Title: Meeting Thanatos
Author: afterthree
Summary: The Muggle war is of little concern to Tom Riddle until something happens that changes him — and perhaps the entire wizarding world — forever. (Written for the 2007 Christmas Fic Exchange)
Dedication: For Angel.
----------In 1940, the McKinnons live on Devonia Road in Islington. This is an unremarkable fact in itself, except to mention that this particular family of McKinnons were indeed the wizarding family McKinnon. It is not unusual for wizarding folk to live chimney to chimney with Muggles in London; Muggles tend to best ignore the things that are right under their noses, and while the McKinnons themselves would have been somewhat of an oddity in the immediate neighborhood, they have resisted adding anything of a too-fantastical nature to the outside of their home on Devonia Road and thus largely no one suspects them to be anything out of the ordinary.
That the McKinnons live on Devonia Road is of note because they are one of the closest wizarding families to the orphanage on Burgh Street where thirteen year-old wizard Tom Riddle spends his summer holiday. The McKinnons have never met Tom and in all likelihood do not even know he exists; certainly they don't suspect the fate of their entire family will one day be decided by this boy – this Tom Riddle – who lives in the grim stone orphanage on the corner of Burgh and Danbury.
For his part, Tom Riddle only knows of the McKinnons because of the Trace.
After his first year at Hogwarts, Tom had returned to his orphanage for the summer impatient to try some of his new magic away from the always watchful eye of Albus Dumbledore. He'd been enraged to discover the Decree for the Reasonable Restriction of Underage Sorcery made it nearly impossible for him to do so without being sent letters of warning that further attempts at unsupervised magic would lead to his expulsion from Hogwarts. Thus he had been forced to spend a long, agonizing summer with his wand in his pocket rather than his hand where it belonged, and when he went back for his second year he vowed he would find a way to get around the decree before the next summer holiday.
It hadn't taken Tom long to learn about the Trace, and after several careful questions posed to some of the pureblood students in his house Tom discovered its limitations. Pureblood students had little reason to worry about the Trace on them – surrounded as they were in their day-to-day lives by the magic of their parents – and many frequently used spells at home. It was the suffocating press of the Muggles around him during the summer that gave Tom away so easily, and armed with this knowledge he quickly tracked down the address of several wizarding families that lived near his orphanage.
Three lucky – or perhaps unlucky – families qualified: the Prewetts on Canon Street, the Moodys on Baldwin Terrace, and – of course – the McKinnons on Devonia Road.
In the end, the McKinnon house on Devonia has proven to be the best candidate for his clandestine activities; the house next to them is conveniently abandoned and offers some security of privacy, yet close enough that their presence neutralizes the Trace effectively. It is here in this dusty, empty townhouse next-door that Tom spends most of his summer, practicing spells and brewing potions in the comforting anonymity of the unsuspecting McKinnon family.
It is the night of August 24 or perhaps the very early morning of August 25, 1940. The night is warm, but a thick layer of cloud is rolling in from Essex. This seemingly insignificant detail of weather is a very important detail indeed, one that will impact the Muggle and Wizarding communities of Great Britain in both the immediate and distant futures to come.
The McKinnons are sleeping an uneasy sleep; this Muggle war is beginning to worry them. Sometimes they can hear the strange mechanical growl of Muggle aeroplanes overhead, and almost daily now there are reports of great battles of fire and smoke in the air between the Luftwaffe and the RAF up in Birmingham and Liverpool. The announcer on the Wireless assures them each night that this is the way Muggles duel each other, and that the rules of Muggle combat dictate that these guns and bombs will only be used on other aeroplanes, but it seems to the McKinnons that the Muggle science of bombs is an imprecise one, and they worry just the same. This night there is talk of aeroplanes over Essex near where their friends live, and Meldrick McKinnon has been unable to contact them through the Floo, which worries them most of all.
The Muggle war is of no concern to Tom Riddle, who next-door is still awake and busy tending his Polyjuice Potion. Surrounded as he is by Muggles, one would naturally assume he knows more of the war than the McKinnons do, but the truth of the matter is that Tom is too preoccupied with his own ambition to take much notice of the comings and goings of Muggle planes– especially considering he will be returning to the assured safety of Hogwarts castle in a week's time. He can – perhaps – be forgiven for this lack of concern, as most children of thirteen tend not to notice the world of adults until it starts to affect them directly, and the arrogance of youth encourages them to believe themselves indestructible until something happens to inform them of their own delicate mortality.
