Fic: Restless with Expectation, Tom Riddle, King of Coins
Title: Restless with Expectation
Author: apricot_bath
Type: Fiction
Length: 1,875
Main character or Pairing: Tom Riddle.
Card: King of Coins
Card Interpretation: "A rather dark man, a merchant, master, professor."
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own nothing that is recognizable.
Warnings: None that I can think of, though this is a fairly dark story.
Summary: “Teach me,” murmurs Bellatrix, coiling her flourlike hand over his throat, pressing gently into his windpipe. Bellatrix likes to play with life. Three women who encountered Tom Riddle, and then some.
Author Notes: Thanks to my beta, M, who knows that I struggled beyond belief with this, and only just finished. Seriously, thank you, buddy.
- &-
“and foolish Hope, that lives on a drop and a crumb, made him restless with expectation.”
Jude the Obscure, Section VIII
-&-
Time is a carousel of exchanges: the earth spins with trade, Tom learns quickly.
A locket for a patch of bread, a patchwork quilt for a kiss that tastes like floodwater, a jug of well-water for a quivering rabbit. Quid pro quo is the only sea he can navigate, and his compass is necessity. Triumphs and defeats are the shifting of the scales.
It isn't as dramatic as it seems when he puts it like this. It's the lack of danger, the perfunctory bleakness that really burns Tom.
The boys and girls (they are boys and girls, because to mature in an orphanage is to walk into extinction) are united in their survivalist bodies, in the way that Margaret will sing Anna a lullaby that’s more breath than melody one night, and black her eye for pillow pilfering the next. Tom Riddle likes the way hope gathers between them, a separating force guised as unity.
Pure things can divide, too, but Tom knows that no-one likes to think so.
He likes the way that as their bones swell against the skins of these refugees (some are discarded, some are left behind, but all are abandoned, he thinks) their throats shudder with thirst for honeyed milk and fidelity.
It’s dinnertime, and Tom is itching the wool that cuffs his wrists. He hates the wearied fabrics, these scraps which are grey, which are the ultimate markers of desolation. He has no possessions, nothing which is his but the body he was born with.
Jill sits beside him, her knuckles white, parched by winter, her fingernails bitten to the quick. Tom glances at her through the side of his eye. Her brownish hair is scooped up by a length of yarn, like a bundle of cattails, and an eyelash lies on her sallow cheek. Tom is curious about the worlds which rustle beneath the paisley cotton of her frock, and the silence which curves through her dark eyes.
She is everything repulsive combined, epitomizing the kind of filth he imagines was his mother.
He hungers for her. Carnal is his want of her.
Tom lifts his thumb and contorts the air, teeth gritted with focus. Jill’s hair tumbles from its knot.
This is how he secures the promise of her time.
Everyone succumbs to promise. Loyalty is the culmination of every promise. These are the facts which Tom discovers in the years which pass in the house, where the lace of the curtains whistles and the keys of the piano stick. Everything in the house is desolate, and reaching, and Tom is nothing, he is nothing, if not a bridge-builder.
In later years, he will understand that the best paths are forged in the midst of debris.
In later years, Tom stops moving forward.
Tom understands that strength will come to him through the submission of the other children. Their coexistence is a competition, their frailty lies between them like oceans, like air between faces.
But these are beside the point, he reminds himself, shelving this line of thought to tend to Jill.
Jill has chosen religion as her crutch. Everyone adopts a hobby. For Anna it is brushing her hair, enough that Harry has begun to weave a strange assortment of dolls from the hairs he finds on the girls’ dresser. For Jill it is devoutly reading the bible that’s missing the entire book of John and has no cover.
For Tom, it is warming water with the curve of his hand.
He pulls himself into the present, where Jill is discussing her newest most favorite ever parable. The Book of Judith is especially pleasing to her, and Tom fastens himself onto the words.
Jill’s voice is slow and endlessly dull. It reminds him of molasses, of the coming of spring and butter churns. Her mouth hangs open even when she is not speaking.
