He hadn't really noticed anything about her at first. The day he'd first heard her name, he filed it away into his catalogue of trifling information required to maintain his post of Head Boy. He didn't give her a second thought after her Sorting in front of the school, barely gave her a glance as she glided past him to sit on the other end of the Slytherin table. He didn't absorb the strangely alluring scent of vanilla she wore nor the soft-looking silk of her skin, and to him, she was simply just another dunderhead in the hallowed halls of magic who happened to share his House and classes.
The few times they were partnered for miscellaneous school projects, he absentmindedly acknowledged her adeptness and skill. She was still rather beneath his notice, of course, because she never sought to better herself in the eyes of others. Unremarkable brown hair and eyes, a face that couldn't be recalled easily or distinguished from a crowd, a voice that was rarely used at all – in his mind, if one refused to be admired, no matter with how much potential, then it was of no use to anyone to recognize such a creature at all. Thus, despite her apparent cleverness, he subconsciously deemed her unworthy of his true attention.
Weeks had gone by, but the moment he actually saw her was a rather unusual event, for him at least. He had gone by the edges of the Forest, collecting ingredients for his Potions project and had heard the pounding of hooves some creature deeper in the woods. Hearing the gasp of a decidedly human voice, he determined that it was for his benefit to go rescue whichever fool stumbled into the Forbidden Forest. Of course, being who he was, he had sought to practice the admittedly very Dark curses he'd noted from some unsavory books in the Restricted Section on whatever beast that was in there, and another human being in his debt or another trophy wouldn't be an abhorred consequence at all.
Striding confidently in the trees gracefully with his yew wand in hand, he prepared himself for a desperate confrontation and perhaps a damsel in distress, a bit of dramatic heroism from him before defeating the monster with ease. But alas, his imagination had never concocted what was lying in wait for him in the clearing – perhaps, he thought dazedly, it was indicative that he was slightly more lacking in creativity than the other areas of expertise he mastered so easily.
She was standing in a careless manner, swathes of her brown hair flying about in the breeze. So aloofly calm was this foolish girl that he'd been slightly concerned for her sanity. A herd of centaurs surrounded her, their weapons aimed at her and their faces ranged from hostility to disdain. The leader of the herd was facing the idiotic girl, the words formed by his mouth unheard and unseen by Tom, but he could see that this girl was completely unfazed by the proximity of the beast and her wand was nowhere to be seen. Tom had been calculating his odds against the creatures, as he was vastly outnumbered even if he counted the brainless girl as an ally.
Something was exchanged between the two and then a silence fell upon the forest; not a creature stirred, but something that was not quite magic drifted along the trails of wind circulating reluctantly among branches and leaves.
The brutish centaurs galloped away without a single second glance at the witch they had encountered and life continued as if nothing happened, to Tom's astonishment. If it weren't for that little smile strewn across her scarlet lips, he would have thought it was all some bizarre and very uncharacteristic daydream.
Before that afternoon, Tom Marvolo Riddle had never experienced as much bewilderment as he had that day. He hadn't been sure if he liked the sensation or not, but his curiosity was always something that prevailed above all else in the end. How a girl, obviously clever enough to know and identify a centaur, had remained so calm and unscathed when confronted by more than a dozen of them was a dilemma he found himself constantly dwelling upon days and nights afterwards. She was an anomaly of some sort – she wasn't a child so centaurs should have reacted with more ferocity towards the encroacher of their territory, and even if she were a virginal maiden, they weren't bloody unicorns.
And so he found himself looking at her. From the start of his newfound realization of her existence, he only glanced from the corner of his eye with extreme caution, so as to not give away his interest to the girl in question. His glances became stares, unbeknownst to him and seemingly the girl herself, but everyone else noticed how his gazes grew longer and more intense with each day that passed.
As his dark, unfathomable eyes found themselves straying continuously to the quiet, formerly very uninteresting and mundane girl, he began drinking in the small details he could see about her. Her mind was always closed off so he couldn't necessarily use Legilimency to understand her workings and he couldn't read her face as easily as he could with other people, so he resorted to analyzing every physical characteristic she possessed with the fastidiousness of a painter observing his muse.
