Written for the 34 stories, 106 reviews challenge.
Round Five: Tom Riddle/Orion Black.
He had become an old man.
His face had lost the confident appeal of youth, there were wrinkles around his dark eyes and his mouth was nothing but a hard set line anymore. His wife had greying hair and seemed never to feel anything but belligerence and bitterness. The energy, the passion of the Blacks lived in their sons now. His son – his one son – beautiful (though less than the other), brave (without being brainless) and willing to fight for what he believed in.
Once upon a time, Orion had almost been ready to fight, too.
Once upon a time, Orion had had a possible leader. Oh, a lesser one than this self-proclaimed Dark Lord, perhaps, but an extraordinary man all the same. He had had a strong, commanding voice, yet commanding all in subtlety, with burning passion and clever words which would slide under your skin and inhabit your heart forever. He had swept away the oh-so-proper, haughty and dignified Slytherins of his year, sending them reeling into dreams of greatness and revolution. His eyes had been alive with fire, his skin white as the purest snow, his face, lit up by the maddened glow of a sacred conviction, fitting a martyr, a prince, an emperor. His name had been as his personality, cryptic, secret, veiled in a mystery nearly holier than blood, for Orion could not, not for an instant, bring himself to doubt his purity. This man had been as good as Salazar reincarnated, and when he talked to snakes, Orion would feel his own entrails twisting and hissing and writhing and crying and bleeding for him.
(It had been madness.)
It had been wrong, and the memory, so striking, so deeply engraved in the very essence of him, still made Orion gasp and stagger, after twenty blasted years. It had been conviction, worship – passion... It had been physical. It could not be denied, Orion had ached and yearned for white skin and shining eyes, for the pale, pink mouth that would unleash the words which possessed him. He had yearned for Tom, the stranger, the Parseltongue, the revolutionary young prodigy, the seductive, smooth-talking orphan. He had loved every facet, every nuance of the man, and he had... wanted... to touch. To feel, to approach, to possess, to keep a part of him in his body and soul, the silky texture of his long, thin, elegant hands, the taste of his lips, the scent of his skin, in the crook of his neck... The look in his eyes when he... It had been wrong, but Tom had transcended right and wrong, made his world fall out of its safe little setting of cold, distant stars, so that it would only be held by fragile strings of beauty and power. Tom had become the world, the sun, and Orion – his pale-faced, tormented moon, endlessly pulled around him, yet glowing with delirious triumph in the caress of the light. Lovers, the word was faraway, an empty shell haunted by the never-ceasing echoes of what they had really been (infatuation, pain, ambition, loss, a mad, mad, mad devotion) yet it was meaningful, in a way that Orion loathed, because lovers weren't immortal.
Lovers, star-crossed lovers, a long-expected fall from grace.
A long, excruciating fall that death wouldn't relieve, for Orion had not deserved death, Orion the coward, the traitor. Orion the hunted hunter who hadn't followed Tom to the end of the world and back, had not even awaited his return. Orion had spoken messily of duty and purity and wedlock and Tom had looked silently into his eyes and understood, and Orion had seen, in his lover's pupils, a flash of something he could only call loathing, like a sword right through his heart. Tom hadn't spoken a word. The whole night through, their last Hogwarts night without a word. It would have been easier perhaps if he had been expecting it, for both of them. With Orion's months-long silence while the others were all excitedly stating their will to follow their leader out in the real world he could have... But he had never been quite able to believe it, that they realized only then. That night Tom tried to make Orion mad for him, to get under his skin and work his mind into embracing another destiny, or perhaps only to say goodbye in the cruellest way possible, making sure he would never, could never be forgotten. It was too late but Tom wanted to burn the family, the fiancée, the duty of Heir, everything that wasn't him, to ashes. He got up in the morning and tasted ruin on Orion's lips.
He left behind a hollow wreck of a man.
Orion Black helped himself to a glass of his strongest brandy. Twenty years. Money, power, marriage, blood. He stood among those who ruled the world.
And all he could feel was coldness... or the burning of failure, passion and regret, for a face he would probably not even be able to recognize.
He wished better for his sons.