Disclaimers: None of this is mine. Except the plot… methinks.

Authors Notes: This is a companion to Ashes to Ashes. It consists of various snippets, some short and some long, in Tom's POV (both first and third person) before, during and after events in the original story. No slash in this one, I'm afraid.

Summary: Companion to Ashes to Ashes. Turned back to what he was before he was Voldemort. Before he had lost all trace of his innocence. But just how innocent is Tom Marvolo Riddle? Take a peek inside his head.

Ashes to Ashes:

Inside his head.

1937

A few weeks after I turned ten I had been walking by the river with the rest of the orphanage - the warden would periodically decide that we needed more exercise and take us out for supervised walks. Almost as soon as I stepped out I thought that I could hear whispers. Whispers that were soft and secret and not meant for human ears.

"It has started. It is he."

"The house of the Snake shall rise again."

"He is the one heir."

I didn't understand these whispers, nor could I tell where they were coming from - but something told me that these invisible whispers were about me and that thought both thrilled me and scared me at the same time.

That night I dreamt of a large black snake that was several feet long. As it was a dream - for I knew that it was a dream - I wasn't surprised that I felt no fear when I saw the snake. Something told me that she - I knew that it was a she just as I inexplicably knew that she was extremely old - would not harm me or let me come to harm.

"Who are you?" I asked her. "What do you want of me?"

"It is not what we want of you but what you want of us."

Again I felt no surprise that I could talk to this snake.

"I have been waiting," she said. "Waiting for so long. So very long. I had almost begun to think that it would not come to pass and it were all a lie. But here you are and we are not deceived."

"Waiting?" I asked. "For me?"

She nodded her black head and slithered over to me until she was so close that I could feel her breath. She flickered her forked tongue over my face - some sort of serpentine caress. And again I felt no fear or revulsion that one might expect.

"For you. For you we have been waiting. For over ten hundred years we have been waiting. He promised us that you would come, you see. You have much work to do."

I blinked at her, unable to comprehend a word that she had said. Nothing made sense but then nothing about me ever did make sense.

"What?" I asked. "Who promised you? What work is it that I must do?"

She tapped the tip of her tail to my lips. "Soon," she hissed. "Soon you will know all. Wait for us."

And then I woke.

The first rays of the dawn were filtering in through the small windows. No-one else was awake and I lay there unwilling to move - lest I break the enchantment the dream had seemed to cast over me.

I knew somehow that something extraordinary was going to happen and that there was something very special about me. The snake had told me to wait and wait I would with ever increasing impatience. For what I had been told to wait for I was not sure but I knew that when the time did come my life would never be the same.

Nine months later an owl flew in through the window during breakfast.

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At first they thought that he had staged some sort of elaborate joke and locked him in the cupboard under the stairs. That was where they would send him whenever they thought that he had been 'wicked' to think about what he had done.

When he was very young he was afraid of the cupboard and would cry and plead to be let out. But that was a long time ago and he didn't mind the cupboard any more. In fact he almost preferred it to the taunts and punches of the other boys. He had never fit in with them and he didn't really want to. They were crude, savage creatures of sticks and stones. He was of fire and silk and of the darkness. He was above their childish brawling and rudimentary games and was of an older much superior line than they were. He knew this just as he knew now, that the time that the black snake in his dreams had spoken of had come.

Everything suddenly made sense. His life until now had been nothing but a lie.

He was a wizard. A sorcerer. And he was to go to Hogwarts school of Wizardry and Witchcraft.

He smiled to himself silently. His time had come indeed.