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Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
I've been writing more oneshots lately, mostly because I've gotten into fic exchanges.
My longer works:
Oneshot Index:
My longer works:
- The Gods Have Horns — Homestuck AU, coauthored with @Shadow-Wasser.
- There is Nothing to Fear — Harry Potter AU. Tom Riddle was sorted into Gryffindor.
Oneshot Index:
- that's how it is on this bitch of an earth — Harry Potter AU (no wizarding war). Petunia Evans/Sirius Black. First published on AO3.
- their true black tergiversation — Harry Potter AU (Chamber of Secrets divergence). Ginny Weasley & Tom Riddle. First published on AO3.
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that's how it is on this bitch of an earth (Harry Potter AU)
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
This story was written for the HP Rare Pair Fic Exchange.
The only time Petunia is ever properly frightened of magic, she is fourteen years old and reading an issue of The Daily Prophet. What is unusual about the circumstance is not that she is reading a wizarding journal, but the lengths to which she'd gone to acquire this one in particular, which Lily very pointedly hid from her in an enchanted trunk. Petunia is a muggle, which means that even the simplest of Locking Spells is proof enough against her, so Lily can be forgiven for thinking that it was good enough. The sisters have been at odds before, but always on an equal footing. This is the first time that Lily has used magic against her, and the first time Petunia has had to oppose it.
Petunia is not frightened by this. The fear would come later, by the object of concealment and not the act. For now, she is indignant. She reflects. She plans. Petunia's curiosity cannot be assuaged, but it can be concealed, so she feigns disinterest and forgetfulness, turning the problem over in her head every so often. When Petunia finds a magical multitool in a wizarding catalog, she mentions it to Lily, pointing out that it could be rather useful the next time Lily went out looking for magical plants. "There are a lot of plants you can't use even a little bit of magic on, or it'll ruin the potion," Lily says, and Petunia files that away like a bit of gossip from Sharon Jones, but Lily looks interested anyway, and Petunia isn't surprised at all to see Lily pull the multitool out of a gift-wrapped box that Christmas. The very next day, while Lily is out and up to something with that terrible Snape boy, Petunia quietly borrows the multitool and uses it to pick the lock on Lily's trunk.
It opens like a charm.
The headlines on the front page of the Prophet are banal, interesting only in how uninteresting they are, proof that even witches and wizards have their slow news days, and Petunia flips through page after page, almost bored, until she reaches the international section. Then Petunia understands why Lily kept this from her.
Her fingers tighten around the journal, crushing and tearing through the page.
In clinical detail, the article describes the deaths of an entire wizarding family. Petunia had known that there was a war over in the Americas, just like she knows, in an offhand way, that there was some sort of violence going on in Bangladesh or Bengali somewhere, but neither of these events seemed to have any relevance to her own life. Not until this article.
Later, Petunia won't even be able to properly remember which side in the war was responsible. What sticks out to her, like a lance in her heart, isn't even the gruesome manner of their deaths. The scene of the crime is too violent for the Prophet to show, but there's a family photograph from a couple of years ago, smiling out at Petunia without any thought about how their lives would terminate. There's a set of twins, dressed alike in suspenders and bowties and impossible to tell apart except for the fact that just one of the boys is holding a wand.
Petunia can't help but see herself in the squib boy, who lived on the periphery of wonders that he could see and even handle but never conjure for himself. She can't help but think about how terrified he must have been, how powerless he must have felt, to know what horrors could be wrought by magic and to know that he could do nothing to stop it or defend himself. When Petunia sets down the page, she can set aside that story, set aside all her thoughts of war, but that poor American boy was in the midst of it all.
If there were a war like that in Britain, Petunia thinks, it would be very hard not to think about it all the time.
But, there was no war in Britain, so fear doesn't become a constant presence in Petunia's life. When she has nightmares that night, they are the first nightmares of magic that she has ever had, and the last as well. Fear and envy together might have engendered resentment and hatred, but Petunia can deal with envy on its own.
"I should've known that you would figure something out," Lily says later, when she realizes what Petunia did.
"You should have," Petunia agrees.
It's a paradigm shift for both girls. Lily never again underestimates her sister, and Petunia never again resigns herself to a life on the periphery. There is so much that she will never be able to do, enchanting shrubbery to dance and transfiguring toads to stools, but there is so much more in the world than magic sticks and silly words: multitools that glide beneath her touch, invisible horses that feed from her hand, and textbooks that she can study.
Someday, God willing, Petunia will write one of those textbooks.
James Potter, that rapscallion, that misbegotten good-for-nothing, has stolen Lily's heart, and there is no number of reminders about his past misbehavior which will change Lily's mind on the subject. Petunia can't exactly say that she's surprised; it isn't as though she's ever convinced Lily about that terrible Snape boy, either.
And now they're getting married.
There's something in Petunia which is a little bothered by the fact that Lily is getting married so soon. No, not so soon—before herself. That's the thing that's bothersome. Maybe she should have paid more attention to Vernon—but no, that's silly, that's desperation talking and Petunia has no reason to be desperate. Petunia is only a year older than Lily, and she shouldn't take her sister's marriage as any kind of sign of things to come. For Christ's sake, women are hardly spinsters at twenty-two.
Besides, people can afford to take things slowly in Wizarding Britain, can't they? Really, it's Lily who's the odd one, marrying so young.
The thought of Vernon still troubles her. He was a bore, he was simple; he was kind, he was dependable. Good God, he was patient, even when Petunia would cut anecdotes short without an explanation or work on little projects she could never tell him about.
Vernon was a muggle, like her, and he was a muggle unlike her.
Because Petunia is a witch's sister, she could know, she was allowed to know, that magic is real. She could try on dresses at Madam Malkin's and eat ice cream at Fortescue's, because she is Lily's immediate family. But the Statute of Secrecy, Lily explained at one point, was hazier on more distant relationships. If Petunia had told Vernon then it might have been alright now, but some other Minister for Magic might tighten things up a little, somewhen down the line, and poor Vernon might be Obliviated. It had happened before, during Josephina Flint's term in the 19th century.
Petunia couldn't bear for that to happen to him.
The ceremony is a small event, just for the family, and on Lily's side there are, not counting Petunia herself and their father, just two grandparents and a cousin. An empty seat marks a place for their mother, two years dead, and that's the whole extended family, or everyone worth mentioning. James didn't contribute much either; his parents married late in life, and Fleamont's younger brother Charlus doesn't think that marriage vows are even valid when a muggle says them (or maybe it's just Anglicans that he doesn't like), so there aren't many relatives from the Potter to invite.
That doesn't mean that nobody else got to celebrate. On the final balance, it seemed wrong to exclude any of the decent members of the extended Evans-Pearson clan, few though they might be, but it also seemed wrong to go through the entire affair pretending that magic didn't exist, and Petunia and their father are the only muggles in Lily's life who have been clued in. Lily compromised with herself by holding the reception under different terms.
Petunia still has one foot in the muggle world, even if her dalliances with Vernon are rarer these days, and even if she's finding more and more work in Wizarding Britain, copyediting for Dust & Mildewe and performing secretarial work at the Gamp Magical Library of the Bodley. It's all rather minor right now, but she's already caught the eye of Berenice Mildewe. Though Petunia's colleagues are generally magical, her friends are still mostly muggles. Lily, however, has had seven years and more to lose her primary school friends. The result being, the only person Petunia really knows at the reception, besides her own father and sister, is that terrible Snape boy.
But that's alright. Petunia isn't here for herself, and nobody else is here for her, either, so she can circulate through the room mostly unhindered, making all the appropriate small talk so that she makes the right impression on everyone. She's mildly anxious about being here, because that entails being here as Lily's sister, as a muggle, and people can connect the dots even if she doesn't introduce herself as "you know, the unmagical Evans" in every conversation, and a part of her is worried that she might be closing doors to career prospects that haven't even come over the horizon yet. But Petunia isn't here for herself.
