Beetle Wings: Chapter One, Requiem

(First ever patreon early access post! Please enjoy! I'll be posting updates to my fics and wips about a week early, so keep an eye out for that.)

title: beetle wings

desc:

Merope Gaunt’s mother dies when she is six years old. 

Merope Gaunt very suddenly realizes that her mother isn’t the only dead thing laying in the Gaunt Shack. Besides the snakes, of course. 

(si into merope gaunt before she ever has tom riddle, since nobody’s ever done that before)

tags:

M

categories: f/f , f/m

warnings: creator chose not to use archive warnings

Merope Gaunt, Original Female Character(s), Morfin Gaunt, Marvolo Gaunt

period-typical sexism, blood purity, reincarnation, transmigration, self-insert, child abuse, mentions of incest, yeah i’m going there, merope’s family tree is a trunk, Self-Insert as Merope Gaunt, animal death, trauma is a cycle, and here we will break the wheel

--

Merope Gaunt’s mother dies when she is six.

Sweat damp fingers curl into Merope’s dark hair, limp and feverish. Morgana Gaunt isn’t a beautiful woman, her cheeks are too sallow and her back is always hunched with some unseen weight. 

But Morgana is Merope’s mother, so she will never see beauty like hers again once she is gone. She will search for her long lashes and warm, willowy hands for the rest of her life. She’s chasing them already, nestled close to Morgana’s ragged chest and listening to her breathe. 

“Be a good girl, Merope,” Morgana murmurs, so quiet Merope can barely hear her. 

In the other room Merope’s father shouts at Morfin for breaking something. Merope flinches when she hears a particularly loud hiss of parseltongue turn to harsh English. 

“I will,” Merope says in a voice almost as hushed as her mother’s. She has already learned that to be heard brings only suffering.

Merope’s fingers play with black black strands of her mothers hair and her own, twine-ing together in the candlelight. She thinks that if she twists the strands between each digit her mother will never leave her. 

They will always be laying on these sweat damp sheets. Merope’s mother will always be breathing into her brow. 

Morgana Gaunt dies in a dirty shack to the sound of her husband shouting at their son, and her daughter curled up beside her. Morgana presses her wand into Merope’s chest with uncoordinated fingers, Merope’s pulse quick and humming there. She does not move her hand until Merope takes the wand.

Morgana stills with a barely there exhale. 

And then Merope remembers things she had forgotten, all at once. Her mother’s wand is warm in her hand. 

—

Death is a strange thing. It’s an end, certainly, but not seemingly the end. 

Merope’s head aches, thoughts tumbling with new knowledge and a fully formed self. She feels too big for her body. Hands too small and pale where once they were kissed by sunlight and big. Knobby kneed and skinny where she had been curved.

The funeral passes in a half conscious haze. Merope thinks she hears father (Marvolo, his name is Marvolo, Merope’s son will bear his name—) calling her stupid. She doesn’t react. Her mother’s body is lowered into a shabby little coffin, and the coffin is lowered into a pauper’s grave behind the house. There is no priest.

Marvolo says something about a family plot, another lost glory stolen by mudbloods. He carves Morgana’s name into a plank of wood with shaky hands and uncertain letters. The date is an afterthought. February 17th, 1913.

Merope says nothing. She wasn’t a loud child before this. She will not start now. 

It takes her weeks to realize what exactly she is remembering, and by the end she has little idea of what to do with it. 

She is dead. Or, Merope was dead. And Merope’s name was once different, her face different, her family different, her life—

The Gaunt cottage is in a state of slow growing disrepair. Merope’s mother had been the one to maintain it. Her bone pale wand would make the air shimmer and the rooms cleaner. Marvolo doesn’t know how to cook, and doesn’t care to clean. Dirty dishes begin to pile up in the sink. Bugs scuttle along the floor. 

Morfin has started nailing snakes to the door since mother died. They stink with sweet smelling rot. Merope stares at their glassy eyes and the weeping blood trails down the door.

Merope’s life was different, once. 

“It’s about time you started to earn your keep, girl,” Marvolo orders, shoving a sweep and dustpan into her small hands. Sunlight drifts through the dirty windows and dust motes fill the air. Merope had crawled out of the small bed she shares with Morfin to go outside before her father stopped her in the small living room.

Merope blinks at the broom. Hesitates for a moment. It’s a mistake. 

Pain spirals quick from the side of her head, sudden and blunt. Marvolo’s hand retreats from where he’s cuffed her in the ear. Merope makes a wounded noise, leaning away from him. 

“Don’t just stare at it! Salazar knows your ma’s death turned you into a little numpty. Bet you’re a squib too, with my luck,” Marvolo says to himself. He looks down at Merope narrow eyed. He’s so much taller than Merope. A thin man made thinner by Merope’s mother’s death, but towering over skinnier and shorter Merope. 

His dark eyes shine with a kind of thoughtless malice. Merope had a father with kind eyes, before. Bags grew beneath them and wrinkles pulled at the corners, but he had been kind.

Does Marvolo understand kindness? Had his parents held him? 

