AN

To the ones telling me to finish Revolution... guys, Revolution is my main focus, along with The Age of Men, so I'm forcing myself to complete a chapter for one of those two fics every time I write a chapter for my minor fics, such as 'Opening the Eyes of God', 'Meddling Giant', etc. I've updated several chapters of The Age of Men in the past weeks in order to be free to build a bit in this fic.

So... suck it up. I'm going to finish everything (besides Unbound, but that fic is my exception, you know that), I promise.

"That was very well done." a calm voice that did not belong to a 13 years old kid made me turn where an amused Tom Riddle was looking over the results of the impromptu duel.

Oh, fucking hell! I groaned.

Rising Star

I ignored the frothing-at-the-mouth teenagers that I had swiftly incapacitated in order to study Tom Riddle: high cheekbones, dark eyes and flowy black hair. I could understand how he would grow up to be charming, but for now, he still held the gangly, uncomfortable appearance of someone that had just got started on puberty.

Distractedly, I loosened my tie before resuming my walk towards the common room, the wands of my impromptu opponents held loosely in my hand: "You could have helped, you know?"

"It didn't look like you needed it." came the smooth reply, "Aren't you going to..." he nodded towards the still screaming teens, suggesting that I took a measure of revenge for their attack.

I rolled my eyes, I wasn't going to punch around teenagers only because they were dumb. Even if I' going to kill this particular 13 years old. I grimaced as my resolve showcased my hypocrisy, choosing instead to answer Tom's enquiry: "I was thinking about placing the wands on the mantel of the main fireplace, even if someone different than a professor manages to get them down, they'll still need to recover their wands in front of everyone."

"A power play." Tom's eyebrows rose on his forehead, "You're not like your everyday eleven years old wizard, are you?"

Fuck. I shrugged: "What did give it away? My height? My non-verbal charm?"

"The fact that their first Pietrificus Totalus didn't affect you at all. But yes, the non-verbal magic is quite advanced, I take it that you've received previous teachings? I've never heard of a spell to hang people by their ankles." the slithering Slytherin inquired.

"I've got a protective charm on me, such a low-level thing would hardly affect me." I shrugged off his first question, rapidly thinking about how to approach my clearly extraordinary skill. On one hand, proving myself extraordinary could make Tome see me as a potential threat, but as 13 years old, I was temporarily safe. On the other hand, he may try to take me 'under his wing', and I would be more than capable of sliding a knife between his ribs.

He knew jack shit about my life, so I could sell away my skill by talking about a previous teacher. The problem was... I didn't want to. I wanted my accomplishments to be mine, I couldn't care less about the opinion of the World about my actions, but my skill and power... I wanted to be respected for it. I wanted to make it clear that I wasn't just another wizard. I was going to flip the world on its ear, and a part of me wanted confirmation.

That I deserved to be here.

That I was up to the challenge.

That I was here to stay. And fuck the rest.

"I sort of hammered together a variation of Impedimenta and Tripping Jinx." I bullshitted Tom, taking a deep breath before going ahead: "And I don't understand the difference between verbal and not-verbal. To be truthful, I hardly understand the punny or blatantly wrong Latin for incantations, but I guess I'm here to learn."

By then we had reached the Common Room where Tom waited for a few seconds before following me, letting the common rabble of students quiet down and look me with wide eyes as I dropped the two wands of my attackers on the mantelpiece of the largest fireplace.

I then seated down at the table where a marble chessboard was waiting, casually setting up a new game before picking up my extremely advanced Transfiguration books. I wasn't a genius at chess, to be truthful, it was a pretty linear game, which tended to be too slow to be enjoyable. Now, the Bullet games were much more interesting: a couple of minutes for performing your whole match.

Soon enough, Tom sat in front of me, eyeing my books with a quirked eyebrow before fingering his black king, showing a sharp smile that I couldn't know if it was real or not.

