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Splinters
4
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Scrambling to his feet as fast as his shaking, buckling limbs allow, Tom's hands and eyes flit across the floor, torn between searching for his wand and for the rasping, wheezing shape of a body cast in darkness.
At some point after he'd collapsed, his lumos had stuttered out, and the conjured mirror must have fallen. Fragments of glass crunch and scrape beneath his heels.
It's a rare day when Tom Marvolo Riddle is set off guard.
How—
How had someone gotten down here? How long must he have been unconscious, for him to have not noticed the intrusion? Tom's usually sharp mind struggles to function around a blistering migraine.
Finally, finally, he spots it. His blurred vision trips across the pale wood of his wand, flung halfway across the chamber in the opposite direction of the intruder. It is stark against the dark stones.
He raises his dominant hand out before him, tensing his fingers against the ceaseless trembling. Tries again to summon it to him. "Accio wand." His words are a hoarse whisper – a rush of hot air over dry lips – and his attempts to call up his magic are met with a slow, feeble trickle where usually there is a tidal surge. It tingles briefly in his palm, and the wand twitches, once, where it lies on the floor.
Despite the instinctive prickle at the nape of his neck that warns him not to turn his back on whomever lies, prone, beneath the mighty shadow of Salazar's statue, Tom stumbles towards his wand, struggling to stay upright. His sense of balance is compromised, as though he's damaged an eardrum.
Breathing laboured and heart painfully sluggish, the boy leans down for his wand and almost overbalances. His vision swims—
—a burst of fiery red hair and the scent of rust over freshly cut grass—
—and Tom fights the violent urge to gag against the intrusion. Bitter saliva floods his tongue. Gripping the side of his face in his free hand, he drags his weakened Occlumency shields up through sheer, blind willpower alone.
Bewitched. He must have been bewitched.
Teeth grit and panic rising until his weeping chest is tight with it, the young wizard turns on the spot. Wand in a white-knuckled fist, the remains of his drained magic rise up from his broken core.
Lord Voldemort will not be played for a fool.
He approaches the figure, brittle shards of mirror crushed and cracking underfoot. Raising his hand, he draws a silent lumos into being from the tip of his wand (and there is a wash of relief that he can do at least that much).
With a tap of his index finger, the lumos detaches itself and lazily climbs into the air, once again illuminating the chamber and glittering over water, wet rock and glass.
Tom's dark eyes flicker down to the prone body.
It is a male.
He is lying with his back to Tom. His skin is bare from his head to his feet. The light scatters over raised ribs and the sharp point of a hip, and even in the darkness there are welts, shiny white patches of old scar tissue, bumps in an over-accentuated spine. Dark red lashes and abrasions spider-web across his pale skin.
The man's body is almost skeletal. Small.
Starved. Beaten. Cursed. This is clearly a victim of torture.
Pacified by the poor state of health that the stranger is in, Tom fires a weak Expelliarmus at their back, little more than a safety precaution. The only response is the flex of ropey muscles in thin arms, a primal lurching as if to hold tighter onto something. Tom's eyes narrow. Not a wand, perhaps, but something.
He casts again – stronger, this time.
The man's body shudders.
Nothing. And yet his muscles flex.
Brows furrowing, Tom circles around the pitiful figure until he can peer down at his face.
The first thing he notices is the blood.
From some kind of a head wound, blood as black as ink spills into one shut eye, matting the hair on one side of his head and obscuring sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, thin lips.
But then Tom's attention is drawn down to the man's torso and he balks. Clutched in the stranger's arms, pressed tight to misshapen ribs and a stomach that looks like it's been blown open by a reducto is the black leather of his diary.
His heart stops.
Tom's lip draws back over his teeth and his fingers spasm around his wand until it creaks.
"Accio Diary."
Convulsions force themselves down the stranger's body as what is left of fingers curl into the leather cover.
He casts again, pouring his spiking anxiety into the spell. Cold sweat beads at his brow.
Still the man does not release his hold.