Highest on her list of acquaintances to meet: James Potter's friends. None of them, thank God, have ever been invited to an Evans Family Dinner, so she only knows them by reputation, but oh, what a reputation it is. She is dreading these meetings, but that only means she needs to get them out of the way.
Remus Lupin, when she meets him, is wholly as unimpressive as she expected. He's dressed well enough, but Petunia knows that it can't be his own robes that he's wearing: the man is chronically unemployed, thanks to some sort of medical condition that's never quite come out into open conversation—had there been even a hint of it, Petunia would have sunk her teeth into that clue and never let go until she figured out the rest—and couldn't possibly afford those robes himself, but they look too perfectly-tailored to have been rented.
She likes Peter far better, for all that he seems the proverbial runt of James Potter's gang. That's part of his appeal in some ways, because Petunia can always appreciate the unappreciated, but it also helps that he has a steady job. He's a journalist, actually, which is a lot like being a professional gossip, and that's even better. Petunia likes her hobbies too much to monetize them, but that doesn't lessen her respect for the art.
Petunia hits a bump in the road after that when Agrippa Merrythought—Lily's Herbology tutor, hiking friend, and (very briefly, amicably separated) former boyfriend—intercepts her and asks whether she's met Professor Riddle.
She has, yes, but Agrippa is already making introductions before she can respond. "—and Petunia, this is Professor Riddle. He teaches over at Hogwarts, Lily might've mentioned him to you before."
"We've run into each other a few times." Riddle smiles. "Lily did excellent work picking out your robes," he says in the most earnest tones. In point of fact, Petunia had helped pick out Lily's. "If I didn't know better, I would think you were a witch yourself."
There were two types of wizard in the magical world, as far as Petunia was concerned: the Lily Evanses and the Severus Snapes. Lily's history professor is of the second sort. Riddle hides it well, Petunia will give him that, keeping the nastiness behind a veil of manners and so sharply-dressed that Petunia could cut her fingers on his robes. But he's still a Severus Snape.
Petunia isn't going to say anything like that in front of Agrippa, though, so she smiles and falls into the conversation just long enough to be polite, reminding herself that she's here for Lily. "Likewise, my compliments to your old tutors. I can hardly pick up any Cockney in your voice." Petunia can't pick up any, actually—Riddle has an infuriatingly perfect Hogwarts British accent—and for all she knows, Riddle never grew up in the East End, but there are enough stray facts about him in the air to know that, wherever Riddle came from, he doesn't like to think about it.
"You simply can't imagine how good they were," Riddle agrees. "But I'm afraid that you're right about my speech. Some might say that good oratory is like magic itself: even the best teachers can only do so much if the natural talent doesn't already exist."
The man is supposed to be able to talk with snakes, according to Lily, but Petunia thinks he's more like a shark. Predators like him, they can't stop hunting, or they'll drown. It's positively exhausting to interact with Riddle; when she's finally able to escape, Petunia decides that she's had enough of the reception and that it's time to head home. But there's one more person to hit on her list before she can do that.
For all that Sirius Black is her brother-in-law's best friend, most of what Petunia knows about him is a grab-bag of facts. The essential things are that Sirius is a troublemaker like James (terrible) and that Severus hates him (excellent, and the one redeeming thing about James, while she's on the subject). Petunia has only ever met one of his cousins, Bellatrix, who made a small donation from her own library in exchange for the privilege of copying a passage from the Bodley's restricted stacks. Bellatrix probably doesn't remember her supposed-squib escort, but the memory never faded for Petunia, who was in charge of watching Bellatrix's wand while the witch traveled beyond the chained doors of the Singular Volumes Wing. Petunia had never guarded a magic wand before; in her hands, it felt like any other polished stick.
While Petunia passes through pleasantries like a ghost and listens to the room, she hears only the occasional reference to Sirius, who proves to be as elusive as a shadow in a dark room. Eventually, she resorts to outright asking the next person who looks like they're one of James Potter's sort, Yvaine Wiggleswade. "Black's over there," Yvaine says, pointing out at the balcony, and Petunia heads off.
At first, the fact that Yvaine said "Black" makes Petunia think that she gauged wrong, and Yvaine is from Lily's social circle, someone who didn't feel comfortable referring to him as just "Sirius." As Petunia approaches, she updates her assumptions: the "Black" to which Petunia was directed looks so much like Bellatrix—the greyness of her eyes, the austerity of her face—that, for a moment, Petunia actually thinks that it is her. Then the moment passes and a pertinent fact is summoned from the recesses of Petunia's memory, which recalls that Sirius has multiple (two? three? James Potter's tale didn't specify) cousins, and not just one.
Up close, Petunia can notice little details that she couldn't make out before. "Black" is dressed in men's robes, with a square-cut collar and a wide knot in her tie that's just a little too thick for her frame. Petunia has practically majored in Wizarding Fashion so that she wouldn't out herself as muggle-raised before she even sits for an interview, and Black is clearly saying something with her outfit, but Petunia isn't sure what it is. "Good afternoon, Miss Black," she begins. "I was hoping to make the acquaintance of your cousin, Sirius Black, and it was suggested that you could direct me."
Black's eyes brighten, and her lips curve ever so slightly in bemusement. Perhaps it's obvious what Petunia is trying to accomplish. "I suppose you could say that."
"Perfect," Petunia says, and it is. One more conversation, then maybe another circuit around the room for the sake of appearances, and she can escape. There's only so much time Petunia wants to spend under the same roof as both Severus Snape and Tom Riddle. "If it isn't too much trouble, could you point him out to me?"
"You're speaking with him," Sirius says, with a voice that is firm and uncompromising, but also unruffled, and perhaps a little amused.
"But you—" Petunia stops talking, and gives her brain a moment to work things out. She knows what her father would say if he met a man who'd been a woman, at least if this weren't Lily's reception. "And you are…" Petunia regarded Sirius carefully, then scanned the crowd. If anybody was bothered that Sirius was present, they weren't showing it. "Wizards don't care about that," Petunia finally said, unsure even to herself whether she was stating or asking. Belatedly, Petunia realizes that she was right the first time: Yvaine really didn't know Sirius well enough to comfortably refer to him by his first name.
Sirius laughs. "Not about that, no," he says, and Petunia understands. It was the sort of mistake that would have immediately outed her as muggle-raised, if she weren't already here as Lily's sister. Gender is important here—witches and wizards and all that—but the little differences she's schooled herself on, all the styles in clothing and so on, aren't to conform to an expectation but to send a signal. Or so she would put it, anyway; Sirius probably has a different view on the matter, like a fish describing water.
If that's how things work here, then that's fine with Petunia. It didn't matter that she herself was a woman, not at Dust & Mildewe or anywhere else in Lily's Britain, so what does it matter that Sirius isn't a woman at all?
There's a moment of silence, in which Petunia wracks her mind for everything she's heard about this sort of thing. Not an awful lot of it feels reliable. "Did you, I mean… What was your name before?"
"Sirius."
Petunia thinks that sounds rather like a boy's name, and tells him so. "Did your parents always know?" she asked.
"It's a dog's name, really, if we're being honest here, but I suppose the naming seer might've gotten a twinge of something," Sirius adds thoughtfully. "It would have been a little more frustrating if they'd named me Alice Adzari or Cassiopeia, but Sirius works just fine for me, and nobody had to remember a new name." He slips a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes from his pocket, and tips his hand a little toward Petunia. "Do you smoke?"
