"To some, a monster, and to others, a leader. Either way, I became god."
"Did you really? Do you think God becomes trapped?"
Having just earned your doctorate, you decide to work in the Azkaban Secure Facility for the Criminally Insane. There, you...
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You had sat in your office for hours, thoroughly disturbed. The truth was, as much as you wanted, needed, to help your patient – because God knew nobody else was – you were beginning to think that there was something even deeper. Dumbledore had treated him as a child, and still it got to this point? And everybody around here was singing his praises? You desperately wanted there to be something sane left within Tom Riddle, something you could free.
He was just so, so painfully out of touch with reality that it made you want to keel over from the sheer amount of pain it induced inside of you. What a waste. Not only for him, but for those people too, innocent and killed at the beginning of a fictional spree.
You couldn't even bring yourself to go and find that mop. Instead, you stared at his file for hours on end, pouring over the details of his life. How did it all go so horrifically wrong if he was getting help from the beginning? How could you even go about making it better? All you had were desperate questions and no answers. Or, at least not the answers you needed or liked to hear.
Last evening, under the flickering light in his cell, you had made him a promise. You were trying very hard to keep it. It all made sense why his mind had changed aspects about the world – to fit the delusion. But that wasn't really what you were looking for when you were looking for the lies, as you promised him you would. You turned instead to the administration – to Doctor Dumbledore, specifically.
You'd heard so, so much about the man. The general consensus from your co-workers was that he had been a saint – they always referred to him in the past tense, so you knew he was dead. And as much as you didn't want to speak ill of the dead, there were a multitude of things you could criticise about his apparent approach to treating Tom as a young child. There was apparently a lot of things you would have done differently.
In fact, it made you flinch just to think of the sheer hatred in Tom's voice whenever he talked about the man. He seemed rather indifferent to the other doctors, at times even mildly distasteful, but towards Dumbledore... it was different.
For a mere moment, you wondered how he would perceive you by the end of this.
Perhaps with more fondness than the others. Perhaps with something more than fondness.
