The canonical term for this is "plurality".
(This is not a point of criticism; just thought you might find this piece of trivia interesting or useful.)
There is Nothing to Fear [Harry Potter AU; Gryffindor!Voldemort]
- Thread starter Callmesalticidae
- Start date
(This is not a point of criticism; just thought you might find this piece of trivia interesting or useful.)
According to His Own Nature, pt. 4 of 5 [1944]
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
It's Friday somewhere.
I dislike most of Rowling's version of magical America, so I've ditched most of it in favor of something else. Shoutout to @RedX for helping with that process.
There were precious few tournaments held during those summer months when Tom was in Filius' charge, and to be honest none of them were particularly high-profile, but it was already clear to him that Tom might not stay with him for long after graduating from Hogwarts and Filius wanted to see the boy when he got his first taste of action on the international circuits.
With the state of the global war as it was, there could be no hope of traveling to the Continent, which was a great disappointment to Filius. It would be physically easy to travel there, of course, but local politics made it a different matter to do so in practice. At any rate, Tom seemed well-suited to the style of dueling that was in vogue among the Eastern Europeans and, given its popularity among Grindelwald's supporters, that style was becoming more unpopular than ever before among everyone else. American dueling was a fair substitute, perhaps, and the New World didn't care one whit for the fashions of Western Europe, but Filius still would have liked to see Tom square off against a spirited Magyar before his apprenticeship had come to an end.
Things were as they were, however, so Filius found himself preparing for a trip to the New World that summer. "At this time of year there will still be some exhibitions, mostly to serve our very purpose, which is to show you off and let you begin the process of building a name for yourself," Filius explained when he first proposed the idea to Tom. "As a duelist of no small renown, my status as your master is enough to guarantee you a place in at least a couple of exhibitions, and if you perform as well as you have in our sessions together, then, Merlin willing, when you are on your own you will be able to use that to negotiate entry into some tournaments that would otherwise be closed to a neonate duelist."
Most wizards could apparate from London to Edinburgh in one pop. From there it was a couple of shorter jaunts from Edinburgh to Thurso, in the north, and then to the Faroe Islands. The only tricky jump was to Iceland, but Tom had spent a few days practicing longer jumps across Britain, and Filius was confident that he wouldn't splinch himself across the Atlantic. From there, they got to Greenland by way of Scoresbysund, and after that it was clear sailing (or rather, clear apparating) through communities all down the east coast and up the west. Then they jumped across the strait to Baffin Island, and they were nearly in La Belle Terre, or what the muggles called Quebec.
All told, the journey took them just short of two weeks, having spaced the jumps out by a day each and taken a few extra to rest in Iceland. A ship from London to New York City wouldn't have taken even half that time, and the journey wouldn't have been half as cold, but all that was worthwhile for the practice that Tom had gotten. Too many wizards could travel from Ireland to England, then splinch themselves twelve ways trying to apparate across the Channel.
The New World was a place of many magical nations, far more were present in Europe. In some ways there were large swathes of the continent which were without any unitary law at all, an anarchistic melange of peoples who would neither rule nor be ruled by others. In such places one could not even be assured of finding wizards who believed that what they did was magic: some claimed a psychic talent, others miracle-working. If there was one good thing about this then it was the diversity of approaches that they brought to magic. All in all, though, Filius was glad that he and Tom would be remaining in the Atlantican Commonweal, a little strip of land along the East Coast that held all one could find of a Wizarding British tradition in the New World.
Everything seemed to be new and delightful to Tom, however, who took to the place with such a passion that Filus wished he could have been there when the boy had first seen Diagon Alley. Oh, he tried to act reserved about it all, of course, and that seemed to be something of a habit whenever he was in unfamiliar territory, even figuratively, but Filius knew the boy's body language by now and Tom's eyes were focused. There was the enigmatic "ghost in a box" at Junk Deluxe and Augury & Alchemy's panprosoponic mask, which could adopt anyone's features before it was put on. "Take care that you don't overuse it, though, because the damned thing doesn't always come off," the proprietor told them before he tapped the side of his own face and drew attention to a place where the coloration of his skin changed sharply along a line. "I should know." They lost all interest in the mask after that and moved on to Jealous Monkey Candies, where there were exploding chocolate taffies, cinnamon berries, and dynamicremes that changed flavor as they were chewed. In one bookstore, Tom's hand lingered over The Peacetime Applications of the Dark Arts, but ultimately drew away.
Three days after they'd settled in at the Quiet Thicket Hotel, an unkempt wizard with a stubby beard and yellow gloves arrived to escort them to the exhibition, which had been willing to admit them but not to trust them with its location. He took them deep into the North End and down a sad and crumbling alleyway, talking animatedly to them all the time and occasionally making reference to some kind of animal that had been common around these parts. "The age and the reputation of these streets are as good as any enchantment for keeping out the No-Maj sort, though of course that doesn't mean we skimp on the necessities." And then, as he led them through a creaking, sunken flat that smelt of mildew and rotted worms, and deep into its cellar: "These tunnels weren't always safe for habitation, no. The whole place was infested, donchaknow, whole packs of the things running around beneath your feet."
"Packs of what?" Tom asked. The man hadn't actually specified, now that Filius thought of it, just gone on and on about them, ever since they'd crossed over into Battery Street.
"Ghouls, kid. And mind your heads now," the man said as he lifted a hatch in the floor and ushered them through. "You couldn't lay a corpse down and turn your back for five minutes before they'd come over and steal it out from under you, but the aurors, well, they went and did a job of it and cleared out all these tunnels. That would've been before you were born, maybe twenty years ago or so."
"Using aurors seems extreme," Tom said as they followed him into the cellar. "Aren't ghouls just beasts?"
"British ghouls are rather tamer than what I suspect Boston had to deal with," Filius said. "A dog is one thing, a feral one quite another, and, like many things on this continent, the New World's ghouls have gone very feral indeed."
Mr. Barlow gave Filius a quick look, as if wondering whether Filius had meant anything untoward about his countrymen with that comment, but any further discussion was nipped in the bud when the three of them turned a corner and the exhibition came into view.. The passageway widened into an underground plaza, teeming with people and illuminated by balloons that glowed in ever-changing colors. Above the crowd, in a gigantic, cursive script that flowed from the torches all around them, was the proclamation that they were Welcome to the 28th Annual Atlantic Apprentices' Tournament. The area smelled strongly, though not unpleasantly, of stale beer and damp mushrooms, and Filius was reminded of his grandfather's summer hut.
