Written. By Cassandra Claire

Written

By Cassandra Claire

She lies face down on the bed. He dips the quill in the ink before he climbs on top of her, straddling her waist, his hands on either side of her back, light, as if he is measuring the span of her skin, calculating what words will fit, where the letters will go. He touches her hair, not roughly but with an almost professional detachment, drawing it away from the nape of her neck, tracing the downy furrows behind her ears with his fingertips. He leans forward and the nib of the quill settles in the hollow of her spine, as he says, " This might take a little while. "

When she first began coming to his room at night he thought it must be a dream or a joke or perhaps a little of both. She came in so quietly, pushing his bedroom door open with her fingertips, and he sat up and stared at her, standing there in the doorway. She wore white pajamas and in the dim light they seemed to hang in the air, ghostly and untenanted. It was only when she came forward and sat on the bed that he saw her and recognized her: that red hair almost blood's precise color, the dark-lashed dark eyes, the unfortunate Weasley freckles. He had always thought she had an interesting little mouth. Her upper lip was thin but the lower one was full and marked as if she had just bitten it, although up close he could see that those marks were freckles too.

He had been rough with her that first night. Not knowing what he was doing, partly, and because he wanted to make sure. When she had come in he had thought, I am dreaming, and then wondered why he would dream her up, someone it had never occurred to him he might have wanted. She shivered as she sat on the end of the bed. It was always cold in the dungeon rooms: cold stone breeds cold hearts, as his father would have said. Despite the cold, Ginny slipped her pajama top over her head and then shook her hair out and down over her naked breasts and shivering skin, looking at him. Where her freckles ended her bare skin was the bluish color of skimmed milk.

" I have to be back in an hour, " she said, as if they had had some sort of predetermined assignation which, he was fairly sure, they hadn't. He would have remembered something like that. " Or they'll look for me. "

He told himself later that he had been quick because she had wanted him to be, but in fact he had been terribly excited as well as terribly worried that at any moment he might wake up. He felt as if he were racing the leading edge of wakefulness, his heart pounding; he drew her under him and was on her and inside her in seconds, burying his face in her shoulder, grabbing handfuls of her hair. He was far too excited to kiss her and in fact it didn't occur to him until later that kissing her might have been a plausible extension of what they were doing. The end, when it came, was like the onset of a malarial chill: he collapsed on top of her, shaking down to his bones, drenched in cold sweat.

" Thank you, Draco, " she said, and sat up, pushing him gently off her. She retrieved her pajamas and left as noiselessly as she had come, leaving him staring after her in a sudden welter of bewildered fear. Perhaps this was some sort of trap?

For the rest of that night he did not sleep and the next day at breakfast he sought her out, staring across the room at the Gryffindor table. At first he thought she was not there. It was only when breakfast was nearly over that he realized she had been there the entire time, sitting next to Potter, only he had not recognized her, she seemed so ordinary, so nondescript, with her neat hair twisted into braids and her dark school robes.

When she rose from the table, she looked across the room and right through him as if he were invisible. She stumbled a little, getting up, and steadied herself on Potter's arm.

She didn't come back that night but she did come back the night after that. She wore the same white pajamas and again she came and knelt on the end of his bed and took off her clothes and sat there patiently in just her long hair and her white lace knickers with the blue bows on either side, looking at him. There was no expectancy in her gaze, only a sort of disinterested curiosity, as if she wondered what on earth he might do next, as if he actually had some sort of choice in the matter. She wore a gold chain around her throat and when he pulled her over and into his lap he saw that the charm on the end of it was shaped like a small gold quill.

The next day he saw her in the hallway, her arms full of books, looking at the assignment list pinned up on the wall outside Potions class. Her hair was knotted up at the back of her head with a quill thrust through it and there were ink spots on her white cuffs. He walked up to her and knocked the books out of her hands with a clatter. When she turned and looked at him he grinned at her nastily and she looked mildly surprised, as if she had caught Crabbe and Goyle reading French love poetry to one another under the Fluttering Ferns. Then she turned around and walked away, leaving her books in a heap at his feet.

That night when she came back he was waiting for her. He met her halfway across the room and caught her arm. " I didn't pick up your books, " he hissed in her ear, shoving her back against the wall next to the dressing table. " I left them there. "

" I know. " She looked up at him, blank and calm. " Harry got them for me. "

A little shiver of memory and hatred went through him at that and he almost turned her loose, but that would have seemed like losing. He pushed her up against the wall instead and had her that way, her legs locked around his waist, heels against the small of his back. " You'll fall down when you come, " she said to him in a small, assured voice, and she was right. His knees buckled and he nearly dropped her. She didn't seem bothered. He assumed she hadn't been, because she came back again the next night, and the next night, and the next.

