i.
When she dreams, he tastes of sin. Spice and silk and sacrilege.

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 him. Empty dreams of a teenage idiot, she knows, only the aching obsession of a slut with nothing more to lose, longing for something worth the loss.

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...

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.
In her mind, when she thinks on herself, Merope sees Morfin staring back at her.

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.

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."