Chapter 6: Base
BASE
In the middle of the night, I awoke with a tortured groan that perfectly managed to encapsulate the sheer agony that my sleep cycle currently represented.
In the dark of my room, with my eyes still closed and encrusted with sleep, my hand fumbled on my nightstand until I found a vial that I had previously prepared, and before I could snuggle once more into the heavy, warm blankets, I uncorked it and downed its contents.
Just as the last drop was gulped down, a crisp coolness seemed to surge through my body, and I felt as if I had just splashed my face with fresh spring water, and my body shivered with unexpressed energy.
Potions are awesome. I smiled to myself as I tossed the covers away from myself and stood, grimacing for an instant as my bare feet landed on the chilly stone of the floor. My fingers found then my wand, and I expertly cast a 'lumos'.
The white light washed coldly and unfeeling over my room, shining upon the few adjustments I had made since my second week into the castle. The small desk had been transfigured into a tall bookshelf, where all of my books rested quietly, while the small chair I had once eyed mistrustfully was now a comfy armchair large enough to host me.
My eyes trailed longingly over the stacks of parchment that awaited me, but I forced myself to perform as many stretches as I could, for my body as well as for my fingers, which I feared would eventually lose mobility because of my half-giant nature. Sure, eventually I could probably purchase a series of tools in silver, which was an inert material as far as it concerned potions, but the idea of spending an inordinate amount of time dealing with clamps and whatnot to perform what any normal-sized wizard was capable of sat ill with me.
While I moved in the coldness of my room, I started to shift my stretches into what little I remembered of yoga positions, occasionally tilting my frame in order to not fall. While my body heated up because of the effort required by my movements, and a light sheen of sweat manifested upon my skin, I let my plans and thoughts about this life of mine fade away, slowly but surely quieting my nervousness about pretending friendship with Tom Riddle, allowing my guilt regarding the relationship between Hagrid and his father to be smothered by the moment, and for a while, I thought about nothing.
Once I had completed my routine, I took a quick shower, trying to cling to that particular feeling of thoughtlessness that marked my first steps on the road of the Mind Arts. While the exact mechanics of magic were simply not explained in the books I had read in my previous life, almost everything I remembered about the world was on par with my metaknowledge, so I had decided that until I managed to figure out how to trick Slughorn into teaching me Occlumency without him peering into my head, I would try to 'empty my mind', as Snape would one day tell to Harry Potter.
How to raid the Restricted Section? I asked myself as I walked quietly in the empty halls of Hogwarts. Secrets of the Darkest Arts and Magic Most Evile were going to disappear from the shelves as soon as I could manage it. I didn't know if Tom had already spotted the tomes, to be truthful, I didn't know f he had already gotten started on his quest for immortality, but if I could avoid that particular clusterfuck by doing something as minor as removing two books, well, how could I ignore such opportunity?
Entering that particular area of the Library was easy enough: besides Slughorn general giddiness at seeing me proposing outrageous stuff like preparing a Polijuice Potion that would turn someone into an animal, which I used as an excuse to research the Animagus transformation, using such a topic to bring into the fold Minerva McGonagall and a reluctantly engaged Tom Riddle, the problem wasn't reading the material in the Restricted Section, the problem was outright removing it from the school.
Hiding a book was stupidly easy: transfigure a hidden compartment into the shelves and dropping there the offending tome.
Finding such an offending tome was complex. Because while navigating the ordinary shelves was somewhat possible after a bit of practice, the Restricted Section was a clusterfuck of epic proportions, organization-wise. While the shelves closest to the divide between the two areas of the Library contained the least dangerous topics, such as The Shape Within or Moste Potente Potions, the successive shelves followed their own order. Some books were alphabetically ordered by their author, some didn't have an author, and were thusly dumped in blocks with topics of the same genre, but keeping them in order was an impossible task, especially given the fact that they moved.
Turns out that there were reasons why some books were chained to the shelves, who knew?
So, while I had a solution of sorts in order to prevent Tom from learning about Horcruxes, I still had no idea about how to find them.
I returned from my shower with a determined glint in my eyes, and after dressing myself in the pale light of my 'lumos', I walked immediately towards the candle on which I had been practicing for the past weeks. I lit the wick simply by tapping it with the tip of my wand, before levitating the candle in front of me as I walked into the desert Common Room.
I seated into an armchair in front of a fireplace where only the embers survived, and I twisted my wrist, having the candle follow my movement and drop molten wax on the stone floor. Once I created a large enough smidge, I lowered the lit candle, leaving it upright in front of the dying embers of the fireplace.
