desiderium | t. riddle

xii. veiled demons

tw: mentions of blood, eating disorder

Riddle's fingers waltzed across black and white keys with poetic grace, coloring the silent room with sweet rhapsodies, oblivious to Evangeline's eyes growing hazy in response.

In the weeks following her first encounter with music, his midnight tones had melted and molded to become their midnight tones. It was a recurring unspoken arrangement that both knew the other was pleased with.

But tonight, Tom was not interested in the music at his fingertips, but rather in the black trails peeking through the opaque skin blanketing his singular audience member's wrists. As Eva's eyes followed his hands' rhythm, his burned into the most vulnerable of her veins.

He was so allured by her hands, in fact, that it slipped from his notice as they moved from their resting position on her lap to include themselves in his practiced tunes until the elicited sound reached his ears. His fingers discontinued their singing instinctively to shoot across several keys and curl around the same wrist he'd been studying so intently only seconds before.

"Don't." Her added note had lacerated his easy melody with its ignorance.

When the usual, quick-witted reply pronounced itself absent in the silence that followed Tom's blunt demand, he finally tore his observation away from her hands to study her eyes. The same could not be said for Eva, who grey eyes were resting dazedly on the minute physical contact, with her lips falling slightly apart and eyebrows blown gently into wider arcs.

Tom did not have the faintest idea why her demeanor had so abruptly turned aloof and studied her clouded face. Her skin, which had been an unnatural ivory at the beginning of term, had warmed into a soft shade of magnolia. There were even signs of freckles beginning to kiss her cheeks, making her formerly indurative cheekbones take on a more sweet, maple flavor.

His mouth tilted into a small frown. Beauxbatons must not have been in a very sunny area, if her freckles were only beginning to appear now, at the considerable age of fifteen. Even then, it was strange. He stored the thought to a shelf in the back of his mind for later inspection and continued to sweep his gaze across her features in their continued state of stupor.

If Evangeline were a season, Tom found himself thinking, she would surely be autumn. It was evident in her entire appearance, from the way her lips held only the palest tints of pink hydrangea to the vermillion apple whispers combing through her hair. From the light, easy breeze that seemed to carry her everywhere she went, to the ground cinnamon dusting her cheeks in faint constellations, the way stars appear right at the zenith of twilight's blade, when the sky is torn between sun and moon.

One major difference, he reminded himself, was that Tom actually liked autumn. It was, truth be told, his favorite time of the year— not because of anything sentimental like leaf colors or silly like Halloween, but because it was the season he was able to return to school every year. If there was one thing Tom could admit he felt emotion towards, it was Hogwarts, his only home and extrication from the dreadful muggle orphanage he'd grown up in.

Tom was snapped brutally from his thoughts when the hand he had wrapped around Eva's wrist shifted slightly in his contemplation and her pulse could be felt pounding rapidly through her gossamer skin. This brought him back to the original subject of his studies — the blood running through her veins.

Evangeline's daze must have made it easy for Riddle to forget exactly how lethal her abilities were, because he didn't think before doing what he did next. He was frustrated, and wanted answers. His calculated patience had clearly reached its breaking point, and his ravenous need for an explanation could not be ignored any longer.