Depravity

Merope liked to watch the beautiful boy because he made her feel wicked.

She spied through the bushes, through the trees and felt hot, wicked lust rushing through her body at the sight of the earthly perfection the Muggles had produced. Tom Riddle was more beautiful than Morfin, and Morfin would be horrified at who she thought of as he tied her struggling arms to their favorite tree.

Today her handsome Muggle was escorting a pretty blonde, touching her hand and talking freely and looking at her ways Merope dreamed he would look at her. They moved away from the path, whispering secretively, kissing softly, touching intimately. Merope didn't dare move, didn't dare make a sound from her crouching position behind a bush.

Leaves brushed her neck, tangled in her hair like lover's fingers, but her eyes didn't leave the couple now on the ground. With every moment that passed, more of Tom was revealed - the pattern of freckles marring his smooth skin, his repetitive and reverent movements, the words of adoration that fell from his lips as his blonde writhed and licked and stroked her way into his heart.

Merope desired, longed, ached to deprave herself with her Muggle.

***

When she remembered Hogwarts, she remembered the way her classmates had kept a weary distance from the Gaunts. She remembered wide, shocked eyes when a younger girl had entered the unused, dusty classroom and found Merope and Morfin rutting like beasts on a rickety, creaking desk.

The girl had begged and pleaded with them. Her shocked eyes dulled with pain as Morfin beat her, shoved her over the same desk they had been on and smashed his fists into her face as Merope watched, an eager spectator wanting to taste the pure blood splashed on the desk.

She had crept up, sliding her hand along the girl's pale leg, and leaning to lick the blood off the dirty surface. The girl whimpered, crying noisily, as Morfin leaned down and licked a tear off her bloodied cheek. Merope laughed, touched the girl's face with both hands, caressing broken skin and smeared pure wizarding blood across her bared breasts, up her neck and roguing her swollen lips in blood and tears.

They hadn't modified her memory, though Morfin had considered it. The girl hadn't talked. The distance around the Gaunts grew deeper and wider until they were alone, just as they always had been.

It didn't matter. Slytherin's blood ran strong in their veins, and the Gaunts didn't need others, outsiders. Merope's lover and brother and only friend were one person, the same person it had been her entire life. Morfin wasn't handsome like some other boys, he wasn't smart like others, but he was hers and she was his and they understood each other better than anyone else would ever understand.

Morfin was the same as she, was the same blood and bone and flesh, only separate from her own.

***

When she remembered childhood, remembered drawing on dirty floors and violent yells and innocent laughter and her mother's lolling, vacant head twisted at an unnatural angle after an unnatural deed, she imagined what her father would say if he knew her fantasies.

Unholy. Impure. Disgrace.

One sweltering night she pants, "Tom," as her brother and her father pay homage to her, fighting amongst themselves like dogs to get what they want.

They do not freeze, they do not stop their violent passions. The hands gripping her thighs dig in, harder and deeper until she feels skin break and blood ooze from ragged fingernail incisions.

Morfin's hands are around her throat, creating a necklace of bruises to make the locket of their forefathers seem all the more noble against and making her see spots of angel brightness against the devilish darkness of the night.

She reaches, stretches, struggles to get her wand, lying carelessly on the bedside table, and grips it in her hand as her lungs burn. One spell, then another leave her father and brother limp and unconscious draped over her body.

She doesn't want to violate their minds, but they have murdered her trust. Her memory spells waver, and she fears she has destroyed them, but hopes they are whole. She has faith they will not remember her admission.

Merope curls up away from her family, and cries and shakes and wishes she had enough breath in her body to laugh or sob.

She is impure.

Generations of pure, Slytherin blood quickens in her veins, pulsing in her ears.

She is impure.

***

Morfin once was the same as she, but time has wrought its differences and Morfin's madness scares Merope now.

Morfin is jealous, and Merope does her best to alleviate his suspicions.

Merope watches her brother whispering affection to an adder and jealousy surges deep in her heart, from the same squalid part of her soul where her desire for Tom lies.

Merope remembers when Morfin whispered sensuous Parseltongue love to her, instead of useless, cold-blooded snakes.

When the snake curls too tightly around Morfin's hand, he sees it as rebellion not intimacy. The snake's screams for mercy and forgiveness and love are ignored as Morfin pounds a nail through its delicate spine, pinning it alive to the door.

Cold blood and warm scales and broken bones. Delicate thrashings and hoarse, hissed screams of agony. Morfin shows no mercy to his lovers.

Morfin will show her no mercy if her painful, wicked secret is revealed.

***

When Merope was a small child, her mother was her world.

Her mother kept the hovel looking respectable, put steaming meals on the table, washed behind Merope's ears and scolded Morfin for jumping out of trees. Her mother looked like her and she looks like her mother and Morfin and her father. They were family.

Her mother died young, died while Merope was young. As the warmth dissipated from her dead body, the warmth in their home faded away, leaving Merope in charge of cooking and cleaning and washing. Merope was just a child, she couldn't manage it all.

Merope yelled at her father once her mother was dead, screamed and beat on his chest and sobbed and hated him until she loved him again. Her father shoved her back, screamed at her back, loved her back but he never cried.

Merope had watched him murder her mother, but her hatred never festered.

Morfin had bounced on their mother's corpse, jumped up and down on her back, laughing delightedly as bones popped and flesh groaned.

Merope had stared at the woman's eyes, stared at the blank way they stared, frozen and dead. She had not helped her father dig the hole in the back of the garden, but simply had watched her mother's corpse as her brother desecrated it.

Before it was taken outside to be thrown in a hole, Merope had unclasped the golden locket from around the broken neck, and carefully clasped it around her own.

It was hers now.

***

Merope didn't mean to fall in love with the Muggle, but lust and desire twined through her heart until her heart's desire was the same.

Merope denies Morfin's touch in the night. She wants to be pure for her filthy love.

She wants to be wholesome and beautiful and become his fondest dream.

She wants to share her magic and soul and blood with him.

Morfin turns violent and angry towards her.

Her father begins to notice.

Her magic falters.

She is alone.

***

They do not question her, but they suspect now.

When she sneaks out to spy on her beautiful filth, her brother drags her home by her hair. She kicks and hits and gnashes her teeth, but Morfin is stronger than she will ever be.

When she stops stirring the dinner, gazing at dirty walls dreaming of her wretched love, her father shoves her to the floor, kicks her already bruised side and calls her a filthy whore.

Merope wants to laugh but is beaten. Merope is the most filthy one of them all, and they don't appreciate it. She is wicked in ways they will never be, and they hate and degrade her for it. Merope wants to know what impurity feels like inside her. Merope knows she will, one day.

Merope will give up everything for him to love her.

If she has to break him, she will. If she has to break herself, she will.

The blood of Salazar Slytherin runs proudly through her veins, insisting with every heartbeat that she achieve her ambitions.

When Morfin and her father are sentenced, she wants to scream with joy. Her opportunity has emerged. When she gives the disgusted Tom Riddle a drink of water outside her home, dressed in her prettiest gray dress with her locket shining proudly at her neck, the note to her father has been written for nearly a month.

Merope Gaunt broke her family as surely as they broke her.