Hogwarts: a school of Witchcraft and Love (Tom Marvolo Riddle x F!reader)

Chapter 5-03

Death.

No Time-Turner could undo it.

Death.

Some believe that the last images a person sees before dying endures forever in their eyes. People try to capture these images by photographing the eyes of the dead. But the spirit within already fled, and the eyes of a corpse tells them nothing.

Those images of death did linger. But in the spirit, not in the rapidly cooling remains that were left behind.

Death's unavoidable stench along with that of superstition rolled out over the dilapidated cemetery. He still was a mortal, but now that the unexpected path toward eternity was open, he would never lie in a grave, would never feel that rushing sensation of falling at a million kilometers an hour into a vast abyss.

Tom Riddle's body was not going to be cremated, forgotten about. Tom Riddle's achievements were not going to be forgotten about. His new name, was not going to be forgotten about. The moss and dirt eating at the slabs of pale gray rock forgotten to time, would never eat at his engraved name, left unprotected against the elements. Anything that could destroy it.

Although Slughorn's wife may be under the dewy ground giving slightly underfoot, she wasn't forgotten by her left-behind husband of sixty-one.

Getting to her was equally as hard as keeping pork inside. Apparition was a harrowing first experience, but handy to the point it should be mastered.

Untended, unkept, depressing. Everything was just gloom through poltergeist-white mist. It warped, it drifted and ghosted around everything, glided and dangled until the farthest gravestones were mere outlines against the white.

The upper class stuck their loved ones in urns stored inside the two limestone columbariums in front of the graves. To the right were smaller ones and to the left were bigger ones. Each one had hand crafted first and last names engraved on the front of stones.

Tom made his way from the left reading causes of death. A grave for someone who abruptly moved on to afterlife by a car crash, another who had been shot by a family member. Long dead flowers stood at the base of their headstones and it looked like the vegetation had not been cut away recently-no one cared for them enough to maintain them.

Whispers of those forgotten souls seemed to linger, heavy with the weight of memories long buried but never truly gone. He read about that incident. Mugglekind at its finest-being murdered by your insane family.

Don't get it twisted-he hated Muggles and everything they stood for long before this, but that event, for one reason or another, added another brick on the wall separating him from them. It was not the only evil Muggles were capable of committing, which was why learning what else they did to each other was the opportunity to come back here.

Come back to this desolate realm where the boundary between the living and the dead blurred for all beings. Despite having been here once every year, so twenty-five times in total, by the (no modest amount of) time Slughorn was on the square, the rightmost gravestone was the only grave he hadn't read yet.

The fog wasn't helping, but even through the light mist he still saw him. Though
they should be allowed to use Luminos so he could banish the darkness and whatever beyond. At least they still had the street lights so if they really needed light, they'd just have to wait for them to turn on.

That a place of death could be so full of vegetate life that it threatened to consume it, doggedly continuing to assert its dominance, make something new from what lay here... A death for a life. Life for death.