"So... should we start our Potions assignment in the near future?" Nikita doesn't even look up from his Transfiguration essay, which is nearly completely filled with neat, inky loops.

Tom, who's sitting on the other side of the table, scoffs quietly, causing Abraxas next to him to tense slightly while slate eyes are piercing through pale skin like icicles, as cold as his heart and lethal like his mind, already coated with the poison his words use to hold in every syllable.

"What are you huffing about, Tone Fiddle? I certainly don't want to make this garbage alone."

Briefly, the icicles turn blunt in confusion - Has Tom Riddle just been called Tone Fiddle? - but then they're sharper than ever before, permeating the other boy's skull as if it was out of cheap sheet music and not bone.

Nikita doesn't even flinch, in fact he doesn't notice that Tom isn't ignoring him unfriendlily but is drowining in music like the pianist is used to do in the from Apollo abandoned nights, that Tom tiptoes past bears and clapping audiences and a bowing little boy - How has he ever missed this? -, surpassing prisons out of empty bars, notes kept hidden inside under the cloak of oblivion that is only slowly lifted and a gallery of smiles, one emptier than the other. And when he looks at his reflection in the pearly teeth, he doesn't see himself but another boy who's faking like him but differently.

Because while Nikita only fakes smiles, Tom fakes his whole existence.

Maybe Nikita can't smile but Tom can't live and perhaps this is the reason he doesn't want to die at the end of his days - because he doesn't know how to. Just like life, death should be something natural but if you don't manage to live properly you certainly don't know how to die because you don't have to know, it's not even an instinct, it's just an invariable fact, an unchangable circumstance, your life ends and you're dead.

But of course it's not that easy - and it certainly isn't for Tom Riddle who fears mortality more than humanity's been fearing gods - how it will fear him.

Dying is natural, it's normal and so it's everything Tom isn't and doesn't want to be. After all he's special, he's gifted, a prodigy, a charmer, a heir. He's witty and twisted and has already been wilted before being born, never blooming like the other blossoms in the orphanage, always just the dead carcass of a living creature, painted with the stolen lives of others with his very own hands, sucking their colours out since his first breath, a flower like it's never been seen before because he's made it himself, striking and more than just pleasing to the eye, the creatures he's feasted on pining away unnoticed at his feet as all eyes are drawn to him.

Tom is artificial - but he is artificial as his facade truly is crafted by the most skilled human on this sorry earth, sculpted in a way that allows no bad thoughts to rise and no genuine smile to drop - how fortunate that Nikita never smiles in delight and thinks about Tom in awe.

Living is next to dying one of the few arts Tom won't ever master. Maybe it's the lack of love or that he does everything to prevent his death that he forgets that he's breathing and that the heart he's claiming to be nonexistent is still pounding in his cold chest. He searches too much to rest and suffers too much to enjoy so he takes his joy in suffering and rests by letting others search - but he's living in their minds because there is only one person he maybe can trust and it's certainly not Nikita, in whom's mind he's just encountered himself, blood dripping off cool walls and chocolate melting on the listener's tongue while staying invisible in Apollo's soothing embracement. 

He listens to his own playing and even though Nikita's definitely remembering it better than it's been, Tom cringes all too often because it could have been so much better. And that he's listening to himself improvising is making him just even more uncomfortable as he's already anxious to hear how enormously he'll fail - failing in front of a witness - and he feels so naked alone from listening to it himself, spare knowing that somebody else has heard it too.

When you play a piece, you don't just play it, you interpret it, you fill it with your emotions and experiences and expectations but in a certain measure - if it's too less, the music appears to be flat and pathetic to the listeners' ears, they'll think of the musician as too cautious, as shy, as a waste of time.

However, it's nearly worse if you exaggerate, if it's not the piece interpreted by you anymore but you playing a piece. When you shove yourself in the spotlight with the poor excuse of presentating music when in truth you presentate yourself, you abhor the audience. You drown them in your feelings and confuse them with senseless tempo changes just to express yourself, you practically shoot them with heavy kerfuffle, calling it virtuosity.

But when improvising, you don't have a piece of art that arouses certain feelings but only yourself and nothing more and if you aren't enough you fail. You take your feelings and modulate them into tones, showing more and more who you really are, denuding your soul until there is nothing left unknown anymore.

It takes a lot of musicality of course as one can't just play a few notes that don't sound too bad after one another and call it a day. At first, you have to know what doesn't go well with each other and which harmonies act like secret lovers and which like cruel orphans. You have to keep an eye on your bow so you don't run out of it and you need a quick mind and hand, as you might or might not have a brilliant idea.

And while Tom has all of the above he doesn't possess the most important factor: the overwhelming amount of feelings.

After some time he just runs out of melodies his violin can sing and while Tom still has so many tragedies to pass on, most of them stay untold - Apollo assures him that it's better like this, safer like this, that the audience certainly would sense that the horror they experience when listening isn't ficitional but brutally real, that blood has been drawn and minds tormented, that snakes have hissed with adoration and a boy with cruelty.

Maybe Nikita's mesmerized by the darkenss that's clouded the air like a prophecy of death but not everybody will be this enamoured by the streaming blood, thirsting for more as long as it's possible, but close their with terror wide eyes shut and clasp their expensive evening gowns, hoping that their money will have an influence on their safety so they won't be consumed by the darknes, that it will be over quickly.

It won't.

The darkness will rise twice and it will fall just as often, oh Tom, why haven't you listened to Nikita?

Listen to him as if you were him when he was younger and he Vasili, listen and do what he says.

Listen, do you promise this, Tom? Listen or you'll die in the end and you certainly don't want that, do you?

One could actually argue that it's strange that Tom Riddle doesn't want to be acquainted with Death personally, that he keeps his distance the way a spider avoids the sticky, lethal threads of its net, creating it as if it'd be necessary for his life but never experiencing the cool touch of the glistening white.

After all, the Riddle boy despises to be normal and the dead on the streets of London have never seemed like something usual. Whenever bombs have been dropped, Tom has searched for corpses afterwards, fascinated by their broken gazes and bodies, how they've grasped the air as if trying to catch the scythe's blade that's too fast for human eyes and definitely for soft human fingers.

They sometimes haven't even looked human anymore and Tom's liked that.

However, never forget that Tom doesn't only despise being an average human but being like others in general and if there is one huge point in which all humans are the same, it's that they die.

So certainly, Tom doesn't want to join this trend, causing others to do it for him instead - all of them have looked normal after he's ended their lives, in contrary to him they're nothing special, they've just been big, broken dolls.

They never last long.

And if there is one person in the common room right now that looks like a doll it's Nikita Pavlov, hair a bit too shiny, eyes lifeless glass, the emotionless smile he's directing at Tom as an answer for his lasting silence painted on the rosy lips with an experienced hand - Vasili has made this sure.

Tom muses if he should break this doll like all the others, a brief twist of his fingers, a flick of his wand and these glass eyes would refract the light like the others have done before him and will do after him, creating deceased rainbows with buried leprechauns with no gold but silver at the end.

Should he or should he not, that is the question.

He feels so exposed in front of these wintery eyes now because they've seen all shades of his splintered soul, he feels naked as if he himself was just another doll, robbed of its clothes.

As if he was normal and Nikita the one who collects the dolls, not him.

Oh Tom, don't you know
that Nikita's been sticking to the threads you've avoided
for all too long?

you can thank melodramagalore for this chapter bc i lowkey forgot to continue it... mwah (and i'm sorry that it's this bad but i'm too lazy to rewrite it, oop)