Chapter Text
After Tom killed Myrtle Warren, he expected to feel different. He thought some transformation would take place within him.
Except, nothing changed. He felt exactly the same.
He had imagined a profound, deific surge of power; a revelatory ascension to the divine. Akin to that time he had taken three tabs of LSD and tripped his face off convinced he had somehow become an immortal and all-powerful magician and could conduct great acts of mass casualties solely with his mind. (All of it, Tom had accepted in stride, except for the oddest detail where he hallucinated himself inexplicably living in northern Scotland of all places.)
However, despite his lofty expectations, Tom remained precisely as he was.
There was only the quiet affirmation of what he had always known: that he was already a God walking amongst stupid, insignificant insects.
So that bright, brief intoxication—from having taken a life and gotten away with it—flickered and went flat within a fortnight.
Still, he yearned for recognition. To have that particular gratification of having his accomplishments and kill count immortalized online and poured over in painstaking detail by the self-hosted true crime forums and fanclubs that he had frequented since he was just six years old.
Tom ran one of the largest of its kind, a meticulously organized true crime site dedicated to amassing every last bit of crime scene evidence from notable mass shootings of the last quarter-century, starting with Columbine. It had struck Tom how so many of them made explicit reference to Columbine; there was no other event in modern history that had incited a greater number of copycat events. Although Eric and Dylan had racked up a fairly pedestrian final body count, they had left, by far, the most lasting impact on an entire generation.
Tom would surpass them one day.
He both revered and loathed them in equal measure. It should have been Tom’s name that was idolized by countless across the most fucked-up corners of the internet, Tom’s acts which invoked horror and fascination and reverence and was cited as inspiration for everything that came afterwards. They claimed glory that should have been Tom’s, only because they were born a quarter-century ahead of him.
On the forum, Tom was simply known as “V” (not to be mistaken with Dylan’s ‘Vodka’ handle). He had spent years curating his site with obsessive focus. The particular draw for true crime junkies was Tom’s willingness to host archival photographs and footage that was taken down on other platforms. He had amassed quite a decent following online as the owner of the site, ranging from true crime fangirls to armchair psychologists to, of course, the disaffected black-pilled loner youths who talked a big game but were in reality too chickenshit to actually go through with anything authentic.
Regarding Myrtle Warren, Tom was careful not to share too much detail about the case, as it was distinct and recognizable enough that he didn’t want some sharp-eyed amateur sleuth to call in a tip to the local police line. So all he posted was a simple: Saw something last week that most people wouldn’t recover from. I’m fine. Followed by a lurid snapshot of blood splatter on an unidentifiable wall taken by a blurry cell phone camera.
He scrolled through the dozens of comments left underneath his post, searching for a single one that might spark his interest and make him feel alive again, but they were all boring, predictable, dull, derivative, boring boring BORING.
> “Hey, are you okay?”
> “V, this is so hot, you are a godddd”
> “Classic dissociation. Honestly, that’s your brain protecting you.”
> “u sound so strong… i wish i couldve been there with u”
> “stop being a fucking pussy and share the details, else it didn’t happen. poser.”
With no one interesting online to talk to, Tom retreated to his handwritten journal to document his plans to shoot up his school, Hogwarts Academy. The trusty leatherbound journal was the one place he was safe from the pervasive electronic surveillance of the FBI and the NSA and the DHS and every other assorted three-letter agency.
He was determined to succeed where even Dylan and Eric’s plans had fallen short. Their bombs had failed to detonate, but Tom was a prodigy in chemistry, physics, all the engineering sciences. He was planning to plant a series of explosives around the perimeter of the school and along the access roads onto school grounds. The detonation would block off access to first responders for at least a few hours as they dug through the rubble, and Tom would have free reign to rack up the highest K/D ratio out of any single lone gunman event in all of history.
*
As the weeks passed after Myrtle's death, Tom continued doing what he had been doing throughout his teenage years in preparation for the event that everything else in his life had been building up to. Browsing the latest rifles in stock at the hunting supply store, adding to his ammo stock with his weekly allowance, mapping out a meticulous route from old blueprints he had found in the janitor’s closet, and refining the manifesto that distilled his views on everything that was wrong and fucked-up with the world.
