Afterword

Dear readers,

thank you for reading all the way through, for your amazing feedback and Kudos, for putting up with my terrible puns and maybe even laughing at them (for I, too, am a pathological punner). I hope it was as fun a ride for you as it was for me, despite the inevitable grammar hiccups due to my not being a native speaker, let alone British.

I found it symbolic to release the final chapters on New Year's, as it stands for the end as well as the beginning of a cycle. I hope you were able to make sense of it. If you really think about it, it's a bittersweet ending – for everyone from the original timeline to live, the "new" Harry still had to die in all but the body... But he got to secure the time continuity (old Harry and Tom knew he would do it, because he already has) and have a happy childhood, in fact, enjoy it twice; once as he lived it and once as an old man watching himself live it. Both Harries believed this was a sacrifice worth making... Plus, dying but not really is a classic Harry thing.

When I first started writing Custodarium, I only had the endgame of Harry and Tom opening an orphanage and how I wanted to go about avoiding a time paradox – most of everything else was where the characters of J. K. Rowling's magical world in general took me. For example, that whole guardian angel thing was a spontaneous solution to the confrontation I've written myself into, I laughed out loud at Harry ingenuity when the idea hit me.

For the characters to take the wheel of a story, though, there need to be solid characters. While the interpretation of Harry also varies throughout the fandom, I feel like young Tom Riddle has rarely been done justice. People just see him as dark and evil, but is that how he would see himself? Could an ominous, penniless orphan sway the scions of the most powerful wizarding families to his side at a young age by intimidation?

I've tried to gather every bit of information canon gives us about Tom's youth – it's blissfully vague, and while you can choose to see him as a psychopath from the get-go, there is no clear indication of it being so. Here are my conclusions:

It's never explicitly said that Tom had tortured or killed any person or animal before Myrtle.

He said he could "make animals do what he wants without training them," which probably just refers to him being a Parselmouth. He might or might not have killed Billy Stubbs's rabbit, but we don't know the circumstances – if you're going for a non-psychopatic Tom like me, you would obviously prefer to assume it was a frame-up; we know he was really unpopular in the orphanage, and would it really be smart to kill the rabbit just one day after you've been seen arguing with its owner? But then, even if he did it, most of us village kids have killed a rabbit at some point, there's not much shame in that. Also note that Tom was able to gain support of almost every intelligent magical species besides humans later on.

As for the cave incident, any number of magical occurrences could have happened there to make Tom remember it fondly while scaring the hell out of the two children; from seeing Tom speak to snakes (perhaps this was where he'd discovered the ability?) to him "making things move without touching them." Tom was probably on the better of terms with Amy and Dennis before the incident, since they went exploring together.

Tom grew up with zero exposure to the wizarding world.

Imagine an exceptionally intelligent young boy, growing up in the harsh circumstances of a post-WW1 orphanage in London, who one day discovers he's different – special; magical. It would be so easy to believe, logical even, that you've been given those powers to do great things. The fact that you alone have been chosen also suggests that you are somehow better suited to have them than anyone else, superior, a hero from the fairy tales you've no doubt been exposed to. You also become quite lonely in your superiority, because you have a giant secret, and there's no one you can relate to – maybe you try to show your peers, but they react horribly?

Then one day, a strange man comes and tells you there's a large community of people like you that you've been missing out on. You're excited about all the new stuff and the new sense of a belonging somewhere, but it also means you're not so superior or special. You have a self-image to maintain, though, so your subconscious searches for ways to work around it. Maybe you include the rest of the wizardkind under your "superior" label; maybe you work extra hard to be one step ahead of the more privileged kids; maybe you step into the role of a saviour, the only one aware of an underestimated threat.

Tom started Hogwarts as a destitute orphan, then was repeatedly described as charming and well-liked by everyone.

What a person starting from the very bottom needs in order to accomplish great things in politics is a solid agenda and the drive, delicacy and assertiveness to enforce it.