Tom decides this is because she has no further words to hold in it. His own mouth, of course, is nearly always shut. Words swell within him, frothy and stinging, like a flute of vinegar.
“And she promised Holofernes dinner, and she beheaded him. It was brilliant.”
“She was a liar is what she was,” grumbles skinny, grubby little Evelyn from across the table.
“He was going to kill her people,” Jill explains, patronizing - or simply aloof, Tom can never tell, “And she did what she had to.”
“She did it when he was asleep, though,” reasons Adam, and suddenly this has become an actual discussion, which is rare in the house. “It was without honor. He wasn’t watching her.”
“Holofernes was watching her the whole time, and what good did it do him?” Jill argues. “He was easily trapped. He was weak.”
Tom pushes his plate into the middle of the table, nose wrinkling at the sticky fettuccini. His past rises in the pillar of his throat and burns, though he doesn't know why.
Before Tom leaves, he makes sure to tear the Book of Judith from the bible.
Also, he makes sure Jill is awake and watching.
Tom isn’t weak.
-&-
Ginny Weasley’s ribcage rises and falls with the smooth hiss of her breath. The floor of the chamber is dark with her blood, black filth, and the shadows that Slytherin himself wound into the stone.
Tom stands, weightless, a projection of himself. He is smoke, he is steamed humanity; Tom’s feet slide backwards and forwards with anticipation, and though he raises a pale hand to the tight flesh of his cheek, he cannot feel the bones. Tom Riddle is a suspended collection of thoughts and wants, incorporeal, bodiless.
It has taken months - or years, but in Tom’s papered timeline it is months - to engineer this, the culmination of his efforts at Hogwarts, but he has done it. Success has arrived, and Tom runs his hands over and through his arms, eager for the hot and cold of flesh.
Tom yearns for the bed that blood creates for a person.
Tom yearns to be a person. Who, he thinks, treasures life as much as he does? Who deserves blood, who deserves heartbeats as much as he?
Certainly not little Ginny Weasley, whose garish hair is starting to slip away from her braid, ends sticking to her collarbone. Not Ginny Weasley, who is a realm of abandonment and petulance.
Not Ginny Weasley, who even now, as her lips are growing bluish, still quivers with the wind that surrounds, traverses him.
“You were so easy to manipulate,” he remarks, smirking. Power, syrupy triumph, bathes him in confidence. I handled you so easily.
“Yes. Yes, I was,” Ginny admits. Her denials are buried hours back, and now she has been stripped of all but her honesties.
“I knew exactly how to control you,” he continues. Ginny watches him, her hands flat against the floor, luminous in their pallor. She stares at him (oh, but Tom, my eyes are just brown as dirt, and I’m just too plain, I know it!) with something resembling peace.
(I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something.)1
“How did you know?”
Not peace. Resignation, more like.
“Moth to the flame,” he quips, and Ginny’s laughter is brash, and blood rises over her lips like sludge. She is possessed by something new, here, she is so certain of her death (or, perhaps, her damnation; there is no difference) and so Ginny asks and asks.
Why me?
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he tells her.
This time she laughs louder, the noise sliding over him, over the bricks like ice. “And satisfaction brought it back,” she says, and the note of depravity in her voice causes his head to turn, his fingers to halt. “Honestly, Tom, I spent years in a house made by overly curious children. You boys are all the same.”
It's the word boyswhich bothers him. Boys don't bury themselves in paper and magic. Boys can't, Tom wants to tell her.
Madness infiltrates her voice like light in water. Tom urges himself not to look at her.
He does.
(He was weak.
Holofernes was watching her the whole time, and what good did it do him?)
Ginny’s head lolls on her neck a bit, and she adds in a wheeze: but you’re not the same, are you? You’re never satisfied.
She doesn't finish, but he knows her, Tom is stealing Ginny Weasley's very soul, and he can find the ending: boys can be satisfied.
Tom’s hands are on her throat before he can think, and when her body goes limp, its feverish warmth beginning to dissipate, he concentrates again, waiting.
This is not a day about Ginny Weasley, after all, who is a stepping stone to glory. Today is the day Tom Riddle will regain his true strength.