Petunia does—of course she does—but never in mixed company. "I didn't know that wizards smoked cigarettes," she says, still looking at the carton in his hand. "I thought that was a muggle fashion."
"If it weren't, then it wouldn't piss off my mother, and then what would the point be?" he replies, grinning madly. "So do you want one?"
Work has been busy, leaving Petunia with just enough time to get home and feed herself and head out again to study, and the Bodley has a strict no-smoking policy, on account of all the books, so it's been an awful long time since she'd really had the time, had the space, for a cigarette. At least a week. So yes, she does want one, bad enough that her fingers twitch at the idea and curl as if there's already a cigarette in her hand.
But…mixed company. Petunia knows as well as anybody how people gossiped, and she'd spent several years trying to build the right reputation for herself, brick by painstaking brick. Her indecision must be wrought up and down her face, because Sirius smiles. "You don't have to pose all the time, you know."
Petunia glances back at the reception. "No, I suppose I don't," she says, and a moment later Sirius is lighting her cigarette by wand-tip and ah, there it is, sweet relief, like oxygen on Mars.
"Why do you want to make your parents angry?"
"Why does anybody?" Sirius says, but Petunia stares him down, eyebrows raised and cigarette level, and he keeps talking. "We haven't gotten along for a while."
"But they don't like muggles," she reasons.
"They hate 'em," Sirius agrees, and then, "Can I try that cigarette off you?"
"Don't you have a carton-full?"
"Sure, but that one's lit." Sirius smiles. "Don't make me beg like a dog, now. I'll give it back."
"I'll spare you from your namesake then," Petunia says, and she hands it over. Sirius is true to his word, and the cigarette is back in Petunia's mouth almost before she can miss it. Almost. And she thinks—maybe she fancies—that she can taste something else on the cigarette this time. Somebody else.
After Petunia takes her next drag, she doesn't even wait for Sirius to ask before she hands the cigarette back to him. When he exhales, Sirius lets the smoke out slowly in a perfect ring, then snaps his fingers above it, so the ring bends into a heart. He grins at her, open-mouthed and toothy, and it's impossible to hate him, or maybe impossible not to love how she hates him right then.
Petunia tries to respond in kind, but all she manages is a smoke blob, not even a ring. It's clear that, between the two of them, Petunia is just a professional smoker, and Sirius… Sirius is an artist.
"Ah, shit, Snivellus is working his way over here," Sirius mutters, breaking Petunia from her thoughts. She follows his gaze, and it's true: Lily's talking with Mary and Alice, but they're slowly drifting in this direction, and Severus is there alongside her, nursing a carbonated lemonade and pretending to be civil. Lily always had the most terrible taste in friends. At least Lily hadn't been required to pick a sibling, or she might've picked Snape for that one too. For the life of her, Petunia can't imagine what Lily sees in him. Snape was an ugly little boy when they met him, and time has aged him like bad meat, turning him tough and rancid.
"Snivellus?" asks Petunia, and Sirius gets his hackles up, leaping to the defensive before she's said anything more. "I like it," she says, and Sirius deflates, confused but pleased. "You must know, if you're friends with James, that Lily knew him since before Hogwarts. That I knew him before Hogwarts," she says, and Sirius develops a smile to match her own.
"What sort of things do you know about him, then?"
"I know why the miserable bleeder never drinks anything stronger than a shandy," Petunia almost says, but that seems a step too far, so instead she says, "Did you know that he'd wash himself at the kitchen sink? They didn't have a proper room for washing up."
"I didn't think he washed at all," Sirius says. "Just look at his hair."
Petunia lets out a smoky breath. "He uses water, at least, but I don't think he's ever used anything but the cheapest soap. I don't know why he's never gotten anything better."
"You really grew up together?"
"Not together, exactly, but… We weren't that far off, I guess. Not far enough. He lived down on this broken-up street called Spinner's End," Petunia explains, careful not to get too close to him even in a reminiscence.
Sirius snorts, and a little bit of smoke curls out of his nostrils. "I always thought he was a little like a spider," he says, and Petunia can see it in the way he moves, twitchy and perpetually alert, ready to eat the first person who looks too much like a cockroach.
"Or a big old bat," Petunia says.
"Ugly git, either way," Sirius replies.
"Stringy scumbag," Petunia offers, while Sirius suggests, "Greasy slime-ball," and so they go, passing insults back and forth like a cigarette, sharpening knives for each other until Petunia can no longer tell where Sirius ends and she begins in their conversation.
When Sirius pulls out another cigarette, Petunia has no objection to sharing this one, too.
It's a couple of cigarettes later, when the conversation has finally wound away from Snape and their respective run-ins with him, that Sirius brings up his motorcycle. "Maybe I'll give you a ride sometime." And then, when that doesn't garner the reaction that he's clearly looking for, Sirius pauses, shifts his eyes to either side like he's trying to find a good idea, and adds, in hushed tones, "It flies, you know." Petunia is a muggle-born witch's muggle sister, at a wizarding party, so it probably isn't rocket science—or pre-history of chronomancy, as it were—but it still bugs her that he has her number so perfectly.
"I don't know, thank you," Petunia says, in her best unimpressed drawl, but she can't keep the light from shining off her face. She knows he can see it, and he knows she knows, and he leaves with the sort of grin that ought to hang in the air while he's gone. The flavor of him on her lips, in her mouth, like sweet Chesterfield smoke, still haunts her like a ghost even after she heads home.
Perhaps there's room for a third type of wizard: Sirius Black. The one, the only.
that's how it is on this bitch of an earth
I.
The only time Petunia is ever properly frightened of magic, she is fourteen years old and reading an issue of The Daily Prophet. What is unusual about the circumstance is not that she is reading a wizarding journal, but the lengths to which she'd gone to acquire this one in particular, which Lily very pointedly hid from her in an enchanted trunk. Petunia is a muggle, which means that even the simplest of Locking Spells is proof enough against her, so Lily can be forgiven for thinking that it was good enough. The sisters have been at odds before, but always on an equal footing. This is the first time that Lily has used magic against her, and the first time Petunia has had to oppose it.
Petunia is not frightened by this. The fear would come later, by the object of concealment and not the act. For now, she is indignant. She reflects. She plans. Petunia's curiosity cannot be assuaged, but it can be concealed, so she feigns disinterest and forgetfulness, turning the problem over in her head every so often. When Petunia finds a magical multitool in a wizarding catalog, she mentions it to Lily, pointing out that it could be rather useful the next time Lily went out looking for magical plants. "There are a lot of plants you can't use even a little bit of magic on, or it'll ruin the potion," Lily says, and Petunia files that away like a bit of gossip from Sharon Jones, but Lily looks interested anyway, and Petunia isn't surprised at all to see Lily pull the multitool out of a gift-wrapped box that Christmas. The very next day, while Lily is out and up to something with that terrible Snape boy, Petunia quietly borrows the multitool and uses it to pick the lock on Lily's trunk.
It opens like a charm.
The headlines on the front page of the Prophet are banal, interesting only in how uninteresting they are, proof that even witches and wizards have their slow news days, and Petunia flips through page after page, almost bored, until she reaches the international section. Then Petunia understands why Lily kept this from her.
Her fingers tighten around the journal, crushing and tearing through the page.
In clinical detail, the article describes the deaths of an entire wizarding family. Petunia had known that there was a war over in the Americas, just like she knows, in an offhand way, that there was some sort of violence going on in Bangladesh or Bengali somewhere, but neither of these events seemed to have any relevance to her own life. Not until this article.
Later, Petunia won't even be able to properly remember which side in the war was responsible. What sticks out to her, like a lance in her heart, isn't even the gruesome manner of their deaths. The scene of the crime is too violent for the Prophet to show, but there's a family photograph from a couple of years ago, smiling out at Petunia without any thought about how their lives would terminate. There's a set of twins, dressed alike in suspenders and bowties and impossible to tell apart except for the fact that just one of the boys is holding a wand.
