Title: An Awfully Mean Boy
Characters/Pairings: OC, Tom Riddle
Challenge/Forum - QLFC Season 5 Round 9 (Beater 2, Ballycastle Bats)
Prompt: Bludger - Write about a witch or wizard being attacked
Opt-Prompts: (word) defeated, (dialogue) "Should we tell him that it's fake?", (word) slate
Challenge/Forum - HPFC Friends Challenge
Prompt: TOW The Videotape (8.4) - Write about someone who uses two names
World: Pre-Hogwarts (canon-ish)
Word Count: 1,532
Beta: the ever-fabulous crochetaway
A/N: I dislike writing about Tom Riddle/LV, but I read this prompt and couldn't get him out of my head.
"Crucio."
The hissed Unforgivable sent a wave of pain through Virgil Crabbe, the likes of which he'd never experienced in his life. His fingers were exploding, his eyes were on fire, and his body had long ago let loose any water he'd had. He couldn't remember if this was the third Crucio he'd been hit with, or the thirteenth. His memory began and ended with the pain coming from the yew wand above him.
"Do you understand now, Crabbe?" Tom Riddle asked, his near-black eyes boring down into Crabbe's dull brown ones. "I want neither your concern nor your advice. I want you to do as I ask."
When the curse finally ended, Crabbe turned and vomited on the slate tiles beneath him. He stayed down and allowed the rest of the Knights to exit the room. He managed to wait until all had left before he began crying.
An hour later, his little sister, Vesta, alerted to Virgil's situation by one of the more sympathetic Knights, snuck into the abandoned classroom. She vanished his vomit and other fluids and ran a cool, wet cloth across his brow until the shaking stopped.
A small mercy for the punishment he'd bore in protecting young Vesta's betrothed from being used as target practice for the Knights. The Goyle heir may have been a Hufflepuff, but he would be family soon, and family meant something to Virgil.
When Vesta burst into the common room in tears two weeks later, throwing herself into Virgil's arms, it took him near twenty minutes to calm her down enough to learn that Clement Goyle was in the infirmary. He was, apparently, severely wounded from a number of severing charms to his torso and clearly Obliviated by the perpetrators.
Virgil, of course, knew exactly what had happened.
His punishment at Tom's wand, his suffering bout after bout of the Cruciatus—it had meant nothing. His pleas to Tom had fallen on deaf ears and, more importantly, the oaths they'd sworn as Knights had been violated.
It took every last ounce of familial pride and courage he could summon, but Virgil marched into the abandoned classroom—the one that had become the unofficial meeting room of the Knights of Walpurgis—and leveled his wand in the face of Tom Riddle.
"A wizard's duel for my family's honor," he said, his voice shaking but his back straight.
The other wizards in the room—Abraxas Malfoy, Thaddeus Nott, Edmund Rosier—looked on in horrified shock. Tom Riddle regarded him as one might regard a pile of hippogriff manure on the path to Hogsmeade.
All five of them knew it was a mistake to challenge Tom, but only Virgil knew he was as good as killing himself. He had seen the look of bloodlust in Tom's eyes that night, before he'd lost himself to the pain of the torture curse. He knew the darkness that simmered beneath his charismatic classmate-his former friend.
"Are you sure you want to do this, Virgil?" Tom's voice was deceptively light. "Goyle is not yet family. Perhaps young Vesta might make a better match, if the squib succumbs to his unfortunate injuries. Antonin graduates soon and will be in want of a wife."
Virgil simply narrowed his eyes. The brotherhood of the Knights of Walpurgis could hang, he would die a thousand deaths before Antonin Dolohov touched his little sister.
After a moment, Tom stood, and though he was a few centimeters shorter than the imposing Crabbe heir, Virgil could not help be feel as though the orphaned, no-name half-blood was looking down on him.
For my family, Virgil thought. And to show my brothers who this monster really is.
When it became apparent that Virgil would not respond or back down, Tom sighed. "Meet me outside of the girls' bathroom on the first floor at midnight." He glanced back at the three seated wizards. "The Knights will stand witness."
When Tom Riddle hissed like a snake, opening a secret well, Virgil felt his stomach drop. Tom led the way down, transfiguring stairs along the wall of the well.
