The Imposter Complex

by Notus Oren

Tom Riddle escapes at the end of Chamber of Secrets, and is quite surprised to find that nothing about the future is as he ever thought it would be. Soon, Tom finds himself on a globe-spanning quest to follow the path his forebear blazed and perhaps, at the end, to put a stop to him once and for all.

7. Of Daemons and Dumbledores

The Imposter Complex, Chapter Seven: Of Daemons and Dumbledores

:-:-:-:-:

There may exist an individual who is able to remain stalwart in the face of a daemon shattering its ancient bonds and walking freely upon the world of Man once more, but I am not they.

I sprinted full-pelt up the marble steps of the Herculaneum College, and the impossibly deep laughter chased me all the way. I desperately ran through my arsenal of spells for anything that might slow it down; daemons were famously almost totally immune to direct magic.

I skidded to a halt and turned, firing off a tight beam of compressed plasma out of my wand, carving right through the ceiling and its supports. Hundreds of tonnes of ancient rubble caved in, completely blocking the corridor. That might hold it for a few solid seconds or so.

A few minutes of dead-sprinting later, I burst out of the front entrance of the College, and almost bowled over the two night guards, who had no doubt heard the destruction.

'DEMONE!' I shouted in Italian, more than a little panicked. 'DEMONE DALL'ABI-'

The foyer of the College exploded upwards behind me, two-thousand-year-old frescoes and statues simply erased by the sheer destructive power of what I had unleashed.

For the barest of moments, the beast simply stood in the remnants of its prison, gazing at us. It stood three men tall, its form undulating in the moonlight, its beautiful face locked onto my own. Then it charged.

One of the guards, the one who had been reading earlier, stepped in front of me and tried for an Expulso. Poor fool, he didn't even have time to register that the spell had rippled across the daemon without even detonating before he was beneath it, being torn apart by its tentacled mane.

The other guard, slightly wiser, managed to get off a Patronus, a hare that shot off across the bay to Naples, before he too was consumed.

Me, I never even stopped running. I just had to make the ward line. I wasn't going to get there in time, not even close, I could feel it behind me.

I skidded to a halt and pivoted, swinging Czernobog's hammer as hard as I could. The daemon could absolutely defeat me in any contest of strength, but it still had to obey the laws of physics. With the hammer in hand, and my already augmented strength, I could hit hard enough to derail a freight train.

The daemon went flying, smashing into a marble pillar. I didn't bother flattering myself with the notion that it might be hurt, I just kept up my sprint. This was not how I die. The ward line was just a few metres away-

The daemon crashed down in front of me, whipping me with its tail of a dozen tendrils. I felt my jaw break, then my ribs as I was knocked clean through a low brick wall. I managed to keep a grip on my wand, but the hammer was gone from my grasp.

I groaned, and rolled onto my knees, wondering why I wasn't dead yet. The daemon's tentacle wrapped around my head like a vice, lifting me off the ground, and suddenly its massive face was inches from my own.

'We had an agreement, Tom Marvolo Riddle. An agreement you failed to honour, say I'

'Whatsh… whatsh honour to a daemon?' I slurred through the fiery pain of my jaw, and then I screamed in agony as it tightened its grip on my head. I could feel myself about to pop like a melon.

'Your death shall be slow, mortal. I shall make it last centuries'

'Not today, I'm afraid' came an amiable, French-accented voice. What?

The daemon whirled, dragging me with it like a rag doll. A white-haired woman stood before us, right on the ward line, wearing a red dress. The finer details were, sadly, lost to my concussed mind, but I did see the golden mandala floating in front of her.

'What is-'

The woman drove her wand through the centre of the mandala, which blasted us with golden light. The daemon shrieked, and dropped me, as it was sent skidding backwards. I landed like a sack of bricks, striking my head again, hard on the ancient cement. The air was suddenly filled with the horrifying stench of seared daemon flesh.

It didn't take long for the beast to regroup, but the woman hadn't sat around waiting. Half a dozen lesser mandalas fired off, pounding the daemon's flank, but it was already starting to resist their effects.

I managed to force myself up onto one knee. She needed my help, and it would be the height of rudeness to leave her to its mercies immediately after she saved my life. Oh damn it all.

Thankfully, I had the sense of mind not to try for fiendfyre. There was less than no chance I could control it in this state, and I figured that given the name there was a solid chance that it would actually aid the daemon. So I went with something a little more creative.

