AN: This story is a continuation (more like a prequel) to the stories He's Always Known and The First Last Step by Tsurai no Shi. Yes, I did get permission from her before writing this story. Hopefully it's good.
Summary: Sometimes, the only reason something happens is because you know it's going to.
Tom knew how he was going to die. He knew the time, place, and he knew he would die while he ran away like the frightened child he would still be on the inside. The problem was that he didn't know any of the events leading up to his death. He didn't know how to change his end, and that, perhaps, frightened him more than the end itself.
Not to say that death didn't scare him because, when he was being honest with himself, he knew he was afraid to die. Who wasn't. Any normal person was afraid to meet their end. But Tom, when he was being honest, liked to think he was even more afraid than most. I mean, wouldn't you think it was worse to know you're going to die without being able to change it than to be left happily oblivious? Tom definitely thought so.
At one point in his life, Tom had spent months trying to figure out why he knew how he was going to die. He'd had to go through the whole of the Hogwarts library, Malfoy library, Black library, Rosier library, and McNair library before he finally found the book he was looking for in the Zabini library. It was an ordinary small black book with no title or author to be found. One would think that this book could hold nothing of importance, but Tom quickly found out just how wrong that was.
The book was no doubt on of the most important books Tom had read to date, coming in second only to the one where he'd learned about Horcruxes. The book told of an ancient power, one that only the most powerful of witches and wizards could harness, and even then the ability to harness it was only a maybe. The writer called this power "Sight", or the ability to be able to know your own future.
It told of how most people would only be able to See one's death, and possibly even a couple of major events in their life. Only the luckiest, or the unluckiest depending on how one looked at it, most powerful were able to see their entire life laid out before them. The writer called those with the ability to see it all "Enlightened", the last recorded one having been Merlin himself.
At first Tom had hated his "gift" even more, thinking it sounded awfully like being a Seer. It wasn't until he read the part about what you see always happens that he realized just how wrong he was. Tom had been mistakenly thinking that he could change what he Saw, that it was only one possibility. He hasn't realized that no matter how much he tried to get off the path he was on, he couldn't.
So he tried to become a Dark Lord. He figured maybe, if he was lucky, his army of deluded followers would kill the boy he always saw chasing him to his death, the boy with ancient eyes, for him. It would be perfect. The boy would be gone forever, never to raise even a finger against him. But as Tom gathered his army, falling deeper into the dark all the while, he realized that someone else killing the boy wouldn't be enough for him. He wanted to kill the boy himself for forcing him to live with the worry and the doubt all of his life.
And then he heard about the prophecy. He searched meticulously for any baby boy that fit what he knew of the prophecy, then narrowed his search down to those he discovered had dark hair. In the end he told his right hand to find pictures for him, thinking he would simply know which child would turn into his demise. He was right. The second Tom saw the green eyes of the smaller child, he knew that it was just who he was looking for.
He went out that very night to kill the child himself, sending some of his more insane minions off to kill the other child just incase. He killed the boy's father, and he killed the boy's mother, and Tom turned to kill the child himself. The child with too bright, too understanding eyes as he stared at the lifeless body of his mother without even a single tear in his young eyes.
And as Tom lifted his wand against the small form of his future enemy, he thought that he would finally be free of what had caused his worry for years. He should have known that it wasn't the end, as his sole split from his body, taking the form of a raven before flying away.