Author's note: Hello hello, here is a new (and long) chapter! I barely re-read it so I apologise for any mistakes or typos, but I really wanted to update tonight! TG for: dubious consent (didn't expect for that to happen but here we are) and child abuse. Hope you guys are doing well and that you are enjoying the story. Feel free to leave a comment, I always love to read your thoughts. xoxo
October 1944 - A Taxing Disclosure
Tom woke up to the sound of the pattering rain, and despite the storm outside, all was still in his room.
On a normal Sunday, the young man would have looked at his watch and pushed away the covers, dragged himself out of bed. He would have headed to the park first, for a draining workout, to the Great Hall then, to meet up with his friends.
On a normal Sunday, Tom would have held dull conversations with his fellow classmates, conceded affable smiles to the teaching staff. He would have gotten a head start on his many homework and carried on with his Head Boy's duties, supervised students' detention and patrolled corridors.
On a normal Sunday, he would have arranged to meet with some girl, whom he would have brought to the prefects' bathroom to treat himself with some fleeting entertainment, before he would have had to assist Slughorn with whatever task his Head of House might have needed his help with.
On a normal Sunday, Tom would have been efficient, proficient, dutiful.
Yet, that very morning, and for the first time in years, Tom wished for nothing else but to lay in bed with Annabel next to him.
He turned around, his hand grazing the empty bedsheets and he buried his face in the other pillow where her scent remained. He breathed in, missing the feeling of his fiancée's warm and lithe body in his arms. She had snuck out of his room at dawn, so her roommates would not notice she had stopped out. "I'll see you later" she had promised him with a kiss before she had slipped in her clothes and shut the door behind her.
He closed his eyes, finding comfort in her lingering smell, not the one of her perfume but of her, of her skin and her hair and he wondered, how she would smell and taste down there.
Slowly, remnants of his evening came back to him as he remembered how he had had to cut short on their throes of passion the previous night, how he had spared her his forceful desire. And soon enough, he remembered the words she had uttered.
She was broken.
Tom did not need to think far to impute sense to her evasive words.
But how? Was she not a maiden? He ran a hand through his hair at the thought, unwilling to dwell on the creepy thoughts of all the different ways there were to hurt a woman while sparing her virginity.
He sighed as he stood up, feeling the need to move in order to quiet his tormented mind.
He had been relieved, back in August, to learn from Annabel herself that she was unsullied. Not because he cared about her innocence, even though he cherished, at times, the thought of being her first, but precisely because he believed this meant that no one had ever caused her any damage. That her body and her soul remained unscathed… Tom knew enough about men and their greed to know about the pain they could cause to a young girl's heart… After all, he himself had not always been the most virtuous lover.
Tom stepped in the shower and mixed feelings stirred inside him.
He had had many girls before, some for whom he had also been the first. He had unzipped countless skirts and unclasped lots of bras, spread many thighs with one demanding knee. Tom used to approach sex like a conqueror. It was about taking, commanding, enforcing. He had been callous more often than not, dismissing the girls without a glance shortly after his own relief. Still, they came back, asking for more, for sex was about power and he was mighty.
But at the sight of Annabel who had lay before him the previous night, he had found himself wanting to give what he never gave… He wanted to linger, to win her. He wanted to have her longing for him.
He recalled all the fantasies he had had about her already, in which he did unspeakable things to her, which would have made blush even the dirtiest minds…
And yet, he could not bring her there, not yet, and an ironic sigh escaped his lips at the thought that making Annabel his own would truly not be a sprint but a marathon. He would have to summon all his patience and find an elaborated plan to have her the way he wished, all compliant and sweet. But first, they needed to talk, for him to figure out the scope of how broken she said she was.
—
"So? How is everything going with Tom?"
Annabel folded back the piece of paper Alastair handed her as the two of them were sitting on a table in an empty classroom.
"Meet me after dinner" it read, from Tom's neat handwriting. She had assumed Tom would stop commissioning others to deliver his messages now that they were engaged, but old habits died hard. She used to believe it was his way to show her that he had the upper hand in their relationship, but it now occurred to her that he might simply be truly busy.
She thanked her friend with a whisper before she slid the paper into her pocket and rested her back against the wall.
