Arise on the Ruins

arise on the ruins

"We see the things we had thought evil are really evil, and we know more definitely than we ever did before the directions in which men must move if a better world is to arise on the ruins of the one which is now hurling itself into destruction."

-Betrand Russel, Political Ideals

Tom steals Minerva's soul and when the white breaths escape from her body her ghost is just sixteen years old.

There's a moment when her outline wavers and he's not quite solid and the incorporeality of their hands touch, and is like the intervening years have rolled back. Tom runs a finger up her ghostly arm and presses down, one point of the universe pinned down underneath his fingers and peeled away, and when you shift one point everything else falls into place around it.

Tom says, "I could never kill you" when she's floating four inches above the ground and you can see the edge of the Chamber curve through her body.

"Do you still read Bertrand Russel?"

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life.

Dumbledore teaches Transfiguration, and it's all about selective pressure. Trailing a wand along the edge of a form and then whispering, whispering; the shape of reality is simply the shape it has now, and with a wand the outline of everything becomes slightly hazy.

When you change something, you make it your own.

Transfiguration teaches you:

When you shift one point the universe falls into place around it, so it's just the question of finding the right point.

The thing about fate is that it works in threes.

Clothos, Atropos and Lachesis.

Spinning, spinning.

It is not the thread of life they are spinning but a roulette board.

The barrel of a gun.

Eventually you lose.

The sport is in how long it'll take.

So Dumbledore spins his roulette board, and it's just a matter of time but Alchemy teaches you patience. The slow bubble of a solution and the drip drip drip of one liquid into another.

Elements are pure, but to create something new they must be mixed together.

Transmutation is about creation.

When you change something you make it your own.

Minerva's a Mudblood and reads Bertrand Russel in the hallways between classes, pressed up against the stone of the castle. Underneath the flickering lights which obscure some of the words, and on some days Minerva thinks that Hogwarts decides the meaning of the light&shadow on her page. The castle is filled with yellow light, and it's never quite black-and-white print like at home, always a matter of picking among the greys.

in dark days, men need clear faith and a well-grounded hope;

Tom, with his Prefect Badge and his worn clothes sparks when he walks because of the magic holding his shoes together, twisting like laces around his feet. At the ceremony Minerva's the one to pin the badge, being Head Girl and all, but her fingers slip and there's blood all over the place. It's red like carnations on his chest and for a moment she just stands there watching, because it's just a little prick and nobody should bleed like that.

Dumbledore carries Tom to the Infirmary and Minerva follows them at exactly four paces, and she's soaked in blood but it doesn't show on the Gryffindor ceremonial robes.

Elements are pure, but they're flawed too, and if you want to create something perfect you have to mix them together.

That's how Minerva finds out who Tom really is, because that disease has been lurking underneath all their skins for so long but no Pureblood actually has it. Dumbledore shows Tom the scar on his palm, and if you're very very careful you'll feel one under your fingers every time you meet a Pureblood wizard because that's how they check for the disease. The day their sons are born, knife pressed to skin, and if they heal they're named.

There's this superstition about children with the disease, that it's really a curse put on males. It dates back to the Greeks, really, and a myth about Selene and Artemis involving broken hearts or something like that.

Of course, it's all a load of bullshit. Minerva knows it isn't just males who're cursed, it's just that the girls who have the disease are stillborn. Good thing, too, or they'd be perfect perfect until they grew up and the first time they had their period they'd bleed to death.

But the point is, the entire supersitition is about souls and the older wizarding families, those with the purest weakest blood, the one's who're most scared, slice open their babies' chests and push the still-warm heart into the mother's mouth.

To consume death.

death, thou shalt die

Or else, the superstition goes, the same soul will infect the next baby of the family, and the next, and the next.

Whenever the last member of an ancient family dies without an heir, they blame the curse.

Minerva thinks it's just easier that way.

Tom's mother knew her son wasn't a Pureblood, but Salazar's blood counts for something so she pressed a knife into Tom's palm but died even before she found out whether he would live or die.

Tom always says that his mother named him, but really it was old spinster Miss Thorpe who ran the orphanage. It's the same formula she used on all the other babies who came to her without names:

Father's Name Grandfather's Name Surname

Tom Marvolo Riddle.

But Tom had a bit of his father in him and the Muggle is what's kept him alive.

Tom doesn't even have a scar.

Minerva changed the axis about which Tom spun, and when you change something you create it so she sits beside Tom's bed in the Infirmary and reads aloud from her book.

Sometimes she thinks that he just heard bits selectively, the flickering of his eyes back in his head deciding the meaning of the words. Maybe he heard in dark days, men need clear faith and a well-grounded hope; but drifted away for You may put a man to death because he loves his fellow-men, but you will not by doing so acquire the love which has made his happiness.

