Prompt 89 - Hot Seat - "One Man's Hell"- ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spikespetslayer - HP
Apr. 5th, 2008 03:06 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
dedra.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
tamingthemuseTitle: One Man's Hell
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: None-gen
Warnings: Non-conformist view of heaven/hell/religion, some language.
Summary: He thought he should be worshipped and lauded for what he did for wizards everywhere. That might not be the case.
A/N: A wise man once said "We each create God in our own image" (1)--in the same vein, wouldn't we each create our own little Hell as well? Enjoy! :D
They were waiting when the green flash faded to black, ready to take him to the gates of his eternal rest.
He couldn’t really see them. They swam in and out of vision if he looked straight at them, only clearly seen from the periphery. He couldn’t see much around him, either; the pitch dark seemed to swallow it whole, a blind Ouroboros of never-ending night. He was blind in a world of blind men where chaos reigned and there was no king.
The path was smooth under his bare feet. There was no chill in the air or excessive heat on his bare skin. His long fingers tested his face to see if it was the same; there was no difference in the features that he had worn in life now in death that he could readily identify.
He was, and now he would receive his rewards for his deeds.
The room they led him to seemed small—at least, in width. It was about six-foot wide, enough for a chair with a small walkway all the way around it.
And the chair. The chair was…simply to die for. Instead of just a throne, it was an altar for him to lay himself upon and be worshipped as he should be for all he did for the world. It rested on a black marble platform that raised him well above the heads of the masses that would surely be recumbent at his feet, serving his every desire. He climbed up into the cushioning folds of fabric that seemed both stiff and soft at the same time, an anomaly that he would fully investigate as his time here grew long, for he knew that he would spend the bulk of his time being in this chair.
He rested his cheek on his wrist, anxious for the pomp and frippery to be over. Those that accompanied him to the room stood along the edges like an honor guard, waiting for the same thing he was. He could see their shadows on the floor in the dim half-light of the room, when black can’t get any darker so it shows as halftones of gray.
When he thought that his nerves would snap from the tension of waiting for some kind of something, there was light. Light flooded the room and the surroundings, shining on him from every angle and highlighting the knifelike creases of his cheekbones with their stretch of flesh, the angles and hollows of his clavicles as they protruded starkly. His ribs and pelvic hollows seemed deeper in the light, almost obscene in broadcasting his emaciation into the ether. Scattered among the lights were what he recognized to be cameras or some other signal-bearing apparatus; why they were there may have entered his thoughts but it was rapidly shattered as the voice began to speak from the only darkness left in the room, the shadows that lay inside his mind and deep in the recesses of his thoughts.
“Tom, Tom, you thought that you would beat it all and make it to somewhere that you would be worshipped? Oh, please, don’t tell me that you believe that drivel! Why do all the mad ones seem to want to be a god? No, Tom, this is hell.”
“Why am I in hell? I’m the greatest wizard alive!”
“Obviously not, Riddle, otherwise we wouldn’t be chatting it up in your head. Now, I’m Satan, or the devil, or whatever your religious beliefs suggest that you call me and I’ll be conducting a brief tour of your afterlife with you.”
Tom Riddle, or Voldemort as he preferred, scratched his head. “Hell? How can I be in hell? I—”
“—was defeated by Potter because you forgot the first line of the Creed—no matter what, never let them know that you’re evil. Had you remembered that and pretended to be sorry for everything, you would have lived long enough to kill the idiot that held you at bay with that stick of wood. But no, you had to make yourself look all tough in front of your Death Eaters and this is what happens! One AK later and you’re lying on a couch. In a black room. In hell.”
“But I don’t believe in hell. Or heaven, for that matter. I renounced all that when I became a wizard.”
“Wizard or not, you have a netherworld with a good place and a bad place. The good place, no matter what you call it, is heaven.” There was a queasy sensation that rippled in his brain and he recoiled back, afraid of his thoughts all of a sudden. “The bad place is called hell. That’s where I come in—I run the place, set up the torments, that sort of thing.”
For some reason, Voldemort thought of a short red-skinned demon with a cigar in his mouth, pacing in a circle. “So I’m in hell. I’m to be tormented too?”
“You think that you’re here on vacation or something? Right—now I’ve heard it all. Nope, you get torments and tortures. You know what they are, right? I assume that you do, you were so good with them when you were on earth.”
Before Voldemort could get worried, he looked at the far end of the room and saw shadows moving toward him. “Who are those people?”
