1942
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Tom enjoyed being a Prefect.
But his enjoyment was overshadowed by two things:
The first was his awareness that the job of Prefect only existed so that teachers could off-load their duties onto someone else, permitting them to put up their feet after class and drink in the staffroom, instead of patrolling the castle and doing actual work. Prefectship meant nothing in the long run. Although they did get to keep their badges after they left, even the Head Boys and Girls only got their names engraved on a plaque that was shared with all the other Heads of the last decade. Tom had visited the Hogwarts Trophy Room, looking for any other Toms and Marvolos and Riddles and finding nothing, and there he had seen that most of the trophies were dusty relics, monuments of no importance. Especially that Medal of Magical Merit awarded to A.P.W.B. Dumbledore in 1899.
(As for House Points and Quidditch awards: the House Cup was a joke—for God's sake, the prize was eating one meal at the end of the year under the winning House's banners. This, in exchange for a whole year's worth of academic merit?! But it was like religion or fiat currency, the way the points system was indoctrinated into the minds of impressionable children. It had value because other people gave it value, and Tom, who saw himself above consuming the opium of the masses, could nevertheless recognise its usefulness.)
People who were famous were remembered for real deeds and accomplishments. The lists of deeds on the back of the chocolate frog cards never said, 'He was also a Hogwarts Prefect for the years of 1752—1755'. No one became famous by virtue of being awarded a Prefect badge; ergo, being a Prefect was not a real accomplishment.
Thus came the physical proof of real accomplishment: in the last week of October, a nondescript owl arrived to the Slytherin House table during breakfast, bearing a thick envelope with an official-looking seal in sparkly carnelian pink wax.
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Dear Mr. Bertram,
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We are pleased to offer you an invitation to the Wizarding Britain Society of Journalists (WBSJ), the premier society of contributors and creators in the business of printed media.
Enclosed within is your Press Identification Certificate and Press Badge, engraved with your credentials and personal identification number. We urge you not to misplace it. WBSJ members attending hearings or official appointments at the Ministry of Magic must present their badge at the reception desk after wand weighing; the Badge is registered with the Ministry and charmed to allow entry to court sessions closed to the public. Lost or misplaced badges must be filed with the MOM Department of Administrative Registration, which charges a fifteen galleon service fee for replacements.
The WBSJ Annual Dinner is set for Friday, 18 December. The invitation and RSVP ticket is enclosed with your nomination slip to our Most Charming Smile annual award. We request that all seating reservations and paperwork be owled at your earliest convenience.
Our sincere congratulations,
.
Clementine Wimbourne,
Editor-in-Chief
Witch Weekly Magazine
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It came from a year's worth of writing and studying and practising magic within the closed drapes of his dormitory four-poster, spending the free hours he had between meals and curfew in the library, combing through the shelves for simple spells he could re-purpose and promote as a groundbreaking solution to a common problem.
It came from the late summer nights spent in his room in The Hog's Head. The heat sweltering in the small room, so hot and humid that the windows dripped with condensation, but he didn't risk opening the window because anything was better than the fragrance of sweaty goats. In that room, he'd devoted himself to magical experimentation, wet socks squishing between his toes, broken porcelain scattered across the splintery floorboards from yet another Transfigured chamber pot whose structure could little withstand a water conjuration charm under high pressure.
It was a year of self-education outside of the Hogwarts curriculum, combining what he'd learned from his classes into a sum greater than its parts. It made him question why they separated Charms from Transfiguration from Defence when they could be so much more powerful combined. Magic was magic; the divisions between disciplines were arbitrary and placed out of convenience than any fundamental distinction. Alchemy was the blurred line between Transfiguration and Potions. Defence was just Charms cast with martial intent. Many of them, such as the Severing Charm or the Banishing Charm, were useful for both housework or self-protection.
He found his Press Badge to be a more meaningful achievement than his Prefect Badge, which came from buttering up the professors for the last four years, on top of earning all those House Points for turning in his homework on time and for knowing the answers in class, which was like being rewarded for cleaning one's plate at dinner, or flushing the loo after doing one's business. It was such a non-achievement that he had imagined everyone's expressions of shock and horror if he'd launched the badge into the Lake and renounced his Prefectship in the middle of the Great Hall.
But those images never manifested themselves in reality; Tom kept them locked away within his imagination, and when the time came, he accepted the Prefect badge with gracious smiles and counterfeited modesty.
The duties of being Prefect aside, it still had plenty of privileges to make it worth the bother. For example, he could now loiter in the corridors after hours without anyone daring to tell him off.
That was where his new Prefect status was overshadowed for the second time.
When Tom had been in First Year, and the walls of Hogwarts had been the extent of the magical world as far as he had been aware, he had looked forward to being a Prefect. He wanted the power, the authority, and the ability to eject people from the many hidden alcoves and out-of-the-way classrooms, because there were better purposes they could be put to than serving as rendezvous spots for various upper year students' amorous ambitions.
