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"How many of us would be granted pardon if our true hearts were known?"
― Madeline Miller, Circe
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Tom Riddle screamed for seven months and seven days and then he stopped. The healers told him later. They sat for hours and ran through the treatments they'd tried, explained how they'd had to silence him with spells and potions, tried to magically relax his vocal cords to stop him ripping through them, and even tried to induce a coma. Nothing had held for long, they told him. He'd screamed and he'd cried and he'd begged and they'd had no answer for it.
He couldn't speak when he woke up. But he remembered. Agony, the likes of which he'd never comprehended; agony that surely surpassed anything he'd inflicted on anyone. And he remembered a kaleidoscope of pain given and received, of losing more of his mind with every severed piece of his soul. He remembered what he'd become, as though remembering a nightmare that had gripped his mind on repeat. He remembered, and he was ashamed.
But, Tom had other memories too, vague ones that he was sure had never belonged to him: memories of love, and loss, and laughter.
He slipped into a restful sleep.
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When Tom Riddle woke up the second time, Harry Potter and Hermione Granger Dearborn were in the room. They weren't fighting but the air was thick with the sour aftermath of a battle. He knew, with some unearthly awareness, what the latter had done. She'd dragged him out of that eternal agony, forced the flayed pieces of his soul together and given them something they'd never had in life until they were aware enough to feel it. Remorse, he thought. Remorse so terrible he'd thought he'd drown in it, thought he'd rather die than resurface.
But before she'd pulled him from the dark, he remembered, she had helped to destroy the pieces.
"You," he croaked, "are a far better liar than I ever gave you credit for."
"I told you," Hermione said, leaning forwards, "that you'd burn the world to ash."
"I suppose you've brought me back just to say that, have you?"
She laughed, and it was the most beautiful sound he'd ever heard; a laugh that could have stopped his heart all over again.
"Potter," he said, "I'm surprised to see you holding vigil at my sickbed."
The green-eyed boy he remembered had become a man in the interim, and those fierce eyes set blazing with fury at his words. He got up and turned his back on the bed, pacing next to the window.
"He's here in an official capacity," Hermione said. "I'm not allowed to visit you unsupervised."
Tom wanted to tell the boy I'm sorry, but the inadequacy of the words stuck in his throat.
"If you want to kill me," he said instead, "I quite understand. I can really die now, you know. Pass on forever, all that stuff."
Harry Potter whirled around in surprise and stared at him. Tom held his gaze as Hermione murmured something about water and vanished from the room. There was far more to say to her, but there would be time for that. He coughed and sat up. His throat was on fire.
"Is that supposed to be an apology?" the other man asked in disbelief. "You killed my parents, and you tried to kill me over and over again and you're trying to apologise? There is nothing you could say, Voldemort. I'm going to see you locked away forever if I can."
The if I can rang rather hollow from the young hero, and Tom thought that was interesting. But it was not the time to press.
"True. Nonetheless, I am. I won't ask your forgiveness but I thought you ought to know anyway." He paused, trying to find the words, to force them from his battered chords. "I remember being all the split parts of his soul. I remember being you. Or in you. But… it's like a warning. Or a nightmare. The path not to be taken."
"How pleasant for you."
The room lapsed into silence. It was highly warded, no doubt of that, and he suspected the window's lovely view of Wizarding London was magical. Still, it wasn't Azkaban. Hermione wasn't there either, though she probably ought to be. That meant they weren't sure, or couldn't prove, that she had brought him back deliberately.
"She didn't mean to do it, you know," he said eventually. She must have, of course, but that would be their secret. He'd wasted enough time. "It was the castle."
"Hogwarts?"
He nodded, voice failing him. He swallowed hard, and tried again.
"You destroyed too much of me… on the grounds. Especially in the Chamber. Ancient spell you see. Founders' protection."
Harry Potter stared at him, then sat down.
"Why doesn't my scar hurt?"
Tom shrugged.