“Your tormenters. You don’t think that we have demons to spare to torment all those idiots who get dropped down here, do you? Like we can afford the overhead.”
As the line grew closer, he noticed that they were dressed in robes and hats, much as he was used to in the wizarding world. He wondered why and the answer came to him.
“You see and feel the things that you can understand. This is the way that your type dresses—they’ll dress this way here. See their little wooden sticks? They’ll torment you with those.”
When the first of them was close enough for Voldemort to recognize his features as the handsome lad in the cemetery the night of his return, he smiled widely, hoping that the lad was a forgiving sort. Instead of a returned smile, the electric shock of the Cruciatus curse ran the length and breadth of his nervous system. Ever muscle pulled in a different direction until his back was bowed one way then another, his joints strained unforgivingly as his body contorted. Ligaments popped and snapped as he rode the lightning sharp curse, his screams echoing beautifully off the marble walls.
Strangely, his couch seemed to turn into a bed of nails, sharp and piercing against the sensitive skin of his body as he writhed. As soon as Cedric released the curse, the fabric smoothed again and he lay panting on the couch, trying not to vomit.
“What the hell was that?”
“Who do you think wants to torment you the most, Tom? The ones that you destroyed and hurt when you were alive. The ones that you stepped on in your quest for power and glory, the ones that you murdered to split your soul into manageable parts, the ones that you kept from kith and kin. They are the ones that want to torture you and watch you bleed.”
The lights came up full to the back of what he thought was a room, but was now revealed to be a long hallway with an auditorium above it. The line extended so far that he could only distinguish that there were shapes at the door far, far away from him; no faces or features could be picked out of the teeming crowd.
“We’re broadcasting on all channels, all the time. See Voldemort in his eternal torment! Cast a crucio yourself for a friend or loved one! How do you like my porcupine skin chair? I made it especially for you—sharpened the spines myself.”
His eyes followed the line, his mind still reeling. “Who are all these people? Surely every single person that I killed or had killed didn’t go to hell?”
“That? That’s a little side deal that I have going with heaven. We advertised that you were here and they started showing up, ready and willing for even a little damnation if they could curse you. After all, one man’s hell is another man’s heaven.”
(1) BTW, the wise man was Spock, from ST:TMP. SF nerd here.
Fandom: Harry Potter
Pairing: None-gen
Warnings: Non-conformist view of heaven/hell/religion, some language.
Summary: He thought he should be worshipped and lauded for what he did for wizards everywhere. That might not be the case.
A/N: A wise man once said "We each create God in our own image" (1)--in the same vein, wouldn't we each create our own little Hell as well? Enjoy! :D
They were waiting when the green flash faded to black, ready to take him to the gates of his eternal rest.
He couldn’t really see them. They swam in and out of vision if he looked straight at them, only clearly seen from the periphery. He couldn’t see much around him, either; the pitch dark seemed to swallow it whole, a blind Ouroboros of never-ending night. He was blind in a world of blind men where chaos reigned and there was no king.
The path was smooth under his bare feet. There was no chill in the air or excessive heat on his bare skin. His long fingers tested his face to see if it was the same; there was no difference in the features that he had worn in life now in death that he could readily identify.
He was, and now he would receive his rewards for his deeds.
The room they led him to seemed small—at least, in width. It was about six-foot wide, enough for a chair with a small walkway all the way around it.
And the chair. The chair was…simply to die for. Instead of just a throne, it was an altar for him to lay himself upon and be worshipped as he should be for all he did for the world. It rested on a black marble platform that raised him well above the heads of the masses that would surely be recumbent at his feet, serving his every desire. He climbed up into the cushioning folds of fabric that seemed both stiff and soft at the same time, an anomaly that he would fully investigate as his time here grew long, for he knew that he would spend the bulk of his time being in this chair.
He rested his cheek on his wrist, anxious for the pomp and frippery to be over. Those that accompanied him to the room stood along the edges like an honor guard, waiting for the same thing he was. He could see their shadows on the floor in the dim half-light of the room, when black can’t get any darker so it shows as halftones of gray.