Perhaps that was petty, but he'd been a child, and his horizons back then were narrow and simplistic, with a limited view on what tools were available to him. In First Year, there had only been himself, Hermione, and Peanut.
But Peanut's ill health had dampened his high spirits. He'd eagerly anticipated roaming the corridors with his loyal minion in his pocket, sniffing out the curfew breakers, the contraband smugglers, and the lovesick fools. Searching for the parts of the castle that had been off-limits to him in the past, like the kitchens, the laundry room, the caretaker's office—where did all the coins that rolled under the sofas end up?—and the Common Rooms of Hogwarts' other Houses.
(If it hadn't been for the Common Room library and the freedom to visit Hermione outside of class, Ravenclaw would have been disappointing; he'd been back after that Christmas just to see if the word puzzles improved, but they hadn't.)
Instead of his obedient and dependable Peanut, Tom had gotten Miss Sidonie Hipworth as his patrol partner.
Hipworth wore her hair in stiff, curling blonde ringlets, courtesy of hair charms rather than nature, quite unlike Hermione's naturally fluffy curls. Hipworth wasn't as pompous and overbearing as Everard, or as vacuous as Chuffley, Summers, and Preston; he'd heard that Hipworth's family had earned rather inherited their way into modest fortune, and as such, she understood the value of dedication. To Tom's annoyance, however, its manifestation in Sidonie Hipworth came in the form of shameless attempts at social climbing. She was in the top quarter of their year by marks, and he remembered that she'd asked to be his Potions partner a few times before Tom had begun leaving his bag on the seat next to him. His regular Potions partners were Lestrange or Avery, who made up for their near-illiteracy by being good at taking orders; beyond that, they could mash slugs and de-bone bat wings without being squeamish about the blood.
The girl had apparently wedged herself into that much-prized intersection between Acceptable Academic Records and Notable Family Connections, which had been enough to convince Professor Slughorn to acknowledge her existence, to the extent of handing her a badge and remembering her name. Tom was consoled by the fact that Hipworth's existence hadn't made so strong of an impression on Old Sluggy to merit invitations to his Slug Club dinner evenings. There was only so much of her that Tom could tolerate; she didn't even qualify for being one of his "friends".
(If it hadn't been for Peanut's poor state of health, Tom would have considered pranking the girls' dorm again on the off-chance that a public humiliation would force Miss Hipworth to hand her Prefect badge to someone else less annoying.)
Tom had set Peanut up in a shoebox under his bed, lined with the feathers pulled out of someone's pillow, and a hand towel taken from the dormitory bathroom.
Nott caught him coming out of the bathroom, and had asked him about it. "The Prefect with the non-approved pet? Aren't you going to assign yourself detention now?"
"I have a permission slip from the Deputy Headmaster," said Tom, brushing past Nott, shoebox in hand. "I can have whatever pet I want."
"And you got a rat?" Nott's eyes widened in disbelief. "You could have gotten a snake! Why didn't you get a snake?"
Because snakes are temperamental and boring, thought Tom. He didn't understand why the members of his House worshiped them so much. They were fine as symbolic or heraldic animals—and if he had to choose, a serpent was miles better than a badger—but in reality, most breeds of snakes were rather dull and pre-occupied with their base urges.
Tom had talked to snakes when he and the other orphans had gone on trips outside the city. All a snake wanted was food and a warm place to sleep; Tom could imagine himself spending a week to build and charm the perfect heated terrarium for a pet snake, and then being woken up in the middle of the night because the snake wanted the temperature adjusted. Snakes could be as callous as cats, but at least the average house-cat maintained some semblance of domesticity.
"Because I didn't want a snake," said Tom. He tried to push past Nott to get to the door, but the boy didn't budge.
"Are you sure you were meant to be in Slytherin, Riddle?" Nott asked, folding his arms across his chest. "The others mightn't have noticed, but I have. You're making questionable choices, and it's showing: you invite that Granger girl to our club, then you fawn over her like a moonstruck puppy. It makes me wonder if you're really a Slytherin at all. Maybe you should've been in Ravenclaw. Or Hufflepuff."
Tom stopped dead. His fingers tightened on the shoebox; he could hear rustling from inside as Peanut woke up and shifted about. Nott was trying to provoke him. Nott had always been more perceptive than the other boys who saw new spells and novel magical tricks and didn't question the person providing them. Nott was quiet; he watched and observed, and despite not being as vocal about his opinions as the other boys back in their First Year, he had kept his distance from Tom. Things had warmed up since the Wardrobe Incident in Third Year, but Nott, though outwardly respectful, still chose to remain withdrawn and reserved, even as the rest of the boys grew closer as a group.
If Tom were to count the Slytherins who actually possessed traits that Salazar so valued, Nott would be one of the rare few.
"This isn't about what kind of pet I picked, is it? It's about Granger."
