but I have the lioness by her luxuriant mane, tied to me by her vanity.
Another pair of eyes glints from a dark corner of the room, and we hear the groan of bedsprings.
"Millicent, darling." My voice sounds feral in my ears, coloring the night with wildness. "I found Draco's little toy trying to leave the common room a few moments ago."
She edges her way to us, reaching out to grab Weasley's shoulders. Our eyes meet over the girl's head, four dark, vengeful mirrors. There will be no mercy tonight.
"Without visiting us?" Millicent whispers in her ear.
"Imagine that." Her thigh muscles tense; I can feel their strength all along my own. She will not run but in the direction I demand.
I lean in for another kiss. My teeth pull on her bottom lip, biting too hard for her comfort. She will not be comfortable.
Millicent finishes the job I started, and our lioness's gown lies in a puddle at her feet.
I want her to be cold, yet she still feels warm under my hands as I trace patterns on the small of her back. She blushes, the color draining into her neck and along her collarbones.
I take my arm from around her to let Millicent shove her onto the closest bed. She tumbles, looking forlorn and young in her nudity. Millicent sits next to her, a mess of waist long black hair and unattractive features. She leans over, touches one hipbone with lips and tongue.
"Don't…" Her voice is almost silent with fear.
Fucking girl. It is too late for her to act this way. Millicent rests her hand atop a white knee with calculated precision.
"Don't you run away now, little one," she says hoarsely and turns to me. Her usually clumsy hands undo my robes with ease; my lips are rough against her cheek. There will be time for her later. Or sooner. Somewhere along that line of thought I cease to care.
Draco's lioness is a river of pale skin atop the dark sheets, the polar opposite of Millicent, who leapt out of obscurity to ignite the desire deep in my belly, who in the nights is never less than a figment of the shadows. How many times I have cried out in her arms and still not seen her body.
This girl squirms underneath me, crying out, trying to ignore the rising pleasure. So paper-thin, I could almost believe her to be innocent. That is her charm, her innocence, her wide eyes gazing out from fair brows. The bruises Draco gave her not too long before her map imagined landscapes across her arms, her stomach. Millicent's hand is on her thigh; she is a patch of deeper black hovering around the girl's head. The throaty roar of the lioness the only sound I can hear, taking me far… far…
She scratches me as I take her, like I hoped she would. The long red lines down my arms burn, but they make me giddy. I have walked upon the very surface of the sun. I have collared the wild beast he thinks to keep for himself. She thinks she is fucking something. Fucking deluded, she is. She feeds us her transparent sham of purity and she envisions herself mistress of our hearts.
Millicent turns the girl onto her back, gently. Too gently for what she is about to do. She straddles her knees and a silver razor blade gleams in the scant light. I rest my chin on Millicent's dark shoulder as she draws. A small snake, coiling its way across our youth's pale back, weaving through her vertebrae. She will never forget how she is owned, how tightly we wound our way about her unresisting form in the night. He would find it, the tale written in scars; he would know the twin betrayals made us all even.
"Draco," she cries, feeling the sharp bite of Millicent's artwork and the ache of her body.
The two of us laugh.
"What about him?"
"He will hear us, he will see…"
I kiss her cheek, upturned from the pillow, treasuring the heat brewing under the pink-tinged porcelain. "Slytherins," I say with vehemence, "know better than to ask questions of one another."
We hand her the nightgown; her face is tear-stained, her knuckles white clutching the garment. Blood trickles down her legs, curling around the hollows at her knees and ankles. There is so much of it…
Millicent caresses my arm with the knife, envisioning another drawing within. Suddenly, I want the Gryffindor gone. She puts on her dress slowly, so slowly…like the flat of a knife…
Blood seeps through the back, we see it as she goes to leave. The red snake, winding its way into the cage of the sleeping canary.