10 September 1938
After a first week and a half in the magical world proper, Mary was still not sure what to make of it—lovely and horrid at once, neither of these essences seemed to precede the other.
Lovely is real magic; not a day went without Mary witnessing a miracle. In the past two days alone she had seen a Ravenclaw prefect transfigure a barberry bush into a tortoise; the portrait of a 17th century headmaster threatening a vandaliser with expulsion; droves of students circling the castle on brooms after classes like their muggles analogues would with bicycles; and a burly Gryffindor boy enfold a romantic competitor in a mass of thorny, pulsating vines that then turned into ropes of solid ice. Lovely were the professors, who liberally made practical demonstrations before awed first-years; lovely was exploring the castle with her long-estranged, brilliant yet devilish twin brother, who adored her as if they were the last girl and boy on the planet. Lovely were newspapers with moving pictures and candles that orbited you like the moon.
Horrid was being a muggleborn in Slytherin, or being perceived as such; horrid were Slytherin girls, Slytherin house, and the preeminence of both the Slytherin ethos and individual Slytherin graduates in Magical Britain's haut monde. Indeed, it quickly became apparent to Mary that the mean-spiritedness of her housemates during the Welcome Feast was symptomatic of a greater, socially conventional prejudice, not incomparable to that of the medieval clergy for a mass of reprobates or lechers. Mary had been called 'mudblood' innumerable times, both in her face and behind her back; during meals, none except Tom deigned to levitate anything to her plate; and vile rumours about her true parentage were spread with plaguelike quickness. While she was spared the hexes and curses on account of her being a girl, seeing Tom suffer them was no less horrendous.
The only direct offence Mary received thus far was a self-exploding newspaper clipping deposited on her bed by Walburga Black (who, though not acknowledging of the antic, had the intention transparently visible in her mind) of Cardinal Banastre Macmillan's 'On Alleviating Muggleswell at Hogwarts' – an 'opinion piece' for The Daily Prophet composed after it was revealed that the newly enrolled Hogwarts class of 1945 had, cumulatively, a grand total of eleven muggleborns.
The victimisation of the twins did not go unnoticed by sympathetic members of other houses; on a Saturday afternoon, as the pair pored over archival documents in the library in search of their biological family (their enigmatic middle names and surname providing a point of departure for investigation), they were approached by a pair of Gryffindor boys of their year – Pavel Paskevich and Arthur Hill, both muggleborns themselves, though each of his own temperament. Paskevich, the British-born son of an exiled Russian cavalry general of the Tsar, half reminded Mary of Dostoevsky's Alyosha, half a precociously snobbish public schoolboy, while Hill was a cheerful, freckled backchatter of professors and classmates alike. In the hands of each was a rolled-up newspaper; without asking, they seated themselves before Mary and Tom and placed them on the table.
"The Singing Patronus," Hill proclaimed jocularly, handing Mary a copy of indeed, a newspaper titled so. "A paper for folks who ain't daft enough to believe them pointy-hat ponces at the Prophet. It don't have much circulation yet, but me and Pavel thought you two'd like it."
"Why should we?" asked Tom, his arms folded.
"Because just like me and Pavel, you, my mate, ain't got the privilege of being descended from a bunch of inbred head-cases with a penchant for murder and black magic. And neither does yer sister, who's a right sweetie –"
"Watch your tongue," interjected tom.
"What Arthur means to say is, we noticed how the snakes seems to have it out for you two," Paskevich said, picking up where his less gracious friend left off, though a small, amused smile had likewise come onto his face. "We reckoned you could use some friends, and maybe something to read that isn't undiluted vitriol against us and ours."
"We don't need your pity," Tom said coldly, his eyes legilimantically focused upon Paskevich's grey ones to determine the meaning of those two strange words. "Nor do we want it. Go bother someone else."
Hill shrugged. "Alright with me, Riddle. Do as you will, it's a free country. But do give 'em papers a read, eh? There's some funny stuff inside. Can't say we didn't try, Pav." He flashed a grin at Mary before walking away with Paskevich, whistling as he went.
Mary found that her spirits were much elevated; while in Salisbury she would have considered a boy like Arthur Hill at best charmingly impertinent, his innocently puerile compliment was rather agreeable after a week of constant bullying. Tom, however, stared at the papers vitriolically as if weighing whether to cast them aside or tear them to shreds, before finally picking up one and flipping through it with a sneer.
"What the hell is this about?" Tom jabbed at a headline on page five. Mary leaned over her twin and discovered beneath the iridescent masthead – The Singing Patronus – a poem entitled 'Ode to a Banshee', composed by a certain 'Phanto Lovegood', above a crudely drawn image of a floating green face. She recited:
"O Wide-Hats of lecherous concentricity, who like many rotten petals enfold upon that bulbous necrophantic lobelia in tyrannous ever-winter; even the Banshee shall one day tire of its proper voice – then shall it scream, and with a thousand others in her choir, resound the ossuary of your skulls –"
"What on earth is this about?"
