Fic: "Northern Lights", PG-13
Title: "Northern Lights"
Author: scythia
Pairing: Tom Riddle, Ginny Weasley, assorted Death Eaters
Rating: PG-13
Summary: About the Dark Mark
A/N: For Tarie's song title challenge
There were usually parties for the Markings, and, because it was so excruciatingly painful, there was always plenty of liquor.
Tattoos are made of ink, and they hurt because the tiny needle drives itself into your skin again and again and again and your flesh rebels against the strangeness. The Dark Mark finds something that was already inside you, a stain, a taint, and calls it forth to just simmering beneath your skin. That has always been what Voldemort was best at.
It doesn’t come all at once, the stain: first there is the ceremony, burning eyes on yours, fingers around your wrist cold as fire, and then once you are released there is a warm languor very much like sleep.
And then the pain begins.
The parties begin before that, though - they begin with the languor. Everyone gathers around and drinks firewhiskey and brandywine and their voices get louder and louder, secrets out and people kissing people they ordinarily never would, and when the skull floats up to the surface and acquaints you with your own death, often you begin screaming. The frenzy of the party really begins then. By the time the snake winds itself around the skull it has usally subsided to a steady ebb of longing and everyone is usually asleep. You all wake up together and there it is: the Dark Mark. No one ever speaks about the haze of secrets and sex, because that wouldn’t be gentlemanly. No one ever speaks about the screaming. Smashing party, they will say.
England is far North and Manchester more northern still but electro-magnetic storms are still rare. Tom Riddle remembers once the Northern Lights were visible from the roof of the orphanage and everyone gathered to watch. There was a strange lull, life itself holding its breath while the sky flickered and twirled and dull sad Manchester was buffeted by a strange wind from the sun. One of the older boys punches him in the kidneys because he looks so vulnerable, standing there, baring his throat to the sky, practically daring them to hurt him. Tom buckles over in sudden pain and when he looks up again the light is gone. Tom passes blood for a week and every time he does he thinks of the Northern Lights again, how beautiful, how cruel.
Severus Snape never had his party. Lucius Malfoy offered to throw it for him, the likes of which the Death Eaters would never have seen, but Snape said that it was very kind but he would respectfully decline. Suit yourself, said Malfoy. You always do. Snape had merely looked at him, the pain already rising behind his hooded dark eyes, and Lucius was reminded of the screams that had been torn from his throat, how everyone had seen, the look in Snape’s eyes much the same, and he said I do hope it isn’t about the money, Severus - after all, we all already know your… situation. Snape’s lips were pale and Lucius saw the faintest roiling on the skin of his forearm and knew that he was already unreachable in his private agonies, so he let him alone, this time.
When the Dark Mark goes up above the houses and shivers through a thousand shades of green every Death Eater remembers what it was like, the first time -- but all they remember is the pain. Except that human beings can’t remember pain, not really: if we could then life would be difficult, or more difficult than it already is. So what they remember instead isn’t their veins turned into iron filigree, isn’t their skin bubbling like tar, it’s an abstract word: pain. Sterile but potent, like cleansing charms, or the words aurora borealis or avada kedavra, or the sight of more announcements in the news, more death. It’s easier that way. Avada kedavra. See?
They’ve saved Ginny and made her whole again. She is very grateful to them for salvation, for forgiveness. She goes to bed before the others now, and her mother worries that it is shame that drives her away, so makes a point to tell her how no one blames her, how they know she doesn’t have it in her to be so cruel. Ginny smiles, but what she does not say is that she doesn’t sleep when she retires for the night: she lies awake in bed in her brothers’ too-big clothes, on their hand-me-down sheets with faded flannel dragons flapping listlessly across her pillowcase, and listens to her siblings jostling below her. She didn’t think it was possible but already she is beginning to forget what Tom looked like, only that he was beautiful and cruel, and that her very soul stood at attention when he spoke to her, and that the only thing they had to share was power.
There are many people who remember what the Dark Mark feels like to acquire, more than would admit to it. Only two people remember what it feels like to give, to call someone's transgressions to you, to bathe in them like a strange wind from the sun: Tom Marvolo Riddle and Ginny Weasley, who even now is lying in bed gnawing the skin of her inner arm with little milk-white teeth, mouth tasting of copper and sweat and her own sins, which give her first languor, then pain, then a steady ebb of longing.
