Eyes. Nothing but eyes and open months and pointing fingers. That was what Dumbledore has reduced him to. A circus side show, the village freak. Attend, attend, this be the once fearsome Dark Lord, now a Muggle! Two Sickles to see!
Actually, they did not have to pay a single bronze Knut. At sunrise, the curtain opened on its own, baring him to the early morning Alley shoppers and employees. They had not exorcised their fury before; they brought fruit and spells to throw at him, but the wards pushed off all but the dust of the residue. Occasionally a nut would make it through and well-executed expectoration, but that was about it. Unlike before, they brought their children, who traced the letters on the display sign. Tom Marvolo Riddle, a.k.a. Lord Voldemort the Dark Lord (once You-Know-Who and He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named) – vanquished by Harry Potter, Albus Dumbledore, the Ministry of Magic, and the Order of the Phoenix. To add insult to injury, the display sign had an illustration of his former self that was, to say the least, inaccurate.
There was a mirror in his small lavatory that was away from the prying eyes of the visitors. He saw himself as a man for the first time after Dumbledore left him alone in the prison. Even as a man, he was striking, as he had been as a boy. He shared some features with his old form – he was thin, his complexion was pale, his bones and muscles pronounced under his skin, and his facial structure resembled that of his other appearance. But he was most definitely human. There were clothes – wizarding robes – in the wardrobe that fit, and he put them on before sleeping. The opening of the drapes roused him.
When his gazing visitors looked at him, they did not flinch. Some of them compared the illustration to the man in the prison and laughed. He stayed in the lavatory at the beginning. Then he began to feel angry at himself for hiding. He could not control the worm of vulnerability writhing within his ordinary human body. Sometimes he caught himself reaching for his wand only to remember that it was broken and would not work even if he held it whole in his hand now. He took minimal compensation from the eggs in the ice box. He remembered how to cook them, and breaking their fragile shells made him at least simulate the destruction of a living creature. He hoped a cockroach would invade his prison. A rat would be even better.
He could not escape them, though, the eyes. There was something intense behind the glassiness, something that seemed almost like a shielded intelligence that even animals possessed. Those that stared at him were wicked, derisive, malicious, malevolent, vengeful… cowards. All of them. Knowing their cowardice made staring back easier. He frightened a boy by hissing at him – it was a simple serpent lullaby in Parseltongue, but the boy cried as though Voldemort had called down hellfire upon him. The mother, who should never have brought her child to ogle at him like a Muggle before the television, glared at him disapprovingly. Voldemort laughed as the mother led the little boy away.
However, even Voldemort had his limits, and he turned to the lavatory to avoid the eyes, even for a few minutes, but it would not open. He pulled at the knob, twisted it as far as it would go. It was not jammed, it simply would not move. There was nowhere else that the eyes could not reach him. Even his bed was in full view. Although he had hoped to become a public figure, he was an intensely private person. His chest began to constrict as he realized that this was going to be his life. These eyes.
He paced. He foresaw decades of pacing before he was some decrepit Muggle man whose weak body failed all around him, painful, like all Muggle deaths. The wizarding world had enough medicinal potions and charms that preserved healthy life even in the oldest of wizards. Most died peacefully. But Muggles' lives were short and awful, and he could feel his body dying even as he walked back and forth on the lush carpet. He was barefoot – his boots had been taken, and there were none in the wardrobe.
Time was immaterial, slipping through his mind in a tangle knot of spider's web. He could not concentrate the way he used to. There was no library, no study, not even a desk with parchment and quill and ink. He sat at the end of his bed with his knees bent and his arms resting on his thighs. He looked out into Diagon Alley, past the visitors, and into the crowd that was not concerned with him. He was passing entertainment; already, the captivation he once held over the British wizarding community waned, as though he was being forgotten or suppressed in the back of minds that abhorred pain, as though he was simply a shadow of the name that they once could not speak for fear.