"The espèce type of the lobelia is the cardinal flower; Lovegood declaims against the regime of cardinals. Uses thanatological imagery to imply that their infinite greed will one day return to feed upon itself. It's satirically and dramatically compelling I'd say," said Mary, leafing through the paper, finding articles on Ministry and Wizengamot corruption, plight in the muggle world, the advancement of muggle technics compared unfavourably to the stagnation of wizarding societies, except two – the German Thaumocracy and the Soviet Arcane Council, the only two in the world ruled by magical governments openly sympathetic to muggleborns and half-bloods; Polukrov's Transcendentalists and Grindelwald's Freimagier had both once been revolutionary parties with muggleborn partisans, become senior officials in the regimes they established.
Suddenly, the paper combusted in Mary's hands, leaving nothing but ash in her lap. Tom looked at her cheekily, wand outstretched.
"Quite ill-mannered of you, Tom," Mary said placidly, knowing that such pseudo-maternal repudiation simultaneously irritated yet pleased her twin.
"Our namesakes would have despised Lovegood and his ilk."
"You don't know that," Mary said. "Anyhow our namesakes were world-historically trivial people; we ought not care for their opinions."
She gestured smoothly at the mass of books spread on their table, none of which contained any plausible mention of a Marvolo or Melusina. History books, award and prefecture archives, genealogies (of which the Hogwarts library contained a dizzying many), even herbology and divination compendiums wherein they hoped to glean references to plants bearing their middle names – all to no avail. Tom sulked silently for a time, his eyes fixed on the ash in Mary's lap, before transfiguring it into a moth which he crushed under his heel. Mary watched him with mild consternation; they had been siblings for over a week now, and still she could never tell what he might do next.
"The Hat said our ancestors stopped coming to Hogwarts ages ago," continued Mary.
One among many pureblood prejudice Tom picked up was that the various groups of British and Irish sorcerers who did not send their children to Hogwarts – categories ranging from staff-wielding, Brittonic-speaking Welsh druids to 'Saint-Recusant' Yorkshiremen – were inferior practitioners of magic, and hence inferior beings entirely; Mary learned of this conception when a sixth-year boy of their house derided Eileen Prince for having a grandfather who had studied wizardry at home and tutored his progeny therein.
"Then our namesakes were useless wankers," said Tom splenetically. "Stains on history's arsecloth."
Mary laughed uneasily; her twin's easy vulgarity sometimes amused her more than it perturbed her, but presently it was the latter feeling that prevailed. Destitute and degenerated though Marvolo and Melusina likely had been, Mary could not stomach her twin's sudden hatred of them, as if they alone were responsible for all of his ills, when likely they were long dead and powerless to affect anything. Mary thought of her (adoptive) parents, of how phenomena quite beyond their control (the Great War and the Slump preeminent among them) had vitiated them into shadows of who they once were; would not the same principle of disillusionment and deterioration apply, if not more so, to a family over many generations? There were many examples; the Julio-Claudians, the Medici, the Hapsburgs…
"One wonders how the bloody hell it all went wrong," Tom muttered.
Tom's shoulders were visibly rigid as he returned to his reading. Mary, suddenly finding herself that it hadn't all gone bloody hellishly wrong, if only for her twin brother's sake, reached out and caressed his cheek. Predictably he flinched – he was still unused to receiving physical affection – but softened as Mary persisted in her sisterly massaging. Eventually she put both her arms around Tom's thin shoulders, stroking his hair and holding his head against her nascent breasts. Tom nuzzled against Mary's bosom like a puppy its mother. His arms came around her back, first furtively, then firmly. The scent of his hair (a cheap, stiff muggle pomade that smelled of shoe polish) overcame Mary with a sense of vertigo – as if she were falling into a void of boundless time, where Tom and she were all that existed, and all that mattered.
"We've got to change how we go about this," Mary said softly.
"How do you mean?" Tom asked, his tone warmer – Mary's affection was a dose of a narcotic that dulled his pride – he was hers again – pliant – eager to please – willing to listen.
"Have one of your fawning dormmates owl The Daily Prophet's Diagon office to scour the archives and look at all the birth announcement bits. Surely one of their fathers is big enough to get it done."
Tom raised his head from Mary's bosom. "That's brilliant, Mary – I'll have Lestrange do it tonight."
"Lovely; we shall soon know of what cloth we are cut."
An hour and thirty pages of biographical information about Hogwarts prefects later, Mary rose bleary-eyed from her seat for her pre-dinner bath, uncomfortably yet sensually conscious that Tom always watched her when her body extended or contracted, and walked away. The blatancy of this routine little lechery embarrassed her, but she could blame him; not when she always held him to her bosom when his distress became hers, not when she enjoyed this pseudo-maternal role she so seamlessly played for him.
