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assyrian; therefore beware the spammage. Backdating doesn't work on communities unfortunately, else I'd go for that option.
Woodsmoke
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of JK Rowling.
Summary: Tom is a photograph. A photograph is Tom.
EDIT (August 2005): This fic came out as hopelessly obscure when I first wrote it, and nobody could figure out what the heck was going on. I've made some changes in the hope of being less oblique; hopes it works better this time. It does assume a working knowledge of pre-HPB canon, however.
It’s a sharp summer morning when he first has reason to stir; or so he thinks from the bright bands of sunlight cutting through the gaps between curtains. He hears the sound of scraping wood, then sees the glint of a keyhole on a large familiar chest of varnish and oak, being dragged across the floor by an equally familiar man.
He blinks twice and the scene becomes painfully clear, like a too-clean mirror. Outside, he knows, the room is musty – and dry.
There is a click, the shadow of the chest lid creeping across the floor as it is tilted back, and then dust rising. Perhaps the smell of parchment saturates the air; he wouldn’t know. He cannot sense everything that goes on outside the glass. It is looking through a closed window - a very large and transparent window, to be sure, with extraordinary sound conduction, but still a window.
He learnt early on, to tell the difference between inside and outside a picture.
He puts a flat palm against the pane. “What are you looking for?” he asks, voice careless.
The other man looks up. He looks exactly as he remembers: the indoor skin, paler than his own; the immaculate robes; the constant impression of sharpness. The hair is different; shorter, perhaps, and less carefree than before – but then he cannot remember exactly what it used to look like.
“Nothing that would concern you,” Lucius says. The drawl hasn’t changed.
“A surprising number of things concern me these days.” He wants to add some quip about scuttling insects disturbing his sleep, except that it’s not particularly witty, and the memory is too genuine: the buzzing noises at the frame, pluralistic and menacing. When he thinks of them it is too vividly physical; he has the sense of having been touched and he doesn’t like that, even less than he used to.
“Do they?” Lucius’ voice is indifferent. That it does not make him angry is probably the effect of the years. “Well then, see for yourself.” Lucius comes closer, holds the object at an angle just so it catches the dim light.
“Ah,” he says, and he doesn’t understand why, exactly, but suspicions dance around the edges of his mind. “Wouldn’t I do, though?”
Lucius may have smiled. “Too conspicuous. Also,” there is a pause, “they took you too young.”
He likes hearing about the now-future. “Really? And why would you think that?”
“How old are you?’
“Fifteen,” he says, and the word seems to repeat itself everywhere, like a pattern in the walls of the room. Fifteen, fifteen. But Lucius is already leaving; the curtains slide shut. Footsteps recede. He hears breathing in the new darkness and goes very still, wondering if the other one is there. But the breathing is regular, and after some time contemplating the diary and counting his heartbeat, he falls asleep again.
#
In his dreams, he remembers his name. The next time, it is the other one who wakes him up.
"Do you always sleep?" Warm, bitter breath down his neck; he turns too quickly, tumbles to the floor. Tom is up again in a moment, scrambling to his feet, forcing his lips to stay calm. There is a three-inch difference in height between them, just large enough to make him feel a child.
The other one looks just like his father. The image brings anger – and fear, but those too, make him feel young.
“Lucius came back,” the other one says. There are premature lines about his face, and a body soft from too little exercise, even though he’s only twice Tom's age and – it is not like looking into a mirror. Not at all. “What did he come for?”
Tom tells him. There is a sudden savage twist to the other one’s face. He knows that twist. It looks like pleasure.
“You know what was in the diary.” But the other one does not respond, only turns away and looks out the glass, thin dark brows arched.
When he does speak, the words come in a different language, hissing and familiar. “He’s a traitor, you know.”
He whispers back, cold excitement to the other one’s anger. Their eyes are sharp and blue, and he doesn’t like the other one, not really, but he listens, because the other one is - not cleverer, but wise-older, more knowledgeable.
“Then he will pay. In good time.” There are things the other one says sometimes that look foreign to him; ridiculous, like posturing cruelty.
But traitor.
This message he understands.