Petunia can't help but see herself in the squib boy, who lived on the periphery of wonders that he could see and even handle but never conjure for himself. She can't help but think about how terrified he must have been, how powerless he must have felt, to know what horrors could be wrought by magic and to know that he could do nothing to stop it or defend himself. When Petunia sets down the page, she can set aside that story, set aside all her thoughts of war, but that poor American boy was in the midst of it all.
If there were a war like that in Britain, Petunia thinks, it would be very hard not to think about it all the time.
But, there was no war in Britain, so fear doesn't become a constant presence in Petunia's life. When she has nightmares that night, they are the first nightmares of magic that she has ever had, and the last as well. Fear and envy together might have engendered resentment and hatred, but Petunia can deal with envy on its own.
"I should've known that you would figure something out," Lily says later, when she realizes what Petunia did.
"You should have," Petunia agrees.
It's a paradigm shift for both girls. Lily never again underestimates her sister, and Petunia never again resigns herself to a life on the periphery. There is so much that she will never be able to do, enchanting shrubbery to dance and transfiguring toads to stools, but there is so much more in the world than magic sticks and silly words: multitools that glide beneath her touch, invisible horses that feed from her hand, and textbooks that she can study.
Someday, God willing, Petunia will write one of those textbooks.
II.
James Potter, that rapscallion, that misbegotten good-for-nothing, has stolen Lily's heart, and there is no number of reminders about his past misbehavior which will change Lily's mind on the subject. Petunia can't exactly say that she's surprised; it isn't as though she's ever convinced Lily about that terrible Snape boy, either.
And now they're getting married.
There's something in Petunia which is a little bothered by the fact that Lily is getting married so soon. No, not so soon—before herself. That's the thing that's bothersome. Maybe she should have paid more attention to Vernon—but no, that's silly, that's desperation talking and Petunia has no reason to be desperate. Petunia is only a year older than Lily, and she shouldn't take her sister's marriage as any kind of sign of things to come. For Christ's sake, women are hardly spinsters at twenty-two.
Besides, people can afford to take things slowly in Wizarding Britain, can't they? Really, it's Lily who's the odd one, marrying so young.
The thought of Vernon still troubles her. He was a bore, he was simple; he was kind, he was dependable. Good God, he was patient, even when Petunia would cut anecdotes short without an explanation or work on little projects she could never tell him about.
Vernon was a muggle, like her, and he was a muggle unlike her.
Because Petunia is a witch's sister, she could know, she was allowed to know, that magic is real. She could try on dresses at Madam Malkin's and eat ice cream at Fortescue's, because she is Lily's immediate family. But the Statute of Secrecy, Lily explained at one point, was hazier on more distant relationships. If Petunia had told Vernon then it might have been alright now, but some other Minister for Magic might tighten things up a little, somewhen down the line, and poor Vernon might be Obliviated. It had happened before, during Josephina Flint's term in the 19th century.
Petunia couldn't bear for that to happen to him.
III.
The ceremony is a small event, just for the family, and on Lily's side there are, not counting Petunia herself and their father, just two grandparents and a cousin. An empty seat marks a place for their mother, two years dead, and that's the whole extended family, or everyone worth mentioning. James didn't contribute much either; his parents married late in life, and Fleamont's younger brother Charlus doesn't think that marriage vows are even valid when a muggle says them (or maybe it's just Anglicans that he doesn't like), so there aren't many relatives from the Potter to invite.
That doesn't mean that nobody else got to celebrate. On the final balance, it seemed wrong to exclude any of the decent members of the extended Evans-Pearson clan, few though they might be, but it also seemed wrong to go through the entire affair pretending that magic didn't exist, and Petunia and their father are the only muggles in Lily's life who have been clued in. Lily compromised with herself by holding the reception under different terms.
Petunia still has one foot in the muggle world, even if her dalliances with Vernon are rarer these days, and even if she's finding more and more work in Wizarding Britain, copyediting for Dust & Mildewe and performing secretarial work at the Gamp Magical Library of the Bodley. It's all rather minor right now, but she's already caught the eye of Berenice Mildewe. Though Petunia's colleagues are generally magical, her friends are still mostly muggles. Lily, however, has had seven years and more to lose her primary school friends. The result being, the only person Petunia really knows at the reception, besides her own father and sister, is that terrible Snape boy.
But that's alright. Petunia isn't here for herself, and nobody else is here for her, either, so she can circulate through the room mostly unhindered, making all the appropriate small talk so that she makes the right impression on everyone. She's mildly anxious about being here, because that entails being here as Lily's sister, as a muggle, and people can connect the dots even if she doesn't introduce herself as "you know, the unmagical Evans" in every conversation, and a part of her is worried that she might be closing doors to career prospects that haven't even come over the horizon yet. But Petunia isn't here for herself.
Highest on her list of acquaintances to meet: James Potter's friends. None of them, thank God, have ever been invited to an Evans Family Dinner, so she only knows them by reputation, but oh, what a reputation it is. She is dreading these meetings, but that only means she needs to get them out of the way.
Remus Lupin, when she meets him, is wholly as unimpressive as she expected. He's dressed well enough, but Petunia knows that it can't be his own robes that he's wearing: the man is chronically unemployed, thanks to some sort of medical condition that's never quite come out into open conversation—had there been even a hint of it, Petunia would have sunk her teeth into that clue and never let go until she figured out the rest—and couldn't possibly afford those robes himself, but they look too perfectly-tailored to have been rented.
She likes Peter far better, for all that he seems the proverbial runt of James Potter's gang. That's part of his appeal in some ways, because Petunia can always appreciate the unappreciated, but it also helps that he has a steady job. He's a journalist, actually, which is a lot like being a professional gossip, and that's even better. Petunia likes her hobbies too much to monetize them, but that doesn't lessen her respect for the art.
Petunia hits a bump in the road after that when Agrippa Merrythought—Lily's Herbology tutor, hiking friend, and (very briefly, amicably separated) former boyfriend—intercepts her and asks whether she's met Professor Riddle.
She has, yes, but Agrippa is already making introductions before she can respond. "—and Petunia, this is Professor Riddle. He teaches over at Hogwarts, Lily might've mentioned him to you before."
"We've run into each other a few times." Riddle smiles. "Lily did excellent work picking out your robes," he says in the most earnest tones. In point of fact, Petunia had helped pick out Lily's. "If I didn't know better, I would think you were a witch yourself."
There were two types of wizard in the magical world, as far as Petunia was concerned: the Lily Evanses and the Severus Snapes. Lily's history professor is of the second sort. Riddle hides it well, Petunia will give him that, keeping the nastiness behind a veil of manners and so sharply-dressed that Petunia could cut her fingers on his robes. But he's still a Severus Snape.
Petunia isn't going to say anything like that in front of Agrippa, though, so she smiles and falls into the conversation just long enough to be polite, reminding herself that she's here for Lily. "Likewise, my compliments to your old tutors. I can hardly pick up any Cockney in your voice." Petunia can't pick up any, actually—Riddle has an infuriatingly perfect Hogwarts British accent—and for all she knows, Riddle never grew up in the East End, but there are enough stray facts about him in the air to know that, wherever Riddle came from, he doesn't like to think about it.
"You simply can't imagine how good they were," Riddle agrees. "But I'm afraid that you're right about my speech. Some might say that good oratory is like magic itself: even the best teachers can only do so much if the natural talent doesn't already exist."
