i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

XIX:

The ill feeling in her gut intensified. She asked, "What child?" despite knowing full well who they were talking about.

The Headmaster seemed loathe to say it, but Dumbledore had no such qualms. "Rubeus Hagrid."

Ever since her heart stopped, it felt like it seemed intent on working twice as hard to make up on lost time, to make up for failing once. Ophelia's pulse spiked, reacting to her panic, and her breathing escalated proportionately.

"Rubeus didn't do anything!" She grabbed Professor Dippet's robes and forcibly yanked him closer. He startled, and Fawkes, cooing indignantly at the disrupted serenity, glided out of an open window. Lucky bird. Jumping out the window was looking increasingly tempting with the panic that was expanding like a bubble in Ophelia's chest. "Nothing! This has nothing to do with him! Do you hear me?"

"How can we be sure if we don't even know what happened? Your wounds– they were unnatural, and without an idea of what did it, I'm afraid—"

"I did it!" she exclaimed desperately. The room went silent, and she continued more quietly, "I did it to myself. Are you happy? Rubeus had nothing to do with it."

III

The fifth year Slytherin boy's dormitory had seen better days: curtains were ripped from windows, sheets, blankets, and pillows strewn across the room, down fluttered softly through the air like snow. Tom's trunk laid upturned on his now barren bed, it's contents spilled haphazardly across the floor. A History of Magic and Advanced Potion-making missed several pages each, shredded into confetti-sized bits and littering the floor beside the glass and feathers.

He picked up one of the few items that somehow survived his purge— a crystal decanter now mostly empty of the firewhisky Avery managed to sneak from home— and watched it shatter against the wall, amber liquid and glass shards flying in every direction. Breathing heavily, he looked for something else— anything else— to break into a thousand satisfying pieces.

The mess didn't matter. Magic could fix it all in a fraction of the time it took him to break it.

Not all.

Tom buried the intrusive thought under a fresh wave anger. Anger was good. If not for anger, he'd be overcome by that other feeling, and he wouldn't let it come to that.

Fury at least had purpose and a cure. That other emotion provided nothing except pain and suffering. So why didn't he feel better yet? The basilisk, the source of his problems, was dealt with.

Why, then, did he still want to raze the whole castle, the whole country, to the ground?

His fingers dug into the cover of an old notebook, gripping the edges to rip it apart when he distantly realised it was his diary. Pages upon pages of notes filled its space, varying from useless thoughts that happened to cross his mind  to painfully detailed descriptions of enchantments that didn't quite fit into Hogwarts' carefully curated curriculum. In a coincidence that felt more like fate than chance, the spot where the diary split in half, where he gripped one cover in one hand and the other with his remaining one, intending to tear the whole thing apart, was his record of a rather particular branch of magic.

Horcruxes.

Tom took up slow, retreating steps until the back of his legs collided with one of the four-poster beds and his knees buckled. Sinking into the bare mattress, he let his head drop into his hands and the diary slip out of his fingers to fall back onto the rug with a nearly silent thud.