#
The other one's name is – Voldemort.
It is always dark in here, even when there is light outside, and since the day the photograph captured him, it has always been dark outside.
He was taken in the middle of the winter, evening Midwinter Eve after roaming the forest all day. The seventh-year Mudblood spotted Tom as he came through the corridors, his cheeks flushed from the crisp wind. The camera was shiny and the flash was light purple. He remembers her saying, “You’re so handsome,” as he disappeared here, and thinking yes, he was handsome, he was perfect, of course she would think so.
The holly is still hanging from the stone ceiling, when he cares to notice it, and the floor, when he touches it, feels like Christmas frost. How his picture fell into Lucius's hands, Tom does not know.
“I killed her, you know,” says the other one, one day – night? – when they both chance to be awake. “The little Mudblood who used to stalk us.”
He is sorry, and then he remembers he no longer has to be, there are no teachers now, and then he is curious: When? How? Years and years later, laughs the other one, and the way I always do.
Tom pulls out his wand, and stares at it, then swishes. Green light bursts down the corridor of photograph-Hogwarts.
“Not much use without a target,” the other one says, and brings out his own wand. He looks outside, at the world beyond the photoraph.
“Don’t break the glass,” Tom says. The other one laughs again, because that spell doesn’t affect glass, didn’t you know? Only moving things.
And then he speaks and the fly drops dead.
The crumple of legs falling past the picture frame sends a little thrill down his chest. He turns abruptly. It is only when he settles down to sleep again that he realises he is gripping his wand so tightly that his nails have dug blood from his palm.
“Come with me,” the other one says one day. “There are so many people you could meet. And kill.”
“But I don’t care to meet anyone.”
“It’s not just the others – the victims,” he says. “There are more of us – more of you Tom, and more of me as well. We could meet, and plan.”
He knows there are more. With luck, he thinks, he can ignore them for the rest of forever.
#
He begins to think of himself as other-Tom. He thinks that the other – Voldemort is a portrait, not a photograph, and wonders whether artistic medium affects the temperaments of wizarding pictures.
Other-Voldemort isn’t there all the time, just often enough to make things uncomfortable. Such as when the door outside the glass is flung open, with such force it makes all the pictures shake, and a young vibrant body dashes into the room and flings open the curtains, empties the chest with a single charm. Books and glass objects scatter across the floor in a series of clumsy noises.
Other-Tom winces.
The boy’s hair is white-golden and his neck is long and angular. For a moment, desire spikes through him. He wonders what makes this one so different, so much realer than his father, until the boy turns and he sees the eyes, bright and angry.
“You must be Lucius’s son,” he says, and the boy jerks his chin around to stare at him.
“What?” he asks. And then: “Who are you?”
“Nobody,” he says, but then there is a change in the inside air, and then other-Voldemort is standing beside him.
“Draco Malfoy,” he says silkily. “Come to repeat your father’s sins?”
The boy’s eyes – not a boy really, older than himself – narrow with sharp recognition as he stares at the other one.
“You!” he says. Then he turns back to him. There is a wide-eyed moment as they look at each other, young man to young man. It is broken by the other one.
“Me,” he says. “Us.”
Draco is defiant again, tilting back his chin at the right angle to sneer down. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Aren’t you?” says the other one.
“No,” Draco says, and brandishes his wand. It is ebony, and it gleams in the sunlight filtering in as he bows his head to look down at the floor. His clothes are rumpled. Everything about him emanates haste. Other-Voldemort nods at the exposed contents of the chest.
“If you try to destroy those,” he says, “you’ll bring the whole place down.” Draco raises his arm suddenly. “That won’t kill me, you foolish little boy. A fire bring down Voldemort? Do you wish to destroy your own home?”
Draco is tense and poised to strike. The other one’s eyes are watchful and greedy. He looks at other-Tom and then Draco and says, “Your family will die too.”
That shatters the pause. “I’ll be back,” Draco says in a low voice. And he spins and disappears in a whirl of robes.
The other one is angry. His eyes glitter. “We failed once, did you know?” he says. “Defeated by a baby.”
