inspired by and dedicated to ffnet user xxlilmusicxx. her story Riddle Me This is so so so so good and acts hugely as my muse for this. when i first developed the huge urge to write fanfiction for her fanfiction—god it's so good—i asked her if this was okay and when she said yes i was SHAKEN and ofc very pleased so if you think this is good go read Riddle Me This too! for this fic, the basics go like this: Marilyn Potter is the girl-who-lived and she loses the war and dies ): only she doesn't. thanks for reading!
sNAke
The war doesn't go the way she expects it to.
It isn't like Marilyn thought for sure she was going to win. That sounds both stupid and self-assured and she's never been either. It's a war that started decades ago, that started before her birth and burned angry even in the cold of the night her parents were killed. This war is larger than her. She never presumed herself important enough to end it. She always knew it was more complicated than that. Good and evil aren't black and white and the side of light doesn't always win and sometimes things don't work out and it all goes to shit and sometimes you fuck up.
Sometimes you lose. Sometimes, the war is louder and the enemy is angrier and sometimes, you lose.
Marilyn always knew that. She's no fool.
She never pretended to know what she's doing. Voldemort has had years to perfect his spellwork, and Marilyn can barely cast a head bludgeoning curse. She knew the odds were against her.
Still, with blood on her face and Neville's body pressed against her legs; with curses exploding mid-air and stone crumpling off the Hogwart's walls as though pulled; with the smell of something like a corpse brushing against her face and her bones cracked under her skin; with the air cloudy from dust and the ground itself shaking from the assault—still. She didn't think it would be like this. She can't think at all under the weight of her own failure and it is her failure. The war is bigger than her but Dumbledore told her she was destined to defeat Voldemort. He told her he believed in her. He told her things that made her believe her best would be enough. He told her she could do it and she can't.
Voldemort is attacking magical Britain. He is winning. Marilyn is in the wreckage of Hogwarts, with the bodies of her friends littering the dirt. Her hair is sticky with blood. She runs a hand down her side, feels something sharp lodged into the skin there. Every move of her lungs brings a sharp sting. Her head hurts.
It's hilarious. Neville is dead against her, but her head hurts.
She can't think past the noises bouncing aerial across her skull. There's something in the distance, just beyond Hogwarts and its broken walls. It must be the army, she thinks distantly, rolling back around to ensure Hogwarts fell. Marilyn finds she cannot manage the will to move.
Luckily, it seems she doesn't have to. It only takes several minutes for Minerva to rip Marilyn's half-dead Girl-Who-Lived ass from the dirt. She can barely walk, and she stumbles against the professor's side. "McGonagall," she slurs, Neville's blood staining her bare legs. Her Hogwarts uniform—with the skirt and grey sweater vest and white dress shirt but it isn't white anymore—has never been practical for battle.
McGonagall is strangely beautiful in the dull lighting. She looks like a goddess, like the Roman goddess of wild, Diana. Her image is one easily consumed, burned into memory. There's blood on her face and a wisp of hair that's escaped from her bun. She looks pale and sallow and her eyes are made from stone. Marilyn can't see straight; one of her eyes has been blinded by either blood or a stray curse, and her balance is wrecked. But she has to keep this forever. Marilyn doesn't know what sticks after death but she wants to keep this forever.
This is her fault. She has to remember them.
"I'm sorry," Marilyn manages. They've been making their way across the dirty grass, stepping delicately over rubble and stray body parts. Marilyn faintly feels the urge to throw up, and McGonagall's arm around her is tight with tension. "That we didn't win."
Minerva's body shakes. "Be quiet," she orders lowly, harsh. "We haven't lost yet."
Marilyn stumbles across stone—a staircase, edging downward into darkness. Marilyn squints. Runes glow along the walls, but she can't find it in herself to decipher them. There's a hand against her back. She no longer remembers who it belongs to.
Her name is Marilyn Lily Potter. She knows this the way she knows her own skin—the way she knows the feeling of her magic itching against her bones.
She is so tired. She's so tired. Marilyn's feet trip over themselves and she topples into cold stone, cheek pressed to it and her legs unable to support her. Someone maneuvers her to her back, her limbs spread out over what seems to be a table, her head lolling and her hair sticky on her face. It feels she has spent so, so long trying to survive. There have been so many obstacles, so much to force her way through. It has been so difficult to live. She can't remember what she was doing it for. The table is so hard; her back aches. She stretches her hands out, curls her nails into the surface. Not metal—not an operating table. Not wood—not a dinner table.
