The Epicurean
Lord Voldemort is a man of discerning taste.
He likes to think that he was always such a connoisseur, but is he is not fool enough to believe that his childhood palette was nearly as refined.
But he does believe that he always knew something was missing, that the repetitive slop was not all that could come to the table.
"We are what we eat," Mrs. Cole used to say as she filled his bowl with the paste-like gruel that passed for a morning meal. And in his black heart little Tom valiantly denied that he was so bland, so lacking in uniqueness, so, well, forgettable.
As he and the other children bowed their heads in grace, he would raise furtive eyes to the table and think about how one could be a brussel sprout, or a side of greying beef, and whether or not the others found it odd that one was bound to forever consume life for the purpose of continuing their own admittedly pathetic existence.
And for a moment, he wondered idly, what would happen if one consumed death instead.
---Knowledge too is a kind of a hunger, and it flavored his Hogwarts days. And if the tastes of childhood were founded on the comfort of the same thing, day in and day out, then this new world was one of endlessly rotating dishes, and a fervent need to consume all that he could see.
At the orphanage, every Sunday had meant a morning with Father McKinnon. He taught Tom that muggles saw knowledge as a fresh fruit, ripe for the taking, coaxed by the sweet words of a great snake. Tom likes that image—the serpent at the base of a tree twisting with unrealized power. He thought of it each time he raised an apple to his lips and bit.
And Tom's craving was insatiable. At meals, between classes, in the toxic unreality of three am dreams—he would sink into his books, relishing the taste of ink and parchment and feeling the words reach into his very bones. He sometimes dreamed that rusty ink ran in his veins, that there was Tom of the flesh and another Tom of iron gall and yellowing parchment, endlessly feeding off one another, consuming the self in perpetuity.
In his fifth year, he decided that such a dream had been but a premonition.
---When he left Hogwarts, Tom's preference took a turn to the exotic. He yearned to discover lost things, to tastes the depths of life and death and everything in between.
He went to India where the lost knowledge of the Nagi fell from his lips (he drank cool lassi and savored fiery curries on the banks of the Ganges). He saw the forbidden depths of China, a land once resplendent with conquering lords (and consumed tiny dumplings and plucked the eyes of still steaming fish). He made the trek across Siberia and reveled in the ever-present darkness of empty tundra (and let the salty meat of reindeer melt on his tongue).
Along the way, he tasted magic too. There was a bit of a ritual to it. Of calling the dark magic—unfixed and ever-changing—and swirling it so that its aromas caressed his senses, and finally drinking just a bit, enough to identify its elements and to decide if this was a vintage worth cultivating.
Death may be the most ravenous force of all, but Tom thinks that with the right ingredients, he can change that. If only he could become the consumer—to hunt down that force and butcher it so that it lies motionless on his plate, existing only to satiate his own desires.
For Tom will not be taken by death. And if he must become death to do so, then he will happily accept that bill.
---When Tom returned to England, he shed his name and the pretenses of his schoolboy days. He meant to shed all his weakness, but it didn't quite work out.
Death and hunger are both maladies of the flesh. It is our mortal beings that cry for the succulent lives of others, only to pay for our greed when the earth and its worms dissolve our putrid form. And so Tom acknowledges that these are his weaknesses. Lord Voldemort does not fear the moment of death. He fears the dissolution of self that follows.
But he thinks he's found a loophole.
That which is immortal cannot be eaten—never can it give of itself so completely. And so Lord Voldemort aims to become that which can never be consumed. He will shuck this vulnerable flesh and death will gag on his bones.
---When he's not dabbling in dark arts or butchering the weaker of his kind, Tom likes to go to muggle restaurants. It's a secret pleasure, one he would never share with his followers. No one would ever hear him admit that muggles really understand food much better than wizards.
Wizarding food, even its delicacies, have the flat cardboard taste of a mirage—the artifice of the conjured. It is not of the earth, of blood or sweat, of the toil of a life made short by hard labor. You don't taste suffering, and joy, or the eerie rain that washed across the valley that spring. Tom tastes all these things, his newly forked tongue lapping up every delicious bit.
It was after such a meal (a pomegranate-glazed leg of lamb to be exact) that Lord Voldemort gathered his Death Eaters and raised his glass above the quivering spy. A toast: to hunger, and power, and three lives to end that night.
---As he walked up the
path to Godric Hollow, he wonders idly whether James Potter would
cook up just like venison stew.
He thinks he'd like to try.