Forever
Challenge: 2nd Person POV
Summary: Magical, modern AU where Tom is a demon who consumes magic, and he's got his sights set on Hermione, a human oracle that's very powerful.
Rating: M
Warning: potential death? Self-harm (of sorts), graphic descriptions and gore, mentions of murder, death, and previous acts of violence.
Part 1: Flood of Futures
Your dress scraping across the wooden floor - that's the first thing I hear. Fenrir Greyback's footsteps are heavy and slow - but two steps ahead yours. He's dragging you to the altar. You're not exactly fighting with him, but you're not walking towards me willing either. Frankly, it's refreshing compared to the banshees and other magical creatures squealing like pigs being led to slaughter. No one appreciates the honor of being a sacrifice in this day and age.
I glance up at you from where I've been reclining on the altar stone and stand up. The long ceremonial robes fit nicely, especially since we've been giving you nourishing foods for the past month to make you look at least healthy. You've somehow dyed your robes red, and I can't help but think you're the human fairy tale character Red Riding Hood and that I'm the Big Bad Wolf, waiting for impatiently to devour you. In addition to the scarlet robes, you're wearing a long black veil that covers your face. Please realize this isn't a wedding, I plead silently to you. I need to consume your magic or else I'll die.
As you close in on the altar, I can't think about how much more powerful you are now than you were when you first appeared on the list.
You see, the first time I heard your name, it was being read off to me by my vampire lieutenant Severus from a list of potential magical creatures who could become my victims.
"Hermione Granger - human in Stamford, Connecticut. Fleur Delacour - veela in Paris, France. -"
"Go back to the other girl." I demanded.
Again, Snape drawled, "Hermione Granger - human-" but I cut him off before he could continue.
"Why is there a human on the magical creatures list?"
Crossing his arms, he hypothesized, "Special ability, perhaps."
I shrugged it off at the time, not thinking much further of it as Severus droned through the rest of the magical creatures. It would be another two years until I heard your name again, let alone saw you. And you were far away from home in cozy little Connecticut.
We found you under an overpass in Miami, the insane asylum bracelet still snug on your wrist under all the stolen sweatshirts. I saw you from the car while we were stuck in traffic - you were chattering to yourself and moving your hands rapidly - half dance, half prayer. And despite your very human physique, I could feel the magic radiating off of you.
"Fenrir, stop the car!" The werewolf slammed on the breaks, causing Bellatrix to cackle from her spot in the trunk. Making sure my sunglasses were on, I hopped on and approached you. Upon my arrival, your chatter stopped and you buried your head in your hands.
"Great and terrible things - so much blood, the blood, the blood the blood," you began rocking back and forth.
"Whose blood?" I ask, crouching down to your sitting position.
"Enemies - enemies of the heir beware." I reached out to touch you and you froze. A wave of calmness settled over your form. "You're listening to what I'm saying."
"Yes."
"And you don't think I'm crazy," you glanced up at me through your fingers, almost wincing at the sight of me. I wondered how I look to you - was I a handsome man, a monster, or something in between?
Me personally, I don't know. I can't see my own reflection in a mirror. But my previous victims, the ones who had enough time to talk before I locked my eyes on them, they all said I was beautiful. Obviously, they hadn't learned that beauty is terror, as the Greek phrase goes.
"No. I know you're not crazy."
"Everyone thought I was sick. My parents had me locked away in a loony bin. Couldn't handle the constant predictions." Behind me, Fenrir honked the horn.
"My lord! Traffic is moving!" I dropped my hold on you to toy with my family ring.
"An oracle, h'mm?" I tilted my head to examine you better. For a human, you were average looking. But for a magical core? You were the most powerful snack I'd yet to taste. "How would you like to come with me? I know how to help you control and focus your sight." You contemplated this but gave no response, biting your chapped lips. "Dr. Thomas Riddle, expert in mythology and magical creatures." I offered out my hand to shake but you shook your head.
"No. Lord Voldemort, leader of the magical community and enslaver of the human race."
This future pleased me- it seemed like everything would go according to plan. But then you began to reflect on my past, your fingertips just barely grazing the tops of mine.
"A little boy in an orphanage who could talk to snakes. A teenager with a wild intellect who could set people on fire without touching them. A half-demon, but oh so very powerful. A Medusa demon, to be specific. One who wants to rule the world."