The voluminous quality of her brown curls, the slightly veiled sparkle in her golden eyes as she laughed or successfully casted a difficult spell, her smooth velvety skin that glowed especially in the cold with a faint rose tint, her melodious voice that seldom spoke in or out of class, her fluttering dark lashes… There were so many traits of hers he studied profoundly, but there was no other feature that had entranced him as much as her pair of rosebud lips. She'd painted them a passionate scarlet and so they were easily her most eye-catching facial feature for any bystander observing her, as she wore no other cosmetics, but he was more obsessively attached to how they framed the scant number of words she spoke.
As she performed verbal spells, he saw how the ends of her lips would rise appreciatively as she said the incantation. It reminded him a bit of himself, really, the way she obviously loved magic and revered it as more than just a talent or hobby. Her wand was more like another appendage of her slender body, reflective of his own attachment to his yew wand, and he had once caught her kissing the vine wood absentmindedly. He began connecting her every movement to himself, dreaming of her saying his name with those scarlet lips with the same adoration she imparted to spells.
He never stopped long enough to realize that the name he wanted her to utter was not his chosen one.
Time passed – how much, he couldn't really decipher – and everything in his life seemed to revolve around her. Her quiet brilliance, though he wished always that it was a secret to be kept only between the two of them, had shone brightly enough to attract Slughorn. She became his assigned Potions partner and their shared projects were the best Slughorn had ever seen. Together, they augmented already well-established elixirs and wrote articles that were published in influential magazines and journals. Never had he worked in such harmony with someone else and he was overjoyed to see her actually debating with him, revealing a side of her that no one else had ever seen. But she never seemed to want the spotlight, which frustrated him to an extent. Part of him wanted to keep her perfection away from all the ordinary, unworthy people out there, but another fragment of his wretched heart wanted her to reveal how superior she was, how beautiful she would be at his side.
It was evidently fortunate, however, that she rarely associated with anyone else at the school. He was glad that there seemed to be no other competitors for her attention, so he was relatively content to simply observe her from a platonic distance in the beginning, to learn more about her secrets and her potential.
He slowly stopped holding as many Death Eater meetings in the dark corners of Hogwarts' grounds and his followers became distant, his dreams of immortality and inhuman infallibility shuffled into a compartment further from the center of his consciousness. Her existence had been at first a gentle candle's flame to his black soul, but it began to consume his darkness and burned holes into his slowly reviving heart so that she was safely entrenched in every cavity of his humanity, filling up anything he lacked with ease. Single-minded as he always was, he somehow threw himself into a completely different way of seeing the world.
It was strange to live with this new lightness in his life. Of course, he had not become a hopelessly lovesick fool, for he still practiced his Dark spells and scoured the Restricted Section for ways to retain eternal life and youth, but now he was looking for a way to keep her with him as well. He kept the moniker of Lord Voldemort firmly in his grasp although he somehow never dreamt of her addressing him as so. He had considered opening the Chamber once more before he graduated, but the thought of her endangered by his actions somewhat sickened him for reasons unknown. He always watched her, looking for the answers to her secrets but was constantly distracted by the new things he learned about her. Tom Marvolo Riddle coveted her and the blackest part of him was determined to make her his forever. He secretly craved the light she emitted just by existing… He wanted to consume all of it.
So when Slughorn began nudging them together, he let himself be swept along in the hopes that she would willingly fall into his arms during his courtship. Suave and charming as he could be, Tom was slightly dismayed when he found that she was fairly immune to him and gave only faint smiles to his attempts but he persisted until she fulfilled his vivid daydream of calling him by his formerly despised Muggle name. The way she said it was unlike how any other person's ever spoken it; her velvety voice and those enticing scarlet lips seemed to embroider his name with the finest silk, caressing him as sweetly as the vanilla scent she wore. His chest throbbed with joy when she began responding to him, no longer a statue of polite indifference, and he was only contented when he was in her presence.
And then came the night she agreed to be his. It had happened as they were leaving Slughorn's graduation party early, when she said that she was feeling a bit lightheaded. He offered to escort her back to her dorm and was a bit too pleased with the feeling of her slender arms on his own.
They were passing the Come-and-Go-Room when she stopped suddenly, her hands shyly reaching for his with a timidity that endeared her a bit more to him, if that were possible.
He let himself be guided in, surprised that she even knew of the Room at all, and was anxious for some reason as they both entered. He was never one who trusted blindly or at all, but perhaps the only exception was the girl before him.
