Dark Lord's Pet

Monster

Voldemort

His eyes flashed wildly from blue to red, blue to red, blue to red.

Harry hadn't followed the plan. He said he was going to go in with the fake injuries, wait until the Dursleys were all home, then blow up the house. He wasn't supposed to get hurt.

But he had.

That scar, that horcrux, now that Voldemort was aware of it, he could, with a great deal of effort, see through Harry's eyes and hear through Harry's ears. He couldn't read the boy's thoughts, but he didn't need to.

It was all his fault. Tom grasped his head in his hands, breathing hard as memories from long ago began to break through his defenses. He should never have let Harry go.

When Tom Riddle was a boy of nine years, his only friend had been Sandy. She hadn't liked him any more than she liked every other child in the orphanage, and perhaps that added to her appeal. She'd never treated him like something other than human, a monster, an abomination, an demon from hell that had to be exorcised.

She'd been too good for the world she was born into, thirteen when she died. When she killed herself. Everything had just been too much for her as well, and though Tom had been aware of her struggles, he hadn't known how deep they went. Tom had confided everything in Sandy, his secrets, his fears, his wish for more. . . but she'd just listened, never reciprocating. He understood now that she hadn't wanted to burden anyone else, but Tom wished to hell and back that she had.

His only friend had been torn away from him by suicide. She'd used her sewing scissors, a small pair of knives he'd never have expected to hold the possibility of death. But they had. Sharpened well, they'd made it as quick as one could hope for with that method.

He began to withdraw from that pain, stumbling back to the more recent one, the one where Harry had been lying on the floor with no pulse or air. He thanked Merlin for that goddamn muggle CPR course he'd taken, it'd been something he'd randomly stumbled across in his search for knowledge, and he'd taken to it easily and never forgot it.

Looking down at his bone white hands, thinking of his inhuman face, Tom didn't wonder why no one had or ever would love him. He was a monster, a nightmare, a murderer. . . he was what scared children into eating their vegetables, the monster that kept teenagers up all night ruminating on scary stories they were pretty sure weren't true, only, Tom was.

Tom Marvolo Riddle

I am Lord Voldemort. . .

That's all he was, and that's all he ever would be.

A tear traced down his cheek, and as it fell from his skin, so too did the blue fall from his eyes, leaving only seething red behind. He wouldn't kill Harry, not for his betrayal.

There were other ways to take his anger out on the world, and he had the plan already sorted for his next step.

It was time to visit Gringotts.

With a letter tucked into his robes, Voldemort glamoured up and disapparated.