#scienceontheweekdays

[childotkw]

In dark side of the moon, can we hear a little more about Riddle's take on things? Particularly regarding Harry?

Tom was, admittedly, a little embarrassed that it took him so long to really notice Evans.

Dumbledore’s son - and wasn’t that a disturbing notion, that someone somewhere had looked at the man who regularly wore outrageously coloured robes decorated with bumblebees and snitches and fluffy clouds and thought him desirable enough to sleep with - had initially flown beneath Tom’s radar. Oh, his arrival at Hogwarts had sparked much conversation, but his actual presence?

Tom hadn’t given the young man much thought. He had had him categorised and labelled in a neat little box from the very first mention of his existence.

Any son of Dumbledore was surely a steadfast believer in his father’s doctrine after all, and therefore not worth Tom’s time.

That impression has lasted only a few weeks.

Word had spread about Evans’ mentorship of the Shame of Slytherin, Nathan Ciro, but Tom had never seen the two together. It had been a point of discussion amongst the school and their House in particular - Dumbledore’s offspring taking a Slytherin under his wing, yet another sign he had dismissed - but for all that people were baffled by the choice, no one seemed to know much of anything about the relationship. How or even why it had come to be.

It seemed like fate that Tom was the one to stumble across the pair. Without even trying he had accomplished what so many others had not.

As it should be.

He had only seen Evans from a distant before, and the man had never struck him as someone particularly intimidating or imposing. He was short, slender, dressed plainly, and the frankly hideous glasses he wore were the only thing Tom could make out of his face - another point, everything about the man was so carefully constructed to be forgettable, Tom really was a fool - but his voice was distinct.

Tom slowed momentarily when he heard the muffled sound of a conversation, then crept closer. It was late in the afternoon, still an hour before dinner would be served, but the dungeons were normally quite empty at this point. Classes had let out ages ago, and most Slytherins enjoyed basking in the sun before they had to return to the cold hallways that bracketed their common room.

He peeked around the corner, and immediately felt his interest pique.

Evans was squatting before a curled up Ciro, staring at the younger wizard with a painfully kind expression.

“- it didn’t work.” Ciro was mumbling, hiding his face in his knees.

“It was your first try, you can’t have expected to get it right straight away.” Evans’ voice was low and patient, not dissimilar to how he spoke in classes, but with a heavy kind of intensity in it that caught Tom off-guard. “Most wizards and witches never master it.”

And that intrigued Tom more. Just what was Evans teaching Ciro?

The other boy said something else, inaudible from how his mouth pressed into his knobbly knee. Evans huffed a laugh, poking Ciro with his wand. “What’s the rule, kid?”

Ciro shifted, unfurling a little. “Head up,” he grumbled, clearly reciting this so called ‘rule’. “I said, you mastered it, and you were younger than me when you did it.”

“I was,” Evans agreed easily, his smile sliding into place with an ease Tom was briefly envious of, “but I also had a hell of a motivator to get it done.”

“What, were you being harassed by dementors?” Ciro asked, his tone far more snide than Tom was used to. He could count on one hand the amount of times he had heard that level of life in Ciro’s voice. Certainly not in the last year had he shown that much fire.

But that knowledge felt secondary to the implication behind his words.

Dementors. A difficult spell. Surely they weren’t talking about the patronus? And Evans had supposedly mastered it before he was fourteen?

“Well, maybe not ‘harassed’, but I had a few run ins,” Evans said blandly, as if most wizards would survive one encounter with such a creature. Ciro goggled at his mentor, mirroring Tom’s own incredulousness. “The point is, I learned the patronus under a lot of pressure. I needed it to protect myself, so I pushed myself. You don’t have that driving you - and you should be bloody glad for it,” Evans added when he saw whatever expression crossed Ciro’s face.

“Then why are you trying to teach it to me?” Ciro’s voice was small. “If not everyone can master it…why bother at all?”

Evans sighed, his face creasing fondly as he ruffled the boy’s hair. “Because I know you can do it,” he said simply, as if the very idea that Ciro would not be able to produce a fucking patronus had never crossed his mind. “Kid, Nathan, you managed to produce mist on your first try. That alone is incredible. It took me weeks to get that far, and I had a far better teacher showing me the ropes. You’ll get there, but you have to be patient with yourself. I’ll be right behind you every step of the way, okay?”

Tom stood there, feeling oddly breathless as he watched the scene play out. He couldn’t hear the rest of the conversation, his ears flooded by the rush of blood.

He felt, strangely, as if something fundamental had just shifted inside him, and that was -

Exhilarating.