how it feels to be alive {tom riddle}

twenty-eight: emptiness

EMPTINESS

After pacing angrily around the magnolia tree for a couple of minutes to calm his breathing, Tom apparated back to the hotel room to try to talk to Lucia.

When he appeared in the room, it felt empty, like all the life had been sucked from it.

When he realised her trunk was missing, his breath became ragged.

"Fuck." He yelled, running his fingers through his hair angrily, exhaling deeply through his nose. He rarely cursed, but no other words could express his feelings in this moment.

She was already gone.

He'd ruined everything.

Every chance he had at humanity had been broken to shards that painfully stabbed into his chest over and over.

Some of her belongings were still strewn across the room, alluding to a quick departure on her part.

It was torture, he could smell her sweet perfume still lingering in the air, but couldn't even lay his eyes on her.

He lay back against her bed, closing his eyes to imagine the feeling of her head pressed against his chest or her hands threading into his hair.

But she wasn't there.

All he could feel was cold emptiness both surrounding him and inside his soul.

Tom hadn't realised how much Lucia had changed him, how she was now so deeply woven into every one of his cells, not until she was gone.

His mind searched for where she would go, where he could find her. She would never go to her parents house, but where else? Nowhere came to mind, and the mere thought of her wandering the dark, cold streets alone made chills run down his spine.

Something hard pressed into his back, so he reached under himself to retrieve the item. When he pulled it out, the black screen of her phone was revealed.

He sat up abruptly, eyeing it in disbelief.

Tom pressed the on button, unlocking it with the passcode he'd seen her do too many times.

It concerned him that she didn't have her phone with her, a means of contact to others. But he couldn't help the relief of having something to connect him to her in some way.

His fingers automatically found the photos app, and he began flicking through just to see her face again.

When the picture from the London Eye popped up, he paused to appreciate the happy glint in her eyes, that had been replaced by fear and sadness because of his lack of forethought and honesty.

He kept flicking through, finding the pictures from Alannah's birthday of them together, analysing the touch of her fingers against his chest as she had reached up to place her lips against his cheek.

Tom so badly wanted to feel that again, to feel her hands linger down from his shoulders to his abdomen in a moment of passion, or her fingers laced in his as they simply lay talking about philosophy.

To think he would never experience that again was too painful of a thought, so he pushed it back, utilising his powerful occlumency skills on himself.

He continued flicking through photographs of her, even from before they'd met.

In one video Darcy and her had been dancing on vertical metal poles, laughing to each other as Mel cheered behind the camera. Lucia walked towards the camera, "If you want to see more, you'll have to pay me." She giggled, pushing away the phone and the video ended abruptly, the laughter painfully echoing around Tom's skull.