A/N: This has been buzzing around all day, so I wrote it. Hope you laugh. :)
"Ah, hello. So kind of you to join me," the girl said, patting the chair next to the sofa where she sat. Her legs were crossed at the knee, and she rested a yellow legal pad and pen on top of them. Her fingers drummed on the papers' surface as she waited for her companion to seat himself.
"Will this take very long?" the young man said disdainfully. "I can't make a habit of these... interviews."
The girl took a moment to scribble something down on her pad of paper. "It'll take as long as you make it, sir." She tapped the pen against her lips. "Say, what should I call you? Tom? Mr. Riddle? Lord Voldemort? I would go with 'my Lord' but that would imply some form of allegiance, and obviously I can't be a follower since I'm just-"
"Shut up." Voldemort, aged twenty-five for the purposes of the interview, was not nearly as much of a loose canon as he was in the later years, but he still had a low tolerance for the annoying, the unnecessary, and the insipid, all of which the girl appeared to be.
"Sure," the girl replied easily, unaffected by the young dark lord's ire. "But you never did tell me what I'm to call you."
"'Sir' or 'my Lord' will suffice," Voldemort said, a slight sneer curling his lips.
The girl whipped her head back up, thrilled at the revelation, sending her black hair flying. "I can call you that? Really? This is great! Squee!" She realized what she had said, observed the look of unsettlement and disgust on Voldemort's face, and tried again. "Well, this is excellent. Shall we begin...my Lord?" This last was gotten out with a great deal of smiling and poorly contained giggling.
"I don't seem to have a choice." Voldemort pulled out a pocket watch and checked the time, wondering when the interview would end. It would be a long while yet before he would kill those who angered him in a fit of rage, but this girl was testing his limits already, and the interview hadn't even started.
"Oh, you're so funny!" the girl said lightly. "Okay. First question: Did you ever encounter a Minerva McGonagall while you were at school?"
"Yes," Voldemort said blandly. He raised an eyebrow when the girl squee'd again, rounding her shoulders and clenching her hands tightly with glee.
"Okay, great! Next question: Do you have any sort of history with her?" She tapped her pen against her full lips again, leaning forward in her seat.
A confused frown spread over Voldemort's aristocratic features. A few cries of "tell us! Tell us!" started up in the distance, and his eyes narrowed. "Is there a live audience watching this?" The girl nodded, her gaze unwavering. Voldemort shrugged. "Well. Does planning things in prefect meetings and the occasional patrol together count as a history? Oh, and I may have been in a couple of her classes."
"Yes! Yes it does," the girl said, more to the legal pad than to him as she frantically scribbled something else down. "Um.. what exactly did you...you know...plan?" Her eyebrows jumped up and down and she smiled mischievously.
"School events, who would do what patrols... trivial stuff," Voldemort answered tersely. "Are there any questions that aren't about McGonagall?"
"Subject...appears...hesitant...to discuss...his love interest..." the girl muttered slowly as the pen blazed back and forth across the lined pages again. "Right," she said, looking at him and smiling sweetly, "no, there aren't. I'll cut to the chase, since your time is valuable." She sat up, smoothing off her shirt. "Were you two completely in love?" The audience burst into cheers. The lights in the darkened room were suddenly turned on full force, and Voldemort beheld numerous teenage girls -and even a few boys- standing and whooping, wearing shirts or holding banners with poorly photoshopped images and poorer drawings of what he assumed to be him and McGonagall in what he took to be romantic poses. He wasn't quite sure; it wasn't very professionally done.
"No. I'm Lord Voldemort, and I don't love." He thought that might end the insanity. By now he had gathered that the whole point of this interview was to verify the girl's belief that something had happened between him and McGonagall during their time at school, and that it wouldn't end until there was an answer. He stood. "Since that answers your question -and invalidates any others you clearly were planning to ask- I'll just be going."
