Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 30

Lucy was tired. Beyond tired. And it was no one's fault but her own, she knew that. She also knew that she most definitely shouldn't have been tired. Less because the things she'd been doing shouldn't have made her tired and more because she shouldn't have been doing the things she'd been doing. And yet she had been. She still was.

It was a difficult thing to explain, Lucy supposed, but then, she didn't expect to ever have to explain it to anyone, and in her head, it was simple: Tom was looking for family. Lucy had looked for family before and, even if it hadn't turned out at all the way she'd hoped, she had found that family. Given this, it seemed perfectly logical to her that she could help Tom find his.

Of course, logical was perhaps the wrong word. The truth was that it had nothing to do with logic and a whole lot to do with a gaping sort of ache that had yawned in Lucy's chest that night she'd found him in the library. Not that that ache hadn't been there before. She'd known he was an orphan - basically everyone at the school seemed to, though Lucy, and, it seemed, just about everyone else, had no recollection whatsoever of having actively acquired that information. It was just... known. And so she'd known it. She'd known also what it meant when she'd caught him looking at genealogies and old newspapers, looking over the birth announcements and obituaries. She'd known what it meant when he'd tried to hide them. After all, there was really only one explanation for behavior like that from someone like him.

All of which was a long winded way of saying that Lucy had known for some time now that Tom was looking for his family. But somehow, that night in the library had made it different. Had made it more real. More... painful. More personal. Maybe it was because she'd asked about it, addressed it, in a way she hadn't all the other times she'd noticed him covering up book titles or tucking loose papers away that looked suspiciously like newspapers and records. Maybe it was that it had been so late and he'd still been holed up there, looking, searching, without seeming to care that it would leave him exhausted in the morning. Or maybe it was simply that her mind had been on family lately, on searching and finding and missing them.

Whatever it was, when Lucy had left the library, that aching thing in her chest had ballooned and was pulsing with an insistence that she couldn't ignore, a second heartbeat that made it hard to concentrate. And it had made Lucy want to do what Lucy always wanted to do when things hurt: it made her want to fix things. The problem, of course, was that this was not the sort of hurt that could be eased with careful words and a cup of cocoa. It wasn't the sort of hurt that could be talked out, or coached through. It wasn't the type of hurt that had concrete, finite solutions. And Lucy knew that just about as well as anyone. Because this was a hurt Lucy had felt.

In some ways, she supposed, its familiarity made it worse. And maybe the familiarity was what drove her to start helping in a way she knew she shouldn't be, searching the records herself, probably in vain, probably doing all the things Tom had already done, probably not really helping at all. But, the way Lucy saw it, two sets of eyes would be better than one and even if she never found anything, all she'd lose was her time.

And if she did happen to find something... well. Then things got more complicated. Because this was a form of helping that Lucy knew was selfish. She had no delusions about that. If she had asked Tom, he would have told her not to. If she had told him what she was doing, he would have shouted at her. And she would have deserved it.

Lucy had been friends with Tom for several months now, and she'd been hearing about him for nearly all her time at Hogwarts. Which was to say, Lucy thought she knew Tom rather well by now. And certainly, she knew him well enough to know that he would have taken one look at her 'help' and decided that it was done out of pity. And though he'd never said it, Lucy rather thought Tom hated pity. It was a quiet truth of his life that permeated seemingly everything he did. It was in the way he held his chin just a touch above horizontal, the way he answered every question perfectly, the way he made sure everyone liked him, the way he deflected any and all questions about his family and his upbringing and what he did or where he went on the holiday breaks. It was in the way he pretended not to know a damn thing about the muggle world Lucy knew full well he had been raised in. All because, Lucy thought, he didn't want anyone to think too much about how he'd been raised. About where he'd been raised. About the things he'd grown up missing. All because he didn't want them to pity him.