I wondered if Riddle was aware of the implication of him seating in front of me right after my defeat of an older couple of students. For now, it didn't look like he was the top dog in Slytherin, I guessed that it was more because of his age than because of his skill. No matter how good, no adult wants to listen to a kid that can show you up.

"Do you play?" he asked, hopefully oblivious to my thoughts.

"I prefer timed matches." I retorted while I started skimmed my selection of books: "If you can set up a minute worth of hourglass for each of us, with sand flowing only when it is my or your turn, then we can have a match."

And just like Minerva had challenged me after I had already started to impress her, I found myself setting up a condition through which Tom could prove himself worthy. I suppressed a grimace when I realized what my casual reply did. Questioning his worth is a sure way to have him do something, but it will also make him see me like someone that looks down on him.

Befriending psychos was hard, who could have guessed?

I started casually skimming the principles regarding the transfiguration of living beings, trying to reconcile it with the admittedly limited knowledge I had about Transfiguration.

Long-winded chess matches, not professionally at least, were generally won in virtue of the computational skills of a player coupled with the concept of 'wearing down' the opponent, piece after piece. Bullet games were instead a balance of aggressivity and timing. Generally, the first 5 to ten moves were executed through rote memorization: getting the horses on the field, opening avenues for the bishops to strike, controlling the centre of the chessboard with your pawns, and more often than not castling in order to set up a defence.

So I watched with the corner of my eyes, with disguised amazement, as Tom frowned in concentration and pulled out his pale wand.

With a muttered 'accio', which I'm sure he pronounced more to my benefit than out of real necessity, a couple of pawns from a free chessboard were summoned to our location, squawking outraged by the sheer gall of the 13 years old Slytherin, before he muted them with a distracted 'silencio'.

For a few seconds, Riddle seemed to still as he looked them over. Then he quietly waved over them with his yew wand, and I stared openly as the pieces elongated themselves, the marble they were made of flowing like water on their sides in order to showcase an eight-like shape of glass. After a couple of muttered incantations, with a tap over the head of the two small hourglasses, white and black sand fell in its respective hourglass, stilling in the upper side.

In the end, the two pawns, which had originally kept glaring daggers at Riddle, had gone from being a couple of crouched infantrymen behind kite shields, to two hand-spans tall hourglasses, one in white and one in black, with helmed heads that were still glaring outrageously at Riddle.

I stopped pretending to study in order to follow as closely as I could the next part. Transfiguring was easy enough, the fundamental principle was something that I had grasped successfully, and everything that followed was a mere consequence. Making it so that the sand would run only at the opportune time was not so simple, and entered a field that I hadn't yet met: enchanting.

Sure, charming a feather to float was technically 'enchanting', for it added a property to the feather that it naturally didn't have. But it was a 'direct' approach, very much like a colour changing charm. Making it so an object would retain a certain mechanism or magic was a whole different kettle of fish, at least in my admittedly uninformed opinion.

His eyes met mine then, and he openly smirked before simply touching the top of the black hourglass and the head of the black king with his wand, before repeating the process with the white pieces.

Little motherfucker. I cursed mentally at him: by doing everything silently and without movement of the wand that I could see, he had effectively stopped me from learning something new.

"Would you like a match?" he repeated with a sly attitude that screamed 'yeah, I kept what you wanted to see hidden, we both now it, deal with it'.

Or maybe I'm just fucking annoyed by this little shit. I frowned before moving my queen pawn ahead of two spaces, spying the white sand in my hourglass as it flowed for an instant, stopping immediately when my piece landed in its box.

"Pawn B6." he answered with a frown, and my eyes widened as I saw his sand fail to flow at all.

I moved without thinking, following my usual routine. If you give the order the sand doesn't move? I had forgotten that the chessboards were alive!

"Bishop B5."

"Knight F3." I caught up with his method and stared pleased as the grain of sands didn't move from their place in my hourglass.

