Chapter Text
Albus Dumbledore is having an exceptionally peaceful morning on the second of July, 1998. The students and faculty have left, Hagrid and the house-elves are enjoying a rest, and the Scottish sun is shining with undue cheer. How wonderfully warm it is! The heat of the day and sight out of his quarters’ windows are so distracting that he finds it difficult to focus on packing for tomorrow’s research sabbatical to Shanghai (certainly, it does not help that his feelings on multi-portkey travel border on dread). Perhaps a quick pop outside will clear his head, he decides. There’s no one around but Hagrid and the squid to see him roll up his sleeves and bask in the sun, after all, so he needn’t fear traumatising some poor student with his wrinkly elbows.
For not the first time in his tenure on the Hogwarts staff, he laments the anti-Apparition wards that require him to take the long walk in and out of the castle. Spry may he be for his age, but he’s still old as dirt, truth be told, and nothing so starkly reminds him of this fact as stairs.
As he descends, he considers whether it might be worth it to again petition the Ministerial Department of Magical Maintenance to allow Hogwarts to build a lift or two. If only dear Armando hadn’t signed that horrid deal with the Ministry, which surrendered so much of the school’s autonomy. The lift could have been built years ago. At the very least, Albus thinks as he crosses the Entrance Hall, he could have hired someone to fix the trick—
There’s a pop—a flash of light—
And a young man in student’s robes lies crumpled at his feet.
“Bloody Grindelwald,” he mutters, as he tries to rise to his feet and Albus struggles to get over his shock of someone simply appearing in his well-warded school. When the boy collapses back to the floor, Albus automatically reaches out to catch his arm; he yelps in pain. The feeling of blood, unmistakably, oozes from a tear between his skin to seep between Albus’ fingers.
Then the boy raises his head.
He screams.
Albus drops him.
“Professor?” says the visage of the boy who would be, who is, who was, Voldemort, as Albus says, “Mr Riddle?”
“You’re alive,” they say at the same time, equally mystified, and the boy says, alone, “But you’re old.”
They stare at each other. Blood, dirt, and ash wreck the young Voldemort’s face. Yet more blood plasters his hair to forehead. His lips are paler than lips should ever be, as if he’s about to faint. In the sunshine slanting through the high windows, his large brow eyes are so light and clear they’re almost amber. Only one pupil contracts.
His concussion is severe.
In all Albus’ memories of the Dark Lord, he never looked so disheveled, nor terrified. For truly, he is that.
“Mr Riddle,” he starts, but the boy cuts him off to ask, “Why are you calling me ‘Mr Riddle?” He sounds just as mystified by that as Albus’ state of being.
Dumbfounded, Albus answers, “What do I call you ordinarily?”
“Tom,” says the boy. “If you’re some trick of Grindelwald’s, he didn’t do a very good job. Professor Dumbledore’s called me Tom since I was eleven.”
Abruptly, Albus decides the Tom Riddle half-lying, half-sitting, definitely dying on the floor at his feet is not a threat. The situation is simply too bizarre for anything else to be true. No one knows that Tom Riddle is Voldemort except Albus, and anyone left to remember Tom Riddle is well aware that Albus liked the boy even less than he likes long distance travel. He’ll still need to question him, but that will have to wait; he needs to be cleaned and healed first.
Laboriously, Albus gets onto his knees, so that they’re level. “I can’t say I understand what’s going on, Tom,” he says carefully, “but I’ll ask that you trust me nonetheless. We’ll talk, but only after you’re well enough. I’m going to run a diagnostic spell on you. Please be still.”
It says a lot about whatever relationship this Tom Riddle believes he has with Albus that he does he’s told. Albus runs the wand over the length of his body, which reveals increasingly distressing results: a concussion, compressed nerves in his thoracic outlet, four broken ribs, a sliced open wrist that very narrowly avoided the artery or other major veins caused by a curse, one mildly dislocated knee, a fracture in the same wrist, and, unsurprisingly, shock. If the blood loss doesn’t make him faint soon, then the sheer amount of pain he’ll experience once the shock wears off will.
Albus smiles mechanically and lies that the boy will be right as rain in no time, before Summoning the requisite potions from Poppy’s cupboards. Until he’s a little more put together, Albus fears what additional damage moving him might wrought.
