Tom Riddle Aesthetic - Tumblr Posts

patricide is like falling in love (tom riddle, probably)

~inspired by a moodboard thing I saw on here where TMR says murder is like falling in love~

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

“You are my son,” Tom Riddle chokes out, his gaze roving helplessly over his dead parents’ bodies as he clutches a crucifix, dangling from a small silver chain. 

His voice is wrecked from the pain.

Weak. 

“I made you. You’re a monster.”

Tom laughs. “No one made me, father. I made me.” He feels his head tilt, his eyes focus. “You’re sixteen years too late to claim me, now. You left me. I came for you. You see?”

“Your mother bewitched me!”

“That may be so,” says Tom, twirling Morfin’s wand and laughing as his father shrinks back. “She’s dead. Died giving birth to me. In Wool’s Orphanage, London. My poor, dead mother stumbled into the orphanage, weak and starving on the coldest night of the year. They couldn’t stop the bleeding or the fever, and she only lived long enough to name me.”

“I’m sorry,” says his father, though Tom doesn’t want his pity. He hates pity. He hates his pathetic, neglectful, sobbing father.

How could two weak people produce him?

“This is wrong, Tom!”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare.” Tom points his wand at the battered copy of Hamlet on the bookshelf, laughing. It catches on fire.

“What do you want?” He sounds tired.

“Nothing much, father,” says Tom sweetly. His father, who left him, like everyone else. His father will never read him a bedtime story or wipe the sweat away from his face when he is sick or hold him when he is sad. (Not that he needs any of those things — he doesn’t.)

His father is the reason he is broken. Broken from birth.

It doesn’t matter, because Tom is something better than human now. (There is only power.)

“Daddy,” he says, like a small child. He has never said the word before, and it rolls off of his tongue with surprising difficulty — the agile tongue that pronounces Parseltongue, Latin and Arabic spells, and Ogham runic chants with ease. “Why did you leave me?”

“She bewitched me — she lied to me, you don’t understand how violated—“

“I want to see the light leave your eyes,” whispers Tom, in a tone that befits a love confession more than a death threat. “I hate you.”

“I grieve for your soul,” says his father, trembling with fear. “Repent, demon. Show some remorse, for your own sake!”

But Tom doesn’t intend to meet judgment. Tom intends to live forever.

He is burning, burning, he has never burned like this, he is so full of exquisite hatred that aches so good, and all Tom has to do is to let it all go.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Now, Tom is sitting on the floor in the Riddles’ dining room. He is running his fingers through his dead father’s hair, handsome, just like him, admiring his frozen, horrified expression. 

Tom sits in his grandfather’s chair and cradles his dead father, like the Pietà, with two more dead bodies strewn at his feet. His head tilts gracefully down, mimicking the Virgin Mary’s silent compassion and suffering, but feeling none of it. Tom Riddle is gone. He is dead. Tom lays his head on his father’s chest, but there is no more heartbeat, no more breath.

His brown eyes, just like his son’s, blown wide with fear. Lips parted in surrender. 

He leans forward and kisses his father’s forehead sweetly, presses two chaste, cold lips to still-warm skin, like a priest’s blessing. 

The twilight sky is darkening, turning dark violet like ink has spilled on it.

It is beautiful. It is perfect, yet the despair is not gone. His heart still beats with anguish, and Tom Riddle is left more broken than ever and aching for more.

It is like falling in love.

Chapter One: The Tragedy of Tom Riddle

June, 1943

The cry of the jackal was high and mournful as it regarded the lone boy standing in the courtyard. Smoke trailed from the fingers of his left hand.

Tom lifted the lit cigarette to his mouth, closed his eyes, and winced. The sound was penetrating. He exhaled bitter smoke, looking around surreptitiously. The last thing he needed was Mulciber or Avery, or worse yet, a professor, coming around the corner.

He did not relish the thought of having to explain a nicotine addiction at this present moment (or any moment at all), because that would require explaining the Blitz, too, and Merlin knows these morons were oblivious to the world war that was currently going on. Pureblood society wouldn’t stoop to concerning itself with Muggle politics even if the bombs were exploding over the heads of the entire Sacred Twenty-Eight.

