Ties of Blood

Tom Riddle was a very ambitious boy. He also was one of those few people, who, if they held a grudge, were actually able to do something about it. And he was also among the people, those that are fewer still in number, who, when they avenge whatever wrong was done to them, never regret the final manifestation of the vengeance.

So terrorising two kids, who told him that his they would complain about him to a brutal older boy about his bullying, was easy. He remorselessly put aside his nature for a few months biding his time and then feeling the power to lock them into a cave he knew had the same sort of power he did. Using the mysterious death of another competitor's pet rabbit – a rabbit that that very night had been smuggled into the room of the competitor (which was locked from inside) from the hutches – to cement his place as the undisputed king of the little kingdom that was Wool's Orphanage did not make Tom feel anything but empowered.

It did get the children to pay him a tithe of sorts. And when he demanded objects from them, they chose to yield, under the unspoken threat of death. It was with a sigh of relief that they bade him goodbye when he went to Hogwarts, though they still had to bear him for at least two months each year.

On his part, he truly did not want to be parted from his power, for that was what going to the muggle world did to him. It put him in the most horrible position of being powerless, and having to retrain the little monkeys that he had trained during his previous years there. He had decided though, that, he would never let himself be put into a position where he had to beg ever again. So he started observing what people dearly wanted around him.

People wanted to live.

People wanted money.

People wanted power.

People desired other people carnally.

People wanted to protect the lives of their loved ones, if they loved someone more than they loved themselves.

So Tom decided to never be in a place where he had to beg for life or money. He would be power. And he never truly had any loved ones, so the last one never applied. His Slytherin ancestry, and the resulting gift of Parsel, ensured that he achieved a powerful status. And with the banner of hating muggles and mudbloods, he got, through what the stupid idiots thought was 'charisma', the pureblood families to pledge their fortunes. He charmed many women through a carefully projected facade of love, and cheated them out of their lives. He took care to never sire a bastard, but by his count, he had taken care of all...mistakes.

But for the first need – that of everlasting life he had to find a kind of magic that had been untouched by all who knew of it since Herpo the Foul. He split his soul. And then, knowing that a single one would have and be no insurance, he created more. As his soul split apart, so did his mind. His appearance remained the same but the part that made him Tom Riddle, truly, waned.

Thomas Marvolo Riddle was a clever megalomaniac, a man of many gifts and many more means. He had, however, one fatal flaw. He was hasty. And in his haste, he never learnt to read the fine print. And he had too much confidence in his infallibility.

Amidst all this, Tom was still able to have friends. Trusted friends, who would do anything for him at but a word. He had always had them. And it was not just his charisma that won him them. They knew that he would do so too. And yet few knew that about him. Voldemort used it to his advantage.

Halloween 1981

As the spirit of Tom Riddle floated away, having been defeated by the sacrifice of a mother, he put all his mental acuity towards one objective – finding out the reason for his failure. He had done his preparations well. He had done the rituals for the Horcruxes before. He had done everything correctly. Yet he had been disembodied. Why? How?

He floated around the British Isles for a while, collecting information from people possessed to approach Necromancers, before killing both the possessed and the informers. Yet he found nothing new. He found nothing that'd tell him why it had all gone wrong.

At last, weakened and drained of his magic, he had to beat a hasty retreat into the forests of Albania where he had last known peace of a different kind – a peace that, then, in the company of a lost English girl, probably memory charmed, he never found again, and one that had scared him.

There he remained for ten years.

June 1992

And there, he had failed once again to kill the Potter brat. Why was he failing? Why? Where was he going wrong?

It had to be some sort of blood protection, he decided, since that was one of the avenues he had not explored. That was the sort of out of the way thing that the mudblood would have thought of. He quashed any thought of her. It made him feel different whenever he thought of her, somehow, in spite of her being the only woman who ever stood up to him and lived and nearly killed him. Blood magic was what he was thinking of, and that was what he would pursue.

She represented a place he never thought he would visit even in the darkest recesses of his mind.

Tom possessed people and tried everything to find out why he had failed. He didn't find the answer, for he was looking in the wrong treatises. He did find a way to get around it, though. It was actually just a resurrection ritual that needed the blood and body of a young powerful magical person. Well, he would steal both the blood protection and the life of the Potter boy.

All the same, the idea that there was something truly momentous that happened that night never left Tom. He was determined to get to the root of the matter.

24th June 1995

"Blood of the enemy, forcibly taken, you will revive your foe," chanted Peter Pettigrew, as he stole Harry's blood for the ritual.

