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“Tom, my boy,” Slughorn exclaims, all well-meaning, smothering concern, “you can’t work at Borgin and Burkes!”
This, naturally, is the moment Tom decides he will.
(He learns that his disdain for boundaries extends far past the realm of magic.)
He sends his acceptance that night, after only the most perfunctory of salary negotiations. He then sits down to write out the rejections. No, he’s afraid his talents won’t be available to the Department of Magical Transportation, nor will he have the time to become Junior Paralegal-in-Training in Support of the Wizengamot Historical Archives. No, he shall not be joining the Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office, despite the personalised letter from the head assuring him that his “humble background will make him perfect for the job.”
Dumbledore accepts this news with unsurprised, unsurprising contempt. “Whatever you learn there, Tom, I fear it shall not do you much good.”
His other professors react to the news with disappointment, concealed with varying levels of effort. He smiles back in their disapproving faces with ferocious glee. He would rather disappoint everyone, would rather descend into infamy and destroy his prospects forever than be mired in mediocrity.
At least they’ll remember him, if only for his “wasted potential.”
He is a clerk at a second-rate second-hand Knockturn shop. They’ll see in the end, that it is simply one step in his plan for unprecedented power.
Tom Riddle is a liar. Borgin and Burkes isn’t a step towards anything, except potentially poverty. He is a liar, the knights have likely always known it even if he kept them too frightened to speak aloud, and he has never extended his “plan” beyond a tacky anagram, a ring, and a diary that, for a Horcrux meant to serve him eternally, displays an irritating amount of cheek.
He moves into a flat (rusty pipes, creaky floors, a sunken mattress that defies Transfiguration) on Knockturn, still stunned that, with his marks, he failed to secure any truly prestigious post.
Gringotts is firing Cursebreakers left and right, citing the financial instability around the war. St. Mungo’s is flooded with experienced healers from the continent, fleeing Grindelwald’s carnage. The Obliviators have stopped hiring, following infiltration by an enemy spy, and he’d rather march himself into Azkaban than apply for a position with the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.
(Then there is the question of why he’d been turned away from the Department of Mysteries. He’d like to believe it was a word from Dumbledore that soured his chances, because otherwise it was his own last name.)
The first week of summer, Grindelwald is defeated.
In single combat.
By Dumbledore.
Merlin, it’s like he specifically waited until Tom’s career was derailed entirely before bothering to intervene. The rest of magical Britain has gone mad with joy, owls criss-crossing Muggle London in broad daylight. It’s disgusting. Tom drags himself to the one place of safety, drained of energy.
Three Firewhiskeys later, his spirit is back, if listing towards open violence.
“He could’ve taken care of Grindelwald anytime,” Tom rants, sloshing liquor on the bar as he gestures wildly. It’s fine; the wood could use sterilization. “But no. He waits five years, until my life is ruined, before he bothers to lift a finger.”
Distantly, he recalls that thousands of other lives were also ruined by Gellert Grindelwald. For all of Dumbledore’s talk of “love,” he must’ve appraised all those people and found their value low.
“I could kill him,” Tom mutters. “I could really kill him.”
There’s a clink, as the bartender pours a glass for himself. “I’ll drink to that.”
Tom arrives at Borgin and Burkes hungover, but resolute in his conviction that Dumbledore bears sole responsibility for the wreckage that is currently his life. This is easier to swallow than the alternative possibility, that he might have ruined himself in a fit of adolescent pique.
(Stupidity is a privilege, more expensive than unicorn blood or thestral hair. Stupidity is for children with beautiful Latin names and full Gringotts vaults. It is not a luxury he can afford.)
“Glad Grindelwald’s dead, are you?” Borgin asks, casting an eye over his relative state of dishevelment.
“No, I was mourning him,” Tom retorts, flatly sarcastic. Maybe he can get himself fired on his first day, and start the cycle all over again-
But Borgin just laughs, the deep furrow in his brow relaxing. “Yes, the world lost a great man yesterday.”
Tom lets himself be ushered past the wall of grotesque masks into the backroom, all while rendered uncharacteristically speechless. Whether Borgin’s joking or not, he can’t tell.
Tom had known Knockturn mostly by reputation, only wandering in once as a younger student. (Alright, maybe three times.) He had known it as a blight on magical London, a failure of civilization, a glaring embarrassment to the Ministry. Yet somehow, it had never occurred to ask why the Ministry hadn’t just shut the place down.
He learns that its defence is, inevitably, just power.
Nearly as much money passes through Knockturn as its more presentable younger sister, one block over. Knockturn sells all the things this charming society wants but can’t admit to. Potions that become abortifacients, after three shakes. Portraits that take off their clothes on demand. Galleons from the eighteenth century, their anti-crime charms long since worn thin. Second-hand wands, available without a licence. History books from other countries, untouched by Ministry “editing.”
Tom would say the Ministry’s decided to turn a blind eye, if a third of the customers didn’t work for the Ministry.
He’s only allowed near the accounts at first: impeccably well-organised and shockingly honest, so far as Tom can tell. The size of the numbers surprise Tom just as much, as do the particular names. Borgin and Burkes handles merchandise rivalling Ollivander’s for expense, with roughly the same clientele as Twilfitt and Tattings.
He learns to balance the accounts and pay the taxes. He ensures that if any meddler wants to shut this place down, they can’t use the paperwork to do it.
On his second week, he’s allowed into the front room.
At first, he’s only given cleaning duties. The process is described thus:
- Check an object for curses.
- If it’s safe to move, transfer it to the back room.
- If it’s not safe to move, transfer it to the back room anyway, but only after making sure there are no customers in the blast zone. Even if they’re asking for it.
- Using your wand at a safe distance, attack it with assorted cleaning supplies.