The man is supposed to be able to talk with snakes, according to Lily, but Petunia thinks he's more like a shark. Predators like him, they can't stop hunting, or they'll drown. It's positively exhausting to interact with Riddle; when she's finally able to escape, Petunia decides that she's had enough of the reception and that it's time to head home. But there's one more person to hit on her list before she can do that.
For all that Sirius Black is her brother-in-law's best friend, most of what Petunia knows about him is a grab-bag of facts. The essential things are that Sirius is a troublemaker like James (terrible) and that Severus hates him (excellent, and the one redeeming thing about James, while she's on the subject). Petunia has only ever met one of his cousins, Bellatrix, who made a small donation from her own library in exchange for the privilege of copying a passage from the Bodley's restricted stacks. Bellatrix probably doesn't remember her supposed-squib escort, but the memory never faded for Petunia, who was in charge of watching Bellatrix's wand while the witch traveled beyond the chained doors of the Singular Volumes Wing. Petunia had never guarded a magic wand before; in her hands, it felt like any other polished stick.
While Petunia passes through pleasantries like a ghost and listens to the room, she hears only the occasional reference to Sirius, who proves to be as elusive as a shadow in a dark room. Eventually, she resorts to outright asking the next person who looks like they're one of James Potter's sort, Yvaine Wiggleswade. "Black's over there," Yvaine says, pointing out at the balcony, and Petunia heads off.
At first, the fact that Yvaine said "Black" makes Petunia think that she gauged wrong, and Yvaine is from Lily's social circle, someone who didn't feel comfortable referring to him as just "Sirius." As Petunia approaches, she updates her assumptions: the "Black" to which Petunia was directed looks so much like Bellatrix—the greyness of her eyes, the austerity of her face—that, for a moment, Petunia actually thinks that it is her. Then the moment passes and a pertinent fact is summoned from the recesses of Petunia's memory, which recalls that Sirius has multiple (two? three? James Potter's tale didn't specify) cousins, and not just one.
Up close, Petunia can notice little details that she couldn't make out before. "Black" is dressed in men's robes, with a square-cut collar and a wide knot in her tie that's just a little too thick for her frame. Petunia has practically majored in Wizarding Fashion so that she wouldn't out herself as muggle-raised before she even sits for an interview, and Black is clearly saying something with her outfit, but Petunia isn't sure what it is. "Good afternoon, Miss Black," she begins. "I was hoping to make the acquaintance of your cousin, Sirius Black, and it was suggested that you could direct me."
Black's eyes brighten, and her lips curve ever so slightly in bemusement. Perhaps it's obvious what Petunia is trying to accomplish. "I suppose you could say that."
"Perfect," Petunia says, and it is. One more conversation, then maybe another circuit around the room for the sake of appearances, and she can escape. There's only so much time Petunia wants to spend under the same roof as both Severus Snape and Tom Riddle. "If it isn't too much trouble, could you point him out to me?"
"You're speaking with him," Sirius says, with a voice that is firm and uncompromising, but also unruffled, and perhaps a little amused.
"But you—" Petunia stops talking, and gives her brain a moment to work things out. She knows what her father would say if he met a man who'd been a woman, at least if this weren't Lily's reception. "And you are…" Petunia regarded Sirius carefully, then scanned the crowd. If anybody was bothered that Sirius was present, they weren't showing it. "Wizards don't care about that," Petunia finally said, unsure even to herself whether she was stating or asking. Belatedly, Petunia realizes that she was right the first time: Yvaine really didn't know Sirius well enough to comfortably refer to him by his first name.
Sirius laughs. "Not about that, no," he says, and Petunia understands. It was the sort of mistake that would have immediately outed her as muggle-raised, if she weren't already here as Lily's sister. Gender is important here—witches and wizards and all that—but the little differences she's schooled herself on, all the styles in clothing and so on, aren't to conform to an expectation but to send a signal. Or so she would put it, anyway; Sirius probably has a different view on the matter, like a fish describing water.
If that's how things work here, then that's fine with Petunia. It didn't matter that she herself was a woman, not at Dust & Mildewe or anywhere else in Lily's Britain, so what does it matter that Sirius isn't a woman at all?
There's a moment of silence, in which Petunia wracks her mind for everything she's heard about this sort of thing. Not an awful lot of it feels reliable. "Did you, I mean… What was your name before?"
"Sirius."
Petunia thinks that sounds rather like a boy's name, and tells him so. "Did your parents always know?" she asked.
"It's a dog's name, really, if we're being honest here, but I suppose the naming seer might've gotten a twinge of something," Sirius adds thoughtfully. "It would have been a little more frustrating if they'd named me Alice Adzari or Cassiopeia, but Sirius works just fine for me, and nobody had to remember a new name." He slips a carton of Chesterfield cigarettes from his pocket, and tips his hand a little toward Petunia. "Do you smoke?"
Petunia does—of course she does—but never in mixed company. "I didn't know that wizards smoked cigarettes," she says, still looking at the carton in his hand. "I thought that was a muggle fashion."
"If it weren't, then it wouldn't piss off my mother, and then what would the point be?" he replies, grinning madly. "So do you want one?"
Work has been busy, leaving Petunia with just enough time to get home and feed herself and head out again to study, and the Bodley has a strict no-smoking policy, on account of all the books, so it's been an awful long time since she'd really had the time, had the space, for a cigarette. At least a week. So yes, she does want one, bad enough that her fingers twitch at the idea and curl as if there's already a cigarette in her hand.
But…mixed company. Petunia knows as well as anybody how people gossiped, and she'd spent several years trying to build the right reputation for herself, brick by painstaking brick. Her indecision must be wrought up and down her face, because Sirius smiles. "You don't have to pose all the time, you know."
Petunia glances back at the reception. "No, I suppose I don't," she says, and a moment later Sirius is lighting her cigarette by wand-tip and ah, there it is, sweet relief, like oxygen on Mars.
"Why do you want to make your parents angry?"
"Why does anybody?" Sirius says, but Petunia stares him down, eyebrows raised and cigarette level, and he keeps talking. "We haven't gotten along for a while."
"But they don't like muggles," she reasons.
"They hate 'em," Sirius agrees, and then, "Can I try that cigarette off you?"
"Don't you have a carton-full?"
"Sure, but that one's lit." Sirius smiles. "Don't make me beg like a dog, now. I'll give it back."
"I'll spare you from your namesake then," Petunia says, and she hands it over. Sirius is true to his word, and the cigarette is back in Petunia's mouth almost before she can miss it. Almost. And she thinks—maybe she fancies—that she can taste something else on the cigarette this time. Somebody else.
After Petunia takes her next drag, she doesn't even wait for Sirius to ask before she hands the cigarette back to him. When he exhales, Sirius lets the smoke out slowly in a perfect ring, then snaps his fingers above it, so the ring bends into a heart. He grins at her, open-mouthed and toothy, and it's impossible to hate him, or maybe impossible not to love how she hates him right then.
Petunia tries to respond in kind, but all she manages is a smoke blob, not even a ring. It's clear that, between the two of them, Petunia is just a professional smoker, and Sirius… Sirius is an artist.
"Ah, shit, Snivellus is working his way over here," Sirius mutters, breaking Petunia from her thoughts. She follows his gaze, and it's true: Lily's talking with Mary and Alice, but they're slowly drifting in this direction, and Severus is there alongside her, nursing a carbonated lemonade and pretending to be civil. Lily always had the most terrible taste in friends. At least Lily hadn't been required to pick a sibling, or she might've picked Snape for that one too. For the life of her, Petunia can't imagine what Lily sees in him. Snape was an ugly little boy when they met him, and time has aged him like bad meat, turning him tough and rancid.
