Your indigo agony heals
Take this stupid halo off so you can see through my charade.
Indigo.
When he first saw her, he saw indigo. It dawned on him. Slowly crept its way inside of him and has not left ever since. It matched her Ravenclaw colors – the long scarf she had taken off after coming inside almost slid off her forearm.
He was an Enigma. Everything that was both right and wrong in this world – anchoring all that weight in his very body. A tide that was both calm enough to fall and right after to rise and crash. An everlasting storm taking everything with him in destructions route, without anyone even realizing it. He was going to take everyone down while he was going to rise and reflect everybody’s surprise off him, shining and glistening like a wrecked ship refusing to sink into the bottom of the ocean. He saw himself as the exception. What others may never be able to put into thoughts, he would make a reality. He would go against all odds and come out of the war untouched and stronger than ever, even if he was the wreckage, he would refuse to ever sink, rather find a loophole, and slide right through to come out as the sole victor.
He was confident and charming, others called him over-compensating and arrogant. Some claimed he was rightfully conceited, even if they could not quite describe why. Many spoke from a position of jealousy and envy because there was not much he was not able to do. He was top of the class, he was a prefect, he was well-known around the students, even from the other houses, and he was many teachers' favorite choice to pick if nobody else knew the answer. He was responsible and resourceful, that was what made it hard to badmouth him really.
It was human nature to feel irritated by something they did not quite understand, and Tom Riddle was far from being easily understandable or predictable. It was hard for others to make sense of his actions – he seemed normal until he did not.
He stared too long at times, not at everybody or just anybody, but if something caught his attention enough to awaken his curiosity he did not shy down from blatantly staring. He had this unspeakable right, the privilege of doing these things, without anybody being able to complain. If they did, they did it behind his back. They followed him as hushed whispers, making him even more powerful and alluring, building up his reputation to make new students keenly aware of his presence without him having to do much. He reeled in this, gave himself in, and enjoyed it but never expressed he did. It would be his tiny little secret – alongside many other little secrets.
One of his secrets had been her. At first at least. After a while, it wasn’t possible to treat her as yet another secret, because he needed everyone on board with his fixation. He needed everyone to understand that there were lines and walls between her and anybody else. Lines no one was allowed to cross unless he said so.
It started small – small enough to be a sick little secret unbeknownst to anyone else, even her.
When he saw her that day in October, it was like a lever had turned and changed everything. He had never really seen her before this. Not with the same eyes he was looking at her now.
She was usually in her own world, surrounded by her friends, so there wasn’t much to know about her prior.
She was simply a face in a crowd, but that evening, when Abraxas Malfoy was wasting his time teasing a few Ravenclaw students, she had stood there and looked at him with such disgust on her face, that he just couldn’t simply describe it. It was deep-rooted disgust and disapproval that was being reflected in her face, that Tom was unable to look away from. It was the look of someone who wasn’t just looking at a fellow student and hating his guts, it was like at that moment, she was stripping him naked, baring his whole black heart and sickened soul out to everybody around them, ripping into him like a person who knew more than she let on.
It felt like she had pointed him out during a witch trial, sealed his fate and the whole court had agreed. It sounded like her expressions could talk in a tongue, that no one but Tom was able to understand, and it made him shudder in a way he had never felt before.
And then she had opened her mouth to reveal poisonous words and wisdom beyond her years, asking him if he was ever thinking before talking if he had ever felt how he made the girls shake in disgust when he was passing by. She had expressed how foul his heart seemed and how the imagination of his hands near anybody of the other gender must have made them run and scrub at their skin like he was a bush of nettles chasing everyone away. She had sealed her acidic words with promises of hexes and jinks, following a quote by a philosopher Tom remembered but didn’t know until he sat down that same afternoon going through all those muggle philosophers, he at some point had the misfortune to learn about.
“You know nothing, you’re just a muggleborn with plain looks and empty threats.” Malfoy had said. Striking a chord within Tom that made him distrust Abraxas forever going forward.
“At least I know I’m wise by knowing I know nothing. I can swallow my pride and accept and admit it, yet you are so scared of being insignificant that you try to convince yourself you’re more than you will ever be. You’re just a shadow in somebody else’s light.”
With those words her fate had been sealed and thinking back Tom couldn’t help but have a little smile forming when thinking back to that exact moment. The way she was so oblivious to what she had done – truly an enjoyable memory.
