Chapter Text
Tom could have never, not in a million years, expected Harry’s rushed and awkward confession of his feelings toward him. Oh, he had known that Harry felt more connected to him than any of their other friends – Tom was the one he turned to, after all, when he needed more than just a friendly word of advice or a kind pat on the shoulder. Tom was the one he curled up to when the crushing weight of being Harry Potter, of being targeted by Voldemort, became too much to bear upon his thin shoulders alone. But that he might want something more, something special and sacred between only the two of them? That had never once crossed his mind as a possibility, not even when Draco had so blatantly spelled it out for him before the Quidditch game.
Of course, that hadn’t stopped him from immediately accepting when Harry had finally, in a burst of words and emotion, asked Tom to go out with him on that initially disastrous Valentine’s Day. As soon as he had said it, something had clicked inside Tom like a key in a lock and he had welcomed the change in their relationship with open arms, taking to it in much the way he did when discovering a new and intriguing branch of magic. Kissing Harry for the first time (well, second – he had kissed his forehead before the Quidditch match, hadn’t he?) had only further proven that his decision was correct, their magic and soul connection alighting between them, stirring something in Tom he had never felt before, not even for Harry.
It took him a few days to put the pieces together, but in the end the puzzle became clear. In his previous life as Voldemort, he had never experienced attraction – oh, Voldemort had experienced how the presence of Veela could make his mind fuzzy with lust, had taken pretty girls and boys alike to his bed and witnessed firsthand how his own good looks and carefully practised charm could sway someone to his side, but the Dark Lord had never truly felt it himself, never personally understood what it was that could draw two people together both in body and soul. Tom had learned, long before reawakening as his ten-year-old self, what it meant to love, even if it had still not come easy to him – but his primary focus had been to protect Harry and see to it that he was no longer terrorised by his horrible Muggle relatives. He had not thought that those initial desires would ever develop into anything more.
But he was thirteen now, and with each new day it seemed that so too he developed new feelings, strange and alien to him – shame for how Voldemort had been so quick to write off Muggle-born witches and wizards, guilt for Voldemort’s slaughter of Harry’s parents, and now, having seen Harry gloriously twirling in the air as he caught the snitch, nearly five inches taller than he had been when they met and his features beginning to sharpen much like his own, a strange fire had flared within him as his feelings for him shifted from ‘protector’ to ‘equal,’ from friend to… something more. No longer did he want to keep Harry safe at his side, he wanted them to share their lives together, the two of them both each other’s most important person.
And so that, he finally concluded, must be how Harry felt as well.
It was a strange revelation to Tom, but as the days and weeks wore on it began to settle on him like a familiar cloak. It helped a great deal that nothing much changed between the two of them aside from the dissipation of the nervous energy that had begun to build up, their previously close relationship only growing stronger as their mutual attraction was finally recognised. If the rest of Slytherin noticed their darling boys snuggling tighter together in front of the fire, their eyes darting toward each other during meals or quiet moments, a kiss stolen now and then, they said nothing. And during this period of bliss, as well, the rest of their friends stopped bothering them to seek out the Chamber of Secrets, as with Tom’s diary safe within his trunk no new attacks took place.
Only Ginny Weasley seemed out of sorts about these new developments.
The first incident happened a few weeks later. Tom had accompanied Harry to Quidditch practise purely for the thrill of watching him fly, and as they crossed the grounds the sun slowly dipped below the horizon, alighting the sky in a brilliant display of red and gold. They took their time to savour the beauty of it, meandering slowly up the path to the castle.
Tom had never stopped to watch a sunset, to marvel at the radiance of a rainbow or be soothed by the calming dark of a forest. He had found joy and beauty in other things – in the fear flashing across someone’s face as they realised with finality that he had no mercy to spare, and in the heady scent of despair as the damning truth of betrayal set in, Tom’s hand around his victim’s throat. In cruelty, and in destruction, too – these were all things in which he delighted and revelled, long before Dumbledore had ever appeared and set his wardrobe on fire. But as he held Harry’s hand, basking in the glow of the swiftly fading sun, he accepted with a bittersweet sense of peace just how small his world had been, to say nothing of how much better his new life could be.
