The Fearsome Name of Riddle

PART 1: An Old Photograph

Rubble and dust covered the castle. The battle for Hogwarts had come to an end hours before, leaving the survivors to wander aimlessly throughout the broken halls. Nothing felt real. Like a limbo in which they were not supposed to live in. 

Horace Slughorn had wandered his way into the remains of the room of requirement. There wasn't much left of the once magnificent room. The doors hadn't moved since the horcrux had been destroyed there, the magic of the stone clearly needed more time to repair itself. Ash covered the floor, some charred remains of wood and statues stood in piles having survived the fiendfyre curse. 

Horace had been followed by a small group of students. Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnigan among the most notable, as well as a couple of others. They trudged through the ash, looking for anything that might be left after the fire. 

Seamus crouched down on his toes. His fingers furtling through the soft ashes in search of the glint of something that had caught his eye. The brush of the edge of a piece of thick paper found his fingertip and Seamus took it from beneath the gentle wreckage. Pushing the ash off of the gleaming surface of what seemed to be an old photograph, he frowned at the thought of how something so fragile could have survived something so violent. 

"What's that?" Dean asked, frowning down at the piece of paper that didn't have a black mark on it. 

"I've no idea," Seamus shrugged, lifting it to show Dean, "some old couple." 

There were a few creases in the paper and the photograph looked old but the paper still held strong. 

A boy and a girl around sixteen years old, stood holding each other in their Hogwarts robes. Two Slytherin. Smiling and laughing as they rocked slightly in the ink. The boy had dark hair that curled softly in its short style and dark eyes that looked almost black. He was taller than she was with a look of superiority and arrogance in his eyes that only left in the moments he looked down at her. The girl had white blonde hair so straight it couldn't possibly hang that way naturally. And crystal blue eyes with an aristocratic cold gaze that softened when they saw him. She was tucked under his arm, barely looking up at him as she smiled in perfect form for the photograph. Occasionally the boy would pull her closer to him and make her laugh. 

Dean turned the photograph over to see a short message, handwritten, on the back.

'For we shall live until this image dies'. 

"What have you got there, Thomas?" Slughorn asked, shuffling his feet as he walked over to the two of them. 

"Some old photo," Dean said, shrugging as he handed it over to the potions master, "it didn't burn." 

"How odd," Slughorn frowned, reading the inscription before turning it over. As if it were possible after the war, Horace paled. His eyes raked over the photograph, taking in the student's faces like they could have been his own lost children. "Merlin's beard. It can't be." 

"What is it?" Seamus asked, standing suddenly from his crouching position. "Who are they?" 

"This one," Slughorn said, turning to show the boys. He pointed to the boy in the image as Dean and Seamus leaned over his shoulder. "Tom Riddle, Voldemort as a boy." 

"Why didn't it burn with the rest of it?" Seamus asked, glancing over at Dean with a grimace in his expression. 

He didn't want to look at it for another second. The idea that Voldemort, the man who had tortured the wizarding world for two generations, had been that happy once. He hated it. He wanted such a vile person to have been miserable all his days. 

"He probably charmed it, or she did," Slughorn told them as he stared down at the smiling faces of his former students, "made it unbreakable, or replenishing. For it to survive such a curse, something capable of destroying a horcrux, I can only imagine the kind of magic necessary to keep it safe. It was more protected than his soul."