Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tom woke up on All Saints Day cold, the late autumn chill creeping in from where he lay on the floor (why was Lord Voldemort sleeping on the floor, what in the name of all Salazar’s descendants—), water dripping onto his face from the—

—he cracked his eyes open, wincing at the sharp shafts of sunlight piercing through mostly-leafless trees. The same trees that were dripping that infernal tepid leftover rainwater onto him, because the floor he was lying on was in a room with no roof on the second story of some dilapidated hovel vastly unworthy of his…

…Memories of the night before began to come back to him. There had been Godric’s Hollow, yes, and this cottage, although it had seemed significantly more intact when he first arrived. His lips curved into a smile, at the thought that he’d done some damage to the place.

Because this was where his enemies lived. The infuriating Auror Potter and his far-too-clever wife, of course, who’d had the gall to face him in open battle three times and still draw breath; but more importantly, their son. His real target, his prophesied nemesis, who he had come to obliterate before he had the strength to so much as lift a finger against Tom—

—which he hadn’t, because the boy was a baby.

Tom’s mouth reversed its course, pressed into a frown of consternation. Why had he been trying to kill a baby? Yes, yes, there was the prophecy, he remembered that well enough, but also that it had been spoken by an unproven ‘Seer’ with a long record of attempted fraud. Yet his memories of the past few days—and weeks, and months, back to the turn of the year when Severus had brought him the damn thing—were consumed with thoughts of this prophecy and its awkward free-verse poetry, of the infant child and how he would wipe him from the face of the earth for the crime of considering himself equal to Lord Voldemort.

The rage, he can remember that too. Remember it, but no longer feel a shred of it; just uncomfortable chagrin, at being so worked up over such a load of twaddle. He had the vague, ominous sense that he’d been doing many other inadvisable, frankly undignified things too, and that he was in for an unpleasant few hours as the knowledge of them dripped steadily back into his conscious mind.

Dripped, like this Hades-damned water that was still persistently attacking his face—

Merlin, this was like a bad hangover in the Slytherin common room after an all night OWL celebration party.

Tom rolled over, bracing himself on his hands and knees before rising to his full height and surveying his surroundings more thoroughly. The crib was still there; empty now, so at least that task was done with, regardless of whether it had been a productive use of his time. The body of the foolish redheaded woman who’d thought to stand in his way was gone, but so was half the floor and most of the furniture, presumably blasted away along with the roof.

He nodded slowly. Things were beginning to make sense mechanically, if not logically. He had clearly come here last night, discharged a fairly ridiculous amount of magic in service of his dubious goal, and—ah, here came the embarrassment—passed out from the backlash, as he hadn’t done since the age of nine. Bizarre—and dangerous. Anyone could have found him here, and made the link between his near-anonymous Tom Riddle persona and the Dark Lord on the verge of conquering Britain.

Resolving to get some breakfast and get his head on straight before returning to his headquarters and checking in with his followers, Tom Apparated to Diagon, aiming for a little hidden gem of a diner that he’d been loyally patronizing since he was a fresh graduate working at Borgin’s. That was another similarity between this strange morning and his fifth-year exultations after scoring a full slate of O’s; a massive headache, and a burning desire for pancakes.

***********

Things were not right. They were not right at all.

Tom sat in a booth—not his regular booth, that one had been taken by some codger with a hearing trumpet, and an Avada Kedavra right now would blow his cover—at the Golden Snidget Cafe (it had been changed from its original name of the Greasy Grindylow, complete with a round, yellow winged mascot with a simpering smile and cartoonishly large eyes), his knuckles white as they gripped the edge of the table, the new, cheap material (was that Muggle plastic?) cracking under the force of his rage.

He stared down at his so-called ‘breakfast’—a pitiful stack of three wafer thin pancakes, half the circumference and twice the price of the ones he’d had on his last visit (to say nothing of his times here in the forties, the only period when the ratio of price to portion size had been anything near reasonable). At his reflection in his cup of (weak, tepid) black coffee, which currently displayed an expression of white-lipped fury on a face that was not even his own (as usual, he'd glamoured himself before appearing in public: from the peak specimen of wizardkind, physically no older than twenty-eight, that he’d carefully and perfectly preserved around the time he’d secured his immortality, to an unremarkable gentleman who was barely more than ‘conventionally handsome’). And most saliently, at the copy of the Prophet that the far-too-chipper waitress had offered him, and its inexplicable, impossible, undeniable headline:

NOVEMBER FIRST, 2001: TWENTY YEAR ANNIVERSARY OF YOU-KNOW-WHO’S DEFEAT!

No. No, this couldn’t be right, it made no sense—and yet, the evidence around him all pointed to the same, horrible conclusion.

The other patrons, who were all looking placidly at the same, apparently non-prank issue of the paper—and dressed in an appallingly casual mixture of magical and Muggle ‘fashions’.

The establishment itself, which had clearly—he shuddered—gentrified and, when he’d demanded to know when the change to the name and pancake recipe had occurred, Tom had only received a shrug and a “The original owner sold it sometime after the war ended.”

Diagon Alley, which was crowded with families (apparently this was some sort of holiday) and storefronts selling frivolous wares in the open street, rather than the boulevard of grim, shuttered buildings he’d observed last time he’d patrolled the area with his followers.

That last patrol had, it seemed, taken place twenty years ago. And the backlash from whatever happened in Godric’s Hollow had not knocked him out for a night, but flung him forward in time.

*************

Two hours later, Tom had moved—physically, from the “cafe” to a bench on the main stretch of Diagon with a good view of the passing shoppers, workers, and slow-moving families; but mentally and emotionally, he’d traveled a far greater distance, deep into the realm of existential crisis.

He was—there was no denying it now—indeed in the year 2001. An entirely new century.

He was not, as he had planned since Hogwarts and been on the cusp of achieving, the sole and unquestioned ruler of a newly-prospering wizarding Britain. His name was not spoken in awed and reverent whispers; if anything, people seemed to treat it as a taboo on par with the ugliest of slurs. His followers had all disbanded years ago—gone on to claim their seats in the Wizengamot, or pursue ordinary careers, or in some extreme cases, to prison.

It was all in the Prophet article, which he’d read through at least three times now. An eight-page special “retrospective” with clear section headers, a breezy and succinct briefing on the two decades he’d missed, all neatly packaged like the bloody Royal Red Box. As far as the public was concerned, he’d disappeared (Tom had had to read entirely too far to reach that correction to the cravenly misleading headline. He knew damn well that he had not been killed or “defeated”, because he was right here and still in possession of his perfect dueling record, thank you very much, and had been on the verge of shouting it for all to hear when the hack journalist had finally admitted, in a grudging aside, that the Dark Lord was merely ‘missing’ and presumed dead) without a trace in 1981, after an attack on the Potters that killed the happily married couple and—this was the true shock—left their son, Harry, unharmed but for a tiny scar, to be heralded as the Boy-Who-Lived.

Salazar, he really had tried to kill a baby—and hadn’t even managed it.

And that was among the least of the depredations recounted in the “You-Know-Who’s Decade of Terror” section. Bodies in the streets, mass murders of Muggles and their magical children, entire families burned alive in their houses. Snakes and skulls hanging ominously over homes and shops and public events, like a green banner announcing death for all who stood beneath—

Tom had snapped the paper shut momentarily, then, initially sure that this was slander, a twisting of he and his followers’ cause, a perfect example of history being written by the victors. Yes, he’d courted pureblood support in his quest to revolutionize the governing structure—because they’d had power and money, not out of any ignorant belief in blood superiority. He’d certainly killed people, he’d always known that would be a necessity, but they had been enemy combatants facing him in battle, not innocents sleeping in their beds…

But wait, a small voice hissed in his head—though it was far more disagreeable than any snake he’d spoken to. Didn’t you do those things, as the war dragged on? Search your memory, Riddle—what really happened, not what you had originally planned…

And with dawning horror, he realized that he did. He did commit war crimes, atrocities—personally, and those he’d ordered done on his behalf. He remembered; but it was the same sort of memory as the ones he’d had this morning, of his blinding rage and urge to murder an infant over a dubious prophecy. He could recall, with a bit of effort, carrying out the raids and murders, planning them beforehand—even the thoughts and feelings that he’d had, how convinced he’d been that each step was the natural, the necessary and correct course of action.

