Chapter Twenty-Two: Hogsmeade
Happiness is gonna find you,
Gonna fly next to you all the time
Satellite, are you lonely,
Spinning away in the dark all these years?
– "Family of Aliens," Teleman
I want to be warm
I want you to be warm
– "Fog," The Ophelias
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He had never liked waiting.
It was bitingly cold, which ameliorated his vexation somewhat; discomfort was, perversely, more comfortable to him than its lack, and failing its presence he tended to find ways to create it for himself. He thought his spells worked better when he was feeling some physical unease – only something of a superstition he'd picked up in his first year, but one that he found himself reluctant to bother with disproving. In any case, feeling entirely comfortable made him restless.
Tom shivered, and felt a moment of peace – or, rather, of preparedness, which was the closest to peace he got.
After a moment, he grew irritable again. Regardless of his own private feeling, he thought, they really ought to be more punctual. Nothing going on in their absurd little lives could possibly be important enough to keep him waiting here, standing out in the courtyard by himself, like a fool. That thought made the irritation spark into anger, and Tom took a breath and let it simmer.
When the sound of ten-odd pairs of footsteps on the stone behind him faded into his hearing, he made only the barest effort to suppress a glare. "What kept you?" he asked shortly, evening his tone when he noticed Professor Van der Mond rounding the hallway corner that led to the courtyard entrance.
Malfoy, at the head of the group, glanced at Lestrange just behind him. "You did say fifteen minutes past ten."
Tom indulged himself in a brief roll of his eyes. "It's nearly half past, Abraxas."
Malfoy opened his mouth again, looking as though he wanted to argue or make some excuse, but closed it instead. Tom looked past him at the others, silently taking roll. Malfoy, Lestrange, Black, Black, Rosier, Selwyn, Selwyn, Avery, Dolohov, Bulstrode. The corners of his mouth turned down: one absence. He paused briefly, just long enough to make his displeasure obvious, before addressing Malfoy again. "Where is Lovegood?" At Malfoy's failure to answer, he turned to Walburga Black, who looked slightly stricken.
"I didn't realise you meant her to come too," she protested, her expression somewhere between apologetic and accusatory; Tom, who had no patience for either, narrowly controlled his temper and made a dismissive gesture. Useless. Actually, that was being generous; it was likely also intentional pettiness on Walburga's part. Tom briefly debated with himself which offence was worse.
"I'll go and get her from the dungeons," volunteered Edith Selwyn in her quiet monotone, causing him to look up.
"Don't bother," Tom clipped. "I'll do it myself." This was met with ten irritating looks of surprise, which he ignored. "And Walburga can stay behind," he added on impulse, "for her negligence." Black huffed in surprised anger as he turned his back, which he also chose to graciously ignore.
Tom jogged a couple of steps inside to catch Van der Mond on his way out. "Excuse me, Professor," he called politely, and was rewarded with a brief, slightly abstracted smile.
"What is it, Mr. Riddle?"
"Sir, I just need to go and fetch my friend. She's late, she never knows where the time's gone," he spouted automatically, half-wondering for a moment at his own willingness to go even this far for something so inconsequential before pressing onward. "Would you be willing to wait another minute or two for us before leaving?"
Van der Mond paused, then replied, "Yes, of course. Just be quick about it. Only so many hours in the day, eh?"
"Thank you, sir." The man was irksome, but not quite as much as certain other individuals he could point to; competent, at least, for all his arrogance. Tom spared him a respectful nod before taking his leave.
He was back at the common room before he knew it, remarking briefly on the quickness of his pace – and there she was, already looking up at him from her seat on the floor as if she'd somehow known he was coming. Curious, but in the manner that was usual for her.
"You're still here," she said, looking mildly surprised but not unhappy to see him. Her birdlike hands fluttered for an instant in her confusion. "I thought Hogsmeade trips started today, and you were meant to go."
"Yes, and you're coming too," he told her impatiently, and added when she opened her mouth to reply, "I already spoke to Slughorn about it this morning. Come on now, or we'll be late."
A soft ohleft her lips, and she clambered to her feet, shaking her head slightly. "I'm sorry."
"Not your fault," Tom responded, placing less emphasis on the your than he'd meant to, "but hurry, now, let's go."
Lovegood raced into the girls' dormitory and emerged some twenty seconds later wearing a coat and gloves, and looking at him attentively, eyes bright. Tom turned on his heel and stepped out, confident that she would follow.
A few moments passed in relative silence as the two of them made their way back to the castle entrance, and then she spoke up softly from behind him: "Thank you."
Suddenly uncomfortable, but not in the way he liked, Tom pretended he hadn't heard. Lovegood continued on at the same pace, by all accounts wholly unbothered.
