PAPER CONFINES.
33. / Whose Gentle Heart Thou Martyrest
✶
Tom was asleep in a conjured chair when she came to, an old text bookmarked midway on his lap for refusal to dog-ear even the most ruined pages. Amoret blinked at the dull teal light, and wound her face into one of involuntary discomfort.
There was a blanket tangled at her feet, no doubt kicked away in her sleep as her temperature rose, and she assumed Tom had conjured that too. It was strange—strange to look at him and find him suddenly boyish, features absent of the underlying enmity that always seemed to weave them. A soft, bruised-looking thing he was when he slept. It heightened the contrast of his scar. Amoret still couldn't summon guilt for it; the discomfort was in wondering why he'd stayed.
"Tom," she whispered, her mind steadier now that the draught was wearing off, but fuzzy with sickness.
She hungered for Bibi's urojo and Colette's best tea, but made do with strumming her fingers along the tassels of Nadya's pillow and watching Tom's eyes flutter open.
"Amoret," he answered languidly, pushing back a few fallen strands of hair.
Her tone went stiff. "Good morning."
It reminded her, inexplicably, that she was dying. She was dying and her lungs were sore from sobbing and she'd forgotten to wrap her hair before bed and she was wishing Tom Riddle a good morning, stuck on the drowsy inflection of his voice.
Perhaps Tom was equally put-off, but hid it better. He stretched forward in his seat, fixing posture that hadn't been slack in the first place. "Good morning. Have you thought about what I said?"
"I've just woken up, so no, ritualistic murder hasn't yet crossed my mind."
"All in due time."
She really was going to set a rule about that word. "How long did I sleep?"
He checked his watch, which was a useless contraption in a place like this, and then up the window to where the water was negligibly lighter. That meant it was daytime, at least, which was enough for Amoret.
She shot upright and groaned at a pulsing headache. "You shouldn't have let me sleep so long. I need to check on Myrtle."
"Of course," Tom remarked glibly, "How unfortunate it would be if the girl whose life is draining yours were to die."
His pleasantness was greatly reliant on his staying unconscious.
Amoret didn't afford him a response, shoving her blankets aside and ignoring all her body's resistance as she stood. She'd push through this like she had all else—Besting death twice didn't seem a cheap accomplishment to cite in a future where she escaped. If she could look at it that way, maybe it wouldn't eat her whole before the magic did.
"Here," he said behind her, "if you insist on foolish acts of heroism."
He had another draught in hand, held out from the other side of the bed. She took it apprehensively, eyeing the pearly blue liquid as it swirled in the phial, then back to his face.
"Did you conjure this?"
"No. I knew you'd be difficult if I did."
"...The colour is from silver?"
"Yes."
She couldn't deny the ingenuity if she wanted to, which she did. Silver for external wounds was obvious, but now that she had a better understanding of what exactly was happening to her body—wrought by dark magic and being pulled in a thousand directions—a sealant made sense. It could keep her from irreversible cellular deterioration.
"Fine." She tucked it into her pocket. "I'll take it when I need it."
Tom paused before nodding.
The walk to the hospital wing was terrifying enough to immediately reconsider. Her muscles felt half-atrophied and her skull was pounding, but taking the potion so soon after the last felt like a resignation she was not ready to make, especially when Tom was resolute that letting Myrtle live was further proof of her supposed weakness. Such a glaring display of her infirmity would only embolden him.
And there was Myrtle, revealed on the reverberating grate of the old hospital doors as they stretched open, her black hair matted to her forehead by sweat, her hands folded over her lap like a funeral-ready corpse.
Amoret bit her cheek. "Check her breathing for me."
She wished so badly she could be the one to help her. To do it through Tom seemed like desecration.
Still, he abided, fingers at her clammy pulse. "It seems... better."
"Better?"
"Her inhales are followed by exhales. Will that do?"
"Tom. Is it spiking at all? Is she warm, or is it cold sweat?"
"You told me not to touch her."
There was a step beyond madness that she hadn't yet reached, and she swore one day he was going to push her there.
"Yes, but I can't!" Amoret barked, and then cupped her searing forehead, eyes shuttering as she steadied herself by the cupboard. "I can't," she said in a quieter voice, "and if you were going to kill her, you would have done it when you made that draught. You would have done it the moment I fell asleep."
