Transcendence

The little things about being alive (or close enough) pleased Tom the most. He chose not to cast an Impervius Charm on himself as a light rain began to fall, because he enjoyed the splatter of cool raindrops against his skin. The sound of his shoes against the paving stones leading up to the nondescript two-story house also sent a ripple of pleasure through his dark mind. Memories in diaries couldn't click-clack against anything, or make any other noise at all for that matter.

In the end it turned out that it was probably a good choice not to repel the water from his body, because he could see in Helen Higgs's mind as the woman peered through her peephole that the wet hair sticking to his forehead made him look even younger and less threatening than usual. She opened the door without much more thought than that, and Tom smiled shyly to perfect his vulnerable look.

"Good evening, madam. Is Mr. Albert Higgs home? I've a delivery for his hands only."

Whether it was simply a common request or Tom just looked pathetic enough not to qualify as a danger, he wasn't quite sure, but Mrs. Higgs smiled graciously. "Oh, yes. You just come inside out of the rain, dear, and I'll fetch Mr. Higgs for you."

She stood to the side, gesturing into her front hall with a hand that appeared to be covered in flour. Tom stepped inside with a shy smile.

The Higgs home seemed rather typically middle-class to Tom's eyes, not that he had much experience in homes outside of the orphanage, Malfoy Manor, and the Slytherin dormitory, none of which were middle-class in the least. There was a coat rack and an umbrella stand crowding into one corner of the cheery yellow hallway, and several wizarding pictures of the Higgs family were displayed on the walls. He could see a sitting room with an uncomfortable looking sofa off to his left, and straight ahead he could just see into what appeared to be a small dining room stuffed with a large table.

For a man who had significant political clout and many influential friends, Bertie Higgs's home was completely unremarkable.

He heard Higgs stepping on a creaky floorboard before the man appeared around a corner at the far end of the hall. He appeared to be of average height and weight, with average features and plain brown hair. He was rather as nondescript as his home.

Tom wondered briefly if the appearance of utter normalcy was somehow beneficial in climbing the political ladder. Well, for other people anyway. Tom would just take over by manipulation and sheer force, because he was incapable of appearing normal for very long.

"Yes, what can I do for you?" asked Higgs.

He was using that strictly polite tone most people reserved for servers and shop girls and other undesirable but unavoidable parts of life. Tom had grown used to that tone being directed at him when he'd been nothing more than a skinny orphan dressed in threadbare clothes.

He pushed his damp hair out of his face and stared at his victim with unmistakable red eyes. "Oh, you can do a great many things for me, Bertie Higgs."

Higgs let out an indistinct exclamation of shock and reached for his wand, but Tom's silent, wandless spell upended him and sent him flying ass over head into the wall behind him. Tom wouldn't have viewed the man as any sort of real threat even if he hadn't been a Horcrux and virtually indestructible, so he felt no compunction about turning his back on Higgs in order to open the front door. He couldn't see anything, but he could hear his companions' thoughts quite clearly, one filled with glee and the other with impatience.

He stared coolly at the empty space. "Come in."

Wet footsteps appeared on the hardwood floor moments before the door swung shut again and Mulciber's head appeared floating in thin air, covered in his white Death Eater mask.

"Thank you, My Lord," he said, eyeing the groaning man sprawled against the far wall with a kind of sick pleasure.

Tom watched indifferently as he began to untangle himself from the Invisibility Cloak.

"Next time remember to charm the bottom of your shoes as well," he admonished, gesturing to the wet shoeprints leading from the door to where Mulciber was standing. Tom couldn't see his reaction through the mask, so he quickly lost interest and turned sharply to look at Lucius Malfoy, who was hanging his own Invisibility Cloak neatly on the coat rack as if he planned to stay for tea. "Bring the woman."

Malfoy paused almost imperceptibly; probably even Tom wouldn't have noticed it if he hadn't been watching so closely and if he hadn't been able to read in Malfoy's mind that he didn't appreciate being relegated to such a menial task. But it was over nearly before it had begun, and Lucius turned to make his way down the hallway.

"Don't use magic on anything except the woman," Tom reminded him before he disappeared through the narrow doorway leading in the direction Mrs. Higgs had disappeared. "Any magic you use on the house or an object will leave a trace."

Some sort of fire spell streaked towards Tom suddenly, and his attention turned to Bertie as quickly as a striking snake. Mulciber cried out a too-late warning from behind him, but Tom didn't bother to step out of the way. The spell burned through his robes and scorched his skin, but with barely a flick of Tom's hand it dissipated. He could feel his own anger mixing with the emotions of the others in the room: Higgs's terror and Mulciber's anxious confusion.