"It's all right I guess" she shrugged. "He does not have much free time so we don't really see one another"
Alastair was the only one who knew of their betrothal, and thus the only person she could confide in. She was grateful that he was privy to their little secret, for she felt at times like she would not manage to keep her engagement concealed, especially not towards her nosy dorm mates… The latter had begun to wonder, relaying the rumours that slowly spread at school, that the golden boy from Slytherin had yet to invite anyone to the prefects' bathroom this year… "Perhaps he found himself a girlfriend" they pondered when sitting at the blue and bronze table while Annabel kept stuffing her mouth with whatever food she could find, pretending to be too busy eating for joining the conversation.
By Merlin, she could not wait for her parents to share the news, for she was already fed up with such masquerade.
"Slughorn and Dippet rely on him a lot. It must be exhausting to be handling that many responsibilities" indicated Alastair with a pensive air. She nodded absentmindedly, realising for the first time that she had never questioned her friend's loyalty towards her fiancé. Just like she knew very little about Tom in general…
"How did you two become friends actually?" she asked with a raised eyebrow all the while flattening the folds of her pleated skirt with her palm.
Alastair shifted in his seat to peek through the window and she felt how he turned suddenly embarrassed.
"I…"
He stopped, his voice strangely quiet.
"Do you remember, when you used to defend me against Winter Selpie and Erin Passel?"
Annabel nodded as she recalled those two kids who went to the same elementary school as them, how they used to pick on the blond boy. Once, she had entered the bathroom and found the two of them trying to push Alastair's head inside the toilets, and a rage had gripped her, so great that she had hexed them on the spot, with a curse highly advanced for her young age which had ended in the immediate hospitalisation of the two bullies. Annabel had been grounded for a year, but it had certainly offered Alastair some respite.
"Well, something… similar happened to me the first week I arrived at school"
"Here? In Hogwarts?" she frowned with a puzzled voice.
He nodded, his eyes still casted on the window the rain was fiercely hitting.
"I don't know how they-" he paused.
"-how they figured this out about me but… An older kid from Slytherin began to call me a poof"
Annabel felt her features harden in contained anger.
"It went on for a while until Tom made them stop. We were already sharing our dorm at the time but we did not speak much. He was a bit… odd. He was very quiet, kept to himself. One day, as I walked past next to the older kids in the Great Hall, one of them tripped me up"
"I remember that day" she whispered with a lump in her throat as she recalled how Alastair had landed flat on his stomach in front of the entire school, thus providing much hilarity.
"I thought it was an accident"
He shook his head.
"No. It was very much intentional. It was the day Tom approached me. He asked if I enjoyed being treated like this, and he said he could make it stop if I helped him"
"Helped him?"
"He had a lot of questions about the wizarding world, which he did not feel comfortable to disclose publicly. That's how I learned he grew up in a Muggle orphanage. But he was already so exceptionally gifted, Anna… Often, I did not even understand his questions… It felt a bit like talking to you at times" he said while letting out a small laugh.
"Anyhow, I don't know what he did but from one day to the next it just… stopped. Everything. The mockery, the bullying, everything. After that we became friends and the kids who used to mob me walked past next to us with hunched shoulders and eyes casted down"
"Oh Alastair" she replied softly and took his hand.
"Why did you not come to me?"
He shrugged and shot her a sheepish glance.
"I cannot always rely on you to protect me Anna"
"Of course you can silly" she shook her head as her heart constricted and she moved towards him and cupped his face, kissed his cheek tenderly.
"You're my best friend. Of course you can rely on me"
—
"Annabel" Tom nodded once the girl knocked on the door.
"Please. Have a seat" he gestured at one of the two chairs that stood in front of his desk while he kept glancing at the document he was working on: the girl's training schedule, which he had yet to finish.
He lifted his gaze, surprised to find her rooted to the spot but when he noticed her cautious stare, Tom realised he was being overly formal. He discarded the document and stood up, silently chastising himself for being unnecessarily cold.
"I'm sorry" he whispered as he wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her towards him for a soft embrace.
"I was lost in my thoughts… Come" he gently issued as he grabbed her hand and guided her to his desk.
"Sadly, I don't have much time, I'm awaited in Dippet's office at eight" he sighed as he glanced at his watch.
"I know" she nodded before she let herself fall on the seat when she saw him sitting down.
