Rosie ⎮ Tom Riddle

Thirty Seven

Futile

6 Months Later - 1948

  After so many years of a life lived so dangerously and under constant threat, it seemed downright domestic for Rosalie to be shopping in the town square of Biéré on the Sunday markets. She trailed her fingers over the artichoke she was looking at, feeling for any impurities hidden in the indents and layers.

  She held a hand over her stomach, stifling in the thirty-degree heat that even the thin dress she wore couldn't help her. Rosalie tried to ignore the lingering feeling in her chest, playing it off to be the discomfort of the sub-saharan-like weather.

  Rosalie placed the artichoke down and picked up another, something about the brownness tinged around each layer put her off from the last. She might've been taking too long at the stand but she couldn't find it within herself to care. Passers-by took note of her hand on her pregnant stomach, each wondering where her husband was.

  Rosalie also would've liked to know, but after living with Tom for another half a year she had learnt to trust blindly that which she couldn't understand. The importance of it was that she knew he was safe somewhere, escalating new plans for the takeover of the ministry. And the further Rosalie got along in pregnancy, the less involved he felt she needed to be.

  She was fine with that, knowing she needed more rest now than ever. But it still felt a little useless to be here, planning what to have for dinner when there was clearly more to their life than just that. But ambition doesn't bode well with vulnerable states, and Rosalie was clever enough to know she was vulnerable and held something that a lot of people would like to get rid of.

  So when the tickling feeling at the back of her neck of someone watching her persisted, she placed down the second artichoke and turned herself around to look over the other side of the waist-high stall.

  Blue eyes locked with hers and suddenly anything that she could ever say or feel couldn't explain the gut punch in her stomach. Those eyes that once brought her a feeling of safety, or perhaps on occasion one of pity, now only had her subdued.

  "Rosalie." Dumbledore greeted from above across the vegetable stand. She could only see him from the shoulders up, which alarmed her in a way she hadn't felt before. Motherly instinct had her clutching her stomach, a dry spit in her mouth as she blinked at him.

  He looked at her with the same view, though not as worried that she would throw a curse at him.

  "Tom knows where I am." Rosie said, her words picked carefully and sparingly.

  Albus pinched his eyes together, trying to understand this new look on her. Glowing. Happy. Devoted. His eyes must've been deceiving because this wasn't how he had pictured her over the past few months. How could she be, when she had chosen wrong; chosen love over the rest of the world when the rest of the world had all the love she wanted and more.

  "I'm not here to hurt you." Dumbledore said so simply that Rosie couldn't believe it.

  "I'm just here to talk," he spoke and the threat vibrated in her ears.

  "Then talk." She said quickly, her eyes wide, her skin now cold rather than hot.

  "You act as though I'm a monster," Dumbledore said, his voice as flat and calm as the final wave passing over the Mediterranean, leaving a serene stillness in its wake.

  Rosie looked at him, watched the people walk past him with no idea who he was. A man with so much power was also no one at the same time. The sunlight danced on his shoulders as the covers along the streets of the market brushed against the wind.