"That speech you made about special privileges and exceptions," said Nott, his eyes narrowed, his lip curling into a derisive sneer. "That was about her, wasn't it?"
"I'm not sure what you're getting at."
"Come off it, Riddle. You know what I'm talking about," Nott said contemptuously. "Don't you know how it looks? How you act around her? You've talent and ambition, and we both know it—Slughorn's already picked you for a winner. You're going to be someone important when you leave this place. But what I can't comprehend is why a man like you is wasting his time and potential on chasing a bit of skirt, let alone one like her. There's no knowing what kind of muck flows through that blo—"
Tom felt his anger rising, the air growing heavy and stifling, a warm tingle running across his limbs and down to his fingers. His fingers itched; a hot pressure built up behind his eye sockets, and he could hear the thump of his own pulse roaring in his ears.
The cups and toothbrushes on the shelf by the sink rattled. A tube of hair lotion rolled off the edge of the sink and plopped onto the floor. Tom settled the shoebox in the crook of his left elbow, while his right arm rose up as if performing an act of divine benediction.
Tom flicked his wrist.
The bathroom door slammed shut with a bang, and Nott followed, his body propelled backwards until his back struck the wooden door, the handle driving into his kidneys from behind and expelling all the air from his lungs with a loud whoosh.
Nott wheezed for breath.
Tom drew his wand from the interior pocket of his robes, stalking forward over the green tiled floor.
When Tom was within arm's reach of Nott, the tip of his yew wand brushed against the other boy's throat, tracing a complex, looping pattern down his clavicle and the line of his sternum, over the pristine uniform jumper.
This was a spell he'd learned from a Healing textbook from Rosier's family library. One that was meant for field surgeries and medical emergencies, it constricted blood vessels and slowed the beating of the heart, in order to reduce blood loss while a Mediwizard sealed open wounds and waited for a Blood Replenishing Potion to take effect. It wasn't Dark Magic, which left traces on the body and in the caster's wand, nor was it something useful for fast-paced duelling, but it looked to be useful here and now. Tom had tested it on Old Ab's goats during the summer, while he'd held their eyes open and made them stay still.
He'd felt what they felt, and while it wasn't dangerous unless, according to the book, one had pre-existing heart conditions, it was still incredibly unpleasant. He could describe the sensation as something akin to holding his breath, but that would be an understatement; for a healthy human who had no restorative potions in his system, the arterial constriction was closer to being held upside down in a tepid pool of water and slowly starved of air.
"They called me 'Mudblood' back in First Year, as you may recall," Tom spoke in a quiet voice, looking down into Nott's eyes. The pupils were dilated, the white of his sclera visible around the iris, and his breath rasped in his throat. "You never said it, but I know you heard them, and you thought it. You and everyone else. Back then, my name meant nothing, my magic was an accident, my blood was tainted. But I wonder..."
Tom leaned closer and dug his wand into Nott's chest. "If we were to have a look at your blood, what colour would it be? Would it be the same shade, have the same consistency as mine, or even Granger's? Do you know what I think?
"I think there would be no difference. But we could always check, if you wanted to make sure of it."
Tom pulled back a few inches and twisted his wand in an intricate counter-pattern, reversing the spell. Nott sucked in a slow, croaking breath between his clenched teeth.
"There's a reason why I 'waste my time', as you call it, with Granger," said Tom in a conversational tone, pinning Nott down with his eyes. Tom felt the spine-prickling itch of an unease that wasn't his own, mutating into a sharp flicker of alarm that crawled up his throat like bile—
And then he was assaulted by a succession of images: a looming shadow in the corner of his eye; a vast, polished table in a room lit by candles; a little boy and a regal, grey-whiskered wolfhound hiding beneath a desk; a veiny, be-ringed hand turning the brittle and yellowing pages of an old book—
He blinked and the images were gone.
"It's because she understands the meaning of loyalty," continued Tom, deciding to pursue that strange episode at a later date. "In fact, that's what makes her exceptional and worthy of my time—it was never about name or blood or sex. You see, Nott, I haven't the time to spare for anyone who is anything less than loyal to me. And those who are loyal, who do prove themselves deserving? I'll give them whatever privileges I want. That's what I understand to be the mark of sensible leadership. If you learn anything from our little discussion, I hope it's that."
A few taps of his wand and Nott's collar straightened itself out; the wrinkles fell out of his robes with a soft puff of steam. Nott himself was paler than usual, his skin clammy with sweat, and he'd sagged onto the floor, but Tom couldn't do anything about that. He levitated the other boy out of the way of the bathroom door.
He spent a moment adjusting the shoebox, which had been tucked under his arm the whole time, and ensured its contents were secure before he opened the door.
Lestrange and Rosier, who had returned to the dormitory in the time Tom was having his talk with Nott, turned to look as the bathroom door opened.
