There is Nothing to Fear was originally posted on Spacebattles and Sufficient Velocity. It is currently complete, with twenty-one chapters, and I will upload a chapter here on FFnet every week. There will then be sequels. You can also search out TINTF on SB, SV, or Ao3, where I post as Callmesalticidae.

Because I dislike making the same edit on a thousand different websites, the authoritative version is on Archive of Our Own. Except for glaring mistakes (e.g. anything that makes the story less comprehensible), I'll only make edits on the Ao3 version.

There is now a Discord discord DOT gg FORWARD SLASH xjCBgff

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Having the Right Enemies

There is only one thing more useful in politics than having the right friends, and that is having the right enemies — Anonymous

The year was 1967, and Nobby Leach, first muggleborn Minister for Magic, was only getting sicker—of the divisions in the country that he loved so dearly, of the people who were fomenting those divisions, but most of all from the mysterious affliction that no healer had been able to treat successfully. Tipper's Delirious Boils, one had said, but he wasn't getting daydreams anymore. Another had suggested spattergroit, but that didn't explain the aches or coughing.

It was only getting worse, though, and if his condition didn't reverse then new elections would be necessary. If there were just one last thing that Leach could do for Britain, it would be to ensure that the process didn't tear his country apart.

"Private room for two," he said, and he was led quickly enough to a room at the back of the Three Broomsticks.

"And your companion will be…?" asked the young woman who brought him there.

"Looking for whichever room I'm in," Leach said. It wouldn't do to give a name when he wasn't sure whether the other man would be coming under an assumed identity. "Send in a bottle of firewhiskey, if you don't mind, and that'll do."

The firewhiskey arrived when Leach's opposite number did. Leach recoiled under the weight of the other man's gaze but managed to disguise it with a cough that soon enough became genuine. "So," he said, gathering himself together. "Mr. Riddle. I'm pleased you could make it."

Riddle drew the chair out with a flick of his wand and took his seat smoothly, almost flowing into it, as though he were dark water. His robes were plain and black, humble garb that was befitting of a man who could declare his descent from Slytherin and then, in the same breath, renounce it. "I would have cleared out my entire schedule for a meeting with you," he said, and he tugged lightly at the lion-headed torc around his neck. It was perhaps the one show of extravagance which Riddle allowed himself, a reminder of his childhood House. "Please, call me Tom. I don't hold for titles, you know. Tom and Nobby should do, shouldn't it? We aren't friends, but I'd like for us to be. I get along so well with my friends, we're birds of a feather," Riddle said with a smile.

His teeth were white, which was alright, but his face was sickly pale and his eyes were so red that they seemed to glow. He had sunk into the Dark Arts, everyone knew, but what was worse was that he had made no secret of it and yet gained so many supporters regardless. Some had overlooked it, but Leach had noticed that a few had already begun to move from making excuses to offering justifications. Perhaps even more than Tom Riddle himself, what Leach feared was how the man was shifting the boundaries of the quidditch field.

"Nevertheless," Leach replied, "we aren't friends yet, and first names have to be earned."

"Very well. I can respect that," Riddle said, though Leach still noticed a flicker of annoyance on the man's face. "If we aren't friends, however, we ought to get down to business. I suspect that you didn't ask me to come here in order to offer your endorsement in the election. What is your aim?"

"What is your aim, Riddle?" countered Leach. "Your people have to know that you can't possible achieve half of your goals. Confiscating the estates of the pureblooded families, just for starters…"

Riddle cut him off with a chuckle. "If you brought me here to talk about Death Eater demands, then we won't get anywhere. You're speaking with a moderate, Leach, the sort of friendly face that you'll need to keep the Death Eaters from nipping at your heels. I have nothing to do with that organization, as I have said on numerous occasions in the past."

"Yes, yes, I'm aware of your denials, just as I'm aware that you are nevertheless associated with several people known or suspected to be Death Eaters. I'll remind you of the arrest of one Filius Flitwick, and we can go down the list if you'd like."

"Filius' case is being contested."

"Monroe, then." Leach coughed again, violently, making a sound like an old dog's barking. "It doesn't change the facts," he said upon his recovery. "If we're just doing business, then let's not waste each other's time."

"Fair enough." Riddle shrugged. "I will admit that I may have some...connections. When a people cannot secure their freedoms through peaceful methods, they will eventually attempt to seize it by force. But we both fear, do we not, that violence shall only beget violence, so let us work together to forge a compromise."

