Chapter 223: Perfect
The sterile scent of potions in the Hospital Wing did little to mask the sudden, suffocating awkwardness settling between the white beds. Harry reached up, his fingers nervously catching in his messy black hair. He stared at the fair, exquisite face across from him, the steady thumping in his chest accelerating into an uncontrollable rhythm.
He opened his mouth, the words hovering on his tongue. He wanted to confess that even if Tamara had never asked, he had already planned to offer her his Invisibility Cloak. It just made sense; she needed to move around the castle unseen. Yet, as his green eyes took in her rigid, almost imperious posture, the confession died in his throat. This did not feel like the right moment for earnest admissions.
A helpless, lopsided smile broke across his face. He offered a slow nod of surrender. "Alright, no problem. But... that cloak is currently shoved at the very bottom of the trunk by my bed. In the dormitory."
The polite, angelic smile plastered across Tamara's face froze. A microscopic twitch pulled at the corner of her eye.
The Gryffindor boys' dormitory?
Her mind rapidly calculated the logistics. This meant she had to traverse more than half the castle, bypass whatever ridiculous security measures the lions employed, sneak into their common room, and somehow infiltrate the third-year boys'sleeping quarters.'For the great Dark Lord, this should be child's play,' she thought, her internal voice dripping with venom. A simple, high-level Disillusionment Charm would render her entirely invisible, solving the problem with elegant efficiency.
But the agonizing reality crashed down upon her. She was currently shackled by that blasted Virtue System. If she dared cast a spell with malicious or rule-breaking intent, the resulting electric shock would leave her twitching on the floor like a dying fish.
She mentally flayed the system alive, cursing its cheerful existence ten thousand times over. On the outside, however, her expression remained a mask of cool, unbothered grace.
"I understand. You do not need to worry about the details."
Harry stammered out the exact location of his four-poster bed. Once she had the coordinates memorized, Tamara turned on her heel and glided out of the Hospital Wing, her dark robes billowing slightly behind her.
Asking another Gryffindor for assistance was entirely out of the question. She refused to owe a favor to any member of that reckless, loud-mouthed house. If she wanted the artifact, she would have to steal it herself.
The stone corridors of Hogwarts were etched into her very soul. Moving with the silent, predatory grace of a serpent, Tamara handled the winding staircases and shadowed alcoves, effortlessly evading a patrolling professor whose heavy footsteps echoed in the distance.
She finally arrived before the portrait of the Fat Lady. Lady Luck, it seemed, was on her side. Two first-year Gryffindors, still flushed and buzzing with adrenaline from a recent Quidditch match, were loudly shouting the password. As the heavy portrait swung forward, Tamara slipped into the blind spot behind them. Her slender fingers twitched in the shadows.
"Confundo."
The whispered incantation struck with flawless precision. The two boys blinked, their eyes glazing over as a sudden, heavy fog clouded their minds. They stood frozen in the threshold. In that split-second window, Tamara flattened herself against the stone and slid past them, stepping into the offensively bright, tasteless scarlet-and-gold explosion that was the Gryffindor common room. The crackling fire and raucous laughter masked her silent footsteps.
She slipped up the spiral staircase and pushed open the door to the third-year boys' dormitory. Her nose immediately wrinkled. The room was a chaotic pigsty of discarded socks, half-eaten sweets, and crumpled parchment. Tamara held her breath, suppressing a wave of deep disgust, and crossed the room to Potter's designated bed.
A flick of her wrist and a silent Alohomora popped the brass locks on his heavy wooden trunk. She dug past the haphazardly folded robes until her fingers brushed against something impossibly smooth. She pulled it free. The silver fabric pooled in her hands, shimmering like liquid water in the dim light.
The Invisibility Cloak was finally hers.
A triumphant sneer ghosted across her lips as she shoved the ancient artifact deep into the inner pocket of her robes. Without a second glance at the squalor around her, she retraced her steps, slipping out of the lion's den as silently as a ghost.
Her next destination was the Owlery. She needed Potter's highly conspicuous snowy owl to complete her pending transaction. A heavy package of stolen kitchen scraps hung from her hand. The cold wind howled through the open stone arches as she stepped out of the circular room and rounded the corner of the drafty corridor.
She stopped dead. A pair of furious eyes burned into her from the gloom.
"Riddle."
The name was spat like a curse. Ron Weasley stepped out from the shadows of a stone pillar. His knuckles were bone-white from how tightly his fists were clenched at his sides.
