PAPER CONFINES.
25. / A Sort of Murder

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Two hundred and fifty days of Tom Riddle's soul sunk cold and acrid onto Amoret's shoulders. The time bit down and ate, and for all her own hunger, as the kitchen supply dwindled to the worst scraps of Tom's childhood—watery peas and porridge—she could not recompense what his soul consumed of her. Not at a matching rate. Her stomach would growl and she'd pick at her food like she did as a child, then meander to the Astronomy Tower and watch the sky change.

Hail, on this day, started at dusk. It battered the asphalt and the court clovers until morning. Amoret didn't sleep. She watched it turn from black ice to amethyst to gold, in the night and the dawn and the verge of an afternoon washed green from staring at the sun. Whatever decrepit thing she lived in had, at last, turned to summer.

It was Sybil's birthday.

She would be twenty-one today, wherever she was. Whenever she was. And if when was the question, then maybe she wouldn't be, but Amoret had no room to hold onto a thought like that. It was something she caught herself doing more often, and she had grown quite proficient with a metaphorical shovel. She'd bury this with all the other graves she'd dug in advance.

Sybil and her ribbons and her cheek and her aliveness, every bit their mother, and there sat Amoret in the treetops of a beautiful bloodline, feeling full of death.

She went to the Hufflepuff dormitories that morning for some meagre recognition of the day, and tied the tight curls of her hair with a single yellow strip she tore from one of the linens. It was a ribbon by approximation, anyway. She flitted between calling it celebratory and memorial and landed somewhere in the middle, as she did with most things now.

It had become routine that Amoret's lessons took place in the meadow, and Tom's in his library. An arm of puckered red dots did not dissuade her from the Room of Requirement. She'd arrive every other morning to sit at the stirring lakeside and watch for her eagle to strike. Very rarely did it, and instead she'd fall asleep against the oak tree and wake to Tom sneaking his way into her dreams, sat too staring at the water, tracing a ring on his finger that he never took off and she never asked about.

This day, she fell dizzy against the tree, and woke to the eagle perched on the toe of her shoe.

Amoret screamed, clambering for her wand. The eagle leapt from her kicking feet but didn't seem afraid. It cocked its head, great wingspan tucked behind its torso, beak slavering with blood and light.

Amoret stood and panted, her wand arm out and fizzing instinctually in her palm. She stared in some sort of contest with the eagle. When it finally looked away, it didn't feel like Amoret had won. It felt more like the eagle just had better things to do, and propelled upward and left into the forest, the shadow of its wings eclipsing the sunlight so Amoret could watch after it.

For a moment she stared like she was watching a dream disappear. Then sense, perhaps, kicked in, and she followed it; into the forgotten depth of the forest.

It was different from the Forbidden Forest, to be sure. The danger in those trees was that they were so full of life. Good or bad, the wild contained all manner of beasts and beings. Here, the worry was the lack of them. The last time Amoret had been further than the first few trees, there wasn't so much as a rustle to be heard in the winding branches to signify any life beyond her own. There were no flies, or spiders, or starlings—only the firm sense that she was being led somewhere important.

She was spinning again.

She gasped. After all this time, the room had bewitched her again.

Amoret staggered for the flanking trees and her nails clung to the bark. It was feeble under her fingers, sallow, peeling without much effort at all. Part of her stupor, maybe. Imagined.

She tried to ease into it. The feeling was syrupy and weightless and she was inclined to sink against the tree and wait for the ground to crumble beneath her, but it didn't. Instead the trees toughened and the bark bit her fingers.

Amoret hissed at the sliver of wood needling her skin and stumbled backward, a bead of blood trickling down her thumb.

Underneath her the grass sprouted. The branches overhead curled and cracked like limbs that hadn't stretched in years, and vibrant clusters of leaves blossomed. Sunlight kissed the treetops. The grass was soft. There were woodpeckers chirping in roost cavities. It was summer, and it was beautiful.

Amoret was not in the Room of Requirement. It was Hainault Forest, and she knew it like a distant memory.

A pair of shoes tread serpentine through the grass, and when Amoret turned around, Tom was there, seven years smaller, dressed in Wool's Orphanage summer clothes—a too-big button-down and a pair of dress shorts that fell to gangly white knees.

She stepped around him as if he wouldn't likely walk straight through her, and followed in clumsy coordination behind him.

