Author's Note:
For kainee, as always, because you're always checking to see whether I'm alive and is the best reader a writer could hope for. Thanks to raggedblossomgirl for the review as well! It's too bad that I can't reply to your review through PMs, so I'm doing it here. Yes, Havelock Vetinari is actually one of my favourite characters (across all fandoms, at that). How did you know? ;)
'-
Riddles - Diagon Alley III
Bookstores and Broomsticks. Anthony takes issue with (the lack of) Newtonian physics. Thomas returns to his cloak-and-dagger routines like a fish to water. In which we see that Thomas has perceived far more of Anakin's world than is obvious.
'-
"Alright, we're here."
Anakin was too occupied in looking around, taking the sights in this weird, weird place that he hadn't realised Tom had stopped if he hadn't said so. As it is, he narrowly avoided crashing into his twin's back.
"Here?"
"Yeah. Here."
The dark-haired twin sounded curiously bored. And annoyed. This odd combination of emotions made him turn around and saw a building at the corner of the street. It had rounded walls of a tower than a store, stout and wide in the middle and reminded him of a giant pepper-shaker made of bricks. The other thing that Anakin noticed about the store was how there were brooms everywhere. Brooms? What…?
"I thought we were going to go to the bookstore?"
"We are. I just thought that if I don't bring you here first, you're going to mind if I spend too long in the bookstore and get jittery." Tom answered with grim determination.
Anakin stared at him. "And we're here to buy…?"
"Brooms." Tom answered, as if that explained everything.
His eyebrows rose to his hairline. "What, Mrs. Cole asked you to get some? The ones in the orphanage have shed too much of their bristles?"
That snapped Tom out of whatever slump he seemed to be in as his eyes widened. He was rubbing his chin in thought as he explained.
"Well, people fly using brooms in the wizarding world. Most of my housemates are either fans of quidditch or outright players of it. They'd whine like you wouldn't believe if I don't drop them off here before I go off for books. They always complain I took too long, et cetera, et cetera."
Anakin was staring at the cleaning implements sceptically. "How does that even work? Wouldn't it fall apart? And why brooms?"
Tom shrugged. "I have ceased to complain about the idiosyncrasies of this world after a while. Not everything has answers."
The blond grabbed his arm. "This is a joke, right? They could make planes here, right? Right? People don't hang their lives on a stick of wood?"
The desperation in his twin's eyes were real. Tom would've laughed in his face if he wasn't concerned about Anakin trying to get him to pay for it later. He took a deep breath before answering instead. "People have flown a kilometre above the ground on broomsticks, you know? All the way across the English Channel too, for that matter."
A sound akin to a dying wildebeest escaped from Anakin's throat. Tom's lips twitched at the edges.
"At the very least I can assure you that it's more intuitive than flying an aircraft. It's mostly just a stick."
That sound of a beast choking and dying was turning into keening death throes now, along with some indignant trumpeting that would do an elephant proud. Tom had to look away because he was having a harder time not laughing.
"You can't fly with just a stick—"
"Oh yes you can. You just ride on it, and then kick off. Whoosh. You fly." Tom's reply was nonchalant and it was decidedly weird seeing him pronounce something as plebeian as whoosh with the King's English.
Anakin spluttered, his voice rising in pitch. "A broom can do vertical take-off and landing? Vertical take-off and landing?"
"Why not? Magic probably helped," Tom replied, one hand covering his mouth as sniggers began to escape him.
"Without krethin' propulsion? What in Bantha's bloated backside is the fuel?"
Anakin's cheeks were well beyond ruddy at this point. Oh, he's crossing languages now, his mind must be pretty screwed alright. It surprised Tom since Anakin had accepted the existence of the Floo Network with aplomb once he saw the people going in and out. And wasn't travelling great distances in a moment through who-knows-where, here one moment and then gone the next, is stranger still than merely enchanting a branch and some twigs to carry your weight and fly?
Now that he thought about the Floo Network, he started having some interesting questions about apparition. He supposed it could wait for now, though.
Tom had to bite his tongue once to keep his tone level and oblivious. "Well, kicking off with your legs is plenty propulsion, isn't it?"
"Lift doesn't work that way! Gravity wouldn't let you out of her clutches that easily and a person riding on a broom is not even aerodynamic! Does drag even matter? There is no such a thing as Magic!"
It really should worry him that he understood every little thing that Anakin was complaining about, that he'd known much more about physics than he ever even cared before and knew just why Anakin thought flying broomsticks were ridiculous. Yet right now, he couldn't care less. Tom finally gave up the battle against his stomach and just laughed, leaning against the wall of the store as the absurdity truly sets in.
