evelynn | t.riddle

12 | IMMORTALITY'S BOND

When Tom opens his eyes, he's lying on his bed. He hasn't got a clue how he got there since the last thing he remembers is-

"You awake."

Tom's not ashamed to admit that he just about jumps out of his skin at the soft voice. Screaming, he'd be a little embarrassed by - then again, she did kill him before and has every possible reason to do so now when he's no threat to her. When he looks over, he meets green eyes across the room - currently darker than the Killing Curse, the colour of emeralds now, but that he knows can glow the exact shade of that deadly curse when she's angered enough. He scrambles and presses his back against the wall, asking, "What now? What are you going to-"

Evelynn's expression looks resigned, but she cuts him off with a wave and says, "Nothing, Tom. I'm not going to hurt you."

She is sitting on her bed, presumably waiting for him to wake up alone, but still... "You're the Master of Death. If you wanted to, you could kill me with a thought." He knows so, Death said so! Not in those exact words, but still! He's not in the habit of pissing off all-powerful beings like the one that is the end of life! Or this plane's link to such a being! He rather likes being alive!

Evelynn gives him a dead-pan look and drily says, "First off, the term 'Master of Death' is a mortal convention, and Death just found it amusing enough to let it stick. You cannot master Death; anyone who wanted to would never have been chosen. I was told so myself. Second, if I were to kill you, Tom, you'd be dead by now. I've had so many opportunities to do as much, even at Hogwarts, and yet you're still alive. Third, you're still alive after being unconscious for the past ten minutes, and all I did was put you on the bed and wait for you to wake up." She gets up and checks the hallway, giving him a minute to process everything.

Tom hates how reasonable that sounds at the moment; he wants to Hex and Curse her and make her get the bloody hell away from him in case she does want to kill him and keep that horrible future from happening - it's what he'd do, after all! Instead, he asks, "Why am I on the bed?"

Evelynn says, "I put you there. You fainted after seeing Death tell me I'm the immortal Master of Death and that my body will stop ageing on my twenty-first birthday." She shrugs and adds, "I suppose it was a bit much in the end, but you did want everything."

After a few tries, Tom swallows the lump in his throat, then asks, "So...if you don't want to kill me..."

"Why am I here?" Tom nods his head immediately.

Evelynn sighs, sits back on her bed and quietly says, "It was an accident. Twelve years after I went on the run, my so-called friends finally found and cornered me." A bitter, mocking laugh bubbles up as she stares at her hands, adding, "They thought they knew me so well, but they spent eight years chasing their tails because they never realised I wanted friends so badly I hid most of my personality from them. Even with Dumbledore's Potions and Compulsions brainwashing me." And then another four trying to follow her trail, eventually cornering her in the Forest of Dean in a twenty-person ambush.

She knows she took six of them out, people she recognised as various Order Members - Doge, Shacklebolt, Podmore, Mundungus Fletcher, Dedalus Diggle - along with several Aurors, but even with her experience, she fell eventually. Mainly because Ronald Weasley, one of the biggest voices in how Dark she was even as a second-year with her Parseltongue, cast Fiendfyre, and it was enough to make her freeze in shock for a brief moment. The bone-breaker to the chest from Granger came straight through the flames, hence the rib she had in her lung.

"Right, those..." Another thing that made him sick to his stomach - Dumbledore had her drugged to her metaphorical gills with various Potions, Obedience, Loyalty. A few Love Potions keyed specifically to Ronald Weasley being the main ones, and Compulsions that buried her self-preservation instincts, her survival skills, her will to survive, everything that would've put her in Slytherin. And, incidentally, it kept her from walking to her death.