Title: Silas
Word count: 441
Summary: Fifty-six and a half years later, vacant blue eyes still haunt the dreams of one Tom Marvolo Riddle.
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He surrounds himself with his followers, and immerses himself in his studies and tells himself that they cannot find him here. He is sure that here, surrounded by his books and his men and his plush red carpets, he is safe.
It is in bed that night, and every other night, that they come to haunt him. They find their way into his dreams and he wakes with a start. Memory, blurred by time, nevertheless recalls all too clearly the night he saw them. There was a boy, the blue eyes, and the goddamned Muggle orphanage.
They had found him lying on the white linen of his bed after dinner, one arm draping off either side. His wrists were slit and there was blood on his left index finger and his left middle finger. Some of it had dripped. His bared chest sported a bloody red lightning bolt that was just beginning to dry and flake.
The authorities had declared it a suicide. Stupid Muggles, Tom called them. He did not see why Silas should have killed himself. (Not that he ever cared, he tells himself.) He did not see why anyone would choose death over life. Fresh from his first year at Hogwarts, he had heard of Grindelwald and the Lightning Guard. It was them, he told himself then. (It is not what he tells himself now because he does not care for Muggles.) Later, when he discovered the Imperius Curse that allowed control over another's actions, he told himself, Yes, yes, it must have been that.
The next year, he threw himself into his studies of magic and tried to forget. But they were there at every turn, blue eyes that do not smile or hold any fire. And he told himself he was not scared. For why should the newly-styled Lord Voldemort fear a corpse?
The same year, he began a quest. It is a quest that has taken most of his life, the search for immortality.
It has been fifty-six and a half years, and ten thousand six hundred seventy-two deaths witnessed (not that he counts, of course). Some have been his best friends, some despicable Muggles. And it is not their eyes that haunt his mind, but those of a thirteen-year-old boy who would have lived for seventy years today, had he not died. (Not that he remembers such despicable things as the birthdates of a Muggle.)
He sits in his chair, not thinking of the Muggle boy whose birthday he does not remember, and whose friend he never was.
After all, Silas Ferrias is just another Muggle, and they are nothing to him.
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Written for Rowena DeVandal's July One Thousand Wards or Less Challenge in The Fireplace.