He hadn't even claimed his wand yet, but he knew of magic, his eyes rigid with intent, and Amoret heard the whistling lilt of the boy who'd taunted him the last time she had arrived at this memory. She tripped over herself to keep up with where she knew it was going, afraid and curious all the same. She could see from Tom's perspective that despite the assured jeer in the other boy's voice, he had been misled to think he was the one hunting, and not the prey.

And what a funny thing that was. The boy was older, Amoret remembered; big and broad-shouldered. Tom looked like he couldn't strangle a rabbit with all his strength. Of course, she also remembered he hadn't needed to. It swung bloodless from the rafters with blank eyes.

"Come on, Riddle," the boy crooned.

Billy. She saw his name in a burst across her vision.

Tom kept on through the grass, almost gliding, sidelong and slow, and both he and Amoret snapped toward the sound of crunching twigs. Billy didn't care about making noise. He wanted Tom to know he was getting closer.

"Can't hide forever..."

He had no intention to. Tom's eyes glinted through a gap in an arm of the nearest tree. Amoret stood in the open and followed his line of sight.

Far along the expansive woods, she could see his target. Billy looked around with an eager grin on his face, blond hair tousled over his eyes, with no weapon but his hands in fists. Amoret supposed it had once been enough. But Tom had been brewing with this rage for a time, preparing, perhaps before his bigger ambitions bloomed, just for this.

Billy's eyes darted to where Amoret was swaying in the clearing, and she felt the aim of them even knowing they were really on Tom. She felt the forgotten sense of being in his soul, and not just his mind. It was a fractured, vengeful thing long before any horcrux had split it in two.

Billy's smile spread. "Got you right where I—"

Pale green light gleamed from beyond him, and there was the slicing language of Parseltongue to enact whatever curse swept Billy flat on his back.

He screamed, but it was short-lived. Newborn leaves flounced from the open palms of their branches, graceful, certain, and sweet-smelling. It was gentle magic that held him to the ground. The plush leaves clung to his sunburnt wrists, his neck—they climbed up past his collar, invasive as ivy. The earth dipped. The leaves filled his mouth. Amoret could see him trying to spit them up or grind them down. Neither worked. Summer swallowed him, and Tom approached from his gap in the trees to watch with withdrawn satisfaction.

It occurred to Amoret to scramble over Billy's sinking body, but it was true that she was a ghost here. Her jittery, bewitched hands went right through him.

She stared at Tom. Crouched on the ground, he was barely taller at this age. Eleven; the number plummeted through her chest and Billy still suffocated quietly beside her. What eleven year old wizard could conjure magic like this before setting foot in a classroom? His soul enveloped her, and of course, she knew it was nothing learned. Pure want in the hands of a child who had never had so much as a wish come true on a birthday candle.

In Amoret's childhood, bursts of magic had shattered mirrors, snuffed flames, blown ripples through the river and slit the fins of fish she'd brought home for supper. They were wildly unpredictable, but their consistency was in their inability to be controlled.

Tom had. He had wanted this more than anything. His magic was carved around it.

"Billy?" came the voice of one of the caretakers. "Tom? Are you out here?"

Tom stared with great constraint at Billy's struggle. He sketched this moment internally to keep—a round, purple face, wreathed in sunlight and green grass—and let go.

The leaves fluttered away with a small hum. Billy gasped furiously, clutching his stomach like he was going to be sick.

The caretaker stepped into the clearing in a long blue dress and a horrified expression shadowed by the rim of her hat. "B-Billy? Tom—good God, whatever happened?!"

Tom looked skyward, and then at the dent in the grass that Billy had skittered away from. "He tried to climb one of the trees, Madam. I warned him he'd fall."

Billy's face was pink now, his chest still lurching with each breath, and the caretaker gaped at him. "Fifteen, Billy, and acting like a boy. Get up, then. Now, boy! Off to Ms Bishop—she'll be cross with you."

Tom clasped his hands behind his back. Amoret sunk into the earth.

She landed in the snow, and Tom was six.

The sky was a tapestry of black velvet behind the embroidery of trees.

It was his birthday; a camping trip. They'd spent Christmas in little tents along the site, cooking over a spit. There was no war, but there was always a war.

He ran past Amoret and she startled to chase after him.

His coat devoured his undernourished frame, whipping through the momentum where it fell at his calves. Amoret leapt through the shoe-prints he left behind—little black Oxfords, the only things he wore that fit him. He was panting, checking behind him every few seconds with wide eyes and red cheeks.

