Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 11

Lucy was tired. Exhausted, really and only some of it was for the usual reasons.

The first problem, and the only usual one, was that she'd stayed up late the night before. She hadn't meant to, really, but the book had been rather good and she hadn't wanted to leave the Room of Requirement. Not when it was so snug and comfortable and familiar. So she'd lingered, wrapped in the warmth of a good story and a thick blanket and the cozy atmosphere of that lovely room where she could almost pretend she was home.

Of course, come the next morning, she'd rather regretted those few extra chapters, but it had been a little thing, a bit of fatigue she'd have been perfectly fine to handle. A bit of fatigue she handled perhaps a bit more often than she ought to, really.

But then, when she'd left the Great Hall and gone to the library, the first thing she'd found was Tom Riddle. Reading a newspaper clipping. With a stack of genealogies next to him.

Lucy didn't have any good way to explain exactly why that had made her very bones feel tired, but it had. It had made her heart hurt. Made her throat tight. Especially when he'd lied about it and tried to tuck it away so she wouldn't notice. Wouldn't think about it. Wouldn't realize what it meant that an orphan was searching through birth records and wizarding lineages. Like, for all that his face was calm and his voice was light, he was terrified of what she might think. What she might say.

It was that, more than anything, that had kept Lucy from commenting. If he didn't want anyone to know, then she could pretend she didn't. Or rather, she could make sure she was the only one who ever did. Because Lucy was good at secrets. Especially when they weren't hers to tell. But she wasn't very good at pretending. Lies had never come naturally, not even the little ones. In so many ways, her life might have been easier if they had, but that ship was long sailed.

So Lucy had just kept her mouth shut. Kept her eyes on her work. And tried to push away the memories of the time she'd spent tracking down her own father. Though, not for quite the same reasons she supposed Tom was searching through those clippings and lineages. Lucy had, after all, known her father. For nine years, no less. And then... well. She supposed the very fact that she'd had to find him again said enough.

And now, years later, the memories weren't as painful as they had been, but they still ached. And the ache was exhausting. Especially since she couldn't help but wonder if the boy sitting across from her might end up with that same ache. If it might be kinder if he simply never found whatever family might be left out there. If they never so much as had the chance to send him away like the stranger he should have never have been.

Or, she reminded herself a bit tartly, maybe fortune would favor him. Maybe he would be lucky. Maybe he would find what he was looking for and more. Maybe.

But either way, Lucy hadn't said anything. About either line of thought. She wasn't sure she ever would, either. If thinking about it was draining, then she could hardly imagine talking about it. Especially since she suspected it wasn't a conversation Tom would particularly want to have. There were a lot of those, of course, and Lucy wasn't sure how long she was going to be able to keep her mouth shut about all of them, but she'd try. Even if that too stole bits of her energy every time their casual words tripped over the contents of those conversations. And God knew it did.

But today, that was not the only thing sapping away her liveliness. Because today, even as Lucy had just managed to push away the ache that always appeared when her father came to mind, there had been the incident with the Black cousins.

Lucy knew of the Black cousins only in passing, as a pair of uniformed mirror images walking down the halls, seemingly separated from Lucy by more than just the year age gap. In many ways, really, they had the same air about them as Tom. Except Tom's version of untouchable had always seemed somehow less foreboding.