My eyes found Riddle's briefly before I returned my full attention to the game, my lips twitching upwards. This will be fun until I figure a way to kill this little fucker.

I didn't know when bullet chess actually got started, because I only knew that computers started to consistently win against humans in 1997, that was yet another useless bit of trivia that was even more useless now than it was in my previous life. The annoying part, was that Riddle played like he was used to such fast-paced matches, which, given his brief frown when I had spoken about 'one minute match', was bullshit. Pure and simple.

"If you wanted to learn how to enchant, you would be better served by asking directly." he casually pointed out at the end of the first game, in which he somewhat stole a draw.

I'm going to strangle him. I sighed, reining in my instinctive answer.

Who knew that planning the death of a 13 years old wizard would come so instinctively to me?

Three weeks after the beginning of term, Horace Slughorn, Master Potioneer, Professor of Potions, Head of House Slytherin, ad general hedonist, walked at his own pace in a scantly illuminated Hogwarts, his ears peeled and his eyes charmed to pick up, even in the dark, the presence of students out after curfew, while his mind freely roamed from one consideration to another. It wouldn't do to reveal my position with a Lumos now, would it?

He greatly enjoyed flexing his networking skills. It wasn't like he actually needed those, because at this point in life, he was a reasonably powerful wizard, and if he ever started producing potions to sell could live quite comfortably.

He didn't need powerful friends in order to live a life of luxury. But the act of handpicking the brightest of each generation, helping them when they were young and directionless, foretasting the privileges that would come when those pupils started to actually shine in the wider world. He enjoyed boasting of his 'friends' all over the world, he loved the respect and veiled, oblique power that came with having the ear of so many people, and he luxuriated in the simple joys of life.

Nicking a few leaves from the greenhouses here and there, occasionally 'helping' the Professor of Care of Magical Creatures and thusly ending up with free and fresh ingredients. Reselling the, admittedly few, perfect potions that his students managed to brew. Receiving thanks in a multitude of forms throughout each day of his life.

He even enjoyed the occasional detention, a somewhat mean habit of his, but students somewhat were justly served by receiving a little hard talking to. And if he used such occasion to see if the bombastic student had a hidden talent in this or that branch of Magic... well, it was a good thing for everyone, wasn't it?

Horace had spotted the bright intellect of Tom Riddle within his first month at Hogwarts, and the Professor had been since then overjoyed to spy the constant, quiet inquisitive of the talented youth, often wondering if that was what Albus' professors had felt when they taught him.

Oddities happened, here and there, magic wouldn't be so if it didn't come with its small quirks, after all, and while somewhat Horace 'bent' a little his rules and helped along with this or that Heir in order to keep friendly ties with the next generation of Lords, he was very aware that he shouldn't expect another like Tom Riddle for the rest of his tenure in Hogwarts.

Horace huffed as he strolled across the dark halls of Hogwarts, forcing himself to complete his patrol despite the general distaste he felt for such occupation. That was the very reason why Prefects were made, in his opinion at least. Letting young wizards and witches to freely roam at night was an obvious recipe for disaster, that he knew, but it didn't mean that he would enjoy having to wake up before dawn. Sure, he could attend to some potions that were better treated at night that way, or just before breakfast, but it was still murder on his sleep cycle.

Oh well, the Head of Slytherin House sighed, nothing a small dose of Sleeping Draught cannot quickly adjust. With another annoyed sound, he started to climb the Astronomy Tower, quickly falling back into his self-reflection and inane musings about his life, appreciative of the results he had got thus far.

He hadn't dare hope to ever meet another pupil of Tom's calibre, until that uncannily tall first year came along. Rubeus Hagrid. The image of the unreasonably tall Slytherin appeared clear in his mind: shaggy dark hair and a generally unkempt fashion, accompanied by black eyes that seemed ready to devour every snippet of magic he found interesting, failing to hide his sharp mind.