Unexpectedly, Filius felt rather like he was at a Hogwarts event. He couldn't see them all, but he knew from previous reports that there wouldn't be more than seven hundred people in attendance, and slightly less than half of those would be underage. The tournament was for duelists no younger than fourteen, and no older than eighteen, and organized into age-based brackets, so there were quite a few older teenagers, but there were also a number of master duelists accompanied by much younger children. These couldn't compete, but they could still observe and glean what lessons they could, and a few probably had older fellow-apprentices to (very quietly) cheer on.
"Watch yourself in these matches. You may be an accomplished duelist for Hogwarts, but you are not the only skilled youth in the world," Filius warned Tom. "Dueling is a formal part of the curriculum in many of the schools on this continent, and there are places where the rest of one's academics may come second to the art of dueling."
Tom took his counsel with a nod, and Filius wandered away in search of familiar faces. He eventually found Samphias Cobblefrost, an Atlantican native as tall as Filius was short, with lemon drop eyes and a black Stetson hat with the words Boss of the Plains lettered on one side in bright silver. Samphias had no interest in taking on an apprentice and was here to scope out the future competition (and maybe just fiddle around), but she was more than happy to give Filius the word on this year's competitors: "And then Malachi Rankin, from the GLC, well, he might have only won a bronze in the Great Lakes tourney this year, but it was a near-miss and I wouldn't be surprised to see him perform better here."
"How's he fight?"
Samphias popped another crab dumpling into her mouth. "Light on his feet," she said, speaking out the side of her mouth as she fished through her bag with spindly fingers. "Looks timid, but doesn't ever act intimidated. Maybe his face is just stuck like that. Mm, you want a dumpling? Two dragots for a baker's dozen, just down the way over there, by the hag with the lazy eye," Samphias said after Filius tried the one she had offered and found that it agreed with him.
The first matches started pretty soon after that, and while they wouldn't get around to Tom's bracket for an hour it was still good form to be in attendance in the stands. Eventually, however, his name came up and Tom walked down onto the dueling strip, and as the day progressed and he advanced through the matchups, the break between each of his duels became increasingly shorter.
"Bright kid you've got there, and vicious, too," commented Samphias. She'd come to sit next to Filius after the first series of matches had finished, bearing fried anole on a stick—or rather two fried anoles, one for herself and the second for Filius, which Filius had accepted gratefully. British food could be so dull, and the diversity of American cuisine was a breath of fresh air that reminded him of his family's mixed recipes.
"Tom doesn't hold back," said Filius, though that was somewhat of an understatement. His apprentice's last duel just now, against a gangly wizard named Miguel Legrande, had been finished in under a minute. Legrande, the poor boy, had gotten cocky after his last three victories and cast his shield charm more sloppily than was wise, and Tom, never one to hold back, promptly cracked that charm wide open and then snapped Legrande's kneecaps.
Beside the dueling strip, the referee called out the next set of names. "For the final match of the sixteens bracket: Tom Marvolo Riddle, of Filius Flitwick and Hogwarts, and Rosetta Isabella Le Roi, of Guillermo Rasmussen and Long River." Each held out their focus for the referee to examine, Tom with his wand and Rosetta with her gloves—or gauntlets, properly speaking, since they were made of hardened leather—and then they took position at opposite ends of the dueling strip. The environment put him at a disadvantage, with precious little in the way of terrain and clutter to turn against Le Roi, but that just meant that he would have to stretch a little. "The duel will proceed under the Buchanan Rules," the referee stated, meaning that there would be no points taken and the duel would end only with the incapacitation or explicit submission of one of the duelists.
It wasn't immediately obvious, but the longer the Filius looked at Le Roi, the more he thought he could pick up a kind of ashy grayness in her complexion. Was that a hint of vampire that he saw in her, or was it merely the heat of the moment? Her eyes were not quite sunken, their color perhaps rusty but not red, and if her jaws had just snapped, well, it was anyone's guess whether that could be ascribed to mind games or some predatory twitch inherited from five generations back.
"The duelists may prepare themselves!" called the referee.
Le Roi punched her left palm, then switched hands and drove a fist into her right hand while Tom, on the opposite end of the strip, angled his chest away from her and lifted his wand-arm nearly parallel to the ground. That would require him to reach around in order to use his left hand, but it was a classic stance and might entice her into drawing the wrong conclusion.
"The duelists may commence!"
There was maybe half a moment of stillness, and then an onslaught. "Semaforo! Semaforo, Palmatefy!" she cast, switching from one hand to the other with every spell, and Filius leaned forward in his seat. It wasn't every day that one saw a truly ambidextrous caster, but she didn't appear to favor either hand.
Tom's defensive reply was elementary, and he delivered it as flatly as if he were remarking on the weather. It was nothing serious, though, and Le Roi continued to set the tempo of the duel. What she cast were relatively simple spells, but the shortness of their incantations let her deliver them in a flurry so she could keep up the pressure. Her earlier spells had worked in a similar way, sending multiple bolts with every casting.
"Looks like your boy's on the defensive," Samphias observed. "Course, Rosetta's nasty enough to be his match."
"Tom's only being careful. So long as he gets the room to breathe and evaluate, he should be fine," replied Filius. "Her style lends itself well to an all-out assault, but can she defend as well as he?"
While he cast another Shield Charm to bolster the first, Tom pressed one foot against the heel of the other and slipped out of his shoes. His off-hand twitched. He advanced, and the shoes slid forward with him. Another twitch, and they disappeared.
"Semaforo!" Another three streaks of light: green, yellow, and red. With as much of an opportunity as Filius had to examine that spell, he wasn't sure that those lights were supposed to do anything but look flashy. It would explain the ease of casting, and amid the casting of other, legitimately dangerous spells, they would have forced even Filius to fight a little more cautiously than he would have liked.
Tom, though, was preparing for something. He had been pushed back a little, or let himself be pushed, so Filius was no longer sure where Tom's shoes were. Had they moved with him, gone forward in his stead, or remained where they were? Not for the first time, Tom's off-hand briefly disappeared inside his robes, but when it reappeared this time it was followed by a streak of red.
A human of Tom's size could easily lose most of a pint of blood without notable ill effect. Make that, say, five hundred cubic centimeters, and one would have five hundred thousand cubic millimeters. Spread that out, as though along a flat surface, and, well...
With a few hand movements, what Le Roi was presented with was a solid sheet, half a millimeter thick and one meter squared, of Tom's own blood. And what was that in her eyes—deep-rooted thirst, or a stab of fear?
