Golgotha
A/N: Written for the Darkones Livejournal community's "The Green Hair of Graves"-challenge.
The night is dark. A pale moon is hidden behind the veil of a cloud- just like you are hidden from me. My feet are invisible to my eyes and others', but I do not care.
They find their way blindly.
A single, rare beam of moonlight touches the grass in front of me- but your grave, that secret, that hidden grave I call yours, is covered, covered by the long, stretched shadow of a single sycamore tree. I am glad for that.
I sit down on the heavy, greyish stone without a name. You were buried where you died, here, simply because there was no other place where the earth would want to accept you.
Your bones are darker than the night.
I am your sole visitor- I always am. Not a bird, not even a rat, not a living creature ever comes here anymore. The fear for you goes on- beyond death, beyond defeat you still terrorize their hearts.
But never mine.
Because I gave it to you first. I gave you my heart, gladly, voluntarily- and though you tore it and ripped it apart, I know you gave me yours just as well. It was not your fault that to you, love equalled red and red equalled blood.
I have bled because of you, but never without remembering that no-one's blood had ever been spilt more than yours had. No-one had suffered the way you had- no-one has. Whereas I was yours, whereas the world was yours, you-
You were your own victim.
Now nothing more than me remains. I am your legacy, your will- your everything, but most of all just- yours. And I am proud because of it. I could never understand you, never understand what you wanted, because it was not my wish, not my desire- but I did not love you less.
I am proud to sit here, for this is your Golgotha.
A fingertip, wet with my tears, writes your name in the dust. Your name- the name by which I called you- the name by which I knew you- the name-
Tom.
The name by which I loved you.
I know I am an unlikely person to sit here. Trusted, renowned part of "that other world", as you called it, I am, indeed, the last person people would expect to bear the legacy of whom they knew as the Lord Voldemort.
To me, you were nothing but my Tom.
I bear your legacy and it hurts me, but I would not live without it.
It's part of me- like your child, the child that died, in the womb already torn between good and evil just the way its mother always was, once was part of me too.
My own name I write too, in equally faint letters, right beside yours. I am no more than you are, and nor are you better than me. I have always believed in fairness.
Minerva.
The earth is silent and savage around us. Darkness enfolds us.
We fade to black.
I cry.
I die.
Just another death.