Rosier was sitting on his bed, unwrapping his green-and-silver Slytherin scarf, quilted leather mittens and woollen cloak laying on his bedcovers; his shoes were half-laced, leather tongues pulled open to reveal a flash of green socks adorned with fluttering golden snitches. Lestrange was in the midst of changing, his numbered team jumper halfway over his head, wearing mud-flecked white Quidditch breeches with heavy pads buckled over the knees and shins. It was obvious that they'd come back from the Quidditch pitch, Lestrange to play, and Rosier to spectate.
Tom stood in the doorway, blank-faced. Behind him, Nott was getting unsteadily to his feet.
Rosier's eyes darted to Lestrange, then back to Tom. "Did something happen while we were out?"
"Nott ate something that disagreed with him," said Tom.
Nott said nothing.
"It might be best to leave him alone for a bit, actually." Tom glanced over his shoulder at Nott, who really did look ill. "If you need to use the loo, you could go across the hall and ask the Fourth Years. Black or Mulciber would let you in if you knocked on their door."
"Aww," Lestrange groaned; he had by now pulled his jumper over his head. "Can't you just take points off like a normal person, Riddle? I wanted to use the shower."
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After that incident in the bathroom, Nott put as much space between them as possible, removing himself from his usual spot at the House table and moving down to the point where the Fifth Year section met the Fourth Years. Mulciber, who had been joining the Fifth Years for dinner from the previous year, took Nott's vacated spot. Orion Black came and went as he liked; as the heir to a prominent family and closely related to a number of upper year students, he was invited to a different spot at the Slytherin table every other day.
Nott's enforced distance didn't stop him from attending Tom's homework club, which was held once per fortnight and included every other resident of the Fifth Year boys' dorm. The awkwardness also didn't stop Nott from observing Tom's interactions with Hermione, in the casual setting of the club and in the more structured setting of their mixed classes.
It prompted Tom to begin evaluating his own actions.
Did he really give Hermione special treatment?
Yes, in fact, he did.
Hermione was Hermione. He was accustomed to the small physical displays of affection they shared. He didn't mind the nudges and pats and the way she leaned against him at the end of the last lesson on a Friday afternoon. Those student desks were the same ones they'd picked in First Year, but they'd both grown since then, especially Tom, whose knees now pressed against the bottom of the desk. Contact was unavoidable, and there was nothing inappropriate about it.
Did he fawn over Hermione?
No. No, he didn't.
He counted fawning to be what the younger girls in his House did, pouting their lips and speaking in stupid childish voices, as if they hadn't had governesses from the age of six to teach them how to sign each other's dance cards in formal French. Tom had stopped studying in the Common Room because there was always several groups of girls who did nothing but giggle, whisper, and sneak glances at him from behind their textbooks, daring one of their number to go up and ask him a question about Third Year elective subjects.
His dorm mates found it amusing to watch thirteen and fourteen year old girls grow red and flustered when Tom looked in their direction, and downright comical when one of them tripped over her own feet and fell on her face. It wasn't so hilarious to Tom, who as the Prefect in attendance was expected to escort her to the Hospital Wing to the sighs and envy of her classmates. Perhaps they would have thought differently had Tom been anything other than indifferent to their advances, as more than a few of the girls had been nominal purebloods with all four grandparents being magical. (They weren't Sacred Twenty-Eight; those girls might look, but they'd never be so bold as to countenance a match to a man with a Muggle name, who happened to be a half-blood at best.)
Did he like Hermione?
There were many ways to answer that question, because Tom's feelings about her were... complicated.
He enjoyed her company, which came without the expectation of payment or obligation; spending time in Hermione's presence was the opposite of the dull evenings frittered away in Slughorn's office pretending to be grateful and pleasant, while he had one eye watching the sand in the hourglass, counting the minutes before he could make a polite departure.
He also found her appealing in a deeply visceral way, something that he hadn't noticed until the last year or so. There was no fawning involved, but when Hermione plaited up her hair and wore it tucked over her shoulder, Tom's eyes were immediately drawn to the small bumps at the back of her neck, once hidden but now revealed. One, two, three, four—he'd counted them, the evenly spaced bones of her vertebral column, before they disappeared under the white starched collar of her uniform blouse. It was an alluring sight on a level far beyond the vulgarity of simple titillation; he was at once entranced and dissatisfied by the implication presented by such a display.
In the end, he concluded that he did like her, though to what extent he was still unsure. He did feel that if Hermione had formed a friendship with anyone else other than him, it would never have had the depth of connection of what she had with Tom; she would have been wasted on anyone else, and Tom would have gone his entire life without knowing his Foil, which was so appalling a notion that he could scarcely bring himself to contemplate it.
It brought him to his last question:
(Which was perhaps Nott's last question, too.)
Did Hermione like him?
Of course she did—she'd said it before, and more than once.
But how far did that go? Was it the same amount that he liked her? Was it more, was it less?
Objectively, it didn't matter, but he couldn't help but be curious about it. It was silly to worry overmuch about it, as the Muggle girls at Wool's did when they plucked the petals one by one off daisies and played a game of He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not.
