Ink and Parchment ~ blood and bone

19

Eliza didn't leave her room the next day. She told the Malfoy's she felt a bit under the weather and they reluctantly left her alone. She could tell that none of them believed her, in the years Draco had known her Eliza didn't think she's ever been ill before at all but thankfully they didn't question it.

Eliza's not even lying that much, she did feel a bit sick.

She didn't touch the diadem, she doesn't even pick it up from the floor where she had thrown it. Instead she focused on pulling herself together.

She jumped in the shower and pretended not to notice how long she spent trying to drown herself beneath the rushing water. She wrote a letter to Tom, she didn't tell him about what she had discovered. He would find that out himself when he absorbed the horcrux and then she sent both the diadem and the letter off with Hedwig.

It wouldn't do to keep Tom waiting, especially when he would more than likely have to track down the horcruxes prior to the diadem before absorbing it.

She was a horcrux, she carried a piece of Tom's soul but she was also Eliza Potter. Nothing could take that away from her. She wasn't Tom Riddle possessing the body of poor Eliza Potter who had never gotten a chance to live. This wasn't like Pansy Parkinson, or Ginevra Weasley.

If anything she and Tom were just, soul mates in a way.

It reminded her of the old Greek legends. How when humans were first made they were made as a double. They had four arms and four legs and when the Gods became too scared of their power they split them apart. And they became individual people, searching for the other part of their soul.

We are unfashioned creatures, but half made up someone had once said – a muggle author Eliza had read over her stays at the orphanage.

She was fine. It was all fine.

And it was, really, after she spent the day considering it. Eliza had allowed herself her moment of crisis but the more she thought on it the more she once again felt more comfortable in her own body.

After all she could freely admit (at least to herself) that she loved her friends. Love, something Tom Riddle had never managed to achieve.

It was hopelessly sad that that was the thing that reassured her.

It seemed Eliza Potter and Tom Riddle had always been inevitable in some form or another.

She didn't know why it was such a comforting thought.

~

The next day she left her room and joined the Malfoy's for breakfast as if nothing had happened. Draco stared at her as she delicately cut into her omelette but he didn't say anything on the matter and soon they were back to playing quidditch.

It was funny how when everything suddenly shifted nothing ever seemed to actually change.

On Yule Night Eliza was invited to join the Malfoy's in the family room. A Yule log crackled merrily in the fire pit and Narcissa told Eliza to light one of the candles herself. When she did Eliza felt a wave of peace crash over her, the Malfoy Family magic was heavy in the room. It reminded her of the manor itself in some ways, crystallised and opulent and somehow incredibly comforting.

Eliza had thought she had a family in her court, and she did, but she had never before experienced the parental comfort that came from Narcissa braiding her hair, or Lucius actually having bought a present for Eliza despite their disagreements.

She had sold a vial of Jormy's venom to be able to pay for her gifts to the Malfoy's and her court. She had bought a rather expensive bottle of scotch for Lucius (she had heard him complaining about Professor Snape drinking all his best liquor the night of the ball)