The girl leaped to her feet and pushed him back into his chair, a displeased frown on her face. "Nice try, my Lord. We're not through yet." She returned to her seat. "I have prepared a lengthy argument explaining the attraction between you and McGonagall, and once you hear it, you will have no choice but to agree with me and admit to the truth. I don't believe that you're truly a psychopath, my Lord. For J. K. Rowling to do that would be the same as justifying all your horrific deeds -those done and those yet to come- with the simple argument that you don't see right and wrong. That would be like saying you were evil from birth and therefore can't be blamed. And I don't believe that. You're not off the hook!" She turned to the crowd with a sweeping gesture, and it erupted in applause. She looked at Voldemort. "Well? Am I wrong?"
"You've gotten one thing right: I'm not a psychopath," Voldemort said, inclining his head towards her. "Well done, you aren't nearly as stupid as I had previously believed, not to mention you can speak in a rather coherent manner."
The girl blushed. "Oh, thank you," she said, thrilled at the compliment from the greatest Dark wizard of all time.
"Yes..." Voldemort continued. "I deliberately rationalize my doings based off of how they will serve my greater purpose. No, it isn't a psychopathic tendency, but rather an overdeveloped sense of selfishness, arrogance, and," he smiled in a self-satisfied manner- "frightening intelligence. But," he continued, "how this can tie in to your argument regarding McGonagall and myself, I can't imagine."
"Sit back and relax, my Lord," the girl said, dark brown eyes reduced to slits as she narrowed them, her grin slowly tugging the corners of her lips up. "I'm just getting started." She dug around in her purse, pulling out old receipts and lipgloss, a wallet with a Snape sticker plastered on it, a glasses case, and at last a tiny composition book, well-thumbed by the look of it. "Here we go," she announced, opening it and pointing to a page with a self-manicured fingernail. "I wrote it in essay format," she said to Voldemort and the audience apologetically, "but it's in casual English.. well, you'll understand. Oh, and I wrote 'Tom' instead of 'Voldemort' because it's hard to picture teenage you as Voldy..." And she began.
Tom would never initiate anything, I'm quite sure of that. But Minerva would, and here's why. Wouldn't Tom be the perfect challenge and experiment? Wouldn't the intellectual in her love to psychoanalyze the boy who came from such humble beginnings and quickly rose to prominence? Wouldn't the intellectual stimulation, the desire to beat him in classes I'm quite convinced they could have shared, resulted in not only constant acknowledgement of his own brightness, but an unquenchable urge to defeat him? We know she's a fair person. Wouldn't she feel immense respect toward someone of Tom's accomplishments? We know she delights in serious, deep discussions. Who knows what went on in the library -she and Tom each poring over their respective texts- couldn't there be hushed verbal sparring? And would Tom, the self-satisfied bastard that I adore, take her challenges without soundly defeating her? He would have to prove his points by winning. And as commonly happens, she would dwell on these altercations, these inevitable meetings, these inevitable collaborative efforts once she was Head Girl and he a sixth year prefect. She would dwell on them, and ultimately him, and in the muddle of her thoughts regarding these occasions, she would fancy herself intrigued. Ultimately she would come to like him from prolonged exposure, since Tom is an acquired taste, and ultimately she would come to be attracted to him.
I know it's been made clear by Rowling that Tom is incapable of feeling love. But he was still a teenage boy at the time, and therefore is not immune to feeling something. But the fact remains that Tom is not a stone like Rowling would like us to believe. More importantly, Tom is extremely perceptive, to his surroundings and to people's interactions. As I've already established, Minerva would bridge the gap between them initially, not actively pursuing him, but forging an interesting sort of bond instead. We know Dumbledore described Tom as solitary, alone and friendless, with no need to make friends, so Tom wouldn't see the need to befriend/seek out Minerva. However, his perception and intuition would make him fully aware of the numerous girls who I'm sure fancied him, so naturally, Tom would pick up on it once Minerva's benign interest turned into something more. Were she anyone else, he would ignore it. Since she is who she is, he would recognize the immense value she has: Beautiful, athletic, intelligent, witty, fun-loving, and sarcastic. She was very likely a match for him in academics and he would find her maddening and through this appealing. Tom strikes me as the type that would find a girl attractive if she proved herself by beating him -not all the time, just enough so that he's always on his toes to stay on top. Add to this Tom's sadistic love of manipulating people to his own ends. What's more valuable than someone who Dumbledore, bane of Tom's existence, trusts implicitly and cares deeply about? Case closed there as to why he'd pursue her once she expresses interest.
