||•Tom riddle

The Slytherin common room breathes slowly in the last hours of the night, enveloped in a green light filtered by the lake. The fire crackles in its stone cage, casting restless shadows on ancient tapestries and high-backed chairs. The others have long since gone to sleep.

They didn't.

Tom sits like a crowned serpent, motionless, majestic in his precision. The room curves around him without touching him. Beside him, Dolohov leans back with a mocking smile, Rosier savors a glass of bootleg firewhisky, looking at you with a mischievous glint at the corners of his lips.

You sit before them, serene, impassive, luminous. Not in a gentle way. No, like marble: cold, sculpted with nobility. You come from one of the oldest of the Twenty-Eight Sacred Orders, your name whispered with equal parts reverence and fear. Such power leaves its mark. And yet, you carry it without drama. Without arrogance. Without self-indulgence.

You should be predictable. You should already belong to them.

But that's not the case.

You're not like the others. You're not like him. You don't feel the same hunger. You never laugh when they do. You almost never speak unless it's absolutely necessary. And he—Tom, who sees through masks and marrow—can't decide if your self-control is discipline or defiance. If your silence is loyalty, or something that might one day change.

You unsettle him. You make him cautious. You obsess him.

And when others look at you, he observes.

—So —Rosier begins, hunched over and smiling—, who has the honor of taking you to the Christmas Ball?

Dolohov snorts. "I bet the owls are overflowing with offers. They're probably lining up in the dungeons."

You don't answer.

Tom's gaze rests on you, slow and deliberate. He studies you as if you were an unanswerable question, one he trusts.

Her voice breaks the silence, low and precise.

Are you going to waste your time with someone who doesn't understand who you're meant to be?