You would expect thunder and lightning on a night like tonight.
But there was merely a little rain and gray clouds. It was cold. But then this was England. And he was always cold, no matter the temperature.
Every step he took on the gravel felt as if he were grinding something defenceless and weak beneath his foot. The sound was all that accompanied him, beside the wind, to the front door of the old house. The house was huge, larger than he had expected.
But that did not make up for the fact that his father had turned out to be a Muggle after all.
A useless, witless, repulsive Muggle. Had he waited sixteen years for this? Years of staring into a trophy cabinet, years of pouring over old newspapers in the Hogwarts library, years of going back to a hovel of an orphanage while his “friends” returned to their manors and their influential parents.
Enough was surely enough.
If he had been the type of person to analyse his feelings and put them into words, he would have said he felt disappointed. And frustrated. And hateful”of both his father and himself. Mostly himself. Always himself.
But Tom Riddle hated feelings.
He stroked his wand lovingly, as it had been the friend that saved him when he was eleven. Holding it and knowing, actually knowing, that his power was real was what had both saved and destroyed him.
He thought of his uncle in the shack that had once been the House of Gaunt. What a wretch he had turned out to be. Well, he had allowed human emotions to grip him like a vice and get the better of him. No wonder his life had deteriorated.
He heard their voices as he approached the door, where the light seeped out like wisps of unwanted conversation. For some reason he hesitated. He felt that he would be sincerely intruding should he push open the door and enter. But that was ludicrous! He had come here with a motive and, in many ways, it was already carried out. However, he paused and listened to the voices coming from the other side of the door.
‘Sure I can’t tempt you, Mary?’
‘Positive, Thomas. I’ve told you, I can’t touch the stuff!’
There was a murmur of amusement before a younger and slightly more arrogant voice spoke.
‘Frightful bad weather. How can anyone be seen in it?’
‘You know you look handsome no matter the climate, Tom!’
Tom Riddle flinched at hearing the woman say that name with a loving caress in her voice. Nobody ever said his name like that. Dumbledore said it with so much condescension and mockery, in his opinion. Slughorn said it with a flicker of admiration and a might of fear. Everybody else said it with fear.
Never love.
He opened the door silently and entered, almost like a spectre. He kept his wand at his side for the moment. He didn’t intend to kill them quickly. He wanted the truth, and he would get it! For no one could lie to him.
The youngest of the three fixed him with a look of annoyance and disgust.
‘I say, what do you think you’re doing? This is a private estate”’
The man stopped speaking as his mother dropped her wine glass and gave a small and strangled scream. She hurried to her husband and pointed like a woman possessed.
‘Look at his face! Look at him, Thomas!’
The two other men narrowed their eyes and intently examined the young man’s face. Tom allowed it, wanting to see their reaction.
He was not disappointed.
The man who, by blood, was his grandfather swore and clasped the back of a chair. His wife whimpered as she, too, looked closer. Perhaps she had been trying to convince herself that it was all a dream or a trick of the lighting.
‘Tom…’ she breathed, reaching blindly for her son. ‘Why…how…?’
‘How did you find me?’ whispered Tom Riddle, staring at the young wizard.
Tom raised his cold eyes to meet his father’s. There was no denying their resemblance, his own coal black curls and well-defined cheekbones were still prominent in this Muggle. Except, his father wore an expression of fear. Tom’s face was blank.
‘Did she send you?’ snapped Tom’s father.
‘Do you mean my mother?’ Tom spoke silkily, almost pleasantly.
‘Yes,’ snarled his father. ‘Who else?’
‘She’s dead.’
A shudder ran through Tom as he said it. He had expected his father to look remorseful or horrified. He was no expert on human emotions himself, but that was usually how it went.
The expression his father adopted shocked even Tom Riddle.
‘Thank God,’ he murmured, taking a swig of brandy. ‘And good riddance.’
A muscle twitched in Tom’s face as he stared in incredulity.
‘What,’ he whispered, ‘did you say?’
‘She was mad!’ snapped his father. ‘Mad and a whore.’
‘How can you stand there and say that?’ hissed Tom, his control slipping. Things were not going according to plan.
