a/n: in which i attempt to psycho-analyze tom riddle through the lens of a romantic relationship. what, what, what am i doing.

i just saw a shooting star
we can wish upon it
but we won't share the wish we made
but i can't keep no secrets,
i wish that you would always stay...

"It's nothing to be afraid of, you know."

Perhaps it would have been different if her tone was abnormally kind, or pitying, or pompous, or a thousand other things. But she said it cleanly and simply, still flipping through their shared research books on the library table. He looked over at her.

"What?"

"Dying." A smile flickered over her face as she returned his glance. "Oh, don't freeze up like that. I see you flinching every time there's a picture."

A years-old urge to flush red came over him, but he suppressed it. He hated it when she could read him like that. Like she only had to look, and all of his secrets were bare for her. "I don't," he said, continuing to page through his History of Magic textbook. He was studying early wizard burials— she'd told him it was on the final last year, and he wasn't chancing anything less than an O just because the paintings of graves and processions made his skin crawl.

After a moment, she placed her own book back on the table. He knew she would have preferred to study in the Gryffindor common room, by the fire or sitting in a window seat, but she liked being with him more than she wanted that. It pleased him in a way he didn't like to dwell on. "You're so odd about death."

He went still. Of all the things… "Am I?"

Her features narrowed in annoyance. "Don't start that 'answering with a question' thing again, you know full well I despise that."

The remark made him laugh, which not many things did. He wondered idly if she knew what she did him, and then supposed that she didn't and so it was okay. "Sorry. But I'm not odd about it."

She raised a questioning brow. Her hand came forward and slid into his, and she knotted their fingers together. She was always so sure about touching him; she didn't flinch like the people he accidentally brushed against in classes or bumped into in the halls. Besides, he liked how warm she always was. "Is it because of the orphanage?" she asked, still not pitying or mocking or false-kind, just gentler than usual, the same voice she used to direct lost first years in the corridors.

A smirk crawled over his face as he swung their clasped hands in the space between their two chairs. "I suppose that might have something to do with it. Dead parents don't make one the largest fan of the state, you know."

She rolled her eyes, which happened to be another thing he appreciated about her. He'd never been sentimental about his orphanhood, never tiptoed around the subject. He supposed people expected him to whisper and sound tragic at every mention, but he had never been able to discern why. She took his bluntness in stride. He even dared to think that she liked it. That thought, however, always got pushed back in his mind; she wasn't supposed to like him for something like that, something that made everyone else uncomfortable. She was supposed to be dating him because he was handsome, intelligent, charming. Not because he was needlessly frank and prone to moodiness that she couldn't comprehend and loathe to lose a debate with anyone. How she liked those things about him was a mystery that made his head hurt.

Their silence stretched on longer and longer. Not wanting to talk when there was nothing to say was a trait that had crossed house boundaries. He slowly allowed himself to relax, running his thumb up and down the side of her small hand. Sometimes he really wondered why he dated her. Relationships were much more trouble than they were worth. The few times he'd previously given in to his hormones for a quick snog, it had taken far too much effort to both find girls who weren't dangerously stupid and then tie off their feelings afterwards so they wouldn't expect anything more of him without making himself seem like some sort of cavalier heartbreaker. No, that wouldn't do well for his image at all. But he'd managed it, always, and it was perfectly expected that he end up alone.

Well, there was a hitch in every good plan. (He'd need to remember that.)

She was, as the taunts went, his very first girlfriend (oh, of course he wasn't meant to hear those, but he did, and that was where silent curses came in handy). He hadn't even meant for it to happen, which to this day made him randomly, unpredictably worried— he had always done everything with a clear goal in mind, a motive, a plan. Not having one made him feel off-kilter, as though each moment he blundered on would only be used against him in the future. But each time they argued during the Slug Club, each time she'd asked him if anything was wrong when he was quiet, each time he had sat beside her at Quidditch matches for lack of anyone better… it had grown on him like the worst sort of ailment, until he found with a vague sort of disgust that he looked forward to their interactions.

Maybe it was a bad thing that the first time they'd kissed was a soft blur in his memories— it had been late, and they had reopened a long-simmering argument, and she'd had her hair tied back with a ribbon. He couldn't even recall a formal inquiry, a courting, any of the normal activities. They'd slipped into this more seamlessly than he'd thought possible of himself. They continued on with what they had always done, adding only the physical aspect that he realized with strange annoyance had been building up for quite a while. It was, he reasoned, much more effort to stop the avalanche than throw himself into the roil and just go with it, after all. And she was different than anyone else.

Because it wasn't that she was stupid (she was brilliant), nor that she clung to him (he sought her out more than the other way around, which, truthfully, irritated him at times). It was, like he'd been thinking before, that half-infuriating way she had of poking perfectly at any unsavory part of himself he exposed for even a moment. Death. Dark arts. Orphanages. Anything he left unguarded, she could find, like a sharp-eyed professor intent on the truth.

He hated the truth.

But it was also— it was also a lot of other things that he only allowed himself to dwell on during the nights he could not sleep, and when it would have been imprudent to sneak up to the Head's dormitories and sleep with her instead. It was how she flounced off when he'd annoyed her; it was the way she bit at her thumb when she was thinking. It was how excited she got when there was a new issue of Transfiguration Today. It was that easy way she kissed him, like he was her kind of good all over.

Sitting there in the library, his lip curled slightly. Good. She was so convinced of good. Merlin, he wished she'd been in Slytherin. Then it wouldn't be half so hard to slowly break through that chivalry, those convictions. She was so smart, but so sure that everyone else deserved an equal chance. So kind, but to everyone, whether they'd been the same to her or not. Whether or not they deserved it.

Deserve. The word came up much too often in their arguments for his tastes. You deserved what you earned, but in her mind everyone was born with the quality innate in them, deserving of platitudes, of kindness, of friendship. Foolish. She was a brilliant witch, a genius one, even, if he allowed himself that, but so foolish in the matters of morality. Why shouldn't everyone be forced to prove themselves? He'd done it— why couldn't they?

"Tom?"

His thoughts slowed to a halt. She had leant closer to him, perched on the edge of her chair. Her skin smelled faintly of flowers. "Minerva," he answered.

She smiled, and he found that it made him want to do so too. Not good. "Just making sure your voice still worked."

Her own thumb was now stroking the side of his hand, though he hadn't noticed when they'd switched the motion. "I think I'll be all right."

He wondered vaguely when he might tell her that he'd killed his father over the summer.