Rosie ⎮ Tom Riddle

Forty One

Albus

  She was gone and her final cold breath was all that was left of her. Something about the unsettling temptation of locking himself inside the dark void that was his mind tapped at Tom's soul every second that passed in the house without her. Hands over his mouth, eyes at the floor, face sleepless of nights upon nights and heart shrunken in his chest into nothing more than a prune of what she had made it; He might've just died right along with her. 

  He leant back, sat on her side of the bed, sheets tucked and duvet still messy from where she had gotten up that fateful morning. He sat there inhaling her sent, his eyes closing as he swallowed down hard on words that he would never again get to say to her. 

  Tom moved a hand down to the black suit he wore, brushing past the pocket that he knowingly kept a photo of her in but couldn't bring himself to look at again today. He stood up tidily, his mind begging him to turn back, to imagine her, asleep and safe, right where he was just sat. 

  But he knew that looking back couldn't change anything. It wouldn't change the fact that he had been the one to kill her. He could imagine Dumbledore in his office soaking in the irony that he had gone there to end her, but her own husband had managed to do it before he had.  

  Tom had never hated himself before but now it was such a prominent emotion in his mind that it was overbearing. The constant headache of consciousness taunting him every time he dared to think of her. 

  When he apparated the sky was aptly grey, thick clouds swirling above as if reflecting the turmoil in Tom's heart, and the loss of the moment. The wind whispered through the trees pressed against the inward side to the scene of the cliff, carrying the scent of rain and freshly turned earth.

  The robes over his suit billowed around him, the fabric heavy, and he knew then, in the midst of the dark clothing he saw in front of him, that he would do anything to see Rosalie in a dress of flowers. 

  He could hear reverberating through his heads the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks below the mountainside, and Tom watched from afar, his appearance noticed by no one as he looked down the kill, grass as grey as the sky as people huddled on its coldness around the sickening sight of a coffin.

  It had only been days since he had last seen her smile, since he had watched every warmth suddenly drain from her face by his hand without even the tiniest shred of regret or hatred for him.  It had only been days. But it felt like an eternity. Her last breath seared into his mind, the flash of green light, the sudden silence, the way the world seemed to shatter around him.

  On an instinct he felt himself drawn to the coffin, her body supposedly inside though it didn't express any warmth as it once did. The light steps down close to the small crowd of people only seemed to be heard by a woman on the outskirts who turned to watch him approach. His hair waved in the wind, his face bereaved and harsh, his robes brushing past him.

  Tom felt numb as he got loser, as if part of him had died with her, not just because of the horcrux but because of the very loss of her soul on this tainted world. The love they shared, the life they had planned, the son she had carried—it was all gone, ripped away in a moment of cruelty and fate.

  Lily's scream broke through his thoughts, sharp and filled with fury. "What the hell are you doing here?" Her voice was raw, trembling with anger as she stepped forward, her eyes blazing with hatred. She parted from the crowd to stand in front of him, preventing him to let him get any closer.