Chapter Text
Everyone had a soulmate. Didn't matter if you were magic or muggle, pureblood or muggleborn, rich or poor. Somewhere out there, you had exactly one other person tied to your very soul, and every day, without fail, your arm would prickle and warm, and words would surface on your skin in another's handwriting: some stray thought your soulmate happened to have at some point that day.
The words began appearing once both soulmates existed in the world, and were capable of forming thoughts. For most people, this meant sometime within the first few years of their life—half-formed little sentences from a toddling counterpart somewhere out there, or silence for some years while one’s brain developed enough for thought.
You couldn't choose which thought, or when it would appear. It simply did. Countless scholars had tried to study soulmates over the centuries, to pin down some explanation for the phenomenon, but to date no one had managed anything conclusive. There were theories—ancestral, magical, scientific—but none had ever been proven.
There were myths that soulmates made each other more powerful when together. That they were stronger, smarter, magic coming to them more easily than it ever had alone. In some exceptional instances, this did seem to hold true: studies had found that the longer a bonded pair spent together in close proximity, the more their magical cores grew.
One centuries old tale, generally thought to be fiction, told of two women in ancient magical China—Princess Loulan, daughter of Sorcerer Shao, and her lady-in-waiting, Zulin—who had grown up together, soulmates in secret. When Princess Loulan's family discovered the truth, both women were sentenced to execution. Their love was said to be so strong that it brought them back from the very brink of death, allowing them to escape, never to be seen again.
Actually finding your soulmate, however, wasn't exactly a commonplace occurrence. You were lucky to even meet them, let alone recognize them when you did. They might live in some far country across the seas, speak an entirely different language—which made deciphering your own marks something of a puzzle for those people, squinting at foreign words and symbols and trying to work out if that was Korean or just very bad handwriting. Receiving their occasional thought did help narrow things down: the language they thought in, the shape of their handwriting, the lucky mention of a name or a place or something identifying enough to go on.
It was why, in most modern countries, there were no laws against marrying someone that wasn't your soulmate, though in some circles it was frowned upon. Traditionalists and the more religiously devout in particular tended to treat the matter as blasphemous, a betrayal not only of your one true intended, but of some greater cosmic design.
Tom Marvolo Riddle had gone the majority of his life believing he did not have a soulmate, and had shaped a considerable amount of his identity around that fact.
For 50 long years, not a single word or symbol had ever shown up on his arm. Not at birth. Not at 11, when he got his Hogwarts letter. Not at 17, when he'd left the orphanage behind for good and swore to himself he’d never live like that again. Not during his time working at Borgin and Burke’s, nor through his travels across the continents afterward. Not when he eventually returned to Britain at 35 and began his infiltration of the Ministry, nor during his steady rise to the top.
"Soulmates are a mystery we have pondered for thousands of years," Professor Dumbledore had told Tom's first-year class, to a room of eager, wide-eyed children who had spent the morning classes comparing what their own arms had said. He looked Tom in the eye as he spoke his next words. "But they are a blessing, a reminder that none of us are truly alone. Together, you shall prevail."
"Unfortunate," said the Healer who'd raised the subject the first time he visited the hospital wing, during the mandatory physical and magical examinations of Tom’s second year. His eyes were full of pity and a barely-veiled curiosity. "It does happen. Perhaps one in several hundred thousand… but It's more likely they just haven’t been born yet. Chin up, lad."
Tom had promptly ended the conversation, having already read everything he could get his hands on regarding the subject, and having absolutely no intention of being looked upon with more pity than he already had for being a poor mudblood orphan.
Slytherin, as it turned out, suited him perfectly. Soulmates were regarded less as a blessing and more of a hindrance—something that got in the way of their politicking and matchmaking, and were a standing risk that family secrets may be revealed to outsiders. Besides, what use was the supposed power of a soulmate, to those already powerful in their own right?