He barely even registered as Draco tore across the grounds, screaming his name.
“Tom! Tom!” Draco shouted, seizing his free hand. “Salazar, are you deaf? I’ve been trying to get your attention for ages!”
“What is it?” Tom snapped. He didn’t appreciate his time with Harry being interrupted, not on such a glorious day. “What do you want?”
“Tom!” Harry chided.
“Don’t worry about it, Harry,” Draco said, catching his breath. “He’s going to be even angrier when he sees what’s happened. It’s the dorms, Tom – someone’s been going through your things. It’s – well, you’ll see it when we get there.”
Tom froze, an icy mixture of rage and terror flooding through him. Then, without thinking, he began to race toward the castle, dragging Harry along behind him.
How could Ginny have gotten into the boy’s dorm? He wasn’t able to access the girls dorm, that was the first thing he had tried when he realised where his diary had ended up. Surely the founders wouldn’t have built such a double-standard into the charms and runes that made up the protective barriers around their bedrooms – unless, of course, they had held with the archaic notion that girls were more trustworthy than boys. Tom scrunched up his nose in distaste. Of course they would have.
“Tom,” Harry gasped, his shorter legs working hard to keep up with Tom’s long, coltish limbs, “do you reckon it’s the same person who stole your diary? Do you think they’re looking for it again?”
“Of that, Harry,” Tom snarled, “I have no doubt.”
“But why?” Harry asked.
“Harry,” he replied, thinking fast, “I make it no secret that I intend to rise through the ranks of the Ministry when we graduate. For that, one needs connections and preferably a well-known bloodline. I am afforded the air of respect that they believe I am due because of my mother’s name, for all that she ended up with a Muggle. On the other hand, my father’s surname – Riddle – cannot be found among the Sacred Twenty-Eight, nor among any other known wizard families, and as Voldemort obviously shed the name we share long ago, there are likely few who remember him as Mr Malfoy did. This makes me an enigma – am I a half-blood with a Muggle father? Or is my father an unknown wizard who disappeared, as I tell people?”
He slowed a bit, allowing Harry to catch his breath. “There are undoubtedly those in Slytherin who, while adopting a facade of respect toward me, consider me unfit to take my place in any Ministry position. There may also be those very few who are aware of my parentage, and wish to cast suspicion upon me. In either case, what better way to discredit me than to use the one place I keep all my secrets?”
Harry’s eyes were wide as dinner plates. “But that means… someone might already know what really happened with Quirrell last year. They might know that Voldemort isn’t actually dead.”
“Luckily,” Tom replied, “I’ve charmed my diary to appear blank without the correct password. It’s not going to stop someone who’s determined to learn my secrets forever, though.”
They had reached the Slytherin common room at last. Gritting his teeth, Tom made his way into the second floor dorm, preparing for the worst.
“Oh, Tom!” Harry cried. The room was a disaster – the contents of his bedside cabinet drawer were strewn across the floor, several quills broken and pages torn from his books. The bedclothes had been ripped from his four-poster and the mattress left askew, as if Ginny thought he might be hiding the diary beneath it. Scitalis was cowering in a corner, hissing and spitting madly, though saying little of anything coherent. Only Tom’s trunk, which he had sealed with a locking charm stronger than could be lifted with a simple Alohomora, sat untouched at the end of his bed.
He retrieved Scitalis first, letting her slide into his sleeve and wrap herself around his arm. Then, taking a deep breath he unlocked his trunk. He was almost certain that Ginny had not been able to access it, as its contents were not scattered across the room like everything else. Still, he had to be sure – he dug through his books and clothing until he reached the bottom, breathing a sigh of relief when he spotted the familiar sight of his Horcrux.
“You’re staying with me, now,” he whispered to the diary as he retrieved it from his trunk, slipping it into the pocket of his robes – there really was no better way to protect his soul than to keep it with him at all times, apparently.
The second incident happened shortly after the Easter holidays. Exams were quickly approaching and Tom and Hermione had drafted up a rigorous study schedule that had the six of them spending nearly every free period in the library, pouring over their notes and quizzing each other on subjects likely to be included. To Tom’s delight (and Harry’s disappointment), Marcus Flint had cancelled Quidditch practice due to a large and dangerous thunderstorm, so they found themselves with extra time on the Friday following the Easter holidays to gather in the library once more.
