Ink Spots

Some people start out as tastes. Others, as ashes.

Ginny... had blood between her teeth and tears in her eyes. New girl, I shrugged it off. New girl, new habits, old for her. I'll get used to her eventually. Just another roommate. Blood between the teeth, she'll wash it off. Tears in the eyes, it's just a phase. Teenage hormones.

Kids have explanations for everything. I was young, once.

She was never beautiful. Her hair, though exceptional, was frizzy as though electrically charged; her features held no brilliancy. Her freckles were too pronounced against her pale skin; you could scrap them off with a teaspoon. She had eyes of twilight, however. They shifted with the wind, with her mood: then cold, then receptive, then inquisitive, then wondrous, then down.

A ponderous child, she was. I could never quite put my finger on her. Sometimes it seemed as though the words falling from her mouth were not her own. She would gasp, at those moments, catch my eye as though in a panic, then leave the room in a flurry.

She never did stay long in our dormitories: it seemed that she was always away, hiding... or running. Or writing in that little black book of hers, pinning down her thoughts.

She never paid any attention to me.

I was just the roommate, just the other inhabitant of the room: only space-filler, only there. I was a constant in her life, like her mother had been for her at home, like the diary fixed permanently on her nightstand. Like her night-light. She was afraid to sleep in the dark, so she lit a tiny candle next to her bed every night with her hand... making sure the light did not hinder me in my sleep.

On some nights, when my bed was too warm and my feet too cold, I would put on my slippers and sneak on tip-toe to her side of the dormitory, and there I'd watch her face as the candle-light flickered over her features; nipping at her nose, setting the edges of her hair on fire, attempting to mimic movement in shadow. Sometimes her eyes would flutter, then, and I would rush back to bed.

I had no explanation set in my head for why I took this time out of my rest to watch her sleep. Kids do not always need an explanation for everything.

She never seemed quite alive to me... a thing I found peculiar, as one of such vibrant hair and eyes should you think breathe life into every step, every tone, every spoken phrase.

And yet the room always did feel emptier whenever she was around... as though she took up more air than the rest of us, as though to give weight to the pretension of existence she had to live in this quiet vacuum of her own... as to not dissolve into the thin air about her. Fade away, as her transparency of skin sometimes seemed to foreshadow.

I found myself, over the course of that first year, tracing the ink spots that she'd left behind on the table she'd been seated at in the library. They looked like dark tears to me, taking up attention from the eye as they bled into the wooden plane, just as unrepentant for their presence on a previously perfect desk as she was.

Indeed I thought these supposed signs of sloppiness to be quite indicative of her nature. Leaving shadows on the surface, just as she was prone to do whenever entering a room. Leaving dark spots in her wake, everywhere she went. Ever leaving. I felt sorry for her.

I would never quite forget my first sight of her, when blood had stuck to her front teeth and tears shone in her eyes. And then she had smiled at me. Unapologetic, as though knowing how she looked, what I must have been thinking, and defying it by this small-form pretence of submission.

They say the smile was developed from every animal's natural impulse to grimace, pull the skin about their teeth back as far as it would stretch, upon sensing danger. This flagrant sign of fear was to convince the attacker of the victim's capitulation, to show that they no longer posed any threat to them.

After a while I began seeking her out, attempting to converse with her. This was not an easy thing to do: either preoccupied with studying in the library or writing in that silly diary of hers... how I longed to simply steal it from her night-stand on those nights when I could not sleep! But I knew somehow, by the hint of warning in her stiffened stance whenever I turned my head to try and sneak a peek at whatever she was writing, that it would be wiser of me not to try and do such a thing. Honour is a trait instilled in all Gryffindors: I was no exception to this rule.

That being said, to find time alone with her – unoccupied, unperturbed – proved nearly as difficult as attempting to bring up a subject that would draw her into conversation. There seemed little she could talk to me about without resorting to monosyllables. When I tried to bring up the subject of Harry Potter for instance, her mouth would close up to a straight line, her eyes dimming like a flame in the dark. Her feelings for him were clearly something to be hidden behind closed doors, revealed only to herself. Regular teenage ramblings about make-up and boys did not seem to interest her.

Only when the conversation turned to writing did a cast pebble disrupt the calm waters of her eyes. No longer stagnant and still, her hands would come up from her sides and her tone rise to a pitch to express in great detail her love for stories and all things literary. And in a quiet voice she once admitted to me – bending her head my way as though afraid to be overheard – that in the deepest of wishing wells, her dream was to be a writer.

I must say, back in those days, I felt proud to be the one recipient of her attentions; the one person she confided into, aside from that blasted diary of course. I knew nothing of her as she acted outside of school, in the presence of her brothers: I knew only the Ginny that had come to Hogwarts quiet and unassuming, restless as a bird. For me, she would stay an hour longer in our dormitory, before heading off for the library or turning her mind once more to her diary. I felt gratified to be the one to slowly draw her out of her isolation. I was smug.

And then, the attacks started.

The first time of course, at Halloween, people had been startled but not troubled. Mrs. Norris was a cat, after all, not a human, and a fiercely obnoxious cat at that. Everyone seemed glad to be rid of her for the time being; no one gave much thought to how the sudden petrifaction had come about or why this might have happened.

