"You promised".
Two words. Barely above a strangled, desperate whimper, landed in the ballroom with all the subtlety of a gunshot. She gasped, her vision blinded by the unrelenting, unquenchable desperation she felt coursing through her veins. Burning her insides, fragmenting her soul unlike anything Tom Riddle had accomplished on his, frankly absolute horseshit horcrux creating benders that had landed them all in this very moment.
She couldn't breathe. Wouldn't allow her mind to wander. She dared not. Her vision swam, tears burning as she refused to let them fall. Even now, even like this. She wouldn't give them the fucking satisfaction. Her silent spectators, watching with rapt attention as she drowned before their very eyes. There were no words shared this time. No smirks, no faint twinkles in their eyes, betraying their reluctant affection for the baffling creature that proceeded gallantly to tear apart all of their carefully constructed realities. They huddled in their oddly formed trio, unable to tear their eyes away from the scene that played out before them. Melting into the darkness of the blood soaked walls.
"Y-you promised. The ...Y-Yule Ball...you said!''
She could not control the emotion that rippled through her words, the pain and the anguish that burnt up within her throat as she attempted to speak. Another emotion, one she could not name, could not allow herself to acknowledge for she would never again be any semblance of herself if she allowed her mind to give a thought to that which had burned within her all those years ago.
"D-draco".
A final plea. A death wish.
It was as if the air itself was holding its breath, turned to frost with her final, mournful whimper.
The mother watched, a portrait of perfect stillness, watching the girl crumble into the floor, there was nothing left for her to give. The seemingly impossible had been achieved. The goal had been realised. Destruction. Utter Annihilation.
Her silver eyes glinted, faint lines creasing around them, her only sign of actual life being within the body she inhibited. She watched.
She watched him freeze. As if spelled by the few words whispered into the ballroom. Silver eyes, cracking with anguish and loathing. A deep painful cerulean blue bleeding into those empty spaces that she herself had spent years cultivating, pruning. Teaching him her ways. Protection. Protect yourself. You must not allow anyone in. Hide it all.
And now she watched as he cracked before her very eyes. Unable to occlude, unable to control. He broke, a face so haunted, so wrecked that she could not control the clench in her chest. Filth.
She watched as he blinked, the pained, gaping cracks smoothed over into stone instantly. His posture righted, the tremor in his fingers was snuffed out. His eyes burned with a dark victory, the fury barely hidden within.
He turned, no longer facing her, looking down to the heap on the floor. When he spoke, she knew there was nothing to be done. He had broken beyond all means.
"I had assumed that one dead brainless mudblood would be enough tonight.".