It didn't matter. Tom jabbed his wand and went on the offensive. The sheet floating between them crashed against her and her shields like a red-stained tidal wave upon the rocks. "Leviosa, depulso!" Tom cast, his off-hand mirroring the movements of his wand. Something—an invisible shoe—hit her in the stomach. "Accio!" Another shoe hit her in the nape, and Tom lunged forward in a relentless assault to match Le Roi's, unleashing spells with his right hand and, where necessary, guiding or refining them with his left.
"Definitely a match," whispered Samphias. "I'd like to see them have it out again in twenty years when they're matured."
With an impression of nonchalance, Tom deflected one spell and set up a shield for the next, then made a few gestures with his off-hand. The blood on Le Roi's gloves immediately coagulated, then hardened like a tough shell. While she scraped her gloves against each other to remove the obstruction, one of Tom's shoes hit her in the back of the knee like a slung stone and Le Roi fell straight back. The back of her head smacked the ground and then she was still.
Tom stood equally motionless for a moment and then, when the referee didn't call the match, slowly advanced forward. Le Roi wasn't moving much, from what Filius could see, but her eyes were open. Tom stood near her feet, his posture relaxed and triumphant, and slowly leveled his wand on her. Filius noticed Le Roi's feet twitch besides Tom's, and something seemed to stick in his throat. This was nothing but an exhibition, a mere duel between peers, but for the first time in his life Filius experienced the dread of seeing someone in the act of making a terrible mistake while he was unable to do anything about it. Even if the rules allowed outside interference, a number of charms had been laid down to prevent the duelists from seeing or hearing the spectators.
Tom smiled and leveled his wand on her. "Do you yield?" Le Roi said nothing, and Tom persisted. "You aren't getting out of this. My wand is ready to cast and your hands are out of position. Just tell me—" Le Roi swung a foot up into Tom's groin, swept his legs out from under him, and then, in one fluid motion, kicked back and flipped herself into a standing position before Tom could get to his knees. "Cutis estlapis," she incanted. Her gauntlets flared green, and Filius wondered briefly at the point of her spell before Le Roi revealed its purpose by punching Tom square in the face and Filius heard a sickening crack. Tom crumpled and fell back again, and Le Roi dropped to her knees over him in order to keep him in range.
"Do you yield?" Swing. Hit. "Do you yield?" Swing. Hit. "Do. You. Yield?" Even as Le Roi demanded his reply, she continued her assault, alternating fists with the steady precision of two pistons as her gloves began to come up streaked with a fresher shade of red than they'd had before. Despite himself, Filius began to feel more than a little uncomfortable. Physical contact between the duelists' bodies was a faux pas even in Hungary, and resorting to fisticuffs, clad in magical foci or not, would have surely disqualified her in most matches that Filius had participated in.
Tom said something in response to Le Roi but Filius couldn't make out what it was, only that his words, whatever they were, seemed slurred—and, judging by that the duel was still going, that he had not given in. As the duel wore on, the seconds seemed to drag. Though it took only two minutes or so from the time that Tom hit the floor to when he lost consciousness and the duel was called, to Filius it seemed as though years had passed. He left his seat immediately, nearly launching himself out of it, and reached the strip before the referee was finished with her diagnostic spells.
"He's mostly fine," she said, while an automatic quill wrote furiously on a length of parchment floating at her left shoulder. Finally, she stopped casting and the parchment drifted into Filius' hands. It was a list of potions and instructions for their use. "Take that to the medi-wizard down in Shaft 4-B, and you'll get set up with what you need. Just go down that tunnel," she said, pointing, "then take the second branch to your left. Then go talk with the director before you leave."
"Excuse me?"
"Your 'prentice made it to the finals. Second place. That's four hundred dragots that he's earned," she said, and Filius crunched the exchange rate before he could pause and scold himself for it. Without factoring in the money changer's fees, that would come out to sixty-one galleons and change. Not much, by Filius' standards, but a respectable sum for a young duelist's first exhibition. "We good?" she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she cast a reviving charm and walked away.
At Filius' feet, Tom groaned. A hand rose half-heartedly in the air, but Tom didn't seem able to lift it higher than his chest before it went back down. Tom groaned again, but it was more coherent this time and almost sounded like real words.
"Did I never teach you how to lose, Tom? That dogged obstinacy of yours is going to get you killed someday."
"If it had really been dangerous, the referee would have halted it."
"There are accidents," Filius said, and Tom shrugged, at least to the extent that he could do so while lying on the ground. "As you wish. There is a kind of animal in the New World that they call an opossum. When threatened, it will act as though it has died. The behavior is well known in these parts, and they call it 'playing possum.' This is what Le Roi did to you," Filius explained. "Nonetheless, she did not win by that stratagem alone. Do you understand the contribution that you made to her victory?"
"I was careless," Tom said as he pulled himself into a sitting position, and Filius nodded.
"You could have thrown a stunner from across the room, but instead you approached and left yourself vulnerable. You were gloating, Tom. In action, if not in word. If there is one lesson that you take from this, then learn that you must not be too cavalier in handling your opponents. The wounded tiger must be regarded as being twice as dangerous."
"Yes, sir." There was a hint of something strange in Tom's voice, but Filius couldn't tell whether it was frustration or reflective of some bodily pain that was yet unaddressed. Tom focused his eyes on Filius, and smiled. "I bet they'll remember, though. Everyone who was here. I didn't yield."
"Or they'll remember that Rosetta Le Roi pounded your face into the ground," Filius snapped.
"Maybe. They don't matter, anyway," Tom continued after a moment's pause. "Who cares what they remember? My pride doesn't live or die on them. You'll remember that I didn't break. I'll remember it. No matter what," he said, more slowly, more thoughtfully, "I know what I can bear."
"You're going to get yourself killed with that attitude," commented Samphias, who must have followed after Filius. "But I can't say it won't be fun to watch you go out. Oh, that'll be a sight to see for sure." She grinned and, a second later, so did Tom.
I dislike most of Rowling's version of magical America, so I've ditched most of it in favor of something else. Shoutout to @RedX for helping with that process.
According to His Own Nature, pt. 4 of 5
The Summer after Riddle's Sixth Year
The Summer after Riddle's Sixth Year
There were precious few tournaments held during those summer months when Tom was in Filius' charge, and to be honest none of them were particularly high-profile, but it was already clear to him that Tom might not stay with him for long after graduating from Hogwarts and Filius wanted to see the boy when he got his first taste of action on the international circuits.
