"Ruin," Tom/Minerva, PG-13 Title: Ruin Author:kethlenda Characters/Pairing: Tom/Minerva Summary: "There's a prophecy: a black-haired queen to rule beside me." Rating: PG-13 Warning(s): none Originally Written: 2/06 Notes: Written for absinthe_lust for her birthday and betaed by sionnain; this is another one of my favorites among my own stuff.
Her feet were as quiet as cat's paws in the softly drifting snow, and the bitter wind whipped strands of her hair loose from her tight bun and against her chapped cheeks.
He always liked my hair, she remembered, thinking of another snowy day and a pale boy unplaiting her tresses, the pleasure-pain in her scalp as the tension uncoiled. Face pressed to chill stone walls, sensible tartan skirt rucked up above her waist, and long cold fingers.
No. Forget.
She had come out onto the grounds to escape the thoughts that ran riot in her mind, made her feel she didn't fit in her skin, didn't fit in the confines of the castle. Or was it Tom who didn't fit, had never fit, in her world?
"Young Tom Riddle has an appointment with me today," Albus had said. Young Tom Riddle. Were any of them young, now? Minerva no longer felt young, weighed down by worries and secrets and sensible shoes and hair pulled back tight and unforgiving. No, no longer young; I've become someone's maiden aunt. Cat lady.
She walked on, letting the elements batter her, letting thoughts drift from her mind. It was a world of grey and white today, dim sky not-day not-night above her, air thick with swirling snow, an endless blanket, an endless blank, at her feet. She turned to look back at Hogwarts, iced like a wedding cake. It blazed with a thousand golden beacons, twinned in the frozen mirror of the lake, and she wondered if he had gone yet. Until he had, the castle's welcoming aspect would be only a trick of the light.
"Do you know what a Muggle sees, if he stumbles upon our little castle?"
Tom's voice. It was too high somehow, strangely wrong, yet she knew it, knew its accent and its slight sibilance and that indefinable quality that made her think of the wind through icicles. She did not turn to face him.
"A ruin," he said.
Minerva knew this, had read it in Hogwarts: A History, but she always hated thinking of it. There was always an inverse to that knowledge, the thought that maybe the castle itself was the illusion, that her whole life would turn to twigs and leaves like fairy gold if she looked at it too closely.
"Sometimes I think the Muggles, for all their inferiority, see it more clearly than we," he said. As if he'd read her mind.
Of course he had.
"It all falls away," he said, and in his voice Minerva heard screams, saw the lighted windows blaze brighter for a moment before going blind and dark and sootstained, saw the Great Hall laid open to the skies in truth. "All these mortal things."
"It'll be standing when both of us are gone," she said, praying she was right.
"Not me," he said.
She looked at him for the first time since he'd come upon her, for the first time in so many years. His face made her cry out, bring a hand to her lips. "What…what have you done, Tom?"
He smiled, a horrible thing to see in that waxy, sunken face. "Come now, Minerva. You know your mythology. I am merely burning away the mortal chaff. Didn't I always say I would become more than a man?"
"Less," she whispered.
"You could share it with me," he said. "There's a prophecy: a black-haired queen to rule beside me."
"No need to blush like that, Minerva. I'm not speaking of those disgusting carnal things. I'm beyond such human pleasures."
She felt her cheeks burn hotter, wanted to slap the smirk from his face. There was a wetness in the corners of her eyes, and she told herself it was just the wind.
He waved his arm at the school. "I will be the god to whom those fools pray. What'll it be, girl? Will you be my goddess?"
"No." Always, always, a thousand times, no.
He shrugged with a maddening nonchalance, and walked away into the falling snow.
No longer young, maiden aunt, and the only man I could have loved has made himself a monster.
She trudged back up to the castle, knowing its warm candleglow welcomed her now. Home, and ordinary days stretching on, not to eternity, but to the end of her life. It was not so bad, as destinies went.