Rising in isolation on the plain, in face of Troy
"Semaphores"
Tom Riddle/Binns
As requested by _hannelore.
They sit in the echoing Hall and scratch with forks at empty plates, hands brushing through the air to prove points. They don't debate, not quite; they make two separate speeches about the same thing, acknowledging each other occasionally.
The professor sits distractedly on one of the few remaining chairs, cataract-grey face curled around his glasses and small mouth as he talks about a thousand little wars. Denied heaven, denied hell, and he's learned nothing new since he died. History fell open to a certain page, the rest of the book was blank: his future, Tom's past, decades that slipped by them both, unnoticed and unwanted.
Tom talks about the orphanage sometimes, in strictly cynical terms: the inedible food, the splintered hardwood floors, the runaway tangles of boys in the yard. The shivering sliding nights spent in someone else's cot. This school was more father to him than any man, this is where he was born: why talk about anything before?
He wonders, somewhere deep inside him, what it's like to grow older and older until suddenly there is nowhere else to go. He knows already what it's like to stay in the same instant forever, to know a life and not experience it, to know that he never really lived at all. Maybe, maybe, they're almost the same thing.
And at the end of their tandem conversations, Tom reaches out to where the professor's hand would be, the ghost of a memory of a history touching nothing at all.
They sit, they talk, they scrape at empty plates: at rest, two lives, unlived.