He remembered his initial reaction too well. For the first time during that whole conversation, he had stopped to look at her. His little fighter, Madeleine. And he had really looked at her and really seen her. She was quick enough to notice and her eyes drifted into Tom's direction for the first time. Her anger vanquished. The sour expression on her face softened just to be replaced by a blank stare, a dull throbbing feeling spreading across her body, while a shiver ran down her spine, violent enough for her to visibly shudder as she was looking at the dark-haired boy.
Suddenly all of his thoughts had successfully encapsulated her knowing face and put it on a pedestal, prioritized that very image, and plastered it onto his every waking thought, reminding his overthinking mind, that she was there and would be there for eternity even.
He had used his influence and reputation to work against her futile attempts of escaping him. If she took another extra turn to avoid him in the hallways or a class they happened to have together, he made sure to meet her regardless. He would take the same extra turn or intercept her plans of skipping that class. In the beginning, it was never that extreme, though.
In the beginning, Tom liked to use his presence to remind her of him. He lingered too long, stared a little too long at her, or spoke with her in front of others, in order to establish their growing relationship. He had planted the seeds and only needed to water them to see them grow.
These scenes led to rumors and added whispers. He used his charm to be nice to her friends, put Malfoy on a tight leash far away from her and the other girls, and was the perfect gentleman around her, but she didn’t seem to budge. That’s when he knew, he had to take additional action.
And when he knew he was putting the cage down around her, almost capturing her, she slipped away from him. It seemed he wasn’t the only one with a plan.
Whenever he came closer, pulled another sneaky thing to get her to fold and bend into his will, she squirmed and thrashed around – it became an endless dance of cat and mouse.
After he memorized all her escape routes, she found new ones – one, where she was even able to take a detour to the main hall by finding a painting that was hollow on the other side and revealed a hidden hallway just for her to sneak through.
After he was able to take further action where he made sure no other chair was free but the one beside him in Slughorn’s class, she simply skipped the class by finding new ways to get into accidents. Most often than not these accidents involved Peeves, which led to Tom actually actively watching out for that wicked ghost, by appointing one of his little lackeys to follow Peeves around before Potions class.
Whenever he spotted her in the library he made sure to stay there or have someone watch her if he didn’t have the time to be there himself, until she made it her life mission to find new reading spots and have her friends bring her the books she needed.
And if one of those rare days, in which he was planning to finally tell her more about him, reveal just how dangerous he was so she stopped running, because there was no way she could escape him for eternity, were plaguing his mind, then he was set on finding her, stalking through the hallways and corridors like a madman with the blankest stare on his face and the most convinced and made up mind, that when he found her, he would make her pay and fold for the way she was constantly slipping from his grips. Yet, he never did that. He wanted to intimidate her into submission, into finally letting him have her, but he liked doing it from a distance, up until they graduated.
After Tom left Hogwarts, he admitted to himself that whatever this was, it was becoming a problem for him to focus on his plans. He had to have her, have her near, have her with him, have her so he could focus on his initial plans again, become what he wanted to become, and possibly have her by his side but whatever had started between them at Hogwarts, now that they were out of school, it had intensified and their cat and mouse game had updated itself into a special kind of mind games and torture.
For a while he had intercepted owls, flying to her or from her, until that stopped. After that he had many men on her back, hoping to find her location, but this resulted in being unfruitful. With any passing day, he became impatient. He was losing control and if there was one thing Tom hated, it was to not be in control of a situation he should be in control of. It was slowly driving him insane and that realization was beginning to make him way more dangerous than he intended to be. His controlled killings, his plans, and his growing influence all were but a step to fulfilling what was rightfully his, but with every passing day of her location being unknown, of her being in hiding, he was going down a route, that seemed to give him an edge and a deranged view on any woman that even slightly resembled her.
He started scouting for women who looked like her, who had that same soft expression, that same long, dark wavy hair and was intelligent enough to pass for her, at least for a split second, which was all the time he needed to get to her. He took and gave nothing back. He claimed and unclaimed them right after. He wanted them and discarded of them the moment he was stable enough to recognize it wasn’t her. And he did all of that over and over again until it became noticeable. Some were left completely unscathed and unharmed, others turned up dead and unrecognizable. A few were still missing because there was something about them, he couldn’t let go of immediately.
Yet, his soul, which was doomed to never love, was craving her. His Madeleine.
Yet, his body, which was becoming colder with the years passing by, wanted nothing but to be near her and it took not even a fool to see, that he was going absolutely insane from being deprived of her.