PAPER CONFINES.
23. / Time
✶
By the heart of January, Amoret had blown eighteen imaginary candles and finally managed to carve a memory of Tom's childhood from an unseen recess of his mind. At the glimpse of it—a young boy swaddled in a hospital bed with a bruised cheek and a bloodshot eye—Amoret believed it to be planted to garner sympathy. But she had grown capable of differentiating a truth given from one taken. When Tom gave, it was mostly to prove something he knew Amoret wouldn't believe without seeing herself. He lent it reluctantly, scoffed as if it were absurd of her to distrust him, but gave it entirely, and let it be hers until he claimed it again. It was a feeling too intrinsic to compare to holding a hand, though she'd initially tried; it felt instead like pressing palm first to a mirror and finding her reflection's arm attached to another face.
When Amoret took, it lasted only a second. It was airtight. She inhaled the memory and Tom lurched with an angry child's hands to grab it back. He went alight with something before settling to indifference again. She hungered to call it fear.
In the meadow, little fish leapt from the lake. Little fish and little rabbits and a murmuration of starlings, all white as the moon. Amoret spent long nights in a temple of blankets against the big oak tree, occupying an empty vein that sought impossible answers for impossible magic with things she understood instead. It had been ages since she'd found the time to study something of her own desire.
A half-finished star chart was strewn across her lap, tonight at the Astronomy Tower rather than the meadow, if not for nostalgia's sake then to compare the two skies. Amoret was curious to see if the meadow, which seemed to be of Tom's creation, would reveal anything about him in its differences from a true sky—if any such thing still existed. All she knew so far was that the castle and the meadow were occurring in different times. She had half the thought that the meadow might have even been so expansive it contained multiple times spanning the width of it alone. At the lake was a winter where Jupiter shone, and in the deep of the woods an early spring, shadowed by the vacuum of space.
The castle felt in another world entirely.
Amoret chewed the chain of her necklace while she scrawled notes of near-incoherence. Quill to ink to parchment to ink again, until her hands were stained and the stone balcony of the tower looked like it had been struck by droplets of black rain.
"The starlings have laid eggs," Tom said without introduction, the clangour of his shoes on the metal staircase enough to announce his arrival.
By then, Amoret had covered a quarter of Nadya's dormitory wall in tallies for the days. It was ninety-five that night.
"Have they?" she mumbled without looking up.
"Two of them. Eight between them both."
"Hm."
She was in the middle of a thought, half-scrawled with aching wrists—something about Libra and the moon—before a knotted wallflower fell on her lap.
Amoret finished her writing in a scrawl she probably wouldn't be able to translate later and looked up with a scowl. Tom didn't appear much happier.
The flower was shrivelled and tinged beige, its stem frayed like split silk where it coiled around itself, as if it had been sewn together in a rush. She held it, unimpressed, and placed it back in Tom's hand.
"My cat has brought me dead mice that've made better gifts than this."
He scoffed. "You instructed me to practice."
"Is that what you call it?"
He skimmed past her defences and stole a glance at her studies. Jupiter, earthshine, a binary star on October nineteenth. He took. "You might consider doing the same; it's a tragedy the ease in which I can breach a weakness in your defense."
Amoret huffed, refusing to resign to him, and dipped her quill again.
"You weren't always a recluse."
She laughed. "Riddle, I know you lack self-awareness but you of all people calling me a recluse might be the funniest thing you've ever said."
He went quiet. She could see without looking—his tense neck, his edged inhale, his eyes digging holes in her back. She continued writing despite his annoyance.
"Are the stars going to free us, then?"
"No, they're going to make my stay more bearable."
"Our stay."
"Is that not what I said?"
And the equally edged exhale hit the air on a white sigh. "Lest you forget I'm still here, Amoret."
"How can I, with you breathing down my neck? A whole world of your making and you continue to find your way within an inch of mine."
"Call it your overwhelming magnetism."
She rolled her eyes.
"Your planets are misplaced."
"They aren't. They just move slower here. Everything bigger than us does."
He sat without invitation and peered over her shoulder. Breathing down her neck indeed. "Wouldn't that cause catastrophe?"