I transfigured a dozen pieces of rubble into foot wide glass spheres, then powered as much of my magic as I could into a permanent conjuration of pure hydrochloric acid. Permanent, because anything less would be negated entirely by the daemon's anti-magic aura. The effort nearly exhausted me, and the pounding headache that ensued almost made me black out. But I had strength enough left to banish them at the daemon, before sagging against the same low wall he had thrown me through.

The first sphere shattered right in the daemon's gaping maw, and it immediately began hacking and choking. The other spheres smashed along its body, coating it with one of the most corrosive naturally-occurring acids known to mankind.

For a moment, I dared to hope, but then the daemon lunged forward, slamming into the golden dome barrier that the woman had erected only just in time. The dome cracked from that one impact, and the woman staggered. The daemon inhaled, and I could see an unholy ultraviolet light shining in its throat.

Other wizards were cracking in now, I could see. Italian Aurors in forest-green robes, battering it uselessly with Killing Curses. The thing didn't have a soul to kill, you damn fools.

A dozen of the cannon fodder were wiped away in an instant as the daemon exhaled, bombarding them with a torrent of negative energy that tore them apart on an atomic level. It ate one wizard's fiendfyre blast without even blinking, and then the man himself.

Meanwhile, the woman had taken advantage of the reinforcements to regain her composure, and was now running in a wide circle raising more of those golden mandalas in a ring around the otherworldly monstrosity. I was mostly deaf at this point, but I could make out her shouting in Italian to do everything they could to keep the beast in one place. Smart lady, she knew when to sacrifice pawns for the greater good.

A flash of flame. I looked up to see Albus Dumbledore standing beside me, looking more like the god Odin than a kindly headmaster. Gone was the trademark grandfatherly twinkle in his eye, this was wizard that I feared, this was the wizard who had single-handedly broken Gellert Grindelwald's stranglehold over Europe.

I never thought I would be glad to see him.

He twirled his wand above his head, then brought it down to earth, and a corresponding lightning blast from the sky rocked the daemon, briefly immobilising it. He followed up with a long, complicated weaving motion, and hundreds of pieces of rubble strewn across the battlefield danced to his call. Forming chains that transmuted themselves into stalwart adamantine, they wrapped themselves around the abomination, binding it further.

It was a display of complex skill and power unlike any I'd seen before, but the daemon was not so impressed, bellowing out another stream of negative energy directly at the aging wizard. Dumbledore flicked his wand, and the spray split neatly around him, gouging deep furrows into the earth. Dumbledore levitated himself, and started hammering away at the thing from above with spells that made the very ground shake.

The woman, finally, finished her ring of mandalas, and with a shouted incantation in an extinct dialect of Chinese, each fired a solid beam of golden light. The daemon screeched loud enough to make everyone's ears start to bleed, but there was nowhere for it to go, and so it seared and burned and boiled. It stopped moving altogether, but the beams kept on, until the corpse had been sublimated entirely.

That was around the time I passed out, the overwhelming stench being the final nail in the coffin.

:—:

I awoke in a hospital, enshrouded in darkness. Given that my, ah, everything hurt, that did seem apropos. The magic-dampening cuffs shackling each hand to my bed were a bit less welcome. They were well-made too, they even blocked my Re'em strength.

I struggled with them briefly, before my splitting headache drove me back into slumber.

:—:

They woke me with a Rennervate. In the wizarding world, this was the equivalent of tossing a bucket of ice water over someone. I shot awake, immediately alert.

I was in the same hospital bed, but feeling considerably better. It no longer hurt to breathe, at least. I was surrounded by people. A couple of healers, but also a woman in a fine pantsuit, and an Auror. A high-up Auror, by the looks of his robes. Behind them in the corner of my room, stood Dumbledore, his expression grave, and the woman who had saved my bacon. With my concussion cleared, I could see her clearly, finally. Snow-white hair, but a completely line-less face, she didn't look a day over twenty five. Pretty, too. Some hitherto-unknown apprentice of Dumbledore's, perhaps?

The woman in the pantsuit cleared her throat. She, at least, I recognised. Antonia Marchesi, Italian Minister for Magic.

'Signor Grey, is that correct?' She addressed me in English, that's not a great start. I realised suddenly that my disguise had disappeared; it must have failed when the daemon dragged me into its aura.

'Yes, that is me' I said carefully. At the very least the background Garrow Avery and I had spent some time forging seemed to have held up to scrutiny.