It was not hard to surmise the reason for his brother's breakdown, the images of all the sleek and highly efficient crafts that his brother had so enjoyed steering had begun leaking through their link.. Anakin had lost all control at keeping his walls up (he probably doesn't even remember that he needed to do it at all).
Apparently, magic was allowed to touch anything else in Anakin's life but flying.
'-
Tom's laughter seemed to have broken the spell that have caught Anakin from the beginning, making him realise just how ridiculous he'd been. He huffed, folding his arms in front of his chest.
"Yeah, yeah. Go on. Laugh it up."
"I'm sorry," Tom said with an ear-splitting grin, his tone absolutely not sorry, "it's just that…" he wheezed, before laughing again. "You're just…"
He cleared his throat. That set Tom on a final burst of laughter. To tell the truth Anakin wasn't as annoyed as he looked. He was still shocked, yes, and not a little bit flabbergasted, but he supposed he'd get over it with time. He was always good at rolling with the punches. What he just realised now was that he hadn't really heard Tom's unrestrained laughter before. Sniggers, maybe. He'd learned to appreciate the occasional chuckle along with his smartass quips, but it was not often that his bother sounded that free.
In a way, it was…sad.
"I was wondering when that would happen. At least it's over and done with." Tom said, oblivious to the epiphany taking place in Anakin's mind.
Anakin gave him the stink-eye. "You knew I'd find it impossible?"
"You'd find something impossible, sooner or later. It's inevitable when you're not used to magic. I couldn't wrap my head around the moving stairwells of Hogwarts during my first year. I refused to accept that it's real. Of course, avoiding them meant taking longer routes around the castle to get from one class to another, and that's a pain and half on its own." Tom said.
"Let's not even talk about the library aisle that may or may not exist. Aisle number 13. Rumour has it that some witch of older times locked all her ex-boyfriend's library inside it and threw away the key, robbing him of his store of knowledge. I've been trying to find it for a while, but there are stories of people able to take books out from it."
"Huh. That must be some breakup." Anakin replied, too surprised to really think.
"Yeah, that's what I thought so too."
The blond blinked. He hadn't expected Tom to tell him a small piece of his own history either.
"Anyway, there's a small field behind this store for people to try riding the brooms before purchasing. You'd probably want to do that before you swear off flying entirely here and regret it." As he said that, his brother led the way into the store, with Anakin following him with a distinct sense of unreality.
"Are you sure we've got the budget for it?"
Tom shrugged. "Yeah, sure. As long as we don't get the racing types. I think the Nimbus 1000 would be alright."
He walked in, right into a store that had even more brooms inside than outside. There were brooms with smooth and polished handles and those whose handles are naturally crooked like the branch it came from. There were dark-coloured woods and lighter-coloured ones. The proprietor of the store was a middle-aged man as thin and dry as his wares. His eyes, however, were the liveliest thing on his face.
"Good afternoon, boys. What are you looking for? We have many of the traditional brooms as well as the new modern ones. Maybe a stable Comet? The latest Cleansweep?"
"Afternoon, Sir. Can we try out a few first?"
He observed their height with more scrutiny than he had. "Aren't you a little too young to fly brooms?"
Tom shook his head. "Of course not. Might as well not have a broom than ride a toy broom. My brother is one of the best flyers I've ever seen. If you've seen him on a real broom before, you know how much of a waste it would be for him to use a toy broom."
"Is that so?" The shopkeeper was non-committal.
A smile lit Tom's face as he leaned forward slightly, as if taking the man into confidence. "Ah, it's very much so. Come on, let us try your steadiest, most stable broom first and see what Anthony can do with it. The worst that can happen is what, a sprain? I'm sure that's a trivial thing to heal for you, isn't it?"
The wizard stared them both down with an assessing look. Anakin gave him an innocent and unconcerned smile while Tom was as unfazed as ever, a laid-back self-assurance drawn in his posture. Neither of them fidgeted and simply stood there, waiting. The way the shopkeeper mentally adjusted their age in his head yet again was almost visible on his face, and in the way he relaxed before finally nodding.
"Well, this way then, boys." He walked out of the counter and they followed him to the back of the store. It involved jumping over brooms forgotten on the floor and pushing away bristles as thick as underbrush, but they managed. "Already planning on getting into the house Quidditch teams, eh?"
"No start is too early," Tom replied with aplomb. "I believe Anthony could even be Seeker."