Merope’s grip on the broom and pan tightens. Her pale, knobby knuckles turn white. 

There’s a foreign energy boiling under her skin as she walks away from her father. The gnashing of teeth at her tendons and fingers plucking at her ribs. She breathes slow and lets that tension leave her, ignores the way the broomhandle comes away with little singed handprints.

Her name is Merope Gaunt. She is six, almost seven. She lives in a world of magic she knew from books. She is supposed to die in a decade. Her son will be like his grandfather. 

Merope picks up the pieces of the Gaunt shack with too small hands. The sink loses its moldy plates. The floors get a little less muddy. The spring rains have started and nobody but her ever wipes their feet at the door. 

Merope does not want to die. Merope does not want to have a son like Marvolo Gaunt— a son that will hurt children and kill mudbloods and hate and hate and hate. There is nothing pure about Merope’s blood. Nothing sacred nor sanctified by magic. 

Merope catches her reflection in the dirty dishwater, stares down at her left eye that’s drifting. Merope stares at Morfin and his rages, his worst tendencies egged on by their father. Merope stares at Marvolo’s wand in his pocket. It never leaves him, and is never, ever used.

Merope Gaunt thinks. 

—

There are advantages to her situation. There has to be, because otherwise Merope will rip her hair out and throw herself into the creek that runs through the forest behind the cottage. She wishes she could be a frog there, sometimes. Wishes she could burrow into the mud and smooth stones and never see the cottage again. 

Merope, unlike her brother, unlike her father, can read. Merope can write. Merope can stomach being in Little Hangleton without spouting off slurs about how the populus is dirty. Whether she can stomach everyone else in Little Hangleton thinking she’s dirty is still up in the air.

“Will Morfin go to Hogwarts?” Merope asks her father on one of his good days. He came home with a pair of fat ducks he’d poached from the woods— or maybe the word poached is wrong. Merope thinks her family owns the cottage and forest behind them and that’s the only reason the rich Riddles down the road haven’t had them evicted. 

Merope doesn’t allow her mind to stay on the stately Riddles for longer than she needs to. What glimpses she’s gotten of their son have been enough for a lifetime. She wants nothing to do with them. 

Marvolo grunts in response, hands full of feathers as he plucks one of his kills. He’s sat out back behind the cottage, settled on a chair that clearly used to be ornate before it found a new life outside. The legs are chipped and the lacquer washed away in the rain and snow.

“Your mother tell you about that? Silly woman. Why would I send him to school with those muggle fucking vermin?” Marvolo hisses through his yellow teeth. He pulls another handful of feathers sharply. “No. Not for the House of Gaunt. Not for the heir. No matter how stupid the boy is.”

“Do we have spellbooks?” Merope asks quietly. The duck in Marvolo’s hands has shiny head feathers. They glimmer green in the afternoon air. 

The day is cloudy and just a little cold, but not enough for her breaths to fan out before her eyes. The trees sway in the wind and the birds sing songs older than man. Merope stares at the ducks. She wonders why they should die so that she may eat. 

The ducks stare back like the snakes on the doorframe. Blankly and with no answers.

Marvolo pauses his plucking to give Merope a shrewd look. Merope rolls her shoulders in and lowers her head, because that is what he wants. She tries not to be afraid, since mother died. But the fear left anger in the place it used to live, a living and desperate kind of anger. She was never so mad in her last life. 

“You think you’re being clever, don’t you? You don’t know how to read, girl. What would a numpty need a book for?” Marvolo asks cruelly. He’s smiling, too, something pleased in his eyes that makes Merope wary. 

Marvolo waits for Merope to say something, and Merope keeps her mouth closed. A minute drags on, before Marvolo scoffs and turns back to the duck. 

“You’ll be taking the head off this one. About time you learned how to dress a catch.”

Merope only nods, moving quickly around the side of the cottage to avoid any worse punishments. Not for the first time Merope wonders if other parents make their children do tasks like these in the 1910s.

She steps around where Morfin is talking to another poor garden snake, gripping its black tail with a tight fist and making conversation. 

“—Massster Gaunt is mossst generousss. Massster Gaunt iss mossst kind,” the small snake says, swaying just so as it speaks. Only the young snakes listen to Morfin anymore, and only the young snakes seem to be susceptible to his convincing. 

“Pa’s plucking a duck,” Merope tells Morfin in English, eyes staying on the snake and Morfin’s thick hand. He’s getting so big for a ten year old, enough to make her cautious. 

Morfin grunts, not turning from the snake. 

“He wants you to help plucking,” Merope lies. She wonders if Marvolo can hear them out back around the house. She keeps watching the little garden snake. 

She’s tired of seeing snakes on the door. 

“Nev’r plucked b’foree,” Morfin says in parseltongue, finally turning from the snake and looking in her direction. 

“Pa said the heir of House Gaunt needs to learn,” Merope says very seriously. The same kind of seriousness she uses when she reports any of father’s other orders.

Morfin grunts and drops the snake’s tail. He stands from his crouch and stomps around back, hissing to himself. Merope doesn’t waste time, stepping through the muddy grass and crouching in front of the dazed looking snake. 

