Greater Things

Taste this, and be henceforth among the Gods thyself a Goddess. --John Milton


Minerva McGonagall was dreaming of dancing mugs filled with pumpkin juice and patterns of a complicated arithmancy lesson she could not follow. Oddly, the slightest of disturbances woke her; a pulsing sense of magic thick and heavy in the air and oily on her skin. As her eyelashes fluttered open, she heard a soft male voice whisper “ Consopio ,” and in her surprise she shot up, the sleep torn from her eyelids, her dark hair unbound and tumbling around her pale face and shoulders as her eyes quickly scanned the room and flew to the source of the dim light by her bed.

“It's the middle of the night, Tom! What are you doing here?” Minerva's heart fluttered as her fingers caught at the sheet, her voice quiet even though she had noticed that he'd sent out a spell to lull her other dormmates into uninterrupted slumber. Minevera could feel the strength of the spell against her skin, weighing down her eyes, her limbs- although she was awake. With a tremor, she looked around her dorm, her roommates snuggled in their bedcovers, and snuffling in their pillows. Then, under her eyelashes, she peered up at Tom.

The boy looked down at her with large dark eyes, pale face made even paler in the dim light of her chambers. He stood before shrouded in his black robes, his wand raised over his head so all she could see was the pale spectre of his face in the darkness. The curtains of her bed were parted and it bothered her that she had not heard him open them. She was supposed to be safe – each house dorm had its individual wards… how , she thought fleetingly, did he get past hers ?

“I had to come and see you.” His voice thrummed with a manic urgency that distressed her.

Minerva pulled the covers up to her chin, shuddering a bit at the look on his face.
“At two in the morning? Why can't it wait until tomorrow?” She struggled to sound blasé, cross even, anything but scared. Scared was a feeling that he would use against her, it was in his nature to do so.

“I—I had to ask you if you could see it.” He was twining his hands in the folds of his black cloak, pulling at the fabric nervously. Every now and then his eyes would dart back and forth to the others in the darkened room, moving his glowing wand as if to check that his sleep-spell still held.

“See what?” Minerva asked, bewildered, and casting for an out, she started- “Tom, I think you're sick, I think you need to go—“

“The mirror, Minerva!” he reached down and shook her, hard. It frightened her, his hand edging from the cloak of darkness which he stood to grasp at her shoulder. He had a strong grip and a small thrill went through her at the touch of his hands on her body – despite her concerns, secretly, shamefully –she found him attractive. “Please, I need to know…” his voice trailed off and he looked at her, desperate. “Please.”

Minerva sighed, biting her lip for a nanosecond and after a moment, pushed her bedcovers back. “Fine,” she said, grabbing her wand from underneath her pillow. “Wait for me outside. I don't know how you got in here, but you know you shouldn't be here.” She put on her best no-nonsense prefect voice, trying to throw in a bit of Gryffindor bravery as well. It would not reach him, not when he was so diabolically focused, but she put forth the effort regardless. It lessened her pique at his audacity and flaunting the rules for this little nocturnal visit.

“Because I'm brilliant,” he said in a strangled whisper, as though he mocked himself, and turned away from her. “And mad.”

Minerva paused as she pulled her robes over her head, staring at him. His head was bowed, and his shoulders appeared to be shaking. She stepped up to him, putting a hand very lightly on his shoulder. “Tom? Are you—“

But he wasn't crying. He was laughing. “I'll wait for you downstairs.”

And then he was gone.

****
Minerva muttered to herself as she made her way down the hallway, past the quiet portraits that only occasionally made sleepy sounds of interest as she passed. She tugged her robes tighter around her body, blinking sleepily, cross at him for waking her up and dragging her out of bed. The stones were cold under her slippers, the air's chilled fingers grasping at the surroundings around her. The darkness was not comforting here- like it was in her chambers or within her curtain-shrouded bed—it was heavy, oppressive, and frightening. She brushed her hair from her face with a shaking hand, summoning up her Gryffindor courage.

She didn't even like Tom, not in the way others might think. She knew he was brilliant and scary and a Slytherin, but they were friends, of a sort. He was friendly and smart, and they studied together, sometimes.

He was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs, huddled in his robes, leaning against the wall. “Come on,” he said gruffly, grabbing her arm and pulling her along.