Many of Tom's pureblood peers had been betrothed since birth. In public, they kept their arms carefully covered. Behind closed doors, their soulmarks were subjected to constant scrutiny, family councils convening to determine the identity of whoever was on the other end. If the soulmate turned out to be of respectable breeding, all the better—alliances could be rearranged, contracts quietly adjusted to fit. If the soulmate was of lesser blood, they were to be ignored entirely, never to be acknowledged. And if that lesser-blooded soulmate—mudblood, or Merlin forbid, muggle—happened to be matched to the heir of one of the darker families, well. Should some unfortunate accident befall them, no one asked too many questions.
That Tom did not have a soulmate was simply one more reason they admired him. Feared him. Followed him.
As a small boy at Wool's, watching the other children fawn over their words each day—orphans who owned nothing but the certain hope that somewhere out there was a special person who belonged just to them—Tom had wondered, more than once, whether he was truly unlovable as Mrs. Cole liked to say.
The Matron, deep in her cups, had put it plainly that it was God's mercy that he had no one fated for him, because no one deserved to be cursed with a devil like him. Her own arm was blank, gone a deadish grey. Her soulmate had perished years before, in the first world war.
After a while, Tom started to believe it too. Not for such pitiful reasons, of course. But it made a certain kind of sense.
Lacking a soulmate set him above everyone else.
The idea of him—Tom Riddle, prodigy, Heir of Slytherin, the most powerful wizard and Dark Lord the world would ever know—being assigned some other half, some other person whose feelings he was expected to care for, was beneath him.
He preferred it this way, in the end. No soulmate meant no one privy to his inner thoughts, to his mind. It meant nothing could be used against him in that way, and Tom had spent a great many formative years learning exactly how much could be used against a person.
In his final year at Hogwarts, he crushed whatever small, juvenile hope still lingered that he might possess a soulmate after all. Surely, even if he did, the time for it had passed. Age gaps weren't unheard of, but 17 years, at minimum? It was foolish to continue waiting.
So it was, to put it mildly, an inconvenience when, at the age of 54—by then fully established in his role as Undersecretary to the Minister—words appeared for the very first time on his skin.
He was in the middle of hosting a meeting at Malfoy Manor with his inner circle, and as this was an informal meeting with those of his most trusted followers, Tom leaned against the table with his sleeves rolled up. Preoccupied with laying out the latest set of legislation he intended to bring before the next Wizengamot Assembly, he did not notice that a patch of skin on his wrist had gone warm, a shaky scrawl of letters surfacing.
"—and once Rowle has the wording amended, the Committee will have no grounds left to stall on the Muggle Artefact restrictions, which brings me to—"
“My Lord, your…”
Corvus Lestrange noticed it first, sitting closest.
Tom furrowed his brows, about to scold him for the interruption, but then followed his gaze to where Lestrange was staring with wide grey eyes.
Mama, uppy. was written in messy handwriting on his wrist.
Tom went silent.
The room, previously filled with the idle noise of turning pages, the clink of wine glasses, and the occasional clearing of a throat, went silent along with him. All eyes went to his wrist.
"Is that—" Cordelia Carrow spoke up in shock, leaning forward in her seat.
“Meeting adjourned.” Tom said stiffly. Forcing his expression into something that gave absolutely nothing away, he rolled his sleeve down with a nonchalance that dared anyone to comment further, and stood up, ignoring the curious and concerned stares that followed him as he calmly sped—he did not flee, whatever it may have looked like—toward the nearest washroom.
This can't be. He inwardly panicked, entering the washroom and locking the door behind him. It must be some tactless, foolish prank. Once I find whoever’s done this…
He practically tore his sleeve apart to bare his skin once more, scrutinizing his wrist and turning it this way and that. He rubbed at it, as if he might scrub the juvenile words away. They did not move an inch.
He was 54 years old. He did not, could not, have a soulmate.
