[1943]
He had to be sure. He had to.
It wasn't that he didn't have confidence in his own abilities - far from it, in fact. He knew he was more than capable of pulling it off.
But if he was going to leave behind what he considered to be his life's work (or at least the work he'd done up to age sixteen which, in his defense, was considerably more than most), he wanted to make damn sure the thing was going to do what it was supposed to do.
Admittedly, there was a slight - slight - chance that he had miscalculated the amplitude of transmigrational sentience and had, in fact, launched what would probably be a confused and quite distraught copy of his sixteen-year-old consciousness into the boundless void between dimensions.
But it was unlikely.
He was so far down the rabbit hole with this one that, at one point, the only thing he could do was make sure the colors and sounds that emanated from his dear old diary during the ritual vaguely matched what Memory Mechanics and Manipulation in Magic had said.
The object should now be glowing a bright, cerulean blue, akin to a mid-day sky. Blue was blue. Close enough. Check.
The proximal space around the object should increase in temperature, peaking at a balmy 41 degrees. Well, it felt warm and it wasn't melting. Check.
Finally, the odor emanating from the object should approximate your earliest and fondest childhood memory. What the hell was that supposed to be? The sweet smell of not getting killed by German bombs? He didn't bother.
Once the ritual was complete he set the book down on the ground. Then he decided the ground was too wet and picked it back up, then set it down again, determining that a little dampness was fine since he'd purposely made the damn thing indestructible, and if it couldn't handle a little wet then he had no business doing any of this at all.
He opened the book and awkwardly knelt down to make his mark upon a random page with the battered infin-ink quill he kept in his pocket. Then he stepped back, took out his wand...
...and stopped.
He picked the book up again and propped it up on the foot of Salazar's statue to give it some height, thinking it might be better to see what was happening from there. Would it? Would the apparition be visible? He had no idea.
His obsessive compulsion for perfect staging satisfied, he finally whispered the incantation and stepped back with excitement.
The pages of the diary started to turn rapidly as if they were being blown by a strong wind. A humming sound filled the chamber, and the book began to glow with a sinister white light. A bit much, Tom thought to himself. He was perfectly fine with flashy and dramatic displays of magic, but not when he was trying to get something done, and not when there was no one around to be impressed by his showmanship.
The light grew brighter, gaining in intensity until he had to look away. Covering his eyes, he went over the steps again in his head to make sure he'd gotten it right. There was no mention in the book of a blinding light or a humming sound. But then, most how-to books on magic tended to leave out a considerable amount of extremely useful details short of "oh, by the way, side effect - you die."
Suddenly he heard a loud THUMP.
He removed his hand from his eyes, attempted to fan away the explosion of smoke that had filled the air, and then cursed. Loudly.
He'd been expecting a disembodied voice. Or a ball of light, maybe. Even a floating book that looked like a talking mouth would have been acceptable.
What he did not expect was a copy of himself - a complete and relatively accurate specter that looked exactly like him except for the translucent glow and slightly over-dramatic hovering effect.
The Book Tom stood and wiped the metaphysical dirt off of his metaphysical clothes, glanced around the Chamber, looked at Tom with what Tom chose to believe was a highly uncharacteristic and therefore inaccurate air of pomposity, and said, "so."
"So," said non-metaphysical Tom.
They stared each other down for a while. Tom was wondering just how this was going to go. Would it have the same memories? Would it be capable of strategy and manipulation? Would he have to teach it English?
Meanwhile, the other Tom looked around the Chamber with casual interest, adjusting to the painful reality of being yanked into sudden existence with a halfhearted "huh."
"Do you know who you are?" Tom asked expectantly.
"I am you," said Book Tom.
Good so far. It was sentient. It had self-awareness. It was even looking at him with a judgmental sneer, which indicated higher thought.
"Do you remember your purpose?" he asked, saying the words slowly as if he was talking to a child.
The specter did not reply. It seemed preoccupied with itself - himself - now, feeling (did he feel?) his hair, straightening his jacket, giving his Prefect's badge a quick metaphysical polish.
Tom didn't want to push it. Despite his brilliance, even he had to admit that he was marginally out of his depth when it came to discourse with sentient memory ghosts that had been vomited out of books.
He tried to gather his thoughts, still reeling over the mirror image of himself hovering effortlessly over the grimy floor of the Chamber.