“You failed,” other-Tom says softly. “Not me.”
Voldemort glares back at him and raises his wand – he never has to draw his wand, it is always sitting there in his hand.
“Kill me if you wish,” he says, but brings out his own wand. He is surprised to see Voldemort step back.
It never occurred to him that he was the stronger one.
#
He is other-Tom, not Tom, and he doesn’t like Voldemort, never mind the size or form. Voldemort is a picture book name. He should have realised this, he realises, and then has to remind himself that he is not them. It is enough that he didn’t fail, that he didn’t make the same mistakes, and that he can remain. Like this.
Other-Tom is very tall, his prefect badge gleaming and his eyes looking down at him proud and cruel – and jealous. He is, he realises, the very youngest. Cleaner, sharper, more powerful.
None of the others he has met has been a match for him – not the older Toms, not the Voldemorts, and he has met a great many since he started wandering. He is hated and feared but not forgotten – and the new war, his other selves whisper, has rekindled memories.
He sees Tom very often. Tom is young and beautiful and makes an excellent wall decoration. Voldemort is usually found lying in a miniature frame – or sometimes a newspaper clipping - locked in a dusty drawer. Voldemort’s guises are strange and lined. They stare back at him with a hunger he cannot comprehend – until the day he sees the real one; the one that fills the outside with the smell of death; the one with the ruin of a face, ruined spirit.
The tall figure stands in a circle of kneeling men, robe pulled away so they can kiss his feet. The moment stands still and stretches – long enough for him to think it very comic and absurd, for him to wonder how can it have gone so wrong and for scarlet eyes to look up, look at him,and the ruined voice to rasp out, “Tom.”
He darts away, running for the furthest portrait he can find. He kills the first Voldemort he meets, and sits with the Tom he finds in a dark, perfume-rich shop in Knockturn Alley, speaking in hushed, horrified voices. This Tom is angry at the humiliation. How shameful, he says, twirling the wand in his hand.
Other-Tom is not angry. He thinks he has forgotten how to be angry. And there are things far worse than humiliation. But he has always known that he is different.
Soon after that he decides to leave England. Thomas Riddle travelled a lot, in the years after the Second World War, and there are, he has been told, pictures of him scattered all over, from Norway to Australia. He thinks he would like to see the rest of the world, even all if he can see is the inside of buildings.
He meets the oldest Tom he has ever seen in China, in a small elegant room bordered with painted triptychs. The frame is heavy gold and hangs in the middle of the room, gleaming bright like the rings in this Tom’s ears.
“You look – almost happy,” he says, looking up at this different man in silken robes, with eyes that seem for some peculiar reason bluer than his own.
Happy-Tom smiles. “So do you.”
They talk for a very long time, and he stays for some more. Curiosity tugs again. “How were you taken?” he asks, one morning when birds are singing from beyond the room’s drawn blinds.
Happy-Tom frowns. “There was a witch – an artist,” he says, nodding at the white couches crowding the room outside, new with neglect. “It took her three months to paint me.”
He imagines it: an Asian girl with narrow eyes, etching out the shape of his body with neat, strong lines.
“He - the real Tom - left soon after,” happy-Tom says. “Her parents own this house. She doesn’t come back often.”
He should have stayed, is the unspoken addition, and maybe you should too.
Other-Tom is tempted; here he feels as hopeful as he has ever been able to do. But he has seen the future, and it is a false hope.
“Thank you,” he says, and because he feels awkward, he adds: “I’ll remember you.” And he wanders out of the frame and into the next country, seeking out darker rooms, stranger crevices. All Voldemorts from here onwards, and yet he feels safer, close to the more familiar darkness. He begins to feel strong again, where that Tom made him feel weak.
Then there is the day all the curtains in the Manor are flung open, and he rushes back to his own frame to see noise scattering everywhere. Men and women with sensible hair and grim faces wander the halls, levitating tables back and forth.
He (the real one, he has to remind himself) must be dead, other-Tom realises, and Lucius must be too. Both thoughts bring a hint of sorrow.
He walks from room to room to inspect the newcomers. A man stands in the drawing room, opening up the all the secret compartments. He coughs as dust streams through the outside.