He guessed that she came every night that nothing happened to prevent her, although he couldn't be sure, as she never answered any of his questions and never acknowledged his presence in the halls. In fact, she barely spoke and made no noise during sex, no matter what he did, how he kissed her, how he varied the way he touched her, if he went slow or fast, if he spoke to her or if he didn't. Sometimes he held her so hard he knew there would be bruises later, and he searched for them during daylight hours with a fierce intent sort of appetite, but there was never anything there. He began to be sure that he was dreaming the whole thing, or that there were two of her, and both of them hated him.

It was her necklace that solved the problem in the end. One night she had arrived so late that he had nearly been asleep; she had crawled into the bed beside him and picked up his hands, sliding them up under her shirt. He was careless and messy this time, too tired to hold back, and at the ultimate moment he bit her shoulder, hard. When he let her go and fell back, she frowned. " I do wish you wouldn't mark me, " she said, she said, tracing a thin fingertip over the half-circle indentation and he thought what it would be like to see that mark on her during the day and to know. " It's such trouble to charm them off, " she said, and lay down with the pillow across her breasts, the gold charm gleaming in the hollow of her throat. He felt a faint unlocalized resentment, knowing he wanted to ask her to leave it, but that he wouldn't; it was a lover's mark, but they weren't lovers. The closest he had ever come to asking her for anything was not asking her to leave him alone.

When she fell asleep, he took his quill and wrote on the back of her freckled shoulder, his own signature, scribbled and probably illegible. He didn't quite understand the impulse that made him do it but Draco had been taught that his own whims were law, so that hardly mattered. He wrote just the surname, Malfoy, as if he were signing something he'd made. Ink got on his hands and he put his fingers in his mouth, sucking the ink away, nearly choking on the bittersweet acidic taste of it.

In the morning, when he woke up, she was gone, and there was a smear of ink on his pillow. He looked for her in the hallways again, and found her just before Arithmancy class, standing with a group of other girls near the statue of the humpbacked witch. The strap of her bag covered her shoulder, but when he walked by, he saw her look up and over at him, blinking, and he saw recognition in her eyes. The other girls stared.

When she got to his room that night she seemed agitated, working her hands together as she stood in front of the bed. " You wrote on me, " she said. " How did you know to do that? "

" I don't know, " he said.

" I used to write on myself, " she said. " During class, and at night. I don't have a diary, so sometimes I forget things, if I don't write them down - to remind myself. "

" Maybe you should get a diary, then. "

" I'm not allowed one, " she said.

He didn't ask her why. This was the most they'd ever said to each other. " I have more ink, " he said.

She always undid her hair when she was naked, and undone it fell to her waist, patterning her white skin with a thousand hairline fissures. When she knelt at his feet she twisted her loose hair into a rope and pulled it forward so that it shawled down over her breasts. She put her hands on his hips, her mouth moving over him as he leaned down over her and wrote on the naked skin of her back with the black raven feather quill his father had given him.

Confusion and arousal made his hands shake. In the end, all he could think of was his Potions homework, and he wrote the ingredients on her, dragon's blood along the wingtip of her shoulder blade, vert and asphodel on her waist, belladonna along her spine, looping and curling the letters, taking as long as he could. He thought his stamina must have increased in the past weeks because this time when he came he did not fall down, although he did drop the quill and dent the nib of it, possibly beyond repair.

" I'll get you another quill, " she said, " if you like, " she said, and stood up and went naked over to the mirror above his dressing-table and twisted around and looked over her shoulder at herself, her arms above her head, lifting her hair away. " You have beautiful handwriting, " she said, " although, I suppose, that's to be expected. " She let her hair fall down then, covering what he had done. " Next time you'll write what I want you to write, " she said.

" I write what I like, " he said.

She smiled faintly. " Potions homework? " she said, and her tone was contemptuous.

When he saw her in the halls the next day she had her hair up, as usual, and because of that, when he passed her, he could see where the ink had rubbed itself off against the inside of her white shirt collar. It was as if he was looking at the bite marks he had left on her breasts, the faint fingertip bruises on the inside of her thighs, and he felt it like the spike of a fever. He was vaguely aware of Potter turning and looking at him, " Is there a problem, Malfoy? "

" I was just, " Draco said, looking past him at Ginny, " trying to remember the ingredients in our Potions homework. "

" Well, do it elsewhere, " said Potter, and weeks ago this would have been enough to send Draco into an hour-long transcendent sulk over how much he hated Harry Potter and everything do to with him, but now it didn't seem that important. He certainly knew something Potter didn't know, which was a nice change of pace at any rate.

When she came that night she seemed cross at first. " You shouldn't stare at me in the hallway, " she said. " It upsets Harry. "

She was wearing a nightgown this time, made of thin blue batiste with pink smocking, and there were ribbons on the end of her braids. " And it wouldn't upset him if he knew I was fucking his girlfriend every night? " he said, with more curiosity than rancor, undoing the buttons that held the straps of the nightgown up. They were tiny and he had to work at them with his fingernails.

