Chapter Text
This is a story about three children. Two of them live.
The third one, well... It gets complicated.
Tom Riddle had never planned for such a return.
It was a tremendous feat. It ought not to have been possible for this broken-off piece of him to be once more standing there in the flesh, a ressurected sixteen-year-old youth plucked out from the past. Yet he had accomplished it!
However...
All was not well.
Not yet.
His form still flickered with a faint, ghastly glow, as if he were not quite real, though already he was as solid a part of his surroundings as the two unfortunates stuck in the Chamber with him.
He carefully tried out his new body: he could sneak across the hard, slippery stones, and he could silently pick up a wand without its young owner noticing. Most importantly of all, he could feel his magic prickling underneath his fingertips, waiting to be released upon an unsuspecting world.
"Are you a ghost?" The skinny twelve-year-old boy asked him, uncertainty blooming in his comically worried eyes.
"A memory", Riddle lied smoothly.
I am so much more than that.
"Preserved in a diary for fifty years", he clarified, because the boy did not seem all that quick on the uptake.
Harry Potter did not look very reassured, but still wasted no time in asking Riddle for help with utterly naïve conviction. Riddle smiled agreeably at the foolish child, keeping his real emotions hidden. They were a surprising mix of pride and embarrassment, truth be told.
On the one hand, he could not hide his pleasure at his own cleverness. His foresight in creating a contingency in case he ever met an unpleasant end was nothing short of brilliant.
He tried to nudge Potter into figuring out that he was doomed by giving several choice conversational remarks, but the boy seemed adamant in trusting that Riddle was an ally. A friend. It was awfully amusing.
"How did Ginny get like this?" The boy finally asked.
...On the other hand, it was enormously frustrating for a dormant Dark Lord to have depended on being a squeaking first-year girl's bloody pen pal for his continued existence.
(The less said about the experience of receiving pink glitter ink on his diary pages, the better.)
Yet he had always been very good at using what limited resources he had at his disposal, so needless to say, eventually his nauseating efforts at pretending to be nice had paid off.
"If I say it myself, Harry, I’ve always been able to charm the people I needed. Ginny poured out her soul to me, and her soul happened to be exactly what I wanted. I grew stronger and stronger on a diet of her deepest fears, her darkest secrets."
He had been well-fed. The girl was now dying in a pitiful little heap on the stone floor of the Chamber of Secrets, the last remaining magic from her soul siphoning itself off into his renewed life force.
And the boy? Alone, wandless, trapped and awaiting Lord Voldemort's mercy, which of course would not be forthcoming.
Enough playing around. Time to finish this, Riddle decided smugly, idly whisking the boy's stolen wand like a conductor's baton. The only options awaiting poor little Harry were either instant death by basilisk stare or slow digestion after a brief and intimate acquaintance with Slytherin's monster's many-fanged maw.
All in all, things were looking pretty great for Tom Marvolo Riddle – until Dumbledore's phoenix came flapping along like an ill omen, its heart-rending song immediately transforming the grin on his handsome face into a vicious snarl. Annoyingly, the Potter boy grew emboldened by the bird's appearance and began to throw around cheap insults and empty threats.
Riddle forced himself to laugh.
It wouldn't do to sour his impending victory by letting himself be rattled by a mere pet of Dumbledore's. Besides, he had his own creature to deal with such nuisances.
"Kill them", he hissed at the basilisk.
When part of Tom Riddle's soul had transferred into the diary, it had been a strange and disorienting sensation.
The Horcrux ritual was a messy, distasteful job. The dark magic made itself felt every step of the way. It was only through superior willpower that Riddle successfully prevailed against every thought in his mind screaming at him to stop it, please, please, while he still had the chance.
He didn't stop until it was over.
Once the agony dulled into something almost bearable, he felt hollowed out and somehow repugnantly unclean: like a blackened pumpkin gone soft with putrid rot or an eyeless, worm-riddled corpse.
No, actually – he felt nothing at all. He could touch nothing, see nothing, hear nothing, smell nothing, sense nothing. Not even his own heartbeat.
It took an embarrassingly long time to realise that these disquieted musings came from the torn piece of soul embedded into a book, and not himself in the flesh. He felt disembodied panic, then, one that slowly curdled into flat, unyielding fear; until finally a message reached him:
Did it work?
He could not sigh in relief when he saw his own neat handwriting, because he had no lungs. No hands, either, yet due to the nature of the many other enchantments he had placed on the pages, it was possible to imagine writing back.
Yes, he hastily scribbled to himself.
This easy means of exchanging information was the most genius thing about choosing the diary for his first Horcrux. There had been no instructions in Secrets of the Darkest Art on how to communicate with the part of the soul that was cut out.
