Bad Education

Chapter 1

If Tom Riddle had ever had the desire to classify his worst miscalculations into some sort of hierarchy of failure, choosing to work at Borgin and Burke's would probably have been at the top of that list - even higher than that time he shot himself in the foot by killing a Muggle-born and almost accidentally causing the closure of the school he so desperately did not want to leave.

Not that he would ever actually have admitted to failure, of course.

But he might have conceded, in this hypothetical exercise in choice analysis, that the decision to forgo all the generous offers of employment he'd received upon graduation, and to wave away the promise of a stable income and upward mobility in order to work in - of all things - retail, may have been a bit hasty.

But Tom had had a goal, and he was certain he knew the best way to achieve that goal.

At the time.

He was certain at the time.

And the brilliant strategy he'd come up with required working in a dingy shop in Knockturn Alley for two barely functioning idiots who knew less about magical history than he did and who couldn't even get his name right half the time.

"Mornin', Roodle," said Caractacus Burke, lumbering into the shop visibly hung over and staying faithful to his schedule of drinking six out of seven nights a week.

"It's four o'clock in the afternoon, sir."

"Yes, two sugars, please. Thanks." Burke stumbled into the back room, barely noticing the massive, tentacled, fanged book that Tom was trying to stuff into a box, and certainly not offering to help.

Tom wondered whether, someday in the future, Borgin and Burke would look back on his time there and realize that they'd been using the Most Powerful Dark Wizard of All Time to balance their ledger.

Borgin was somehow even more difficult to deal with than Burke. It seemed that no matter how many priceless, rare artifacts Tom brought in or how much money he made them from sales, any time he was not visiting clients, Borgin had him performing menial tasks like inventory and restocking, and would criticize him the entire time.

So, when four o'clock moved to five, and he had moved from deadly book beasts to hanged men's hands, he was not at all surprised when Borgin suddenly appeared and started asking questions.

"What are you doing with those?" he asked when he saw Tom at the back counter, piles of shriveled human hands all around him.

"Sorting," Tom said without looking up.

"What do you mean, 'sorting?'" He sounded as if he were trying to seem only vaguely interested, but Tom could tell without looking that he had begun to count the hands as soon as he'd seen them.

"For inventory purposes, sir."

"Inventory? They're all Hands of Glory! Surely you need only count them."

That was an interesting statement coming from the man who had once spent an entire afternoon lecturing Tom on the detailed differences between medieval, Renaissance, and Victorian wand holders, all of which did one thing: held wands. And rather poorly, at that.

"And why do they need counting, anyway?" Borgin demanded. "It's only the category three and higher artifacts we need to account for in the ledger."

"I thought perhaps we could sell the bulk and reinvest in some more popular, slightly rarer items."

"Sell...?" Borgin's eyes widened. "No, no. We can't sell those. I need them." He scooped up the hands like a paranoid squirrel protecting a particularly tasty pile of nuts and threw them back into the box.