Chapter Text
It starts with an abandoned, dripping book. Harry finds it half flushed down the toilet. Someone’s name remains on the diary's cover. Someone gave up on their dreams, left their ambitions all alone, tried to ruin them instead of nurturing them and letting them grow.
As much as Harry tries (oh how he tries) to play the hero, he knows he is not so different from this diary. (abandoned) He remembers the words of his “relatives,” the note of disappointment in Aunt Petunia’s voice that she has to keep him, his no-good parents drunk and leaving him all on his own with no one to love him.
His parents are war heroes, he reminds himself in the dead of night when the pain of loneliness crushes all his hopes of happiness. They gave their lives for him. They died for me, but dying is easy. Why couldn’t they LIVE for me? (Abandoned.)
So Harry picks up the book and dries it with a towel instead of his wand. He knows it is irrational to treat the diary as though it is precious, as though it is touch-deprived and in need of affection ... but Harry is. Harry is in desperate need of gentle touch; he thinks that ‘Tom Marvolo Riddle,’ whoever he may be (or may have been) would have wanted a gentle touch too.
The pages of the diary are blank. Perhaps the ink washed clean off. Perhaps the abandoner never decided to write. (Given up on before your first words)
Harry wants to say something ... only, he doesn’t want to write. He’s been doodling on the back of discarded receipts and stray bits of paper since he was barely able to speak. He’s wanted somewhere to allow his images to connect to parchment, to spread out across a blank canvas and colour a white world into magic. He wants to feel a pen in his hand like a wand in his palm, capable of creation like gods.
So he does not write ‘Hello’ on the blank page of the diary. He does not write anything at all.
He draws.
He draws the whomping willow and the trunk that twists and rages. He draws the violent branches and the scraping leaves and he can almost hear the wounded pride of the wind as it sails between the tree’s boughs. He can taste the bitterness of the wood, smell the musk of sodden bark. He can feel loneliness and at first, it does not matter because he thinks the loneliness is his own ... but then he remembers the tree. A lonely, violent tree, pushing everyone away because it is so afraid it will be left alone. (Abandoned.)
When he looks down at the page of the diary, the page that had been so empty not so long ago, he feels something new flare in his chest. Pride. The whomping willow looks real, black lines casting shadows and twisting with a hint of motion. It’s as if just a bit of his magic has gone into the parchment to bring his sketch to life.
***
Tom Marvolo Riddle stares down at the book in his hand with no small amount of surprise. When he went into the diary, he had imagined that he would be asleep. He instead found himself in a pale imitation of Hogwarts, (only the parts he remembered) ... he found around the edges, the castle faded into Wool’s. He is trapped in a dreamland made of a nightmare, alone in a castle devoid of color. He holds a book that looks like the diary and no matter where he leaves it in his dreamscape, it always finds itself in his hands the moment someone writes to him. They write from back up There, in the world Tom cannot help but hope is still real.
So he listens to the people who pour out their hearts to him. He waits until he can take their souls too. Tom Marvolo Riddle is many things, but he has waited for over five decades in a barren wasteland of his own ambition. He will not be forgotten. He will not be abandoned.
The girl, Ginny, talked about her crush (a boy worth looking into, killing his living self as a baby, most disquieting) and her own feelings of inadequacy. She is a diamond in the rough, Tom knows. Her soul is tantalizing, her magic strong. But her mind, her mind is so very weak. Tom has enjoyed breaking it.
“I’m going mad Tom.”
Are you? How very sad.
'The transition to boarding school is very hard Ginny. It’s perfectly normal.'
“Tom, I woke up with blood on my robes.”
Oh, poor thing. That was my fault, wasn’t it?
“I’m sorry, Ginny. I’m a bit squeamish about girl stuff. Maybe go see the school nurse?”
“Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom--”
Do be quiet, Ginny! Nobody cares about you.
'I’m here, my dear. No need to fret.'
But then she stops writing from up There, that infernal weak-minded girl. He is left in the lavatory. Half flushed. (Abandoned.)
He is picked up again. Picked up by a boy, not much older than the girl, simply brimming with magic. He is dried by hand and it feels like a gentle caress. The dungeons within the shadow Hogwarts warm almost imperceptibly.
Tom opens the book. He waits. He waits for the first word to appear. It is almost always 'Hello.'
He waits and sees the first splatter of ink, only it does not form a word at all. It slowly curves and lengthens to form a trunk, then dances to fashion blades of grass, then jumps to sketch out branches and leaves, and --
Tom can hear the wind.
For reasons he cannot understand he goes up out of his shadow dungeons and past the skeleton of his memory out onto the field that is blank in perpetual winter. And impossibly right there, growing on the frozen ground is the tree being drawn in his book. Formed of ink, the tree sways ever so slightly in a gentle breeze. The book cools, alerting Tom that the artist has finished his work. And, astonishingly, (impossibly, perhaps even more than the tree), Tom wants to hold on to this message. He always discards what the people write to him, never of any consequence. But this tree is powerful and new, and angry, and ... lonely. Like him.
He presses one hand to the page of the diary and one hand to the inky ghost of the tree in front of his chest. The tree from the book draws into one palm, flows up the vein on his wrist, dying it black, and then through his heart and out his other palm and ... the ink-tree solidifies and becomes a tree of wood. One of the branches tickles Tom above his left rib.
His hands drip with ink the color of midnight but he cannot gather the desire to care.
He absorbs the beauty of the tree, the first tree that is not a ghost of memory in this shell of a world ...
He feels the blossom of a new desire.
Tom does not want to destroy the soul on the other side of this book. The beautiful soul that gave him a tree is not a soul destined for destruction. It is a soul glowing with the magic of creation. It is glorious and it is Tom’s. They will not be (abandoned).