Serpentine [T.M. Riddle]

I have you (Part II)

Walking home and eating his sope is nostalgic in a way he hates.

The chapel the orphans were forced to visit was near an ice cream shop; none of the children ever entered, but Tom once managed to swipe a treat from a whining child a little older than him at the time (what was he? Four?). He ate it walking, trailing behind the group so they wouldn't notice his bounty. But it felt like none of them even remembered he was there. Perhaps they'd forgotten him (misplaced him). Or perhaps he'd used a bit of accidental magic to protect him and the sweetest thing he's ever eaten.

No one is here to take his food away from him this time. He doesn't walk alone. He's not returning to an orphanage.

Balam is still not back at the house, but Churro greets them both with a happy trill, padding up to Ximena and him before pressing against their legs: he is wearing a knitted wizard's hat. Blue with white stars. Obviously homemade. He wonders if Ximena was the cause of it.

"Churrito," Ximena coos, the tone of voice so foreign to him, that Tom actually freezes in his spot as the door closes behind them. It makes his throat dry, it makes it hurt to swallow. It isn't as if he's never heard that tone of voice before, he just...

She squats down to baby the cat, scratching eagerly under his chin. Churro, naturally, allows her (did they know each other before?), eating up the attention happily. When Tom realizes he's staring at Ximena's hand again, he tears his surveilance away quickly and scans the home for any changes.

The biggest difference is the photographs: Ximena is in them. In pictures, both moving and unmoving, where only Balam or a few people sat, an empty space beside them, is her. All at an extremely young age. Balam holding a baby Ximena in his arms, in his lap. A Ximena old enough to walk standing next to other children who were probably her cousins. A Ximena, no older than six, laying in the lap of an old woman, asleep. The old woman running her hands through her curls, smiling gently.

It reminds him of the portrait of Mrs. Acwellan and her baby. He turns away.

"Do you need help unpacking your things?"

Tom blinks, then smiles courteously. He doesn't know the spell Balam used, but he can figure it out. Scrincan[1]? That's Old English. He can reverse that easily. "Yes, please."

To his (slight) disappointment, she does not take her wand out to help, but merely gives him the spell to de-shrink his items (grōwan, he was right). She doesn't even enter his room, waiting for him to shut the door behind him before going on about her business (Tom hears the sound of his door opening and closing, but knows she is going into her own room).

Well,

His room is unchanged since he last stepped foot inside, down to the lack of dust on the surfaces of his things, his furniture. A different sort of frozen in time as his room in Wool's is: for one, the room isn't stale. Stuffy. As if someone's been in here every day to air it out. Tending to it. As opposed to the state of neglect he always returns to back in London.

A deep breath. He sets his things away. Books and scrolls and stationary. The small number of clothes outside his school robes that fit him, his actual school robes (he transfigures them to his liking), and his one pair of shoes. As he slides in the books to the shelf, he glances at a number of new titles, left by Balam no doubt.

A hum, contemplative. Books picked out and left for especially him. His ex-classmate is probably going to stay in her room for a while...

He picks out one whose title draws his notice and reads until Balam comes home.