Tom couldn’t leave anything to chance. His final kill count had to be higher than anyone else’s. He was determined to be immortalized amongst the greats. Eric and Dylan had racked up a body count of just 13 in total. Tom had to beat Seung-Hui and Lanza and Nikolas and all those other fags. He had to. The 25th year anniversary of Columbine was less than a year away. How better to surpass their legacy than by tripling, quintupling, their body count?
The most critical variable, Tom thought, would be the law enforcement response time. The upper middle-class suburb that Hogwarts was located in was too small to have its own dedicated SWAT team, only a local police station, but the nearest big city was just over an hour away, or 40 minutes with sirens on.
For hours and hours each day, Tom poured over grainy CCTV footage and shaky cell phone clips from every single past school shooting he could get his hands on, studied first responder bodycam videos frame by frame, memorized the timelines of active shooter incidents to figure out how much time he would have before the police would move in.
Whenever Tom imagined it, the blood and shredded flesh and gore everywhere, the thrill of emptying a full clip into the cranium of anyone who’d mocked or insulted him, mowing down rows of warm bodies—it felt like the closest he would come to experiencing divinity.
The spree would be glorious, the ultimate demonstration of how much better he was than everyone else. He would reset all leaderboards; the day would go down in history books, and his manifesto would spread like wildfire online. The whole world, afterwards, would reorient to speaking about Tom Riddle instead of Eric and Dylan, always Eric-and-Dylan.
Tom had been imagining it for so long that all the bloody, gory details felt viscerally real in his head, rather than a fantasy that hadn’t come to fruition yet.
He felt a familiar lick of heat unfurl and bloom deep within his gut. He pulled down his pants and wrapped a hand around his rapidly hardening cock. He thought about his manifesto being poured over by millions, every carefully-constructed phrase and reference dissected and studied and analyzed and glorified and quoted and tweeted and retweeted and blogged and clipped. The orgasm that followed was, in a word, transcendent.
*
But after Tom killed Myrtle, though he perceived no discernible change within himself, he did observe one subtle, and somewhat troubling, external change.
Albus Dumbledore, the Headmaster of Hogwarts Academy, watched Tom closer than ever before.
Tom could not afford even the slightest misstep; he could not risk Dumbledore going to the police with his suspicions, not before his grand plans were fully executed.
The murder had taken place in the spring of Tom’s 11th grade, and when he returned to school in the fall for his senior year, he had a plan to refine his already squeaky-clean image. Tom had always been the model student with perfect grades, but he added volunteer hours shelving books in the library, increased his number of patrols as hall monitor, and offered peer tutoring for his classmates.
The only person to take him up on the latter was Harry Potter.
Tom had never spoken with him before, but he had a general awareness of who Harry was. There was only one thing of note interesting or remarkable about Harry, in that his godfather Sirius Black was a former convict who had been sentenced to life in prison for setting off a pipe bomb that killed 13 people. He had been released three years ago, due to mishandled evidence that resulted in a judge throwing out his case, and had assumed the role of Harry’s legal guardian.
Tom’s chief interest in life lay in the study of serial killers. Naturally, he was keen to hear from Harry about what it was like to live with one.
He could hardly pose the question to Harry outright, however. Questions of that nature, as Tom had learned over the years, tended to unsettle the average person, and earn him a punch or two to the stomach.
He would need to first cultivate a sense of rapport with Harry, and then, at the opportune moment, find some natural way to turn the topic of conversation to Sirius Black. Prior to the first tutoring session, Tom did some minor research and reconnaissance.
Harry was the running back on their varsity football team, the position that required the most speed and agility. He was lithe and athletic and significantly less bulky than the rest of the team. To Tom, football was a senseless pursuit, perhaps the most idiotic use of time he’d ever encountered. What rankled more was that the Hogwarts football players were treated like minor gods within the school’s social hierarchy. Many of them were the same boys who had mocked Tom back in the 6th grade, calling him trailer trash when he first arrived at Hogwarts Prep as a scholarship kid living with his Uncle Morfin in the RV park just outside of town.
