i. In
the earliest hours, drops of unholy dreaming stand upon her brow,
mingling there with the icy sweat. Every consciousness of her blood
treachery leaves her, replaced by soft and constant thoughts of But the Muggle's hair is soft against her palm, softer
than her skin will ever be, and her heart nearly stops as her fingers
graze a cheekbone...
When
she dreams, he tastes of sin. Spice and silk and sacrilege.
ii.
Merope awakens in a
spastic fit of coughing, her tongue burning.
iii.
Morfin
grumbles, kicking at her petulantly before rolling over to an edge of
the squalid, bloodstained mattress, taking a great deal of the
greying sheets with him.
iv.
In her mind,
Merope sees her face reflected as in a mirror. She sees herself as
she is; plain, with fish-belly white skin, her lank hair a constant
veil of mourning, with wild eyes dimming beneath. She despairs to see
so little of her father in her, more so when she cannot draw forth a
clear memory of her mother for the purpose of comparison. Merope had
gathered the strength to ask her father his opinion on the matter one
day, one day when he had been drunk enough to answer, though not to
any satisfactory extent. He told her only that she was a runt, that
her mother never should have given birth to her, but that if the
woman had gifted her anything of herself, it was her smile.
Merope knows he meant that neither of them had ever had one.
v.
Her
hair spreads like spider webs over a bare chest, her breathing comes
softer than the slithering of her brother's pets across the floor,
and she dreams of a sacrilege worthy of her family's
hatred.
vi. Unstable,
careless, emaciated Morfin, and while this perturbs her she is not at
all startled by it. Her thoughts are not so blasphemous yet that she
believes them to be divisible entities. His blood, flesh, bone, and
soul are her own, perhaps more so than he himself is. Merope
thinks on her Morfin-self – the tangled, hopeless hair so greasy
beneath her hands, dark eyes gleaming with depravities not yet bought
to fruition, the spaces where he is missing teeth where she knows her
tongue fits perfectly, the serpent blood edging his grin is drying on
her lips – she screams, hisses, cackles until her lust no longer
rages for the Muggle, but sordidly, righteously, for her
brother.
In her mind, when she thinks on
herself, Merope sees Morfin staring back at her.
vii.
It is as Merope remembers her
reality of stale snakeskin and sweat that she understands. No one
will ever love her as beautifully as her family loathes her."Ain't
that the truth," Her brother drawls with smoothness, artfully
taking the edge of his knife to his breathing canvas.
"Yes." Merope admits, digging her fingernails into his shoulder and stifling a whimper with a hiss. "No."