Love's Labours Lost

Ch. 1

Minerva headed down the stairs to the entrance hall. She instantly knew something was wrong. Her friends were crowded around a newspaper, and the room was unnaturally quiet. Walking over to the huddle, she tapped her friend Anne on the back. "What's going on? Is something wrong?" she asked anxiously.

"You'd better believe it," cried Anne. "Some dark wizard killed Professor Babashanian. This wizard-he calls himself Lord Voldemort-also yelled some sort of curse about "This man's job". We don't know what it means, but we are now short a Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher. In addition, there's a crazed maniac running around-the new Dark Lord."

"Oh, God," gasped Minerva.

"I think it's nuts," said Allen Lynch, a rather annoying Hufflepuff. "What kind of person names their kid-Voldemort?"

"His parents didn't name him that," said a cold, drawling, slightly trembling voice behind them.

Minerva whirled around to see Lucifer Malfoy, a Slytherin boy with a pale, pointed face. "What do you mean?" she demanded. "Do you know this wizard?"

"Yes, and so did you," said Malfoy. "His name rearranged spells 'I Am Lord Voldemort'. His given name is Tom Marvelo Riddle."

Everyone sat in stunned silence for a minute, not daring to believe that their hero, the person who had caught the Heir of Slytherin, was the most feared Dark Lord in a century. Slowly and shakily, the crowd dispersed. Mostly, they filtered chattering into the Great Hall for breakfast. Minerva did not. She watched them go, then ran up the stairs to Gryffindor Tower.

When she arrived, she went to her dormitory and began digging through her trunk. Finally, she found what she was looking for. It was her photo album that her mother had given her seven years ago when she'd got the Hogwarts letter.

Slowly, she turned the pages, from the scarlet Hogwarts Express to Ogg, the gamekeeper, to Hogwarts itself. The pictures with her in them got increasingly older. Finally, she stopped on one page in particular.

The picture showed a girl, with long brown hair hanging down her back, standing with her arm around a boy. The boy had jet-black hair and startling green eyes, and he had an arm around the girl and a cut on his right cheek, as well as numerous bruises. Next to them, two adults, one very old and one very tall, each holding the arm of a very large boy with brown hair. The large boy looked scared. The two adults looked shocked and angered. The girl looked relieved, and the boy looked smug.

She remembered clearly the day that picture had been taken. It had been four years ago, when she was only thirteen. There had been something attacking students, and one, a friend of hers named Myrtle, had been killed. Her Tom had found out who was attacking them. It was the large boy-one called Rubeus Hagrid. He was in her year-or had been-and he was always in trouble, but she had never considered him a suspect. She, like so many other people, had assumed it to be a Slytherin, because none of them had been attacked. The picture had been taken after Tom's capture of Hagrid. Students had been forbidden to tell anyone about it, but everyone who'd been there knew about it. What hurt most was that she and Tom had been dating. At the end of the following year, however, he had begged her to marry him. She had been forced to refuse, saying that her mother wouldn't let her marry until she was twenty-one and had a job. They hadn't spoken since. And now...

Now he was the most feared Dark Lord ever.