A / N : For the Quotes Remix challenge on xoxLewrahxox's forum. The challenge was to write a piece inspired by a quote in someone else's writing – the one I chose comes courtesy of the lovely and talented Expecting Rain. Chapter title is from a song by Akron Family. Enjoy!
"Blood is like water. Always finds its own level." - from 'Devouring', by Expecting Rain.
Merope's magic is late coming – so late, in fact, that she begins to fear it will never arrive.
Her father and brother do worse than fear – they shout and laugh.
Stupid sister - stupid Squib - no daughter of mine –
They set her Muggle tasks, cooking and cleaning, and when even these elude her they shout, and she runs. Runs from the shack to the big house, to hide in the elegant gardens and watch a world in which she does not belong.
There is a girl there, sobbing on the lawn, her curls askew. And – and him.
He holds out a hand, smiling.
"Then we will find her!" he laughs. "And bolt her in the stable! Come on, Cee!"
Merope shifts, and a traitorous twig snaps beneath her bare feet.
"Oh!" Celia cries, startled. "Tom! Tom, there's something there!"
Her shelter is swept back and she is done, discovered . . .
"Must have been a fox," Tom shrugs.
He stares through her wide, frightened eyes and turns away.
"Come on, Cee! The chase is on!"
His voice wavers out of earshot and Merope fades into the foreground again, her magic a half-remembered dream.
She dreams of him, after that. In her dreams he smiles and laughs. He teaches her to dance and touches her without hesitation.
By the time Morfin's snakes have whispered her secrets in his ear, there is a sullen, secret crevice in her heart.
Why shouldn't she look? Why shouldn't she want?
Morfin catches her with her back pressed to the wall, spits in her hair and calls her a whore.
Her father calls her a Squib, no more witch in her blood than a Muggle.
No more witch in your blood than a Muggle, she thinks. No daughter of mine.
Why shouldn't she look? Why shouldn't she want?
His horse is bitten by a snake – a freak accident, he calls it.
There is an inch of dust on the tabletop and a straggling field-flower in her hair, and when he kisses her, the blood seems to sing in her ears.
A child is crying, somewhere far off, and the blood is old and cold in her veins.
It was her own fault. She was complacent, stupid. She'd thought he would love her, by now. She'd thought he would stay, for the baby. He did neither.
It was her own fault. The way he looked at her, afterwards – crumpled at his feet and crying, pleading – it was the way her brother looked at her, the way her father looked at Muggles. At his feet, she was something contemptuous, something -
"Inhuman", he'd muttered. "Witch . . ." And she had tried, oh, she had tried, to explain . . .
She was no witch. And she couldn't be Tom Riddle's Muggle wife either. She had thought she belonged in neither world, but now a cold certainty steals over her. She can't live in either world, and she will die between them.
She hopes Tom will have his father's face. She hopes he'll never dream.