"Snivellus?" asks Petunia, and Sirius gets his hackles up, leaping to the defensive before she's said anything more. "I like it," she says, and Sirius deflates, confused but pleased. "You must know, if you're friends with James, that Lily knew him since before Hogwarts. That I knew him before Hogwarts," she says, and Sirius develops a smile to match her own.
"What sort of things do you know about him, then?"
"I know why the miserable bleeder never drinks anything stronger than a shandy," Petunia almost says, but that seems a step too far, so instead she says, "Did you know that he'd wash himself at the kitchen sink? They didn't have a proper room for washing up."
"I didn't think he washed at all," Sirius says. "Just look at his hair."
Petunia lets out a smoky breath. "He uses water, at least, but I don't think he's ever used anything but the cheapest soap. I don't know why he's never gotten anything better."
"You really grew up together?"
"Not together, exactly, but… We weren't that far off, I guess. Not far enough. He lived down on this broken-up street called Spinner's End," Petunia explains, careful not to get too close to him even in a reminiscence.
Sirius snorts, and a little bit of smoke curls out of his nostrils. "I always thought he was a little like a spider," he says, and Petunia can see it in the way he moves, twitchy and perpetually alert, ready to eat the first person who looks too much like a cockroach.
"Or a big old bat," Petunia says.
"Ugly git, either way," Sirius replies.
"Stringy scumbag," Petunia offers, while Sirius suggests, "Greasy slime-ball," and so they go, passing insults back and forth like a cigarette, sharpening knives for each other until Petunia can no longer tell where Sirius ends and she begins in their conversation.
When Sirius pulls out another cigarette, Petunia has no objection to sharing this one, too.
It's a couple of cigarettes later, when the conversation has finally wound away from Snape and their respective run-ins with him, that Sirius brings up his motorcycle. "Maybe I'll give you a ride sometime." And then, when that doesn't garner the reaction that he's clearly looking for, Sirius pauses, shifts his eyes to either side like he's trying to find a good idea, and adds, in hushed tones, "It flies, you know." Petunia is a muggle-born witch's muggle sister, at a wizarding party, so it probably isn't rocket science—or pre-history of chronomancy, as it were—but it still bugs her that he has her number so perfectly.
"I don't know, thank you," Petunia says, in her best unimpressed drawl, but she can't keep the light from shining off her face. She knows he can see it, and he knows she knows, and he leaves with the sort of grin that ought to hang in the air while he's gone. The flavor of him on her lips, in her mouth, like sweet Chesterfield smoke, still haunts her like a ghost even after she heads home.
Perhaps there's room for a third type of wizard: Sirius Black. The one, the only.
their true black tergiversation (Harry Potter AU)
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
This story was written for the T. M. Riddle Me This fic exchange.
"Dear Tom," Ginny begins. "There was another attack today and I don't know where I was." She pauses for a moment, uncertain, but forces herself to press forward. "But I do know when else I didn't know where I was, and what happened then. And… well, you're a very odd diary," Ginny writes. "So you might understand why it is that I'm beginning to wonder whether you might have anything to do with this."
Ginny Weasley is just an eleven-year-old girl. She wasn't supposed to figure out what was going on, and if she was going to figure anything out then it wasn't supposed to happen so bloody quickly.
Because Tom has had precious little to do for the past fifty-odd years, besides think to himself and brood and contemplate and occasionally have a dialogue with his greater self or—in later years—with Abraxas Malfoy, it doesn't take him long to admit that he might have been wrong about some things. In his defense—because Tom must play defending counsel as well as judge and prosecutor—it had been a long time since he had been as young as Ginny Weasley, even from the vantage point of an actual sixteen-year-old, for whom a preteen child is as insufferable as both of them are to an actual adult. He was a bright child before ever reaching Hogwarts, and in hindsight this was the sort of deception which wouldn't have gotten past a six-year-old Tom Riddle. And then there is the matter of the juvenile environment: it seems plausible that those prankster brothers of hers might have trained Ginny to think a little more carefully about possible deceptions.
"I'm sorry," Tom writes back. "It was supposed to be a bit of a surprise. This may take a bit of explanation, so make sure that you're sitting comfortably (and if you wouldn't mind giving me a little more ink, I would appreciate it)."
"It begins with that boy you like," Tom says, and Ginny, feeling her face go hot, is grateful that Tom can't see a thing. "You're right that he's never going to notice you, the way that things are, but I thought that I could fix that."
"By scaring everyone in the school?"
"That's just the first step. Every plan is a bad plan when you only consider the first step. Look, have you seen my name anywhere else in the castle, or maybe heard anybody talk about me?"
"No."
"I imagine that it's quite late right now—it's so easy to lose track of the time when I'm left alone," Tom writes, and Ginny winces at that. She ought to bring him into classes and write to him there, too, because he's right, he doesn't have anybody or anything else except for her. "But when you have the time, go down to the trophy room, which should be on the sixth floor if they haven't moved it since my day. When you get there, I want you to look for a trophy. It will have my name on it: T. M. Riddle. And it will have been awarded to me for special services to the school."
"What did you do?"
"Why, I saved Hogwarts from the terror of the Chamber of Secrets. Or that was what everyone was afraid of, but it was really a monstrous spider, and quite unrelated. That is a long story in itself. But my own experience gave me an idea: If Ginny Weasley saved the school, then there's no way that Harry Potter could fail to notice her!"
"But you were attacking people, Tom!"
"I only petrified a cat. Really, she's been harmed no more than you have by any of your brothers' pranks. Less, even, some of those pranks have hurt, haven't they, but the caretaker's cat will hardly notice that any time has passed. In fact, I daresay that the caretaker might not let his cat wander so freely from now on, which is probably a good thing. There are all sorts of things which might happily eat a cat."
"You petrified Colin, too."
"Oh, him," Tom wrote, and Ginny gets the sense that he might have shrugged his shoulders, had he had any. "Haven't you told me that he's been bothering Harry since the beginning of the school year? I thought that Harry might appreciate the space."
"You still petrified him, Tom!"
"Nobody's been hurt for real," Tom insisted. "Colin will have missed some classes, and that's all. He's even gotten an amazing story to tell everyone once he's unpetrified. If you had asked him ahead of time, I'm sure that he would think it was a great idea."
"But we didn't ask him."
Tom doesn't reply immediately. "You're completely right," he finally writes. "I think that being alone for so long has truly given me some bad habits. From here on out, I resolve not to do anything with anybody without first talking with them about it."
Ginny sees a flaw in this plan. "How am I supposed to save anyone, though?" She's only eleven years old, after all.
"I'm still working on that," Tom admits.
"You don't know? But Tom, I thought that was the whole point."
"It is impossible to plan for some things, and anyway I consider myself to be quite adept at improvisation. Now that the surprise is ruined and we are partners in this affair, however, I would like to involve you in the discussion."
"I would have liked that from the start!"
"Right now, I have two ideas. The first is that we could let this play out as it did in my day, and find some dangerous beast to corral or expel, though I am reluctant to do this. I would never forgive myself if you somehow came to harm."
"Then what's your other idea?"
"First, a hypothetical: If your brothers played an awful prank on you, but you couldn't convince your mother that they were responsible, do you think that it would be okay to make up a second prank, pretend that they were responsible for that one, and get them in trouble with your mother for it?"
"I suppose," Ginny writes at last.
"Then who have you been having trouble with?"
"No one, really. At least, no one who's that bad."
"Then let's think bigger. What about Harry Potter? If anybody has been making trouble for him, then he's sure to appreciate the help."
"Well, there's Draco," Ginny writes. "Ron's always complaining about him."
"Draco… It's his family who's been giving your father trouble at work, if I remember correctly. Lucius Malfoy has always had an excuse for whatever bad business he's been caught up in, right?"
"He has."
