The Story of a Soul and a Struggle for Control

Prologue

Tom knew the story. He knew all the events that had transpired to bring him to this point, even the ones that had happened when he was just a baby, too small to remember.

True, his grandfather had never sat down and told him how it happened from the very beginning, like a bedtime story, his grandfather wasn't the type. Tom had been forced to scavenge for information like a beggar, picking up crumb after crumb until all the events leading up to his servitude fit together to form one big picture.

It had started with his mother, who had abandoned her duties.

As a witch, and Marvolo's daughter, she should have been waiting for her father when he returned from prison with a warm meal and a subservient attitude. Instead, Tom's grandfather had returned to find the cottage coated with a thick layer of dust, and a note telling him she had run off with some muggle filth.

As a child, whenever Tom would hear Marvolo's venom-laced curses of Merope's memory, he would secretly wish that he too could abandon his duties and run away. He couldn't, though. He would never be able to escape from Marvolo. And besides, it was his duty to help purge the world of muggle vermin.

He was lucky to be alive, of course, even if it was a life of slavery. After all, Marvolo's initial plan had been to kill Tom. This was because Tom was the result of a sexual union between a pure-blooded witch and a muggle, and therefore a despicable abomination that was unworthy of life.

At least, that was what Marvolo liked to tell Tom. Personally, Tom thought it was because he was a physical manifestation of the fact that he had been defied and betrayed by his daughter.

During the initial plans to kill Tom, Marvolo had another issue to contend with- the death of the Slytherin line. His son Morfin was in Azkaban, and likely to die there, and his daughter Merope was also dead, her only descendant a filthy half-blood. This made Marvolo the last pureblood descendant of Salazar Slytherin, and as such it was his duty to make sure the Slytherin blood lived on.

Therefore, around the same time that Marvolo had learned of Tom's existence, he had begun researching methods to immortality.

His ancestors had many personal journals and manuscripts they had managed to keep hidden and safe from the Ministry's censorship of all things Dark Arts, and among those journals Marvolo began to discover the secrets of soul magic.

The journals had contained information about becoming immortal, but the method they named had one drawback- they would not bring the youth back into Marvolo's deteriorating old body, nor would they strengthen his weak magic. It was better than nothing, of course, and Marvolo set out to create a Horcrux. It was only symbolic, he decided, that the death to tear his soul would be the death of his grandson- Tom.

This next point in the story was the one that Tom liked to think about least. Marvolo had come for Tom to kill him, but as he grabbed hold of the baby by the hair, he felt a flash of pain shoot up his arm. The fact that at the age of a year Tom was able to use magic to defend himself was very impressive, magically speaking. Marvolo realized just how incredibly powerful Tom was, and didn't want that to go to waste. So instead of killing him, Marvolo cursed Tom.

Like Horcruxes, this spell was soul magic. Like Horcruxes, this spell also required the ripping of the soul. Unlike Horcruxes, though, the torn soul was not placed in a physical vessel. No, the piece of soul was bound to another soul.

It had been invented by a male Gaunt named Morpheus some century ago when his wife had made an attempt to kill him. One day she had had enough of the beatings and humiliation and had run at him from behind with a knife. Her murder attempt had failed, but Morpheus had learned the lesson and created the spell which tied a shard of his soul to his wife's.

It served a double purpose: first, as long as the wife was alive the husband could not die, making it impossible for the wife to kill the husband, and second, if the wife was of an especially meek and underdeveloped personality, the piece of the husband's soul inside could take control of her body and do as he wished with it.

An added bonus of the spell was that the two souls bound together could hear each others thoughts. So Morpheus's wife was completely unable to even plan an escape from her husband without him knowing about it and thwarting her.

For generations, the spell was simply used by Gaunt males to subdue their wives which was, in Marvolo's opinion, dreadfully uncreative and wasteful. Marvolo himself tied his soul to his grandson's. Thus, he could insure the continuation of his life and thus the continuation of the Slytherin line. In addition, he could use Tom's body, and therefore his incredibly powerful magic, to do with as he wished.

Suddenly, Marvolo had power. And Tom, at an age so tender he could not even remember it, became a slave.

Sometimes, Tom wished that Marvolo had just killed him that night and spared him this life of servitude. He only wished it very briefly, though, because the piece of Marvolo's soul inside him could read his thoughts and didn't like it at all when Tom thought that. And Tom didn't like it when Marvolo decided he had to be punished. He also stopped wishing for death because, though he constantly yearned to be free, Tom liked living.