The lower they climbed, the more his imminent death played on Virgil's senses. He could smell the foul stench of rot and decay, and the oppressive grey chamber sucked the vibrance from the green trim of their robes and ties.
"Where are we?" Abraxas' voice was barely a whisper.
"Somewhere we won't be disturbed," said Tom evenly. "Where well-meaning professors won't interfere with something as grave as family honor." Virgil could hear the sarcasm dripping from Tom's voice.
A deep rustling echoed through the chamber, its volume increased by the echo of the stone walls.
"What was that?" Antonin's voice was aloof, but his shoulders were tense, his wand was drawn, and his eyes darted to the corners of the room.
"Given how you're jumping like a first year Hufflepuff, Dolohov, it must be a great monster of some kind." Tom had yet to take his eyes off his opponent, but the look was not what Virgil expected. Tom was an angry man, and that anger often bubbled beneath his cool, Slytherin facade. Virgil had expected to see that anger now, for his challenge to their leader.
Instead, Tom looked excited—almost aroused.
"Look at Virgil-he's terrified," Edmund whispered to Abraxas. "Should we tell him that it's fake? Tom wouldn't really let him die down here. This is all a show, right?"
Abraxas pushed down the sick rising in throat and shook his head once, sharply.
It was over before it ever really began. Virgil's Diffindo bounced off Tom's shield, ricocheting into the wall and deeply gouging the stone. Tom rallied and summoned a viper that, only moments later, had its fangs deeply embedded in Virgil's left leg.
There would be no mercy, Virgil thought, laying on the floor, defeated. No quick trips to Madam Pomfrey. This chamber was not simply a secret, it was a tomb. His tomb.
He refused to meet the eyes of his fellow Knights, who stared at their dying brother. If there was any admiration for Virgil's courage of convictions, it was buried beneath too much fear, shame, and pity to be palpable.
"Go back to the dorms," Tom commanded. "Make sure you are not seen. I will take care of this." He gestured to Virgil, disdain dripping from his voice.
And so left Virgil's former friends, now implicated in the death of one of their own and forever tied to the monster that was Tom Riddle.
Though his heart was beating faster and his body felt increasingly like lead, Virgil kept his eye on Tom, who had pulled a small, thin leather book from his pocket with an almost gleeful look. "You have done me a great service, Crabbe," Tom said as he walked toward the dying man and laid the book down just out of Virgil's reach. "You have secured the loyalty of my Knights."
"Loyalty." Virgil turned his head and spat with all the contempt he could muster.
"Yes, loyalty," said Tom, using his wand to etch runes in the floor. "A man does not bite the hand that feeds him, nor does he bite the hand that would kill him for such an act." Tom smiled at Virgil then, a genuine smile, and it was the most horrific thing Virgil had seen in his short life. "You would have done well to learn that lesson before tonight, but it seems your death will have the second, and more important benefit of securing my immortality."
Virgil could no longer feel his arms or legs, and his vision was starting to go spotty. That Tom was spouting off about immortality worried him, but he pushed that thought aside and focused, in the last moments of his life, on his family: his sweet sister, Vesta; his younger brother, Vincent, who would take his place as heir; his parents, who had instilled in him the duty on owed to one's family. He hoped they would remember him fondly.
He hoped they steered clear of the monster that was Tom Riddle.
It was a small mercy that Virgil took his last breath moments before Tom hissed loudly, in Parseltongue, "Darling, dinner!"
During graduation, there was a moment of silence for Virgil Crabbe, the boy from their year who had wandered off into the Forbidden Forest one night and never returned.
"No great loss, if you ask me," Myrtle Warren whispered to her friend, Olive Hornby, after Headmaster Dippet began another long winded speech. "That Crabbe was an awfully mean boy. Just as bad as Tom Riddle and the rest of that lot."
Years later, Lord Voldemort would take an oath from Vincent Crabbe the Third to watch over a special item for him-an item that had been in his family's keep for more than fifty years.
The ring was buried with his grandfather, the locket was hidden away with a different kind of dead, the cup was deep in the bowels of Gringotts, and the diadem was tucked away at Hogwarts amid long-forgotten junk.
It pleased Voldemort to know the one Horcrux he entrusted to one of his inner circle had been created with the blood of that very family's former heir.