With the state of the global war as it was, there could be no hope of traveling to the Continent, which was a great disappointment to Filius. It would be physically easy to travel there, of course, but local politics made it a different matter to do so in practice. At any rate, Tom seemed well-suited to the style of dueling that was in vogue among the Eastern Europeans and, given its popularity among Grindelwald's supporters, that style was becoming more unpopular than ever before among everyone else. American dueling was a fair substitute, perhaps, and the New World didn't care one whit for the fashions of Western Europe, but Filius still would have liked to see Tom square off against a spirited Magyar before his apprenticeship had come to an end.
Things were as they were, however, so Filius found himself preparing for a trip to the New World that summer. "At this time of year there will still be some exhibitions, mostly to serve our very purpose, which is to show you off and let you begin the process of building a name for yourself," Filius explained when he first proposed the idea to Tom. "As a duelist of no small renown, my status as your master is enough to guarantee you a place in at least a couple of exhibitions, and if you perform as well as you have in our sessions together, then, Merlin willing, when you are on your own you will be able to use that to negotiate entry into some tournaments that would otherwise be closed to a neonate duelist."
Most wizards could apparate from London to Edinburgh in one pop. From there it was a couple of shorter jaunts from Edinburgh to Thurso, in the north, and then to the Faroe Islands. The only tricky jump was to Iceland, but Tom had spent a few days practicing longer jumps across Britain, and Filius was confident that he wouldn't splinch himself across the Atlantic. From there, they got to Greenland by way of Scoresbysund, and after that it was clear sailing (or rather, clear apparating) through communities all down the east coast and up the west. Then they jumped across the strait to Baffin Island, and they were nearly in La Belle Terre, or what the muggles called Quebec.
All told, the journey took them just short of two weeks, having spaced the jumps out by a day each and taken a few extra to rest in Iceland. A ship from London to New York City wouldn't have taken even half that time, and the journey wouldn't have been half as cold, but all that was worthwhile for the practice that Tom had gotten. Too many wizards could travel from Ireland to England, then splinch themselves twelve ways trying to apparate across the Channel.
The New World was a place of many magical nations, far more were present in Europe. In some ways there were large swathes of the continent which were without any unitary law at all, an anarchistic melange of peoples who would neither rule nor be ruled by others. In such places one could not even be assured of finding wizards who believed that what they did was magic: some claimed a psychic talent, others miracle-working. If there was one good thing about this then it was the diversity of approaches that they brought to magic. All in all, though, Filius was glad that he and Tom would be remaining in the Atlantican Commonweal, a little strip of land along the East Coast that held all one could find of a Wizarding British tradition in the New World.
Everything seemed to be new and delightful to Tom, however, who took to the place with such a passion that Filus wished he could have been there when the boy had first seen Diagon Alley. Oh, he tried to act reserved about it all, of course, and that seemed to be something of a habit whenever he was in unfamiliar territory, even figuratively, but Filius knew the boy's body language by now and Tom's eyes were focused. There was the enigmatic "ghost in a box" at Junk Deluxe and Augury & Alchemy's panprosoponic mask, which could adopt anyone's features before it was put on. "Take care that you don't overuse it, though, because the damned thing doesn't always come off," the proprietor told them before he tapped the side of his own face and drew attention to a place where the coloration of his skin changed sharply along a line. "I should know." They lost all interest in the mask after that and moved on to Jealous Monkey Candies, where there were exploding chocolate taffies, cinnamon berries, and dynamicremes that changed flavor as they were chewed. In one bookstore, Tom's hand lingered over The Peacetime Applications of the Dark Arts, but ultimately drew away.
Three days after they'd settled in at the Quiet Thicket Hotel, an unkempt wizard with a stubby beard and yellow gloves arrived to escort them to the exhibition, which had been willing to admit them but not to trust them with its location. He took them deep into the North End and down a sad and crumbling alleyway, talking animatedly to them all the time and occasionally making reference to some kind of animal that had been common around these parts. "The age and the reputation of these streets are as good as any enchantment for keeping out the No-Maj sort, though of course that doesn't mean we skimp on the necessities." And then, as he led them through a creaking, sunken flat that smelt of mildew and rotted worms, and deep into its cellar: "These tunnels weren't always safe for habitation, no. The whole place was infested, donchaknow, whole packs of the things running around beneath your feet."
"Packs of what?" Tom asked. The man hadn't actually specified, now that Filius thought of it, just gone on and on about them, ever since they'd crossed over into Battery Street.
"Ghouls, kid. And mind your heads now," the man said as he lifted a hatch in the floor and ushered them through. "You couldn't lay a corpse down and turn your back for five minutes before they'd come over and steal it out from under you, but the aurors, well, they went and did a job of it and cleared out all these tunnels. That would've been before you were born, maybe twenty years ago or so."
"Using aurors seems extreme," Tom said as they followed him into the cellar. "Aren't ghouls just beasts?"
"British ghouls are rather tamer than what I suspect Boston had to deal with," Filius said. "A dog is one thing, a feral one quite another, and, like many things on this continent, the New World's ghouls have gone very feral indeed."
Mr. Barlow gave Filius a quick look, as if wondering whether Filius had meant anything untoward about his countrymen with that comment, but any further discussion was nipped in the bud when the three of them turned a corner and the exhibition came into view.. The passageway widened into an underground plaza, teeming with people and illuminated by balloons that glowed in ever-changing colors. Above the crowd, in a gigantic, cursive script that flowed from the torches all around them, was the proclamation that they were Welcome to the 28th Annual Atlantic Apprentices' Tournament. The area smelled strongly, though not unpleasantly, of stale beer and damp mushrooms, and Filius was reminded of his grandfather's summer hut.
Unexpectedly, Filius felt rather like he was at a Hogwarts event. He couldn't see them all, but he knew from previous reports that there wouldn't be more than seven hundred people in attendance, and slightly less than half of those would be underage. The tournament was for duelists no younger than fourteen, and no older than eighteen, and organized into age-based brackets, so there were quite a few older teenagers, but there were also a number of master duelists accompanied by much younger children. These couldn't compete, but they could still observe and glean what lessons they could, and a few probably had older fellow-apprentices to (very quietly) cheer on.
"Watch yourself in these matches. You may be an accomplished duelist for Hogwarts, but you are not the only skilled youth in the world," Filius warned Tom. "Dueling is a formal part of the curriculum in many of the schools on this continent, and there are places where the rest of one's academics may come second to the art of dueling."
