Your Unholy Halos [Tom Riddle]

I. god, i'm different. i promise.

    Until Urvashi Sarao's sixth year, everything was pretty uniform. There were days of strutting down the hallways with her friends, clad in pressed Slytherin robes and a crown of a pureblood family name sitting upon her brow.

She had a clear memory of dim hallways, rainy scent and murk beneath her feet.

Her friends were mean. Not to her, but to others. Usually. There were cruel jokes and unkind pranks, a laugh twisted from virulence, sadistic winks, feigned pouts, and dirty mouths stained with privileged rouge. She always stood back and forced a laugh. Sometimes, she lifted her lips a bit less to feel better about herself. What else could she do? They were her friends. Terrible people, yes, but friends nonetheless, who had stood her back from the first day she stepped into Hogwarts.

She never participated in any of it. Always a foot back from the commotion, arms crossed and shoe tip digging into the ground, unless Beatrice Mulciber dug her fingers in her arm and pulled her forward.

Urvashi Sarao was scared of many things. Getting what she deserved was one of them.

She never could figure out why she was hesitant to mock other people. Perhaps she was kind deep down, or maybe she was just a coward. What she knew for a fact was that all of it was wrong, and it would somehow get back to her. That's how it worked. The world demanded balance.

Oh, how she feared the day the scale would straighten again. She could see it from the corners of her eyes, equity waiting to pounce.

She had always been scared. However, she was always good at hiding it. But then Myrtle Warren died, and the blood was partly on her hands. She was not involved in her death, but she knew about the real murderer. Tom Riddle.

When Urvashi was asked about it (every Slytherin student was questioned), she only bit her tongue, staring calmly into Dippet's eyes, avidly avoiding the Warrens' hopeful gaze and shook her head. Her limbs felt weak when she did, as if by denying any knowledge of the incident, she had marked the future for something terrible, and a force in her body was letting her know. You are at fault!

She grew distant. Tom did not know why, and neither did any of the knights. Why was she, a Slytherin pureblood witch, so affected by the passing of a mudblood?

She wanted to tell them but held back every time. It wasn't normal, was it? The perpetual nausea, flashing images of a child crying every time she blinked, Tom standing on a pile of corpses, an obscure robe spindled from dark threads and soaked in blood clasped inanimately around his shoulders.

Some would say she was a seer. She could be. There had been seers in the Sarao family before, but that was centuries ago. Whatever the reason was, she did not like it. For the visions were recurring. They started differently but ended the same with Tom Riddle destroying everything.

The other knights resumed their lives- got back to their rotten ways and clandestine meetings, juvenile habits and blurring lines for fleeting pride. Sure, they grew uncomfortable when someone mentioned the incident or when Myrtle's older sister, Marcie Warren, glared at them from across the hallways. But that was all. They were too high and mighty to be bothered much by any of it. Muggle-borns had no place in their world.

They moved on, but Urvashi was anchored.

    Tom Riddle used to be a constant presence in her life.

She was the first to join him. The first one to scar her arm with the death mark. Perhaps it was naive, but she always thought she was special. Oh no. It was surely naive of her. She took the way he rolled her name off his tongue as favouritism, the way he lent her his rare smile from across the room as a hidden message.