2^0 = 1: Voldemort.

2^1 = 2: Slytherin's Heir.

2^2 = 4: Once Tom Marvolo Riddle.

2^3 = 8: He fell down again. Once upon a time.

2^4 = 16: Once then now and Ginny Weasley turns to him and asks why, ashes in her hair.

2^5 = 32: Floating. Time. Trying to remember. Haven’t happened yet. (What is?) Then. Smokestone, ashen skies, orphanage, sirens. Noise. Boys, beatings, dust in mouth, unrelenting hunger. Sweat. Bruises. Pricklyscalding pain. A voice, “It’s broken.”

2^6 = 64: “You wanted to see me, sir?” Seething.

“Thomas. Come in.”

Serious eyes and he’s the only one Tom’s never been able to fool. Serious eyes and suddenly they lose their focus.

“Your time will pass,” he says, distant, and Tom grits his teeth, hate barely concealed beneath straightened tie and ironed shirt, Head Boy badge. “The day will come and they will destroy you.”

2^7 = 128: There were so many men. Black cloaks and masks and he couldn’t see any of their faces. They knelt at his feet, kissed the hem of his dirty robes as he stared. “My Lord.” He turned. Who had spoken?

This wasn’t right; men had never knelt at his feet; he had always been the one kneeling as they screamed at his incompetence, his speed. Fingers fumbled as he ducked their blows and still he wasn’t any faster.

“My Lord.”

He started; they stepped back, all except one. His voice was calm, almost soothing. Again. “My Lord, is something the matter?”

One thing was the same. These men were still faceless, ghosts in the dark, hiding their identities from either shame or fear or-

It couldn’t be anything else.

2^8 = 256: He first heard it in a dream. “Harry Potter,” and he knew he would remember that name forever, even though at that place and time he had no idea who Harry Potter was. It disturbed him, even at nine, and he woke up sweat-soaked and mind reeling with subconscious images, streets overflowing with blood and skies of fire. Harry Potter. He thought then it must be an evil name, the name of the man who caused all this destruction. Harry Potter he thought and then, the name had appeared on his arm, cuts so deep he nearly passed out from the pain.

Hogwarts and then he forgot all about Harry Potter, was more interested in magic and all the potential, manifestation of all the power he had ever dreamed of – he could do so much with this.

(Hogwarts and skinnybeautiful little girl, “Tom I’ve never told this to anyone but I’m in love with Harry Potter; they all know anyway, all think it’s some schoolgirl crush but it’s not; this is the real thing”; eleven-year-old and her confessions and he sucked her dry)

Hogwarts and he didn’t dream again until seventh year, snake-eyed man lost in hysterical laughter as a skinny black-haired boy faced him down. “Avada Kedavra,” said the man, said the boy, flash of green light and Tom was all alone on the field, chill up his spine as he looked down at the endless dead.

Chill but not without some pleasure, not without a sense of euphoria in the back of his head.

2^9 = 512: The darkness was overwhelming; black bile through his veins and he had never felt better. Never so harmonized with everything around him. “Crucio,” he said and the spider twitched; twitched, twitched, and then fell still. He closed his fingers around its legs and watched it dangle lifelessly. Child’s play. Nothing compared to the real thing.

He remembered the prophecy (no it can’t be I won’t let it be anything to stop them from stopping me, anything so help me now) and then forgot it again; it was there and then it wasn’t; so much was slipping from his mind these days. So much he couldn’t remember; yet so much was there, spells and curses he had never known. A new capacity for pain. A new indifference to humankind. A new-

(Why, she asked and he didn’t know; couldn’t bear the tears in her voice and all the things his sixteen-year-old self didn’t know so he turned away instead)

Everything, almost.

(“You can’t destroy me!” and the battlefield was dyed scarlet with blood; maniacal laughter rippled through air. “You’re wasting your time, little boy; your mother’s protection will serve you no longer!”

Grit and blood and dirt and wild green eyes, bright and vivid with pain. “I won’t let you go,” said Harry and in his eyes TomVoldemort saw the pain of his younger self, heard the determination that had taken him through eleven years at the orphanage unharmed.)

Seven years in this place, and he had learned so much. People were always so afraid of isolation; they didn’t understand what a gift it was. Science told them it led to insanity and so they believed but what they didn’t understand was that you have to be crazy before you can understand genius, have to fall before you can go any higher.

(The Basilisk called to him. He didn’t understand how no one could have found this place before when it was so easy; the very stones of its foundation called to something in his blood. He knew how to speak the words before he had ever learned what the language was called; talked to snakes and attributed it to his imagination because in that “logical” Muggle world, when you talked to animals they didn’t talk back.)

Time through was-

He was falling through time again, like he had that first time when Billy Tudor had “accidentally” pushed him down the stairs and he hit his head; hovered in a coma for two months before coming out to learn that they wouldn’t pay his medical bills, would have left him to die had someone not interceded. It was strange then. He saw things, things he couldn’t possibly have seen – his birth and death and the building of Hogwarts, centuries of war and power struggles made useless and he would be the one to finally succeed-

Now; it had to be now, before things got any hazier.

You have to destroy yourself before you can be reborn, like the phoenix rising from ash. Tom cut in deep and waited for the blood to flow.

End.