In the end, Albus does not enjoy the morning’s sunshine, nor does he ever pack for China. He’s no healer, but he knows enough of the art that only the boy’s wrist offers any complication, and even that’s fixable, though not without a scar. Tom Riddle spends the afternoon, evening, and night in a deep, Dreamless sleep in the Hospital Wing, while Albus returns to his rooms to riffle through his private library and correspondence for anything related to time. There’s rather much more than he realised, though the consensus among scholars of chronology is that forward-travel is not doable. It makes little sense, considering that the Tom Riddle currently trying not to die in his sleep mustn’t be more than fifteen.
Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, he stumbles across the burgeoning field of Multi-World Studies, a subset of Time Studies, which hypothesises that there are an incalculable number of worlds, each brushing up against one another, formed at crossroads, when seemingly unimportant decisions alter the course of history.
Well. That’s certainly an explanation. There are ways to know if it’s the right one before he need speak with the boy. It’s not as if taking a memory for the Pensieve requires permission—and, naturally, he will return it.
He returns with the Pensieve to the Hospital Wing, where he selects the memory of where they first met. Then he deposits the silver thread in the basin, glances at the boy, and slips in.
You must be Mrs Riddle, says the younger version of himself. I’m Albus Dumbledore, Professor of Transfiguration and Head of Gryffindor House at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. I sent you a letter.
His hair is the colour of carrots in the sunshine; his robes are the same periwinkle as the early morning sky. When he smiles, the corners of his eyes crinkle, though not as much as they one day will. The woman across from him on the townhouse’s doorstep is his age, at guess. Mid-50s. Her hair is perfectly coiffed, and her suit is simple, but stylish. Albus can only see her from behind; he views this memory from the perspective of young Tom, who hovers in the entranceway. He is, as Albus remembered, very small for his age.
Mrs Mary Riddle folds her arms. Yes, you did, Professor, she says. You must come through, I suppose. Please leave your shoes by the door.
She steps aside. The younger Albus enters. Thank you, Mrs Riddle, he says as he toes off his dragonhide boots. Then he spies the boy. You must be Tom, he says. I’m Professor Dumbledore. I’ll be one of your teachers soon.
Present-day Albus watches Mary Riddle’s lip curl. She glares at the back of his younger self’s head. When he shakes her grandson’s hand, Present-day Albus is somewhat shocked she has the self-control not to commit an act of violence.
How very curious. Where is Wool’s Orphanage? How did it come to pass that Mary Riddle, one of Lord Voldemort’s first victims, is, or was, his guardian?
Tom just nods and looks down at his socks. Mary Riddle steps past both versions of Albus in her house slippers, takes her grandson’s small hand in hers, and says, Through here, Professor, before leading them into a remarkably hideous sitting room. Albus has always been partial to lace himself, but this is too much.
The younger version of Albus sits on the chair, while the Riddles occupy the sofa, with eleven-year-old Tom tucked under Mary’s arm. There’s no sense of cold superiority permeating the memory; instead, Albus would almost call the taste in the air fear.
I see, his younger self says, that you must already know of your magic. Again, the boy nods. Well, then that does make the introduction quite a bit easier. But I do think I would like to speak to your grandmother alone first.
It’s quite all right, Tommy, says Mary, in the same clipped tone she’s used since the memory began. I’ll call for you when we’re done. It shan’t take long.
Though Tom doesn’t like the thought of leaving her alone with the strange man in the funny clothes, he acquiesces, which means Present-day Albus, too, must leave. However, they do not go far. They retreat to the hallway with the staircase leading to the level above, then pull the door mostly, closed, but not all the way. It’s a relief. Albus doesn’t know what he would have done, had this Tom Riddle done nothing but display perfect angelic sweetness.
Back in the parlour, his grandmother asks, Do you mind terribly if I smoke, Professor?
Undoubtedly, the answer is yes, but his younger self says no. There’s a snick, then the smell of cigarette smoke.
May I ask where your son is, Mrs Riddle? he says. This is a conversation best had—
He’s dead. As is my husband.
I’m sorry for your loss.
There’s a pause. A drag on the cigarette, Albus thinks. Then Mary says, The Gaunts always talked about ‘your world’ and ‘our world.’ Tell me, Professor, what did your world think of the War?
Well, that Albus says politely, we’ve been rather busy with our conflict, I’m afraid. But as the boy’s legal guardian, if you wish for him not to attend, it’s your choice.