Mary told herself it was necessary; that Tom, like some sort of Greek monster, had to be regularly placated – and so what if she as priestess-placater derived a sort of sinful enjoyment from it? Her primary principle was not pleasure anyhow, for she never rendered herself wholly accessible to Tom – she created distances, here and there, never hugged him for too long; rewarded Tom often, but withheld her total bounty, so that his relation to her was defined by a quantity she determined – she was in charge. Nonetheless as she hurriedly made her way from the Slytherin Common Room to her dormitory (she could not stand those cold pureblooded glares), Mary was struck by her own wiliness; Tom was her brother – her twin – why manipulate him? Because he is unpredictable when his pride is wounded, and his pride is wounded frequently. Because he loves Mary too much already. Only surgically restraining Tom's caprice and ensuring the maximisation of her own influence would ensure the integrity of their fraternal bond, or so Mary kept repeating to herself, until the sophistry became axiom.
Mary was met with an absurd sight as she entered her dormitory: Florence Travers shaking an unconscious house elf on her bed, by the side of an alabaster Victorian music box.
"Good afternoon, Mary; I see that you've discovered my predicament. An elf, collapsed on my bed. I hadn't thought my music box capable of causing harm. As you can imagine I'm quite distressed," Florence spoke rapidly, still shaking the elf. "Have you seen anything like this before? Ah, I forget. Of course you haven't."
Florence, a small, warbler-like girl who Mary internally likened to a zealously kept doll, with her over-smooth brown hair and semi-protuberant light blue eyes, was ordinarily full of poise. Her father, formerly Head of the DMLE, had been relegated to a lower Bishopric in the Wizengamot after the 'Kirkwall Scandal', wherein a party of eminent German purebloods visiting Britain touristically were detained by Aurors under suspicion of being Grindelwaldian henchwizards, if not Freimagier under the Fidelius; Florence consequently suffered unduly from gossip concerning her family, though her witching pedigree dated to the twelfth century and her wealth was vast.
Mary, however, legilimantically discerned that Florence was lying; that she knew very well the music box was cursed; that she, knowing Mary would return to the dormitory before dinner to bath, had wound up the music box precisely to bewitch Mary, but had failed to anticipate the prior arrival of a laundry elf. She wished to gain the favour of Walburga and Condril by humiliating Mary; she resented Walburga's refusal to treat her wholly like a peer, despite both their fathers having been, at some point or another, 'enrobed in red' in the Wizengamot.
"How on earth did you come to get such an object, Florence?" Mary asked, sitting on her bed and unlacing her shoes.
"One of my father's old servants became a toymaker after my father's…resignation. He sent us a gift – I thought it was rather pretty, but now I'm not so sure. It forces those listening to dance continually; I suppose the elf's knocked itself out," Florence continued matter-of-factly, releasing the creature. It rolled onto the floor limply. Its inertia vexed Florence; she resembled a child accustomed to unresisting toys that behaved when and how they ought to behave. "I doubt it's in mortal danger – but having a cursed object in one's dormitory…"
It was easy enough to deduce that Florence feared more the reaction of Torquil Travers than that of Horace Slughorn (Mary imagined their corpulent Potions Master guffawing at the absurd story, and meting out only a perfunctory detention before composing a bemused letter to the former).
"How long has it been out?" said Mary, disrobing, knowing that underripe Florence envied her figure. "Should we not at once alert Sluggie?"
"No – no – that wouldn't be –" Florence stammered, imagining her father's wrath – Mary legilimantically beheld the image of a stiff, austere man with grey hair and eyes like cut glass (though likewise protuberant like his daughter's) suspending Florence upside down in his dungeon-like office, conjuring shards of 'Boreal Black-Ice' (a Class II prohibited curse-conjuration) to puncture her soles and palms, and castigating her for 'bringing shame upon our name'. "I - I don't think that would be necessary."
It was the first time Mary beheld corporal punishment in its magical form; it horrified her – few children in Salisbury feared their parents' anger so, and none experienced it in such a vividly ghastly manner. She suddenly pitied Florence, and began to wonder whether Walburga and Condril's fathers treated them similarly –
"GET OUT OF MY MIND!" Florence screamed, flinging the music box at Mary, who barely redirected its course into her bedpost. Florence fell to her knees and covered her eyes – Mary, backing away from the agitated girl, had not thought it possible for others to feel her legilimency besides Tom, who often welcomed her presence in his mind. "OUT – OUT – OUT! GO AWAY!"
"I'm sorry!" said a half-nude Mary pressing into a corner of the chamber. "I didn't mean to intrude! I was –"
"MUDBLOOD SLAG! Confringo!"
