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His House asks him constantly if he hates muggles. Those he grew up with, the ones who dirtied his bloodline, those he has never met and never will. It’s their way of making him uncomfortable, a stone in his shoe as he walks through halls they claim as their birthright. He answers 'yes', because it is true enough.
Hatred may be a strong word for it.
Tom has never been passionate, and hatred conjures a depth of feeling he has only felt for specific individuals. Mrs. Cole, who could lock him away for impertinence, who once broke his fingers during a caning after he was caught stealing. His parents, who abandoned him through death or disinterest. Dumbledore. Always, always Dumbledore.
Muggles, as a tedious whole, lack the distinction that drives Tom to loathing. It can’t be denied that he had little affection for them. Weak, powerless and blind, with none of the redeeming factors of wealth and prestige that his peers offer. Muggles are useless and intent on drawing him into the bloody churn of their tiny lives.
But still: unremarkable as rats.
If there’s any group of people who make Tom seethe, it’s those he’s suddenly packed in close with.
Society’s dull crop. The privileged few that he’s sharing a dorm with: silly children with deep pockets and old blood. People seated comfortably on piles of dusty galleons, content with ambitions of inheritance and petty dynastic squabbles.
It baffles him that anyone would be content to rest on another’s laurels and never strive for more.
If any of his housemates were to ever condescend to consider his opinions of them, they would mark it down to envy. And if they ever let those thoughts slip to his face, Tom isn’t sure even his self-control would abide it.
So Tom keeps his disdain for his housemates locked behind good teeth. (The matron regrew them, so straight and white and pretty, when Tom was attacked his second year. How sad that they never caught who did it.) (In Tom's trunk, among too-expensive quills and other people’s family photos, is a stone from the lake with his own blood painted into the cracks.) He nurses his grudges over years and horrid summer holidays, allows resentment to sour into something venomous slipping down the back of his throat.
It smoothes his voice into a polished lilt, erases the burr of the gutter wanting to creep in at the edges.
And so it goes. Having the pulse of the world under his fingers makes putting up with these small-minded people worth it, makes them better than Wool’s if only because sometimes the crackle of magic from his classmates’ wands smells like potential. Hogwarts is his home, and though they aren’t like him, these are his people.
Tom is patient. He will grab them by the neck and drag them to heights they are afraid to dream of.
And then, in his fifth year, everything changes.
There’s a monster in the school.
There’s a monster in the school and it isn’t Tom.
When he was at Wool’s, he buried himself in books. The wireless in the orphanage was monopolized by the caretakers and any games the other children played always stopped when he came near. Even for a child with a bright imagination, there are only so many ways to entertain yourself on the streets. Not if you wanted to avoid a heavy cuff round your ear. So Tom learned to devour any books he could find. Even the cheap romances that the older girls passed around; one summer Tom practiced his expressions in the mirror until his cheeks ached, wondering what made a scowl different from a frown, and why one was more alluring than the other.
As was the case for most English boys, Tom devoured tomes of Kipling. He laughed over the kings of Kafiristan, and told the tale of Nag and Nagaina to scandalized garden snakes when he was very young.
As a rule, novels were more readily available than instructive texts, which had to be stolen from school cupboards and returned quickly or risk a lashing when the rooms were searched. Tom learned young that any information was to be treasured, and then hidden away. If people knew you had something that they didn’t, it would be taken away from you. At least the storybooks were frequently donated by well-meaning souls with something to spare.
Standing in the chamber, Tom remembers a different snake from those childhood books. A beastly serpent, old and wise and always hungry. In front of him, a basilisk spills from the mouth of Slytherin.
The old plea for help. ‘We be of one blood, ye and I.'
Even without magic, people believe deeply in the power of words.
In the Chamber, Tom feels afraid for the first time in years. He has pride in who he is, and the history living on in his veins. But he can’t claim the purity. Not the kind Salazar Slytherin vaunted, that his housemates cling to even as they scurry from him. He has no family, no name.
All Tom has to offer is his hunger.
The gnawing in his belly that wants more than ration cards, or admiration, or OWL scores and a social ladder to climb.
There is a good chance that this monster will find him wanting, and he’ll come to an inglorious end.
She does not.
He listens to the basilisk, her soft words of gratitude and flattery for his cleverness in finding the chamber when so many others failed. She’s beautiful; larger than any snake he has met or heard of. She must have shed many times and eaten her fill through the years to be so large, but her teeth and mind are undulled by time.
He does not trust her. There is nothing that she says that rings false, only the prickling wariness on the back of his neck that here is a creature that he can claim honest kinship with. Not because of Slytherin, heir or not. But because he knows how it feels to drip honey in someone's ear, to offer everything they want on a gilded platter, and to sink a knife in their back. To make it hurt, just because you can.
Tom has only ever known kindness to be bartered for, and he knows that the price for immortality will be great.
He is prepared to pay it.
Where there is life, there is hope. And despite himself, Tom has always been a creature of hope. That he was different from the insignificant children shivering beside him in the orphanage, that he can take this indolent world and make something better of it. That he will have the time to do so.
Tom Riddle fears death more than anything - more than humiliation, than poverty, than the indignity of chiseling away his humanity.
She curls closer. He can't tell if she is curious or thinks she knows him- possibly both. She knows what he will do with the knowledge she offers, certainly.
Tom stares into the trap she's laid before him and reaches out to take it with both hands.
Pain, and suffering, and the curse of living a soulless life.
It may be one of the few blessings of being Tom Riddle that he knew emptiness long before he ever heard of horcruxes.