Catharsis [Tom Riddle]

Chapter Two

She scrambled to follow him. Her body shoved past all the students walking in the opposite direction, paying little regard for who she had to shove away to run after him.

    Her eyes scanned the hallways, desperate to find their target once more. It didn't take long for her to notice him again. He was hard to miss. His height towered over most of the others, and he walked at a quicker pace.

    If rage had a face, she would be it.

    Her knuckles turned white from her grip on her wand. He was stopped by another boy, roughly his own age, with curly blond hair and matching Slytherin robes. Every moment they were stopped in conversation, she strode closer and closer to him, her vision going blurry from the anger coursing through her veins.

    He was right there.

    The reason for the hurt. The reason for the death. The reason for the war.

    He was right there.

    She didn't have a plan. She knew she couldn't kill him right then. She had to make sure he didn't have any Horcruxes, but that didn't make it any easier for her to quell her thirst for bloodshed in that moment.

    In order for the Killing Curse to work, one has to mean it. You have to want to take a life, and you have to believe, with every ounce of your being, that you desire the curse to work. And she knew, with absolutely no doubt in her heart, that she could kill him right then and there. She had used that curse before-- four times, actually. Each time on another faceless Death Eater that had stolen the life of one of her loved ones.

A life for a life.

In this case, it would be a life for thousands of lives.

She had never been more tempted to do anything before, but as she found herself raising her wand, a familiar face wedged himself between her and her prey.

    "Well, I don't believe we have met, yet, my dear."

    She stared directly past him, refusing to break her line of vision connecting her to her target, but the professor shifted his weight to rest into her direct view. He stood patiently before her, waiting for her animalistic eyes to finally focus on him. It wasn't until she registered who the man before her was that she actually lowered her wand again.

    Dumbledore stood before her, a bemused smile written on his lips. A part of her wanted to give him a hug. She had missed him. He looked so different, yet still so similar to the man she knew. His auburn hair was littered with silver streaks and his beard was beginning to stretch past his neck, though not nearly as impressive as she remembered it to be.

    The sight of a familiar face within the sea of strangers before her brought a smile to her lips.

    "Would you like to come to my office?" he offered, as though he could read her mind. "Perhaps then you could inform me of when we accepted a new student that I wasn't aware of."

    She nodded, though her eyes flickered back to where Tom Riddle had once stood, a hint of disappointment flashing across her features when she noticed that he had disappeared in the time she had been interrupted by the professor.

    He began to lead her through the corridors, occasionally waving at some of his students as they weaved their way through the crowds and towards his office. She noticed he was taking them to the transfiguration classroom and it then occurred to her how strange it was to not see him occupying the role of Headmaster.

    He held the door open for her and motioned for her to walk inside, shutting the entrance behind them as they were left alone in the classroom. There was a comfortable quiet between the two of them as he made his way over to his desk and sat down on its edge, his lips slightly curved upwards as he spoke to her. "Well, I must say. It's not every day I see an unfamiliar face around here. I usually know all of our students before the end of their first year."