A creak of the sofa. A sharp exhale. I don’t trust your sort, she says, but I don’t much trust mine, either. You have spells that kill a single person effortlessly, if I remember correctly. How quaint. The Americans and the Russians can demolish whole cities with just one bomb. The Nazis nearly destroyed my country through air raids. That’s how my husband died. Outside in the wrong place at the wrong time. My son died in Caen just a day before the battle’s end. And with the cancer, I’m unlikely to live more than another three years. We have no family. I may not like your kind, but I won’t have my grandson left to rot in one of London’s illustrious orphanages.
I’m sorry, he says again. We’ll take good care of him.
You best see that you do. He’s exceptional. It’s a miracle, considering what a nasty little bitch his mother was. If he’s even half as good at magic as he is at his ordinary education, I’m certain he’ll be top of his class within the month.
I am sure. Has he demonstrated magic before?
Of course. He’s exceptional. Several of his teachers are already salivating over the idea of what he’ll achieve one day. We let him experiment. How were we to know there was a magical school? His mother clearly never attended.
Is his mother the reason you dislike ‘my kind,’ Mrs Riddle?
Oh, yes. It’s the sort of thing you never hear about happening to men, if you understand my meaning. Positively beastly. There was a wedding and all, and by God’s grace, she had the decency to die in childbirth. Broke her curse. Tom was hardly past twenty. The whole village thought he’d leave the baby at some orphanage in London. They all knew he’d been bewitched, you understand. Judged him hard when he chose not to blame his son for his mother’s actions, and judgement’s judgement, so it wasn’t long until they moved to London. And then the Krauts declared war and started dropping bombs, and we allowed the House to become a convalescent home and followed them, but Thomas died in Kensington because the sirens were faulty and he forgot the milk, and the War Office conscripted Tom, despite him raising his son alone, and now the Russians and the Americas both have their fingers on the triggers of weapons that can destroy the world. Yours, mine. Does it matter if we all breathe the same air? But perhaps it does, or your lot would have stepped in and stopped those men from discovering how to split the atom. I used to think magic made people careless. Now I know it’s simply that the human default is wickedness. Forbidden fruit, thy name is Eve and all. Atoms, love spells, apples. Who cares if Tommy has magic? If it offers him even a modicum of protection against nuclear power, then teach him how to use it. Does that answer the question to your satisfaction, Professor?
At this point, Tom Riddle’s face is doing all sorts of interesting things. He ranges, in the course of his grandmother’s rant, between openly confused to anxious to concerned and finally, back to anxious. As a boy of this age, he’s too young to understand her euphemistic approach to discussing the violation of his father, but his intense reaction to any mention of what the Muggles call The Cold War overrides any curiosity. Was it such a concern to him in Wool’s Orphanage? Albus hadn’t even known to ask. Regardless, he does know this: the point of deviation is Tom Riddle Sr’s decision to raise his son.
That’s enough. Albus exits the memory and returns it to its rightful owner.
The easiest way to convince Tom Riddle to talk was to always allow him to think he had control. It’s unlikely a change in upbringing shifted that aspect of his character too drastically, so in the morning, Albus allows the boy to choose where they should hold their discussion. To his surprise, the boy who might be the Dark Lord in the making sayings, “Outside.”
“After you eat,” Albus says, then retreats to fabricate an errand for Hagrid.
Half an hour later, Albus and the boy who’s probably not the Dark Lord in the marking sit on conjured garden furniture beside the lake. “Tom,” Albus says, as the boy adjusts himself so Hogwarts is entirely at his back, “can I surmise for the state of your injuries, mention of Grindelwald, and aversion to the castle that you came here from an active attack on the school?”
“Yes,” Tom says. He blinks a few times, very quickly. “I’m very confused. While I may not be an authority on Death, I suspect you aren’t meant to begin your deathly journey in hospital. But you were quite dead. I was there.”
“In the attack on the school?” Tom nods. “And this was because of Grindelwald?” Again, Tom confirms. “Tom, were you hit by a curse before you…arrived here?”
“Oh. That.” The boy smiles wanly and sips his tea. The movement reveals the new scar on his arm, a puckered pink, violent thing that hurts to look at. “Well. Yes. I blocked it with a Shield of my own design. I’d say I suppose that could do ‘it,’ but I still don’t know what ‘it’ is.”
“Did you recognise it?” Albus asks, though he suspects he may already know the answer.
There’s a long, uncomfortable pause, before Tom says, “The Killing Curse.”