Tom took his counsel with a nod, and Filius wandered away in search of familiar faces. He eventually found Samphias Cobblefrost, an Atlantican native as tall as Filius was short, with lemon drop eyes and a black Stetson hat with the words Boss of the Plains lettered on one side in bright silver. Samphias had no interest in taking on an apprentice and was here to scope out the future competition (and maybe just fiddle around), but she was more than happy to give Filius the word on this year's competitors: "And then Malachi Rankin, from the GLC, well, he might have only won a bronze in the Great Lakes tourney this year, but it was a near-miss and I wouldn't be surprised to see him perform better here."
"How's he fight?"
Samphias popped another crab dumpling into her mouth. "Light on his feet," she said, speaking out the side of her mouth as she fished through her bag with spindly fingers. "Looks timid, but doesn't ever act intimidated. Maybe his face is just stuck like that. Mm, you want a dumpling? Two dragots for a baker's dozen, just down the way over there, by the hag with the lazy eye," Samphias said after Filius tried the one she had offered and found that it agreed with him.
The first matches started pretty soon after that, and while they wouldn't get around to Tom's bracket for an hour it was still good form to be in attendance in the stands. Eventually, however, his name came up and Tom walked down onto the dueling strip, and as the day progressed and he advanced through the matchups, the break between each of his duels became increasingly shorter.
"Bright kid you've got there, and vicious, too," commented Samphias. She'd come to sit next to Filius after the first series of matches had finished, bearing fried anole on a stick—or rather two fried anoles, one for herself and the second for Filius, which Filius had accepted gratefully. British food could be so dull, and the diversity of American cuisine was a breath of fresh air that reminded him of his family's mixed recipes.
"Tom doesn't hold back," said Filius, though that was somewhat of an understatement. His apprentice's last duel just now, against a gangly wizard named Miguel Legrande, had been finished in under a minute. Legrande, the poor boy, had gotten cocky after his last three victories and cast his shield charm more sloppily than was wise, and Tom, never one to hold back, promptly cracked that charm wide open and then snapped Legrande's kneecaps.
Beside the dueling strip, the referee called out the next set of names. "For the final match of the sixteens bracket: Tom Marvolo Riddle, of Filius Flitwick and Hogwarts, and Rosetta Isabella Le Roi, of Guillermo Rasmussen and Long River." Each held out their focus for the referee to examine, Tom with his wand and Rosetta with her gloves—or gauntlets, properly speaking, since they were made of hardened leather—and then they took position at opposite ends of the dueling strip. The environment put him at a disadvantage, with precious little in the way of terrain and clutter to turn against Le Roi, but that just meant that he would have to stretch a little. "The duel will proceed under the Buchanan Rules," the referee stated, meaning that there would be no points taken and the duel would end only with the incapacitation or explicit submission of one of the duelists.
It wasn't immediately obvious, but the longer the Filius looked at Le Roi, the more he thought he could pick up a kind of ashy grayness in her complexion. Was that a hint of vampire that he saw in her, or was it merely the heat of the moment? Her eyes were not quite sunken, their color perhaps rusty but not red, and if her jaws had just snapped, well, it was anyone's guess whether that could be ascribed to mind games or some predatory twitch inherited from five generations back.
"The duelists may prepare themselves!" called the referee.
Le Roi punched her left palm, then switched hands and drove a fist into her right hand while Tom, on the opposite end of the strip, angled his chest away from her and lifted his wand-arm nearly parallel to the ground. That would require him to reach around in order to use his left hand, but it was a classic stance and might entice her into drawing the wrong conclusion.
"The duelists may commence!"
There was maybe half a moment of stillness, and then an onslaught. "Semaforo! Semaforo, Palmatefy!" she cast, switching from one hand to the other with every spell, and Filius leaned forward in his seat. It wasn't every day that one saw a truly ambidextrous caster, but she didn't appear to favor either hand.
Tom's defensive reply was elementary, and he delivered it as flatly as if he were remarking on the weather. It was nothing serious, though, and Le Roi continued to set the tempo of the duel. What she cast were relatively simple spells, but the shortness of their incantations let her deliver them in a flurry so she could keep up the pressure. Her earlier spells had worked in a similar way, sending multiple bolts with every casting.
"Looks like your boy's on the defensive," Samphias observed. "Course, Rosetta's nasty enough to be his match."
"Tom's only being careful. So long as he gets the room to breathe and evaluate, he should be fine," replied Filius. "Her style lends itself well to an all-out assault, but can she defend as well as he?"
While he cast another Shield Charm to bolster the first, Tom pressed one foot against the heel of the other and slipped out of his shoes. His off-hand twitched. He advanced, and the shoes slid forward with him. Another twitch, and they disappeared.
"Semaforo!" Another three streaks of light: green, yellow, and red. With as much of an opportunity as Filius had to examine that spell, he wasn't sure that those lights were supposed to do anything but look flashy. It would explain the ease of casting, and amid the casting of other, legitimately dangerous spells, they would have forced even Filius to fight a little more cautiously than he would have liked.
Tom, though, was preparing for something. He had been pushed back a little, or let himself be pushed, so Filius was no longer sure where Tom's shoes were. Had they moved with him, gone forward in his stead, or remained where they were? Not for the first time, Tom's off-hand briefly disappeared inside his robes, but when it reappeared this time it was followed by a streak of red.
A human of Tom's size could easily lose most of a pint of blood without notable ill effect. Make that, say, five hundred cubic centimeters, and one would have five hundred thousand cubic millimeters. Spread that out, as though along a flat surface, and, well...
With a few hand movements, what Le Roi was presented with was a solid sheet, half a millimeter thick and one meter squared, of Tom's own blood. And what was that in her eyes—deep-rooted thirst, or a stab of fear?
It didn't matter. Tom jabbed his wand and went on the offensive. The sheet floating between them crashed against her and her shields like a red-stained tidal wave upon the rocks. "Leviosa, depulso!" Tom cast, his off-hand mirroring the movements of his wand. Something—an invisible shoe—hit her in the stomach. "Accio!" Another shoe hit her in the nape, and Tom lunged forward in a relentless assault to match Le Roi's, unleashing spells with his right hand and, where necessary, guiding or refining them with his left.
"Definitely a match," whispered Samphias. "I'd like to see them have it out again in twenty years when they're matured."
With an impression of nonchalance, Tom deflected one spell and set up a shield for the next, then made a few gestures with his off-hand. The blood on Le Roi's gloves immediately coagulated, then hardened like a tough shell. While she scraped her gloves against each other to remove the obstruction, one of Tom's shoes hit her in the back of the knee like a slung stone and Le Roi fell straight back. The back of her head smacked the ground and then she was still.