Tom summoned his wand and cast spell after spell—diagnostic charms, vanishing charms, cleaning charms, curse detection, finite incantatem, anything he could think to try. Nothing worked. Not one of them so much as made the ink flicker.
Mama, uppy. The letters stared up at him, as if taunting him.
Breathing hard, he tried to think. This was probably nothing. A once-off, some fluke of magic. Tomorrow would come, and the mark would be gone, and no others would follow.
The words were, indeed, gone by morning. He allowed himself, cautiously, the smallest measure of relief.
It did not last. That evening, as he was heading out of his Ministry office, his arm went warm again, and three new words revealed themselves across the back of his hand.
Bye bye, paddy!
He stared at his hand in the corridor, frozen mid-stride, one of his aides nearly walking into him from behind.
And the next day:
Noo! yucky!
Tom was prepared for everything. He was not prepared for this.
But he was not like most wizards. He was the best of them all. This was nothing but a minor setback, and minor setbacks could be handled accordingly.
Soulmarks only activated once both parties were born and capable of thought, and going by the words he'd received so far, this meant whoever sat on the other end of this newly-woken bond was an infant.
He would find his soulmate—this child—and eliminate them, before they had the chance to ruin everything. They were a liability, a threat to 50 long years of careful, painstaking work, and Tom Riddle had not gotten this far by leaving vulnerabilities unattended to.
So far he knew that:
- His soulmate thought in English, which narrowed the search down.
- They had at least one parent in their life—a mother.
- They referred to someone, or something, named “Paddy”.
Tom did not know who or what "Paddy" might be, but that could be examined later. First, he summoned Arnold Jenkins to his office—a Ministry official working in the Department of Births, Deaths, and Marriages Registry, and importantly, someone who did not ask too much questions. Tom also had a rather useful piece of leverage on hand, should Jenkins prove difficult: an illegitimate child, and abuse of position involving forged registration documents.
"You wished to see me, sir?" The short and portly man greeted him, the chair creaking as he lowered himself into it.
"Yes. I apologise for the short notice, but I require a list of all magical children born in Britain within the past few years. As soon as you're able to manage it." Tom said.
Jenkins's eyebrows rose, though his face read more curious than suspicious.
"Well, I could certainly have it on your desk within the hour. Might I ask what it's for?"
"Merely statistical purposes. The Minister wishes to understand our future population trajectories, so that we may prepare accordingly, you see."
The Minister knew nothing of the sort. But Tom was an excellent liar, and a master manipulator. Either he would obliviate Jenkins afterwards, or he’d plant the idea in the Minister’s mind. Population trajectories were useful information regardless, so it would be profitable, if anything, to make the lie true.
True to his word, Jenkins returned shortly, depositing a stack of parchment onto Tom’s desk., "There you are, Mr. Riddle. Every child registered with the Department going back five years. I included Muggleborns flagged by the Trace as well, in case the Minister wanted the full picture."
"Very thorough," Tom praised. "Thank you, Jenkins. That will be all."
I'll let him keep his memories, he decided graciously, once the door had clicked shut behind Jenkins's retreating back. Incompetence, at least, was not among the man's failings, it seemed.
He turned to the stack, which was several pages thick, names in tidy Ministry script, cross-referenced by birth date and place, parentage, and blood status, and ultimately told him nothing directly useful.
It did, however, give him children to keep notice of.
There was, he came to realise over the following weeks, a fundamental and infuriating problem that came with searching for his soulmate.
He could not simply demand access to examine every infant of Wizarding Britain, nor could he request daily reports of their words, however cleverly he dressed the petition up in the language of demographic study, scholarly research, or child welfare initiatives. Setting aside the matter of privacy, a man holding significant Ministry power, expressing sudden and specific interest in tracking the soulmarks of children, would be regarded as deeply suspicious and questionable—even he, who had spent years cultivating an image of charm and trustworthiness. Wizarding children were precious things to be protected, kept close and guarded within homes, many not even taken out in public before the age of five. There would be an outrage.