Tom inhaled a deep breath that he didn't need and then released it, using the expansion of his lungs and the relief of a long exhalation to calm his mind and refocus solely on his objective.

"Ah, Bertie, this isn't the time for foolish bravery."

He watched without any flicker of an expression on his face as Higgs gaped in horror at his healing skin. He gave his body a cursory glance as he reached out to catch Higgs's wand and deposited it into his outer pocket. He could sense Mulciber's surprise and confusion but didn't turn around to acknowledge him.

"In fact, you could have avoided all of this if you hadn't decided to be brave in the first place."

The poor man seemed utterly unable to form either a coherent thought or a coherent sentence. "You--I--I didn't think--"

"That is very clear, Bertie," interrupted Tom. "What sort of person would respond to my offer by allowing his family's reputation to be ruined and his father to be tossed into Azkaban? I heard that he's already died in prison, Bertie. Not surprising at his age, I suppose."

"P--p--p--please..."

"Were you a Gryffindor, Bertie?" Tom went on, his tone light and conversational. "I hate Gryffindors. What they call bravery, I call stupidity."

Higgs's eyes were glued to where Tom was reverently tracing the contours of Potter's wand with his long fingers. "I--I--I didn't kn--know it was y--y--you."

"It's too late for excuses, Bertie. I've already roused myself and made the trip, you see."

Lucius appeared then with Mrs. Higgs held at wand point in front of him. Her entire front was covered with flour now, and judging from the white-speckled state of Lucius's robes it seemed like she had put up something of a fight. Tom could sense Mulciber's amusement at Lucius's appearance, but to the veteran Death Eater's credit, he didn't make a single sound.

"Bring her to me," Tom said, his voice now calm but as cold and hard as ice.

He reveled in the way her eyes rolled wildly in their sockets, so dilated with adrenaline that he could barely see the blue of her irises. Malfoy shoved her to her knees at Tom's feet, just far enough out of reach that she couldn't actually touch him. This is what he'd been missing: a human reduced to the abject, mindless terror of a caged animal. His mind briefly flashed to an image of another woman--a Muggle woman, slightly older than Helen Higgs but better looking, staring up at him with wild eyes as she begged the grandson she'd never known to forgive the sins of her family--but Mrs. Higgs's quite different voice brought him back to the present.

"Please, whatever you want!" she pleaded. Her voice was much stronger than her husband's, although her thoughts weren't any more coherent. "Whatever you want! Please!"

Tom tilted his head in a way that he could see in her thoughts made him strongly resemble a cobra staring down an enemy. He let his blood-red eyes bore into her. "I was always going to take what I want."

"Please! Please!"

Tom Silenced her with a flick of his wrist, and she collapsed in despair, falling back against Lucius's legs. He stepped back and briskly shook out his robes as if he could remove her touch that way. Tom couldn't see his expression through the ornate mask he was wearing, but he assumed that Malfoy was scowling. Mrs. Higgs toppled the rest of the way onto the hardwood floor, but she didn't seem to notice.

"Now, Bertie, do you see what your actions are costing your wife?" demanded Tom, fighting to keep his tone the same despite his amusement at Lucius's expense.

Higgs shifted as if to stand, although what he thought he could do to protect his wife against two Death Eaters and the Dark Lord himself, Tom couldn't have said.

Tom gestured to Mulciber, who was still standing behind him. "Hold him. Make sure he watches."

Mulciber crossed the length of the hallway before Higgs managed to stand, but the man still tried to throw his weight against Mulciber in some sort of feeble tackle. It was all he had left, Tom supposed, since he didn't have a wand. Richard's mind flickered with delight as he brought his heavy hand down hard on Higg's shoulder, slamming him back into the wall with a sickening crunch. Higgs moaned in pain both at the impact and at Mulciber's further manhandling. He was soon facing Tom and his wife with one of Mulciber's hands wrapped tightly around his throat and a wand pointed at his eyes so he couldn't close them or direct his gaze away.

"At first I just wanted your cooperation on the simple matter of not testifying on Dumbledore's behalf. It is such a simple thing, Bertie, that I cannot understand your reaction," Tom explained as soon as he was happy with Higgs's position. "I could just kill you for your lack of cooperation and have you replaced, but I think I might like having a servant so close to Scrimgeour. First, though, we must deal with your punishment for daring to raise your wand against Lord Voldemort."

