Animus

Animus

“Have you ever had a pet?”

He does not answer, at first. The girl has finally quietened down, and her voice, angry and distressed only five minutes before, is faint and dreamy. Her dark eyes no longer flash in indignation but are subdued, hopeful dreams and fantasies disintegrating and only a faint shadow of what she used to be reflected in those depthless brown pools of nothing.

But she repeats the question, even more faintly this time than she had the first, and he feels as though he should reply, if only to satisfy her wishes and leave himself more time to contemplate his plans for the young boy sure to come soon. “No,” he says shortly, without a glance at her.

She has nothing to respond with, and so he continues to ignore her, focusing his gaze instead simply on the cold stone floor.

But then she speaks again, with the wistful vagueness of a doomed victim nearly unconscious. “Why?” she asks, and her head turns from the gritty pebbles scattered on the ground to send an inquisitive glance in his direction.

 “They’re useless, aren’t they,” he answers tightly, flattening the last word out as so not to let it rise up into a question. He is unwilling to let the girl believe, even in her last hour, that he cares for her opinion.

“Of course they aren’t,” she says softly. He nearly turns in his surprise, as even though her voice is soft, her tone is tinged with shades of contempt and severity. So unlike the girl he thinks he knows.

He refuses to dignify her statement with a reaction, and continues to stare stonily at the ground. So she goes on, seemingly not caring if he acknowledges her or not, so long as she has a subject she can focus on.

“Pets are always there for you,” she says evenly, looking directly at him. “They’re loyal, and steadfast. They aren’t devious, they don’t mock you, they don’t treat you with scorn. They love you,” and the undertones of her statements are obvious, though neither of them will dare to acknowledge them. She does not break her gaze, but keeps staring openly at him, daring him to match her gaze.

He can feel her dark eyes boring into his back, and pointedly does not look back at her. Yet he feels compelled to answer nevertheless. “Love,” he repeats, his condescension clear in his tone. “Love. And is one to care for love, when one can have so much more?”

“So much more?” she echoes, evidently taken aback. She has been lying motionlessly on the ground, but now she pushes herself up and props her delicate frame against the stone wall, curling her knees up and wrapping her thin arms around them. “How can you say that?”

He finally turns and regards her with emerald eyes as cold as the jewels they shared color with. “And why should you care, my dear?” he returns sharply, emphasizing the last word, usually a form of endearment, and drawing it out so it sounds as though a disdainful form of addressment.

She holds his eyes with hers, and for a few moments is silent. After a minute of silence, he breaks the gaze and snorts derisively, twisting back around and fixating his eyes on the Chamber entrance.

And then her voice splits the stillness, clear and even with no hint of emotion betraying her inner thoughts. “I care,” she states composedly, “because I love, and I am loved. My parents love me, and my brothers – they’re annoying, yes, but it doesn’t matter sometimes because we love each other. My friends, my teachers…don’t you see? You have to love, or at least care for so, or else you’ll…you’ll…” She stops, unable to finish her sentence. He feels her staring helplessly at him, and knows she would like to use his name as an example. He enjoys her unease, soaks it up, as he does all negative feelings he feels. He needs all emotions of hers, certainly, in order to become tangible, but hate, anger, horror…he likes those most. They put him at ease, tell him that he is in familiar territory.

A small tinkering sound emanates from behind him, a skittering on the rough pebbles. He whirls around reflexively, the girl’s wand in hand, and his eyes land upon a small rat scurrying across the floor, its beady eyes glinting. He lifts the wand and points it at the loathsome creature. A soft murmur and wave of the hand, and the rat falls to the ground, dead. He smiles with something like satisfaction. He has enough power to kill. That is all he needs.

The girl speaks again, in a tight, constricted voice. “That was horrid.”

“Did you find it so?” he asks, rhetorically, but she answers anyway.

“Yes. I did. Why did you do that?”

“And why,” he replies with soft malice, “do you talk so much? That was your undoing, my dear. You just couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t stop pouring your thoughts and emotions out…and to what? To whom, rather.” And he laughs, a strange sound coming from him.

He looks at her, and sees that she is pale and shaking. Her skin is stark white, and dampened with sweat. “No,” she says faintly, her hands clenched into fists. “You had it right the first time. To what, you said. And I’ll tell you what. I spilled out my hopes, my dreams, my thoughts out to a disgusting, horrible, inhuman thing. A thing,” and she looks as though she would like to spit at his feet if she had the strength to do so. “Because you can’t possibly be hu—oh!”

He cuts off her raging outburst with a sharp, well-placed slap. A red handprint stands out plainly against the fair skin of her left cheek, and a muffled sob is choked out from her mouth. “You…you…” she whispers, stumbling to find a classification despicable enough to describe the likes of him.