When he thought that his nerves would snap from the tension of waiting for some kind of something, there was light. Light flooded the room and the surroundings, shining on him from every angle and highlighting the knifelike creases of his cheekbones with their stretch of flesh, the angles and hollows of his clavicles as they protruded starkly. His ribs and pelvic hollows seemed deeper in the light, almost obscene in broadcasting his emaciation into the ether. Scattered among the lights were what he recognized to be cameras or some other signal-bearing apparatus; why they were there may have entered his thoughts but it was rapidly shattered as the voice began to speak from the only darkness left in the room, the shadows that lay inside his mind and deep in the recesses of his thoughts.
“Tom, Tom, you thought that you would beat it all and make it to somewhere that you would be worshipped? Oh, please, don’t tell me that you believe that drivel! Why do all the mad ones seem to want to be a god? No, Tom, this is hell.”
“Why am I in hell? I’m the greatest wizard alive!”
“Obviously not, Riddle, otherwise we wouldn’t be chatting it up in your head. Now, I’m Satan, or the devil, or whatever your religious beliefs suggest that you call me and I’ll be conducting a brief tour of your afterlife with you.”
Tom Riddle, or Voldemort as he preferred, scratched his head. “Hell? How can I be in hell? I—”
“—was defeated by Potter because you forgot the first line of the Creed—no matter what, never let them know that you’re evil. Had you remembered that and pretended to be sorry for everything, you would have lived long enough to kill the idiot that held you at bay with that stick of wood. But no, you had to make yourself look all tough in front of your Death Eaters and this is what happens! One AK later and you’re lying on a couch. In a black room. In hell.”
“But I don’t believe in hell. Or heaven, for that matter. I renounced all that when I became a wizard.”
“Wizard or not, you have a netherworld with a good place and a bad place. The good place, no matter what you call it, is heaven.” There was a queasy sensation that rippled in his brain and he recoiled back, afraid of his thoughts all of a sudden. “The bad place is called hell. That’s where I come in—I run the place, set up the torments, that sort of thing.”
For some reason, Voldemort thought of a short red-skinned demon with a cigar in his mouth, pacing in a circle. “So I’m in hell. I’m to be tormented too?”
“You think that you’re here on vacation or something? Right—now I’ve heard it all. Nope, you get torments and tortures. You know what they are, right? I assume that you do, you were so good with them when you were on earth.”
Before Voldemort could get worried, he looked at the far end of the room and saw shadows moving toward him. “Who are those people?”
“Your tormenters. You don’t think that we have demons to spare to torment all those idiots who get dropped down here, do you? Like we can afford the overhead.”
As the line grew closer, he noticed that they were dressed in robes and hats, much as he was used to in the wizarding world. He wondered why and the answer came to him.
“You see and feel the things that you can understand. This is the way that your type dresses—they’ll dress this way here. See their little wooden sticks? They’ll torment you with those.”
When the first of them was close enough for Voldemort to recognize his features as the handsome lad in the cemetery the night of his return, he smiled widely, hoping that the lad was a forgiving sort. Instead of a returned smile, the electric shock of the Cruciatus curse ran the length and breadth of his nervous system. Ever muscle pulled in a different direction until his back was bowed one way then another, his joints strained unforgivingly as his body contorted. Ligaments popped and snapped as he rode the lightning sharp curse, his screams echoing beautifully off the marble walls.
Strangely, his couch seemed to turn into a bed of nails, sharp and piercing against the sensitive skin of his body as he writhed. As soon as Cedric released the curse, the fabric smoothed again and he lay panting on the couch, trying not to vomit.
“What the hell was that?”
“Who do you think wants to torment you the most, Tom? The ones that you destroyed and hurt when you were alive. The ones that you stepped on in your quest for power and glory, the ones that you murdered to split your soul into manageable parts, the ones that you kept from kith and kin. They are the ones that want to torture you and watch you bleed.”
The lights came up full to the back of what he thought was a room, but was now revealed to be a long hallway with an auditorium above it. The line extended so far that he could only distinguish that there were shapes at the door far, far away from him; no faces or features could be picked out of the teeming crowd.
“We’re broadcasting on all channels, all the time. See Voldemort in his eternal torment! Cast a crucio yourself for a friend or loved one! How do you like my porcupine skin chair? I made it especially for you—sharpened the spines myself.”
His eyes followed the line, his mind still reeling. “Who are all these people? Surely every single person that I killed or had killed didn’t go to hell?”
“That? That’s a little side deal that I have going with heaven. We advertised that you were here and they started showing up, ready and willing for even a little damnation if they could curse you. After all, one man’s hell is another man’s heaven.”
(1) BTW, the wise man was Spock, from ST:TMP. SF nerd here.
