Duende || Tom Riddle

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"So... should we start our Potions assignment in the near future?" Nikita doesn't even look up from his Transfiguration essay, which is nearly completely filled with neat, inky loops.

Tom, who's sitting on the other side of the table, scoffs quietly, causing Abraxas next to him to tense slightly while slate eyes are piercing through pale skin like icicles, as cold as his heart and lethal like his mind, already coated with the poison his words use to hold in every syllable.

"What are you huffing about, Tone Fiddle? I certainly don't want to make this garbage alone."

Briefly, the icicles turn blunt in confusion - Has Tom Riddle just been called Tone Fiddle? - but then they're sharper than ever before, permeating the other boy's skull as if it was out of cheap sheet music and not bone.

Nikita doesn't even flinch, in fact he doesn't notice that Tom isn't ignoring him unfriendlily but is drowining in music like the pianist is used to do in the from Apollo abandoned nights, that Tom tiptoes past bears and clapping audiences and a bowing little boy - How has he ever missed this? -, surpassing prisons out of empty bars, notes kept hidden inside under the cloak of oblivion that is only slowly lifted and a gallery of smiles, one emptier than the other. And when he looks at his reflection in the pearly teeth, he doesn't see himself but another boy who's faking like him but differently.

Because while Nikita only fakes smiles, Tom fakes his whole existence.

Maybe Nikita can't smile but Tom can't live and perhaps this is the reason he doesn't want to die at the end of his days - because he doesn't know how to. Just like life, death should be something natural but if you don't manage to live properly you certainly don't know how to die because you don't have to know, it's not even an instinct, it's just an invariable fact, an unchangable circumstance, your life ends and you're dead.

But of course it's not that easy - and it certainly isn't for Tom Riddle who fears mortality more than humanity's been fearing gods - how it will fear him.

Dying is natural, it's normal and so it's everything Tom isn't and doesn't want to be. After all he's special, he's gifted, a prodigy, a charmer, a heir. He's witty and twisted and has already been wilted before being born, never blooming like the other blossoms in the orphanage, always just the dead carcass of a living creature, painted with the stolen lives of others with his very own hands, sucking their colours out since his first breath, a flower like it's never been seen before because he's made it himself, striking and more than just pleasing to the eye, the creatures he's feasted on pining away unnoticed at his feet as all eyes are drawn to him.

Tom is artificial - but he is artificial as his facade truly is crafted by the most skilled human on this sorry earth, sculpted in a way that allows no bad thoughts to rise and no genuine smile to drop - how fortunate that Nikita never smiles in delight and thinks about Tom in awe.

Living is next to dying one of the few arts Tom won't ever master. Maybe it's the lack of love or that he does everything to prevent his death that he forgets that he's breathing and that the heart he's claiming to be nonexistent is still pounding in his cold chest. He searches too much to rest and suffers too much to enjoy so he takes his joy in suffering and rests by letting others search - but he's living in their minds because there is only one person he maybe can trust and it's certainly not Nikita, in whom's mind he's just encountered himself, blood dripping off cool walls and chocolate melting on the listener's tongue while staying invisible in Apollo's soothing embracement.