Instead he'd stayed. Why—why had he stayed?
With gritted teeth, Tom opened his palm to Myrtle's neck and wiped it swiftly on the quilt. "She's warm."
Amoret nodded, and had no idea why. She didn't know what to do next. If Myrtle was suffering a regular fever, Amoret would treat it as one, but there was almost assuredly no way she was, and little to do to ascertain further information without waking her up, which could send her steadfast into another bout of shock.
"It could be a fever," she said uselessly.
"It could."
"Or... if we're connected, she could be... I don't know."
"Suffering the same ailment?"
"In a manner of speaking. She'd be experiencing it in reverse. She gets better as I get worse, but right now we're both somewhere in the middle, right?"
"Possibly."
Amoret hated how little Tom was offering her. He'd had so much to say before, and his uncertainty—or whatever it was he was clearly restraining—instilled a new layer to her dread.
"I could wake her," he added. "We do need answers."
"No."
What Myrtle needed was rest, and when she did eventually come to, Tom Riddle would not be the first thing she saw.
"Check her eyes."
He scowled. "What?"
"She might not even be able to wake. Open her eyes and cast lumos," Amoret instructed. "Tell me if her pupils are responsive to light."
Tom looked at her as if she'd asked him to kneel at Myrtle's side and propose.
Amoret moved forward. "Fine, I'll do it—"
"The scope of your desire and simultaneous resistance to survival never ceases to amaze me, Amoret. Have I told you that?"
"Yes."
He opened Myrtle's eyes and shone the light of his wand at Myrtle. There was no reaction.
"I think she's comatose," Amoret whispered hoarsely. She took small steps towards her, ignoring the strange wrongness of her proximity and the disapproval on Tom's face.
"Amoret—"
"I'm fine."
She closed her eyes when the closeness started to burn, and prayed to whoever would listen.
The inside of Myrtle's head bore no defences.
Soft and weak, Amoret wove beneath the surface like a needle through yarn. It didn't make being there any easier.
Even numbed by Dreamless Sleep, the labyrinth of her worst memories bit at Amoret's heels as soon as she crept in. Dim and dismal, it wasn't entirely different to the first morning in the horcrux. There were black corridors and leaping shadows, corners that could have hidden anything. Voices chimed like songs off spires of ice, bells in winter wind, cold and glittering; something that could not sound in sun. Many spoke through Olive Hornby, many through Amoret's roommate Circe, many more indistinguishable for all the people who had wronged Myrtle, but the clearest voice was Tom's.
Amoret froze there. Her eyes were wrenched shut in the hospital wing, and she was no longer sure whether the Tom she was hearing was coming from Myrtle's memory or beside her. One would protest to keep her away. One would protest to keep her close. The two of them overlapped, two names of two dead girls fused between them: Amoret. Myrtle. Life force and recipient.
She fought past them both.
The lavatory was in disarray here. It stunned Amoret—just a glimpse of the real castle, disordered and imperfect—to see a picture of the world she left with scars to prove she had left it.
Myrtle's thoughts came in the blurry scraps of obscured dreams, half-aglow through the gaze of an inconscious ghost. They were so different from what it felt like to be in Tom's mind. Bigger, for lack of resistance, but much less vivid. Cold. Hollow. For all the ways her and Myrtle were supposedly linked, to take Tom's memories had always felt like claiming a part of him. Amoret may have seen through Myrtle's eyes, but she felt nothing.
Then returned the voices, smothering her senses. Amoret's ears were full and wet with the wave of them, ringing from overstimulation and the toll reading even an acquiescent mind was taking on her. It was difficult to make anything out. There was the hiss of a serpent over the clamouring voices, but it taunted sweet and low, muffled by a metal echo. The wizened skin slithered damp through the pipes. Its eyes shone like yellow moons upon its prey.
Amoret shut hers despite the dream, and heard the water stir as the serpent sunk away.
Time passed. She could feel it going, skies spinning with the days through the lavatory windows, until footsteps clacked on the tiles and did not depart. She heard the plasticky sound of prohibitory tape being peeled to the side, and didn't know how she knew, but something in her cried out through all the voices—home.
