It begins with the violence born of intimate knowledge, the one that allows for a deconstruction all the more complete and – no, there are beginnings before this one, beginnings that began things long since transpired and which serve as his rudimentary will and cause to come here tonight.
Should have used bone of the mother, don't you agree, Severus? he asks, but Severus does not answer, not he, for he is transfixed upon the ease with which his fingernails penetrate the too, too pallid skin, the garnet blood pooling in beads over sickly silver.
If it matters, he agrees, partly out of habit but also because it is with their mothers that both their virtues lie – within the veins their own lifebloods once traversed, the flesh from which they fashioned their own perfidious and diluted condition, the hearts against which their own once lay beating a constant and reassuring tattoo of life, the souls into which their own were once immaculately woven.
The Riddle house is still tonight save for this silent demolition, only broken at length by a soft hiss bordering on protest. Wallpaper peels, crimson, from the wall, falling in curls that will crunch when he steps on them to leave later, but there will be no one to hear them then.
"This is for Dumbledore," he whispers, sinking his fingertips into bony shoulders, his knee almost roughly into a knobby spine, perching himself above the skeletal, virginal body, "my mentor and friend," (are you not above such things, Severus, asks the dark lord, and it is all he can do not to laugh and) "What are you thinking," Severus murmurs into what remains of his ear, all but grinning at the other's man's imperceptible flinch to have his robes ripped and wrenched away from his body with a violence, a violence he has reserved and has fostered within him since – "what will you think when Potter kills you, hm?"
I do nothing that does not further my own design, he answers, shifting slightly in his now rather complete nakedness, but not in embarrassment, for never has such a concept once crossed his mind. He lowers his head to rest upon the dust-laden velvet of the divan. You of all people should understand this, Severus.
And Severus, on a normal day, may understand this, he who has advanced himself by his own merit and suffering and skill, but not tonight. The dark and the glittering moon find him focused on the wrong done him by a man, a concept, his own youthful stupidity and eagerness to throw his life away for a cause his own origin and body defy, and so he combines that which is impure within him with all that errs within Voldemort, Tom Marvolo Riddle, the inherent flaws in their heritage and derivation as well as that which concerns neither. If it is a chemical reaction, this prickling heat in his veins akin to the reaction of asphodel to wormwood, if these all-consuming thoughts blinding him to the man shifting, writhing beneath him are the result of filth's addition to itself, its corruption of purity, the silent destruction in their veins vivant in the pulse, Severus is unsure. It is doubtlessly not his former lord's will or intent, but it transpires nonetheless in slow excruciation, in sallow hands over clammy, ashen skin, in the meeting and melding of mongrel flesh.