Chapter Text
Tom Riddle has always seen life in monochrome photographs.
It’s a dance between what is honorable and what’s immoral. A war between purity and sin, love and hate, phantasm and the utmost revolting normality.
Everything is black and white and nothing—nothing—surpasses such logic.
That is, until he finds himself standing in the center of a butterfly garden in Italy, 1947 and gazing into the most mystifying set of lilac irises he’s ever encountered.
He’s startled at first. He’s never known so much as a tantalizing color—such beauty and horror in one glance. Everything has always been either this or that but never this kind of that, this … This magically bedeviling, purpley kind of pink that is almost rather … pretty, he guesses.
“Your eyes,” is all he says, disjointed and quite completely enamored. They not only cling to every palette of purple fervidness he’s ever known, but there are—he can’t quite put his finger on it—there are little periwinkle flecks, he supposes, floating over the lilac like it’s a sea meant to be wandered.
It’s color—a fair, eloquent color completely lost in a black and white void. It’s like a sip of whiskey after three bottles of sickly sweet rum.
She doesn’t hear his words, of course. He’s hidden behind a willow tree, clinging to yet another textbook on Dark Arts … He’s watching this girl place seeds into tiny hand-painted pots and hum Chopin to herself and for merlin’s sake, why has he been gazing at her for twenty fucking minutes?
✗✗✗
It's summer. Three fifteen in the afternoon. Tom is playing with a cat he discovers roaming the Italian streets. It purrs and leans it’s forehead into the palm of his hand, sweetly swinging it’s tail as he pets his light, sandy fur.
The boulevard is seamed with infinitely tall and absolutely breath-stealingly beautiful architecture, moss-encased fountains and not even three but four gelato shops. The air smells strongly of rosemary and fire wood yet the clouds above him are still just ghosts of dull gray as usual. This cat is doing quite a fine job of distracting him. It’s fur, he notices, is a peculiar shade of tangerine orange. The sorrel color dances across it’s back and slumbers softly on it’s face, adding all the more rarity and excitation to his experience in Italy.
He loves this: muggles walk past him and can never truly gather who he is; what he can do. No one knows here. And that’s the beauty of it. He can hide in plain sight, in the midst of his enemies, practicing—plotting—and no one will ever know. Even his most intimate friends don’t know he’s here; they’re aware he’s been out traveling for the past few months but being off the grid has truly been wonderful.
“Trying to steal my cat, I suppose?” A peremptory, British accent fills his ears. His entire body steels as his fingers linger above the kitten’s fur. The girl kneels down to retrieve her feline, strands of her arborescent auburn hair brush past his face and it becomes clear.
Lilac.
Two lilac eyes staring at him. It’s her. It’s the flower girl.
He gulps and stands as does the girl who is now holding a cat in her arms and giving him a rather cold glare. The french cuffs on his sleek black button-up shirt make his wrists itch, his mouth is too dry so no words come out and God, could her eyes be any more of a distraction to him then they are now? He can’t think—his mind, his thoughts, his senses have all been numbed by the sheer revelry of the bright luminescence burning in her irises and she’s talking to him—to him. It makes the rest of the world seem out of focus, somehow.
She’s a muggle. He shouldn’t feel so attracted to her. A teenage girl from Italy, knowing absolutely nothing of the magical world hidden behind her back. She isn’t like his people—his people who all say muggles are so fun. Muggles are toys to them, they use, play and cheat them all for amusement. He should not feel so entranced, so tempted—bloody hexed—in her presence.
But this lilac: It belongs to a garden fairy. He should be singing to her, adoring her, conjuring up great spells to ease her hard-working hands. He should be writing poetry about her fox brown hair and the dimples on her cheeks and her smile oh, her honey-like smile when she’s around the songbirds and the roses; it’s as if she’s never seen such sweet herbage in her life.
“I wasn’t trying to steal—”
“Oh, Crookshanks! I’ve been searching everywhere.” She glares up at him. “I promise you, if you hurt him in any way, shape or form, I can do nine hundred times as worse to you.” He raises his eyebrows at the sheer whimsical irony of this.
“I believe I was protecting him, actually.” He argues. “Lots of crazy people out there, you know … ”
“I’m completely aware of how it is out there, thank you very much. Would you like to tell me what it is you planned on doing with him after you were finished—protecting—him?”
“Oh, returning him to the local flower shop, of course.” He smirks critically. How was he supposed to know that this one sodding cat—out of all the cats in Europe—belonged to her?
“Oh, yes, I’m sure you were.” She narrows her eyes at him. He hums. “Hold on,” She has a strange sort of look on her face. Tom’s wrist begin to itch again. “How do you know I work at the flower shop?” She says it much too quietly for him to here but he already knows what she’s said.