He briefly considered the idea of breaking into their homes under cover of night, but dismissed it as a fruitless endeavour. Marks changed daily, and there was no guarantee he'd catch anything useful even if he did manage to sneak a look—half the time even a grown adult's thoughts amounted to nothing more sophisticated than hungry. And every additional break-in only compounded the risk of being caught, which was a risk he was reluctant to take.
There was also the possibility that his soulmate was a Muggle, repulsive as the thought was to entertain. Muggles bred like rabbits; they were numerous, outnumbering magical folk by the millions. There he was not so constrained—they possessed no magic to defy him, to stop him moving among them freely and unnoticed. But there were simply too many of them to track, let alone the sheer impossibility of going door to door across entire countries searching for children of the correct age.
He could, at least, write to his followers with children of the right age. They also could not dare deny him. Yet their screaming little demons offered up nothing but the same infantile drivel as every other chubby-cheeked child.
All the while, useless, unbearable, entirely unhelpful words kept arriving on his skin, day after day, as though determined to mock him with their sheer incoherence:
Doggy woof woof.
Mine! Mine mine mine.
Uh oh.
Big spoon.
Hahaha Dada’s bum bum.
Fifty bloody years of nothin', and now I'm saddled with this shite, he thought bitterly. It was humiliating beyond measure.
He tried tracking his soulmate through magical means. There were ways to confirm a soulmate once found—soul readings, compatibility tests that showed how one's soul brightened and resonated in proximity to its match—but for all that had been tried over the centuries, no one had yet devised a reliable way to locate and point to an unknown soulmate.
Tom was resourceful, however, and had crafted a fair number of his own spells when the need arose. So, consulting two independent experts on soulmates and the libraries of his followers, he set about reconstructing a locator spell typically reserved for tracking blood relations, reworked instead to key on the soulbond itself, hunting for a signature that bound one to another.
The resulting spell very nearly blinded him: to his eyes, every witch and wizard within half a mile lit up in a firework show of competing colours and shapes, each one flaring toward some invisible other. Undeterred, he set off on a six month tour across Britain, America, and Australia, testing the spell on unsuspecting crowds under the entirely respectable cover of official Ministry diplomatic campaigning. He'd even gone so far as to organise a genuine delegation to accompany him to the hastily put together events, to explain his presence in each city he passed through.
Unbeknownst to him, was that during this time of his search, his soulmate and his soulmate's parents and family friends were, inopportunely, several thousand kilometres away on a spontaneous holiday of their own in Singapore.
At his most desperate, he found an elderly hag operating deep in the Australian bushland who claimed to have united no fewer than a dozen soulmates in her long and colourful career. She took his gold, along with a few shavings of his arm hair, muttered something in a language he did not recognise over a cauldron of what smelled like rotting fruit, and poured a vile-looking potion over a compass that she assured him would lead to his soulmate. It spun in aimless circles for the better part of four days, at which point Tom concluded, with fury, that he had been swindled. He hunted the hag down and spent the week torturing her within an inch of her life, taking out the whole of his frustrations on her with a vicious glee, before finally removing her pathetic existence from the living plane.
Back in Britain, he sought out other avenues. A private investigator, operating under a false name and a plausible cover story, spent a year and a substantial sum of Tom's money chasing down the name “Paddy” or anyone answering to it, and turned up nothing more useful than an Irish gardener in Kent, a family of Kneazle breeders who'd named their prize ragdoll Paddington, and a retired Quidditch mascot who'd gone by the name for the better part of a decade, and none of them, disappointingly, had or personally knew any small children. Tom dismissed the investigator, and obliviated him for good measure.
Right then, he thought, some 3 or 4 years into this particular exercise in restraint, standing once more before the mirror in his private washroom with his arm bared and a fresh line of—where does the poop go?—glaring up at him in the same messy scrawl. If I can't find the little wretch, I'll simply get rid of the bond itself.
