Untouched

Untouched

She had always been quite stupid. She was the romantic of her year at Hogwarts; she was the girl who believed in truth, beauty, freedom, and love, all of which Thomas Marvolo Riddle frankly considered rot. She believed in the cleansing power of love, and that once one is in love, one cannot help but become a good person for that other person's sake. And, to do her credit, she faithfully fulfilled her own part of the bargain--the bargain that was unspoken, unwritten, unsealed--and therefore a bargain that Tom did not necessarily feel himself compelled to honor.

True, she had not been stupid in the academic sense. She was one of the best in their year in Transfiguration and Potions, though she got stuck during Defense Against the Dark Arts sometimes and had to beg help from Tom. Charms she was good but not perfect at, and although she loved Arithmancy, she struggled with the subject until she would yank at her hair in frustration. She always had hair strewn over her robes. Maybe she just lost hair to that degree naturally; maybe she was excessively violent. Tom had not really bothered enough about her to want to find that out.

When he asked her on a date to Hogsmeade, she was ecstatic, and, had Tom cared enough to want to know, he would have heard from the rest of Slytherin House that she had bawled in a most degrading way to her friends, a sobbing crying jag of relief and happiness. Tom, however, did not ask, and no one offered the information. He was like that; no one volunteered to speak much around him. One got the feeling that he already knew, and that you would be thought of as entirely ridiculous for only finding out at this late time, and he was the kind of person that one admired. No one felt particularly up to making him think them useless or slow or stupid, so it followed that no one told him.

He had never been in love with her, though it was true that she was the only girl he ever dated--the only girl or woman he ever kissed. Yet it wasn't love in any shape or form--he had liked her, had liked having her around; she was a convenient companion; very predictable, amusingly Slytherin-esque at times, capable of being corrected--and Tom loved to correct people; it made him feel brilliant in comparison--and she was nice, in her own way. He would never have to fear betrayal of any sort from her, though the most important reason was that she had nothing to do with that side of things. Tom aspired for power, and along with power comes politics and backstabbing and fighting and strategically laid plans and inventing new curses for killing more people at once...she was, quite simply, none of that.

She wasn't interested in the way of life of an all-powerful tyrant; all she was interested in was that stupid Transfiguration test that she almost got full marks on and the book she'd found in the Restricted Section that declaimed the absurdly eventless epic of Godric Gryffindor's love life aloud to the entire library when it was opened. (Slytherin House as a whole was quite convinced that a dead beetle could have done better.)

She was happily untouched by Tom's plans, yet not so much that she could have been one of the bungling Gryffindors or Hufflepuffs, for she shared the same ideas as her pure-blooded family did regarding Muggles and Mudbloods. And he liked her for it. He didn't love her, he didn't feel any strong feeling towards her--in fact, that was exactly what it was. He felt so completely neutral to her; he had no feelings at all regarding her, and that was so relaxing--for he cared about everything else, really, in a negative or positive way.

Only she mistook that complete lack of empathy for love.

She thought he loved her when he helped her with her homework; she thought he adored her when she caught him staring at her in Herbology; she thought he believed her the most beautiful and fascinating creature in existence when he sat next to her in one of the green sofas in the Slytherin common room and carelessly leaned over and kissed her. And, in reality, she had no effect on him whatsoever; her presence and sympathetic words didn't calm him down when he was furious about something, though that stopped happening as he grew older.

And now she was standing here, in front of him, so convinced that all the years of never telling her his "feelings" were really a time of repressing his burning desire for her soul or some nonsense like that. And it hadn't hurt her ego any to know that she wasn't pretty; she simply assumed that, since she wasn't as attractive as quite a few other girls, he saw something wonderful deep inside of her and fell in love with it--madly, deeply, relentlessly in love.