I noticed a trend of increasing agitation in my new-found pet project, however: Ginny was retreating again. After three months, she was once more nowhere to be found in our House's common room or dormitories. Sometimes I couldn't even find her in the library... and she was avoiding my company as much as the next person.

I can't deny to have been hurt by this seemingly sudden turn of emotion towards me. I had hoped to have become at least separate from the rest of the student body in her mind's eye: a confidante, perhaps even a friend. To see her retreat was painful not because it once more drew her into the isolation she had acquired about herself from the first day, but because she no longer made an exception of that chosen solitude for me.

Then her eyes began to change.

Those beautiful haunting eyes that had from the first moment set her apart from the plainer ones in her year, had given her face a brilliancy it otherwise would never have had, began first to dim – the light in her eyes hiding away like protecting a secret inside – then to brighten in a devastating fashion.

But not in the way eyes brighten when the one to whom they belong is about to cry, no; the sort of brightening one sees in the irises of a frightened animal. The widening of the pupil, the stretching of the skin around the orbs. The foreboding of tragedy, written in expressive mode all over the impending victim's front. I looked at Ginny and could only think back to that first memory, with the eyes in memory focusing on her teeth now. The blood, the blood.

Her eyes grew darker. I knew this, because I had spent those first few months of the year watching her every move, catching her every nuance in tone and voice, and also, studying her eyes to an extreme degree. The colour of her eyes, before twilight, seemed to have changed to the blood of my memory, dried into her irises.

I could no longer look at her for moments on end; the wrongness of her eyes made me avert mine, and from the beckoning aloneness that had defined her before, the almost pleading seclusion, came this terrible defiance, her bearing now fierce and, in a strange way, vigilant. Do not come near me. She never spoke to me of books and stories again.

Days became weeks became months. I cannot seem to recollect the time previous to Hermione Granger's petrifaction as a time of any interest to me whatsoever. Fear ruled the school and its inhabitants, but I was too lost in my confusion to even feel it crack my bones, shake me up in my sleep, drawing the dark circles under my eyes that had only just begun to show. I didn't know what was ripping me apart inside; all I knew was the moment of day when my eyes flitted to her, whether it was in a classroom or in our dormitory, and see her writing, again and again, in her black cover-bound journal.

And then came the lust.

Suddenly I noticed her hands. How they caress the black leather cover of her diary, how they finger her raven quill, how they tap on the couch's arms when she is bored, or lost in thought, or both. Or neither. Her hand coming up to her face, her lips, as to stifle a gasp.

How could I not have noticed them before? Slim, long-fingered, quadrangle palm. Elegant as a piano player's hands. A writer's hands. Suddenly I found myself afraid to touch her.

The desire became the great divider of my life. She still wasn't beautiful, but I wanted her freckles, her shy asymmetrical smile, her long fingers with their little scars, her gesture of loss as her hand went up to her mouth... I had to have her. It wasn't a matter of property. It was a matter of need.

The lust was a flame in my eye, a knife in my gut, a fever in my brain. I could not get away from her. I could not be alone with her. I couldn't get too close, or I would burn my hands to her. And the flame flickered, and the knife turned... the head howled for remission. I fell asleep bathing in my own sweat.

At day, Ginny had slowly permitted me back into her immediate surroundings, only I could not bear her closeness any longer. She was the one now trying sometimes to engage in conversation with me, and I would give only limited answers, preferring instead to hopefully, hopeless cast my eyes to hers, wrong colour though they may be, and behold her face, her hair, her lips.

I had never been an onlooker. But Ginny had turned me inward, and all I could do now was watch.

At night, the candle came towards me now, flame-shadows licking at my face as I twisted and turned in the sheets. Unaware of this quiet regarding, I would whimper in my sleep, too hot in my clothes, feeling the heat of the flame through shut eyelids. The candle moved away, and by the time the veil of slumber had been totally lifted, it was already stationary near the bed again. The bed in which she slept.

Of course this could only go on for so long. There is a balance, a moment when this balance gets disrupted, and we were both waiting for that metaphorical axe to fall, and cleave us both in two. A word, a thought. A breath of wind, catching her robes and lifting them up into the air, baring white skin to my hungry eye. It was only a matter of when.

In the end, it was a night. Just an ordinary night, when I was screaming in the cushions, caught up in another dream, a dream filled with hands and blood red as hair, red as hers --

A hand on my forehead. "Are you alright?" Her voice, soft, imploring. Careful.

In my dream I had been coaxing her screams, making her budge and buckle under my mouth and tongue and endless greed. In my sleep-weary state of mind, the only thing that seemed out of place in the utterance of her words, was the lack of force behind it.

Eyes still closed, I grabbed hold of her hair, so long now that when bending over it had brushed against my palm. I pulled her down, heard rather than felt the hand that had been leaning on the bed for support slip away, making a swishing noise, and the candle toppling out of its holder and falling onto the bed, setting the sheets on fire.

