Chapter Text
“Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world.
Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.”
-Rumi
He burns. Slithers of ice and tongues of fire graze his skin, freezing him, engulfing him. There is nothing but the chorus he hears now, nothing but the screams of a thousand generations never laid to rest. He is infinite. He is nothing and everything and then suddenly, he just Is.
Everything, the howling winds, the burning, the endless light, it all just stops.
And he breathes.
Slowly, his senses come back to him. Muffled voices and bursts of noise are wobbly and faded, as if underwater, but he hears them. Shapes are undefined and blurry but he sees them. He feels little sensation other than pressure but he feels it.
And then his senses begin to sharpen.
The bursts of noise become explosions, the voices become screams. For a moment, he is terrified that he has failed, that he has simply moved place, straight from the safety of Hogwarts’ walls to the chaos of wartime London. Then the shapes sharpen and he sees it- his beloved Hogwarts in flames.
This is the future Hermione told him about. This is the time of the Girl in the Smoke.
Pushing himself up, off of the hard ground, he looks around him.
He is just beyond Hogwarts’ walls, out on the grass, and he can see the Groundskeeper’s hut in the distance with the Forbidden Forest not far behind.
The majority of the noise seems to be coming from roughly around the entrance courtyard, although it’s falling quieter, now.
He can just make out a parade of dark figures moving swiftly from the Forbidden Forest along the bridge leading to the Courtyard. One stands out beyond the rest and even from this distance Tom can see their skin is unnaturally pale and grey as a corpse. His pulse quickens.
He may not have long.
He feels a sharp prick in his chest as he turns.
Definitely not long.
Tom Riddle sweeps past the standing stones and into the school. It is chaos. Spells fly madly around him, green, red, yellow. They are thrown haphazardly, with little care, the casters simply meaning to take out as many of their opponents as they can as quickly as they can.
There is no elegance in war, he knows this.
People pay him little mind as he passes through the fray (they are too busy focusing on their own battles) but as the fighting dies down and people begin to move, to shuffle towards the courtyard as if pulled by invisible strings, he casts a quick invisibility spell and hides.
The Head Boy observes them carefully. His uniform is clearly outdated, for a start (and he doesn’t even have all of it- he’s still missing socks and shoes for the ritual had required him to be grounded to the earth through touch and he hadn’t exactly been able to bring spares).
They all appear quite war torn, too- injured, bruised, beaten and bloody. Their faces are gaunt and haunted, devoid of almost all hope. These are the faces he sees everywhere in Muggle London.
These are faces he has caused.
He scans the bodies at his feet, at the beaten and broken corpses of Hogwarts students- Hogwarts students- Children, young adults at best- and tries to beat down the rising horror, the rising nausea in his throat.
I did this. I did this.
That stills him, for a moment.
Then he swallows and gets back to the task at hand.
Quickly, he finds one suitable to his needs. He checks for a pulse and finds one- faint, but there. Tom hesitates.
He casts a quick diagnostic spell (one of his own design, one he’s particularly proud of) and checks the boy’s vitals.
He’s unconscious, and badly injured, but he’ll live.
He’s also roughly Tom’s height, age, and build.
He studies the boy- teenager- for a moment, analysing his sharp cheekbones softened by smiles, the neat sweep of his hair, and the careful put-togetherness of his uniform. Tom wonders if he, himself could’ve looked a little like this, in better circumstances.
Just a brilliant boy from Slytherin. Brilliant, great, and most importantly, good.
And then Tom begins to cast.
He transfigures his clothing to match the teen’s and his hair to follow the same careful sweep. He burns and distresses the fabric of his new uniform and, after a brief hesitation, takes his cloak, tie, and shoes. They’re a decent fit and don’t pinch not hang too loosely on his lean frame. The colours are odd to wear but blue looks good on him and that really doesn’t matter now-
He throws another student’s cloak (this one definitely gone) over the boy and runs after the students, hoping that whatever is going down in the courtyard, he is not too late to stop his future self and save Hermione.