Love, the Riddles

"How many today?" Tom asked as Elizabeth swept into the room, robes billowing impressively behind her, a devilish smile on her pale-red lips. Outside, the sun was setting.

"Twelve."

"Twelve?" he repeated, impressed. "You've been busy."

"A group of Magical Co-operation witches stopped after work for a drink in the Leaky Cauldron." Elizabeth smirked. "A foolish mistake."

"Very foolish," Tom echoed. "Any trouble?"

The corners of Elizabeth's mouth twitched upwards amusedly. "You don't have to worry about me, brother."

"I know I don't," he said fondly. Reaching into the pile of yellowed parchments strewn across the table before him, Tom pulled out their notes on the Ministry's extensive collection of workers. The Ministry's workforce was looking rather depleted of late, he noticed happily. "Kill anyone important?"

Elizabeth glanced at Tom, ruby eyes gleaming strangely. "Only Lily Potter." At the immediate flash of shock on Tom's face, she laughed cruelly. "Joking, Tom. I'd never dare harm your dear Lily." Taking the sheet of parchment from Tom, she scrawled out a few names. As she worked, she chewed her lip, Tom noticed. "No one particularly significant," she sighed, tossing the parchment back onto the coffee table. "But I'd say the Minister ought to have gotten the message by now. If not, she's a fool."

Tom nodded thoughtfully. "You think it's time to pay our tame Ministry worker a visit?"

Elizabeth nodded.

James never had a funeral. They hadn't even known for sure that he was dead until a week or two ago, when Tom Riddle and Elizabeth - the strange, monstrous woman who seemed to have come from nowhere, and now called herself Tom's sister - had attacked the Ministry of Magic. Tom had told Lily, Harry's youngest child, that he had murdered Lily's older brother. James. A boy Tom had known since his very first days in the wizarding world. Harry had been there when they had first met. He had introduced them.

Even then, there was no funeral. There was no body, and Harry shuddered to think what Tom might have done with it. What he might have - no. With a herculean effort, Harry dragged his thoughts away from his murdered son. This wasn't James' funeral, here at a little old church in the country, an idyllic place of crumbling grey-stone and ivy, and birds chirping. It was Rose's. They were all here, together again. Harry sat in the front row. Ginny sat to his right, sobbing silently into his shoulder. To his left was Lily, stony-faced, grief-stricken, and past Lily, Albus and his wife.

On the other side of the aisle, chalk-faced among the sea of black were Ron and Hermione, sitting on either side of twenty-one year old Hugo. Both gazed, unblinking, at their daughter. Rose lay atop a black-velvet-cloaked bier, dressed in simple robes, the same deep-blue colour as her now-closed eyes. Blood-red roses were threaded through her long red hair. She looked heart-breakingly like Lily at that moment. The bier was draped in flowers, an explosion of colour on this most grey and sombre of winter evenings, blue and red and purple - and white.

They had arrived, anonymous, this morning, a bouquet of beautiful snow-white lilies. When Harry looked at them, he was almost back on the banks of the lake at Hogwarts, listening to Fawkes the phoenix's sorrowful lament. Hermione had asked around, but no one seemed to know who had sent the lilies.

Sitting on Ron's right were Molly and Arthur, their aged faces streaked with tears. For some reason, seeing them sent a particularly stinging stab of pain searing through Harry. This was supposed to be over,he thought helplessly. This was never supposed to happen again. Instead, Molly and Arthur had seen first their friends, then their children, then their grandchildren die. How long would it go on? Would, someday, Harry's grandchildren lie up there, draped in velvet and roses, while he watched?

Harry, a voice deep within him seemed to whisper. A woman's voice, soft, sweet - yet strong. His mother's, Harry knew instinctively. No more self-pity, Harry. This isn't you.

What can I do? he thought helplessly.

You can try.

Hermione had pleaded with Harry, almost daily since Tom and Elizabeth's attacks began, to return to the Ministry. He had refused. He had asked Hermione what he could possibly do. He was just one man. He wasn't Dumbledore, or Kingsley, or Snape, or even someone like Lupin. He couldn't make a difference.

Of course you can. I believe in you.

Harry was distracted from his mother's faint ethereal whispers by the sound of suddenly-renewed sobs, and the soft flutter as the audience rose as one to watch Rose Weasley's final descent. Harry, too, rose to his feet, taking Ginny's hand in his own with a strength that seemed to have long deserted him. She's in a better place, he thought, as the coffin lid swung shut. That, and the song of the lilies, gave him a modicum of comfort. She's moved on.

She's here, his mother whispered.

The editorship of the Daily Prophet had been a sparsely occupied position of late. At times Ginny, sports editor at the Prophet, found herself wondering whether the curse that had infamously plagued the Defence Against The Dark Arts position at Hogwarts might have transferred itself somehow to London. That was stupid, she knew; no one wanted to be editor because, as everyone knew, the newspaper had been one of the driving forces in the whole sordid Tom Riddle saga and - it was rumoured - Riddle still held a deep personal grudge against the Prophet.