Billy made easy passage through Tom's marked path. He was ten. His boots swallowed the Oxford prints, and his confidence was merited now.

Tom couldn't run anymore. He was tiny, appearing far younger than he was, and his body had no strength in it. He wheezed, knelt clutching his legs for balance, and still glared up at Billy's approach with cold, warning malice.

"Don't come any closer," he breathed.

"Aw, Riddle, never had any manners, did you? Clark was soft by the time you were old enough for beatings—'haps that's why. I learned and you didn't."

There was no wand for Tom to pull. Amoret glimpsed unbidden at a thought later imbedded in this memory by a Tom with hindsight; he hadn't even felt the magic brewing in him yet. He had no conception of his abilities. There was just a vague sense of difference.

He stood taller, though the wind shook him.

Billy laughed. "I just wanted to know what you were doing. It's not very smart to run off in the middle of the night, you know."

"Nothing."

"Nothing? Clark wouldn't like it if I told her, you know."

Tom glanced around for some sort of escape. His teeth were chattering. He had a small backpack that he was clinging fiercely to the straps of.

"Ain't that her coat, Riddle? How'd you get that?" Billy laughed again, coming closer to grab the dangling sleeve.

Tom punched him in the throat. It wasn't very hard, but Billy coughed, and then gnarled as he slammed Tom's head into the closest tree. His dizziness was Amoret's, and her vision blurred with it. She saw fists, and blinked to get a better look. Billy was shrugging off Madam Clark's coat, and Tom looked half unconscious. The coat fell into the snow and the pocket's contents spilled out: a tube of lipstick, a whistle, and a matchbox.

Billy went for the last.

He shook the box open with the hand that wasn't pinning Tom to the tree, and as a dozen matches sunk in the snow, he struck one against the rough side of the box. The matchstick crackled as the flame formed, and Tom barely made a sound when Billy pressed it against his collarbone.

Wind and skin blew the flames out fast, and so Billy lit another, and another, and another, and drew a fuchsia constellation on Tom's collar until he stopped squirming and slipped unconscious.

Then she felt him, eighteen, seeking the weak spots in her mind to hew his way in.

Amoret clawed out of his memory while he pushed into it, and she was already sweating as she banished the forest and left Billy and Tom's younger self standing in a black void, and she nearly collapsed trying to fight him off and erase the rest of it at the same time. He dug into her skull like a dagger. She felt her brain splitting open. The trickle of it coming down her throat. It wasn't real but it was like dying. Amoret screamed; she submerged her mind in darkness, and that could have been enough to someone else, but it wasn't enough to her.

She invented a dream. Something common. The blood in her mouth was hot and she imagined spitting up loose teeth—in front of a crowd—in front of Dumbledore. The Transfiguration classroom formed in that uncanny likeness most things had in dreams, and then she gave in.

Tom walked into the classroom. "There you are."

Amoret gasped awake.

The meadow surrounded her, legs outstretched before the lake where the eagle had woken her before.

She clutched the space below her throat where the breathing came quickest. It hadn't been real. But her occlumency—

"Shall we begin?"

Tom sat across from her with all his composure intact. She wondered if he still had little dots lining his collarbone. Had she ever seen him without every austere button done to his neck? Maybe she had but hadn't been looking for scars. It wasn't as though he was good at healing. She wondered if they were there, if she were to lean in and touch them, if it might hurt him more than when she'd made him bleed.

But all she did was stare breathlessly at the water. "It's unpleasant to dream about you."

"You might thank me for freeing you from that one. Dumbledore looked like he was going to collect your teeth and encase them."

She struggled to keep her expression flat. It wasn't possible. She'd shunned him from his own mind in the mirage of hers, into something entirely contrived—and he hadn't even noticed.

She had beat him. She had won.

He plucked a fine white mushroom. An uncommon choice. "What do you have for me today, Amoret? More of the same?"

It was hard to focus. She could have killed him, if she wanted.

"No," she said. She didn't know why. A part of her didn't know how to make sense of winning. Against everyone else, yes, but not him. If the ground was suddenly uneven she had no idea where to stand on it.

His brows raised in interest. "No?"

Yes. Yes—backtrack, fuck the easiness of complacency—she had beat him.

"I do well to try new methods. You just don't change."