" That ink ruined my pajamas, " she said. The nightgown fell away and she was naked in front of him. The words he had inked on her the night before were not quite gone; they remained on her skin, faint as the ghosts of old bruises. " And Harry's not my boyfriend. I hope that doesn't wreck some fantasy of yours. "

" I'm not bothered about his love life, " Draco said. He drew her down with him onto the floor where he had left his quill and ink bottle; he pulled her onto his lap and kissed her breasts and stomach while she tugged the ribbons out of her hair and let it fall around them both in strands of damp and static silk. She bit on his hand when he came inside her and she wanted to move but he wouldn't let her, even though the tension of stillness made his hands shake. He almost dropped the quill into the ink bottle, and it bled red-black drops on him when he lifted it. She locked her hands behind his head and shivered as he wrote on her, mapping her skin with words, the first words that came into his head. Gryffindor, he wrote, and Slytherin, and a time when and once there was. He stopped only when he ran out of space to write; he dropped the quill and let her move, she came almost instantly, and so did he, partially out of astonishment: he had never seen her so excited.

They fell back on the floor and he held her while her shivers faded; she smelled of sex and sweat and ink and paper, as if she were a page of pornography come to life. The thought made him grin into her shoulder, soundlessly amused. When she could breathe, she said, " We've knocked the ink bottle over. "

" I can get more ink, " he said. " And next time, you can write on me. "

She sat up as if he had smacked her, and drew away from him. " No, " she said. " I won't do that. "

" Why not? "

" I won't write on other people, " she said. " I'm afraid. "

" That's ridiculous, " he said.

" I won't do it, " she said, and retrieved her nightgown and left, leaving him sitting on the floor with his quill and ink all over him. He had used red ink but in the dimness, like blood, it looked black. The words he had written on her had rubbed off on him when he'd held her, a reversed copy, back to front. He had to read them in the mirror, having forgotten what it was he'd written, Once there was a girl.

The next day he could not find her in the halls, or the day after that, and when he did see her again, several days later, she did not look at him at all. She was with Potter; there was nothing he could do, and nothing he could think of to do even if she weren't. Her hands were scrubbed clean and her neck and her eyes when they passed over him were blank. He went down to his room after that, and kicked the ink bottle against the wall, but later, just in case, he took another one from his desk in Potions class and brought it down to the dungeon.

When she came that night he was sitting on the floor, holding the ink bottle up to the light. He saw her first through it, a wavering dim shape, tinted faintly blue. When he lowered the bottle he saw that she was standing in the middle of the room, her hand twisted in the chain around her throat. " I read what you wrote, " she said, " what you wrote on me - is that really what you think? Is that what you think I'm like, what my life is like? "

" I don't know what your life is like, " he said. " You never told me. It was just a story. "

" But that girl, " she said. " She was me. Or was she another girl you know? "

" You're the only girl I've ever really known, " he said. This was true. His father had not encouraged him to befriend girls or to know them, and sleeping with them was not particularly encouraged either as it could cause unpleasant sorts of scandal, although such things were Never Discussed, so Draco was not entirely sure what his father was worried about; it wasn't as if he didn't know about contraceptive charms. " It was a story, " he said again.

She took another step into the room, and another, and then knelt down next to him, and took the ink bottle out of his hand. She put it down on the bed, her eyes on him. " Maybe I want to know what happens, " she said. " In the story. "

He looked at her. He could see himself reflected in the pupils of her eyes as if she held an image of him there, trapped inside her head. " Why me? " he said. " Why me in the first place? "

" Why not you? " she said. She had begun to undo her pajama top; he knew this gesture of hers so well now, knew how many buttons there were and that she always fumbled the third one. " You can guess why you, can't you? "

" I'd guess wrong, " he said. " It wouldn't be the truth. "

She shrugged the pajama top off and folded it, put it behind her and turned her back on him. " No, " she said. " It would be a story. " She looked back over her shoulder at him, and he thought he saw her smile through the fine net of her hair. " Tell it to me, " she said.

He picked up the quill from the pillow, smoothed its feathers with his hand. " Lie down, then, " he said, and when she did, her face on her crossed arms, he thought of the way she had walked past him in the hall all those days, not looking at him, saying nothing, and all the words he had wanted to say and hadn't said. Every insult he'd ever wanted to shout at Potter, every question he'd wanted to ask his father and been too afraid to do it. All those words he'd swallowed down all his life, and where did they all go? He'd thought he'd lost them forever but perhaps not; perhaps they had been waiting -- as he had waited for her, as she, he now knew, had waited for him.

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