For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Mirror

She stood silently looking into the mirror.

An unfamiliar person stared back, but her reflection had long since grown distant and nebulous, like a ripple in a pond, or the blinking of a far-off star. In the hollows of her cheeks and her arched golden brows, the tension of questions she had asked herself in the dead of night hung, dazed and confused, the stamp of hours of fitful sleep and half-baked hope that always shattered as soon as she woke up inside the castle.

It was like an incorrectly set bone, a bruise flushed across delicate skin, some softness turned to stone. And it all ached softly—like rotting flesh slipping off skin, already necrosed at the nerve so she felt nothing but a dull throbbing.

The person she was before was shattered, the pieces of her reassembled with Darkness filling in the gaps like marrow, and now she was like that of a dark night—one that others used as cover for their nefarious acts.

It was a truth that she hated to swallow—a bitter, soul-crushing kerosine that lit the match of sorrow that burned in her throat.

But as the self-pity had faded, it was replaced by stubborn rage, and rather than letting the flame consume her, she consumed the flame, kindling it until a pinch of fingertips couldn't possibly hope to quench it.

"No," she whispered to herself in the mirror.

She wouldn't let a single breath blow her out.

***

Gwen tiredly closed the door to her apartment right as Kenji was exiting his. Their eyes met across the hallway, zapping Gwen awake.

"Good morning," Kenji chirped, his voice soft and warm like sunshine through a window on a morning where you've been allowed the luxury to sleep in.

"Good morning," Gwen echoed, although her voice more resembled a scratchy sweater—presentable on the outside but uncomfortable on the inside.

She hadn't slept well the night before, her cortisol levels never reaching an ideal state as her brain fired with possibility after possibility of what was to come now that she decided to ambush Riddle at his place of work. She played an entire chess match on her ceiling to map it out.

First, she supposed that he could very well kick her out of the store and onto the street—private businesses had that privilege and with his prickly nature, she wouldn't put it passed him. With a flourish of his hand, she'd be cast out, sulking in Knockturn Alley.

Probably solicited my own damn potion at a marked-up price.

He could also force her to buy something so he could earn a commission, although Gwen doubted that he needed the money these days after footing the bill at Nepenthe and Billywig. She didn't even want to know how expensive the bottle of champagne was.

And, in some versions, her mind ran wild. Sometimes, there was a flash of green and she was on the ground dead, and in others, she had no clothes on, and...was also on the ground.

Her cheeks warmed at the thought, but she still stood hollow-eyed in the hallway, refusing to acknowledge it.

Kenji's voice with its light accent pulled her from her thoughts and they began to move if called forward by a thread, puppets in a show, although the truth was that it was routine.

"How was working with Quillish? Should I expect you to be prying into my mind anytime soon?"

She sighed as the pair trudged up the stairs. "No. Truthfully, Legilimency feels a bit repulsive to me. Shifting my conscious forward like that... it doesn't feel right."