There is IMPLIED SLASH present in this fic. If you don't like that, the "Back" button is there for a reason.
Disclaimer: Harry Potter, et al, is property of J.K. Rowling and Warner Bros.
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Timeline
Eleven years old, and knowing that the entire world lay ahead of him. A strange, swollen silence that rose up like a genie from a lamp; the hush as the Hat was put on his head.
And the thought that here he was, a new person. There was nobody who knew him here, and there was nobody who would care. And the thought that he would make them care about him; the way his father never did, the way his mother never did (she died on him, after all, and how irresponsible can you be?).
Eleven years old, and a newly sorted Slytherin. His House clapped for him, smiling the way predators do. He didn't drink the Butterbeer they put in front of him. Later that day, he found a first-year in the lavatory, retching up a thick golden muck.
A Slytherin prefect cornered him in the very same toilet, pushed him against the wall and probed his ear with his tongue. Only fourteen, the prefect whispered, and already so darling I could eat you. In the end, though, he did most of the eating, the prefect's hands shaky on either side of his shoulders. He was made a prefect after that.
Sixteen and running away from the orphanage where he stayed during the holidays and arriving (still running) at his father's house, cold and sweat-stained. Through a window, he watched his father and his parents have tea in aristocratic surroundings that he never had.
It was like listening to a radio, his head so close that it buzzed when the radio crackled -- fanciful stories of extravagance repeated over and over again, songs he could never really sing the way the singers did; an elegant dance he could never really join.
As soon as the maid left, his fist plunged into the transistor and pulled out nothing but cheap, sputtering wiring.
His palms were wet, but then his grip was firm. He found himself grinning exactly like a Slytherin when he said the magic words.
As an afterthought, he killed his father's parents, as well. It was better, he thought, to have no family at all then to have a family that rejected you. He managed to find out that nothing lay behind the looking glass but a cheap mirage and a salesman always ready to swindle you with an overpriced camel to the next mirage.
He talked to a garter snake, afterwards, who told him what he did was right and just. He would have made an excellent snake, it said. It's a pity you're a human.
There was a proper oasis out there, he thought, as he was made Head Boy, at seventeen. An oasis of people who knew where their places were in the world; an oasis where the rich were those who truly deserved it.
He thought he deserved it. Surely, after so much he had been through, he deserved more than the shit of a life they gave him. It was a trophy, to him; like getting distinctions in all his N.E.W.T.s. He just had to work hard enough, get enough blood on his hands; the blood of those who deserved what they got and knew their place -- either splattered on his hands, or below his feet.
Seventeen years old, and the world on a string, like a yo-yo trick he just had to learn, so he could spin it round and round...