Her dormmate's shoddily executed curse was easily parried by Mary and therefore bolstered her confidence. "Control yourself! Do you want me to help you or not?" Mary snapped, in a voice she borrowed from Tom. "Expelliarmus!"
Relief, but also guilt overcame Mary when Florence succumbed to her Disarming Charm without any resistance whatsoever, and burst into tears.
"Here's what shall happen," said Mary, continuing in Tom's saturnian tone, though she lowered her wand and conjured her robe back around her form. "I shall rouse the elf; we shall make it seem as though you were ignorant of the box's enchantment, then solicit the elf for both its forgiveness and silence. Alright, Florence?"
Florence, still sniffling, nodded in agreement; a softness and surprise had come into her tearful blue eyes at mudblood Mary's willingness to get her out of trouble. Mary approached the elf and waved her wand over it and – recalling Professor Merrythought's movements when she performed the same upon a brash Gryffindor boy who had summoned a flock of chickens and sent them into a Slytherin procession, resulting in an obscene quantity of feathers being strewn everywhere and several retaliatory hexes knocking him out – murmured, "Rennervate."
The elf awoke with a spasm. Noticing Mary, Florence, and the music box, it realised its situation, and scurried from Mary's bed to Florence's, cowering beneath Florence's blankets. Mary imagined Tom sneering, 'What a pathetic creature'.
"I told you not to open Lovegood's present," Mary said to Florence, at once slipping into the persona of a chiding but good-natured older sister. "He must have bought the music box from an antiquary without bothering to test it; I daresay it's centuries old –"
"But when I pplayed it – i-it hadn't made me want to dance at all, like Lovegood said it'd –" Florence spluttered, playing along, impressed by Mary's improvised deceit. "I wondered – well – Lovegood's a scatterbrain, isn't he – so I opened it… forgot to turn it off…"
The elf, trembling, poked its head from Florence's blankets, looking about apprehensively; Mary smiled reassuringly at it and asked, "What's your name?"
"Jaunty – Miss," the elf croaked, in a distinctly female voice.
"Jaunty," Mary repeated softly. She disliked the name; it implied that house elves, like mutts, should possess goofy demeanours – when clearly they were fully sentient creatures, even if dispositionally servile ones. Edward would have found it abominable. "You're quite safe now, Jaunty – we apologise for placing you in peril – Florence means to return Lovegood's gift –" Mary gestured at Florence to put away the music box, which she did promptly, "– and neither I nor Florence will punish you for opening it." Mary stared at Florence emphatically – Florence nodded eagerly in assent.
"Thank you, Miss, thank you!"
"Is there anything we can do for you, Jaunty?"
Florence's expression took upon the aspect of a Papuan tribeswoman beholding an airship, as she beheld Mary's apparent solicitude of a creature bred to be a slave. Mary inwardly sighed a breath of relief; she knew that she often got out of trouble with adults by dissembling her intentions – it was easy with her looks and her air – but was unsure whether her wiles would work upon an elf.
"Jaunty wants for naught, Miss – Jaunty serves Hogwarts –"
"Very good; then I have a favour to ask of you, Jaunty. Eschew reporting this incident to Professor Slughorn, or any other authority whatsoever – it would greatly distress Florence and I – we were merely curious about Lovegood's present; we really meant no harm to you."
The elf, relieved yet still trembling slightly, nodded quickly, her large eyes wide with what seemed a mix of surprise and gratitude. "Jaunty will not speak a word, Miss – Jaunty promises!"
"Thank you, Jaunty. We are counting on you," Mary concluded. Jaunty nodded compliantly, bowed, and Disapparated with a loud pop.
"Who the bloody hell is Lovegood?" asked a bashfully awestruck Florence.
14 October 1938
"Expelliarmus!"
Tom caught Tiberius McLaggen's wand with an expression of serene superiority, though this calm exterior belied the adrenaline and magic that coursed violently through his veins. Magical combat felt to him, how opium, prostitution, murder, gambling and suchlike cardinal pleasures felt to their maligned practitioners; it made everything more colourful—removed all the pain in his body—elevated him to something approximating godhood, though Mary had teasingly designated this state 'demonic'. It was how he felt at every DADA practical; held twice a week by Professor Merrythought, rather theatrically in the centre of the Quidditch Pitch, Tom revelled in being the strongest first-year at Hogwarts.
"Foul – foul – you cheated," shouted McLaggen, a conceited member of his house with its representative Apollonian look, messily flowing golden hair and a constant stubbornness to his visage, as if he were permanently intent on defending a thesis. "You used legilimency!"
This took Tom aback. It was the first time someone other than Mary visibly acknowledged his mind-reading. Tom had, of course, always tactfully shied from employing legilimency upon professors and older students, but McLaggen was a first-year; he was not supposed to have the requisite sensitivity to perceive Tom's intrusion.