Although he couldn't stop himself from wondering if Hermione found him appealing in return. He knew that other girls liked looking at him, admiring his silky hair or his soulful eyes or what have you.
(Honestly, didn't they have better things to do? Like, for instance, learn magic?)
Hermione was different in every way possible to those random giggling Third Years, most of them too afraid to say a word to him. If he unbuttoned his collar and showed her the vertebrae on the back of his neck, would she appreciate it? Or maybe she liked knees instead? She'd been awkward about touching his knees since that morning last year, in the alcove near the club rooms.
Someone coughed.
Tom blinked.
He looked down. He'd written KNEES over a page of notes listing the concessions agreed upon between the Ministry of Magic and the Goblin Nation in the Treaty of 1755.
Around him, students were drooling on their desks, playing Hangman, doing homework for another class, or in the case of one Gryffindor, sleeping while wearing glasses charmed to look like open eyes.
Was it possible to get an Outstanding N.E.W.T. for History of Magic without showing up to any of the classes? Why was History of Magic a mandatory class for O.W.L.s when few people even bothered continuing on to the N.E.W.T. level class, and unlike Charms or Arithmancy, no employer looked for good marks in History on a student's school record? In the Muggle world, such an arrangement was likely due to the interference of an interest group or political lobby who wanted to over-inflate student fees or flog textbooks.
Those questions were more interesting to contemplate than the rest of the class lecture, which detailed the Ministry's progressive tax rate on goblin-manufactured artefacts.
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Peanut died on the second day of the Christmas holidays.
Tom checked on Peanut each morning before he went to class, so it wasn't unexpected for him to open the shoebox one day and see a dead rat instead of a live one.
He took the velvet wrapping cloth that his Christmas present from Lestrange had come in—the gift had been a silver cloak brooch in the shape of a snake, with matching cuff buttons, which could be used to pin back one's robe sleeves to leave the hands free for duelling—and folded it around the stiff, curled body of the rat. The rat went back into the shoebox, which was then covered with the lid.
Tom put on his winter cloak, gloves, and scarf, striding through the empty hallways without passing a single student; even the portraits were still asleep at this hour of the morning. Up and out of the dungeons he went, and into the freezing air of a Highland dawn.
The grounds were white with snow, the Forest silently ominous, the footing on the carved stone steps down to the edge of the Lake slick and treacherous. Drifts had gathered on the frozen surface of the water. Other than the whistle of the wind and the clatter of an unsecured shutter in the nearby boathouse, there were no other sounds to disturb the solemn occasion of Tom's first proper funeral.
He had seen dead bodies before, of course.
The victims of industrial accidents or traffic collisions, the occasional corpse fished out of the murky depths of Regent's canal, the youngest children of the orphanage, who were the most susceptible to pneumonia or pertussis. Outside the orphanage, he'd heard talk of suicides committed by underemployed men fallen on hard times, and fallen women who chose death over disgrace. But these were people whose passing hadn't warranted a service or a grave marker; most of them hadn't even gotten a coffin, only a bedsheet and a hole in the ground shared with a few other random bodies, an arrangement that came at the generosity of the local borough council.
When he was younger, he'd wondered if that was where his mother had ended up. He didn't even know her name—the little he knew of his parentage was limited to his given name and surname, and the speculations he'd made over the years: that his special "talents" were hereditary, that there was a good explanation for his father being absent at Tom's birth and Tom's mother's death, and that his looks had to have come from somewhere.
None of that mattered now that Tom knew he was a wizard, and was old enough not to need parents anymore; he possessed the skills to earn his own keep and manage his own household. He had made his own memories worth preserving, and they were leagues above the idle daydreams of things that had no basis in reality, no matter how hard he'd wished for them to be true when he was five years old and trying to drown out the sound of other orphans coughing themselves to sleep.
But back to the funeral—
What did people even say at funerals?
Tom's experience with funerals had been in seeing them at a distance when the orphans had gone to church and he'd passed mourners in black on the way out. He hadn't been inside a church since... 1937. By that time, he'd been old and well-read enough to debate theology with the matron, and instead of trying to argue with him, she'd given up and let him spend his Sunday mornings how he wanted to.
(Perhaps she couldn't contemplate sharing an eternal afterlife with Tom Riddle, after a lifetime of dealing with him in the mortal plane of existence. Or perhaps she'd convinced herself that, being paid to clothe and feed young children, the same duty of care did not extend to ensuring their spiritual well-being. If Tom himself didn't care about it, why should anyone else?)
Tom decided to do things his own way. It had always worked before.
"Incendio!"
The shoebox caught on fire, and quickly, before his hands began to burn, Tom slid it over the ice, skidding ten, twenty, thirty feet away from the shoreline before friction took hold of it and brought it to a stop.
