Grandloves//Tomarry

2

She is a horcrux.

For there is nothing else she could be.

In her eyes, in the dark spaces between the beats of her heart there lay a part of him so deeply entwined that it cannot be broken apart. He is there in the trembling of her bottom lip and the determined set of her brow, in the shallow valley of her collarbones. When she turns her striking eyes to him, they flicker red, and gray: she has the insolence of a young orphaned boy—she has all his anger and all his fears.

He wants to destroy her for this, for bringing back Tom Riddle into this world. For being a part of him he wishes so deeply to eradicate from this earth.

He stares at her for an uncomfortable length of time: she fidgets in her seat, her eyes shift from the ceiling, to the fireplace, to the patterns on the rug, avoiding his gaze with a palpable temerity.

At this point he has memorized the curve of her jaw and the subtle slope of her nose, her frightened eyes in their wide, grave sockets. Finally, after long uncertain moments of silence she turns her face away from him, brings her knees up to rest her cheek against them, staring blankly into the wall. The fire illuminates half her face in warm light, the profile of a young girl: the sweet bottom lip, the color in her cheeks and the pleasant arch of a brow. On the other side flickers Tom Riddle, darkened in shadow.

She resolutely keeps her gaze on the wallpaper. It's an unfortunate sight, a paisley print in muddy green. He'll have to burn it all off, but he holds Riddle Manor in such low regard he hasn't gotten around to it. All the furniture is at least a century old, covered in dust and unmoved since the day he swept in and murdered all its residents. She is also covered in dust. Dust, dirt, and grime—as if she's spent the better part of the afternoon traipsing through a homicidal maze, and spent the other half running from a homicidal man.

He snorts.

There may be some merit in that.

He supposes it's quite a lot for a fourteen year old girl. He's not quite sure why he cares at all about what's too much stress for a fourteen year old girl or not.

He stands in a sudden, fluid motion. The reaction in her is instantaneous: everything in her seizes up, even as she resolutely fixes her gaze on the side of the wall. Even as he looms closer, a wraith in black at the foot of her seat, she refuses to meet his gaze, stubborn until the last.

Something unerring compels him to catch her chin by his fingers, tilting her complaint head up. She moves willingly, but her eyes are wide and shaking.

"Up," He commands, and is immediately displeased with how soft it sounds. Even his voice betrays him now, it seems.

She follows, though, righting herself carefully on trembling legs, her enormous, doe-eyes peering up at him from beneath the fringe of her hair. Absent-mindedly, he wonders what happened to the horrid glasses. He hopes they're sitting somewhere in the graveyard outside, crushed to pieces.

He steers her by a hand on her back, in the shallow dip between her shoulders; he can feel the tension spun between them at the touch, and can almost hear the erratic beating of her heart. He leads her into the gloom, down the darkened hallway. Some time in the interim his hand manages to get caught in the unmanageable mane she calls hair, and he sneers as he attempts to wrangle it out, instead leading her by the shoulder.

The fingers skimming her collarbone make her heart jump into her throat. She can't see a thing in the hall, a scattering of light here and there, bare sounds against the grating wood—like the horror shows on the telly Dudley used to watch. But he always turned them off before they got too scary. Lyra thinks, hysterically, that she might finally get to see the ending of one of those.