20 Facts About Merope Riddle (HP, 1720 words, 15+)

[nopejr]

Warning: Rape.

Title: 20 Facts About Merope Riddle
Rating: 15+
Word Count: 1720 words
A/N: Written for the Harry Potter Random Facts Fest.

1. The end begins at the beginning. There's no way of escaping future history, not for them, and not for us.
    
2. And here is our Merope Gaunt, a Riddle now but still little more than a child, her plain, sallow face suffused with triumph, her lank hair almost radiant in the reflected spell-light, in the warm gold glow of pregnant congratulations. She is almost pretty here, and we would linger if we could, for we will not see its like again, but Merope has no mirror to admire herself in and wouldn't care to even if she had.
    
3. Today, the little vial goes glug, glug, glug in the sink, not in his coffee. Today, she doesn't remind him to take his vitamins. Today, she takes him to their bed again, as a good wife should, and afterwards she smiles and hisses and pulls his soft, rich hand to her pale belly, presses it to her clammy skin. She watches the confusion slip from his eyes.
    
4. Don't bother trying to explain. She won't get it, you know. How can she, when oft-jealous Morfin's idea of romance was to use his fingers a few times before he took her? When his idea of romance was to use his feet and fists? She's been taught to like it strange, has our Merope, right from that first, bloody and gagging on the remains of her dress, and every of the oh-so-many times since.
    
5. Poor Tom. Not too sympathetic, now; he's always been more devil than saint, for all his looks, arrogant, rash, and cruelly thoughtless. But poor Tom for this, waking, as if stumbling from some slow lingering summer fog, to this cooing, hissing, graven thing, squatting over him. Can we blame him? We can, of course, and we will. Love is blows like rainfall to our Merope - oh, but this is hate, she knows, she does. Her broken parts have reknit all twisted over the years, but she knows.
    
6. She always has. Hadn't she reported her loving father and oh-so-wonderful brother to the Ministry, soft like and sneaky, but done? Hadn't she done that, at least, whispered and whispered until they came? Perhaps Dumbledore was right and there is something essential to our natures, some unmarred core beneath the rust and ruin, beneath the tarnish and the debris. Salazar's steel still runs in these veins, you know, grown gnarled and bitter on the inbred vine, but there. Our Merope does not comprehend much, understands little of that, but she knows hate. It is the flame that chars. It is the spark that sustains.
    
7. Not so pretty now, our Merope, nor ever again. Poor Tom has made a mess of her, he has, though he could not stomp the baby out for all his trying, and we'll never know if he let her alive on purpose or by dreadful accident. Poor Tom's a-gone now; and he'll come to a sticky end, in the by and by. You can decide for your own how much or how little justified that particular unpleasantness may be. Here, our Merope's a wee bit busy, dragging herself across the ground by her fingertips - blood really is a poor lubricant - dragging herself on. But not away, not her: toward is the word of the moment.
    
8. It looks like a weed, Spickleseep does, like some half-hearted daisy-dandelion, but it makes you bleed less, scab faster, as our Merope knows. She likes her plants, what little, stunted things that'll survive her attempts to cultivate them. Muck in your veins, daddy tells you, but that dirt doesn't make for real green thumbs, sadly. But what she's got, she's got. She read, didn't she? Not much, not well, but she had eyes and a-thinking and there were pictures too on those little scraps rescued from the shit-wiping pile. She had those, and a need, sometimes, a desperate, terrible need.
    
9. Thought not much of a writing. Not one for label making. It won't be shock that does dear papa in, not six months from now. It'll be the aconite in the sage jar, taken in in greedy gulps by a man who never learned to cook, guzzled and swallowed and choked on, instead of sprinkled, sneakily, cheekily, just a little, in each and every meal.
    
10. Spickleseep prepared right can make the blood rush, can replicate that deep belly ache, that itch between your thighs that Merope thinks love is, when it's not blunt force trauma and emotional scarring. Poor Tom will remember the taste for almost seventeen years. Merope knows it raw, chews it now, between silent sobs that rack her body, that shake her like a private earthquake with just enough room for two.
     