“Hermione,” Tom said, reading from his Transfigurations textbook, “what is the first of the Five Principal Exceptions to Gamp’s Law of Elemental Transfiguration?”
“Easy,” Hermione answered, matter-of-fact. “Food. While it can be increased, or summoned from another location, food cannot be transfigured or conjured out of thin air – or rather, food with any nutritional value cannot. You may conjure a simulacrum of it, but it will taste of nothing and do little to sate your hunger.”
“Excellent answer,” Tom replied. “Ron, the second?”
“Money,” Ron answered gloomily.
“Professor McGonagall is going to want specificity, Ron!” Hermione interjected. “To be precise, one cannot conjure certain pure metal elements, such as gold, copper, or silver, from which our money is created. It’s one of the reasons the Philosopher’s Stone is so incredible – technically, it shouldn’t function at all. In fact, out of the one hundred and nine elements discovered by Muggle scientists, only twenty-seven can be successfully conjured in their pure forms, and many of them are highly reactive to oxygen and therefore prone to explosion upon being created.”
“Very thorough,” Tom noted, “though I doubt you found most of that in any texts from the library.”
Hermione smiled as she blushed. “I found a list of what could and could not be conjured, then had my parents send me a copy of the periodic table from one of the scientific books we keep at home to do some extra research.”
“Professor McGonagall will appreciate the initiative,” Tom replied. “Harry, the third?”
Harry chewed on his lip as he pondered. “Potion ingredients, right?” he finally answered. “Or, er, that was one example listed – anything needed to craft a magical item, whether that be a potion, artefact, or other physical object?”
“Correct,” Tom smiled, reaching over and squeezing his hand for encouragement. “Technically speaking, it is possible to transfigure or conjure many ingredients or components, but they would lack the magical energy needed to imbue your potion or artefact like their natural equivalents.”
“So, similar to transfiguring food, then,” Harry replied. “What I don’t understand is, if most pure elements can’t be transfigured, and elements make up, well, everything, how someone can conjure something like a teacup out of thin air. Isn’t it likely that some of the non-transfigurable elements would be part of the porcelain that it’s made out of?”
“That’s a good question, Harry,” Hermione said. “Unfortunately, the textbook doesn’t explain that, but I would guess that, given the combined nature of the molecules which are found in porcelain, that –”
She was cut off by a sudden, very loud explosion under their table, and the air filled with a thick, acrid smoke. Coughing and choking, the six of them shoved back hard from the table, their chairs scraping on the floor as they each made a desperate bid for freedom from the noxious cloud. Madam Pince was upon them in seconds.
“What’s the meaning of this?!” she screeched, reaching for her wand. “What have you miscreants done to my library?!”
“It wasn’t us, Madam Pince!” Pansy choked out. “Someone must’ve rolled some kind of smoke bomb under our table! We were only trying to study for exams.”
The librarian scoffed in disbelief, clearing the smoke away with a wave of her wand. Tom’s blood ran cold and his brain suddenly stopped processing as the table came back into view. It couldn’t be – it simply couldn’t be –
“Out!” shrieked Madam Pince. “All of you, out! And don’t think about coming back before the weekend is up!”
“My bag…” Tom murmured, shaking. “My book bag is missing…”
“Er, sorry, Madam Pince,” Hermione said, looking very apologetic indeed. “We’ll just gather our things and be on our way.”
“Harry,” Tom faltered, “my book bag – it was right by the chair, and now it’s gone.”
“Tom, are you okay?” Harry asked, reaching out for his hand. “You’ve gone as pale as the Bloody Baron.”
“It’s over here, mate,” Ron called, poking his head out from behind a bookshelf. “One of us must’ve kicked it in all the confusion.”
Tom snatched the bag from Ron’s arms the moment he was in reach, but before he could check its contents, he and the others were unceremoniously shooed from the library as Madam Pince lectured them on decorum and proper library usage. As soon as they were in the corridor he dropped to the ground and began to furiously rifle through it.
“Tom, what’s going on?” asked Draco. “We just got kicked out of the library and you’re concerned about your books?”