Harry had never been one of them. Yet he did seem to possess some special talent for getting himself into disciplinary trouble, serving detentions at least once a week for some infraction or other, along with a reputation for outspoken clashes with various members of the faculty. Still, Harry’s position on the football team, as well as Dumbledore’s apparent favoritism towards him, ensured that he always got bailed out before he could really face any serious consequences.
Tom arrived early to their tutoring session in the library after their final class period.
“Here,” Harry said, jabbing a finger at the ‘Chemical Reactions’ chapter in the battered old copy of Physical Science that he dug out of his North Face backpack. “I think this is where I lost the gist of things.”
Tom peered at the textbook. He hadn’t seen this particular text for years, not since middle school. “You’re taking… 8th grade science?” he asked, brow furrowed.
Harry gave him a sheepish grin. “I’m not retarded, okay?” he laughed. “Snape’s a fucking dick, so I can’t really go to him for help.”
Tom found this explanation to be utterly baffling. “But it’s been four years.” It was their senior fall. Tom couldn’t imagine falling more than two days behind in his coursework.
“Yeah, I know, I know,” Harry said, still laughing. “But I gotta keep my grades up, or I’ll get kicked off the football team. That asshole threatened to fucking fail me-- can you imagine getting held back to redo senior year after everyone else graduates?”
Tom couldn’t. His grades had always been perfect. Besides, he had never planned to complete his senior year anyway.
Once a week after school, always on a Wednesday, they met either in the library or an empty classroom, and Tom helped Harry make up for the years of chemistry he had managed to bluff his way through. Harry had football practice the rest of the week.
It briefly crossed Tom’s mind why Harry wasn’t going to his best friend Hermione for tutoring help. He asked as much. It turned out that she was taking five AP classes and did not have time. (Tom was actually taking seven AP classes, but it wasn’t like he really needed to try in any case.)
“See? You balance the oxygen by adding a coefficient of two,” Tom said, neatly writing the corrected equation onto a sheet of graph paper. “Now the number of atoms matches on both sides. Try the next one.”
Harry muddled his way through a few more practice problems.
“Why are you taking this class?” Tom asked him. “Aren’t you just going to get a football scholarship somewhere?”
Harry shrugged. “I might get a degree in sports therapy. Biochem is a prerequisite.” He threw his mechanical pencil down on the notebook, eager to have an excuse to take a break from chemistry equations. “Why did you volunteer to tutor?”
“Community service hours look good on college applications,” Tom lied. He had no intention of going to college or even applying for it.
“Oh,” Harry said. “But you don’t have to worry about that! You’re so smart you’ll get in anywhere you want. I bet you’ll go to MIT.”
Tom allowed himself a small chuckle. It was important to appear modest when receiving compliments. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “We’ll see. College admissions are incredibly competitive these days.”
“Also, you don’t have to worry about paying for it!” Harry added. “Your dad is loaded, isn’t he? Owns half the mines in the state?”
Technically, yes. Father had offered Tom a life far better than the squalor of the trailer park he grew up in. But a bitter little part of Tom, buried deep inside, still held somewhat of a grudge that Father didn’t look for him sooner, and that it took CPS intervention for Tom to be placed with him.
“I’d like to keep my options open,” he answered Harry noncommittally. He briefly wondered if this was the right time to ask Harry about Sirius Black, but decided against it. “Here, try this simple combustion reaction.”
“Huh,” Harry said, tapping the eraser end of the mechanical pencil against the notepad page as he thought through the configuration of the electrons.
Tom took the chance to study Harry’s features in turn. A sun-warmed complexion with strong cheekbones that descended into a well-drawn jawline. But the generically pleasing attractiveness of his features all faded into the background upon a glimpse of his two most distinct features—the spring-green eyes that shone with neon intensity, offset by a peculiar, lightning-shaped, white scar splitting down the center of his forehead that stood out in stark relief against his golden-tan skin.
There were more strange scars down the back of Harry’s hand—small, jagged white marks that looked like teeth from a miniature shark had dug into his skin and tore out tiny chunks. It made Tom want to run his finger down the back of Harry’s hand and trace the cicatrized flesh.
When Tom was satisfied that Harry could passably balance chemical equations, he flipped to the next unit. “We’ll go through ionic versus covalent bonds next,” he said, pointing out the section in the textbook.