Besides his generally unruly behaviour in class, at least going by what Horace's colleagues muttered from time to time, he was undeniably gifted. No, gifted was not the correct word: he assimilated the principles behind the working of Magic just as fast as he encountered them. Such understanding was clear in all of his essays, which seamlessly brought together different Branches of Magic.

Why, just the week before Horace had the occasion to read one of his Astronomy essays, in which Mr. Hagrid had managed to use the symbolism inherent of Charms in order to showcase why the phases of the Moon were capable of influencing a Potion.

If only he could write essays of the required length. The Potions Professor mused, a soft smile curling upwards his lips. For all of his insight, he doesn't seem to be willing to spend any time more than strictly necessary on his essays. He can be awfully concise, and he doesn't bother polishing his coursework.

Perhaps it was understandable, the first year was clearly annoyed by the slow pacing of the coursework, and thusly was unwilling to spend much time on topics that he felt he had easily understood. What was unusual was his general disinterest in his grades, which never dipped below Acceptable.

When professor Farsee had required Rubeus to write an essay of the proper length, lest he received a failing mark, the cheeky first year simply added a drawing of the mechanism explained in the first half of the parchment, not seeing any need to expand on his words.

Horace kept huffing on the staircase until he reached the very top, shaking slightly his head at the few aversion wards that washed ineffectively over his disciplined mind: "Dear me, I hope I'm not interrupting..." he started to speak as he opened the door to the top of Hogwarts' tallest tower, expecting to be crashing a secret meeting between randy teenagers, only to be met by something completely different.

His casually jovial opening, designated to increase the embarrassment of whoever he spotted, fell into silence while his eyes took in the top of the tower.

The stone platform had been freed from the stools and wooden planes over which the students leaned upon in order to chart the skies, and despite the lack of moon in the sky, the light of the stars seemed to shine just a bit too much for it to be natural, showing a memorable student that had been occupying Horace's most recent thoughts.

Calmly seated on an enlarged stool, one Rubeus Hagrid was slowly but constantly stirring a rather large iron cauldron, bluebell flames calmly shimmering between the cauldron and the stone floor, and a wide, curved shape of glass hovering just above the potion.

The student's eyes jumped up at the interruption, but he didn't stop his movements: "Good night for a stroll, professor? Even if we're almost at dawn." he tilted his head toward the East, where the sky was starting to abandon the black of the night to become deep blue, slowly but surely tilting towards purple.

"Mr. Hagrid!" Horace stepped forward after having closed the door, conflicted between reprimanding the first year and expressing his curiosity about his student's endeavour.

"I've thought a lot about our first lesson, professor." Hagrid spoke without giving the Head of Slytherin a chance to answer: "And I've asked myself, can I use one story as an ingredient for another, greater one?"

"Using a potion in order to enhance another is possible only in a handful of cases. Poisons, for the most part." Horace strode forward with an interested gleam in his eyes, quickly undoing the charm that allowed him to see in the dark in order to discern the situation without magic to mess with his refined potion maker's senses.

"That's what I had thought too at first, but then I rethought about the whole 'Story' concept you showcased for us." Hagrid's eyes remained pointed East, like he was waiting for something, "And it makes sense, a Story doesn't need another in order to be 'complete', then I thought about the refining of ingredients, and what it could signify."

"And?" Horace prodded, his hands held behind his back, forcing himself to not interfere with a potion he could tell was not going to be harmful anytime soon. Once he's done we'll have a stern talk about the risk of experimental potions. He decided, postponing the more obvious reaction to a student blatantly ignoring the rules in order to satisfy his own curiosity.

"And if a single ingredient can be refined, I don't see why a small 'Story' cannot be brewed in order to obtain a very specific sum of properties." the tallest first year to ever grace Hogwarts' halls explained: "A story that is nothing more than a 'definition' of sorts."

"What did you do?"