He liked practicing magic in the secret of his little room in the orphanage. He also liked tormenting all the muggle children around him.

At first, he had struggled very hard when Marvolo took control of his body and began using Tom's own magic to hurt the other muggle children. He had cried and screamed inside his head, where only Marvolo could hear him, and he walked around feeling sick for hours when it was over.

Eventually, though, Tom learned through Marvolo's careful tutelage that they weren't really children like him. They were filthy animals that needed to be punished for soiling the world with their presence. Once Tom realized what a great service he was doing to the world by subjugating muggles and putting them in their place, he began taking pride in it. He felt an important sense of duty whenever he used his magic to root them to their place and make them hurt. But that didn't mean he stopped hating his grandfather.

Then came Hogwarts.

Tom loved Hogwarts with every fiber of his being. He loved the huge hall with all the good filling food. He loved the twisting corridors and secret passageways, full of mysteries to be uncovered, he loved the enormous library, containing more books than he could possibly read in a lifetime. More than anything else, though, he adored the magic classes.

Tom had always taken to magic like a fish to water. It came to him with an ease and a grace that was unmatched by any of the Hogwarts children, and it was his greatest source of pleasure.

There were other things in Hogwarts, though. Things that, in Marvolo's opinion, were far more important than turning hedgehogs into pincushions (even if that was a fourth-year spell and Tom had managed it within his first three months at Hogwarts). Things like mudbloods. Tom had never met or even seen a mudblood, but his grandfather was quick to teach him that they were just as bad as muggles. In the small bubble of the Slytherin house, where everyone believed the same thing, it was shockingly easy to remain ignorant. It was not until Tom's fifth year at Hogwarts that Tom even became aware of the fact that mudbloods were capable of having intelligent conversations, and being friendly and compassionate and all sorts of wonderful things that Marvolo had always attributed to wizards only.

Tom's fifth year. It had probably been the most pivotal and most traumatic period of Tom's life, and it could be attributed to two things happening.

The first was that Tom was beginning to gain strength, and had started to wrestle control of his body back from Marvolo. In general, when the soul-binding spell had been used, the torn soul would not be able to take control of its host's body unless the person the soul had attached itself to had an especially weak and submissive personality. Marvolo had tied his soul to Tom's when he was just a baby, and Tom was far too young at that point to have any kind of mental strength and personality of his own. It was no problem for Marvolo to enslave Tom's body.

Over the years, though, Tom had begun to become his own person. And it was during his fifth year at Hogwarts that he had managed to wrestle control of his body away from his grandfather for the very first time. The attempt had left him exhausted and weak, and Marvolo had soon seized control again, but Tom had been victorious, if only for a few moments. The age of fifteen is generally one of the least likely ages for a person to begin developing a strong and confident personality. Most people at that age are guided by social pressure and cripplingly insecure about their worth. Tom, though, was a brilliant prodigy and he knew it, and he had grown up hating his grandfather with every fiber of his being. He will to be free was iron in its determination, and he had never been stronger in his confidence or resolve. And for a few short moments, he had succeeded in breaking free.

What a tragic mistake.

Marvolo panicked once he realized that Tom was beginning to become stronger than him, and quickly took steps to insure that Tom's soul was permanently and irrevocably weakened. Tom, still not completely stronger than his grandfather, and weakened further through the fight with him, could do nothing to stop it.

He watched, trapped inside his own body, helpless, as Marvolo used Tom's body to kill, and then split Tom's soul and moved the splinter into a journal, creating a Horcrux.

And then he did it again. And again. And again.

As far as Marvolo was concerned, the Horcruxes served a dual purpose: they not only weakened Tom's soul to an extent to which it was too weak to fight Marvolo, they also guaranteed Tom's immortality, and therefore Marvolo's as well. As long as Tom's soul remained in the land of the living, so would Marvolo's.

By the time Marvolo felt safe enough in his control over Tom's body to stop creating Horcruxes, Tom's soul was split in six, and was mangled beyond recognition. Weakened, battered, and utterly powerless against his grandfather.

As time went by, Tom's hatred for his grandfather only grew, and he eventually also grew disillusioned with the concepts of blood purity Marvolo preached.

But he was weak, and Marvolo was strong, and as the decades passed, Tom began to think he would remain Marvolo's slave for all of eternity.

Until Harry Potter came along.

Welcome to my new story. I have no clue where I'm going with this, but if you're as curious to find out as I am, feel free to follow this story :)