i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

XVIII:

Tom rounded the corner, moving faster at the sound of muffled, ear-grating laughter. He wasn't sure if he'd care normally— nothing was inherently wrong with laughter— but his gut told him something was wrong. Very wrong. The feeling had been growing in the pit of his stomach all morning and needling at the back of his mind, though he couldn't for the life of him he couldn't pinpoint the source.

He slammed open the door to the woman's lavatory, not caring about what it looked like to passerby's.

"There you are," he breathed.

Ophelia looked up in alarm, her hair disheveled and silent tears snaking their way down her face, as though she didn't even know they were there. She lurched back from where she'd been huddled on the ground at the base of the sink, but seemed to slip, and  collapsed sideways. She didn't get back up.

It was obvious what she'd slipped on and it wasn't water, despite a certain ghost's very best efforts to flood the whole floor. Blood.

Tom crossed the room in a few short strides, ditching his bag somewhere along the way.

"Go away, Tom," she muttered wearily, the few words seeming to take all her energy. "In case you haven't noticed, I'm avoiding you."

"What have you done?" he demanded, looking around wildly for the source of the blood, for any wound that could explain it.

"Oh, I'd check her arm," Myrtle contributed with a giggle, floating dreamily out of a stall behind him.

Although Tom didn't acknowledge her gleeful taunts, he slid back the sleeves of Ophelia's robes, ignoring her weak attempts to bat him away. The torn fabric stuck like still-wet glue to her skin and so much blood covered the actual wound he almost missed the fact that there wasn't just one puncture but two. He flipped it over to examine the other side— probably a bit too roughly in his growing panic, because she flinched— and found another matching wound going the opposite direction. Furthermore, just above them, in the few spots that weren't coated with blood, the skin bloomed into a kaleidoscope of blues and purples, greens and yellows.

She inhaled sharply through her nose. "Could you not?"

He got the impression she was going for annoyed, or even sarcastic, but the fight just wasn't there.

"Who?" he heard himself ask. It wasn't the time for it- he was wasting precious seconds- but he needed to know. "Who did this to you?"

The anger rising in his chest was both simultaneously quashed and multiplied when Myrtle giggled again. "I found her like this, all alone. It was absolutely dreadful."

"OUT!" he snarled. "GET OUT!"

Splashing from one of the stalls alerted him to the ghosts departure, but he didn't look away from Ophelia. He couldn't.

He didn't know what to do. She was bleeding out too fast, turning the area around them where Myrtle had flipped on all the faucets a deep shade of pink.

"Go away, Tom," Ophelia repeated, softer than before. "There's nothing you can do. Even you... cannot fight death."

"Open your eyes," he ordered, shaking her harder. She needed to get to the nurse immediately, before she lost too much blood. If she hadn't already. "Stop talking nonsense and tell me who did this!"

"I can't do it anymore, Tom," she whispered, not paying him any heed. "I tried, but I can't."

"Can't what?" he asked desperately, as he pulled her into his arms, one arm under her knees, the other at mid-back and tried to stand up.

She fought him weakly, finally wriggling out of his grip.

"I chose you over Myrtle, a girl you'd accidentally got murdered and we both knew it, I chose you over Hagrid, a child with no one else to protect him, and let him take the blame for a death he had no part in. I chose you, and I can't live with myself." Her voice hitched at random points as she struggled to breath, yet she plowed on. "I can't keep lying for you, but I'm also too much a coward to turn you in. I can't live like this... I can't live like this, and it's all my fault..."