On second thought, he’d quite like to see a bomb exploding over the idiots’ heads.

At any rate, he had to be careful. Especially considering what he was intending to do later today. He already had an inordinate amount of detentions with Dumbledore — Professor of Transfiguration and the only person Tom considered a serious threat to his plans — as it were, and unfortunately only a finite amount of patience. 

Undoubtedly, this week’s session would involve advice on how to make friends, and questions as to why he liked to spend so much time alone.

He had to tutor that ditzy Gryffindor girl again today after he finished that extra assignment for Slughorn, and then he had patrol duty tonight with that irritating Ravenclaw git he’d been paired with — oh, fuck it all.

That and the essay for Merrythought — how could he have forgotten? He had an eighty-inch final paper due in Defense Against the Dark Arts on Friday, and he hadn’t even started it yet.

Even assuming he got through this behemoth of a week and everything went smoothly with the Horcrux, there were still his O.W.L. exams to worry about...

Continue reading at FFN | AO3!

Chapter Three: Red Death, White Torture

Perhaps, Tom should have felt comforted, as the nurse patted his arm and smiled sympathetically; but all that he could focus on was the fluttering curtain. Now he could see Death, as the sounds of crying and sniffling dulled around him, as the room seemed to darken with the Reaper's presence (if he hadn't been so scared, Tom would have noticed that the sun had only gone behind the clouds).

Comfort wasn't something Tom needed. He'd never been afraid of monsters before; never shirked from dark corners or shadows dancing across the walls or shapes cowering under the bed. He liked spiders. Sometimes, he would let them crawl on him, and if he concentrated hard enough, he could make the spiders play dead or roll over on their backs.

Billy Stubbs had called him a monster once, when they'd argued. The next morning, Tom had gotten up before anyone else, while it was still dark outside, taken the rabbit that Billy was so fond of, a silly, white fluffy thing, up to the attic, and hung it.

He hadn't been intending to. Tom hadn't sat there and planned it. He just had to do it. In fact, he hardly knew what he was doing as he climbed up the rafters, the warm, fuzzy rabbit struggling in his hand, its heartbeat quick and frenzied against his palm. Nor did he know how to make a noose. No one taught him.

All he could think was punish Billy, he was mean to me, how dare he, I'm special. Tug. Loop. Knot. He had gripped the rafter between his knees, hard enough to leave welts, but it was worth it as he felt the rabbit stop struggling in the noose. Billy deserved it.

But as the fury burned out, he was sitting cross-legged and looking up at Billy Stubb's rabbit, its stupid ears drooping as it spun slowly, the grey twine knotted around its neck, as the room filled with morning light.

There was a black curtain in the attic too, fluttering against the window. The dead rabbit had been fascinating, and Tom had wanted to keep it in the box in his wardrobe, where he kept all of his secret toys. But it wouldn't fit, and it would stink. Dead things smelled. So, he left the rabbit, shutting the door and creeping back into bed, unable to sleep as he waited with glee for Billy's reaction.

"Well, it didn't hang itself from the rafters, did it?"

Tom remembered staring unrepentantly back up at Mrs. Cole, his face a mask of feigned confusion, but internally singing, he got what he deserved, stupid Billy, stupid rabbit. And Billy's crying; that had been music to his ears.

"No, ma'am. I don't see how I could have gotten up there, ma'am."

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

Name: Tom Riddle

House: Slytherin

Birthday: December 31, 1926

Signature spell/skills: Parseltongue, Legilimency and Occlumency, Dark magic, intimidation and charisma 

Familiar: The Serpent of Slytherin (basilisk)

Patronus: None

Wand: Yew & phoenix feather, thirteen-and-a-half inches, slightly yielding

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

Chapter Five: Down the Rabbit Hole

Mrs. Cole, Tom had decided over the past few months, was entirely too sharp. Amy and Dennis had been unable to recount the events in the cave — and she'd tried to get it out of them many times, Tom had crept downstairs at night and put his ear to the office door to hear her discuss her visits to the Williams' household with Martha.