"Oh, you'll do just fine with us." I smiled, but you grimaced in return, pulling away from me and rushing towards your kidnapped grocery store cart.
"Eating magic, eating magic, magic eater!" You cried, shoving a sleeping cat inside your cart and beginning to run. Luckily for me, there was no need to chase you.
"Bella," I cried out to the car, "shoot one of your darts, will you?"
Popping her head out, the voodoo queen sent a sleeping dart your way, but you had moved, expecting the blow.
"Eating magic, boarding plane to Chicago, visiting the coke dealer, trying to convince the landlord that you'll pay the rent later, magic eater!" You screeched as multiple futures hit you at once. Now distracted and bombarded with the images, you began to shake and staggered to the floor, where Bella easily shot a laced blow dart at you.
Your body hit the cement without much noise. Scooping you up off the ground and pushing the cart towards the car, which had pulled farther up in the rush hour traffic, you were deposited into the back of the car, where Bellatrix took the time to start making a doll from a lock of your hair.
When we worm-holed back to Albania (it's a demon thing, don't worry about the specifics), Severus noted something very important, "My lord, she's just finished her monthly event."
I sighed deeply. Sacrificial blood from women is strongest during their menstrual cycle, and since you had just finished yours, I would have to wait a month until your body replenished its supply.
"What are we doing with her in the mean time?" Fenrir asked, licking his lips hungrily. Under normal circumstances, the seizure of a magical critter was well-planned out to coordinate with their period if they were female, or for when they was a full moon for males (something about how the moon heightens the magical senses, the werewolf had explained to me).
"I could use her for my projects," Bella grinned wickedly.
"Absolutely not, Bella," I scolded. "No playing with other people's food. That goes for you too, Greyback." The werewolf huffed and skulked off into the corner. "Besides, you've already got your zombie twins in the basement."
Bellatrix Lestrange of New Orleans had been the first member of my cult - a witch of the highest order but not mentally stable. In a moment of anger a few years ago, she murdered her husband. But days later she began to miss him, so she slipped a love potion to his twin brother, and they soon married. However, Bella was once again thrown into a violent swing of anger and murdered him too. When I first found her, she was praying to me on the dirt floor of her swamp cabin in the hopes I would resurrect her husbands. In return, she would serve me eternally. So, I gifted her with zombified husbands and she's been loyal ever since.
"But they get so boring - and I love new dolls," she cooed as she wrapped a finger around your hair.
"No!" I shouted, slapping her hand. Like a kicked dog, she whimpered but yielded, retreating to her greenhouse in the back.
"But what are you going to do my lord?" Snape asked cautiously - always the steady and irritating voice of reason.
"Well, I did promise to help her control the flood of futures. . ."
"Very well then," he sighed, "I'll have Kreacher set up a guest room somewhere far away from the rest of us. The left wing, perhaps? So she's near the gardens and the library?"
"Yes, that'll do."
You know what happened from there. I trained you (very carefully - constantly outside wearing sunglasses and near no mirrors) in the art of prophecy throughout the month, teaching you how to focus on one individual's future even in a crowd of thousands. You learned how to read oracle bones, realize destinies in the flight patterns of birds and the swimming patterns of fish, sense fortunes from palms and tea leaves and drops of blood. And with each lesson, each word I said, you grew stronger. Making it harder and harder for me not to just gobble you up regardless of Snape's insistence of the "menstrual blood".
You alluded the sacrifice for almost half a year because of an irregular period cycle. "Women who are stressed out or are recovering from being extremely underweight commonly have irregularities in their cycle," Snape informed my clinically after the first month.
"How do you know so much about this?" I asked him, suspicious I had let a skeezy, perverted vampire into my inner circle. This delicate information was not generally known throughout magical or even human populations.
"I wasn't always a vampire, you swine. When I was a teenage boy, and yes, there was such a time, I was best friends with a young woman whose mother was an OBGYN and I had the pleasure of hearing this all over the frequent dinners at their home." I shriveled my nose at this.
But now the time has come for me to ravish your magical core. Once at the altar, Fenrir slinks away to the window seat, where he's eyeing the almost full-moon. Snape is sitting at the other window seat, picking out the dried blood from his finger nails. Bellatrix is digging for maggots in the wooden floor of the decrepit chapel at the center of my estate.
