Standing in the Rain
Authors Notes: So I'm redoing this. I hope you enjoy it, and even more then that I hope that some of you are still watching me in the event that I did revive the story. I warn you though that this is not the same fic exactly, its going to be darker and a bit more serious.
Here there be monsters.
Disclaim: I own nothing.
Without Ceremony
In fairy tales there is always a big lead up to a final battle, to any action that will determine the outcome of a war. Before the climax we are forced to determine the differences between our hero and our villain, we are taught as children that in the universe, in there fairy tales that there is good and there is evil and that there are clear defining lines that are drawn between the two.
But in the real world there are no lines, oh certainly there are the ones that we imagine there, right and wrong black and white, but in reality there are only the spaces between the shades of gray and the variations on the concepts that we were taught would stand up to anything. We are still fond of the anticipation, we fancy that there is a clear path that will arise from any action and that each step we take is inevitably going to lead to a specific end.
Wizards are just as guilty of this as Muggles, for all that they fancy themselves enlightened and more capable of thinking beyond the limits that they see Muggles as having created for themselves. They still draw lines, dark and light, magical and mundane, no idea of the full spectrum of the world that they have found themselves fortunate enough to belong to.
These lines that they draw between dark and light make it almost impossible to see where the true monsters lie, where we may take a glimpse at someone like Thomas Marvolo Riddle and see a monster, was there a clear moment in time where he became such? Was there a great amount of pomp and ceremony put into his ascension as a dark lord or was he born the monster we view him as?
On the other end of the spectrum there is Albus Dumbledore seen as the pinnacle of light, a shinning example of how a wizard should be. But is this the truth or simply a facade? We've all heard of his defeat of Grindlewald in the first war and seen how this seems to have accounted him a status above the rest of the world. Someone to be revered and held up as an example for the rest of us. But how much of this story is myth simply repeated for the sake of reinforcing our awe in the man?
Now remember this isn't a fairy tale and this is the real world which is why it shouldn't surprise you that without any fanfare Riddle was destroyed, and not by Dumbledore, the savior of the light, either. No, Riddle was defeated by a infant without any ceremony one Halloween night, an infant that Riddle had found himself unable to kill. An unknown neither light nor dark claimed as their own, and thus the future was changed.
And it should surprise you even less, given how imperfect the real world is, that this child, responsible for ridding the world of the largest threat at the moment was, with just as little ceremony, abandoned. First gifted upon Muggle relatives who would never understand what he was any more then they would tolerate it, which is to say not at all, and then cast aside by them, into a gutter careless over whether the infant lived or died.
And in a sense he did die, he was never going to be the same child that he had been on his way to becoming, instead something dark twined around his heart and something new was born.
In a gutter in the Muggle world, without any fanfare or ceremony the fate of the world in general, both Muggle and Magical, was completely altered never to be returned to what it was.