Parallel

3. Launching Peas

Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle.

Tom Riddle.

The name couldn't stop echoing around the chambers of her mind.

It induced a sensation of vertigo, a lurching feeling in the pit of her stomach; it reverberated around her head and resounded through her eardrums, drawing up memories of a lightning-scarred boy clutching his forehead in pain, of silently-spoken horror stories: serpentine features, a skull-like face, and long, spindly fingers, wielders of a pale wand seen as the last object ever by too many.

She'd never felt fear like this before—not when she'd been pursued by Death Eaters through the dark corridors of the Ministry; not when she'd shattered her Time-Turner, her only prized possession, her lifeline; not when she'd found out that she'd somehow slipped through the fabrics of time and ended up over sixty years into the past; not when two Ministry officials had showed up at her house when she'd been two, and she'd heard her mom scream like she'd never done before.

It was just that: fear, paralyzing fear, fear that seemed almost fake with how powerful it felt. There was no other emotion; fear encompassed Eve, twisting and coiling around her like a snake, squeezing tight until her whole body felt suffocated by its pressure. She found that she suddenly couldn't breathe. The pulsing of her heart was the only thing she could hear; distantly, she made out voices, but she couldn't register any of it. Her ears felt like they'd been stuffed with wax.

Tom Riddle strode forward, coming to a stop by her chair. The scene seemed to play out in slow motion. He looked down at her, mouth opening to form inaudible words, before turning towards Dippet again. He stood there, right next to her, hand coming to rest casually against the back of her chair.

Eve stayed frozen, spine straight. From her peripheral vision, she could see the fabric of his robes, the slight movement of his body as he breathed. She felt like she'd been whisked back into a memory. This didn't feel real. It didn't feel real that she could just reach over, and her fingertips would brush against his robes, would be able to touch his hands, would be able to feel warm skin underneath her own.

She slightly tilted her head upwards. She saw a sharp, aristocratic nose sloped high, but it disappeared with a blink: snake-like nostrils took its place, flat slits against chalk-white skin, which was stretched tightly over a skeletal face. Brown—the kind of brown that was closer to black than itself—flickered, overcome by blood red, which rimmed thin slits—cat-like pupils, glinting unnaturally. The wavy black locks had vanished—instead, they'd transformed into a bald head, a map of purplish veins crawling all over it.

Eve blinked again, and her overactive imagination receded, revealing a tall, handsome Head Boy once more.

She'd just escaped from a time where Voldemort's influence pervaded society to another that, in essence, was exactly the same. She hadn't associated 1944 with him, would never have until a reference to his name inevitably popped up. She'd even talked to him—he'd been the attractive boy she'd bumped into who'd stuck in her mind minutes afterwards, she remembered, and suddenly she felt sick, because how could she have not seen it?

Voldemort—she'd never thought of him as a person in her mind. He was a concept, a thing, a manufactured individual—never a living, breathing human. No human could have consciously done what he'd done to the magical community. She'd assumed an objective, remote view of him—had never thought about him as a child, as a teenager, as someone who'd spent years growing and developing into the thing he'd eventually become.

After his experience in the Chamber of Secrets and in Pensieve memories, Harry had talked about teenage Voldemort; he'd gone into extensive details about his physical appearance, but Eve hadn't ever really registered his words into imagery. It had always been just talk to her, just meaningless adjectives that conjured up misty images in her mind—hazy, clouded conceptions of floating black waves and disjointed dark eyes, like dreams, like conjurations of absurd thoughts and illogical visions—like she was really only dreaming it all up, just as how she sometimes dreamed about flying underwear and giraffes with apples for eyes and quills for legs.