Chapter Text
“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
- Mary Oliver
~*~
Beauty can be discovered in the eyes of the beholder. Each delicate brushstroke containing a series of unheard words. These were his brushstrokes. This was the magnum opus of god’s unseen art.
“Last night I had her in my bed.” There is a darkness to the exhilaration dancing amongst his vocals. A tight curl of enjoyment ready to snap deep inside his soul. Beautiful and so very broken. “I wound my hot and tight clasped hands about her.” The sweetest of silks swept under his wandering digits. The sheer-white fabric framed her body lovingly and he admired the stitching that passed under his touch. “It fused her, body and soul, together with my own. Poured into her, my spirit, breath and strength.”
His lips curl dangerously once the fabric turned sticky and began to grasp desperately to his passing presence. Oh, how his insides swelled with pride. Magnificent beauty. The art of his own design depicted in the eyes of another. Pity the artlessness of the dress was beginning to soak up something so sinister.
The man made a slow circle around his creation, taking in any details of imperfection. Perhaps it was the way the body was propped against her chest that made him seek out defects.
The ever-watching imp, a man with no skin, who painted the pure woman red. No, he was mistaken, the scene was immaculate. It had to be. He would not have his masterpiece ruined by something as tactless as tattered muscles or empty eye sockets. No. Nothing had even been ticked, which was a feat in-itself. The imp’s screams were that of a siren’s, singing for the way it’s skin slowly peeled away from its body. He supposed the imp was considered a man once, but now he was nothing more than an image to be depicted.
Slowly his gaze returned to the woman below it. Her head dropped off the back of her bed and gave way to a cascade of red waves. She looked to be at rest, delicate in her purity. “Anyone who touches her now commits adultery and incest. She is mine, and I am hers.” She was the last to die. She begged for her husband’s mercy, simply because she was unable to listen to the imp’s wails. He allowed the dampness of her cheeks to remain; it left a pleasant glow against her frail skin; added to the story’s beauty. He had chose to kill her softly, smothering the air from her lungs and watch passively as the light left her green eyes.
The abyss that once devoured him from the inside spread, reaching out for the sight of her cooling skin and like a hungry animal it absorbed the monstrosity of it all. “And have her I will…”
There came a whimper from space next to him and the man turned his cold blue eyes towards the tiny creature. It’s mother’s fingers barely brushing the edges of its mass of dark hair. The child reached for her, cried for her, but did not understand why she did not respond. The emptiness of the man’s eyes darkened at the sight of the tearful child. It would survive his presence, left behind with a darkness imprinted on his unconscious mind. Slowly he lowered to the infant’s level and absentmindedly brushed the fringe from its eyes. A smile slowly upturned the edges of his lips. He would have to keep an eye on the little beast, for he was suddenly curious to how he would cope. Would the images, in the mind of an infant, still affect the world around him?
Yes, watching the boy would become part of his great desig--
From his position the man caught a glow illuminating from the peripherals of his eyes. A distant shine from the floor beneath the bed. Rising numbers... ‘Call in process’. His brows scrunched together as his eyes snapped towards the woman’s seemingly peaceful face.
“Don’t fucking move.” He felt the metallic click of metal and the firm press of it’s barrel before he had heard the Man, whom he could only assume was the Sirius Black blinking mockingly from the phones screen.
He found himself laughing against the cold press of the gun. He, Tom Riddle , had been bested by a woman desperate to insure her child’s safety. His cruel smile tightened as her peaceful features become contemptuous in the darkness of his eyes.
Clever witch.