"Well, I started with the idea of capturing sunlight in a liquid." he gestured with his head towards a thick stack of papers that Horace grabbed delicately, "But then I thought, 'Go Big or Go Home', and decided to capture 'Dawnbreak' itself."

"You used mostly Fungi here." the Head of Slytherin House observed, receiving a nod as an answer. Then the professor finally glanced inside of the cauldron, seeing only what looked like the uppermost layer of an impossibly deep well, which nevertheless seemed to shimmer softly when he observed it with the corner of his eye.

"I needed something to act as 'containment for the dawn break, you see. So I've chosen an iron cauldron, to act as a cage. But then I needed to turn the simple iron into something capable to not only withstand but contain the first ray of sun. Hence the Dark Amanita, desiccated and ground..."

"Because it grows best in dark environments?"

"Yes!" the first year smiled widely at the professor, "and goes into some sort of hibernation when exposed to direct light. So I lined the inside of the cauldron with it, using only a little water to turn it into a paste. Then extract of Nyx's Delight, and limestone dust to coat the pine branch I'm using to stir clockwise."

"Because you want the mesh to happen orderly? Following the natural motion of time?"

"Exatcly, I'll only add one counterclockwise stir before the last passage, in order to turn the potion into a 'reactive' state of sorts."

"Seven leaves of White Ivy? Which instead thrives with sunlight? And no less than 21 Lustre Bat's eyes. I see you modified the bluebell charm too?" the Head of Slytherin inquired, only to receive a sly smile in return.

"Well, yeah, the Ivy will keep the cauldron from exploding, the bat's eyes instead I've added one per minute since the sunset. A Lustre Bat's eye symbolizes the animal's ability to roam the dark, to capture even the faintest direction. Even if biologically speaking, normal bats use echolocation, not sight, and that threw me for a loop." Hagrid's eyes seemed to shine in the dark with unrepressed glee, "The eyes are to capture the starlight, you see, I needed starlight in order to actually prepare the cauldron."

"Like a muggle smith warming the iron before striking it with a hammer, I'd guess?" Horace found himself captivated by the extremely original line of thought thatb had brought the first year to spend the whole night tending to an experimental potion for which, he could readily admit, he had performed an incredible amount of research.

Even if the importance of the timing and the importance of Astronomy for the brew pointed towards Ritualism a bit more than Horace would have wished for a First-Year, there was no denying the brilliance or the sheer ambition of the project.

"More or less, it was also to prepare the glass, it will be the 'epilogue' of the story, just after the dawn, you'll see. As for the bluebell flames... I've lit an ember with the last ray of sunset, and only then I've cast the bluebell flames."

Before Horace could keep questioning him, the tall first year shook his head.

"Now's the moment." Rubeus Hagrid suddenly stood from his stool, retreating the straight and freshly pruned pine branch that he had been using to stir his concoction, and placing himself with the cauldron between him and the imminent dawn.

"If you blink, you'll miss it." he warned with a suppressed bout of laughter.

The Sky had lost his pitch like darkness, turning into shades of purple and pink that seemed to punch clean through a small cluster of clouds, and the eyes immediately burned as they were pointed exactly where the sun was about to surface. With a cautious movement of his wand, Hagrid tilted the curved glass above the cauldron until it rested with its centre pointed exactly towards the incoming rising star.

When finally the sun poked up from beyond the horizon, for a single instant, nothing changed.

The shadows remained still, the stars didn't disappear, the colours of the sky didn't change, and the warmth of the favourite star of the planet didn't wash over the two wizards.

Instead, the curved glass glinted impossibly in the dim light that came just before the actual dawn, and the dark pit of water present in the cauldron shone with the same impossible bright light of the dawn break, casting upwards a funnel of white warmth that shattered what was left of the night, accompanied by a wooshing sound caused by air being displaced by the change in temperature.

"Here comes in effect the powdered limestone, to bleed off the warmth." Then the curved shape of glass tilted backwards and fell into what had once been the dark water of the cauldron, which now shone of a pale gold, the shimmer over the water looking like the glinting of sunlight over polished silver, and only then the bluebell flames were extinguished.