“Ouch! Will you be careful, you're hurting me!” She tugged ineffectually at her arm, annoyed. A shiver of unease ran up her spine as he turned to glare at her with a hint of madness in his lovely dark eyes.

“I can't be bothered with that right now, Minerva.” He snapped the words at her as if the mere act of pausing to speak had cost him valuable time. Wincing under the pain of his grip, she followed him to an unused classroom. The light was different as the soft glow from his wand was diffused throughout the room, and an eerie blue tint illuminated the area around them.

For all his haste in dragging her there, he became slow and almost nonchalant when he shoved the door closed and leaned against it, breathing harshly from exertion. Languidly, he waved one of his hands towards the center of the room. “Look. Just look.”

Minerva stared at him, noticing the elegance of his hands and the intensity on his starkly handsome face. Her heart was still racing from their frantic flight and from a curious reaction to his nearness. “Why?”

“Just. Look.” The words were icy, impersonal and arrogant. She did not like the way he sounded. He was acting nothing like her quietly intense but usually friendly study partner.

“Tom,” she said quietly, eyes concerned. “What—?”

He moved towards her in a fluid movement, reminding her of the serpent that denoted his House.

“All right!” She said with hands raised in supplication. Turning, she braced herself for whatever it was he wanted her to see so desperately.

In the center of the room stood a mirror.

Minerva approached it carefully, staring at it in trepidation. She knew very well from her studies that the simplest of objects could be the most deadly. “What am I supposed to do?”

“Just tell me what you see.”

He was standing very close behind her, too close. His breath fell on her neck, causing gooseflesh to rise on her skin, and she wondered why his s's were sibilant, and why the air vibrated around the sounds. Minerva shivered, feeling the heat of his body radiating from behind… the warmth of his breath ghosting on the nape of her neck as it made her hairs stir… If she tilted her head, he would almost be kissing her neck. If she turned towards him…she felt the flush creeping up to stain her cheeks.

No .

“I see…myself. With perfect N.E.W.T. scores. A…teacher, Head of Gryffindor House. Married to…” She blushed further at that, not wanting her schoolgirl crush to be revealed. It was a fantasy and that was all it would ever be, he was older than her and a professor besides…

Tom made a disgusted ‘ tu t' behind her, as if he saw, as if he knew her innermost desires. “Typical. I see greatness, and you see only trivialities.”

He was crowding against her, and she was becoming irritated with his closeness where she had not minded it before. Now his body was a threat instead of an enticement, his nearness menacing where before it had been seductive. She no longer wanted him pressed so against her.

Minerva turned around at that, pride pricked at what he'd said. “These things to me are a mark of greatness, Tom. What did you see?”

She almost didn't want to know.

He had been facing the door, and when he turned to look at her, his face was as blank and frozen as she had ever seen it. She took a step backwards, and he advanced until she was pressed against the cold glass of the mirror and he was crowding her, pressing into her. She felt the warmth and heat of his body, a stark contrast to the hard and unyielding glass behind her, cutting through the thinness of her night dress. Her legs felt curiously weak, as if she would fall if the mirror was not there to support her. A rush of warmth ran down her body, zinging through her veins and pooling in her knickers, causing an embarrassed flush to decorate her cheeks. His hand was too close to her breast, and she was terrified that she would move a tiny bit over so that he was touching her, when she didn't want him to, didn't…want…

“Tom,” she said, voice calm despite her fear, eyes steady on him. “Move back.”

“I thought you wanted to know what I saw?”

She had never heard his voice like this, so curiously devoid of all emotion. He looked different; the shadows carved lines on his pale face that were not there in the daylight. Eyes that had always been warm and friendly glowed with an obsidian fire that made her breath catch in her throat.

There was a flush on his cheekbones, his breathing ragged and coming far too quickly. She could see the lean lines of his body beneath his robes, and she knew he could hurt her, if he really wanted….a warm flush suffused her again, and there was a strange lassitude in her voice as she answered him. “I don't want to know what you saw, Tom.”

He laughed, raised a hand, and touched her lips. “I'd have to kill you if I told you,” he said in a low sing-song voice, and she pushed at him. His malevolence was tangible, and it pushed her finally to being afraid of him.

He stepped back to let her go, turning away from her as she fled the room.