Nadya's whisper brought Amoret to her knees.
She was back in the hospital. Her nerves felt singed, but it was as much from pain as it was from a fire reignited.
Nadya was looking for her. Amoret was smiling and crying at the same time.
Tom had moved from the other side of Myrtle's bed, crouched at Amoret's side, but his face was barely strained and otherwise unreadable.
"I am not dying here," she said with finality. Her chin was trembling and her head hurt so badly she wasn't sure she'd be able to stand up again. It didn't matter. Nadya was looking for her.
She uncorked the phial in her pocket and drank until it was empty.
"Are you going to tell me what you saw?" Tom asked evenly.
"No."
"Fine." He stood, a hand offered, his face darker and less honed at this angle.
"Are you going to Apparate me again?"
"Yes."
She winced, sniffling back tears, and took his hand.
They spun to the edge of the Black Lake. Tom helped Amoret onto the grass, pleasant on her warm fingers as she clutched it and sat. She was already dizzy from another dose of the draught. Her cheeks were tough again, and the wind was frigid on her damp eyes. Summer filtered away with the first yellow leaves, still warm but fleeting. She was terrified of another winter alone.
Tom sat beside her.
"What do you intend to do now?"
"I don't know," she admitted faintly.
"She isn't there, Amoret. She never will be."
"You don't know that."
"I know the laws of death cannot be rewritten if only because you want them to be."
"Says the man who kills to live forever."
He sat too. "Dying for someone who cannot be saved isn't a kindness, it's madness. It's beyond your moral obligations. She—"
"And what if I don't want a horcrux? What if it's more than just killing Myrtle, and it tears my soul in two to claim an eternity I don't even want?"
"Do you not?"
Did she? Amoret hugged her knees to her chest and wiped her tears with her sleeve. She wanted her mother and for Reid to come home and Sybil to play beautiful music before the fire. She wanted her hair in her mother's time-worn fingers, woven behind her ears, her forehead kissed. These were not things she could have forever.
Tom nodded thinly to himself at her silence. She ground her teeth at the thought that he viewed it as a victory.
"When did you figure it out?" he asked, and she was thankful for the turn in conversation. "Legilimency."
She didn't bother lying. "When you found me asleep in the meadow, dreaming of losing teeth in Transfiguration. I made it up."
"You made it up," he copied slowly.
"You know the Room of Requirement shows me things sometimes. I was in a memory and I didn't want you to know, so I pushed you out and invented a dream."
He sat as if trying to remember the moment, and she wondered momentarily if he'd be furious. She'd bested him in this, after everything. He still couldn't heal.
"And I assume you saw something," he pressed.
"Yes, I did."
"Are you going to tell me, or are you making a lesson of it?"
Now she wanted to lie, and now there was no use. "Billy."
Tom allowed his displeasure to show for only the time it took him to adjust his expression. His body was taut, but performatively placid. He was impossible. A walking contradiction. Amoret wanted to poke him without warning to see how much air he'd let out when his torso was forced to unclench.
She'd noted it before, but his greatest admissions were in what he tried the hardest to hide.
"What of him?" he continued.
"What he did to you. What you did to him in return."
"I'm afraid that's not a particularly comprehensive answer. The list on both accounts is rather long."
"It was your birthday," she relented, "You were six. He lit matches at your collar until they scarred. And then you were ten, and you... got him back."
"I wanted him dead," he said without pause, but his tone had changed.
"I know."
Tom observed her blankly. "You're remarkably dispassionate. Did poor, dead Myrtle unveil the truth of the universe in the seconds you scoured her mind?"
"I'm far more likely to judge you for saying things like that than I am a ten year old boy seeking vengeance on someone who mutilated him."
"I thought it was your belief that vengeance and justice are two different things."
"Not to a child who had never seen justice done."
"And you told me not to pity."
"I don't pity you. I regret that this is the person you've become, I regret what happened to you, but I don't think you were helpless to it. You have a choice. Everyone does."
"Have I ever denied that I chose this, Amoret?"
She fell back on the grass with a weak huff. "I don't know—you only think I memorize everything you say."
