INVINCIBILITY
Summary: You crane your neck to look at the full moon dominating the night sky, and think that invincibility is boring. Dark!fic.
Pairing: Hermione/Tom Riddle. Or Hermione/Voldemort. It's all really one and the same, if you think about it.
Disclaimer: Not mine!
You crane your neck to look at the full moon dominating the night sky, and think that invincibility is boring.
It is one of the reasons you stopped reading fiction books when you were younger, before you went to Hogwarts and discovered that magic, glorious and strange and frighteningly powerful, was actually real.
Invincibility had seemed so dull, dry as sun bleached desert sand and insubstantial as bone ash. And all your old fiction books had featured indestructible heroes, like invincibility was just another character trait they all received, another weapon in their armament, like startlingly good looks and swords that gleamed silver sharp.
Your books were filled with men who could not lose, could not die.
And it was all so boring.
Not to say the heroes never possessed any flaws, but true weaknesses, devastating, crippling, and fatal, never existed.
It made the glamour of reading pale, all the color, all the excitement of opening a book and breathing in the slightly musty scent of paper and ink wither away to nothingness.
The hero would prevail. Always did prevail, no matter how ghastly the circumstances.
Emerged triumphant on his white horse with banner waving and rescued damsel gazing up at him with lovestruck doe eyes.
Nothing about predictability makes your heart pound, your breath quicken.
The sheer inevitability of fiction; good, always victorious over evil, made you appreciate fact.
Made you learn to love the intricacies of logic, the spellbinding intensity of history. You can watch battles fight to their bloody, despondent conclusions, catalog the fall of empires, differentiate poisons from their antidotes. The world's knowledge, lying beneath your fingers in carefully formed block letters, and all of it so wonderfully, blissfully unpredictable.
So grandly, magnificently, unlike fiction, with it's ill-contrived plots and too simple victories.
So yes, you always believed invincibility to be boring.
It remained that way to you, too, even through Hogwarts, even when your friendship with Harry introduced you to an evil more monstrous than any horror your nightmares ever could have conjured. Because even then, it was Harry who always faced Voldemort, Harry who always returned ashen-faced, too quiet, weariness and sorrow aging him more and more with each encounter.
Even then, you were removed, secluded, protected, out of evil's reach and harm's way.
And you still believed that invincibility was boring, and that Voldemort was a fool to destroy himself in its pursuit.
You sit quietly, breathing in the arctic air and watching the moon's luminescence devastate the defenses of the midnight sky, gossamer threads of spider silk light shredding through black velvet expanses.
You could stay like that forever, attuned to the exploits of the night, inhaling and exhaling as the darkness thrums around you, when suddenly, shouts and screams fracture the silence like glass. You turn, brandishing your wand in front of you and wishing strangely, futilely, for the cold metal comfort of a gun instead, but it's too late.
Blackness descends like swamp water over your eyes and your consciousness.
When you struggle back to wakefulness, you only see red eyes in a face lacking in humanity and drowning in evil before the pain begins, sharp and hot and unmerciful as acid, flaying away your skin with bloody, unmerciful strokes of a knife's edge.
And even as you scream, you pray for invincibility.
And later, after you've been broken, after you've been strengthened, Tom Riddle, his eyes gleaming crimson and a smile twisting at his lips, kisses you and grants your wish.