She blushed as she reached up to move a lock of sable hair from his forehead fondly and she left trails of fire across his skin that burned for moments afterwards like the flames of Hades. She stood on her tip-toes to whisper something – he thought she was about to tell him a secret, perhaps of how she bewitched him so or the strange aura that always surrounded her and protected her from the centaurs from when they first met – but what she gave him was more precious to him than any Horcrux or Philosopher's Stone…
"I love you," she murmured in his ear, those scarlet lips lightly brushing against his earlobe.
He shuddered as the fire from her touch coursed through the blood vessels there and it spread like the waves of a disturbed ocean across every limb he possessed.
But then his mind fixed upon her words. Love. Was what he felt love? An utterly disgusting, weak and more importantly mortal emotion could not possibly exist in someone like him. His heart was simply a chunk of flesh and blood, not a vessel capable of such romantic notions. How could he, someone beyond any human, have such a fallibility? But how else could he explain the foreign warmth that enveloped him as she smiled at him, or the infinite longing he felt when she was away? This sentimental self was not something he really disliked, however. Since that fateful day, his life's burdens had lightened and he felt like the sun had finally decided to shine into the shadows of his soul. He'd felt happy for once in his seventeen years and he was, in short, unwilling to give up the newest experience he'd gained.
Love was not a weakness, he deemed. He was happier and felt stronger than he had ever felt. Having her in his arms for the rest of time was a notion that raised his adrenaline levels and his heart beat faster in anticipation.
Unbidden, he pulled her to his body and embraced her gently, arms circling her slender waist. He couldn't really say anything, for his tongue was tied and his brain was blanker than it had ever been, and his body was paralyzed despite his heart's furious beating.
She was the first to pull away, to his disappointment, but she compensated by taking his face between warm, soft hands and drawing him to her own. He reached for her forearms and looped them around his neck smoothly instead so that he was the one initiating the kiss, their very first proclamation to the world of their bond.
Lava was coursing through his veins, the scorching heat growing higher in temperature the moment their lips touched. He tentatively tasted the scarlet mouth he had always dreamed of and the delicate sweetness of her skin tempted him to devour more of her. His nerves sang, his lungs working faster and faster to give him the oxygen that seemed to burn away with every second of passion.
He melded her closer to him, trying to consume her utterly, elegantly pale fingers dancing down her spine and stroking the mane of tempestuous hair on her lovely head. A moan of pleasure rang in the static air as she pushed him towards a large armchair that stood at the center of the Room. He collapsed blindly into the chair with her still entangled in his arms and she straddled him, grinding herself onto him wantonly, crying out as he slipped his hands at the hem of her pleated uniform skirt.
And then, the fire escalated into something that he could no longer contain or drown within himself anymore.
He screamed, his arms not obeying him anymore as they only twitched uselessly at his sides as the girl they had been holding slipped from the plush chair gracefully. His heart was beating fast, too fast for him to gather his thoughts or composure, and his brain could only register her tucking in her shirt and readjusting herself.
"W-what is this?" he asked weakly, his usually smooth voice laced with pain. "Help me…"
She looked at him blankly, her face a blank and flawless mask. Its utter lack of emotion pierced something in him, somewhere deep inside his chest. Her face was like his – the old Tom Marvolo Riddle. The few faculties in his mind whirled wildly, concocting the possible implications, but he couldn't come to any kind of conclusion that fit with what had happened just seconds earlier.
Her stare didn't lift from his prone body, now slouching pathetically into the soft chair.
She drew out something from her pocket – his beloved yew wand – and pointed it at her lovely scarlet lips, muttering something that his slowly depleting senses couldn't really make out. A round, clear globe floated away from them.
"I've been waiting for this moment for ages," she said lightly, twirling his wand with her hands. Sparks flit out, somewhat puzzling him as she was the only person besides himself that had ever gotten a response from it. "But it doesn't feel quite as satisfying as I'd thought it would be. You made it seem a lot more enjoyable, actually, darling."
His confused expression must've leaked out of his naturally stoic face because she laughed a bit before she answered.
"Killing, I mean."
He felt his face contort as another wave of flames crashed through his nervous system. He vaguely thought that this must be what the Cruciatus curse felt like, if he had ever had the stupidity and misfortune to get it casted on him before. His mind was still in chaos, but he knew that she hadn't Crucio'd him at all. Her own wand was stowed somewhere else and as a master of the torture curse himself, he knew that the caster would have to retain perfect concentration and a wand pointed at the victim for the duration of the torture.
"Why?" he gasped out. "Why would you do this? How?"
