sleepinthegardenxxx

[sleepinthegardenxxx]

Prologue

Summary: He was her dark fairytale and she was his twisted fantasy. And together they made magic.

TW: death

Pairing: Tom Riddle x Adelaide Hale (0.8k words)

The last of the snow was melting and Myrtle Warren had been dead for three days before Adelaide Hale came to understand the heavy weight of her situation. She had been missing for nearly 48 hours before she was found laying in the girls' lavatory on the first floor by a third year. It was one of the biggest investigations in the school's history - enforced curfews, professors searching the dormitories; combing through Myrtle's personal effects, even talk of Hogwarts being shut down for the unforeseeable future.

It was hard to believe that Adelaide and Dumbledore's simple plan could have worked so well despite recent events. It was more Dumbledore's plan, really. A notion he had to change the actions of a single man. It wasn't a secret society back then, not even a shadow of a rebellion. It was just an odd and cryptic old man with insights into the future and a young girl tasked with being a hero.

Adelaide hadn't meant to hide the body where it couldn't be found. In fact, she hadn't hidden it at all but had hoped that some unlucky professor or student or ghost would stumble upon where she had found it before anyone even noticed she was missing. There wasn't much to interpret. Myrtle lay on the ground, her eyes wide open and her mouth agape, all of her muscles stiff as the lavatory floor slowly filled with water from the single faucet that had been left running. A tragic accident, no more, no less. Myrtle fell down and hit her head or fell unconscious due to some undiagnosed condition. No one lived forever, not even in the wizarding world. And it might have been left at that, at silent tears and a small eulogy delivered by Headmaster Dippet in the Great Hall, had it not been for the storm that fell that night. It sent the students to bed early that night with no one allowed outside the castle walls until the rain let up, and the storm raged through the following day, cancelling classes and leaving the students to wander through the castle with no direction.

She had thought Myrtle would be found faster that way. Surely someone was bound to wander into the first floor lavatory at some point during the day. But as the water began to fill the room, professors and the headmaster were convinced the storm had broke past the stone walls of the castle and begun to leak, so they blocked off the area, waiting until the rain stopped completely to drain the floor of water and repair the supposed leak.

It wasn't until the next day when everyone began to grow weary. It had started with exchanged looks of confusion between Professor Dumbledore and a few select students when the ever so tedious Myrtle hadn't shown up when classes resumed. Dumbledore's eyes then fell to Adelaide before giving her a long and pointed stare, holding her gaze for a few seconds before moving on and beginning the lesson.

_____________________________

In spite of the shared panic and mass hysteria that had filled Hogwarts for the first time since its doors had opened, Adelaide remained visibly calm, willing away the cold feeling that rushed over her blood, chilling her bones. Because she knew what had happened. She could call it a hunch, a feeling, or even intuition. But that would be a lie. She'd heard the whispers behind the stone walls of the school corridors in passing. And at times, she could have sworn the statues lining the hallway were whispering, too. She knew the reason why, and she was partially responsible. And yet, she walked through it - through the whispered conversations, the distressed looks of the headmaster, even the flashes of cameras in the distance, no doubt there for the Daily Prophet. Walking through it was easy. Walking away, however, was something else entirely.

As time passed and the search had come to a close, life had grown quiet again. In her newfound relief, she came to realize that while she had always imagined herself in a different light, perhaps she had been here all this time: living in the grey areas, somewhere between the shore and the moon. It was almost impossible to resist, the charm of it all. It was dangerous.

And so she found herself caught between two sides of a battle that had yet to take place, forced to choose and pulled in nearly every direction.

Maybe years from now, he would find his name in a book she wrote. A book about an antihero who tasted of heartache and war. He would read about moments that would trigger age-old memories that he'd buried somewhere so deep that he had begun to believe they no longer existed and it'll hurt him like it hurt her now, that they could have been so much more. That they almost made it. Almost. 

And maybe, they could have really saved each other. That didn't happen of course. Things never happened like she imagined them.

#harry potter #tom riddle #slow burn #love #enemies to lovers #tom riddle imagine #harry potter imagine #Adelaide hale #oc #original character