Mirror Image

Prologue

AVADA KEDAVRA

"Avada Kedavra."

A green light burst out of the end of Voldemort's wand, rushing at the green-eyed baby. The second the light hit the child, the magic of a mother's sacrifice bounced the curse back, hitting the Dark Lord.

Voldemort should have died that night, when the curse hit him. The green light ripped the wizard's soul from his body. The Horcruxes that he made were the only things that kept him from truly dying.

The killing curse, combined with how mangled and broken his soul was, created another Horcrux, which imbedded itself in the forehead of the green-eyed baby, leaving behind a jagged scar. The creation of the Horcrux was unusual and unprecedented, but not the strangest of the things that happened that night.

A common misconception about Horcruxes is that they are half of a soul. If that were true, it would have been impossible for Voldemort to have split his soul several times. A locket or a ring could not have a bigger soul than a human being. It isn't rational. A Horcrux creates a hole in the soul, much like a hole puncher and a piece of paper.

And this is where the story splits, where a random, improbable fluke changes the future of the world.

What was unusual, improbable, and almost impossible, was the location of this final hole. Against impossible odds, the new hole threw the soul at an angle interacting with two other holes so that another piece broke off, much larger then a normal Horcrux.

The original piece of soul fled, seeking someplace far away, needing only time to recover and regain strength.

The broken off piece of soul didn't have that option, since only the core of the soul was indestructible as long as there were Horcruxes. The Horcruxes themselves need containers. This piece of soul wasn't a Horcrux, but it did need a place to reside in before it faded out of existence.

The soul was not quite Voldemort, though it held his thoughts and memories.

Magic is sentient when it doesn't have a guiding force, like a child's accidental magic. Once a person learns how to control their magic, it stops working to protect them.

The broken off piece of Voldemort's soul didn't have a conscience, needing a physical container to think and reason. Instead, it (magic is gender-neutral, as is a soul piece) was using its magic to survive.

Not powerful enough to possess a person, yet too large to reside in an object, there was no possibility for continued existence, until, yet again, the almost impossible happened.

Not far away, at least for a bodiless spirit, there was a body of a child, slowly dying of the cold on the steps of an orphanage. The magic sensed the child dying, and knew that it could reside in this fresh body. The soul fragment entered the body, reviving it with a new life.

The body fought against the magic, reacting to the new host. The magic was trying to make the body take the form it knew it should be wearing, changing everything from the eye color to the blood that was flowing through the baby's veins.

The baby's brain was overloading, not able to fit years of memories, knowledge and desires into a body just under two years old. If the magic hadn't drained itself trying to make the body as it felt it should be, then maybe it could have done something to preserve the memories of a lifetime inside the child.

However, the magic was exhausted and almost completely drained, and so it chose the only path available. It placed a blocker on all the memories, so they would slowly seep into the fragile mind. As the body aged, the mind would gain access, leaving, at that moment, the conscience with only the memories it possessed at the age of a year and a half.

The boy was now the exact replica, from body to memories, of Tom Marvolo Riddle.

When the matron of the orphanage opened the front door the next morning to put out the milk bottles, she saw another baby abandoned in the middle of the night, not even wrapped in a blanket. It was a beautiful boy with jet black hair and intelligent blue eyes, looking about two years old in her experienced eyes.

"Do you know what your name is?" she asked the boy, unsure if he was old enough to know the answer. Sometimes they started talking at a year, other times, you couldn't get them to say a word until they were almost three.

But the boy did answer. "Tom."

The lady added the last name Foster, for the records, since the boy didn't answer when asked about a surname, and took the boy into the orphanage.

And so Tom Foster grew up, a strange boy with strange dreams. He found out through the dreams, where he watched through the eyes of a boy that he was sure was himself, that his full name was Tom Marvolo Riddle. But by the time he understood that, he also understood both the fact that knowing something no one else did put him at an advantage and that normal people did not re-live a life 50 years in the past. Being strange, being called a freak any more than he already was, didn't appeal to him, so his name stayed Tom Foster.

He was ten years old when he was adopted by a young couple, and taken to Little Whinging, Surrey.