Unlike Harry, Tom had nine months to prepare for his premiere in the wizarding society – he was a Londoner, therefore able to venture to Diagon Alley during that time, observe the culture and come up with a persona that would most benefit him in this new and threatening world.

If you're smart, you don't go all-out dark lord just because you're more talented than your classmates. If you're really smart, you don't go all-out dark lord until you're invincible, like when you have an anchor to keep you alive even if someone kills you.

You play nice. You play hard-working and friendly. Tom had probably learnt very quickly that some wizards looked down on Muggles and Muggle-born, and the majority knew next to nothing about the Muggle culture. He would have tried to keep his background as mysterious as possible without making it look like he's hiding something, and he'd sure as hell work hard not to stand out in a negative way from the beginning; he'd learn everything he could find about the wizarding world. He would spend a lot of time in Diagon Alley collecting data and maybe even practicing spells, if he found a private spot near enough to adult wizards not to trigger the Trace.

Tom was forced to return to the orphanage every summer, even in the 1940s and after pleading with the headmaster.

It was the 1940s London, for heaven's sake, even the wizards couldn't be so oblivious as to not notice the Blitz?! Surely it couldn't have been that much of a problem to give a couple of children a safe place to stay, especially if it was empty anyway?

To be precise, we know Tom was denied the stay after the Chamber of Secrets fiasco, but there is no indication of it being otherwise in the previous years. This may be an additional reason for him to hate Hagrid, if the half-giant was indeed allowed to stay at Hogwarts over the summer after his father had died.

Tom petrified three Muggle-born students before he was caught by surprise by Myrtle in the bathroom.

This, to me, is one of the most intriguing facts about his younger years. Improbable coincidences from the second HP book aside, I like to think this was an intentional and carefully planned development – after all, it would be significantly more complicated to plan the attacks so that the victim got petrified rather than killed, Tom had to worry about a potential witness once they got revived,…

The most logical explanation for this extra effort is that he had it in him to care about innocent lives; at least before the Myrtle incident. He was aiming to intimidate, I can think of multiple ends he could have been going for with that, but there was a line he wasn't willing to cross.

Myrtle's death was an accident.

This one involves a bit of guesswork, but if we assume Tom used to be as smart as the canon tells us, there's no way he would have killed someone right by the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets if he thought he had a choice. Tom was normally calculating, but he wasn't completely immune to panic and rash decisions, which I hope I've managed to capture in my story as well.

Tom had known how to create a Horcrux when he killed Myrtle.

And isn't that an interesting point if we assume he wasn't planning to kill her? He had his sought-after immortality at his fingertips, that's one thing you really don't want to delay obtaining. If he truly was a cold-blooded murderer from the start, he could have picked a random Muggle-born, lured them to the Chamber of Secrets, Obliviated them of their last hour (in case they left a ghost) and killed them there with no one ever the wiser.

All in all, I believe young Tom saw himself as a well-meaning revolutionary and did care about lives, or at least struggled with the idea of murder for selfish reasons. People never see themselves as evil – I bet Hussein, Hitler or Stalin didn't.

I like to think taking an innocent life leaves a mark on a person, makes them give up on themselves morally or twist their morals to accommodate what they've done. Also, there's no telling what ripping one's soul in pieces would do, but I assumed it wouldn't exactly strengthen their character either – if anything, I imagine them becoming weaker, more fickle and petty, until we eventually get Lord Voldemort as we know him from the 90s.

Why am I ranting like this, you ask? Well, I obviously feel pretty strongly about Harry Potter, and when someone asks about my favourite character, they look shocked when I say it's Tom Riddle. He was ambitious, passionate and proactive, not shying away from what he believed had to be done, willing to risk a lot to accomplish it – I admire and identify with those qualities, and I hope that after suffering through this last couple of columns, some readers might see him in a new light, too… Some readers might even use it to write their own Tomarry stories.

I wish you a beautiful year 2020 filled with good fiction, good people, and just everything good in general!

Love, Tina