The box burned over the ice, red flames over white. The sun rose slowly above a jagged line of white-capped hills. Tom stood on the icy shoreline and watched the rising pillar of grey smoke, reminded of the day two years ago when he had set a wardrobe on fire. He had confronted his fears, and he'd destroyed them. He'd learned from that, and he'd learned from this as well: physical existence was frail and limited, but knowledge and information persisted beyond that.
Peanut was dead, and the years of training were lost for good. But in Tom that knowledge lived on; he remembered how to find his way through all the winding passages and dead-ends and dusty storerooms of the dungeons. He'd learned how to subdue animals with a thought. And he'd recognised that unquestioned devotion—loyalty unto death—was a gift that couldn't be bought.
Tom cast a warming charm over his cloak and pulled his scarf tighter around his throat, watching the ice melt in a circle around the charred box. Eventually, the ice thinned and the blackened remnants of velvet and cardboard plopped into the freezing water.
When it was done, he turned back to the castle, climbing the two hundred stone stairs up the rocky face of Hogwarts' foundations. Entering the grounds proper, he noticed a figure emerging from the treeline of the Forbidden Forest. A large figure, too big to be a student, wearing a cloak with the hood pulled low.
Tom held back and watched.
Heavy, lumbering footsteps, something small and lumpy swinging from each of the figure's hands. In the soughing wind, the flutter of the cloak revealed inner robes in school uniform black... lined with red.
A student.
But not just any student—this had to be the one student that members of his House called the 'Half-Breed Oaf', because if there was anything worse than a wizard who didn't meet their standards for blood, it was a wizard who needed a hyphen to accurately describe his species.
This particular student was the bane of the mixed Slytherin-Gryffindor Potions classes, someone Professor Slughorn tried to avoid, because from one glance he knew that Rubeus Hagrid would never be worthy of The Shelf. Even Tom Riddle, the penniless outcast of Slytherin, despite the unfortunate circumstances of his upbringing having prevented him being told of his magical status, had in his First Year won the praise of his all his teachers by the end of his first term. To Tom, it was proof that wizards and witches weren't inherently equal by dint of having magic.
Tom decided to follow Hagrid. The Forbidden Forest was off-limits to student. There had to be an explanation for the oaf's breaking of school rules. And was it not Tom's duty to uphold student discipline, as one of the few Prefects who'd remained at school for the holidays?
Realising that wearing black in the snow was rather conspicuous, Tom concentrated on casting a Disillusionment Charm, a N.E.W.T. level spell for a reason: holding it for long periods could be tiring, which made the camouflage effect fade from near-invisibility and reduced one's extremities to blurry dark shadows. Wizards who wanted to perform hidden surveillance for hours at a time would do better with items enchanted with concealment spells, like Invisibility Cloaks.
Hagrid entered the castle, Tom following at a reasonable distance, the snow dried off his clothes with a quick application of the steam charm, his shoes Silenced against tapping on the stone floors. From up close, he could see that Hagrid carried dead rabbits in his enormous hands.
I hope he's not going to eat them, thought Tom, who had heard in the Slytherin Common Room that Hagrid was half troll.
Hagrid stopped at the door of a broom closet on the Second Floor, one of the many hiding places Tom had discovered back in his First Year. He unlocked the door with his wand, looked both ways down the hallway—missing Tom, who was holding his Disillusionment without an issue—then slipped into the closet. The door shut behind him.
Tom waited.
Two minutes passed, then five.
He began reciting the major grammatical cases of Latin, then moved to translating short sentences in his head.
You await the oaf. I am waiting for the oaf. He waited for the oaf.
After ten minutes, the door creaked open, Hagrid's head popping out to check the hallway again—nothing to see, move on—before he locked the door and went up the nearest staircase, not looking back. The dead rabbits were gone.
Tom waited for a minute, then began to cast Silencing Charms on the door, which unlocked with a simple Alohomora.
He entered the room, locking the door after him, not knowing what to expect. He raised his wand, tip alight with a non-verbal Lumos.
A dusty cupboard, bare shelves on the side with a few empty bottles of furniture polish and cauldron de-greasing potions, their labels faded and unreadable. A dirty mop and a dustpan missing the brush lay on the floor. He identified a strange smell that wasn't the herbal, astringent scent of cleaning solutions; there was also a metallic whiff of spilled blood, and then something earthy and stale and organic, reminding him of the nest of baby mice Mrs. Cole had once found in the back of the linen pantry.
At the back of the cupboard was a school trunk, wooden with battered brass latches. Tom could hear a soft tapping from within, and a scraping sound like fingernails being dragged slowly over a chalkboard.
What has Hagrid done?
Tom didn't think it was a boggart; they weren't living beings, so they didn't need proper food. And it was obvious that Hagrid had fed whatever it was inside the trunk those dead rabbits.
Tom pointed his wand at the trunk and with a well-aimed Banishing Charm shoved open the lid.
The thing inside the trunk had eight eyes, all of them gleaming in the light shed by Tom's wand.