It didn’t take too many sessions for Tom to notice that Harry’s concentration was piss-poor. They could only do a few practice problems at a time before Harry would get distracted and veer off into conversation about completely irrelevant things. Video games, their other classes, stories about his friends. He’d often ask Tom about his opinions on Halo 3, GTA, Call of Duty, even The Sims, his unnaturally green eyes fixed intently on Tom as though he really cared what Tom had to say.
However, Harry didn’t talk about his serial killer godfather, the one topic Tom was dying to learn more of.
It was still rather astonishing to Tom that Harry was living with an actual real-life serial killer. He idly wondered if Sirius Black might autograph something that he could show off on his website. He had so many burning questions—had he always had the urge to kill people, what materials did he use in the explosion, did he have a target in mind, or were the victims all randomly selected—but he couldn’t easily slip them into the normal course of conversation with Harry.
Tom had to tread carefully, especially since he couldn’t afford to raise anyone’s suspicions about himself. He couldn’t afford to get caught now, not when he was so close to fulfilling all his goals.
His grand plan was less than a year away from coming to fruition.
*
Harry had that way of casually treating someone who was a near-stranger like they were already friends. And yet, he never alluded to anything involving his home life. Tom thought something like that would provide him with the best pretext for asking about Sirius.
The opportunity presented itself by chance. “Wanna go outside for a smoke?” Harry asked one golden fall afternoon, the leaves just starting to turn. He had been chewing on the tip of his mechanical pencil and was clearly looking for a distraction from reviewing endothermic processes.
“As long as it’s not Marlboros,” Tom said, figuring this was as good a chance as any to build rapport with Harry. Morfin had chain-smoked for as long as Tom could remember, so Tom really hoped that Harry had something other than his uncle’s preferred brand.
They went to the student parking lot, and Harry led the way to his car, clicking the remote key. It was a brand-new 2024 Jeep Wrangler, with a bright red custom paint job. Harry gave the hood a couple of fond slaps. “Sirius got this for me for my 16th birthday. I call her the Firebolt.” He hopped into the driver’s side and motioned for Tom to get in the passenger’s side.
Harry’s fingers fiddled with the top left pocket of his vintage leather jacket, where Tom could see the outline of a cigarette pack.
It looked nice on Harry, the cut accentuating his broad shoulders, the material a worn, supple leather. Real leather, Tom could tell without touching it. Like the trenchcoat in the back of his closet that he had been setting aside for a grander occasion, for the day his accomplishments would be immortalized for every would-be school shooter that would come after him.
But Tom was surprised to see that, instead of cigarettes, Harry pulled out a hand-rolled joint from the cigarette box. It was slim and nicely tapered at the end. A perfect roll.
“Is that—”
“Yeah. You cool with this?” He flashed Tom his dimples.
Tom had gotten high before. In fact, he had sampled nearly every illicit drug before, ordering them off the dark web and trying them out by himself in his enormous room in his father’s twenty-bedroom McMansion. But he’d never had occasion to share a joint with any of his classmates.
“It’s the middle of the afternoon.” Tom gestured at the half-full parking lot, where any of their classmates trickling out of sports practice or other clubs could see them. “You’re not worried about people seeing?”
Harry gave Tom a reckless, devil-may-care grin. “Nah. We’ll be fine.”
Tom only broke the law under conditions where he couldn’t be caught. What madness was this? Perhaps, he mused, eyeing the distinctive scar running down Harry’s forehead, he had been dropped on his head as a baby. It would explain a great deal.
“It’s a strain called Liquid Luck. My friend Neville grows it in his uncle’s greenhouse. 60-40 sativa-indica hybrid, so it’s more of a head high. It’ll get you nice and buzzed in a dreamy way, kinda makes everything feel like it’s going your way.” Harry flicked the lighter, a small flame springing to life and glowing an intense blue and yellow. “THC’s somewhere around 23%, just under 0.3% CBN, so it hits, but won’t knock you out unless you overdo it.”
Briefly, Tom wondered how and why Harry could struggle so much with basic chemistry equations when he seemed to have no problem memorizing biochemical formulations otherwise.
He lit up the end and took a long inhale, holding the smoke in his lungs for a full twenty seconds before exhaling it in a dense white cloud that gathered between the ceiling and their heads.