"Sophia said she won't be there for dinner either" she explained, hinting at her friend who had been appointed beside him as Head Girl. Her silvery eyes scoured his desk which was more messy than usual. Yet, she did not seem to judge the shambles and she picked his Head Boy pin from his desk and inspected it absentmindedly.
"Did you want to talk to me?" she asked, finally lifting her gaze and meeting his. He was silent for a minute, a knot in his stomach.
He wished he would have been able to introduce the topic smoothly, but Tom was running out of time. The coming week was overloaded with various appointments incumbent to the Head Boy's position, and he was scared that his ignoring the matter would lead to Annabel hedging his questions, and him not having the guts to bring it up again, and he feared the problem would persist, undisclosed and undiscussed, and cause irreversible damages.
So he summoned all the strength he could gather and divulged why he had called for her.
"I wanted to talk to you about what you said yesterday"
The girl frowned.
"About you being broken"
Her lips moved as she let out a small "ah" and she looked down with a shrug.
"Forget it. I was just feeling overwhelmed" she whispered as she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and tried to compose a detached look on her face.
"I just said that on the spur of the moment"
She was playing with the pin she had in hand but her fingers were fidgety.
"Really?" he probed with a suspicious tone and she nodded, more firmly this time as she put the pin back on his desk.
"Really"
He inhaled, slowly, his doubts now confirmed that she would beat around the bush would he broach the topic.
"So you lied?"
She shot him a black look but soon enough, she was glancing down again, speechless.
He repressed a sigh.
Oh, how much he wished that all-things-Annabel were not that complicated… He leaned back and stared at her, trying to think of a better approach than such a brutal face off. She was rubbing an invisible spot on his desk with her thumb now, her shoulders slouched, and the sight of her sitting like that strangely pained him.
"Do you know what I think?" he pondered cautiously as he kept watching her.
"I think something happened to you and you both want and do not want to tell me"
She moved ever so slightly, tilting her head in a little nod before her lip began to tremble.
"Come here" he issued, his voice hoarse as he patted his knee. She stood up with difficulty, like if her legs were about to give in and she walked over to him.
He reached for her hips, sat her down on his lap.
"Did somebody hurt you, love?"
She nodded against his neck.
"Where?" he asked softly, his stomach churning at the thought of the irredeemable. "Where did they hurt you?"
"I… I cannot tell you" she whined, her voice nothing but a whisper.
Tom inhaled before he placed his hand on the girl's forehead, urging her to open her mind.
"Let me see" he asked but she jerked against him and begged for him to stop. He was close, blurry images already forming in his mind but she managed to push him away.
"Please don't" she whined. "I don't want you to see that"
"Show me then" he issued with a brusque voice, because he needed to know, and he needed to see.
"Show me where they hurt you baby" he asked with a strangled voice as he stroked her jaw.
"Did they hurt you here?" he asked.
"Or here?" he queried as he wrapped a hand around her throat, his breath now frantic. His heart began to race when excruciating thoughts assembled in his brain, torturous images of the girl being harmed beyond repair as he moved his hand lower, and she shook her head at each question, lithe against him despite his ruthless gestures.
His fingers were on her hips suddenly, bruising her skin through the fabric before he suddenly cupped her sex.
"Did they hurt you here?"
She was very still for a moment, before she finally shook her head once more and faintly, ever so quietly, she murmured:
"Lower"
Tom's stomach churned at her words and he stood up and pushed the girl against his desk. She was sobbing now, her small body convulsing before him as he pressed her front against the wooden surface.
With a growl, he pulled down her knickers, all the way to her knees while he held her firmly against the furniture, his palm on the small of her back as he lifted her skirt. She squirmed and whined but he turned a deaf ear to her tears.
"Spread your legs" he ordered coolly, his ire so great that he could not pretend any longer.
She did as he asked though, tears wetting her cheeks as his fingers pressed into the flesh of her behind and he spread her right butt cheek.
There, just there, a thin white scar.
Tom's breath got caught in his throat and he looked up, his anger threatening to spill all over.
"Anna, listen to me" he ordered between gritted teeth.
"I will never let anyone hurt you again"
"Do you hear me?" he growled, and Annabel nodded, her face buried in her folded arms.
—
"How old were you?"
They were resting in the darkness now, nothing but the warm light of the fire shining on their faces. Annabel was wearing Tom's sleeping clothes, her back resting on a fluffy pillow, her foot in his lap while he was sitting across her.
