Chapter Text
Your hands and your voice were shaking a small but noticeable amount as you expounded on the truth of yourself. Tom found himself fixating on it; he thought it endearing, at first, that you were so nervous, because it meant that his opinion, his verdict, mattered to you. (As it should.)
But as you elaborated further, and he came to understand the source of your nerves, his mood shifted.
Under normal circumstances, he would have been bothered that you had told your family before telling him, but given the nature of the news and your distressed state, he was instead just furious, enraged, that they had upset you.
“Come here,” he said, and you warily drew closer. He pulled you into an embrace, his eyes staring darkly out the window of the abandoned classroom you were both occupying even as the side of his face nuzzled gently into your hair.
Comforting you was the immediate priority, because he didn’t like to see you upset, but certain things would have to be corrected once you felt better.
His arms were tight and secure around you, and he was satisfied to feel you ceasing to quiver. Melting into him. Good boy. Very good. With one hand, he stroked your back, up and down your spine in a soothing pattern, and with the other, he raked his fingers through your recently-shorn hair. (He understood, now, why you’d cut it. He would make sure that one of his followers did that for you next time. Such things shouldn’t be your job.) You relaxed even more, all of the tension leaving your muscles, just as you should, in his arms. Mine. My own.
“Will I be calling you something new?” he asked. Even he was feeling calmer, now; the feeling of your heartbeat so close to his own had that effect on him. It didn’t extinguish his rage that someone had bothered you in the first place, but it ensured that he wouldn’t be so swept up in it that he killed them straightaway.
Which was good, because he had other plans for them, and killing them was only the last.
“I thought of a name,” you said into his robes.
“Let’s hear it, then.”
You told him your name. It wasn’t something he would have chosen, as he enjoyed the more opulent, unique pureblood names (and you deserved an opulent name, because you were his), but it fit you well, and he would allow you that choice.
“I’ll see to it that that is the only name you hear from now on,” he assured you, in that matter-of-fact way he had of making services sound like mere tasks, so that he could never be accused of kindness. “And you’ll sleep in the boys’ dormitory tonight.”
“Are there enough beds?” you asked, and he laughed aloud:
“Carrow would sleep in the lake if I told him to.”
So, you had a bed in the boys’ dormitory for your first time since starting at Hogwarts. You turned in early, the first night, for fear of being stared at by the other boys, but when you awoke, they were all very friendly (almost fearfully so, as if they thought they’d burst into flames if they failed to say “Good morning” soon enough) and quick to call you by your correct name even when the sentence didn’t call for use of your name at all. No one even called you by your surname, anymore; it was strange…and very pleasant.
Tom lurked closer to you even than before, likely due to a combination of having increased access to you, in the dormitories and the lavatories, and his vigilance about making sure no one said anything untoward.
The first person who “conscientiously objected” to using male pronouns to refer to you vanished from two days’ worth of classes and returned (without explanation of the disappearance) pale, trembling, and unwaveringly polite.
But that was just Tom’s equivalent of sending a warning.
After that, all bets were off.
Every “slip of the tongue”, every thoughtless comment, even instances when people failed to wish you a good afternoon when they greeted everyone else, was followed by a disappearance, and this time they didn’t simply return to class a few days later, shaken up; now, they had to be found, suddenly dangling from the highest point in the owlery a week later, or suddenly in some spider-infested cupboard after two weeks, or suddenly rescued from the Black Lake by a pair of curious mermaids a month later still. Every one of them terribly hoarse, as if they’d been screaming a great deal, for an extended period of time.
They never could explain how they’d ended up in such places; the most coherent of them could only spout out something about a door suddenly appearing in the middle of an empty wall, and something about being locked in a room for a long time. Every investigation into the matter was inconclusive; most of the victims came from different Houses; the only strange commonality between the cases was the fact that every victim was adamant, upon waking, that the first thing they had to do was apologize to you, but you had an alibi for every single disappearance.
You didn’t voice any suspicions about Tom (or to him), partially because there was no point; he had covered his tracks well, and anyway, his efforts had worked.
Most everyone was vigilant, to the point of distraction, about addressing you in the correct ways.
You slept in the boys’ dormitory, washed in the boys’ showers…you were being treated, for the first time, as exactly who you were.