Red

Chapter Two: Myrtle

Red hair was scarce at Hogwarts, especially in Slytherin. Tom smiled wryly. Except for the occasional blonde, his house really did attract a darker sort.

But finally he found it, in his fifth year, cleverly disguised under black Muggle dye. He didn't understand why he'd never noticed it before, for the girl was a third year, he discovered, a Ravenclaw named Myrtle, and every year before the Christmas and Easter holidays her roots would take on the fresh glow of red, only to disappear again under their veil of black once term started again. And Tom smiled.

He was busy that year, preparing to open the Chamber of Secrets, but he took time to watch the girl. Myrtle. He noticed that not only was her hair black, but her fingernails also, chipping to reveal the rose crescents beneath. She usually carried a leather bound journal around with her and would sit in the library or the Great Hall and scribble out somethings. Poems, it looked like.

So once, when she left it lying by her schoolbag as she looked for a book, Tom opened it and read the poems. And, to his slight shock, they were all about him. Tom felt his lips curl against his teeth and had to pull to get them to unstick as they dried in the pallid air of the library. This made things so much easier. Once again, he had found something he could use to his advantage.

Then he took a closer look at the journal itself and noticed the address of the shop stamped on the back. Vauxhall Road, London. A Muggle shop. Muggleborn. Perfect.

"What are you doing with my things?" asked a quavering voice from behind him, interrupting the plans that were now zooming through his head like possessed gnomes, the plans that were so perfect it almost hurt to think them.

He turned to find that Myrtle had come back, clutching a book to her chest, and he grinned wider.

"Just admiring your pretty journal…and your poems."

Scarlet flooded her plump cheeks at that. Tom's eyes lingered on those red cheeks. Red. He wondered if he would be able to feel the heat of them if he got close enough.

Without another thought, Tom leaned forward and brushed his lips across her skin, but he could barely feel the heat at all.

Myrtle dropped her book.

oOo

Tom saw more of Myrtle after that. In January, he kissed her flush on the lips behind the statue of the one-eyed witch on the third floor, and pressed his fingertips along her cheekbones, her temples. They broke apart, and Myrtle breathed heavily, her lips red and swollen.

"Nobody's ever kissed me before, Tom," she told him.

He thought about what her blood would look like spilled on the floor of the Chamber.

oOo

After it was all over, her blood splashed not on the floor of the Chamber but across the tiles of the girls' bathroom, Tom stood over her and looked at her.

Myrtle's glasses had skittered across the floor and her eyes were wide open and glazed. She sprawled, her hair half in her face, the red roots half grown in because Tom had told her he liked it that way. Her journal stuck out the pocket of her robes.

Almost tenderly, he brushed the hair out of her eyes, picked up her glasses and set them on her face. He plucked the diary from her pocket and placed it in his own. After all, it was a necessary part of his plan.

Then Tom set about cleaning up the blood smeared on Myrtle's arms and exposed calves, curlicues that looked like writhing snakes and circles that lay inside triangles. Because a basilisk killed with its eyes. There was no reason for there to be so much blood. No reason at all.

It was only later that Tom realized that even though he'd stared into them on numerous occasions, while she was both living and dead, he'd never known the color of Myrtle's eyes.

xXx

A/N: Reviews make my life a happier and sparklier place to be. Just remember that.

Next chapter: Whores of London.