Dumbledore, though comes in just as she's saying,

Every man has it in his being to develop into something good or bad: there is a best possible for him, and a worst possible. His circumstances will determine whether his capacities for good are developed or crushed, and whether his bad impulses are strengthened or gradually diverted into better channels.

Tom's losing blood, you see, and you can conjure up blood but eventually the spell wears out and you're left with water or pumpkin juice or malt whisky or whatever it was to begin with in your veins.

The wizarding world learned that the hard way.

So Dumbledore places Minerva's hand on Tom's arm and then slides a knife between them. He asks, "All right?" but he's not asking for permission, really, and so Minerva just nods, and then the knife twists and the edge glitters before she can feel the warmth of her blood, his blood. A spell binds them together, and Minerva can feel the magic sneak up the veins in her body and slowly squeeze them out.

He wakes up as she falls forward and snatches his hand away. Dumbledore's standing and watching them, but he doesn't come to Minerva's aid immediately. "She almost died," Tom remarks, pressing his hand into the wound.

Dumbledore uses magic to seal him up, and it works, it works on the Muggle bits of him and when Minerva finally comes to she thinks that he'd probably have preferred to die.

Magic can't seal the wounds of Purebloods with the disease, even if you bind up their skin like laces it dissolves in the blood.

Minerva sits there between them, and she isn't sure whether it's the blood loss or something else entirely but the outlines of everything just kind of fade away.

The universe comes in threes, but the model isn't Clothos Atropos and Lachesis.

It's Jesus, God & Judas, and one must be a sacrifice.

He asks, "Do you still read Betrand Russell?"

And Minerva says no, no, not any more. Not since I grew up.

Because Russell has it all wrong, Russel still holds on to fixed outlines and a world which is eternal but then again he's never been in Dumbledore's Transfiguration classroom.

Russel bases his theory on the creative versus the possessive impulse and he says creative or constructive impulses, which aim at bringing into the world or making available for the use the kind of goods in which there is no privacy and no possession but oh, creation is the most private, possessive thing because when you create something you make it your own, and that's something Minerva found out as the blood drained out of her body and into the veins of a boy that tried to destroy the world.

And sometimes, that destruction was her own.

And sometimes, she smiled.

Which is why she never speaks his name.

Naming something is creating it, too, and Miss Thorpe the clumsy old spinster who used to slice the bread twice at mealtimes to make it last longer, so thinly that the orphans got used to the taste of her blood under the butter, owns a little piece of Tom which is why he pressed his wand into her neck even before his father's.

Now Tom owns a bit of Minerva as well, and she's a ghost but she's the ghost of his memory.

Dumbledore and the others rush in, then, even little Harry Potter straining from underneath Dumbledore's grip. Minerva smiles at Dumbledore and places a filmy hand on Tom's shoulder, and it's propretorial because possession doesn't cancel out, it just grows stronger. The slavery between slaves runs deeper, the layers of oppression and ownership weighted down by the crush of bodies.

Tom saunters forward, reaching past Dumbledore and to Harry's forehead where he traces the line of his scar. "I heal, you know," he says, conversationally. "I don't get scars."

The universe works in threes.

One has to be the sacrifice, and Minerva has always known she was Dumbledore's. He can't bring himself to apologise, and really, you have to make mistakes to get it right. Everyone fails the first time, but the thing about Transfiguration is selective pressure. If one point doesn't work you just choose another one and watch the universe slide into place around it.

The universe works in threes, but nothing is eternal and if you know where to push you can change almost anything.

Lily, Harry and Voldemort.

The only rule is: one must be a sacrifice.

Dumbledore places his hand on Harry's shoulder and pushes down on a point in the universe.

Harry, Tom and Voldemort.

But while you can decide to make your own mistakes, it's not very often you get to choose which ones.

So Tom kills Harry after Harry kills Voldemort and Minerva's still alive at the end of it all, only her fingers fall through Tom's when she touches him.

When you're sixteen, it's easy to believe you're infallible and when you have spent your life shifting shapes, reality just becomes another possibility to peel away.

All it takes is a little pressure, and while Minerva was Dumbledore's sacrifice she was never Tom's. But the universe works in threes, and they're missing a sacrifice so Dumbledore tries to find a point in the universe to press down on but the only one left is him. And sometimes the reality we create really does becomes reality and we have to play by it's rules.

Change is ownership, and when Dumbledore places the wand to his temple he becomes his own God.

Minerva and Tom lie together in bed, and he pretends so carefully that sometimes she forgets that she's not really there. They lie together and read Bertrand Russel and laugh about how he got it almost right, almost.

Every creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse;

They hold the world in the space between their fingertips, and create it anew with each breath.