The years had not done much for her, either, he reflected as he saw her there, pathetically appealing to him to stop the constant killings of people that didn't deserve it--or so she thought. He remembered her with straggly brown hair that she kept pinned on top of her head, with flaky wisps constantly falling down and pushed behind her ears. Her eyes were the same blank grey as always--she had not had to buy glasses, then, after all her whining about it. Her dark green robes were mostly hidden beneath the plain black cloak clasped with a silver pin at her throat; her hands were twisting themselves into painful-looking knots, and then they would untwist, growing alternately yellowish-white and dark red as she put pressure on them in different spots. Her nails were not groomed well; they were long but untrimmed and not shaped aesthetically at all; and she had an expression of the most incomprehensible dumb belief and trust that he would do what she considered the "right thing" on her face that came near to surprising him, before he remembered her views on the amazing and purifying power of love.

"Please, Tom," she whispered. "Please. Ariadne didn't deserve to die. None of those people did. They're...they're just standing up for what they believe, just as you are--and it's not fair, is it, to condemn people for what you're doing yourself?"

"You are a singularly dimwitted girl," he said coldly. "I uphold a better world, and anyone who defies me holds that in contempt. Your little friend's death was one I would not take back had I the chance."

"But it was her father, Tom!" she almost wailed. "Her father! She wasn't saying any of those things; how could you kill her?"

"To make an example of her, of course, you silly wench," he snapped. "Now, have Lestrange show you out."

"I'm not finished!" she hiccupped, wiping tears and mess from her nose off of her face with her sleeve. "You're so untouchable, the great Lord Voldemort--the horror of every wizard alive. And you think you're happy like that, you selfish bastard--with your armies and goons and cronies and all your heartlessness--but you're not as great as you think, you know that?" Gaining strength, she stepped closer to him, but he remained standing where he was, next to the long black velvet curtains, and did not move a muscle. "You're vulnerable, everyone is--you think you're some sort of godlike thing everyone is forced to pay homage to just because they exist--well, let me tell you, you're human too, Tom Riddle. You were mortal once, you had feelings once, and you've still got that within you."

"You could sell romance novels for a living," he said drily. "Shall I kill you before you go any further, or will you leave by your own two feet?"

"You bastard!" she shrieked, arms flailing; wanting to slap him but thinking better of it at the last moment. "You're not so great and high and mighty as you pretend you are; you're still the same as you were after all these years. I know. I know you can't forget anything like--like that; I know you better than anyone else does. You--"

Quite bored now, he raised his wand, and he was almost amused at the way her eyes widened in horror. Almost--almost amused; she still could not manage to draw any sincere reaction from him, not even amusement.

"You love me," she whispered, suddenly quiet and, if he had wanted to, he would have seen her shoulders straighten and her eyes flash in a kind of adoring certainty. "You love me, Tom."

This was, he knew, the moment in which she expected him to buckle, to admit his everlasting love for her, and to fold her into his arms and kiss her with a passion that would weld their souls into one eternal star or something of the same ludicrous sort. With every twitch of her body, he knew that that was what she foresaw, what she anticipated; what she hoped for. For years, she had kept herself alive by believing that he loved her and saw something in her that even she could not find. The most romantic of them all, he reflected, also turned out to be the most stupid of them all, thanks to exactly those sentiments.

"That is perhaps the single most insulting thing anyone has ever said to me," he replied unfeelingly, and pointed his wand directly at her. "Avada Kedavra!"

The flash of green light obscured her horrified face, the face in which his betrayal of her broke down the illusion that had formed her stronghold and kept her alive. The face in which her fear of death struggled with the shock of the realization that he did not love her; indeed, that he never had loved her. The face in which love wrestled for belief and dismay tempered with the utmost grief--her horrified face in which the eyes rolled up underneath her eyelids, her mouth opened to form the beginning of a shocked "But--", and her hands raised instinctively to try to block the curse, which was, Tom thought idly, so typical of her, and so utterly pointless.

The next moment, she crashed to the floor, her cloak flung wide to reveal a patched tear in her robes, and one of her rings falling off and pattering away across the marble, clinking methodically and quite callously.

He looked down at her, at the wretched, miserable expression that was the last she would ever wear, and noted nonchalantly that, even in death, she was so interestingly incapable of producing any emotion within him.

The Dark Lord looked away from her prone figure, which a pudgy, short little man was busily removing from the room. He reflected, with some pride, that he had successfully become quite simply what he had always aspired for--purely untouched.

LA FIN