“I see,” Albus says. He sips his own tea. It’s herbal, borderline sweet.
“I’ve done it before,” the boy says, as if that’s normal. “Blocked the Killing Curse, I mean. I don’t know why this time would have resulted in me appearing in a Hogwarts empty of all but a dead man and some ghosts.”
Because, Albus thinks, you’ve never blocked such a curse cast by the Elder Wand. “I do see how that could lead you to the conclusion that you’re dead,” he says aloud, “though I assure you, you’re quite alive. What year did you come from?”
To the boy’s credit, the question doesn’t appear to come as a shock. “Nineteen fifty-four,” he says. “It was the second of July.”
So, he’s seventeen, then, but has not yet finished his Hogwarts education. He looks younger than his counterpart had at the same age, more narrow, more boyish. Innocent, maybe.
Albus isn't certain if he trusts it.
“It’s now the third of July,” Albus tells him, “nineteen ninety-eight. You come, I believe, from a very different nineteen fifty-four than the one I lived.”
The boy looks a little green around the metaphorical gills. How expressive he is! A teenage Voldemort’s every expression was approximately as real as a Dionysian theatre mask; this Tom Riddle is not overt, perhaps, in advertising his emotional devastation, but the threads of it that he reveals do surely appear to be sincere.
He sets down his teacup. “I had hoped you wouldn’t say that,” he says. “I concluded that this morning, but it isn’t possible.”
“Recent research indicates it is, I’m afraid.”
“Does recent research indicate how I might return?”
Chagrined, Albus admits he hadn’t found anything of the sort last night. “It may exist,” he says, “though you must leave the discreet inquiries to me. The Unspeakables are very particular about timespace.”
The boy nods distractedly. “And in this…plane of existence,” he says, gesturing vaguely at nothing, “you don’t like me?”
“Didn’t, I’m afraid,” Albus says, as he pours himself more tea, “nor did you particularly like me. Though you’re nothing like your counterpart. It’s quite refreshing, really. Does the ‘Chamber of Secrets’ hold meaning to you?”
“No,” says Tom. “Unless, is that the room on the seventh floor?”
“That’s the Room of Requirements,” Albus says, startled. He had always assumed Voldemort never learnt of the room, but perhaps it might be worth checking it out after all. “It refers to Salazar Slytherin’s hidden chambers. Only his true heir can open it.”
Tom delicately raises a brow. “With a Parseltongue lock?” he says. “I suppose the Other Me went looking for this place, then. Was he a Slytherin, so he assumed that made him heir?”
“You weren’t a Slytherin?” It seems prudent not to mention that Voldemort just was the heir, no assumption needed.
“I’m a Ravenclaw,” he says, with something nearing a smile. “I’m a Prefect. I’ll be—”
He stops.
For a moment, Albus simply watches the boy stare out across the lake, before he says, “The version of you that I knew lived his entire childhood in an orphanage in London, including the summers between term. Grindelwald never attacked Hogwarts in fifty-four. In fact, I duelled and defeated him in fifty-five. Clearly, I’m very much alive. But before I tell you more, I need to know more about you.”
Tom looks at him with such guileless, innocent trust that it’s heady. “All right,” the boy says. “I suppose I’ll start at the beginning.”
When Tom was three, the Nazis started dropping bombs on Britain. His grandfather died within the first month. He was not the only magical child in the nation to start exhibiting accidental magic as a direct result of the stress, exhaustion, and abject terror, but he might be the only one who began learning to control it because he feared that should he not be able to protect his family, he’d be shipped off to the country like his schoolmates. He did not want to return to Little Hangleton; Little Hangleton did not want him.
His father encouraged his learning, and tried—often successfully—to help by extrapolating the latest educational and psychological theories from scholastic texts he purchased with his Oxford connection. The Riddles hadn’t known of Hogwarts, but were aware, however peripherally, of a magical community that they didn’t want finding out about Tom. But then his father died, and his grandmother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and the letter came. Do you want to go? his grandmother had asked, after reading over the letter, and he’d answered, Not particularly. Do you think I should?
She did, which isn’t surprising. She was usually right about these things.