“Minerva,” he called as she wrenched the door open, eager to be gone from his presence. “I saw greatness. I saw myself, and blood, and pain.” He looked up at her with destroyed eyes. “I saw death.”

“We all die, Tom,” she told him, a bit crossly, angered at her instinctive reaction of fear towards him and for giving in to his demands to accompany him.

“I don't,” he said, and the intensity left him and he bowed his head, and his voice was Tom Riddle again. “That is what scares me. That something will hurt that much and not kill me.”

Minerva shook her head and tore out of the room, the walls and stairs passing in a blur of shapes and shades of darkness, not caring that her feet felt frozen or that she was occasionally running into walls in her haste to escape him. She used her hand on the walls to find her way, stone scraping at soft white flesh, and she tore her nail as she moved quickly towards the Gryffindor common room. She would count herself lucky to escape this night with only bruises and a robe torn at the hem.

The safe darkness of her dorm waited for her, and she tore her robes and slippers from her in haste. She crawled into the bed and, in a fit of childish hysteria, drew the covers up over her head. Not until the sun peeked in through the windows did she finally drift off to sleep, tortured by dreams of snakes and blood, and a madman's chilling laugh.

*****


Minerva ignored him after that, for the most part, though she could feel him watching her across the Great Hall, or in the hallways where they passed each other, he alone and she always with a group of friends.

He was always alone.

It wasn't until years later that she spoke with him again, long after they'd both left Hogwarts and she had returned to teach Transfiguration. The memory of that dark night with the Mirror of Erised had always haunted her. She had finally confessed to Albus, years later, and he had shaken his head and told her of the dangers of the mirror, and how men had become obsessed by what they saw inside of it.

What had he seen that had been so terrible?

She went to Hogsmeade, a young single woman escaping the prim and proper atmosphere of being a schoolteacher for a little momentary diversion with friends and some butterbeer and maybe even a Firewhisky if the headmaster was not around.

The air was crisp and frosty, a December day very close to the holidays- a time when every thing was lighter and brighter despite the horrible bite of the Scottish winter. Minerva sat with friends and drank her Butterbeer, then her Firewhisky, laughing and joking with the other younger teachers as they remembered their days on the other side of the desk. She blushed a little when they mentioned Albus, whom she still rather fancied, and then she excused herself to stop by Honeydukes before heading back to the castle. She'd wanted to give her first years some candy for the holiday, in a fit of whiskey-inspired adoration of her profession and her young charges.

It was a typically chilly December night, muted lights giving little guidance to her step in the darkness as she walked along the cobblestone streets. The shops and other establishments were lit from within, warm beacons of light in the winter night. She could see people inside, warmed by the closeness of others. It heightened her feeling of solitude, but she found she did not mind. The brisk air helped to clear her head, abolish some of the fuzziness from the whiskey.

Minerva saw him as soon as she turned towards the store, a figure clad in black with a hood pulled up over his head, leaning against the pole of the street light. There was something about his stance—the way he stood, the tilt of his head and the curve of his body, that told her on an instinctive level who it was.

He walked up to her, boots crunching on the snow. “Minerva,” he said in a delighted voice. “It's been a few years.” Bowing neatly, he extended his hand out with a flourish, a shiny red apple in his palm.

“Tom,” she said, a tad haltingly, still not able to see his face in the muted light of the streetlamp. “Is that you?” She reached out her hand for the apple, thought better of it, and dropped it to her side.

He laughed, but it did not sound amused. “Mostly.” He looked up, and she saw his face for a bit—older, certainly, with more lines where there hadn't been before. “And you, have you acquired your greatness, Minerva?”

She smiled a bit, searching for signs of the young man she had known. He was taller, broader, but she could tell little else from the lack of light around him. “Mostly,” she said, mocking him a bit gently.

He laughed, and there was an edge of warm amusement, and she relaxed a bit. “So what have you been up to?”

Tom took a step forward and smiled at her, and she saw his face more clearly as he moved into the warm circle of the streetlight. “Oh, what haven't I been up to?” He laughed again, and this time she took a step backwards. The apple had vanished, as if he'd never had it at all.

He followed. “Minerva….I've been wanting to talk to you, find you, ask for your help…”

She found she was breathing quickly, though not entirely from fear. He had a powerful sense about him, sensuous in a way she did not understand and had certainly never felt before around him. It was as if he pulled at her, using some dark magic she—

“Stop it!” She squeaked, and he laughed again.

