CHAPTER ONE
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-: fifth year :-

── IN WHICH THERE'S BRIEF
INVESTIGATION

. . .

"THEY WANT ME TO ASK IF IT WAS YOU."

The knock had come to his door in the middle of the afternoon. In the mix of August, the world outside was a downpour of rain, courtesy of the lakes, with short moments of worshipped sunlight. He never bothered to venture out for the precious breaks from the thunder, and hardly looked up when she asked.

She was the same age as him, although most would never know, assuming him to be older from height or the opposite from how she carried herself, shoulders firmly back and posture straight in the sage gingham summer dress, or the way she wore her hair sometimes, the small pout on her lips evidence of a longer-lived life.

Or perhaps it were because she settled with the weight of having to deal with him, because he made her mother nervous and that angered her father a great deal.

"I'd rather you explain what you're talking about than just stand there. It's impolite, you know." He still hasn't looked up at her, focus trained on the book balanced upon his knees.

She didn't move from the doorway.

"Matthew's Rememberall. He saved two Christmases of the Sinclairs' donation money for that." She replied. He didn't say anything. "Tom?" She asked, her voice sugary sweet in the same tone that she used when asking her father for something new. "Did you take Matthew's Rememberall?"

"My memory works plenty fine, Lena." He looked up then, when he said her name. "Why would I need Matthew's Rememberall?"

"I don't believe they you think you need a reason," Lena replied. "My mother, she...."

"Does not like me." Tom finished the sentence for her. "Is she aware that mistreating me under the circumstance of simply not liking me is against her contract? Forgive me, Lena, but I was under the guise that being a carer was unconditional."

"And when has she mistreated you, exactly?" She countered, a particular harshness to her tone that could be forgiven; he was insulting her mother after all; an entirely unusual pursuit that didn't befit her persona in the slightest. "Today she was simply too preoccupied to come and ask you herself."

"Is she asking the other older children?"

"Yes. However, you are the only recluse amongst us, and appear to need special treatment." He looked at her again and she fell into meekness, eyes avoiding his. "When Headmaster Dippet arranged for you to stay here, he made the staff aware of your previous behaviours and-"

Tom sighed, sliding a slip of paper between the pages of his book and closing it. "And it is believed a person is unable to change and progress?" He asked, coming to stand up, leaving his book on his bed. "Would you too like to mirror Professor Dumbledore and search my belongings?"

She had once heard the tale, from her mother, of the day when Tom first found out he was a wizard and the promise he had to make so he was able to attend Hogwarts. He watched as her eyes darted downwards, chin quickly following as she looked away from him, uncomfortable within the situation.

"That's unnecessary, Tom." She replied, offering a half smile. "But I do not wish to upset my mother, so I would rather I properly ask than do so half-heartedly."

"Ah, you Hufflepuffs." Tom smiled as he met her eyes, head shaking slowly, in mock disbelief. "So kind, so needlessly sweet."

She was quiet for a moment. "You're not mocking me, are you?" Lena asked quietly. Slytherin and Gryffindor were by far the heaviest into the house rivalry at school; they always had been; but she was no stranger to the belittlement of those in emerald, for those in Hufflepuff were far too easy to target.

"Of course not." He came to stand in front of his desk, opening his notebook and flicking through the pages until he found what he was looking for. "I meant it entirely sincerely."

"Oh." Lena's eyes fluttered downwards. She stood in the doorway still, her fingers holding onto the wooden frame. "I see. Thank you."

"It's quite alright, Lena." He replied. "As I said, I speak sincerely, truthfully." He closed his notebook top, leaving the quill leaning against the ink well, drying off from the last usage.

"I didn't wish to be ill-mannered in asking you, Tom." Lena's hands clasped together, arms resting against her stomach. Her fingers knotted together, one rubbing circles into her knuckle. He noticed, then, how there was a pearl bracelet too big for her and it fell over her wrist, brushing the skin upon the back of her hand.

"I know. You were simply doing as your mother asked you to." Tom smiled at her reassuringly and she nodded.

"All I want is for Matthew to find his Rememberall. He was upset early because he lost it and got confused as to whether or not he had forgotten when he put it or not." She smiled slightly at that, an endearingly pretty sight. "I'll continue looking though, thank you, Tom."

She made her way to leave, reaching for the door handle to close the door on the way out.

"Elizabeth has it." He told her, just as her back turned. "She's forgotten her doll. It's by the bench beneath the wisteria."

"...Thank you." Lena nodded and hesitated to leave again. Instead, "I'm going to play the piano later, for the little ones. You can come and watch, if you'd like."

He looked up again, having reached for his abandoned book. "I would, thank you. At three? Like when you usually play?" Tom said.

"Half three. I've arranged to read to the girls for a little bit." Lena smiled and turned away properly this time.

