Come Together

Chapter 2: Prison

Tom awoke to loud, metallic sounds and the shouts of men. He opened his eyes to see that he was in a prison cell of some sort.

So they had moved him again, then. These strange muggles, who had deemed to call themselves HYDRA, seemed to love moving around their prisoners, though for some reason they kept him separate from the others.

When he had first awoken in this place, he had been tied to a chair, his hands bound behind the back. Two soldier dressed in black had come in, shouting at him in German. When it became obvious that Tom couldn't, in fact, understand them, they switched to English. Which apparently wasn't any better, because they questioned him on his clothes, and his supposed "men". After a few rounds of pretending to know what they were talking about he managed to deduce that they thought he was a solider, an enemy one at that. His dark blue eyes had darted to their clothes, which held a red insignia on it, having an eerie similarity to a design he had been coming up with himself, what with the skull motif and all.

They had asked about whether of not he came alone here (he did), what was his mission (there was no mission), and what his name was (Tom Riddle). His answers did not seem to placate the soldiers. On the contrary, they got rather angry when he at last stated his name, and told him to stop playing games with them.

So now they think him to be a British covert spy, and put him in a cell with only a window on the door, not that he could see from it very well. They would sometimes take him out of it to interrogate him again, sometimes coupled with some "persuasion" in the form of painful injections or breaking of some limbs. His magic seemed to heal it quickly, much like they did with his injuries in both the orphanage and Hogwarts, which baffled the people even more. After every questioning session he made sure his small bag stayed hidden, but couldn't risk taking anything out of it for fear that the charm would then be negated. The bright side to all was that he managed to gain quite a lot of information by their questions and their conversations to the other soldiers that they had captured.

They were a group called HYDRA, they just recently turned on the Nazi party (wasn't Grindelwald supposed to be puppeteering the muggle side of that?) and required slave workers to help build...a muggle machine. HYDRA seemed to also hold some kind of advantage, but Tom wasn't able to find out what it was.

He wasn't sure how much time had passed, but he was certain that it had to be about a month or so since he was detained here, which meant that school had already started. People would notice his absence, he was sure. Dumbledore had kept an annoyingly close eye on Tom ever since he let the Basilisk loose. Slughorn would notice that one of his prized students had gone missing, and his Slytherin sycophants would probably realize the Heir was no present.

But who would truly miss Tom Marvolo Riddle?

It was a rather depressing thought, so he pushed it away and instead thought of how to gain more information, which meant picking up key German words. Which couldn't be that hard, he tried to say to himself, as he was already fluent in most of the Ancient Runic languages (including some unsavory ones). German was derived from the Norse linguistics, right?

Days passed, and he would always be led into a room, questioned, tortured, and questioned again. None of them believed him even when he told his half truths over and over again. For some reason they still asked his name, and he soon found out from his garbled German understanding that they didn't believe that "Tom Riddle" was his real name. Tom couldn't help but find it rather strange. It was a bland, muggle name, nothing that could cause alarm. Yet the HYDRA soldiers refused to believe it, so he was put through hell once more. They broke his fingers, which healed, burned marks into his skin, which would be unblemished a few days later, and they shot his legs, which again, healed.