Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 20

As the misery of the British winter plodded on, Tom found himself spending more of his time with Steele than he honestly knew how to explain. And he was getting to the point where he would very much need to explain it.

The problem, simply put, was that Steele was not the sort of person that someone like him spent time with. He was Tom Riddle. He was popular and polite and perfect. He was held to a higher standard and he had spent some time making sure everyone knew it. And Steele... well. She was nobody. Or at least, everyone thought she was nobody. But Tom no longer believed everyone.

Not that he hadn't already suspected that, of course, but now... well. The more time he spent with Steele, the less he believed she was as ordinary and invisible as everyone - including Steele herself - seemed to think.

This did not mean, however, that he had figured her out. She remained an aggravating, obnoxiously intriguing mystery. But he had learned things about her all the same. Specifically, he had learned two things about her.

First, that Lucy Steele was kinder and more intelligent than anyone gave her credit for.

And second, despite her assertions to the contrary, Lucy Steele was a liar. Just not in the way he'd expected her to be.

The first of these two points was not entirely new information, so much as it was the confirmation of plenty of guesses he'd kept coming back to as the weeks went on. Steele was, Tom had learned, mediocre at classes. She was not brilliant or clever like Tom was. Her marks were far from perfect and though she undoubtedly tried far harder than most people would have bothered, she was simply not academically gifted.

But she was smart. Annoyingly smart. The more time Tom spent with her, the more he saw her interact with people other than himself, the more he realized that he was not an exception to the rule. Steele simply seemed to have the uncanny ability to look at a person and, with no more than a stare and a cock of her head, figure them out. She could read people the way Tom had always thought he'd been reading people. Only she was better at it.

Of course, Tom was never going to admit this out loud, and certainly not to Steele, but it was true. The more Tom watched her the more he became certain that all he had ever managed to do was learn enough about a person to manipulate them. It was plenty, for his purposes, but seeing Steele with her soft stares and the crease that formed between her brows when she figured something out, Tom became painfully aware that all he had ever done was scratch the surface. Steele delved deep.

And yet, despite that, she never used any of the things she learned. He was certain that if she'd bothered, she could have had the whole school wrapped around her fingers. But she never bothered. Or rather, she never bothered to use her talents the way Tom would have used them. But she did use them.

In the weeks that had passed since the winter holidays, Tom had seen Steele hand a handkerchief to a boy whose eyes, to Tom's apparently inexpert gaze, were completely dry, and tell him not to worry about giving it back. When he'd asked, she'd said he always cried on that day, that his mother had passed two years ago and every year on the anniversary, he pretended to be fine until he snapped.

The next week, Tom and Steele had walked past a Ravenclaw second year in the library who was scowling at a textbook and looking like she very much wanted to give up, a scene Tom had thought little of except to wonder if perhaps this girl's struggle could somehow be useful to ingratiate himself. And it might have, except the next thing he knew, Steele had disappeared down a row of shelves and returned with a copy of Challenges in Charming that she laid carefully in front of the girl with a smile and a promise that it would make much more sense than the textbook did.

Only a few days after that, Tom had watched Steele smile at a girl who'd been whispering none too kindly with her friends about Marion Adkins' new hair (her natural blonde now tipped with brightest blue) and inform her that the spell was simple really, and she could write down the instructions if they wanted it. When met with protestations about how the girl didn't want to look like that thank you very much, Steele had just shrugged and said that was rather a shame. She thought she'd have looked wonderful with a touch of color, especially if it made her happy. The next week, the same girl had showed up with scarlet red tips to match her Gryffindor robes. Steele had smiled, but hadn't commented.