Tom picked at stray grass she'd pulled from the soil where it clung to her hair, and she tried to remember when she'd accepted his small touches as something more than derision. She focused on the sun pouring out of parting clouds instead. It was an easier thing to think of.
"You memorize the worst of me," he said.
Amoret frowned, watching his eyes trace his own fingers, her curls strewn in the field, the flowers dotting the grass. "Show me something better, then."
The wind shifted and his hair blew across his face, gaze darting dumbfounded to where she waited for an answer she knew would never come. She reached up to brush away the strands like he always did, deliberately, curiously, and Tom stared brazenly at her even as she pulled back.
"You wouldn't know where to begin, would you?"
They simmered in heat and quiet. The bulrush was swaying on the lakeshore, mosquitoes dancing in the shade. It reminded Amoret of home. It reminded her of better dreams.
Tom was still staring.
"I used to want to live beside a lake like this," she sighed, rolling her sleeves up to her elbows. "In a house with its own mill, with a little dock on the water. Nothing deep enough for a current, because River Eye always scared me, but enough for a boat to pretend to sail in and practice all my knots, pretend to be a lady when I tired of playing pirate. And that would be—" She laughed— "Frilly parasols and poetry books. I'd be wearing a flowery dress, and... there would be blackberries in the front garden to make scones with, even though I'm helpless in a kitchen. There'd be no fences around the garden—it'd just blur into the pasture. I'd get another cat because I always imagined Petra was lonely, and they'd have kittens running around everywhere. I'd have an observatory in the back with a proper telescope. A fireplace connected to the Floo. Magic everywhere. As much magic as I wanted."
"Anything else?" Tom asked wryly.
"A green door."
"For any particular reason?"
"I like green."
"Riveting."
"And you? I find it hard to believe you started at world domination; surely your goals were a tad humbler at some point."
Sunlight favoured him as he smiled noncommittally, a hand shading his eyes. "I never thought to want anything like that."
"You should."
"Want a house on a lake?"
"No. Just want better things."
"Like frilly parasols and a green door."
"Like something that makes you want to live forever for more reason than not to die."
"I already told you—"
"And I don't believe you. Everyone is afraid of something. Don't make an argument out of it, Tom—that's a very bad thing to do to someone who's dying."
"A moment ago, you claimed quite fervently not to be."
"No, but I should be allowed to hold it over your head for proximity to death alone."
Tom laughed or scoffed, or perhaps to him they were the same thing. She'd never heard him properly laugh. "I should expect nothing less."
Amoret hummed and closed her eyes. In the stretch of silence, she listened to the birds and the lapping waves, felt her skin heat with afternoon sun and the buzz of the draught, and pretended to be in that dream: a girl wearing a flowery dress in a garden with no fence. The reality was mutual scars and bug-bitten legs, that she was a girl who was very good at imagining but not pretending. She knew where she was. She knew who sat beside her.
"I wanted a cinema," Tom conceded. There was as much of an air of indifference as could be put in an admission like that, as if he needed quite badly to impress upon her the absurdity of her question.
Amoret blinked up at him, grateful despite his disposition. "A cinema?"
"We sorted scraps for the war effort the summer after third year. There were a hundred children a day, perhaps, in makeshift depositories across London, salvaging metal, rubber, and fat each morning. If we did well, we were taken to the cinema on Oxford Street."
"And you... did well, I assume?"
He wasn't looking at her anymore. It alarmed her to realize there were words in his body language she hadn't yet learned—that there was cold, wooden anger when he was forced into vulnerability, having memories pried by his own soul and given to her against his will, but there was discomfort in offering it freely. It was different from his usual tension. Maybe he didn't know the words to this either.
"I went twice," he told her. "The first film was entirely in French."
"Sounds interesting."
"I understood enough."
She raised a brow. "French?"
"The actors' expressions, their intonation, the sight of a dead man followed by a woman crying."
"Astute observations. I always assumed reading was your preferred medium, but then again, I've never been to see sad French cinema."
"I do prefer reading. Of course, I already have a library and I've no need for another."
"Because greed is so far beneath you."
"Quite right, Amoret."