Tamara paused. She slowly raised a single, perfectly sculpted eyebrow, her dark eyes sweeping over the freckled idiot daring to block her path.
"Weasley?" she drawled, her voice dripping with a sickly sweet, feigned concern. "Whatever is the matter? Has your precious Scabbers finally been found?"
"Don't play dumb with me!" Ron's face flushed a violent, mottled red, clashing terribly with his hair. He took a threatening step forward, his voice cracking into a roar. "Harry has been acting like he's possessed lately! He would never have spoken to us like that before! You're the one doing this to him. You're the one who made him like this, aren't you?!"
He glared at her, his chest heaving. Raw anger and deep-seated grievance swam in his watery blue eyes.
"And Scabbers... ever since you showed up, everything has gone to hell! You clearly lost my rat, yet Harry is taking your side! He's choosing you over his best friends!"
Tamara stared at the boy. His eyes were rimmed with red, genuinely furious and heartbroken over a filthy, useless rodent. A rare, genuine flicker of confusion rippled through the cold depths of her mind.
'Why is he crying over a rat?' she wondered.
If it were her possessions—like Nagini, or perhaps Bellatrix in her past life—and someone had dared to lose or kill them, she would not stand here crying. She would systematically flay the offender alive and tear their soul into jagged, screaming pieces.
But she could not conjure a single ounce of empathy for Ron Weasley. The sheer, pathetic intensity of his mundane emotions repulsed her. It was a weakness she instinctively avoided. And whenever confronted with something she refused to understand, the Dark Lord's default response was cruelty.
"If a mundane rat is truly that indispensable to your fragile emotional state, Weasley..." Tamara gestured lazily toward a dusty ceramic vase sitting on a nearby pedestal. "I can conjure you a new one right now."
She watched the shock register on Ron's face. Her voice dropped, becoming cold, grating, and utterly devoid of humanity. She spoke as if tossing a copper coin to a starving beggar.
"I can give it the exact same matted gray fur. The exact same irritating squeak. And, if you have a penchant for that specific brand of ugly, imperfect beauty..." A dark, cruel amusement danced in her eyes. "I can even use a Cutting Curse to slice off one of its toes. It will look exactly like your precious Scabbers."
She tilted her head, her dark hair spilling over her shoulder. "It will eat. It will sleep. It will perfectly satisfy your pathetic, desperate need for emotional attachment. So, Weasley... what do you think of my generous compensation?"
The words hung in the drafty corridor. The winter air seemed to freeze solid, turning brittle and sharp. The violent red flush drained entirely from Ron's face, leaving behind a sickly, deathly pallor. His freckles stood out starkly against his white skin.
He stared at the girl standing before him. She possessed the face of a porcelain doll, exquisite and flawless, yet the sheer, hair-raising terror radiating from her made his stomach violently churn. He looked at her as if she had just crawled out of a grave.
"You..." Ron's entire body trembled. A massive, suffocating wave of horror intertwined with his rage, choking him. He dug his nails into his palms, drawing on every ounce of his Gryffindor courage to roar the most primal truth he could muster.
"You are a heartless monster, Riddle!" His voice echoed sharply off the stone walls. "You don't care about anyone! You don't even know how! Living, breathing things mean absolutely nothing to you! No wonder everyone in this castle is terrified of you. You will never have a real friend in your entire miserable life!"
It was the crude, desperate curse of a thirteen-year-old boy. Yet, facing this outburst, the great Dark Lord did not feel a single prick of offense. Instead, a heavy veil of bored indifference settled over her dark eyes.
Tamara simply watched him panting in the cold air. A soft, breathy chuckle escaped her lips, echoing eerily in the silence.
"I will take your word for it, Weasley."
Dismissing the boy entirely, she turned her back on him. She had agreed to a transaction, and despite her overwhelming disdain for the parties involved, Lord Voldemort always honored a magical contract. She stepped up to the arched window and let out a sharp, low whistle.
A moment later, a flurry of white feathers descended. Hedwig landed on the stone sill, hooting softly. Tamara swiftly bound the heavy package of food to the owl's extended leg.
"Go to the Shrieking Shack," Tamara murmured, her fingers brushing the owl's soft feathers. "Find a massive, black mad dog. Make sure the filthy mutt doesn't starve to death."
She watched the snowy owl launch itself into the stormy, ink-black night sky, quickly vanishing into the swirling clouds. Tamara dusted off her hands with a satisfied clap. Her business here was concluded. She turned her steps down toward the damp, comforting gloom of the Slytherin dungeons. Now, she finally had the peace and quiet required to dissect the lingering secrets of the Deathly Hallows.
