Chapter 19
Hermione was caught by Dumbledore before she made it to the dungeons. There was a solemn look that halted her in her steps.
"H-hello Headmaster," Hermione greeted haltingly. "How are you?"
"I find myself taken by thoughts I haven't considered in more than thirty years, actually," the Headmaster said reflectively. "It's strange how pictures painted by many years can be addled by a moment in time."
"Sir?"
He looked at Hermione with a focused eye now, brought to the present once again. "Forgive me, dear. Old age brings a tendency to look back a little too often, I find. Did you enjoy your parents' visit?"
"Thank you for letting them come sir," Hermione said. "I needed it."
The Headmaster nodded. "I'm glad you feel that way. Will you walk with me, dear? I think we have a few things to discuss."
Hermione stepped next to the Headmaster and followed him to his office. The walked the empty corridors with a slow gait. "Your parents were situated safely, you'll be glad to know."
Hermione nodded, not speaking in case it disrupted the old Headmaster from his clearly rehearsed thoughts.
"Have you noticed any changes in Tom recently?" he asked her then, his eyes once again on her. "From before your binding to now?"
"I didn't spend time with him before my change, sir," Hermione told him. "I really wouldn't know if he had changed."
The Headmaster nodded. "I had thought not. I need you informed of things like this, Miss Granger, and I think it would be best if I were to share what I know of Tom. Do you know anything of his childhood?"
"Nothing, sir, beside he attended Hogwarts."
The reached the Gryffin statue then, and the Headmaster said a low 'Licorice Snaps' and it opened to the both of them They both refrained from continuing until they were seated in his office. Dumbledore drew his chair forward so he could perch his elbows on his desk and sat, his gaze on her.
"I have a story for you, Miss Granger," Dumbledore began calmly, "and it's one I think will help you to understand the man you've been bonded to. I will allow you to ask questions, but please allow me to answer whatever I can before you ask."
Hermione nodded.
Dumbledore cleared his throat. "We will do this chronologically. His story actually begins with his family, the Gaunts. They are members of the Sacred Twenty-Eight, but who, over the centuries, became the lowest of all of them. Years of gambling, bad luck, poor alliances, and inbreeding left them with only one final heir to their line, Merope Gaunt. Tom's mother."
He drew a picture from a drawer on his desk and presented it to Hermione. "I remember teaching her, you know. She wasn't exceptionally talented, but she wasn't lacking. Her only strength, in the eyes of the faculty, was potions. Love potions."
Hermione's eyes went wide as she looked at the picture of Voldemort's mother. She had his black hair, and the lightest green eyes. She looked ill, with drawn in cheeks and all too skinny limbs.
"It was after her final year at Hogwarts that Ms. Gaunt returned to her family manor. She wasn't employed at this point, and her father and mother were determined to see her married off for the benefit of the family. She fell in love with a muggle, named Tom Riddle.
"He rejected her," Dumbledore stated, "and she decided to she wanted him anyways. She dosed him with Amortentia and kept him on it for over a year. Sometime during that time, she became pregnant with his son."
"Under the influence of love potion?!" Hermione yelped. "That's so dangerous! So few children even survive!"
"That is true when the mother is the one dosed," Dumbledore informed her. "So few instances are recorded where the father is dosed that all we know is it causes the child be born with an addiction to love potion and an inability to feel."
Hermione stared at Merope Gaunt again, trying to see in her eyes what Dumbledore was telling her. Were those eyes the eyes of a woman who would do this?
"So Voldemort . . .?"
"When I first uncovered this part of his history, I thought it was an explanation for his lack of remorse," Dumbledore admitted. "He had never shown any ability to be anything more than sadistic and cruel, persuasive, but with no happiness.
"Back to our story," Dumbledore continued, his face pensive and remembering. "Ms. Gaunt stopped dosing the father with love potion, and he left her. She died giving birth some months later at age nineteen to Tom Riddle Jr, who you now know as Lord Voldemort."
He produced another picture for her, this one of the boy known as Tom Riddle Jr. His eyes were vacant and blue, his face in a constant look of hatred.
"This is him as I met him, many years later," Dumbledore told her. "I took the photo for his school records. I have something to show you."
He pulled out a pensieve and slid it across to me, letting it hover in the space between. "Join me?"