Something of this sort is about to happen to Tom Riddle, though he doesn't know it yet.
He is focused, instead, on the Polyjuice Potion in front of him, having carefully timed the brewing of it so it will be ready to take with him to Hogwarts next week. He is greatly anticipating starting his third year with a stock of this extremely useful potion hidden in his trunk; it will be easy enough to browse the Restricted Section of the library at his leisure clothed in the skin of an older student – or perhaps even as one of the professors – and there are Dark Arts books stored there with secrets Tom greatly desires.
By contrast, the war is of great immediate concern to one Muggle German Luftwaffe pilot, Rudolf Hallensleben, who – due to the thick cloud cover – has been unable to get a visual on his target: the oil refineries and storage tanks of Thames Haven in Essex. He cannot tell it, but he is no longer even flying over Essex at all; he and several planes under his command are in fact now cruising northwest over central London.
Unable to locate their target through the clouds, Hallensleben orders his team back to France. As it is unwise and even dangerous to land their planes with the payload on board, Hallensleben does what any other Luftwaffe commander would have done and orders the drop before turning and leading them back across the English Channel with the hope that the one of the other commanders was able to complete the mission objective. His pilots comply readily, and their cargo of explosives are dropped indiscriminately over Bethanal Green, Tottenham, Finchley and – most importantly – Islington.
Even Tom Riddle – engrossed as he is with his potion – is startled by the sound of explosions and the sudden and intense shaking of the ground under him. It is unlike anything he's ever felt, and in a heartbeat he's at the window, scraping away the thick film of dust and mildew on the pane so he can see what's going on. There's a bright flash followed by a sound so booming it hits him as a physical force, and then the building he's in is being torn apart as if by the hands of a giant.
Tom is tossed against the wall by the power of the thing that's landed in the back garden, and before he has time to understand, the ceiling above him is crashing down and the floor beneath him is giving way. He falls with it, screaming and sliding and tumbling over ten feet to the unforgiving cement floor of the cellar below, the floors above him falling in after him faster than he can think. He screams again and covers his head, forgetting his name, forgetting his wand, forgetting everything but the noise of the building collapsing in on him.
He is fortunate that he is young enough and that his magic is not yet so well tamed that it no longer obeys instinct. It responds to his screams to ensure its survival like a separate entity, exploding from Tom to redirect the other forces around it, creating an uneasy shield between the boy and the disaster dropping in on him.
It goes forever, and Tom is sure he will die: is sure that every second and every shuddering breath he sucks in between sobs will be his last; is sure the floor underneath him will tear open again with every new explosion; is sure the force of the earthquake will shake him apart while the ceiling crushes him. He presses his eyes tightly closed and curls against the floor, clutching his head and his knees and his shoulders as he does everything he can to become smaller, tinier, minute. He is acutely aware of the colour of the shifting shapes behind his tightly clenched eyelids, the taste of dust on his tongue, the smell of split wood and cracked stone, the feel of the rushing air against his back, and the sound of his own drumming heart.
It is in these moments that Tom Riddle is more truly alive than he has ever been or will ever be, though he will never remember it that way. He will remember only the terror of being destroyed as easily as the crumbling house in which he made his hideaway, and the unacceptable weakness and fragility of being human.
Eventually the chaos passes. At first Tom hardly notices, bewitched as he is by the power of his own senses, but, bit by bit, he realizes the thunder has been replaced with silence and motion has faded to eerie stillness. Tom's body thaws and his breathing slows and evens. He is made aware of a throbbing pain in his leg, a sore spot on his side, a badly scraped elbow, and a dozen other minor scratches, each a casualty of his unceremonious plunge through the floor into the cellar.
He opens his eyes, but is greeted by a darkness deeper than that behind his eyelids. Something far above him shifts and cracks, and Tom gasps, curling in on himself again, but only more dust is shaken loose and Tom recovers from this new start quickly.
He is alive. Alive and whole and largely unhurt, and it is both anguish and relief for Tom to discover it so. His wand is still clutched tight in his fist, miraculously as unbroken as Tom's own body, and with a shaking voice he casts the Lumos Charm.
