i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

XIII

To Ophelia, there seemed a disproportionate amount of cloak and dagger at work to merely have followed Tom to the lady's bathroom. Was it a peculiar destination for a sixteen year old boy to sneak off to in the dead of night? For sure. Did it seem anticlimactic to tail him all the way from the dungeons only to watch him slip into a restroom? Even more so.

Now that she thought about it, she never did ask him why she'd caught him walking out of one those weeks prior. She would have, had Dumbledore not interrupted, and then a thousand more interruptions chased the memory from her mind. Until now.

She paused, ear to the door, listening for any sound. None came. After waiting a minute more to be sure, she pulled lightly down on the handle and crept into the room.

Why was she sneaking? Surely, she had more right to be there than he did? Nonetheless, she chose to err on the side of caution, entirely for no reason, it turned out. He was nowhere to be found. That was not to say, however, that she didn't know where he'd gone. That much was obvious.

The massive gaping abyss in the middle of the room that she was almost entirely certain hadn't been there the last time she'd been inside was some indication. Edging up to it, she looked into the inky darkness only to find... more darkness.

Without any loose objects nearby forthcoming, she tore the top button from her shirt, enchanted it to a weight befitting that of a sizeable brick, and nudged it over the ledge.

She waited, her expression pulling down more and more into a frown the longer  she waited without hearing the button thud against the ground.

"Accio button," she whispered, pulling out her wand after some time had passed.

One, two, three, four... nineteen seconds elapsed before the small plastic collided with her cold fingers with a painful whap! All the weight she'd added to make it hopefully land loud enough for her to hear instead created a propulsive force that shot into her hand with enough concentrated power to break bone.

She bit down her yelp, and had enough sense to move her wand to her right hand before waving it wildly in silent agony.

"I'm stronger than a bloody button," she muttered when she had enough self control to open her mouth without cursing loud enough to wake the entire floor. "I will not be defeated by a button of all things."

Shooting said button suspicious glances, she reversed it back to its correct weight and repaired it to its rightful place on her blouse.

Nineteen seconds from wherever it had been to her hand. She was no physicist, but Ophelia felt she could hazard a guess that that was at least a deep enough drop to be a "dead on impact" kind of jump. Which begged the question: had Tom really gone for it? He certainly wasn't anywhere else, so he must have.

Trusting her knowledge of Tom's character just enough to say he wouldn't throw himself into any mysterious holes if he thought it was going to be lethal, she propped herself upon the lip of the tunnel and leapt.

III

Although Ophelia had been prepared to cast a spell to prevent her grisly flattening, it turned out there was no need. The tunnel evened into a slide that dropped her only about a foot off the ground. Could have been worse, even if the grime that now coated her like a second skin was less than ideal. It was of a type that even after she vanished it all away, she could still feel its slickness, despite knowing it was all gone.