‘She tricked me,’ his father stated coolly. ‘I would never have willingly married her. She tricked me”’
‘You destroyed her! She’s dead!’ the young Slytherin had lost his place on the script he had intended to follow in the night’s play.
‘Something tells me I was the best thing that ever happened to her,’ chuckled his father, darkly. ‘Now if you’re here for money, you can be on your way; we’ll give you nothing.’
The young man laughed then”a high-pitched, manic and desperate sound with no humour or happiness in it.
‘I want nothing from you,’ he said, his voice almost pleasant again. ‘I just wanted to meet you… Father.’
All three of them flinched at the title and his father looked suddenly uncomfortable.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Tom bitterly, his voice shaking a tad. ‘Does it hurt to face me?’
They did not answer him.
‘I used to imagine that you were incredible,’ whispered the boy, his eyes glazed over. ‘I used to think you were a great man, who had done great things.’ His face hardened. ‘But you’re a Muggle. A rotten, dirty Muggle. And I hate you for making me believe you were better than that.’
‘Now, see here”’
‘No,’ hissed the boy, his eyes flashing scarlet. ‘I will not listen. I will not think. I will not see. I will simply do and be gone.’
And before his father could object, Tom Riddle fired a casual Killing Curse at Mary Riddle and her husband, killing them both within seconds. Again, his father’s emotional response was not as Tom had predicted. Instead of mourning his parents or turning on his son in blind rage, his eyes widened and he fell to his knees.
‘Please, I beg of you, do not do this.’
The cold laugh returned, laced with years of hope that had been savagely cut by the throat.
‘I do not listen to begging,’ he revealed smoothly.
‘But…but you’re my son. I’m your father”’
‘Ah, there it is,’ Tom Riddle smirked, pressing the tip of his wand against his father’s sweating forehead. ‘There’s the expression I wanted. No arrogance, no swagger, no expectation…just pure and utter…fear.’
‘How can you do this?’ breathed his father. ‘I created you”’
‘I created myself,’ Tom hissed smoothly. ‘And there is nothing of you in me.’
‘You don’t look like her!’
‘By “her” do you mean my mother? The woman you deserted, abandoned and allowed to die?’
‘I didn’t allow her”’
‘She would have lived for me if it weren’t for you!’ spat the boy, his hand trembling on the wand. ‘If you hadn’t destroyed her, she would have stayed alive for me!’
‘What are you talking”?’
‘But that’s what emotions will do to you,’ breathed the boy, his voice soft and his gaze far away. ‘They’ll rip away your logic and your reason.’ His face darkened and he drew a shallow breath before breathing, ‘That is why it is wise to be immune to them.’
‘I don’t even know your name,’ bleated the withering man on his knees.
Tom’s anger flew out of him like a spark of fire.
‘She named me after you! Tom Riddle after my father! That’s what they kept on telling me! Though I never saw any evidence of this apparent father. He never came. He never wrote. So, in many ways, he never was.’
‘I didn’t know she named me after you,’ affirmed his father. ‘I”I didn’t”’
‘Ignorance is never an excuse,’ muttered Tom Riddle, sounding almost bored. ‘Especially with me.’
‘You seem clever,’ murmured his father. ‘Very clever.’
The cold laughter returned once more.
‘Flattery shall not sway me; my mind was made up when I came here.’
‘But why? I don’t”’
‘Enough of this,’ sighed Tom Riddle. ‘I grow weary of talk. In a way, this matters not. In a way…you’ve been dead to me for many years.’
And before his father could alter the look of shock on his face, it became his fixed expression for ever. The Killing Curse had been uttered lazily, but there was more motivation and pain behind it than any other he had cast before.
Tom Riddle sat for a moment. He sank to the ground and crossed his legs like a small boy, though he seemed every essence a man. He took a harrowed breath and tried to memorise the scene. Revenge. Accomplishment.
And yet…there was a gnawing feeling inside him. A feeling of incompleteness. A nagging, twisting, wrenching feeling that would not go away. The hole in his insides was supposed to have been filled by the murders, but it had stretched wider. He prodded his father’s cheek with the tip of his wand, and tilted his head to the right while he stared.
‘I won’t need your asinine name for much longer,’ he breathed, though his father was obviously beyond hearing.