- Don’t mix the silver polish with the venom-dissolver unless you’re trying to start a fire.
- No, don’t clean that thoroughly, it should still look like it belongs in this shop!
- Go on, add a little bit of the tarnish back, and a tasteful cobweb or two …
This process holds Tom’s attention for the first three shelves, as he acquaints himself with the surprisingly broad collection: spanning from ancient Roman curse tablets to pamphlets by Grindelwald’s Acolytes, penned only last year. Yet in time it grows boring, offensively simple for one of his talents. The repetition chafes, serving only to remind him of how thoroughly humiliating this position is.
While fuming in silence, he picks up an unremarkable white quill, chalking the tickle in his throat up to the surrounding layers of dust. He grasps it roughly and tosses it down on a backroom table. When he coughs, he blames the strong scent of the soap.
And then suddenly he’s on the ground, wracked by convulsions as the world goes black.
“Caractacus owes me money,” is the first thing Tom hears, when he regains consciousness. Borgin’s rocking on a chair in front of him (not a rocking chair, just an ordinary wooden seat with one too-small leg), wearing a rather pleased smirk. “He said you’d make it a month before nearly killing yourself. I said you wouldn’t, an innocent like you, still wet behind the ears.”
Tom scowls. “That quill wouldn’t kill me.”
He is a master of the Dark Arts. He is unbreakable, fortified by not one but two Horcruxes-
Oh, right. Those are meant to be a secret.
Borgin snorts. “If you say so.”
Clearing his throat one more time, Tom pushes himself to a sitting position. “That quill was harmless. I checked.”
“It was created specifically to evade detection by Aurors,” Borgin says, still wearing a secretive smile. “It’s the harmless ones you have to watch out for the most.”
Borgin’s watching him closely now. Dumbledore had looked at him similarly, as though staring through his soul, yet Tom has the sense Borgin’s more pleased by what he sees.
Yet what he says is, “If you’d like out, now is the time. We can say you reconsidered this role after a ‘health scare,’ any employer in Britain will forgive you for it.”
Tom narrows his eyes. He ought to leave. The proper thing to do is to leave and try his luck elsewhere, in a world now reorganised by peacetime.
Then his gaze shifts to the quill, still sitting in its spot, white as snow and screaming innocence.
“If you’ll have me,” he murmurs, “I’d like to stay.”
“Wonderful.”
“With a 10% raise, to offset the previously undisclosed health risks.”
“Done,” Borgin says, now getting to his feet. “Though I hope you’ll negotiate more persuasively with our customers.”
With no small amount of indignation, Tom Riddle learns that he’s rather bad at Dark Magic.
It’s not his fault, he reasons, shoving away the wave of shame. He’s been stuck at Hogwarts, he had to get his information by stealing it from the Restricted Section after curfew or threatening it out of other students (or, on certain desperate occasions, by flirting forcing it out of Slughorn). This wasn’t Durmstrang, he never got a comprehensive education.
Horcruxes, while enlightening (ha), turn out to be only a single strand of the tapestry.
Working at Borgin and Burkes proves to be a full course in the Dark Arts. Dark artefacts flit in and out of the shop all day, in all shapes and shades, and once Tom goes a full month without knocking himself unconscious, he’s allowed to graduate from cleaning to repair work.
And so he realises that Dark magic is beautiful.
“Most people these days look at a well-made Dark artefact and see a bludgeon.” With reverence, Borgin inspects the folds of a lace-edged tablecloth, prone to tossing the dishes at any diner who spills food on it. “Yet they ought to see a sword. Dangerous, yes, but balanced. An object of art as much as destruction.”
In any other profession, upon seeing a malfunctioning Dark object, Tom would have to alert his supervisors. They would rush it away or, in certain positions, instruct him to defang it, shattering its power and rendering it useless. In this shop alone, he is allowed to instead pull each curse apart and inspect the clockwork innards. Thus, he learns to tinker until he can taste the darkness, the different techniques like different flavours: rich cream or rosewater, crusty bread or velvet cake. He learns to pour out his own genius and strengthen each artefact that crosses his desk until it feels like him.
In time, he learns to leave “Dark” things more luminous than they ever were before.
He stays long after dark, alone in the backroom, faithfully wedded to his work. He finds he is newly prone to laughter, the sort of giddy foolishness that had gotten Mudbloods soundly mocked, when they fell for purebloods far above them. He keeps worse hours than he did at Hogwarts, even in the throes of exam season, and yet wakes up with a smile playing on his lips.
He is happy.
(This makes him dangerous, more than ever before.)
Sometimes he lingers in the shop even when his work is done, when the moonlight turns the gallery of masks from strange to evil. With gleaming fangs and empty eyes they scowl and grimace and grin down at him, each one a threat.
(Each one an opportunity.)
“Riddle,” Burke barks at him, paying proper attention to him for the first time in a year. “What’s the value of this hatstand?”
Tom leaves the scarf he’s mending (one that ties itself into a noose on command) and walks over to the item in question, an elegant hatstand of carved mahogany, its curved prongs sharpened to intimidating points. He takes out his wand and casts the usual detection spells, and then the unusual detection spells that he’s identified as crucial by trial and error. As expected, the prongs can slice flesh if they choose. They can also double in number to accommodate the headgear of a large party.
Tom considers the materials, the age, the quality of the spellwork, and the selling prices of several similar items over the past month. “About 15 to 20 Galleons, sir-”
“Wrong!” He raps his wand against the hatstand, knocking it back into a shadowy corner of the shop, out of sight. “The value is whatever you can get for it. You’d better understand, Riddle, that customers will agree to the worst terms imaginable when desperate. Never rely on your own ideas of how much a thing matters. Twist the knife, and people will give you anything.”