"What is fire?" I asked myself, letting my eyes focus on the wavering flame. In Charms, fire was a cornerstone of sorts, it represented a change in its most primal state, it was instinctive to rely on the symbology of fire in order to perform a charm. Languages came in symbols after all. And to talk with magic, ergo to do magic, meant being able to grasp at the same time the final result one wanted, the intent at the start of the spell, and a symbol that managed to act as a bridge between the two.
It is Change given form. Power at its most primal. I tilted my head as I stared into the small flame of the candle, my mind focusing on my memories of stars and nuclear explosions that I had witnessed in movies. But that isn't quite it. I frowned as my memories of Fawkes from the Harry Potter books surged forth in my mind. Destruction and rebirth?
"Incendio works well enough I guess." I muttered as my perspective of Fire slowly shifted until I could see into the small candle's flame both the shining sun, the reassuring lit hearth, and the wavering licks of flame that attempted to chase away the dark.
Symbols had no meanings on their own, what did a dragon understand of symbols? Nothing. The dragon understood the rage and the erasing of the opponent that threatened its territory. What did phoenixes understand of fire? They died in it and were born from it, but there was no symbol to act as a buffer between the creature and the magic, for they didn't need it.
Wizardkind needed symbols in order to apply any kind of controlled magic to the world around them, be they spoke, gestured, or simply thought. But it was the caster that gave meaning to the symbol, and the understanding of the meaning that gave power to the spell.
So, while I easily used the symbolism of fire in order to cast charms, in particular, the aspect of fire that stood for change, what symbol was I going to use for fire itself? Fire was easy, if vast, to understand. And any scientific notion that I had about it wasn't going to help, I was lucky enough that I could take as face value that magic and physics were simply separated.
An exothermic chemical reaction? Useless labels when it came to magic. Fire was Hunger, and Light, and Warmth, and Scorching Heat, and Complete Change, it was Energy, and Killer, and Life-Giver. Fire was a multitude of things, each with its meaning, each worthy of its own symbol.
Without a word, I lifted my wand, keeping the symbolism clear in my head, the multitude of meanings that I could grasp present in my mind as a lit flame themselves, each turning into another and yet staying the same, for Fire was Fire, no matter if it was scorching Sun or warm Hearth, and I pointed the length of holly towards the candle that had by then burned half of its length.
With a ripple through the air, the flame on the wick spread like a folding fan, a curtain fluttering outwards on invisible wisps of air, until the quiet cover of flames landed over the embers of the fireplace, and there they remained.
Where before there was a lit candle in front of an almost empty fireplace, now the candle was no longer lit, and the dying embers and warm ashes were akin to a stretch of lush greenery, where each blade of grass was a single, gently waving flame.
Then I blinked, and the shift in perspective that had allowed me to grasp the concept of Fire left me while the world righted itself once more, and everything looked ordinary, except for the small carpet of flames that remained in the fireplace, giving off more warmth than they should have been able to.
What the fuck did I just do? I remained seated for a while, trying to grasp again the sense of detached understanding I had previously achieved, only to fall short of it when I heard shuffling and quiet noises from the doors that led to the dormitories.
When I tilted my eyes towards one of the clocks resting against the walls, I simply rose from my seat. Breakfast would start soon, and curfew consigned students to their common rooms only until 7 a.m., I had just the time for a jump in the Library before stuffing my gob with the divine food provided by house-elves.
Maybe I'll nap before the start of lessons. I thought as I lumbered out of the Common Room, feeling tiredness that weighted heavily over my eyelids.
"What are two Slytherin Wizards and one Gryffindor witch doing in the middle of the night in deserted corridoor?" I asked barely restraining a guffawing laugh.
"I hope you have an answer, because you're the one that dragged us in this foolishness." Riddle snarked from behind me as we completed another floor of stairs and reached the fourth floor.
"Yeah, I do, but I wanted to remark how this situation looks like the beginning of a raunchy joke."
"Must you be so uncouth?"
"Why are we doing this at night again?" Minerva's voice cut my laughter before I could properly reply to Tom Riddle's quiet distaste for anything related to 'socializing'.
"Because secrets don't belong to the day, and symbols are important in magic?" I tossed out in the air my random-ass answer, knowingly teasing my two companions.
"That's not what Professor Farsee meant."
"If you say so, Riddle. Yet, you couldn't resist and now you're here." I shrugged uncaringly as we kept walking.
"Must you be so aggravating Hagrid?"
