Jörmungandr

Interlude I: The Veil

Summary:

After ending the Statute of Secrecy proves to actually be a bad idea, Voldemort travels to a time where Gellert is most easily killable. There are a couple of minor hitches at the beginning. Namely, returning as a twelve year old, struggling to cleave together two souls, one mad and the other going through puberty, and getting that perpetually morose Albus Dumbledore, ever bemoaning the cruelty of fate, to do what must be done. But the boundless stretch of years only provides him more time to prepare for after. A power vacuum that will renature the world and him at the precipice with decades of foresight. Rewriting the course of history is as simple as retelling a story.

And if he gets to kill Father again, then so much the sweeter.

Do you think this is love, Tom?! Do you think you love me? Do you think you love them? Take your love and fucking choke on it. Drown in its pretty blood.

Or, Tom makes mistakes and deals with them the only way he knows how: murdering them.

Part 2: Larger, More Desperate Mistakes

his burned slow, sickly, in whimpers;
faded magic tainted cruel,
but a stone thrown in the ocean of fate
has ripples, reaped by the fools

October 22nd, 1943.

It hurt.

The green fire of the floo ripped through his worn and patchwork soul, biting at the tattered holes in it, and it hurt.

For a moment, breathless, he succumbed. His skin burned off leaving waxy sleeves of flesh easily sloughed off to expose wet muscle and boiling fat. Raw and split open, rubbed with lemon and salt and the cheap soap Wool's made with too much lye and smelled of choking talc.

And then he was through, with a small cough and a stumble, and the subdued bustle of the Ministry at midnight greeted him.

Tom Riddle tucked the small rock in his front jacket pocket, where the spark of it would settle his heart, and walked briskly toward the lifts. He had waited for the nosebleed to stop before he had flooed to the Ministry, for some small stitches of his magic to weave back together. Fuck all that did. The floo still hurt. And the old bastard would ask what had delayed him.

Thurston Kalbey was on guard tonight, fifty-two, unmarried, one estranged son, a soft spot for alcohol, a softer spot for men. The guard glanced once at Tom Riddle—boy-faced and familiar, was there a bit of blood on his chin?—nodded quick like a professional, and let him through the gate without comment.

Tom Riddle called the lift and straightened the front of his robes neatly.

There was a reason the Atrium was on the eighth level of the Ministry of Magic. Nearly a hundred and fifty feet underground, a man was already at the beating heart of the government the moment the floo spat out. Hypothetically, it was a crippling design flaw. The entrance of a bank being through the cold iron door of the vault, already breached. The guards were supposed to check wands, but even with the heightened scrutiny of the war, it was a cursory inspection to gather measurements and nothing more. As if a spy gathering intelligence at the heart of the Empire would use his own wand.

Materially, it served one purpose.

A man going up was dismissed as the regular work of government. A good worker, a manager or a Minister, here for the war effort, keeping his head down, nose clean, working diligently in the hopes of one day getting promoted to some slightly higher position and waste his life there. Perhaps even on something important.

A man going down was either an Unspeakable or a criminal.

Here and now, and before, Tom Riddle was both.