Expelling a hard breath, Tom steps forward, delivers a solid kick to the deformed man's side, the toe of his shiny black shoe sinking into the ragged, hollowed-out wound.
With a silent, gasping cry, the man rolls weakly onto his back, legs extending and eyes fluttering in the light.
Flashes of green.
Damp trails, shiny through the congealing blood, pool in the corner of hollow eyelids, and dribble over his cheeks. Tears.
Tom feels the air leave his lungs.
Not a man, but a boy.
This is a boy, barely older than Tom.
Young Lord Voldemort stares down into the face of this boy only briefly, perplexed at the growing mystery. How… curious this situation is.
The boy is not a Hogwarts student. Tom knows he isn't. Has had every single student in the school – and their family backgrounds, where useful – memorised from his first year. This dark haired, green eyed, beaten creature is not someone he recalls ever seeing. Which begs the question, who is he? Where did he come from? How did he get into a secret, guarded chamber under a heavily protected, unplottable magical school like Hogwarts?
Tom belatedly considers that this stranger might not be the only person down here. He certainly doesn't seem strong enough to have gotten inside the chamber by himself. Once again, the young wizard feels a stab of frustration at his muzzy, clouded thoughts.
"Homenum revelio," he whispers, straightening, his wand raised to the hall.
Nothing appears.
He casts again, ignoring the burning strain on his core, and turns to study the stretch of shadows behind him. No.
And again, sweeping his wand in the direction of the pipes.
By the time Tom's satisfied that they are alone, the boy is shuddering, his teary, half-mast eyes clouded over like he isn't really seeing Tom at all. The struggle of retaining consciousness is apparently too much for the stranger, for after a heartbeat of bright green eyes staring, unseeing – through him – they roll back into his skull.
The mangled hands (little more than poorly butchered stumps) go lax. One slides off his abdomen completely, leaving Tom's precious, precious diary unguarded.
He leans down, tentatively hooks his fingers around the underside of the cover, and lifts it away from the body.
Or at least, he tries to.
The second that his skin brushes the leather, his visions swims red, a chill like nothing he's ever felt before surging up his arm, locking his fingers, burning so cold it feels like fire. Someone's screaming, shrieking something that makes all the blood in his veins curdle. Every nerve is set alight. The wounded, hollow cavity of his chest where his magic and his soul took residence recoils.
He tears his hand away, but still his eyes are clouded red, his ears are ringing with phantom screams, his muscles are locked—
and the force of the curse cleaves him open, sends his insides spilling down his front, and somehow as his organs fall in tangles to the floor, the blood rushes up, up, up, until it fills his mouth, copper and salt, chokes him, bursts past his lips and pours down his chin, out his nose, his ears, eyes, and his head - his head—
The Slytherin's legs buckle, knees slamming into stone, and the pain jolts him back to himself. Glass slices into his bare palms and through his trouser legs to his skin.
The frigid, freezing red retreats just as fast as it washed over him, leaving him gasping, clutching at the floor. His eyes are squeezed shut, his breath coming in harsh pants. There's bile souring his mouth, and he breathes through it, through the turn of his stomach and the roughness of his breath.
Swallow it back. In, out, slowly. Swallow.
In the silence of the cavern, past the rush of his breath, there is laughter. Laughter so quiet, so strangled, it's hardly a sound at all.
But it's enough for Tom's head to shoot up. Enough for him to scrabble for his wand.
Barely a foot from his face are those hollow, haunting green eyes. Half-lidded, glazed. Staring. At him, not through, this time. Not now.
The stranger's face is twisted into a grin, white teeth bright where they aren't stained pink. He looks, to Tom, like something that's crawled straight up from the bowels of hell. The Slytherin can't look away as the thin, bloody face scrunches around a breathless, body-shaking laugh. The boy quivers and coughs that wet, hacking cough with the force of it.
Throughout, his gaze never leaves Tom, like this is the best joke he's ever seen.