Her flowers are practically famous in his group of friends? A family member told him of her? He buys flowers all the time and of course her face looks familiar to him?
There wasn’t a single excuse he could think of. The truth? Hell no. But what really was the truth? Why does he notice her in such a way? In such a way that is actually making him—Lord fucking Voldemort—nervous to be around someone.
For eighteen years his eyes have only ever seen black and white until she came along and now he’s seeing lilac and orange and pale green and an abundance of other color so diverse they could fill up the entire cosmos and still be spilling out over the edges. And now here she is, he “stole” her cat and she’s also apparently mad about it for God knows what reason.
“What I’d like to know is how I’ve somehow found the …” He pauses, attempting to change the subject. “… delight—of meeting a fellow Brit here in the heart of Italy.”
This question seems to throw her off and it takes her a while to answer.
“I’m here studying plants.” Her eyes descend to the cobblestone beneath them, he sees her fingers gripping the poor cat’s fur as if she were being questioned for a crime. “And you? Why’re you here?”
“The coffee in Luxembourg was too bitter for me.”
“Right, so you’ve been to Luxembourg, too? How about Russia? Spain? A guy like you must’ve been to Argentina, right?” Her voice toys with different tones of sarcasm and seriousness as she continues to play along with him.
“Yes, there are guys like me just jam-packed in the streets of Argentina right now, as we speak.”
“You mean cat-napers like you.”
“Right, yes, that’s us. I’m actually part of a large group of world renown kitten snatchers, you’d be our first victim: we’re still in the starting process, going through experiments and such … ”
“‘I’m so honored.” She smiles—yet her hands are still trembling as they speak. What makes her so fearful, he wonders.
“Let me make it up to you. I’ll buy you a drink.” He suggests quickly and let’s face it, pretty smoothly. “It doesn’t have to be alcohol. Whatever you like, coffee, tea, um … Lemonade?”
“Beer. And afterwards you can apologize to Crookshanks.”
The cat makes a sort of meowing noise that should’ve belonged to a mountain lion. It possesses the image of a furrier, more rabid adaptation of an Egyptian sphinx, the thought burdens over Tom like a thousand red bricks and he finds himself suddenly plotting against the pitiful creature.
“A-Alright.” He agrees, though saying it through his teeth.
✗✗✗
The garden fairy—Hermione is her name, he discovers—guzzles three beers like massive shots of vodka, each gives her more motivation to finish another. She’s silent as the barkeep continues pouring her fifth glass before she’s even done with the fourth.
“You like beer?”
She hums in a sort of way that tells him she isn’t sure yet.
“I see.” He bites his fingernails as an old folk song plays through the cheap pub speakers. “Hermione,” He says practically dancing with the mellifluous syllables of her name. “You say you like plants. Have you ever thought about herbalism?” He’s quiet, waiting for something. He wants to talk about flowers and charms and magic with her—But no. He can’t talk to her about this. “More specifically—er—magical plants?” He stares at the dark wood of the bar counter and pretends this is a random subject he’s just brought up.
He feels the need—the enticement—to share with her all his burdens. Such a magical, bedeviling woman can’t be a muggle. She must know, she must know. He continues to repeat this in his head.
She doesn’t answer his question, though. She orders him another drink instead.
“Do you believe in those kind of things? Like children’s magic stories?” He defines.
She twirls blonde highlights through her fingers like vines. Her eyes burn into his, her tongue darts out of her mouth to moisten her lips—a soft pink, like the transparent memory of a rose petal.
“Do you?” She returns.
“No.” He states solidly and repeats his question to her.
“No.” She answers coolly, repeating his lie.
He nonchalantly hums, ever so silently, along to the music and watches her fingers graze her collarbones. She’s staring outside an open sliver of the bar window’s blinds. Tom notices it’s almost dark out.
“You never told me your name.” Hermione says, turning to him. He smirks—a sheepish yet devilish sort of grin that actually comes out of no where.
This girl—could this be something? Could this one sentence of a girl mean anything to the large chronicle that is his harrowing life? He feels something when he looks at her. Something he can’t quite guess but the one and only thing that he can possibly identify this aching feeling with is something rather terrifying to him.
Yearning.
Yearning and also hope.
“Tom.” He states and for the first time an actual laugh comes out of his mouth, out of the abyss and thrown into a state of desire and real content with how things are. “My name is Tom Riddle.”
There is fear in her eyes, actual fear only someone who knew him could express.
And suddenly he feels this very fear incinerating a hollow cavity amidst his hope like fire melting plastic. His sanity is slowly crumbling onto it’s rocky foundation and he’s seething with doubt, seething with regret, seething with anger. She knows him.
That look is something only a witch could give him. He knows it all too well.