"As if I'd need to read your thoughts to beat you," Tom sneered. It was true enough – Tom could have outsmarted McLaggen with his eyes closed and both hands tied behind his back, but where was the fun in that? But the accusation boiled his blood; the nerve of McLaggen, of all people, to make known his capacity for wordless legilimency – this was not part of Tom's plan.
"Back to the line, both of you! Riddle, give McLaggen back his wand!" barked Professor Professor Merrythought, a former auror of ageing albeit still imposing aspect who, unless there was significant if not literally bloody evidence to the contrary, dismissed the accusations her students levied at each other with supreme contempt.
Tom grudgingly thrust the wand back into McLaggen's waiting hand, and strode to his house's line to stand by Mary, whose hair was made into a bun with an over-vibrantly green (colour-enchanted) ribbon for DADA practicals – she usually wore it loose and wild (the twins shared a general distaste for physical restraint). Besides her was compact little Florence Travers, the girl Mary had befriended despite Florence's cretinous plot to hex her with a music box. Tom found Florence's pixie-like charm slightly nauseating, though he suspected his distaste might have something to do with the aforesaid mischief.
"Did you really use legilimency, Tom?" asked this pixieish subaltern of his sister, her silly blue eyes glimmering with something – dare Tom suspect it? – resembling attraction.
Tom glowered at her. Florence paled – Tom noticed that she shivered slightly. He derived a vague satisfaction from Florence's timidity; she reminded Tom of the mice he killed as a small boy.
"Of course not. McLaggen's a fibbing wanker," lied Tom, affecting a small conciliatory grin. Florence smiled with nervous reciprocity. Her teeth had obviously undergone some sort of magi-cosmetic treatment, but they were too neat and pale; Mary's were much nicer to look at.
8 - 20 December 1938
December brought a collapse of diplomatic relations between the German Ministry of Magic and the Sorcerous Council of Prague, the first bout of Quidditch games (Slytherin trounced Ravenclaw, though Tom found both the game and the frivolity it engendered only slightly less crude than soccer and cricket), and the sublimity that was snow. Tom, who had never before beheld snow, instantaneously loved it – he loved its sparkling virility, how it blanketed the landscape, cleansing it of its defects – he loved how it fell lazily but ceaselessly from the sky – he loved to watch how it made Mary positively angelic – the glacial air imparting to her ordinarily pale cheeks a tinge of pinkness that made Tom mourn mortality and loathe his own boyhood.
Throughout the term, both of them had grown; but his twin sister far surpassed him physically – Tom revelled in Mary's visible enlargement of length, bosom, hips, and rear; her hair grew longer; her physiognomy, tenderly feminine yet increasingly serpentine (her thin, wide lips, made increasingly large dimples when they wedged smilingly into her cheeks). Her movements had a balletic grace when she performed magic that indicated what Professor Slughorn effusively called 'witchly genius', a point that other girls envied to no end and imitated to no avail – Tom, however, continued to remain skinny and rather short, though he no longer had the pallor of the underfed Woolsian he once was.
Magically, they were both prodigies, though differently endowed. Tom was the infinitely better duellist – in hallways he had started subduing second- and third-year Gryffindors – and faster at grasping the theoretical basis of any bit of magic, while Mary was the superior transfiguress and enchantress. Indeed, she had one weekend fashioned out of mildewed old firewood living butterflies of iridescent glass, which delighted even Walburga Black. Mary's magic was softer, subtler than Tom's – she had more than once likened Tom's magic to the natural but anthropologically disastrous overflow of some element (a flood, cyclone, or perhaps volcanic eruption) – and indeed Tom's wandwork was, sometimes, excessively if not detrimentally theatrical; but Tom, a chronic insomniac ever-practising spells in solitude in the Slytherin Boys' Dormitory, felt his style to rather invigorate him.
"You will stay over Christmas, won't you?" Tom asked his sister while they pruned 'creatureweeds' from valerian planters in Greenhouse Three during Thursday Herbology with Hufflepuff. The fleeting insectoid beings, resembling crossbreeds of flies and white forget-me-nots, lived parasitically off valerian roots; Professor Herbert Beery, a rather fumbling man wearing the filthiest robe Tom had ever seen, was an enthusiastic proponent of 'recycling, not slaughtering' sentient plants; hence only usage of the 'Bug-Bewildering jinx' (incantation Petrificus Parvulus) was allowed when dealing with these creatures that were to Tom obviously a magical analogue of the malarial mosquito.
"I'd love to stay, Tom," said Mary, pausing and giving him a rueful, almost petulant look, "but mum and dad want me back over the holidays – what with the war looming and all, they're quite worried."
Tom's ensuing scowl had a threefold cause. Firstly, that his sister would, after so many weeks of discussing passionately the mystery of their biological parents with Tom, refer with languid nonchalance to the two muggles who had stolen her from Tom in 1927 as 'mum and dad'; secondly, that she omitted reference to Edward, who she surely missed as much as the dour doctor and his frigid wife; thirdly, that the indeed impending war reaffirmed her old sentimental ties with irrelevant muggles instead of intensifying her affinity to Tom.
