It didn't feel right to accept the ring, for many reasons, but Tom refused to let her return it. Besides, it would be a lie to say the idea of seeing— of talking to— Julius wasn't terrifyingly appealing.
Still, that one persistent, nagging thought remained that Tom had no idea what exactly he'd given up, regardless of what he'd said about his family. The stone in his ring was far more precious than he could have ever realized.
On the bright side, Ophelia was at long last confident in the fact that she wasn't just hallucinating. If Tom never had cause to mourn someone, of course the ring didn't effect him. It was a far greater relief than she would have liked to admit to know she hadn't finally lost her mind.
The flip side, of course, was that even if she wasn't actually crazy, she still certainly looked it whenever someone walked in on her in heated conversation with herself. Unfortunately, that wasn't even a theoretical issue. After getting a thorough dressing down from the Fat Lady, who couldn't have known Ophelia was talking to an apparition that may or may not have actually existed and wasn't actually calling her a treacherous, backstabbing rat who's crowning gift to humanity was the moment was she stopped wasting the rest of their oxygen.
In retrospect, Ophelia may have let her temper get away from her there, but Julius deserved it, and if that meant she had to avoid gaining access to the Gryffindor Common Room for the foreseeable future, so be it.
One could only listen to a nonstop stream-of-consciousness-esque attack on their person in quiet for so long. If she were a better person, Ophelia knew she would have let Julius continue on in his rant in obliging silence— she had killed him after all, and if that didn't make you slightly deserving of verbal abuse than nothing did— but she wasn't a better person. For so long she'd been torn to shreds inside from the guilt of doing the worse thing one man could do to another. Well, no longer.
She couldn't say when it happened, exactly. At some point she just got to thinking: "If I could go back and do it over, would I?" The answer to that was startlingly simple: no. It didn't require even a second's thought or hesitation. Of course she'd kill him. It went beyond reason and logic, rooted more in instinct than anything else.
If it came down to it and she was faced with the decision to choose anyone over her uncle, she'd choose her uncle every time. Julius tried to kill Grindelwald. She killed Julius. The math was so easy, she never needed to pause to calculate it.
That wasn't to say she yet agreed with her uncle. On anything. She didn't need to in order to know she didn't want him to die.
The upside of arguing with Julius, however, was that if she wasn't in the mood to talk it out she could just slip the ring into her pocket. She never ran the risk of not having the last word, even if he possibly— maybe— deserved it more than she did.
Why listen to him at all? Was she a masochist? Some kind of glutton for punishment? If only. She simply liked to see him, to memorise his face and remember details she'd forgotten about him over the passing of time.
And, well, yes. Punishment did play a small part in it all, if only for selfish reasons. Being praised for killing Julius never sat right with her, despite knowing she'd do it again if need be. Being yelled at was refreshing, almost. No one liked being put in their place, but after so long a part of her felt absolved by it.
So after the "incident" with the Fat Lady, Ophelia only acknowledged Julius outside the castle, far from any portraits or persons capable of overhearing. Did he appreciate being ignored most hours of the day? Yes, actually. It gave him more time to rant uninterrupted, though she did have to remind herself to take the ring off before bed. She made the mistake of forgetting to that first night and to say the result was unpleasant was an understatement. Julius wasn't stupid. He knew outright shouting in her ear would just provoke Ophelia into removing the ring from her finger. No, he talked until just before she was fully awake and then lapsef into innocent silence, so she'd think she'd been roused by natural causes. His game ended by the third time, but at that point it was too late. It was nearly morning and she was abominably sleep deprived.
By day eight, Julius's anger had mostly evaporated, or else he was just conserving that rage to unleash later. They actually talked.
She didn't know if he was real or just some dark magic of the ring meant to deceive people. It hardly mattered. It should have mattered more, but the more they spoke the less she was inclined to actually care.
A dark corner of her mind did wonder at that. Her uncle was never the type for bedtime stories, but The Tales Of Beedle the Bard, specifically the tale of the three brothers, had been an exception. An obsession. She could recite the story word for word backwards, forwards, and translated into German in her most boring nightmares. As a result, she couldn't very well ignore the part where the second brother more or less went insane due to the Resurrection Stone. Was he crazy because of the stone or did he see things that weren't there because he was crazy. What came first, the dragon or the egg?
Details had likely been embellished over a few hundred years, Ophelia eventually decided. She wasn't obsessed, like he'd eventually become. She could let go of the ring any time she wanted. Any. Time. She just didn't want to, yet.
The day would have been peaceful, were not for the twittered screeches of a small flock of ravens. Ophelia watched idly as the enchanted songbirds fluttered outside the staff room window, aligning themselves into a new, inventive curse word every few seconds for the professors' benefit. Every once and awhile, they changed formation to specifically insult a member of staff, usually Apollyon Pringle.
Ophelia smiled to herself, wondering who was possibly behind it and sincerely hoping they got away before they could be caught. With that thought in mind, she hastened her own steps, lest she be considered the perpetrator.
It was nonetheless a welcome distraction from Julius's new hyper-fixation: a step-by-step outline of how she could "save the world" by killing Grindelwald herself.
"You're the only one he trusts enough to get that close without his guard rising," and "Think of all the lives you'd be saving just by taking his." The clincher was "I'll even be willing to forgive you for what you did to me."
She almost preferred it when he was plain furious.
"I think I'd prefer silence over the sound of your voice," she grumbled, more to herself than him. "I'm not killing anybody. You might as well come to terms with it now. Besides, I don't even know where he is."
Ophelia could feel his side-eye burning a hole through the side of her head. "I hardly think that would be an issue for long," he surmised, and she couldn't disagree.