Tom nods, and mutters “yes, sir” and goes back to his sewing with the start of a storm brewing in his head, because salesmanship can get you far but there are still some lines that can’t be crossed.
Then he sees Burke talk Victor Crabbe into spending 60 Galleons on that hatstand the very next morning. Even accounting for Crabbe’s unique brand of witlessness, this is its own kind of magic.
Borgin manages customers with slow, serpentine flattery, pulling them under his sway. Burke (a shameless tout, he could run for Minister) batters them with facts and prices and “for you, I’ll throw in another one, just 10 Galleons more” until they’re as good as Confunded.
When he finally earns the right to speak with customers, nearly two years in, Tom picks a different style entirely. He feigns a quality they have both long since relinquished any claim to: honesty. He plays the clean-cut, wide-eyed shop boy who can still be trusted, who’s not yet corrupted by the business. He presents himself as sober, serious, full of care and concern.
It is his Head Boy mask, updated for the world of business.
The pocketbooks open.
Tom retracts every kind thought he has ever entertained about Borgin and Burkes. His teachers were right, when they warned it would waste his talents away.
Yet the Dark Magic (beautiful, sparkling) isn’t the problem.
The problem is the people.
They get their grubby fingerprints all over freshly polished silver. They ignore warning signs and poke at cursed objects, leaving Tom to mutter countercurses frantically under his breath. They knock over priceless ornaments and “forget” smaller wares in their pockets as they leave.
All of this, Tom could forgive as simple human carelessness. He is, after all, a merciful shop clerk.
But people also argue with his appraisals. They tell him he’s wrong, their Nana’s candelabra is genuine goblin’s silver, he’d better pay like it. They tell him he’s wrong, that ugly old knife on display isn’t goblin’s silver, he must be daft to expect 20 Galleons when it’s worth 20 Sickles at the most-
And then they ask for his manager.
He could forgive this too as harmless stupidity, except these people are officials and aristocrats, vaunted luminaries of their society. It’s the Head of the Exchequer who tells Tom he’s got his figures wrong, that 15% off 100 Galleons makes 75. It’s a distinguished Wizengamot juror who insists on hiring Tom to curse a snuff box (an “exotic” gift from the “faraway” locale of Harrods), having apparently never heard of the laws banning the misuse of Muggle artefacts. And it’s a researcher for the Dragon Research and Restraint Bureau who mistakes a Horntail hide for basilisk skin, never mind Tom’s protests that basilisk scale patterns aren’t anything like this, that he knows what he’s talking about even if he isn’t the one with “years of experience in this very field.”
Stuck behind a shop counter, unable to use his wand to settle unnecessary conflicts, Tom learns other people are useless.
Late in his second year, Tom is permitted to join Burke on house calls.
At Hogwarts, his classmates complained that the Slytherin dormitory was plain and unimpressive. At the time Tom had dismissed them as spoiled brats, but now he thinks they might have been stating a simple fact.
He visits the Princes first.
“They’ve got only the townhouse now,” Burke mutters. “The father gambles, and they’re downsizing. Quickly.”
“Only the townhouse,” he says, as though the front door isn’t wand-grade ebony, as though the doormat isn’t edged in Acromantula lace. While greeting Ignatius, Tom does his best not to gawp. When ushered into the cellar to examine a wrought-silver, human-sized cage of now questionable legality, he keeps his stare away from elven wines, their bottles tucked into a curling, gilded framework, their hues a shimmering Tyrian purple.
(Burke eyes them greedily, but then the shamelessness suits a pirate of his reputation. Tom is different. He must never be perceived as wanting.)
Burke talks about money. To Tom, he leaves the subtleties. The politics. The whispers between the lines of the latest Wizengamot transcripts, suggesting that one Albus Dumbledore (newly re-invited to the body as thanks for ending a war) intends to enforce the laws against Dark Magic far more strictly. Tom’s acquired an intricate knowledge of their country’s byzantine laws, and so he can quote the page and paragraph of the rules that may snare the Princes at any moment.
And it will be names like Prince that’ll fall first, if the wind shifts. Their position is unstable, and they are painfully aware of it.
“Oh, and Mr. Prince?” Burke says, winking at the patriarch when Tom thought their negotiations were done. “I just got the most gorgeous quartz cauldron in. Solid quality. And I know all the talk about how stone cauldrons are a passing fad, but I think they’re a sure bet for the future, don’t you? There’ll be a tidy profit for anyone who gets in on the right side.”
Stone cauldrons are doomed, likely to be banned within the decade. Tom’s the finest potioneer he knows, and yet he’s never been able to manage even a Pepper-Up Potion in one. Still, Prince’s eyes light up at the word “bet,” like a man enthralled. Burke knows it, too, as he offers to simply trade the cauldron for the cage, no money needed.
“I can’t believe you talked me into this,” Burke guffaws as he leaves, cage shrunken and tucked deep in his pocket. “I’m practically giving you the cauldron for free!”
There is no weakness so private, so sacred that it cannot be exploited.
(This lesson is redundant. Tom learned it a long time ago.)
Tom goes to the Rosiers, to sell Druella a seven-foot string of pearls for her trousseau.
(He demands that Burke not take him, even threatening to quit on the spot. This is a misstep: Burke deduces the history between them, his suppositions incorrect but too close for comfort. He decides to send Tom alone, and doubles the price he expects Tom to fetch.)
“I ought to buy a negligee too for the wedding night, but perhaps I should wear only this,” she says, her smile stopping well short of her eyes. “It’s just Cygnus’s taste, don’t you think?”
She runs her hands over the strands, fingering the pearls with merciless intensity, claiming them entirely as hers. She pays the asking price, yes, but taunts Tom ruthlessly the entire way.