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The trip, as usual, was not long, but felt lengthened by its rare level of silence. The other Slytherins seemed disconcerted and reluctant to talk amongst themselves as usual, and this perplexity was clearly felt by their peers, who were not as quiet but nearly as subdued. Tom took the opportunity to compose himself, relishing their silent attention while suppressing the echo of their confusion within himself. It ought to be obvious to them by now that he had chosen to have Lovegood replace Abraxas as his second, and while he felt no obligation to explain his reasoning to others, he thought his logic fairly intuitive as well. It only made sense that if he were going anywhere, she should come along. Not that he needed a bodyguard as such, but he liked the idea anyway.
Lovegood herself had obediently gravitated to his right side, as usual having caught on to what he wanted fairly quickly. "Snowy," she observed inanely. After a long pause, she continued.
"My father used to tell me that if I stood in fresh snow long enough, creatures would come. Giant moths, called fuzzlings. Looking for warmth."
"Moths look for light, not warmth," Tom pointed out automatically.
"I know that." She was briefly silent again, and Tom noticed that their peers had begun to relax; he could hear Rosier loudly quarrelling with Dolohov over Leonard Spencer-Moon's relative merits as Minister for Magic. "I used to stand outside in the snow for hours, when I was little, just waiting," Lovegood said. "My mum would call me inside for hot chocolate, but I never wanted to go." She sounded wistful, and Tom started to grow uneasy again, and a little annoyed.
"I don't care," he said blandly, hoping that would make her be quiet.
"I know." Her voice was very soft now. Tom resisted turning his head to look at her expression. The two of them walked in silence down High Street a little longer, listening to Lestrange make off-colour jokes in his gentle baritone, and Black's answering hushed laughter.
"He's a fool," Tom found himself declaring aloud. It was a thought he had had more than once, but had never bothered to voice.
She was not so unsubtle as to actually look at Lestrange, but it was clear she had caught his meaning. "Why do you say that?"
"Isn't it obvious?" He turned to her, a little incredulous. Her wide, pale eyes looked vaguely reproachful.
"You think love is foolish," she said, and Tom scoffed.
"I think stupidity is foolish. He ought to know better than to think Black would ever break his betrothal to his cousin for a marriage that could never produce pure-blood children."
She was quiet, and he wondered spitefully for a moment if this was more holier-than-thou shock at the value others placed on blood purity, until she spoke up abruptly in a mild tone. "I think Orion just doesn't want to leave Walburga. He loves her."
Tom laughed outright at this, drawing looks from the few remaining Slytherins that were still hovering nearby. "You and your – Is that why your name is Lovegood?"
"I'm serious," she insisted, frowning at him a little. "Not how you might think, maybe. But she must be like a sister to him. They grew up together, always knowing they were meant to be together forever. You see how they are together – they're like twins. He's kind to her." She paused. "I don't think they love each other in the same way. But he would never even think of breaking her heart."
"Fine, be sentimental about it," he allowed. "Lestrange still ought to know better." She did not argue this point, although he knew she disagreed. The pair of them watched as Quintus Avery surreptitiously peeled off from the small group of stragglers and made a beeline for the music shop.
"Did you want to go anywhere specific?" Lovegood asked. "One of the shops, maybe?"
For a moment he entertained the idea, wondering absently which of them she would choose to visit. A brief image presented itself to him of Lovegood happily choosing sweets in Honeydukes, and after a moment of consideration he revised this to one of her browsing through old books in the bookshop.
What was that all about?He blinked the images away, feeling vaguely irritated again.
"No," said Tom definitively. He would rather be outside in the winter air anyway, although he did not particularly wish to bother explaining this to her.
To his mild relief, Lovegood once again accepted this without comment, and the two of them continued walking. When they drew close to the bookshop, they turned off High Street toward the residential area of the village, leaving the rest of their fellow students behind. Tom meditated on the numbness in his fingers and toes.
As they progressed through the humbler and quieter quarters of Hogsmeade, he waited for her to begin speaking again, and was slightly surprised when she did not. The buildings were shorter here, huddled together, many of them looking rather run-down and poorly insulated; this was a bit typical of the laziness of most wizards, Tom thought without acrimony, as there was no reason to keep a home in a state of perfect repair when one could cheaply heat it with magic – particularly if one did not need to keep up appearances. He shuffled his feet mindlessly a little in the snow, the way he used to as a child, before remembering that he was not alone and stopping immediately with a flash of anger and embarrassment. Why had he taken her along?
Help me.
Tom started and looked around, the anger paling and dwindling. Lovegood quickly stopped when she saw that he had. "What is it?"
"Er – " He paused, squinting, as he heard the whisper again. "There's a snake," he told her absently, as that was the most likely source.
"Where?" She sounded very concerned, and he forgot his anger at her entirely. Tom pointed. Lovegood rushed forward and quickly located the creature, a very small garter snake, lying limply on the ground. It was clearly near death.