“Oh, Minerva,” he said, gleeful. “You don't need to be frightened of me. I'm Tom Riddle, prefect, Head Boy, remember?” His face was smiling and open, friendly and utterly false.

“I remember, Tom,” she said, her voice trembling as if she was sixteen years old again, on that night. “I remember.”

Minerva turned and quickly went back towards the crowds, searching for her friends, her errand forgotten.

***


The next time she saw him, it was several years later, during the summer holidays, and she was in Brighton – a cheerful little seaside town then – with brightly shuttered beach houses, pebbled beaches and ultramarine seas.

Minerva had never appreciated the solitude of a vacation more than she did after living with so many children in one place. Somehow as a student it had never bothered her, but it did as an adult—as if there was some desire for solitude that came with adulthood, a desire not easily attained in the business of the castle.

She'd booked the little house in Brighton on a whim so that she could have time to herself. The cottage was on the beach, and it was just her and the crash of the ocean and her books.

She walked on the beach, a hat covering her fair skin, smiling at the couples and the old women chattering with their floppy sunhats. When I'm an old lady, I shall have a floppy sunhat, too .

Minerva did not see him there, because there were no shadows in which he could hide. He was far from her mind, but there were times at night she thought she heard something in the tavern where she sometimes had dinner, or saw something in the windows of the houses she passed on the way to her cottage.

That night she read Baudelaire and ate fish pie. She took a long hot bath and let herself slip into the fantasy that he was with her, that he was there to play chess with her and hand her a towel when she got out of the bath.

Fantasies were nice, but the reality was that she was alone in the cottage and it was best she accept it. It was such a silly dream, really, her and Albus—he was powerful and older and she was just his former student. No doubt her infatuation would fade in time.

She wrapped herself in a blue silk dressing gown, and sat by the fire with her hair down around her shoulders, halfway to the land of nod by the rhythmic wash of the waves on the shore just outside her window. She was dozing off a bit when she felt it .

It was the slightest prickle of unease on her skin, and then a strange, hissing sound from the shadows. The windows were open, and she thought perhaps a snake was curled beneath her window, strange a place as it would be for a snake.

The hissing continued, off and on, soft and almost…seductive. It was something that she could ignore for a little while. Then…

Her body was flushed beneath the robes, and she shifted uncomfortably on the chair with her legs tucked beneath her. A soft breeze came through the window and played at her hair, and still there was that hissing, sinuous and seductive, floating on the ocean breeze spilling through the window.

Minerva was conscious of the weight of her hair, still damp from her bath, on the skin of her shoulders as she sat there, book forgotten. It felt as if invisible fingers were tickling her, gently, up and down her arms. Her skin felt flushed with arousal, warm heat pooling in her stomach. What was this? Her fingers crawled down to brush the silk covering her thighs, the urge to move lower beneath the fabric and touch herself almost overwhelming. The noises continued, soft and insistent, until she was tugging the silk of her robe out of the way and moving two fingers towards herself, eager to end the throbbing ache that had settled between her legs. When the sound stopped, she was almost sorry, though slightly ashamed at what she'd been about to do.

Eventually, she set the book down and stood up, walking over to the window. There was nothing outside except the ocean, the noise of the surf familiar and reassuring. She turned away and went towards the bed, hands moving to the ties of the robe.

She'd slept naked every night since she'd arrived, but she hesitated as she went to remove the robe. The hissing stopped. All she heard was the surf, and after a few moments she let the silk fall and crawled naked into bed.

It was strange, she'd spent six nights in this tiny cottage and her sleep had been easy and unfettered every night, but tonight…she tossed and turned in the bed, and it took her forever to doze off.

When she did, her dream was full of serpents. Winding about her, sliding over her skin, and she couldn't move her hands. One twined its way up her body and glided between her legs, and the touch of the scales made her gasp and awaken, body flushed with arousal and shame.

It took her a moment to notice she was not alone, to see a fire burning in the hearth and a figure seated on the chair, swathed in black.

“Hello, Minerva,” the voice said, cold and utterly soulless, yet surprisingly familiar all the same.

