Patricide Is Like Falling In Love (tom Riddle, Probably)

patricide is like falling in love (tom riddle, probably)

~inspired by a moodboard thing I saw on here where TMR says murder is like falling in love~

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

“You are my son,” Tom Riddle chokes out, his gaze roving helplessly over his dead parents’ bodies as he clutches a crucifix, dangling from a small silver chain. 

His voice is wrecked from the pain.

Weak. 

“I made you. You’re a monster.”

Tom laughs. “No one made me, father. I made me.” He feels his head tilt, his eyes focus. “You’re sixteen years too late to claim me, now. You left me. I came for you. You see?”

“Your mother bewitched me!”

“That may be so,” says Tom, twirling Morfin’s wand and laughing as his father shrinks back. “She’s dead. Died giving birth to me. In Wool’s Orphanage, London. My poor, dead mother stumbled into the orphanage, weak and starving on the coldest night of the year. They couldn’t stop the bleeding or the fever, and she only lived long enough to name me.”

“I’m sorry,” says his father, though Tom doesn’t want his pity. He hates pity. He hates his pathetic, neglectful, sobbing father.

How could two weak people produce him?

“This is wrong, Tom!”

“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Shakespeare.” Tom points his wand at the battered copy of Hamlet on the bookshelf, laughing. It catches on fire.

“What do you want?” He sounds tired.

“Nothing much, father,” says Tom sweetly. His father, who left him, like everyone else. His father will never read him a bedtime story or wipe the sweat away from his face when he is sick or hold him when he is sad. (Not that he needs any of those things — he doesn’t.)

His father is the reason he is broken. Broken from birth.

It doesn’t matter, because Tom is something better than human now. (There is only power.)

“Daddy,” he says, like a small child. He has never said the word before, and it rolls off of his tongue with surprising difficulty — the agile tongue that pronounces Parseltongue, Latin and Arabic spells, and Ogham runic chants with ease. “Why did you leave me?”

“She bewitched me — she lied to me, you don’t understand how violated—“

“I want to see the light leave your eyes,” whispers Tom, in a tone that befits a love confession more than a death threat. “I hate you.”

“I grieve for your soul,” says his father, trembling with fear. “Repent, demon. Show some remorse, for your own sake!”

But Tom doesn’t intend to meet judgment. Tom intends to live forever.

He is burning, burning, he has never burned like this, he is so full of exquisite hatred that aches so good, and all Tom has to do is to let it all go.

“Avada Kedavra.”

Now, Tom is sitting on the floor in the Riddles’ dining room. He is running his fingers through his dead father’s hair, handsome, just like him, admiring his frozen, horrified expression. 

Tom sits in his grandfather’s chair and cradles his dead father, like the Pietà, with two more dead bodies strewn at his feet. His head tilts gracefully down, mimicking the Virgin Mary’s silent compassion and suffering, but feeling none of it. Tom Riddle is gone. He is dead. Tom lays his head on his father’s chest, but there is no more heartbeat, no more breath.

His brown eyes, just like his son’s, blown wide with fear. Lips parted in surrender. 

He leans forward and kisses his father’s forehead sweetly, presses two chaste, cold lips to still-warm skin, like a priest’s blessing. 

The twilight sky is darkening, turning dark violet like ink has spilled on it.

It is beautiful. It is perfect, yet the despair is not gone. His heart still beats with anguish, and Tom Riddle is left more broken than ever and aching for more.

It is like falling in love.

Rochester Police officers handcuff and pepper-spray a 9-year-old girl after call of 'family trouble'

Police officers in Rochester, New York, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl on Wednesday while responding to what a police official called a report of "family trouble" in an incident sharply criticized by city officials.

Laura Ly and Eric Levenson at CNN: 

Police officers in Rochester, New York, handcuffed and pepper-sprayed a 9-year-old girl on Wednesday while responding to what a police official called a report of “family trouble” in an incident sharply criticized by city officials.

Two body camera videos of the incident released by the police department on Sunday show officers restraining the child, putting her in handcuffs and attempting to get her inside the back of a police vehicle as she repeatedly cries and calls for her father.

After the girl fails to follow commands to put her feet inside the car, the officers are then seen pepper-spraying her.

The girl was transported to Rochester General Hospital, where she was later released, according to Rochester Deputy Police Chief Andre Anderson.

The incident has troubling similarities to the death of Daniel Prude, a Black man who died in March after Rochester police pinned him to the ground and placed a hood over his head as he experienced a mental health crisis.

The police body camera footage of that incident, released in August after city officials intentionally delayed its release, led to protests over the police’s treatment of Black people and those experiencing mental health crises. Mayor Lovely Warren later fired the police chief, saying there was a “pervasive problem” in the police department.

At a press conference on Sunday, Interim Rochester Police Chief Cynthia Herriott-Sullivan said that the police’s treatment of the girl was not acceptable.

“I’m not going to stand here and tell you that for a 9-year-old to have to be pepper-sprayed is OK. It’s not,” she said. “I don’t see that as who we are as a department, and we’re going to do the work we have to do to ensure that these kinds of things don’t happen.”

[…]

Police say they were responding to a report of ‘family trouble’

Officers were called to a home on the afternoon of January 29 for a report of “family trouble,” Anderson said Sunday.

The officers were told the girl was “suicidal” and that she had “indicated that she wanted to kill herself and she wanted to kill her mom,” the deputy chief explained.

The girl tried to flee from officers, Anderson said, and video released by police shows an officer chase her and attempt to provide assistance.

Afterward, he said, her mother arrived and the body camera video shows the two arguing. Anderson said officers then decided to remove the child from the situation and transport her to an area hospital.