He returned, as he did most things, to books.
The Malfoy library yielded a handful of tantalising references to soulbond removal theory, though none proved promising. One ritual, described by some long-dead Malfoy ancestor, appeared to require a willing sacrifice as understood by both parties, which was rather difficult to arrange with an unknown child who would not yet have the ability to grasp the concept of sacrifice, or even of concepts.
The Black family archives, accessed through the considerably less willing but sufficiently intimidated cooperation of Regulus Black—courtesy of dear Bella's particular methods of persuasion—offered up an entire shelf devoted to ancient blood and soul magic. Though they described no outright removal of the bond, there were ways to silence it, to block the transmission of thoughts. The catch was that, without fail, every subject on record suffered severe mental instability and were dead within the year.
Nott's private collection produced the most promising research yet—a slim and ancient grimoire that detailed a ritual performed successfully, multiple times. However, it was at the cost of both participants' magic entirely.
Not an option, Tom thought acidly, setting the book down with rather more force than it deserved.
And so Tom was stuck yet again.
Every path led to the same wall. Soulbonds, it seemed, simply did not want to be tracked or severed—not safely, not without a cost so high that even Tom, for whom cost had rarely been an obstacle, found himself unwilling to pay it.
The years passed, from the outside, exactly as Tom Riddle intended them to. He smiled for the Daily Prophet. He attended his meetings and charity balls. He continued to quietly consolidate power, followers, and influence, and if anyone at the Ministry ever wondered why a man of his obvious age and eligibility remained so contentedly unmarried, they were wise enough, by then, not to ask him.
Not once did a single one of his marks offer him anything resembling a name (aside from that first instance of Paddy), a location, a gender, a school, a confirmation of whether they possessed magic, not a single identifying detail he might have followed to its source. He had instructed his followers to keep an eye and ear out for any child receiving words out of the ordinary, stationed them overseas to every English speaking country, yet they also consistently reported nothing of note.
It was, Tom reflected, with mounting, weary fury, either the single greatest stroke of misfortune of his entire life, or some cosmic joke being played specifically at his expense, because his soulmate, whoever they were, remained maddeningly obscure, as though fate itself was intervening.
He continued to receive words each day. His soulmate's thoughts were, without exception, the height of stupidity, even as they got older. If Tom had not remained paranoid enough to keep checking each time new ones appeared, in case something slipped through, he would gladly have stopped looking at them altogether.
Mummy says I can't marry her.
Why can't I have ice cream for breakfast, it has milk in it, milk is breakfast food.
I don't wanna do homework. I hate homework.
Oops.
I wonder what it would be like to be a worm.
Can I train him to do my chores?
I think the cat is a secret spy.
I’ve lost my sock again.
Did I get fatter? Maybe I need to lay off the tarts for a while…
And so it went on. Tom could only imagine, with a fresh spike of dread each time his own arm went warm, how many of his private thoughts and secrets were being broadcast beyond his control.
⚬──────────✧ 1999 ✧──────────⚬
Tom had been the Undersecretary to the Minister for 20 odd years now. He could have been Minister several times over, had been offered the position more than once by more than one grateful, indebted predecessor, but had declined every offer. The Minister was his puppet regardless of who sat in the chair, and this arrangement suited him rather nicely.
Undersecretary meant influence without the direct spotlight. It meant the Minister took the public falls, weathered the scandals, fielded the newspapers worst headlines, while Tom ruled from just behind the throne, untouched and too useful to ever be seriously questioned.
No one wanted a Minister who never left. Every few years, the public demanded change, fresh faces, some new promise of reform—and every few years, Tom obliged them, orchestrating the rise and eventual fall of whichever ambitious fool currently held the title, before installing the next.