Tom ignored him. “It has to be here,” he muttered. “It can’t be gone… can’t be…”
Harry fell to his knees in front of him with a look of sudden, horrified understanding on his face. “Tom, surely you don’t mean – your diary?”
It wasn’t there. Tom knew it wasn’t there, knew he couldn’t feel that fizzling light of connection between him and the piece of his soul, but he tore through the contents of his bag anyway, desperately searching for that small black leatherbound book that was so undeniably precious to him.
His hands shook as they stilled on the last scrap of parchment – there was no denying it now. He looked up, his eyes meeting Harry’s and his teeth chattering as his terror bled away into anger.
“They took it again, didn’t they?” Harry asked softly.
Tom’s screams of rage were heard all the way down to the Great Hall.
The third incident was undeniably the worst.
The storm had broken overnight, and the sun rose high above the grounds, illuminating the dew-damp grass with a glossy sheen. There was to be a Quidditch match today between Gryffindor and Hufflepuff, and while normally Harry would have gone he had insisted on dragging Tom out of bed and into the warm spring air to “cheer him up.”
It was pointless. Nothing was going to lift Tom’s mood other than retrieving his Horcrux from the Weasley girl and finding a better, far safer place for it. He ran through his options – Legilimency could be used to force her to return it, but she would surely question later why she had so willingly given what she undoubtedly thought of as “her” diary to Harry’s friend, the boy with the same name as the boy in the book. He couldn’t break into the girls’ dorms, and asking Pansy to go rifling through the first year’s possessions would be extremely suspicious. He wasn’t sure if Ginny carried it on her person, and even if she did it wouldn’t help much – a Horcrux couldn’t be affected by a Summoning Charm.
“You know,” Harry said, squeezing his hand as they meandered by the lake, “you really gave everyone a scare last night.”
He truly had – people, students and professors alike, had come flooding into the corridor, expecting to see that yet another person had been petrified. When all they found was a group of second year students and Harry Potter tightly hugging an infuriated Tom Riddle on the ground, most had lost their interest, but Snape had dragged the two of them to his office and insisted that he explain himself. Tom had been vague, stating simply that he had lost an old family heirloom that was very important to him during the explosion in the library, and that Madam Pince would not allow him back in to search for it. It was all technically true, too, if a diary that housed a piece of his soul and that had once belonged to the person he was calling his father counted as an heirloom, of course.
In the end, Snape had let them go with a sour, pinched expression, promising that he would speak to Madam Pince about overriding the weekend-long restriction on library usage – they did have to study after all.
Tom’s heart softened a bit at Harry’s words though, and he returned his gesture with a slight squeeze of his own. “I hope I didn’t scare you , Harry,” he murmured.
“Well, a bit,” Harry replied. “I’ve never seen you so angry before. But I understood, too – I know how important your diary is to you. I don’t understand why you didn’t tell Snape what really happened, though.”
Tom couldn’t, of course – if it were found, Snape would be able to tell in an instant that the diary was a powerful Dark object, not the kind of thing a normal twelve-year-old boy would be carrying around. He would no doubt turn it in to Dumbledore, who would want to investigate it thoroughly. He would discover exactly what it was, destroy it, and then Tom would be – would be –
Tom swallowed hard – he didn’t want to contemplate the implications of possibly dying without his soul intact.
“I’ll tell them only if I can’t find it myself,” he said flatly. “I wouldn’t want to give whoever took it the impression that I’m not capable of handling them on my own.”
Harry laughed. “Of course,” he said. “You really are the perfect Slytherin, you know? Sometimes I wonder if I was missorted – you really sold me on our house before we ever got here.”
“Oh?” Tom asked, feeling his spirits lighten. “And where do you think you would have ended up if not for my gentle persuasion?”
Harry hummed, thinking. “Ravenclaw, maybe,” he said. “Though it was you that convinced me to be more studious. So maybe Hufflepuff.”
Tom outright laughed at that. “ You ?” he asked incredulously. “In Hufflepuff? After launching yourself at Voldemort to pull him off of me last year and spending half your time this year trying to track down the deadliest serpent in existence? No, you’d be in Gryffindor for sure.”