Harry was shaking in terror as he saw the bastard complete the ritual. This was it. This was the end. He was supposed to go up against the resurrected Dark Lord whom his mother had defeated. There was no chance, none at all. That moment of terror was soon replaced by a surge of love for his parents – the people who truly loved him. He would go back to them. He would miss his friends and Sirius and Remus, but he had his true family waiting on the other side.

So he stopped panicking and stopped his struggles as he resigned himself – not sadly at all – to what was sure to come.

And then, the potion flashed, and a silhouette of a tall man started rising from it. Voldemort was back.

But Harry, Peter and Voldemort were all surprised to see that it was not the scaly creature attached to Quirrel's head that rose out of the cauldron – not completely anyway.

Half of Voldemort was, well, Voldemort. The other half of him, though, was human. It was very human.

"What is this?" asked the creature of everyone. "What has happened? Wormtail," it furiously shouted. "You botched the ritual. Whose blood is it?"

"It is Harry Potter, milord," Wormtail snivelled around his sobs for his cut-off hand. "You can kill him now..."

Whatever it was that Wormtail was about to suggest never got through his mouth. At the word 'kill', both parts of Voldemort had surged forward to grip the rat by his throat, nearly strangling him. "What did you say?" Riddle coldly hissed. "Did you by any chance suggest that I should kill Harry?" The way it was said made it obvious that the required answer was 'no'.

Harry would never admit it, but for the first time, he found himself agreeing with Wormtail – Voldemort had gone insane. More than he was before.

The next moment he dropped Wormtail. "What is happening to me?"

This question was more sibilant than the previous anger. It told Harry, in his heightened state of perception as death closed upon him, that, somehow, Voldemort had become two people.

Thoroughly confused, he abandoned the speech he had reserved for the boy, and set about calling his Death Eaters. He tortured them, more to hide the confusion than anything else. All he recognised was that Voldemort, who had Horcruxes, was now sharing consciousness with Tom Riddle who didn't, but had planned to do so.

"And finally, now that I have taken your blood, Harry Potter, I can touch you without fear of retribution," he declared. The sooner he got rid of the boy, the sooner he would learn what was happening.

He approached the bound boy, and a part of him rebelled at the very idea of the boy being in distress. Voldemort could not understand that. He pushed the thoughts away as he surged ahead. The man raised a bony white finger to touch Harry's scar and did do it dramatically.

Then he stopped as he heard Harry's screams. The different part of him couldn't bear it. This time both hands were raised – Harry was sure that this action was meant to strangle him. Instead, Voldemort caressed Harry's head and made weird shushing and soothing sounds. One hand wiped his brow, over the scar, and then, all of a sudden, Harry felt a tremendous lightness, as something was drawn out and merged with Voldemort, making him more human than he was just after the ritual.

"What magic is this? How could you be the one who saved my soul, or at least a piece of it? How?" he demanded.

Irritated by being stonewalled everywhere, he tore through the boy's mind to know more.

"You destroyed it!" Voldemort shrieked. And then he calmed down like a flipped switch. "I am proud of you. You are strong. Stay strong Harry." Then the switch flipped again. "What am I saying? What is happening? Who are you?"

"Who are you?" Harry finally retorted. "Why are you like Voldemort and yet aren't him, not truly?"

"Milord?" ventured Lucius Malfoy, trying to make sense of this strange reunion, and was struck by the green light of death for his trouble. Voldemort wasn't sure whether he had killed Malfoy for losing his treasure, or for hurting Harry. Why would that matter?

Tom moved away in a daze. He felt for his magic. It was strong – stronger than he had truly ever felt, and yet he, Lord Voldemort, felt weakened in a way. So that wasn't the problem, yet there was a problem.

"LEAVE!" he ordered. "If word spreads of my resurrection, I shall know, and I shall destroy every last one of you. You are mine. Your marks shall never set you free," he warned as he simply cauterised Wormtail's wrist and conjured a common iron prosthetic in its place. "Not even if you cut your hands." Once they were gone, he ordered his aide, "Fetch my treatises."

Peter, who had been thanking his master till then, cast Harry a malevolent grin and scampered away. Tom seemed to have seen that, for he sent the Cruciatus at Peter, deciding that it was only to hurry the man up.

