Chapter 3
It was a gradual change, like the insidious winter's chill that would creep through the thin walls of the orphanage and slide under his rickety wooden door and threadbare blankets to seep into the very marrow of his bones. He'd barely notice it, at first - all too used to the feelings of lack and want and need that haunted the days of a child of Wool's Orphanage - but suddenly, one night, he'd wake up to find his fingers half-frozen and desperately clutching at another orphan's stolen quilt. And then it would hit him, and he would resign himself to the months of misery that characterized his first decade of winters.
Even now, decades later, after a Nordic sacrificial ritual he'd scrounged up in the dusty shelves of Borgin and Burke's that granted him immunity to the coldest of temperatures, he would find the urge to shiver at the sight of snow outside his window. And then he'd curse himself for the weakness, and firmly stamp the remnant of poor, orphan Tom Riddle from his mind.
His current change was quite like that, only no amount of Horcruxes or Occlumency could erase it. He hadn't seen it, hadn't placed his lack of satisfaction at holding his trembling followers under the Cruciatus or slaughtering yet another family of muggles. But then, when faced with a crying child surrounded by windows shattered by accidental magic, hiding under the bodies of her dead muggle parents... he'd conjured a feather and - with barely a quick flick of his fingers - levitated the newly-created portkey to St. Mungo's onto the girl's tear-stained cheek.
"The child might be a mudblood, but not a single drop of magical blood belongs in the filth of the muggle world." The fledgling looks of confusion in the eyes of his followers were quelled by his cold glare.
Later, he couldn't help but recall the look in that girl's eyes - it was the same haunted gaze of his younger self the first time the bombs came. He'd crawled out of the rubble amid the screams of the dead and dying, terror running through his veins, and had sworn to himself that those crushed bodies would never be him, that he would never lie in a shallow grave, just another corpse insignificant and forgotten. It was then that he had vowed that he would always survive, no matter the cost - yet it felt like a part of him had died all the same.
In his youth, he'd railed against the injustices of the world, furious at the complacency and inaction of the Wizarding World. They had magic, they had power, how could they allow those weaker than themselves to commit such atrocities? No one cared about the muggleborns that never made it to the Hogwarts Express, the lost children that vanished over the summers and were never seen again. No one cared when he had begged Dumbledore to let him stay at Hogwarts, to give him a chance at survival - he was a penniless orphan, after all, with no pureblood connections or grand family name to make him listen. And certainly, no one protested when he was blacklisted from every ministry position he applied for, no matter how high his NEWT scores were - what was he, a supposed muggleborn, to the word and reputation of the great Albus Dumbledore, defeater of Grindelwald? And so Tom Riddle had planned and plotted, hiding in the shadows and slowly gaining the support of the pureblood elite, chipping away at the enroaching political influence of Dumbledore's so-called "Light".
Where had he went wrong? How had he turned from protecting magical blood to spilling it? When had he begun to spout pureblood rhetoric as if it was more than an illusion, a mere means to an end? Perhaps it had been the Horcruxes. Perhaps it had been the disgusting complacency of the British magical world, the stubborn resistance to change. Somewhere along the way, he'd begun to hate the wizarding population, tired of their sheep-like minds and bigoted thinking so much so that he'd simply stopped caring. It was easier to torture the scum into compliance than to get them to listen, and if they were so pathetic, they deserved to be crushed under his boot, didn't they? The proud purebloods that had so disdained him would kneel to a filthy half-blood like him, and the muggleborns that brought their religions and muggle-loving ways (just like the priests Mrs. Cole had called to exorcize him as a child, just like the children in the orphanage who had pelted him with rocks and beat him until he bled).
Lord Voldemort did not care for their screams. Lord Voldemort had no use for their weakness. They were ants that would live and die at his command, and yet... And yet, for the first time since he was a child at Hogwarts, dreaming of recognition and glory for accomplishing some great deed, he begun to care about a cause other than his own violent quest for power, no matter if he let the world burn in the process. What was power, with no worthy goal? What was the point of violence to cause nothing more than pain? What was greatness, when bringing about no great change? Nothing. Everything he had done, everyone he had killed... was for nothing. Perhaps it was time for it to mean something.
Tom Riddle knew himself quite well, so he knew that he had never truly been sane. Perhaps it was the price all great wizards paid for power - history did support that notion. However, nor had he truly been insane, until the last few decades when he had lost whatever capacity for empathy and self-control he once had to the burning Fiendfyre flames of sadistic rage. Now it was replaced by cool logic and a genuine desire for change.
But that didn't make him any less dangerous, simply a different kind. After all, how many terrible things had been done for the greater good? Unlike Dumbledore, he would not even attempt to delude himself into some moral justification of his actions; greatness was not necessarily good. And he would make magical Britain great.