(She doesn’t know, then, that he’d wanted her before Cygnus. That Cygnus was the second-place prize, all stolen nights and bitten-off cries: stolen in a rage over never coming first. There was a time Tom dreamed of having a Dark Lady just like her reigning openly at his side, all flashing eyes and knowing laughter, though age and practicality have skewered that hope through the heart.)
Burke takes Tom to Malfoy Manor, and he re-learns the definition of opulence.
A garden full of albino peacocks, the symbol of alchemical brilliance. A line of silver roses around the terrace, a strain long-since thought extinct. In the foyer, a chandelier of pure diamond, each stone cut just so for impossible brilliance.
Tom’s mask fails him, faltering as he crosses the threshold. Abraxas (peering down from the top of a grand staircase) catches the moment of weakness, yet Tom scarcely cares, too stricken by the sight. In the orphanage he used to conjure stories for himself before he had any other kind of magic: stories where he’d be a lord one day, with an entire palace to call his own. It is the absurd, impossible palace of his imaginings, sprung up around him.
(And some childish part of his heart screams it’ll be his, before he can recover his wits.)
The tactics Burke chooses are the inverse of what they use with the likes of Prince. The shop is now bursting at its seams with increasingly hot Dark artefacts (Tom regularly has to break up fistfights between the three Hands of Glory), and the lesser families are selling more off each day. The landscape is shifting underfoot, one tremor at a time.
(Tom blames Dumbledore, energetically warning customers against his machinations. Fewer people dismiss him as paranoid, these days.)
“They are pieces of old history,” Burke says with low urgency. “Pieces of our history. Unless families like yours take on the responsibility of caring for them, the Ministry would see them all Vanished as if they are worthless.”
He appeals to history, to “our history,” and it is truly remarkable how quickly the Malfoys are bewitched. The intelligence leaves their eyes as though they have fallen under the Imperius, and Burke jumps at the chance to command truly staggering prices. It seems there is nothing the Malfoys will not pay, to preserve their tenuous sense of a grander, better time.
(There is nothing the Malfoys and their ilk will not pay, to preserve a dream with less weight than air. Tom learns this lesson well.)
“I’m looking for other opportunities,” Tom says. He is sitting on a rickety chair at the Hog’s Head, fingertip tracing the rim of an even grimier tankard than usual, but Nott, Rosier, and Mulciber have gathered around him and it feels like a palace to rival the Malfoys’.
“That shop’s not worthy of your talents,” Rosier murmurs.
“It has had its uses.” Tom corrects him, feeling magnanimous. “But if you hear of anything promising-”
Mulciber stirs. “Augustus just got in as an Unspeakable, and he says that they need more talent, now that everyone else is hiring like mad.”
Tom’s eyes light up. “Fascinating.”
“I’ll have him put in a word,” Mulciber assures him. Tom doesn’t even need to ask.
While Tom’s sure he could learn more from Borgin and Burkes if he wanted, he can feel his upward momentum starting to falter. It’s time for a change.
He thinks that change will come from the Ministry. So he resubmits his application (with only a little bitterness that they aren’t reaching out to him), and he sails effortlessly through the interviews, his grasp of the subtleties of magic only strengthened by the past three years…
And he’s offered a position in just one particular division. Mind doesn’t want him. Death doesn’t either.
Only Love.
(He can hear Dumbledore cackling in the background.)
He writes a dozen owls to all levels of the Ministry bureaucracy, and no one can offer any clarity on their rationale. He begins to wonder whether they just spun a roulette wheel; that’s certainly how their policy decisions seem to be made nowadays.
Beaten down, Tom thinks of taking the offer just to hope for a transfer. He thinks of re-applying to Gringotts and the other usual suspects.
And then Burke sends him on a house call.
Alone.
“Even though she’s an old customer of yours?"
“Yes. And brush your hair,” he adds inexplicably, as though Tom hadn’t combed it just before leaving his flat an hour ago.
Despite his confusion, Tom obeys his orders and arranges his curls just so. Then he Apparates to the address, bearing the jewel-encrusted mirror he’s tasked with selling.
The house is ornate, though no one could accuse it of good taste. Corinthian columns. A gilded door-knocker in the shape of a hippogriff head. Around the border of the house are orchids, bright blue and wildly out of place in a crisp English autumn.
He is greeted at the door by a wobbly house elf, so swaddled in pink lace doilies she can barely move her limbs. Then he steps inside, and he cannot move either.
This is a practical concern, as much as an emotional one. There are fifteen antique broomsticks floating at waist height, prodding his hips in an invitation to get on and ride. A three-foot tall vase is stuffed full of silken flowers, which burst open the moment he walks in, shaking about for his attention. And a massive silver tray flies smack into his breastbone, shoving a squat pink cake into his way.
(Two tiers, positively festooned with stringy white icing.)
And then the lady of the house appears: the cake in human form. Hepzibah Smith is a massive presence, swathed in pink taffeta robes. Atop her head is a perilously balanced coiffure or wig, in, alarmingly, Dumbledore’s exact shade of auburn.
“Well,” she says, stopping short when she sees him, jaw falling open, “isn’t this a lovely surprise? Mr. Burke didn’t warn me he was sending two presents today.”
She hastens forward as best she can, in shuffling steps hampered both by her enormous hoop skirt and the trinkets piled everywhere.
“Mr. Burke apologises for missing his appointment,” Tom says though Burke does no such thing, “and sends his regards.”
“He should have warned me,” she huffs. “I would have dressed up.”
She sticks out one hand, and not at the angle for a handshake. Tom is briefly stunned. Then he bends down to kiss it, all while calculating the prices he could get for each of the rings adorning her fingers. When his lips brush her knuckles, she giggles like a schoolgirl.
(Like Myrtle Warren, if he is precise. The comparison is disconcerting.)