Anthony could almost hear the chuckle in the man's voice. "Sure you do. You do know that first-years aren't allowed their own brooms, right?"
What's a Seeker? The blond asked in his mind.
A position in a Quidditch team, usually considered as the most important position there.
"Oh, is that so? It's fine. As long as one is on the team, it doesn't really matter, does it?" Tom said.
You could read about all that in any book about quidditch. I'd recommend getting "Quidditch Through the Ages" too, for that matter.
The shopkeeper was laughing good-naturedly again. "My, aren't you very confident children?"
The farther back they enter the shop, the more it resembled a warren. Less light had filtered in from the storefront, and the lanterns used for lighting was more subdued. Anakin was sure that the store wasn't supposed to be this deep…
"Ah, here's the door."
Anakin had expected a large backyard. Considering that the other stores on the street probably doesn't even need as much backyard space as a broom store, he had expected the place to have also taken up the backyards to its left and right. And maybe a few more beyond that too.
He certainly didn't expect to stare at a field. This was a field that couldn't possibly exist behind the rows of shops in Diagon Alley. The grass was green, with an unexpected blossom of yellow or white poking here and there and the air smelled crisp. That was the final impossibility—he knew krethin' well how London's air always held the slight aftertaste of oil or grime. It was noticeable to people who hadn't always lived there and paid attention. Trees dotted the edge of the clearing and apart from the door and the small house they just came out from, there was no other building next to the field.
"Thomas," He ground out his brother's name under his breath.
"Yes?"
"We really need to talk about what magic can or cannot do."
The shopkeeper's voice pulled them out of their conversation. "Now, what do you think, boys? Magnificent, isn't it?"
'-
Thomas was the first to overcome his surprise to answer. "Indeed, Sir. But this isn't behind the stores at all, is it? There's not enough room for it!"
The surprise he expressed wasn't even half faked. The shopkeeper chuckled.
"Yes, it's great, isn't it? Thing is, this store's been in my family for generations, and so is this Quidditch field. A hundred years ago after we can swear that neither land would leave the family, we finally had the license from the Ministry to link a door in the store to the field and create a portal."
"You can actually do that?" Anthony asked.
"It's certainly not cheap. But it's more impressive than going through the floo here, don't you think?"
The twin certainly gave varied sounds and comments of agreement to that. It was impossible not to. Even as they trailed the wizard to the door to the storehouse where he kept the brooms, their mind was still on that door that was actually a portal. On the upside, that meant Anakin wasn't still extremely hung up on the idea of brooms as vehicles. Tom took one, but he didn't do much except hold it while the shopkeeper instructed them on how to fly.
"Say 'Up'."
"Up," Anakin said the command sharply, and his broom snapped harshly into his hand, probably leaving some impression.
"You need to relax a bit in saying that, I think," Tom commented. "That was a bit too hard, wasn't it?"
His brother was mulish. "It works, doesn't it?"
Tom shrugged. "Suit yourself. Now, 'Up'."
The broom he was holding rose at his command without a hitch. The shopkeeper certainly nodded with approval. "Seems like you both got it down well. Nothing else to do but fly, then."
His twin was eyeing the broom dubiously. The black-haired Riddle sighed. He really did not make it a habit to fly. Why waste your time travelling when you could instantly be anywhere you need, through apparition? Anthony wasn't going to get over his distrust anytime soon without an example, though. Oh look, the shopkeeper was demonstrating! Wasn't that a good thing? The shopkeeper had taken off and was now sedately flying in circles above them. Thomas elbowed his sibling to make sure he was paying attention, but the frown on his face hadn't let up at all.
"Fine. Please observe carefully, Anthony."
Sighing yet again, he rode astride the broom, took a deep breath and casually kicked up. Wind rushed past his face as the ground fell away from him and the blue sky promised to take him into her embrace. He did not look down until he had gained sufficient altitude and he could see that Anthony's gaze followed him. Right, flying for travel wasn't such a complicated matter, was it? The broom was unfamiliar in his hands and he belatedly remembered that the Nimbus Racing Broom Company hadn't even existed yet. The Cleansweep was solid and reliable, certainly, but it wasn't going to be turning corners around any coins.
Even if the air was on the brisk and cold end, he did not mind. It certainly woke one up into attention. He made a circle around the field. Then, just because he was getting bored too, he sloped down at a faster speed than before and made sure he did a hairpin turn in front of Anthony.
"There. Not that hard, is it?"
Anthony was shaking his head. "I can't believe it."
He snorted. "I couldn't have been much faster than the newspaper boy on a bicycle."