Tom stood equally motionless for a moment and then, when the referee didn't call the match, slowly advanced forward. Le Roi wasn't moving much, from what Filius could see, but her eyes were open. Tom stood near her feet, his posture relaxed and triumphant, and slowly leveled his wand on her. Filius noticed Le Roi's feet twitch besides Tom's, and something seemed to stick in his throat. This was nothing but an exhibition, a mere duel between peers, but for the first time in his life Filius experienced the dread of seeing someone in the act of making a terrible mistake while he was unable to do anything about it. Even if the rules allowed outside interference, a number of charms had been laid down to prevent the duelists from seeing or hearing the spectators.
Tom smiled and leveled his wand on her. "Do you yield?" Le Roi said nothing, and Tom persisted. "You aren't getting out of this. My wand is ready to cast and your hands are out of position. Just tell me—" Le Roi swung a foot up into Tom's groin, swept his legs out from under him, and then, in one fluid motion, kicked back and flipped herself into a standing position before Tom could get to his knees. "Cutis estlapis," she incanted. Her gauntlets flared green, and Filius wondered briefly at the point of her spell before Le Roi revealed its purpose by punching Tom square in the face and Filius heard a sickening crack. Tom crumpled and fell back again, and Le Roi dropped to her knees over him in order to keep him in range.
"Do you yield?" Swing. Hit. "Do you yield?" Swing. Hit. "Do. You. Yield?" Even as Le Roi demanded his reply, she continued her assault, alternating fists with the steady precision of two pistons as her gloves began to come up streaked with a fresher shade of red than they'd had before. Despite himself, Filius began to feel more than a little uncomfortable. Physical contact between the duelists' bodies was a faux pas even in Hungary, and resorting to fisticuffs, clad in magical foci or not, would have surely disqualified her in most matches that Filius had participated in.
Tom said something in response to Le Roi but Filius couldn't make out what it was, only that his words, whatever they were, seemed slurred—and, judging by that the duel was still going, that he had not given in. As the duel wore on, the seconds seemed to drag. Though it took only two minutes or so from the time that Tom hit the floor to when he lost consciousness and the duel was called, to Filius it seemed as though years had passed. He left his seat immediately, nearly launching himself out of it, and reached the strip before the referee was finished with her diagnostic spells.
"He's mostly fine," she said, while an automatic quill wrote furiously on a length of parchment floating at her left shoulder. Finally, she stopped casting and the parchment drifted into Filius' hands. It was a list of potions and instructions for their use. "Take that to the medi-wizard down in Shaft 4-B, and you'll get set up with what you need. Just go down that tunnel," she said, pointing, "then take the second branch to your left. Then go talk with the director before you leave."
"Excuse me?"
"Your 'prentice made it to the finals. Second place. That's four hundred dragots that he's earned," she said, and Filius crunched the exchange rate before he could pause and scold himself for it. Without factoring in the money changer's fees, that would come out to sixty-one galleons and change. Not much, by Filius' standards, but a respectable sum for a young duelist's first exhibition. "We good?" she asked. Without waiting for an answer, she cast a reviving charm and walked away.
At Filius' feet, Tom groaned. A hand rose half-heartedly in the air, but Tom didn't seem able to lift it higher than his chest before it went back down. Tom groaned again, but it was more coherent this time and almost sounded like real words.
"Did I never teach you how to lose, Tom? That dogged obstinacy of yours is going to get you killed someday."
"If it had really been dangerous, the referee would have halted it."
"There are accidents," Filius said, and Tom shrugged, at least to the extent that he could do so while lying on the ground. "As you wish. There is a kind of animal in the New World that they call an opossum. When threatened, it will act as though it has died. The behavior is well known in these parts, and they call it 'playing possum.' This is what Le Roi did to you," Filius explained. "Nonetheless, she did not win by that stratagem alone. Do you understand the contribution that you made to her victory?"
"I was careless," Tom said as he pulled himself into a sitting position, and Filius nodded.
"You could have thrown a stunner from across the room, but instead you approached and left yourself vulnerable. You were gloating, Tom. In action, if not in word. If there is one lesson that you take from this, then learn that you must not be too cavalier in handling your opponents. The wounded tiger must be regarded as being twice as dangerous."
"Yes, sir." There was a hint of something strange in Tom's voice, but Filius couldn't tell whether it was frustration or reflective of some bodily pain that was yet unaddressed. Tom focused his eyes on Filius, and smiled. "I bet they'll remember, though. Everyone who was here. I didn't yield."
"Or they'll remember that Rosetta Le Roi pounded your face into the ground," Filius snapped.
"Maybe. They don't matter, anyway," Tom continued after a moment's pause. "Who cares what they remember? My pride doesn't live or die on them. You'll remember that I didn't break. I'll remember it. No matter what," he said, more slowly, more thoughtfully, "I know what I can bear."
"You're going to get yourself killed with that attitude," commented Samphias, who must have followed after Filius. "But I can't say it won't be fun to watch you go out. Oh, that'll be a sight to see for sure." She grinned and, a second later, so did Tom.
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- Location
- Canada
Among other things, I chuckled that the incantation for the Toe-Biting Jinx is apparently "nom".
- Location
- USA
So no unified magical USA in this universe then? Just the original 13 colonies as one thing and the rest of the country split up?
Finagle007
[Verified Great Old One]
- Pronouns
- He/Him/His
In Tom's place, I'd have followed that blood-sheet with a Lumos Solem.
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
There is no unified magical USA, correct. Even within the boundaries of the original Thirteen Colonies, the Atlantican Commonweal doesn't get much further than a hundred to a hundred and fifty miles out from the coast.
There are some other magical countries of comparable size, though: La Belle Terre and La Florida are French and Spanish counterparts to the Atlantican Commonweal. The GLC, or Great Lakes Confederacy, where Malachi Rankin comes from, is another country.
EDIT: Oh, and New Scotland.
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- Location
- USA
So how does that reflect on magical and mortal relations? Do all of these magical governments have representatives to the president? Are citizens of the magical countries also citizens of the US? Do they all view themselves as Americans?
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
Citizens of these magical countries are generally U.S. citizens for the technical reason that they were born on U.S. soil, but most of them regard the local No-Maj government in much the same way that a U.S. citizen who lives near the U.S.-Canadian border might regard Canada, as a foreign country which is very easy to step into. Others, generally No-Maj-borns and half-bloods, care quite a lot about their American citizenship, but they still know that they aren't allowed to use their powers openly.