What he could not recall—or piece together, or begin to fathom in any way—was why and how he could have ever engaged in such a sloppy, irrational, and frankly imbecilic thought process. It was like looking at the Pensieve memories of someone else, someone foolish. Why on earth had he been murdering Muggleborns, when they were the very demographic that was least hidebound, most open to the radical change he wanted to enact? Children, when he always would have preferred to indoctrinate the youth as a professor—the Dark Lord persona being his second option, after he’d been stymied by bloody Dumbledore? Merlin, when had he changed his organization’s name from the noble Knights of Walpurgis to the Death Eaters—a public relations catastrophe if there ever was one?

…He remembered that too, actually. He had been in his mid-twenties, right around the time when—

When he had created his third and fourth Horcruxes in quick succession.

A creeping dread began to rise up from the pit of his stomach as he reassembled the timeline in his mind, matching up his compromises to his original ideals with each bit of his soul sealed in an object. Circe, even the decision to make more than one—two, perhaps, so the diary could be used to control the basilisk—was something he’d never have considered back at the beginning of all this. It wasn’t something he’d consider now, sitting here feeling fairly disturbed by a write-up of his own actions.

The evidence, now that he could see it for what it was, was once again all pointing to the same, unpleasant conclusion:

With each Horcrux he’d made, he’d lost a bit of his sanity, his intelligence, his mind.

And something—his trip through time, maybe, or the magical chain reaction that preceded it—had caused him to get it back. To regain his perspective.

But—the dread in his stomach rose like bile, and he almost wretched as his throat seized up in terror—for how long? He was thinking clearly now, yes, but he still had the five Horcruxes; could still feel, if he concentrated, the withered edges where he’d split his soul. What if whatever reprieve he’d been granted wore off, and he descended into madness again, once more seeing genocide and terrorism as sensible and justified?

No. No. He’d rather die—truly, though he never imagined he’d prefer death to anything—than lose his mind, his greatest asset, his weapon and armor both in a life that had been cruel and unforgiving. He’d end himself if he ever so much as felt it happening again.

Not that he was about to simply wait around for that terrible potentiality. No, along with his sanity he’d also regained his cleverness, his Slytherin cunning, his ability to see through a maze of options to the true route to achieve his ends.

Tom snapped the paper shut, for good this time, and sprang from the bench, striding purposefully toward the nearest Apparition point, pushing past several dawdling window-shoppers who made ineffectual noises of indignation. It wasn’t as if their mental capacity, if they even had any to begin with, was on a ticking clock.

He had Horcruxes to hunt down.

*****************

He had almost hoped that, when he re-absorbed the Gaunt ring, his theory would be proven wrong after all. That he’d feel worse, weaker, diminished somehow, and it would turn out that his lapse into insanity had a wholly different, unknown cause. It would have meant starting the investigation again from square one with no leads, yes; but it also would have saved him the humiliation of knowing that he’d almost lost himself completely, killed his mind if not his physical body, and it had been completely his own doing. A near-fatal unforced error.

No such luck. The moment the fragment of soul reattached itself, he felt more…not whole exactly, that would be rather trite, but more present in his body, and in his surroundings. More aware of the breath and blood moving through his veins, the hunger already gnawing at him after that pathetic and overpriced breakfast.

He’d once been eager to shed these all-too-human sensations, delighting in going days without food or realizing he’d been utterly still for a full hour, absorbed in a book or a planning session while the world around him faded to static. But now…despite the hunger and thirst, the fetid humidity and smell of the Gaunt shack—he hurried out the door and through the hopelessly overgrown garden, not bothering to reset the wards as there was nothing left worth taking—he could not deny that he felt more right than he had in years, maybe decades. Tom was not one to rely on such nebulous things as “gut feelings”, but every one of his instincts was telling him he’d just taken a step in the right direction. The first in a long while, possibly.

And speaking of right and wrong paths to go down, he also now felt even more distant from—and repelled by—some of the things he’d done during the war. Merlin, did he really order Rosier to Crucio the young children of the Head of International Cooperation in front of the man to secure his cooperation, and then resort to Imperius when that failed?

That was a rhetorical question. Yes, he had done it—and worst of all, the Department of International Magical Cooperation didn’t even play a key role in his original plans. His strongest memory of the incident was of re-watching the scene in Rosier’s mind afterwards—of enjoying it.

What. Of course, he had always relished punishing people—but only those who deserved it, even if his definition of “deserving” was significantly broader than that of more squeamish wixen. Case in point, he had worried he wouldn’t be able to reabsorb the ring at all, seeing as he felt not an ounce of remorse, now or ever, for the murder of his father and grandparents. In his view, they were the very first of his enemy combatants, abandoning him to die in the trenches of life before it even truly started, and their deaths still brought him nothing but pleasure. He’d eventually managed it by thinking of how unfortunate it was that he’d killed them without first establishing paternity, so that he could have gotten hold of the money and the manor that was currently sitting empty.

Pushing aside his jumbled thoughts and emotions, he concentrated on his current, literal path: the one back to the main road, away from the incessant hissed conversations of the snakes who had continued to live in the area. The creatures were nearly as inbred and deranged as the place’s former wizard residents, and listening to their prattle long enough might be enough to send him insane again all on its own.

His next Apparition would take him across the map—and the socioeconomic spectrum—to Wiltshire.

***************

Merlin, the Malfoys were awful.

He’d known this, of course, since his first night at Hogwarts, when Abraxas had immediately become convinced that Tom had access to some top-secret magical hair product that he was refusing to share (it’s called genetics, he wish he could’ve told the ignorant twat), and maintained a yearslong grudge over it. Even once he’d managed to win the spoiled pureblood to his side, his money and connections only barely compensated for his vain and narcissistic nature.

Lucius had been all of that and more, with the notable addition of a mile-wide cruel streak that Tom, by then several Horcruxes in, had put to use in his increasingly bloody campaign to win the Ministry. He’d married a witch from the Black family, of all things, as if tempting fate to create the most innately unpleasant human being possible.

And now. Draco.

Tom watched the young man from the shadows of a hedge, where he’d Disillusioned himself after the trivial work of slipping through their wards. It was still rather surreal, to see the child who, just yesterday by Tom’s count, had been a squalling baby, being presented by Narcissa for a special blessing from the Dark Lord; now a grown wizard in his early twenties, marching across the manor lawns and berating the servants as they rushed to set up for some sort of event.

“No, no, no, you weak-blooded incompetents!” He shouted, his voice a ghastly mixture of his mother’s nasal whine and his father’s arrogant drawl. “I told you to set up the chairs on the west side, under the wisteria trellis! Are you deaf or just stupid?”

Tom—who had distinctly heard him say, not ten minutes earlier, to place the chairs “in the east quadrant, to greet the sun”, ground his teeth and resisted the urge to hex the little ferret himself as he steadily crept along the hedge to the side entrance of the manor. He couldn’t help but feel a pang of empathy for the workers. And it was odd—hadn’t the Malfoys had a house-elf for this sort of thing?

“With all due respect, Heir Malfoy, sir,” one of the bolder servants ventured, eyes on the ground, “perhaps your lovely bride herself might be able to clear up the misunderstanding. Where is Miss Astoria today?”

“She’s unwell,” Draco snapped, “probably with grief that a bunch of useless layabouts are trying to ruin her wedding,” just as Tom thought to himself She’s probably faking it to avoid you. “Ow—what was that—something just grabbed my ankle—!”

The blonde kicked out viciously without bothering to look first, and sent the albino peacock that had been playfully nipping at his trouser leg sailing across the lawn like a Quaffle, feathers flying and screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

“Now look what you made me do!” Draco fumed, rounding again on the terrified servant, and Tom used the combined commotion to dash the final few steps into the house.

***************

Standard blackmail, Tom thought to himself, sifting through yet another piece of correspondence in Lucius Malfoy’s ostentatiously large desk in his personal study. Thinly veiled threats, an unseemly amount of bribes, the outline of a proposal to test incoming first years for creature blood before admitting them to Hogwarts. Several pages worth of petty complaints about his rivals in business and politics, and attempts to get them fired…

This, apparently, was what his former right-hand man had been getting up to in the two decades since Tom had come unstuck in time. Power and influence Tom would (and, admittedly, sometimes did) kill for, and he’d been using it to line his own pockets, settle grudges, and persecute anyone the slightest bit different than him. Tom had been insane from splitting his soul six literal ways to Sunday; what was Malfoy’s excuse?

The answer, obviously, was that he was malicious, entitled, and quite simply, awful. If anything served as proof that Tom had lost his way, it was that he put this man in charge of his political operation. The plan had always been to use people like this and then double-cross them so subtly they didn’t even feel the knife in their back, not become one of them.

