June Week

III: Monster In Training

At the beginning of his fifth year at Hogwarts, Tom Riddle learned how to make Lethe potion, and a world of possibilities opened up to him.

Lethe was really quite amazing, like a liquid form of the Obliviate charm, but easier to use. When you used Obliviate, you had to worry about replacing the memory you'd removed with another one. It was tricky, and didn't always work like you intended it to. With Lethe, you just administered a few drops to your intended target. The person was conscious while the potion was active, but weakened and disoriented. When the potion wore off, all memory of what had happened since it began to work had disappeared.

Armed with this useful tool, Tom and some of his more intimate friends became the secret terrors of Hogsmeade, the local village, for several months. Every time they were given permission to go to Hogsmeade on a Saturday, they chose a girl - sometimes an attractive one, but sometimes just an available one - and offered to buy her a drink. A few Lethe-laced sips later, their new acquaintance would be ready to follow anywhere they led. They would take her to a private place, where she would be completely at their disposal for an hour or so. Then they would turn her loose to find her own way home.

It was a delightful pastime for them, though not for the girls, and as such, it was too good to last. As rumors about their activities spread around the village, parents started warning their daughters to beware of men and boys, and girls became very suspicious of anyone who even approached to talk. By the time the winter term ended, they were forced to abandon their sport or risk being caught.

Tom had never thought of the Hogsmeade excursions as anything more than entertaining diversions, but when they stopped, he found he missed them. He had enjoyed the physical pleasure, of course, but more than that, he had liked the sense of power, the knowledge that he could exercise such complete control over another person. He wanted to recapture that feeling if he could.

Until then, he had never quite dared to use Lethe with the girls he knew at Hogwarts. He did, however, know just who he'd like to try it on: Minerva McGonagall, who was one of the Gryffindor prefects, two years ahead of him and a dreadful annoyance. She was clever, and pretty, and ever so high-minded and serious about her responsibilities; just the sort of person who needed to be taken down a notch for her own good. She was also an orphan, as Tom was, but she'd known her parents, as he never had. And unlike him, she had someone who cared for her - Professor Dumbledore, the Transfiguration master. Dumbledore was Minerva's legal guardian, though she didn't live with him during the holidays. You could tell he was as proud of her as could be - it was all over his face every time he looked at her - and he petted and spoiled her enough to make anyone sick, outside the classroom at least. According to the seventh-year Slytherins, he was careful to treat her like everyone else during lessons.

No one had ever taken such pleasure in Tom's accomplishments. He earned House points and awards galore, and his teachers thought him very brave for striving to overcome the unfortunate circumstances of his early life, but their approval was professional and detached. There was none of the personal connection he craved.

Minerva had that from Dumbledore in spades. Tom hated seeing them together, her dark head tilted attentively to listen to her mentor's supposed words of wisdom, his hand resting on her back or shoulder in gentle affection. What had she done to merit that sort of closeness? What made her any more deserving than Tom himself?

Yes, she definitely needed to be shaken out of her smug self-confidence - and he knew just how to do it. Using the Lethe again would be risky, but he thought he could manage if he was careful.

Of course, the main source of his animosity toward Minerva - her relationship with Dumbledore - made his plans much more problematic. The old man already disliked him, and if he discovered that Tom had laid so much as a finger on his princess, he would ruin him for sure. So Tom watched, and waited, and carried on with his other covert activities. Humbling one girl, however insufferable she might be, was only secondary to his main ambition.

He saw Minerva often throughout that year, as their prefect duties constantly threw them together, but no matter how he tried, he could find no way to get hold of her without endangering himself. But then, just when he began to think she was going to leave school and slip out of his reach forever, the Chamber of Secrets crisis erupted, and in his effort to save his own hide, he inadvertently became a hero. Now people were on his side; now they thought well of him. Far too well to believe he would do anything unpleasant.

This was his opportunity, and he seized it. Slipping a little Lethe into Minerva's cup at the prefects' dinner was easy. He'd had plenty of practice at it earlier in the year. After that, he had to leave things up to chance somewhat - he had a spell he could use to get her back to her dormitory unobserved later, but he couldn't cast it in front of witnesses. Nor could he risk being seen alone with her.

I can do this, he told himself, watching the mellow glow of candlelight on the cup as she lifted it, studying the long line of her neck as she tipped her head back and drank. It will all go right.

And it did go right; as smoothly as if he'd planned it step by step; as easily if he'd finally captured the luck that had eluded him at his birth. Minerva stayed talking to a few people after dinner until the other Gryffindors had already gone back to their tower and the potion had begun to do its work. Then it was simply a matter of catching up to her as she walked away and whisking her off into a disused room he'd selected beforehand.

He'd shared the Hogsmeade girls with his friends, but this was different. Minerva was a special treat for him alone. He knew he'd have only a short time with her, and was determined to make the most of it. And make the most of it he did. The experience was the most exciting he'd ever had, both because of who she was and because they were inside Hogwarts, bastion of rules and regulations, where such things were definitely not allowed. Her fright and confusion added an extra layer of enjoyment for him - not a trace of the prim, arrogantly self-confident Minerva he knew was in sight to spoil the moment.

She turned out to be a virgin, which didn't surprise him. Girls like her always were. He expected she'd been saving herself for her true love, or some such nonsense. Or perhaps she was nursing an unrequited passion for Dumbledore. Either way, he put an end to that right off. It was almost a pity she wouldn't remember any of it; he'd really been far kinder to her than he could have been, considering the circumstances. He suspected he'd given her too much of the potion for her health, though - people weren't meant to lose consciousness completely from it. Oh well, there was nothing he could do about that now.

After their little tryst was over and he'd sent her reeling on her way, he went back to his own dormitory and stretched out on his bed, lazily replaying the evening in his mind and trying to decide which part had been the best. He finally concluded that it had been having the opportunity to get his hands into that lovely hair of hers. He'd been looking at it for years and wondering if it felt as fine and silky as it looked. Now he knew it did. In fact, it had been so pleasant to the touch that he'd taken a bit for himself.

He pulled his souvenir out of his pocket - a long lock he'd snipped from underneath the main mass, where she'd never notice it was missing - and stroked it contemplatively with one finger. If he took this back to the orphanage with him for the summer, he thought, it would almost be as if she were there too, as if she had to share part of his suffering. It would serve her right.

From his other pocket, he took the red tartan ribbon he'd got off her in the library earlier in the week. He coiled the lock of hair neatly and tied it with the ribbon for safekeeping. Then he tucked it under his pillow, rolled over, and fell into a deep, untroubled sleep.