"Why yes! Yes, I must!"
"Can we get on with this blatant and unnecessary violation of the rules?" the Gryffindor witch snapped at us, her wand held loftily in front of her in order to shine light in the dark hallways of the school.
"Oh, Minerva, don't deny that your Gryffindor self is enjoying this!"
"And why do you call each other with your surnames but I'm called by my first name?"
"That would be because you're a beautiful witch with a beautiful name." I quipped, before turning towards my fellow Slytherin, "See that Riddle? That's how you woo a witch."
"How dare you?" the spluttering reaction of Minerva almost covered the huff of irritation from Riddle, who spoke: "I don't need to woo anyone, thank you."
"Take it easy Minerva, we may be walking in the dark, but I can feel the heat of your blushing from here. And Riddle, you really should get yourself a date. Why, take Minerva here for example..." I quickened my steps once I found that we were nearing my objective.
"We're not having this conversation." Minerva's stinging hex rippled ineffectively over my left shoulder, stealing a smile out of me.
"I quite agree."
"If I wasn't here to amuse myself both of you would probably spend all your time studying on your own."
"That has never been a problem." the pursed lips of Minerva found confirmation of her opinion in Riddle's words.
"Magic isn't meant to be this stale thing we're being spoonfed during the lessons. Magic is mysterious, it should be practiced accordingly, and rightfuly so."
"This is not one of your insane potions for which you go gallivanting for ingredients... Now that I think about it, how did you two know where Gryffindor's Common Room was?" the Gryffindor witch asked.
"That's surprisingly easy, think about the most hideous hiding entrance in one of the most 'over the top' areas of the castle..."
"The Fat Lady is a..."
Minerva started to defend the portrait that hid her Common Room only for me to interrupt her: *Snoore* "Let's focus on magic now, aye?"
"Are you sure you aren't doing this simply because you can't fly a broom to save your life?" Riddle's voice tried ineffectively to tease me enough to reveal the real purpose of our nightly excursion, receiving only a sly glance for his effort.
"It's not that I can't fly a broom, it's that I'm too heavy for it." I ignored the teasing, "I could string a couple of brooms together in order to keep me afloat, but I'd much prefer to find my own solution to flight."
"Broom-less flight?" Minerva seemed to look at me like I was mad: "I sometimes forget that you're a Slytherin."
"And what do you think I am when you forget the Green and Silver on my tie?"
"A madman."
"Fair enough." I laughed while Riddle thinly smiled, showing to the world his amusement in a proper and dignified manner.
"Will you tell us why you dragged us out in the night?" Tom finally asked, "I'd say we've been far more than simply accomodating. The promise of not regretting this will carry you only so far."
"I agree."
At the words of Minerva, I sighed in defeat: "I wanted this to be a surprise of sorts, but Riddle hates riddles, and you're as curious as a cat, aren't you Minerva?"
We turned left into yet another deserted hallway and I came to a stop. On my left, the wall of the long corridor sported a wide succession of leaded windows that pointed south-west, showing us the moon as she began her descent towards the horizon. The sight the windows allowed us included a large stretch of the Hogwarts grounds, with the Forbidden Forest north-side and one stretch of the Black Lake just beyond a small hill where I supposed one day would host a certain Whomping Willow.
Suddenly I stopped, and opened the tall double doors on my right, revealing a quite large room that rested under an inch of dust: "I want us to raise walls on the opposite sides of this corridor, and turn this whole thing in a private Common Room of sorts."
The room that I showed them was half as large as the Great Hall, and I had discovered it by chance a couple of months prior, hiding behind a tapestry that Pix the Poltergeist, of all people, had once hung in front of the doors, eventually forgetting completely about it.
"That's why you've been levitating those boulders from the Black Lake?" Tom pointed at the tall pile of stones that I had taken from the depths of the Lake during the Winter Hols.
At the end of November, I had declined the option of returning home for the Winter Break, unwilling to expose myself to weeks with Hagrid's father, and so, while everybody but the muggle-borns had returned home, I was left sharing Slythering with only Tom Riddle, and the rest of the school with the only people, aside from the staff, aware that there was a war going on in the wider world. I had obviously exploited the situation as much as I could.
"Why would you want to do this?" Minerva's tired sigh clued me in to the fact that she didn't see the appeal of having such a private space where she could do what the hell she wanted, only having to keep track of me and Tom.
