A/N: This chapter was betaed by rambkowalczyk. Praise her!
It has a Character Death in it, but one that doesn't really count because said Character is already dead in the series.
Thanks for R&R!
Chapter 15 : Coincidence
The sheets of parchment were still tumbling through the air.
Tom was in a girl’s bathroom, but he didn’t care. He had been here before and he would come here again. He was the Lord of Hogwarts. He was the Heir of Slytherin. He had entered the Chamber of Secrets and unleashed the King of Serpents. Now he was not only a lord by means of anagrams, but lord by his own deeds.
Still, the sheets of parchments were floating to the ground around him, like the yellow leaves of a tree in fall. Time had come to halt, as if somebody had disturbed its steady flow.
The light falling into the bathroom through the high, glass-paned windows was unnaturally bright. It highlighted every shape in the room and was brightly reflected by the puddles of water on the grey stone floor and blinded him with its pure brightness. The image of these few seconds, their dazzling brightness and the sound of rustling paper would forever be burned into his memory.
The parchment fell into the water, swimming on the surface like square water lilies. They didn’t belong to him, those sheets, and the ink blurring on the parchment wasn’t his, either. He had seen a glimpse of the chubby fingers which had written those words...
The silence was short and perfect. For a tiny moment, when all the sheets had fluttered to the ground, the girl’s bathroom was as quiet and sombre as a cathedral.
Then the door of the stall creaked once more. It startled Tom out of his awe, and time was moving forward restlessly once more.
“Go home! Hide!” he hissed at the King of Serpents. The basilisk raised its blunt head menacingly, but it didn’t dare to look at its master, for the deathly stare would have killed the Heir. It slithered to the hidden entrance of the Chamber of Secrets, hissing to Tom in parseltongue and then slipped away, to the bowels of Hogwarts. Finally they were alone: Tom and the dead girl.
Tom stared at the creaking, swinging door. He could just walk away now. It would be safer. She had shrieked one short piercing wail before she died. Somebody might have heard it.
But the door was still swinging, beckoning him closer.
He walked up to it like a man in a trance, yet carefully avoiding the puddles of water, like a child who avoids stepping onto the dark stones in the pavement. The light from the outside made them as bright and reflective as mirrors.
The door had stopped swinging when Tom reached it. He had seen her standing right there, when she had opened the door of the stall. She looked out with her owlish eyes behind thick glasses to see who was making all that noise. Her wet lips formed a surprised ‘o’ and then she shrieked, just once, and not very loudly. The basilisk looked straight into her eyes, and she dropped backwards with a dull noise, like a bag of wet clothes falling to the floor.
Tom raised his hand and touched the wooden door. It was as warm under his touch as a living thing, warmed by the bright sunshine falling onto it. Quietly, he opened it.
He could still imagine her as she fell backwards in a graceless lump, vanishing behind the creaking toilet door. He replayed the scene in his mind: she heard him talk to the King of Serpents. He remembered jumping slightly when he had heard her annoyed complaint from one of the stalls. Then she had ripped the door open, presumably to yell at him.
“This -!” she only had managed to bring out in a high-pitched whine. Then she was startled, letting go of her papers, which still fluttered around in the air even when she was dead a second later. The basilisk had turned around to look at her. Killing her with one look from his deathly eyes.
For the very first time since Tom had found the Chamber of Secrets, the basilisk had killed a person. Salazar Slytherin had hidden the deathly beast in the Chamber so that his Heir would hunt down the Mudbloods that infested the Hogwarts. Tom had tried to do this and caused quite a wave of panic throughout the school when one Mudblood after another was petrified. But this girl was not petrified. He knew that she was dead, although he couldn’t tell why. It was the first time they had killed.
But Tom had not thought that she would die so slowly. Because that one moment seemed to last forever, when she looked at them in surprise mingled with fear and he had looked equally surprised at her. He hadn’t expected her to be there. It hadn’t occurred to him that he would look into her eyes while she died. He could actually see someone dying “ not just dead.
He also had not expected that death would look so graceless and mundane. A fat little girl in a toilet stall, her pimpled cheeks on the wet tiles: that was not the noble work of heroes.
Tom knew he should leave as there was nothing more to do here in the bathroom. People would be coming, eventually, even if they hadn’t heard her scream. The Chamber of Secrets was closed. There were no clues of his presence here to erase. Why then was he still here? What did he want to do?
He just wanted to look at her a little more, to see if he would find the greatness he was missing.
She wasn’t just ugly; she was horrible. In spite of that he found her more pleasant to look at than all those posing, painted, pretty witches who were constantly around him. She was so quiet. She would never annoy him with any superficial drivel; never would she cling to him that way.
Her image in his mind would always be ready whenever he wanted to look at it. He would be able to confide in a girl like her because she’d never ever tell a soul. She wouldn’t bother him with scruples and emotions, for she had none. She was already as cold as a stone. This girl he pictured in his mind was her and not yet her, it was only a figment of his imagination and yet he felt close to her. But it had always been like that: his only friends were imaginary friends.
What he saw in her was something greater than a dead body on wet tiles. He knew her death had more meaning than met the eye. Just like there was more to him than met the eye. When people looked at her, they saw only a plump girl with lank dark hair with pimples on her face and glasses in need of repair on her nose. When people looked at him, they saw just a boy from an orphanage, a meaningless Half-Blood.
He wasn’t sure in what way they both had more meaning, and now he knew why he wanted to stay just a little while longer: to find out what all of this really meant.
Tom kneeled down next to her, carefully not touching the dirty ground. He pushed at her shoulder and she sagged to the right side. Why was she important?
Because she was the first Mudblood the Heir of Slytherin killed, a ready voice inside him supplied.
But was she even a Mudblood? Her death had been but a coincidence. It could have been anyone, lying there on the floor. It could have been him...
He pictured himself, limp and cold on a floor like this, his legs and arms at odd angles, his black hair spilled over his forehead, his eyes closed “ or perhaps open and unseeing, nothing but a coincidence in world without meaning.
A coincidence without meaning ...
Tom froze.
For a moment he saw clearly why he and she were alike, and it was like falling into darkness. And then he bolted up, dashing through the room. He ran through the puddles, slipped on the wet parchment, caught himself and ran on. The light from outside blinded him and the banging of the toilet door was like a thunderclap, like the judgmental voice of fate behind him as he left the bathroom, and still in his ears for hours to come.
From that day on, Tom Riddle’s Boggart held the shape of a dead body on a wet tiled floor.