“It’ll all have to go,” he says to the people standing behind him. He is tall and sunburnt. He looks like a worn-out version of Happy-Tom, only with green eyes. Of course he can only be one person. Of course they want to kill each other.
Other-Tom stalks into the closest frame. “Harry,” he says softly. “Harry, Harry, Harry Potter. How do you do, Harry James Potter? Do you like my home? Of course, it’s hardly adequate without the appropriate hosts, but then Draco doesn’t seem to be available right now, does he?”
He is surprised by the flash of grief when he sees it.
“Draco is dead,” says Harry Potter, and – doesn’t sneer or scowl, but looks back at him very hard and angry. “As you should know, since you killed him.”
Other-Tom is confused; did another Tom kill him, or the real Voldemort, or the diary, perhaps? But another look tells him that Harry has no room for distinctions right now.
“Did I?” he says. “Oops.”
He darts to the next picture before the Incendio comes. Clumsy and emotional. It makes a sickening sort of sense that this is what killed him (no, not himself, the other him, the Voldemort – but his sense of self seems muddier than usual today).
“Poor choice!” he calls, over the crackling fire. “That wasn’t my picture. In fact, that was Draco you just burned.” He smiles, hard-eyed. But Harry is still not looking. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll die too, Harry Potter. You’ll meet him behind the veil. If you’re clever and hurry things a little, you’ll see all your friends a little sooner! Wouldn’t you like that?”
He runs back into darkness before Harry can follow him. Some things just don’t change, and he still likes power, likes pain. He always has.
#
Fear is something he can spot in the middle of a sea of distractions, and hers is palpable from beneath the brave set of her mouth, her long red hair, her pretty brown eyes.
It is the fear that stirs him to action. That, and the fact that she has come on purpose just to see him. He doesn’t like to be seen.
“Legilimens,” he whispers.
She throws him off the first time, and the second, but the third sneaks past her reflexes too quickly. He takes a rough pleasure in seeing her eyes go blank.
Spells cast in here do not work well on people from the outside, he has noticed before. Still, it is enough to dip past the fear and dive into something deep and old – something with blood and a tangle of spirits; ancient hissing and death and very young children.
So that is what happened, he thinks, and stumbles back. So that is why all the other Toms are different from him.
“You poor little girl,” he says, and watches her believe it for a split second. “You poor, lost, little girl.”
When she is gone he sits on the floor, leans against the wall. He has to force his fingers to unclutch his wand. If she ever comes back, she will be boyish and steady-eyed, prepared for anything else he could try. Maybe she will kill him.
He does not think he will try anything else. Neither does he think he wants to die.
#
Soon after meeting Ginny Weasley, other-Tom realises the diary's last secret.
What a fool you are, Voldemort, he thought, and wondered, is the fool myself?
He can no longer be other-Tom, he decides, and thinks, now I am simply Tom.
#
They are stacked in a pile on a field outside Malfoy Manor, encircled by the contents of the chest. Everything is there, and a great many things he does not recognise; amulets, broken wands, ink-stained signet rings. All dangerous, says Harry Potter as he approaches the heap, the red-haired girl by his side. All must go.
The diary should have gone, he thinks, and feels sorry, because he loved the diary once. And it is already gone.
His picture is right at the bottom, buried beneath low whispers and grainy fear. He cannot keep the rest away, so he sits and ignores their dry presences as they slink past. Sometimes they stay and watch him for hours, and when they do he turns away, thinking of all the ways he would have done better.
Every day there are more of them. He knows what it means, and tries not to think about it. There is the now, and now has never changed.
Now ends the day he wakes to hear a soft autumn breeze, and the sounds of terrible words, the picture glass all breaking and some fragments stabbing into his body. His arms begin to bleed.
He sees Harry’s eyes, remorseless. He sees Ginny's fingers, trembling and brave. The wand sweeps up once, and then down. Flame strikes and hisses.
