Chapter Text
Lord Voldemort had lived 71 years, 5 months and 2 days when he faced his greatest fear. No Boggart came close to the reality of dying or the pain of being bested by a child once again.
Harry Potter was nothing special. In his final moments as he tumbled towards the eternal darkness he had long dreaded, the boring Harry Potter stole his thoughts. It was hardly poetic but pathetic to be defeated by someone so young and callow.
Lord Voldemort remembered being eight years old when a girl in the orphanage passed from typhoid. He had prayed then to a God that didn’t exist that he was spared this terror.
Please, he’d begged. I don’t want to die.
🦇
“Ah, Tom,” the voice was a thousand simultaneously. An endless pressing cacophony of the void.
Who was it, taunting him? Was it Charon here to ferry him into his damnation? Was it Atropos cutting his thread? Was Hypnos sending him into eternal sleep?
Tell me who you are so I can defeat you.
“You are the most pathetic soul we have ever come across.” It appeared that the voices of death despised him.
The feeling was mutual.
Lord Voldemort wished he could cut his greatest enemy down with his savage tongue, cast a Crucio, or do anything other than wait here to be consumed. But he was bodiless. Voiceless. Powerless.
“Still so afraid,” they laughed. “You should be afraid.”
Please, his pitiful soul begged. I don’t want to die.
“You twisted your soul, ravaged it.” They sneered. “You wasted the life you had running from us.”
I want to keep running forever.
“Pitiable. So very pitiable.” An icy skeletal finger trailed down the barely fused fissures of his soul. “You should thank Harry Potter for this. He has taken pity on you, Tom.”
What?
The voices mimicked him then. They took on the tonality of his weakest most foolish downfall. The youthful and vibrant face of Harry Potter filled his mind as they said, “He’s holding your broken soul in his arms, Tom. It’s bloodied and gruesome but he is not afraid of us. He is our Master.”
Harry Potter has… mastered death. Lord Voldemort’s fury tripled. Harry Potter's crimes against him knew no end: he killed him as a baby. He broke the Stone. He killed Diary. He killed Nagini, Diadem, Locket, Cup, himself, and now he mastered death! All under his nose!
“You don’t have a nose, Tom,” Harry Potter’s poor facsimile chuckled. “You should be dead now. If it were up to us, you would be dead… but our Master pitied you so greatly he wants to give you another chance.”
Lord Voldemort had been reduced from king of all he saw to ruler of none, not even himself, and it was all Harry Potter’s fault!
“Even still, you deny your choices…” They tsked. “You will learn the errors of your ways whether you want to or not. Begone, Tom, and the next time we see you will be the last.”
🦇
The first thing he felt was terror. Blinding animal terror.
Clutching at his throat with tiny hands, Lord Voldemort’s eyes bugged out of his head as he took in his surroundings. He couldn’t breathe. There was a strange translucent material wrapped over his face that wouldn’t budge. He was running out of air.
He was going to die a minute into his second chance.
No. I’m not. The fury overtook him, shoving his terror aside in his mind. Reflexively, he tried to put it behind Occlumency barriers only to realise his mind was completely vulnerable. He had never been as expert at it as Severus - the traitor - but he knew enough to keep Dumbledore’s sticky fingers out of his secrets. Lord Voldemort felt inside himself for the dark licks of magic that had soothed him since infancy.
He felt nothing.
The panic threatened to steal his attention.
Take in your situation. Find a way out.
There was a lock on his throat holding the material in place. He thumbed the dials and noticed they were letters, not numbers. 4 letters. A 4 letter word?
On the floor, written in green chalk:
It can be cracked.
It can be made.
It can be told.
It can be played.
Various green question marks decorated the challenge.
It was surely a riddle. Lord Voldemort hated riddles despite his bastard father’s name. It was partly why he’d never made a great inroads with Ravenclaw House during his time at Hogwarts. It had been far more enjoyable to blackmail any useful Ravenclaws in his twenties than placate them as feckless teenagers.
Think.
It was think or die.
Cracked, a code. But a code can’t be told, can it? This is just great, he thought to himself, dizzy from lack of air. What a grand joke Death has played on me, killing me before-
Wait
He turned the dials with dexterous little fingers.
J - O - K - E
The lock clicked.