The differences between the two might also be endearing to him. She's fun-loving and affectionate, she can be stern and withdrawn but quirky and delightful to those who know her and those she loves (exhibit A: she blushed and giggled when Hagrid kissed her). She's his missing half, quite literally... actually, she's more like the missing circle in his Venn Diagram of two. Tom would be confused by his feelings for her and lie to himself about them, but know that he finds himself ultimately drawn to her, her brains, looks, gifts, and hidden vivacity.
The girl stopped reading. The cheers began again. Voldemort found it maddening, and raised a hand to speak, frowning. "But that- that completely skipped my point! My narcissism and general single-mindedness toward my goals prevented much thought on others from crossing my mind, unless there was a great deal of interaction with them-"
"But there WAS! You said there WAS! You admitted to classes and prefect meetings-"
"Which are by no means extensive!" Voldemort snapped. "I didn't see too much of her, all right? Yes, her conversation was good, but nothing extraordinary, and she didn't make enough of an impression on me for me to even consider manipulating her and making her a Death Eater! Why can't you understand-"
"NO! You had some form of relationship! You HAD TO! Why are you her boggart, then, hmmm?" The girl had flung her legal pad aside and was poking Voldemort in the chest with her pen. "Why does she get so uncomfortable when Dumbledore talks about you? Why does she-"
"You're clearly reading into little details to make the story realistic way too much!" Voldemort snapped. "You have way too much free time- why would you-"
"Okay." This girl sat down, folding her hands in her lap demurely.
"No, I'm not finished yet! You had that entire- that entire speech to explain your irrational theory about me, and I deserve a chance to-"
"I said okay, my Lord." The girl reached over and patted his hand. "Calm down. Clearly you're in denial about your feelings because you don't know what love is."
A vein pulsed in Voldemort's forehead. "WHAT?"
"Yes, you don't understand it because you see it as weakness, so when you feel it, you just think-"
"Listen," Voldemort interrupted. "You're right, I don't get love. I think it's something that the weak get themselves into. I also find it, magically speaking, to be a poor-"
"But you love Nagini!" the girl said triumphantly. "You whisper endearments to her, you speak to her sweetly, you treat her as you would a loved one." She raised her arms up, and the audience burst into applause again.
"Yes, but she's just a part of me. You just strengthened my 'I'm narcissistic' argument." The cheers died at once, and Voldemort smirked. "I just won."
"No! No, there has to be something!" the girl cried. "No, don't leave! I'm not finished yet!" she ordered as Voldemort stood and dusted himself off. She flung her arms around him, trying to force him back into his seat. "Wait! I'll bring McGonagall out, you two can talk-"
As if on cue, McGonagall entered. The shippers in the audience went wild. "Hello, everyone. Hello, Tom."
"Minerva. Charmed," he said in response. "Avada kedavra," he added casually, and the girl dropped to the floor, lifeless. "She had quite a grip," he commented. "So, did she try and convince you that we were madly in love during school?"
McGonagall shrugged. "Yes. I think to spite her corpse after all the hell we were put through, we should go get a drink. What do you say?"
Voldemort frowned. "Well, all right. But it's not-"
"-a date. No, of course not." McGonagall turned the girls face with her foot. "Poor thing. If she saw us now, she'd have died of happiness, not such a violent death."
"They're finishing each others' sentences!" screamed someone in the audience. A chorus of 'awwwww's followed.
"Let's go," McGonagall said, and they walked out of the studio with a more than respectable distance between them.
The girl popped up, a pink flush returning to her cheeks. "I win," she said triumphantly. "All they needed was somewhere to start."
FIN
A/N: I really did write an essay on the subject. It's 2500 words though, so message me if you REALLY want to read it. :P And I maintain that all they needed was a place to start for this ship to take off. JKR should have given us that place with Pottermore. But did she? Noooo. Don't forget to review!