InsaneJournal

Who: Merrell & Toma Riddle (swap)
What: father-daughter meeting!
When: Saturday evening
Where: outside the Thomas house
Warnings: look at the "who". this thread is going to heck in a handbasket.

This was, somehow, Malvoy and Morfina's devising. Merrell felt certain of it, although he was having trouble figuring out how they could have managed it. They were imprisoned, for one thing, but if they could manage to escape Azkaban, then he supposed they could probably manage to get him to a strange place like this. How, he wasn't sure, but they had far more knowledge of magic than he did.

Still, it seemed a little beyond even the scale of his sister and mother. This place was like nowhere else he'd ever seen, full of pleasant people (who actually smiled and greeted him in a friendly manner). What the point of the black and white was, or the strange language, he had yet to figure out. But even if this was not all of their own devising, he was convinced that either Malvoy or Morfina was here. The person he'd been talking to on the journals seemed somewhat different from them, but the kind of hatred she showed for him was something he'd only ever known from his family. He didn't think anyone else could hate him that deeply.

And she was spewing lies about Toma, too, lies that he refused to believe. How stupid did she think he was, to believe that his wife hated him just because she made up a future date? Admittedly, the fact that she knew about the potion was concerning, because his sister and mother weren't supposed to know about that-- but how could anyone else know that, either? She was just guessing, she had to be. Trying to break him down with words since apparently violence wasn't allowed here.

Which was something, he supposed, but he still didn't like this place. It was stupid and weird and he didn't like having an extra voice in his head, one who seemed obsessed with baking and housekeeping. It was like someone was attempting to Imperius him into going back to being a glorified house elf. And by glorified, he really meant not glorified at all. He was resisting it as strongly as he possibly could, holding tight to the determination not to fall back under his mother's thumb. He'd gotten away from her, and she had no control over him anymore, except what he let her have by falling into her mind games.

The reasoning that they were playing mind tricks on him made it hard to believe his eyes, at first, when he saw a familiar dark-haired figure. He was approaching the house he was supposed to stay in-- which was not where he really wanted to stay, but he didn't really know where else to go in this town-- when he saw her. Toma.

He started to rush forward, and then stopped partway, realizing belatedly that it might be a trap. His mother and sister loved to set him up to fail, to make seemingly easy tasks impossible for him to impress upon him how much of a failure he was; thus he'd learned fairly quickly to be wary of things that seemed too easy. They'd said Toma wasn't here. If they were allowing him to see her, or her look-alike, it was probably another game. But he loved her too much to walk away, to avoid the risk.

He continued toward her at a wary but hurried pace, and paused a short distance away when she started to turn towards him. "Toma?" he said, voice cracking a bit on her name. He looked hopeful, but also hesitant, half-expecting a violent reaction.