"Is there a point to this meeting?" Book Tom asked suddenly, picking at the theoretical nails of one hand with a high-class, Slytherin-esque nonchalance that Tom himself couldn't even muster.
Tom approached him slowly. "Yes. I need to be sure that you will carry out the duty to which you are assigned. Do you remember your purpose?" he repeated.
Book Tom thought for a moment, tilted his head, then finally said, "yes."
Tom waited.
"And? What is your purpose?" he demanded after a half-minute of silence.
"To complete Salazar Slytherin's Noble Work," the image said simply.
More silence.
"Are you going to expand upon that?"
The specter smirked at him. "Must I?"
Tom's patience was wearing thin, and his hands were going numb from exposure to the Chamber's freezing underground air. He wanted to finish this. Quickly. "Tell me this: do you have my memories?"
"Which memories are those? The ones in which you spent five whole years looking for a Chamber that was specifically designed for you to find right away? Or the ones in which you were given control of a highly intelligent and deadly beast and only managed to terrorize one or two Mudbloods over the course of an entire term?"
Tom felt a surge of rage bubbling up and tried to calm himself. "You were made," he said through gritted teeth, "to take up the cause of fulfilling the Chamber's purpose should I not succeed."
"Obviously." Book Tom began to pace-hover. "I believe I understand the situation and, after keen and thorough assessment, I have determined that you are both wise and foolish."
"I'm sorry?"
"It seems that you possess some impressive wisdom to have created me the way you did, for you must have known, somewhere in your subconscious, that you - the original you - would not have the strength of character and skills required to complete the work."
"Pardon?"
"So you made me," Book Tom continued, "an entity capable of succeeding where you yourself would have undoubtedly failed. Wise."
"I did not make you to-"
"AND," he interrupted, "you've seen fit to summon me immediately upon the event of my incorporeal birth, without hesitation, without proper preliminary examination of the object you created or any sort of analysis of the risks involved in activating said object, which could have done any number of things to you had you gotten it wrong. Foolish. If you ever had any chance of completing the Noble Work in the first-"
"Don't talk to me about the noble fucking work, you bloody wanker!"
Tom's shouting echoed through the chamber. "Wanker... anker...ker..."
Book Tom's face was indiscernible. He didn't seem angry or offended. He just floated there, blank, vaguely glowing like a dying, judgmental streetlight.
"I see," he said.
They stood there for an indeterminate amount of time, arms crossed, attempting to out-sneer each other. Somewhere nearby a Basilisk chirped.
"But I didn't get it wrong, did I?" Tom said after a good long sneer.
"Sorry?"
"You said I could have gotten it wrong. But I didn't. I never get it wrong. Anyway, you have my memories. You know why I can no longer trust the outcome to fate."
"Ah yes," Book Tom muttered, "the horcruxes. Still on that, are you?"
"Of course I am. It is the only way forward."
"Are you still going to use Dad for the first one?" Book Tom asked with a wicked smile.
Tom smiled back. "Naturally."
"Kick him in the teeth for me."
[1947]
Book Tom was a snarky bastard.
Tom knew this going in, but if he had any chance of keeping his diary horcrux safe, he needed to make sure his diary horcrux knew to keep itself safe.
He was leaving the country. His hasty and impulsive murder of Hepzibah Smith, despite being overwhelmingly therapeutic, threw his entire time table out of whack. Now he had to find a way to keep the diary hidden, but close to Hogwarts, without being able to hide it inside the school itself. He had to leave it behind.
Which meant he had to talk to the damn thing.
Setting the book down on the dingy kitchen table and forcing himself, with all the will he could muster, not to lose his temper, he raised his wand and performed the incantation.
"Why am I not at the school?" the teenage version of himself asked, sitting on the counter and crossing his non-existent arms, the perfect model of a judgmental prick from head to toe.
Ah. Just as Tom remembered.
He scanned his surroundings and turned up his nose at the state of the tiny apartment. "Where the hell are we?"
"In my flat," said the older Tom, patience already dangerously thin. "Don't get used to it. We won't be here long."
Book Tom, who hadn't been spoken to in almost five years, was quick to express his distaste. At length. "...and I don't remember derelict accommodations and cheap, shoddy furniture being part of our five year plan, friend."
Tom ignored his jibes, wondering with great concern how he had accomplished so much between the ages of sixteen and eighteen given that - if Book Tom was anything to go by - he was, without a doubt, a complete and utter arsehole.
