…That Has Such People In It
Asteria
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter or Tom Riddle. Brave New World is by Aldous Huxley (and it's an amazing book. Everyone should read it.)
Author's Note: I don't know where this came from.
*****
I'm not just power-mad, you know.
It's all that Muggle's fault, and for once I'm not talking about that idiot who abandoned my mother just because she was a witch. It was a different Muggle, a writer named Aldous Huxley. He wrote a book called Brave New World.
I read it when I was eleven. I'd asked one of the older boys at the orphanage if I could borrow it because I had no idea how long the train ride would be or if anyone would talk to me. He said I could keep the book, he didn't like it anyway.
The first time I read it, I didn't understand all of it, but what I did understand scared the hell out of me. I read it again and again and it scared me more each time.
By the beginning of my fourth year, I'd read Brave New World about thirty times, and I was determined to keep the events in the book from happening. I was terrified that the war that had been going on for two years would turn out to be the Nine Years' War and that I would be the only one to see all the changes taking place. You see, at Hogwarts I was experiencing a kind of freedom that I hadn't known before and I did not want to see it taken away by any stupid, technology-obsessed Muggles.
That's why I decided to take over the world.
*****
Author's Closing Notes: Sometimes I don't know where I get these ideas. I see Tom Riddle as something of a sci-fi geek, and I also think he would not be good at Quidditch. He's already so perfect: handsome, smart, powerful, popular, a Prefect and then Head Boy; he needs some faults and guilty pleasures and secret paranoias, just like the rest of us. I think it keeps him human.