Hungrily, I begin to lift the veil away from your face, and I'm immediately alarmed by the smirk on your face. This is not the mouth of a victim and sacrifice. This is a smile of a fox after outsmarting the hunter, and it sets me on edge. I lift the veil up a little further to see still sticky blood dripping down your face in a tear trail.
"Hermione?" I ask. The grin on your face widens, and it's monstrously beautiful. In a mix of anger and confusion, I rip the veil from your head and find the blood is seeping from your eye sockets. "No!" I scream in outrage.
Your eyes are no longer intact inside your skull, and when you open your mouth, you spit them out into your open palm. You toss one to Bella on the floor, who squeals with glee and bites into it. The other one you cast towards Snape, who nods in thanks before sucking all of the blood from it.
Everything has I had planned has turned upside down. For the sacrifice to work, we needed to make mutual eye contact so I could turn you to stone (thus freezing the blood), break your statue-esque form over the altar, and snort the frozen blood from the ruins.
Lashing out, I sweep all of the ceremonial candles off of the altar and pound the sweating stone with my fists.
"Whatever will you do," you mock, "it's not like you have an oracle or anything to help you."
"You've ruined everything!" I exclaim. "I'm going to die if I don't eat a strong enough magical creature - I can't live off little fairies and fawns!" But you ignore my rants and bend down to the floor where the candle wax drippings have been scattered.
"Three melting splatters, for three possible paths," you explain as you point out the pattern. The three spots make a triangle, with one forming the top point and the other two residing farther back and nearly on the same plane. I don't understand how you're 'seeing' the pattern since you're now blind, but then again, you're an oracle. "Your future is blurring - you can't decide."
"And what am I deciding among? How many ways I can still try to eat you?" You laugh lightly at this.
"In one option, yes. In another you I escape, have a demon hunter locate you, and you spend the rest of your life on the run and eating baby unicorns." I flinch at this - eating pure creatures is for the lowest of the low.
"Finding a way to still eat you sounds pretty good right now." The snake tattoos that cover my clothed body slither towards my neck, where the can peek out of my collar and hiss at you. The most defensive of them, Nagini, even begins to slither off of me and into her 3D form, but I pet her head, telling her to wait.
"And how do you plan on doing that without making eye contact with me?" Your smile makes me want to rip my hair out, it's so smug.
"Blood can be split in other ways Hermione," I say as I take out a knife from my robe pocket. You sense this and stiffen.
Holding the tip with one forefinger and the head of the grip with the other, I twist it. "Granted, just gutting you like a pig for slaughter won't be as clean, and I want get as much magic, but it will be oh so satisfying after what you just put me through."
I circle around you before crouching down next to you and holding the blade to your chin. "But it would be such a waste." I notice your hand hovering over the wax drippings and recognize that you never gave a third option. "What is the third possibility?"
"Well, you seem very intent on eating me, so it's not even worth saying," you huff.
"Passive aggressiveness? Really? We're going to handle this with that kind of behaviour? Ugh, I thought you were more mature than that."
"Says the three hundred year old demon trying to manipulate the nineteen year old young women like a psychiatrist."
"Just tell me the third prediction then."
"No! Besides," you sigh, "one of the drops has already disappeared." I look down at the floor and see that this is true.
"Well, that could have been the horrible unicorn fate. You don't know which dripping means what."
"Well, I would be able to if you kept training me, but no, instead you had to try to eat me."
"Stop trying to avoid the necessary and just tell me the third option!"
"In the name of Vlad, you two sound just like my parents," Snape snaps from his window-seat, "always bickering!"
"My parents were way worse," counters Bellatrix in a moment of clarity, "they had an arranged marriage and they met the night of the wedding." But then the moment is gone as she squeaks, "Ooh, a beetle!" Before she hungrily munches it up.
"At least you knew your parents, " Greyback sighs, "I just had my uncle, and he was barely ever around. Always trying to recruit other wolves for our pack."
Suddenly, a realization hits me. "Bellatrix!" She looks up from her rather large snack. "Did you say marriage?" She nods. Oh, this is even better than eating you, I think to myself. "Snape, you know the ancient binding rituals still, right." It's a rhetorical question stated more for your benefit than for my knowledge.