The distinct smell of burning marijuana filled the inside of the Wrangler.
Harry took another drag, then passed the joint to Tom.
The acrid smoke scorched Tom’s throat and burned in his lungs as he strained to hold in his inhale for at least 10 seconds longer than Harry had, determined not to be outdone.
When he finally exhaled, the rush that hit his brain felt like pure euphoria. His limbs slackened; his cheeks grew warm and his thoughts pleasantly unmoored. A gentle weight settled over his entire body. Time stretched out like taffy, and Tom’s inhibitions had been sufficiently lowered that he asked Harry if he were afraid of getting in trouble if he were caught.
“In trouble with—oh, you mean, Sirius? Nah, he doesn’t care.” Harry took the joint back from Tom and took another drag. “My parents were stoners too. Their whole crowd. It was the 70s.”
Tom nodded; he could understand. Neither Morfin nor Merope would have cared if he’d been caught with a little bit of weed. Thomas, in contrast, would no doubt threaten to impose an internet curfew and then lecture Tom on destroying his future job prospects with a criminal record. Not that it mattered anyway.
“My aunt and uncle, on the other hand...” Harry shook his head, a dark look in his eyes.
Tom was keen to hear more about Sirius Black, but he knew he had to contain himself. He couldn’t sound too eager to talk about Harry’s serial killer godfather. Something within him—perhaps the influence of the weed, Liquid Luck as Harry had called it—nudged Tom in a different direction, to ask Harry about his aunt and uncle, rather steer the conversation back to the topic of Sirius.
“They were strict?” Tom inquired.
“Oh yeah. They would have gone fucking nuts.”
“In what way?”
“How much time you got,” Harry said in a manner like he was joking, but his expression looked like he’d bitten into something sour.
There were more than eight months until April 20th. Tom had time to spare.
Then he realized Harry had meant it rhetorically. “Go ahead,” he said, after a pause.
“My aunt and uncle fucking sucked dude,” Harry said, still trying to sound casual, but there was an underlying, hard edge of anger in his voice. “Yeah, technically I had a room, but it was a closet under the stairs. My uncle beat my ass twice a week for, I dunno, existing? Meanwhile I’m doing all the fucking chores, and their fatass kid Dudley’s getting new toys, new clothes, all that shit.” He let out a short laugh, but there was no humor in it. “One time they got so pissed at me, they locked me in my room for a week and fed me through a cat flap. Let me out twice a day to piss. Sirius said it sounded worse than prison.”
Harry had grown up in the nice part of the town, in a neighborhood with two-story houses and well-maintained front lawns. But his stories about the Dursleys that he shared over the joint passed back and forth with Tom sounded no different than what Tom had seen in the trailer park amongst the meth-ravaged degenerates who had somehow, against all reason, decided to procreate.
People, Tom had long believed, were despicable, base, worthless everywhere, regardless of postcode or tax bracket.
Tom didn’t really have anything to say. He’d never been one for hollow words of sympathy or empty platitudes. So instead he told Harry about Morfin and how he’d get shitfaced and wave his gun around. Sometimes he’d aim it at Tom, laughing as he pretended to pull the trigger. Then there were the men that came through at all hours, and even though Merope would hide him under their beat-up couch, he’d still see and hear too much. After she’d died of AIDS-related complications at the end of 6th grade, CPS had shown up for a welfare check and, somehow, managed to track down his biological father. As a parting gift, Morfin had nailed Tom’s pet snake, the only friend he’d had since he was five, to the front door of the trailer.
“That’s seriously fucked up!” Harry cried, his voice rising, face flushed with righteous indignation. He seemed more pissed about what had happened to Tom than anything he’d said about his own life. “Your uncle is a fucking asshole! If I ever meet him, I’d fuck him up without thinking twice.”
Something flickered inside Tom’s chest. A brief spark of recognition, as though glimpsing a kindred spirit. Then the moment passed.
*
They finished the joint as the other cars slowly emptied from the student parking lot, listening to some 80s alt rock playlist Harry pulled up on his Spotify. When the sun began to dip beneath the horizon, Tom opened the passenger-side door and stepped out. He made his way to his BMW and drove home completely high, the world soft and fuzzy at the edges.