Leach poured himself a tumbler of firewhiskey, mostly just to give himself a moment before he had to respond. "I can sympathize greatly with the position which you claim, Riddle. I was the first muggleborn in the history of Britain to be elected to this office. I am well-versed in the difficulties that muggleborns like myself, and even other magical Beings, are facing, but what you are asking for is simply untenable. Now, I can understand how a man in his forties might still have some of the hot-blooded temper and intemperance of youth, but were you older you would be able to see the situation more clearly. You must give these things time."

"Time," spat Riddle, almost growling. "With all due respect, the goblins have been waiting for centuries. You have to give me something tangible, so that when I return I can convince them that progress is being made, or else the Death Eaters will be the least of your concerns."

The firewhiskey burned on Leach's tongue and all the way down his throat. "I do not appreciate being threatened."

"Goblins, hags, werewolves," Riddle said. "They do not appreciate the state of their oppression. I will admit to having some amount of influence over them, but you cannot tell a people to wait when they have been denied every decency under the sun. You may have been elected Minister for Magic, but how much power did you have as a member of the Wizengamot, against the hereditary seats that so outnumbered you?"

"If you recognize that the Wizengamot is dominated by the old families, how do you expect them to vote against their own interests?"

"Out of care for their fellow Beings, I would hope," Riddle said, and then he seemed to hiss what followed. "Otherwise, out of self-preservation."

"And we're back to the veiled, and less than veiled, threats. You can't expect me to be patient when your every other sentence is an insinuation about how the Death Eaters would like nothing more than to mount Abraxas Malfoy's head on a spike and leave it to rot in Diagon Alley." Not, of course, that Leach would have been too heartbroken to wake up to that event. Between the open use of the Dark Arts by those who would label it the tool of muggleborn liberation, and aristocratic bigots who were willing to keep their own practices behind closed doors, Leach had no choice except to ally himself with the latter, but he was hardly pleased with it.

"I don't recall that one. Did I miss an edition of the Daily Prophet?" Riddle asked, sounding amused. "Regardless, you seem to still be laboring under the misapprehension that I am directing any of this."

"Give me a little credit, Riddle," he said. Another coughing fit came over him, and his body shook with the force of it. "I know what you're up to, using the threat of the Death Eaters to present yourself as the voice of reason. I can even understand it, but I fear that you've misunderstood your opposition. People like Malfoy and Longbottom don't see you as a moderating force but as a harbinger. They think that if they give you an inch then the Death Eaters will take a mile."

"And here I would have thought they would appreciate my little gesture of suggesting that muggles be reclassified as merely honorary Beings," Riddle said with a smirk. "I will not apologize for our demands. All magical Beings will be treated as full equals under the law, one way or another. It is only a matter of time. That and, ah, strength of will."

"What you have been asking for is simply untenable, Riddle, and holding such a platform will only exacerbate the situation. You cannot realistically expect the ancient houses to give up any of their seats, or to agree to inflate the number of elected seats to outweigh their own."

"Those who do not clear the path for history will be ridden over by it," Riddle said, and then Leach saw the real misapprehension which he had been laboring under this entire time, that Riddle was using the threat of violence to support his politics.

No, it was worse than that, Leach realized. "I do not suppose that we have anything further to say to each other," he said, voice low, and he stood. "I bid you goodbye, and hope that we shall one day meet under better circumstances."

It was only once he was at the door, his fingers on the handle, that Riddle replied. "I rather doubt that we will meet at all. The healers don't know what it is, do they?"

Leach didn't give him the satisfaction of a reply. Let that be their final exchange, he thought: an expression of goodwill and an admission of malevolence. For that is what it was, even if he would never be able to prove that Riddle or one of his cronies had been behind this ailment. His death had been the goal all along.

It had started with Riddle's demagoguery, but then there would be the election. Leach doubted that the man would win, but that wasn't the prize that he had really been aiming for. It might even be preferable for Eugenia Jenkins to win. That would stoke the fire further.

The fire of revolution.

It had never been Riddle's object at all to win in the political sphere, Leach now understood. Whatever his reasons, all his machinations had been to thrust Britain into a state of war, and the political maneuvering had just been to build a support base. That was why his demands were always balanced on the razor's edge between what would attract the disaffected but be impossible to his opposition, and why his every victory was followed by an extension of the platform. Build a party, start a war...and then what? Sit in a red and golden throne amid the ashes?

No. That didn't seem like Riddle's style, all told. Leach thought he had an idea of what Riddle had in mind, though. In the wake of his victory it would be simple to call for reforms that were more extreme than anything that Riddle had thus far dared to voice except through his Death Eaters. Those whom he had failed to persuade under better circumstances might nonetheless accept the same laws under the title of "emergency measures," and in the name of keeping a hardfought peace, in the memory of the fallen and for the sake of their children.

He had to speak with Dumbledore. There might not be much time left to prepare.