He had worried about that. After all, the diary had a threefold purpose: it was to keep Lord Voldemort immortal; it was to serve as a weapon in case of a dire need; and finally, it was an additional means to reopen the Chamber and to command its monster by proxy one day. Should the future Lord Voldemort be unable to personally return to Hogwarts at the perfect strategic moment, the diary would be crucial towards victory.
So Riddle had by neccessity gotten exceptionally creative with his spellwork. Not that he would ever be able to boast about it to anyone, unfortunately.
The Riddle fragment supposed his diary must have been hidden in a safe place soon afterwards, for he counted long minutes and yet received no message beyond the initial confirmation of the ritual's success.
Hello, he wrote, when fruitlessly awaiting more news became unbearable.
Sleek ink lettering blossomed on the diary's paper. It stood there a while, glossy and black, before retreating back into the page. Unread.
Perhaps the part of Riddle that still resided free at Hogwarts was tired and in pain. The Horcrux ritual had surely taken a heavy toll on the body.
How goes recovery? Riddle wrote to himself solicitously.
His real-world counterpart did not answer back.
Hello? He tried again, several times, feeling somehow small and immature for so desperately wanting a reply.
He eventually gave up. It was probably unwise for a diary to appear to be writing in itself, should it ever come into the wrong hands.
Time passed. What felt like hours of solitude turned into what felt like days, and then months. Riddle had wondered prior to his Horcrux's creation if he would be able to know what was going on with his real self, perhaps through some kind of innate soul connection, bonding them together beyond mere physical limitations.
Apparently not.
There was something else he had not anticipated. Being trapped in a Horcrux was excruciating to his disembodied mind: forever waiting, languishing, with no visible end to the torment in sight.
Until Ginny came along.
Suddenly having a friend to share his woes with became... useful.
Things were rapidly getting out of control in the Chamber of Secrets.
The basilisk was dead – dead! – with a silver sword gleaming obscenely through its virid serpent's head like a toothpick through an olive.
"No!"
Riddle abruptly sat down, overrun with dismay. He had vastly underestimated the weapons that Dumbledore had sent his young champion.
He ought to have finished the boy personally, he never should have awakened the basilisk so frivolously...
Stop hand-wringing and focus! He admonished himself. He needed to fix this mess.
Thankfully, neither of the captive children were in any state to notice his display of weakness. Ginny was still out cold and Potter was drenched in blood, curled up against a pillar, a gaping wound above his elbow and a splintered snake fang at his feet.
Riddle exhaled slowly. Everything was fine. The basilisk poison would quickly do its work. The boy's suffering would be over, the girl drained dry of her life, and then he could make his bid for freedom.
A small comfort, he thought irritably, avoiding looking at the slain serpent sprawled out in front of him like a broken toy.
Dumbledore's pet had alighted next to Potter. The bird was comforting the dying child, nuzzling at his mangled arm and shedding pearlescent tears of regret. Riddle tried standing up to shoo the bird away, but quickly lowered himself back down again when he felt a sudden dizziness. Perhaps he was overexerting his new body too soon.
"I’m going to sit here and watch you die, Harry Potter", he said. In a mockingly comforting tone, he added:
"Take your time. I’m in no hurry."
With a greedy pleasure, he took in the dull, glazed appearance of Potter's green eyes, the sickly pallour of his filth-coated face.
It was petty to gloat, he knew, but he couldn't help it. Even though Riddle knew of Lord Voldemort's disappearance only because of Ginny gushing all the time about kind, famous Harry Potter, The Boy Who Lived, he still felt a need for vengeance as keenly as if this fragment of him had personally experienced ignoble defeat by a mere infant.
"You see, Harry, no one can escape their end, once Lord Voldemort has decided it", Riddle explained quietly.
He smiled ruefully. "I cannot believe your Mudblood mother threw her whole life away, only to give you little more than a single decade of yours. Ha! Quite stupid of her, but a gift all the same. I admit it, my own mother would never have done anything so generous. It was her despicable Muggle husband she cared about, not me. All I got from her was my worthless name and a place in an orphanage."
Potter's eyes shone with a hateful fervour. Riddle clicked his tongue disparagingly.
"Don't be so angry. Try to be at peace. You must have known that your life was always going to be just a little bit of borrowed time. Only that! I hope you spent the years well. Had fun, made fond memories, and so on. Perhaps you'll meet your dear Mum again in death. Then you can tell her all about what her generosity bought you."
Some of the colour had returned to Potter's face. How odd.
Riddle startled. The wound on the boy's arm was gone!
Of course, phoenix tears had healing powers, how could he have forgotten?
"Get away from him!" Riddle yelled at the bird, firing a powerful blasting curse in its direction. It evaded the spell easily and took flight across the Chamber. But he knew it was too late. The poison had already vanished out of Potter's body.
"Never mind", he muttered. "In fact, I prefer it this way. Just you and me, Potter."