No, Marilyn realizes. Not a table. An altar.
She is too exhausted to be afraid.
"If the ritual succeeds," someone murmurs, "then you can save us yet."
That always seems to be Marilyn's job, always seems to be her responsibility. Haven't they realized she can't do it? Isn't it obvious she can't do it? Don't they know she could never do it? She's failed. It's over. She can't save them.
"I need you to think about Voldemort," a different voice tells her. Don't say his name. There's some kind of scratching noise—she can't place it. It's a tiny grating static growing louder. "I need you to say his name." The scratching intensifies, gets even louder, and still she can't place it. A radio, maybe, or her own nails scraping against the stone she's supine against.
Don't say his name.
Scratch scratch scratch. It's rhythmic.
No, Marilyn realizes. Not a scratching. A hissing.
There is a snake in the room.
"Marilyn, please. I need you to say his name," someone urges. The hissing is closer to her, with a backdrop of something outside crumpling. The world is falling apart around her and a snake continues to hiss. She can hear it, now, can understand the words and they float over her, gather under her eyelids. Marilyn can feel the letters smudging on her skin. She would hold them in her hands if only she could move.
"Voldemort," the snake is hissing. "Voldemort, Marilyn. His name is Voldemort. Say it!"
"Tom Riddle," Marilyn rasps. Don't say his name! His face flashes across her and she can't think and he could very well be in the room, too, hands on her the same way he had touched her in the chamber, when his fingers were just corporal enough to close around her throat. The snake's hisses turn into something closer to a howl and there are more hisses blurring over her ears, now, and she can't breathe.
The hissing is a chorus. Scales drool over her legs—snakes are everywhere.
"Good enough," she hears. It's a voice she can't place; she imagines for a moment it would be rather difficult to manage it when she is lying flat on an altar but then she remembers she is lying flat on an altar. "Goodbye, Marilyn," they say. She can't think past the ringing buzzing against her ears. There are spells and curses being shouted in the distance, crashes of rubble just loud enough to catch on the edge of her mind.
"Don't leave me," Marilyn manages to get out. Please, please, please don't leave me please please please don't leave me! She can imagine her body, cold and rotting, alone in this chamber. It makes her remember the chamber of secrets, of bleeding and barely breathing and feeling so, so certain of her own death, alone and lost and never found and it makes her think of the nights alone locked in her cupboard, hungry and blind and sniffling in the blackness, choked by the quiet and she can't do it. The thought sends panic reeling down her spine. She can't imagine dying here with nothing but her own pained breath to keep her company. She takes in another, throat stinging from the force of her inhale. It is too dark to see. Is she going to die here?
Maybe she already has.
"You'll see me again," someone says. Minerva? Or is it Padma? Granger?
It occurs to Marilyn abruptly that she's no idea if Granger, if Padma? If they are alive or dead. The thought curls up in her chest, scraping against her heart. Everyone is dead or maybe they aren't yet but they will be soon. The weight of this presses against her, her head pounding. Everyone's dead or dying and it's her fault. Everything's over and it's her fault.
It's all her fault and she knows it—she thinks of her cupboard and she thinks of Aunt Petunia and you're worthless you're nothing and it's all her fault. "I'm sorry," she says again, the word a curse, slurred from her lazy mouth, her lips refusing her commands. She feels her own fingers twitch. "I couldn't beat him. 'm sorry. I'm so sorry—" Marilyn finds she can't tell if it's guilt or shame of if she means it and blood bubbles out of her mouth and there's something warm spilling over her cheeks but she doesn't know if it's tears.
"Don't be," someone tells her. "You'll beat him now."
The year is 1997. A breath creeps into Marilyn Potter's throat with the ease of a snake, and there is a hand on her forehead, brushing back her hair. "Voldemort," the chorus of serpents say. Pythons corn snakes vipers—she wishes she knew because she can feel one curling around her arm. "Say it!"
Something explodes above her. Marilyn's eyes slither open, just barely, to see destruction, before something living slides over her face, the texture of its skin and the bony plates all over it—
There's a sound, a sort of pop, and the world is gone.
