Sacred Silence | A Tom Riddle Story

51: Roommates (Tom's POV).

Having Siobhan in his dorm for a week wasn't as much trouble as Tom thought it would be. She mostly slept, only waking up for small periods of time to eat and drink. Sometimes she asked him to read to her, which he did, resulting in her falling back asleep within minutes.
Her body had obviously taken a huge hit, but the potions and tablets he had made her take with every meal seemed to strengthen her a little more every day. It took him a while to get them correct, and he spent more time on it than he had initially planned.

It frustrated him how worried he had been when he saw her limp and lifeless body next to him in the chamber. How he had left everything - including the diary - on that wet floor and had immediately scooped her up to get her out of there. When he had taken a closer look, she looked white as a sheet, and her lips were dry and cracked.
In that moment, he was convinced she had died. It wasn't necessarily sadness or guilt that flooded his body, more so an overwhelming feeling of hatred for the world. Whenever he thought things were going great, it was taken away from him.

Luckily, Siobhan lived, and it looked like she would be back to her old self in a couple of days. That satisfied him. It meant his plan had worked from the first move to the last.

It felt like these last months had gone by incredibly fast. Being immortal had been a goal for a long time, and now that he had finally accomplished it, it was almost unreal.
He felt stronger than ever, his already inflated ego reaching an ultimate high. The only downsides he had noticed was, for one, that he was now completely unable to get warm. He had always been prone to getting cold hands, but they now remained that way no matter how long he sat in front of the fireplace. And it wasn't just his hands now, but his whole body.
Besides that, there was the bloodshot look his eyes now had. Another thing that he frequently had before, but that now seemed to have turned permanent.

Cold skin. Red eyes. Immortal. Seemed like a pretty good deal to Tom.

On day 3, when Siobhan woke up for dinner, she asked if she could go to her dorm to pick up a few things.
She was still swaying on her feet whenever she walked to the bathroom, and she couldn't focus on a book for more than a few minutes at a time.
Therefore, Tom had made her write down a list with items for him to gather in her room.

'Are you sure you'll be able to enter the common room? No other Ravenclaws stayed behind, so there is no one if you can't open it on your own,' she had said earnestly.

'Isn't the protection a riddle?' he had asked.
She nodded, pulling the sheets up to her chin. The way the dim light softened her face made him want to walk over and do unspeakable things to the girl. Images of his hands around her neck and goosebumps on her skin flooded his brain.

'I'm sure I'll be fine,' he replied crossly, ignoring his intrusive thoughts. 'It's my last name, after all.'

When he had reached her dorm (the riddle was a lot harder to answer than he would ever admit to Siobhan), he was stunned by the amount of clutter in her room. Some of it must belong to the girls she shared her dorm with because there was no way this was all hers.

He spotted her bed immediately by the high stack of books next to it that was being used as a nightstand. The top book, an old French mystery novel, had an unfinished glass of wine on it. The now sticky red residue reminded him of the bottle he had chosen to mix the Felix Felicis with, her favorite. He hadn't ever met someone who genuinely enjoyed red wine as much as Siobhan did.
Tom caught himself smiling at the sight, and immediately cursed under his breath for doing something so pathetic.

He collected a couple of books she had requested, her toothbrush, two sweaters, a pack of cigarettes, and her pajamas.
When he flicked through a couple of the books, he noticed there were almost as many annotations as there was original text. Arrows pointing out significant things, lines connecting sentences, small doodles in most of the corners. She tended to draw a small dandelion next to every page number.
A memory drifted back to him. Shiv, in their potions class a few months earlier, her hair in a ponytail, chuckling and saying: 'Name a better place to take notes.' He barely knew her back then.