Aphrodisiac

                   PART ONE

          AND THY DEVIL DO YOU STARE 

___________

The walls were blood-stained, silly, little son-of-a-bitches, Ginny decided, at the second day of being held in the isolation of curate freeze. It was a windowless cell, the walls the color of water and the floor damp with a substance she wished not to recognize. The feeling of complete inadequacy filled her the moment she woke up from the deep sleep she had been possessed in—a black and white sleep with a colorless steel surrounding her, and something blowing across from her, and silver hanging like a locket in front of her eyes. Or perhaps it was not a dream it all.

Because as her hands wandered the cell, she found a strand of silver-blonde hair—and perhaps it was the black morning she had awakened to, but she pushed it into the only pocket of her skirt—when she realized, that someone had changed her clothes. They had done so, with a slight crumble at the edges of the fabric. It was obviously a male who had done it, as the clothes were all black and clashed horribly with her red-flaming hair.

Listen to me, she thought, smiling a soft little smile, debating fashion statements---her smile vanished within seconds when she felt the same, plunging fear about her like a sleeping drought washing across her once more. The clothes, the shoes mismatched along with them, suffocated her insides with it's tight grip, a rope so unsteady that it had been yanked around her wrists with an unbreakable charm.

She raised her head—and saw a glimpse of a word, one single word:

Sav

She couldn't touch it, not even with the tips of her fingers, but felt no need to do so. It was obvious the sentence had been unfishined before something erupted—perhaps another prisoner had written it down and fallen at the last, single moment.

Perhaps, just perhaps.

Her sighs felt sharp and glowering, and whimpers were escaping through her penetrated, restrained gasps. The feeling of helplessness, the yearning for all to wash around her—and finally, everything seemed to stop at once.

Because someone was opening the cell. The door that covered the cracks of the walls was opening.

"Hello?" she whispered hastily.

"Well, well—" said a sweet-turmoiled voice.

She widened her eyes and saw a hooded man, his body equipped with so much black it stung her eyes instantly, made her feel as if her eyelids had been torn off along with her eyelashes and left to drown in a pool of blood on the floor.

The only thing she saw was the glint of silver that he pushed away from his head when he saw her staring. His tongue ran over his dry, deprived lips and made them moist, his saliva dripping grotesquely across his paler-than-ivory chin.

She knew his name but dare not to speak it, as if cancer would thump her chest as soon as she did, as if darkness would cloak her as soon as her tongue rolled off the minion's name.

She only asked a question. "Who wrote this?" she demanded, in but a croaked whisper. Her arms failed to reach the writing on the wall behind her.

But he understood. He brushed the cloak off his head in such a movement that she was sure his articulate, small little fingers vanished--"Aren't you smart enough to figure it out, sweet little girl?"

"I am not a little –"

"Ah, uh, uh!" His fingers wrung through his strands, his gray eyes glowering, almost red in the dark.

And then she felt it—the movements he made with his fingers seemed to twist her throat, because before she knew it, she had reached it was trying to breathe—but the ropes were failing to loosen, and a relishing fervor was going down her chest, rubbing it in the heated embers of fire--

Until he let go.

A wish of relief washed over her, her neck bruised and bleeding drops like splattering rain on her fingers, staining it with the seeping thin blood, but she did not try to care.

"Be glad I didn't do more," he said calmly, his lips upturning into the cruelest whisper she had ever heard—"But, of course, the writing is yours."

"Mine?" she repeated in disbelief. "That can't be mine. I wasn't even awake when that woman – that little, bitch of a woman—"

"You mean Bellatrix," Draco contradicted, amused. "Yes, well, she is a rough woman."

"It's not mine," was only what she would surrender. Her head was floating with a strange light-headed dizziness—she couldn't understand why she wasn't waking up—this was, after all, a dream—a nightmare—

"Yes," he said, gritting his teeth, then moving his hand flawlessly. "It is. A shame, isn't it? When you tried to take your last breath, trying to edge those faithful words with your own, sick tainted, mudblood loving blood…"

"What are you saying?" she sputtered, the agonizing pain now writhing in her temples, the dizziness gone but a disease a float.

"Oh, but sweet Weasley, don't you understand?" he blinked innocently, and she fought to wrench her hands out of the ropes.

"—I am saying," Draco said, brushing the remaining strands that covered his eyes, concealed them as if they were consoled in their own spit, their own heaven and their own sin—"That you, Miss Weasley, are dead."

She let her hands falter at last, settling into the burn of the ropes and wished to be burned at stake to rise up from the nightmare.

But the cell and silver never disappeared.