In which Lily benevolently provides employment to the blood sucking unfortunates of England, Tom Riddle comes to terms with his own powers and that of Lily, and things seem to slide into place.
It wasn't as if she didn't see Tom Riddle after that disastrous and awkward morning; they lived in the same room, after all, but somehow it felt as if he was thousands of miles away from her. As distant, perhaps, as Wizard Lenin was more than fifty years removed from Lily in this strange world of 1937.
He was there, but he seemed smaller, unobtrusive in a way that for him was so unnatural, and lost in his own thoughts for days on end. Not as if he was any solemn dark-haired child, but as if he was only half inside this world and was half in some world beyond Lily's imagining.
It was late into the evening when she got back from London, after having to barter with the goblins, set up accounts, and then go back and find whatever bastard owned the building and lot that would soon become Riddle Inc. She'd been tired, not just emotionally but somehow physically tired as well. She couldn't really explain why; she had no reason to be and had certainly been through worse, but it seemed like a weight had come crashing down on her shoulders, and it was all she could do to put one foot in front of the other. The day had just been so… long.
And she hadn't really wanted to deal with anything else Tom Riddle or the universe might throw at her.
Either way, she'd thought nothing of it when she'd appeared without a word in their shared bedroom and slid under the covers and into sweet oblivion. Only the next morning did she groggily realize that she hadn't said a word to her temperamental roommate, hadn't even given him an acknowledging nod. Stranger yet, Tom Riddle hadn't demanded one.
She'd missed breakfast, slept through it entirely and found herself walking down to an eerily empty dining room. It'd struck her, then, that every morning (barring that first morning when she'd stuck him gagged to a wall) he'd made sure she knew exactly when breakfast started and that she wasn't a second late to feed him magic scones.
Standing there, she'd felt something like a ghost, a shadow on the wall of the orphanage, there but not truly. Only visible or noticeable to Tom Riddle, and this was by intention, but all the same… Even at Hogwarts, when her life had felt contrived at best, she had never felt quite like this.
As if her existence, in its own way, relied solely on the attention and acknowledgement of the orphan Wizard Lenin had once been.
She'd done her best to shrug it off, instead told herself it was for the best and she needed to get this Riddle Incorporated thing running anyway. She wanted a headquarters to show Frank before she brought him into the fold, wanted everything decorated the way it should be, like she could make an island of her childhood in this foreign land. It'd just seemed suddenly important that everything there be perfect, exactly how she remembered it when she was only six, even if it meant she had to spend a few days in London running here and running there to get everything in order.
And he must have shrugged it off as well, or else disregarded it better than Lily ever could, because he didn't say a word. Just stared forward into space, in the way that Wizard Lenin very rarely had, when the world had drained his ambitions and dreams of grandeur from him and left the wary and fearful man in their stead. Someone who, all at once, realized how small a single human life truly was. It was how he, Wizard Lenin, often looked out at the train station called Purgatory.
And every once in a while, in those few days since the lesson that never should have happened, those pale eyes would meet hers across the bedroom or the dining hall or the orphanage yard. It'd only be for a second, a moment, but the sight would stay with her hours after he'd turned his head away. They hadn't burned as his eyes usually burned, nor had they cut; instead they'd been pale as glass and just as reflective. A single, solitary question inside of them: "Who are you?"
And for whatever reason Lily couldn't quite put into words, she found that she preferred the petty raging and temper tantrums, the overblown ego and pride. This, whatever this was, it didn't suit either of them.
More, she didn't know how any of this would lead them down the path that was Tom Riddle's transformation into the man he would one day become.
Finally, as they hit the last week of August and the end of summer, Lily broke.
It was the idea that she should probably finally talk to Frank, after giving him a week or so to pit his terrible circumstances and poor life choices against Lily's alluring offer of employment, that did it.
Somehow it just hadn't seemed right that Lily Riddle would move forward so cleanly, so easily, when the task she'd actually set out to do seemed to be slipping like sand through her fingers. That and…
If this was 1992, if this was Lily's world, then of course Wizard Lenin would be by her side. He'd either still be stuck in her head, grousing as usual, deeply uncomfortable with the fact that Lily really was Lily Riddle this whole time, or else he'd be walking along beside her stating how he had better things to do but still showing up anyway.
Because that's what they did, even when he left Hogwarts and she was brainwashed by his alter ego, or when she was decades behind in the past without any idea what she was doing. If it was anything of worth, they did it together.
