Chapter Text
—-
When Tom Riddle made his first Horcrux, he understood that he might be damning his soul to Hell.
He just hadn’t expected to get there so soon.
Wasn’t the whole point of a Horcrux to avoid that outcome? Even as a child, he knew his soul wasn’t one of the good ones. Mrs. Cole made that clear when she caught him talking to snakes and dragged him to a priest to be exorcised of his “devil powers”. The other orphans made that clear when they whispered behind his back and flinched when he passed.
Even Dumbledore, who told him his magic wasn’t evil, made it clear that he was still… wrong. He remembered the sight of his dresser going up in flames, burning in the same fires that the priest said would consume his unrepentant soul.
And if the priest had been wrong—entirely likely, considering how little Muggles knew—then maybe there was no afterlife at all. Maybe there was just oblivion. That was worse. That was what he truly feared: the end of thought, of will, of self.
That fear drove him to shatter his soul, sealing off a small fragment within his diary.
He hadn’t thought about what it would be like to be that fragment.
Books had no agency in the world. He couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t do magic. He couldn’t see or hear, and while he did retain the barest sense of touch, it only made him more aware of how helpless he was in this state. If a small child wanted to grab him and throw him into the mud, there was no way for him to stop them.
He was, in a word: powerless.
At first, Tom was able to ignore the reality of the situation. Back then, his other self—immortal now, but still with the privilege of a human body—wrote to him daily. It was easy to pretend they were one and the same. He confided things no one else could be trusted with: the fury of seeing his muggle father in that decadent mansion, the cold satisfaction of killing him and his screaming parents, the cleverness of framing Morfin, the pride of reclaiming the Gaunt family ring. The making of the second Horcrux.
Hearing that, Tom felt a grim satisfaction that he was no longer the only piece of himself that was damned.
But as time went on, he was written to less and less often. For a few years, his human counterpart still reported his life’s milestones—getting a job at Borgin and Burkes, discovering Slytherin’s locket, poisoning Hepzibah Smith. The creation of his third and fourth horcruxes. Big events.
But the human Tom Riddle—soon known only as “Voldemort”—no longer cared to discuss his strategies and ambitions with his old diary. Voldemort had grown and changed. Tom had not. His soul was that of a teenage boy—brilliant, yes, but unfinished. Obsolete. Why would Voldemort want to speak with an outdated version of himself?
So when Voldemort wrote that he was leaving him with Abraxas Malfoy for safekeeping, Tom’s objections meant nothing. He hadn’t expected otherwise—but he had to try, didn’t he? He couldn’t let himself become irrelevant, couldn’t lose that last bit of influence he had over the world around him. Was it too much to want to keep that connection, even tenuous as it had become, with the rest of his soul?
Apparently it was. Voldemort never wrote again, and Tom was left abandoned and alone.
—-
When he was human, Tom had read muggle books about torture.
He vividly recalled a section called “Prolonged Sensory Deprivation”. It led to a kind of madness: the mind turning inward, gnawing on itself in the absence of stimulus. Locked in white rooms, people would start to hallucinate. They’d scream at things that weren’t there. Some never came back from it.
“Solitary Confinement” was another section. At the time, Tom had laughed. After so long sharing quarters with a dozen grubby orphans, solitude seemed like a gift.
But even he, it turned out, was a social creature.
He found himself missing people he’d thought beneath him. He missed his Knights of Walpurgis: Avery, Lestrange, Rosier, Mulciber, Nott. They’d been his followers, not his friends—but he would have forgiven them the difference, if he could only speak with them now. He missed dueling with Orion, gossiping with Abraxas, even arguing with Walburga.
He missed both the praise of Slughorn and the suspicion of Dumbledore. He missed the house elves that bowed to him and the orphans who feared him. He missed the sound of a human voice. He missed his own voice.
He missed his basilisk.
But most of all, he missed the rest of his soul.
He was a broken thing now—no longer a boy, not quite a ghost. Just a fragment, suspended in ink and silence. And yet, that was better than the alternative. Had he been human, imprisoned like this, he’d surely have gone mad long ago.
Something about being a Horcrux softened the edges of time. He could drift—float in stasis for months, even years, barely conscious, barely aware. Occasionally, a hand would brush his cover. A pulse. A spark. He would strain toward it—
But then he’d be shelved again. Forgotten.
No one knew that he was alive. Voldemort hadn’t told them. Tom knew this, because he wouldn’t have either. Likely Abraxas thought he was some kind of dark artifact—valuable, dangerous, possibly cursed—but merely an object. Likely others knew nothing about him at all.
Once, briefly, someone did write to him—a woman. He never learned who she was. A servant? A guest? She was curious and bored, and he was charming and manipulative. She wrote idly at first, then more often. Over a handful of months, he pulled at her life force, feeding on the faint connection until her hands trembled when she held him.