Impatiently, he began rifling faster through the drawers, going through years’ worth of extremely questionable material that, much like the manor itself, wasn’t even warded properly. Arrogant too, and without the power to back it up—Salazar, this was why he hated purebloods. If it turned out the fool had lost the diary as well, Tom was going to lock that useless son of his on top of the Hogwarts Astronomy Tower and make him duel Dumbledore to the death for his entertainment—

Ah. Here it was. Tom felt something in his chest relax, and he smiled as he ran his fingers over the pebbled black cover, still so familiar after all these years, the first and youngest piece of his soul calling out to him from within the pages.

Myrtle was another that he didn’t regret killing—the girl had been practically asking for it, memorizing his schedule and following him around with big cow eyes, finally making the mistake of trying to ambush him by the Chamber entrance and—surprise, surprise!—consequences. But as he’d learned with the ring, remorse was a fungible concept when it came to reabsorbing Horcruxes.

He focused hard on how her death had inadvertently led to so much hardship for him—losing his already-slim chance of staying at Hogwarts over that terrible summer of war and rationing—and the poor basilisk, who’d had to go back into hibernation just when she had been really coming into her own again; and soon he felt the soul shard again reuniting with him, meeting slight resistance at first but then merging smoothly, like a marble pressed into room-temperature butter.

Tom gave a brief shudder, and looked around the room.

This time, he’d expected the heightened sensory input, the increase in smells and sounds and the brightness of colors—and was thankful that he was in a relatively tasteful study now, instead of a filthy hovel. But he did experience a new wave of disgust nonetheless—not for the physical trappings of Malfoy Manor, but what it represented. Obscene wealth, unearned privilege, power and potential left to stagnate like a pool of standing water…

Was this, perhaps, a shadow of the resentment, the hunger and drive to overcome his own impoverished beginnings, that he’d felt at sixteen, when he made the diary? Had he lost some of that fire, the fighting instincts of a born underdog, when he took the first step toward immortality? Perhaps the degradation to his personality, to what made him Tom, had begun even sooner than he’d thought.

He found himself feeling thankful, as he made his way unnoticed back through the halls (but not before making a few Geminio duplicates of Lucius’s more…interesting documents, because blackmail was a perfectly valid tactic when used for a worthy purpose), that he had discarded his first idea, of simply making discreet contact with the Malfoys and demanding the diary back, along with their help recovering the other Horcruxes. He was beginning to suspect that the associates he’d cultivated during his years of mental instability were no longer people he much wanted to associate with.

Just before he crossed the Anti-Apparition line and popped to the seaside, he caught one last glimpse of Draco, who was now pitching a fit over the alignment of hundreds of meters of flower garlands being strung around the garden. Wasn’t he around the same age as that other baby Tom had last seen before his twenty-year sojourn—Harry Potter?

He wondered, idly, what kind of man that boy had grown into—without parents, yes, but also without Tom hunting him as a fated nemesis. Someone at least halfway decent, he hoped; he certainly couldn’t be worse than Draco.

****************

The cave was empty.

The cave by the sea where he’d first taught some very deserving people exactly what happened when they crossed him was empty of anything of any importance, because the Horcrux was gone and all that was left was a cheap fake and a self-righteous note left by a spoilt nineteen year old with no idea what he was playing around with, who then went and died without even securing the boat back properly, and if Tom wasn’t on a tight schedule here he’d have gone through the entire lake with his bare hands just to find whichever Inferius used to be Regulus Black and kill him again, more painfully this time. Punishing turncoats was something he would never stint on, because you had nothing if you couldn’t trust your own subordinates. Yes, Tom himself was currently questioning the things he’d done in the war, when Regulus had committed his betrayal; but only he was allowed to do that, no one else. Certainly not some dilettante prettyboy who claimed to be Tom’s biggest admirer until he suddenly wasn’t anymore, who he only deigned to Mark because of the lingering camaraderie with Orion.

Tom let out a frustrated roar loud enough to dislodge several stalactites from the ceiling, and tore right through his own wards just to get out that much sooner.

***************

Here, then, was where things stood: his next two Horcruxes were both in the hands of the Blacks, and both highly inaccessible, though for opposite reasons.

The locket, because Regulus was dead and Grimmauld Place, the likeliest location, had been uninhabited since Walburga’s death in the early nineties—but was still in the legal possession of one Sirius Black, who had once been second only to James Potter in annoyance to Tom and had now, apparently, somehow both spent a dozen years in Azkaban and then escaped, been cleared, and rapidly risen through the ranks to become Head Auror in 1999 (Tom had been doing some heavy-duty research through various archives since calming down from the cave incident, but the exact sequence of events was still extremely murky).

Then there was the cup, which by all accounts was still in Bellatrix’s vault. She’d probably be happy to give it to him, too—if she were not still in Azkaban, along with her husband, for torturing the Longbottoms into insanity while their baby boy cried in the next room. Merlin and Morgana, even at his worst Tom had granted the Potters the mercy of a quick death, if only because Severus begged. His newly-restored soul and sanity did not feel up to dealing with the Malfoys, let alone Bella, who he could remember having a—he shuddered—fondness for back when they’d been equals in madness. Not to mention, she’d probably take one look at him and start shrieking to anyone who’d listen that the Dark Lord had returned, and it might arouse some suspicions even if no one took her seriously.

Which meant that he had two, equally unappealing tasks ahead of him now, his only choice which one to tackle first: breaking into the ancestral home of one of the Darkest, maddest, and most paranoid families in Britain, and breaking into Gringotts.

He was really beginning to wish that he’d never bothered with Hepzibah Smith and her wandering hands and excruciating attempts at flirtation, and had just taken the Junior Undersecretary position Slughorn had offered him after graduation.

Tom rented a room above the Leaky Cauldron, to serve as a base of operations while he gathered intelligence on his targets and planned the next steps. After a bit of deliberation, he’d also decided to go back to using his true face and name. All his sources indicated that Lord Voldemort’s human identity was never discovered (at least anonymity was one thing he’d still managed, even with his diminished capacity), everyone who’d known him in school was well into their seventies by now (while he was still gloriously in his physical prime), and Tom Riddle was a ridiculously common name. It was worth it to take this small risk, to avoid the bigger one of a glamour or transfiguration wearing off in public, or slipping up and failing to respond to a false name.

Besides, “pretty privilege” was an undeniably real phenomenon and it worked just as well as it always had to get him favors, discounts, and little bends and loopholes in the rules when he cocked his head just right and flashed his dimples. He felt no shame over using this advantage; it was the only sort of privilege he’d ever been born with, after all.

The one snag in the plan came when he signed in at the Leaky and discovered that the barman was also named Tom—and seemed to find the fact that two men shared one of the most popular names in the country to be an incredible coincidence, worthy of remarking upon endlessly.

“Hell of a thing, isn’t it?” the man had said, for approximately the dozenth time, when Tom came downstairs on his third morning there. “You know, I looked up ‘Tom’ once in this book of baby names—me and the missus bought it when we had our little one, see—and you’ll never guess what it means!”

Tom didn’t interpret that as a statement requiring a response, but inferior-Tom apparently felt differently, because he proceeded to blather as Tom considered ordering tea and toast, thought better of it, and grabbed a banana to go while trying to quickly navigate around the tables and out the door:

“‘A twin’! That’s what ‘Tom’ means. I’m not a twin myself—that’d be the fine gentlemen running the joke shop down the way—so my own mum and dad must not’ve had this book. Sure wish I were your twin, then I might be smiling for the camera in Witch Weekly instead of wiping down…oh, you’re leaving.”

When both of them were in the dining room at dinner, he also constantly repeated the ‘joke’ of saying “He’s over there” when patrons shouted “Can I get a refill, Tom?” and then explaining the “strange twist of fate” all over again. Tom quickly took to eating all his meals in his room or elsewhere in the Alley.

He spent his days at the Ministry, in the Prophet’s archives, and lingering on the street with eavesdropping charms in place, chasing down any leads at all related to the Black family, the specific wards in place at Gringotts, or any past burglaries of either, whether attempted or successful. This mostly turned up a large number of things that had been proven not to work, unless one were trying to get their limbs amputated or their face melted off, but on Saturday, while ambling slowly past the entrance to Knockturn, he struck gold.