"And what about after graduation? Unless you plan on stealing half the Room of Requirement like you stole half the Restricted Section."
"It would be worth Dumbledore's vexation."
Amoret snorted. "Should you return, I'm sure that would be the least of your concerns with him."
"By then, I might be the least of his."
"No. I seriously doubt that."
Not even a cataclysm in Grindelwald's war could distract from what Tom had done, and Amoret prayed Dumbledore had enough sense and suspicion to know it was Tom who had done it.
"I don't want to go to the meadow anymore," she said as soon as the thought welled, though she didn't know what had prompted it. Honesty called upon honesty, perhaps. The sun was sweeter here. "I don't like how it feels."
Tom blinked. An effigy of his soul, the meadow was the heart of this world, and so, in some way, the heart of him. Still, it was a cruel, true thing. There was a coldness there—he must have felt it too. Amoret wondered if he felt it all the time.
"What of your fixation on my memories?" he asked, and she heard what might've been injury to his pride. "Sated?"
"Tell me more stories and I might be."
"I have few you'd want to hear."
"Tell me anyway."
His soul was bloodsucking and wearisome. He told her a story to make up for it.
━━━━━
In a month, Myrtle was stable but still sleeping, and Amoret hadn't counted tallies for six days. Three hundred and thirty lines curled rinds of wallpaper in Nadya's dormitory, and there was only stone and glass left to scratch. She didn't see the point in trying. A butterknife sat discarded on the nightstand.
Most mornings, Tom brought breakfast from the Great Hall, and now slept in his old dormitory like he thought Amoret was going to drop dead one day and needed to be near enough to somehow resurrect her. Death by expired non-perishables was more likely. Nearly all the tinned food was off, and that left sweet porridge, savoury porridge, creamed rice pudding, rye flour, and one can of corned beef Amoret was saving for an undetermined special occasion.
They continued with their lessons in the common room, but now Amoret struggled so much to puncture Tom's more armoured thoughts that she felt naive for proposing the deal at all. What did legilimency matter when she was too sick to use it? When Tom may not have been the key to escaping in the first place? She imagined sliding a knife through Myrtle's ribs. Quick and kind while she slept; she'd never know she'd come back at all.
Tom insisted, as if he could hear her, that it was the greatest kindness a dead girl could be offered.
Meanwhile he had mended mushrooms and Black Lake bulrush, and still not snowdrops or primrose, but his desperation was suspended. He was Apparating more frequently. To the hospital and the Potions room for Amoret's draught, to the Great Hall, to the Room of Requirement, to places undisclosed to her. Amoret was laden with as much awe as she was envy. The force of his magic as his horcrux filled with life was unprecedented.
She told herself she was stronger for refusing to become him to take it.
"I should have tended the greenhouse this summer," Amoret complained numbly, scraping her spoon through that morning's porridge. "I could have grown something more edible than this."
Tom glanced up from a book on memory extraction and tampering. "From medicinal herbs and cacti?"
"From cocoa beans and plums? Leeks? Aubergines? Are you as bad at herbology as you are at flying?"
"I fly perfectly fine."
"And yet."
He returned deliberately and with a long exhale to his book.
"I could plant them now for a fall harvest," Amoret continued, "but I can't eat more of this."
"Or you could allow me to conjure—"
"I'm not that desperate."
She pushed her empty bowl across the table. He turned a page. "Have patience."
Amoret groaned—Whatever it was he meant by that.
War had trained her for times like these as well as it could. Of course, war was something else, this was purgatory, and she had grown accustomed to Hogwarts feasts and Reid's spare galleons from Russia. Amoret craved meals of comfort to offset the whining buzz of the draught.
She had tried altering the ingredients in her spare time, but nothing alleviated the jolt, the constant sense of static. That brushing velvet felt like clouds of a storm. That Tom's magic sometimes grazed hers and she flinched at the rawness of it. She'd try to shock him back but it was hard to do that to someone who smiled in the face of her violence and goaded, more.
It scared her how badly she wanted to oblige him.
"I'm going to the library," she said, standing up. "The actual library."
"An insult to my collection," he joked.
"Based on your recent reading, I'd say your collection is officially useless. I'll be back for dinner—and tomorrow I really am planting aubergines."
