i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

XXVII

It didn't feel right to accept the ring, for many reasons, but Tom refused to let her return it. Besides, it would be a lie to say the idea of seeing— of talking to— Julius wasn't terrifyingly appealing.

Still, that one persistent, nagging thought remained that Tom had no idea what exactly he'd given up, regardless of what he'd said about his family. The stone in his ring was far more precious than he could have ever realized.

On the bright side, Ophelia was at long last confident in the fact that she wasn't just hallucinating. If Tom never had cause to mourn someone, of course the ring didn't effect him. It was a far greater relief than she would have liked to admit to know she hadn't finally lost her mind.

The flip side, of course, was that even if she wasn't actually crazy, she still certainly looked it whenever someone walked in on her in heated conversation with herself. Unfortunately, that wasn't even a theoretical issue. After getting a thorough dressing down from the Fat Lady, who couldn't have known Ophelia was talking to an apparition that may or may not have actually existed and wasn't actually calling her a treacherous, backstabbing rat who's crowning gift to humanity was the moment was she stopped wasting the rest of their oxygen.

In retrospect, Ophelia may have let her temper get away from her there, but Julius deserved it, even if it meant she had to avoid gaining access to the Gryffindor Common Room for the foreseeable future.

One could only listen to a nonstop stream-of-consciousness-esque attack on their person in quiet for so long. If she were a better person, Ophelia knew she would have let Julius continue on in his rant in obliging silence— she had killed him after all, and if that didn't make you slightly deserving of verbal abuse than nothing did— but she wasn't a better person. For so long she'd been torn to shreds inside from the guilt of doing the worse thing one man could do to another. Well, no longer.

She couldn't say when it happened, exactly. At some point she just got to thinking: "If I could go back and do it over, would I?" The answer to that was startlingly simple: no. It didn't require even a second's thought or hesitation. Of course she'd kill him. It went beyond reason and logic, rooted more in instinct than anything else.

If it came down to it and she was faced with the decision to choose anyone over her uncle, she'd choose her uncle every time. Julius tried to kill Grindelwald. She killed Julius. The math was so easy, she never needed to pause to calculate it.

That wasn't to say she yet agreed with her uncle. On anything. She didn't need to to know she didn't want him to die.

The upside of arguing with Julius, however, was that if she wasn't in the mood to talk it out she could just slip the ring into her pocket. She never ran the risk of not having the last word, even if he possibly— maybe— deserved it more than she did.

Why listen to him at all? Was she a masochist? Some kind of glutton for punishment? If only. She simply liked to see him, to memorise his face and remember details she'd forgotten about him over the passing of time.

And, well, yes. Punishment did play a small part in it all, if only for selfish reasons. Being praised for killing Julius never sat right with her, despite knowing she'd do it again if need be. Being yelled at was refreshing, almost. No one liked being put in their place, but after so long a part of her felt absolved by it.

So after the "incident" with the Fat Lady, Ophelia only acknowledged Julius outside the castle, far from any portraits or persons capable of overhearing. Did he appreciate being ignored most hours of the day? Yes, actually. It gave him more time to rant uninterrupted, though she did have to remind herself to take the ring off before bed. She made the mistake of forgetting to that first night and to say the result was unpleasant was an understatement. Julius wasn't stupid. He knew outright shouting in her ear would just provoke Ophelia into removing the ring from her finger. No, he talked until just before she was fully awake and then lapsef into innocent silence, so she'd think she'd been roused by natural causes. His game ended by the third time, but at that point it was too late. It was nearly morning and she was abominably sleep deprived.