She leads him deeper into her home, down a hallway with three rows of portraits on each wall, and brings him to sit on a startlingly red love seat. She sinks down on the other end.
“Why don’t you take out whatever you’d like to show me,” she says, “and Hokey, why don’t you open a bottle of elven wine for me and Mr.-“
“Riddle,” he supplies.
“For Mr. Riddle,” she says, now turning a surprisingly fierce stare upon her house-elf. “Be sure you choose something before 1780. Mr. Riddle deserves a very special treat!”
Tom takes the mirror from his pocket and freshly shines it with a wordless tap from his wand. Then he begins his pitch, turning it this way and that, demonstrating how it can show the same image from different angles. She watches this with covetous eyes, stare fixed on the treasure in his hands.
“It’s impossible to say for certain,” Tom says, “but I think it must be from the Italian Renaissance. The sheer passion behind the spellwork-"
At this moment Hokey totters in, bearing two fluted crystal goblets brimming with purple-red wine.
“For you, sir,” she warbles, passing him the first cup.
He takes it with shameless curiosity. His knowledge of liquor extends only to the selection at the Hog’s Head, which he suspects is newly cut with Muggle industrial cleaner. He knows enough to recognize that ancient vintages are a currency of their own, yet he hopes that the Slytherins were exaggerating the lusciousness of fine wines as he closes his eyes and takes his first sip-
It tastes like money.
It must be a pudding wine, the alcohol mixed with straight fruit juice. It tastes like money, and candy, and the currant preserves served with the bread at every Welcome Feast. He’d gotten through whole summers of miserable rationing, dreaming of that jam.
“What does it taste like to you?” Hepzibah asks, curious.
“I’m tasting notes of black currants,” he answers, adopting the tortured phrasing he’s heard Abraxas and Rodolphus spout, growing grander the further they drink themselves into oblivion.
She’s pleased by this, her eyes twinkling. “I am so very glad I could introduce you to it.”
He fetches ten Galleons more than even he expected, and an invitation to come back whenever Burke has something to sell. Tom drops the coins on Burke’s desk, feeling unusually gleeful.
Burke counts the coins with a snort. “She liked you, then.”
“And I liked her,” Tom replies automatically, before realising with some surprise that it’s true.
Hepzibah Smith is an acquired taste. Slowly but surely, Tom finds himself acquiring it.
She is a collector, she declares unnecessarily the next time he darkens her door. Tom brings news and prices of a goblin-made sword (an oversized longsword with two emeralds like eggs set into the base of the pommel). Given her predilection for all things pink and frilly, he had doubts about whether she would show any interest, but no, she takes to the conversation about his sword with a zeal bordering on hungry.
“I have waited thirty years to find a sword worth keeping,” she tells him as he sips from a medieval goblet, filled with even older wine. “Patience is key for a true collector. Wait long enough, and in time the most delectable things will fall right into your lap!”
She leans in with a conspiratorial smile as she says it, as though she knows they are kindred spirits in this. She is not wrong; her gallery of delectable things makes his heart flutter, in a way he hasn’t felt since he stood in the Hogwarts trophy room and first saw his name carved indelibly into his home.
“Do come back,” she titters, “the next time Mr. Burke has something you think worth my time.”
Come back, she bids, and he turns down the Department of Mysteries. Gringotts, too.
He negotiates a raise from Borgin, enough to afford a flat where he doesn’t have to cast ten defensive charms every time he locks the door, where the charms are merely optional. Rosier and the rest have questions, the next time they meet, and he grants them no answers.
He stays.
His fourth year begins, and Borgin lets him into the real business.
Tom hadn’t guessed it, despite years spent slaving over the books, but much of the money that flows through this shop goes to or from the Aurors. There are the ones who pocket certain objects during official searches. Others have gained an appreciation for Dark objects from their work, and require a discreet supplier. More than a few require persuasion to turn away investigations that naturally lead to the shop, and they are paid with either money or a more precious currency: information.
Thus Tom learns that everyone, even the most upstanding defender of law and order, has their price. And most of the Aurors will sell themselves for nothing.
Like a boggart, all the intimidating authorities of their world would collapse into a farce, if only someone bothered to laugh.
The collecting is the first point of connection between him and Hepzibah Smith. Not the last.
The taste for history binds them next: not the attempt at self-aggrandizement that the Malfoys mistake for history, but a genuine interest in the whos and whys of their strange little world. She rhapsodises over the great wizards and witches of history and lets him do the same (though he keeps away from Herpo and the like, cautious even here).
“There simply aren’t great wizards anymore,” she laments. “People talk of Albus Dumbledore, but I don’t think he can really compare.”
She is pleased, if a little taken aback, by the viciousness of his agreement.
He recognises the strange glint in her eyes when their conversation turns to the Founders, the newly doubled passion in her voice. It sends him scrambling through the genealogies to uncover the unlikeliest of similarities: Hufflepuff blood, a line stretching unbroken to Helga herself, if stained somewhat by the decidedly Muggle name of “Smith.”
He does not tell her that they are alike. He cannot; the message he painted, claiming Warren and assorted petrifications for the Heir of Slytherin makes sure of that. He finds himself uncharacteristically peeved at his younger self for locking him into secrecy.
(He will never be able to claim his lineage openly. Not unless he reinvented himself into some kind of comically criminal Dark mastermind, with a long enough record to render one more murder irrelevant.)
He simply keeps his secret, and leeches more intensely off her generous hospitality. At least once a month, he finagles an opportunity to make her an offer, to insinuate himself further into her good graces. He will add her to his collection, soon enough.
It is the fifth year when Rosier asks if he’s ever taken a holiday.
“I haven’t.” The answer surprises even Tom, but he defends it easily enough. “The shop is busier than it might look; I see no point to squandering my time on frivolous outings.”