The bars distanced him. The emptiness, the hollow that his magic used to inhabit, consumed him. He was nothing but a slowly shattering mind, thanks to the cruelty of Potter and that girl and... Those tears in her eyes, sparkling in his vivid memory like crystals, revealed her guilt. Voldemort latched into the hurt he saw in the memory-Hermione's eyes. Perhaps in her guilt, she would do something rash in his favor. He indulged in the dream for a few moments before casting it away with a self-deprecating laugh. A single day in this domestic prison with those fucking eyes always boring holes in his skin and he became a gothic villain, the kind that women tried to redeem.
He would not be redeemed. He would not give Dumbledore that satisfaction. He could see the celebration now – Dumbledore would be ecstatic, and the bloody fool would cover Hogwarts in crepe and call a feast, and everyone would cheer as Dumbledore brought him forward. They would drink to his "recovery." His ears would be filled with saccharine shit about how he had given them a nasty shock, but finally he had seen the light and his potential in conservative society could finally be reached.
He ended the sugary vision by somehow poisoning the entire assembly. He still had that capability, at least, although if he left Diagon Alley, the apothecary would be unreachable. Voldemort curled his lips into a snarl. He swore that if he saw the insane fool of an old man, the Boy-Who-Lived, or Hermione, if they tried to touch him, he would kill them. There was still power in his hands, and he was not above using brute strength if it was all he had left. It was one of the few advantages of this awful body – it was physically much stronger. His endurance, however, was shot, and he was tired even after pacing and thinking so hard to think of something. In his serpentine form, he could live without sleep for days and never feel the exhaustion to which his Death Eaters yielded.
His second night in prison, he fell asleep with his head against the foot of the bed.
The wizarding world toasted each other to a war well won the day before. The Muggle world felt the residue of magical unrestraint and the news was peppered with oddities initiated by lackadaisical wizards and witches who did not care who saw them. The Muggle world had just as much reason to celebrate, and those who straddled both worlds brought the celebration to their relatives and friends, even if they did not quite understand the threat that Lord Voldemort posed to them that had been destroyed.
In the aftermath of the parties and drunken orgies, formidable witches and wizards that had been preoccupied the day before came back in full force, like the crowd that had tortured him, except instead of sneers, there was laughter and smiles. Groups directed half-intelligent jokes in Voldemort's direction. Tipsy spells flew at the wards, some mild enough that he was hit full-force. One witch spelled him with the Tickling Charm, and Voldemort was brought to tears in laughter until a goblin guard pushed the wand and the witch away from the viewing area. The witch insisted that he just needed to get into the mood of things.
Voldemort encountered his first rehabilitation offer – "Surely now that you no longer have magic and no longer pose a threat to our world you would like to join it in the few ways that you can become a constructive member of society." Voldemort resisted the puerile temptation to throw an egg or an apple at the man. Instead, he ignored him, and the man, after exhausting all his sales pitches, left him to the rest of the wolves in the plaza.
Soon, the wolves found other more interesting and contemporary exhibitions over which to salivate, but then the researchers with the QuickQuotes quills and clipboards and name tags came to replace them, officious little sycophantic students who thought that they could study him properly in a controlled environment. A Dark Lord in his unnatural habitat. Captured in Scotland. Non-venomous and declawed. He could tell the eager chicks from the aged ravens who watched him through the day, their persistent eyes jaded and movements less enthusiastic.
By now, Voldemort had learned to ignore the eyes – he looked at them instead, watched the comings and going in Diagon Alley and Gringotts, trained his ears to hear bits of conversations. It was mindless, thoughtless, and exercised little of his intelligent brain, but it was something to do. And he paced. He was beginning to see a slight trail in the carpet. His bed was never slept in, not since that first night. He felt useless, unchallenged. Before, his ambition extended to immortality, full mastery of magic, and reigning over the entire world. He had purpose.
Now he did not even have the Daily Prophet to read.
