A/N-

hey guys, here we are againnn! I'm aware that oc fics typically don't get much love, especially on a fanfic website, so I'm really especially grateful for all the views saudade has managed to gather here!

again, please leave a review, they're like the equivalent to any author's dose of caffine needed to kickstart the keyboard!


ACT ONE

sun kissed dreams


i — • not to be forgotten •


Again the other girls see fit to warn her in fervent, apprehensive whispers, filled with spat suspicion and an undertone of starkly wavering terror.

"You've been hanging out with him, havent you, Ana?" They impute in an accusing voice, all rather dramatic. The reprimand is complete with all their unsubtly theatrical hints of scandal and righteousness. As if she had been trying to hide Tom like a dirty little secret and had ultimately been found out—when she has in truth done no such thing.

They say that it is for her own good that she does not continue to associate with him, for he is devil-touched. And they—girls who had so shamelessly offered falsities to her face from the very first time they introduced themselves—tell her that she must trust them. That Tom Riddle is unnatural, the spawn of Satan himself; nothing she hasn't heard from them already.

He has been banned from Church, they insist still, in animated tones, nodding fast and leaning in in a conspiratorial manner. Madam Cole wants him looked at; Father Brennan performed an exorcism last spring and is now senselessly terrified of him. All that and more.

They are being ridiculous, Anastasia thinks, and tells them so in a low voice, something insintrical in her tying her heart into a noose around her own neck as her eyes narrow. She tosses her long hair sharply over her shoulder, standing abruptly up from where they are sitting beneath the canopy of shade cast by the wiry oak tree in the orphanage yard and primly smoothing the front of her dress down.

The children are fearful of Tom Riddle, and yet so too are they eager to degrade and bemean him behind his back. No, not behind his back—they are not blind. They speak up louder when Tom is in sight, eyes alight with an ignorantly rallying cruelty that speaks much of their social etiquette—or even basic human compassion—and the lack thereof. And yet, when he actually turns his eyes upon them, hard and cold (and hurt, nobody sees), suddenly all their audacity turns to nothing but empty bravado, until even that deserts them and they are left making a quick getaway, sprinting around the corner.

"Do you know what that is called?" Anastasia's eyes are in a juxtaposition of chilliness and heat at the same time, her face set in an impeccably unmovable mask of carved marble she has long mastered.

She likes to think herself like any other girl, excitable and approachable and sweet and loving, but for years her life was also prodominently that of a noble, taught all the decorum, poise and aplomb necessary to survive the gilded shark tank that is the upper echelons of society—on the arm of her husband. When she arrived, she dreamed she would leave all of it behind, but now she really does see that nobility is not all that's needed for narcissism and pretention to flourish, and she has been afforded a tool she will wield.

"Pusillanimity—cowardice." She watches them recoil and a furious, helpless heat build in their eyes, but for now they quail nonetheless under her cutting grace. The beginnings of hate, she sees, sprouts from the black seeds of jealousy already nestled comfortably there in their childish hearts, and all of a sudden Anastasia realises she has just cut all the friendships she has cultivated here in one fell swoop.

But they were never friendships, were they? Not if all she had done was indulge their shallow desires for fame and princesshood and nod along.

There is only one she would most like to call friend here. It is none of them.

"And I want nothing to do with it." She enuciates coldly, turning on her heel and walking away, head held high with her hair swaying mesmerisingly behind her.

(a boy stares after her, squatting hidden behind a row of bushes, silent, stunned, and breathless. it is a while before he can bring himself to move again)


"It wasn't me."

"Tom-"

"It wasn't me!"

"Tom, I-"

"It wasn't me! I was standing- I was nowhere near him! It wasn't me! It wasn't."

"..."

"It… I don't- I don't know. Things… they happen, around me. When I want them to and when I don't- I-"

"Tom, it's okay."

"It wasn't my fault. I was- I was just, so angry, I don't know how it-"

"Tom."

"Stop looking at me like- You- fine. Fine. Well? What are you waiting for? Go. Go back to your friends and tell them they were right all along and that I'm a demon and a freak... and… an…"

"…Anastasia?"