"In theory," Amoret said, "but there's barely anything here to disrupt. No oceans, no North Pole, no South—it's not a planet. We don't even know if any of this is real."
"The clocks turn slower too."
So he had noticed.
"And yet night and day pass the same."
Tom's gaze manoeuvred with a visible show of thought. "A time loop, then?"
"Can't be," she dismissed with a turn of page. Her chart of the meadow appeared vastly different from the last. "There are different times all around us. I'd wager every manifestation of the Room of Requirement is months apart, if not years. It's not a loop; it's more like... a maze."
"Everything bigger than us moves slower?"
She nodded.
"What about time?"
Amoret's mouth closed in a bite.
He knew he was pushing. He must have. That curious gleam—the one that sought to crack her down the middle and watch the contents of her spill—was present in the diagnostic flick of his eyes across her face.
"No," she said, "Not time."
But Amoret had no way of knowing. It could have been true that the illusion around them was spinning slower than their true clock ticked, and home was a pace ahead. Maybe two. Maybe three. It could have been true that days here were months there, and her mother would be dead before she ever found a way home.
"Why not?" he asked carefully.
Her fingers dug into a paper star. "Because it can't."
February, then, passed in a flurry of white.
Amoret was always cold and always sick, and had fashioned winter socks out of the soft blanket of Nadya's roommate's bed and a coat from a jumble of spare fabrics she'd dug out of the Divination classroom, which Tom turned his nose up at and called "the ugliest thing he'd ever seen." In turn, she called him useless, and with a lazy wave of his hand he made materialize a black box coat she had no energy to refuse.
Tom, as of Valentine's day, could mend parchment and bind metal and wood, and that was all. His attempts at using microscopic transfiguration on anything living were colossally unsuccessful. And Amoret, for all her desires to conquer him before her vow caught up to her, had not found anything since the flash of a boy and his wounds in bed. Tom had hardened his defences at her singular triumph.
It was counter-mitotic; psychologically cannibalistic. He'd leave trails of mangled flowers like footprints everywhere he went, she'd prick herself at the meadow's door in desperate search of his memory. He'd slither into her mind without warrant and she'd cut him open to siege his. Amoret found the pattern forming frightening in its reminiscence of the past, but couldn't stop herself from mirroring his obsession. They toed the line of this rivalry until it began to feel again like a chase for Slughorn's approval or an E at the top of the History of Magic bulletin, which was to say that they sought to best the other with juvenile informality; as if Amoret didn't draw every tally every morning with a lump of suspicion stuck in her throat that it might be the last. As if Tom's sly smile wasn't stained by a whitening scar dealt by her hand. As if he did not know how many she wore beneath the surface dealt by his.
She wasn't stupid. If she had been sharpening her dagger, Tom Riddle was certainly prepared to draw his.
And yet the game went on, and neither of them spoke of it.
"You're building a wall," Tom said at the end of February, aglow in his green candlelight. "Perhaps you should try a blade."
Amoret frowned, panting from fending him off for the last hour. "A blade? I was under the impression occlumency was a defensive strategy."
"I'm playing to your strengths. Consider it a lesson I learned from you."
He thinks I'm vicious. He thinks I'm cruel. He thinks I'm him.
She sat forward. "Fine."
Tom made no mention of a duel, but when he struck again, it was sword to sword. Their steel sung. They danced.
Amoret's skull prickled with her own resistance. It frustrated her that her body's natural instinct was to give in, the weakness of her physicality a larger function than the strength of her mind. Even as she became more skilled in legilimency, her desire was simply and overwhelmingly to slip past the pressure and sleep, and the sharp charge of Tom's magic wore a dishonest guise. It begged to be the warm cup of tea soothing her deeper into the dark.
When she knew she could not best him, she took him somewhere beautiful.
It was meagre, spiteful dignity, but all she had. Tom wished to see the ugliest parts of her. He bored of beauty rather quickly.
This night, which he appeared in as always like the haunted flame of a candle, was their sorting ceremony.