"How do you suppose it ended up above ground?" she said, speaking rapidly in her worry. She was opening her coat.
"Must – must have been some local child doing snake charms," he posited, distracted a little by her slipping the snake inside the neck of her sweater and gently holding it there. Unorthodox, but surely effective. "It has to be quite young – the child. Anybody older would know better, this time of year. Accidental magic, maybe." And younger snakes are stupider about those things, he stopped himself saying. "Try not to move," he told the snake under his breath.
I can't, anyway, it replied faintly, its sibilant voice muffled by the sweater.
"We ought to take it to the Herbology shop – they'll have warm lights," Lovegood was saying urgently.
Tom felt his eyebrows draw down. "The what? There's no Herbology shop in Hogsmeade."
Lovegood paused a moment, mouth open slightly, then said, "Oh. I'm sorry, maybe it went out of business. I visited Hogsmeade a few times when I was a child, so I thought it would still be here."
That didn't sound right, but it didn't seem important just now. He could always ask her more questions later. "The owner of the bookshop keeps a snake. We can take her to him, just for now." Lovegood bobbed her head in assent, seeming not to notice his slip of the tongue regarding the snake's gender.
By the time they arrived at the bookshop, the snake had warmed up significantly and was beginning to get chatty.
It is so very gentle, it was praising Lovegood, so very warm and kind. Such a merciful creature. Warm like sunlight.
Moonlight, he almost corrected it irrationally, and pressed his lips together to stop himself. Really, the snake ought to be exalting him; he was the one that had answered its cries for help in the first place, and anyway, Lovegood couldn't even hear its adulations.
"Do you think you could take care of it, just until the winter is over?" Lovegood was wheedling to the proprietor of the shop, pulling the garter snake out of the neck of her sweater and trying to hand it off to the fleshy-faced old man. It was twining around her fingers, wanting to stay with her.
"Oh yes, miss, I should think so," said the man. It was hard to say whether he looked more charmed by the little snake or by Lovegood herself. When he reached for it, however, it began to protest.
Nononononono. Precious warm gentle. Don't make me leave it, it begged.
"Go with the other one," Tom ordered it as quietly as he could, though not as harshly as he might have. "It will be warm, just like her, there will be lamps and sunlight and food for you."
The snake perked up at this, though it was still hesitating.
Will precious be safe without me?
He wondered a little at this. Truly astonishing that a garter snake thought it had any power to protect something more than twenty times its size. Tom controlled his impulse to point this out.
"I will take care of her for you," he told it patiently.
At this, after another beat of consideration, the snake allowed itself to be removed from Lovegood's hands.
"There we go, little fella," the bookshop owner was muttering to it. He carried it into the back of the shop, leaving Tom and Lovegood loitering next to the broad and overstuffed bookshelves.
"Let's go," said Tom. "The snake will be fine."
She looked at him with wide eyes. "Are you sure you don't want to look at any of the books?"
The image from before popped into his head. Tom was momentarily speechless, less from any real hesitation to leave the bookshop than from surprise and anger at himself. What was wrong with him today?
"What if I found something for you?"
He glanced at her in irritation. "How would you possibly know what I'd want?"
Lovegood just looked at him. "I don't," she said simply. "But I could guess."
In truth, he hadn't actually been much for books in general ever since he found out that magic was real; after that, they had started to feel less like a diverting hobby and more like a waste of time. The only things he ever read these days were textbooks or theoretical treatises related to his own research, which in all honesty he'd half-expected her to have already noticed. She'd somehow sniffed out what he was interested in, after all, even though he had been so careful to allow nobody else other than himself to know for certain. It was odd – even troubling – how deep her intuition ran in some places, but in others she appeared totally ignorant. He really had no way of knowing how many of her unnervingly successful guesses were simply due to chance.
Out of base spite, he was tempted to refuse her, and he doubted she would press the matter if he did. After a long moment, however, his curiosity won out.
"Fine," he assented with a little curl of his lip. Her vacant expression did not change, but something in her face looked lighter as she turned and headed into the stacks.
Idly, he considered what sort of thing she might choose, entertaining the idea of telling her he hated it regardless of what she came back with. Absent mutters in her silvery voice accompanied the sound of her footsteps around the bookshop.
No, he decided. This had by all appearances been an impulse of loyalty on her part, and whatever else could be said of him, Tom was not one to punish loyalty. There was no point in toying with her feelings out of boredom when the only possible result would be to weaken a useful tool. Before her oath he might have indulged such inclinations, but she had already bent the knee and abandoned her rebellious attitude. If she wasn't causing him trouble, he had better assume good faith.
Still, she was taking a rather long time. Tom caught himself craning his neck a little to try and catch the titles she was looking at and quickly stopped. Despite himself, he was becoming somewhat interested in what result she would produce.
