i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

XXVII

By day eight, Julius's anger had mostly evaporated, or else he was just conserving that rage to unleash later. They actually talked.

She didn't know if he was real or just some dark magic of the ring meant to deceive people. It hardly mattered. It should have mattered more, but the more they spoke the less she was inclined to actually care.

A dark corner of her mind did wonder at that. Her uncle was never the type for bedtime stories, but The Tales Of Beedle the Bard, specifically the tale of the three brothers, had been an exception. An obsession. She could recite the story word for word backwards, forwards, and translated into German in her most boring nightmares. As a result, she couldn't very well ignore the part where the second brother more or less went insane due to the Resurrection Stone. Was he crazy because of the stone or did he see things that weren't there because he was crazy. What came first, the dragon or the egg?

Details had likely been embellished over a few hundred years, Ophelia eventually decided. She wasn't obsessed, like he'd eventually become. She could let go of the ring any time she wanted. Any. Time. She just didn't want to, yet.

The day would have been peaceful, were not for the twittered screeches of a small flock of ravens. Ophelia watched idly as the enchanted songbirds fluttered outside the staff room window, aligning themselves into a new, inventive curse word every few seconds for the professors' benefit. Every once and awhile, they changed formation to specifically insult a member of staff, usually Apollyon Pringle.

Ophelia smiled to herself, wondering who was possibly behind it and sincerely hoping they got away before they could be caught. With that thought in mind, she hastened her own steps, lest she be considered the perpetrator.

It was nonetheless a welcome distraction from Julius's new hyper-fixation: a step-by-step outline of how she could "save the world" by killing Grindelwald herself.

"You're the only one he trusts enough to get that close without his guard rising," and "Think of all the lives you'd be saving just by taking his." The clincher was "I'll even be willing to forgive you for what you did to me."

She almost preferred it when he was plain furious.

"I think I'd prefer silence over the sound of your voice," she grumbled, more to herself than him. "I'm not killing anybody. You might as well come to terms with it now. Besides, I don't even know where he is."

Ophelia could feel his side-eye burning a hole through the side of her head. "I hardly think that would be an issue for long," he surmised, and she couldn't disagree.

As she considered various means of ducking out of that particular conversation until he moved onto something more pleasant, a movement near the forest caught her eye. Normally, she wouldn't have minded. Let them sneak into the forbidden forest for all she cared; she wasn't their mother. If they found trouble there, well, that was entirely on them. They got the same warning as everyone else.

But this wasn't "normally". This was Tom, an immediate cause to be instantly suspicious. Whatever business he had kneeling at the edge of the forest— without his usual entourage, no less— could not have spelled a nice, stress free future for her. For him to deliberately break free from his shadows meant he was up to no good. Again.

It was more for the sake of the greater good than his own that Ophelia stalked his way, arms crossed. Leaves crunched noisily beneath her feet and even though he must have heard her coming up behind him he didn't move.

"I'm not sure what evil you're planning this time, but I'm morally obligated to tell you to it's a bad idea," Ophelia announced when she drew close.