He awakened in the hospital wing. The curtains were drawn, and no one else appeared to be in the room. It was quite dark. All was silent and still. His entire body ached, especially his head.
Sitting up slowly, Tom reached for his wand of the bed beside him. He casually gave it a flick, and the lamp beside him lit, filling the room with a chilly light.
Suddenly Tom realized that he hadn't the faintest clue what he was doing in the hospital wing in the first place. What had happened? He ran his fingers through his hair repeatedly and he struggled to recall what had happened, but he came up empty. How unusual.
He recalled that he had come back to Hogwarts to ask Dumbledore for a job...
As soon as he thought the old man's name, he suddenly felt furious, though he could not explain why. He had always been wary of him; he didn't seem to like Tom as much as the other professors, but he had never completely hated him. But there was no question in his mind that the emotion flooding though his veins was hate.
He reached for the glass of water placed on the bedside stand, and quickly drank it down. He felt as though he were recovering from a bad bought of the flu, shaky and weak.
What in the name of Merlin…? He was suddenly overcome with stabbing pains in his forehead, as though a porcupine had just jammed every single one of its quills into the soft tissue of his brain.
Groaning, he cast a quick nonverbal spell on himself to make it go away. What had happened?
He could remember going up to Dumbledore's office to ask about a job…and… there was something else, too.
He remembered some kind of explosion, and being thrown against the wall before falling unconscience. The corner of his mouth turned up in a wry smile. I wonder how they had explained that? They would never discover…
Tom's thoughts slowed to a halt. Never discover what? There had been something….
Gah. His head ached. It felt like... what was that term muggles used? A hangover.
There was something that he was missing, he was sure of it. It was just beyond his grasp. A wisp of memory drifted through his conciseness. A vision of a girl, kneeling before him on a stone floor, a slight haze around her form, as though the world around her was spinning almost to fast for him to follow….
But it was a blurry memory, foggy and indistinct, and it slipped from his grasp, and Tom was left reaching for it, desperately truing to figure out why it felt so important. Like he had lost something.
Tom shook his head, clearing his mind. He had more pressing things to deal with than this odd sense of forgetfulness. It bothered him, certainly. He never forgot things. How foolish of him, to worry about something as trifle as this.
Rising from his place in the hospital wing, he silently crept from the darkened room, quietly closing the door behind him. He left like a ghost in the night.
In the morning, the nurse would draw back the curtains to check on Tom, and find that he was gone. But she had never been quite sure that he had been there in the first place. Strange things seemed to surround that boy. And stranger things went on at Hogwarts. Goodness knows…and she would bustle off to attend to professor Dumbledore, laying only a few beds down.
And so the strange girl (but really not so unfamiliar) faded from Tom Riddle's mind. As his power grew stronger, she grew more and more distant to him, and he gradually lost that lingering feeling that he had lost something important.
Until one day, she faded entirely.