"You have been made into a horcrux," he stated. "As such, I will need to ensure you are kept safe and hidden while I travel."
Book Tom's brow furrowed in confusion.
"I have questions," he said.
"I thought you might. But I'm not here to answer your questions." ...you pompous, disembodied little shit, Tom continued in his head.
Book Tom ignored him with expert-level pomposity, raising a finger to make a point like a sixteen-year-old college professor whose tenure was paid in units of sarcasm. "It just doesn't seem very logical. Or strategic. I thought you were going to use your - our - father to make the first horcrux?"
Tom rolled his eyes. "I was. But things... did not go according to plan."
"Well, obviously, if you were the one making the plans."
"DO NOT-"
Tom stopped himself and took a second to calm down, pinching the bridge of his nose in frustration. "Do not speak," he continued, "unless you have something constructive to say."
Book Tom seemed to nod in understanding, until- "Who makes a horcrux out of a book, anyway? Highly degradable."
Tom's hand twitched toward the wand in his pocket. "You know I enchanted the book to be indestructible."
"Oh, yes. I forgot. The one time you actually covered your bases. Well done, you."
Tom slammed the diary shut.
But Book Tom stayed put, using the moment of silence to glance pointedly around the flat again with as much utter distaste as he could manage to fit on his metaphysical face.
"Why are you traveling in the first place?" he asked after a while. "What did you do?"
"It's none of your concern."
"Incorrect. Everything is my concern."
The bloody ego on him, thought Tom, ignoring the fact that he often used to hit his followers with the same logic, using the exact same phrase, in the same tone, and may or may not still do so currently.
"What did you do?" Book Tom asked again.
Tom did not answer.
"What did you do?" the specter repeated, dragging out the "do" like a four-year-old child.
"Not that it is relevant to you, but I made a slight miscalculation, alright? I am taking care of it."
Book Tom paused for a moment, thinking. Then he said, "I would say that I am not surprised, but we both know that I would not be surprised, so we can cut the pretense. At any rate, I assume you have summoned me to ask for my help?"
"No. I am giving you a warning because, as I've said, you've been made into a horcrux. I can't leave you lying around-"
"How many horcruxes do you have floating around out there now, anyway?"
"Three."
Book Tom's mouth dropped open slightly. "Three? Good Lord. What does that do to your soul? Is it like a fractional sort of situation? Are you down to an eighth now? Or does it sort of just stretch back like dough?"
Tom ignored him and moved on. "I am leaving you with a trusted ally, and when he deems the time is right he will return you to the school so that you may wreak havoc on the Mudbloods there."
"Yeah, about that..."
"No."
"It's just-"
"No."
"Well, it's really not the highest priority, killing Mudbloods, is it?"
"We are not discussing this," Tom growled.
Book Tom backed away and put his hands up in mock surrender, sporting an impressively subtle smirk. "Alright, lord. Calm down. Don't lose your nose about it. I'll do the bloody job."
"Thank you."
There was a minute of silence during which both Toms stared at each other in a mutual loathing so strong that even the Muggles downstairs could feel it (though it only came across to them as a mildly disconcerting sense of futility, which they naturally shrugged off in a characteristically British way.)
Book Tom dared to speak first. "You know, if I'm a horcrux, we'll always be connected. Tethered to each other, as it were. I'm not sure I can handle an eternity with-"
Tom threw the entire kitchen at him.
[1955]
"Who are you leaving me with?"
"An ally."
Book Tom snorted. "'Ally?' We don't have any allies."
"You don't. You're nothing more than a collection of memories stored in a book that I strongly regret making."
Book Tom ignored this in characteristic Book Tom fashion. "You look old. How old are you?"
"That's irrelevant."
"Old, then. Must be disappointing."
He had taken a seat in Tom's high-backed chair, nonexistent feet up on the desk like he owned the fucking place, youthful cheekbones that Tom had long since lost glowing offensively in the dark.
"What's disappointing?" Tom demanded, wishing his younger self was solid so that he could curse him to oblivion.
Book Tom shrugged. "That you've spent years studying the deepest recesses of magic, concocting this elaborate plan to tether yourself to the earth and become immortal... and you still age."
Tom threw the book into the fire.
Somewhere in the infinite darkness of space, three galaxies away, a very confused teenage Tom Riddle floated haughtily through the void, wondering whom he could possibly blame for this one.