His picture is right at the bottom, and the smoke reaches the top first. It will be hours before the embers reach his frame. Plenty of time to wonder whether photographs have souls.
assyrian; therefore beware the spammage. Backdating doesn't work on communities unfortunately, else I'd go for that option. Woodsmoke
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Harry Potter is the property of JK Rowling.
Summary: Tom is a photograph. A photograph is Tom.
EDIT (August 2005): This fic came out as hopelessly obscure when I first wrote it, and nobody could figure out what the heck was going on. I've made some changes in the hope of being less oblique; hopes it works better this time. It does assume a working knowledge of pre-HPB canon, however.
It’s a sharp summer morning when he first has reason to stir; or so he thinks from the bright bands of sunlight cutting through the gaps between curtains. He hears the sound of scraping wood, then sees the glint of a keyhole on a large familiar chest of varnish and oak, being dragged across the floor by an equally familiar man.
He blinks twice and the scene becomes painfully clear, like a too-clean mirror. Outside, he knows, the room is musty – and dry.
There is a click, the shadow of the chest lid creeping across the floor as it is tilted back, and then dust rising. Perhaps the smell of parchment saturates the air; he wouldn’t know. He cannot sense everything that goes on outside the glass. It is looking through a closed window - a very large and transparent window, to be sure, with extraordinary sound conduction, but still a window.
He learnt early on, to tell the difference between inside and outside a picture.
He puts a flat palm against the pane. “What are you looking for?” he asks, voice careless.
The other man looks up. He looks exactly as he remembers: the indoor skin, paler than his own; the immaculate robes; the constant impression of sharpness. The hair is different; shorter, perhaps, and less carefree than before – but then he cannot remember exactly what it used to look like.
“Nothing that would concern you,” Lucius says. The drawl hasn’t changed.
“A surprising number of things concern me these days.” He wants to add some quip about scuttling insects disturbing his sleep, except that it’s not particularly witty, and the memory is too genuine: the buzzing noises at the frame, pluralistic and menacing. When he thinks of them it is too vividly physical; he has the sense of having been touched and he doesn’t like that, even less than he used to.
“Do they?” Lucius’ voice is indifferent. That it does not make him angry is probably the effect of the years. “Well then, see for yourself.” Lucius comes closer, holds the object at an angle just so it catches the dim light.
“Ah,” he says, and he doesn’t understand why, exactly, but suspicions dance around the edges of his mind. “Wouldn’t I do, though?”
Lucius may have smiled. “Too conspicuous. Also,” there is a pause, “they took you too young.”
He likes hearing about the now-future. “Really? And why would you think that?”
“How old are you?’
“Fifteen,” he says, and the word seems to repeat itself everywhere, like a pattern in the walls of the room. Fifteen, fifteen. But Lucius is already leaving; the curtains slide shut. Footsteps recede. He hears breathing in the new darkness and goes very still, wondering if the other one is there. But the breathing is regular, and after some time contemplating the diary and counting his heartbeat, he falls asleep again.
In his dreams, he remembers his name. The next time, it is the other one who wakes him up.
"Do you always sleep?" Warm, bitter breath down his neck; he turns too quickly, tumbles to the floor. Tom is up again in a moment, scrambling to his feet, forcing his lips to stay calm. There is a three-inch difference in height between them, just large enough to make him feel a child.
The other one looks just like his father. The image brings anger – and fear, but those too, make him feel young.
“Lucius came back,” the other one says. There are premature lines about his face, and a body soft from too little exercise, even though he’s only twice Tom's age and – it is not like looking into a mirror. Not at all. “What did he come for?”
Tom tells him. There is a sudden savage twist to the other one’s face. He knows that twist. It looks like pleasure.
“You know what was in the diary.” But the other one does not respond, only turns away and looks out the glass, thin dark brows arched.
When he does speak, the words come in a different language, hissing and familiar. “He’s a traitor, you know.”
He whispers back, cold excitement to the other one’s anger. Their eyes are sharp and blue, and he doesn’t like the other one, not really, but he listens, because the other one is - not cleverer, but wise-older, more knowledgeable.
“Then he will pay. In good time.” There are things the other one says sometimes that look foreign to him; ridiculous, like posturing cruelty.
But traitor.
This message he understands.
