Nope, he's STILL not mine. Prizes for the first person to work out Jenny Belette!
*~*
Tearing his eyes from the image in the mirror, Tom turned abruptly round and, with a swish of his black robes, left the dormitory.
As he descended the staircase to his common room, his posture was somehow . . . different. He held himself taller than usual, shoulders thrown back rather than hunched forwards. His face, normally blank and angled to the floor, was now held high, and a wicked smirk twisted the corner of his mouth.
He slid his hands into his pockets as he entered the common room, where he saw a petite redhead – Jenny Belette– staring into the fire, her mascara smeared underneath her eyes. Tom had heard people comment that she was looking a lot thinner recently, and he couldn't help wondering if she had been skipping meals like this a lot.
As Tom stepped towards her, she gasped and turned away from him, hiding her face in the crook of her elbow. Though she was doing her best to retain her composure, Tom thought he could see small sobs in the movement of her shoulders and back.
He reached out to touch her shoulder – that was what you did, wasn't it? Comforted crying girls? – but she jerked it back and out of his reach.
'Don't!' she warned, staring at him murderously. But, as she stared, she saw the slightly darker outline to his eyes, the flicks at their corners . . .
'You . . . make-up . . .' she stuttered, eyeing him with a mixture of disbelief and interest, her tears wiped away and forgotten.
Tom didn't know what he had expected his first revelation to be like, but it was not this. She looked at him as if asking for an explanation, but Tom knew he had none to give her. Even if he had a clearly defined reason for doing what he had done, he doubted he would have shared it with Jenny Belette. He didn't really know her (he didn't really know anyone), and certainly did not know her well enough to trust her with knowledge of his own identity. Then again, not even Tom himself posessed this knowledge. You'd think that somewhere, in all the books he'd read, he'd have found it, but no.
He floundered for a moment, with no idea what to say to the wide-eyed, tear-streaked girl in front of him. He found he had nothing to say to her, so he turned quickly and swept out of the common room.
*~*
To be fair, Tom had never mastered the art of social interaction. The subtle art of potion-making? Came to him as easily as cookery. Memorising complex charms and incantations? No problem. But knowing when to speak and when to stay silent, how to initiate a conversation, how to make meaningless small-talk that served no purpose other than to cover the lack of actual conversation . . . Tom found no books that dealt with this. But he was in no particular hurry – there were things that interested him more.
From the first time he sat down at the Slytherin table, Tom had felt isolated. To begin with, he blamed a mistake on the part of the sorting hat. He was a natural Ravenclaw! He simply couldn't understand his placement in Slytherin.
He began to understand his placement, however, after his first Herbology lesson . . .