Darkness and Devotion - A Tom Riddle Story

The Whispers

Evelyn had only been awake for a few hours but she was already ready for Halloween to be over. The sky was gloomy. Students were happily chatting about parties happening later in the evening. Pumpkins hung from the ceiling, their happy faces taunting her from where she miserably sat below.

She stirred her porridge with a sour expression on her face. She didn't want to eat it. She didn't want to eat anything. Her last meal was when Mattheo ate lunch with her. The boy seemed worried about her habits but she lied and said that she ate in between her classes. For some reason unbeknownst to her, she didn't want him to tell Tom. He probably didn't care anyway. Making sure that a seventh-year was eating three meals a day probably wasn't part of his commitment to take care of her, a commitment he only made because a brusque professor cornered him in a hallway while he was healing her broken rib.

But then why did he heal it? Probably all part of the act. It always was. Pretend to care about the girl with no parents, pretend to notice her in the back of the room, pretend that she mattered.

The only one that wasn't pretending? Mattheo. Ever since she had agreed to be his "family", he had hardly left her alone. Between listening to him tell her all about his friends—a group of pureblood Slytherins who were headcases by themselves—hearing him complain about his homework (apparently one assignment was one too many), and eating meals with him in the Great Hall, she hardly had any time for herself. Evelyn rarely spoke back to him but he didn't seem to care; it was like watching him talk to a brick wall. A wary yet bemused brick wall. Still, it meant that her routine—the thing helping her forget about the way Tom Riddle confused the life out of her—was disrupted by chocolate brown curls and a wicked grin. Her book—the one about a vampire stealing a woman to be his bride—sat mostly untouched by her bedside. Mattheo had even infiltrated her time in the library.

At first, she thought the boy was scared of his brother, constantly being with her once she allowed it—because, apparently, she was "almost as terrifying as Tom" with "a sense of darkness just like him", whatever that meant. It seemed that he and his friends were too scared to approach her because they thought she would hex them. To be fair, she might have once the shock wore off. The only thing that saved him from her telling him to beat it at first was just the fact that he called himself her cousin. Now... blimey, did she really like him now?

Evelyn had a feeling that the elder Riddle didn't ask Mattheo to spend every waking moment with her. The boy chose to be with her, treating her like the family she never knew she had. It was nice. It felt almost... normal.

Except today, Mattheo was nowhere to be seen. She wasn't surprised—he told her several days ago that he would be spending the holiday with his friends—yet she found that she was strangely disappointed.

Merlin, my only companion is a thirteen-year-old. A chatty, somewhat obnoxious thirteen-year-old who was impossible not to like. Well, impossible for everyone but Nora Rosier, whom Evelyn heard a lot about.

Now, she sat alone at the breakfast table, pushing around a bowl of pathetic-looking porridge while she waited for the day to be over.

Evelyn hated Halloween. It wasn't that the holiday was necessarily bad—she wouldn't know, she'd never celebrated it—but it did bring up bad memories of a young girl at the tender age of six learning how awful her existence was.

She was sitting in the drawing room while she waited for her grandmother to come and get her. It was Halloween, the night the Blacks held a ball for all of the other pureblood families. This was the first Halloween since Voldemort's demise, a reason to celebrate with lavish food and wine and adults who got too handsy with each other. Sometimes, they would find a muggle to torture, telling them that witches were real and that they must pay the price for their mockery. They always obliviated the victim after, though even a memory charm couldn't erase scars.