"First: to see if we could. Second: because in this way we don't have to wrap up our project anytime we leave the Library. Third: you'd have a space where you can become an Animagus before your O.W.L.s, so you can dazzle the world being the youngest witch to ever achieve the transformation." Because this will make it easy for me to coast on your brilliance, leaving your notes available to me once you leave Hogwarts. I smiled smartly at the two talented mages that eyed me shrewdly.
"And because this way you can observe us modify the hall and apply those changes to your own room." Riddle insightfully pointed out, making me scratch the back of my head bashfully.
"Your own room?" Minerva distractedly inquired, her mind likely still focused on the possibility of becoming an Animagus at 15 years of age. If Pettigrew mangad it, there is little doubt that she can too. And in the meantime I'll learn human transfiguration ahead of the program.
"Yeah, you gryffs may be okay with sleeping in the same dormitory, but Slytherin encourages everyone to make up their own sleeping arrangements, from the first to the seventh year." I snorted dismissively. If I had to share a room with eleven years old children I would have murdered them and pinned it on Riddle. Then I blinked as the thought crossed my mind. That was actually a good plan.
"So your plan was to levitate and transfigure the boulders in order to wall off the two extremities of the corridor?" Riddle brought us back on track, his eyes gleaming greedily at the idea of building his own private room in Hogwarts.
"I've prepared a potion..."
"Obviously." quipped Minerva con a sigh, earning herself a glare from me.
"Don't diss potions, they can do everything a wizard does with a wand, only without being taxing in the slightest." I reprimanded the witch that sniffed disdainfully, "You don't really need to transfigure the rocks, only stack them together after spreading a few drops of this beauty between one and another."
As I spoke, I fished out a rucksack filled with vials, revealing them to my two companions.
"Such a muggle method." Riddle's voice expressed disinterest, but his eyes studied curiously the dull green grow that escaped the potion that I was showing them.
"I don't recall saying that I would be on board with this foolishness." Minerva tilted her head upwards slightly, attempting to stare us down, reprimanding us with a glare that resulted quite ineffective, since she was barely 1,60 meters tall, reaching just beneath my shoulder.
"You would have already gone away if you didn't want to be here. You simply want us to accept your objection so that the fault will be ours if we're discovered." Riddle spoke softly while his eyes tried to pry the secrets from my potions, "Venomous Tentacula?" he inquired, tilting his head towards me.
"Just a little, then some Devil's Snare." I explained, easily recalling the story behind the potion I had brewed to act as lime to string together the boulders: "Vines to bind, you see, and these rocks were deep down in the lake, where light doesn't reach, they'll remember the quiet, the cold, and the dark."
"It will make the walls highly capable of holding wards." my fellow Slytherin idly commented, his fingers twitching as if he was barely restraining himself from getting to work.
"What about the doors?" Minerva inquired, finally dropping her reluctant act.
I simply pointed at the two largest boulders I had found, each measuring roughly around 4x3x2 meters^3: "If we place them at the center of the wall, then you can transfigure a door on the surface, and a lock of some sort... But that's more something that you need to work out with Riddle."
"Why me?" the Heir of Slytherin arched an eyebrow, knowingly setting himself up to be recognized as the best with wards.
"Because of reasons that everybody already knows, Tom." Minerva rolled her eyes, "It seems to me that Rubeus is going to do very little to help."
"Hey, I did the grunt work and the planning." I protested whipping out my wand in order to cast a Lumos that shone forcefully in the room, revealing a cluster of furnishings that I had lifted from the Room of Requirement on every weekend that Riddle spent in Hogsmeade, "And I've set up a bathroom in the next room of the corridor. Bath, toilets, showers, even a sauna... I'm planning to add a colorful leaded window, but I haven't had the time to learn how to make one."
"Why do you know how to set up a toilet?" Riddle blurted out in surprise, eyeing me like I had two heads.
So that when I go gallivanting around the world I don't have to shit in bushes. "Because I was curious about how plumbing and magic interacted." And a bathroom in which I'm sure a basilisk cannot pop out from a toilet sounded like a good idea.
"It's more likely that you've picked the wrong book from the Library, but didn't want to look like a fool by not using it." Minerva outright laughed at me, but her expression was actually interested now. I guess the idea of a personal bath is enough to completely sway her.
"It's nothing glamorous for now, the bath takes 6 hours in order to be filled with water, and I still have to enchant the taps, I'll probably prepare a coating in order to keep the tiles bright, or I'll outright plan out a mosaic with some runes on it." I shook my hands in the direction of my companions.
"How do we avoid being spotted by the prefects or the professors?" Riddle, apparently sold on my plan of stealing for ourselves this unused section of the castle, started to tilt one vial of my potion this and that way, studying how the light of our Lumos seemed to disappear into it.