“But you said in seventh year, you were desperate to see Albania-“
Tom cuts him off with a raised eyebrow (a trick stolen off Arcturus Black, capable of shutting even Burke up). The conversation turns elsewhere.
Yet he reflects on it later that night, and realises that even after five years of hard work he wants no time to himself. He does not need it, when he spends one afternoon a month surrounded by all the treasure he could want, being waited on hand and foot by a particularly obsequious house-elf, nibbling on bonbons and drinking fabulous vintages and inspecting Bagshot’s latest work down to the footnotes. For now, he needs nothing more.
He learns to coax gifts out of Hepzibah.
It is hardly difficult. A smile twisted just so wins him a Flamel first-edition. A bouquet of poppies is exchanged for a clasp, dripping rubies like perfect globules of blood. The presents sing to him, particularly the jewels, arousing the part of his soul that rendered his Patronus a niffler.
(He had feigned incompetence with that one spell, back in Defence).
He is a master puppeteer, techniques honed by years of winning special treatment at Hogwarts, and she (eccentric, harmless yet decidedly irritating, undeniably lonely) makes for particularly easy prey.
She tells him about her family, a rapacious horde who refuse to visit her.
“They won’t come see me until my funeral,” she says with a self-pitying sigh. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought, Tom, of getting secretly married. If only to drive them mad one last time, when the will’s read and they don’t see one cent!”
She laughs at the idea like it’s truly impossible and thoroughly ridiculous. Yet Tom learns a great deal about inheritance laws that week, poring over books that never concerned him before. Before, he hadn’t the money to care.
Tom Riddle begins his seventh year at Borgin and Burkes, and learns to be content.
He has a comfortable flat. A modest job at a shop. He has a box of sensible Potions ingredients growing by his window, and a stack of books to read by his fireplace. He has- not a girlfriend, yet, but prospects.
Hepzibah Riddle.
Or, perhaps, Tom Smith. It’s done sometimes, when the wife comes from a higher class, and the thought no longer disgusts him.
(He is still special, the two Horcruxes make it undeniable, but he is content to pretend otherwise.)
One morning Tom pulls his diary from its hiding place, inside the mokeskin bag behind the secret wall in his kitchen cabinet. He has done this many times, but he finally gets up the nerve to flip open the cover.
You won’t believe it, he writes. I’m twenty-five, and everything’s turned out alright.
The words come spilling out, met with responses in his own hand (So you’ve decided to be mediocre then? Safely forgettable?). He’d forgotten how prickly his younger self was, how cynical and consumed by misery.
(How alive, he thinks, for one odd moment.)
You can’t actually love her, the diary insists, every word seeped with disdain. She sounds like Slughorn, but without the social graces- the only thing that made him worthwhile.
Of course I’m not in love with her, he writes back, ever-so-slightly sidestepping the accusation of “love.” If I marry her, it needn’t be for long.
She’s approaching death anyhow; no one would know if he helped her along.
(Surprisingly, he’s not completely set on murder yet.)
If anything, Tom adds, she’s like a mother to me.
The ink fades, and the page stays clear for several long moments.
Finally, his other half deigns to respond. There is something deeply wrong with you.
The diary (slammed shut with perhaps undue force) goes back in its bag, behind an extra layer of locks. Tom goes back to work.
In his eighth year, he stays late one day to change the display in the shop window. Thus he notices that the anti-theft curses on the glass have gotten threadbare. He stays on the street, checking the wards himself, hardening it against different lines of attack. What starts as a long-lasting Shield Charm becomes Salvio Hexia, and then turns into an attempt at replicating various curses that have crossed his desk and weaving them into the shop’s defences-
He stays long after dark, because he might be slightly overdoing it.
(A lock clicks undone, in the back cabinets of his brain.)
Knockturn Alley changes, after dark. The hags and pickpockets come out, along with an even less savoury class of businessmen. They all resent Borgin and Burkes. It holds an uncomfortable position as the most successful and therefore the most unlikeable establishment in the area.
Yet no one in their right mind will cross Tom. Not tonight. Not when he is standing on the cobblestones and hurling a rapid sequence of Reductors and Bombardas at his own storefront, throwing the occasional Killing Curse into the display. He shatters the glass and rebuilds it, shatters and rebuilds, until it is remade new and better from the inside out.
“You! What’s your business with that?”
Tom whirls about to see an Auror looming over a mousy woman with matted hair, lit only by a bright moon.
“That is thirty ounces of fresh wolfsbane,” the Auror. It’s that Barty Crouch, young pride and joy of his department; Tom recalls the name from both the neat moustache and the polished self-satisfaction in his voice. “Purchased one night before the full moon, despite subsection 31b of the Potions Ingredient Control Act, which states clearly that wolfsbane is not to be chewed, stewed or otherwise used for the mitigation of lycanthropy symptoms.”
(It’s illegal to act on lycanthropic impulses, and illegal to try and curb them. Tom wonders if next they’ll make it illegal to breathe while afflicted by lycanthropy.)
The woman starts stammering, clutching her bundle more closely to her chest. And before he knows it, Tom strides over, the thrill of Dark Magic hammering in his temples, calling for a fight.
“Obviously she’s using it as a sedative for managing canine pets,” Tom interjects. “Which is perfectly acceptable and in fact explicitly allowed by subsection 32e.”
And then there is a wand pointed directly between his eyes. Crouch switches targets, and the woman cleverly Apparates away with a loud pop.
“Crucio.”
And the most promising Auror of their generation starts using an Unforgivable on an innocent bystander, in the middle of the street.
He does it because none of these witnesses would be allowed into a Wizengamot hearing, much less listened to.
