Snape clutched a hand onto Rebekah's shoulder, reassuring her after he knew this would be the Boggart lesson Lupin spoke of. She smiled softly and said, "I'll be fine."
He nodded and strode out of the staffroom, letting Lupin start his lesson without a word. Even after he insulted Hermione and Neville, mostly the latter, he seemed like he didn't want to do it. It gave Rebekah a funny feeling but she didn't know what it was.
"Just a Boggart," Lupin said and watched the apprehensive class. "Boggarts like dark, enclosed spaces. This one moved in yesterday afternoon, and I asked the headmaster if the staff would leave it to give my third years some practice.
"First we have to ask ourselves, what is a Boggart," Lupin continued and, of course, Hermione's hand was the first one up.
"It's a shape-shifter," She said. "It can take the shape of whatever it thinks will frighten us most."
"Couldn't have put it better myself. So the Boggart sitting in the darkness within has not yet assumed a form. He does not yet know what will frighten the person on the other side of the door. Nobody knows what a Boggart looks like when he is alone, but when I let him out, he will immediately become whatever each of us fears most.
"This means that we have a huge advantage over the boggart before we begin. Have you spotted it, Rebekah?"
"Because there is a large group of us, it will become confused and it won't know which form to take, causing the people to fear the thing less if it tries to scare several people with vastly different fears," Rebekah said without a fault.
"Right. Neville," Lupin turned to the trembling boy next to him. "First things first: what would you say is the thing that frightens you most in the world? Didn't catch that, Neville, sorry."
"Professor Snape,"
The group clasped hands onto their mouths before they laughed, stifling the chuckles and slowly coughing when Lupin sent them a serious glance. Rebekah rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth as Neville approached the wardrobe.
"One. Two. Three. Now!" The wardrobe opened with its door slamming.
Black-robed, hook-nosed and deadly annoyed, Professor Severus Snape came out gracefully. He stalked closer to Neville who stepped back. When Snape began to reach into his robes, Neville stammered out, "R-R-RIDDIKULUS!"
Snape-Boggart staggered and stood up straight, now wearing a lacy dress and a high hat. A red handbag was lodged into his hands. The class howled with laughter, even the Slytherins clutched their stomachs at teh sight of Snape dressed as an old woman.
"Parvati, forward!"
A bloody bandaged Mummy appeared, and then the bandages unravelled and fell face-first into the ground.
"Seamus!"
A pale woman with black hair that reached the floor stood, opening her too-wide mouth and screamed a tone too unearthly that Rebekah jumped. It was a malevolent Banshee
Then several others appeared, a rat, a rattlesnake, a single, bloody eyeball were the most memorable. It soon became Ron's turn and it turned into a huge spider.
"Are you sure to want to do this, Rebekah?" Lupin asked when he saw that Rebekah was next.
"I'm not scared of him, Professor," Rebekah said and tightened her jaw. "Voldemort isn't going to jump out," The rest of the class gasped at her use of his name, "I fear what should be feared."
"Alright, then," Lupin said, not completely convinced but he didn't have a reason to not trust her.
Ron's giant spider made her flinch as it rolled over to her feet. With a crack, the shoulder height spider morphed into a being more than half a dozen feet tall. He looked like a Dementor with his cloak and hood but Rebekah knew this wasn't a Dementor.
He drew itself up to his full height and his head almost grazed the top of the staffroom. Hood concealed the face of a skull, bare of all flesh and muscle, clean ivory. He began to bend at the waist, leaning forward until his neutral face was only a foot away from Rebekah's and then pulled his hood back.
The class gasped and shuffled back more as Rebekah stiffened her posture and raised her wand. With a flick of her wand and saying, "RIDDIKULUS!" fiercely, Death's form was replaced by Marge's bloating one. Rebekah stifled another chuckle as the fat woman bobbed in the air as she tried to flap her hands to stop and get on the floor again. The Marge-Boggart swayed until it was upside down and her head banged against the floor and made Rebekah laugh.
The Boggart exploded with lots of smoke blowing out as the creature finally left.
With a trembling hand, Pansy put it to Rebekah's shoulder, asking, "Are you okay?"
Rebekah turned around with a brewing smile. "Oh, I'm fine, I'm great."
"What was that?" Lavender Brown said loudly. "It looked like a Dementor but it wasn't. That was worse!"
"That," Rebekah gestured to the wardrobe, "Was Death."
"I thought you were scared of spiders," Blaise said, a knowing smile on his lips.