The other one's name is – Voldemort.
It is always dark in here, even when there is light outside, and since the day the photograph captured him, it has always been dark outside.
He was taken in the middle of the winter, evening Midwinter Eve after roaming the forest all day. The seventh-year Mudblood spotted Tom as he came through the corridors, his cheeks flushed from the crisp wind. The camera was shiny and the flash was light purple. He remembers her saying, “You’re so handsome,” as he disappeared here, and thinking yes, he was handsome, he was perfect, of course she would think so.
The holly is still hanging from the stone ceiling, when he cares to notice it, and the floor, when he touches it, feels like Christmas frost. How his picture fell into Lucius's hands, Tom does not know.
“I killed her, you know,” says the other one, one day – night? – when they both chance to be awake. “The little Mudblood who used to stalk us.”
He is sorry, and then he remembers he no longer has to be, there are no teachers now, and then he is curious: When? How? Years and years later, laughs the other one, and the way I always do.
Tom pulls out his wand, and stares at it, then swishes. Green light bursts down the corridor of photograph-Hogwarts.
“Not much use without a target,” the other one says, and brings out his own wand. He looks outside, at the world beyond the photoraph.
“Don’t break the glass,” Tom says. The other one laughs again, because that spell doesn’t affect glass, didn’t you know? Only moving things.
And then he speaks and the fly drops dead.
The crumple of legs falling past the picture frame sends a little thrill down his chest. He turns abruptly. It is only when he settles down to sleep again that he realises he is gripping his wand so tightly that his nails have dug blood from his palm.
“Come with me,” the other one says one day. “There are so many people you could meet. And kill.”
“But I don’t care to meet anyone.”
“It’s not just the others – the victims,” he says. “There are more of us – more of you Tom, and more of me as well. We could meet, and plan.”
He knows there are more. With luck, he thinks, he can ignore them for the rest of forever.
He begins to think of himself as other-Tom. He thinks that the other – Voldemort is a portrait, not a photograph, and wonders whether artistic medium affects the temperaments of wizarding pictures.
Other-Voldemort isn’t there all the time, just often enough to make things uncomfortable. Such as when the door outside the glass is flung open, with such force it makes all the pictures shake, and a young vibrant body dashes into the room and flings open the curtains, empties the chest with a single charm. Books and glass objects scatter across the floor in a series of clumsy noises.
Other-Tom winces.
The boy’s hair is white-golden and his neck is long and angular. For a moment, desire spikes through him. He wonders what makes this one so different, so much realer than his father, until the boy turns and he sees the eyes, bright and angry.
“You must be Lucius’s son,” he says, and the boy jerks his chin around to stare at him.
“What?” he asks. And then: “Who are you?”
“Nobody,” he says, but then there is a change in the inside air, and then other-Voldemort is standing beside him.
“Draco Malfoy,” he says silkily. “Come to repeat your father’s sins?”
The boy’s eyes – not a boy really, older than himself – narrow with sharp recognition as he stares at the other one.
“You!” he says. Then he turns back to him. There is a wide-eyed moment as they look at each other, young man to young man. It is broken by the other one.
“Me,” he says. “Us.”
Draco is defiant again, tilting back his chin at the right angle to sneer down. “I’m not afraid of you.”
“Aren’t you?” says the other one.
“No,” Draco says, and brandishes his wand. It is ebony, and it gleams in the sunlight filtering in as he bows his head to look down at the floor. His clothes are rumpled. Everything about him emanates haste. Other-Voldemort nods at the exposed contents of the chest.
“If you try to destroy those,” he says, “you’ll bring the whole place down.” Draco raises his arm suddenly. “That won’t kill me, you foolish little boy. A fire bring down Voldemort? Do you wish to destroy your own home?”
Draco is tense and poised to strike. The other one’s eyes are watchful and greedy. He looks at other-Tom and then Draco and says, “Your family will die too.”
That shatters the pause. “I’ll be back,” Draco says in a low voice. And he spins and disappears in a whirl of robes.
The other one is angry. His eyes glitter. “We failed once, did you know?” he says. “Defeated by a baby.”
