OF SERPENT AND ANGEL ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎ ‎‏‏‎➝ tom riddle ¹ | ✓ |

FORTY-FOUR

The crack of a whip sounded once more and Tom appeared in front of Eliza again, except now he wasn't alone. On the floor, a struggling person had been forced along, Tom's grip tight on the collar of their periwinkle robes which billowed about with their movements. Eliza's brain was too weak, too slow, to register the sensory input around her and it took her quite a long time to even hear the grunts and shrieks of their strife, and it was only when Tom threw the person to the hard floor and they picked their upper body up that she recognised the woman in front of her.

She had never felt horror the way she did at that moment, apart perhaps from when she had seen her family die. One would have thought that by now, after the constant pain and torture she was subjected to in body and mind, she would grow desensitised to it. But she never did, the pain never felt less than it had before.

Atha, whose brown eyes had fallen onto the broken frame that had once been her friend, made to stand up, but Tom pulled her back before she could.

"Eliza!" she called out like to a sister, as if she had not read the Daily Prophet articles which revealed Eliza as the murder who had lost her mind that she was. Atha tried once more to crawl forward, now without standing up, and this time Tom allowed her to get close enough to reach out her fingers a millimetre away from Eliza before he pulled her back.

"Don't touch," he said calmly, sounding like a guard in a museum who had just seen a child reach out for one of the paintings.

"What have you done to her?" screamed Atha, throwing her head back to look into Tom Riddle's crimson eyes. He didn't even glance in her direction, almost as if she didn't deserve to be acknowledged.

Instead, he watched Eliza, whose eyes had not left Atha and her lips moved with inaudible mumbles. Only some words managed to make use of her vocal cords: "Tom – Why? – What? – Don't."

Atha continued shouting, continued trying to get to her friend who sat limply in the hardbacked chair, continued asking questions, and continued to be ignored.

"Please Tom." Eliza felt like she was melting. She couldn't look at the monster hiding within the frame of a man, she couldn't face the crimson eyes or the cat-like pupils. And thus, her gaze remained on Atha, though it was unfocused and unrecognising.

He evidently did not want to listen to her pleas because from somewhere beside her, she heard him say "crucio" and she braced herself for the impact expect the pain she felt then was much worse than what she had prepared for. The spill didn't hit, her body did not react, and instead, she was forced to watch Atha fall weakly to the floor as a scream ripped through her.

And Tom didn't stop. It felt like an eternity as the room filled with shrill screaming, both from Atha who was convulsing on the floor but also from Eliza herself as she watched in horror.

"Do you want her suffering to end, Eliza?" he asked. Why would he even ask that from her? Why would he force her to answer?

"Yes," she told him, her voice shivering, her throat sore. "Please."