11. She doesn't go back. She won't go back, not our Merope. This has been a year of her making, yes, even this that it has come to, all of her own making. When she presses her hands to her belly, she can feel life quickening, she can, she swears she can. There is no back. That oh-so-cute cottage and Tom, that dear decrepit shack and Marvolo. No, not to them, not crawling, not on her knees, not on her feet with the back straight, not our Merope.
     
12. Though she will stand. She does. Tears strips from her dress to bandage her wounds outside, plucks herbs to soothe them from inside. Merope has her skills, what they are, and she has her wand, she has that, aye, and her necklace too, the gold noose of history around her neck - the ring alone she misses, its gaudy shine, its deathly pall - and Slytherin is in her veins, he is. She is Merope Riddle, yes, she is, Riddle still, she took it and its hers and you can't have it, Riddle still, and she stands and she does not go back.
     
13. Not even when the months stack on her shoulders like the biggest damn stones you ever did feel. Merope walks, she does, clear across the country, and if she can not stop, well, she can move, can't she? She can move, and she does. There's food enough if you're willing, if you don't mind the grime, if you have your will and your wand, and she is, she doesn't, she does and she does. She will live. She will live.
     
14. But it gets harder and harder to cast spells, her belly gets bigger and bigger, and maybe one is pouring into the other, nourishing her child like a mother should. Maybe he's sucking it out of her down some twisted umbilical straw. Did I really pour the potion away, she wonders, did I? Or had it already been fading, slowly, slipping away with each new second life stirred inside her?
     
15. He - she knows it's a he know, knows it instinctively - he is her triumph, her ruin, a monument to her greatest love, to her worst failure, a reminder of misery, a moment of joy. She loves him and she hates him and she hates that she loves him and hates that she hates him and loves him still, despite, perhaps because of all this. And each day she gets thinner and more distended, thinner and more distorted, a bulging balloon strapped to a skeleton and smeared with the thinnest layer of skin, crowned with a few strands of hair and decorated in dirt and rags.
     
16. And still she moves, always towards, never away from. London can not bar her, though the owls screech blue pandemonium, though the Leaky Cauldron tries. Her eyes are obsidian. She is so pure now, stripped of all but that very base nature, the immutable sense of self that survives even this insatiable hollowing. Holy - she feels some kind of holy.
     
17. Burke tells her it's worthless and for a moment she is oh-so-grey again, colour of stone, background fading, but she is not stupid, not all the way, and she tells him so. "Everything has its worth, however pitiful, Mister Burke, and I'll mind you to 'member that, if you please," she tells him, that little diamond spark of hate burning in her throat, easing words from the permafrost. Ten galleons, she'll take, ten galleons for the locket, not a sickle less, and never mind if he would have given her fifty. She stood up, that's the point. Give her that, at least. No one else gave her much of anything.
     
18. The wind howls around her feet, spectral voices, wailing, and in the snow shapes she thinks she sees him, Poor Tom's a-cold, or maybe it's marvellous Marvolo, dead and her not knowing it but feeling it, oh, yes, and seeing them both, in one, and all of them, in the snow shapes, clutching and pulling at her and she already oh-so-cold, but she will stand, she will live, and she will not go back, our Merope. She will not, she says, and there are steps, a door, a Mrs Cole, a bed and towels and hot water and such pain, there has never been such a pain as this, such a pulling, such a wrenching, but she will not scream, she will not, she will not go back.
     
19. "I hope he looks like his papa," she tells them, after, be it benediction or curse. He's gone from her now, and soon she will be gone from him. There's a tingling in her that might be love, that might be her magic, growing again, a twisted, stunted thing like all her creations, but grown and hers, make no mistake of it. There's her tingling and her diamond hate and her cold core, and, see, Mrs Cole, see brother-lover, see father-hate, see, you patronising old Headmaster, you jaded youth, see? Not so defeated as all at. Not so defeated, our Merope - but then Mrs Cole looks away for just a little too long, and-
     
20. And that's it. We can't follow any longer. She's gone, gone, gone, and neither wind nor owls will find her now, no, nor us. She's gone, is our Merope, nineteen and a Riddle and gone, so long, goodbye, fare thee well. Which just leaves us with this - this bonnie baby, lying oh-so-silent in his crib, his eyes open and dark and perhaps, just perhaps, focusing unerringly upon us - and like so many, here, where Tom Marvolo Riddle begins, we find ourselves at, at last, the end.