'Our British friends tell us they have no record of you leaving their borders. Would you do us all the kindness of explaining why you are in my country?'

She sounded pissed. Can't blame her, I would be too.

'I don't remember,' I confessed woefully. 'Last thing I recall, I was in Diagon Alley.'

She sneered. 'Dose him.'

One of the healers held my mouth open, while the other pulled out an eyedropper and deposited three drops of Veritaserum onto my tongue. I didn't bother resisting them, it wouldn't help any. I felt its cold influence creep over my mind. Fortunately, for a man of my skill in occlumency, it would avail them none. I faked the trance-like state, and awaited their interrogation.

'State your full birth name'

'Thomas Morgan Grey'

'When and why did you come to Italy?'

'I arrived in Naples on the 7th of September, 1993. I came here on holiday, to visit Pompeii and Herculaneum.'

'Did you enter the country illegally?'

'Yes I did. I wanted to avoid immigration fees.'

'Did you unleash the daemon?'

Moment of truth.

'No I didn't.'

The Auror made a disbelieving noise. He'd been giving me a filthy look the entire time.

'He must be lying,' he said to Marchesi in Italian.'Allow me to examine his mind, I shall uncover the truth.'

She shut him down hard.'We will not be legilimising a man against his will without a court order, mister Palermo, not on mere suspicion!'

She turned back to me. 'Tell me about that night from your perspective.'

I fed her a line of bullshit about going on a late night walk through the ruins, and how I had been asking to bum a smoke off one of the guards when the daemon had erupted from the ground.

The French woman with Dumbledore interrupted then.

'The daemon, it spoke to you, like it knew you. Why?'

Bugger. I could only assume that she didn't hear it call me Tom Riddle, or Dumbledore likely would have ensured I never awoke.

'I believe it was angered when I struck it with my hammer.' Damn the veritaserum, it killed any opportunity for me to be snide.

'Ah yes, that brings us to the the other concern.' said Dumbledore, smoothly. He withdrew Czernobog's hammer from within his robes, the black iron head barely shining under the harsh lighting.

'You understand that this is a Dark artefact, is that correct?' he asked.

'Yes. I have a license for it.' I did too, albeit one that I had forged and broken into the British Ministry's hall of records to plant.

'Where did you obtain it from?'

I made a show of resisting the Veritaserum. Chuck the man a bone to distract him from my deeper secrets.

'I-I-I d-don't have to t-tell you that.' I bit out. Dumbledore frowned disapprovingly at me, but I was right. If I already had a license, legally I did not have to disclose where I obtained it. Get fucked, old man.

They asked me a few more questions about my false past until the Veritaserum "wore off", then filed out of the room to confer. Only the snow-haired woman remained. She approached my bedside.

'Do you know who I am, young man?' she asked, dark blue eyes glimmering.

'Haven't the foggiest' I answered honestly.

'My name is Perenelle Flamel.' Holy shit.

She looked over her shoulder, where Auror Palermo's outline was gesticulating wildly through the frosted glass.

'I was very impressed by your conjurations against the daemon. For one of your age, you show potential I haven't seen since Albus first showed up on our doorstep. Assuming they don't throw you in Azkaban, you should pay us a visit. My husband has always had a certain fondness for prodigies…'

She let herself out, leaving me alone to contemplate. The Flamels had never approached me as Tom Riddle; perhaps because Dumbledore had warned them off me. No such luck this time, Albus.

:—:

The debate outside my room continued for several minutes. Eventually, they filed back in, Auror Palermo leading.

'Signor Grey, at this time we are charging you with illegal entry to the country, and with smuggling a dark object into the country. Our investigation into the daemon incident is ongoing, and you will be detained until it complete.'

He paused, before reluctantly adding. 'In light of your efforts to assist in the defeat of the daemon, we are willing to show you some clemency, but rest assured that if we find that any aspect of your story is untrue, we will be prosecuting you to the full extent of the law. And heaven help you if we find that you were the one to free it.'

I took some time to digest this. The only people who could outright contradict my version of events would be the guards I encountered, and they were both very dead. I simply had to hope that any trace of my own presence within the college had been wiped clean by the daemon's rampage.

'Would I be able to send a letter to my business associate, to let him know that I will be at least delayed in my return to England?'

They agreed to get me a scribe, and began to file out again.

'Dumbledore!' I called out. 'My hammer.'