Lord Voldemort coughed violently as he tore the material off his face. On hands and knees, he retched, taking deep galing breaths until he was further than a pace from the cliff of death.
The room he was in was cramped and filled with dreadful muggle appliances. He staggered to his feet and was immediately hit with a sense of vertigo. Lord Voldemort was twice as short as he’d been before. He looked down at his hands and saw that they belonged to a child.
A tatty mattress lay on the floor of the room beside an opened gift box. He carefully inspected the asphyxiation device that had almost taken his second life and noted that it had been spring loaded into the box. It was that same ugly green as Harry Potter’s avada eyes.
If Lord Voldemort never saw that colour again, it wouldn’t be soon enough.
The gift box had a tag attached to it.
Happy birthday
Love, dad.
8 10
For all Riddle Senior's many faults, he had never actually tried to murder him. He yanked the tag off the box and shoved it into his pocket. He was wearing muggle clothing: a pair of blue denim jeans like farmers had worn when he’d been growing up. Lord Voldemort strode defiantly over to the window of this den of destitution and met his reflection.
A little boy of eight or nine years old stared back.
🦇
“What happened t’you, Riddle?” As soon as Lord Voldemort escaped onto the lowly muggle streets, he was accosted by one of the pests directly. The lowly vermin took the form of a child and if you weren’t as well versed as Lord Voldemort, you may have been fooled into thinking it was one. “Why’s y’er face all red?”
The muggle boy was a few feet taller than Lord Voldemort but he didn’t let that stop him from addressing it with a sneer. “It is none of your concern.”
The boy burst out into laughter, slapping a hand onto his leg. “What’s that accent, Riddle? That’s hilarious!”
Before Lord Voldemort could show him its place at his feet, a gaggle of muggle children appeared out of seemingly nowhere. In the old world, his magic gave him a sense of where living entities were at any moment. Now he was as blind as the rest of them.
The boy who had been laughing took one look at the street rats and ran away, leaving Lord Voldemort alone at their mercy. They were armed to the teeth with... trash? The dirty children were older than Lord Voldemort’s current host. He turned to leave but the biggest one grabbed him by his collar.
“Shake ‘im down,” the teenage girl said with a heavy American accent.
What’s worse, Lord Voldemort thought, being amongst the mudpeople or the Yanks? They were both exceedingly unpleasant realities.
The children swarmed him, patting him down for whatever they could hock. They turned out his pockets. One of them chanced upon the gift tag that Lord Voldemort had snatched from his deadly birthday present.
“Lookie! It’s Riddle’s birthday!” The youngest of the gang waved the tag around as if it were the golden ticket.
“Ooooo,” the children said. Lord Voldemort had always despised children.
The ringleader - a girl who had barbarically pierced her face with metal accoutrements - swaggered forward. “Give it here, then, Tommy. What did Daddy get you this year?”
I live to suffer. His name in this universe must also be Tom Riddle. Of all the indignities…
“Attempted murder,” he drawled, anxious to escape her iron grip.
“Ooooo,” the mudchildren said again, laughing and shoving each other like the feral rats they were.
“He’s pretending he’s Bri’ish!” Another kid howled with laughter.
“That’s not funny, Riddle.” The girl poked his chest. Lord Voldemort was a sitting duck, still suspended from the tight grip on his collar. “You know the deal. You live in Crime Alley so you’ve gotta pay y’er taxes.”
Crime Alley? Harry Potter would suffer for a thousand years before Lord Voldemort finally ended his miserable existence. For this, there would be no reprieve until his mind, body, and soul was bloodied and broken beyond repair.
He had sent him to Crime Alley.
“I am not lying.”
The girl scoffed, shaking him around a bit like he was a nightstand filled with knuts. “Every year, y’er mysterious Daddy sends you a pretty present and every year, you hand it over like a good little boy.”
Lord Voldemort smiled tensely at the girl. “Look at the redness of my face. I am not lying.”
The muggle savage did not return the polite gesture.
“Right, we gave you a chance, didn’t we, boys?” She looked around at her legion of sycophantic mudchildren who nodded along with grisly excitable grins. “So now you pay the price a different way.” She shoved him into the arms of the second oldest street rat - who tightened his grip on Lord Voldemort’s flimsy upper arms before he could wriggle out - and withdrew a bat-shaped serrated blade.
