Sapphire
After only a few minutes and a poor attempt at invitation, the witch began to warm up to him.
The cabin’s hearth blazed with a brilliant tinge of apple green and Tom had reason to believe that the last owner must have had a quirk for adding pyrotechnic colourants to their flames.
To Muggles, floo powder might simply be seen as ash mixed with borax. Even he could admit that adding a bit of colour to the dead was a clever bit of morbid humour, coming from those who would never know or be worthy of immortality.
They sat opposite each other at a wooden table that had certainly seen better days over a century ago.
Bare and bereft of any dining essentials or served meals, save for the termites that feasted beneath, nothing had been prepared.
There was no imposing grandfather clock to pronounce the prolonged and eerie silence that settled between them.
Stubbornly, she had kept her mangled forearm glued to her side as he had wrestled her through the door. She was surprisingly strong for being a head shorter than him with a delicate, starveling build to match.
Like a child refusing to give up their toy, prying whatever delicious secret she had from her cold, living body made his wand itch for the Imperius Curse.
Nevertheless, with a resounding huff from her rosy lips and button nose, Tom decided to release her.
It was more fun to have stopped abruptly, waiting but a moment while she continued writhing, to flex his fingers out from that bruising grip and watch as she flailed against draughty air, thumping against dusty floorboards with a squeak that bounced across the cabin’s desolate bearings.
If he were stranded in the coldest reaches of the globe, without an ounce of magic to spare, he supposed he wouldn’t have been too worried about freezing to death.
The way she was glaring at him across the table would have surely set anyone else ablaze in a fire more intense and destructive than Fiendfyre.
Tom matched her with smoke and mirrors, appearing indifferent and unbothered with snake eyes, black as a void, but there was the subtlest twitch of intrigue betraying the absence of a blink.
Legilimency would be playing dangerously with that fire and while he was unconcerned with the spark of an explosion, he thought it better for her to conserve her energy.
Notwithstanding, there was also little doubt in mind that the witch could, and would, deflect him without the flair of dramatics she expressed now.
It was always so easy to identify Gryffindors when they so brazenly wore their anger and lack of control as a badge of honour.
The near absence of shame might have been admirable to many, but disgust was a response of second nature to him whenever he was exposed to such petulance.
It made it all the more infuriating to Tom that the most revered of them all was just as skilled as, if not more than, him at fooling everyone with the opposite of what was expected.
Just as a devil deluded into believing themselves to still be an angel, there was no greater poster child for hypocrisy and corruption than that red-headed professor who would watch him with arrant disdain.
Except, there was a clear difference amidst the smoke and mirrors.
Whereas Dumbledore’s sleight of hand involved deceiving everyone with the opposite of expectation, Tom’s sleight and dissimulation involved deceiving with the opposite of truth.
He’d almost be convinced that Dumbledore was here now, possessing this witch’s skin. As loath as he was to admit it, there was no denying that the canting ginger was an exceptional wizard.
Overtime, this loathing would ebb and flow until a drought remained as Tom had no interest engaging in that which he never believed in or considered applicable to him. Competition didn’t exist where Tom was involved.
Where magic was contested, Dumbledore may have been his equal. But, it was only a matter of time before he would fade into obscurity and all of Tom’s efforts would overshadow the greatest wizard of his generation.
The greatest trick of all is that there would be no one to replace him because Tom was not a replacement, and the thought of anyone replacing Lord Voldemort was so laughable as to be a joke that could only be heard by the deaf.
Tom didn’t need to prove himself or compete.
Time would always be on his side, but that swaggering egomaniac? In spite of his extended life, he would grow older still and eventually succumb to that Muggle disease of Death.
It was impossible, he knew, for Dumbledore to be here. How strange it would be for him to still care about the whereabouts of an old student at all after all these years.
Dumbledore was far from unaware, far from clueless, but to go to such great lengths at getting rid of a perceived threat after failing to do so in that cell of a room in a Muggle orphanage would have been unbecoming of him.
For behind the bravery of every Gryffindor was a greater stench of cowardice that coveted trait was fostered to conceal.
Still and all, it seemed the man would continue to haunt him as an unwitting thief of his future.
Still, he could see the old man reflecting in this young witch’s eyes, yet instead of piercing blue there was melting caramel, flashing poison green against the altered flames.
Quietly, he had unsheathed the treasure that was secreted.
In the middle of this moth-eaten table, like a gambling bid, he gingerly placed the diadem.
Its sapphire eye glinted a sickly grey and while she never once relinquished her fiery gaze or relieved that marring grip on her arm, there was a hint of questioning that he could see.
It was that curious little thing around her neck that sparkled with keener interest, the white sands of its hourglass resisting gravity and being suspended in time without so much of a single spin. The sort of “little thing” that Mr. Burke would have closed shop for and claimed early retirement.
The tiara’s silver was well-preserved by the grace of magic, yet even without, Tom was certain that this mysterious gold she possessed would never tarnish.