"No, the way you turn. Your feet just barely touched the ground—"
"Well, that's just the art in flying low-altitude."
"—which was good control, by the way, but that turn doesn't make sense." Anthony started to circle him, still eyeing the broom with a mixture of wariness and curiosity.
"What doesn't make sense?"
"When you turn." He made a rounded motion with his hand. "There's no extra swing or anything. It's nothing like the way a star pulls its planets to orbit. Or if you pick up a toy on a string and starts swinging the string around so it would pick up speed before you throw it somewhere. The natural direction and speed of a planet, or of that toy, is in a straight line, right? If you take away the object that pulls it to the center, which in each case is the sun or the hand holding the string, they'd run in a straight line, escaping their previously circular path."
The shopkeeper seemed to be content to let them try the brooms out in the field, for he was peeking back into the store, probably checking to see if he had other customers.
"Yes, I think I can see that happening," Tom said.
"But that doesn't happen here. If you don't pay attention after going in circle several times, what would the broom do? Go in a straight line."
Tom paused as he'd begun to notice the strangeness that his brother was pointing out.
"…no. I've been in that situation more than once, actually, and the broom simply followed your previous paths if you've done it for a while. It would keep going in circles."
Anakin shook his head as he walked back and forth, thinking.
"It can't possibly be the presence of a perpetual centripetal force once one starts moving in a circle. For one thing, what's the source of the force? Where the heck does it come from? How does it disappear again when people stop flying in circles? As crazy as it sounds, it's even simpler if the…the broom doesn't even consider centripetal force at all, whatever it actually uses."
"Hence, there is nothing like the presence of centripetal force to keep circular movement, and there is also nothing like its absence to release the moving object to move back in a straight line.
Tom didn't exactly have anything to say to that.
"Let's take a different scenario. Say, if something forces them to stop, like say, a hand catches the toy in mid-swing, one could feel the jolt of all the mass and motion previously directed forward."
"Of course."
"But that doesn't happen when you brake with that broom, does it? You don't feel that jolt?"
Tom took off at a low height just to test out exactly what Anthony said. He picked up speed and then pulled the broom handle up and back to stop it and he simply…
…stopped.
There was no braking sensation that he was already very familiar with from riding on the non-magical bus. Heck, even the Knight Bus had a similar feel. He flew back to his brother.
"Huh. You're right. There's no jolt at all."
The blond nodded, as if he'd expected this. His face was still completely serious instead of satisfied.
"I'm sure there would be a jolt if you crash into something. All that kinetic energy can't just krethin' disappear. But if you stop and rely on the broom to stop. You just…stop."
He took a deep sigh. "Damn, how far in magic mushroom land are we in now? First, there was no centripetal force and now there's no momentum. Sithspit. The frickin' broom doesn't even follow the classical mechanics of physics! The rules it follows is…something that came waaay before space-flight physics. It's not even physics yet, it's one of those old postulates, isn't it? I vaguely recall it at some ancient history of science class in the Temple. It's probably still called philosophy of nature or something. What in Force is it, Thomas?"
Thomas had dismounted at this point, watching his brother work himself almost into a frenzy.
"Merlin's balls," he said, dryly. "Magic, obviously."
"'Merlin's balls' is right." Anthony said it with a vehemence that made it into a proper curse.
"Does this mean you don't want to fly?"
Anthony's blue eyes held a fire in them when he looked up. "Of course not. It just means I need to figure out a new set of rules while I fly."
He picked up the broom nearest to him with a vehemence that Tom hadn't expected and took to the sky with the fluidity of a flock of dove scattering and he corkscrewed up. To Thomas' surprise, he was reminded of a rising rocket instead of anything else, either a memory of Anthony's he'd seen often enough to remember on his own or something he'd seen in Terminus. There was grace in his chase for sheer speed, especially when he came straight down like a hunting eagle spotting a rabbit.
That had the proprietor running into the field until Anthony stopped a foot above the ground. Knowing very well about his brother's flying abilities, Thomas set off at a sedate pace.
"You just shaved a few years off my life, lad!"
His smile was an embarrassed one. "Ah, sorry. I was having too much fun to notice. This broom is fun, though, I think I'll take this."
"Don't want to try the other ones?" Thomas asked.
He shook his head. "I already did before I started flying. This one is the one that feels most right in my hands, and that was why I was flying with it. If I don't take this, I don't think I'll take anything else."
That must be another of that strange magic sense his universe had developed. He'd probably asked his twin about it later.
The shopkeeper accepted his reasoning easily. "That would be the Cleansweep, then? One broom or two?"