…
Marilyn wakes to silence. It's unclear to her if the entire world has been destroyed or if she is dead or perhaps worse. There's something in the air layering over her face, like dark bands wrapping around her, but when she breathes they are shaken from her throat. She is soon enough capable of sight and her forehead's dry of smeared blood.
"Be silent," someone says. The command has fear rising in her. Marilyn can't breathe through the feeling starting to build in her chest. It's like she's waking up in a body that doesn't belong to her. "Be still." There's a noise like a hiss crawling along Marilyn's ears, sneaking up her spine like the chills creeping over her skin. "Be silent, child. Be still."
She's never been good with directions.
Her entire body seems to wake at once, shaking as it rises. Her chest trembles under the pressure of her breaths, and her eyes are wild as they scan the room. It's all blank, dirty walls, with cracks and spiderwebs lining the corners. There is one window. It's got bars crossed over the clouded glass.
Marilyn breathes. "Child, be still!"
She's on a stiff cot, with a metal frame and a single blanket pushed to the backboard. Marilyn twists, bare feet touching to the cold concrete floor. She stares at the matching cot leaned against the opposing wall, at the dark haired boy laying on his side in it, facing away from her. The cot—it is barely a foot away.
The room is smaller than some prison cells.
The entire world is separated from her by a thin sheen of what could have been glass. Marilyn's toes are numb against the floor. The world feels unreal; her body itself alien. The difference, somehow, the change, is palpable, and her eyes scan desperately for the voice.
There's a snake peeking out at her from under the adjacent cot. "Be still," it hisses as she watches. Marilyn feels achingly disturbed.
"Where is this?"
The boy's shoulders shift under his thin shirt. He can't be more than ten. "What?" His voice—it's whispery. Pale. Mere decibels from a hiss. "Marilyn, what are you talking about?" The sun is barely rising, leaving the light washed grey. He turns over, twisting on the cot, and his face—
"What year is it?" her own voice asks. It isn't her speaking she knows it isn't because she has swallowed her own tongue. The boy is still looking at her.
Marilyn's breath is caught. She's looking at Tom Riddle.
The youngest she's ever seen him was sixteen and this boy is far, far younger, but he's unmistakable. His cheekbones are angular and his eyes are dark and his hair is darker and glossy, too, even in the flat light. It's Tom Riddle. She can tell by his spidery fingers, by the slightly sick curl to his mouth.
She's siting fully upright in an instant, her back painfully straight, afraid to take her eyes off him but desperate to search the room because she needs her wand—she needs a knife, a letter opener, an icicle—a heavy book, for god's sake—where is her wand—
"Marilyn, dear sister," Tom Riddle says, voice pitched low from sleep. "It's 1936."
Sister.
She can't stop the sharp inhale, her hands clenching into fists around the rough, thin sheet covering the mattress under her. Her body becomes a string pulled wildly tight with tension. Her heart is beating so, so loudly. The year is 1997… Everything rushes out of her in a thick breath.
"Oh," she says faintly. "I see."
She pushes the tips of her toes more firmly against the ground, stretches her feet over the side of the cot. They barely touch the cool concrete floor. She stands, stiffly, her legs weak and her knees threatening to buckle. She's in a nightgown, and when she looks to Tom, he's wiggled from under his bedding and revealed equally shabby sleeping clothes. Her shoulders feel trapped under the fabric.
"Are you alright?"
Tom's staring at her, eyes glazed with concern. It's like someone has painted a layer over him, like someone has brushed a veneer over him and left his eyes enameled with something kind. No, that's wrong. It's not kind. It's more obsessive than that. It's more like adoration, glorification. He looks like he wants to reach out and touch her, like he wants to pull her towards him and offer comfort the way some people would offer tribute to their gods.
Marilyn suppresses a shiver. Her fingers still tremble.
"I'm fine," she says.
"You're up early," Tom notes, slipping from his bed as though shedding a skin. "Mrs. Cole hasn't woken us yet. No one else, either, I'll bet. The old bat probably isn't awake herself." He smiles, like this is a joke they've shared often. Marilyn's stare is blank; Tom's face loses its cheer.
His voice isn't the same as she remembers it. Still intelligent, sure—but with a distinct slip of street dialect, of something unpolished, and a hint to it that betrays his age. His eyes are bright with something frightening.
"Did you have a nightmare?" Tom's starting towards her, now, and the room is so small and he crosses it so quickly, before she has a chance to recoil. His hand rises, and even as Marilyn closes her eyes against the image, cold fingers brush her face.