A twisted smile curls his lips, and he bends down and cups her chin in his hand. “Love,” he says again, contemplative. “I’ll tell you something of love, my dear. You loved me – no, don’t deny it, you know you did – but you didn’t know,” and he leans ever closer, and he can feel her short, quick breaths against his face, “that at one point, I grew fairly fond of you.”

She chokes, and pulls away. She stares at him in muted horror, her eyes wide and mouth forming a small O. “Wh—no—you couldn’t possibly—”

“Don’t be stupid,” he cuts her off briskly. “I didn’t love you, certainly. After all, you’re naught but a little fool. But I’ll confess that I started thinking of you with something quite near to affection. Perhaps all masters have this feeling towards their most devoted servant,” she makes a small sound of indignation, but he ignores it, “but yes, you could be most amusing at times. Most notably,” he smiles, “during your frightened rants. Yes, my dear, I don’t hate you. For of course I don’t believe you worthy of such a strong emotion. I reserve that for more – intelligent, say – victims. Quite the contrary, you were like…a pet,” and this is the clincher.

She cries out in surprise and dismay, and puts a hand to her mouth. “Of course I wasn’t—” she begins, and breaks off as the realization hits her.

Again he smiles, a curving of the lips and malicious sparkle of the eye. “How was it that you described a pet, dear? They’re loyal, never mock you, aren’t devious…and, oh yes, they love you. How…quaint.”

A choking sound escapes her as she struggles to hold back tears. “I hate you,” she managed, trembling.

“Of course you don’t,” he answers dismissively. “On the contrary, I think.”

“I don’t love you,” she says forcefully, with an uncharacteristic defiance that surprises him. “Maybe I did. But I don’t, not anymore. How could I possibly love you now?”

Their faces are close now, his emerald-green eyes burning into her bright brown ones – or was it the other way around? “You can’t,” he says, “and certainly, now you don’t. But you once did. When I wasn’t the tall stranger who knocked you unconscious and possessed you, but the nice boy who always kept your secrets and talked you through all the homework you couldn’t do. Do you remember that?”

 “I do,” she says, quietly, “but I wish I didn’t.”

“And why is that?”

“Because,” she lifts her chin up defiantly, “because then I could bring myself to hate you,” and suddenly she is crying. She does not often cry, unlike other girls in her year, who can be reduced to tears by something as useless as an unfinished extra credit assignment. She is emotionally strong. Or at least she used to be.

Before he broke her.

And he can see it most in her eyes, that spirit – or lack thereof. He has broken her. And he knows he should feel triumphant. Condescending. And, yet, he feels neither of these emotions, but something else. Something that tugs at his heart, a small, pitiful voice crying out through hard cruelty. He watches the girl, the girl whose spirit he is responsible for crushing, and that feeling, that odd feeling, rises.

Despite himself, he allows himself to kneel beside her, and tilts her chin up with his hand. She immediately averts her eyes, reluctant to let her eyes fall upon what she regards as a monster, but it does not matter. He has caught sight of her face, her expression. And what is in it?

Nothing.

And so anxious is he to see color in her face, emotion. Even at the very beginning, where he had never seen her, but only spoke through written words, she had always been so vivacious, so full of life. Even when she had only bad news to report, only complaints about various such things, he had felt her disgust. Felt it in the jagged scrawl of her handwriting and teardrops on the page and angry words she’d written. And now he thinks as he watches her cry that he would rather see that, an explosion of frustration and madness, rather than this – this silently crying, utterly foreign, empty figure.

She looks at him now, with no angry and sad words to spew, but a resigned, vacant stare. “You win,” she whispers quietly. “You win.”

And then she falls unconscious.

For a long moment, he does not move. He remains in his position kneeling beside her prone body, silently contemplating.  Yes. He has won. He has won the truest prize, against any dead body he may have caused.

He has taken Ginny Weasley’s soul.

And then, he stands, and looks down at the unmoving body of his unfortunate victim. Like a prince, though not charming but a prince of darkness, he leans over the fair young girl, and kisses her.

Her lips are cold, cold as snow. Yet, even in her mindless state of unconsciousness, he feels that, perhaps, probably, certainly, that he has affected her through this simple meeting of mouths.

Through a kiss, a Dementer steals one’s soul.

But Tom Riddle is not a Dementer.

And so, Ginny Weasley indeed felt something, despite that she was unconscious. But perhaps the soul is never quieted but in death. Always wandering, always searching. Yes, Ginny felt a sudden, odd spark. And some part of her became alive. She was aware of a presence before her. She also, somehow, felt the nature of that such presence. She saw its color. It was not black. Nor was it white.

No. It was colorless.

It was the presence of her captor. And yet, had he ever been her captor at all?

Or had it been, all this time, the other way around?