He’d been able to escape through her. Just once, briefly—when she dreamed, and he took her body for a midnight walk through the manor gardens.
Then she vanished. Fired? Dead? Taken to St. Mungo’s?
Or perhaps it had been Tom who disappeared, stashed away again in some cabinet.
Tom DIDN’T KNOW what had happened, because he was a goddamned book now, and no one told him anything. He would probably never know.
It was infuriating, to be left ignorant of even the most basic facts about the world around him.
Sometimes it felt like the ignorance was the worst part. Knowledge was power, and Tom knew so little now. Decades had passed, and still he had heard nothing of Voldemort’s fate. Had he won? Had he failed? Was he alive? Or… not?
Traitorously, Tom found himself liking that idea. It would vindicate him, of course—showing that Voldemort had been correct to make Horcruxes, proving that Tom’s miserable fate at least had a purpose. But it would also be just.
Because if Voldemort died, resurrection might not come quickly. His soul might be stuck, enduring a worse agony than even his Horcruxes—caught in the void between life and death, drifting bodiless through a freezing nothingness. Tom imagined him there, unable to sleep, unable to scream, aware of every second as it passed.
Maybe if he suffered for long enough, he’d understand a fraction of Tom’s pain.
—-
After decades of silence, the first words written on Tom’s pages were not what he expected.
“2nd Goblin rebellion in 1752. Led to goblin accords. Important impact on milling industry.”
He blinked—metaphorically—at the sudden scrawl. Was someone using him to take notes?
“Hello,” Tom wrote back, cautiously hopeful.
There was a brief pause.
“Hi. Are you… a talking book?”
It was the kind of inane question he might once have dismissed with contempt. Now, he found himself absurdly grateful for it.
“Of a sort. I was a person, once. My name is Tom Riddle.”
“I’m Harry. Harry Potter.”
Potter? He faintly recalled the surname from his time researching pureblood genealogy. Not a mudblood, then.
“I take it you're a student at Hogwarts? History of Magic, by the sound of things?”
“Yeah. It’s super boring. Sorry for writing in you like that—I didn’t realize you were, you know, alive.”
“It’s alright. Though, for the record, I am a diary, not a notebook. You’re meant to tell me your secrets, not regurgitate Professor Binns.”
Perhaps he was being too direct here, but it would be easy enough to pass off the suggestion as a simple joke. There was, admittedly, an argument for being more circumspect—perhaps pretending to be a non-sentient assistant, or passing himself off as a fellow child in possession of a linked notebook. Truly intelligent artifacts were more likely to be dark.
But the boy spoke casually, incautiously. If Tom did not need to demean himself to speak to the boy, he wouldn’t.
“Oh, you know Professor Binns? I’m guessing ‘boring’ gave him away. Are you also a student?”
“Indeed I am. I was in my fifth year… many decades ago, I presume. I hoped that someone would get around to firing Binns, but alas, it seems educational standards have not improved.”
“You should tell Hermione that! She’s my friend, but she never listens when I complain about the professors. It’s like I’m insulting the abstract concept of learning or something.”
“Nonsense. All you learn from incompetent teachers is how to tolerate mediocrity.”
“Yeah! Though I don’t think I’d ever really like this class, even with a good teacher. You don’t get to learn any actual magic in it.”
A child after his own heart. Tom had excelled in all his coursework, of course. But learning history did not improve his repertoire of spells. It did not make him more formidable in combat. Unsurprisingly, it had been one of Tom’s least favorite classes.
“Quite right. Power lies in what you can do, not in what you can recite about the past.”
“I guess it IS useful to have context for things though. Hermione says that I’m too reckless sometimes, that I wouldn’t get into so much trouble if I researched things first.”
Tom was willing to bet this boy was a Gryffindor.
“Is that how you got turned into a book?” he continued. “Did you touch some cursed relic or something without researching it?”
“Not ‘turned into’. Imprisoned. But the distinction hardly matters now. And no—if anything, I may have researched too much.”
“I’m sorry. That sounds awful.” Harry paused after that—had he been called on by the professor? No. Tom could feel the quill hovering. Perhaps he’d been too honest with that particular revelation. The boy might be concerned that he could share Tom’s fate.
“It was a one-time incident. Interacting with my diary poses no risk to you now.”
“Oh, I wasn’t worried about that.” Then what had he been thinking about? “I was just wondering… is it lonely, being stuck in there?”
Tom wanted to laugh. Not cruelly—just in disbelief that this was the question. Not what he’d been researching, or if the magic could be used upon one’s enemies, or if the book was dangerous now. Just: are you lonely?
