Author's Note:
I will start uploading edited chapters soon. There won't be any major differences - I just fixed mechanical errors.
BUT in the new version, Victoria told Slytherins that she was adopted by muggles, leaving them to assume (because they are blood supremacists and she's a powerful witch) that she had to be at least halfblood. She IS a muggleborn. She's NOT actually adopted. But since her housemates are blood elitists, they will eat up any lie she says because the alternative is admitting that their beliefs are wrong. So, either way, it's a win for her.
This will not affect the existing plot.
I (obviously) don't own Harry Potter.
This is one of my favourite chapters so far:)
Professor Snape, Victoria noticed, was especially sour that day. Not only did he insult the Golden Boys five times in as many minutes and took twenty points from Gryffindor by the end of class, he also snapped at Malfoy, albeit only once.
Even the howler Weasley got over breakfast didn't seem to improve his mood.
Charms were a definite improvement over Potions. Victoria always loved the class - mainly because it was chaotic, and thus provided an opportunity for errant spells to hit their unsuspecting targets without any consequences for the caster.
This time, they were learning the Dancing Feet Spell.
"... so Arthur Weaseley nearly got fired over 'illegal use of magic on muggle technology', but of course one of Dumbledore's stepped in, and he got off. No punishment whatsoever. Father nearly lost it - especially after what happened this summer," Draco told the group as his spell hit some poor Hufflepuff.
"What happened this summer?" Victoria asked curiously from where she lounged in her seat and fired off a series of her own spells, all of them meeting their targets. Professor Flitwick ran about the classroom hectically in a futile attempt to find the culprit.
"You don't know? Arthur Weasely attacked Lucius Malfoy in Flourish and Blotts, right as Lockhart was presenting a new book. Half the people in Diagon Alley saw it, and the other half had heard of it within an hour," Pansy said. "Poor Mr. Malfoy, having to fight off that filth."
Victoria could bet that poor Mr. Malfoy was responsible for the fight starting in the first place.
…
Victoria looked from the question on her paper "What is Gilderoy Lockhart's favorite color?" to the blond, turquoise robed man in the front of the classroom, and wondered what the hell had prompted Dumbledore to hire him.
Closing her eyes for a moment, the witch went back to her paper. Favorite color, favorite color…
After a few seconds of futile attempts to recall everything Pansy ever said about the wizard, she simply chose the option that seemed most pompous. She had skimmed through all of his required novels, but the only thing she remembered was that the Professor had an overly-inflated ego.
The rest of the class dragged by at an excruciatingly slow pace.
The witch kept glancing at the clock, and when the bell finally rang, she was one of the first people to leave.
…
Victoria stretched in her favorite library alcove, glancing at the clock. On her right lay an unassuming Potions textbook and a completed two-foot essay on the uses of bat spleen in brewing. On her left was a far less innocent book she may or may not have snaked out of the Restricted Section.
It was open to a chapter titled "Sentience in Cursed Objects", complete with an image of some poor wizard being (literally) sucked into a garish piece of jewelry.
Victoria was glaring daggers at the thing. No-thing. Not a single line in that whole Merlin-forsaken tome came even close to describing the pulsating, living magic of the journal.
She shut the book with a loud snap.
Her other lead was the name - T. M. Riddle. But this one might be even murkier. Assuming she combs through dozens of yearbooks and somehow finds this individual, she'll be no closer to finding just what the journal was.
It might, however, narrow down the search. Either way, it was worth a try, if only because there was nothing else to be done.
So, Victoria went to the rarely used yearbook section and began going through each and every one of them, starting with class of 1990 and getting as far as 1975.
She didn't expect to get so caught up in the task. It was just so interesting to see her classmates parents and relatives, their faces so similar to their present-day counterparts, and yet having drastically different personalities. There was an Abbot in Ravenclaw, and a boy who had to be a cousin to the Weaselys in Hufflepuff.
The only house to have all the same names in it was Slytherin.
It was eight o'clock before she knew it, and an angry-looking Madam Pince shooed her out of the library with a stern warning that if she ever catches her after closing hour again, she will assign a detention.
When Victoria got back to the Common Room, it was stuffy and crowded - as if the entire Slytherin population decided to take up all the sofas around the fire. The few that didn't sat in chairs throughout the room, trying very hard not to look like they were listening in.