A spark in her golden brown eyes lit up her face and he couldn't help but stare at the newest expression he observed. She was more beautiful than ever with the slightly insane shine in her eyes – was this the secret she'd been hiding from him? The veil was gone and he saw the girl he had claimed as his own in her true form, but the temptation to ravish her and extinguish her flames still remained even as he felt his life slip away. But he wasn't finished yet, he told himself.
"Vengeance, Tom Riddle," she told him indolently. She stepped closer, her scarlet mouth delicately morphing into a smile that showed a perfect set of pearly teeth. "And as for how I've gotten you here, I thought it was obvious enough?"
She traced the contours of his face gently with the tip of his yew wand almost lovingly.
"Oh, but maybe the little know-it-all in you wants to learn about what I've poisoned you with?" she teased, scarlet lips pouting tantalizingly. "I know that I would and we're definitely two of a kind, dearest."
He realized that the vivid shade reminded him of something, but with his brain frazzled and rapidly losing its clarity, he couldn't remember anything besides how hauntingly lovely she was. Did she spike him with Amortentia as well, all this time?
"It's ironic that I'm using the very weapon that you've utilized during your fifth year. Cleansing the filth from Hogwarts, is that how you put it?" she smiled, tapping the wand on her plump bottom lip. "I'm using diluted basilisk blood, Tom. Even as you are now, I'm sure you know the properties quite well."
He could only stare at her as his befuddled mind helpfully supplied him with textbook-worthy facts about his basilisk. The blood was fatal, like the venom, and like the basilisk itself its decomposition was slower than most organic matter, magical or not. The blood didn't congeal and always remained in a perfect liquid form, ideal for mixing with other substances. She had hidden it in her lip-paint and cunningly kissed him so that he ingested the toxins unknowingly when he kissed back.
"W-w-w-where did you get basilisk b-blood?" he stumbled over the words that no longer fell from his mouth like silk. "Why aren't you affected…?"
She giggled. "Here's where it gets even more ironic, darling. You see, this basilisk blood is from your basilisk – the very one that you killed Moaning Myrtle with! Isn't that just funny?"
The air in the room grew warmer, making it more difficult for him to breathe. Needle-like pricks danced along his skin and sank deeper into his flesh, but he was too feeble to even groan in complaint. His entire face, once so marble and angelic, was now fluidly contorting into various expressions that no longer made his visage anywhere near cherubic. His dark eyes couldn't even shift his line of vision. He could not move them from her scarlet mouth at all, and he found himself not caring.
Her smile grew wider and wilder as she noticed his increasing discomfort and her caution seemed to be thrown to the wind, leaving only her savage delight in its place. She climbed back onto him, knees on either sides of his legs, embracing his now shivery body with a tenderness that made his chest ache again.
"I've diluted it so that its effects are miniscule compared to its full capacity. On the Dagworth-Granger scale of potency, it's probably only a six, not even a fatal level. It only paralyzes, Riddle. But then, that was only for the thin layer of lipstick I've been wearing – Muggle brand, so easy to add magical ingredients into without worrying about strange side effects – and you've just taken in a healthy dosage of it. I've disinfected myself after I put you in that chair and now it's been accumulating in your tissues and nerve cells for the last few moments."
Leaning in and puffing some warm breath at his face, she pushed away some of his now completely disarrayed hair from his sweating forehead. Her whiskey colored eyes glowed when she spoke.
"You'll be dead soon, Tom. Gone forever, like everyone else you've killed."
"H-H-Horcruxes," he said with a shallow breath and a cracked voice.
"Gone."
"H-H-Hermia," he pleaded.
"She never existed. It was all a Midsummer Night's Dream, wasn't it?" she whispered, stroking his hair fondly. "But I suppose that it wouldn't hurt to tell you that I never used any Amortentia or love potions, Tom. The best part of all of this is that you let yourself come here."
His voice died, throat splintering and his air supply slowly draining out of him. The fires of Hell that burned his body started to recede and only numbness remained in his blood. He couldn't think beyond those damning lips and her gentle hands in his hair anymore and for some reason he really didn't mind. He was no longer afraid of death if this is what it felt like always.
"Goodbye, Tom Marvolo Riddle," the girl murmured into his ear before dropping one last token of her enflamed passions for him on his pale, dry mouth.
And the last thing he remembered consciously was a bit of scarlet kissing the skin above his dying eyes.