I will never quite forget her eyes then, the moment I opened mine: wide and startled, but in their depths the fire all around us reflected. I blinked, and blinked again, but the vision lasted: the way the fire charged her hair, making it rise like a halo around her head. I will never forget how she looked then, as though formed out of flames.

Then there was her mouth, soft and willing. And her hands, roaming over my form from where the bed linen covered me, to where it released my heated flesh to the night.

Under her breath I heard Ginny murmur a spell, and my surprise grew larger still when, instead of setting out the flames, there was a sort of breathless shimmer in the air around the bed; a Charm, the way it persisted suggesting some kind of protection spell.

Though lost in her mouth, I managed to break away long enough to look down: and the burning sheets were too close, too close, with the flames crawling across my skin with their vicious red-forked tongues, and --

But I wasn't burning. I was not on fire anywhere other than in my belly, where I was being positively consumed, and someplace lower still. I looked back to Ginny and, in close-up, saw her grin at me, for the first time since what must have been the beginning.

Then, her lips were closed to mine again and I forgot all other thought.

I forgot that there had been no prior indication of a mutual partiality existent between us -- but her mouth is to mine and how can I think anything else -- I forgot that Ginny should have at least been surprised by what was happening, as her personality suggested such a response, rather than have her take bold command of the situation. I forgot even that no first-year could have possibly worked such a complicated spell. I forgot all.

I forgot when I laid her down on the bed that she would be wreathed in flames, yet they did naught but tickle her, and she laughed and stretched her neck and back from the bed, and then I just had to have her naked under my hands.

My mouth was everywhere; on her mouth on her eyes on her breasts her jaw her neck her collarbone. Her tummy, when she cried out and took into her fist a handful of sheet.

And all the while, the scorching flames; all the while the molten fire; burning all around us, ash-white and dream-red.

Every so often I would pass the scene in my head and believe it all a dream; but then her nails would scrape my clit, make me bite my lip to keep from screaming. She seemed to know exactly when I was falling back into doubt, and was relentless in pulling me back.

And yet at one point, she forgot, or lost track of me, and I looked at the scene as though from a distance, falling out of a dream though her tongue was to my breast and her fingers moved like death to and fro just there, inside.

While still inside of myself, feeling the greatest of physical pleasure, I managed to detach myself; and through that, saw within her eyes a foreign nature: the eyes slit, not red from firelight, but from themselves. Even a fool could see that the smile to grace her face was a look of not pleasure at giving, but of pleasure at receiving. Her face looked triumphant.

And the moment before I climaxed, spiralling far outside of recollection and brought on by her deft twist of fingers, her tongue darted out of her mouth, licking lips quick as lightning, but as alien a movement to her mouth as the blood-red in her eyes.

And I saw also that she was not licking her lips so much as her teeth with that impossible tongue: they were bloodied, the red wrong to the white, and then. . . a feather. Between two crown teeth, a trace of a feather, and the very moment her snake-tongue passed the feather, Ginny let out a moan between a stifle and a gasp.

I must have fallen asleep. The fire had died when I next opened my eyes. I was lying flat on my back on the bed, and when I turned my head there, next to me, lay Ginny, fast asleep or so she appeared, with one arm thrown possessively over and around my waist.

I got up abruptly, startling her to awareness with the movement. Her eyes flew open and with that, the memory of last night (though had the night passed yet? Darkness still breathed around us) came roaring back to me in a flash of flame and feeling, deep in my gut. I searched her eyes for those red lights, coming out of her like a lighthouse before... but what I saw was only startled, broken blue.

Ginny seemed to understand what I'd been searching for, however. Her face closed, and turning slightly away from me, she brought her legs up and closed her arms around them, tugging them to her chest. She was a little fortress, removed, isolated. I looked at her and wanted to cry.

"You're haunted, aren't you." It wasn't really a question. She made no move, but a single teardrop slipped down her face onto her nightgown.

I was weak with sympathy, and when she turned her head away from me to hide her tears I felt something deep within me stir and come to life again. The feeling that had been lost when my hunger for her body had overtaken all thought; the feeling of tenderness towards a friend.

I wrapped her up inside my arms, waiting for the tears to start cascading down her cheeks. Waiting to give comfort, as I should have done so long ago.

But the tears didn't come. Instead, after a little time that could not have been more than a minute, she gently disengaged my arms from her form, resting my hands to my side. The look in her eye was sad, but not reproachful. She lifted one hand to my face and laid it to my cheek. She looked like a broken piece of china, trying to mend itself together.

"You cannot help me." A thin, broken smile. Her index finger caressed my brow. "No one can. But it means something that you tried."

I closed my eyes when she kissed me again, tears spilling out from under my eye-lids, and when I lifted them up she was gone. She had left the night-candle on my bedside, its tiny flame creating shadows on the wall opposite me.

The very next day, the Monster had taken her into the Chamber. The fingers of my hand kept going up to my chapped, broken lips, and I said nothing to no one. In my head I heard only mocking, high-pitched laughter, and everything I ate that day tasted of blood.

And so she died in my mouth. But that's okay. It is the way she started, after all.

And she left her ink spots on my heart... as sure as a footprint.

_FIN_