Today is the day I will exchange Harry Potter’s life for mine.
-&-
“Teach me,” murmurs Bellatrix, coiling her flourlike hand over his throat, pressing gently into his windpipe. Bellatrix likes to play with life, with the primal types of pain.
Tom laughs mirthlessly against the cool skin of her cheek, pulling her away to stand beside him at the entrance of the cave.
It's December, and so snow collides with the air around them, glowing in the starlight. There's a half-moon slung onto the sky, there's cold, the type of dry, thin cold that means the heart of December, and Tom pauses to cast a warming charm over his body. The magic rushes over him as heat, and suddenly December and winter are surrounding him, distant.
Tom likes the way magic protects him from nature. Magic is the puzzle given to great men to become Gods, he thinks.
Bellatrix fidgets beside him, slightly. He can feel her impatience; Bellatrix is loyal and devoted, but Bellatrix is endlessly eager.
Tom likes her keenness. It will be tempered with their ascension to power, and for now, it fuels the green magic that erupts from her wand with a force rivaled only by his own, and few others.
Bellatrix Lestrange is a good weapon to have, and so he revels in her adulations, promises her a greatness that will, of course, be only his own.
She is beautiful, in a full, darksome way. Bellatrix Lestrange is pretty like a lightning bolt, and the purity of her blood is what draws Tom so fiercely to her. Her feeble husband aside, Bellatrix's magic is profound and her supremacy undeniable and she represents the world Tom will begin. There will be revolution, of an incontrovertible - because magic can change the earth, and muggles just can't - sort and he will be king.
Lately Tom indulges in these reveries more and more. He has both the time and certainty at his disposal now.
"Obliviate," Tom answers lazily, flicking his wand from where it is near his hip, and adds: "You were too frightened to enter the cave, and so I had to enter alone, Bella."
"Yes, my lord," says Bellatrix dully, eyes unfocused.
Tom enters the blazing cavern, and it takes strength to rip his soul apart.
-&-
1. HBP hardcover US edition, pg. 271
Author: apricot_bath
Type: Fiction
Length: 1,875
Main character or Pairing: Tom Riddle.
Card: King of Coins
Card Interpretation: "A rather dark man, a merchant, master, professor."
Rating: R
Disclaimer: I own nothing that is recognizable.
Warnings: None that I can think of, though this is a fairly dark story.
Summary: “Teach me,” murmurs Bellatrix, coiling her flourlike hand over his throat, pressing gently into his windpipe. Bellatrix likes to play with life. Three women who encountered Tom Riddle, and then some.
Author Notes: Thanks to my beta, M, who knows that I struggled beyond belief with this, and only just finished. Seriously, thank you, buddy.
- &-
“and foolish Hope, that lives on a drop and a crumb, made him restless with expectation.”
Jude the Obscure, Section VIII
-&-
Time is a carousel of exchanges: the earth spins with trade, Tom learns quickly.
A locket for a patch of bread, a patchwork quilt for a kiss that tastes like floodwater, a jug of well-water for a quivering rabbit. Quid pro quo is the only sea he can navigate, and his compass is necessity. Triumphs and defeats are the shifting of the scales.
It isn't as dramatic as it seems when he puts it like this. It's the lack of danger, the perfunctory bleakness that really burns Tom.
The boys and girls (they are boys and girls, because to mature in an orphanage is to walk into extinction) are united in their survivalist bodies, in the way that Margaret will sing Anna a lullaby that’s more breath than melody one night, and black her eye for pillow pilfering the next. Tom Riddle likes the way hope gathers between them, a separating force guised as unity.
Pure things can divide, too, but Tom knows that no-one likes to think so.
He likes the way that as their bones swell against the skins of these refugees (some are discarded, some are left behind, but all are abandoned, he thinks) their throats shudder with thirst for honeyed milk and fidelity.
It’s dinnertime, and Tom is itching the wool that cuffs his wrists. He hates the wearied fabrics, these scraps which are grey, which are the ultimate markers of desolation. He has no possessions, nothing which is his but the body he was born with.