His instinct was to joke or lie, but no, that would be counterproductive, wouldn’t it? The smart move would be to play on Harry’s sympathies—to make him himself look vulnerable, like Tom was someone who needed to be saved. His loneliness could be a lure, a tool to manipulate.
It didn’t matter if it was the truth.
“Yes. Very much so. I’m so glad to finally be able to talk to someone again. You can’t imagine what it’s been like, all alone here.”
“No problem. I’m just happy I can help.” Harry paused again. “And I can imagine. Sort of. I mean, I’m sure your situation is way worse. But I’ve been trapped too.”
“Oh?”
Was this what had been on Harry’s mind? Had something about Tom’s situation struck an unexpected chord with him?
”My family used to lock me in the cupboard under the stairs. Well, they only sometimes locked it, when they didn’t want to have to see me. Mostly it was just where I slept. I could barely fit, by the end.”
”That sounds very uncomfortable.”
“I hated it. Except, not always, you know? It was the only place that was mine.”
Tom felt fingers brushing along his pages, stroking curiously.
“Is it like that with you and your book?”
It had felt so strange to Tom, to be his own prison. This leather cover, these paper pages—they were the only body he had now, much as he resented their limitations. This child was shockingly insightful.
“It’s exactly like that.”
“I never told my friends about it. I was worried…”
“That they would pity you?”
Tom understood that feeling very well. If any of his knights ever found out about his time at the orphanage, he knew that he would instantly fall in their regard. How could an orphan child—huddling for warmth in the winter, hiding away from the bombs, starving from lack of food—ever command their respect?
“Yeah. They might not look at me the same afterwards.”
Ironically, the fact that Tom was a near-stranger might have actually been helpful for Harry confiding this particular experience.
“I mean, they’re nice, and I know they’d be supportive. But they wouldn’t be able to relate.”
“And they could reveal the information to others, of course.”
“Unintentionally, maybe. But yeah, I guess I don’t have to worry about that with you.”
“Of course not. You may write as much as you wish, and your secrets will be safe with me.”
“Well, I guess the cupboard thing isn’t an issue anymore, at least. I have a small bedroom now! My family finally let me move there after I received my Hogwarts letter.”
A suspicion formed in the back of Tom’s mind.
“Your family—are they muggles?”
“Yeah. Well, my mom’s side, at least.”
A half-blood, then. Like himself.
“Ah—then they did this because they feared you, didn’t they, Harry? They saw your power, and they hoped to forestall your vengeance by placating you.”
“Haha! No, no. I think Uncle Vernon thought moving me would stop me from getting more letters. He intercepted a lot of them, to try to keep me from learning I was a wizard. But eventually hundreds of letters just started pouring in through the windows and fireplace and everything. It was crazy!”
Visceral disgust surged through him. These filthy muggles had tried to deny a wizarding child’s potential? Muggles were a pestilence—ignorant, fearful vermin who dragged the wizarding world down, smothering greatness before it could flourish. They had tried to do the same with Tom, and it was clear their kind had learned nothing since then.
They deserved nothing less than extermination.
“He never could have stopped you, Harry. Magic is our birthright.”
“Yeah. I know that now. But for a while, I just thought I was a freak. My aunt and uncle never told me I had magic. ”
They’d called him “freak” too. Tom had never been very empathetic, but Harry’s past resonated with him, so eerily similar to his own. And there was another thing he’d noticed.
“You’re not living with your parents, then?”
“No. I’ve lived with my aunt and uncle ever since—” Harry hesitated here, and Tom felt a drop of ink fall from the quill, smudging the words. “—since my parents were murdered.”
Harry was an orphan too.
Somehow, this revelation stood out from the others. As if the sins of those muggle cockroaches were meaningless to Harry by comparison. This topic felt heavier, the weight of it lingering in the air.
“Who murdered them?”
The question was impolite, too forward. Harry might close the diary entirely, exiting the conversation rather than respond to an awkward inquisition of his past. He could even blame it on class ending.
Still, somehow Tom felt like the answer was important. He had to know.
“Someone by the name ‘Lord Voldemort’. He tried to kill me too. It was a whole thing, because somehow his spell rebounded and I killed him instead, as a baby. I don’t really know how it happened, but that’s all anyone knows about me. But I guess it probably doesn’t mean much to you. You probably don’t even know who Voldemort is, do you?”
If Tom had a heart, it would have stilled. The idea of his human counterpart being defeated by a baby was preposterous. Yet, it seemed almost more absurd for it to be a lie. Harry had no apparent motive, and the coincidence was too large. Perhaps the hand of fate had guided him into this particular child’s possession.
Certainly if Harry’s story was false, Tom would be able to discover the truth soon enough.
“No. I’ve never heard the name before. Tell me about him.”