He does it for the reason all of his kind do it: because he thinks no one can defy him.
Tom stands there and takes it. The red light strikes like a jolt of lightning, setting every nerve alight.
And somehow he feels better when it’s over.
He waits a few moments for Crouch to catch his breath. This isn’t his first Cruciatus, but he’s still winded by the exertion.
Then Tom speaks, perfectly calm and just a little amused. “P, for Poor. Your technique could use work.”
They have an audience now. The whole of Knockturn Alley gravitates towards the two of them as they take their places in the very centre. Crouch wields his wand like a battle-axe, fist clenched tight around it, frame tense with furious effort. Tom holds his own wand lazily, just barely curling his thumb around it. It is a legal manoeuvre, certainly, so that he can argue that he made no threatening gestures. It is as much a statement of power.
He is magic, and magic is him. It requires no effort. He needn’t even try.
“Am I under arrest?” Tom asks sweetly.
“You interfered with the capture of a monster-“
“I didn’t. And …” He tips his head, pretending to consider the matter, doing his very best impression of Dumbledore. “I’m not entirely certain werewolves get to count as monsters, when they’re only monstrous one day a month, and here you are, doing it full-time.”
This wins him a Stunner to the chest, easily dodged. It’s followed by a hodgepodge of other spells, schoolbook jinxes and hardcore curses jumbled together. It’s a self-contradictory mix, but Crouch is undeniably dangerous.
Tom is something far worse.
Voldemort, that’s the name he’d chosen as a second-year with too much time during History of Magic, and he’d first chosen the name as much for the vol as the mort. He learned to fly as a child falling off a cliff and he never forgot how. He flies now, skirts swirling as he skims frictionless over the stones, slipping between some and leaping over others. He cancels the charms that threaten bystanders and simply dances around all the rest. Though Crouch pours out all his cruel hypocrisy for Knockturn Alley to see, Tom is untouchable.
Once bored, he finally reacts, shooting forth a Stunning Spell and then a far quieter Memory Charm. As Crouch collapses, Tom turns to deal with the now massive horde of witnesses.
There is stunned silence around him. Tom tenses, preparing for an attack from any Ministry sympathisers in the crowd.
“What?” he demands.
There is more silence.
“Nothing,” one woman says, now shuffling carefully away. “We didn’ see nothing, sir.”
Her face is thoroughly covered by a hood and several scarves. Her tone is difficult to read, but Tom senses terror.
She backs away with haste, and the rest of the crowd disperses too. Crouch wakes up a few minutes later, dusts off his cloak, and resumes his patrol, having no recollection of any odd incidents earlier in the night. Tom watches him go.
(It is not for years that he will realise that it was awe in that woman’s tone, not terror, and that hags who catch a scent never forget it. He will not learn this until far in the future, when he finds that he is treated like one of their own, by their species and other Dark creatures too. That they trust him not out of panic or calculation but honest, heartfelt care.)
Tom fails to sleep that night, possessed by an edgy, itchy feeling. He comes back to the shop in an ill mood, though he has long since learned to cover up such things, to sand down all his rough edges. Borgin throws him a funny smile when he walks into the backroom.
“I heard you got up to some fun last night,” he says, “and here I thought you’d been domesticated.”
Tom forces a laugh, and walks back out with a miniature, shrunken obelisk. It’d stand taller than him if properly erected, yet even in its current state it’s about a foot long, all luxurious cream marble with subtle reddish veining and pearl inlay on the tip.
Burke protests. “I’m planning to get 50 Galleons for that, from the Parkinsons.”
“And you will, unless I get 60 Galleons first.”
“You won’t. What use has she got for it, where’s the space-”
“She’ll pay,” Tom replies icily. “It’s precisely her taste.”
He’s correct. Obviously he’s correct; after all these years, no one knows Hepzibah Smith half as well as he. And as he drinks her wine and pockets her money, the unease leaves him, and he’s lulled back into safe, comfortable serenity.
It is 1955, and Tom is a poor shop clerk. Not desperate, not destitute, not scraping for survival like he once feared. But he has to Conjure his comforts (or get them second-hand), rather than buying them from specialty shops like Twilfitt and Tattings, as proper young wizards do. The quality is higher this way, but the prestige is nonexistent.
He doesn’t care.
Customers come in fits and starts, in varying shades of stupidity, all now blurred in his head to a mildly offensive shade of beige. Now thoroughly acquainted with every aspect of the business, he glides through each shift effortlessly.
He risks boredom. So to get through the day, he imagines how he would take over the Ministry.
It’s quite a detailed plan, by this point. He knows precisely which Aurors to Imperius and which ones to buy off. Which upstanding Ministry officials deal happily in Dark artefacts under the table, spouting hardline sentiments solely for show. Which fine manors have failed to repair their aging wards. Which families would gladly ruin themselves, to preserve their reputation.
It is the most detailed of daydreams. It is set aside every evening, as he curls himself into an armchair and takes to his books and, recently, his pipe, presented to him by Hepzibah because “it complemented his cheekbones so well.”
Tom has no need for transcendent grandeur anymore. Not when, at long last, he has grasped normalcy.
In a blink of an eye, he has spent ten years at Borgin and Burkes.
The next time he visits, Hepzibah is in a particularly rambunctious mood; he can tell from the thickness of her rouge and the shocking pink of her robes. He kisses her hand as his wont and then presses his luck, Conjuring up a bouquet of roses.
“You naughty boy, you shouldn’t have!” she laughs, breathless from surprise.
(She happens to have an empty vase nearby, though Tom hadn’t known he was going to offer flowers until a moment ago.)
The house-elf brings a tower of cakes: Rotweinkuchen, a long-time German favorite of Hepzibah’s, because the entirety of two wars seem to have passed her by. It’s sticky, and positively drenched in alcohol.