And so Dumbledore came. His visit to the townhouse was uninspiring, but he accompanied them to Diagon Alley, where he introduced Tom to magical books and owl post and potions, as well as his wand, which happens to hold a core from Dumbledore’s own phoenix. He explained about the train and the Sorting and the Houses, but Tom was very disappointed to learn about the qualities of Gryffindor. I won’t be in your House, sir, he said. I’m still scared all the time. It gets inside you, you see, he didn’t say at the time. All that fear—of the sirens, of being trapped underground, of the blackouts. He was afraid of loud noises and tight spaces and the dark and, most of all, of dying. Death, to him, was surely one endless Blitz.
Dumbledore said that any House was a good house, and that even if Tom wasn’t his, he should feel free to reach out whenever he needed.
Ultimately, Tom was Sorted in Ravenclaw. He excelled. By the end of the year, several of his results were record-breaking. Sure, there were a pack of Slytherin boys determined to ruin his life because of it, but Slughorn’s blatant favouritism largely forced them to pull their punches, Flea was always ready to throw one of his own in his best friend’s defence, and Mia seemed to like patching up cuts and bruises, so it was manageable. Flea as Fleamont and Mia as in Euphemia. Of the Potters and the Peverells, respectively. Close inter-House relationships are unusual, but they made it work (quite possibly because Dumbledore never minded if Tom spent far too much time in the Gryffindor Common Room).
They were at the school, too, when Grindelwald attacked, and Grindelwald caught Tom on the outs because the sight of Flea on his knees clutching Mia’s body was distracting, and —
Well, in his third year, his grandmother died. He was allowed a week’s absence to return to London and settle his affairs. Flea’s father came with him. The next summer, Tom spent in the Wye Valley on the Potter estate. He had intended to return for this summer and the summer after that, before following through on a promise to his Muggle family and attending Oxford alongside his Mastery. It’s as good a plan as any; he knows he wants to teach DADA one day, but Dumbledore says the minimum hiring age at Hogwarts is twenty-four.
But to return to the topic at hand: it was during his time with the Potters that Grindelwald reappeared on British soil. Bobbit, the Muggle Studies professor, theorised that it had something to do with Stalin’s death, but Tom never saw the connection. Regardless of the reason, the fact remained that he held The Prophet at wand-point and forced them to run a front page article publicly challenging Dumbledore to a duel. For whatever reason (Tom suspects Ministry involvement), Dumbledore ignored it. Months passed when nothing happened. It was even said he had called Grindelwald’s bluff.
The attack on Hogwarts was ten months later. It started the last day of the term, as the students were leaving and the wards were at their weakest. And rest? Tom’s not ready to talk about it yet, so tit-for-tat, he thinks. He’s told more upfront than he’s used to telling, so he deserves the same in kind.
Dumbledore indulges Tom with the tale, if the word “indulge” could dare be used for the nightmarish reality the man bears before him. How was Tom, in any version of himself, a hypocritical, anti-Muggle blood purist Dark Wizard who murdered his best friends’ son and daughter-in-law, all because some Muggle orphanage was terrible? It belies belief. Good and bad is a bullshit binary, he’s always thought, but while he knows he’s not a paragon of virtue, he can’t imagine ever becoming the magical version of bloody Hitler with a murder spree that probably began at the age of fourteen.
Merlin’s pants, he wishes he had some of Flea’s fire whisky just about now, of better yet, the Calming Draught. Even war might be preferable to this. “That’s not me” is all he can think to say, once Dumbledore is done.
“I can see that,” his mentor, who he saw brutally killed just yesterday, answers. Grindelwald hadn’t used Avada Kedavra. In fact, Tom had the impression that the immolation was a mistake, not deliberate irony. “The differences between yourself and Lord Voldemort are nothing short of miraculous. Unfortunately, this does mean we should have a frank discussion about what we need to do. You’re here. There’s a distinct possibility that your continued presence here is permanent, particularly as gaining entry to the Department of Mysteries is inadvisable with your blood record being what it is. But then, you haven’t completed your schooling. Faking OWL scores is remarkably easy, but that’s not so with NEWTs. I can offer you a place for your seventh year at Hogwarts with a clever cover story and a false name, but if you’d like to try your hand with Muggle schooling instead, I’m sure we can find a way to set that up as well. Take a day. Consider your options seriously.”
So Tom takes the day.