"Hm. So more of the same."

He peeled the mushroom down the stalk. It broke in clean halves until the cap started to chasm, and then it burst. Tom collected the bigger pieces and left the rest in the grass.

Amoret shook her head, picking them up and handing them to him. "You have to mend all of it. That's the whole point, Tom."

"Tom?"

He would have never smiled like that if he knew how much she was contemplating his death.

"Mend the whole damn thing, Riddle."

"Fine."

He began to concentrate, forcing the stalk together again like a closing zipper, and once more the cap struggled to reform. It trembled in his hands, and he looked strained with the effort. Amoret liked him better when something was difficult for him.

When he let out a sigh, apparently resigned, she realized he'd almost finished. The mushroom stalk was undoubtedly perfect, but the cap was still cleaved at the top, and the rest was messily strung together by the gills.

But the stalk was perfect. That was all it took for Amoret to sour. She had still won, she reminded herself, but he was getting better, and that wasn't something to take lightly.

"How did you rebuild the castle?"

"Hm?"

Amoret tossed the mushroom aside. "When I burned it down, you built it again, exactly the same. How?"

His brows knitted together, and she forgot about his little burns. She hoped selfishly his only scar was the one she gave him.

"You can't pull a mushroom together, but you construct a castle without breaking a sweat," she said, as confused as he looked. "It doesn't make sense."

"It isn't living," he tried.

"You know that's not true."

"It isn't living like other things are. There's no nourishment, there's no energy—"

"Yes, but there are parts all the same. It's made up of living parts, of pieces of magic made by people. There's... love in it."

"It's stone."

"It's home. You of all people know that."

Tom scowled like it was too sentimental to consider.

Amoret laughed, because he was right. She was probably going insane. Her body still felt sluggish, and she didn't need to blame the room's reverie when she almost always felt that way lately.

"What?" Tom asked, and it was so obvious how much he despised her little epiphanies before she let him in on them.

But she didn't know how to tell him without confessing the memories she'd stolen from him. It was like that childhood burst of magic that had strangled Billy in the woods, the inexplicable sources that untrained witches and wizards drew from when the well got too full to leave alone. For an eleven year old Tom Riddle, who had never had anything, there was Billy, and the vindication of magic itself; the string that connected them was Hogwarts.

He might not have ever known what he was without it. He could've become an Obscurial, or maybe the first to find out what the opposite was. Hogwarts had changed everything—had given him power, vengeance, and purpose, above all.

Transfiguration on the living was difficult enough, and Dumbledore had told them it required a degree of understanding. Healing magic, on the other hand, required a degree of love.

Amoret demanded too much from him in combining them.

Tom could perhaps not love in the traditional sense, but his magic was strong. Carved around Billy, yes, but carved around Hogwarts too.

And there was love in that whether he wanted it or not.

"Wow." Amoret laughed again. "You're never going to be able to do it."

Offence flashed across his features, and resided in his hard gaze. "And why is that?"

"Love, Riddle," she said, too close to his face and smiling. She stood up. "The nature of this magic is impossible for you. You'd have to muster care, at the very least. Do you think you could? I mean, do you think you even can?"

"Is that your final hypothesis, Amoret? Love? It's quaint, I admit. I should have told you kindness was the answer to legilimency."

"Oh, Riddle, you have no idea—"

"You're naive."

She turned around and her yellow ribbon blew against her cheek. "And you're alone."

There wasn't any bite in it. She glanced at his collar and his buttons. "Gather whatever means you have, Tom—love, like, devotion, if that's all you're capable of. Find something that matters. You made the castle. I suppose that isn't nothing."

"Is that another broken vow?" he asked. He thought she was going to abandon this, but there was always more to learn.

"No," she sighed, "it isn't. But as you said, it's more of the same. I can't help you unless you let me, Tom."

He said nothing, and Amoret walked away. Her heart might have beat out of her chest. She could kill him, she thought, over and over again, rolling into bed and dreaming of him alive.

[ . . . ]  amoret being like. weirdly obsessed with scarring tom. and simultaneously being like wow who would scar him like that. don't think of me cruelly but i'll make sure every time you see yourself you think of me cruelly. "wow you're never gonna love anyone 😂 ... wow... you're never gonna love anyone :(" ...... Woah! are you ok! (she is not) / word count. 3515

©  Crierayla  ✶  2023