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Let’s talk about Tom Riddle, whose father left and whose mother died, who grew up with harsh hands and harsher voices and a war spitting to life outside his bedroom window, who learned to make himself strong and take what he wants and survive.
In a couple decades, there will be a study done on monkeys starved of kind touch and maternal warmth. They grow up strange and wrong, those monkeys, and if Tom Riddle, Voldemort by then, heard about it he would have scoffed but this is an experiment done in the muggle world and by then he will have cast the world that raised him but never loved him off like a cloak into the dust. He would have said his mother was weak and he is stronger for her absence, that his father was a filthy muggle and he’s glad he never met him but to cast the killing curse, and maybe these things will be true to him then but they weren’t, once.
Tom Riddle grew up starved of touch and warmth. His mother held him once, then died. Is it any wonder he tried so hard to flee from death?
When he was younger, he stared at the stars and the vastness of the night and it took his breath away. When he was younger, he yearned with open hands and dreamed of flying, of family, of reaching out and touching the sky. (The couples who came to the orphanage never wanted him, this dirty orphan whose eyes even then were just a little too sharp, and he grew older and colder and he learned not to care, to want himself.
This is what happens when you grow up told that you are nothing: in your head, you make yourself everything.)
This is not about forgiveness. It is not about pity, either. It is about understanding, or at least trying to.
When Tom is eleven, a man with a red beard just starting to fray white comes to the orphanage and Tom thought he knew what this is. Cole had never liked him, after all, his too-sharp eyes and words he learned to carve into knives, the way she could never catch him when rabbits hung themselves and children became shells but always knew it was him. “Tell the truth!” he says and he makes it an order.
The man just looks at him, smiling steadily, but Tom can see the hardness lurking in his eyes, just past the twinkle.
(This is not a story about Albus Dumbledore, but let’s talk about him for just a moment. About how he looked at this young boy, this survivor, in front of him and saw just another charismatic young Dark Lord and how he refused to let himself care for this one, too. Let’s talk about how Dumbledore thought everyone could be saved but not this child. Let’s talk about how people become what others make them.)
He is introduced to magic not with wonder but with violence, with control. The hard-eyed professor who sees another when he looks at Tom sets his wardrobe on fire and forces him to return his stolen treasures, the ones Tom clutches on bad nights to remind himself he is strong, he is powerful, he is alive, alive, alive. But even so, it is magic, he is magic, (he has always known he was special) and the words tumble out of him in a rush.
“I can make them hurt if I want to,” he says, and Professor Dumbledore’s eyes go even harder. Tom had thought, foolishly, that the professor would have understood. That he was not alone. (He will always be alone). But the other orphans hurt each other, and him, too, before he taught them not to. They used their fists, not magic, but they could make someone hurt if they wanted to. (Tom is just better than them, he had thought, he had always thought, because he has true power while they just have blunt fists, but watching his wardrobe go up in flames he realizes that he is nothing against Dumbledore.)
(He vows that someday, Dumbledore will think the same about him.
Tom is done being powerless.)
“I can go on my own,” Tom says when the professor offers to take him to get his things, because he doesn’t need anybody to help him but also because it’s so clear he isn’t wanted. (Again.)
It doesn’t matter, he thinks. He wants himself.
He steps into the Great Hall and the enchanted ceiling looks like the night skies of his childhood. He hates it, now, for how small it makes him feel. How insignificant. Tom jerks his eyes away. When the Hat slips over the head of this boy, this boy who wants so much so badly, who no longer yearns with open hands but takes with them, who has clawed his way to untouchable in a vicious orphanage, who can make them hurt if he wants to, the Hat barely wastes a second before crying, “SLYTHERIN!”