In the morning, he disappears into the dungeons, where he raids the Potions stores and brews himself a Calming Draught for the first time in a year as he considers how Flea had just draped an arm around his shoulders, saying, don’t be such a git, Riddle, when the doors to the Great Hall burst into splinters. He considers the woman he killed, before she could do in that eleven-year-old, except then the Fiendfyre came and burned up all the injured in the Great Hall anyway. Two days. No one slept for any of it, unless they were dead, just like in Dad’s letters to Gran about the front, the ones he wasn’t meant to read. Tom considers Dumbledore, caught in the fire, burning, and the Avada Kedavra Grindelwald dodged out of sheer dumb luck, and that Tom still could have won in the end after all, if only the man hadn’t been a cheating prick who broke from their impromptu duel to aim his curse at Flea’s back—
Tom skips lunch. By the early afternoon, he’s staring at his Common Room’s enchanted ceiling as he (calmly) considers the nature of fear. He’s never mastered banishing a boggart—he’s not even the only Muggle-raised student who can claim this is the case—and while he can technically cast a Patronus, he’s always secretly doubted he’d be able to if faced with a real Dementor. What shape, he wonders, would his boggart take now? Perhaps it’s still the very unoriginal form of blown up corpses accompanied by air raid sirens. His own, his family’s, his friends. But it’s not as if he ever conceived this as a possibility, and it’s certainly worse. To be stuck here (and he is stuck, he knows he is, in the same way he always knows the answers on an exam or that the sky is blue or the Nazi were evil) is like being dead, with his life trapped behind an unseen veil, but at the same time, his body and mind have the audacity to keep living in world where he’s the villain.
While he’s always wanted fame, he intended it to be for cutting-edge research, like finding the cure to lycanthropy or freeing the house elves or something. Not mass murder.
By early evening, he’s (calmly) considering known and unknown variables. Inevitably, everything here is, to some degree, an unknown. However, the Muggle world always advances at a much faster rate, as they actually believe in technological innovation. Clearly, the Wixen world still hasn’t even adapted to trousers, so it’s likely not much else has changed, either.
“I’ll finish at Hogwarts,” he says at sunset, when Dumbledore asks again. They’re in the Ravenclaw Common Room, where Tom will have to sleep tonight. “I suppose I can always continue with the original plan. I imagine Transfiguring Hogwarts transcripts into Muggle ones is as simple now as it was in my time.”
“Quite so,” Dumbledore says. He smiles. His eyes twinkle. How he manages that, Tom will never know. “We do need a story to explain your sudden existence and transfer. It wouldn’t do for you to stay here for the summer. Rubeus Hagrid is the gameskeeper, and I have no doubt he’ll remember your face.”
Tom blinks. “The Gryffindor spider boy?” he says. Somehow, this might be one shock too many. “How is he—was he not expelled here?”
“I dare say he was,” says Dumbledore, just as surprised, “after he was framed for a crime he didn’t commit. ‘Spider boy?’”
Repressing a shudder, Tom says, “He’d raised an Acromantula. It escaped. His dorm mates suffered for it.” Joey Trent died for it, when the demented creature ate his face, but even Tom has limits on what he can discuss without feeling queasy.
“Oh” is all Dumbledore says to that and moves on quickly. “Well, I have plans to travel for research this summer. I strongly recommend you come.”
“All right,” Tom says. He’s never been outside of Britain, so that’s nice enough, even if spending weeks for a version of his favourite professor who doesn’t trust him sounds absolutely barmy. “As long as it isn’t Germany. Or the USSR.”
“There is no USSR,” Dumbledore says. “Hasn’t been for several years. No, my research calls me to Shanghai.”
“China? What for?”
There he goes again, twinkling. “Why, Tom,” he says. “Dragons.”
Dragon pox, specifically, Tom discovers. Western dragons and Eastern dragons are markedly different, so the strains of the disease are different, and lately, a hybrid’s formed that’s immune to all known cures. At seventeen, Tom’s “too young” by the standards of local law to do much by way of assistance, so he spends most of his time exploring the city with a small cohort of local Muggle acquaintances who have no trouble believing he’s an ordinary sixth form student tagging along on his batty grandfather’s research trip. He likes the Bund and French Concession best, because the architecture reminds him of home, and the trees that lose their bark rather than their leaves are fascinating, but the rest is interesting as well. It’s not enough to dull the ache of losing everything, but it’s a nice distraction; he hopes fervently that the Other Him never experienced anything nearly as (dare he say it) fun, because the man didn’t deserve it.