The Great Hall glimmered with a thousand lights, the enchanted sky a deep, stirring blue above them. Along the tables was more food than eleven-year-old Amoret had seen in her life. There was too much to see and smell than she knew what to do with, and the hushed gossip of the older students had made her hands sweat in her pockets. She'd searched the room for Reid and Sybil but couldn't find them, so her eyes remained instead on the ceiling. It was the only familiar thing. In all of the unknown sounds and a crowd bigger than all of the Slaughters, the sky remained the same.
She'd known she would be one of the first called to the front, but the surnames starting with A felt like a millennia to get through and her palms were so hot she thought she might accidentally set fire to her trousers.
Amoret stood before herself and felt a stab of grief. She had the urge to kiss the big, free curls of her younger self and un-tuck her trembling hands. Ravenclaw, she'd tell her. You'll love it. You'll be perfect.
It was hardly something she would think of herself now. Intelligent, adaptive, inspired, yes—but perfect... perfect was always another milestone away. There was always something left to accomplish; another rung on the ladder of her grandmother's success, her mother's revelation, her sister's glory. But it was impossible to look at the child in front of her and be so cruel as to call her anything less.
Her younger self moved through her, oblivious, taking another step to the front.
Professor Dumbledore passed from A's to B's and there was only one boy left until Amoret expected her name. The hat had debated his placement for a while before he stumbled nervously to the Hufflepuff table. He was welcomed, finally, as Amoret caught sight of her yellow-ribboned braids, by Sybil's warm smile.
She'd longed to remain there with her sister's gaze at a comfortable distance, but the girl behind her had obstructed her vision with a pair of big brown eyes and two braids as thick as rope, freckles smattering dark skin like constellations.
"Go on," she'd said to her, with quickness Amoret remembered thinking was confidence but could see now was fear. "It only takes a minute."
And it did. Amoret had walked up to the stool on legs like the jelly decorating the tables and stared at the ceiling the moment Dumbledore placed the wretched hat on her head.
She'd hardly heard it call Ravenclaw, and it didn't appear the rest of the hall did either. The interest was solely on the hat's small grin as it announced her.
"Another Banks!" it had said in that rough, emphatic voice, and that was all it took for it to become her name.
Amoret hadn't cared. She'd yanked the hat off with haste and hurried down the steps, smiling at the girl with the dark eyes and rushing past to join her house.
They'd ushered her in with plate-fulls of biscuits and mugs of pumpkin juice, stories of their duelling team and little whispers of their admiration for Amoret's sisters. Halfway through stuffing herself full of all the table had to offer, Amoret had found Reid while tracking the dark-eyed girl to her new seat among the Slytherins.
Nadya, whose name she hadn't yet known, sat opposite to Reid and shook her hand when she extended it.
The Ravenclaw prefect beside her, Caroline Bones, had nudged her gently to regain her attention. "Hey," she whispered, "my brother was Head Boy before I came. It's normal that everyone thinks of you as Reid and Sybil's little sister now, but you won't always be, okay?"
Amoret had nodded, unsure of what to say.
Caroline had held out her pinky. "That's a promise, Amoret."
The image vanished. The library returned.
Amoret wanted to laugh that she'd almost forgotten Tom was there. His predictability was amusing, even when it pulled her away from moments like those.
"I think the wall will do," she said, nestling into the arm of her chair.
"You gave up in less than a minute."
Oh. Her small dignity shrivelled like he'd pointed a hot magnifying glass over it.
"I'm tired."
"Evidently."
"And I enjoy making you watch memories I like."
"Yes, you're a sadist. Your torture knows no bounds."
"I know you're trying to mock me, but not actually torturing people isn't a character flaw."
"We'll do my lesson again tomorrow," he said, going to the door.
"Your—why?"
Honestly, she couldn't take this two days in a row. It was the only balance in their routine that Tom suffered the same humiliation in her lessons as she did in his.
"Because I instructed you to fight and you dropped your sword the moment it felt too heavy to wield. I want you to do it again, and try this time."
Amoret went to follow him. They stepped into the corridor and the air was degrees colder. "I'll entertain your new interest in my knighthood when you can string a clover together. Let's try tomorrow, during my lesson."
He kept irritating focus on the turns of the castle without a glance her way, walking at a pace that was difficult for her to keep.