As she considered various means of ducking out of that particular conversation until he moved onto something more pleasant, a movement near the forest caught her eye. Normally, she wouldn't have minded. Let them sneak into the forbidden forest for all she cared; she wasn't their mother. If they found trouble there, well, that was entirely on them. They got the same warning as everyone else.
But this wasn't "normally". This was Tom, an immediate cause to be instantly suspicious. Whatever business he had kneeling at the edge of the forest— without his usual entourage, no less— could not have spelled a nice, stress free future for her. For him to deliberately break free from his shadows meant he was up to no good. Again.
It was more for the sake of the greater good than his own that Ophelia stalked his way, arms crossed. Leaves crunched noisily beneath her feet and even though he must have heard her coming up behind him he didn't move.
"I'm not sure what evil you're planning this time, but I'm morally obligated to tell you to it's a bad idea," Ophelia announced when she drew close.
Looking at her over his shoulder, he shook his head. "Evil? How little you think of me. I'm a model wizard. Slughorn says so."
She snorted. "Slughorn says a lot of things. Would he have said that if he actually knew what you got up to in your free time?"
His brows furrowed in mock puzzlement. "Whatever are you talking about?"
"No one's buying that innocent act," she said, laughing despite herself.
The corners of Tom's lips curled upward slightly. "That's where you're wrong. Most do believe it, in fact."
She grimaced. "Unfortunately. Now, what are you actually up to?"
He waved her over, a sly gleam in his eyes. "Would you like to see for yourself?"
Ophelia knew that look well enough to know it meant nothing good, but couldn't beat back her curiosity.
"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Julius muttered behind her, watching as she stepped over a pair of thick roots snaking out from the dense village of trees.
Tom murmured something she couldn't understand at the same time that she peered over his shoulder. Nothing was there. She shot him an inquiring glance.
"Are you just admiring the grass?" she asked, not bothering to mask the sarcasm.
"No," he said, and dropped his gaze down to her feet at the exact same moment she felt it.
Something crawling up her leg.
Three somethings, to be exact.
Not generally the shrieking type, the sound that tore from her mouth surprised even her. She backed up too quickly, tripping over the root she'd only just stepped over in her haste to put as much distance between herself and the three serpents as possible. They didn't give chase, but she scrambled backwards on her hands a bit for good measure.
Only then did she hear the laughing.
"I'm glad this amused you," she told both Tom and Julius, giving each a specially curated dirty look.
"I didn't think you'd fall," Tom replied without an iota of remorse, the shadow of a smile still on his face.
"You would, too, if your only other meaningful interaction with a snake was of it trying to swallow you whole," she groused, slowly, very slowly, sitting up.
Just like that, all humor dropped from his expression, making Ophelia wish she hadn't brought it up.
"Why were you out here talking to snakes anyway?" she asked to break the newfound tension.
"I can't very well talk to them inside the castle, can I."
She rolled her eyes and fell back onto the grass, watching the clouds drift past the canopy of trees. "That's not what I meant and you know it. Why are you talking to them at all?"
"You didn't think I got all my information through prophetic visions, did you? They spy for me."
"Don't you just use Legilimency?"
He hissed something at the serpents and they slithered off, two towards the castle and one towards the forest. To Ophelia, he spoke slowly, as though explaining something very simple to someone even simpler. "You must realize I can't very well use Legilimency all the time. What of the people I rarely see? What of the professors? The things said behind closed doors and in the safety of common rooms? Using Legilimency was what got me in trouble with you in the first place."
"Have you considered not invading people's privacy?" she suggested.
"No," he replied in short.
"As your conscience, it's my responsibility to tell you you should."
"You're my conscience now?" He sidled up beside her until they were hip to hip, him sitting and her laying back, sounding like he severely doubted she was up for the challenge. "You don't sound particularly stern about my means of gathering information."
Ophelia waved a hand lazily between them, before letting it flop back onto the grass. "Of all the dastardly deeds you could be doing, this is nothing. Your conscience isn't paid enough to prevent something this minor."
"Sounds like an excuse."
"You talk a big game for someone who only got second place in that rigged duel. Let's see..."Ophelia pretended to think hard. "Who won again? I can't seem to recall."
"I'm afraid your confidence is gravely misguided."
She shrugged. "It's just the facts."
"Do you want to test that?"
"There's nothing to test." Knowing he was watching her, she made a grand show of examining a bowtruckle peaking its leafy little head around a fresh sprig of greens with far more interest than strictly necessary. "I beat you once, I can do it again... Probably."
"That wasn't exactly a fair match," he mused, twirling his phoenix feather wand slowly though his fingers.
"What can I say? Life isn't fair," she said, enjoying herself immensely and not doing much to hide it.
The wand came to a halting stop, resting loosely in Tom's palm. He leaned closer, dark eyes sparking with equal parts amusement and challenge. "I won't even need this, you know. I won't even need a wand."
Now, Ophelia couldn't help but imagine his confidence was misplaced. Still, she humoured him, nudging his leg with hers. "Oh? Do tell. How do you plan on doing that?"
A hand came down beside her head, blocking her view of the rambunctious young bowtruckle. She turned again to face the sky, but a wide expanse of blue was not what greeted her.
"Like this," Tom said, and pressed his smile to hers.
A/N
Sorry for the long delay! I've been busy with summer classes, my triwizard tournament story, and just plain writers block, if I'm to tell the truth. Hopefully it was worth the wait. I couldn't quit figure this one out, probably because I lack morale tbh. Harsh reviews really aren't good for my confidence with this sort of thing... But don't worry! I'm over it! It just means I need to keep on improving!