An interminable two minutes later (the bookshop owner kept a clock next to the register), his patience was rewarded. At long last, Lovegood chose a book and trotted back to him, looking triumphant. She held it out, and Tom automatically took it.
"Shelley," she said.
He couldn't have heard that right.
She couldn't have picked out what must have been the only Muggle book in this wizarding bookstore to give to him, of all people. After all his navel-gazing about how clever and intuitive she was, she wouldn't have spent ten minutes browsing the stacks just to pinpoint the absolute last thing he would ever want to read. Was she having him on? Was this some sort of taunt about his blood status?
"What," said Tom flatly.
"Percy Bysshe Shelley," Lovegood repeated, as if he didn't already know. He grew steadily angrier until he was almost too furious to assemble speech.
"He's a Muggle," Tom stated through gritted teeth, at a total loss for what he could possibly say other than the obvious. Fuck you seemed like the next best option, but he swallowed that addition when the bookshop owner chose that moment to emerge from the back of the shop.
"He's a poet," she said gently. The look in her eyes was very earnest, and Tom forced himself to take a breath.
When Death for me, at the last, outreach his hand, still shall I remember thee.
All right, the more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed that she had chosen the book out of intentional malice. He would have put it down to an honest mistake (still worthy of punishment, but forgivable), except that Lovegood didn't make honest mistakes, not in his experience. He studied her briefly, perplexed.
"I can ring that up for you, if you'd like," the bookshop owner put in, a bit awkwardly. "And our little friend should be just fine."
Tom spent a brief moment hunting for a way in which he could reject the book without appearing rude in front of the man, but his fevered brain failed to present him with one. "That's good," he said instead, a little relieved when his tone came out more neutral than it had a moment ago.
"I think you'll get something out of it," Lovegood told him quietly. He glared at her, a little half-heartedly as most of the anger had gone, and after staring back at him for another moment she took the book out of his hands and went to pay for it at the counter.
Once the two of them were out of the door, Tom had at last recovered enough of his composure to calmly open his mouth in preparation to command her to be rid of it. Before he could speak, however, an annoyingly familiar voice called to the two of them from across the street. Lovegood took advantage of this opportunity to slide the book into one of the pockets of his robe, which he took note of with a mixture of irritation and some slight admiration for her persistence.
"What a coincidence!" Professor Slughorn was beaming at them and striding forward; automatically, Tom abandoned thinking about the book and moved to meet him with a smile, Lovegood following close behind. "Hello, Tom! And hello there to you, too, Miss Lovegood," he added kindly to Lovegood, whom he obviously recognised. "What a nice pair you two make," he went on jovially. "When Mr. Riddle came around this morning to ask me if you could be allowed to come along with him today, I was so surprised. Put the idea in my head to come down here today myself, matter of fact!" The building he had stepped out of was the Three Broomsticks, Tom noted – about on par with what he knew of Slughorn, as the man hid his love of drink only rather perfunctorily.
"Have you had a nice time, Professor?" Lovegood put in, in a sweet tone of voice he'd never heard her use before. "I find the Spinning Hortle-Torts can make walking round in the snow a bit cumbersome at this time of year, but even so."
Slughorn, already visibly drunk, was clearly struggling to make sense of this. "Oh… yes. Quite," he said vaguely, and gave Tom a look of confusion, to which he only smiled apologetically. "Anyway," Slughorn went on bravely, "Lovely to see the both of you. I'll see you in class on Monday, eh, Tom?" At Tom's nod and encouraging smile, he at last tottered off.
"Spinning hortle-torts, indeed," Tom remarked thoughtlessly under his breath. "He'll be hortle-torting all over his floor when his walls start spinning in the morning."
A little choked laugh suddenly issued from behind him, and he turned around in a state of mild shock. Lovegood looked just as caught off guard as he did, her smile melting away into surprise and then bleeding back into her expression again as she began to giggle. The difference in her face was astonishing.
The whole way back to the castle, he found himself sneaking glances at her. The times when she noticed and met his eyes, she smiled at him, and he returned the expression despite himself.
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He did not remember the book until he was in his dormitory that evening, shortly after supper. Out of some combination of boredom and idle curiosity, he opened it to a random page and read the poem printed, fully expecting it to be an inane waste of his time that he could make fun of her for later.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
With a scream of rage, he hurled the book across the room, and would not speak to anyone for the remainder of the evening.
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A/N: Hi all. Thanks as always for your immense patience with my slow update speed. 3 It has been a tough year (for you all too, I'm sure), but I finally managed to hammer out a new chapter for you guys. I'm really excited about this one, it's kind of a turning point and OH BOY I GET TO WRITE THE LOVE STORY PART NOW. (still slow burn, don't worry, it'll be a little more time, but.) :) thank you very much for reading and sticking with me and I hope you're all keeping well. xo shai