"Where are you going?" she asked, and her face knitted in confusion when she asked it again to herself. Tom practically never left the Room of Requirement unless it was to find her. He didn't eat at the Great Hall and he had no need for any classroom or courtyard when he could turn the Room into whatever he wanted.
"Out."
"Oh, do you have somewhere to be?"
"If you insist on joining me, I won't protest."
She resented what four and a half months of this purgatory had made of her. Frail and dour were incomparable to willingly following Tom Riddle anywhere.
"Fine."
They walked the corridors until cocooning walls became snow-quilted courtyards, and the thick fog of the early afternoon swirled with little ribbons of sunlight. Amoret trudged through the snow with her nose buried in her new coat to keep warm. She hadn't a clue how he'd managed it—it was hers the moment it was conjured—but Tom had somehow imbued his cologne into the stitches: cypress and geranium and whatever it was that smelled like silk. He remained a consistent three steps ahead, and wore no jacket of his own over his school shirt and vest. The few times he turned to see if Amoret was still behind him, she couldn't find even a dust of pink on his cheeks to indicate the cold was affecting him at all.
"Where are we going?" she asked, breathless when they passed the empty gamekeeper's hut.
"To the end," Tom said.
He continued without waiting, and Amoret stomped up the hill with sopping wet socks, cursing his name and his mother's name and Salazar Slytherin's name, too, for good measure. She was not going to turn around after coming this far.
But the fog cleared as the castle shrunk behind them and they gained higher ground. Eventually, even the forest was distant. Eventually there was no sound but their shoes crunching in the snow, and then the snow became gauzy chiffon underfoot. And then it was paper, and Amoret looked at the silhouette of Tom and shivered for more than the frost biting at her heels. In the end, wrapped in the ecru-white of what must have been the diary itself, the world felt fine enough that a single misstep might tear the ground out beneath them. Tom was almost invariably certain, but his surefire disposition was no comfort in a place like this. The detached interest in his eyes as she stood beside him was not an assurance of their safety, it was only an assurance of his.
Amoret felt the need to whisper. "I didn't know you came here."
"Intermittently," Tom answered, and it relieved her that he was whispering too. "Look."
She squinted. It was hard to know what he was referring to at first—everything was white or a beige of practically identical shade—but she tracked his rapt gaze and found something vivid and milky like the ribbons of sunlight in the fog. Light. Unlike the rest that enveloped them. Light that coated flies and footprints and starlings and—nothing. There was nothing in centre of it. It was light cradling itself, dense as a cauldron cloud and brewing like one too, but with no potion underneath.
Her whisper was compulsory now, awe itching in her fingers like a child itches to poke the glass of a fishbowl. "What is it?"
"I don't know."
He didn't sound bothered not to. It made Amoret wonder if he somehow knew that was going to change.
"You've seen it before."
"Twice. Once when I first explored the grounds after you released me from the Room of Requirement, and again before Christmas. I was looking to see if any creatures had found their way to the Forbidden Forest when I remembered it."
"It's the same light."
"And like the rest, this one has grown. I almost didn't see it the first time I came."
She couldn't fault him. It looked like the opposite of a storm.
"This doesn't look like death," she said. Tom turned to her, puzzled. "The day you brought me to the flies, you inferred the law of cycles and opposites. You said maybe the flies were already dead, but this isn't—this is life. It has to be."
But Amoret barely took a step closer and the light fizzed, a small tremor coursing through her like a slap to the wrist. It was painless enough that she was able to swallow her shock. So it wasn't a thing of kindness, then. She felt anywise surer of her observation. Death didn't do that, and life didn't have to be kind.
"Life," Tom contemplated. "What did it come from?"
"What did it come from if it's death?"
"Myrtle."
Amoret stepped back. She could suddenly remember how cold it was. "Yes, maybe."
It was too much to understand. The different skies, the rose-and-thorn door, the animals, the light, the faulty clocks, the fish that bled when nothing else did; it was one unsolved mystery onto the next without a moment to breathe between them all.
"We'll see to it weekly and note any changes," Tom decided.
Amoret nodded, shivering again.
The walk back was somehow harder. She had imagined going uphill would be the worst of it but the trek back—shoes full of new snow and legs aching, nose so cold her coat had lost its smell—nearly sent her tumbling down the hill. Her body wracked with its constant underlying fever. She trembled, burning hot between her ears and frozen numb from the legs down.
