Savior

by She's a Star

Disclaimer: Harry Potter belongs to J.K. Rowling.

Author's Note: I've been wanting to try something dark for awhile now, and this came about. It's a bit abstract - I'm sorry about the religious parallels - I rather scared myself with those. I was just trying a character exploration explaining how Tom Riddle became Voldemort, and this kinda . . . happened. I hope I don't offend anyone. Mind you, this isn't what I think. He is, however, kind of a twisted guy and I can see it happening.

"Yeah, Voldemort. In the second book, Chamber of Secrets, in fact he's exactly what I've said before. He takes what he perceives to be a defect in himself, in other words the non-purity of his blood, and he projects it onto others. It's like Hitler and the Arian ideal, to which he did not conform at all, himself. And so Voldemort is doing this also. He takes his own inferiority, and turns it back on other people and attempts to exterminate in them what he hates in himself." -- J.K. Rowling

*

I cannot escape.

It has sunken into me, seeped and twisted its way through my veins, marring my very blood. More than anything I want to rid myself of this filth, this weakness that seems to be a thousand perpetual needles stinging my flesh. It is part of me, and there is nothing I can do to change it.

I hate what he has done. I hate that he is pitiful, feebleminded, weak, and yet he is the reason I live. There is nothing I can do to escape him - he is molded into me, and I could run a thousand years, a million worthless eternities, and still I could not escape this curséd side of my own soul.

I find myself yearning for power, craving the sinfully rich taste of it, knowing somehow that it will be some sort of consolation for the disgusting weaknesses of my father. Of all of them. They fear what they do not understand. They thrive upon the pain of those different than them. They are pathetic, heartless, closed-minded: they are the reason that people die, that misery and faded shades of gray have taken over this world.

And that blood - blood like theirs - runs through my veins.

Bad blood.

Dirty blood.

Something haunts me: something adamant and cold, something that promises in silent, vicious whispers never to leave me. It drives me to the brink of madness; it makes me wish for agony, death, anything but this strange sense of being chained.

I don't deserve to feel this.

No one deserves this.

I don't wish to be a savior, or any sort of saint. I never thought I would truly care about helping people.

But this feeling, this everlasting feeling is something no one should experience.

The world needs to be cleansed: all this darkness needs to be washed away.

Every Sunday at the orphanage, they would take us to the church. A pure sort of silence always lingered there, a sense of something more.

I would stare at the stained glass windows, beautiful in the way that death and agony are beautiful. Careful, intricate, a single picture, an image, a face: a man on a cross, bloodied and beaten and yet somehow powerful beyond all comprehension.

And for an instant, I see children staring up at another figure: still solemn, still saddened, captured forever in glass.

'He saved us,' they whisper, eyes wide with awed naiveté.

I will fight. I will save us all, preserve our world. My name will spill from soft lips in murmurs; I will live on always, always. Master, they will call me, Lord, they will say, overcome with respect, knowing that I am something more than a hero, something more than a savior.

I will win.

But I will not bleed.

I will not see him in myself.