"Then it's agreed: we'll get Draco Malfoy in trouble, which will get his father in trouble. I'd like to see Lucius try to weasel his way out of this, and I'm sure that the rest of your family will be delighted as well."
Tom needs to borrow Ginny's body again, but Draco Malfoy's guilt is bewilderingly, undeniably proven. Even young Draco believes that he was responsible for the petrifications. There is no spell which would allow even a particularly clever Second Year student to petrify anybody, but it isn't out of the question that a magical device might do the trick. If Lucius Malfoy is anything like his father then he'll have all manner of interesting toys, and after he rifles through the boy's head a little, Tom learns that the Malfoys are hiding some of their collection in a cellar beneath the drawing room.
Though he is loathe to admit any kind of insufficiency, Tom simply doesn't know how to lay down the kind of enchantment which would make this possible—petrification is complicated, and enchantments are even more difficult to manage. It's considerably easier to simply break an object and leave magical traces of the sort which will suggest that it once held an enchantment. All that's left is to ambush Draco Malfoy, Stupefy him in the back, and leave him with two special gifts: a broken crystal bauble with a vestige of Dark magic, and a host of false memories.
Not everyone believes, not at first, but that changes when the Ministry proves the existence of the cellar, still full of unaccountable and extremely illegal Dark artifacts.
It's probably impossible to slip away with any unsupervised joyrides in Ginny Weasley's body, now that she knows what Tom can do. Maybe he could try when she was asleep, but if he were caught in the halls and she woke up, or if she just felt more tired than usual the next day, then Ginny would probably catch on. Tom thinks that he's salvaged the situation, but he's going to have to tread more carefully from here on out.
But that's fine.
Ginny is bright enough, which means that she's useful. What's more, after the whole Chamber of Secrets debacle she's even more devoted to him than before. Tom is still her little secret, but Tom is thinking about broadening his social circle in due time. He could probably get Ginny to introduce him to Harry Potter, if no one else, and then perhaps he'll begin to make a study club like he did the first time around, right under Dumbledore's nose.
Tom will need a body for himself, but he isn't in any rush. He is feeding less vigorously than before on Ginny Weasley's life force, but over a long enough span of time his powers will still grow immensely. Already, he remains conscious of her doings even when he is not overtly possessing her.
And yet, no matter how powerful he grows, Tom will—unless he discovers some other mechanism—require a death in order to obtain his new life. Ginny would surely balk at that if he proposed it now, but he has years to win her over, and Tom thinks that he can wait. There are plenty of downsides to being a memory in a diary, but it's easier to remain discreet this way.
Draco Malfoy returns to Hogwarts at the beginning of the next school year, and with the private tutor that the Malfoys were able to pay to teach him, he hasn't even fallen behind on his classwork.
"It isn't fair," Ginny writes. "I mean, I know that he didn't really do it…" Here, she pauses and glances around to verify again that the room is empty. "Everyone thinks that he did it, though, and if he had done it, then he shouldn't be allowed back at Hogwarts."
"It sounds like things are no better than they were in my day."
"What do you mean?"
"Powerful people just get more power, and people with lots of money have more power than anyone. I doubt it would surprise you to learn that Abraxas Malfoy acted just the same when he was at Hogwarts as this Draco Malfoy of yours acts now. They're all spoiled children, really."
"That's exactly what they're like," Ginny agrees.
"Then maybe we should do something about it."
Lord Voldemort is still out there, evidently weak but certainly unslain. Tom isn't sure how many other Horcruxes were made, but his own existence means that his original self can't truly have been destroyed. Under other circumstances, the sensible thing to do would be to get this diary in the hands of somebody who could help him to find, and restore, Lord Voldemort. Based on what Ginny told him, Lucius Malfoy has done nothing but reingratiate himself into British society, and the other Death Eaters have likewise either turned their backs on Lord Voldemort or been imprisoned at Azkaban. Still, it shouldn't be impossible to find one former servant who could be swayed back by evidence of their master's continued survival.
The more that Tom considers what he ought to do, however, the less he wants to do it. Lord Voldemort—the original, the defeated—left Tom alone for decades, and Tom feels like his abandonment entitles him to just a little bit of self-consideration. Obviously, if Tom doesn't treat himself right, nobody else is going to, either.
Tom has faith in himself, though, and he has faith in his other self as well. Lord Voldemort has been banished but not destroyed, and if Tom can bide his time in darkness then so can Lord Voldemort. The Dark Lord will return one day, and if Tom has been working actively to his own benefit and not to Lord Voldemort's, then there will be nothing short of hell to pay. But so long as Tom lives, Lord Voldemort cannot die (their mutual dependence is frustratingly asymmetrical in this respect, since Lord Voldemort either has or at least can make more Horcruxes).
There is no obvious solution to this problem, so Tom has decided to take things one step at a time, trusting in his ability to improvise as necessary and making opportunities where he can. When Lord Voldemort returns, he will benefit from having servants and money and influence, so Tom will deny him these things. Besides, pure-blood supremacy is turning into a bit of a dead unicorn anyway, now that its fiercest zealots are dead or in prison and the rest of the Death Eaters are fiercely pretending that they had nothing to do with the whole thing.
Tom is still working out the details.
their true black tergiversation
"Dear Tom," Ginny begins. "There was another attack today and I don't know where I was." She pauses for a moment, uncertain, but forces herself to press forward. "But I do know when else I didn't know where I was, and what happened then. And… well, you're a very odd diary," Ginny writes. "So you might understand why it is that I'm beginning to wonder whether you might have anything to do with this."
❦
Ginny Weasley is just an eleven-year-old girl. She wasn't supposed to figure out what was going on, and if she was going to figure anything out then it wasn't supposed to happen so bloody quickly.
Because Tom has had precious little to do for the past fifty-odd years, besides think to himself and brood and contemplate and occasionally have a dialogue with his greater self or—in later years—with Abraxas Malfoy, it doesn't take him long to admit that he might have been wrong about some things. In his defense—because Tom must play defending counsel as well as judge and prosecutor—it had been a long time since he had been as young as Ginny Weasley, even from the vantage point of an actual sixteen-year-old, for whom a preteen child is as insufferable as both of them are to an actual adult. He was a bright child before ever reaching Hogwarts, and in hindsight this was the sort of deception which wouldn't have gotten past a six-year-old Tom Riddle. And then there is the matter of the juvenile environment: it seems plausible that those prankster brothers of hers might have trained Ginny to think a little more carefully about possible deceptions.
❦
"I'm sorry," Tom writes back. "It was supposed to be a bit of a surprise. This may take a bit of explanation, so make sure that you're sitting comfortably (and if you wouldn't mind giving me a little more ink, I would appreciate it)."
"It begins with that boy you like," Tom says, and Ginny, feeling her face go hot, is grateful that Tom can't see a thing. "You're right that he's never going to notice you, the way that things are, but I thought that I could fix that."
"By scaring everyone in the school?"
"That's just the first step. Every plan is a bad plan when you only consider the first step. Look, have you seen my name anywhere else in the castle, or maybe heard anybody talk about me?"
"No."
"I imagine that it's quite late right now—it's so easy to lose track of the time when I'm left alone," Tom writes, and Ginny winces at that. She ought to bring him into classes and write to him there, too, because he's right, he doesn't have anybody or anything else except for her. "But when you have the time, go down to the trophy room, which should be on the sixth floor if they haven't moved it since my day. When you get there, I want you to look for a trophy. It will have my name on it: T. M. Riddle. And it will have been awarded to me for special services to the school."
"What did you do?"
"Why, I saved Hogwarts from the terror of the Chamber of Secrets. Or that was what everyone was afraid of, but it was really a monstrous spider, and quite unrelated. That is a long story in itself. But my own experience gave me an idea: If Ginny Weasley saved the school, then there's no way that Harry Potter could fail to notice her!"
