Death in the mask

      Tom landed next to the group of Slytherins, in the empty spot on the bench at the long dark wood table. His classmates were finishing their meal, while the girls on the opposite side had already eaten and were now quietly whispering about something. He quickly piled some roast onto his plate before the nimble elves decided to clear away the food. The dishes were already almost empty, with just a few chicken legs or the remains of vegetable ragout left here and there.       “You took a while,” Zabini remarked, sitting at the end. “Did you get lost in the castle?”       “A little. But the main thing is I made it in time,” Tom nodded. He began eating his lunch at maximum speed — thanks to his difficult childhood he could chew quickly. Of all things, a nice stroll with Potter was certainly not something to tell the Slytherins about.       Feeling someone’s gaze, he raised his eyes from his plate. The blonde Daphne Greengrass tried to pretend she hadn’t been looking at him, and whispered something quietly into Pansy’s ear. The two girls giggled in unison, then Pansy, tucking a black strand behind her ear, leaned toward Daphne’s wrist, almost burying her nose in it. She began tracing something on her friend’s skin with a quill, periodically dipping it into an inkwell in front of them. She stuck her tongue out a little in concentration.       “What are they doing?” Tom asked, briefly pausing in his hurried work with the fork.       “It’s indelible ink from the Weasley twins,” Theodore, sitting behind Blaise, answered. “It shimmers in different colours. Looks like the girls have adapted it to do tattoos. How long does it last, Daphne?” he called out to their classmate.       “Almost a week, until the magic runs out,” she replied. “I tried it over the holidays. It doesn’t wash off with soap and water, so you have to draw very carefully.”       “It’d be great to write something on Potter’s forehead,” Malfoy mused dreamily, propping his head on his fist. “And make sure it doesn’t come off…”       Rising in his seat, Nott appraised the drawing across the table. He snickered, “Tom, they’re copying your Rune necklace!”       “Hey, so what?” Daphne objected angrily. “Professor Black said it’s perfect. Tom, you don’t mind, do you?” She batted her eyelashes innocently.       “Go ahead, use it as much as you like,” he shrugged, finishing the roast. He had timed it perfectly — the food vanished from the plates as soon as he set down his fork.       “Who are you trying to attract, Greengrass?” Zabini smirked, lazily eyeing the girl with his dark eyes.       “Don’t worry, not you,” she haughtily lifted her nose. “And it’s none of your business anyway,” she examined the result of Pansy’s work as her friend straightened up, and for some reason quickly glanced at Tom.       “We have a free period now, then Potions,” Nott looked at his schedule. “Shall we go to the common room?”       “I wanted to stop by the library, start on the essay for Snape,” Tom got to his feet.       “It’s not due for another week though…” Malfoy languidly remarked. “We’ll start in six days.”       “You do as you like, but I’m used to doing it early,” Tom grimaced.       “If you get lost, ask the ghosts or paintings for directions,” Nott called after him as Tom headed for the exit, leaving the satiated buzz of students behind. In response, he just nodded.       He could walk to the library blindfolded on a moonless night, but the others didn’t need to know that. He wondered if the sections and shelves inside had changed over these fifty years, or if he could still find his way around from memory. The smell was surely still the same, that beloved scent of paper, printer’s ink, and glue.       Tom had already walked halfway along the spacious, sunlit corridors when a vaguely familiar girl’s voice carried from behind. At first he paid it no mind, but as it drew nearer, the speech grew louder, ringing with irritated notes, so he couldn’t help but listen.       ”…we need to set everything straight right away. Say it to his face, and if he’s deliberately provoking you, we’ll deal with it on the spot!”       “No, Ginny, stop! I don’t want any scandals.” He recognized Granger’s voice.       “Sometimes you can’t avoid them. Who else will stand up for you on this, my friend, if not me? The guys will just laugh.”       “Hey, Riddle!”       Tom slowed and glanced back at the call, raising an eyebrow in surprise. It was now obvious they had been talking about him, and judging by the tone, it smelled of an argument. How ill-timed were all these confrontations. The girls hurried to catch up with him; the redhead looked quite furious, a true witch with wild hair and blazing eyes, while Granger seemed a little guilty. As they drew nearer, however, she tossed her head and resolutely pursed her lips, and her face took on a stubborn expression.       “What the hell, Riddle?” the Weasley girl started right off, eyes flashing. “Suddenly appears out of nowhere, bothering people! What are you trying to prove, your own awesomeness? Why are you harassing Hermione?”       “I’m not harassing anyone,” Tom replied as politely as possible. “But if you wish, let’s talk. What exactly is your grievance?” He addressed Granger, pointedly ignoring the quarrelsome redhead.       “The point is you’re doing it on purpose!” she exclaimed indignantly. “You’re doing everything you can so I don’t earn points for our house!”       “Or maybe it irritates you that I’m earning more points than you?” Tom asked insinuatingly, carefully scrutinising the angry girl’s face.       He probably shouldn’t exacerbate the conflict, but anger grew inside, smouldering deep in his chest, melting his self-control, and he couldn’t stop himself. How dare some Mudblood compare herself to him, even try to prove her supposed superiority? A stupid girl who understood nothing of real magic, limited to textbooks. He wanted to show her the place she deserved, grovelling somewhere at his feet. But he had to keep himself in hand in public. Tom slowly inhaled through his nose in an attempt to calm down.       “If not for you, I would have earned them!” Granger spat out, narrowing her eyes. Her nostrils quivered indignantly. “You’re cutting off every opportunity!”       “Or maybe you wouldn’t have,” Tom forced out, eyeing her coldly. “Maybe the professors are tired of your textbook parroting, since that’s all you’re capable of?”       Granger choked on her outrage. The Weasley girl took a step forward and angrily hissed:       “You arrogant git! You don’t know Hermione at all, you have no right to say that!”       “I think I can say whatever I want. Especially if it’s the plain truth,” Tom cut her off sharply. “And in your place, I wouldn’t start insulting someone you know nothing about,” he venomously repeated her own phrase.       The redhead yanked out her wand and aimed it right at his face:       “Are you asking for me to fix up that smug mug of yours with a bat-bogey hex?!” she cried angrily.       “Ginny, don’t!” Granger gasped, her eyes widening in fright. She grabbed her friend’s wand arm, trying to pull it aside.       “Listen to your friend, Weasley, she has a tad more brains than you,” Tom ground out through his teeth. As a precaution, however, he stealthily pulled out his wand from his bag behind his back. “Don’t bring us to sin, I have no intention of fighting a girl. Put your wand down from my face and let’s talk calmly. Granger, you understand that you should stop her? Or are you also a mediocre prefect, completely unable to maintain discipline?” he contemptuously threw out. The redhead exhaled indignantly and stepped forward, pushing away the hand of her friend who was trying to hold her back.       “My my, the girls are already cornering Riddle in the hallways. You’re quite the slick guy to get jumped on your first day,” Malfoy’s haughty voice drawled from behind Tom. He glanced over his shoulder to find Draco Malfoy lazily approaching, flanked by Crabbe and Goyle. “Too bad it’s just a Mudblood and a blood traitor… We should think up a punishment for them,” he smirked, rubbing his prefect badge with his thumb. “Or should we teach them manners right here?”       The goons chuckled nastily, pulling out their wands.       “Draco, don’t, I’ve got this under control,” Tom evenly replied. “Miss Granger and Miss Weasley were just leaving.”       At night and in private, he wouldn’t have held back, he would have taught the girls manners himself, especially with an unregistered wand on hand. He would have enjoyed watching the redhead screaming and writhing on the floor under his Cruciatus, then modified her memory afterwards. But a fight with Gryffindor girls in broad daylight in the middle of the hallway was decidedly not in his interests.       Granger, correctly assessing that the balance of power was not in their favour, pulled her friend back by her robes. Her tense gaze darted between Malfoy and Tom and back. Weasley, having angrily eyed the reinforcements from under her brows, began reluctantly lowering her wand.       “Ginny? Hermione? What’s going on here?” Potter and his redheaded friend came pounding in from the adjoining corridor. Quickly taking in the scene and wands in Ginny’s and the Slytherins' hands, they also drew their weapons.       “Are you threatening my sister?!” Ron Weasley bellowed. Potter raised his wand toward Malfoy, warily glancing at Tom. Tom sighed in irritation: it seemed all his attempts to build rapport with the boy were about to go down the hippogriff hole.       “Let’s not exacerbate the conflict, lower our wands and go our separate ways,” he suggested in a deliberately even tone, raising a placating hand in warning.       “How dare you dictate what we do?!” Ginny shrieked, clearly emboldened by the sudden appearance of defenders, and raised her wand again. “Jerkfaces, every last one!”       “Ginny, Riddle’s right,” Potter gently touched the redhead’s shoulder. “Maybe we should just…”       Growing tired of the overly wordy ponderings, in his view, Crabbe stepped forward, aligning himself with Tom, and smirked as he raised his wand at Potter.       “Diffindo —!” he began, but Tom sharply lashed his wand in the goon’s direction.       He didn’t even have time to think about what he was going to do, and the next second Crabbe shrieked in pain as his arm jerked to the side as if struck by an invisible whip. The cutting spell went wide, just grazing Harry’s shoulder bag, slitting the fabric. Textbooks thumped heavily to the floor. Crabbe dropped his weapon and grabbed his arm, whimpering piteously.       “Why you —!” Goyle cried out, turning his wand on Tom. But in the next moment, black shadows darted at him with an ugly high-pitched squeaking, several bats latching onto the Slytherin goon’s face, clinging to him with leathery wings. He moaned dully, began spinning in place, trying to rid himself of the pesky creatures beating their wings against his face. Draco Malfoy, staring at his incapacitated henchmen in shock, also reached into his pocket for his wand.       “Don’t!” Granger shrieked, but Ron Weasley had already swung at Malfoy. Tom nonverbally Expelliarmused the redheaded Gryffindor. The wand flew from his hand, clattering along the floor with a loud high ringing.       “What is going on here?!” Professor McGonagall came flying out of the adjoining corridor. She surveyed the scene with outrage, her rectangular spectacles sternly flashing. Tom slowly lowered his wand, Potter and Malfoy following suit.       “They started the fight first, Professor!” Ginny indignantly cried out.       “Actually, it was you who decided to make a scene, Miss Weasley,” Tom coolly reminded her.       “I don’t care who started it first, fighting is prohibited at school!” McGonagall cut them off sharply, pursing her lips, and waved her wand: “Finite!”       The bats finally disappeared from Goyle’s face, he blinked in confusion, trying to understand what was happening.       “You should have kept yourselves under control and resolved the conflict through negotiation. Miss Granger, I did not expect this from you! Ten points from each, forty points total from Slytherin and Gryffindor. Everyone back to your common rooms immediately!”       Hermione groaned softly at the loss, but summoned her friend’s wand, grabbed both Weasleys by the elbows, and dragged them off down the corridor. Malfoy, scowling at Tom in displeasure, collared Crabbe and Goyle and shoved them in the opposite direction. Potter crouched at McGonagall’s feet and began gathering his ink-soaked textbooks off the floor. Tom, glancing at him briefly, turned and headed after Malfoy. It was unwise to defy the angry witch’s order and head to the library in front of her, and he no longer felt like it — anger boiled in his blood, his fingers trembled, and his thoughts were far from studying. It seemed his attempts at outreach with the Gryffindors had not only been reset to zero, but gone into the negative, as had his relationships with his Slytherin classmates.       

***

      “So what the hell was that you pulled?!” Malfoy fumed, pacing around the Slytherin common room. The younger students, sensing the smell of infighting, had quickly vanished in different directions. Lips pressed tightly, Tom leaned against the stone wall. With arms crossed over his chest, he intently watched his classmate pacing the room. “We were trying to cover your back, yet you attacked one of your own?!” the boy flung out his arms theatrically.       “You were trying to fight with girls,” Tom said coldly. “I could have resolved the conflict myself.”       “Of course you could have!” Malfoy sneered sarcastically. “I saw you already had your wand behind your back!”       “That was just a precaution, I can talk down to a couple girls. But you dragged me into your feud with the Gryffindors.”       “You’re in our house now and you should stand up for its honour!” Draco declared, boring into Tom with an angry gaze. “Slytherins always support each other!”       “As a prefect, you should stand for the house’s honor, not stoop to public brawls!” Tom spat out. “What kind of image of Slytherin are you creating, a bunch of bludger-brained idiots who can only start fights and forget to use their brains?”       Malfoy froze, staring at Tom in shock. He clenched his fists.       “Who the fuck did you call an idiot?!” Crabbe roared from the leather sofa, even forgetting his hurt arm that he had been cradling, and made to get up. Zabini, sitting next to him, forcibly held him down with a hand that looked cartoonishly narrow on the broad chest.       “Let me see your arm,” Nott sighed. He approached Crabbe, bent over him and touched his forearm with his wand, running diagnostic spells. He concluded, “Just a bad bruise, no fracture.”       Tom dug his nails into his palms in an attempt to calm down and get his nearly overflowing anger under control. He raised his eyes to the heavily breathing Malfoy and spoke insinuatingly, in as even a tone as possible:       “Draco, I understand your feelings — your feud with Gryffindor goes back a long way, strengthening over many years. But as a newcomer to your group, I can look at it impartially. And here’s what I’ll say — this approach, getting into direct confrontations in front of the whole school, can only lead to the consequences we got today: teacher intervention, lost points, lucky we weren’t all sent to scrub cauldrons. If you want to get the upper hand in this standoff, you need to act more subtly.”       “More subtly?” Malfoy repeated uncomprehendingly, his temper for confrontation dampened by Tom’s restrained speech. He stared at him perplexedly, having lost all his steam.       “Yes, more subtly,” Tom reassuringly repeated. “In public, your reputation must be impeccable. You need to look to the teachers like a polite, neat boy. So that when the likes of Potter try to accuse you of something, no one believes them. And you deal with your opponents far from prying eyes. So no one catches you or even suspects you.”       “Yeah, Tom’s right,” Nott nodded. “He seems like a polite exemplary student on the surface, but inside he’s a real snake,” he smirked.       “That’s why today I only intended to stop the fight before it became public knowledge. I harbor no kind feelings for the Gryffindors, wasn’t trying to protect them, or attack my own,” he glanced at Crabbe. Though he hated having to justify and apologize, sometimes it was necessary to make people behave the way he wanted. “Sorry about your arm, it was unintentional. I can heal it if you’ll allow me.”       Crabbe indignantly huffed, eyeing him distrustfully. He looked questioningly at his boss. Malfoy, absorbed in contemplating the words spoken, curtly nodded. Tom approached and touched Crabbe’s forearm with the tip of his wand, quietly murmuring a healing spell. The goon carefully felt his arm with the other, rotating his wrist, relieved to test the sensations. Tom stepped back.       “I understand what you’re saying, and that you didn’t intend malice against us in your actions,” Malfoy finally concluded, raising his gaze. “I heard you. But we’re used to doing things differently. So don’t go preaching your gospel in someone else’s monastery, Riddle. Just this once, we’ll pretend this…misunderstanding…didn’t happen. But if you start butting in where you shouldn’t again and fucking with my head, we’ll be having a different kind of talk.”       Tom pursed his lips in displeasure but nodded. Obviously, assuming the role of leader in the established Slytherin hierarchy would be no simple feat. Far from as easy as it had first seemed. On the other hand, that wasn’t his goal now; all his devoted followers, the Knights of Walpurgis, remained back in the 1940s. Eventually he would return to them. What did he care about these cocky teenagers, let alone an insignificant nobody like the younger Malfoy? The main thing was to maintain a more or less even relationship so as not to lose his persona of a polite, friendly to all exemplary student, avoid making unnecessary enemies who could cause trouble at an inopportune moment.       And if intra-house conflicts like this one reached Dumbledore, it could even play into his hand. He could play the card of disagreeing with the sharp pro-pureblood policies of the current Slytherins, display a desire to fight against injustice. That might even allow him to get closer to the Order of the Phoenix faster than through befriending Gryffindors. Though one didn’t preclude the other, and the more evidence of his loyalty the better.       “Time for Potions. And Greg, finally get your decorated mug to the hospital wing!” Malfoy angrily spat toward Goyle, who was sadly examining the deep scratches left on his face by the bats in the wall mirror.       Tom picked up his bookbag and followed after Malfoy, who was whispering about something with Zabini walking beside him. Nott caught up to him and touched his shoulder.       “Don’t be upset, you’ll gradually find common ground,” he said quietly. “It seems to me you made reasonable points, and eventually Draco will see you’re right…”       “Thank you, Theodore,” Tom forced a smile. “I realised right away that you’re a sensible guy.”       “I didn’t like the constant clashes either,” Nott shrugged. “But saying that to Malfoy’s face… That took guts.”       “Or stupidity,” Tom sighed. “I didn’t plan on making enemies on my own.”       “Truth is born in argument,” Theodore pronounced importantly, raising a finger. Tom quietly snorted — in his opinion, it was more likely to die there.