“It is an outrage, oh yes, that Kreacher is forced to toil for the blood-traitor dog, keeping Mistress’s beautiful house spotless even as the unworthy heir refuses to open it to visitors, such a terrible waste…”

Tom went still. Kreacher? Could it be? He’d assumed Regulus’s house-elf was long dead, yet another casualty of the wanton sadism Tom had displayed in the latter years of the war. But then again…he’d never seen the body…

Ducking into a nearby gap between buildings, he hastily conjured a mirror and applied some simple glamours, knowing that if it was indeed the same elf he was sure to recognize the erstwhile Dark Lord. He then reversed course and pushed through the crowd until he spotted the diminutive creature again, grumbling and muttering to himself under a heavy burden of cleaning products from Knockturn.

It was definitely the same elf. Tom would recognize him anywhere, especially with—he winced—the nasty scar on his ear where he’d nearly ripped it off midway through drinking the Draught of Despair.

“Excuse me,” he called politely, then repeated it more loudly, then fairly screamed it, because Kreacher seemed to have gone entirely deaf and courtesy took a backseat to getting his attention before he popped away and slipped from Tom’s grasp permanently. “Did I hear you say your name was Kreacher?” he asked when the thing finally turned around, showing a face even more hideous than Tom had remembered. “Would you by any chance be the Black family elf?”

Kreacher stopped, but when he spoke he was not addressing Tom, or even looking at him; rather, he raised his head upward as if beseeching the heavens and began to—there was no other word for it—declaim, with a presence that would’ve made a West End Hamlet envious but was currently just annoying his fellow shoppers, who were scowling and giving him a wide berth.

“Kreacher belongs to the Black family, oh yes,” he moaned. “And what a proud position it once was! But oh, how low the Ancient and Most Noble House has fallen, with Kreacher’s dear Mistress and Master Regulus taken too soon, and Miss Bella cruelly locked away, and Miss Cissy never coming to visit! Who will help Kreacher now to restore the tarnished name, when the unworthy heir runs it through the dirt so, covering it in the stink of dog and half-breed and mudblood filth—“

“Oh, how fortuitous!” Tom cut him off, forcibly maintaining a bright, rictus smile as the people around began to give them extremely nasty looks and cover their children’s ears. “I actually happen to be an old schoolmate of”— he nearly said Walburga but then remembered he was supposed to be much too young for that—“of Regulus Black, and I’ve been searching for a way to contact him after being out of the country for some time now. Surely you can’t mean that he’s died!”

The elf abruptly jerked his head down, ears twitching, and looked Tom in the face for the first time, with a directness that was rare for a subservient creature. “You is being…you is knowing Master Regulus?” he asked, practically radiating cautious hope.

“Know him? Why, we were quite close. In fact,” Tom began to improvise on the spot; this elf might have a talent for drama but he’d always been better, and was twice as quick-witted, “I actually have something of his”—he fingered the horrid fake locket in his pocket—“and I’m sure he would have wanted me to give it to you. He talked about you often, you know.”

Hook, line, and sinker, he thought smugly, as Kreacher’s fragile hope turned to full-on awe and reverence with every sentence he spoke. He may not have been able to kill Regulus personally but manipulating his feebleminded servant would be a bit of poetic justice, and nothing he’d said was even technically a lie. “Please, allow me to escort you to someplace less crowded—I’m quite desperate to know what terrible fate befell dear old Reggie”—all right, maybe he was laying it on a bit thick—“and I’d love to share some fond memories with another of his best friends.”

And with that, Tom and Kreacher were soon back on Knockturn, tucked into a booth at an actual little-known eatery behind one of his custom impenetrable privacy wards. The elf had sobbed when Tom offered to buy him a drink, wailed harder when he’d told a few juvenile stories of schoolboy antics he’d heard secondhand from Rosier and Crouch, and nearly flung himself onto the floor and begun rending his pillowcase garment when he pulled out the locket.

“But it cannot be!” he howled, subjecting Tom’s soundproofing and Notice-Me-Not charms to the greatest test they’d ever withstood. “This is being…this is being the same as the necklace that Master Regulus entrusted to Kreacher before he passed beyond the Veil, that he made him promise to destroy!” Tom felt a brief spike of alarm—destroy!?—but then the elf carried on, oblivious. “And Kreacher failed! He tried his best but he failed Master, and now Kreacher is a disgraced elf, oh yes, in service to a fallen House…”

Ah. Well, that explained rather a lot. When house-elves were given orders they found impossible to fulfill for some reason or another, they tended to go a bit…off until their master rescinded the command. How long had he been like this? Tom almost would’ve felt bad, if not for the fact that the situation aligned perfectly with his goals and was really entirely Regulus’s fault anyway.

“How awful,” he crooned, discreetly reapplying his Silencer and looking around to make sure there were no heads turned in their direction. “How horribly tragic. I thought I had suffered a blow today, learning of the untimely death of my friend—but you, my dear Kreacher, have endured far greater torment, and for far longer! I do believe—that is to say, perhaps, just maybe, the two of us could help each other…”

*********

In the end, it was all easier than Tom could have dreamed.

He’d assumed that Kreacher would be under strict, standard house-elf orders to not remove anything from the house or let anyone unapproved past the threshold, and that they’d have to work out some convoluted scheme to get the true locket into Tom’s possession without being disobedient. But as it turned out—

“Unworthy Master Sirius ordered Kreacher to ‘get rid of all this Dark crap’”—he screwed up his already-wrinkled face in distaste as he repeated the phrase verbatim—“when he unjustly inherited Mistress’s beautiful home,” he explained, grinning nastily. “Kreacher has been protecting the precious Black family heirlooms by storing them in the side garden and in his own nest, which are not technically ‘in the house’. But surely Master Sirius would not object to Kreacher giving the necklace away, so that he may be rid of it.”

Tom wondered just how disturbed he should be that the man running the Auror Department did not, by all accounts, have full control of his house-elf—or his house. What if it had been Bellatrix asking for ‘Black family heirlooms’—or Narcissa, on behalf of her slippery husband? Not that he would ever be tipping off Sirius bloody Black on security risks. He wound up compromising by graciously agreeing to Kreacher’s request (on literal bended knee, the elf really should’ve gone into theatre) that Tom “safekeep” several other of his good friend Reggie’s treasured things, until such a time as a worthy heir came to claim Grimmauld. Kreacher then made the trip to the townhouse and back with a snap of his bony fingers, and bestowed several eye-poppingly Dark artifacts and grimoires on Tom along with the genuine locket. Tom made impressed noises that he didn’t even have to fake, and vowed to take excellent care of them.

(And he would. For research purposes, and to keep them out of more nefarious hands.)

Kreacher walked away down the street with a spring in his step, still carrying his load of cleaning products (several of which, when Tom had gotten a closer look, appeared to be made with banned creature parts and toxic substances) and yet already appearing a hundred times lighter. Tom was very pleased with how today had gone. For all his subtle manipulations, he and the house-elf really had managed to help each other, and towards the same worthy end: regaining a piece of their sanity.

That night, in his room at the Leaky, Tom turned the locket over and over in his hands, thinking of his mother. He truly did regret that she’d had to sell her inheritance for a pittance, that she’d been taken advantage of in so many ways. He wished that he could have been there with her, instead of carried in her belly. He’d have told her she deserved better, and used his magic to make sure she wasn’t cold or hungry. Then he’d have hexed Burke into oblivion, for offering a measly ten Galleons for a Founder’s artifact.

By the time he absorbed the soul piece, he could say with relative honesty that he no longer hated Merope Gaunt.

****************

With his first seemingly impossible labor resolved, Tom was ‘free’, so to speak, to focus on his second: robbing Gringotts.

Unlike Grimmauld Place, which you’d be lucky to even get a glimpse of without a personal note from the current Secret-Keeper (not that that was an insurmountable obstacle, as he knew well enough), the bank—with its towering marble edifice and giant-sized bronze doors and threatening rhymed message that Tom had read as a challenge from his very first trip there at the age of eleven—taunted him constantly, due to the sheer fact that it was the tallest building in Diagon by a fair margin and thus readily visible from any outdoor location. Even his window at the Leaky looked directly out on it (he’d considered asking for a different room, but wasn’t keen on initiating an unnecessary conversation with barman-Tom).

In theory, this should have provided ample opportunities for reconnaissance, but Tom wasn’t stupid and he knew that Dark Lord or no, he’d have his head mounted on the wall of an underground cavern somewhere faster than he could say Quidditch if he loitered around the bank any longer than the time required to complete a transaction. His eventual, imperfect solution was to pass by at lunchtime and at the end of the workday, surreptitiously tailing the bank’s handful of non-goblin employees when they went to get food or an after-hours round of drinks. There were a handful of local bars and cafes they tended to frequent, and Tom spent the next week or so ingratiating himself at those establishments, subtly making it known that he was an independently wealthy wizard, newly back in the country and looking for a flat in the area—and an excellent tipper.

