Chapter 1
“What are you doing, Tom?”
“Searching for your madness.”
i.
Their first meeting goes like this:
Tom watches as the careless hand dislodges the apple from the merchant’s stand. Bright red tumbles down the cobbled road, and his eyes dart around. No one else seems to have noticed it. He quickens his footsteps, chasing after the fruit, whose journey is extended by the busy feet of the bustling street and Tom’s silent urging. It’d be better to be further away from the merchant; he had always been able to move things without touching them. The fruit will be bruised, but that is fine. The push and pull of this unknown power crackles beneath his skin. The journey ends as the apple knocks against a brick wall. He bends down, skeleton hand reaching for the fruit – and knocks not against fruit, but another hand as wretched as his.
“Ah,” he hears. The hand flinches away, and Tom quickly snatches the apple. He looks up and sees a lamentable boy, framed in a shirt that may have once been posh but is now strewn with holes and four times too big. Tom frowns. The boy feels odd, tastes like something saccharine sweet.
“Ah,” the boy repeats. “You can have it.” The boy speaks as if he isn’t as skin and bones as Tom, milky skin mottled sickly yellow and green. His large iridescent, green eyes look misplaced upon such a body – the type of eyes that Tom reckoned that he could pluck out and make a pretty money out of in the backstreets of London.
(Later, he'd realise it was the same colour as the killing curse: Avada Kedavra.)
Tom glares at the boy before stumbling off, ignoring the buzzing itch underneath his skin. Today, he will pray to God for the luck blessed upon him and think nothing more of it. And if the boy’s stomach ached with hunger as his did – well then, the boy should have been quicker.
He takes a bite.
The apple tastes as he thought it would – honey sweet, the flavour of victory.
Mrs. Cole tells Tom he has a visitor. He stiffens, expecting words of penance, exorcism, salvation to fall from her lips like a broken record, but instead it is “A professor has come to see you,” in a strange, dream-like voice. A man strides into his room: calm, self-assured, dressed like the wealthy adults who’ve come to bestow charity but are frightened away by whispers of God-forsaken and devil-kissed. People, Tom has found, are not fond of those who are different.
“Don’t lie to me,” Tom snaps, and the power that runs in his veins snaps with him. “I’m not mad. There is no Satan within me.” The scars on his body ache with a vengeance.
(“Vade retro satana,” he hears the priest breathe down his neck.
Tom strains against the rope bound tightly against his wrists and the candles flicker eerily with the movement of his struggle. He knows what comes next: a sharp and sombre prayer, the hymn of cracking whips as it etches absolution upon his skin.)
“Not a lie,” the visitor says gently. He waves a hand and lights Tom’s armoire on fire, and Tom’s heart skips a beat. How dare – he scrambles towards the furnishing and yanks the door open. Everything inside remains unscathed. He slowly turns around back towards this unknown, powerful entity. Tom grabs onto him like a fish yearning for the bait on a hook.
Tries to. Fails spectacularly. He knows he’s said the wrong thing the moment the words come tumbling out: “I can make bad things happen to people who annoy me. I can make them hurt if I want to.” The man’s – Dumbledore – face is impassive. Tom doesn’t miss the way the thin fingers twitch on the stick (the wand ) he holds in his right hand. He wishes he had never opened his mouth at all. A misstep.
“My apologies, Professor,” he says demurely, sweet words he knows that adults devour in ignorance. “I’ll endeavour to return the items to their rightful owners prior to the start of the semester.”
Dumbledore peers over his glasses. “See that you do, Mr. Riddle. Hogwarts does not tolerate misbehaviour of any kind.” Tom smiles tightly in response. The wizard inclines his head, but Tom is familiar with the distrust that grows so easily from a wayward seed. It may be too late for this professor in particular, but there will be plenty more from where the wizard comes from.
There’s a game that he needs to play, he just needs to figure out what it is. Anything to get away from this terrible, gloomy place for kids long forgotten.
Harry knows that a wizard will come to visit years before it happens. He has dreamt of the deep auburn hair cropped right where the neck begins, the sharp acidic taste of lemons. A flick of a wand, as it transform’s Aunt Petunia’s delicate china teacup into a chirping bird.
He’s always known what he was: a freak.
He tells the man just so, seated in the Dursley’s drawing room that they had so graciously vacated: “I knew you were coming, the man with the scent of lemon drops and taffy. I’ve seen you in my dreams. They call me Freak.”
Dumbledore raises a hand and strokes his beard. “Is that so? I suppose it’s not uncommon for little children to manifest accidental magic and dream of dreams that don’t belong to them.” Harry watches as the man peers down at him. “I can assure you, Mr. Evans, that you are not a…freak.” Dumbledore frowns, rolling the word on his tongue as if tasting it for the very first time.
“Will I be taken away?” Harry asks. The Dursleys have often spoken of abandoning him in the middle of nowhere; in an asylum, in an orphanage, in a long forgotten alley in the East End of London. But never the church, they’d say, We can’t have the neighbours know we harbour a hell-spawn.
Will you take me away? is what he doesn’t ask. He’s learnt that desperation only ends in a dark, cramped room behind a locked door and the gnawing hunger in his stomach.
The wizard ponders for a moment. “Hogwarts will welcome you with open arms, should you choose to attend.”
It’s not a yes, but Harry decides that that is good enough.
The silence of Hogwarts castle in the summertime is as disquieting as the two muggleborn children Dumbledore had visited that morning. He thinks of the words that they breathe out, freak and madness. He thinks of sweet Ariana and her broken, broken magic; the grief in Aberforth’s eyes as his brother breaks his nose.
He thinks of his own foolish, childhood reverie: soft tussles in the dark shadows of the barn, whispered promises of the greater good and glorious revolution.