He turned to me with that grandfatherly expression I despised so much. 'Mister Grey, I could hardly return it to you whilst you remain in Italy. You may reclaim it from me when you return to Britain.'

I snarled. 'I am not a schoolboy with a fanged frisbee, Dumbledore.'

He regarded me sombrely. 'No, indeed you are not. But you'll have to forgive me for being wary of the man who wields this weapon. Its previous bearer has not, after all, been remembered fondly by the people of Poland.'

I scowled after him as he left. Even without realising who I was, he still managed to make my life difficult.

:—:

Once the healers gave me a clean bill of health, I was moved to a holding cell in the Ministry. Much nicer than holding facilities at the British Ministry, I'll tell you that for nothing. More secure too, though I'd already identified a couple of potential means of escape. Hopefully it wouldn't come to that. Burning this identity would bring much more trouble than it was worth.

After a week of perusing the meagre library of books they kept to entertain detainees, Auror Palermo returned. He looked as surly as ever.

'Mister Grey, follow me. Your hearing is ready for you.'

Wizarding courts of law were, thankfully, much more straightforward than Muggle ones, and so it was only on the most severe of charges that an adult wizard had to bother with a legal representative. This was good news for me; it meant they didn't find anything to tie me to the daemon's escape.

The courtroom was small, with a spotlight over an armchair in the middle of the room, and the rest shrouded in darkness. I sat in the armchair, and tried to look innocent. I was very good at it.

'Thomas Grey!' boomed a voice that I didn't recognise, continuing in Italian. 'You stand accused of illegally crossing the border, and of smuggling a Dark Artefact into the country. How do you plead?'

Wizarding law might be simpler, but it was still boring, and so I shall spare you a direct recounting of events. Typically smuggling Dark Artefacts entailed a year in Azkaban, but in light of the fact that I had used the hammer in the act of defending the city of Naples, they had elected to drop that charge, and simply fine me the customary 200 galleons for illegal border crossing. They slapped me with a three year ban on entering Italy for good measure. All in all, I got very lucky, and they went to great lengths to remind me of that.

I left the Ministry a free man, and this time I took a legal portkey back to Britain.

:—:

I sighed heavily, looking up at wrought-iron gates that teemed with magic. I really didn't want to be here.

There was a time when Hogwarts had been the only place I had ever felt at home, the only place I felt safe. That time was long past. The spectre of Dumbledore loomed over it like a lion over a fresh kill. Worse still, the unholy scourge that were the Dementors patrolling the edge of the grounds had thoroughly killed any lingering vestige of nostalgia. Dumbledore was mad to allow the Ministry to install them.

I knew it was possible that this could be a trap. That Dumbledore had deduced exactly who I was after all, and had simply wished to keep things in-house, but I didn't think so. It didn't strike me as his style to deliberately endanger his students like that.

The oaf, Hagrid, met me at gates, giving me what he probably thought was a thoroughly mistrustful look. He just came off looking like he had a headache. Idiot. He walked me across the grounds, looking more like he thought he was escorting a criminal than a guest.

It was the weekend, and so there were more than a few students scattered across the grounds enjoying their brief taste of freedom, and the final tattered strands of Summer before Autumn took its due. No Potter in sight, sadly.

We passed into the castle, and up its marble staircases.

'Hagrid!' came a very young voice, which the oaf turned towards.

It was a girl, couldn't have been older than twelve, with scraggly dirty blond hair and big blue eyes that almost seemed to glow. Accompanying her was another student, who I recognised immediately. The waif, Ginny Weasley.

'Hullo Luna!' said Hagrid brightly. 'M'afraid now's not the best time, got a guest for Professor Dumbledore.'

The waif was looking much healthier than when I saw her last, good for her. She didn't recognise me in the slightest, of course, her eyes passing over me curiously. Out of curiosity of my own, I reached out with my mind and brushed up against hers; she'd clearly been seeing a mind healer. The piece of art I had created in her mind had been thoroughly undone. So her family was not entirely idiotic, despite how much she had whinged about them to me.

I glanced over at the Luna girl, who was also staring at me. Our eyes met, and something told me I didn't want to take a look into her mind. Her gaze was… unsettling.

'…do come by my house soon, have a cuppa tea, some rock cakes…' Hagrid was nattering on, despite his own claim of not having the time.

'Hagrid!' I interrupted sharply, and made a gesture up the stairs. He sheepishly said goodbye to the girls, and we continued to Dumbledore's office without incident.