Tom Riddle is not wanted in his house. They call him mudblood, worthless, nothing. He will make them want him, someday. He will make them bend to the floor and kiss his worthless mudblood feet and he will laugh. For now, though, he keeps up pretense. He’s learned to lie in those years of wanting, to shift his faces like jewelry into what will please those around him most. The only one he can’t win over is Dumbledore, who will always see Grindelwald when he looks at Tom’s handsome features until those features twist and distort and then Dumbledore will see a monster. Tom doesn’t know this, though, and just tries harder.
He is sent home over the summers, to a country at war, and he huddles by the window and watches the world burn. His magic is strong but not strong enough to protect him from this, and Tom hates nothing more than being powerless.
The war gets worse. Time passes in leaps and jolts, one summer to the next, and every year it gets worse. He all but begs Headmaster Dippit to let him stay at Hogwarts but he shakes his head and smiles and sends him straight into the Blitz. It is here that Tom learns to fear death. Learns to count each shaking second like they could be his last, and he has never felt weaker.
When he goes back to Hogwarts that year, he is different. Quieter. The other Slytherins see his power and they bow to him, this boy they once called worthless, because they can see the ambition burning brighter in him than in anyone else. Can see the power sparking through his veins. He whispers crucio and their screams fill his ears and a gnawing void inside his chest. (It’s never enough, though. He makes them scream again and again, to remind himself he is strong, he is powerful, he is alive, alive, alive, but there are bombs echoing in his skull and he makes them scream and scream and tries to drown it out.)
He convinces Slughorn to sign a pass to him for the restricted area of the library. Slughorn agrees readily. He’s Tom Riddle, after all—model student, quiet and responsible and always, always perfect. What could be the harm? Slughorn thinks, and he will think this again later, when Tom asks him about rending his soul in seven, but that’s a story for later. Tom spends his days reading and researching and then he finds a path to immortality (to strength, to the end of fear, to power.) A life for a life, he thinks, that’s not so bad. Thousands die in the streets every day, and his life is worth so much more.
(This is what happens when you grow up told that you are nothing: in your head, you make yourself everything.)
After he finds the book, something loosens in his chest. His fear is gone, or at least it will be soon, and loneliness expands to fill it. There is no one in this castle who is his equal, he thinks, but he is so, so lonely. He finds the snake carved into the tap in the girl’s bathroom because he was lonely and wanted to be alone. He found the snake and whispered to it because he’d always liked snakes (because he was lonely) and the snake answered.
A passage opens up. Tom steps through it. He had stopped looking up at the night sky years ago, but the darkness still calls to him.
He fashions himself a new name, stitched of anagrams and fears. Tom is ordinary, is plain and muggle and forgettable. (Tom is the name of a past he wants to forget, is the name of a mortal boy shaking as the world explodes around him.) I am Lord Voldemort, he thinks late at night, and tells himself it is strength. Voldemort, meaning flight of death. Death will flee from me, he thinks. I will carry death in my hands, he thinks. I flee from death, he does not think, but it is more true than all the rest.
He kills when he is sixteen. It is an accident, really, and he kneels in a puddle next to the unmoving form of a dead girl and feels empty and hollow and so, so cold. He didn’t mean to, he thinks, but it doesn’t matter, she’s dead and it might as well have been on purpose, might as well have been a flash of green light instead of yellow eyes. There’s a ritual on his tongue and bombs in his ears and a dead girl at his feet. His soul is ruined enough already, he thinks. He might as well do it proper and tear it apart.
He puts a piece of himself in a diary and seals it away, this part of him he can’t bear to look at. The last part of him that was ever mortal, ever weak. He’ll give it to Lucius Malfoy, later, because he will hear it whispering to him at night, that boy pressed between pages, stuck forever at sixteen, knees damp. That is later, though. Now, his fingers are shaking, just a little bit. He wonders if he’ll be able to feel that missing bit of soul, like a tongue probing a lost tooth. A gap.
That night, he steps outside into the dewy grass and looks up at the sky and there’s no wonder at the vastness of it, no rage at feeling small. He feels nothing. He’s safe, he thinks, he’s powerful, he’s strong, he’s defeated death so why—why does he feel so empty?