He had gone too far, that time. He had to lie low for a while; ignore the screaming and taunts and everything else that irked him about the other children (inmates).

"Still not quite the same, the both of them," said Mrs. Cole. "He's done something to them. I don't know what, but it must have been horrid. The only thing Mrs. Williams has been able to get out of them is that they went into a cave with Tom Riddle."

One of those nights, curled up against Mrs. Cole's door, Tom heard something that he could not easily forget.

"An asylum," said Mrs. Cole. "One more incident, and no questions, he's going straight to an asylum. Whether he's a lunatic or possessed by some ungodly evil — I'll wash my hands of him, and good riddance. Terrorizing the other children — it's not right, Martha. I almost wish he would give us the excuse."

Every night since then, the black curtain was not the only figure in his nightmares.

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

Chapter Seven: Alice in Wonderland

"Are you coming, Riddle?" asked Icarus, turning imperiously as he put one foot on the stairs.

Suddenly, someone came rushing down in a flurry of dark robes, shoving Icarus away. He stumbled back, looking crestfallen, and the others drew away, too.

"Has no-one told you not to stand in front of the stairs, Lestrange?" snapped the newcomer; a boy of about fourteen or fifteen, with a narrow, aristocratic face, white-blond hair and grey eyes that glinted like steel in the dim, wavy light.

"Who are you?" asked Tom, before he could hold himself back. But he couldn't help but be curious, especially when the other four boys were staring at the newcomer with such adoration and reverence.

"Abraxas Malfoy," he said, drawing himself up to his full height — which Tom noted with a faint hint of pleasure was not much taller than him.

Malfoy raised an eyebrow. "And you are?"

"Tom Riddle." Tom did not take his eyes off of Malfoy's, instead lifting his chin and glaring.

"Tom Riddle," repeated Malfoy. A mocking grin spread across his face. "And what might you be? Another half-blood? Mother ran off with a Mudblood, or worse, a Muggle, is that it?"

"No!" snapped Tom, acutely aware of the others gazing at him and Malfoy fixedly, awaiting an answer with bated breath. He could see his perfect façade unravelling already, all the work that he had done to earn his classmates' respect wasted. "My father was a wizard! His name was Tom Riddle, too!"

Malfoy threw his head back, laughing, the sound echoing ominously against the stone walls of the corridor.

"Oh, you filthy little Mudblood. Bold as brass."

Tom finds that Slytherin House isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. If he wants respect, he’s going to have to earn it.

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

Tom Riddle attempts to (mis)educate purebloods about WWII

Mulciber: "But why don’t you want to go back, Tom? Other than the fact that they’re, you know, Muggles."

Tom *aggressively shoves books in trunk*: "There’s a war going on. Didn’t you know that?"

Mulciber: "Yeah, I know about Grindelwald — what do you take us for, Tom — idiots?"

Tom (near the end of his tether): "Not Grindelwald. A Muggle war."

Rosier (confused): "But, er, who are they fighting?"

Tom: "Other Muggles. Germans, mostly."

Mulciber: "For Merlin’s sake, why? Don’t Muggles all like the same things? Like filth and what’s it called again — electrics?"

Tom: Looks very hard at Mulciber, and debates the use of teaching wizards about the evils of fascism.

Tom: Decides against it.

Tom: "Muggle stuff."

table manners

"You'd better keep your voice down."

Tom stiffened. He knew that voice.

"Try not to piss yourself, Mudblood."

The boy with the birthmark was nearby. Tom thought of lifting the tablecloth to get a closer look, but he feared revealing himself.

The ground under him shuddered slightly with approaching footsteps, and Tom inched towards the wall.

"Do you see him?"

Loud chewing.

"Who? Slughorn?"

"No."

Whoever it was needed to learn how to chew and swallow before they spoke.

"Riddle."

"Haven't seen him for a while." That was Abraxas. "Slippery little bugger."

Another excerpt from Chapter 11 (out Saturday!) @ FFN | AO3!

I don’t know why, but I find Tom Riddle hiding out under a table of hors d’oeuvres kind of funny.