Tom brought up his own wand to force Mrs. Higgs to her knees in front of him. She had tears and snot streaming down her face in equal measure, mixing with the flour and creating a disgusting mess. Tom was certain that Lucius would burn his robes later.

Higgs's voice was choked and strained due to Mulciber's grip on his throat, but he managed to gasp out, "Please..."

"Which is your wand hand, Bertie?" continued Tom as if he hadn't heard. "It was the right hand, wasn't it, that you raised against me?"

Helen Higgs's right arm extended out towards Tom, palm up, and the long sleeve of her blouse magically rolled up to expose a lightly freckled forearm. She stared up at him with bulging, fear-filled eyes and struggled to pull away. Of course, all of her efforts were futile in the face of Tom's overwhelming magic.

"No! NO!" screamed Bertie, his voice escalating with every successive shriek. "NONONONO!"

Tom Silenced him before he'd even fully turned to look at the man.

"Since you have proven that you care nothing for yourself or your own reputation, I will have to punish dear Helen instead. You do care about your wife, don't you?"

Higgs was screaming without making a sound and thrashing in Mulciber's grip, until the Death Eater had to use magic to subdue him much like Tom had done to the woman. Then Higgs could only sit silent and immobile as his wide, panicked eyes were forced to fixate on the grisly spectacle at the other end of his front hallway.

Tom smiled cruelly. "Ah, I see that you do care about her."

He unsilenced Mrs. Higgs before he began, because he wanted her husband to get the complete experience of her being tortured for his mistakes. She began shrieking immediately, not producing any discernible words but only long, frightened screams that were muffled by the fact that she couldn't open her mouth any wider than the half-formed word on which Tom had frozen her in place.

Still, somehow she managed to scream even louder when Tom made the first cut on her arm.

He could have just lopped the whole thing off in one go, of course, but he wanted to take the process slowly so that her pain would be as great as possible and the sights and sounds would have their greatest effect on her husband. He concentrated on the feeling of Dark magic surging through his body and out his fingertips into his wand, and on the now hoarse screams of Helen Higgs, as he separated her forearm from her body with surgical precision.

Finally, just when his victim's voice was beginning to give out and Tom was sure that she would have collapsed from shock and blood loss had she not been held upright by his magic, he cast the final curse and watched as her forearm fell to the floor between them with a horrid plop of finality.

Tom turned to look at Malfoy, who had long since moved further away, with an unforgiving expression. "Make sure that she doesn't bleed out."

He could sense Lucius's utmost reluctance to get anywhere near such a mess, but the man stepped forward immediately and produced his wand from somewhere within his voluminous robes. It wasn't his snakehead cane, of course, because that would have been immediately identifiable, but rather it was his boyhood wand.

Tom only watched for a few moments as Malfoy examined the stump that started several inches below Mrs. Higg's right elbow before his focus turned instead to Mr. Higgs, who was still frozen in place by Mulciber's magic.

He traversed the hallway at a deliberately leisurely pace, allowing Higgs to watch him coming. Finally, when he was close enough to see the whites of the man's bloodshot eyes, he demanded in a glacial tone, "His arm."

Mulciber didn't react for a handful of seconds, but soon enough he realized what Tom meant and manipulated his spell so that Higgs's right arm was extended in the same way his wife's had been before Tom had separated it from her body. Higgs's eyes widened desperately, but he couldn't otherwise move or make a sound.

"Now, now, Bertie, there's no need to fear," reassured Tom, although nobody could have actually been reassured by his voice. "I told you that your wife was taking the punishment in your stead. That's all done now, you see, so we can move past such unpleasantness."

Higgs's mind was such a jumble of horror, disgust, and guilt that Tom could barely make it all out, but nonetheless he could clearly feel the shocked anger produced by that comment. He very nearly laughed under the combined weight of his own and Mulciber's amusement.

"I could place you under the Imperius Curse, but I judge the risk too great since your best friend is the Head of the Auror Office. You can do my bidding without being placed under the curse, can't you, Bertie?"

Higgs couldn't move or speak, but his expressive eyes attempted to convey his willingness to cooperate now that he was faced with Lord Voldemort himself.

"Crucio," Tom said calmly, as if he were saying hello. He held it for only a few seconds before releasing it, and when he next spoke his voice was full of mocking anger. "Of course you can't! I cut off your wife's arm, for Merlin's sake! You mustn't lie to me, Bertie, because I can see everything in your mind, and you only make me have to punish you."

Bertie stared up at him, silent and frozen.

Tom pressed Potter's wand harshly into the tanned flesh of the man's forearm. "Fortunately, I know how to control you without resorting to the Imperius Curse."