Dumbledore’s friend generously offered him use of her two-floor flat in Sānlín, the dullest neighbourhood of the city, where they only see each other at breakfast. Part of Tom wants to believe this is a mark of trust, but, frankly, his Dumbledore would never trust any seventeen-year-old to run around a foreign city on his own (not after Longbottom’s malfunctioning wand almost burnt down Cairo last summer anyway), and this one keeps watching Tom like he’s waiting for the manifestation of megalomaniac tendencies.
For once, Tom’s glad to disappoint.
As a result, though, it’s a month before Dumbledore says, “I’ve discovered a case that may help craft a background for you.”
“Oh?” Tom says, as he swirls a chopstick around in his ice coffee to integrate the milk. Even with the Cooling Charm working its magic on the balcony, it’s so bloody hot already that the thought of drinking anything colder than freezing is unimaginable.
“In nineteen fifty-six,” Dumbledore says, “the son of a journalist from London disappeared, last seen in the French Concession, presumed dead because his mother was found dead. Margaret Ryder was a Muggle, but there’s no name listed for the father. An American wizard could work, perhaps. The identity of the murderer was never discovered. I propose that Malcom Ryder becomes Tom Malcom Ryder, a half-blood transfigured into a doll and left in a dollhouse by his private tutor, until I discovered him—you—this summer.”
Tom considers this. It’s the sort of ridiculous untruth that people will accept because no one will believe that a person would try to create a new identity based on a lie that dumb. Moreover, it’s only a couple years off from his own time, so should help explain any confusion he has about the modern world. To say it’s awfully convenient is an understatement, but after being uprooted from his life, he deserves at least this much luck. Probably.
“It’s acceptable,” he says. “Thank you.”
“That’s good to hear,” Dumbledore says, before pausing, sipping his piping hot Earl Grey, and continuing, “The issue, however, with so directly tying you to me is that I have many enemies. They may seek you out as a means to learn more about me. How are you at Occlumency?”
“If that’s a concern,” Tom says, “you needn’t worry. I’m a—the Other You taught me himself last year.”
Clearly, depressingly shocked, Dumbledore asks, “What prompted that?”
Tom delays in answering by drinking more coffee at once than is strictly necessary. “Grindelwald’s followers kidnapped a veritable pride of Gryffindors from Hogsmeade,” he says, as he looks across the cityscape toward the river, where barges float by on the brown water. “Visits to the village were banned from then on. There were student petitions. Eventually, Dippet decided that any student who wished to be granted visitation permission again had to achieve an acceptable level of proficiency in Legilimency and Occlumency.”
“That’s preposterous,” says this Dumbledore, just as his Dumbledore had. “That may protect information, but it surely didn’t protect the students.” Tom shrugs. He found the whole thing a massive overreaction, right until a fragment of the broken doors hit him so hard in the head he collapsed. “Did you perhaps mean to say,” Dumbledore adds, drawing Tom away from memory lane, “that you’re a natural Legilimens?”
Uncomfortable suddenly, Tom shifts in his seat. “I suppose.”
“And why did you not?”
Again, Tom shrugs. “Well,” he says, “bragging’s rude.”
“Bragging is rude,” Dumbledore says, with an expression Tom can’t read. “Stating a fact is not. The Other You never denied himself the opportunity to do the former, though he couched his self-flattery in calculated humility.”
“Perhaps he learned social etiquette from a snake,” Tom says. The words leave him with a pang; Mia once said he must have learned flirting from the school’s grass snakes, back before she and Flea and him figured themselves out. But she had no right to talk, as she never tried to catch the attention of someone like Kate Lovegood. She was the top scorer in the year ahead of them, another Ravenclaw, and a pureblood. Speaking with her for more than five minutes always reminded him of his crushing sense of inadequacy.
It sounds like the Other Him could have used that feeling. Surely, he thinks, something must account for the change beyond their childhood caregivers.
No sooner does the thought form than he voices it. Dumbledore just stares at him over his mug for a moment before he says, “I have a theory. We can discuss it when you’re older.”
“I’m of age!” Tom says, offended. “That excuse is invalid.”
“Yet, alas,” Dumbledore says, “there are topics I find I cannot comfortably discuss—”
“So it’s my mother?”
Another pause. “I had hoped you were ignorant of the circumstances of your birth,” he says. “I’m rather sorry that you’re not.”
Tom presses his lips together. “I’ve known the circumstances to varying degrees since primary. It was impossible not to know in which way Dad had been ‘bewitched’ when Professor Merrythought’s practical demonstration of the Imperius Curse failed to elicit a result from me.”