Tom is furious. Tom is terrified. He's frozen to the spot, even as the stranger's rattling laughter dies to a spluttering wheeze. The tracks in his blood-caked cheeks have grown more pronounced, the skin beneath the thick layer just as stark a white as the rest of him. The grin falls to a thin line, the corners of his mouth curled up. Those hazy green eyes travel over Tom's face, and he' s lost.
Time seems a petty insubstantial thing, stuck in the dark of the chamber, eyes glued to this hideous, deformed creature. Tom's perfect, powerful mind is—
is not. It is nothing but raw sensation; he's numb with it.
And then the stranger's lips part, his tongue curling around words Tom can barely make out over his own breathing. "Why... always y-ou...? Always comes b-back to-" Another rattling cough overwhelms him, and those eyes scrunch shut.
Whatever spell held Tom locked in place breaks, and he wrenches himself upright, away. His thoughts crash back down into him, a hundred miles a minute. He forces himself up onto his feet, knees throbbing and eyes wild.
Everything is disjointed, nonsensical. All of his carefully laid plans, uprooted, torn out and churned up by this— by this—
what is he even supposed to be?
"Who are you?" He spits the words like venom, and his throat stings. "Who the hell are you, and what have you done to me? To my diary?"
Coughs easing up, the stranger's eyes remain closed. His torn up abdomen rises and falls in a jolty fashion. He's barely conscious, Tom ascertains. Tom's horcrux – not right, something's wrong with it, with his soul fragment – lies placid against his wrecked torso.
When the silence stretches for too long, Tom's tattered patience snaps. "Answer me!"
Stirring, the boy's eyes slip open the barest fraction. The grin is back, and his mouth is as red as his face now.
Tom bares his teeth. "Tell me."
The stranger watches, silent and mocking, smile stretching wider in a sick parody of amusement.
"I'll kill you if you don't talk. I'll cut your tongue out of your head and shove it far enough down your throat that you choke to death on it—"
That laughter. That laughter. The stranger shudders with it, a dying animal beyond sense. "I'd like... to see you try."
Rage courses through Tom, overriding his frustration, feeding on his blind confusion and fear.
"Crucio!" His magic skips down his arm, a meagre strand of it that flits from the tip of his wand and wavers in open space before striking its intended target.
He may be far weaker than usual, but this is a spell that Tom has researched extensively. He has practiced the wand movements, has memorised what is known of the spells origins. And the kind of resentment needed to fuel such a cruel curse comes to Tom as naturally as breathing.
The deformed boy shudders, gurgles, bloody grin widening until his mouth gapes and his body thrashes, mangled arms flailing and Tom's diary toppling to the ground as his back arches off of the flagstones.
Tom only lifts the spell when his eyes roll and pink froth trickles down his cheek and chin. The magic sputters out like a stifled flame. Shaky limbed and breathing laboured, the Slytherin looks down at the lolling head and the unnaturally still body.
He thinks, through a spike of cold fury, fine. I'll leave you to bleed to death. And then I'll feed you to Salazar's basilisk.
He's turning away, back straight and expression schooled. All he can think is that he needs to leave, needs to get back into the castle before it gets too late, before he is missed. He has no idea how much time he's lost.
"Is that... the best... you can do?"
It's a split second reaction, and Tom knows that he ought to stop, ought to think this situation through, nonsensical, illogical as it is, ought to...
But he doesn't. He whirls around, pulls his leg back and aims a kick at the stranger's head, connecting so hard with his face that there's a crunch, a garbled sound, and a rivulets of fresh blood pouring from a mangled lump that was once a nose. The boy lies, still.
Tom's almost positive he's broken his own toes.
After a moment of bated breath and buzzing silence, Tom steps back - hobbles, really. The puddle surrounding the other teenager expands past its congealing borders, spilling into cracks between giant stone slabs and inching through the darkness towards the gutters.
Silent, introspective (still sick to his stomach and so angry he could peal the boy apart, limb from limb and muscle from skin), he considers the mess that he has made.
He's been cursed, or bewitched, and his diary – his horcrux, his precious soul, oh God oh God – has been tampered with somehow. He needs to investigate this troubling possibility.
