It is the thirty first of December, and the common room is mostly empty, save a measly faced third year, Rose, and himself. All orphans. Slughorn had thrown them a sad little Christmas dinner last week. After, he pulled him aside.
“Now, I shouldn’t be giving you this, but you only come of age once,” Slughorn had said, with a wink, handing him a bottle of Firewhiskey. “Ogden's finest. Tell anyone and I will deny it!”
With that, Slughorn departed the next day, clearly having a much better week than the rest of them. The bottle of Firewhiskey is left unopened, along with another, significantly more expensive bottle (courtesy of Malfoy), a box of Truffles (Rosier), pair of fancy cufflinks (Lestrange), a small pile of books and other presents on his nightstand. Tom isn't complaining. The sight of the girl on his bed, however, does irk him.
“I don’t suppose I’m about to get lucky now?" Tom drawls, sitting next to her. "Bit forward, even for you. But I won’t refuse if you’re offering.”
“Haha, very funny,” Rose says, dryly, not looking up from her book. “Looking at this nice little mountain of gifts, clearly you don’t need sex to get lucky.”
Rose is… complicated. She had turned up, at the start of their sixth year. And she had hated him. There was that brief period when he wanted to kill her. She tried to destroy the Diary. Oh, and she happened to be a time traveller from fifty years into the future. It's complicated.
“That book is useless, but I’ve found something interesting,” he says, handing her a bit of torn parchment he found inside said book.
Rose scrunches her nose as she reads it.
"It sounds stupid,"
"It does," he agrees. "But you don't have anything better to do today, do you?"
"It's cold outside," she complains.
The problem starts with the dreams. Tom starts dreaming, about flashes of green lights. Hunger. A dark little cupboard. Dreams he can't make sense of. He doesn't have any reason to worry about being locked in a cupboard. So why does he wake up, with his heart racing and an inexplicable sense of panic that wasn't his?
(He has a pretty good idea of what she dreams. She doesn't talk about his, and he hers. An unspoken agreement.)
They were sharing dreams. Worse, they were sharing emotions. He could feel what she felt, and that’s when he knows this was something far deeper. There is more than her being a time traveller, and, after a particularly bloody duel, he is forced to believe she knows as much as him.
This leads to a brief truce, where they agreed not to destroy any Horcruxes or kill each other. They were left chasing loose strings, like now, wading ankle deep on the shores of the Black Lake. Neither of them believe it works, but it's better than sitting inside the empty castle.
At least, that's what he feels. Rose has no qualms in telling him exactly, candidly, very colorfully, about how she feels standing in cold water.
“So, after drawing the runes, we need to put our wands into the water,” he says, checking the parchment.
“I’m not dropping my wand in the water.”
“Rose,” he says, exasperated. “It won’t work unless we show a gesture of surrender.”
“It won't work anyway because the Giant Squid is just a squid, not some immortal being. Are you sure you didn’t write that parchment to get me here and drown me?”
He drops his wand. “Now?”
She hesitates, before dropping her wand with a splash.
Nothing happens. She spitefully kicks the water in his direction.
The ritual was supposed to help the caster communicate with the Giant Squid, or, the “Great One”, as the book had claimed. The Squid was supposedly an immortal being, a priest, trapped in the Great Lake by the founders. It could apparently see into the future. It was a nice story.
He watches Rose gleefully fold the parchment into a boat. The afternoon sun makes her face flushed. His heart does that funny thing again.
They sit under the shade of the tree, in a lazy silence, watching the water wash away his runes.
Her hand brushes his, and he takes it, intertwining their fingers. Feeling her callouses. Marvelling how small it felt against his own.
It feels far more intimate than anything they've done. He brings her hand to his lips, placing a featherlight kiss. His thumb traces the freckles. He likes watching her reaction, how red she turns and her breath hitches. It doesn't change how he actually feels about her, he tells himself.
He's seen worse birthdays than this, he admits.
"Happy Birthday, Tom," she says, quietly, turning to him. He leans in, their lips brushing. Their fingers are still entwined.
(much later, long after the boy and girl depart, hand in hand, the water swirls of its own accord, despite the cold, still night. something emerges against the water. at the first light of sun, It returns back to the depths of the lake.)