In his visual exploration of Diagon Alley, he saw Order members and Aurors that came for supplies or to check on him from a distance. He never saw his archenemies, Dumbledore, Potter, or Hermione. Not once did his sharp eyes catch them – until Hermione was one of the students with a clipboard.
Unlike the usual students whose faces were open, fresh, and all too easy to read without the aid of Legilimency, Hermione surreptitiously looked at him from the furthest corner of his prison, near where the edges of the purple drapes stopped after they opened. She wore sunglasses and a light hooded cloak, but she did not seem out of place or overtly incognito. Simply covered. He noticed her not because of her attire, but because while energy crackled about the other observers, the area around her was serene, unhurried, unconcerned. She shifted when he saw her, but composed herself.
He could see her eyes behind the dark frames, and while he sensed guilt, she did not avoid his gaze, and she took few notes. He suspected that she was not here to observe him so much as watch him.
On the second day she came, he deviated from his usual pacing pattern, opened his trousers – causing no small amount of concern among the observers – and urinated on her face.
She jerked back when the stream hit her cheek, and the rest splattered on her cloak. The goblin guard signaled someone out of sight, and a human guard burst into the prison, the first person who had stepped into his prison since Dumbledore left. Before the guard bound him and bruised his left cheek, Voldemort saw two men and a woman help Hermione to her feet and lead her away, presumably to clean her up and calm her down if she needed to lapse into a hysteria. He felt a twisted sense of satisfaction. Although the bruise ached that night, he slept better knowing that she would never return.
She did not come back the next day, but she did come back the day after. The observers were slowly decreasing in number – deadlines must be met – but she reestablished her post on the one end of his prison. Voldemort and Hermione locked gazes. Hermione was the first to look away, but he knew it was not from defeat. She beckoned to the goblin guard, whispered something in his large ear that even Voldemort could not hear, and handed the goblin a package. The goblin gave her a suspicious glare, but he called to another guard, one of the human guards who Voldemort could not see. The package was passed to him.
Hermione turned back to Voldemort, nodded her head in a slight bow, and left the plaza.
Later that evening, after the curtain had closed and the guard brought dinner into the prison, he gave Voldemort the package. Voldemort unfolded the thin parchment to reveal a book. He sneered and did not thank the guard as he left the prison.
Voldemort sat on his bed and opened to the title page. There, in neat, precise handwriting, was a note from her: I know it isn't much, but the story is entertaining and engaging and it will give you something with which to occupy your time. I noticed that you didn't have a library. I cannot give you anything magical, of course, but I will not give you something myopic, droning, or mindless. This is a good book, and I think you will enjoy it. There was a pause in the writing, and she moved to another line. I do not suppose you will ever forgive me. I do not expect you to. But know that I want to help you as best as I can in your singular situation. I won't patronize you, and I won't treat you like everyone else treats you. I respect you. The note concluded: I really hope you enjoy this book. It's one of my favorite pieces of fiction. Sincerely, Hermione Granger.
Voldemort was shaking with fury by the end of the note, and he nearly pushed the curtains back to throw it from his prison to the flags of the plaza. Instead, he set the book aside on the night table. He would start to read it tomorrow, slowly, to draw the novel through the eternity that he was going to spend in his bloody cage. He would take advantage of the gift that Hermione gave him.
But a book does not a peace offering make. He did not forgive her.
She always came back, every day. She did not inquire about the book, or about the other books she slipped to the human guard now that the goblin guard recognized her. The books were always checked, but they were always given to him on his occasional dinner platter. He read them at his leisure, usually pacing during the day and reading in the evening. He ignored her for the most part. He turned his attention to the last few observers, watching as they tripped over themselves to write notes or dictate to their quills. Hermione never seemed harried or frantic. She just resumed her place by his prison every morning and waited until the curtain closed in the evening.
One day, all the observers were gone. Hermione did not come that morning. Instead, she came that evening through the door with his dinner.