Author: scythia
Pairing: Tom Riddle, Ginny Weasley, assorted Death Eaters
Rating: PG-13
Summary: About the Dark Mark
A/N: For Tarie's song title challenge
There were usually parties for the Markings, and, because it was so excruciatingly painful, there was always plenty of liquor.
Tattoos are made of ink, and they hurt because the tiny needle drives itself into your skin again and again and again and your flesh rebels against the strangeness. The Dark Mark finds something that was already inside you, a stain, a taint, and calls it forth to just simmering beneath your skin. That has always been what Voldemort was best at.
It doesn’t come all at once, the stain: first there is the ceremony, burning eyes on yours, fingers around your wrist cold as fire, and then once you are released there is a warm languor very much like sleep.
And then the pain begins.
The parties begin before that, though - they begin with the languor. Everyone gathers around and drinks firewhiskey and brandywine and their voices get louder and louder, secrets out and people kissing people they ordinarily never would, and when the skull floats up to the surface and acquaints you with your own death, often you begin screaming. The frenzy of the party really begins then. By the time the snake winds itself around the skull it has usally subsided to a steady ebb of longing and everyone is usually asleep. You all wake up together and there it is: the Dark Mark. No one ever speaks about the haze of secrets and sex, because that wouldn’t be gentlemanly. No one ever speaks about the screaming. Smashing party, they will say.
England is far North and Manchester more northern still but electro-magnetic storms are still rare. Tom Riddle remembers once the Northern Lights were visible from the roof of the orphanage and everyone gathered to watch. There was a strange lull, life itself holding its breath while the sky flickered and twirled and dull sad Manchester was buffeted by a strange wind from the sun. One of the older boys punches him in the kidneys because he looks so vulnerable, standing there, baring his throat to the sky, practically daring them to hurt him. Tom buckles over in sudden pain and when he looks up again the light is gone. Tom passes blood for a week and every time he does he thinks of the Northern Lights again, how beautiful, how cruel.
Severus Snape never had his party. Lucius Malfoy offered to throw it for him, the likes of which the Death Eaters would never have seen, but Snape said that it was very kind but he would respectfully decline. Suit yourself, said Malfoy. You always do. Snape had merely looked at him, the pain already rising behind his hooded dark eyes, and Lucius was reminded of the screams that had been torn from his throat, how everyone had seen, the look in Snape’s eyes much the same, and he said I do hope it isn’t about the money, Severus - after all, we all already know your… situation. Snape’s lips were pale and Lucius saw the faintest roiling on the skin of his forearm and knew that he was already unreachable in his private agonies, so he let him alone, this time.
When the Dark Mark goes up above the houses and shivers through a thousand shades of green every Death Eater remembers what it was like, the first time -- but all they remember is the pain. Except that human beings can’t remember pain, not really: if we could then life would be difficult, or more difficult than it already is. So what they remember instead isn’t their veins turned into iron filigree, isn’t their skin bubbling like tar, it’s an abstract word: pain. Sterile but potent, like cleansing charms, or the words aurora borealis or avada kedavra, or the sight of more announcements in the news, more death. It’s easier that way. Avada kedavra. See?
They’ve saved Ginny and made her whole again. She is very grateful to them for salvation, for forgiveness. She goes to bed before the others now, and her mother worries that it is shame that drives her away, so makes a point to tell her how no one blames her, how they know she doesn’t have it in her to be so cruel. Ginny smiles, but what she does not say is that she doesn’t sleep when she retires for the night: she lies awake in bed in her brothers’ too-big clothes, on their hand-me-down sheets with faded flannel dragons flapping listlessly across her pillowcase, and listens to her siblings jostling below her. She didn’t think it was possible but already she is beginning to forget what Tom looked like, only that he was beautiful and cruel, and that her very soul stood at attention when he spoke to her, and that the only thing they had to share was power.
There are many people who remember what the Dark Mark feels like to acquire, more than would admit to it. Only two people remember what it feels like to give, to call someone's transgressions to you, to bathe in them like a strange wind from the sun: Tom Marvolo Riddle and Ginny Weasley, who even now is lying in bed gnawing the skin of her inner arm with little milk-white teeth, mouth tasting of copper and sweat and her own sins, which give her first languor, then pain, then a steady ebb of longing.