"Considering that first years can't even bring their own broom, I think one is fine," Thomas concluded.
'-
The odd thing was, Tom hadn't even remembered to ask for the man's name until after they were nearly done. Mr. Gerard Forrester was a suitably mundane name for a rather mundane shopkeeper. What he found to be even odder was that he remembered to ask the wizard's name at all.
Hmm. He'd never really bothered with people he'd considered he'd only have superficial contact before. This noticing-people thing he was developing was unusual.
Of course, there's no telling when having the contact information for the owner of the Broomstix would come in handy, so perhaps he was just being more prepared than he'd been before. Tom put further thought of it out of his mind, especially once they were done with brooms and could get down to business. Books.
'-
Of course, Thomas' idea of a bookstore wasn't the same as Anthony's. It wasn't the largest bookstore he had seen (obviously), but there was something mind-bending in the way the bookshelves at Flourish and Blotts extend up…
…and up and up and up.
It was a three-story store, with its lobby area opening all the way up to its rafters and one can easily see balconies for the other two floors from there. The bookshelves in the lobby, however, grew up all the way to the ceiling.
"How does anyone take the higher books?" Anthony asked, bewildered.
"That's the easiest part, with Accio, of course!" An enthusiastic staff answered. The witch had an easy and friendly smile on her face.
"It's a summoning charm," Thomas clarified. Now that was clearer.
"The harder part is in stocking it," a different staff muttered from somewhere behind them. The witch shook her head.
"Oh come on, it wasn't that hard—"
"Try flying a broom carrying an armful of the Book of Slugs, Saps, Slime Spells and All-Sorts of Slippery Stuffs and I bet you'll change your mind."
Those words had the Riddle twins turning around to face her fully. Sure enough, there was a broom in the young witch's hand. What was more off-putting was the slime that coated her arms. The tall witch smelled…weird. There was something faint that made him think of slugs, but there was also something astringent that reminded Tom of herbs crushed underfoot in a forest. Everyone else stepped away from her. Her co-worker certainly looked apologetic. She rolled her eyes.
"See what I mean? Don't worry about it, boys, we don't really keep that many exotic books. Stick to the normal-looking ones and you'll be fine."
"But what if we want to read Slugs, Saps, Slime Spells and All-Sorts of Slippery Stuffs?" Anthony asked with complete innocence—nothing that his brother believed in, to be sure.
"Ask someone to Accio it, Merlin help you," the witch grumbled. She turned to her fellow employee with the same annoyed look she'd been wearing all this time. "I don't care what Mr. Fourish or Blotts would say, but I'm going out to the back to wash my arms and face, and change."
"Um, alright. I'll be sure to tell them."
She left a dripping track of slime from her broom. Thomas couldn't help wincing a little. "If that slime is what I think it is, it's going to eat through the parquet floor."
"Oh, that wouldn't be a problem for long. Scourgify!" A soapy wash certainly covered the floor area she gestured to. Anthony was staring at the wand and then the floor, not quite believing what he was seeing.
When the witch finished her hand movements with an upward flick, the soapy water vanished again. The slime was still there, though if one was generous, one might say that there was less of it. A bit less.
Thomas shook his head, "I knew it wasn't mere slime—it dropped slower and was thicker. That was the sap of something close to the Devil's Balsam. Soap's not going to be that effective against it."
"Surely the Scouring Charm can clean everything?" She asked. She sounded more desperate than anything.
"You're better off with turpentine," he noted. "Might as well fight fire with fire."
"Or paraffin," Anthony added.
"I think I saw that in the supplies room. I'll be right back!" She rushed off to get one of the two solvent, whichever it was that she happened to have on hand.
Anthony saw Thomas cringe. "We shouldn't have done that."
"We're just helping."
"No. How many children our age are competent with ingredients?"
It was Anthony's turn to wince after that. "Ah, basic chemistry. Right. Not exactly supposed to be common here, is it?"
"No."
Neither of the twins wanted to hang around until she was done, and they moved away as quickly as they could, instead, hoping to not meet her again, if possible. They were generally following Thomas' whim on which direction they should check out next.
"That book was…weird," Anthony commented.
"And here I'd wondered in the 1970s why the S7 is hard to find," Tom mused. "Turns out it's just really hard to keep in inventory."
"S7?"
"The Slime book. Did you count the number of S words on the title?" Tom asked.
"Ah."
"Yes. It has many interesting spells as well as cross-applications of charms and potions."
"Sure it does," Anthony replied, his attention wandering to other shelves already as he drifted away. "But what could you do with it?"