"I'm not the same as him. I'm… before. The potential, made flesh, maybe. Although there's no piece of you that's not your own now, Harry Potter. Dumbledore made sure of that. We are both... whole."
Potter just nodded and Tom looked at him, curiously. He was filled up with rage, Tom thought, but he seemed exhausted too. He wondered who Harry Potter would have become without him. Heroes needed monsters, after all.
He slipped back into sleep.
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The next time Tom Riddle woke up it was dark in his room, but he was not alone. A handsome, dark-skinned man he vaguely thought was Auror sat in the corner. He searched for the name, and couldn't reach it.
"Awake are you, Riddle?" the man's deep, low voice slid through the dark like treacle. The lights brightened. Tom imagined that, on a different day, that resonance could be a tolling bell, a call to arms, a seductive whisper. It was a voice politicians would pay anything for. A voice to trust.
"I suppose I am," he replied, reaching for his water. He'd hoped to find Hermione there, and yet perhaps he wasn't ready to confront her yet. She'd helped destroy him, twice over, he remembered. She'd been right to do it, he could see that now, but the deception made him bitter and admiring together. And then she'd brought him back. What a woman. What a brilliant, dissembling woman.
Shacklebolt, he remembered suddenly. He'd been one of the most sought-after members of the Order. That's who was in the room.
"He had a five-thousand galleon price on your head didn't he?" Tom mused. "I'm glad you evaded it."
This had clearly not been what the other man was expecting him to say and Tom peered up at him. He wondered if they Healers had given him a potion: he felt rather loopy. Perhaps it was Veritaserum. A woman came into the room and sat in the corner. She had the look of someone who'd been summoned and did not like it.
"Are you Lord Voldemort?"
"I could have been but I am not."
"Did Hermione Granger bring you back from the dead?"
"No," he said. It was Veritaserum: the urge to spill out truths was horrifying. He grasped for control and couldn't find it. But he had not been dead: he had been destroyed.
"Fascinating," the woman at the back commented. She was rather grand.
"I don't know you," he said, still compelled to over-frankness.
"Do you even know yourself?" she countered with a wicked smile. "I am Madam Scaevola, Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot."
Shacklebolt flashed her an irritated look.
"I am Tom Riddle's path not taken," he said, exerting all his control over the potion. He couldn't lie, but he could choose his truths. "I remember him. I remember Lord Voldemort."
"Are you dangerous?" she asked, sounding more curious than scared.
"Only to those that would threaten me."
"Are you sorry?"
"Desperately."
"Put him back under," she told Kingsley. "He's got control of his own tongue and I don't trust selected truths."
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As the weeks had passed, Tom's interest in life returned. He burned to get outside the hospital's psychiatric ward. He wanted a wand in his hand and the sun on his skin and to look Hermione Granger Dearborn in the face and tell her that he'd learned a new secret he'd never known was possible before.
The interrogations went on and grew increasingly intrusive. Then, after a while, his captors' verve for the subject began to wane. He was moved to a new room, and began his physical rehabilitation. Experts from across the world came to examine his mind. He was not given legal assistance because, they said, he was ill, not a prisoner. But Hermione stayed away and his door remained guarded.
Harry Potter came, though, and as suspicion faded from the others it never left The Boy Who Lived and Lived Again.
"Hermione hasn't been here," he commented one day. Tom thought it was an attempt to be cruel hiding a genuine question.
"Oh, she won't come until they've decided what to do about me," he told Harry. "I expect she thinks I deserve everything I get if I can't get out of this place."
Tom enjoyed the way the other man was undone by candour. Harry expected lies from him and would have recognised an outright one, but he was not cunning enough to understand that truth could be wielded as a weapon just as effectively.
"Do you know what the Healers call you?" Harry Potter asked him. He wasn't usually this chatty, but perhaps the monotony was affecting him too. So few people were in on the secret, he supposed, that his guards were always the same. A rotation of three Aurors, plus Potter and Shacklebolt.
"No," Tom replied. "What do they call me, Harry Potter?"