“Ah,” Dumbledore says, as if all his suspicions were confirmed. It’s insufferable. “Yes, that would account for it. Partly, anyway, I suspect. Here, Merope Gaunt used a love potion.”
He says this as if he expects Tom to be well-versed in how the myriad of side effects that appear in a child conceived by magical coercion may different depending on method. Of course, he’s aware of his own deficits, from nosedives into paroxysmal phenomenology if he feels he’s losing control of a situation yet dichotomous suggestibility when stressed to his inconsistent mood to how often he finds himself wrongfooted in social interactions. If Flea and Mia hadn’t decided to bully him into friendship during their first trip on the Hogwarts Express, it’s doubtful he would have developed a relationship with anyone that went deeper than study partner. Certainly, he can be charming, and has always managed to craft a layer of likeability for himself, but there’s probably some truth in Ethel Steward’s drunken claim that no one would even notice him if he “weren’t walking around with the face of a Victorian doll.” Outside of Ravenclaw, where everyone is too obsessed with studying and scores to pay real attention to other people, he would have been fucked.
For fourteen years, he just assumed he was weird. Then he was a duck and Imperio was water, and he did what he always does: went to the library.
When it must be clear he has no intention to respond, Dumbledore says, “The effect of a love potion is more…potent. A child conceived under its influence has great difficulty, if not the inability, to feel either empathy or love.”
Tom snorts. “I’d no idea there was a hierarchy to these things. Glad to know I’m the result of the ‘less bad’ method.”
“It’s all quite horrendous,” Dumbledore says, suddenly haggard. “This is why by ‘older,’ I admittedly meant never.”
“I’m meeting friends,” Tom says, standing, before he does anything dumb. With a wave of his hand, his empty mug is once against the other half of the chopstick pair. “We’re going to Suzhou. I’ll be back late.”
Dumbledore lets him go without more than an obligatory reminder to stay safe.
Though Tom could Apparate to the railway station, he walks to the metro and hops on the train to allow himself time to think. He can’t actually fault this Dumbledore, he concedes, for wanting to avoid the topic just as much as Tom prefers to ignore it. Dealing with his “oddities” has always been a complicated process, mostly facilitated through Dad and his grandparents’ trial and error in childhood, and, during the chaotic lead-up to OWLs, a flirtation with a dual Calming Draught-Wide Wake Potion addiction Mia caught and nipped at the root. Tom couldn’t possibly manage a shop, let alone lead Magical Nazis. It fucks him up a bit to learn the tipping point different is likely his mother’s choice approach to rape.
Bloody fucking fuck—
He calls on his Occlumency and slams a wall down in front of any thought that formed from this morning’s discussion. These are later worries.
Today, he has a garden to visit.
Tom Riddle, Albus decides, is an unexpected, but nevertheless, not unwanted gift. Within a week, he begins to resign his every plan to include the boy. However shall Voldemort survive, if paired against Albus’ wisdom and intellect, the love-protection built into Harry Potter’s blood, and this Tom Riddle’s malleable, yet similarly casual genius?
A week before term begins, they return to England. Dumbledore grants the boy a generous allowance and organises him a room where he can stay alone in the Leaky Cauldron—a display of trust in return for the faith he shows Albus based on a doppelganger relationship he’s too young to separate—before alerting the Ministry of the unusual events leading to the last-minute transfer. Transfers aren’t unheard of, though they are rare, and for it to happen in the student’s seventh year is unprecedented, but Cornelius is so gullible he swallows the lie with the ease Albus anticipated. He thanks the man with ego-stoking platitudes, then moves on with his preparations, which include explaining the situation to the steadily arriving faculty.
Neither Minerva nor Severus believe him for a minute, but that’s all right. Minerva may recognise Tom’s face, which isn’t quite all right, but she’s discreet enough that it’s doubtful she’ll ever mention her suspicions.
On the first, the students arrive. Tom stands out among the first years, attracting every eye in the room for his height even before the closest students notice his face. Charlie Weasley sends him a thumbs up and a grin from the Gryffindor table, Albus notes, but as a secondary observation to the Sorting Hat’s uninspiring song. At its end, Minerva starts the roll.
Tom is Sorted last, after a brief introduction. He walks up the steps with confidence and, right before he turns to sit and face the other students, meets Albus’ eye and graces him with a smile that might be called cheeky.
Minerva drops the Hat on his hat. There’s a pause. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. Then:
“Gryffindor!”