The memory was terrifying. Not because of the young Tom Riddle, who even at his young age was good at threats and ambiguity, but because of the conditions of the orphanage she was shown. Dumbledore walked through it without a care for the children around him working their hands to the bone. The place was small, with only two large rooms for any orphans. It wasn't an orphanage, Hermione realized, it was a farm. A farm using orphan labour. Tom Riddle was pulled from working in the fields around the small farmhouse and brought back inside to meet the Headmaster with bloody and dirty hands from the labor. If he was born in 1926, Tom Riddle Jr. would have been in the orphanage during the Great Depression and gone back every summer during World War II, when the bombs were coming down. Hermione's eyes filled with tears involuntarily.
When she was thrust from the memory, Hermione's eyes were blurred and stinging. She looked to Dumbledore. "How could you leave him there?"
"Many students lived in similar conditions during that time," Dumbledore tried to soothe her. "We did a service to the muggle parents by taking them in and feeding them for the bulk of the year."
"But you left him!" Hermione accused, no longer finding the situation sad but aggravating. "I've read about the history here, and at this point the muggle and magical world in Britain were still thoroughly segregated. There was barely a recession here, let alone the Great Depression! Grindelwald barely made a dent! You could have still helped them, helped him. How could you just . . . abandon him?"
Dumbledore looked to his desk. "Time has changed many of our preconceived notions, Miss Granger, one being 'spare the rod and spoil the child'. I thought it would keep him from becoming what he is now."
"And that worked so well," Hermione bit. She sat back in her seat, now fully awake and aware. "What happened during his years at Hogwarts?"
Dumbledore took Hermione through his life. He described his interactions with other students, how they were without affection. He told her about his horcruxes, when he believed he made each one and who he killed. He told her how he applied for a position as Defense Against the Dark Arts professor and was denied, and how he then started using his Knights or Death Eaters for power after that. He described the years of fighting him that Order members experienced. When he was done, Hermione was as much of an expert on Voldemort as Dumbledore was except for one thing . . .
"He doesn't act like that with me," she admitted to Dumbledore, once his story was nearly over. "If you're asking if he's changed from that, I think he has."
"Ah, so tell me, how does he behave?" Dumbledore asked.
She thought about it. He wasn't as extreme as the stories, with his temper only showing after deliberate disrespect or at the one celebration she was forced to attend. Alone he seemed nearly docile, but still studious and brimming with passion over the studies they were engaged in.
"He's just . . . happier than that, I guess," Hermione told him. "Calmer? If he tortured any Death Eaters this past week, it hasn't been on any of the bonded grounds, or I would have felt it. He's downright pleasant to me in the evenings, but that might just be because no one else is around."
Dumbledore leaned forward. "Miss Granger, I feel like it would be best to share my suspicions with you. Before I do, however, how is your occlumency coming?"
Hermione hesitated. "That might be better to ask Professor Snape, sir. I'm not sure."
"May I?"
Hermione nodded and fixed her eyes on the old man's. She felt him probe at the edges of her mind and, upon finding nothing, launch himself forward. She focused on a fog or mist, comprised of innocent memories related to what Dumbledore was searching for. After a moment of going around in circles, he withdrew with a smile on his weathered face.
"Yes, you're coming along nicely," Dumbledore praised. "I trust you will do your best to keep the following information to yourself, then?"
"Yes sir," Hermione accepted.
"I believe that in binding himself to you, Miss Granger, Tom may have been given a chance he's never had before," Dumbledore revealed. "Harry's connection with him seems to have vanished, and his Horcruxes may very well be no more. If this is true, he may have his soul back. What's more, if the magic that bound you to him fixed any deficiencies he had in comparison to you, he may very well be cured of whatever the love potion did to him."
Hermione's heart stopped. "He raped me, and now he may be able to feel love?"
Dumbledore sighed, leaning back in his chair. To Hermione, he seemed to be considering his next words carefully. "He never had a chance, Miss Granger. He was cursed from birth to be unfeeling, he was born a direct descendant of Slytherin, he was friendless and orphaned and abused . . . There is a chance that he is only now capable of deciding what he truly needs or wants. It does not forgive his previous actions against you or anyone else, it only means that – in the circumstance that I am correct and there is a distinct possibility I am not – there is hope for him where I had written him off before."
Hermione thought about it in her seat, trying to reconcile this story to what she knew. It was easier to separate the good-looking, human Tom Riddle from the snake-like monster who had raped her. It was almost too easy, and it made her unsettled.
"Sir, what do you want from me?"
The regarded each other, each weighing their next words or next questions.
"I just want to know whether it is true, that he is different," Dumbledore said lightly. "Find out whether he may truly love something, or even be kind without it gaining him anything. That is all."
"Then that's what I'll do." Hermione exited her chair hastily and moved towards the door. "Until the welcome feast, Headmaster."
"Farewell, Miss Granger. Give my regards to Severus."