As he left the house, he knew why. He knew why he didn’t behave the way other children did. He didn’t want presents because he knew someone would try and take them from him. He didn’t make friends, because then they would know his weaknesses and his vulnerabilities. Well, of course, he had none. But if he did…
And love. What of love? A simple word that brought decades of war and strife with it. How many people did evil things claiming they did it for love? He had never loved anyone. He had never been loved. He told himself everyday that he didn’t need love and he never went in search of it. But he sometimes wondered…After all, he often wanted what he apparently could not have.
But strange little incidents brought his mind to what meagre people called “finding love”. Though love was not an object or a book that could be tracked down or located. It could not be locked away and kept safe from the world.
It was a disease. It infested and ruined the body, drawing out strength and praying on weakness. It was everything he despised. Look at his mother! Look at what she had endured and suffered; a small part of her probably convincing herself that love was behind it. Well, if that was true, then love was a murderer.
He thought back to the idea of “finding love”. He had never desired it, but strange things triggered curiosity. A girl of late had done just that. Though he had not seen her clearly, he had made out her figure and heard her laughter. And it had been strange. He had wanted to possess and to own her, not quite understanding the logic behind it.
It had terrified him.
And he loathed being scared.
So, really, the only way to avoid pain, disappointment, misery and death…was to stay away from love.
This conclusion lingered with him as he made his way out of the house and down the pathway. The gravel sounded different beneath his feet this time. He took no care to conceal himself to anyone who might have been looking. But then, they were Muggles. What on earth could they derive from his being there? They were as his father was”ignorant.
He kept walking, the cold air and the quiet almost tranquil. He leapt up onto an old crumbling wall and walked along it, his balance perfect; like a skilled cat’s. If he had known any songs, he might have whistled. He thought of Hogwarts. The only place that had taught him that acceptance was not a dreamer’s idealism. The place was his everything.
Just thinking of it warmed the coldest parts of him. And although he would no longer have to look at the trophies and resources, hoping for a trace of Tom Riddle, there would be plenty of other places for him to squander away his precious moments of freedom there.
He climbed off the wall and moved swiftly, letting the night envelop him.
He felt no sorrow for what he had done. That man had destroyed the only person who had loved him. The only person who would maybe have cared.
‘I am who I am and nothing will change,’ he whispered, the wind carrying his words like a message to the world. ‘No one can change one such as me.’
His mind flitted back to the sound of their laughter as they had sat together, as a family, in their home. It was foreign to him. Warmth and family was something he could witness to his heart’s content, but never have. Not that he wanted it, good heavens! He couldn’t think of anything worse than”than having”having someone…love you.
Love you.
Love you so much.
Love you, Tom.
‘Stop it,’ he snarled at his imagination. ‘Don’t play these foolish games.’
Love was a tiny, fleeting pleasure compared to that of immortality. Who needed to be cherished and adored, when one could never die? Power and influence were better than love and care, surely. No, there was no “surely” about it! Love was nothing compared to power.
And he would have power.
He looked at the house in the distance, and then in the direction of the Gaunt shack.
‘I feel nothing,’ he vowed, quietly.
He almost convinced himself. Even with a shaky soul, not quite as sturdy as most, he felt a tremor of something run through him. A voice in his head laughed at his stupidity. The strange things he sometimes let himself think were laughable.
He was above such things as love.
Then why did you kill them? hissed a malicious voice in his head. You did it for her. Because you couldn’t bear to think of what she suffered.
‘I did it because they were polluting me,’ he said aloud.
The voice sneered.
Do you think she’d be proud of her little boy? Her little angel-faced demon? Do you think this would make her love you?
‘Stop it.’
She didn’t want to live for you. She chose death over you.
‘It wasn’t her choice.’
We always have a choice. Look at you.
Tom said nothing. Who was he arguing with anyhow?
He gathered himself together and readied himself to return. To go back. To put his mask upon his face and return to being the bright but impoverished orphan, gifted with magical gifts beyond contemplation.
The face that he had always imagined was his mother’s flashed before his eyes, which were tinted red after the evening’s events.
‘I did it for her,’ he whispered to himself, vowing never to reveal such a weakness again. ‘I did it for her.’
For it was true what philosophers of love said: one cannot feel hatred without having felt love.