“You failed,” other-Tom says softly. “Not me.”
Voldemort glares back at him and raises his wand – he never has to draw his wand, it is always sitting there in his hand.
“Kill me if you wish,” he says, but brings out his own wand. He is surprised to see Voldemort step back.
It never occurred to him that he was the stronger one.
He is other-Tom, not Tom, and he doesn’t like Voldemort, never mind the size or form. Voldemort is a picture book name. He should have realised this, he realises, and then has to remind himself that he is not them. It is enough that he didn’t fail, that he didn’t make the same mistakes, and that he can remain. Like this.
Other-Tom is very tall, his prefect badge gleaming and his eyes looking down at him proud and cruel – and jealous. He is, he realises, the very youngest. Cleaner, sharper, more powerful.
None of the others he has met has been a match for him – not the older Toms, not the Voldemorts, and he has met a great many since he started wandering. He is hated and feared but not forgotten – and the new war, his other selves whisper, has rekindled memories.
He sees Tom very often. Tom is young and beautiful and makes an excellent wall decoration. Voldemort is usually found lying in a miniature frame – or sometimes a newspaper clipping - locked in a dusty drawer. Voldemort’s guises are strange and lined. They stare back at him with a hunger he cannot comprehend – until the day he sees the real one; the one that fills the outside with the smell of death; the one with the ruin of a face, ruined spirit.
The tall figure stands in a circle of kneeling men, robe pulled away so they can kiss his feet. The moment stands still and stretches – long enough for him to think it very comic and absurd, for him to wonder how can it have gone so wrong and for scarlet eyes to look up, look at him,and the ruined voice to rasp out, “Tom.”
He darts away, running for the furthest portrait he can find. He kills the first Voldemort he meets, and sits with the Tom he finds in a dark, perfume-rich shop in Knockturn Alley, speaking in hushed, horrified voices. This Tom is angry at the humiliation. How shameful, he says, twirling the wand in his hand.
Other-Tom is not angry. He thinks he has forgotten how to be angry. And there are things far worse than humiliation. But he has always known that he is different.
Soon after that he decides to leave England. Thomas Riddle travelled a lot, in the years after the Second World War, and there are, he has been told, pictures of him scattered all over, from Norway to Australia. He thinks he would like to see the rest of the world, even all if he can see is the inside of buildings.
He meets the oldest Tom he has ever seen in China, in a small elegant room bordered with painted triptychs. The frame is heavy gold and hangs in the middle of the room, gleaming bright like the rings in this Tom’s ears.
“You look – almost happy,” he says, looking up at this different man in silken robes, with eyes that seem for some peculiar reason bluer than his own.
Happy-Tom smiles. “So do you.”
They talk for a very long time, and he stays for some more. Curiosity tugs again. “How were you taken?” he asks, one morning when birds are singing from beyond the room’s drawn blinds.
Happy-Tom frowns. “There was a witch – an artist,” he says, nodding at the white couches crowding the room outside, new with neglect. “It took her three months to paint me.”
He imagines it: an Asian girl with narrow eyes, etching out the shape of his body with neat, strong lines.
“He - the real Tom - left soon after,” happy-Tom says. “Her parents own this house. She doesn’t come back often.”
He should have stayed, is the unspoken addition, and maybe you should too.
Other-Tom is tempted; here he feels as hopeful as he has ever been able to do. But he has seen the future, and it is a false hope.
“Thank you,” he says, and because he feels awkward, he adds: “I’ll remember you.” And he wanders out of the frame and into the next country, seeking out darker rooms, stranger crevices. All Voldemorts from here onwards, and yet he feels safer, close to the more familiar darkness. He begins to feel strong again, where that Tom made him feel weak.
Then there is the day all the curtains in the Manor are flung open, and he rushes back to his own frame to see noise scattering everywhere. Men and women with sensible hair and grim faces wander the halls, levitating tables back and forth.
He (the real one, he has to remind himself) must be dead, other-Tom realises, and Lucius must be too. Both thoughts bring a hint of sorrow.
