Catharsis [Tom Riddle]

Chapter Twenty-One

Silence.

Avalon woke to absolute silence.

Her body jolted upright and she quickly looked around, taking note of her surroundings as the memory of where she was flooded back into her brain.

She was in the Room of Requirement. With Riddle.

And yet, as her eyes skimmed the room, he was nowhere to be seen.

Her body eased back into the couch, but there was an unsettling feeling in the pit of her stomach.

She had fallen asleep in a hidden room that nobody else in the castle knew about...with Tom fucking Riddle. Her fingers began nervously tapping along the couch as she scolded her own foolishness-- how could she have let her guard down so much around him?

For all she knew, he could have killed her right then and there and left her body to rot in that bloody room. It would have been ages before anyone would have found her. And for what? Because she had been too damn stubborn to have walked herself back to her own room.

But, she was still alive.

Alive. Awake. Safe.

He hadn't done anything that night to make her feel even remotely unsafe. She compared his attitude last night to how he'd behaved the last time they had been in that damn room together. The last time, he had spoken with venom in his words, pressed a knife to her back, thrown it at her head...

He had wanted her dead. She saw it in his eyes-- he had wanted to kill her.

But, last night was different. He hadn't been his usual self. If she didn't know better, she would almost think that he had been trying to be nice to her.

Thankfully, she did know better. And she knew that 'nice' was not in Riddle's blood. Logic led her to know that everything Riddle did was transactional. If he wanted her to do well on the project, he would be more tolerable to her until he got what he wanted, and then all would return to normal. He viewed human beings as nothing more than a means to an end...just little chess pieces in his manipulative game of life.

He was not kind. He was not caring. He was not comforting.

Tom Riddle was not the kind of person to sit by her side to make sure she didn't have nightmares. Tom Riddle was the kind of person to sit by her side to make sure her nightmares didn't interrupt his studying.

His books were still on the table before her and a cushion was placed on the ground near where he had been sitting.

Where was he?

A part of her wondered if her screaming episode had scared him off and he'd left in the middle of the night.

But, almost as quickly as that thought entered her mind, her attention was grasped by the sound of the entrance creaking open, revealing a dark-haired Prefect carrying a large tray in his hands. Tom wordlessly made his way over to her, placing the tray on the table and then sitting down in the armchair beside her couch.

His eyes were painted with dark purple circles beneath them, his pale skin dull from his evident exhaustion. It was apparent that he had not slept at all that night, surely too busy reading and rereading the same books to be bothered by something so mundane as resting.

She eyed the tray carefully, staring hungrily at the two steaming cups of dark coffee and the plateful of lemon blueberry scones... That's strange. Those were her favorite things to eat at breakfast every morning.

Tom watched her stare at the food he had brought and raised an eyebrow at her. She returned his stare with a blank expression strewn on her face, and he rolled his eyes before reaching out, grabbing one of the scones, and taking a bite. Only after she saw him eat, did she grab one herself and quietly eat it, picking up a cup of coffee shortly after and sipping from it as she looked around the room.