A few hours ago, Tom had pulled her clothes back on, and he had cradled her while she had cried to her heart's content.
When the clock had rung, he had pulled away, carried her bridal style towards the sofa where he had lied her down. "You're sleeping here tonight" he had indicated quite simply, his jaw still cramped in contained anger before he had accioed some pillows and covers, to make the sofa a cozy nest.
"Wait for me. I'll be back in no time" he had claimed, and she had simply acquiesced, far too exhausted to actually argue with the young man who had kissed each of her eyelids and disappeared through the door.
And when Tom had come back, with some food and a slightly reconciled look on his face - she assumed that spending two hours staring at the grim face of Dippet must have settled him - he had handed her some clothes - the pyjamas he had once lended her - and they had eaten quietly until Tom had announced that they needed to talk.
"Eight" she revealed and Tom drew a sharp breath.
"So it was not your grandfather"
"No" she disclosed.
She felt strangely serene, despite their dire conversation, and she was thankful that Tom had raised the topic despite his unorthodox methods...
She sighed.
"He was deranged but… not like that. It was the people who wished to bring him down who did this to me" she explained.
"His opponents?"
She nodded quietly.
"People who opposed his politics"
"I thought he was a pure-blood supremacist"
"He was"
"So the people who did that to you, were they Muggle-born?"
She swallowed and looked to the side, regretting his question. She knew where this would lead, according to Tom's logic…
"It's not that simple" she replied as she frowned.
"My grandfather had upset a lot of people, including the British Ministry of Magic. He wished for a strong Egypt, liberated from the Western influence because at the time, the Muggle colonisation was pertaining even to the wizarding world..."
"He hated British people" she whispered.
"I was not there to see it, but I can only imagine the face he must have made when my mother announced that she had secretly married my father" she shook her head with an ironic pout at the thought of her strange family history.
Tom's eyes widened as he looked at her.
"Your parents' marriage was not an arranged marriage?"
She shook her head once more.
"I know" she sighed at the sight of his incredulous glance.
"It's quite ironic isn't it?"
He squeezed her foot again and avoided her gaze, stared at the dancing flames instead.
"Go on" he asked softly.
"I was alone at the house that day. My grandfather was meant to hold a speech at the Confederation…"
"I hid in the basement, because it was a secret room, and the entrance was concealed. They found me anyway. My grandfather used to say that there was a mole among his henchmen…"
Annabel's blood curdled as she remembered the hasty footsteps above her, how she was crouched behind the staircase in a desperate attempt to hide, hoping for them to leave.
"Once they were-" she paused.
"-done, the maid found me"
Her stomach churned as she recalled the desperate sobs of the woman.
"They had left a note. That this was only a warning. That they would come at me again"
Tom squeezed her foot a little too hard and she repressed a whine.
"Why you? Why not lashing out at your grandfather?"
She shrugged.
"I was an easy target"
"You were a child" he rectified and she bit her lip.
"Alastair told me your grandfather used to train you. Why?"
She swallowed, a lump growing in her throat as memories of the excruciating training she was subjected to came back to her.
"He thought I would… lead the revolution once he'd die. That I would take over from him. That I was meant to be Egypt's next leader"
She had a bitter laugh when she pursued:
"Sadly for him, I was never into politics"
Annabel felt Tom's glance on her for a while before he asked, his eyes probing her face in the darkness.
"What did your grandfather do, once he found out what happened to you?"
She snorted and lifted her gaze, a smirk contorting her mouth but her eyes were prickling with tears already.
"Nothing" she whispered, and she absentmindedly grazed the copper bracelets that adorned her wrist.
"He said that I was weak… That if I had trained like he had taught me I would have been able to defend myself"
She fell silent, and the both of them were quiet for a while, the room bathed in stillness to the exception of the crackling embers.
"I used to believe he was right" she hiccuped, the words stinging as she pronounced them, ands tears escaped her eyes and ran down her face. Tom seized her hand and pulled her towards him, cradling her once more as he shushed her.
"The pain was terrible" she whined.
"I was not able to sit for days"
Tom's face contorted in ache.
"And I was scared. So scared. Because I was weak"
"You were not weak Anna" he whispered.
"You were only a child"