A shaky laugh.

"I-I think… I might make things happen too, Tom."

His fire is gone, smothered by a senseless burst of pelting rain, dying like it was never there—the only indication it ever was being a new scar on the carpet of yellowed grass.


Tom Riddle, Anastasia thinks, is a boy who builds walls to keep others out.

They are tireless walls, of a fortress, tall as the sky and wide as the Earth. Albescent and gleaming and smooth. Slippery like ice, thick in the way only time and circumstance can make them.

He is a dragon, one who hoards treasure within—possessive, mercurial, eyes red like rubies. He steals away whatever he touches, stashing meaningless things in the hollow of his chest to build himself up. They shine, the trinkets he takes, but with a listless lustre that cannot hope to compare to the radiance of a smile.

Nobody can see inside, and so nobody thinks to try scaling the wall—for just what would such effort be worth, nobody knows. Anastasia watches his cold expressions and cold eyes and cold heart and all she can think is how lonely it must be, to never have felt warmth inside the gilded cage of his tower. Even the moon has her stars, doesn't she?

But, she admits, it would surely be hypocritical to ask. She wonders—wonders when in the quiet swallows of night she wakes nestled into him with the fringes of his curls tickling her chin and only starlight for company—if Tom knows that she is a person who builds walls to keep what's left of her in.

Taught young to be stone, learned to be reliant on nobody but herself, Anastasia Moore-Emrys was meant to be the shiniest jewel of her husband's collection, poised and forever smiling. She cries only behind closed doors, in the darkness without sound—and most importantly, with nobody knowing. A century-old oak can fall, scattering dirt and bark alike, but hidden behind rows and rows of other oak trees glossed with dew and blinding in their beauty—but with nobody there to see it—is it not the same as having not fallen at all?

So much of her is moulded and remoulded by the calloused hands of her father that even she doesn't know anymore what is and what isn't. It is akin to hiding a stolen trinket away in a place nobody will ever think to look so that they are not found and ripped away from her bleeding hands. Over and over again, until there are so many little nooks and crannies occupied all across the sky that she forgets just where and what is in some of them, that she fears she will never find them again.

But Tom…

She thinks it's like magic. She has never met another boy—another person—who can tease those little filaments of her out through cracks of her wall so effortlessly.

Tom has taught her that she loves strawberries and cartwheeling and stargazing, the thrill of walking across precarious rooftops and the forbidden satin touch of skin against skin. That she loves the feeling of fingers awkwardly braiding her hair crookedly while their owner insists that he definitely knows how to do it, for there is surely nothing he cannot do.

Tom has taught her that no wall lasts forever. They are worn by time, by the chipping of nails and the softening of the sun, and it is inevitable that one day, cracks will appear and light will spill.

And she, Anastasia promises, if only to herself, will chip and scale at his wall until it gives, no matter how long it takes.

("you…" a face, open and true for the first time. surprise, and awe and- and hope splashed across handsome features like spilt milk. "you're like me")

(a single dip in his left cheek, the little dimple that caves when he smiles, stiff as if he cannot recall ever doing it before)

(faint quivers still under a soft touch. he utters intelligible things in sleep, pressing in hard, desperate for rest, his unsaid, wordless pleas rewarded with peaceful dreams and tightening arms)

(the smell of black licorice, the most damning evidence of his thefts, cling to the curls of his breath like cigar smoke)

She'll wait for him.


Once upon a time, a little girl seeking light instead reaches out her palm to the dark, amaranthine eyes shining with promise.

Her smile is so radiant it is blinding. It is sweet like strawberries and licorice, but most of all it is dangerous. And when she turns it to the little boy still staring at that hand of hers, he is all of a sudden struck by lightning and his heart stutters in his ears.

It rings like the antebellum of war, and thus the curves of her lips rewrite history as he jerks forward and his hand, cold and having never known a kind touch before her, laces with hers like a solemn vow.


A/N-

"the curve of your lips rewrite history" ~ Oscar Wilde