Ink and Parchment ~ blood and bone

57- A Riddle Interlude III

Tom heaved a sigh as his death eaters filed out of the meeting. Narcissa sent him a pointed look before she flounced out of the room and Tom’s hand immediately froze where it had been scratching Eliza behind her ears.

In his defence she did make for quite a cute fox, her green eyes still the exact same shade when she peered up at him and somehow the same smug sort of grin.

That smile had always been quite fox-like.

Tom sighed again, slouching further into his chair, unwilling to interrupt the silence or Eliza’s soft tiny snores. But he knew they didn’t have time to waste.

Shaking Eliza awake Tom watched as she groggily stretched out before shifting back, not a hair out of place as she perched herself on the table top. She swung her legs back and forth and Tom had to suppress a smile at the sight of her ridiculously mismatched socks.

“Only you Little Star, only you” he found himself saying and smiled fondly when she rolled her eyes. He would love to just sit here and talk to her, just talk and talk about nothing. But there was a war out there that he intended to win. And he couldn’t do that without knowing the machinations of a certain old man.

“Has Dumbledore spoken about anything regarding his futile horcrux hunt to you yet?”

Merlin Dumbledore wasn’t even here and he was ruining Tom’s conversations. He really couldn’t wait to kill that old bastard. It wouldn’t even surprise him if Dumbledore was immortal at this point, just so Fate could continue to spite him and rob him of his satisfaction.

“So he’s heading for the Gaunt house in Little Hangleton then” Eliza continued their conversation and Tom nodded his head in thought. Dumbledore was already hunting his horcruxes, which meant they had a year at most. If Tom was being honest within himself his older self had not been especially crafty when it came to hiding their horcruxes. Dumbledore would track down their previous locations easily, and when he found nothing his suspicions would only grow.

He could not place Eliza in such a precarious position.

“The question is” Tom drawled “What will he do next?”

“Unless” Eliza cut in, fiddling with her fingers “He doesn’t find nothing”

Tom watched curiously as she tapped her wand against her hand, dispelling some form of disillusionment charm, and slipped something off her finger.

A ring.

His Ring.

Perhaps a family heirloom would be more accurate but Tom truly didn’t view it as such. The Gaunt’s connected him to Slytherin but beyond that Tom had no use for them, inbred maniacs that they were. But the ring was his. It was by far from the first thing he had stolen but it was perhaps the first that truly meant something. That he belonged in this world, that he belonged to magic and that nothing would ever take that from him.

And Eliza had kept it, all this time.

“Of course I kept it you moron – what else would I do with it?” she scoffed and Tom could only blink in bafflement, not even moving away when her dainty calloused hand reached out for his own.

She had kept it. Kept something Tom had given her not because it was branded onto her, or unescapable, not because she needed it or wanted something. She could have even just stuffed it in a box somewhere and yet she had kept it, sat on her hand all this time.

Tom was only shaken out of his musings when the very ring he had been obsessing over (and it was the ring, not Eliza-) seemed to change. The moment it left Eliza’s hand the once glimmering obsidian black became a dull slate grey.