(He had money, plenty of it, even without access to his old followers’ vaults. Compromising material wasn’t quite the only thing he’d taken from Lucius Malfoy’s desk that first day; it wasn’t as if the man was going to miss his spare Galleons, or would have used them for anything good.)

Unfortunately, Gringotts’ human workers were a tight-knit and close-lipped bunch, going on working lunches where they mostly did paperwork, and spending their pub hours singing inane drinking songs in Gobbledygook. When they did discuss their work, they spoke in a dense jargon of lingo and inside knowledge that might as well have been the Enigma code, for all Tom could make sense of phrases like “the you-know-what in the Reversal of Fortune” and “taking the trolley past the falls”. He found himself with a lot of free time on his hands, though he didn’t necessarily lack for diverting pursuits. The objects Kreacher had ‘entrusted’ to him were already proving a fascinating topic of study, and Flourish and Blotts had a full twenty years’ worth of books Tom had never even heard of (forty years, really, he realized when he delved into the stacks. When, exactly, had his cracked mind stopped consuming anything but Dark magic books and manifestos on war tactics?). Though he tried to prioritize material relevant to his current objective, he told himself that it would be suspicious to buy nothing but books on goblins, curse-breaking, and great wizarding heists over the ages. And besides, he would need to catch up on the two decades of history he’d missed at some point.

What he learned, through the books but also from the Prophets delivered daily to his door, the conversations of the other patrons at the places he frequented, and just his natural talent for observation and deductive reasoning, was…interesting.

The wizarding world, it seemed, had changed in his absence. Was still changing even now, slowly but surely, one day at a time.

…For the better.

Oh, it was far from the utopia ruled by none other than himself that Tom had dreamed of as a teenager. And likely never would be, not at the glacial rate it was going. But things were more…progressive, now. To his great annoyance, more advances had been made in what the history texts ridiculously called “the postwar years” than in all the time he’d reigned as Lord Voldemort, working (admittedly haphazardly) toward that exact result.

Despite the best efforts of the Malfoys and their ilk, the Wizengamot, and the Ministry as a whole, was significantly more equitable. The current Minister, a man named Kingsley Shacklebolt, was a member of a Sacred Twenty-Eight family, true; but his cabinet was full of halfbloods and no-names that wouldn’t have had a prayer of getting those positions when Tom was in school, and his Junior Undersecretary and top protégé was a Muggleborn witch named Hermione Granger who everyone already spoke of as a Minister in the making as if it was a feat accompli, with nary a whisper about her blood status except from the most retrenched of bigots, who were severely frowned upon.

Magical innovation, too, had experienced a boom in the eighties and nineties. A breakthrough based on the Pensieve enchantment now allowed wixen to record—and rewatch—not just memories but public events, informational segments, even staged dramas and comedies, whole families viewing at once, comfortably and cheaply. Aurors—and concerned civilians—now wore hats, cloaks and boots imbued with Shield Charms and basic poison-detecting spells as standard procedure, instead of needing to cast at a moment’s notice. The wealthier and more connected could frequently be seen carrying and speaking into small, glass balls about the size of a prophecy orb, full of green fire—which Tom quickly learned were called PalmFloos and allowed for instant, handheld and relatively private communication.

In short, one of his greatest fears—that wizards were too unaware of Muggle technology, and were in danger of being outpaced and eventually obliterated by it—was gradually being ameliorated. Their society was once again comfortably ahead of the slow march of mundane innovation, ironically thanks to the greater integration of wixen from nonmagical families.

“In the aftermath of the disappearance of the terrorist leader calling himself ‘Lord V———‘, as one rather dry scholarly article had put it, no one wanted to be seen espousing blood-purist ideology, as it was considered a slippery slope into wix Britain’s previous state of near civil war.

But it wasn’t just Muggle-inspired innovations that were becoming more accepted. Tom knew more about enchanting and spellcraft than nearly anyone, and he quickly deduced that most of the products and services prominently featured in shop windows and advertisements made use of magic that was classified as Dark or outright banned in his time. When he asked about this, at an apothecary selling personalized healing potions that activated upon the addition of the patient’s own blood, he got a puzzled look, followed by a smile of recognition, from the clerk.

“Oh, you must be that newcomer my sister told me about—she works weekdays down at the Knotted Knut,” she said, naming a pub that Tom had spent a night or two lurking in. “Been away for awhile, yeah? A lot of this type of stuff—non-harmful blood magic, rituals, even life force transfer in small amounts—got legalized after You-Know-Who kicked the bucket. Took a few years, but once the Death Eaters—those were his minions, see—weren’t using dark magic to wreak havoc all the time, people came around to the idea it could do a lot of good.” She shrugged, then looked closer at his face and flushed a bit. “Say, what d’you think of going and grabbing a drink with me—not the Knotted Knut, somewhere else—later this evening? I get off at six.”

Tom left the shop with the names of a few recent books on the topic—and the clerk with the vague and completely inaccurate impression that he found her much prettier than her sister and was absolutely, positively thinking about considering going on a date with her.

“Dark” creatures were noticeably more present in society as well—it wasn’t highly unusual to see people with some degree of visible Veela, Naga, Draken or other creature blood walking unharassed outside of Knockturn, and he’d spent a full thirty minutes interrogating a genuine day-walking vampire—who’d told him, in a rather bored voice, that “they have special sun cream for that, now. Makes it easier to work and have a decent social life. Like Wolfsbane, you know?”

…Yes, there was now a potion that rendered werewolves harmless to themselves and others on full moon nights. And according to the latest medical journals, Healers at St. Mungo’s were closing in on a full cure. There was a werewolf on the Wizengamot—as a proxy for one of the inherited seats, but still. He was frequently quoted, admiringly and at length, in the politics section of the Prophet.

By Saturday, Tom was sitting in his tavern room, staring pensively out the window at Gringotts’ mocking marble face, while his stew and pie slowly grew cold on the table in front of him. He’d been afforded, he mused, the unprecedented opportunity to peek into the future, and found what every wizard surely dreamed of: that he’d changed the world, made a positive impact on it—

—and he’d done it by disappearing from the face of the earth.

************

Tom’s second existential crisis in half as many weeks was, thankfully, interrupted by another serendipitous encounter, that night at a raucous pub called the Tipsy Troll.

He had just about given up on the group of Gringotts workers he was shadowing—who were busy adapting a goblin song meant for counting gems to keep track of how many rounds they’d had, but kept drunkenly forgetting the numbers—when William Weasley (Bill, to his friends) walked in. The man, a senior curse-breaker, was one of the few employees Tom had come to know by sight over the past few days, and not just because of his unmissable hair; the way he spoke and carried himself instantly marked him as highly competent and knowledgeable in his field. He was the type of wizard Tom would have loved to have as a student, back when he’d dreamed of the Defense post at Hogwarts.

(It was also, admittedly, difficult not to take notice of young William when his wife dropped by to share lunch with him or accompany him on the walk home from work, due to her crowds of drooling admirers if nothing else.)

Tonight, though, Bill hadn’t come in with his coworkers, and right now he was in the company of only one other man—undoubtedly a brother, cousin, or other close relation, with similar face and coloring but a stockier build.

Tom half-watched the pair from the corner of his eye as they sat down, ordered a pint, and promptly got into a heated argument.

“I just don’t know what you expect me to do about it, Charlie!” Bill was shouting when they finally grew loud enough to be heard over the singing, throwing his hands in the air.

“I expect that you’ll do what’s right—or at the very least speak up for it, like Dad always taught us!” The shorter man squared his jaw and shoulders, making himself appear even more like an impenetrable, immovable object. Tom wondered if he’d ever played Keeper.

“Sometimes it’s not so simple as all that! Goblin culture is different, Char, it’s hard to explain. In their view, creatures they’ve captured and subdued are their rightful property, to make use of until—“

“Until they die,” Charlie seethed, the red now creeping down from his hairline and up his neck. “Die an unnatural, premature death from being worked like house-elves in a cold, dark tunnel, instead of being free in their natural habitat. Doesn’t sound too complicated to me.”