Tom looks down at himself, and studies his cut palms, the mess of his chest, the ragged tears in his trousers and the foot he'd injured just moments before. A trip to the Hospital Wing is absolutely not an option, and he can't risk anyone seeing him like this, but his magic is… extremely limited. He fears that, if he tries to push himself too far, the consequences might be dire.
He shouldn't have wasted his magic on the Cruciatus; should have practiced some self-restraint.
Taking a slow breath, Tom casts Episkey on his foot, and Tergeos his torso and his white shirt to remove the worst of the blood, his face a grim set against the pain.
After buttoning his shirt and adjusting his tie with unresponsive fingers, he summons a plain black cloak to throw over his front to hide the blood already budding up through the fabric again.
Tom pauses.
He peers down at the mangled young man lying on the floor, and considers what to do.
There's a large part of Tom – the bloodthirsty, reckless, admittedly Gryffindor part of him – that just wants to leave this boy for dead, despite the danger and the puzzle that he presents. He wants nothing more than for this impudent, patronising creature to die just as pathetically as he appeared…
But that would be a waste, he knows.
Despite the agonising drain that leaves him unsteady and clutching at his head, Tom summons a second cloak to throw over the stranger, and even goes so far as to cast Vulnera Sanentur and Anapneo, to knit the worst of his abdominal injury and to clear his throat of any blood. Only a portion of the boy's stomach wound knits, and he isn't sure that the final spell works at all.
Sickened by his inability to cast, Tom turns to Slytherin, slipping his eyes shut and calling up the image of a coiled snake. With it image in mind, he raises his voice.
"Speak to me, Slytherin, Greatest of the Hogwarts four."
The grate of stone on stone follows, and a rush of cool air spills out of his cavernous mouth like the last exhale of a corpse.
Tom adjusts his footing, steadies himself from swaying. This has to be quick, he thinks, adjusting his grip on his wand.
Mercifully, it isn't long before Tom's request is met, and the mighty basilisk emerges from her master's throat, slipping out into the chamber with a quiet scraping of hardened scales over rock and a long, hissed breath.
Acid yellow eyes, bulbous even in the basilisks huge face, peer down at him, and Tom stares back, unaffected by her magic the way that normalwizards are.
"Master…" Her crooning fills the chamber, and she approaches with a weaving head. Her long, forked black tongue flits out, tasting the air as she drags herself across the chamber to Tom. The crest on her head stands at the scent of blood, and her eyes lock on the stranger's body. "A gift, a gift for me?"
"That is not for you," Tom says, inhaling the musk of stale water and dead things that is unique to his pet. "This is mine, and is something I wish for you to… guard."
"Hungry, so hungry, Master. Just a taste, just a bite—"
"Silence," he says. His voice is sharper than usual, and the basilisks mighty head withdraws, crest flat and neck curled.
A chastised hiss echoes off of the shadowed walls. "This is yours, yes, scrawny thing is yours, not mine… This scrawny thing, I shall guard for Master."
Perhaps her subservient nature would have settled his nerves and placated his temper on a usual night, but he does not reach out to stroke his hand down her muzzle or praise her the way he might have otherwise. Tom just doesn't have the energy.
"Watch it, make sure it doesn't move. Do not kill it." He looks down at the bloody mess that is the boy through blurring eyes, struggles to feel anything beyond the impending sense of lethargy that is weighing down on him. "If it escapes, find me through the pipes. If anything else appears, kill, capture, eat; I do not care. If it dies…" He pauses, struggles to think of any possible threat. "Do not let it die."
His basilisk hums, air around it sparking imperceptibly as his orders settle around it like a noose. It is not happy, he thinks, but the possibility of other prey turning up has it lowering its head to the floor, the side of its jaw brushing against his arm and shoulder affectionately. "Yesss, Master…"
Tom inclines his chin, settles one hand fleetingly on the creatures mighty crown, and with one final look at the mangled body being slowly obscured from sight by the huge coils of Salazar's greatest gift, he leaves.
Time to return to reality…
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