"Figure out how to procure certain ingredients on your own instead of merely relying on store-bought ones," Tom promptly answered. "It would be very useful considering that we cannot exactly withdraw near-infinite amounts of galleons. Also of note is how the trade of certain reagents are closely monitored by the Ministry."
"We're cooking? More chemistry?"
"Potionmaking, Anthony. Potionmaking," Thomas replied with unusual patience. He casually walked to the back of the counter with no regards to the employees only sign. He crouched down and looking for something resembling a rag. "Snape swears by it for any ingredients that oozes so I'm certain we're off to a good start."
When Thomas surfaced once more, it was apparent that the best he could find was several thick brown paper bags.
"What's that for?"
His brother did not directly answer that and looked up the bookshelves instead. "Accio Slugs, Saps, Slime Spells and All-Sorts of Slippery Stuffs."
Sure enough, a rather thick tome came zooming down and Tom moved. Anthony had seen the other orphanage kids play cricket often enough to realise that Tom had sharper eyes than many of them, and could've easily caught anything the amateur batsman could field. He didn't even hesitate to catch it with only his left hand, even as the impact that such a large book, falling down, almost pushed him to the floor.
"Damn. I hate being small," Tom complained.
The unnatural slime of the book was safely contained by the paper bags he'd covered his hand with. With a deft sleight of hand, he turned the bags inside out, and now the book was inside several layers of them.
"Here, you've practised your summoning charm after lunch, right?" Thomas suddenly said as he pushed a scrolled note to his twin. Anthony didn't take it and gave him a disbelieving look instead.
"Yeah, but that wasn't with anything serious! I still screw up from time to time."
He shrugged. "All you need to do is repeat it after that. Failure doesn't cost anything and you could use the practice."
"And?"
"And we need to get all those books."
"How the heck are we going to explain it to the store staff?"
"Oh, we're not sending it to us." Tom said easily. Anthony almost gaped, but he sighed and gave a weary look at this brother's cryptic reply instead.
"We're not?"
"No. I'll need to contact a remailer I'd used before in Knockturn Alley—he'd renamed the package and will forward it to a second remailer I'll deal with today as well, in a different part of town. Only the second remailer has the orphanage's address, to Messrs. Riddles. For now, we'll say that we're running an errand for an uncle, an old family friend."
"I'm getting really tired of all the subterfuge we need to do." Anthony complained. He got the gist of it, of course, but he didn't try to remember all the details.
"And yet they're necessary, Anthony. Trust me on this."
Considering that of the two of them, it was certainly Thomas who had successfully managed an insurrection and guerrilla warfare before, he threw his hands in the air.
"Oh, fine. Hand me that list."
"Excellent. These are the books that are on the western side of the store, as far as I can remember the layout. I'll take the east. Let's meet up when we're done."
"And I'm supposed to drag the books around while I go looking for the rest?"
Thomas was unamused. "Of course not. What use are floating charms, Anthony? Or weightless charms? The list of combinations you can try out is endless. Truly, the task isn't that hard."
The blond knew, from the bottom of their linked souls and the Force that they were in contact with, that his brother didn't mean anything by it. Yet even he could understand in that one moment why many Slytherin seniors thought Tom Riddle an annoying and condescending ass who needed to be taught a lesson.
"You know you need to tone down your asshole-ish-ness, don't you?" He asked, curious.
"That is not a word," Thomas immediately replied, seemingly out of reflex against any mangling of the Queen's English than anything his twin had said. He seemed more perplexed than anything.
"What are you talking about, anyway?"
"It's…oh, poodoo. You really don't get it at all, do you? Your 'I am a Dark Lord, bow before me' routine really stands out a lot from the background. I thought we were trying to keep a low profile?"
He snorted. "Technically, we're not dark lords anymore, so no one can accuse us of that. Secondly, we're wasting time. Come on now, we don't have all day."
And with that commanding tone, he turned around with a snapping stride that would earn the respect of any Stormtrooper, and marched to his side of the bookstore. Anthony stood there with a bemused expression on his face, as he wondered idly how the Jedi Temple was going to take the double surprise of their entrance.
It's certainly going to be…fun. Yeah, that's it. Fun.
Well, he might be stretching things a bit there. It was only fun the same way that trying to fly a craft leaking fuel and with half of its engine dead is fun, while trying to find an empty enough space in hyper-packed Coruscant for emergency landing that wouldn't mean crashing right into something else. Basically, everything that made Obi-Wan swear off being piloted by Anakin if he could avoid it, and pitied anyone who had no idea what they were getting on to when they signed up to ride with Anakin for the first time.