Ah. So this was some tiresome creature-rights debate. Tom found himself quickly losing interest; he’d never had much patience for bleeding hearts. Though he had a healthy respect for powerful beasts like the basilisk, in the end he mostly agreed with the goblins; a creature was only worth as much as its usefulness to you, and if Gringotts wanted to use captive firecrabs for steam power or endangered Re’ems to haul their cargo, it was their prerogat—

“Charlie, come on. I’m not going to throw away a decade’s worth of career advancement to help you and your friends stage some kind of breakout—“

“It’s a rescue operation—“

“—or escape mission, whatever, for one Gringotts guard dragon that’s on its last legs anyway. And neither should you, it’d be suicide—“

…Dragon, did he say? In Gringotts?

“We have a plan,” Charlie insisted. “And the numbers to pull it off. We’ve been working on this a long time, but your insider knowledge would be invaluable—“

“No, Charlie, and if you weren’t my brother I’d go straight from here to my supervisor to report this mad scheme of yours! I have a family to take care of, a kid on the way, I know you might not get how that—“

“Fine!” Charlie slammed his pint glass down on the counter, sloshing beer everywhere and earning a reproachful look from the barkeep. “Pulling out that old argument again, are you? Charlie the bachelor, Charlie the flighty one, just wants to play with dragons—it’s not like he understands about real problems, right?”

“Hey now, that’s not what I—“

“This round’s on me. After all, you’ve got a family to support,” the younger redhead snapped, slapping a few Sickles down next to his drink and rising from his stool, already shouldering his way toward the door before his brother could stop him.

He left without a backward glance—not at Bill, nor at Tom, who rushed to settle his own tab and slipped into the Alley directly on his heels, unnoticed.

*************

A good ways further into the evening, Tom found himself sitting in the dilapidated basement of a different, seedier bar—the name escaped him, but they were all inane anyway—being repeatedly toasted by a group of muscular, rough looking wixen covered in scars, faded burns, and tattoos.

Following Charlie Weasley had led him through a zigzagging, roundabout maze of side streets to this place, where the redhead had ducked around the back and down a set of stairs to rendezvous with his fellow…well, apparently they called themselves the DND (Dragons Needing Defenders) League and this was their makeshift headquarters while they stayed in Britain.

When Tom had first revealed his presence, the group had been wary, hostile, and in some cases downright threatening. It had taken every ounce of willpower in his body to suppress his natural reflex to mass-hex them all and instead raise his hands in a nonthreatening manner, insist that he was a friend, and deliver one of his personal specialties: a semi-improvised monologue, custom tailored for the situation.

He was a Parselmouth, he explained, who’d been traveling for years to avoid the stigma surrounding his abilities in Britain. He naturally loved dragons too, because—as experts such as them were surely aware—they shared an ancestor with serpents and could also communicate with Speakers in a rudimentary way, although the majestic creatures considered it rather beneath them. And the hand of fate must be at work tonight indeed, because of all the brewpubs in all of London he’d wound up at the Tipsy Troll, where he’d heard Charlie speaking with Bill about the absolute outrage—the crime, really—of an aging dragon, who should by all rights be living out its golden years on its own protected patch of territory, being forced to toil for the goblins in the dark and damp.

But Charlie, he said, had also intimated that there was a group of brave people—and now that he was among them he could tell that they truly were the very best kind of wixen—who had a plan to put an end to this atrocity. All of which was to say—

—did they have room for one more on their expedition, a Defense expert who might also be able to secure the dragon’s cooperation?

(They did.)

“To Tom!” Charlie was shouting now, raising his glass and sloshing liquid all over the scarred wooden table, which had been spread, over the past few hours, with reams of parchment, intricate diagrams, and homemade devices that the Ministry definitely wouldn’t consider legal in any decade, as the DND members walked him through what they had in mind. It was really quite impressive, what this merry band had managed to put together, especially since Tom would bet his mortal life that every last one of them was in Gryffindor or Hufflepuff.

“To Riddle,” said a tall witch with a half shaved head and only one remaining eyebrow (the missing one had been replaced by a dense collection of stud piercings). She winked slyly as she pronounced the name; he had heavily implied that it was an alias. “Parselmouth, freedom fighter, and our new partner in crime!”

“One thing though, Chuckie,” a man with a beard to rival Rubeus Hagrid’s put in, rubbing the lustrous hair on his chin. “Don’t we still need an insider to get us past the first ward set? Since your brother chickened out and all…”

“Don’t you worry about that.” Charlie’s eyes glinted with mischief. “Bill’s helping us whether he likes it or not—I only went and nicked his office key off him when I stormed out of the Troll!”

Tom gamely joined in with the cheer that went up around the table, and offered to buy the next round. This group was rather growing on him. They delighted in his stories of roaming the world in his youth, full of questions and impressed exclamations about his encounters with dragons, serpents and all manner of other creatures; they made for a far better audience than his pureblood Knights, most of whom couldn’t see the appeal in any trip that didn’t include a five-star resort with an attached spa.

“We ride at dawn!” a diminutive man in an eyepatch shouted at some point past midnight, jumping onto the table and knocking over the latest round of pints, which Tom had long lost count of. It might be interesting, he mused, to see how a real hangover compared with one induced by time travel and insanity.

**************

“Come on, Riddle!”

“One bloody second, Charles—“

Tom raced inside the cavernous Lestrange vault, practically having to shield his eyes from the blinding light off the gold stacked floor to ceiling. It served as a decent reminder of why he’d originally courted the family of madmen to his cause—nothing could be sweeter than having access to such obscene generational wealth, and then using it to destroy the very system that had made its accumulation possible.

He’d gotten a bit…sidetracked along the way, of course. He who fights monsters…But that was what he was here to fix.

Even stronger than the glare of torchlight on Galleons was the pull on his soul, calling out to him from—there—the two-handled golden goblet perched atop a pile of treasure fit for a pirate captain.

Or a dragon, he thought wryly, listening to the screams of goblin, human, and giant reptile alike that were growing ever louder outside the vault door.

The DND League’s mission had, to his pleasant surprise, gone off mostly without a hitch. That was largely thanks to his own involvement, of course; they’d have never passed the innermost ward barrier without Tom’s knowledge of esoteric Egyptian tomb protection magic. But he was man enough to admit that they’d also have been lost without the little devices Charlie kept pulling from his bag, fiendishly clever things that did everything from conceal to distract, pick locks and turn entire stretches of floor to peat bogs.

“You’d have to ask my brothers,” Weasley had shrugged, when Tom had inquired about the inventions during a relatively easy stretch of flat-out running in between lethal spike traps. “They made them all.”

Eventually it had been just him, Charlie, and the one-eyebrowed witch, the others having peeled off to duel the goblin hordes at the waterfall bridge (or, in the case of the more peaceable group members, up in the main hall causing a mass distraction by asking to convert thousands of Galleons worth of muggle pennies). Tom had managed to convince the old, blind dragon (the conditions it was being kept in were enough to offend even him—perhaps the creature-rights activists had a fair point after all) that they were here to help, and to let them climb onto its back.

And if he’d also instructed it to blast down the door of the Lestrange vault along the way…well, no one else in their little party spoke enough Parseltongue to know that.

Face-melting charms, it turned out, were a rather ineffective deterrent when the attempted bank robber was a fireproof dragon.

Now, as debris rained down from the ceiling, shaken loose by the stamping and roaring of the furious Ukrainian Ironbelly, Tom didn’t bother with a Summoner. He simply stretched out his arm and willed his wayward piece of self to come to him, come home…

It hit his palm with a satisfying smack—and then all hell broke loose, as the gold in the vault began rapidly multiplying and emitting the heat of a thousand furnaces.

“Fuck,” he muttered, pivoting on his heel and pounding in the other direction, shoving the Cup into the secure pouch he’d prepared beforehand. His ginger accomplice had better still be waiting.

Out the door and back into the hall, where Charlie was having an increasingly difficult time controlling the dragon (whose head had disappeared into the hole it had torn in the ceiling). A few words of Parseltongue to get the thing to lower its wing for him, a few dozen goblins blasted back with a shockwave spell…

And then Tom was sprinting up the dragon’s wing like it was the ramp of a muggle aeroplane, brushing off Charlie’s frantic “Where were you!?” and bellowing “GO!” in Parsel as he stood between its scaly shoulders, lifting off the ground and soaring—up through the hole and into the level above them, ahead of the rising tide of molten gold still boiling up from the Lestrange vault; through the tunnels and along minecart tracks, straight through the Thief’s Downfall (the stud-pierced witch gave a shout of relief, as her robes had been hit earlier with an unquenchable fire curse); higher still until they were gliding, aerodynamic, through the marble lobby, where the tellers seemed to be catching on to the currency conversion ruse, out the bronze doors with their stupid poem, and into the sky.

