Darkness and Devotion - A Tom Riddle Story

The Lake

Flying with angels. So why did it feel like she was so low?

Their little dove. So why did it feel like she was alone?

She was alive. So why did it feel like she was dead?

Evelyn sat there in the mud for hours. Dawn remained at the edge of the horizon and the oil lamps nearby burned low and yet she didn't care. Somewhere in the back of her mind, Evelyn knew that she was cold. She knew that she was cold and dirty, starving and thirsty, and, above all, exhausted and in pain. Yet she didn't care. She just stayed in front of the grave that was meant to be hers and waited for it all to swallow her whole.

She was tired. My god, she was tired. Tired of living this half-life, a life burdened by fear and pain and loss. A life where her only childhood memories consisted of harmful hands in the corner of the bedroom. A life where her only happiness came in the form of a man who killed as if it were nothing, a man who probably would protect her from anything, even if the most dangerous being was him. A life where her family lay six feet under the dirt while she was first to be above it, desperately wishing she were there with them.

What would it be like to be with them again? What would it be like to hold her mother's hand for the first time, to look into those light blue eyes and pretend as if she had been looking into them her whole life? What would it be like to be wrapped in her father's arms as he told her the stories Sirius had told her? What would it feel like to be loved like that?

Evelyn always wondered how things would have been if her father had lived past seventeen. Now, she would always wonder what it would have been like if her mother only knew how often her daughter visited this exact graveyard, wishing she could join the only family she had left.

It was crazy how life was sometimes. We measure our moments in "befores" and "afters". Before her grandmother hit her for the first time and after every strike since. Before she went to Hogwarts and after. Before she met Tom and after him.

But that was the thing.

Evelyn didn't get either a before or an after with her parents. All she got was a life without them, wondering what it would have been like to just have a few moments of unconditional love.

All her life, Evelyn had been told that it would pass. The grief would pass. The pain would pass. The loss would pass. "Eventually," they said, "You will hardly remember how you didn't have a mother or a father."

But they were wrong.

They didn't realize what it was to feel a weight on her chest that was so heavy despite the fact that she felt nothing but empty. They didn't know what it was to have all this torment tearing up inside of her, to know what it was like to carry this sort of thing for the entirety of her life as if she weren't just a girl who couldn't bear to feel it all on her on. They didn't know what it was to wish she had a mother and a father, to have someone wiser to run to when things became hard. They didn't know what it was like to wish that someone cared about her enough to answer her pleas. She talked to the gods—to any that would listen to her pleas for companionship and some semblance of love—but the sky was empty and the graves were full.

They didn't know what it was like to reach out and only grasp air instead of fingers. They didn't know what it was like to reach out anyway knowing that there was only air but wishing that, for just a brief moment, something else would be there too.

They didn't know what it was like to be so broken that she wasn't even sure what parts of her were left. Just a shell of a daughter. A shell of a dove.

Evelyn stared at that small teddy bear. Its ear was almost torn off and years of wind, dirt, and rain had not been kind to it. She supposed it was brown with a white stomach at one point but that point was long ago.