Her teeth were chattering loudly enough to capture Tom's attention.
"Is there something wrong with you?"
She supposed there might have been a language where that translated to concern.
"I'm—fine."
The winds that had picked up since that morning drove heavy gusts of snow against them. Tom, when Amoret went to look bitterly at him to demonstrate exactly how fine she was, finally appeared the slightest bit affected. It must have been that which wiped all pretence of indifference from her face.
Suspicion would require an inkling of doubt that Amoret was lying. Tom's relinquished sigh as she held her ground had no doubt in it at all.
"Come on," he said, turning to the gamekeeper's hut.
"W-why?"
The bridge to the castle was only another small hill away.
"Because you're evidently too cold and sick to warm yourself and I suspect you enjoy having ten fingers."
She scoffed. "And you can't do it for me?"
He smiled. "Would you ask me to, Amoret?"
Absolutely not. She trudged behind him to the hut, cursing again, though her afflictions were aimed less precisely through teeth that couldn't stay still.
Amoret had never been inside the gamekeeper's hut. The walls were stone, and thick enough that as soon as the door closed behind them it felt a degree warmer. There were mismatched stools around a small wooden table by the fireplace, a series of wilted foxglove plants, and an array of blankets in patterns so similar to those she'd found in the Divination classroom that she wondered if Professor Morgaine had made them. Amoret rushed for the thickest one and wrapped it around her legs as she sat on the rocking chair it was draped across. Rummaging through her pocket for her wand, she was horrified to find the accuracy of Tom's warning when she realized her fingers were too raw and stiff to even hold it right.
To her surprise, he spared her the abasement of asking and lit them a fire—perhaps because she'd yielded enough dignity in their lesson already, or because his cheeks were now a balmy pink and his own fingers looked tender.
She shed her boots and staggered to find the bedroom on wet feet. She dug a pair of socks from the top drawer of a wobbly old dresser and strained to pull them on, helpless not to collapse on the bed in the process. Her feet prickled with resurrected warmth, and after a minute she managed to stand back up and return to her rocking chair by the fire.
"Not a bad place to live," she murmured into a long silence.
Tom glared at her like she'd said something terribly offensive.
"Of course," she added after a yawn, "I'd never dare suggest it for you, My Lord. Only for measly gamekeepers. Orphan boys aim much higher, or so I've heard."
"I've heard the same is true of half-orphan girls."
Amoret yawned again. The sun was setting outside and the warmth of the hut had made her sleepy. She dreaded the thought of going back into the snow, but longed for the familiarity of Nadya's bed. It was, of all the lousy places she had slept here, the one where she had the fewest nightmares.
"Do you think time moves slower here?" she asked, eyes trained on a crooked clock above the mantle. It was still stuck on an afternoon weeks ago she'd stopped bothering to keep track of.
He glanced at her as if to make sure she wasn't talking to herself. "I believe it's likely, if your observations of the stars are accurate."
"I don't know if accurate is a word you could even use for the stars here. They're intrinsically inaccurate, they make no sense."
"The purpose of a maze is to confuse its travellers."
She rolled her eyes. "You make it sound omniscient."
"It was you who called it one."
"I wasn't suggesting it was made by anything." She sighed, holding her blanket tighter. "My observations are as accurate as they can be."
He nodded listlessly. "Then yes, Amoret, I believe time moves slower here."
She couldn't help her frowning as she prodded at the possibility like a loose tooth. Her own had grown in—a perfect new molar at the back of her mouth—along with the healed scars of her first month in this prison. The scratches of the narrowing trees where Tom had chased her, the bruises that coloured her legs from the height of the meadow, the wounds of her first nine days—all gone. The only scars that remained were the needle pricks of the rose-and-thorn door and the one she had gifted Tom upon his return. Time, otherwise, had displayed its fleetingness so glaringly that to even consider this had been slow was an itch in another dimension. She could scratch at it all she'd like. She would have no idea the truth of it until she was on the other side.
The scars there had surely deepened. All she had to stay sane was the hope that they were not unfixable.