Bertie would have screamed, Tom was sure, if he'd been able. He had been sure to push every bit of malevolence and Darkness into the magic that he could, so he knew that it was at least as painful as the Cruciatus Curse. The man would have screamed even without the pain, if his horror-filled eyes were any indication of his reaction as he watched the terrible skull appear on his once-pristine skin, quickly followed by the miniature likeness of the basilisk slithering in and around it.

"My Death Eaters are quite upset that I gave you such an honor, Bertie. But they understand your purpose. What would Auror Scrimgeour say, I wonder, if he saw his best friend Bertie Higgs with a Dark Mark on his arm?"

It was not an actual Dark Mark, of course, because Tom was not Voldemort and could not reproduce the Dark Mark. However, it was the very image of one except tied to Tom instead of to his other self.

Tom let his lips stretch into a half-amused grin over his white teeth as he read Bertie's thoughts. The man was still the consummate Gryffindor even after the horrors he'd endured.

"Oh, Bertie, did you really think that I would leave your memory perfectly intact for you to show your friend? You and dear Helen will remember every second of tonight, but anyone else who looks will see only what I want them to see. Namely, you coming to me willingly, and you inflicting that injury on your wife with your own hands when she refused to do the same."

He motioned for Mulciber to release the man, and Higgs promptly sank to the floor in defeat and misery.

"Good. I can see that we understand one another. You will carry out my orders without question. If you make a mistake, then your wife will be punished on your behalf. If you kill yourself or allow yourself to be captured, then I'm sure I have at least one Death Eater who would love to torture and rape her every day of the rest of her life. If she should die before I'm satisfied, then your grandchildren will take her place. They're lovely children, from what I can see in your family portraits."

"Y--you wouldn't--"

"I certainly would, and then I will have them turned into werewolves before returning them to you," interrupted Tom matter-of-factly.

He knew that he had ensured Bertie Higgs's cooperation long before he had brought the children into it, but the utter adoration rolling off of Mulciber in waves was well worth the addition. Besides, one could never make too many threats.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Several weeks later, the preparations for Malfoy's lawsuit were well underway and going as well as could be expected. The hippogriff was scheduled to be executed in two weeks' time; apparently nobody had told Hagrid that he could file an appeal, so there wasn't anything clogging up the works on that front. Furthermore, there had turned out not to be any need for Lucius to investigate Draco's claims about Hagrid's devolving classes, because one of the other governors had already been told about it by her granddaughter, a sixth-year Ravenclaw. That was the best outcome for Tom's plans, of course, because the less Lucius and Mulciber were directly involved in things, the fewer suspicions could arise.

Malfoy's barrister was happily surprised when he received the list of potential witnesses from Dumbledore's barrister and saw how incredibly short it was. He was a former Voldemort-sympathizer who had not quite attained the honor of the Dark Mark before Voldemort's fall, and he had worked closely with the Malfoys for several decades, so he was sure that Lucius had some nefarious hand in the situation but was wise enough to pretend otherwise.

Tom could not think of the situation with Dumbledore's witnesses without thinking of Mrs. Higgs's screams, the satisfying squelch of her severed arm as it landed in the pool of her blood, and Mr. Higgs's stricken, bloodshot eyes. And of the various other forays he'd made into the world of blackmail and intimidation in the name of removing Dumbledore from power, none of which had been anywhere near as satisfying as the Higgs incident.

Now, with the civil trial scheduled for less than a month away, the barrister had arranged for Draco to come home for a weekend so that he and Dumbledore's lawyer could take the boy's testimony. Given the circumstances and the fact that Lucius presented his son as a traumatized minor, it was deemed unnecessary for Draco to actually miss class to attend the trial.

Tom was only happy that Draco would finally deliver the package he'd been waiting for months to get his hands on. In fact, he was barely able to contain himself while Lucius and Narcissa greeted their son and held him in the parlor talking after his arrival. Contain himself he had, though, because he hadn't wanted the Malfoys to have any idea exactly what he had enlisted Draco to do.

Honestly, with the way Narcissa carried on, one would think that Draco had been off at war for several years instead of at school for a few weeks. The more Tom saw of how actual parents behaved, the happier he became that he hadn't had any parents after all.

Finally, later that night after everybody else had gone to bed, he heard Draco's distinctive footfalls against the stone floors outside the library door. He nearly leapt from his chair and rushed the boy, but he managed to stay seated and make a passable attempt at nonchalance as Draco crossed the room towards him. He had a plain wooden box in his hands, which looked far too ordinary for what Tom knew it contained.