Tom Riddle holds a strand of her hair between his index finger and his thumb. She forces her eyes open, and finds him entirely too close. His eyes are holding hers as though there's a steel wire strung between them.
Tom Marvelo Riddle. Murderer and conqueror. His nose, less than an inch from hers.
Marilyn can't breathe.
"Were you awake long?" His eyes are soft. His fingers run through her hair, thumb going up and down over the top of her hairline. It feels somewhat intimate, and he's Tom Riddle, and Marilyn wants to throw up. "You should've woken me—"
"I'm fine," Marilyn announces abruptly, stepping back and nearly tripping over the edge of her cot. The metal bed frame feels cold against the backs of her calves and the juxtaposition of it compared to the sharp flush spread over her cheeks makes Marilyn want to scream. Tom's fingers are still midair, reaching for her, and hurt inches over his face. "I'm fine," Marilyn says again.
She steps carefully around him, avoiding even a brush against his side. Her hand has closed on the metal doorknob when Tom's hand catches her wrist.
"Marilyn," he murmurs, "what's wrong?"
You, she wants to scream. You, touching me. Don't touch me. Don't. Let me go let me go let me go—
"Nothing," she says, wrist pulling from his grip. She opens the door just as a whistle sounds from down the hall, and there are so many doors, all with badly chipped brown paint. Looking at them makes her dizzy. The hallway must have an end but as she looks down it, it seems to stretch, pulling backwards as though it goes on forever. Marilyn's heart beats even louder. An older woman of average build, hair up in a tight bun, seems to be the whistler in question; the whistle is still held in her mouth, and Marilyn watches her spit it out, watches the whistle catch on the string threaded around the woman's throat. The woman looks at Marilyn like she's being forced to examine roadkill.
"Dress yourself, Miss Riddle," the woman says, the corners of her mouth tilted down a bit in disapproval or disgust or both. She raises the whistle up again, blows it. Marilyn recoils, falling back into the room.
"Listen to Mrs. Cole. We have to get dressed." Tom catches her arm, spinning her around to face him. His face is cautious, now, and there's worry under his blank features. "Okay?"
The questions in his eyes will never rest.
Marilyn has no intention of answering to Tom fucking Riddle.
"Go change, then," Marilyn hisses, extracting herself from him the way one would remove a tick. She steps back into the hallway, and Tom's staring at her like she's slapped him. "Get on with it," she says, panic biting at her throat. He still doesn't move. He reaches towards her, but she pulls the door closed.
In the thirty seconds or so that Marilyn's stranded in the cold hallway, a tiny blond girl wiggles past. When she sees Marilyn, she jerks back, pressing herself against the opposite wall. The blond girl looks over her shoulder several times as she scrambles down the hall. Marilyn watches her tiny pale head grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it vanishes around a corner somewhere in the distance of the never-ending hallway. No one has ever acted that way around her before. It almost looked like…fear. It leaves a sour feeling in Marilyn's mouth.
She taps her knuckles against the door. "I'm not going to wait forever, Tom."
It opens. Tom removes himself. He looks demoralized in the face of her unrest, and the collar of his pale shirt is ruffled under the grey sweater vest.
"All yours, sister," he says. He sounds empty and strange and Marilyn hates him.
There ends up being an adventure of grey uniforms in a storage bin under her cot. Marilyn takes it upon herself to pull one over her body. Her skin is pale and clean; her old scars are gone. It feels like something's been taken from her.
The scar on her knee, from where she tripped on the marble church steps in the rain; the scar going up the inside of her elbow, from her first Quidditch match; the scar lacing along her stomach, from the first time meeting Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets. They're gone. It was her identity. This pale skin means nothing. She leans in close, looks for the mole on the corner of her lip. There isn't one. There is no mole.
Her old hair, smooth and light and pin-straight, is now a thick dark brown, wavy and unhappy. It sears down her shoulders to her lower back like a burn. Her freckles are gone, as well as the scar inked on her forehead. She lifts her shirt a bit, looks down at her protruding hipbones and the unforgiving straight line of her young figure. Her skin feels unfamiliar where it is stretched tight over her bones.
Marilyn Potter is dead, after all.