"Fenrir, get the portal ready to go to Mount Walpurgis, we're going to buy some things." He rises from his spot eagerly and runs off to his errands.
Bella cackles happily, standing up and skipping around us, "A wedding, a wedding, there's going to be a wedding! Oh, my Lord!" She screams, stopping my skip. "Can we set a village on fire afterwards? I love a good reception!" I wave my hand at this, and she skips off to presumably alert her zombie playthings.
"There can't be a wedding," you state coldly, arms crossed and nose high.
"Why not? Would you prefer to be carved into pieces for a feast?"
You sigh angrily and scowl (a terrifying thing since you lack eyes). "There can't be a wedding because you haven't even asked me!"
"Will you marry me?" I rush.
"No! I refuse to be wedded to the man who kidnapped me-"
"-Saved you," I interrupt. "You were on the run from the insane asylum and living under an overpass, remember?"
But you steamroll on, "a man who kidnapped me and now expects me to marry him. I refuse to be an example of Stockholm Syndrome!"
"Well, look into your future and tell me what you see for yourself besides this!" I throw my hands up to gesture around me, only to remember that you're blind now and let them fall back to my sides. You mumble something under your breath that I can't quite make out. "Speak up now, what?"
"I can't see my own future," you groan in humiliation. "One of the numerous downsides of being an oracle."
"You know what I see for you? Power. More power than you even have right now. So powerful that anyone who's ever tried to hurt you will crumble at it. A throne to sit upon for forever. And all the books you could ever want."
"Really?" you ask in disbelief. "You see all that as a possibility?"
"No," I insist, "I know that." And I mean it. You send a small grin up at me.
"Ask me again."
"Hermione J. Granger, patient 9191979, of Stamford Connecticut, with several asterisks gained for recklessness and or violence, oracle supreme and future queen - marry me and co-rule this world."
"I should probably wash off my face first, but yes. Yes, I'll marry you. God, what would my parents say at the thought of my marrying a demon?"
"They would probably scream, and then I would capture them in stone like that and we could put them out in the garden with the others."
Behind us, Snape grumbles, "I'll have Kreacher start making the arrangements. Also try to find her some replacement eyes."
"No!" Snape looks startled at your shout. "No, I think I actually like it better this way. My oracle vision is stronger because of it." Snape turns his nose up at this and glides out of the room in his usual fashion, but stops at the door and turns around.
With almost the hint of a smile on his face, he solemnly congratulates us. "And my Lord? I'm glad you didn't eat this one." I smile and nod.
"Me too."
Part 2: Heavenly
Your dress scraping across the wooden floor - that's the first thing I hear. Fenrir Greyback's footsteps are heavy and slow as he walks you down the makeshift aisle. Kreacher is already standing in front of me, the metal rings from Mount Walpurgis sitting on a black velvet pillow in his trembling hands. Bellatrix is crying at the sight of you, which is interfering greatly with her making the zombie twins play the piano and violin via voodoo dolls. Snape stands opposite me, cranky as ever because we've asked him to wake up a little earlier than usual so the ceremony could occur under the rise of the new moon.
What I can't stand right now is that I can't look back at you. Some horrid tradition both in the human and creature world. Like Orpheus leading Eurydice out of the tunnel, it is forbidden that I look at you until you stand before me, veil lifted and Snape approved.
It feels like a hellish forever, but you finally reach my side, and Fenrir takes his place on the other side of me. I still can't look at you, but it's a comfort to know you're standing beside me, gently squeezing my hand.
The ribbon and blood blinding ceremonies blur together as we are married and our magical energies are bound together for all of eternity. When it finally happens, I feel the power break over me, ocean waves crashing against the rocky cliffs.
Snape nods, and then I finally seize the chance to look at you. As I lift the veil away from your face, you somehow know to look up at me. And I can see why Bellatrix was crying. Not because you're overly beautiful or glowing (though you are), but more because you look happy. Overwhelmingly happy and more at peace than I've ever seen you before.
"Great and terrible things," you predict with a smile, "and with us at the front of it. Forever." And then you're on your tiptoes, kissing me, and it tastes like power. And . . . dare I say it?
It's heavenly.