Ambrosia • TMR

C.16

~••Ambrosia••~

Awkward. The word awkward was a severe understatement to describe how her next Transfiguration class was. She sat beside Tom like always although he was seated noticeably closer to her. She tried to avoid looking up in fear that she would catch Dumbledore's eye and that he'd read her mind.

Tom's hand squeezed her's under the table and had been doing so since before the class started. It wasn't an uncomfortably tight grip at all but paired with the absolute look of death that Tom was shooting Dumbledore, it was just awkward. Not to mention her hand was getting kind of clammy but Tom didn't really seem to care.

She couldn't deny that she found it impeccably sweet of the boy to be so protective of her. Sometimes she still had trouble comprehending that baby Voldemort would burn the world down and play in it's ashes for her. Even though she knew she'd do the same, it was just jarring. The way Tom met their professor's twinkling eyes in challenge, not the slightest bit afraid of the man reading his mind, it was all jarring.

The way that Dumbledore's eyes lost their joyful twinkling when he locked eyes with Tom let her know that the man had prodded at his mental shields. Yes, the mental shields she had him developing way back in the orphanage when she used to wake him up at the ass crack of dawn.

Meditation helped center their magic and minds as Snape had told her. They had been doing it for a good couple of years now. So naturally, when doing something that centered both the mind and body repeatedly, the mind becomes more fortified as a result. Like syncing a controller so many times that it begins to do it automatically. That's where the shields come in. As long as their magic was relatively controlled, and Tom had impeccable control, the barriers would be there. Of course, they were flimsy enough for someone like Dumbledore to break through but that would be painful for Tom.

In a noteworthy Slytherin way, Tom played on the fact that they were in class. Should Dumbledore do anything, they would make a spectacle out of it and the man would be sent to Azkaban faster than Sirius Black. And of course, if the man deigned it within his rights to essentially mind rape Tom then she would kill him. Somehow, someway. It might not be today, may not be tomorrow or even the next day but that man would have the shadow of death tailing him until she caught him. When she did, she'd teach him not to run from something so inevitable. Something like her.

The bell dismissing them almost made her jump. She had been so lost in her thoughts of premeditated murder that she hadn't realized class had passed. Tom immediately tugged at her hand, pulling her out of her seat without a word. In his other arm, he held her already packed bag out. She wondered when he even got her bag. His coal eyes stared at her face as she took it almost as if he was surveying her for any of the panic that was there last week. "Thank you." He nodded quietly in response to her gratitude and she could still see the rage swirling around darkly in his eyes.

The grip on her hand tightened as the boy seemed to walk on autopilot toward the common room. She didn't say anything when his tight grip began to hurt her hand a bit. It didn't hurt to the point of being worth mentioning. But she couldn't help but be surprised that he was still angry. It's been a week.

He was very fucking angry.

Seeing her tears of fear the week before was absolutely shocking to him. It was scary and he did not want to see her cry because of fear or panic ever again in his life. It made an emotion he could only interpret as rage ball up in his chest and when she literally couldn't speak of what happened, it grew like a fanned fiendfyre flame. He made a promise that he was sure that, in time, he'd be able to keep.

That professor was bolder than merlin himself to make his girl cry.

He liked to keep the things he treasured in pristine condition and naturally that meant emotionally as well. It grated at him like nails on a chalkboard and almost had him spiraling into an episode of rage that he would most definitely regret. The only thing keeping him from calling the basilisk on Dumbledore was the soft hand that he held onto like a lifeline.