He is surrounded by rubble on every side, trapped in a cavern of fallen wood and stone and metal that isn't quite big enough for him to stand completely upright in. He presses a hand against what appears to be the remains of the brick chimney, and that small pressure alone is enough to start a landslide. Tom staggers backward, watching helplessly as brick and chunks of wood spill in, filling a full quarter of his precious space, and he fully realizes the delicate nature of his protective hollow.
He is trapped. Tom Riddle is buried alive under the remains of an abandoned building on Devonia Road, and no one knows he is there.
The air is abruptly too thick to breath and Tom starts to hyperventilate. A new terror takes hold of him, more insidious than the one before it: he is going to die, a slow, suffocating death that scares him more than the swiftness of the one previous. He is helpless and alone and just a boy holding a useless piece of wood, and he starts to cry because there is nothing else he can do.
That is how Meldrick McKinnon finds Tom Riddle, sitting and crying and clutching his lit wand in the corner of his tomb. All Tom sees is a small white mouse scurrying nimbly through the crevices of the rubble, and because he doesn't know Meldrick McKinnon is an animagus and that he's searching the ruins of Devonia Road for survivors, Tom also doesn't know he's saved until Meldrick transforms back into himself and grabs Tom's hand.
Tom has never been happier to see and touch another human being, and when Meldrick tells him to hold tight Tom clings to him like he's never clung to anything in his life.
The world goes dark again as Meldrick apparates them out and there is an intense compression that forces the breath from Tom's lungs, but a moment later he is gulping mouthfuls of cool, fresh night air. There are voices and shouts and the darkness is not so deep here and it smells more like smoke than dust. He's still crying because he can't quite believe it's really over, and for a long time he continues to hold to Meldrick McKinnon's robes until his daughter Marlene gently prises Tom's hands away so her father can help the others still trapped under the wreckage.
Marlene is training as a medi-witch, and soon has taken care of Tom's superficial injuries. After a while she goes to tend to the other survivor, and so Tom is abandoned, left sitting alone and wrapped in a blanket, hiccuping and sniffling and staring at the remains of his house on Devonia Road. Tom can hear the sirens of the Fire Brigade coming from at least three separate points in the distance, and wonders how long it will be before they make it here.
Eventually he makes his way back to the orphanage, where the only indication that anything out of the ordinary has happened are the overturned bins in the garden and the nervous faces of the other children in the windows as they stare out at the flames and smoke rising over the tops of the other houses. He discovers Mrs Cole has hardly missed him in the excitement, and that only one or two of the older children had spared him much thought or noticed he was gone. He feels like a ghost passing through the hallways, and when he finally makes it to his room and closes the door a wave of nausea sends him to his knees. He throws up on the floor, and suddenly the space is too small and too close and too confining, so Tom flees to the back garden and the calming effect of the air and the wide-open sky.
The thick clouds have moved on west, revealing a clear, star-lit sky with a strong moon that is covered only by smoke, and if the German attack had been set an hour later there is a fair chance that northeast London might have been spared. The next day the English retaliate by dropping bombs of their own over Berlin, and within two weeks the Blitz has begun in earnest. Tom is back at Hogwarts before London starts to burn, but he hardly sleeps at all the seven night before the Hogwarts Express leaves from King's Cross on September 1. He roams the streets, unable to stay in his room where every creak of the floor taunts him and the ceiling always appears to be buckling under the weight of Tom's imagination.
It is during these restless nights that Tom must deal with his own recently discovered mortality. He has been deeply, irreparably shamed by the weakness of his own skin, and he makes his choice to do something about it so that he will never again be made a fool of by the fear of death. His merely mortal body is a liability that must be dealt with.
Many years later it's a different kind of war and Marlene McKinnon doesn't make the connection between the tall, pale man standing over her with an Unforgivable Curse on his lips and the small, frightened wizard boy her father pulled out of the rubble forty years earlier. She doesn't know she's been marked for death since that day, not because of her work for the Order, but because she saw one scared boy cry after he nearly died.
That small, scared boy did die, a few years later with the making of his first Horcrux, and Marlene McKinnon is murdered because Lord Voldemort will tolerate no memory of that boy – that Tom Riddle – to survive.
----------A/N: In Greek mythology, Thanatos was the personfication of death and mortality. He is often depicted carrying an upside down torch, representing a life extinguished, and usually portrayed with his twin brother, Hypnos, the personification of sleep.