Generally speaking, the President of the United States does not know about magic, though the Atlantican Commonweal and a few other countries have an international task force, of sorts, whose job is to keep people near the POTUS who can monitor touchy situations and supply cover stories as needed. In Britain, the Minister for Magic has a close relationship with the Prime Minister because the Ministry of Magic is, as its name implies, a de facto independent arm of the United Kingdom. Some countries have similar arrangements, while others vastly differ (e.g. the Chinese Emperors were traditionally kept abreast of matters in the magical community to a degree that far outstripped what the Prime Minister knows, but the Chinese are, as of 1990s, still debating what to do about these strange muggle revolutionaries who deny the existence of Heaven even while they apparently hold its blessing).
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- Location
- USA
So does that mean that in the continental US wizards are more aware of the goings on in the mortal world than those in England? If those of mixed descent care about being Americans as much as typical patriots, then they would likely be just as pissed about things like the attack on Pearl.
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
To clarify, I didn't mean that all muggleborns and half-bloods are patriots, but that (nearly) all patriots are muggleborns and half-bloods.
That said, there is a greater awareness of the No-Maj world in America and there were definitely witches and wizards involved in WWII (what magical folk call the "global wizarding war" or "Grindelwald's War," because the WWI was mostly a muggle affair with some surreptitious assistance here and there on both sides), though the ICW required them to maintain plausible deniability.
- Location
- USA
Thanks for the clarification. Does this mean that magical america is also closer to the muggle world tech wise than britain?
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
Yes and no.
If you mean, "Is an American mage more likely to have a television than a British witch or wizard?" then the answer is "yes," though magical television shows inevitably carry a feeling of UHF-quality "local programming," simply because the population isn't there to support anything like a magical HBO. Some of the special effects would amaze muggles, of course, because any magic is miraculous for us, but to magical Americans the quality almost never rises beyond MST3K, which may be quirky and worth watching for other reasons but would certainly never be described as "visually stunning." Most magical television shows are news (and commentary on the news!), sports, talk shows, sketch comedy, sitcoms, teleplays, and variety entertainment. Many magical families own a television set capable of receiving these channels, but just as many don't.
If you mean, "Is Magical America more technologically advanced than Wizarding Britain?" then the answer is "not really." In terms of what it can achieve, the magical community can generally be considered more technologically advanced than muggles: for all intents and purposes, muggle diseases like cancer and the flu do not exist, and a British wizard's life expectancy in the 1990s is roughly 130 years; it is possible to travel from one end of Britain to the other more or less instantaneously; and dishwashers cost exceedingly more money, time, and effort than a quick Scouring Charm. Magic is a kind of technology, albeit not one that runs on electricity, and in many if not most ways its capabilities outstrip the muggle world's. For every crazy advance that Arthur Weasley's American counterparts have made by slapping runes on a jet engine just to see what happens, however, there are three spells that they're missing out on because the community is so disconnected: The further you go into the Interior, the more likely it is that you learned magic from the family grimoire or something than from the Atlantican equivalent of Miranda Goshawk's Standard Book of Spells.
(WWII is probably the point when the muggle world began to outpace the magical community, at least in destructive capacity: even a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress is hardly better than a wizard with a broomstick and knowledge of the fiendfyre curse, but they don't have anything like nuclear weapons)
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
Especially since US wizards are even more xenophobic than the British. At least the British are allowed to marry or befriend muggles.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
That's not canon for this fic.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
When did he say that?
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
It was implied when he said he was ignoring most of Rowling's America worldbuilding, and has a massive number of countries in North America
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
You could take it as an implication towards that, sure. But until it's explicit, that could easily still be one of the very many things wrong with the magical world in the potterverse, and I'll see it as that.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
Okay, explain how MacUSA can have the laws they did in canon despite not existong in this story.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
By having the Salem witch trials right in their back yard, so soon after the Statute of Secrecy went into effect. The laws against muggle intermingling would have come from cultural push OTL, and just because there's more than the one nation, doesn't mean that the people across the nations won't have pushed for harsher restrictions than the SoS.
There you go. Explained.
There you go. Explained.
notanautomaton
I've got 99 quests, I've finished one
The Salem Witch Trials were exceedingly minor, and were basically historical trivia until The Crucible was released. That's a solid explanation for Massachussets to have extremely strict anti-muggle laws, but not really any colony outside of New England.
Also, that's not an explanation, given that MacUSA doesn't exist in this story.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
It is an explanation, because the colonies didn't become a country for another 80 years after that. MacUSA doesn't need to have anything to do with the explanation.
- Location
- USA
Um, the author just said that half blood and muggleborn wizards consider themselves Americans, meaning it is in fact legal to marry muggles.
RichardWhereat
Feanor did nothing wrong.
- Location
- Australia
No it doesn't. Neither of Harrys parents were muggles, and he was still a Half Blood.
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
"What do American mages think of, and how do they treat, No-Majes?" is a question with many answers that run the gamut from full separation to almost complete integration (I say "almost" because they still have to observe the Statute of Secrecy and therefore are hiding some things from their neighbors).
There was probably* a President Emily Rappaport in the Atlantican Commonweal, which was likely home to a number of republican (i.e. anti-monarchist) witches and wizards (the Ministry of Magic was once an official, albeit secret, arm of the United Kingdom, hence the name). If so, the Commonweal is (at the time of According to His Nature) probably engaged in assimilationist policies like placing No-Maj-Borns in magical familes and obliviating their birth families, a practice that will finally come to an end in the 1960s. This practice is not universal to American mages, though as I said in an earlier post the POTUS isn't kept in the loop by anybody.
*It isn't relevant to the plot, so I might change this behind the scenes.
There was probably* a President Emily Rappaport in the Atlantican Commonweal, which was likely home to a number of republican (i.e. anti-monarchist) witches and wizards (the Ministry of Magic was once an official, albeit secret, arm of the United Kingdom, hence the name). If so, the Commonweal is (at the time of According to His Nature) probably engaged in assimilationist policies like placing No-Maj-Borns in magical familes and obliviating their birth families, a practice that will finally come to an end in the 1960s. This practice is not universal to American mages, though as I said in an earlier post the POTUS isn't kept in the loop by anybody.
*It isn't relevant to the plot, so I might change this behind the scenes.