She pushed her way through the masses and did a double take. An unmistakable head of platinum hair peeked above some seated fifth-year's shoulder. It was attached to dark green quidditch robes.
"Can you believe this?" a familiar voice spoke.
"He's the new seeker," she deduced, "What did he get his father to do this time?"
"Daddy bought the whole team Nimbuses 2001, Drake got the spot," Blaise said, tossing a fat golden galleon in one hand. "He's not even that good."
"He's not that bad either," Victoria refuted. "Better than last year's — what's his name?"
"Rowle."
"Better than Rowle. At least Draco can tell apart one end of the broom from another," she said, snickering at the memory of the beefy seventh-year flying backward.
"Well, now that you put it this way…"
"SAVORGNAN!"
"The sudden shout of her name efficiently silenced the crowd and turning everyone's heads to her like compass needles. Marcus Flint, a sixth-year and the Quidditch team captain, walked toward her with a parchment in his hands.
"Snape asked to give you this," he said handing her the note. "Dunno why."
Victoria nodded her thanks and read it silently.
"What is it?" Blaise asked.
"Snape wants me to come to his office Friday, eight-thirty pm sharp," Victoria said in disbelief.
Blaise narrowed his eyes. "He never speaks with students. What did you do?"
"I guess I'll find out Friday."
…
The next morning, a bleary-eyed Victoria picked at her porridge over breakfast. A letter from her parents lay safely in her bag - she never opened them in front of her housemates - and "Voyages with Vampires" lay open on her lap. Even as a writer, Lockhart was a disappointment. He could've at least made it not sound like he was bragging, but alas, bragging was all he did.
Someone slumped into the seat next to her.
"Mornin' 'Toria," Blaise mumbled, equally sleepy, and reached for a jug of pumpkin juice.
"That's not my name," she mumbled back.
"Whatever 'Toria."
"Pass me the chocolate - no, the 100% cocoa one. You know I hate milk chocolate."
Blaise tossed her the bar. She bit into it, savouring the delicious bitterness and strong chocolate flavour. Blaise made a face - a "cultured pureblood" version of a face, anyway.
"How do you eat that stuff?" he asked, nodding at the sugar-free, everything but cocoa free thing in her hand.
"Everyone has different tastes," she said. "Mine just happen to be more uncommon."
She finished her breakfast, shut the sorry excuse of a book Lockhart made them read, and left for Transfiguration.
Mere yards away from the corridor, a heavy form collided with her.
"Omph!"
Victoria ended up sprawled on the ground, shaking herself like an angry cat, while Harry bloody Potter - it was always him - was next to her on all fours, muttering something that might've been an apology. The contents of her and the Gryffindor's bags were stern all over the floor in a two-foot radius.
"Clumsy as ever, Potter," she hissed as she got to her feet and began salvaging any papers that weren't stained with ink from shattered ink bottles. "Watch where you're going - you are capable of that, right?"
After showing everything ink-free back into her back, and collecting everything else into a thick stack that she'll have to spell clean, Victoria threw one last, chilling glare Potter's way, and finally made it to the classroom.
She didn't notice that a black journal was missing until much later that night.
…
Ginny Weasly knew that stealing was bad. But she wasn't stealing - not really, and the when she saw the small black book in the mess that was Harry Potter's homework, she simply couldn't help it. He wasn't there, and her brothers were terrible to her again, and the girls in her dorm were just so mean - so, she took it. She was going to give it back, really.
But she never did.
Hello, Ginny.
My name is Tom Riddle.
…
"Potter!"
Harry turned around, startled by the unmistakable sound of Victoria's voice.
"I want my journal back," she said without preamble, tilting her head to the side like a snake when seeing a potential prey item.
Confused, he furrowed his brow. "What are you talking about?"
"Small black book, leather cover, blank."
Harry's confused expression deepened. "I don't have it. Maybe you just misplaced it?"
She seemed to search for something in his face, and whatever it was she must've found it, because a moment later her expression softened slightly.
"Or," she said thoughtfully, "Maybe you did."
