Title: One For Sorrow
Fandom: Harry Potter
Characters: Tom Riddle, the children of the orphanage etc.
Genre: Gen
Rating: PG
Summary:Like a magpie, what Tom Riddle wants, he simply takes.
Author's Notes: Started writing this more than a year ago, got side-tracked, took it up again. Apologies if it seems a bit disjointed.
It is a bright day and the sunlight glints off the edge of Dick's mouth-organ, dazzling and silver. Tom, seated alone on the steps, stares as though hypnotized as the other boy waltzes up and down the garden playing a merry little tune that has his friends singing along and stamping their feet. Tom rises and edges nearer, until Kim notices him, her face scrunching together as she scowls. Tom looks down on her and is pleased to see the fear in her eyes.
Dick has stopped playing, but he continues to bounce the mouth-organ in his hand, up and down, and Tom follows the glittering line of its flight with his eyes. "Let me see that," he says imperatively, and holds out his hand.
The other boy clutches the toy to himself and backs away. "No," he says softly, before seeming to draw strength from the presence of his friends around him, tense and watching Tom closely. "No." He repeats himself with more assurance.
Tom moves like lightning and snatches it out of Dick's grasp. The other children rise up with gasps of surprise and anger as Tom turns the mouth-organ over and over in his hand, watching the sunlight gild its edges. He suddenly wants it, with a vicious longing he is all too familiar with
(how dare this boy, thisinferior, have something that he does not, something he wants)
but with a smile he hands it back to his owner, and Dick visibly relaxes. "I told you," Tom says softly, conscious of the many eyes on him, the many witnesses who would tell on him, if he so much as made a wrong move. "I only wanted to look at it."
They go inside for tea fifteen minutes later, and Tom notices with an amused satisfaction how Dick sits on the other side of the table, and keeps his treasured toy thrust deep in his jean pocket and his eyes lowered to the stained tablecloth.
Two weeks later, the mouth-organ goes missing. The thief is never caught.
But the children know.
On the top shelf of his cupboard, standing as proudly as any trophy, is a small, scuffed cardboard box. When he is alone, Tom Riddle opens it and runs his fingers through the sparkling, shining objects within, entranced by their glitter and the knowledge that they are his,his and his alone, won by wit and cunning.
When Dumbledore makes him return them, he is angry at first; then indifferent, because he now knows (he has always known) that he is special, and destined for far greater things. He turns the box over in his hands, looks at the toys treasured for so long—and even bright and glittering as they are sees them for their true nature—worthless baubles, unworthy of him. He gives them back. He even smiles, a true smile drawn from whatever passes for happiness in his dark and bubbling soul, and looks very grown-up and handsome.
Then he takes his meager belongings, and with the bag of gold jingling cheerfully in his pocket, sets down the road to the rest of his life.
And Hogwarts is the most wonderful place he has ever known. Later, he might even admit privately to himself that he was in love with it, as he could never love any living being. There is magic in the air and around every corner, and the hands of his ancestor had helped to lay the first stones. He cannot help but fall in love with it.
He explores it as he would his lover's body, delving into her secret places. Alone at night he creeps through the corridors, listening to the creak and groan of the moving staircases, the sleepy murmur of the enchanted paintings. He finds the kitchen, and the gratifyingly servile house-elves. He finds the Room of Requirement, reaching out to his need. He speaks to the ghosts, hears their stories, for even in death they are still human, and cave to charm and a sympathetic ear.
(The Grey Lady looks upon him at first with haughty disdain, but by the end of his work she is leaning her head into his shoulder as though she can feel it, insubstantial tears running down her face.)
The halls of Hogwarts are full of mysteries, and even on his last day in school he has not learned them all. But more, he knows, than any other student that has ever come here. He does not take Hogwarts for granted; every secret wrested from ignorance is cherished, hugged tightly to himself with a fierceness that borders on jealousy. Afterwards he rolls back the window of the train to gaze upon the shrinking towers of Hogwarts and thinks, Mine.
He promises himself that he will return someday.
He graduates with flying colors, and goes on to work as, of all things, a shop assistant. Those who know who he is (but not what he is) whisper behind his back: Just what was he thinking, what a waste, an absolutely brilliant boy...