*************

When they were safely out of sight of London, the dragon winging its way north at a suggestion from Tom, Charlie and his colleague huddled together in some private discussion, he leaned back against one of the creature’s massive spine spikes and opened the pouch with the Cup.

Well, he had no more remorse for murdering Hepzibah Smith than the day he stepped over her cooling body, that was for certain. But he could muster plenty of regret for what she represented: long years working a job beneath his dignity, taking orders from a boss with a fraction of his magical power, lavishing flattery and false compliments on pathetic old widows too dim to even realize they were being conned. He should have just stolen the cup and locket the week after he graduated, and skipped straight to traveling the world. His brief time with the DND had reminded him how truly enjoyable those years of wandering had been…

He let out gasp as the soul piece merged with him, slipping between his ribs as sharply as one of the dragon’s spikes.

Charlie turned at the sound. “Alright there, Riddle? Did you—oh.” He looked knowingly at the golden goblet in Tom’s hands, and shot him a grin. “Don’t hide it on account of me, mate—I figured you had more than just humanitarian reasons to break into Gringotts. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the tax they pay for enslaving a sapient creature.”

Tom tipped his head in acknowledgment, even though the cup had already belonged to him—and there were far worse sins than robbery on his conscience.

“Any preference for where we drop you off?” the redhead switched topics easily. “Unless you want to tag along to the sanctuary in Romania, that is— they’d probably hire a Parselmouth on the spot.”

The offer was unexpectedly tempting, but Tom shook his head. He still had business in the United Kingdom—retrieving something he’d found on his last trip to the Balkans, ironically enough.

“Just get me within Apparating distance of Hogsmeade,” he replied, thinking of the diadem and that other well-guarded fortress where he’d hidden a Horcrux.

************

Tom had initially entertained the idea of leaving the diadem in its resting place at Hogwarts, and not just because getting back in would be a tricky matter. He wanted his sanity back, yes, but he also still wanted eternal life—even more so now, with all the years he’d lost to madness and unexplainable time travel. Surely it wouldn’t be wrong to keep just one Horcrux, arguably the most rare and valuable of them all, and in such an enviably secure location.

Unfortunately, he’d been forced to accept the nonviability of this plan halfway through his week in Diagon, when his investigations into the state of the wizarding world revealed one incontrovertible and very disturbing fact: the state of Defense education in the country had gone utterly to shit.

“Well, yes, of course we got the financial aid package,” he’d overheard one middle-aged witch saying to another, one day outside the Leaky. “But things will still be tight with all three at Hogwarts now, especially when you factor in private DADA tutoring.”

“And of course the old families have all the good tutors booked solid already,” her friend had tutted in commiseration.

Tom might have shrugged it off as one witch with particularly untalented children, but he kept hearing similar things again. And again. And—

“Can you wrap these up?” a man had asked the clerk at Flourish’s, levitating a towering stack of Defense books onto the counter. “They’re for my son—he’s finally thrown in the towel and admitted he’ll be self-studying for the OWL this year.”

The employee winced sympathetically. “He certainly wouldn’t be the first. I did it myself as a kid—for the NEWT in ‘92.”

The customer gave an almost visible shudder.

MINISTRY CONSIDERING RECRUITING FOREIGN AURORS, the Prophet blared one morning. ‘SIMPLY NOT ENOUGH QUALIFIED CANDIDATES FROM HOGWARTS’, ROBARDS SAYS.

That was when he did a little digging—into the records of Hogwarts staff at the Ministry archives, and also once again into his own memory. And it came rushing back: possibly the very worst thing he’d done while running amok as Lord Voldemort. Worse than murdering any particular person, or espousing the ideals of inbred twits, or giving Bellatrix Lestrange the idea that he reciprocated her interest.

He’d left something else at Hogwarts with the diadem—

Dumbledore and his insipid moralizing, his blue eyes with that faux-sorrowful twinkle.

Rage, torrents of it, as he detoured to the Room of Hidden Things before leaving.

His knuckles white as they gripped the crown of sapphires and goblin silver…

“If not me, then let them be taught by no one,” he hissed, his voice barely recognizable.

Once, Tom had wanted to teach. Instead, he’d cursed the children of his own country with a half-century of inadequate instruction in a fit of pique.

There was no question, then, that he had to recover the diadem. The problem was how.

“One turkey club, thank you,” he sighed wearily, when the perky young witch at the counter of the Three Broomsticks turned to take his order. Perhaps he’d plot more effectively on a full stomach. It seemed a more complete soul burned calories at an alarming rate.

“Hey, you’re a new face,” the waitress said as a dicta-quill scribbled his request on her pad. “You here on holiday?”

Tom suppressed a snort at the unintentional irony. He’d re-applied his glamours before entering the village, once again becoming a nondescript everywizard. If anyone was going to recognize his true appearance, it would be the staff at the school he’d called home for seven years.

“Business,” he corrected her. “Up at Hogwarts. For, ah, the Wizarding Examination Authority.” He figured that was dull-sounding enough to deter further questioning.

That assumption was correct in the waitress’s case, but his statement attracted the attention of an older gentleman who’d just sat down on Tom’s other side. “The WEA, you say?” he piped up in a thin, reedy voice. “You wouldn’t happen to be Thaddeus Quillcrest, would you? We’ve been waiting for you up at the castle for hours now!”

Tom thanked all the stars that he hadn’t given the waitress a fake name along with his order. “Why, yes,” he said, slipping effortlessly into the officious, slightly pompous manner shared by all midlevel bureaucrats. “I assume you work there?”

The man nodded so eagerly he left himself slightly short of breath. “Dedalus Diggle, at your service. Defense Professor—and proud Gryffindor alumnus—of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry!”

He then proceeded to erupt in a spectacular coughing fit that had nearby patrons discreetly casting Bubblehead Charms. “Ah, do pardon me. It’s not contagious, my condition—hereditary, the Healers tell me, and quite unfortunately fatal in nearly all cases. It’s strange, how they never caught it before this year.” His cheek twitched slightly before breaking once more into a bright smile. “But enough gloomy talk, and enough about me! Once you’ve had your fill of this fine establishment’s rather excellent fare, I hope you’ll allow me to escort you onto the grounds. It can be quite a bother waiting for someone to let you in the wards—oh dear—“

Diggle produced a handkerchief from a pocket in his robes and started hacking again, leaving several spots of blood on the snow-white fabric.

**************

Professor Diggle (as he delighted in being called, since the job was apparently a lifelong dream of his—one that was, appropriately enough, now killing him) blithely led Tom up the path and through the gates onto Hogwarts grounds, chattering all the while—when he wasn’t coughing hard enough to split his own soul, that is. He wasn’t sure what was more horrifying: that his forty-year-old curse was literally stealing the breath from a man’s lungs right in front of him, or that standards had fallen so low that the current Defense professor didn’t even bother with a security question.

Either way, it was his fault, all terribly his fault.

“…and here we are! Home sweet home for me, well, for the next term at least, my Healers have strongly advised—“ Diggle bent over in another coughing fit as he pushed open the great oak double doors into the Entrance Hall, giving Tom a chance to gaze around nostalgically at what would always be his own first home.

Unchanged, as if straight from a memory, from the night he’d first crossed this hall on his way to the Slytherin dungeons in September 1938. The candles glowing against the autumn afternoon gloom even gave the whole scene the hint of a sepia tone.

“Now, lunchtime ended a fair while ago, but I do hope you’ll stay for dinner if your business here takes you into the evening. Steak and kidney pie’s on the menu Mondays! Come along, I’ll escort you to the Headmistress’s office. Or do you already know where it is? I’m just teasing, you look like the sort who went seven years without a single detention!”

Tom trailed Diggle up the staircase at a languid pace, already planning for a way to give him the slip. Glamours or no, he had no intention of getting within a hundred meters of the Head’s office. Dippet was long gone, of course, and Dumbledore—in yet another sign of the nation’s slow but steady march to betterment—had, according to his sources, retired three years back (to Tom’s utter delight, there were persistent rumors that he had been forced out for “erratic behavior”). But his replacement was one Minerva McGonagall, a witch that Tom had overlapped with for a few years at Hogwarts. She’d had a formidable mind and a strong head on her shoulders (despite being the exact type of person who’d choose Gryffindor when the Hat offered Ravenclaw, honestly), and if anyone had a chance to see through his ruse and recognize him on mannerisms alone, it might be her.

