Scrambling through a growing pile of books, Tom finally admitted that he was panicking. He had come up with a basic plan, but it involved some powerful (and possibly dark) magic and he needed a specific spell he’d read a little while ago before he could be sure it would work.
The only problem was that he couldn’t, for the life of him, remember what the book was called. It was an old tome so he’d started by checking the edges of the library, where nobody could be bothered to clean. However, he ended up just discovering a new species of mould growing on some books that had been left next to an open window for too long. After informing the librarian, he decided to take a walk along the seventh floor.
When passing a tapestry of Barnabas the Barmy, he noted a door that he had never seen before. Curious, he decided to take a look inside, after all, it didn’t have ‘staff only’ on the front.
Inside the room was a single book. Upon taking a closer look he discovered that it was the book he’d been looking for!
This room had provided the exact book he wanted! What was strange, of course, was that the room had seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Why would there be a room for a single book, it just didn’t make sense. He took a quick nosy around to see if anything would tell him what the room is.
He was shocked when a small bookshelf containing three books materialized on the wall. They were ‘Hogwarts, a History’, ‘Secret Rooms and Passageways - a Guide’ and ‘Mysteries of the Founders’.
These books all had one thing in common. After reading them he realized that the room matched the description of the fabled room of requirement! This could be useful.
* Harry POV
Tom came back to the dorm a few hours after curfew. The other boys hadn’t bothered waiting but Harry stayed up late so he could make sure that Tom was okay. When he did come back he had a knowledgeable sheen to his eyes that normally meant he had solved a problem and considering their current problem he was keen to see what the solution might be.
“Tom, where have you been,” Harry raised an eyebrow as he emerged from the shadows,
“I found the room of requirement,”
“You mean the room that’s supposed to give you everything?” Tom nodded “I thought it was a myth,”
“No, it isn’t, and it’s given me the answer to our little....timeline problem,”
Ah yes, the problem of Tom being an important person in the universe. Important because he would become Voldemort who kills Harry’s parents. Lovely to think about, not.
“So what is it?”
“So there’s this spell...” he spoke shakily, “This- maybe- possibly- dark spell that will duplicate a person- I mean an exact genetic copy- that used to be used by wizards to fake their deaths (that being why it’s currently banned and considered a dark spell,”
“So we duplicate you, then go to the future?”
“Well, I haven’t finished the plan but, yes love, something along those lines,”
* Next day
Tom was writing so quickly, Harry could see mistakes in even Tom’s perfect handwriting. They were working on their plan which had developed from ‘going to the same time’ to ‘Tom goes a month back from when Harry disappeared so he can make a new identity. The room of requirement, it turns out, is a really cool place for secret meetings.
This, of course, led them to looking at artifact duplication spells because they only had one time turner, and ‘they must have gotten all those replica artifacts somehow’.
Turns out they were right, there were spells to duplicate artifacts (and their magical properties) which were relatively easy and sometimes even used for daily tasks in (rich, pureblood) households.
Harry was practicing obliviate so he could adjust the memories and things of the Tom clone (to which he’d promised not to get attached). The best part was, considering it wasn’t supposed to be alive, the clone would be deactivated the moment he and Tom were looking at it and deciding that they wanted to put it out of its misery.
*
“Okay, I think I've thought of everything,” Tom declared, rolling up his length of parchment, after a few days of that he thought he’d never make eye contact with Tom again.
“So you’ll see me on the train right?” Harry said meekly, seeking confirmation,
“Of course,”
“Right, I have my time turner and you have yours, did you read the updated history books I gave you from my trunk?”
“I would never pass up the opportunity for knowledge sweetheart,”
“Okay, did you make the clone?”
“No, just about to do it though,” he stepped into a rune circle he had drawn on the floor and took a vile of his blood out of his pocket, there was no way he was doing the silly fantasy move of cutting his hand open. He chanted “Virtutem antiquam appello, me duplicare ut me verum inveniam.”
A light surrounded him and the clone grew from the blood he had shed into the rune circle, Harry stunned the clone and helped Tom sit on one of the chairs in the room as he was looking a tad pale from using all that magic.
“You can continue, darling, I’ll be fine in a moment,”
Harry looked wary but continued, erasing memories of his confession and all their planning from the clone. He returned the need for him to become Voldemort and made sure that, if asked, he would deny that he genuinely liked Harry. That last one hurt, but, it had to be done.
He had already given the headmaster a notice that he would be leaving school so he just kissed Tom goodbye for now and left, he had to sneak on the Hogwarts express so he could be in the right place when came back.
* Tom POV
After Harry left, he put the clone in the hallway with a compulsion to go to the great hall where they would be announcing that Harry was leaving.
Once that was done, Tom used Harry’s invisibility cloak (which he had been given as long as he gave it back to him when they saw each other) to leave the school where he proceeded to use a very old (and unreliable) teleportation spell to get to the vague area of Diagon Alley and The Leaky Cauldron. When there, he turned his time turner and began his escapades in the future.
YOU ARE READING
He appeared out of nowhere
FanfictionTom Riddle was going into his fifth year at Hogwarts. Harry Potter had fallen asleep on the Hogwarts express, wishing he didn't have to live in a time when Voldemort was in power, also going into his fifth year. When he woke up over fifty years in t...
