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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.