And with those pleasant thoughts, Anthony Riddle smiled.
If anyone from their orphanage had seen him then, they would've thought twice about saying that he was the nicer twin. Right now, his smile was eerily similar to his brother's.
'-
Even after the day they had, Anthony still insisted on dropping in to their usual library before going back to the orphanage. Thomas had some issues with that, because hadn't they just visited a bookstore in Diagon Alley?
With his hands in his pockets, he only gave Tom a side glance as he replied.
"Yes, but they don't exactly have books on computation engines, do they? On anything even close to computers? I need to find my own books, Thomas."
A second passed before Tom nodded without pause.
"Of course."
It was clear from his expression that Anthony wondered why his twin was quiet after that, and the way he was instantly agreeable with the idea of spending not a little time at the library more than a mite weird.
But then, Thomas knew the loss Anthony felt when he turned around Thomas' world and saw how analogue everything still is. Not that he thought he'd ever say it.
It wasn't that Anthony told many stories, no. He wasn't that good with them, not always knowing where to begin or where a tale should end. He was not a natural orator or charmer like his brother dark lord. And yet sometimes at the beginning of the week, when the weather difference between Tattooine and England was drastic enough to shock, Anthony had nightmares.
For other people, this would be where the explanation ended. For Thomas, twin and Force-bound sibling of Anthony, it was only the beginning. Both Anthony and Anakin's nightmares were loud, for one. It wasn't that he was screaming or shouting, or even restless in his sleep. It was that the nightmares bled over into Thomas or Tamlin's dreams.
Neither Thomas nor Tamlin himself had mentioned it before to his sibling. It didn't feel important, not when they were facing floggings and other various corporal punishments when they were under Gardulla the Hut. It was irrelevant when they both schemed to avoid starvation in Tattooine. It didn't even feel that significant once Tom had to get Anthony up to speed with England's magical world as well as its technological level, or what little of the muggle world about it that he knew, anyway, while at the same time always paying attention to the slightest signs of Grindelwald's rise.
The nightmares were never coherent enough for Tom to figure out any particular story from them, not unless they involved people or events that Anakin had told Tamlin about. He didn't feel Anakin's privacy was leaking in any way. What he saw was usually just a fleeting scene. An intense feeling of fear or anger. Fights and battles. Deaths. Escapes. Endangerments of his mentor (the Jedi known as Kenobi). Multiple Crises. Torture under the hands of the Emperor.
(Now that he thought about it again, it was definitely the repeated tortures under irregular schedule with the Emperor that still left vestiges of PTSD in his sibling's mind).
Loss of a son.
For someone who intensely disliked Tattooine for the way it stripped him of even the basic dignity of being a free man, the nightmares gave Thomas some control back—he regained some power in the raw form of knowledge. He had a vague memory of the cockpit layout of the spacecrafts that Anakin had piloted as well as engine configurations he was repairing in those dreams, and this made him able to absorb Anakin's instructions at Watto's repair shop faster. He saw the ubiquity of the automatic doors and their attendant electronic locks. He saw the ease with which Vader monitored the far-reaches of the empire with what he now knew as faster-than-light (FTL) communication methods. He had seen the moment-to-moment adjustments that the turrets of the Death Star took to keep track of the rebel starfighters, of which the precise calculations he'd seen more than once on a passing screen or two, calculations running faster than any mortal's mind can finish, whatever the race.
Thomas was not Voldemort. He was not delusional enough to think that even if his genius was heads and shoulders among the common people it meant he can also perform miracles such as that. No, he could not. It was not even due to any failing of his.
It was simply not humanly possible to do so.
He'd seen Coruscant's air traffic controls. It made him marvel at how all the people there could continue their lives so blithely when they don't even have Anakin's excuse of being able to call upon the Force if any of their near-misses turned into a string of meteoric accidents. And yet the traffic controls managed to keep accidents at a minimum, assisted with a significant, district-wide neural network that mapped out the movement patterns of different vehicles and people.
How did he figure this out? Anakin had a nightmare of losing a boy that he was tasked to protect there, in one of the traffic stations. From the glimpses he could see, it was highly probable that the teen was an unfortunate victim of Coruscanti politics. Tamlin lost his interest in the youth the moment he deduced the young noble's background and how it relates to the circumstances of the death. Unlike Anakin, he was not obsessed with how avoidable or unavoidable the death was—what would the death of another stranger mean to him? The supercomputer spread below the balcony Anakin fought in drew his attention instead. The great computing machine and the staffs manning it, oblivious to the fight going on over their heads. The routes they mapped out for different traffic, easily changing minute by minute without holding anyone at bay for too long, was an elegant impromptu ballet with thousands of cast, in parabolic trajectories and hyperbolic jets.