And it'd taken Tom Riddle ignoring her and everything else to really cement in how much she missed him.
She'd thought it often enough, but it hadn't really sunk in – like an anchor on her heart plunging down to her feet – until then.
He was sitting by himself in the yard beneath the tree, in his usual bubble of shadows and solitude as he stared out at the other orphans. Unlike Lily's first few days here, though, there was none of the usual haughty contempt as he stared out at his peers, but instead that emptiness which was becoming worryingly familiar.
Still occupied by thoughts and concerns beyond her imagining.
Still, with a jig in her step and a plan to be set in motion, Lily moseyed towards him while, out of nowhere at all, she found herself singing a half-remembered song under her breath, "Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, each one she passes goes – ah."
Wizard Lenin, despite all his posturing, had always had a fondness for Frank Sinatra and classic big band hits that had been caught somewhere between his youth and more wizened years. Often, in the back of Lily's mind during duller moments, she'd find the melody of "Fly Me to the Moon" drifting through her unconscious thoughts.
But it was a little too soon for Frank Sinatra, she thought as she looked at this younger Tom Riddle.
A smile, unbidden and unstoppable, slid across Lily's lips as she stepped closer to his hunched form. "When she walks, she's like a samba that swings so cool and sways so gentle, that when she passes, each one she passes goes – ooh."
The boy that would become Wizard Lenin lifted his head, finally recognizing her approach, but there was still nothing in him. There was not even the slightest hint of recognition. "Oh, but I watch her so sadly. How can I tell her I love her? Yes, I would give my heart gladly, but each day when she walks to the sea, she looks straight ahead, not at me…"
Lily reached his feet, letting the melody and words drift into the air, and in her mind the next line played, that final line of quiet yearning: Tall, and tan, and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking, and when she passes, I smile – but she doesn't see.
Instead, in a voice that was far too hoarse for this early in the morning, she said, "I have a fondness for Sinatra."
He said nothing to that, not a disdainful pout and remark that he didn't know who or what Sinatra was, nor anything about how he was too good for her popular music. Instead, his eyes moved down to her feet, to her worn, off-white tennis shoes, and finally past her and out into the yard again as if she was as transparent as windexed glass.
"So, we're not talking again?" Lily finally asked. It sounded like an easy thing to say, as if Lily could be asking any question at all, and yet the back of her mind was still humming "The Girl from Ipanema" and watching a man who watched the sea.
He didn't say anything, neither confirming nor denying that the shaky foundations they'd built between them had managed to crumble in less than a morning.
She hadn't realized that she and Lenin were a castle built on pillars of sand.
She took a seat next to him with a sigh, staring out with him at the rest of the world, waiting for a word or two. She could, she thought, be waiting fifty years or more. All the same, even more than a drug empire that didn't exist but must exist, this seemed like the most important thing in the world.
Even if he was only a half-formed shadow of the man he'd become.
"I'm going into London today again," Lily said, not looking at him but instead still looking out and leaving her words only as an offering, "And I have money this time. If you want books, then you should come."
He said nothing.
"Books are better, I think, than I ever could be at teaching," Lily admitted, and here her voice did shake a little. She wished she could have been more help, she wished she could have been better, she wished she had some inkling of how it worked for someone like him.
She didn't though; she only had her own absurd gifts, and once upon a time she'd seen nothing wrong with that.
Now, though, she wished she could be worth more than a textbook written by a wizard.
"They, at least, can explain why you can't make food," Lily said with a small, bitter laugh. Whoever's last name was attached to that particular law of the universe would be in bold print, no doubt.
Finally, he looked over at her and seemed to see her again in a way he hadn't managed to for days. His voice was soft, quiet, and she could barely catch his words as he admitted, "I couldn't do it."
"What?" she asked, but he was already looking past her.
"I tried all morning after you left, all afternoon too, but I couldn't do any of it," he said, and for the first time an edge of emotion crept into his voice, frustration laced with pure desperation, "I couldn't disappear and reappear somewhere else, I couldn't make anyone think I was somewhere I wasn't, I couldn't make food or anything at all out of nothing… Just parlor tricks, that's all I can do on my own."
"Most can't even do that," Lily said softly, but he shook his head, an angry flush spreading across his high cheekbones.
"I wasn't supposed to just be most," he said, not without bitterness and more than a fair bit of longing.
"You aren't." But she didn't know how to make that obvious, that he was as much a diamond in the rough as he'd always suspected, that he really was a step above his wizard brethren. He just wasn't her.