Jill sits beside him, her knuckles white, parched by winter, her fingernails bitten to the quick. Tom glances at her through the side of his eye. Her brownish hair is scooped up by a length of yarn, like a bundle of cattails, and an eyelash lies on her sallow cheek. Tom is curious about the worlds which rustle beneath the paisley cotton of her frock, and the silence which curves through her dark eyes.
She is everything repulsive combined, epitomizing the kind of filth he imagines was his mother.
He hungers for her. Carnal is his want of her.
Tom lifts his thumb and contorts the air, teeth gritted with focus. Jill’s hair tumbles from its knot.
This is how he secures the promise of her time.
Everyone succumbs to promise. Loyalty is the culmination of every promise. These are the facts which Tom discovers in the years which pass in the house, where the lace of the curtains whistles and the keys of the piano stick. Everything in the house is desolate, and reaching, and Tom is nothing, he is nothing, if not a bridge-builder.
In later years, he will understand that the best paths are forged in the midst of debris.
In later years, Tom stops moving forward.
Tom understands that strength will come to him through the submission of the other children. Their coexistence is a competition, their frailty lies between them like oceans, like air between faces.
But these are beside the point, he reminds himself, shelving this line of thought to tend to Jill.
Jill has chosen religion as her crutch. Everyone adopts a hobby. For Anna it is brushing her hair, enough that Harry has begun to weave a strange assortment of dolls from the hairs he finds on the girls’ dresser. For Jill it is devoutly reading the bible that’s missing the entire book of John and has no cover.
For Tom, it is warming water with the curve of his hand.
He pulls himself into the present, where Jill is discussing her newest most favorite ever parable. The Book of Judith is especially pleasing to her, and Tom fastens himself onto the words.
Jill’s voice is slow and endlessly dull. It reminds him of molasses, of the coming of spring and butter churns. Her mouth hangs open even when she is not speaking.
Tom decides this is because she has no further words to hold in it. His own mouth, of course, is nearly always shut. Words swell within him, frothy and stinging, like a flute of vinegar.
“And she promised Holofernes dinner, and she beheaded him. It was brilliant.”
“She was a liar is what she was,” grumbles skinny, grubby little Evelyn from across the table.
“He was going to kill her people,” Jill explains, patronizing - or simply aloof, Tom can never tell, “And she did what she had to.”
“She did it when he was asleep, though,” reasons Adam, and suddenly this has become an actual discussion, which is rare in the house. “It was without honor. He wasn’t watching her.”
“Holofernes was watching her the whole time, and what good did it do him?” Jill argues. “He was easily trapped. He was weak.”
Tom pushes his plate into the middle of the table, nose wrinkling at the sticky fettuccini. His past rises in the pillar of his throat and burns, though he doesn't know why.
Before Tom leaves, he makes sure to tear the Book of Judith from the bible.
Also, he makes sure Jill is awake and watching.
Tom isn’t weak.
-&-
Ginny Weasley’s ribcage rises and falls with the smooth hiss of her breath. The floor of the chamber is dark with her blood, black filth, and the shadows that Slytherin himself wound into the stone.
Tom stands, weightless, a projection of himself. He is smoke, he is steamed humanity; Tom’s feet slide backwards and forwards with anticipation, and though he raises a pale hand to the tight flesh of his cheek, he cannot feel the bones. Tom Riddle is a suspended collection of thoughts and wants, incorporeal, bodiless.
It has taken months - or years, but in Tom’s papered timeline it is months - to engineer this, the culmination of his efforts at Hogwarts, but he has done it. Success has arrived, and Tom runs his hands over and through his arms, eager for the hot and cold of flesh.
Tom yearns for the bed that blood creates for a person.
Tom yearns to be a person. Who, he thinks, treasures life as much as he does? Who deserves blood, who deserves heartbeats as much as he?
Certainly not little Ginny Weasley, whose garish hair is starting to slip away from her braid, ends sticking to her collarbone. Not Ginny Weasley, who is a realm of abandonment and petulance.