"Stay a few days at least," Tom implored, though his wand-hand did not waver as he levitated a bundle of dazed creatureweeds into one of the many copper pans strewn across Greenhouse Three. "All my life I've dreamed of celebrating our birthday together."
Tom, who usually shunned pity, found himself using it as a tool to sway Mary.
Mary said nothing for a moment, the soft, pensive contours of her face betraying her mixed allegiances; she yearned for home – for the cosy cottage fireplace transplanted anachronistically into their Italianate parlour, for Edward's cheerful company, for her piano and nitty Godolphin friends – but she, like Tom, wanted to see just how thick the blanket of ice shrouding Hogwarts may yet accrue, and what moods the castle might impart when deprived of the majority of its noisy habitants. At last she said, "I'll spend the twentieth through to Christmas Day at Salisbury; St. Stephen's until our birthday shall be ours alone."
It was a concession, a partial one at that, and for Tom, anything less than total agreement felt lacking when it involved Mary. But he resigned himself to her decision, telling himself the passage of time would naturally pull her away from muggle attachments and towards him, towards his augmenting power.
Yet in the days that came, Tom's frustration at Mary's lack of total devotion compounded; though she did not speak of him, Tom knew that his twin's mind drifted not infrequently to her foppish muggle 'brother', who, though biologically unrelated to Mary, was so sentimentally proximate to her that she felt guilty for the forbidden desires of which he was chief object. Since the moment he was apprised of Edward Annett's existence, Tom had wanted to erase him – to disintegrate him into shreds of pulpy flesh and bone like the Freimagier had done to the last German transcendentalists in 1933. Tom's anger was only checked by his certainty that his sister's warm undercurrents of forbidden desire – that her bad conscience (proper to all biological orphans, even adopted ones, engendered by the indestructible suspicion that perhaps they had caused their parents to leave or die) – also yearned for Tom, and would only swell as Tom's power swelled.
Nonetheless, Tom found it intolerable that his twin, who over the last three months had budded physically and magically with the sanguine grace of a rose nourished by dragon blood (said to create flora with blooms of uncommon beauty), should still harbour any desires for the blond lout. That Mary would desire anyone other than Tom – in physiognomy, prowess, and purity of blood his double, grafted from his image like Eve from Adam's rib – was endlessly maddening.
To quench the noxious humours simmering in him, Tom studied, practised, and contemplated magic with monstrous intensity; during the final week of term he slept less than five hours each night, in order to force his soul to enlarge – to engorge with knowledge about not just charms, transfiguration, and combat spells, but the question of the origin of magic; of whether magic was divinely conferred or evolved; of the philosophical principles that governed it; of the interplay between wand, caster, and spell. Two DADA practicals a week and occasional hallway skirmish with Gryffindors coalesced his capacity for retaliatory violence to a degree that none of his own senior housemates hexed him for being a mudblood anymore. He ate fourfold the food, eightfold the meat (offal in particular; Tom indulged the old superstition that tripe and liver augmented one's magical prowess) he had in his London days.
At last, the day came; Mary and the rest were scheduled to depart from Hogsmeade Station on the Hogwarts Express at 11 AM sharp.
"A final gander at the library," proposed Tom – whose thoughts about the nineteenth-century French Consul-mage Claude Bonstrégon's letters with his nephew Jean-Asmodée Delacour concerning the possibility of 'Immanetising Revelation' (a term for permanently ending the Statute, something considered an inevitability by many pureblood observers of the First Industrial Revolution) through mass astrologically ritualised suicide – at once dissipated upon Mary's apparition in the Slytherin Common Room. She wore a sky-blue peacoat trimmed with faux fur; sported a matching hat with a black silk ribbon; and wore winter boots that made her positively tower over him. Tom's possessiveness, lust, jealousy, resentment, admiration, and wonder conflated in a vertiginous rush of emotion.
"The Bonstrégonic wars wiped out half of pureblood Europe. If they weren't killed, they took Vows of Chastity – a fancy term for ritual self-sterilisation," Tom began passionately as they made their way up the main staircase. "Every wizarding war seems to entail such; the one to come may well destroy wizarding nations entirely –" Tom paused, for Mary's attention appeared to have drifted; she glanced about the castle halls with a vague, wondrous regret at having to leave them if even for a few days – she seemed to radiate a golden, melancholy warmth, like the sun at twilight "– so many wizards dead, so many wizards never to be born, all for what? To preserve a partition bound to break down eventually?"
"That's what Phanto Lovegood says," said a rather distracted Mary, gazing at a portrait of a long-dead Slytherin Headmaster conversing with a protuberantly blue-eyed young wizard Tom suspected was a distant ancestor of Florence Travers. "I thought you were opposed to Lovegood's politics?"