And she wondered if that same question had haunted him more than fifty years later, in its own way. He'd accused her of making his life into a farce, that if she was what his friend had been, then his life had no purpose. That he always, would always, be standing in her shadow…
And how it didn't matter that, if it was up to her, she would never loom so large as to overshadow him completely.
"I promise, Len—Tom," she corrected herself, wincing at the name that so unthinkingly fell from her lips almost like an endearment, "You're not."
She held out her hand to him with a smile, even as he dubiously stared at her pale fingers, "Come with me, see for yourself. Let me buy you books and set you loose. You'll see."
And then, in a year's time when he was eleven and Hogwarts opened his doors, he'd take the world by storm. Casting such a large shadow, in time, that his very name would be banished from the spoken and written English tongue.
He must have read enough in her grin, gained some measure of confidence and faith, because tentatively his fingers met her and finally his hand rested in hers.
"They better be some damn good books," he grumbled, but a smile danced at the edge of his lips and threatened to take them over at any moment. Lily magnanimously let it slide.
Instead, she hurled them forward through time and space and straight into the heart of Diagon Alley.
"Bloody hell," Lily said as she was almost immediately shoved to the side by a panicking family in search of last-minute school supplies. She'd forgotten that the end of August heralded the start of Hogwarts term in September.
"Right, try to ignore the crowds," Lily said, glancing over at her stunned, winded, and slightly green companion (teleportation tended to be rough on whatever poor fool was dragged along for the ride), "They'll thin out in a week or so."
Tom just nodded, pulled himself together, and brushed himself off as he tried to regain whatever semblance of dignity he had. Which, given that he was only ten, wasn't as much as he thought it was.
"Come on then," Lily said as she pulled him through the crowds and into the overcrowded book store, "Right, you're going to want to start on the beginner material, which is somewhere in this direction."
Lily pulled him towards the corner that seemed most saturated with overeager eleven and twelve-year-olds, each only slightly taller and more gangly than Tom himself. Each was practically buzzing with excitement, though, even those who looked like they'd been there and done that either by being born into a wizarding family or else having an older sibling. There was that kind of tingle in the air that had always been present for Dudley on Christmas morning.
Lily herself had never experienced it, either at Christmas or shopping for Hogwarts. Christmas because the holiday was either spent slaving away at the Dursleys' and watching Dudley be rewarded with mounds of gifts, or else filled with murder and despair. Hogwarts because, well, even in the beginning she had somehow known it would not live up to Wizard Lenin's expectations. Still, she suddenly found herself wondering if she'd missed out on something dreadfully important.
At the sight of the shelves of books, Tom's eyes widened in longing and stark envy.
"Once you make your way through those, we can come back for something a little more dangerous," Lily said, because she had no illusions that he'd devour his way through the first and second-year Hogwarts curriculums even without a wand at his disposal. He had always been the type to bend the world to suit his needs, no matter the impossibilities of his task.
He just didn't quite know it yet.
"And you'll pay for all this?" he asked, glancing over at her with narrowed eyes like he was just waiting for the other shoe to drop. If only because, she was suddenly certain, no one had ever gone out of their way to do anything for Tom Riddle.
"Consider it a gift," Lily said, and then relented at his increasingly hostile and dubious expression, "Money's not an object anymore."
Or, at least, it wouldn't be as soon as she had a decent explanation of where it all was coming from. Which she planned to work on soon enough, having sent Frank a letter that morning to go ahead and meet her at Riddle Incorporated's new address.
"Money's not an object anymore," Little Wizard Lenin repeated doubtfully, exactly how Wizard Lenin might fifty-odd years later. It was a mix not just of doubt but of a biting, scathing, sarcasm that left little to the listener's imagination of just what Wizard Lenin thought of their intelligence.
Somehow, she'd even missed that.
"Look," Lily said with a painfully casual shrug, "I have my ways and you wouldn't care about the details. So, go nuts."
Well, he probably would care about the details, but that was too bad for him, because Lily just wasn't going there. Still, apparently he wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth, because he soon enough was shoving his way through the adolescent throng and watching as Lily pulled all the first and second year textbooks and then some.
His eyes widened comically, his jaw falling open, and Lily dimly remembered that this was more books than there were in the orphanage's shared and battered library.
He waited in stunned, eerie, silence while they waited in line for the register. Like he couldn't quite believe what was happening, even as families argued, chattered, and noisily went about their business all around them.