He walks from room to room to inspect the newcomers. A man stands in the drawing room, opening up the all the secret compartments. He coughs as dust streams through the outside.
“It’ll all have to go,” he says to the people standing behind him. He is tall and sunburnt. He looks like a worn-out version of Happy-Tom, only with green eyes. Of course he can only be one person. Of course they want to kill each other.
Other-Tom stalks into the closest frame. “Harry,” he says softly. “Harry, Harry, Harry Potter. How do you do, Harry James Potter? Do you like my home? Of course, it’s hardly adequate without the appropriate hosts, but then Draco doesn’t seem to be available right now, does he?”
He is surprised by the flash of grief when he sees it.
“Draco is dead,” says Harry Potter, and – doesn’t sneer or scowl, but looks back at him very hard and angry. “As you should know, since you killed him.”
Other-Tom is confused; did another Tom kill him, or the real Voldemort, or the diary, perhaps? But another look tells him that Harry has no room for distinctions right now.
“Did I?” he says. “Oops.”
He darts to the next picture before the Incendio comes. Clumsy and emotional. It makes a sickening sort of sense that this is what killed him (no, not himself, the other him, the Voldemort – but his sense of self seems muddier than usual today).
“Poor choice!” he calls, over the crackling fire. “That wasn’t my picture. In fact, that was Draco you just burned.” He smiles, hard-eyed. But Harry is still not looking. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll die too, Harry Potter. You’ll meet him behind the veil. If you’re clever and hurry things a little, you’ll see all your friends a little sooner! Wouldn’t you like that?”
He runs back into darkness before Harry can follow him. Some things just don’t change, and he still likes power, likes pain. He always has.
Fear is something he can spot in the middle of a sea of distractions, and hers is palpable from beneath the brave set of her mouth, her long red hair, her pretty brown eyes.
It is the fear that stirs him to action. That, and the fact that she has come on purpose just to see him. He doesn’t like to be seen.
“Legilimens,” he whispers.
She throws him off the first time, and the second, but the third sneaks past her reflexes too quickly. He takes a rough pleasure in seeing her eyes go blank.
Spells cast in here do not work well on people from the outside, he has noticed before. Still, it is enough to dip past the fear and dive into something deep and old – something with blood and a tangle of spirits; ancient hissing and death and very young children.
So that is what happened, he thinks, and stumbles back. So that is why all the other Toms are different from him.
“You poor little girl,” he says, and watches her believe it for a split second. “You poor, lost, little girl.”
When she is gone he sits on the floor, leans against the wall. He has to force his fingers to unclutch his wand. If she ever comes back, she will be boyish and steady-eyed, prepared for anything else he could try. Maybe she will kill him.
He does not think he will try anything else. Neither does he think he wants to die.
Soon after meeting Ginny Weasley, other-Tom realises the diary's last secret.
What a fool you are, Voldemort, he thought, and wondered, is the fool myself?
He can no longer be other-Tom, he decides, and thinks, now I am simply Tom.
They are stacked in a pile on a field outside Malfoy Manor, encircled by the contents of the chest. Everything is there, and a great many things he does not recognise; amulets, broken wands, ink-stained signet rings. All dangerous, says Harry Potter as he approaches the heap, the red-haired girl by his side. All must go.
The diary should have gone, he thinks, and feels sorry, because he loved the diary once. And it is already gone.
His picture is right at the bottom, buried beneath low whispers and grainy fear. He cannot keep the rest away, so he sits and ignores their dry presences as they slink past. Sometimes they stay and watch him for hours, and when they do he turns away, thinking of all the ways he would have done better.
Every day there are more of them. He knows what it means, and tries not to think about it. There is the now, and now has never changed.
Now ends the day he wakes to hear a soft autumn breeze, and the sounds of terrible words, the picture glass all breaking and some fragments stabbing into his body. His arms begin to bleed.
He sees Harry’s eyes, remorseless. He sees Ginny's fingers, trembling and brave. The wand sweeps up once, and then down. Flame strikes and hisses.
His picture is right at the bottom, and the smoke reaches the top first. It will be hours before the embers reach his frame. Plenty of time to wonder whether photographs have souls.
