The Boy Who Hated Everyone
Disclaimer: I still don't own anything of the Potterverse. I have no rights to a billion-dollar enterprise and expect to make nothing (zilch, squat, nada) from this story. Rats.
Warning: Seriously AU. Things getting better, sort of.
Voldemort was furious. This could not be happening to him. His plans had fallen apart. This could not happen, because he was In Control. He was always 'In Control'.
This was intolerable. He was always the one 'In Control'. He had to be! That was his Plan!
When he learned that all living things are mortal, this was completely unacceptable. At a very basic level he was not in control, but nature itself was. It took a lot of effort and study, but he found a way to become immortal. He had controlled death itself.
Ever since he was small, he had needed to be the one in control. When he was growing up in the orphanage, at first the bigger kids had bullied him, until he found he could reach out with his mind, and make them do what he wanted. If they hurt him, they paid for it. When Marissa had pushed him down the stairs, she soon fell down them herself, and when her broken leg somehow never healed properly, she limped for as long as he knew of her.
He read books, and found references to projective telepaths, and decided that that explained things. He also found that he enjoyed the pain of others.
When Jeffery had hit him with a cricket bat, the boy soon walked in front of a bus, and was killed. Afterwards, the other kids would avoid him as much as possible.
As with all the other kids at the orphanage, he had forgotten Jeffery as soon as he could manage to do so.
He had grown up lonely, but he was In Control. And in his own mind, those words were always capitalized.
When that bearded old fool of a wizard showed up and told him he was a wizard, the man had showed him some of the power that wizards could command. Tom (as he was at the time) decided that he had to have that power, and he had to have more than the old man who came to find him.
He had never been good with numbers; he had never needed to be so. During tests in school, he could easily read the minds of the brightest students, but made sure to make some obvious mistakes. He had seen other students being punished for cheating, and made sure he was never caught.
When the old man had tried to see what skills he had, and of his basic education, he asked Tom what he would have if there were five apples and ten children to share them. Tom had teared up, and cried "You mean I get a half an apple all to myself?" The old man had smiled, and told him that at Hogwarts, he could have as many apples as he wanted.
In his private mind, Tom snickered. The old fool had no idea that with five apples, Tom would have them all and the other orphan kids would have none. They knew that their hunger would hurt less than Tom's disapproval.
When he arrived at Hogwarts and was sorted into Slytherin, Tom found that everything he was, poor orphaned and a half-blood, was despised by his housemates. He decided that before he was finished, they would serve him, and be the dust under his feet. As much as they despised him, he had utter contempt for them. He began to subtly spread the word that he was a direct descendant of Salazar Slytherin himself, and for his family's political reasons, he was hiding his true wealth.
And the bigoted idiots bought it.
Through his schooling, he learned how to flatter and cajole and got everything he wanted. Once he found out about horcruxes, he even managed to commit murder, and have it blamed on a half breed underclassman. Anything he wanted, food, girls, possessions, were all his. Eventually, he did not even have to ask.
Once he was out of school, he invented the persona of 'Lord Voldemort'. The most powerful Dark Lord ever.
He convinced most of the pure-bloods to serve him and he branded them like the cattle he considered them to be. They thought he was blessing them with his favour, but he was showing his contempt for them in the most direct way he could find.
One bit of his superior knowledge he did not share with his subject, whom he dubbed the Death Eaters, was that the brand was also a leach spell, that was draining between 10 and 20 percent of their power to him. As most of them never used more than 10 percent of their inherent power anyway, being as the use of magic and the service of their families' house elves made them persistently lazy, none of them every noticed the decrease in their own power, but did see that their Dark Lord had power well beyond any of them (due to the extra power he was surreptitiously stealing from them).
And because of the extra power he was stealing, had had not noticed that he had only very little of his own soul left. Each horcrux he had created took one-half of his remaining soul in his body
When he killed the Potters and whatever it was stripped him of his body, it was because his remaining soul was not strong enough to resist the reflected spell. And little Harry Potter was marked with a scar that had contained one part in one hundred and twenty-eight of Tom Riddle's soul.
Because the horcruxes remained in existence, Voldemort did not feel any reduction in his power or his being. When the centaurs removed and destroyed the portion in Harry Potter's scar, he did not feel any different. In part because his disembodied spirit was busy possessing a particularly weak-minded and weak-willed wizard who was teaching at Hogwarts. He was also still draining power from his slaves.
The battle at Malfoy Manor changed everything.
The slaves, who were supposed to be loyal to him and him alone, had fought over not who was the most loyal, but over the spoils of their murderous plunder. Thirty of them were killed that night, and young Draco Malfoy had gone through the Manor getting rid of relics of the Dark Lord whose servants had tortured his mother, and killed his father. One of the things he burned was Tom's diary, which contained fully one half of Voldemort's soul, being his first horcrux.
Suddenly, Voldemort was diminished and most of his extra power was gone. There were only a few pitiful remnants of his Death eaters to suck dry of their magic. In trying to stay in power, he sucked all the magic out of Quirrel, killing the man, and a lot of the magic from the students who had taken (or been given) his Mark by their parents. The Mark the student bore supplied only the barest portion of their own limited magic, as their parents had not been taught to invoke the full power of the Mark as when the Dark Lord himself applied it. Even then, the students had fallen gravely ill for a short period during the Solstice holidays.
As Quirrel died, the almost powerless, weakened and only partially souled ghost was driven from the castle by the other ghosts, who had pledged their afterlives to protect the students.
The ghost of Tom Riddle, the self-styled Lord Voldemort, was forever crippled.
This could not happen to him! He was Lord Voldemort! He had the Plan.
Voldemort was furious, but for the first time in his life and forever after, he was impotent to do anything about it. And because some of the horcruxes remained hidden, forever was going to last a very long time.
A/N: It has taken me some time to imagine the mind of a sociopath. It's not a pleasant place to spend much time.