Horace slowly lowered the wand that he had raised in order to be able to defend himself and his student with a moment's notice, and looked at the final result with blatant awe. It wasn't an excessively complex potion, only one that required a lot of constant care, and it wasn't surprising, after all it wasn't something to be consumed in order to grant properties of any kind upon the drinker.

"It will be either a powerful agent to kick off a much larger reaction, or a veritable flash of actual sunlight, and a concentrated one at that." Horace mused with eyes that shone with interest as he went over the detailed notes of his now favourite first year.

"I was thinking that in a pinch it could kill a vampire." Hagrid laughed, and if he had looked a bit unhinged for a moment, Slughorn missed it completely, busy as he was with ogling the 'liquid dawn breaks, "If I used 'Reducio' on the cauldron, would it concentrate the dawn break even further? No, it wouldn't make sense. But what if instead, I had turned into a liquid the light from an instant of the midsummer sun?"

"It would be far more likely." Horace replied distractedly, finally finding again his proper role, "I guess we can talk more about this during your detention for being out after curfew and experimenting with an original potion without a professor to oversee. And also for stealing ingredients, those eyes were worth a pretty galleon, I'll have you know!"

The annoyed groan of the tall student brought a smile to Horace's face. Mr. Hagrid was unusual in many ways, from his size to his attitude, and he wouldn't fail to entertain any time soon.

AN

I hoped I managed to make the interaction MC-Tom organic. Not many words, but they're measuring each other for now.

Dumbledore showed Harry memories of a cruel little kid that lashed out consistently in order to make himself untouchable. Nobody knows how his first years at Hogwarts were, but I'm guessing that a muggle raised half-blood in Slytherin didn't have it easy. And that's without keeping track of the language barrier: I assure you, during WW II, in an orphanage you don't learn how to talk posh English, which I'm thinking was the standard for proper purebloods.

I'm not good enough to use English in order to showcase the different social classes, I have great difficulties with even setting up accents, so don't lynch me for this.

Anyway, Tom felt special because he was a wizard, and thusly discarded the muggles. Then he was likely knocked down one peg or twenty when he realized that even as talented as he was, older wizards could just randomly set his shit on fire in order to scare him into compliance.

Now, the talented 3rd year Tom Riddle spots a first-year Slytherin that casually fucks up the ritual hazing that all slightly different students undergo when in a new place (again, Tom likely has been somewhat bullied in his first year at least).

And our future Dark Lord is left thinking: is he like me? Can he accept such a thought even he wants to be unique? The MC sure doesn't seem to consider the option of 'redeeming' Riddle. Tom immediately shifts to the forma mentis that will have him lead his gaggle of purists wannabe in later years, and decides to get Hagrid on his boat, or at least to know him enough to determine if he's a threat or not.

I don't think that 13 years old kids plan the takeover of a country. That's just... psycho genius or not... it doesn't make sense to me. Take over of Slytherin, or even the school, that's a bit far stretched, but ultimately ok: 13 y.o. kids don't plan revolutions or conquests. For now, his vision is focused on what happens in his immediate surroundings: namely Hogwarts. In the next years, he'll start thinking about the larger world, but that's yet to happen.

That's to say that Riddle is difficult to peg down, sorry the ramble.

And while we'll be soon seeing the MC's POV on potion Making, I wanted to place a Horace moment. Did it work?

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this chapter! Opinions?

I was toying with the idea of tossing in a random 'Triwizard Tournament' after the war, in order to promote 'unity' and whatnot. Opinions? It would likely land in 1946-47 which is Hagrid's 7th year. Convenient, is it not? WW2 basically ends with Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 6th and 7th August respectively, and Dumbledore defeats Grindelwald in the same year, I'm guessing a little after the bombs land. So one year to organize, and the following one to execute it.

Ideas?