Bleed

Bleed

She knew much more than 16-year-old girls were supposed to know. I could see it in her eyes.

Maybe that was what triggered my strange attraction to her. That that same emotion lingered in my eyes, too. I had seen things no one should see.

And so I watched her. I watched her tattoo her wrists and her mind with hot red scarlet lines made from a knife, and I was more conscious than ever of the same beautiful, terrible patterns on my own wrists. I watched her dye her hair the blackest black and paint her eyes midnight. I watched her cry when she thought no one else was looking - hot coarse streaks on her hot coarse cheeks.

And I loved her for it. Because she was just like me.

I had no doubt that the Dark Lord raped her in her First Year. He lived for forcing women on him. It was revolting, despicable, and I hated to think she had to go through with that.

It was late at night when I came upon her in some corridor on the second floor, cutting herself. I could see the tears glistening on her cheeks.

Her back was facing me, so I crept up behind her, watching the silver of the knife glint invitingly in the moonlight. I stood for a while smelling her hair and saying that same line over and over in my head before I finally said it out loud.

"I know he raped you, Ginny."

Slowly, she turned, gripping her knife tighter in her hand.

When she finally met my gaze, her eyes were calm and ready, despite the tears threatening to break free with another word. "No one's called met that in a long time," she whispered.

I frowned. "What - 'Ginny?'"

She nodded, looking down at her bleeding arm.

I took a step closer to her. "Then what do they call you?"

She smiled then, mocking and false. "Slut, Whore, Bitch - whatever you like." And then she laughed harshly, the sound foreign and somehow twisted.

I shook my head, touching her hair hesitantly with my hand. She didn't even flinch - just looked back steadily into my eyes.

"Why black?" I whispered, fingering the smooth locks, even though I knew the answer.

"Because it hides everything," she replied, just as calm. I saw right through that.

"No." I pushed up my sleeve, then, and held my scarred arm up to her own. "Not everything."

Ginny stared down at my arm, like it was an object foreign to her.

And slowly, haltingly, she touched the scars on my arm, tracing the angry red lines. She looked back up at me, her eyes questioning. "But why did you -"

"Because I have things I want to forget, too."

I was inches away from her face, then, looking her straight in the eye.

I pulled her bleeding arm towards me then, my fingers instantly covered with her blood.

I put my lips to her ear and whispered, "We bleed to forget."

Slowly, I took the knife she held out of her hand and cut my own hand with it, pressing my now bleeding hand into her own.

Ginny let out a breath as she felt my blood in hers, warm and wet and right, and I kissed her before she could say a word, cupping my free hand underneath her hair on her cool neck, and our blood and our memories dripped to the floor.

-End-