Not Ginny Weasley, who even now, as her lips are growing bluish, still quivers with the wind that surrounds, traverses him.
“You were so easy to manipulate,” he remarks, smirking. Power, syrupy triumph, bathes him in confidence. I handled you so easily.
“Yes. Yes, I was,” Ginny admits. Her denials are buried hours back, and now she has been stripped of all but her honesties.
“I knew exactly how to control you,” he continues. Ginny watches him, her hands flat against the floor, luminous in their pallor. She stares at him (oh, but Tom, my eyes are just brown as dirt, and I’m just too plain, I know it!) with something resembling peace.
(I knew I was special. Always, I knew there was something.)1
“How did you know?”
Not peace. Resignation, more like.
“Moth to the flame,” he quips, and Ginny’s laughter is brash, and blood rises over her lips like sludge. She is possessed by something new, here, she is so certain of her death (or, perhaps, her damnation; there is no difference) and so Ginny asks and asks.
Why me?
“Curiosity killed the cat,” he tells her.
This time she laughs louder, the noise sliding over him, over the bricks like ice. “And satisfaction brought it back,” she says, and the note of depravity in her voice causes his head to turn, his fingers to halt. “Honestly, Tom, I spent years in a house made by overly curious children. You boys are all the same.”
It's the word boyswhich bothers him. Boys don't bury themselves in paper and magic. Boys can't, Tom wants to tell her.
Madness infiltrates her voice like light in water. Tom urges himself not to look at her.
He does.
(He was weak.
Holofernes was watching her the whole time, and what good did it do him?)
Ginny’s head lolls on her neck a bit, and she adds in a wheeze: but you’re not the same, are you? You’re never satisfied.
She doesn't finish, but he knows her, Tom is stealing Ginny Weasley's very soul, and he can find the ending: boys can be satisfied.
Tom’s hands are on her throat before he can think, and when her body goes limp, its feverish warmth beginning to dissipate, he concentrates again, waiting.
This is not a day about Ginny Weasley, after all, who is a stepping stone to glory. Today is the day Tom Riddle will regain his true strength.
Today is the day I will exchange Harry Potter’s life for mine.
-&-
“Teach me,” murmurs Bellatrix, coiling her flourlike hand over his throat, pressing gently into his windpipe. Bellatrix likes to play with life, with the primal types of pain.
Tom laughs mirthlessly against the cool skin of her cheek, pulling her away to stand beside him at the entrance of the cave.
It's December, and so snow collides with the air around them, glowing in the starlight. There's a half-moon slung onto the sky, there's cold, the type of dry, thin cold that means the heart of December, and Tom pauses to cast a warming charm over his body. The magic rushes over him as heat, and suddenly December and winter are surrounding him, distant.
Tom likes the way magic protects him from nature. Magic is the puzzle given to great men to become Gods, he thinks.
Bellatrix fidgets beside him, slightly. He can feel her impatience; Bellatrix is loyal and devoted, but Bellatrix is endlessly eager.
Tom likes her keenness. It will be tempered with their ascension to power, and for now, it fuels the green magic that erupts from her wand with a force rivaled only by his own, and few others.
Bellatrix Lestrange is a good weapon to have, and so he revels in her adulations, promises her a greatness that will, of course, be only his own.
She is beautiful, in a full, darksome way. Bellatrix Lestrange is pretty like a lightning bolt, and the purity of her blood is what draws Tom so fiercely to her. Her feeble husband aside, Bellatrix's magic is profound and her supremacy undeniable and she represents the world Tom will begin. There will be revolution, of an incontrovertible - because magic can change the earth, and muggles just can't - sort and he will be king.
Lately Tom indulges in these reveries more and more. He has both the time and certainty at his disposal now.
"Obliviate," Tom answers lazily, flicking his wand from where it is near his hip, and adds: "You were too frightened to enter the cave, and so I had to enter alone, Bella."
"Yes, my lord," says Bellatrix dully, eyes unfocused.
Tom enters the blazing cavern, and it takes strength to rip his soul apart.
-&-
1. HBP hardcover US edition, pg. 271