Tom is simply biding his time, but even so, he likes Borgin's shop, dank and dusty as it is; there are artifacts of power here, the kind of power that shies away from sunlight and scuttles beneath floorboards—mean and cowardly, but one he can use. And now and then, there are the genuine articles that pass across Borgin's threshold, gleaming like diamonds in the dirt, like a silver harmonica in a little boy's grubby hand—only to be sequestered once more in the dark in Borgin's backroom, reserved for a very specific clientele, and far, far out of the reach of a lowly assistant.
But although he is tempted many times, he continues to wait, though he knows not for what; until one day the foolish old lady opens the box, and shows to him what he has been truly looking for all this time—the locket of Slytherin, his rightful inheritance.
She had been nothing to him, just another simpering idiot swayed too easily by good manners, a handsome face. But now he sees her clearly, a fat and bloated toad, sitting upon her heap of ill-gotten treasures, her thieving hands upon hislocket, dictated by birthright, his blood—
(how dare this woman have something that he does not, something he wants)
For a moment hatred rises up to choke him, a great unspeakable hatred that bends his carefully practiced smile into a rictus of fury. Then he masters himself, lets go of the locket, smiles at her, flatters her. She does not suspect.
Soon after, she is dead, and Tom Riddle is gone, along with the artifacts she had prized so much.
As with all his treasures, he holds them up to the light once he is safely away, turning and turning to see the sparkle dance along the finely carved edges, and he laughs with something that is very nearly joy.
And he casts the spell, pours his soul into the golden cup, the golden locket. Somewhere, on the distant fringes of hearing, he thinks he can hear himself ripping and tearing away, a thick, crunching sound like a lion at his meal. His heart leaps and flutters within its cage of bone—it is after all a fragile heart, in a flawed, fragile body.
These, however—diary, ring, diadem, cup and locket—these are real things, symbols of power. Even as his body fights against the return to dust, these will endure. His soulwill endure, and he will live on.
He wipes the blood off the new Horcruxes with the edge of his cloak, catches sight of his reflection, and smiles—a wide, humorless smile that pulls oddly at his lipless mouth. To him, it is simply proof of his rise above humanity, the power he has amassed, and the less useful things that had been thrown away.
He had used his looks to charm; there is no need for that any longer, now that he can simply use force.
With his new name, his new face, he gathers his followers.
They flock to him like moths to a flame, seeing in him something that had long lurked within the shadowed corners of their cowardly hearts, as though twenty years ago he had not been merely an orphaned half-blood, penniless and unknown, less than the dirt beneath their well-shined boots…
He had come a long way from the boy who had first sharpened his skills against the other children, stole their toys and held them in thrall. How mean and petty it now seemed—but he had always understood one thing clearly, at the very least: He had always deserved better.
Looking at the heads bowed in allegiance around him, Lord Voldemort smiles. It's almost enough to warm his frozen heart.
But it is all undone, and Voldemort knows this with shocking clarity as he watches the curse rebound, cover the distance between him and his intended victim in a single green streak. It sinks into his heart, tears him from his body with an agony close to that of a thousand white-hot blades going through him all at once—
And in that eternal moment, his mind awash with pain and confusion, a bolt of fear strikes him, and he thinks, For all my power…have I been defeated by love?
But he lives, if his state of semi-existence can be called living, and rues his instant of weakness. After Wormtail revives him, he forgets about it entirely. After all, was it not his Horcruxes that had pulled him from the brink of death?
The wand has served him well for many years, but when it fails to kill the boy, he casts it aside. That has always been his way. When even Malfoy's wand fails to work, Voldemort begins to doubt, just a little. Potter had always seemed to him a fool of a boy protected by luck and much better wizards than he. Surely there is not more to him than meets the eye…?
What he needs is a better wand…a stronger wand. The strongest wand in all of history. Dimly, he remembers a legend, drawn from his many hours spent in the Hogwarts library, reading…a treacherous wand, that will only obey the strongest wizard. What is he, if not the most powerful wizard in all of the world, now that Albus Dumbledore is dead?
He sets out in his pursuit of the Elder Wand. Once the strongest wizard and the strongest wand are joined, there will be nothing that can stop him. Not even Harry Potter and his phenomenal luck…
Lord Voldemort has always known where to put his faith.
-end-