"Ah - Lena?" She was stopped in her tracks and she faced him once more. "...Door?"

"Of course." She agreed. "Thank you, Tom."

And he found, most curiously, that even though he could hear her walking down the hallway away from his room, his eyes never left the door and he couldn't quite focus on the book again.

He looked towards the clock on the bedside table, silver metal, simple Roman numeral lettering.

An hour and a half to go.

𓆙

When Tom ventured out of his room, the sixth room, the last dorm within the lower corridor of the West Wing, it was still raining outside. It was heavy, showering the lawns surrounding the, pressing against the tufts of the opposite hills, hammering against the ground as though it hadn't rained for centuries beforehand.

The Lake before them was dimpled with the pressure of it, rippled pools of the same grey as the clouds. There hadn't been sun for two hours beforehand.

He left the West Wing behind, pressed shirt and deep brown trousers, in his hands the same book he had been reading held tight before him. Usually, Tom simply listened from the confines of his own making as he wrote. He knew Lena to be a wonderful piano player, had listened all these years, but not once had he emerged out to watch the occurrence on his own volition. When he first came here, the day when he found out from Professor Dumbledore that he was being transferred to the Bones Orphanage, he had been forced to stand by his new carers as they watched Lena play.

It had been an introductory thing. He never held it against her.

And she had only grown more talented since then.

Out of the East Wing dormitories, he continued to make his way down the ornately decorated hallways. In his childhood, the corridors had been drab, blueish-grey wallpaper, dark brown skirting boards with no decoration but a hanging light. Here the walls were painted in bright colours, with murals drawn by the children of the trees and nature right on their front door that drifted in a painted breeze, with many moving paintings hung in the empty spaces and side tables with vases and toys and figurines made out of clay.

Emerging outwards, he entered the large entrance hall with the stairs and the doors off to the West Wing. He could hear the piano from the main living room already; he was late.

Quick strides pushed him across the floor, behind the stairs and into yet another hallway. At the end a wide archway that opened up into a large open space. At the centre of the back wall, where the tall windows were, was the piano, cherry brown wood, a girl sat on the velvet cushioned stool before it.

Surrounding her, were the children. They had moved all the plush sofas and armchairs to circle around her, a little audience to her brief performance. They all stared up at her with a sort of wonder in their eyes that Tom recognised. He had been looked at like that, once before.

A glowing orb of red sat in one of the boy's palms. His Rememberall, Matthew. Two children to his right, a little girl clutched onto a hand-sewn doll. Elizabeth. His eyes flickered over to where Lena was playing.

Her hair was wet, drying in loose ringlets and a towel hung over her shoulders like a shawl.

Tom settled against the wall at the back of the room, aside from the line of staff who had gathered to watch over them. He didn't recognise the song she was playing, but it was evidently more difficult than when he had last heard her. Her fingers moved fluently over the keys and she hardly even glanced down at them; she knew the patterns by heart, she had studied the notes and designed her own flair to the piece, as though magic influenced her every move. Even so, a piece of handwritten sheet music lay across the rack that turned without being touched.

She glanced up for a moment, her hands not still as they continued to dart across the keys merrily. Her eyes darted across the crowd of children then upwards. Their gazes met and she smiled, and Tom felt as though his choice to join her there had been cemented.

𓆙

Lena played another song after that, and then a third. He stayed for all of them, stood silently at the back and applauded with the others as they did so. Each of them seemed to be even prettier than its predecessor, taking a life of its own as she played with such practise and vigour it was as though she lived within the music itself.

It was a wonder to see her play because he knew she truly meant it. There was nothing that he could associate that with, and Tom did not know what meaning he had found in it, but she truly believed in what she was playing. It was wonderful.

When she finished playing, the children jumped up to their feet, darting around the piano and asking for another to be played. He watched for a moment, as she lifted up one of the little girls up onto her lap and held her hands above hers to mimic the basic movements. She was smiling again, like she had when she had seen him.

There was no further point in him remaining there. The nurses had begun to gather up the children to bring them back to their activities, and Tom preferred the solitude of his room to join them in colouring or having fairytales read to them again. Lena loved them, particularly when they decided to read from the Tales of Beedle the Bard rather than Muggle ones, but when she read to the children he knew she picked far more interesting books. Frankenstein, for the older children, Alice in Wonderland for the younger ones.

But he did not wish to hear of Babbity, nor the Three Brothers, nor the Pied Piper of Hamlet, and he turned to leave, just as Lena swapped the little girl - he believed her name to be Dorothy for Wendy, and the line of those wanting a chance to play with her only grew longer.

"Tom, just a moment." Mrs Bones stopped him, a hand on his arm. He hadn't realised that she had even been there amongst the line of staff. "I didn't realise you were interested in the piano."