"The Eldritch. They don't know your name, for security reasons, but they can tell there's something uncanny about you."
Tom's lips quirked up. He liked that.
"Eldritch. Perhaps I'll keep it. Am I allowed to read a newspaper yet?"
"Nope," Potter said with something that looked suspiciously like a smile. Tom wondered if the Ministry had made a mistake leaving Potter to guard him: he'd been the most ferocious interrogator, the most righteously sure that Tom ought to be locked up for the rest of his unfairly-doubled life. But familiarity had bred an insidious sort of acceptance. It was hard to see someone as a monster when their young face stared up at you from a hospital bed day after day after day. Hard to have seen someone scream and sob and not unbend, just a little.
"Is the Ministry hoping I'll kill myself out of boredom and save them all this trouble?"
Harry Potter looked like a man trying very hard not to be amused.
To entertain himself, Tom had been planning out the ageing potion he'd brew to make the face in the mirror an adult. His brief glimpse of Hermione had showed her to be as ageless as she'd been back in 1967 when he'd given her that vial of blood. How glad he was now that he'd done so. He had forgotten it when his body had been destroyed by his own rebounded curse. The tether had worked, though. She must have used it to bring him back. But what else had she done?
It shouldn't have been possible. Not after all the Horcruxes were destroyed. This problem, too, had occupied his mind. What was it she'd said? Then perhaps I'll use it for a potion. Had she planned this, even then?
The other Auror knocked on the door and passed a mug of terrible-looking tea and a box of chocolate frogs into the room.
"Alright?" she asked Potter.
"Yes, thanks -" He stopped himself saying her name. Tom wasn't allowed to interact with the door guards. He supposed it was a compliment to his past persuasiveness.
Harry Potter, the Boy Who Lived to Guard Him, opened a chocolate frog absentmindedly.
"Nicholas Flamel," he said. "Don't forget to feel guilty about him."
"He'd had nine hundred years, Potter," Tom replied without thinking. "I'm sure -"
He stopped. Hermione had had a Philosopher's Stone, hadn't she? He'd removed the knowledge from himself, made himself forget her, when he went to war. But the memories were back now and Hermione Dearborn had had a Philosopher's Stone.
Had she given up eternity, for him? It was a delicious, terrifying idea.
"Sure?" Potter prompted.
"Never mind," he said, lying back down on his hospital bed. "I wish they'd give me something to read. I'd like to catch up on some current affairs at least."
"There are some leftover magazines down the corridor," Harry offered and Tom rolled over, eyeing him suspiciously. "I'll get you some when my replacement comes."
Later, Tom was left staring at a stack of Witch Weeklys with no other choice to alleviate his boredom. One of the older Aurors was watching him, and he had proven even harder to charm than Potter thus far. Another new one would be standing outside of course. He'd thought about escaping, of course. It wouldn't be hard: they grew slacker as every week without trouble passed.
But Hermione had brought him back publicly. Hermione, he gathered, wanted him exonerated or not at all. So he waited. And waiting meant either reading Witch Weekly or sleeping again.
He slept.
A few days later, the boredom became too much. Even Witch Weekly had to be better than sitting mulling over every awful thing he had done for another day. He picked up the pile.
They were rather battered in the way of all waiting room magazines and very out of date, and he shuffled through them miserably. One was more promising than the rest. The cover was spellbindingly beautiful to someone who'd seen little else but the inside of his hospital-cum-cell room for a very long time. The photograph had been taken from behind, showing a woman sat at beautiful, leather-topped desk. She wasn't looking at the book open on her desk, but staring out through a huge, open arch, across a terrace and out to sea.
It was Hermione. He knew before the photograph turned and smiled. It was her polite smile, practiced and slightly aloof. Uncomfortable with the attention. He knew it well.
THE MAGIC AND MYSTERIES OF IDUNNA, EXCLUSIVELY REVEALED FOR THE FIRST TIME
He turned over and found the right page. Once again, the photographs caught him first. Without even needing to read, they promised something even he had never imagined, and he was awed by her extraordinary mind.