"Luckily, tonight is Slughorn's turn..."
"Professor Slughorn." Minerva interrupted me, making me frown.
"Sluggy." I stated firmly, just to tweak her nose, "Tonight is Sluggy's turn to be the professor walking around, and the prefects' rounds have washed over this area just after curfew."
"Tomorrow is a Saturday, people will sleep in, nobody will notice if we're not around." Riddle nodded thoughtfully, "We should set up the walls and the notice-me-not before morning, then we can build upon them..."
"No blood." I wiggled my index at him, "Once we're gone from Hogwarts, it would be great if this room could pass to the next brightest wizard or witch in the castle."
"And our heirs." he countered.
"If our 'heirs' are not capable of distinguishing themselves magically, then they don't deserve whatever we manage to leave behind." Minerva returned from her inspection of the closest stack of boulders, "And I feel that I need to point out that your ambition is going out of control. You're not the Founders."
"Only because we haven't founded anything yet." Riddle's charming smile was infectious, and for a second, I imagined how I would go about founding my own school.
Something like a university for magic? No, a whole village in which only the brightest are admitted? I banished the thought from my mind before it could spiral out of control: "Let's start small, shall we? Namely, with the walls."
AN
I don't really know how to fill the years at Hogwarts. I don't want to write down lesson upon lesson. I don't want to be repetitive showing different potions, and I don't want Hagrid to become the next Merlin less than one year into his schooling, so there is a lot of skipping between a relevant interaction and another.
Since I'm not using the 'magical core' route for this fic, I felt that it didn't make sense to have transfigurations fade on their own. Still, as I've hinted in the third chapter, there must be a difference between a real parrot and a transfigured one, otherwise, people would actually simply eat what they conjure or transfigure.
Multiplying food is okay, making it out of nowhere isn't.
So, I'm bringing forth the implications of the first lesson with Dumbledore: Transfiguration only changes the Shape. And all things transfigured are 'lesser' than their equivalent (otherwise people would transfigure gold and fuck the goblins, don't get me started on the fictions in which 'for some magical reason' (= read author's convenience) some shit can't happen).
Even so, talking to you about how Hagrid set up a toilet using magic seems kind of boring. Really, there are pipes in the castle, how difficult can it be to use magic to add to them? I preferred showing off a part of the magic of understanding-symbolism with the MC playing with fire, I found it more meaningful.
As for Tom's canon timeline:
he first starts with the Chamber debacle in 1942-43, then in the first summer in which he's 17, he sets out and uses his uncle to murder his muggle family, obtaining the ring, and Dumbledore obliquely indicates that Tom uses significative murders for his horcruxes, so it's reasonable enough that cutting off his familial ties results in him turning the Resurrection Stone into a Horcrux.
After he graduates I think he immediately tries to get a job as DADA professor, but by then Dumbles is already headmaster, and uses the excuse of Tom's youth to discard him. After that, he works for Borgin, while eventually traveling to Albania for Ravenclaw's diadem, and before going off to fuck up with rituals, he obtains Hufflepuff's Cup and Slytherin's Locket.
He disappears for a number of years before making his return to drop the diadem at Hogwarts, still trying for the DADA's role while cursing the position, effectively crippling Britain's next generation. As for the exact years... well, I'll write them down as we go, but his war canonically starts after 1965 and before 1975. It also depends on what you mean with 'beginning of the war', if you talk ideology, well, Grindelwald recruited massively in the muggle-born population, since they're the ones that literally couldn't live loftily as purebloods, and neither could they be productive elements of muggle society. That exacerbated, even more, the purist movement that Riddle started riding in his later years at Hogwarts.
I'm thinking that Riddle started to subvert Slytherin in his fourth-fifth year, in particular using the Hogsmeade weekends to 'talk idly about the current events' (which is Grindelwald's war), and he keeps his contacts with his future minions while he does what he wants to do with magic, until he's ready to take over.
By then he was already relatively insane because being unable to use the purebloods that follow you in order to grab the whole Ministry means only that you're impatient, or that you pushed too hard on the pissing on 'inferior beings' while you drum up support (understandable, as our favourite psycho doesn't see anything bad in burning the world to the ground if he can rule the ashes).
The next chapter will be in the summer, with Hagrid starting to 'stretch his legs', as it were.
Thoughts, Opinions? I'm trying to focus a lot on the interactions here, trying to not make Minerva or Tom a 2-D cardboard character. Did I manage it?
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