He was pondering this, and listening with maybe half an ear to Diggle’s unsolicited explanation of the rota of sixth years he had recruited to teach his classes when his lung treatments left him bed-bound, when voices echoed from a turn in the corridor ahead.

“We’re sorry, Professor Snape, it was an accident—!”

“Oh, I’m sure it was,” a cold, silky, familiar voice interrupted the sputtering preteen, just as Tom and Diggle reached the intersection and came across three tiny Hufflepuffs cowering in the looming shadow of one Severus Snape.

Wait, did they say Professor Snape? How—

“…and I sorely hope there will be no accidents of a similar nature during your nightly detentions for the next three weeks, cleaning expired potion ingredients from my storeroom. Thirty points from Hufflepuff.”

“But—!”

“…Each.”

The girl on the left, in oversized robes and a badly-knotted yellow tie, looked on the verge of tears.

Diggle slowed his step and paused in his rambling as he followed Tom’s attention to the altercation. He winced. “Oh dear—“

Tom was unable to hide his disgust. Severus Snape was a miserable oil slick of a wizard, barely tolerable even as a subordinate. Who in their right mind would ever hire such a bitter and petty man for a position of power—over children, no less?

“I know, I know,” Diggle said apologetically, seeing the twisted expression on Tom’s face. “He’s really not so bad of a bloke, and an absolutely brilliant Potions master, but as you can see…well. Perhaps he isn’t quite suited to the profession…” He coughed, a fake polite one this time rather than a racking wheeze. “Dumbledore had a bit of a soft spot for him, you see—“

Oh, of fucking course, Tom thought furiously, the old fool gave him the benefit of the doubt and a tenured position—

“…gave him the job after the war ended. It was difficult for him to secure work elsewhere, due to the…” He patted his forearm and began tracing strange patterns on his sleeve, and it took Tom a beat to realize he was obliquely referring to a Dark Mark. “Albus insisted he’d been a double agent, though. And it’s understandable he’s bitter—they say You-Know-Who murdered the only woman he ever loved!” He gave a little squeak of terror, or possibly just thrill at the salacious gossip.

The corridor felt like it tilted a little, in that moment, as Tom reckoned with the realization that his actions under the influence of Horcruxes may have irrevocably fucked up two of the most essential subjects at his beloved Hogwarts, the institution founded by his own noble ancestor. Also, did he say Snape had been a double agent? Were all of Tom’s old followers either sociopaths or turncoats!?

“Do you mind if I intercede a bit here?” Diggle carried on, oblivious. “They’re only first years, it isn’t their fault they caught Severus so close to the anniversary of…well. You do know the way to the Head’s office, don’t you?”

“…Yes. Yes, that’s probably a good idea,” Tom said when the red began to bleed away from the edges of his vision. Mostly because if I stay here any longer, I’ll Crucio “Professor Snape” and blow my cover. “And yes, I do know the way”—oh, why the hell not—“I was a prefect, during my own time here.”

Diggle beamed. “Excellent! Oh, you’ll still have to get past the gargoyle—the password’s ’Ginger Newt’, our dear Minerva’s rather fond of them!” He spun around and set off down the hall without waiting for an answer, the sudden movement triggering another bout of coughing. “Severus—Severus! Surely something more lenient can be arranged…”

Tom walked away at a pace just slow enough to avoid suspicion and ducked into a secret passage to the seventh floor the moment he was out of sight, marveling at the fact that if he’d felt like it, he could have easily strolled into the Head’s office unimpeded and caused havoc limited only by his imagination.

Grimmauld, Gringotts, and now Hogwarts, all so easily breached; people in this soft, peaceful future were all trusting fools. Perhaps the one positive thing he’d done as Lord Voldemort, he thought sullenly, was to instill Wix Britain with a healthy sense of fear and self-preservation.

*************

The diadem was perhaps the easiest reabsorption to accomplish, in terms of feeling remorse—

I’m sorry for the curse, Tom thought to himself, surrounded by heaps of forgotten junk in the Room of Hidden Things. It was, perhaps, the only one I’ve cast that I would consider truly Unforgivable. I’m sorry that I subjected thousands of students, a few of whom may have been prodigies like me, to incompetent professors like Dedalus Diggle, and whoever taught in ‘92 that was so bad the articles won’t even mention him by name. I’m sorry for being too insane, by 1960, to earn the job myself like I’d wanted.

—and yet the most physically painful. It was like swallowing shards of glass, assimilating all the hate he’d left tangled up in Ravenclaw’s lost crown. But eventually the soul piece smoothed, settled, and the entire room—the entire castle, really, as he made his way back out under a Disillusionment Charm—felt warmer, brighter. Lighter in all senses of the word.

He slipped out the gate unnoticed, right past a tall man with a pencil mustache who was being brutally interrogated by the caretaker over his business here.

“How many times must I say it—my name is Thaddeus Quillcrest, and I am a registered representative of the WEA!” the man sputtered in Filch’s unimpressed face, as Tom crossed the ward line and silently Apparated away.

*************

Tom spent that night in a Muggle hotel in Cambridge, the desk clerk Confunded into believing he had a fully paid reservation for a room with all the accoutrements. He really didn’t care for spending time in the company of nonmagicals, but he felt it would be wise to let Diagon and Hogsmeade cool off some, after the Gringotts and Thaddeus Quillcrest incidents.

It was one of the best nights of sleep he’d had in a long time. Since he had the Head Boy suite to himself at Hogwarts, maybe. He likely had his newly-whole-again soul to thank for that, as well as for the vibrantly refreshed feeling he woke with the following morning. Yes, the burden of his misdeeds as Voldemort weighed heavier than ever, but what was past was past, even more so because the world had had twenty long years to recover. As for Tom, he felt almost…not new, he was still the same Tom Riddle that he knew so well (and he wouldn’t want to be anyone else, in spite of everything). But reset, maybe, to a time before his world had shrunk to his own life, his power, and the destruction of any person or thing that might threaten either. As if immortality had any meaning that way; living like an Ouroboros, made eternal only by constantly devouring itself.

It was, in some ways, as if he truly was once again the age he appeared to be on the outside: in his mid-twenties, the best years of his life still ahead, not yet burdened by bad decisions he could not take back.

What, then, to do with this fresh start—this second chance?

He could treat it as a literal do-over, he supposed. Apply for a Ministry job and work his way up, until he was in a position to enact his true, original vision upon the country. Despite the progress, society was still a far cry from what it could be, and it itched at Tom, seeing the government inefficiencies and missed opportunities obvious from even a cursory read of the Prophet. If he were Minister he was sure he could at least do a damn sight better than Shacklebolt, who he could already see was far too much of a traditionalist law-and-order type to truly let magical culture thrive.

But…hmm. No matter how great the divide between them now seemed, he had been Lord Voldemort. He’d been at the top, regardless of how poorly he’d worn the crown. Toiling as a cog in the machine, a lackey for yet another mediocre Ministry wix; the idea made him want to claw his skin off. How long until he reached the actual levers of power again—another twenty years? Thirty? He’d already wasted so much time!

And then there was the fact that Britain was full of ghosts for him, literal and figurative. Around every corner was a location weighted with memory, a reminder of all his misspent years. A face he might recognize—or far worse, one that might recognize him.

Travel again, then, like he’d done the first time around. Time and space to catch up on what he’d missed in more ways than one. Yet if he were truly honest, he had to admit that he no longer had the temperament of young Charlie Weasley and his ragtag band of comrades. He had been on this earth fifty-four years now, and there was a part of him that craved stability, a source of income, a secure home base he could always return to…

It was with these thoughts swirling through his mind, strolling through the wizarding section of the ancient university town—a place he’d once dreamed of attending as a child, back before he realized it was far more than his intellect that made him special—that he came upon a newsstand, a small box for the Quibbler set next to the regular stack of Prophets. Tom scanned the headlines; most wixen considered it fiction or rubbish, but during the war they’d had an eerie knack for predicting the movements of his Death Eaters.

What he saw made him stop, set a handful of Sickles on the counter before the bored attendant, and hurriedly unfold the paper to continue the story on the inside pages:

ILVERMORNY DEFENSE PROFESSOR FIRED AFTER STUDENT AFFAIR—HAS THE DADA CURSE CROSSED THE POND!?!?

Oh, this was quite interesting, Tom thought, as he devoured the details of a school engulfed by scandal, and a faculty scrambling to fill a key position in the middle of the term—and very serendipitous indeed. Almost like the hand of Lady Fate, reaching out to tap him on the shoulder—or give him a strong nudge in the right direction.

West.