Marilyn Riddle, alive, walks quietly behind her brother to a long lunch table. She sits with Tom at her right and children all around. It was frightening at first, to see so many skeletal faces with skin pulled too tight and limbs awkwardly thin. But it is 1936. World War II is crawling awake, and Tom Riddle lives in an orphanage. She does, too, now. It's a gloomy place. Dull. Distinctly muggle. Even non-magical places can have sparks of color, but the orphanage is a dead zone.
Marilyn spares—Tom a glance. He's slowly eating the grey porridge spooned to the bowls in front of them. Marilyn can't bring herself to touch it; Hogwarts has spoiled her. Seven years of delicious food has left her wrinkling her nose. This was particularly problematic over her summers. Petunia Dursley was not a good cook.
She stops. Thinks on that. Petunia Dursley will not be a good cook? She stops again. Thinks harder. Petunia Dursley might not be at all. Nothing she remembers is real. It might never be real. None of it. None of them.
"Tom." He jerks in his haste to provide her with his attention. Be silent, someone had said. "Were you speaking to me? Before I woke up?"
His head tilts to the side, just a hint. It's a strange gesture. She guesses it's meant to silently articulate how strange of a question she has asked. "No," he says. He doesn't ask her why. The way he's looking at her has a smear of something expectant. It's like he believes an explanation is inherent.
Be silent… Be still.
"I thought I heard something," she says airily. It is the only explanation he will be receiving from her. She turns from him pointedly, and for a second it's complete silence. Then—
Tom slams his spoon to the table, leaving porridge to splash messily in its bowl. "What's wrong with you?" he growls, turning to her with eyes wide and hands splayed toward her in some sort of angry surrender. He's ten years old, maybe less than that, scrawny, and he terrifies her. "Have I done something to you?"
Marilyn tries to swallow down the lump in her throat. "I haven't the faintest idea what you—"
"Oh, stuff it." He grabs her shoulders and forces her closer to him. She looks at his nose. She can't handle looking at his eyes. It would be too close. "First you're so bloody strange when you wake up, and then you boot me out into the hallway while you change, and then you can't walk within a foot of me and you haven't even touched your breakfast—"
He grows more expressive as this continues, with his hands going into the air and the air around her thick with tension and on the table, her porridge begins to boil. He's ten. She shivers from the cold air. When was Voldemort born? He's somewhere around ten, and he's Tom Riddle, and he gets louder—
Oh dear.
His face suddenly crumples, words dying on his mouth. It occurs to Marilyn that there are tears going down her face. "Marilyn—"
She recoils from his touch when he reaches for her but Tom doesn't stop. He brings her against him, with her tear stained face pressing into his shoulder and one of his hands burying itself in the hair splashing down her back. She can't breathe over the smell of him, and he won't stop touching her and he won't stop speaking, won't stop murmuring soft condolences against the top of her head.
It's disgusting. It's repulsive. She can't stop crying.
The dead bodies flash in her brain and the image of Voldemort's inhuman features make sparks under her eyelids with every blink. The hand in her hair continues to play with it and another hand manages to slip around her shoulders. His touch blights her. "It's okay," he murmurs, lips moving against the hair along the top of her head. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—don't cry, Marilyn."
Marilyn pushes weakly at his shoulders, tired from the effort of it. She can't think over the sound of her own thoughts, can't feel anything around the palace of screams he built in her head. Her heartbeat gets even louder. "Don't touch me," she manages. She's crying in the arms of a monster surrounded by children she's never met and it's painful and he's still touching her.
"I hate to see my sister cry," Tom whispers and it's sick. She isn't his sister and she doesn't want his comfort or his pity. She wants him dead. Her hands twitch with the urge to strangle him, to rip his limbs out of their joints and peel his skin off his body, to leave him a raw pile of blood and muscle.
She abruptly finds she hates him. His skin is against her skin and he's still talking into her hair and she hates him. Tom Riddle is a killer. He deserves to die.
Not yet. He's a child. He's killed no one. He doesn't deserve to die yet. Marilyn listens to him breathe. Her world is gone but some things are supposed to happen and someone as sick as Tom Riddle can't be circumstantial. He doesn't deserve to die yet, she thinks again, stronger now, one hand tightening around his shoulder while the other grips the back of his shirt. But he will. He'll eventually have to.
And when the time comes, Marilyn thinks, forcing herself to memorize the feel of his fingers on her skin, I'll kill him.