But the girl refused to get inside a police vehicle, “thrashed around,” and kicked an officer, knocking his body camera around, according to Anderson.

“It didn’t appear as if she was resisting the officers, she was trying not to be restrained to go to the hospital,” Anderson said. “As the officers made numerous attempts to try to get her in the car, an officer sprayed the young child with OC spray to get her in the car.”

The body camera video shows the girl repeatedly crying out for her father, while being physically restrained by officers. She is seen screaming before her head is held down against the snow-covered ground and is handcuffed. A struggle ensues between the girl and officers as they attempt to get her inside the back of a police vehicle.

At one point, one officer says, “You’re acting like a child.”

“I am a child!” the girl responds.

Later in the video, a female officer is seen talking to the girl, eventually saying, “This is your last chance, otherwise pepper spray’s going in your eyeballs.” About a minute later, another officer can be heard saying, “Just spray her at this point.” The female officer is seen shaking a can that appears to be pepper spray and the child continues to scream.

This is utter insanity. An officer pepper-spraying a Black 9 year old girl is just plain abuse.

Chapter One: The Tragedy of Tom Riddle

June, 1943

The cry of the jackal was high and mournful as it regarded the lone boy standing in the courtyard. Smoke trailed from the fingers of his left hand.

Tom lifted the lit cigarette to his mouth, closed his eyes, and winced. The sound was penetrating. He exhaled bitter smoke, looking around surreptitiously. The last thing he needed was Mulciber or Avery, or worse yet, a professor, coming around the corner.

He did not relish the thought of having to explain a nicotine addiction at this present moment (or any moment at all), because that would require explaining the Blitz, too, and Merlin knows these morons were oblivious to the world war that was currently going on. Pureblood society wouldn’t stoop to concerning itself with Muggle politics even if the bombs were exploding over the heads of the entire Sacred Twenty-Eight.

On second thought, he’d quite like to see a bomb exploding over the idiots’ heads.

At any rate, he had to be careful. Especially considering what he was intending to do later today. He already had an inordinate amount of detentions with Dumbledore — Professor of Transfiguration and the only person Tom considered a serious threat to his plans — as it were, and unfortunately only a finite amount of patience. 

Undoubtedly, this week’s session would involve advice on how to make friends, and questions as to why he liked to spend so much time alone.

He had to tutor that ditzy Gryffindor girl again today after he finished that extra assignment for Slughorn, and then he had patrol duty tonight with that irritating Ravenclaw git he’d been paired with — oh, fuck it all.

That and the essay for Merrythought — how could he have forgotten? He had an eighty-inch final paper due in Defense Against the Dark Arts on Friday, and he hadn’t even started it yet.

Even assuming he got through this behemoth of a week and everything went smoothly with the Horcrux, there were still his O.W.L. exams to worry about...

Continue reading at FFN | AO3!

Chapter Two: The Murder of Vernon Dursley

Ruby hadn't exactly been planning to kill Vernon, but she couldn't deny that the thought of watching him die in some horrible, painful way lulled her to sleep when Harry's screams were haunting her. And the way to make her dream come true was in the baggy pockets of Dudley's hand-me-downs.

Monkshood was such an Aunt Petunia thing to grow. It was a tall, erect plant with sharp green leaves and ominous violet blooms that reminded Ruby of a knight's helmet. Apparently people used to believe that it cured werewolves; that's how it got its other name, wolfsbane.

A few days ago, when she and Harry had been sent out to weed the rosebushes, Ruby had stuck handfuls of the plant inside her pockets, taking care to avoid being stung by the fat bumblebees drinking from the stamens.

Aunt Petunia never handled the stuff directly. She complained that it made her hands tingle. Ruby's own hands had been numb for a while after handling the plant, and she'd had the worst headache imaginable. She could only imagine how potent the effects of eating it must be.

Ruby wrapped her hands in tissue paper, then clumsily cut the plant: stem, roots, and flowers. She swept it into the pot amongst the tea leaves. Her hands felt slightly numb.

She felt strangely calm and self-possessed as she poured boiling water into the teapot, and washed her hands in the sink. Her fingers only tingled slightly.

Her head felt empty. Everything felt cold and still, as if time had frozen.

Killing Vernon Dursley was the only thing on her mind.

Ruby waited for the tea to steep. The water slowly bloomed a deep red, but the monkshood was still noticeably purple. Luckily, Vernon never paid attention to detail.

When she came back into the living room with the tea, sugar and biscuits, Harry was curled up in a silent ball in the corner.

"Freak," spat Vernon. Ruby set the tea down in front of him. She stared serenely into his weak eyes for a second before remembering to look down. His moustache wobbled.

I hope I put enough wolfsbane in the tea to kill him.

I hope it's painful.

Murder is wrong.

Then why do I feel so calm?

Killing shouldn't make you feel calm.

Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

Year One: Pawns, Rooks, and Queens

Tom Riddle is awake inside the diary.

Lily and James Potter had another child.

Two mistakes, dire consequences. To begin with, Vernon Dursley is dead.

On the bright side, Harry Potter is a wizard. On the not-so-bright side, the man who murdered his parents is after him, and there are strange shadows following him around.

On the bright side, no one found out that Ruby Potter killed Vernon Dursley. On the not-so-bright side, the Slytherins are doing their best to make her life miserable.

On the bright side, Tom Riddle is a gifted sorcerer with a promising future in magical politics. On the not-so-bright side, purebloods are bigots, and World War II has just begun.

Year One officially begins at Chapter Six. Read from the beginning at FFN | AO3!

reblog and make a wish! this was removed from tumbrl due to “violating one or more of Tumblr’s Community Guidelines”, but since my wish came true the first time, I’m putting it back. :)