"I'm not, particularly." He said, his arm clutching his book. Perhaps he would not go back to his room, but instead go and sit alongside the owls that lived within the turret. "Lena invited me. I thought it rude to deny as such."

"I see. But you enjoyed it nonetheless?" He nodded slowly, unaware of the implications for once in his life; that she had been watching him, watching him watch her. "Good. She never stops practising, often tears her father or I away from work to show a piece. It would be nice for her to hear something from someone her own age."

"Yes, I suppose so." Tom's eyes were set on the sight over her shoulder, and she noticed. His tone was entirely vague, his answer nondescript and she supposed, rehearsed for moments of lack of focus.

"I'm sorry, Tilly - I'll be back in just a moment." Lena lifted the child off of her lap and stood up, weaving her way around the crowd with promises of returning to them and gentle, brief touches to the shoulder to adjust their standings as she passed so as to not brush past them. "Mother, where's Theodore?" She asked, and if she didn't have a fleeting smile on her face and her gaze didn't dart towards him momentarily.

"He's in London, with your father. Did he not tell you?" Mrs Bones frowned. "That is most unlike him."

"Not particularly. I would have joined them should I have known."

"It's no matter, sweetheart, your letters will arrive soon and we can take a trip down ourselves." Mrs Bones turned her attention to him once again. "You may come, if you want, Tom. I shall leave you two to talk, I have some correspondence I need to attend to."

And she patted her daughter on the shoulder just as Tom had seen her do to the children as she passed them on a breeze of perfume that smelt like roses.

"You were wonderful." Tom found himself speaking far more earnestly than he had intended to, and his ears burnt, the feeling cooling significantly when he saw a pale pink dust her cheeks. "Truly, I was not aware that piano could be played that well."

"I spend much of my days practising," Lena replied. "Thank you, I was wondering of proper feedback."

"You are unable to receive that elsewhere?"

"The children would be pleased with anything I played. My mother and father too." She confirmed. "I was simply looking for some honesty. I'm glad you came to watch."

He paused for a moment. "And what if I was lying?" He asked. He could do that, quite skilfully; even teachers he knew to be skilled Legilimens could not bypass the mental blockage he carefully curated after years of being forced into position of aggressor.

"You're not." She shook her head. But there was a thread of uncertainty there and he hated it, and decided to make quick work of repelling it. She need not be nerved by him.

"And how do you know?" He asked, the corner of his lips turning upwards.

"You have a tell." She told him. "And before you ask, I shall not inform you of what it is. That is my secret."

"Ah, I see." Tom stood tall, straightened his shoulders. "You need not look for it, I would not lie to you."

Her grin widened somehow, but she tried to hide it a little, biting at the inside skin of her cheeks. "I appreciate that." She told him. Her eyes darted downwards. "What are you reading?"

"A book about the Hogwarts Founders." He replied, surprisingly only himself with his honesty. "I took it out of the library before I left and forgot to return it."

She nodded, and held her hand out to take it. Forever interested in any bound narrative. He surrender it without question, taking note of the same bracelet he saw earlier, the dainty watch on her wrist, the pale pink colour painted on her nails. "Thank you," Lena murmured. Her focus wavered away from him as she read over the title of the book.

It was almost as though he was looking at a painting. Her head turned downwards, hair spilling over her sight, thumb tracing over the gold engravings that littered the cover. She opened it, leafing over the pages. "You're interested in Slytherin?" She asked, as she naturally fell upon the marked pages.

"The story of the founders is more interesting than it seems," Tom replied, watching carefully as she read over the notes, over that neat handwriting of his. "Did you know Helga Hufflepuff was a skilled chef, her recipes are still used in the Hogwarts Kitchens to this day. Rowena Ravenclaw had a diadem that is said to grant wisdom to the wearer until her daughter stole it. Helena was killed by the Bloody Baron."

"The Bloody Baron?" Lena repeated, and watched as Tom nodded. "I had no idea."

"Not many do."

"What about Slytherin?" She asked.

"Slytherin?" Tom blinked. "He supposedly left behind a hidden chamber in the castle. Nobody's ever been able to find it."

Her gaze flickered up to him, filled with something like excitement. "Really? That's-"

"Lena!" A voice interrupted them, and they looked down to find Elizabeth, still clutching her damp doll, tugging on Lena's skirt. "Can you come play for us, please? I want to learn how to play too!"

"Of course I will, Betty." Lena smiled, crouching down to meet her eyeline, her hands holding her smaller counterpart's. "Do you want to go and fetch the book of sheet music? The orange one? I think it's in the rec room." Elizabeth nodded and ran off to go and find it, to go and do as Lena asked. The older girl straightened up and turned to Tom. "Forgive me for-"

"Do not worry of it." He smiled.

And Tom turned out of the living room, away from the hubbub of daily life at the orphanage and towards the stairs. He would sit in quiet for some time, now, and reflect.

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