It was only when they were outside and Lily was dumping the stack into his hands that he asked, hesitantly, "These are mine, then?"
"What the hell would I do with them?" Lily asked, because really, she'd never even bothered to read those books when she was supposed to and still considered them mostly bullshit. Just, you know, the kind of bullshit that would help him along. She then winced, realizing what she'd just said and that he'd view it as some kind of insult, but there was nothing of the sort; instead he just kept staring at the books in quiet wonder.
And then it started to get a little awkward.
She hadn't realized it'd mean this much to him; she'd said she'd do as much the other day and he'd seemed to view it as his god given right. Like of course Lily was going to go and buy him books and prevent him from burning down the establishment.
She rubbed the back of her head, trying to search for something to say. The trouble was that they kind of had to go their separate ways, for a few hours at least. She'd thought he'd run off as soon as he had what he wanted; he'd done that last time, after all. Now, though, he seemed content to stand exactly where he was and just stare at her like he'd never seen anything like her before in his life.
"So," Lily finally said, "You want to find somewhere to read those? Maybe grab lunch?"
Lily wasn't overly fond of The Leaky Cauldron, but it had food, and he could occupy a booth for a solid few hours while Lily met Frank.
He nodded slowly and followed her as she pushed through the crowd, maybe pushing them to the side a little more forcefully than was necessary, and got them into the Leaky Cauldron. Which, of course, was bloody packed.
"I hate August," Lily said with a shudder.
Walking up to a booth in the back, she looked at the occupants, some teenaged couple on a date in Diagon Alley who clearly had been here forever and weren't going anywhere any time soon, and decided that it was as good a table as any. "You have decided it's time to leave now."
They blinked back at her, not understanding for a moment, and then the compulsion kicked in and in a dazed voice the plain-looking boy repeated, "We've decided it's time to leave.'
"Right," the girl said, "I guess we have been here a while. We should get ice cream, it's such a hot day."
Then they were both walking out in a daze, leaving Lily and Tom to slide into the seats across from one another.
"That," Tom said slowly, contemptuously, like he thought she'd been trying to impress him or pull a fast one, "I'm very good at. I've been doing that sort of thing for years."
"Good for you," Lily said and then pointed to his stack of books in a deliberate manner, "Read those and find out what you're not good at yet."
He frowned but picked up the first – Transfiguration – which he might actually have a shot at without a wand. It was hard for Lily to say one way or another; most needed one, but they also hadn't bothered to say words in Transfiguration, so maybe you didn't really need the stick of wood either. Well, either way, he'd find out for himself soon enough.
"Did you read any of these?" he asked as he flipped through the table of contents.
She should probably lie, but it wasn't really in her nature to be anything but bluntly honest, and so she just sighed and admitted, "I was supposed to, but I never really got around to it. Don't use me as your example though. I'm… Well…"
Lily trailed off awkwardly, not having a way, or at least not a good way, to put it into words. He seemed to get it though, for once, as he just quietly nodded. He looked away from his book and towards the other tables, to everyone and their wands, and Lily who had none.
Finally, he said, "You really are different, aren't you?"
Lily had nothing to say to that – nothing he'd appreciate, at any rate. All she could do was, yet again, sort of rub at the back of her head and try to think of something else to say. He was just so… different today.
Had this really just been brought on by lighting the orphanage on fire?
"Right, so I actually have a few errands to run today," Lily said, motioning vaguely towards the door and the rest of Diagon Alley, "Do you mind waiting here for a few hours until I get back?"
His eyebrow ticked in irritation. "And what am I supposed to do?"
"I can drop you off at the orphanage if you want," Lily offered, and then pointing to his stack said, "But I figured you'd rather be here and rather read these."
He considered this quietly, mulling over his options, and with a sigh relented. "I suppose it's better than Wool's."
Damn straight it was.
Lily grinned back at him, a look he returned with disbelief and raised eyebrows. Still, something seemed to have changed between them, for real this time. Perhaps they were built on pillars of sand, but it was a more solid foundation than she'd feared a few hours before now.
It didn't matter if he was ten, if he didn't really know her. In this single moment, everything was fine.
"I'll see you later, then."
Her last sight of him, as she stepped out the door, was of his nose buried in a book as large as his face. Somehow, she thought, she wouldn't be surprised if he was in the exact same position when she managed to make her way back.
"Right," Lily said to herself, "There's work to be done."