"Immanentism comes in many forms," Tom said. "Some make sense, some are just nonsense. Lovegood's in a league of his own, the bleeding heart fool. He should be transfigured into a butterfly and stuck in a jar of shit."
They entered the library. Tom had no particular destination; he simply wished to prolong Mary's presence at Hogwarts, somewhere with few other people – Mr. Quirrell, the librarian, was gone, and only a small handful of fifth- and seventh-year students, preparing for their respective OWLs and NEWTs, were scattered throughout the huge chamber. For a moment they stood in silence, Tom observing his twin as she peered about the shelves languidly, her slender little fingers tracing the spines of books without real interest.
"Come with me to Salisbury," Mary said, with sudden urgency. Tom felt his heart quicken. "There's more than enough space and wealth to accommodate you; plus, you've barely seen anything outside of London, or anywhere really, Tom, have you? I'd love to show you around."
"Absolutely not," Tom said decisively; however intense his curiosity was about his twin's manner of living in the grand house she grew up in, however much he yearned to hear her play the piano, however much he was unable to wholly forego his stupid childish fantasy of having a Christmas dinner with a proper family, pride remained his master emotion. "I shall remain at Hogwarts, where I rightly belong – and so should you."
"I do belong here; but I also belong elsewhere. So could you – Father's coming home too; he'd take to you splendidly – I've yet to tell him of you, but I am sure –"
"Why haven't you told him about me?" Tom interrupted sharply, even if he had not once asked Mary to disclose anything of him to her pseudo-family. "Are you embarrassed by me? Do you imagine I'd not fit into your perfect little world?"
"It's not like that, Tom. I wanted to wait for the perfect moment, to make it something memorable. You're my brother; he'll adore you, of that I'm certain."
Tom scoffed. "Adore me? The man who took you away from me when we were babies? The man who gave you everything while I had nothing?"
"It's not like that, Tom. The Annetts lost their daughter — they were shattered, and found in me a way to heal. Yes, it's perverse, but it's tragic as well –"
"Am I supposed to feel sorry for them? Feel pity because they used you as a bloody replacement for their dead daughter? What about me, Mary? What about what I lost?"
Mary's voice began to tremble. "I-I know it wasn't just, Tom. Yet they cherish me; and – oh, why must you be so terribly obdurate?"
"No one can serve two masters, Mary," Tom replied with clerical finality. "And besides, I am your twin – your brother – I am all you need."
"I do need you, Thomas – greatly, infinitely so. But I can't be whole without the Annetts… it need not be so profound. It's basic psychology – they raised me –"
"Rubbish!" Tom snapped, fury boiling over at this girlishly reductive reasoning, a reminder of all the detestable ways fate had shaped their lives. As if 'basic psychology' were a greater arbiter than St. Matthew. "Mrs. Cole and a slew of daft old hens from Oaktun Heath raised me; I don't need them to be whole. You don't either. You just think you do 'cause you're a weak-minded, spoiled little fool who wants to have it both up the arse and in the cunt at once!"
All of a sudden, Tom was sent sprawling on the floor by a burst of Mary's wandless magic; he had no time to react before Mary loomed above him with wand in hand, her eyes wild and angry. "Petrificus Totalus!"
"You vile little worm! How dare you speak to me like that!" Mary hissed, her voice trembling with fury, wildly waving her wand like Ophelia brandishing a dagger. Tom, sprawled out on the floor in a most undignified manner, felt an odd thrill at Mary's intensity. Her magic was swift and powerful; she was almost more a witch than he was a wizard. "Do you think I'm some sort of doll, to amuse you at whim? I've endured so much of your horrid behavior, treated you with more kindness than you deserve – like some doting nanny – you're right! You do embarrass me! I'm ashamed to be your sister!"
Still suspended in total stasis by Mary's jinx, Tom was helpless against Mary's vitriolic tirade; yet he derived a morbid satisfaction from it. He was aware that he had pushed his twin too far; that his feelings for her, though noble in conception, were often selfish in execution; that he demanded from Mary far more than he deserved, and though shame pulsated in him moderately at her words, a sort of thick, sensual arousal unlike any he had experienced also surged through him; Mary, this beautiful witch – his own blood – whom he would kill and die for – reduced to hysterical wrath before him.
To not only wandlessly and wordlessly, but also motionlessly undo any curse is a difficult feat for an ordinary wizard; but eleven-year-old Tom Riddle knew that counter-curses could be enacted by motions of one's retinae alone, if the geometrically correct pattern was traced in tandem with the psychic generation of the right intention. Tom closed his eyes – seeing Mary glare quizzically at him before he did– and freed himself from the Full Body Bind. Mary leapt to her feet, backing away, her wand still pointing at Tom – Tom, rising slowly, met Mary's gaze defiantly, coolly. She looked at once horrified, impressed, furious, incredulous, and resigned; evidently it did not occur to her that Petrificus Totalus was not an infallible spell for the incapacitation of wayward twin brothers.
