For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Dark Triad

"Scourgify."

Gwen wrinkled her nose in disgust as bedbugs scurried out from underneath the covers and into the far corners of room seven. With a sigh, she pulled out her marble-sized trunk, now missing the Invisibility Cloak, and flicked it across the room, where it grew to be its normal size in the blink of an eye.

The mewling of cats in heat drifted upward from outside her window. Gwen quickly shut it and cast Silencio. Exhausted, she plopped onto the bed, grimacing as a cloud of dust floated upward and the frame groaned under her weight. The squalid fumes of dirt and disheartening groans of wood were enough to set off another cascade of tears as Gwen cried herself to sleep and dreamt of days spent drinking hot cocoa alongside little boys with chocolate locks and toothy smiles.

***

The sun rose and set. Another day passed.

Gwen still didn't leave her room. There was a knock on the door, the barman, but she didn't answer. She didn't want to be bothered—so much so that Gwen had cast that infamous inking spell, the same one she had used on the door to the Prefect's Bathroom, and she didn't even react when she heard the hollers of contempt out in the hall.

She didn't feel hungry. She just felt empty. The only time she moved from the bed was to open the window because the room had grown stuffy. But the fact of the matter was that the room had not become any warmer, Gwen had only begun to feel suffocated under the weight of her emotions she was trying to bottle up.

Griffith, while only sharing half her blood, was an integral part of Gwen's formative past, for better or worse. They shared a unique co-history with one another, common memories, along with critical childhood experiences and family sagas. The moments they had spent together growing up were now difficult to sort out—it was painful to dive too deep into the marrow of the memory, but it also hurt if she tried to forget to ease the pain.

Ultimately, when one distilled the jumble of thoughts and emotions going on inside her head, it came to be apparent that Griffith was Gwen's first friend. He knew her in a very special way, unlike those who knew her now. He had known her before everything became dark and twisted, when they were only children soaking in the sun of their childhood innocence, before they were tainted with deceit and loss.

Back then, blood purity didn't matter, power meant nothing, and manipulation was only used to get the upper hand in a game of wizard's chess or the like.

The ambivalence that surrounded their relationship as they got older was regrettable, but inevitable when fueled by the dynamic between their complicated relation. They were both tools of the same evil hand. Puppets of the same master.

The guilt, sadness and regret threatened to tackle Gwen and never allow her to get up—Griffith was gone, unless she got the ring, and no matter how nostalgic she was about the good times they did share, the relationship was never what she ideally would have wanted it to be.

She knew that they were never destined to live normal lives with comfortable homes and careers and families, but something deep within her yearned for the day she got word that her little brother had found something or someone to make him happy.

But his light had been extinguished much too early, and she felt lost. A constant was gone. She may not have had frequent contact with her sibling, but at least she knew another member of her family was there, alive and perhaps not well, but sharing the same existence.

Griffith's death made her think of her own mortality. Who would grieve for her?

No one, came the cynical answer and her heart flailed in her chest at the mere suggestion it might be true.