He had outlasted several Ministers already this way, waiting patiently in the wings each time for the next one to take office, ready and eager to offer his guidance—because he had, by then, been in his own post for so long that he knew better than anyone how the Ministry worked. No one expected him to step down. No one, by now, could quite remember a version of the Ministry that didn't include him. By the time his silent takeover was complete, they wouldn't even notice a thing wrong.
He had time in spades to scheme and wait. Ever since the creation of his Horcruxes, his aging had slowed to something barely perceptible—at 73, he still looked no older than a man in his twenties. To avoid rousing suspicion, he charmed himself older instead. A touch of grey through his hair, the faintest suggestion of lines at the corners of his eyes.
With the exception of his inner circle, most of his old peers were no longer alive, or had since forgotten he'd lacked a soulmate. The public speculated on the matter for years. It made excellent fodder for the society pages, a mystery to be endlessly relitigated every time some new witch or wizard was photographed on his arm at a gala. Tom eventually spun a story that he had, in fact, met his soulmate a long time ago but they had parted on amicable terms—and no, he would not be revealing their identity, out of respect for their privacy.
It was on one particularly busy day that Tom found himself heading out of a joint board meeting between the Departments of Finance and Defence, in which the annual Auror budgets were under discussion. It was lunchtime, and while Tom usually did not take the slotted break, he had two interns shadowing him, and so, unfortunately, had to consider their needs as well—which meant a brief detour to the offices to drop off paperwork before heading up to the cafeteria.
They were turning into the main Atrium, Tom in front, his two assistants trailing a respectful step behind with their arms full of files, when someone collided into him.
Tom's reflexes had a silent, invisible shield thrown up over himself before the spell had even fully formed in his mind. He came to an abrupt stop, watching indignantly as the person—a short, spectacled wizard wearing what appeared to be muggle clothing—rebounded off and went down hard on the floor in a heap of flailing limbs.
The sudden stop caused his interns to subsequently collide into him from behind, and between that and the gust kicked up by the wizard's rebound, the papers they'd been carrying flew out of their arms and scattered around all their feet. The surrounding crowd cried out and side-stepped to avoid treading on the mess.
"Merlin, I'm so sorry, let me—" the boy who ran into him said in a panic. He looked young, 18 perhaps, with wild black hair that stuck out in all directions and fell around his shoulders, as though he'd never once picked up a hairbrush. He was wearing jeans covered in grass stains and faded dye, and a red knitted jumper with a large H across the front.
To his credit, the boy recovered quickly enough from the fall, though he still made a rather pathetic display of himself, crawling about on the floor in an attempt to gather up the papers.
His glasses had fallen off, so evidently he couldn't even properly see what he was doing, but he was a wizard, wasn’t he? Was he so inept that it hadn't occurred to him to use his magic to help himself, rather than groping about like some muggle, as his attire suggested?
Tom tsked in distaste, unable to bear watching him fumble about any further. “Leave it.”
Pointedly, with one smooth flick of his wand, he had the scattered papers floating back into neat, orderly piles, settling once more into his interns' waiting arms, both of whom were regarding the boy with open disdain.
"Er, right." The boy said awkwardly, patting blindly around him for his aforementioned spectacles. Tom summoned them wordlessly into the boy's outstretched hand, sparing himself the indignity of watching him continue a moment longer. The boy shoved them back onto his face and scrambled upright.
"Are you hurt?" Tom asked, perfunctory and politely. He had no reason to extend this stranger any courtesy beyond the bare minimum—the boy had, after all, gone barrelling brutishly into him without so much as a glance where he was going—but Tom had a certain image to maintain, and so he would show the necessary concern.
The boy looked up at him properly for the first time, and his whole face went abruptly red. "Shit—no, I mean—I'm okay, sorry, I wasn't— I should've—"
Tom was well accustomed to this particular breed of reaction—the stammering, the blushing, the general collapse of composure that seemed to afflict half the population when in his presence—and was already halfway to rolling his eyes, idly entertaining the fantasy of a well placed crucio to shut him up, when he made the mistake of meeting his gaze.
