Dead Love || Tom Riddle

Chapter VI - Pretty Girls

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Warning: sexual content

Rosie couldn't explain what had happened. The memory of Tom entering her mind had faded into an unsettling feeling about the professor. She worried for Aurelie who had detention with him for a month. Currently, the Black daughter was sipping a goblet of warmed cider watching Darcy have breakfast with her friends at the Slytherin table. Aberforth angered Rosie, she didn't understand why her friend was so infatuated with the seventh year. She was rude, classist, admittedly beautiful but nothing like the Hufflepuff. Aurelie crossed her arms and stood up, excusing herself. Rosie watched her figure disappear through the doorway of the dining room wall and Darcy running after her. 

"Aura!" She called out waving her hand. "Please, Aurelie!" Slowly, she turned around with crossed arms and a guilty frown. She looked at her shoes as Darcy ran toward her. "I have been trying to get your attention all week, Aura." 

"I know. I'm sorry. I just—" 

"You don't want to talk to me after what I did." Aurelie looked away. "It's fair. I shouldn't have..." She let out an exhausted sigh. "I'm sorry I didn't take you back to the dorm after I realized you were drugged. I was drunk and wasn't thinking right." Darcy brought her taller body against Aurelie's and stroked her cheek with a manicured nail. "I guess I just wanted to spend time with you."

Aurelie smiled softly, pushing her bangs out of her pink face. "It's okay. I know that you didn't mean any harm." 

"No, I shouldn't have done it. It was selfish." Darcy stroked her arm under her sleeve. "I just hope you can forgive me." 

Aurelie chewed on her lower lip and watched the guilt on Darcy's face. She knew Rosie would be upset, but she couldn't see the pure selfishness in the Slytherin's nature that her friend did. She did see her tempting black iris and soft lashes under her monolids,... her wide purple lips.

"Done. Easily." She let out a deep breath of air, "Oh! I'm so glad." 

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Tom studied Aurelie's every little movement in class and detention. Her eyes wandered across the room while she chewed on the caps of her muggle pens and braided little sections of her hair. Doodle in her notebooks instead of copying the lesson. He noticed her harmful little habits; when she pulled at the skin around her nails and lips and fisted her hands until her nails dug into the skin of her palms. 

On the second detention that week, Aurelie cast a silent charm that grew a thin vine of white buds around the stem of her ballpoint pen. She smiled to herself as the buds opened into lively blooms. 

"Aurelie," at the call of her name the vine withered and fell on the desk as a dead, gray stem.

"Sorry, Professor." Tom watched her head fall on the desk, and she released a heavy sigh ruffling her black bangs. 

"Do you know where your brother kept his research?" 

"No," she answered absentmindedly gazing out the window. "I didn't even know he was researching my curse." She turned her head toward her professor. "Didn't you see it? In his villa in Paris?" 

"Yes, but he moved he moved back to London in September. And I imagine took his discoveries with him." Her eyes drifted away to gaze again through the window. 

"Is it so important?" 

Tom leaned back in his seat. "He spent years traveling the West for this. He knew far more than we do."