“Stop that,” Harry chided. “The ‘Puffs aren’t that bad and you know it. But I suppose you’re probably right. Hell, maybe the Hat would’ve put me in Slytherin anyway due to the whole, you know, Parselmouth thing.”
“Well, I still think it’s the best house for you,” Tom said.
“And the Hat agreed, so maybe it is.”
“Potter!” A familiar voice rang out across the grounds. “Riddle! There you are, I insist you come with me immediately.” Tom and Harry turned to see Professor Snape striding toward them, his billowing black cloak incongruous in the bright morning sunlight.
“Sir?” Harry asked.
“You weren’t at the Quidditch match,” said Snape. “It was feared that the two of you might be… well, follow me. Don't look at me with those troubled face, neither of you are in trouble.”
They followed Snape back toward the castle, joining a large crowd of students being escorted back inside by what looked to be the entire staff population of Hogwarts. Tom frowned. “Sir,” he said, “is the match over already? Has something happened?”
“Quidditch has been cancelled,” Snape answered, “as have all remaining matches until the individual responsible for opening the Chamber of Secrets has been apprehended.”
“What?!” Harry cried, his voice raw with disbelief and disappointment. “That’s not fair, we were going to win the Cup for sure!”
“I don’t like it any more than you do, Potter,” Snape growled. “It is, however, simply not safe for things to continue as they have been.”
“But nothing has happened for weeks!”
“Mr Potter,” Snape said slowly, dangerously, “do you think that the match would have been cancelled if nothing had happened? There has been another attack.”
Tom’s heart sank – not one day had gone by since Ginny took possession of his diary again and his older self had already sought out and Petrified – or maybe even killed – another student. “Who is it this time?” he asked, his voice thick with despair.
“Like I said, Riddle – follow me.”
They trailed behind him up the staircase to the first floor, where he led them into the infirmary. They passed by the Petrified body of an older girl they didn’t know and around a curtain where they were greeted by the pale, shaken faces of Ron, Draco, and Pansy, surrounding a bed in which lay –
“Hermione!” Harry cried, surging forward.
“She stayed behind,” Pansy said quietly. “The rest of us wanted to hurry down to the Quidditch stands, but she insisted on waiting for you. None of us knew where you were, we just…” She trailed off, staring at Hermione’s frozen face, at her lips parted in unmoving surprise.
Tom could hear Harry choke back a sob, and he moved forward to wrap his arms around him. “This isn’t your fault, Harry,” he whispered against his ear. “You didn’t cause this.”
“I insisted that we take a walk by the lake,” Harry argued, shivering. “If I hadn’t…”
“Then the Basilisk still could have done this,” he replied. “Or it could have found a different victim. You can’t blame yourself.”
There was a sharp intake of breath behind him. “A Basilisk? ” Professor Snape blanched, his already sallow skin bleeding what little colour it held. “What makes you think that the creature behind these attacks is a Basilisk? ”
Pansy shrugged. “It’s just one of our theories,” she replied.
“Hermione’s theory,” Draco mumbled, trying to push a curl of her fringe away from her eyes, still wide and staring. “Salazar’s stave, even her hair’s gone stiff.”
Professor Snape was not impressed. “A Basilisk kills, Mr Riddle,” he said, “it does not Petrify.”
“Harry figured that one out, sir,” Pansy replied. “If no one actually looked at the Basilisk, just at its reflection, or through something like a camera, then maybe it wouldn’t actually kill you.”
Snape stilled. “Ms Granger and Ms Clearwater were found with a mirror lying on the ground between them,” he muttered. “Perhaps your theory holds some water after all. I take my leave – I must speak to the headmaster at once.”
But whether Snape ever had the chance to speak with Dumbledore about the possibility of a Basilisk roaming the castle, Tom never found out. The headmaster was apparently removed from Hogwarts that very evening, at the same time Hagrid was arrested for the attacks. The professors began shepherding the students around in large groups, and curfew was moved up to directly after the end of evening meals, restricting the students to their houses. Rumours of Hogwarts’ upcoming closure flew wildly about the castle, even though no further attacks took place.
It was his fifth year all over again, but this time Tom had nothing he could do to stop it.