Cold Embrace

We lie in bed together, entangled in rumpled sheets and each other. His head rests on the bare, soft skin of my stomach, and he dozes with a smile, blissfully unaware of anything but our deep, rhythmic breathing. My fingers comb through his tangled obsidian tresses gently and methodically, exercising an uncharacteristic restraint.

I don't want to caress him. Pretend to love him. Linger in his cold embrace. I want to rip his hair out. I want to kill him - annoying, interfering, unsatisfying hero that he is. And I want her to watch. I want that bitch to suffer unendingly until I put her out of her misery.

Show her to take away what's rightfully mine.

The thought of him - mine - is enough to make my hands jerk. He whimpers slightly in his sleep. I grin openly. No one can see, after all. What they don't know won't hurt them.

Until it decides to.

After all, they deserve to suffer. Without them, I would have him. But they changed him. He's different. He doesn't look at me the same way now. He loves me, all right, but only distantly, like a concept he favours. He loves them more. And his eyes...they burn for her, and her only, the way they used to burn for me. She stole it away, the flame, and now everything in my life is cold. So cold.

No one notices how cold it is. Even him. I think he likes to believe that it's warm here, blazing even, with the hands of my own tragic hero crawling on my skin. Didn't he remember how I used to play? How I used to pretend to want this boy, this Potter? I did it just to see that fire in his eyes. Now, the light no longer shines on me, and in the darkness, he can't see that this isn't truth. No. I'm still playing.

He used to play with me, too, but he wouldn't use his words or his guiles. Instead, his hands would play across my skin as if it were an instrument, and he a musician. He knew the song as if he'd practiced it a thousand times, and I think he loved as much as I did the violent crescendos and longing releases his instrument would give him. I thought so, anyway. Now I lie alone, unused and silent. I think he would remember the notes, though, if only he tried. I would help him. I still know the words, and I will always sing for him alone, no matter how the lyrics change.

I wonder if he plays her so skilfully. Maybe he fumbles awkwardly, makes her believe that he's never even tried. Yes, that would be the way of it. Better that than have to admit where he'd learned the tune; tell them whom he'd practiced on. That would change it all.

I know I do the same. I pretend that I don't know the dance; I fumble, and I act shy, and I try to be surprised and awed by the newness of every step. It doesn't stop me from performing it all with perfect grace. He doesn't notice; it's not as if he can compare to some other. For that, I'm grateful. He's dull enough, not yet noticing the cold when it's been everything but coursing through his veins; but I know that his inexperience is the reason that I keep him in the dark. I'm his first everything. And I will be his last, and only everything.

Anything to get me to the fire.

Even if it burns me.

He stirs, and my cool composure rushes back to my face. All true emotion leaves my eyes and lips to dwell in a cramped place in my soul, where it aches and throbs for freedom. Now, I adorn my visage only with practiced reactions.

"Ginny," he murmurs, and presses his lips to mine.

My lips respond in kind, simulating affection and passion on his mouth, which should be blistering hot, but I find only frigid.

And though my mouth murmurs his name, somewhere in that cramped soul of mine there's a different word I hear.

Ron.