Chapter 2
At first, tom thought that he had made an excellent decision. Immortality at the price of a single life, who wouldn't take up that offer?
… Now, however, he was seriously regretting his life choices. For one, he had no idea that his conscious would become stuck in the bloody book. What had happened to his body after that? Was he alive? Was he dead? Was he still in the chamber, or had Dumbledore finally found out about it? Was the basilisk still killing kids? Had the school shut down altogether?
He didn’t know that he was going to spend his eternity stuck inside the apparently blank pages of his old diary, the one he used to express his rage, with words slashed into parchment, sharply angled letters, tearing the pages, letting ink bleed through to the ones behind. Where he planned the release of the basilisk, the murder of select students and teachers, the torture he intended to enact on his social executioners.
He spent hours upon hours, days upon days, what seemed an infinite time, doing nothing.
So when he felt something he was ecstatic. It was cold, like ice and snow, like a biting winter wind. it was like smooth scales, slipping in and out of his grasp, never wholly there. It was familiar. It was calculating, poking him, prodding, trying to find a threat. It found none.
The only precursor, a drop of ink, stained the page, before fading away.
The only precursor to the subsequent hysteria.
“Wednesday, November 12th, 1993.”
1993
1993 - 1942
= 51
51.
51 years.
Oh… Shit…
“What do you call children who grow up in the capital of Belgium?”
Harry’s quill stopped halfway to the page. He stopped to look up at Blaise, who was asking the ridiculous question. Without his face shifting from the deadpan it’d fallen on, he replied.
“Brussel-sprouts.”
Hermione snorted in a very unladylike manner, but then again, when was Hermione ever “ladylike”? Neville’s face was scrunched up, trying to understand, while Blaise looked like a box of kicked puppies. Draco’s brow was furrowed, mouthing “What?” Theo’s hand covered his mouth, but did nothing to hide the full body tremors wrecking his shoulders; his other hand holding a quill to the page, streaking over his previous writing in a shaky line.
He looked back down, tuning out Hermione’s extrapolation, and Theo’s hysterical laughter. Setting the quill to parchment, he began his brainstorm for the torture and maybe-death of Ronald Weasley.
“Wednesday, November 12th, 1993
Posible:
- Spiders
- Rats
- Snakes
- Snape
- Filch
- Scorpions
- Spider Crabs
- Lamprey
- Leeches
- House Centipedes
- Ea-”
His list only got that far, as when he looked back at the top of the page, the date was gone, and the messy scrawl below it was disappearing quickly after. Harry scrunched his brow, confused at the phenomenon.
“Hello? You said 1993, right?”
The text that replaced his own was flowing, practiced, but hurried.
“Yes.”
“Fifty-one years! Fifty-one- aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—”
“Who are you?”
“I… Tom… Tom Riddle.”
“Harry Potter. You said, “fifty-one years”. What do you mean?”
“I… became trapped inside my diary during my sixth year at Hogwarts. 1942.
I… I need help… to get out… but… I imagine my body is no longer in the school, or even alive…”
“A body… I’ll see what I can do.”
“ … What were you writing about, earlier?”
“A former friend has left me hanging in a time of need. He will pay.”
“A time of need?”
“I’m… sort of a celebrity for something I did, or rather didn’t do, when I was a baby. A madman broke into our house killed my mum & dad, tried to kill me, but I survived. He vanished. My godfather was subsequently wrongly incarcerated after, I was left to my mother’s relatives.”
“I was branded the Boy-Who-Lived, and so far, my life is an utter shitstorm.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why, or rather, how is your life that bad?”
“ … For the first few years I thought my name was Freak. I slept in a cupboard. Meals were few and far between.
“Cook breakfast, Freak.” “Do the laundry, Freak.” “Weed the garden, Freak.”
“The Freak broke your china, mummy!” “The Freak burned the bacon, daddy!” “The Freak is hissing, auntie!”
“Don’t do anything Freakish, Boy!” “Freaks don’t deserve food, they have to earn it!” “Shut up Freak, go to your cupboard!”
“To do Freakish things was unacceptable. To do magic was unacceptable. And then one day I got a letter, addressed to my cupboard. Surprise! Magic is real! You’re a wizard, Harry!”