…
Tom Marvolo Riddle, Headboy, May 1945
Victoria brought the old yearbook closer to her face, studying the blurry image of the journal's owner. Blurry or not, it was striking how good-looking and almost Lockhart-like he was. Not in his appearance per se, but in the polished perfection which she assumed was a forty's thing. The wizard in the photo had sharp cheekbones, dark eyes, and wavy black hair that Maranne Woodsworth and her idiot gang of girls would kill for.
There was nothing else she could find on him. Just this one photo; he wasn't in any books on famous wizards of the past century, he wasn't even in the ministry records. It was as if the name was erased from history.
This, of course, only served to pique her interest.
People didn't just… vanish. There were always traces, some forms of records, something that allowed them to be tracked. Not Riddle though. And the strangest thing was that he was still alive - he had to be, for how else could the magic and his journal be alive. And since he was, he must've been living under a different name.
It brought her back to square one.
Frustrated, the witch got out her Transfiguration textbook and began polishing off a three foot long essay on nonliving to living transformations.
"Oh!"
Victoria's head snapped up toward the sound. A small red haired girl that was obviously another Weasley — how many of them were there anyway — stood in her alcove, six inches away from her face, staring at her snake-emblazoned robes with an expression of pure disgust. She clutched a few small books in her arms.
"I didn't think anyone would be here," she explained, "And… erm, a friend told me about this alcove and I thought…"
"Who's your friend?" the witch interrupted.
"Oh, it's… just someone from my house," the girl stammered, looking around as if she was worried Victoria would suddenly turn into the Slytherin mascot and eat her.
"Sorry. This spot is taken," Victoria said in her good girl voice, hoping to coax the girl into getting the hell out of her personal space.
The youngest Weasley left without an argument. Victoria leaned back into the cushions, her stuck mind on the strange encounter.
Something seemed off.
Who was this friend? In all her time at Hogwarts no one ever took the spot and she was there every day. Maybe the other girl found it herself — but why would she lie about it then? And why was she so fidgety?
Chalking it up to the Weasleys' prejudice against everyone Slytherin, the witch went back to her work, making sure to leave the library before curfew and avoid another run-in with Madam Pince, who it seemed, was growing more and more irritable with each day she spent yelling at yet another pair of idiots who thought the library was as good a place as any for an impromptu make out session.
Victoria walked through corridor leading to the Slytherin Common Room, a windowless passage deep within the school's dungeons, lit, like the rest of the school, with flickering torches, that despite being very much alike to a muggle horror movie scene never scared her.
Until now, that is.
Because she heard a disembodied voice coming from the walls, and that voice said only one word, over and over again.
Kill.
Whether it was a stuid prank or a particularly dramatic ghost, Victoria didn't stop to find out. No, she did the smart, safe thing, and sprinted at record speed all the way to the disguised entrance to the Common Room, roughly barking out the password - "Sacred Twenty Eight" - and not daring to turn around until the wall slid in place behind her.
That night she got very little sleep, so naturally she was about as friendly as a saw-scaled viper next morning.
No getting enough sleep plagued her all day long, which happened to be the day she had to meet with Snape, and considering that anything involving the professor required mass amounts of energy and a clear head, there really couldn't have been a worse time for it.
Victoria knocked on the professor's door just as the clock struck eight thirty. It swung open on its own accord, revealing a sparsely furnished office with a few bookshelves and a large ebony desk in the center. Behind it sat a scowling Professor Snape.
"Ms. Savorgnan," he greeted flatly.
"Professor."
There were no chairs in the office, save for the one Snape took up, so Victoria was left with no choice but to stand in front of the desk.
"Do you know why you're here?"
"No, sir."
Snape rubbed the bridge of his nose in a suggestion of irritation, because Merlin forbid he has to speak with a student. "You were in Diagon Alley on your birthday, weren't you?"
Victoria, not seeing where this was going at all, kept her answers minimal. "Yes, Professor."
"And did you see anything out of the ordinary while you were there?"
Yes. The strange, hunched old wizard that moved from one dark corner to another and disappeared down Knockturn Alley, which in itself is rather suspicious, and added to the fact that he had done so right after catching her eye, downright incriminating. She should tell Snape that.
But her instincts told her to lie. To not get involved.
And Victoria trusted her instincts.
"No."
Please review!
As of 2/15/20 the first three chapters have been updated.
Thank you so much for reading this monstrosity of mine:)
Salazara