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According to His Own Nature, pt. 5 of 5 [1945]
Callmesalticidae
probably not a spider
- Location
- Burlington, Vermont
- Pronouns
- Any
According to His Own Nature, pt. 5 of 5
The Summer after Riddle's Seventh Year
The Summer after Riddle's Seventh Year
The summer that followed Tom's graduation from Hogwarts was marked by both sorrow and exultant joy on Filius' part. Tom had performed well academically and as a duelist, and had more than fulfilled the expectations which Filius had first held for him years ago, but he intended to travel abroad and it was not clear when the two of them might meet again. It was even possible, given his plans, that Tom might fall into trouble that he would be unable to extricate himself from.
"Germany first, then Poland-Lithuania, then down to the Balkans," Tom said as he explained his plans in detail. He had remained with Filius for another summer, to continue his apprenticeship a little longer, but it had come time for him to depart at last. "Now that the war is over and even the muggles are just mopping up, it seems like a good time for traveling. Europe will not be in such disarray again for decades, if ever."
The purpose behind his itinerary was clearer than crystal. "You are searching for the Deathstick," Filius said. Tom had told him last year of a rumor that the wandmaker Mykew Gregorovitch had once claimed ownership of the Deathstick but whereas Filius had forgotten the conversation till now, it appeared that Tom had not.
Indeed, he had done more than just remember the tale. "I am quite convinced that Gregorovitch did have the Deathstick at one point in time," Tom said. "I spent most of my time between Halloween and Christmas last year poring over everything that I could find on Gregorovitch. It cost me a fair amount, between purchasing whatever books I couldn't find at Hogwarts, owling Gregorovitch's clientele, and so forth. I don't know whether there was a duel that I couldn't find out about, or he was the victim of theft, but he had the wand at one point."
"You're sure of that?"
Tom nodded. "Sure enough that I'm willing to spend the foreseeable future pursuing this lead, at least. Regardless of how many hands it passed through in the meantime, the sort of wizard who would be interested in wielding the Deathstick would likely have participated in Grindelwald's War, on one side or the other. I could be wrong about that, and it might have gone as far afield as Vietnam or Peru and never returned to Europe, but if I start thinking like that then I won't look anywhere at all."
It was sound thinking, and if one was going to pursue the Deathstick at all then Tom's plan was definitely reasonable. There was one glaring problem, or at least point of worry, which Filius saw, however. "Much of your planned route will be taking you behind the Iron Curtain," he said. "The Russians may resent your presence and consider you as an agitator. You may not be allowed entry at all."
"Let them resent me," Tom replied. "I do not fear muggle Communists, nor the Committee for Magical Security."
Filius had come to expect that kind confidence from Tom, but he did not appreciate the forcible reminder that the boy was, after everything, a Gryffindor. "Very well. I expect that you will be searching for more than the Deathstick when you head to the Balkans," he said. That region was once home to an empire of dark wizards, centuries ago, and the mountains were littered with ancient sites and the remains of libraries which would be of interest to a scholarly duelist such as Tom had proven to be. "Where shall you go after that?"
The question seemed to stump Tom, at least for a moment. "Perhaps further east, deep into the Russian interior. There is always the Winter Order, if, that is, one believes in such fairy tales. Or I might spend a season in Hispanapule, then turn south, make entreaties to the elders of Uagadou, and learn the finer points of wandless casting from those who know nothing else."
"You will have to be reserved among such people, and keep a tight rein on your temper," Filius advised him. "They will consider you a child until you are forty years old, which will make them unlikely to take you seriously. You may be better off waiting until the end of your travels, wherever else they bring you, so that you can prove your earnestness."
"East, then, through St. Petersburg, to Siberia, down through Japan, and from there to the New World, though in truth I can't predict my journey so far in advance. I will go wherever the trail leads me, and detour when and where I must in order to pay my expenses. You can expect to hear well in advance whenever I plan to make myself known at a tournament, should you wish to attend--or compete and make me truly earn my winnings."
Filius worried that the Russians might give Tom trouble when he went into the Soviets' domain, but there was one thing alone which truly gave Filius pause. "How long do you expect it will take for you to find the Deathstick?"
"Years," Tom said, and then "Decades. But I don't intend to find it all in one go," he continued, and Filius' worries of madness and obsession were abated, at least in part. "It's probably been decades since Gregorovitch lost it, though, and I want to find out what I can before the political climate settles into something else. I won't have another opportunity like this for a long time."
"Reasonable. You will be sure to write, I hope," said Filius.
"At least once a month, and more often if I have anything interesting to report. You will have to wait until my return to hear for news that pertains to my search, though. I wouldn't want a letter like that to be intercepted, especially while I'm anywhere close to Russia."
"Very good, Tom. Only, don't just be writing to me. I know how you like to be on your own, but don't leave your, ah, lady acquaintance out in the dark, either."
"Who?" Tom asked, and Filius was not sure whether he was genuinely puzzled or just putting on a good show.
"Oh, you know, Horiho, Horiyo, it was something like that."
Tom laughed, and the sound of it made Filius realize how rarely he had ever heard Tom express his more positive emotions so openly. "I believe that you mean Horila. She's still at Hogwarts, I'm afraid, and correspondence between us may be difficult to achieve. Even while I was there, we couldn't be seen in public, you know?"
"She's a Slytherin, then," Filius said, realization blooming in him like a warm flower.
"Quite so," Tom said, and he laughed again. "At any rate, there's nothing of a romantic nature going on between us. It's strictly platonic."
"Of course," said Filius, not believing a single word of it. Filius hadn't been born yesterday, and he still remembered how fondly Tom had spoken of her. "And do you have plans for your return, if you do not intend to seek out the Deathstick till the end of your days?"
"Oh, this and that," Tom said, and his mouth parted in a toothy grin. "Perhaps shake things up a little," he added. "Things could do with a bit of shaking up, I wager."
"That they could," Filius said. "That they could, indeed." He paused and, not quite able to reach the boy's shoulder, settled for laying a hand on his elbow. "I am not the sort of teacher who will hand you a laundry list. My expectations of you are not many in number. I ask only this of you: that your accomplishments, whatever they may be in detail, be magnificent. You may be a champion duelist, get elected Minister for Magic, or even find the Deathly Hallows. I do not care, so long as you do great things."
Tom nodded solemnly, shook Filius' other hand, and gave a deep bow. "Your teachings, and your friendship, have been indispensable to me. Thank you, Master Filius, for all your guidance and all that you have done for me," he said, and he disapparated on the spot.
It was the last time that Tom Riddle would call anyone "Master" again.
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