Lo and behold, I meet my first ever friends on the train, hoping to god that they won’t change their minds. When my friends were sorted into Gryffindor, I wanted to go there to, I’d heard the way they’d spoken about Slytherin, and I didn’t want them to hate me. I argued with the hat, and slowly and somewhat subconsciously altered my behaviour to fit in. i really only noticed in hindsight.
In first year, the man who tried to kill me, was riding around on the back of our defence professor’s head, under a turban of all things, to steal the Philosopher’s Stone.
Second year, my godfather escaped Azkaban to kill my parent’s secret keeper, who was literally and figuratively a rat, and that had been pretending to be my, now former, friend’s pet. There was also a werewolf teaching defence.
Now this year, a month in, my friend drags me and our third friend into our fraud of a teacher’s dueling club, where I learn that speaking to snakes is not, in fact, a cool thing to do.
And now everyone hates me because I’m a parselmouth, and that means that, by association, I’m evil and dark and must be purged from the face of the earth.
The only good thing to come out of it was having the Slytherins stop harassing me, and they are now instead helping me.
My other first friend, Hermione, eventually conceded to helping me, as well as Neville. But the betrayer, Ronald, he is the one who will be paying.
He is the one who stole my father’s invisibility cloak.
He is the one who ravaged my godfather’s map.
He is the one who set my mother’s photo album ablaze.
He is the one who snapped my wand.
He is the one who will pay.”
Maybe, just maybe, his fate wasn’t so bad, Tom thought. He had a companion now. A companion who understood him, who was so much like him, and yet so very different. This companion wasn’t just there to stave off boredom, like Abraxas was. Nor was this companion simply in fear of his power, like Reignold was. His companion didn’t pander or suck up to him because of his grades or looks or influence. His new companion was his companion because they respected him, because Harry thought Tom was fun to be around. Because they could both appreciate each other, their flaws and quirks and how they came to be. Was this friendship?
Harry told him of the scheme as he and his friends plotted. The idea was only loosely composed, and could definitely use further work, but even the barebones framework of it was completely revolutionary, compared to modern day magic.
It stripped the process of spell creation down, peeling away all the complex numerology and syntactic fanaticism, and using only the most basic knowledge of magic.
It might’ve been because they were only third years, but it was still incredible that their pure genius had been ignored for so long. It might be that the teachers saw it as accidental magic, or because of their own lack of knowledge, or just their incredible blind stupidity. Tom didn’t know. But what Tom did know, was that these children were revolutionists, through and through.
“ … but we don’t know how to create a spell in the first place, Harry, let alone one so complex as to make a body for a trapped spirit!” Hermione shouted, shocked at the words her friend spoke.
“We might not even have to make a spell in the first place either.” Blaise added.
Harry immediately focused in on him.
“Explain.”
He flinched, “Well, there might be some type of spell or ritual in one of our families’ libraries.” Blaise instantly regretted saying anything along those lines, as he knew he’d just tied himself up in something he might not want to be involved in.
Harry smiled, far too many teeth, glasses glinting, “And as a good friend of yours, I know you would be absolutely delighted to help me over the winter holidays, wouldn’t you?” His eyes were cold and sharp, and Blaise momentarily pondered as to whether he’d ever held a knife while holding that look. Involuntary, he shivered.
“Fine…” he conceded, reluctantly. It wasn’t that he regretted being friends with Harry whatsoever. He was sharp and cunning, and he had it masterfully hidden up until the snake incident, and that was what made him a Slytherin, in Blaise’s eyes. But then he remembered that this was Harry Potter, and all of the chaos that seemingly followed him around; in first year with the troll, and supposedly fighting of the specter of the Dark Lord, if rumours spread by the Traitor were to be believed. Then second year, where his ex-godfather broke out of Azkaban of all places, and proceeded to chase him down to exact revenge on him for the fall of the Dark Lord.
“Then I know where I’ll be staying for… Yuletide, was it?” Blaise nodded, accepting the position he’d been trapped in. That was another thing too. Ever since Draco’s rant on the traditions of magic, the three Gryffindor-not-Gryffindor’s had begun educating themselves. Theo stretched his arms towards the sky, and got up, commenting, “Well, with that, can we head to lunch?”
There were nods from around the group, as they all stood and exited Will’s room.