“Tom,” she gasped, and felt a strange heavy weight upon her chest. Looking down, she saw the serpent lying supine on top of her, warm and dry. “What—“

“Don't worry about Nagini. She won't do anything unless I tell her too.” He spoke in that odd hissing voice—the same one she'd heard that evening—and the snake moved slowly to settle around her naked body, lying its head between her breasts. Its tongue came out to taste the air around her, and it hissed.

Tom laughed. “Nagini feels your shame at your dream,” he said slowly, “and she likes it.”

“Tom, what are you doing here?” Minerva looked down at the snake, heart pounding in her breast.

He was staring in the fire, ignoring her, communicating with the snake in that same hissing language. Parseltongue . He was a Parselmouth.

Of course.

“Clever. You always have been a clever witch.”

“Tom,” Minerva began, earnestly, wanting him to take his…pet, or whatever it was, and leave her alone.

“No,” he said, turning in the chair, face covered. “Not Tom. Not any more.” He stood up, and he was taller than she remembered. She blinked in confusion—certainly she had not seen what she just thought she saw? Tom had dark eyes, not red, no one had red eyes….

“I'm sorry—who are you, then?” She was nervous with the snake on her body, resting there as if she were a perch.

“Someone else. Someone…” he pushed the hood off his face and grinned at her. His face appeared almost skull-like—bony and thin, but his eyes were blood-dark, limpid pools of shadows.

“Someone powerful. Someone great .”

“I—I see. What do you want with me?” There had to be something. She did not think he was taking a holiday in Brighton. Icy tendrils of shock curled through her stomach, displacing her earlier desire.

“I want you to join me, Minerva.” He took a step towards her, staring down at her intently. “You are brilliant—together the entire wizarding world could be at our command.” There was a slight wistfulness in his tone.

“I don't want to rule the world,” Minerva whispered, trembling. “I want to be a teacher.”

He laughed coldly. “What a sorry waste of your talent,' he snapped, and held his arm out. He hissed a series of commands at his snake—for they could be nothing else as the serpent twisted and flowed from her body to his.

He looked…absurd with the snake wrapped around his black-clad frame—but it also seemed fitting somehow. She was pondering this as he stared down at her, and then she realized she was naked.

She couldn't move, suddenly, caught beneath his stare. You need to get your wand. You need to at least grab the covers. Do something. This is…

“So wrong,” he whispered, moving closer. One long-fingered hand reached out to touch her and she shuddered. His hands were like ice…. Like… death.

“I have seen that you will not join me, Minerva. I have seen that you will be my enemy, when you could have been my queen.” He laughed darkly. “I could offer you whatever you wanted, yes, even him …”

“How do you…?” she was mortified, either at him knowing her secret or at his touch on the flushed skin of her neck, she was not sure.

“I saw it in the mirror,” he said softly, sitting down by her. “Saw myself, and pain and the most agonizing suffering I could have imagined…”

His hands moved to cover her breasts, but it was clinical, almost perfunctory. Her nipples responded to his touch regardless, tightening with agonizing slowness under his feather soft caress. Her body was betraying her, opening like a flower under a summer's rain. “Such soft skin. I've forgotten, in all my searching through darkness, what a living body felt like beneath my hands.”

Despite herself Minerva found him and her reactions under his ministrations compelling and oddly arousing. “Why can't I push you aside, free myself?” Her own voice was tremulous but held a hint of genuine curiosity in this strange phenomenon. This was…something was not right, and her mind felt fuzzy in a way that should be terrifying her.

“I have such powers now, and I find a gift I have to compel others, to cause them to give me their loyalty, for just a few words, a few pretty sentences…” he trailed his hands down her stomach, and she shifted restlessly beneath him.

“This is madness, Tom. Whatever it is you wish of me, I will not do it. You know it. You have seen it, remember?” Her voice was slightly mocking—the Mirror of Erised was a thing of trickery, and she did not think it could be believed.

“Indeed I have. But I have seen something else, my grey-eyed goddess.” He leaned down and ran his tongue over her neck. It was dry like the scales of the serpent had been, earlier, but her pulse spiked viciously at the sandpaper rasp of tongue on her skin. “I have seen what will happen in this bed, between us.”

“Nothing,” she said, although knowing that Tom spoke the truth. Of their own accord, her hands were fisted in his cloak. “Nothing will happen.”

“Aren't you tired of being so…good?” His voice was coaxing, gentle and soft. He was pressing biting kisses—his teeth were sharp, she noted wildly, nipping insistently at her skin. “Don't you want to feel what I've found in my travels?”