She ducked out of the alley and into the far less crowded, and far more sketchy, Knockturn Alley. There was the familiar sight of wizards who looked like they were addicted to some potion or another, the prostitutes in the gutter, and all the dark creatures wizards weren't truly comfortable with.
With hair black again, Lily weaved her way with an instinctive grace through the lot of them, ignoring their raised eyebrows and whispers at seeing a little girl walk with unquestioned confidence through the gutter. She walked past each and every one of them, past the antique shops selling goods that should be banned, the brothels, and the dive pubs, until she was at the recently purchased building at the very end of the street.
And the sign, of course, that she'd painted herself.
"Riddle Inc.: Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter Here or Just Leave it at the Door for Later."
It was magnificent.
And there he was, staring up at the sign with his jaw hanging open and his eyes wide and crimson, like if he blinked long enough reality would start readjusting itself.
With a grin, Lily walked up towards him, waving and motioning to her sign. "Pretty cool, huh?"
He opened his mouth to say something, but Lily didn't give him a chance, instead moving past him and towards the door, unlocking it wordlessly and ushering him inside. The inside wasn't quite where she'd wanted it to be yet; most everything was there, but there were still a few key aspects that weren't quite right that she'd have to find time to put together. "Well, it will be. Right now it's just the sign and stuff inside."
He craned his head to get a better view of the posters, lava lamps, and everything else Lily had conjured from nothing, but Lily kept pushing him through until they were in Frank's back office. Which, at the moment, was her own back office, as Frank wasn't quite at his most Frank yet.
She left him standing in front of the oak desk and moved around it, opening drawers to get out all those sheets of paper Frank loved so dearly in this job, the list of their costs and assets and everything that would make them run like a business. "Now, I have enough counterfeit money to get us the basics, but we need to get down to business fast if the goblins are going to buy this."
"You stole from the goblins?!" It was the first thing he said, the first time he'd had a chance to say anything, and he looked at her like she'd just gone and told him she ate children in her spare time.
Which, for a vampire, was a rather impressive sort of look.
He also looked like he was really starting to regret coming in here.
"Hell no, I'm not stupid." She sat down at the desk, at the great wheelie chair that was twice her size, and raised her eyebrows at his doubting impertinence (he really didn't have the yes-man thing down yet and it just was so not-Frank it pained her), "No, I didn't steal from the goblins, I gave stolen – well, fake – money to them."
He blinked once, then twice, then a third time, and admitted, "I don't understand."
Lily sighed and returned to sifting through the desk for his contract of employment, because he was the type who liked things like that. "Well, Frank – can I call you Frank? I'm going to call you Frank."
She didn't give Frank a chance to insist that his name wasn't really Frank (because it was and he was just going to have to get over that one.)
Instead, in a very proud voice, she explained the beginnings of her great scheme to him (which had gone surprisingly well, even relying on a homeless drunkard), "The goblins keep a very close eye on how much gold is travelling through the market, so faking gold (which isn't easy even on a good day) would not be an option. They'd know that the money didn't come from anywhere."
With a bright look in her eyes, she leaned forward, grinning, letting him in on the dirty little secret of the magical world in the 1940's. "However, there is one currency they keep almost no track of – muggle money."
For emphasis, she produced from nothing a twenty pound note, which to a wizard would look like any other twenty pound note and hardly a forgery at all. "With the influx of muggleborns, they've had no choice but to accept it and set up a currency exchange, but they don't know how to check for counterfeit muggle money. It's only paper, after all, not gold, no magical traces, just pieces of paper with a number on it. Who can tell one piece of paper from another, I ask you?"
She then motioned magnanimously to herself in all of her glory. "So, let's say a very wealthy-looking young girl walks into a bank with a butler of some type and a briefcase filled with muggle cash and says, 'I would like to open an account for my tenure in Hogwarts, and I would like this money to be converted into whatever the peons require.'"
"It's not so hard to transfigure an outfit or to find a bum on the street who will walk into a bank with you for a sickle." Her grin became even more conspiratorial as she finally pulled out of the desk his contract as her number-one henchman. "Really, it's almost too easy."
And if Frank had nothing to say against that, the way that Tom Riddle had nothing to say against her either, well then, more power to the pair of them.
For once, she thought, everything was coming up Lily.
Author's Note: Well, Uncle Death didn't work his way in this time, but I swear he will next time. Thanks to GlassGirlCeci for betaing the chapter.
Thanks to readers and reviewers, reviews are much appreciated.
Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter