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A clanging closet opened abruptly as Professor Lupin spoke. It revealing a misty-looking figure in the meanwhile.
Harry was idle, thoughts drifting in his mind, as his professor went through the motions of guiding each student one-by-one towards the mysterious figure; a boggart.
The representative of one's fears.
Harry couldn’t help but think that Lupin should’ve been more mindful of the creature he decided to show this day. After all, half the children here were children born of death eaters and another few had experienced quite the tumultuous years before; case in point, Harry himself, having faced the Dark Lord not only as a baby, but in his first year of school.
But it seemed to Harry Potter that this year he’d have another DADA professor willing to put children in danger and Professor Lupin protecting Harry from the dementors before did not negate that fact.
Regardless, the boy knew he’d have to suffer through this sequence of events, even if untrusting of the adult ahead of him, just like all the rest that had failed him.
Harry stayed watching as each child before him both screamed and faced their fear in stages, mind distant and distracted.
He was the Boy Who Lived after all, a boy with many things or people to fear.
“Harry-?” A deep, almost recognisable voice brought him back to reality. Professor Lupin was awaiting his attention.
It seemed it was finally his turn to meet the boggart Lupin so desperately wanted his class to confront.
“Come on Harry, it’s your turn now.” Ron spoke, a calm and tempering voice trying to coax his best friend out of his apprehension.
Yet the Gryffindor had just witnessed him screech in shock at the boggart’s transformation into a bundle of crawling acromantulas. However, with all the false comforts of Ronald Weasley, Harry felt a sense of love twisting within him. Never before had somebody ever treasured him so deeply as to want to comfort Harry from pain.
Most certainly the Dursleys would never.
But ever since he got swept into this life of mystical magic and drama, the Dursleys were miniscule on his radar, essentially lesser in his mind compared to the importance of all that was murderous or magic.
Harry Potter apprehensively took steps forth, mind flashing with possibilities.
Remembering the green light flashing onto a red-headed woman; Lily Potter, his mother.
The disturbing homonculus-like combination of Professor Quirrell and Voldemort twisted into a united force of evil.
But there was something else that was creeping amongst the back of his thoughts… less outwardly evil but all the more terrifying for Harry Potter.
The wardrobe shuffled and bashed onto the floor, creating noises so loud they garnered a flinch out of Harry, for it seemed it finally was his time to face his fear in front of a whole class of judgy children.
Children, who had not too long ago hated him with an intensity much too relatable to the scorn the Dursleys and the muggles he knew in childhood gave him. Who Dumbledore depended on him to save.
Regardless, Harry knew he had no real choice in confronting his fear or whom he’d be doing so in front of.
Lupins’ order’s to step closer pounded in his head like a drum, over and over again. He didn’t know if he could handle the result. Or rather, what reaction the masses would enact amongst the Wizarding World. Always looking to judge his every move, no matter how innocent it was.
He finally took his last footsteps over to the boggart, with a sense of apprehension still within him.
Suddenly a black motion emerged out of the wooden enclosure. Tumbling down onto the stone floor was an object.
A book in fact.
And now a figure swirled into existence, replacing Harry’s focus from the diary onto the boyishly handsome person in front of him.
Tom Riddle lay before him. Perfect as he had always been, robes fitted perfectly, prefect badge proud on show, and not a hair out of place.
Yet there was something off about him all the same.
His eyes.
Eyes were said to be the window to the soul, so what could that mean for a boy of such evil, Harry had to wonder.
“Hah! How pathetic! The Golden Boy of Hogwarts, afraid of some Slytherin!” Draco Malfoy screeched, his pointy nose all the more prominent with the great sneer in his face.
A sharp voice paused all chattering comments, pulling Harry into a trance of sorts. “Harry Potter,”
“Tom.”
“Here we are again, at last.”
Faces turned all around to gossip, Harry knew. All questioning who was the boy in front of their Saviour and why he was deemed more of a threat than the snake-faced genocidal murderer of his parents.
“Again? I’d rather not see you at all.” Harry Potter kept his cool, neither his eyes nor voice showing any sign of discontent.
“Oh is that why you fear me so strongly then?” The smarmy Slytherin retaliated, a smirk protruding on his face in the moment.
While the girls blushed at his looks, it seemed Professor Lupin was much more apprehensive towards the figure in front of his student, something the aforementioned boy appreciated greatly, for it was improbable for him to find an adult who cared.
“Or… rather is it that you fear our similarities.”
Harry stayed silent. Tom had figured him out.
“Hm, it all makes sense,” Riddle stared deep into Harry’s eyes before taking a strong grip on his chin. “Why you’d fear me more than my counterpart… my past, present and future.”
As Tom Riddle trailed off with his words, Harry was taken back to the night he had met the physical body of Tom.
Those words were hauntingly clear. And full of a truth Harry had not dared to speak except once to Dumbledore. His fear was all the greater for that. Because their pasts were near identical, albeit with some differences, and the fate which Riddle was led to could easily be Harry’s in the future.
“You don’t want to be like me.” He laughed, a high-pitch tone similar to the haunting chuckles that filled Harry’s nightmares.
Lupin was confused, but stern nonetheless, a strong presence wanting to help,“Harry-?”
“I can deal with this, Professor.”
Smirking once-more, Tom Riddle continued to cause ire in his rival across time, “Oh, can you?”
“Riddi-”
“Greater men than you cower at my feet and you think you can face me- at any age?” His voice close to an enraged tone, yet there was a sense of incredulity within.
Harry continued nonetheless in his endeavours, “Riddiku- ridd-”
The Gryffindor’s wand was quavering in his hand while not even whispers of the spell were able to come out of his mouth.
“What a coward!” Pansy Parkinson was seemingly fed up of viewing the boggart in the form of a Slytherin, her pug-nose up in Malfoy’s space while she gossiped and simpered, all the while a faint blush was donned on her face as she took quick looks at Riddle’s handsome looks.
“See, Harry you cannot get rid of me, we are too similar. You’d essentially be killing a part of yourself.” As he said that, his eyes flashed from brown to green; matching the striking eyes only Harry and his deceased mother shared.
Now shared with his enemy, no-matter how quick the moment was. His connection with his mother had been tainted.
“Both half-blood orphans, both forced upon dreadful muggles- who didn’t understand how superior we were to them,” Riddle trailed on, eyes drilled onto Harry, so darkened with fury that they were almost black.
Harry’s back arched downwards in a sense of shame.
He was embarrassed.
For all his accomplishments and all his power, at the end of the day, Harry James Potter still felt like the little pathetic boy who was a freak without parents and alone in the world.
The Dursleys in particular had really drilled that into his mind. But not only them, the whole neighbourhood of muggles felt contempt for Harry, and in turn he felt the same in regards to them.
“Stand up straight Harry, you needn’t pay those muggles any attention,” Tom sneered with particular focus on the derogatory term, fuelled with personal hatred.
“I am what you should be focusing on. We both have a connection to the Great Salazar Slytherin, there is a strange likeness between us- even Dumbledore himself noted it!”
Harry snapped, “Shut up!”
The students looked at him in shock but Harry didn’t care for their opinion anymore, he could take the scorn as he always did, but what he desired now was Tom’s words.
“ Potter-! Who is this boy?” Ever the impatient boy, Malfoy had to interject.
“We even look alike, the similarities are all there… my fate so closely entwined with yours.” Riddle’s voice was soft, almost enticing with his tone.
“You know it, you and I are the same.”
“I will never be like you!”
Students' whispers sounded like soft scurrying of rats, unfazing Harry as his mind was set on Tom Marvolo Riddle now and forevermore. He was used to their scorn of his ability and he didn’t care when it allowed him to communicate with this paragon of evil.
“Harry Potter-”
Lupin, again, interrupting something much greater than he. A clash of tongue between two mortal enemies.
“Professor, I said he is mine to deal with! And I am not backing down- I’ve always gotten him before and I will today.” Harry alleged, making it evident to those listening that this was no ordinary boy before their eyes, but rather this handsome boy would grow to be the sinister boogeyman of the Wizarding World.
He Who Must Not Be Named.
“There’s a difference between you and I, Riddle, that you haven’t even thought of!”
“What?” Tom Riddle snarked, speaking boldly with arrogance, “It’ll be nothing in comparison to the sheer amount of similarities we share.”
“I care for people, you- you have nobody!”
A bitter look of hurt was on Riddle’s face, quickly replaced by an obnoxious mask, as he had once carried.
“My friends Ron, Hermione, Neville- they are important to me and that’s what makes us different.” Harry had found it ridiculous that Dumbledore believed love destroyed Voldemort, but love knows no bounds and is what makes him unlike Riddle, “You don’t care for people, you make friends and discard them- as you did to me and Ginny.”
“So-?”
“We will never be the same!”
“I-”
“Riddikulus!” Harry’s phoenix-feather wand held firm in his hand, aimed directly at Riddle’s worried face.
The boy who tormented him was gone.
Even if he hid elder self may remain, Harry was thankful, for he could have but a moment of rest now.
The Gryffindor finally came to a realisation that he had a public audience watching his every move in that moment.
“What?” Harry was unbothered to answer anyone’s words, “You guys thought I’d also get Snape in woman’s clothes? That’s too traumatising to see again!”
His joking words filled with snark make them all begin to chatter in both annoyance and intrigue, but Harry took this time to take his place away from the boggart, reaching his friends yet again.
“Harry?” Ron tapped him on the shoulder, eyes furrowed in confusion.
“Yes?”
“Was that-?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” Ron looked up to his best friend, face stuck in a bewildered expression, “That’s intense mate.”
Harry was hoping in his mind Ron wouldn’t make this a big deal, he’d been sick of everyone talking about him from the day he’d stepped into this world.
“Well d’you wanna go get some food?” Ron spoke with a grin, “A little elf we both know told me treacle tart is on the menu!”
Leading Harry with his arm atop the boy’s shoulder in a friendly hold, Ron was simply ready to get back to routine, and routine called for some snacks.
That’s what Harry loved the most in the world.
His friends.
And that’s what separated him from the likes of Tom Riddle.
Love.
Love wasn’t as ridiculous as Harry had thought.
No matter how odd Dumbledore was, it seemed he was right.
Love was the power which destroyed Voldemort.