"They're off-season," Tom muttered behind her.
So he knew a trace of herbology.
"You're still a shoddy flyer."
The library was dust-veiled and eerie. There were books scattered across the tables from her first nine days, chairs pulled and a ladder toppled in the Defense Against the Dark Arts section.
It was so long ago now. All of the castle was a wraith of Hogwarts, but the library was a monument of the moment Amoret knew it.
She knelt to peruse the thicker tomes of the lower shelves, fingers skimming the spines. Title by title, her eyes searched for something worthwhile but continued to come up short. She didn't know what she was expecting to find when anything relevant would have been Tom's, and even those books had outlived their usefulness. It seemed everything here had done that.
Her exhale was weary as she slumped cross-legged on the ground.
On occasion, she considered wandering the Room of Requirement itself. She'd only seen it once in its true form, the first time she went looking for it in third year, but there were towers of dross to rummage before finding a single scroll of value—dragon hoards of trinkets glittering in old, cursed coffers. She suspected Tom had stolen what little salvageable literature was hidden there months ago, and the effort of hunting for remains might have been beyond her now.
Amoret reclined until she was horizontal, staring at the ceiling with her arms crossed. Maybe she needed to look beyond books and memories. Tom had called her an inventor, after all.
An abysmal lack of invention resided in her.
She sighed, rolling her wand spiritlessly up and down the bridge of her nose before letting it clatter to the floor.
Myrtle and her were tied by the same lead, pulling in opposite directions. She was comatose but flush like a porcelain doll. Amoret was upright most days, but grey as she'd looked as a child restraining her magic. It was something like Nadya's wishbones; the small end snapped, discarded; bad luck. But calling Myrtle lucky was absurd, and the dead could not come back to life no matter the magic spent—Tom was right about that. What Amoret was plagued by was the perpetual how. Learning the nature of the light and the animals had bared as many quandaries as it had truths. How they had come became where they had come from became why had they come from her?
She thought she'd stopped trying to rationalize the injustices of her life after her father's death and her mother's slow approach. Death was death. It took generously and without reason.
Amoret could not relent this. It wasn't death that had taken her at all—it was the horcrux, starving and mean.
So death was death, indestructible. Horcruxes were not.
Her eyebrows furrowed with thought. She sat up again, retracing eleven months of steps. In the beginning, she had sought answers here and found none, had barricaded herself in Nadya's dormitory to drink herself into her father's old stupors, had followed voices in her head that did not belong to her. What had she done when her own voice came? Where had it led her?
Amoret tucked a quill and an ink pot in her back pocket and rushed from the library to the hall.
One last heat wave shuddered through September, and the sky outside was puffed white with fat clouds, searing blue between, trickling sweat down Amoret's neck as she lumbered down the hill. Her legs were sore even before the effort. She shedded her button-down at the bottom once it began to stick to her back, trekking with great effort along the forest in belted dress shorts, a white camisole, and a pair of clunky Oxfords.
Amoret took a dose of the draught like a shot, pushing herself forward with the relief. Her steps crackled on dry grass. They felt frothy as they began to thin to parchment.
Soon the trees melded to lustre, somehow seamless every time they did, like departing from a fairytale to the pages it was written on. How she'd squeeze her eyes shut when her father used to read them to her, and trace the pages with her small fingers, wishing they were real. But the light was gone with Myrtle. Amoret stood in the place where it had been and felt its absence—life that had departed her to feed something else.
This was a better site to carve than tallies on Nadya's wall or cuts on Tom's pretty face.
She sunk onto the parchment, unscrewed her ink pot, smoothed her quill, and signed her name on the edge of the world.
Nadya was trying to find her. Amoret supposed she should show her where to look.
[ . . . ] let's go nadyamoret nation never loses (except for all the times we lose). tom and amoret bonding..... sharing experiences and smiling together... i just shuddered it's getting very scary. Btw i didn't proofread this. sorry to the people reading it before it's edited. / word count. 5028
bonus! here is a beautiful beautiful gorgeous perfect commission of amoret my dear oomf eden (omenthree on tumblr) drew for me :3 this is how she looks at tom 90% of the time. everybody cheer!!!!
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