She grinned. “This year, you pay y’er taxes in blood.”
🦇
The fumes were thick that night over Gotham. Neon toxic colours and ghastly smells not fit for human ingestion caused Dick to wish the Bats wore more than domino masks. It wasn’t fear toxin or anything like that so Dick was too prideful to grab his gas mask out of his belt.
He soldiered on, ignoring his nerves at the unfamiliar patrol route. Crime Alley was Jason’s turf but Little Wing was very reluctantly recovering at Wayne Manor. Dick wasn’t going to give him any excuse to sneak out and patrol. He was his big brother and he had a lot of making up to do, despite the feeling that he'd never truly make up for how things had gone down when Jason was Robin.
Dick was very obviously not Red Hood and the local youths could tell that if the way they threw their trash at him as he grappled by was any indication. Maybe they did that anyway. He ducked behind a post to regroup as the gaggle of thuggish teens got bored and walked elsewhere. He was in the middle of texting Jason his mid-patrol debrief when he heard:
“Oi, posh stuff!”
At first Dick assumed he had been spotted. Nightwing was known to patrol Bludhaven which wasn’t considered posh by most people’s standards but was a veritable Hamptons in Gotham’s eyes.
“Stop squirming and let’m cut ya!”
No way! That’s not happening on my watch!
Dick stealthily made his way toward the voices, taking in the situation as best he could under the lack of street lighting. Back when Dick had first been adopted, he’d suggested to Bruce to improve the Crime Alley infrastructure which had worked for about two days before its feral residents destroyed it again. This part of Gotham ran on its own set of rules untouchable by council, CPS, or Bats. Jason had made great strides here but there was only so much one vigilante could do.
“You will rue this day,” said the small (British?) child. His arms were secured behind his back as an older girl danced over his flesh with a familiarly shaped weapon. Is that a batarang? Dick’s heart dropped at the sight of one of his family’s weapons being used against the innocent. “I will not rest until I have wiped out all of you. Your lineages will fear the name Lord Voldemort.”
How did that make sense? Dick mused. If he wiped them all out, surely they wouldn't have a lineage? He decided not to question it any further.
The kid talked a big talk but Dick knew a frightened child when he saw one. As the smirking older girl turned to her gang to gloat, Dick’s grapple shot out to knock the batarang from her grip.
“Ow! Shit!” She nursed her now-broken wrist.
He pocketed the batarang swiftly and strode forwards. “Let the boy go,” Dick said in his Nightwing voice.
Half the gang instantly sprinted away from him, yelling familiar warnings to the air of “It’s a Bat!”, “Don’t kill us, Red Hood!”, and “Bats are out!”
The barely pubescent boy holding the kid shoved him to the ground and put his hands up. “Sorry, sir.” Dick wanted to sigh. He had let the boy go but definitely should have been gentler about it.
The older girl showed no such reticence, lip curled in disgust at her cowardly crew’s behaviour. “You broke my fucking wrist!”
Dick ignored her and focused on helping the injured victim to his feet. “You’re safe now, son.” The child was silent in his arms, likely suffering from post-traumatic shock. “I’ll get you somewhere safe to clean up your wounds.”
“That’s Nightwing,” the older boy stage-whispered to the girl. “Should we scram, Becca?”
Becca elbowed him in the side to shut up and turned to Dick. “Give me my knife back!”
“You mean the batarang you stole?” He hoped she could feel the disapproval dripping off his tongue. “The one you used to torture a child?”
At that she showed a smidge of remorse. She mumbled something about taxes under her breath.
“You don’t want to meet me out here again,” he warned her solemnly. “The Bats don’t take kindly to child abuse.”
“He’s Riddle!” She complained, the spark back in her eyes. “He’s one of us!”
The boy in his arms - Riddle, apparently - spat at her, “I will never be like you, muggle.”
Becca looked just as perplexed as Dick felt. Maybe it's British slang? “Look,” she scratched at the back of her neck. “I went a little far, maybe, but I think Riddle hit his head. He’s acting funny.”
Dick nodded in acknowledgement before he grappled away into the night, the child clutched protectively to his chest. He would take this citizen to Leslie’s clinic to patch him up and then return him to his loving family. They were likely worried sick.