"How did you –"
"You think you can hurt me?" Tom asked in a half-contemptuous, half-playful tone. Mary flushed, but kept her wand quiveringly with Tom's chest; Tom, summoning his wand from the floor, held it casually. "Go on then, give it your best."
"Stop it, Tom. This isn't funny –"
"I mean it. I want you to hex me – hit me with your hardest curse; go ahead, sister, try me – I might even let you get in a second before I disarm you."
Tom knew that he made Mary feel trivial; knew she knew that Tom, who had made of magical violence a science, was for all intents and purposes invulnerable to anything she could throw at him, a head taller and several social classes above him though she might have been. Mary lowered her wand with a look of simultaneous resignation and repressed rage Tom found infinitely lovely, and suddenly he felt immensely foolish for putting his sister through this charade. Unable to focalise this inversion of passion, Tom instead snatched Mary into a hug. Mary stiffened briefly, before hugging Tom back with a vehemence that nearly knocked him over; they stood there, the library utterly silent around them, hugging each other as if to merge into one another; Mary smelled of lavender and lemon; Tom wondered whether he smelled of anything in particular, and marvelled at the paradox of hugging someone while simultaneously wondering how one smells – Mary sighed deeply, tearfully; Tom felt her tears fall upon his shoulder, and held her tighter, feeling an overwhelming tenderness for his twin sister, and a violent swelling of shame at having made her cry – though it was also a rather delicious feeling, shame – Tom wanted to tell Mary he loved her, though he thought perhaps the hug said it well enough.
The soft, warm firmness of his twin sister's body; his sudden sense that this was what must have been what it was like to gestate with her in their mother's womb; his sudden desire to, indeed, encapsulate the two of them together in an earthly womb in the Hogwarts library – among many secondary causes, such as the mere passage of time which was soon to send her back to oppressive, bland Salisbury, and Mary's the muscular afterburns of Mary's Petrificus Totalus which impeded his rational faculty from operating at full capacity – Thomas Marvolo Riddle pressed his lips first softly, then violently, upon Mary Melusina Riddle's.
Tom marvelled that a mere physical sensation, that the mere soft, silky, plush wetness of an 11-year-old girl's mouth, was enough to purge his soul of its every last memory of suffering. Starvation; beholding influenzal corpses year after year after year; being loathed by the orphans, the orphanage staff, the British Empire, the world; every foul smell and sight in London that had ever regurgitated metempsychotically into his nightmares – all rendered dissipated into fading snow, by the feeling of Mary's lips upon his own. Then he was brought back to the world; saw that Mary's cheeks burned, and was both flattered and alarmed by this. It was unclear whether Mary actually desired him; perhaps she only did so in the metaphorical sense; but before Tom could withdraw Mary kissed him back, tentatively, shyly, almost in comical imitation of the platonic prototype of all fancy country-town bints of breeding –
"Tom!" Mary gasped, pushing him away, blushing violently, looking left, right, behind, ahead, for any voyeuristic spy, though there were none. "What the bloody hell –"
"Forgive me," said Tom. Mary gazed at him with a mix of shock, indignation, and curiosity; Tom felt slightly stupid for having acted so hastily, but he wanted Mary to know – to comprehend that she was not a mere biological peer to him; that his devotion to her was polymorphously perverse. Yet he was unable to help himself; his twin sister looked so damnably kissable in that fur coat that Tom snatched her face and kissed her again.
"That's enough!" Mary snapped, squirming out of his second attack, her face more encrimsoned than her brother had ever seen it; he legilimantically perceived she was torn between lust and propriety; that she feared corrupting herself irreversibly – though she also revelled in Tom's unbridled impulsiveness – but she had been raised by muggles to fear deviation from convention. "We're not meant to – we're brother and sister," Mary said weakly.
"No – we're not meant to – but we want to; don't we? Damn propriety; damn everything," Tom insisted, his hands clutching Mary's waist with metallic insistence – she quavered deliciously.
Mary backed away, panting; her back bumped into a shelf – Tom stepped closer – she was torn between fleeing and acquiescing, and he was suddenly reminded of her tearful, flustered self on the Hogwarts Express three months ago, who had slapped him then ran away crying. He recalled the heavy despair that assaulted him then, worse than anything he had felt in his life thus far – the horror of having permanently alienated the one person in the world he cared for – Tom took a step back, willing himself to be patient, to not frighten Mary away.
"I – I need to go now," Mary whispered, attempting a smile and failing abysmally. Tom nodded slowly, trying to suppress his sudden despondency; Mary all but ran out of the library.