butterfly effect, tom riddle

33. | past

He glanced up at me one last time as if to make sure I was watching very carefully, and I leaned closer, burning with an uncontrollable curiosity as I watched him tap on the board slowly and cast a nonverbal charm on it.

He did make the chess pieces shut up, but the change was definitely not pleasant: almost instantaneously, the board burst into bright orange flames.

I shrieked in terror and jolted out of my seat, clapping my hands to my mouth as I watched my beloved chess board burn. The unmistakable odor of fire permeated through the common room, invading my uninviting lungs mercilessly, and through the dancing flames, I could see Tom's devilishly handsome face, a victorious grin spreading through his pink lips.

It was only when I began coughing savagely that Tom extinguished the flames, and rid the room of any leftover smoke. I rushed up to my chess board to see that it had been replaced by a colossal mountain of ashes.

I gawked up at him in utter bafflement, slowly feeling the anger starting to boil in my veins.

"What the hell!" I exclaimed. "You just—you just burned my chess board to ashes! Why the hell would you do that?"

"I told you not to disrespect me," Tom retorted, as I balled my hands into fists at my side.

"You complete, total moron!" I bellowed, utterly outraged. "Do you know how expensive that chess board was? What is wrong with you, you absolute psychopath?"

Tom shifted his jaw, clearly irked by the fact that I was still insulting him without any fear, and stood up from his armchair, towering over me by a considerable amount.

I saw his hand dive instinctively into his pocket, clearly searching for his wand—probably to curse me horrendously or something—but then go limp. It was almost as if he was hesitating.

"You should consider yourself lucky," he spoke at last, his voice chillingly icy. "If you were anyone else, you would have been in the hospital wing already."

He whirled around, storming away. I was too wrathful to be stunned, wrathful enough to call after him: "Oh, I'm so terrified! Forgive me, your highness!"

But he had already turned a corner and disappeared from sight. I huffed in dignified rage before flopping down on the couch, glowering at my chess-board-turned-ashes indignantly.

In a few moments, I heard hasty footsteps shuffle into the room. I glanced up to see that it was Maverick, a look of anxiety etched onto his usually mischievous face.

"Are you all right?" he questioned concernedly. "You really shouldn't mock him so much. Do you need to go to the hospital wing?"

I blinked at him, staggered by his nervousness, before bursting into untamable chortles. His brows knitted in befuddlement as he approached me slowly, clearly taking notice of the fact that I was perfectly fine.

"He didn't torture you?" he asked, seeming absolutely stunned.

"Of course not, silly," I giggled. "It'd be really stupid of him to torture me, what if anyone walked in? He did burn my chess board to ashes, though."

I nodded glumly towards the anthill of ashes sitting before me, feeling my amusement deflate.

"If anyone walked in, he'd just Obliviate them—it's happened before," Maverick informed me with a casual shrug, as if admitting that your friend tortures your other friends and erases the memory of witnesses was normal. "But—really? All he did was burn the chess board?"

"Um, yes?" I confirmed, arching a brow up at him. The fact that Tom tortured his friends in the middle of the Slytherin common room and could Obliviate people at the ripe age of fifteen wasn't that shocking; I was already used to Tom being astoundingly powerful and astoundingly psychotic, so it didn't faze me much. "That's a big deal. I paid, like, a million Galleons for it."