It was an island, he learned as he poured over the magazine, of magic. A magic-made land, he guessed, ('Archchancellor Granger Dearborn remains coy about the origins of this extraordinary place, but there's no doubting her love for it.') and a riotous celebration of all it could offer.
An island with a university. Tom Riddle had never dreamt of such a thing, never thought there was anything more than a few publications and a lot of persuasion and threats to get people's secrets. Hermione had turned that over, pulled apart the fear and pulled people together, and made herself a society that was far more than he had thought the world could be, even before he'd only been able to dream of destruction.
I'll rebuild the world in my image, she'd told him, and they'll love me for it.
Isle of apples, the article said, and he saw again those two shining golden apples. How long had she dreamt of this? How grateful he was that she had ripped him out of the hell of his own making to see it. What a fool he had been, to cast her off and follow his path to madness, horror, and ruination.
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Finally, finally, finally he got to see something outside of the hospital. He was taken, at night and in disguise and great secrecy, to the bowels of the Ministry of Magic. A panel of seven members of the Wizengamot had been assembled.
It was, his rather bemused looking legal council explained, merely a hearing. The young man had clearly had little time to prepare and was horrified at the task he had been given.
It did not feel like a mere hearing when the potential charge sheet was read. The names of Lord Voldemort's victims, the dead and the tortured. Breaking the statute of secrecy. War crimes. An illegal coup.
Genocide.
He faced aggravated life sentences.
But, before the Ministry could decide whether to bring a trial or not, it had to prove he was of age, when every magical test indicated the unknown entity was a boy of fifteen or sixteen.
Every night for three nights he was ferried to and from St Mungo's, and Tom once again marveled at the inadequacy of the law. Everyone in the room knew he shared Lord Voldemort's name and face and yet it seemed they had nothing to touch him with. He was too young.
And then, the letter came. They didn't read it aloud but the effect was devastating. A new entry in the Hogwarts' record of magical births. A second Tom Riddle, born on October 31st a year before.
A second entry. A second chance.
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And then, at last, she came. Deciding what to do with Tom Riddle had taken three months, on top of the seven he had spent insensible with pain.
Ten years of exile, Minister Shacklebolt said, and a new name. A vow never to publicly reveal who he was. The Ministry had chosen its reputation over justice, but he would think about that later. He was going to be free, and Hermione was there.
"Archchancellor Granger-Dearborn has offered to let you stay on her island," Shacklebolt told him. "We have agreed under certain conditions."
They were in the Minister's office. Tom was sitting with his back to the door, but he could feel Harry Potter's blazing fury channeled into his back from where the man was standing. He had been pacing, but that seemed to have stopped now. Tom wondered if Potter had looked through the magazines he'd given him. He doubted it. Maybe it had been meant as a taunt, hoping he'd never be free. But he was free and he was going to see the island himself.
"You have to apply to visit Britain, and you won't be allowed a wand if you do come," Hermione said. "And any property your alternative self owned is forfeit to the Ministry."
Tom nodded. He could hardly bring himself to look at her, fearing he'd reveal the wild triumph, the desolation. He had never felt less in control of his own emotions.
"I accept all the conditions," he said. He knew fighting them would be hopeless even if he did care. What use had he for magical Britain now?
He signed his new name, Thomas Eldritch, no middle name, over and over and then Hermione handed him a silver scroll and holding it together they world lurched away from them and they were tearing, sickeningly fast, and stumbling into the light.
It was a terrible day, wind lashing around them, and sending the sea madly throwing itself against the cliffs, but Tom gazed up at the great arch warning of entry to a dangerous land within, uncaring. He revelled in the weather, the biting cold on his skin, the rain on his face.
He turned his face up to the sky and laughed.
"Welcome," Hermione said, "to Iðunna."
The gates swung open, and he followed her in.
This is dedicated to my much adored (and now irl pal) SallyJAvery.
Thank you all for your patience. I've been very busy, but I should have got this up sooner.