All of which were impossible to construct without computers.
In that fragment of a dream, he did not feel inadequate. He was master of his fate, lord of what he surveys; he did not do inadequate. He did, however, feel envy that he had always managed to carefully stifle in his waking hours, so deftly that even his conscious mind scarcely noticed it. He envied Anakin for being born in a world of such breadth and depth, a world with so much potential. And since it was his id speaking, he was certainly wondering out loud, in that rambling thought that one has in dreams, about how much greater he would have been, as a dark lord, had he been born there.
This was why he walked by his brother's side without complaint.
This was why he still hadn't said another word as they entered the library, lost in thought, and why he made the habitual gesture of locating the topology textbooks that he'd been reading lately before he found his way back to Anthony's side. Before, he hadn't commented on Anthony's fervent search for any book that mentioned computers. When Anthony figured out with dismay that a computer was a person in this day and age, he couldn't help but curse out loud of what had been a beacon of hope early in his search:
"Force, has no one ever managed to make Babbage's Analytical Engine? Bloody hell, it's almost a century since he created the plans!"
For a moment, no words seemed adequate to Thomas. The helplessness he felt in the face of a stubborn, slow world that will not assist Anthony's efforts to begin reconstructing pieces of his own world felt strange and unfamiliar to him. He did not like the feeling much.
He said instead, and only half-jokingly at that.
"Well, it might as well be you, then."
The smile it earned from Anthony was short and fleeting. If anything, the words became a spur to the other Riddle. A challenge. He became more agitated in his search, as he settled for checking out business machines for the time being.
Even if it meant reading up on punch-card based tabulating machines. These were pale imitations of the ideal, shades of the river Styx that tries to fool the traveller into thinking that they are as good as living.
They will undoubtedly be only a disappointment.
Yet by then, he was perceptive enough to not say that out loud, or at all. He even stopped himself from even thinking about it in his mind, in case his brother inadvertently heard it. Thomas did not miss the increased desperation in Anthony's search. Just two weeks ago (or four, as he experienced it), Anthony almost filed an interlibrary loan request for the magazine Business Machines. It would have been notable in a young Englishman, for unlike the States, Britain was not as enamoured with new technologies to be obsessed in applying them everywhere, even when increased need had yet to exist to make it necessary.
Such interest would be downright alien in a very young English boy.
(Why Thomas Riddle even knew about the state of business machine technology in the United States was because Anthony Riddle had no one to discuss his readings and expound his dreams other than his brother. If he was still Voldemort, he would not believe that he would ever be that patient or interested in a topic so mundanely muggle. The first person to suggest it would be sent to the torture chamber for the affront, and as a lesson for everyone else).
Anthony was lucky that Thomas saw the application and quickly stopped his twin from doing anything rash. He managed to promise that it was easier and safer for them if he wrote to their office and requested for a subscription.
He didn't even think twice about the cut such a subscription would inflict on the limited cache of money he'd planned on procuring from the Slytherin vault later on. The only thing in his mind then was that he could not let his brother's increasing impatience with this slower, less-advanced world destroy him.
Thomas Riddle did not realise it then, and would not have realised it even years and years later if he did not make an effort to remember his past. Yet at that moment he had clearly thought of how Anthony was going to self-destruct sooner or later—and in the face of his twin's possible demise, he'd immediately sought to prevent it.
It was the first time he did not automatically consider that he had to stop his brother's downfall because it would mean his own as well, tied as their fates were.
At that time, he had not thought of his own fate at all.
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Author's Note:
Will probably add some clarifying notes in here later if my mind feels coherent enough.
I figured that, since flying with broomsticks is already pretty irrational, might as well make magical flight in the wizarding world to be completely unrelated with Newtonian physics. It works under some sort of weird, Aristotelian principles (but Anakin wouldn't exactly have known Aristotles or read much about him at this point). For a pilot and mechanic/engineer like Anakin, it's certainly going to piss him off. "Physics just doesn't work that way!" *hair pulling commences*. I had a lot of fun mindscrewing the poor guy.
Yes, I did brush up my reading on the history of computing before I wrote this chapter. I've been doing that since last one but it never feels adequate. Still don't. I just decided to bite the bullet and write it all down than keep delaying.
As usual, post any questions you have in the reviews (or any clarifications you want me to make).
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