The silver-and-green decor of her dormitory offered a welcome reprieve from the castle's irritating inhabitants. As Tamara pushed the heavy oak door open, she found only Pansy Parkinson inside.
"Tamara, you're finally back..." Pansy whined the moment the door clicked shut, her voice pitching up as if she had just spotted a lifeline in a stormy sea.
The pug-faced girl was curled tightly into a ball on a plush velvet armchair. Her skin was unnaturally pale, coated in a thin sheen of sweat. A crumpled piece of parchment, covered in jagged Arithmancy equations, dangled limply from her fingers.
"This Arithmancy homework is impossible. I can't write a single word," Pansy groaned, pressing her free hand hard against her lower abdomen. "And I feel absolutely dreadful. My stomach hurts so much... it feels like a thousand Flobberworms are churning around inside me."
Her voice was weak, yet still laced with that habitual, spoiled coquettishness she used to garner sympathy. As a well-bred daughter of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, Pansy would never speak of such vulgar bodily functions bluntly. However, the context was glaringly obvious to any female in the room. It was the inescapable, agonizing monthly torture of biology.
Tamara's hand, which had been reaching into her robes to retrieve the Invisibility Cloak, froze. She slowly turned her head. Her dark eyes swept over the pathetic, shivering form of her roommate. A sharp spike of irritation flared in her chest—a deep, fundamental disgust for the inherent fragility of the human body.
Wordlessly, Tamara crossed the room to her personal potion storage cabinet. Her slender fingers bypassed the poisons and plucked a vial of shimmering blue liquid from the middle shelf. She tossed it casually. The glass vial clinked sharply against the polished wood of the low table in front of Pansy.
"Your body is betraying your will, Parkinson," Tamara stated. Her tone was clinical, cold, and chillingly rational. "Drink the Soothing Potion. Eradicate this biological inconvenience, and then finish your equations."
Pansy blinked, stunned. She stared at the expensive, high-grade potion resting on the table. Her eyes instantly welled with fresh tears. Ignoring her cramps, she sprang up from the velvet cushions and threw her arms around Tamara, hugging her arm tightly against her chest.
"Tamara! You're so kind to me!" Pansy sobbed, her voice thick and nasal with overwhelming gratitude. "You are an absolute angel! Merlin sent you to Slytherin just for us!"
Revulsion crawled up Tamara's spine. She immediately tensed, fully intending to violently rip her arm away from the weeping girl's grasp.
But suddenly, her muscles locked.
She slowly lowered her gaze, staring down at her own hands. She looked at this delicate, porcelain shell she now inhabited. She was female now. Biologically speaking, she and Pansy Parkinson were the exact same age, handling the exact same stage of physical development.
Yet... ever since the System had forced her soul into this vessel, she had never experienced a single cramp. Aside from the initial, pathetic weakness caused by severe malnutrition, she had never suffered through any of the periodic physiological fluctuations that plagued female puberty. She had never bled. She had never ached.
Tamara's dark pupils dilated. The gears in her brilliant, twisted mind began to spin frantically. Why must ordinary women endure this pathetic, debilitating biological torture, while she remained entirely untouched by it?
Could it be...?
Was it possible that this seemingly fragile, vulnerable mortal shell had already transcended the base physiological mechanisms of mediocre humans? Had she bypassed the wretched cycle of birth, aging, sickness, and mundane bodily laws? Was this vessel already evolving, shifting steadily toward... another, higher form of perfection?
The realization washed over her like a warm, intoxicating wave of dark magic. A slow, supremely arrogant smile curled the corners of her lips. With a sudden, dismissive shove, she peeled the clinging, coquettish Pansy off her arm. Tamara turned away, her dark eyes gleaming with absolute, unshakeable superiority as she whispered to the shadows.
'I am, indeed, the most perfect being.'
[Akarin's Note:
Enjoying the story? Dropping a quick review, comment, or Power Stone means the world to me and keeps these daily updates flowing!
Want to read 50 chapters ahead or just want to help keep a shameless translator alive? (My livelihood actually depends on this, haha 😭). You can support me directly here:
(P.S. Just remove the brackets and replace the [.] with a regular dot . to use the links!)
✨ Patreon (50 Advanced Chapters): patreon[.]com/AkarinTL
☕ Ko-fi (Support / Sponsor): ko-fi[.]com/AkarinTL
🔗 All My Links: linktr[.]ee/AkarinTL
Thank you so much for reading and keeping this project alive!]