(“Downright indecent,” she giggled, the first time Tom tried a bite, and he’s inclined to agree.)
Then she shows him two more of her treasures, with a surprising and moderately irritating amount of fanfare. After so long, he’d thought she held no more secrets for him.
But then she shows him the treasures in question, and he can excuse all the caution in the world.
Hufflepuff’s cup. Slytherin’s locket. There was a time he’d have killed for those.
No longer. For a moment his eyes gleam red (a habit he thought long-buried). Then the urge is gone.
During a slow period the next day, he slips into the backroom and tries looking at the records for December 1926, all while wondering whether he can persuade Hepzibah to loan him the locket in place of a wedding ring. Walking in on him, Borgin looks askance at him.
“Hepzibah Smith said you sold her Slytherin’s locket,” Tom explains. “I was curious what price you got it for.”
Borgin snorts. “A hundredth of what I sold it for.”
“Who’d you get it from?” Tom asks. “There’s no name in here.”
“I didn’t have a name. I remember she was a tiny woman though, heavily pregnant, and she made that lot look well-dressed.” He gestures vaguely towards Knockturn Alley. “How she got her hands on a locket like that, I don’t want to know.”
“Perhaps she inherited it honestly,” Tom retorts, a little testily.
“I doubt it. I’m betting it was love potions. She tried giving me a cup, after she didn’t like my price.”
Tom’s eyes widen. “Did she?”
Borgin laughs. “She did. A waste of good Amortentia, I thought.”
Love has never held much interest for Tom, so love potions haven’t either. He’s still stuck staring at the single entry for “one locket, gold exterior.”
“There’s no point dumping it all in at once. The real trick is little doses, so they build up over time. It’s saved plenty of marriages, from what I hear. The effects people get with just a few times a year-“
“I’m not feeling too well,” Tom interrupts, suddenly shoving the record book back into its box. “Do you mind if I take the afternoon?”
Borgin stares at him for a moment, because he’s never deviated from his schedule once in ten years. Then he recovers his wits: “Yes- yes, of course.”
Tom dashes out of the shop and to the apothecary, to demand a bottle of castor oil and a pound of Wigentree twigs. The whole time he thinks of pudding wine, and the taste of currants lingering on his tongue.
Patience is key, said Hepzibah Smith. Wait long enough, and in time the most delectable things will fall right into your lap!
Tom hadn’t realised he was among their number.
He spends half the night tending the cauldron. At the devil’s hour, he takes two goblets.
And within two goblets, the dreamlike glow of the world fades. It leaves him in a dull colourless flat, cluttered with out-of-date books and rugs charmed for extra plushness and insipid little pictures on the wall: the detritus of a happy man’s life.
Of a life that most certainly does not belong to him.
He rampages. He twists the doors off their hinges and shreds the printed curtains, gouges the ceiling and sets fire to the trite landscapes hanging on his walls. With devastating care, he plucks each of the little green shoots sprouting outside his window, tearing them out by the roots. He raves and rages until he is staring straight at the diary, tattered and beaten-up and real, the one pristine sliver of his own, untouched soul.
He cannot write in it. He cannot bear the shame of admitting he has forgotten himself. That he was tricked, not just by Hepzibah Smith but by a whole world that told him this is happiness and of course you want it.
(A world that pretended of course you can have it.)
There is nothing left of him. No momentum, no ambition. He is nothing and no one, he has failed to even take a week’s holiday to fetch Ravenclaw’s diadem, he has wasted the best ten years of his life on customer service.
But with trembling hands he flips the diary open, to the front page where he’d first learned who he was, when he could be nothing else.
I am Lord Voldemort.
If he were in his right mind, he’d wait more than two days before the execution. He’d do a better job of the cover-up, make it look like old age or a stumble over the hems of a ridiculous costume. If he were in his right mind, he’d realise he’s done memory modification before and he shouldn’t repeat himself, because patterns are the stuff of Albus Dumbledore’s dreams.
He has spent ten years in his right mind, and he is sick of it.
When Hokey comes out to water the orchids, he casts the Imperius.
I want poison in the cocoa, he tells her. This is objectively an embarrassing murder method, too obvious to go unnoticed yet too treacly to be properly frightening. It’s like if Dumbledore became a Dark Lord: inherently laughable.
But it fits. He would not stoop this low if it didn't. If poisoned cocoa were not the best repayment he can think of, for seven years of pudding wines all spiked with love potion.
He never goes back to the shop. Stupid, really, it’ll just double the suspicion against him if anyone pays the slightest attention. But ten years at Borgin and Burkes have convinced him that the Aurors are masters of their chosen field: the fine art of bungling the simplest cases.
Ten years. Even with eternity before him, the figure’s staggering. But, says his sense of optimism with its dying gasps, he must have learned something of use during this whole ordeal.
Whether he did or didn’t, he will pick up and he will move on, as he always has before.
And he will remake himself. He will warp his face and twist his magic and blacken his shine until no one will ever think of collecting him again. He has learned that he will not (cannot) be normal, and so he will be far worse-
And therefore better.
After ten years of being a model employee, surely he's earned a holiday.
(He returns to Knockturn Alley once, in the dead of night. He stays out on the cold cobblestone, merely peering through the window at the wall of masks, as his chest aches from the urge to steal them and wear them all at once.)
“When I come back, be ready,” he whispers to his innermost circle, words warded from even the Hog’s Head’s barman. “I do not mean to only be a Minister, or hold any conventional post, no. The entire Ministry, and the entire country, will be mine before the turn of the millennium.”
Hearing this timeline, Rosier’s eyes nearly pop out. “You know my regard for you, but to take Britain that quickly? Tom, you can’t.”
And this is the moment Voldemort knows he will.