“What you have found is evil, Tom. I can feel all that darkness on you like some kind of curse.” She stared up at him with wide eyes, feeling her will weakening as she whispered. “Please don't do this to me.”

His fingers slid between her legs, feeling the dewy wetness that proclaimed her desire louder than her words ever could. He played with her, drawing broken moans from her with shameful ease. “Just this once,” His voice was hypnotic and almost -gentle- “ we can pretend…that I crave your light, and you want what is dark within me, and then we will never speak of it again.”

He leaned down and covered her mouth with his, as his fingers slid deeper inside her.

It was wrong , she thought. He had done something to her to make her respond as she was. He was naked in the bed with her, and she was surrendering to his chill touch and his coldly whispered endearments, more horrifying than anything.

His skin was smooth and white, pale and littered with strange markings cut into his flesh and raised red and welt-like upon his back. “What is this?” she asked, voice faint as he sucked at her nipples, the pads of her fingers tracing the relief of the symbols lightly. She could not feel the pattern but it seemed to make some cohesive picture, and she thought she traced the twisting lines of a serpent.

“The most powerful of spells, my gray-eyed one.” he moved over her body and slid down, lips trailing on her stomach, tongue flicking in the same way his serpent had done. He was tasting her just as Nagini had, making a rumbling purr in his chest as he did so. It was an animalistic sound that thrilled her, and her hands fisted in the sheets and tugged, her hips arching towards his mouth.

When his mouth touched her where she so had so desperately wanted, she said “ oh ,” in a breathless voice, feeling the soft wetness of his tongue caressing her. It vibrated against her clit, warm and wet and insistent as it pushed against her. There was the briefest of touches against her mind, as if he was caressing her even there , that she was splayed before him in every way—body, mind and soul at his command. His hands were drawing mindless patterns on the soft skin of her inner thighs, occasionally pinching to deliver the slightest of pains with the pleasure he offered her.

She thought she heard him speaking, and strained to hear what he was saying through the white haze of pleasure, through the intense need that had her tossing her head on the pillow and biting her lip. Pieces of herself were falling, shattering, in the wake of her pleasure as he continued mercilessly. Her mind and body were in thrall and it was hell but she wanted it, wanted it so much…

It took her several moments, as the pleasure ebbed and flowed through her, to realize he was not speaking…not in English, anyway. He was hissing in Parseltongue against her nubbin, causing vibrations at the center of her body to radiate to her extremities and saturate her in pleasure, and her body was sliding wantonly on sheets that were soaked with sweat beneath her. Finally the strangeness of the language, the slight element of the sinister, and the divine pleasure combined until it was too much, until she was falling and grinding against his mouth, coming apart for him with a loud, long moan. Her fingers tore frantically at his shoulders, nails leaving half-moon bloodied gashes in his white skin. Her legs had fallen open, one dangling over the side of the bed as surrendered utterly to him, not caring that it was wrong, that he was not the one for whom her soul should yearn…but in that moment, it was only him, and she was only his.

Minerva was floating in a silky, soft place of no resistance, so that when he moved up her body and thrust inside of her, the sensation was a deep, stretching fullness mixed with a sharp pain. Her mind— or was it his? —was distracting her with images of them together in dungeon rooms with muted torchlight, entwined together in obscene pleasure amidst black sheets while the world trembled before them... She had not the strength or the will to resist him and moved in tandem, body searching for the pleasure her mind gleefully presented. Her limbs felt heavy and her hair was damp again, this time from sweat as it clung to her flushed face. The slightest brush of air against her made her sigh, his lightest touch made her tremble uncontrollably as her skin felt sensitive, raw, from her orgasm. She remained passive beneath him, eyes open, willingly submitting to what he wanted.

This strange joining of theirs was a sublime horror; if he was not so much a creature of darkness, oh, what they might have been together. All that he had ever promised her sparkled in her mind, and for a moment she saw what it would be like to rule the world with him, be by his side, revel in his darkness. Tears spilled from her eyes, down the sides of her face and into her hairline as she pulled him to her, wanting for that one moment what the world would deny her when the sun rose and this night ended.

