Hi! Another Tom/Minerva story, I so do love this pairing. This has been written as a response to the challenge "Of Weathers and Characteristics" by "I promise you that". My prompts were "thunder and spring sunshine, overwhelmed and repentant" and I hope I did them justice.
Please tell me your thoughts, reviews brighten my days up and bring a smile to my face :)!
Sachita :)
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is owned by J.K. Rowling. No copyright infringement intended.
A Spring Storm
Aube, Champagne-Ardenne, France, Spring 1946
The swirling liquid in the elegant long-necked glass was as red as blood.
Tom held the glass in his hand, unmoving, statuesque, and stared into its crimson depths. He could make out the contours of his hand that held the glass through the wine and he watched, mesmerised, turning the glass just so and so that it seemed as if his entire hand was bathed in red.
Blood-red.
It ran over his calloused fingertips that pressed white against the glass, followed the pale lines of his long fingers and gathered in the unique lines of his palm at the bottom of the glass.
Tom positioned the glass so he held it only in his fingertips then, tilting it a little, wondering how a stain of such dark red would look on the white marble tiles...
"Tom?"
He took a firm hold of the glass.
"Minerva," he replied in measured tones, setting the glass back on the white table in front of him.
Only then did he look up at her.
The pale light of early morning spring sunshine through the eastern window outlined the contours of her figure sharply.
It was a clear, sharp, greenish kind of light that showed each imperfection to perfection.
Tom looked predatorily up at her, ran his hungry look over her long pale legs, stopping for a moment at the circular mole on her right knee that he knew intimately, before travelling farther upwards to capture her shapely form that was just barely visible through the white shirt she wore. One of his shirts.
Minerva's eyebrows were raised as she gazed at him with a half-indignant, half-indulgent look from those clear green eyes of hers. Eyes that seemed even greener in this greenish light of early spring.
Slytherin eyes.
Avada-Kedavra-eyes and how fitting, Tom mused, for he knew how deadly her glares could be at times.
"Minerva," he repeated, slightly overwhelmed, grasping again at the stern of the glass to cover his reaction up.
She approached, embraced him and covered him with her long curtain of black hair. Tom closed his eyes and lost himself in the rich scent it carried for just a minute; lilacs and honeydew and something so uniquely Minerva that he couldn't have named it.
Minerva stayed like that for long time though and as Tom reached up to touch her face his fingers came away wet.
"Why are you crying?"
"A letter came," Minerva mumbled into his hair, her voice faint as if heard through the roar of waves crashing onto a shore. Blood was pounding in Tom's ears while hot fury rose up in him. Unconsciously he clenched his fists, interrupting hotly: "From Dumbledore?"
Her silence was confirmation enough.
Tom took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. "What does it say?," he asked eventually, calmer.
Minerva still didn't reply, but started to sob, tiny eruptions that shuddered through her and by extension also him, who was still caught in her embrace.
"What did he do?" Tom inquired dangerously, holding her closer, furious at the thought that the old man dared to make his Minerva cry.
"It's not him," Minerva choked out finally, "it's you."
Forcefully, she pushed him away and recoiled a few steps. Tom watched her with hooded eyes, feeling the loss of her warmth in his arms. Unconsciously, he crossed them.
"It was about you," Minerva stated, looking at him firmly. "He said horrible things..."
The Basilisk, that girl's death, the death of those despicable Muggles who had dared to claim being related to him up to Billy Stubbs's rabbit he'd hung in the Orphanage as a child shot through him with all the force of a bucket filled with icy water to the face but Tom kept his cool.
"Yes?" he said condescendingly.
"He said that he knows you are involved in the death of Myrtle," Minerva said, her voice trembling like a grass stalk in a harsh breeze. "He asked me to come back to Hogwarts and take on the position of Transfiguration Teacher..." her voice broke.
"Well, he is wrong," Tom uttered coolly, his voice without inflection. "He hated me the moment I stepped into that school, you know that."
"Do you promise?," she asked, desperately. "Do you promise that you haven't done any of things he accuses you of? I know how you talk about Muggles sometimes."
With a start, Tom was on his feet, enveloping her in a warm embrace, pouring all the assurance he didn't feel in his voice. "I promise, Minerva."
For a moment he remembered a young boy, an orphan, and the acute feeling of never having anything that truly belonged him and that ache, oh that ache, that never-ending feeling of loss and never having anything he could trust in...well, he vowed, Dumbledore wasn't going to take her away from him!
No-one would ever take her away from him!
A sudden clap of thunder from outside made them look up and releasing Minerva, Tom stepped out of the door on to the terrace as if in a trance. The sky over the Champagne, France, was filled with quickly-moving angry storm clouds. Nothing suggested that there had been innocent spring sunshine just a quarter of an hour ago.
Bolts of lightning nearly tore the sky apart and a fierce wind tore at Tom's black hair. It started to rain then, sparkling, glittering missiles that were hurled from the sky to cling to his hair, his clothes, his face...He had always loved storms.
They seemed to define his entire being on some days.
He'd press his nose against the dirty window panes as a child, watching as violent storms tore across London's skies. And while the other children would huddle in fright in their rooms, Tom would open the window, with the lightning bolts reflected in his eyes and he'd laugh...
His hair plastered wetly to his forehead on this French spring forenoon, he threw his head back and laughed softly. Minerva was watching him in amazement from the opened door.
"Minerva," he said again and held out a hand. "Come here."
She obeyed then and he took her by the hand. "Look at the rain. Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?"
The raindrops were dancing on the roof of their little holiday chalet to the rythm of a soft pit-pat-pit-pat staccato, the spring storm was raging and adorning bushes, trees and window panes with glittering wetness and lightning formed intricate shapes across the sky, like the works of a surrealistic painter, while the ensuing claps of thunder seeemed like the applause of enthusiastic art lovers.
And amidst all that, Tom Riddle was kissing Minerva McGonagall with an unsurpassed passion, marking her as his, vowing in that breathless moment that he'd never let her go...
Time didn't wait for anyone though. Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months, months turned to years and years turned to decades...
Albus Dumbledore had once asked Minerva McGonagall whether she felt sorry for having loved Tom Riddle.
"Having loved?" she'd replied with a bitter little smile. "It's never been having loved, Albus, it's loving, and that is what I brought upon myself."
He had never attempted to comfort her and she had been grateful to him for that.
Then, more than fifty years after that stormy spring in France, Minerva stood, wearied, her composure frazzled and her heart heavy, as she gazed upon the destruction the man she loved had brought to the castle they had both loved with all their hearts.
She turned away from the destruction, at an impasse.
There was anger for the monster he had become inside of her, sorrow for all the victims that had died in this senseless war, pain at the lies he had told her and an immeasurable amount of weariness.
Her heart hadn't been hers to keep for a long time and she watched stoically how it was buried on an unfriendly May afternoon with only her to mourn its passing, for no one came to mourn the man it was buried with save for her.
"Tom Riddle" the headstone read. She had fought them for this and many had looked at her oddly, but they had asquiesced in the end, passing it off as the odd mood of an old Lady who was too philanthrophic for her own good.
Tom had hated his name, but it was the name of the man who held her heart and she felt it fitting that if her heart was buried with him, the headstone carried at least the name of the man who had stolen it from her.
A spring storm was brewing over the Scottish Highlands on that day and she inhaled the familiar scent of wet meadows and cool, fresh air.
"Do I regret that I loved him, Albus?" she whispered, closing her eyes. "No."
For true love knows no repentance.
And Minerva McGonagall never felt repentant for loving one Tom Riddle.
Fin