For the Greater Good || Tom Riddle ||

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Waiting

He had collected, cleaned, and displayed over twenty pieces that past month, and the cold weather partnered with the physical labor had left his hands dry and callused. The assortment ranged from a magical red pebble said to turn the holder into a stone if they so wished to bone and blood candles to a fully intact Ichthyosaur specimen.

It was rare when this feeling came over him. He had worked at the shop for seven years as he amassed his followers, had seized several noteworthy items such as Slytherin's Locket and Helga Hufflepuff's Cup, and seldom did the settings rouse such a sentiment within him.

Typically, it was a feeling reserved for ballrooms and dinner tables, when he was surrounded by the things he had built for himself and was reminded that he was responsible for the grandeur of it all—the buzz of conversation, the political discourse, the Venn Diagram of people he had summoned in the same room.

This moment was much less grand and much lonelier but struck the same feeling within his withered soul.

When he looked into the shop window, something stirred within him, a strange sense—pride—in what he had gathered and arranged. It took a careful hand and eye to craft a catering such as this, taking care of them one by one to make a semblance of a life, and if he was being honest, it was not only for the customers or even Burke.

In some ways, it felt like an offering. In others, it felt like proof.

There were times he imagined his mother, peering at him from around a shrouded corner, and then, he would stand a little off the side to showcase the display to spite her, to prove to her that he had in fact escaped that hellhole she left him in, that he had managed to reach the world she had attempted to conceal from him, and yes, his hands, his, were the ones that were holding these ancient, magical objects.

That he was living, he was free, and he had power.

Power.

The power his mother never claimed, although she was a descent of Salazar Slytherin. She had sat in squalor, accepting abuse in that pathetic shack, sullied and somber. But not him.

Never him.

He had bathed in the dirt, grown up in it, but never again would he return to it.

There were other times that he imagined communication with his despicable father through the murk of the earth—a Frankensteined connection of electricity through the ground—as he rotted in his tomb, feeble and powerless. A mummy, a corpse, barely more than a meal for a worm.

"A mix of dirt and infection."

In those moments, that always took place after hours, when all the patrons had left the shop, Tom would smile with sinister, mad glee to himself over the fact that his parentage had no hold on him. He had invented himself out of nothing.

He was his own creator.

He made himself with his own two hands.

He needed no one.

No one at all.

He had seen the disgusting nature of parentage firsthand when Orion finally brought his father to a meeting, a mocking sort of superiority as the elder Black listened to him speak about the future and perked up at his ideals and vision—that he took credit for his son's share in the pie, that he was the one that set the course in motion.

It was a mockery of charity, of birth, of existence, and Tom was glad he had no family to hover over him and claim the right to his success. There was no debt there, and that made him feel at ease.

Even as some of his followers decided to share sheets with women with pedigrees from the Ministry and whores from the tavern alike, masses of flesh and snot ripping out of them nine months after his men had had their fun and caused all kinds of chaos, Tom never once felt moved by it.