It was stifling hot in the room and yet he was cold, even the hard length of him inside of her seemed to chill her. She put her hands on his buttocks, trying to drive him deeper into her, wanting him to split her open with his length, craving the pain and the pleasure both. The intensity with which he focused on her pleasure was like a drug, a honeyed sweetness pouring through her veins, pulling screams from her soul as she surrendered to him. Her back arched and she almost blacked out from the pleasure of it, the drugging oblivion offered by his body.

“The cottage is silenced,” he hissed, laughing, and his fingers slid down to rub her between her legs, to spark her pleasure again and again. “Scream all you want.”

Minerva felt her body and limbs rolling and heaving with her climax, and yet she beat at him with fisted hands as she came again underneath him –her screams hemorrhaging from her lips, flooding the confines of the room, over him, over her. Over them. His bites were leaving bloody marks on her skin, and yet she forced her hips closer to him to make it more intense, to make her pleasure complete.

He came with another vicious bite to her neck, hissing something in her ear as he did so and then- for a moment- oblivion.

**********************

Minerva's eyes fluttered open a few moments later, her thighs throbbing with the unaccustomed exertion, and her breasts crushed against the weight of Tom's body on her and his fingers were still … there .

In an instant, she was aware of how vulnerable she was, naked, legs spread and in a seaside cottage under a silencing spell with a serpent… and him. With a swallow, she firmed her chin and tried to call on the voice and mien that she used to keep students in line.

“I'm not a snake,” she said, rather cranky, alarmed at what she had just done. Why was she not more…upset?

He pulled off her and she saw it, the soft red glow in his eyes. “But I am.”

He climbed off the bed and laid a hand, warm and sticky now, on her temples before he traced what felt like a sideways number ‘8' on her forehead. “Virgin's blood,” he said softly. “A powerful essence I had to have, to complete the spell that was etched on my body. My thanks to you, Minerva, for what you have given me.”

”You drugged me. Say you drugged me. I would not have—not willingly.” She could have killed him, but there was a strange languor that made it impossible to move. Nor did she want to, and deep down there would always be the knowledge that he might have done something to sway her, but she had….wanted it.

Wanted him .

“I did not. You willingly surrendered to me—with the slightest of suggestions of course—because you've always wanted this. Even that night in the room with the Mirror of Erised, when you feared me, I knew that you wanted me.” He paused, and there was a hint of Tom in his voice. For a moment she thought she could have heard the lilt of an accent shaped by seven years of boarding school up North. “I could have had anyone, Minerva. I wanted it to be you. Because you were there with me the night I saw….” His voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “The night I saw what I would become. What you could have become, if you would have just given in…” He smiled darkly. “Like you did tonight.”

“Go away,” she said, trembling, blindly summoning her wand from the table beside her bed, holding it to his chest with a shaky hand, unable to see clearly from the tears of rage that threatened to obscure her vision. “Go away, forever, and don't come back, Tom.”

“Tom will never come back, Minerva. You've seen to that. But we shall meet again.” He Apparated from the room with a sharp ‘ pop ' leaving behind green slivers of smoke.

Woodenly, Minerva got up from the bed, shut the windows and the door and warded the room in a thick coat of silence, unable to bear the sound of the sea any longer.

****

She spoke of it years later to Albus, when Voldemort's reign of terror was at its height and the deaths were occurring nightly by his gang of robed and masked Death Eaters.

“I still wonder, Albus, if I'd been strong enough, smarter, then I would have known, could have stopped him…”

Albus had comforted her, telling her Voldemort's knowledge of Legilimancy would have been extensive even then and she would not have been prepared to know what he was about. He was charming and ruthless, had split up whole families with his charismatic speeches and his dark power.

She remembered the pattern she'd traced on his body, remembered it because she saw it every time she saw the Mark spread across the page of the Prophet when his Death Eaters killed.

The Dark Mark. The symbol of his terror, of his reign, of his followers. Shining in the sky above the dead, burned in the arms of his followers, and traced by her fingers years ago on the cold flesh of his back.

One day they would meet again, and she rather hoped it would be by the sea, the final battle, whenever it was that it came. She did not like the ocean anymore, hated it, refused to vacation anywhere near it after that night.

Minerva wanted to be able to hear the crash of the sea again, without hearing his laugh and the hiss of the serpent in the waves and her broken screams over the ebb and flow of pleasure that they had that night.

~Finis