Rebekah huffed amusedly and shoved his shoulder. "No, I just hate them."
Rebekah wasn't usually a dreamer. When she went to sleep, she slept and that was it. No images, and no sounds, and certainly no boy with cold eyes and a familiar impassive face.
She felt like she was in the diary again, replaying the memories of Tom Riddle. This wasn't a memory, she knew that, she could feel it. This place, a room with a fuzzy atmosphere and no discernable details, was comfortable enough to not alarm her when she found herself standing.
"Why am I here? Where am I? And why are you here?" She emphasised each question by counting them physically on her fingers, then saw the white collared dress flowing down to just past her knees. "And what am I wearing?"
"I don't know where we are, nor why you or I are here. You're wearing that because that's what female Hogwarts students wear when not in class," The boy, not much older than herself, placed a pleasant smile onto his lips and gestured to a newly conjured table and chairs in the room.
He took one of the chairs and clasped his hands in front of him, his smile still glimmered and Rebekah matched his as she sat down. She refused to look away when they locked eyes, finding something so familiar within another person was very rare. They both waited to see who would crack first, and after a couple of long minutes, they both dropped their fake smiles and gained neutral expressions.
They were too similar to defeat the other with these games.
"I suspect that you're Tom Riddle, but I don't know how old you are,"
"I'm about to turn fourteen in a few weeks," He said with a faint nod.
Rebekah then hesitated to ask but eventually did, "Are you expecting any gifts?"
"No," Tom forced a blank expression over his face.
"Say, may I ask where do you stay when you're not at Hogwarts?" Rebekah saw that he was trying to hide his emotions, his anger and annoyance was thick in the air.
"Wool's Orphanage in London, and you?"
"With my Muggle aunt and her family,"
He bristled. "Are your parents dead?"
"The future you killed them," Rebekah sat up straighter and placed a hand onto the table. "Or would it be an alternative you? It feels like I've gone back in time but I haven't, I know the feeling if I did. This isn't a memory either, done that…" She trailed off in thought.
Where was she? Everything seemed so familiar, the walls were the same ones that were in the dungeons but she knew this wasn't her dungeons. It was too blurry around the edges, and since she couldn't focus her eyes on anything that wasn't the table, herself, or Tom Riddle, she had a suspicion that this was caused by some sort of Magic or outside source.
For now, she would play along and see where she would end up.
"Your aunt, how did she take you being a Witch?" Tom cleared his throat.
"She, well, she was terrified, so was my uncle. The letter came and I opened it. I was ecstatic at the news. I'd known that I wasn't as normal as my cousin, he sat on his bum and shovelled food into his gob constantly," Her lips tugged up at the memory, a calmness washed over her. "Why shouldn't they be scared? If I had a mind to do it, I could quite easily poison their food, give them potions that would mutilate them, or simply kill them with a spell. But they've treated me right, I never wanted for anything and they gave Dudley the same as they did me."
"Do they know?"
"Of course they do. My mother was a MuggleBorn Witch and my aunt is her sister,"
"You make them sound… like they are your family,"
"Biologically, they are my family. My true family is my Familiar, Emperor, and my two pets, Hedwig and Fidele," Rebekah said, being cautious of how much information she gave out. "I know I can trust them with anything I need to."
He made a trailing sound in the back of his throat, looking away to think. Rebekah didn't know what he was thinking, she was smart but she hadn't found any way to do that yet. What a gift would reading a person's mind be. She would be able to know if she could trust her friends fully then.
Rebekah leant back, touching the back of the chair. Why didn't she trust her friends? She didn't actually know. She knew why she was reluctant to tell them everything, they didn't always need to know.
"You look lost," The sound of his voice quickly shook her out of her thoughts.
She sighed. "I was thinking, is all. When can I leave?"
"I don't even know where we are,"
"Right," Rebekah yawned and found herself slightly more awake. Then it came back to her. "I'm asleep but this isn't a dream. Alright, okay. I'd like to wake up now."
With a gasp, Rebekah shot up from her bed. She was shaking with anticipation and something not unlike adrenaline. She wasn't scared enough to have adrenaline, she knew she was going to be alright. She hoped she was.
Emperor's purrs calmed her as he came to lay on her lap and she flopped back into her pillow. She turned and flipped onto her stomach, making Emperor jump off of her with an annoyed grumbled.
"It's not even six in the morning," She said into the pillow and finally brought herself up from the bed properly. Still in her sleeping shirt, Rebekah walked to the bathroom and turned the shower on before summoning her clothes. "Time for Quidditch."