"Have you been to Ravenclaw Tower since the start?" Tom asked.
Amoret shook her head, waiting for him to say some other cloud of light had materialized on her bed, or the eagle from the meadow had made a symbolic nest in her ceiling beams.
He said nothing of the sort. He rolled his sleeves back down and stood. "My lesson tomorrow."
She followed his movement to the door, baffled. "Riddle—"
"Mine, then yours. Use the blade."
"Fine," she said, "but if you can't mend a clover by the end of the week, then next week is all mine."
He pursed his lips. "Yes, fine."
Tom pulled a small envelope from his pocket, placed it on the windowsill next to the door, and left.
"So dramatic," Amoret mumbled, shuffling to the envelope swathed in the large knit blanket and trying not to trip over it.
She almost did once she flipped it over and saw her own name on the back.
It was the letter from her mother she hadn't had the heart to open.
The hand that held the blanket tight slipped for the opportunity to trace over her mother's cursive. Amoret, Amoret, Amoret, written by the one who had given her that name and spoke it with more love than anyone else.
What purpose did Tom have in giving her this? A reminder of what she would lose as the clock ticked by? A means to weaken her even further? The envelope was still intact, with not even a trace of binding magic to show he'd opened it. Did he hope to hatch a new memory to steal for himself later? Perhaps there was a greater satisfaction in that.
It didn't matter. Amoret hadn't been able to read the letter when it arrived because she'd known she'd flee home if she had. Fleeing wasn't a question anymore—there was no home here.
The envelope tore open in jagged stripes from her shaking hands.
My Etta, it began, like the rest,
I love you. Those words must be my first, because everything else is noise. There is my love, you, and there is the world. It is an ancillary backdrop to the love. Nothing else could come before it.
My Isoken visited me in a dream. She sees me often, and never with your bibi. I imagine they bicker even now, after a lifetime. Did I ever tell you of their days at school? Bibi swore to me in her final days that when she was your age, her and Isoken climbed to the summit of Uagadou without a single spell, and carved an opal out of the stone to gift my baba for their wedding.
The opal has taken many meanings. Now, it is said to bring bad luck, but as a child, your bibi told me the opal was a symbol of love, and would represent her devotion to her husband when they made their vows to one another. When I was twelve, my aspirations were large enough to match her own, and she gifted me the opal on a silver string and told me of the riches it could bring if I kept it close. When I was nineteen, and poor, I had begun to uncover her secrets, so she confessed that the opal was believed by some to render its carrier invisible. She had smiled at me, that smile to the left that always meant she was proud. I sought it all my life, Etta. She called the opal the patron of thieves.
I was lucky my mama was not alone when my baba passed, as you are lucky you will not be alone without me. My dear, darling girl, there is no love in the world like that of a sister's. It is not mine and still I feel the burn of its anger and the eternity of its trust. Listen to me this once, as I believe I have earned the right to be selfish. Come home. Find Reid. Be with your sisters.
I lament to escape my bedroom and go to you myself but this sickness strikes like a recurring tide and it is harder each time it returns. I plead with Sybil to take the old broomstick from the closet and fly me onto the roof so I might see the stars unburdened by the box of my window. She smiles and strokes my hair until I sleep again. I am too young to be so old. Tended by an angel in a house that is all but how I envisioned heaven. It has been two years and your father is still here in every atom. You tell me not to share it, my love, because you vow to bandage me together again, but I must confess I yearn to see him as more than the shape he left behind. Some nights I do. I feel him on the edge of my bed and he holds my hand. Some mornings, more, I keep all the faith I have left in my youngest girl and her brilliant mind.
If I stay, Etta, it will be at your behest. But if I go, it will not be without you.
Yours, in either end,
Mum
Amoret sunk to the floor beside the fire.
She was alone. The wanting jolted through her like the quick, icy burn of electricity, and dissolved into an aftershock far worse. She wanted company as her own heart wanted blood. Even if it was loveless, snide, inveterate. Even if it was Tom.
[ . . . ] i went into a state of being i'm not familiar with while writing this. not a bad time i just don't know where i was or how i got there or why. me and amoret are kinda twins like that (also i didn't even proofread this once... i WILL be back...) / word count. 5233
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