Disclaimers: None of this is mine. Except the plot… methinks.

Authors Notes: This is a companion to Ashes to Ashes. It consists of various snippets, some short and some long, in Tom's POV (both first and third person) before, during and after events in the original story. No slash in this one, I'm afraid.

Summary: Companion to Ashes to Ashes. Turned back to what he was before he was Voldemort. Before he had lost all trace of his innocence. But just how innocent is Tom Marvolo Riddle? Take a peek inside his head.

Ashes to Ashes:

Inside his head.

"Whatever you do, however terrible, however hurtful - it all makes sense doesn't it? Inside your head? You never meet someone who thinks they're a bad person."

– The Talented Mr Ripley

I do not believe in love.

I've never known what love is, so I don't understand it. I know hate - hate is an old friend of mine - sometimes I don't know what I would do without it. For it is my driving force - it keeps me going when nothing else will. I understand hate only too well. Hate and passion and fury. Those are all real. But love? It is nothing but a thing of fairy tales and cheap paperback romances. I have certainly never loved anyone and no-one has ever loved me. But, perhaps that isn't quite true. My mother loved me, didn't she? When I was younger I liked to think so but of late I'm not quite sure. She didn't really know me - she simply gave birth to me, named me after the other two men that she loved and then died.

Sometimes I hate her for dying. I hate her for leaving me behind to repay her sins. If she loved me she wouldn't have died. If she loved me she would have at least given me a name of my own instead of naming me after them. It's as if she were wishing a part of them into me. If she loved me she would have let me be my own man. If she loved me she would have taken me with her.

I do not wish for death. I can't for I fear it more than anything. I fear it with a paralysing, haunting fear that most people never know not even in their most blood curdling nightmares. But sometimes I do wish that I had never been born. My mother loved me enough to bear me and to give me life but she has hurt me unbearably by doing so. She has damned me to life and has herself sought a merciful escape and for this I hate her.

I hate her for loving a Muggle. My mother loved my father and he hurt her. She loved me and I killed her while I was coming out of her. Love is a deadly thing. If you love people they hurt you. If you love people they kill you.

I suppose for a thing that doesn't exist love is a very dangerous thing. Caelestis Malfoy, my best - well, perhaps not my best friend, but my closest confidante once said that Love is nothing but a figment of the imagination whose sole purpose is to justify the selfishness and pettiness of man.

"After all it's much nicer to say that you're going to kill your rival for the love of a noble woman rather than say that you want her for yourself and can't stand the punk and want him dead because you're a selfish pig."

I couldn't have put it better myself. But I never intend to do anything for love or even excuse my actions with it. As far as I am concerned I want nothing to do with love.

I honestly don't think that such a thing exists. At least not among the kind that I am forced to live with. They are not capable of it.

But then again, how can they be, when it doesn't exist in the first place?

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At first he had thought that the fault lay within himself. That he was unlovable because of what he was. He believed them when they told him that he was cursed and damned and a creature of darkness. He didn't want to be different. No child ever does. But the fact remained that he was. He wasn't like the other children. There had always been a strange unearthly air about him - something that wasn't quite right, that wasn't quite normal - wasn't quite human.

He hadn't asked to have unnaturally bright, green eyes that unnerved all those around him. He hadn't asked for the aura of mysterious, eerie power that seemed to hang around him - in truth it was quite macabre. He hadn't asked for the power itself - the strange sinister power that he knew he possessed - dormant beneath his skin but unmistakably there.

It hadn't helped that things always seemed to happen around him. When he was angry or scared or upset. And at the orphanage he was almost always angry or scared or upset. As he grew the anger increased and the fear and sadness were soon forgotten.

Anger at them for mistreating him simply because he was different and anger at himself for being different. He was always hurting and always angry and when he was angry things happened.

Windows would break, furniture would hurl itself at whoever it was that his anger was directed, or the victim themselves would kneel over with pain.

He soon realized that if he could make things happen without meaning to then perhaps he could make things happen when he tried. But like the rest of his life nothing ever happen when he wanted it to. But he was sure that he would be able to if he just pushed hard enough. Maybe he could harness his hate and anger and channel it to his use. It never worked except unintentionally, but he never stopped trying. He couldn't stop being different but if he could manage to use his "powers" as he liked to call them when he wanted to maybe he could enjoy being different for once. He knew that he would succeed, if given time.

He had time. He had all the time in the world. He would make them pay.

His time would come.

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Authors Post Notes: Thank you to everyone who reviewed and recced Ashes to Ashes. If you like Inside His Head (or disliked… I'm open to constructive criticism) please review. Updates every week… or earlier if I feel like it. Also this is all un-beta'ed so please bear with me. Any takers?