"But you were attacking people, Tom!"
"I only petrified a cat. Really, she's been harmed no more than you have by any of your brothers' pranks. Less, even, some of those pranks have hurt, haven't they, but the caretaker's cat will hardly notice that any time has passed. In fact, I daresay that the caretaker might not let his cat wander so freely from now on, which is probably a good thing. There are all sorts of things which might happily eat a cat."
"You petrified Colin, too."
"Oh, him," Tom wrote, and Ginny gets the sense that he might have shrugged his shoulders, had he had any. "Haven't you told me that he's been bothering Harry since the beginning of the school year? I thought that Harry might appreciate the space."
"You still petrified him, Tom!"
"Nobody's been hurt for real," Tom insisted. "Colin will have missed some classes, and that's all. He's even gotten an amazing story to tell everyone once he's unpetrified. If you had asked him ahead of time, I'm sure that he would think it was a great idea."
"But we didn't ask him."
Tom doesn't reply immediately. "You're completely right," he finally writes. "I think that being alone for so long has truly given me some bad habits. From here on out, I resolve not to do anything with anybody without first talking with them about it."
Ginny sees a flaw in this plan. "How am I supposed to save anyone, though?" She's only eleven years old, after all.
"I'm still working on that," Tom admits.
"You don't know? But Tom, I thought that was the whole point."
"It is impossible to plan for some things, and anyway I consider myself to be quite adept at improvisation. Now that the surprise is ruined and we are partners in this affair, however, I would like to involve you in the discussion."
"I would have liked that from the start!"
"Right now, I have two ideas. The first is that we could let this play out as it did in my day, and find some dangerous beast to corral or expel, though I am reluctant to do this. I would never forgive myself if you somehow came to harm."
"Then what's your other idea?"
"First, a hypothetical: If your brothers played an awful prank on you, but you couldn't convince your mother that they were responsible, do you think that it would be okay to make up a second prank, pretend that they were responsible for that one, and get them in trouble with your mother for it?"
"I suppose," Ginny writes at last.
"Then who have you been having trouble with?"
"No one, really. At least, no one who's that bad."
"Then let's think bigger. What about Harry Potter? If anybody has been making trouble for him, then he's sure to appreciate the help."
"Well, there's Draco," Ginny writes. "Ron's always complaining about him."
"Draco… It's his family who's been giving your father trouble at work, if I remember correctly. Lucius Malfoy has always had an excuse for whatever bad business he's been caught up in, right?"
"He has."
"Then it's agreed: we'll get Draco Malfoy in trouble, which will get his father in trouble. I'd like to see Lucius try to weasel his way out of this, and I'm sure that the rest of your family will be delighted as well."
❦
Tom needs to borrow Ginny's body again, but Draco Malfoy's guilt is bewilderingly, undeniably proven. Even young Draco believes that he was responsible for the petrifications. There is no spell which would allow even a particularly clever Second Year student to petrify anybody, but it isn't out of the question that a magical device might do the trick. If Lucius Malfoy is anything like his father then he'll have all manner of interesting toys, and after he rifles through the boy's head a little, Tom learns that the Malfoys are hiding some of their collection in a cellar beneath the drawing room.
Though he is loathe to admit any kind of insufficiency, Tom simply doesn't know how to lay down the kind of enchantment which would make this possible—petrification is complicated, and enchantments are even more difficult to manage. It's considerably easier to simply break an object and leave magical traces of the sort which will suggest that it once held an enchantment. All that's left is to ambush Draco Malfoy, Stupefy him in the back, and leave him with two special gifts: a broken crystal bauble with a vestige of Dark magic, and a host of false memories.
Not everyone believes, not at first, but that changes when the Ministry proves the existence of the cellar, still full of unaccountable and extremely illegal Dark artifacts.
❦
It's probably impossible to slip away with any unsupervised joyrides in Ginny Weasley's body, now that she knows what Tom can do. Maybe he could try when she was asleep, but if he were caught in the halls and she woke up, or if she just felt more tired than usual the next day, then Ginny would probably catch on. Tom thinks that he's salvaged the situation, but he's going to have to tread more carefully from here on out.
But that's fine.
Ginny is bright enough, which means that she's useful. What's more, after the whole Chamber of Secrets debacle she's even more devoted to him than before. Tom is still her little secret, but Tom is thinking about broadening his social circle in due time. He could probably get Ginny to introduce him to Harry Potter, if no one else, and then perhaps he'll begin to make a study club like he did the first time around, right under Dumbledore's nose.
Tom will need a body for himself, but he isn't in any rush. He is feeding less vigorously than before on Ginny Weasley's life force, but over a long enough span of time his powers will still grow immensely. Already, he remains conscious of her doings even when he is not overtly possessing her.
And yet, no matter how powerful he grows, Tom will—unless he discovers some other mechanism—require a death in order to obtain his new life. Ginny would surely balk at that if he proposed it now, but he has years to win her over, and Tom thinks that he can wait. There are plenty of downsides to being a memory in a diary, but it's easier to remain discreet this way.
❦
Draco Malfoy returns to Hogwarts at the beginning of the next school year, and with the private tutor that the Malfoys were able to pay to teach him, he hasn't even fallen behind on his classwork.
"It isn't fair," Ginny writes. "I mean, I know that he didn't really do it…" Here, she pauses and glances around to verify again that the room is empty. "Everyone thinks that he did it, though, and if he had done it, then he shouldn't be allowed back at Hogwarts."
"It sounds like things are no better than they were in my day."
"What do you mean?"
"Powerful people just get more power, and people with lots of money have more power than anyone. I doubt it would surprise you to learn that Abraxas Malfoy acted just the same when he was at Hogwarts as this Draco Malfoy of yours acts now. They're all spoiled children, really."
"That's exactly what they're like," Ginny agrees.
"Then maybe we should do something about it."
❦
Lord Voldemort is still out there, evidently weak but certainly unslain. Tom isn't sure how many other Horcruxes were made, but his own existence means that his original self can't truly have been destroyed. Under other circumstances, the sensible thing to do would be to get this diary in the hands of somebody who could help him to find, and restore, Lord Voldemort. Based on what Ginny told him, Lucius Malfoy has done nothing but reingratiate himself into British society, and the other Death Eaters have likewise either turned their backs on Lord Voldemort or been imprisoned at Azkaban. Still, it shouldn't be impossible to find one former servant who could be swayed back by evidence of their master's continued survival.
The more that Tom considers what he ought to do, however, the less he wants to do it. Lord Voldemort—the original, the defeated—left Tom alone for decades, and Tom feels like his abandonment entitles him to just a little bit of self-consideration. Obviously, if Tom doesn't treat himself right, nobody else is going to, either.
Tom has faith in himself, though, and he has faith in his other self as well. Lord Voldemort has been banished but not destroyed, and if Tom can bide his time in darkness then so can Lord Voldemort. The Dark Lord will return one day, and if Tom has been working actively to his own benefit and not to Lord Voldemort's, then there will be nothing short of hell to pay. But so long as Tom lives, Lord Voldemort cannot die (their mutual dependence is frustratingly asymmetrical in this respect, since Lord Voldemort either has or at least can make more Horcruxes).
There is no obvious solution to this problem, so Tom has decided to take things one step at a time, trusting in his ability to improvise as necessary and making opportunities where he can. When Lord Voldemort returns, he will benefit from having servants and money and influence, so Tom will deny him these things. Besides, pure-blood supremacy is turning into a bit of a dead unicorn anyway, now that its fiercest zealots are dead or in prison and the rest of the Death Eaters are fiercely pretending that they had nothing to do with the whole thing.
Tom is still working out the details.