Chapter Text
There has hung a portrait in Hogwarts for generations not so far from the open breezeway leading out onto the sunbeams across the grass, across the lake, and from which can be seen the Quidditch arena. It overlooks what to the common wizard was an utopia. But the portrait’s occupant is seldom there, always off in some other painted land somewhere in the castle.
As long as Tom was a student at Hogwarts he would stand in this breezeway, watching those with friends and a safe home laze about in the sun like cats, and he would take solace in that empty painting’s background. The forest so deep in hue it was only suggestions of black trees in the shadows. It was a scene Tom could see himself in most days. Someplace to hide.
Now, as a professor, Tom strode through that breezeway, never stopping for the portrait. It was just another empty waste of space.
“What are you doing to my office, Headmaster?” Tom tried not to spit fire. He inhaled deep and remembered his manners. “If I may ask.” His quaking hands joined behind his back. No one was supposed to come in here.
“Ah, Tom! Oh, forgive me, my boy; of course I mean Professor Riddle. It takes this old man time to adjust to changes,” Dippet waffled.
“Two years is not so long a time,” Tom said. His affect was perfectly calculated to seem understanding.
“Yes, it does seem slippery some days. Time does, I mean,” Dippet reminisced. “But you don’t need to listen to my ramblings, I’m sure you’re very busy. We’ll leave you to your duties in just a moment, I assure you.”
Stomach dropping, Tom said, “We?”
“Pardon me, Professor Riddle,” a voice came from behind him. The man was tall and slim, obnoxiously dressed, and carried a velvet-draped frame under his arm.
Tom’s smiled wavered. He nodded. “Professor Dumbledore. Excuse me but I’m not sure how I can help you this evening.”
“Oh, none of that, my dear boy. We are here to help you,” Dippet said as Dumbledore walked to the hearth by the dark window. Tom watched, breathing shallowly.
“Albus has thought of the most wonderful idea. We’ve brought you a companion for your office.”
Tom blinked, solidly disallowing his eyes to roll back into his brain. Dumbledore was always suspicious of Tom, but now he was installing a spy in Tom’s office. No doubt whoever occupied that frame was a friend to the old cur.
He could adapt. He only wished he had seen this coming. It would have been better to remove his secrets from their hideaways before the trap was set.
“A companion? You shouldn’t have. I’d only be a bore,” Tom said.
“Not to worry! Albus has found a brilliant match. I daresay you might find you have more in common with the man in this portrait than you’d think!”
The painting now hung, Dumbledore said, “Tom Riddle, I introduce to you Harry Potter.” He pinched the velvet drape and pulled it from the frame.
The young man in the portrait squinted at the brightness, so much lighter than the dark forest he stood him. He wore peasant’s clothes and simple armor, and his hair was a bird’s nest. His eyes were like Venus in the night sky, green and arresting, and they were glaring at Dumbledore.
Tom had much to assess. “Harry Potter? The folk hero?”
“The very one,” Dippet said proudly.
“He’s not a ghost?” One of the first folk songs Tom heard from the wizarding world was about Harry Potter’s ghost and his endless heroics.
Harry Potter’s portrait scoffed. Tom watched carefully as Potter’s eyes wandered around his office. Was he looking for dirt or another painting to hide into?
“I remember you used to be fond of the painting hung in the breezeway to the green. You’ll be interested to know that is the pair to this one. Harry can move between the two freely. However,” Dumbledore said, seeming fond, “he’s been taking sanctuary in this frame for decades, which was hidden in a dark corner of the castle. I’ve been his only company for years.”
Potter’s expression was loathsome.
“Be good to him, Professor Riddle,” Dumbledore said. “I believe it’s time he comes out of his shell.”
Tom was shellshocked, and only vaguely said his goodbyes as Dumbledore and Dippet left his office. He heard them chat as they walked the aisle of his classroom and the closed the heavy doors behind them. When there was silence, they spoke at the same time.
“What has Dumbledore ordered you to do?”
“What the hell did you do?”
Tom reared his head back. Harry in his portrait did the same. Both equally insulted.
“What did I do?!”
“You would only think I’m a spy if you had something to hide. There must be a reason Dumbledore wants eyes in your office, professor,” Harry Potter said. His arms crossed but made no sound. Either portraits’ actions were silent or the leather of his bracers and gambeson were soft.
“So you admit you’re a spy.”
“No, I’m not a spy,” Harry said. He was confident until his eyes wandered to the ground and his bit his cheek.
So even he doesn’t know what Dumbledore expects of him, Tom deduced. In anyone else it would be an opportunity for coercion, but not with valiant, righteous folk hero Harry Potter.
Harry then rolled his eyes and sighed, just like any teenager in Tom’s Defense classes. Whatever his deal with Dumbledore, Harry seemed to decide he wouldn’t worry about it. “So what are you into? Smuggling? Illicit Love Potions? Dark artefact trade? You’re too young to be a professor, anyway.”
“I’m skilled,” Tom corrected. “And too knowledgeable not to hire.”
The hard look in Harry’s eyes, one too close to Dumbledore’s, told of another conclusion: too dangerous.
With a disgusted grimace Tom waved his hand at the portrait and the hearth below the hung frame blazed to life. It was too simple a spell to require his wand. But it seemed to solidify that look in Harry’s eye.
Tom rolled back his shoulders. In a hero’s eye, the suspicion was… flattering.
He walked around his desk, trailing his hand across the wood as he spun his tale. “Would you believe me if I told you Dumbledore has hated me since I was eleven years old? I’ve never understood his vendetta against me. It was just a clever child trapped in a muggle orphanage. I didn’t have a great name, or wealth, or influence. In the eyes of his senseless obsession, if I do so little as deduct points from a Gryffindor student he suspects me of evil acts.
“So I will ask you one final time, Harry Potter, hero of the downtrodden: what has Dumbledore ordered you to do?”
Harry watched him from his painted forest with a measuring gaze, surely trying to discern how much of Tom’s story was a lie. As they squared up, calculations palpable in the space between them, there was a knock on his office door.
“Professor? Professor Riddle?” a student hissed.
Tom swooped to his door, trying not to look like he was trying to catch a squealing kettle. The portrait watched, a clear view of his visitors: three sixth years in Slytherin robes, looking up to their professor with syrupy eyes.
“Nettle. Aves. Raywood,” he named each briskly. Nettle made to open his mouth but Tom interrupted. “It’s near curfew, students. Surely any questions you have regarding nixies can wait for the morning.”
Nettle’s brow furrowed. “But…”
Aves asked in her squeaky voice, “Nixies, sir?”
Raywood glared.
His back to the portrait, Tom raised a dominating brow. Such attitudes required adjustment.
Later.
“I won’t tolerable argument. Return to your dormitories at once. Or need I deduct house points?”
The lot of them turned around slowly, confusedly. As they took the steps down into the classroom Tom spoke again. “Rest well, students. I’ve heard inklings of a Herbology quiz tomorrow.”
Closing his office door, Tom looked to the watching portrait. How was his performance? Had he been sufficiently professorly? But the portrait was empty, only the hollow forest left behind.
On his way to send a message to his followers and right the wrongs of the night before, Professor Riddle strode past the corridor that lead out to the greens. But he froze in his steps. Something wasn’t right. And then he realized why: the forest painting, the matching frame to the one now in his office, was no longer there.
Tom’s mouth twitched, holding back his sneer.
Dumbledore had taken the partner frame.
A spy after all.