What beautiful green eyes, something in him thought, distant and strange.
Like glittering emerald scales. A green so reminiscent of the killing curse.
He felt light, suddenly. Warm and reinvigorated, in the way he felt when holding one of his horcruxes, that particular high of being in proximity of a piece of his soul. His magic stirred beneath his skin, reaching outward of its own accord as though in recognition of something it didn’t know it was missing until this very moment, a hollow space that Tom never noticed he carried.
He had the overwhelming urge to be closer. To close the distance between them entirely, to crawl inside the boy's skin if such a thing were possible, to reach past flesh and bone and intertwine their two souls until he could no longer tell where his own ended and the boy's began.
"Sir…?"
He came back to himself all at once, jarred loose by the sound of his intern's voice at his elbow, faintly concerned, confused. He drew back sharply—he had, he realized with some alarm, been leaning into the boy's space without meaning to, the boy himself standing there just as transfixed, equally caught in whatever strange current had passed between them.
"My apologies." Tom gathered his composure at once, a creeping, devastating suspicion taking root beneath it. He cleared his throat. "I was making sure this… gentleman was alright. He took quite the tumble."
Plastering a smile onto his face, he inclined his head toward the boy, who was still blinking in dazed confusion. "If you'll excuse us."
Then he strode away, urgently needing space to recalibrate.
“Wha—What happened back there, Mr—hah—Mr Riddle, Sir?” Delilah Thompson, his female intern, huffed as she scrambled to keep up with his long strides.
"Miss Thompson," Tom ignored her question, "Do you know who that young man was?" He slowed his pace, just enough to let her catch up properly and speak.
Delilah perked up, eager to be acknowledged, her confused expression replaced with a gleeful smile. She was likely under the impression he was seeking retribution, and was keen as ever to stir the pot and watch the ensuing trouble unfold.
She turned to him and fluttered her lashes, heavy with makeup, in a manner she perhaps imagined was subtle.
"Yes! Yes, sir. I’m pretty sure that was Harry Potter. The Head Auror’s son, yeah? I was going into my fifth year when he started at Hogwarts."
Her voice dropped into something conspiratorial, and she moved closer. "There were these rumours in school that his soulmate was some sort of Dark Lord, sending him all these evil thoughts."
Tom took that information in, very carefully.
"He must've been looking for attention," Lewis Moore—his male assistant, average in both looks and brains, and who had been silent up until now—cut in. "There hasn't been a proper Dark wizard since Grindelwald."
"That's what I was thinking!" Delilah said pompously, nodding along. "And where was he off to in such a hurry, dressed like that and knocking straight into you, Mr. Riddle? Someone ought to teach that boy a lesson."
Tom resisted the urge to show these two fools who also needed a lesson, and reminded himself, not for the first time, that he had chosen to take on these particular interns.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t be rid of them now. "Mentoring" the youth of the Ministry did wonders for his public image. It softened him to the Light families, while lending him the appearance of a man invested in the next generation. More covertly, it gave him an in among the young and impressionable, a useful vantage point from which to keep with the times and glean future perspectives.
Delilah Thompson was a privileged brat entirely too fond of her own voice, but she was not without her uses. The girl was an inveterate gossip, on intimate terms with everybody's business and most of their illicit affairs, which was why he tolerated her continued presence despite an otherwise thoroughly grating personality. Her mother was also an Australian governor, serving as an important liaison between the British and the Australian Ministries, therefore it was beneficial to remain in the daughter's good graces.
Lewis Moore offered rather less by way of compensation, but he followed orders without complaint and was, at the very least, considerably less irritating than the other candidates Tom had passed over.
With Thompson's imparted gossip, his suspicion seemed a great deal more plausible. It brought with it another frustrating grievance: his own followers had failed to notice these rumours circulating. He would have to see them punished for it.
More importantly, he needed to find out everything there was to know about this Harry Potter.
He had found his soulmate.