"Hagrid?" it spoke in a quiet, wheezing voice, with a peculiar whistling quality to it, like a flautist at the end of holding a long note.
"Stupefy!"
Tom cast a Stunner with as much power behind it as he could, then slammed the lid of the trunk shut, binding the latches with a Sticking Charm and a jinx against unlocking charms. After a second's thought, he layered on a few anchored Silencing and Feather-Weight Charms. They wouldn't be permanent unless he enchanted the trunk with carved runes in the Arithmantically circumscribed locations—but he wasn't in the right state of mind right now to sit down and ponder the finer details of planar geometry.
That thing was a spider. A spider the size of a large cat.
Hagrid had a baby Acromantula.
Tom's first question was where Hagrid had gotten it.
Tom took Care of Magical Creatures; it had seemed the most useful class subject out of his remaining elective options, which were Divination and Muggle Studies. He'd read the textbook, and knew that Acromantulas were native to the Malay Archipelago, could live for decades, grew ten feet wide, and produced a highly toxic venom that was used in rare potions.
His second: Who on Earth thought it was a good idea to give or sell an Acromantula to a Hogwarts student?
Hagrid was a Third Year, with less than four months' experience with the Care of Magical Creatures curriculum. He might have been a six-and-a-half-foot-tall oaf whose uniforms had to be fitted on him with an Engorgio or two, but he only had a couple of years of magical training under his belt. He was an idiot, but he was also a child.
What was Hagrid doing with an Acromantula? Was it supposed to be a pet, because he found the standard list of Hogwarts approved pets to be either boring or useless?
Then the third question dropped, and Tom's thoughts took a different direction.
If I had an Acromantula, what would I have done with it?
The parts could be useful as potions ingredients, he knew. A fresh specimen, even a small one like this juvenile here, could be sold on the black market for dozens of galleons. The summer Tom had spent in The Hog's Head had educated him on the trade of magical artefacts, imported animal parts, and Muggle-made luxuries like cigars and fine artwork—things the Ministry of Magic didn't approve of due to the implicit suggestion that some wizard middleman out there was skirting the Statute of Secrecy and defrauding innocent Muggles.
Tom was aware that the venom was the most valuable part, and like the golden eggs laid by a golden goose, killing it would cut off the supply.
But while money was nice, it was only a means to an end. Tom wouldn't mind being rich, but piles of gold only mattered inasmuch as it could provide for his essential needs and comforts while allowing him the freedom to pursue his higher objectives.
Namely, studying magic and becoming a powerful wizard.
Here was where the Acromantula could be very useful in pursuing his studies.
Acromantulas, as he'd read in the books, and had witnessed just now, were capable of speech and reason. They were sentient.
But they were also creatures, which meant that the legal protections which applied to wizards, witches, and various humanoid magical species like Veelas, didn't apply to them.
Tom had never had a sentient creature to try his mind control powers on before, and the incident he'd had with Nott in the bathroom had stirred his curiosity on what else he was capable of. He didn't dare try it again with Nott, not until he knew more about what he was doing. He remembered killing his first few rats with aneurysms when he'd pushed too hard. People would surely notice if Nott ended up brain-damaged. Nott wasn't as dull and feckless as Avery; he did well in academics, and his father was a well-known author and genealogist who had close connections to all the old families of wizarding society.
Using Nott was too risky to be worth the trouble.
(He made no acknowledgement of the promise that Hermione had squeezed out of him back in First Year, when he'd agreed not to experiment on other students.)
The Acromantula it was, then.
This was the perfect opportunity, anyway. No one would be harmed, except for maybe Hagrid's feelings—but then again, it was his own fault for bringing a dangerous creature into the castle and trying to hide it in a room that could be unlocked with a First Year charm. He shouldn't have had an Acromantula; it was only Tom's Prefectorial responsibility to confiscate it, the same as he would have done for any student caught with Dungbombs in his pocket.
His mind made up, Tom transfigured the dustpan into a trunk similar to the one holding the Acromantula, scratching up the interior with a few thoughtfully placed Severing Charms. He broke the lock on the left side of the trunk and placed it on the floor, eyeing the two of them side by side. They weren't exactly identical, but student trunks only came in one standard size and shape. One was pretty much like any other, once you took off the luggage tags, custom engraving, and personalised stickers. He then cast a Disillusionment Charm on the original trunk and levitated it out of the room, leaving the fake one open on the floor. He didn't lock the door when he left; let Hagrid believe that his own stupidity and incompetence had allowed the escape of his pet spider.
How did anyone expect to keep a sentient beast as a pet and not expect it to figure out a way to escape?
(Keeping it as a pet was a whole different situation than keeping it as a captive. The person who did the latter was more inclined to take the proper precautions with what the textbook classified as a wild beast known to be capable of killing trained adult wizards.)