“You musst never lisssten to Massster Morfffin Gaunt again,” Merope hisses in the language she was born knowing, fingers gripping her skirt where it drapes over her knees. The snake nods slowly. “You will tell every sssnake in the ffforessst to run fffrom hiss callsss.”

The snake repeats her words in its strange voice, flicking a little red tongue to taste the air. 

Out back Merope hears Marvolo complain loudly about Morfin’s slow hands, making her jump. With a shooing hand she sends the snake on its way, watching it disappear into the brush silently. 

Merope wishes she were a snake as she stands from her crouch and goes through the stained doorway. Wishes she could disappear into the woods as she carefully searches the cottage for any hidden grimoires and books. 

—

Morfin turns eleven in July when the air is hot and tempers hotter. 

No owl ever comes to the dirty windows with a letter, which seems to put Marvolo into a sour mood that he can’t shake. Merope wonders why he should bother being angry when he doesn’t want Morfin or Merope to go to Hogwarts anyways.

Then again, it does make sense why he’d be mad. With no Hogwarts letter, it’s obvious Morfin will be a squib, no matter if he can manage a few stinging and boil jinxes in a few years. Merope doesn’t remember him doing anything more magical than speak parseltongue since they were small. Accidental magic is meant to be more prevalent, isn’t it? 

Another thing to blame on inbreeding, Merope supposes.

Time passes like rain after that. Merope cleans. Morfin hunts for snakes stupid enough to speak to him. Marvolo pretends that they are too good for their hovel and too good for the people in the village. 

Merope also schemes. 

There is a grimoire among her mother’s old things, along with a few hand bound journals. They live in a box under her father’s bed, but Merope takes them out and hides them in her and Morfin’s room when her brother isn’t paying attention. 

The journals have little to say about magic, and much to say about how awful Merope’s family is and has always been. Her mother hadn’t wanted to get married (not to her— no. Merope can’t think about it. She’ll be sick), hadn’t wanted to be kept from Hogwarts, and hadn’t wanted to have children. 

Merope can’t stomach reading the journals for long. She turns to the grimoire next, when her brother and her father are gone to do whatever it is her father does to drum up money. 

It’s a barely held together collection of pages, bound in soft, dark leather. There’s empty pages at the end, and they don’t ever seem to end when Merope starts flipping through them. Someone must have charmed it to never run out of room. 

Merope flips back to the front, peering at the first page. 

‘Property of Neas Lithe Gaunt, for only the hands of the pure,’ it reads in a smooth, swooping hand. Merope wrinkles her nose at the arrogance, wondering if Neas Lithe Gaunt knew how far their family’s purity would ruin them. 

Potions are listed within the book, along with a few spells. Jinxes with cruel little descriptions on how to use them on muggles, household spells Merope can remember her mother using. The last entry is a potion that makes Merope suddenly, unbearably, nauseous just looking at it. 

A love potion, dutifully written down with wry commentary on how the writer had caught her husband with it. The ingredients are all simple enough that Merope can see how another version of her had obtained them. Rose petals, ashwinder eggs, pearl dust, and a hair from the person the drinker should be infatuated with. The brewing itself seems far more complicated, requiring it to be done under a full moon and stirred for almost an hour in a specific pattern by hand.

A quick train to London, a purchase at a potion shop for ingredients, some petals stolen from the Riddle’s garden, and a day’s worth of brewing. That’s all it would take to steal the heart and body of one unlucky Tom Riddle.

Her mind is blank, staring down at the instructions. Then, finally, she moves.

Merope very carefully grabs the page of the book and rips it out, ignoring the way the grimoire seems to shiver in complaint. She lifts the parchment into the air between two fingers and something inside her aches to be let loose. To do work that must be done and to set things aflame.

She lets it. 

The parchment bursts into flame, heat licking at her fingers but never burning her. The brightness of it imprints into Merope’s eyes when she blinks, but she can’t turn away. The parchment curls in on itself. She stares until it’s nothing more than ash dusting her hand and her lap. 

She is not the Merope Gaunt that would use that potion. She will never be that Merope Gaunt.

This Merope Gaunt is seven years old, give or take a few decades. Merope will not live this life, bending in on herself for her brother and her father. She will not be denied her magic. She will not live in this cottage so close to her mother’s bones. In four years she will get her Hogwarts letter, and she will have enough money to get to King’s Cross station. 

She reaches for her mother’s wand with ash stained fingers, lifting it from where it was on her lap beside the grimoire, and flips back to the beginning of the book. She has things to learn, if this body is able while so young. Even if it isn’t, she has other things to do besides learning magic early. 

Little Hangleton has a small church that all the villagers crowd into every Sunday, save Merope’s family. That will have to change for Merope. She’s the daughter of a well-known rude, belligerent tramp, but she can make up for some of it by being especially holy. And with assumed piety the villagers may pity her enough to do odd jobs.

Marvolo may beat her bloody if he realizes she’s cavorting with muggles. She supposes she’ll just have to take that risk. The man likes hitting whether she’s done something or not.