Kore Revisited

No, he didn't hurt me, only once. When I was frightened, when he came when I was there alone. He took me away then, he made me go down inside.

- from A Child Bride, by Ursula K LeGuin

It is dark.

Dark and dark and dark, seeming endless with it. Dark ink, dark halls, dark thoughts pulling at her mind. She isn’t sure if they are her thoughts or not. They simply appear, unbidden.

Kill.

She wanders the halls aimlessly sometimes, hiding from her brothers, her friends, her love, her lover. (A flight of fancy that; she is too young to have a lover, and in all honesty she is not sure exactly what a lover does, beyond love her, but in all the stories Mum read to her, tall, dark and handsome lovers seem to figure prominently, and even though hers is only a diary, she likes the sound of it.)

Except sometimes it seems like she cannot hide from anyone, as though all of her thoughts and dreams and wants were plain to see, clear as words written on a page, no matter that the pages soak up the ink faster than it can dry, and he has promised to never reveal her secrets. Not to anyone. He cares for her, he listens to her, he soothes and saves and sympathizes with her, he is a saving grace.

Kill.

She is not sure when the thoughts begin, but she knows when she begins to realize they are not her own. A room full of flowers, clean, fresh dirt, leaves and roots and stems that yield to her touch as she drifts through the greenhouse - a new stop in her quest to find somewhere she can be completely alone. She fingers the irises, the narcissus and columbines, drifting her hands against the blossoms and delighting in the scent that clings to her hands, of fresh and clean and spring. She caresses a deep red rose with one fingertip, mindful of the thorns.

It withers under her touch.

She gasps and jumps back, snatches her hands away. She can feel now, in her fingers, the writhe of muscle, soft feathers and rough flesh as the bones snap in her hands. The whisper against her own soft flesh as resilient petals fade and dry. She does not know what is happening.

Kill.

She writes it all out for him, and although he is as kind as ever, as compassionate as ever, she begins to feel as though he is laughing at her somehow. It is more than she can bear, to sense the mockery behind his words, and in a fit of pique, she slips down to that empty, haunted loo on the first floor and throws her diary - lover - away. And there’s an end. She dries her hands and slips away and hopes that it is over.

Without her diary, she has no one to confide in, and the dark winter days slip by like pearls on a string, empty and lonely and cold. But the thoughts stop, the killing stops, the sensory memories of dry flowers and bones fade from her hands. She studies and laughs and does all the things girls are meant to do, even sends a silly valentine to her love, in the hopes it will make him laugh.

But it doesn’t make him laugh, it makes him flush and squirm and try to get away, and in the tumble of his books across the hallway and the blush across his cheeks, she sees it.

Him.

She shakes and flushes and comes short of breath, Malfoy's taunts all but unnoticed as she fades into her classroom with only one thought in her mind. She must get it back! The thought of him spilling all of her secrets to him makes her cringe and go pale with terror. There is no other way. She needs to get it back. It is not for her love to know all her secrets, it is not for him to tell her love what took so long for her to decipher. It is hers, he is hers, and she must get him back. She slips into the boys dormitory when they are all away, and ransacks the room in search of her diary, careless in her desperation. She finds it, and flees, leaving a mess but uncaring, wanting only to escape and hide the book somewhere no one will ever find it. She vows she will not write, only hide it away and never, ever look for it again, and maybe all of this horror will stop.

She swears she will not write, and she carries the diary with her while she searches for a good place to hide it. She doesn’t have the heart to destroy him outright - dark he might be, insidious his thoughts, but he is still hers. She cannot kill him that way. She simply will not write.

But the need is too great, and eventually she sits down, and dips her quill in thick black ink, and places pen to page. She has to know what he has told. And the sense of mockery is greater this time, the sense that her lover is not happy to find her familiar handwriting on the page, the sense that there are thoughts and wants and needs in her now that are not her own. But she cannot help herself; she has to know.

And it all begins again; the fading flowers, the soft feathers beneath her fingertips, the distraction and abstraction, the lost hours and the sense that her body is doing something that her mind cannot countenance. And more people are found, that Hufflepuff boy, and Nearly-Headless Nick, then Percy’s girlfriend and Hermione, and as the year creeps toward its close, her dread grows. She is afraid, not for herself but of herself.

Kill.

But she is a Gryffindor, brave of heart, so she girds herself for it and sits down by Ron, ready to tell the truth, to reveal her shame to the two people in the school she can bring herself to trust with this, horrible as it is. She is willing to risk ruining herself in his eyes, if it means that all this will stop. And when Percy interrupts, she flees back to the common room to sit in a chair and stare at the book that has become, not her salvation but her sin.

And when he calls her for the last time, she must go. There is no hope for it; she must go. Down into the dark, into the deep earth below the castle, below the dungeons. He is calling her, driving her, riding her down, and so she goes. Past the rocks and the skin and the stone snakes and the statue, into the Chamber with her book and her lover. She lies down at the feet of his lord as she is bid, and closes her eyes as she is bid, and this time his laughter is real. It echoes through the room like words made flesh, as though he had stepped from the pages of her diary into the dark.

Her eyes are so heavy, but his laugh makes her struggle against sleep, force them open a crack to see what he is laughing at. And he is there, he is real, he is bending over her with his lean face close to hers, older and handsome and oh, so cruel - laughing, laughing, laughing. He is hers. He is her.

He looks like Harry.

She will never write again.