"I can talk to snakes. Is that normal…for a wizard?"
Turning in the doorway, the old man cast him one last, appraising glance. He didn't like what he saw, Tom could tell. Not that anyone ever did—but he'd thought perhaps this man, who was special too, might see something else…
"It is unusual," said the man at last. "But not unheard of."
And he swept out the door of the dingy little bedroom, him and his ridiculously ostentatious plum-colored suit meant to hide him from people who couldn't see what Tom could.
But Tom recognized the eccentricity for what it was: convenient. He could always see beneath even the most carefully schooled features. Not that most people bothered with that.
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore was clearly not most people.
Neither am I, thought Tom, collapsing on the thin mattress in draining determination and sheer relief. Relief at this final, decisive confirmation.
The Death Eaters were a joke to begin with. In fact, to Tom they were the clearest demonstration yet that silly, stupid things hurt people, and were therefore weapons.
It began almost the first night. Tom went to bed in his dormitory with his duly appointed Housemates, the Sorting Hat's hiss still echoing in his ears.
What have we here? The blood of Salazar Slytherin himself…
It was all about the blood, thought Tom as he punched his pillow into shape. Everything here was.
His life had been broken up into jagged shards and fit back together in a peculiar mosaic, stranger but infinitely better. Still, some of the pieces remained. The kind that bury themselves in your foot and stay there, too small to see and almost, almost too small to feel.
The pillow was too soft and he awoke drowning, thrashing in the soft covers. The other boys were asleep and the common room was empty, his only company the rippling silver serpent stretched across an entire wall. He practiced with his new wand, yew and phoenix feather, marveling at how easy it was to draw the instrument across the air and watch reality twist apart—
It wasn't long before thoughts of the previous evening crept into his head. Tom idly flicked his wand, turning the fabric that draped the walls different colors. Red and gold—silvery blue—hornet-striped—and back again to silver-edged green.
Did a House change so easily, he wondered. Or a person.
Did students make the House, or the House the students? It wasn't so unusual a question, just the test of human nature, after all. Hogwarts made it easier to find the answer by sorting you into piles like stacked cards. You could unstack the cards and build a castle, but they would be fragile then, more frail than the waving arm of an infant left on an orphanage doorstep.
Tom decided to build, anyway. And watched reality twist apart again.
A/N: If you guys like this, let me know. I'm thinking of continuing it.