Summary: Tom Riddle hears rumors of a boy hidden in the hospital wing. It seems those rumors contain truth…and Tom is determined to unravel the mystery surrounding Harry Potter.
Warnings: This story will contain slash (Tom/Harry).
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God-Sib
By: Hana J.
Prologue:
"Bled to death right beside the door…cursed…witch…he's an abomination, caused her death he did…"
Tom Riddle heard the speculations made about his mother's death, whispered behind the hands of staff and children alike. The sound only quieted when he entered a room, gaining momentum again the moment he left—more wild fancies brought on by his appearance.
Handsome, they said, but their voices always grew tight, their eyes flickering to the side as if waiting for him to appear. Tom stayed still behind the bushes, listening to the older girls as they spoke. Only after would he rise up, come cresting over a hill or out from behind a tree to watch them glance at him in embarrassment and a tinge of fear. They blushed and giggled and ran away—always away. Tom watched them go, on the verge of his eleventh birthday, and thought about what he would steal from their knickknacks for gossiping.
In this environment, Tom learned the importance of word-of-mouth, the truth found in even the tiniest of rumors, and what silence meant; after all, few spoke of the troubling political climate which Tom read about in scraps of newspapers that were hidden in the back-pages near the ads.
Hogwarts, fifth year, left Tom with whispers of a different sort.
I heard he just appeared, one Hufflepuff boy said to a Ravenclaw, lingering in the library after their date. Tom sat skimming through a book on potions, flitting lists of: marigold, bat's wings, scorpion eyes, unicorn hair, pixie legs, brains of beezlebees, and urine of thestrals to memory. The Ravenclaw girl whispered back that her friend saw him in the hospital wing, roped off in one of the private rooms. She called him fair and handsome, but Tom took that as the girl's exaggeration. The boy got jealous, as boys were wont to do, and Tom picked out the real truth: there was a boy in the hospital wing.
These weren't the first whispers of the mysterious boy, who'd been said to appear during the Hogwart's feast, on the start of the new semester. Nor were they the last rumors to be whispered. Tom heard many more in the weeks that followed and three weeks later, after watching a Quidditch match in the rain, Tom went to visit Madam Clearwater with the symptoms of a cold. She sat him on a bed, fed him a thick broth of soup and gave him a pepper-up potion. As she bustled about, attending to another sick girl with frizzy blonde hair falling out of its curl and a runny nose, Tom took the chance to look around. He craned his head, attempting to see passed the curtains around the outer bed.
The door opened and in walked Dumbledore, purple robes flaring out behind him like something from a child's picture book. It was disgustingly bright but Tom smiled as Dumbledore descended on him, asking about his well-being.
"Just a cold," he was quick to reassure. Dumbledore nodded, expressing his condolences.
"I hope you'll get better soon, my boy," he said, running slender fingers through his graying beard, which still had shocks of red through it.
"Thank you," Tom said, watching as Dumbledore parted the curtains and pulled out a flask from his robes. The potion was a murky brown, tinted with pink. Tom didn't recognize it.
"Harry, my boy," Dumbledore said, "glad to see you're up." The rest of his words were cut off by the curtain, which fell back into place and silenced their conversation. A silencing spell must have been embedded into the fabric. Tom switched his attention to the bottles of healing potions lined up in the cabinet above the sink. He read off the labels in his mind: pepper-up potion (still sitting on the counter, its cork beside it), calming draught, deflating draught, euphoria elixir, hair-raising draught, hiccupping solution, invigoration draught, skele-gro solution and swelling solution. The curtain parted and Tom watched Dumbledore reenter the room.
Dumbledore's eyes, keen as always even behind half-moon spectacles, stilled Tom's curious glances. "Good evening to you, Tom" he said as he departed, Tom's smooth reply lost in the closing door.
Madam Clearwater tutted him out of the hospital wing much later, telling him to rest and drink plenty of water.
"Thank you for your help," Tom replied, dipping his head in a short bow. He exited the hospital wing with one important fact: the rumors were true. How much, however, remained to be solved.
Tom, most of all, loved solving mysteries.