The Headmaster's office was very different from how it had been under Dippet. His office had had a certain austerity to it, a reflection of how he had run Hogwarts. Dumbledore had thoroughly banished such notions, the room was positively crowded with little display tables, and upon each was a different magical device. Dumbledore's office as a transfiguration teacher had had a similar decor, on a smaller scale. Each device was personally invented by the man, and he surrounded himself with these… trinkets of his own prowess. Arrogant prick.

Albus Dumbledore himself sat behind the same grand desk that Dippet had, scribbling away at some piece of parchment. He looked up as we entered.

'Ah, thank you Hagrid. That will be all.'

He conjured a squishy armchair in front of the desk across from him, and gestured for me to sit.

'I'll stand,' I said coldly. 'Where's my hammer?'

He looked at me, and for a long moment I thought he would refuse to give it to me. Then he sighed, and slid open a drawer, pulling out Czernobog's hammer and laying it gently on his desk.

I snatched it up immediately, contemplating the benefits of crushing the old man's skull with it right then and there. It looked like he was thinking the same thing, given how his hand half-twitched towards his wand.

'I would ask,' began Dumbledore delicately. 'What I have done to inspire such enmity in you? To my knowledge we have never met before Italy.'

'You knew my father,' I half-lied. Lord Voldemort was, technically, my progenitor. 'You didn't get along very well. He left Britain behind because of you'

Dumbledore peered closely at me, and I regretted giving an answer so close to the truth. 'We are not our own kin, mister Grey. I would hope that, as you re-integrate yourself into British society, we may come to understand one another better.'

Oh piss off. He clearly hadn't trusted me from the moment he saw my hammer, a nice taco date wasn't going to change his mind.

'I doubt it.' I replied, and went to storm off.

'Use my floo, mister Grey.' Dumbledore said, gesturing to his fireplace. 'Faster than having you walk through the grounds again.'

I wonder what he was worried I might seek out if I were allowed to wander freely. 'Very well' I said shortly, striding over to the hearth and throwing in some powder.

'Diagon Alley!' I declared, and was gone.

:—:

Two days later, I received a letter from Ollivander. His analysis was complete and, he said, he had an explanation for me.

I apparated to Diagon Alley immediately. Finally, something that might actually resolve one of my troubles instead of piling onto them.

Ollivander's shop was quiet. It was the first time I had visited it outside of the back-to-school rush. Ollivander hurried out of his back rooms to greet me.

'Ah, mister Grey, welcome back! It appears I have found the root of your problem.'

'Lay it upon me, mister Ollivander.'

'This 'adequate' sensation you described with several of the wands I offered you. Those were in fact matching wands.'

I scowled. 'No, they weren't. I know what a matching wand feels like.'

'On the contrary, mister Grey, I believe that the bond you shared with your wand was unique between the pair of you.'

'I don't follow. Isn't every wizard supposed to have a unique bond with their wand.'

'No no. Each wizard is chosen by a wand that matches them, certainly, and that is the sensation that you described as 'adequate'. The magical bonding that I was able to measure between yourself and the basilisk wand was to the same degree that you see in all wizards' bond with a wand that chooses them. Based on the results of my scans, I believe the connection you had with your original wand went much deeper than that, which is why all other wands seem so lesser to you now that you have lost it. A shame, I would very much '

'So… what, I'm shit out of luck? You're telling me there's no solution to this.'

Ollivander looked a bit guilty at his own suggestion. 'Short of somehow retrieving your original wand, well… you did mention that your wand had a twin, and that you knew where it was…'

I stared at him.

:—:

I appeared in Alfhearth's foyer with a crack.

'Garrow!'

My old friend came out of his study with a bottle of whiskey in hand.

'What?'

'Your daughter is only a couple years out of Hogwarts, right?'

'Yes, why?'

'Do you know if they still have the first Hogsmeade weekend for third years on the last weekend of October?'

:-:-:-:-:

A/N: Hogsmeade weekends are another one of those inconsistent timeline issues. In 1993-94, the very first one is on Halloween, but in 1995-96, the first one was on the 5th of October, almost a full month earlier. My resolution to this (assuming that it isn't just completely arbitrarily made up by the teachers) is that Third Years, being the youngest year group to be allowed to visit the village, have fewer trips than older students.

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Edited for continuity on the 22nd of May, 2019