Chapter Text
When Tom wakes, the Undersea is in an uproar over the missing girl. He can feel it, the disturbance in the currents, the tremble of tension in the waves. She's the youngest of a large, pureblooded family on the Sacred Twenty-Eight, and apparently too short-sighted to let anyone know where she's gone.
All day long the news is all about her, her distraught family, her anxious friends, while Tom sips his tea and sorts through his potion ingredients. Through the eyes of his eels, he learns that just before she vanished, she had left a note.
A note.
He rolls his eyes. No matter. His plan is already in motion.
#
My lord, Avery hisses as he circles him. The palace guards have come and gone, and despite Tom's annoyance he was polite to a fault. After all, it wouldn't do to be suspected right now. What is the child doing now?
"Let's find out, shall we?" Tom murmurs, even though he doesn't need to speak out loud for his eels to hear him. He just loves the taste of words on his tongue, relishes the reverberation in his throat.
Avery flicks his tail with excitement, sending a lazy spark through the water. He likes to see his master wield his unconventional magic.
Tom's Voice may be bound and kept from him, but he is not and has never been without means. He's learned to work around his muteness, to channel his raw magic through potions and divination and sheer force of will. If even children can do Voiceless magic, then Tom Riddle can—and will—harness it.
He propels himself to the highest shelf of his cave and hefts his largest scrying bowl over his shoulder. On his worktable he fills it with a heavy, misty solution of his own creation, and peers into it.
It seems the prince has taken Ginny Weasley out to see his little kingdom today, where she goggled at everything like a babe, still wet behind the ears. Idiot. She has spent almost every waking moment with the prince, and they are... friendly. It's hard for Tom to interpret emotions sometimes. They're on a boat now, and they're beaming at each other. He narrows his eyes.
Finally, she leans in for a kiss, bright-eyed and eager. She's so sure of herself, of her suit. She had been the same when she showed up at Tom's cave, on the outskirts bordering the Undersea, and asked to make a deal. Here, males and females of the species pursue each other with equal temerity.
Tom wonders if she knows how much trouble she's wreaking just by sitting there on a boat with a human male.
And the prince leans away.
Tom sniggers. Just beneath the surface of the water, his other eels Rosier and Abraxas glare up at the bottom of the boat and swish their tails, impatient. They're itching to cause trouble, but they wouldn't be so foolish as to go against Tom's specific orders to keep their distance.
There are six days left.
#
Tom doesn't intend to get in her way, but long-distance divination gets tiring after a while, and he's bored. He'd much rather be close to the action.
Transformation spells are a complex branch of magic, but Tom has enough skill mixing potions that it's highly doable, if somewhat illicit. It's the reason the Weaslette had to come to him in the first place, and Tom isn't being fanciful when he says he is the best.
And now he has the Weasley girl's Voice in his possession, and though it's not as powerful or adept as his own, it's easy enough to bend to his will. He fingers the locket that rests on his chest.
The Voice chooses the undine, after all, and who wouldn't choose Tom?
The sun has gone down by the time he arrives at the shoreline, and begins to Sing.
All of their kind can Sing. It's their gift, a mark of who they are. An undine's song is used to identify another, assess the vicinity for threats, tell stories, deliver warnings. Perform magic. When Tom had his own Voice, he could control the very waves of the ocean. Very few undine can do that; as far as he knows, only one other can.
He heaves himself up onto a broad, flat rock, his tail making deep furrows in the sand. And he Sings. He weaves his tail into a pair of legs, weaves his scales into skin and hair. Ginny's Voice fights him for the barest second before he overpowers it, and when he opens his mouth the most otherworldly sound spills from his parted lips. A low hum permeates the beach, low enough to make the very sand quiver. The little sea creatures in the water go still; the seagulls cease their noise. And then above it, multi-layered, are a hundred silvery voices treading together—Tom's magic manifest in Song.
Where does music come from? The vocal cords? The lungs, the diaphragm? Or is it pure magic, as improbable as his gills or his tail?
He flexes his toes, arches his feet. What funny appendages humans have. Humans prefer to hide their bodies too, don't they? Strange creatures. Leg-coverings appear with a wave of his fingers, and he wrinkles his nose in distaste. He misses his scales already.
The prince hears the eerie, almost-familiar music, and finds him within the hour. He offers his hand, and Tom takes his first steps, stumbling only a little.
"Hello," the prince says, staring at him with eyes the colour of sea-glass. "My name is Harry Potter. What's yours?"
And, oh, Tom hadn't noticed it, under the cover of night. But standing together beneath the well-lit, soaring arches of the castle's entryway, he realises that the prince is handsome.
"You may call me Tom," he says, clasping their hands together.
#
Poor Ginny Weasley had turned and fled when she saw Tom standing by Harry's side in the morning. Her hand pressed to her mouth, as if she was sick, or stifling a cry.
Perhaps it isn't entirely fair to let Harry believe that Tom was the one who rescued him; Tom neither confirmed nor denied it when Harry pushed, and eventually Harry relented.
"Are you new to these parts?" he asks instead, and the corners of Tom's mouth lift, intentionally mysterious. He inclines his head.
"Yes, Your Highness."
Harry waves away the honorific. "None of that now. You rescued me, I think that gives you leave to call me by my name."
"Is that him?" asks the king, his gaze sharpening. James Potter is the spitting image of his son, although more weathered and presumably wiser. "What do you do, Tom?"
"I am a doctor, Your Majesty," Tom recites from his prepared backstory. "I have travelled here from a distant land to study what I can about medicine and healing."
"How lovely," the queen says. She is a genteel woman of good breeding, her voice soft and gentle, and Tom finds himself sitting straighter in her presence.
Harry quickly reclaims the conversation. "Then you must stay. We have some of the most excellent healers and the largest library for miles around. And I must get to know you better."
"I have some time. Harry."
Harry beams, pleased. "I will get the staff to prepare you a room next to mine. Then I must show you the town."
Oh, here we go again.