Voldemort/Tom paced some more, and in the truly bewildered state where he couldn't decide whether or not to be afraid, Harry thought that he looked more like the dancers that donned two different sets of clothes and make-up to make themselves seem to be two different people. All the same, the boy was still tied up. Finally, Wormtail returned with the 'treatises'. Determined as Voldemort was to kill Potter, he sat down on a conjured chair and table next to him. The human part of him, though, smiled at Harry. More than scaring him, it actually freaked Harry out.

This continued for quite some time, till finally, boredom overrode Harry's fear and he started peaking into the books.

"Finding something interesting, are we?"

"You have kept me tied. You are not killing me. You are not releasing me. I am bored. You need to rework your methods if this is how you terrify people."

Voldemort sneered, but "Human" as Harry called him, considering that he had met Tom Riddle and he was not even polite, forget considerate, nodded and actually apologised for the thoughtlessness. "Your hands must be hurting," he said as he cast a healing spell, which Harry was sure was the Killing Curse, at the wrists. "I am sorry that I had not thought beyond this point, the resurrection that is. Perhaps you could read the book with me."

He conjured another chair for Harry to sit.

"Well, what the hell. I am pretty fucked up anyway," Harry mused, only for Human to reprimand him for his language and be shocked at that.

Deciding to keep that matter aside, they sat and read.

Finally, Harry did find out the problem.

"Um...did you read the warning?"

"What warning?" snapped Voldemort, his red eye flashing at the boy.

"Well, this one," Harry replied, pointing at the page. "This asterisk leads to a warning."

"So it does," Human mused. He cast a magnifying spell on the words. It shocked them both.

It read:

"The sacrifice used in the Horcrux ritual should NEVER, EVER be a blood relative. Not only does that have the definite risk of death, it may also split the caster into distinct personalities. This has been known to de-soul the caster, and sometimes, the sacrifice becomes a Horcrux as well, and, in more than six of the nine recorded instances, the caster has been disembodied. Also, if a blood sacrifice of protection occurs, then the protector's mindset is imprinted upon at least one of the personalities. There have been unsubstantiated rumours of the protective sacrifice being related to both the ritual sacrifice and the Horcrux maker. At such times, using the Sirlparl's ritual to revivify the Horcrux maker may lead to unforeseen circumstances, according to theorists, including physical manifestations of the split personality.*"

"This means..." mumbled a shocked Harry. "This means...you are related, by blood, to both me and mum?"

"It would seem so..." Voldemort slowly agreed, quite disturbed by this new information. At least one of his bastards had lived. It meant the mudblood was no mudblood after all, but his own progeny!

Even as that thought flashed through his mind, he could feel death. He could feel himself diminishing, even as the human part of him grew. His last thought was that this was some truly unknown terrifying power.

Harry screamed in shock as the body of the man sitting beside him actually bubbled. It continued for a few minutes, before it stopped. What remained was Human only.

"What...?"

The Human panted heavily as he retched and heaved. It was a further few minutes before he felt up to resuming his position. When he did, his eyes went back to the warning. Only then did he see the nested warning as denoted by the "*+". He read that too before laughing, a seemingly light, happy laugh.

"See this, Harry. We missed another of the warnings."

"DO NOT ACKNOWLEDGE THE RELATIONSHIP BY BLOOD. YOU SHALL LOSE YOUR AMBITIONS AND YOUR NEW SELF!"

"What the bloody hell...?"

Human only paused for a moment to chastise Harry about his language as he kept laughing, before a truly stricken look came upon his face.

"Lily..." he muttered. "Lily...she was beautiful. Such an adorable little one she was. Then I killed her mother...or he did. Or we did. I am not sure anymore... We had to give her away. He...we were killing our own...had to keep her safe..."

Human was inarticulate. What Harry could gather was as much as he could from Mr. Crouch Senior. And that wasn't much.

"What do you mean?"

"Don't you understand, my boy? Lily, she was my daughter. I...he...killed her... We killed her..."

"No." Harry kept repeating the word in shocked denial.

"It is true, Harry. I am your grandfather!"

A/N: Before I get angry reviews: Harry Potter and the basic idea also are not mine. The execution and the words are. I recently read a story (I won't name it) where Voldemort is Harry's real grandfather. It had an Evil-Dumbledore-Good-Voldemort theme. Dumbledore knows and hides the relation because Tom Riddle is the only true challenger to his rule over the magical world, and Harry is Voldemort's true heir. D manipulates everyone in very strangely specific ways. (I detest Dumbledore bashing because, honestly, if people fall for it, they deserve it. Obedience is a choice and they choose to obey.) This is not a response; it just happened.