Draco dropped to his knees beside Tom's long, outstretched legs. "Everything went according to plan, My Lord."

Tom all but snatched the box out of his little follower's hands and threw open the lid so violently that he was sure he had broken the hinge. There, nestled in a dark green cushion that had clearly been transfigured out of one of Draco's silk shirts, lay Ravenclaw's diadem. The intricate curves of the gold pieces and the sheen of the sapphires were just as Tom had always imagined they would be when he had looked at the painting of Rowena Ravenclaw that hung at Hogwarts. The Dark magic and evil energy that were absolutely leaking out of every surface of it were not exactly as he had imagined, but Tom had grown quite used to it by now from handling so many Horcruxes.

He wondered vaguely if he had felt like that to others when he was in the diary, or if he still felt like that now. Perhaps this was the aura he exuded when he lost control of his anger and his magic, such as when he had realized that the locket had been stolen?

Draco shifted beside him, his hand brushing softly against the outside of Tom's thigh as the boy withdrew his now-empty arms, and Tom was pulled out of his musings.

"You didn't try it on, Draco?"

"No, I--!" Draco began, but then he seemed to remember all at once that one simply did not lie to the Dark Lord, and he bit his lip and looked down at his own lap. "I mean, I did think about it. About what it would be like, I mean. But you said not to, so I didn't really do it."

Tom inhaled sharply as he ran his finger along one sharp edge of the gold, and the Dark magic curled around the digit and violently lashed out against him. So this was Horcrux was not anywhere near as friendly as the ring, then.

"Yes, I know that you didn't wear it," he finally replied after what must have seemed like forever to Draco. "If you had, you'd be cursed. Probably dead."

Draco's head shot up and his surprised eyes met Tom's. "You didn't tell me that part!"

Tom narrowed his eyes, which was more than enough to reprimand Malfoy. The blond ducked his head and mumbled a quiet but sincere apology.

"Should I have told you?" Tom asked, a slight challenge in his voice. "Was there any real danger of you disobeying me?"

"Of course not!" insisted Draco, his earnest gray gaze rising again to flash at Tom. Then his eyes widened and he immediately added, "My Lord."

Tom allowed himself to smirk. He would never admit it to anyone, but he had come to miss Draco when he'd been away at school--just a bit, of course, and not that it meant anything beyond that Tom was bored of constantly being around the likes of Lucius and Richard.

He gestured to Draco's customary chair across from his. "Have a seat, Draco. Tell me what you've been doing at Hogwarts. Is there anything you haven't been able to put into your letters?"

As Draco rose from the rug and made his way to the large chair, Tom caught glimpses in his mind of cruel pranks against Potter and nervous, nearly-chaste first kisses with a girl Tom didn't recognize. But none of that was what Draco chose to mention when his mind finally settled on a topic.

"I... Well, I..." Draco swallowed, and in the brief pause before he continued Tom watched in his mind's eye as Draco ran his fingers over the spines of a row of thin books in a particularly dusty stack in the Hogwarts library, clearly looking for a particular volume. "I looked up your school records."

"I see," said Tom at once, because it was nearly an automatic response when he didn't know quite what to say. "That is... interesting. What did you find?"

"Well, you were an exceptional student," replied Draco. "How did you have the time to get twelve O.W.L.s? And eleven N.E.W.T.s! And all Outstandings!"

Tom, who actually didn't know any more about his school record after being put into the diary than Draco had before looking him up, was quite gratified to have that confirmed. He supposed that he really had dropped Muggle Studies at the N.E.W.T. level, then, as he had been thinking about doing before being made into a Horcrux.

"And you were the top student in all of your subjects, and there was a note about your Award for Special Services to the School, although it didn't mention what it was for, of course."

Tom grinned in genuine amusement. "No, of course not. There was no ceremony at all, and I was told that I mustn't speak about it to anyone. Then my badge was relegated to the furthest corner of the Trophy Room where probably nobody would notice it. I wished more than once that they would have just given me the badge; I would have had the gold melted down and made quite a bit of money from it."

Draco laughed from deep within his belly.

"I--I--" he tried to say when he thought he'd controlled his laughter. He was finally able to explain, "I moved it to the front of the trophy case, in front of the badges Dumbledore had made up for Potter and the Weasel after last year. The next time Potter has detention, he's sure to see it!"

Tom didn't think that it was anywhere near as amusing as Draco did--he doubted that he had ever thought anything was as amusing as Draco did--but he was so giddy about the retrieval of this last Horcrux and Draco's laughter was so infectious that he allowed himself to smile.