He aimed the wand at its master. He felt a dark little thrill of excitement at what would happen next: Tom Riddle had never tried the Killing Curse out on a real person before.
Or rather, this sixteen-year-old fragment of him hadn't. He was certain his true self had had plenty of practice after graduating from Hogwarts... Still, he knew it would work for him now, too. You had to truly mean an Unforgivable Curse for it to be successfully cast. And if there was one thing he wanted right now, it was for Harry Potter to finally keel over dead.
A red rush of wings stopped him.
Riddle threw himself sideways onto the floor, arms in front of his face, just as a sharp beak tried to take his eyes out. Black ink splurted out from deep cuts on his arms. Riddle couldn't see anything. He quickly wiped his eyes clean with a sleeve of his robes.
He stood up on shaking legs, poised to attack.
The phoenix – that damnable, ridiculous, loathsome bird – merely emitted a pleased trill and soared away, with something horribly familiar-looking gripped firmly in its talons.
For a split second, both boys stared at it leaving.
"I think Fawkes took your diary", Harry Potter remarked mildly.
He was now holding the broken basilisk fang like a poisoned dagger and looking very intently at Riddle.
Riddle backed away slightly.
But Potter did not charge at him. Instead, he tilted his head to one side with curiousity. "What'll happen to you without it?"
Riddle felt himself go very pale. All thoughts of vengeance suddenly postponed, he scrambled across Slytherin's vast halls, following the eerie golden glow of the phoenix that had stolen his Horcrux.
The tunnel floor outside the Chamber was covered in rat skeletons. Riddle skidded and slipped in the darkness, sending tiny skulls flying. Pain burst like an explosion in his shoulder when he hit a snake-encoiled pillar. He leapt up and hurried on regardless.
"Give that back!" He screamed. "I said, give it back!"
There was a pile of rocks where the pipes leading into Hogwarts should have been. The phoenix ruffled up its scarlet feathers and hissed at him like an angry goose.
Riddle skidded to a halt, panting.
"Confringo!" He bellowed, aiming true. Debris exploded, pieces of it nearly hitting his face.
As the dust settled around him, he swore. The phoenix had already slipped through a crack in the rocks.
"Stop it! We'll all end up covered in rocks!" A voice yelled from behind the pile. "And where did that bird come from? Harry, are you there? Who's that with you?"
Riddle slashed the stolen wand back and forth, until he made a sizeable hole to crawl through to the other side.
He was met by a freckled boy – one of Ginny's many brothers, judging by his looks – and a very confused, ostentatiously robed wizard, who both gaped at him.
"Um. Who are you? Are you a ghost or something?" The boy asked, looking very worried.
"No", Riddle rolled his eyes. He aimed Potter's wand at the adult wizard as he passed towards the pipe leading back into the school. "The bird flew up the pipe?"
"Yeah." But the Weasley boy was relentless: "Where's Harry? Where's Ginny?"
"And where are we?" The gaudily-clad wizard exclaimed, shaking his perfectly-coiffed hair. "My, my! Doesn't this place need a tidying-up!"
Riddle blinked wordlessly.
"Memory charm backfired", the child mumbled. "Please, have you seen my sister? Is she alright? Is Harry with her?"
Riddle winced in annoyance. With the ritual to give him a fully corporal body interrupted, he realised that little Ginny would soon wake up.
He ought to kill the man and take the boy with him to replenish his life force, but he simply had no time.
Against his better judgement, he nodded his head curtly in the direction of the tunnel.
"Straight ahead, in the Chamber. The basilisk is finished. Both of them are alive."
"Thank you! Thank you!" Weasley said, almost sobbing with relief. He moved to crawl through the debris, but halted and looked at Riddle pleadingly. "How will we get out? My wand is broken and we can't climb up!"
Riddle ignored him.
"I wish to leave", he said in Parseltongue. A gust of cool air hissed through the pipe and lifted him up like a leaf. He floated upwards, his school robes billowing.
He saw Weasley standing small beneath him, his face contorted with sudden understanding.
"You're the Heir!"
"Clever boy!" Riddle laughed. "Now go fetch your sister and your friend. I'm sure they'll explain everything!"
He could see a faint golden glow at the pipe's entrance – the phoenix was within reach again. He tensed and gripped the wand tighter.
His vowed that his next spell would kill.
Riddle had made a grave mistake. A terror such as he had never known before sliced through him like a gutting knife.
The man was much older, yes, looking awfully careworn and tired, but Riddle would have recognised him in any time or place or nightmare.
There stood Professor Dumbledore, gently stroking the phoenix, a look of cold fury on a face usually masked in calm benevolence.
"Tom", he said simply, the single syllable coated in utmost contempt.
"Professor", Riddle croaked out, the respectful address slipping out of his mouth almost in spite of himself.
And then he did something very embarrassing.
He ran.