Tom brought the trunk into lowest levels of the dungeons, cold year-round and freezing in the winter. Few students explored this far down, and of the few, most of them were Slytherins who were either lost due to unfamiliarity with the castle (First Years) or lost their way due to ordering too many glasses of Firewhiskey on a trip to Hogsmeade (Seventh Years).
He found a storeroom that held folded piles of moth-eaten tapestries and began cleaning it up, Vanishing the dust and steam cleaning the salvageable fabric. He cast warming charms and ignited the sconces with magical fire, and when he was finished, he set the trunk on the floor and pointed his wand at the latches.
The spider uncurled its hairy limbs and clicked its mandibles.
"You're not Hagrid," it said. "Where is Hagrid?"
"He's not coming back," Tom replied. "From now on I'll be the one bringing you food."
The mandibles clicked some more. "Why did Hagrid leave?"
"It doesn't matter anymore," Tom told it. "You'll soon forget about him."
"But I wa—" it began in its soft, piping voice.
"Petrificus Totalus."
When the spider was frozen stiff—not Stunned; Tom's mind magic didn't work well on an unconscious subject—Tom dropped to his knees and gazed into the shiny black marbles of the Acromantula's eyes.
Willpower was the key to any magic, and Tom had discovered this form of it before he even knew what magic was. He could have pulled out the distributive tables from the back of his Arithmancy textbooks and tried to jury-rig his own spell with a calculated pattern of wand flicks, and a Greco-Latin incantation with the right meter and syllable count. Perhaps he could combine several words, like Mental-Spectate or Psyche-Perception. It would have been the formal method for focusing magical intent if there was no pre-existing spell to use.
Or he could do as he'd done from the age of six years old: use his power and raw intent to infiltrate someone's consciousness. He'd used it in the past to hurt people when they deserved it, or persuade them to do things that he wanted, but the most useful function it had served was to show him the integrity of their character. He always, always knew when people lied to him.
Now it seemed he could do more than gauge their trustworthiness.
He'd seen what lay in Nott's mind.
Tom couldn't tell if it had been Nott's thoughts or his memories, but he knew there was more to it.
And if he'd done it once, he could do it again, replicate the circumstances and direct the precise intent, just as he'd done when he forced the truth out of anyone who dared tell him a lie.
Let me see. Show me!
A great pressure began to form behind his sinuses, a growing strain that made his eyes water and his eyelids twitch.
Then he blinked and his vision had gone blurry; he could hardly see his surroundings—they'd dissolved into a featureless mass, unidentifiable with the exception of the strange, drooping black lump in front of him that stirred the air with its flapping wings and its loud, puffing breaths. This thing was warm and fleshy, just as his Hagrid was, but it wasn't Hagrid—nor was it weak; his instincts had designated it as one to be wary of, a greater predator despite how ungainly it was in its movements, dragging along the ground in clumsy motions that could be felt through the sensory hairs lining the lower segments of his—
Hold on a moment there...
Sensory hairs?
Tom pulled himself back, rubbing his eyes. His vision swam back into its normal state.
What was that?
I think I just saw into the spider's mind, and through its eyes, Tom concluded. This... this has promise.
If only it wasn't so unpleasant to see the world through eight eyes and smell it through a million strands of leg hair. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad once he'd gotten used to it.
Tom stunned the spider and locked it back in the trunk when it was time to go to lunch. He had two weeks of Christmas holidays left; there was no reason why he had to rush his research now.
He might run into complications once the holidays ended and the school term resumed, since the spider needed to be fed regularly if he wanted to keep it alive and in relative good health.
But Tom was a Prefect now, and although Prefects could travel the castle how they liked, most patrols were assigned to the areas around their own House Common Rooms, as they were the places where one could most frequently catch students out of hours. Ravenclaw Prefects, according to what he'd seen on Hermione's patrol schedule, were assigned to the eastern wing of the castle, including the Astronomy Tower, which was reputed to be a romantic place to view the sunset.
As a Slytherin Prefect, he had a reasonable justification if he was found wandering around the dungeons late at night.
Tom decided that having a Prefect badge wasn't as terrible as he thought it would be.
.
.
.
Note on Tom's characterisation in this story:
My interpretation of Tom (and how I've written him in BoaF) is that he's mostly aromantic. He enjoys validation from other people (special treatment, acknowledgement for being the best), and spending time with Hermione, but he doesn't necessarily need to be in a romantic relationship to have that. Of course, these labels and definitions didn't exist in the 1930's, so Tom has trouble articulating his feelings. I also believe that if Tom felt attraction to another human being, it wouldn't be in the same way of boys in his age group, because they are filthy peons and he is not. He wouldn't be interested in period-typical pin-up girls; instead he'd be attracted to power and intelligence first, and physical attributes second. Not the size of a gal's milkducts, but the size of her brain! (Or a fixation on some other body part, maybe.)
So, no, this Tom isn't a player looking to bang. He's a neurotic, egotistical nerd who is too busy obsessing about making himself The Greatest Wizard Ever.