Some even thought Riddle might have been behind the death of one of the previous incumbents, a certain Mr. Hector, or the mysterious disappearance of the Prophet's star journalist Elizabeth Selwyn. Curse or no curse, the paper was dying. Ginny should have left years ago. "Don't be stupid," she snapped. The object of her anger was a forty-something year-old man, dressed in a scratchy-brown suit and thick-rimmed reading glasses, a stupid expression present, as always, on his face. Percy Robins, sub-editor of the news department and an insufferable twerp. "Just take the job, you're easily the most qualified out of all of us."

'All of us' were the remaining few senior Prophet journalists and board-members that hadn't abandoned ship the day Tom Riddle returned. All had gathered - all seven of them, in this stuffy little meeting room - to appoint the new editor. Robins, sitting across the table from the fiercely-glaring Ginny, flapped his hands helplessly. "I'm - er - not really sure - well, you see, Ginny, the thing is-"

"Is what?" she hissed. Ginny had been returning home from Rose's funeral when the message had come - another editor had flown the Prophet's nest, and her presence was urgently needed. She was in a bad mood, to put it lightly.

"Well - this thing about Tom Riddle-"

"What about him?" she retorted heatedly. "Weren't you the one that was always writing editorials about him, Percy? Didn't you write 'If we do not take action now; if we do not choke the weed, before it strangles us in our sleep, what will the future generations - if any survive - think of us'?" Robins' eyebrow twitched upwards, impressed by Ginny's powers of recollection, but she wasn't finished. "'Riddle is most certainly not a boy', you wrote, 'whatever the sickening, sycophantic half-wits at the Ministry (Harry Potter chief among them) may tell us.' You wrote that ten years ago, Percy."

"What's your point, Ginny?" he asked faintly.

"You terrorised that eleven year-old boy, Percy. For five years you and Elizabeth bloody Selwyn made his life a misery. And now he's grown up, and he's become what you always said he was, and now you don't dare take the position you've dreamed of since you first stepped through these doors as a snivelling eighteen year-old? You sicken me, Percy."

"You're not still hung up on this, are you, Ginny?" Robins sighed, wiping away the steam from his glasses with a frilly handkerchief. "Riddle was a monster. Look how he's turned out."

"He only turned out this way because of your foul articles!" she yelled suddenly.

Robins looked rather taken aback by her outburst. "Ginny, I'm going to have to ask you to calm down. We need to appoint a new editor-"

"Who cares?" Ginny rose to her feet, suddenly annoyed she hadn't done this years before. Ten years before. "This paper's dying, anyway. Even if Tom Riddle doesn't finish you off, you're done. Nobody reads you anymore."

"Ginny-"

"I'm done," she interrupted, turning towards the exit. "I'm going to see if I can find something useful to do before Tom Riddle kills everyone I know. You scavengers keep picking at the corpse for all I care. You've just about stripped it clean." With that, she stormed out.

"How many today?" Hermione asked, though she was already fearing the answer to her question.

As she looked up, as expected, her junior undersecretary - a young black-haired woman named Harper - slipped through her half-closed office door. The morning death-count had become part of her daily routine of late, yet each time she heard of Ministry workers murdered, or families burnt alive in their homes, or innocent young women murdered on their way to work, a little part of Hermione, too, died. Harper's expression only fuelled the nervous tension gnawing at Hermione's chest. As she slid Hermione's door shut behind her, the young woman's face was a grave impenetrable mask.

"Twelve, Minister," Harper told her reluctantly.

"Twelve?" As Harper nodded, Hermione's shoulders slumped, and she felt the sudden urge to cry. Twelve! "When does it end?" she murmured faintly. Suddenly, she noticed her hands were shaking. Balling them into fists, she did her best to dispel the despair that had momentarily overcome her. She had to be strong. "I - thank you, Harper." Hermione forced some resolve into her quivering voice, the bleariness from her too-tired eyes. "Has - has Ron had any luck trying to find them?"

"No, Minister."

Well, that was to be expected. Riddle and his sister were ghosts. Hermione's heart still sank, however. "Any messages?" she asked.

"In your intray, Minister."

"Thanks." As Harper rose to leave, Hermione flicked through the thick pile of parchment demanding her attention this morning. All seemed fairly routine, except- "Harper?" she called, confused. Her secretary froze, her hand on the doorknob. When she turned, Hermione held a small folded note of parchment in her hand. She had found it at the bottom of her intray. Dear Minister, it was addressed in a wicked scrawl. "What's this?"

After a moment, Harper shrugged. "No idea, Minister." She pulled the office door open. "If that's all..."

"Yes, go," Hermione told her distractedly, her eyes still fixed on this little bit of parchment. There was something about it that filled her with dread. As the door swung shut, she unfolded it. Dear Minister, it read. We think it's time we met. Twelve o'clock tomorrow. Trafalgar Square. Love, the Riddles. P.S. Did you like our flowers?

The parchment fell from Hermione's suddenly-numb hand. They wanted to meet. Tomorrow. And we will, she thought with a sudden hot burst of anger - and that familiar stab of pain, the one she experienced a hundred times a day, every time she remembered that her daughter was dead. We will. We'll meet them - but not to talk. We'll kill these monsters tomorrow, and all of this will be over. "Harper?" she called. A few seconds later, her secretary's head popped in through the door. "Send me Lily, would you?"