Title: Things Taken
Author: thegildedmagpie
Characters/Pairings: Tom Riddle/his left hand, Dumbledore's manic twinkling alluded to
Rating: R
Kinks/Themes Chosen: Harpaxophilia (robber ravishment)
Other Warnings: kleptophilia, humiliation (if you're a Tom), underage character wanking (chansturbation?) since Tom is all of 11, third-person stream of consciousness
Word Count: 1378
Summary/Description: “You will return these things to their owners with your apologies,” says the Professor, but Tom can see that he knows the value of things.
Author's Notes: Based on the chapter in which Dumbledore apparently uses Legilimency on an eleven-year-old child, justified by said child being pants-wettingly terrified of being locked up in a loony bin forever. *fond smile* Dumbledore's such a great guy.



It troubles his pride that the items in the cardboard box, a box that once held a chess set purchased for a wealthier child than he and later donated, less two bishops and several pawns, to the unfortunate ... that the items look so worthless. A meaningless melange of magpie treasures. He keeps telling himself with quiet, childish irritation that it's hardly his fault that his enemies do not have better spoils of war to be taken. He expects that Alexander and Hannibal had to start small, too.

Yet he knows the truth about the value of things, and he knows the Professor-who-is-not-an-asylum-keeper must know it too, or he would never have set the illusory fire that started all this. What value, after all, is normally in a stick of wood? It's something hidden. Something actually magical that looks like no more than a stick. There are stories in it, things it's done and things done with it. His hands itch for one.

Because, really, it's not just a yoyo and a checker and a silver thimble. It's stories. A yoyo that he took stealthily from a battered bedside table to swap with a pet mouse he'd fed a pea-sized portion of rat poison. A checker from the board over which two older girls collapsed with simultaneous inexplicable appendix cramps which the doctor later said must have been in their overheated minds. The thimble, a treasure, not only because it's the most monetarily valuable thing in the box but because Mrs. Cole is still looking for it – that was five-fingered from her sewing basket to honor the occasion of finally terrorizing enough of the other children to get a room of his own. All of it more than it seems. Just like Tom himself has always known he must be, must be.

And the Professor in the florid suit recognizes the potential in both. Hence the vanishing wardrobe fire. Yet the look he gave … the sheer contempt over the small box Tom was obliged to get from the upper shelf … those expressions stick in his head. It makes him toss in his narrow, unforgiving bed, sweating by the breeze of the window he insists on keeping open. The hard look in the blue eyes, the way Tom had to watch his own hands shake, the sense of obligation – if he didn't give up this secret I'll never never never get out of here just as he sometimes had traitorously thought in the dark of the night when, for a rarity, under the ratty blanket he felt very small.

And Tom is not without empathy, just without sympathy. He's smart enough to have wondered if the feeling of opening the box before the flamboyant Professor is like unto the feeling of setting something down only to find it silently moved five paces out of reach while one glanced away, over and over and through days until one has not the energy to keep on with some unrelated pursuit that annoyed an odd orphan. Like bolting from nightmares to grope for a pair of spectacles, and getting up to feel them painfully crunch under a bare foot. Or just (just?) like reaching for one of the few treasures available to a child in this grey house and finding it gone from its place, never to reappear.

That. Perhaps like that.

And so the Professor, with his velvet suit and clashing hair and magical stick that apparently detects nicked property (among, presumably, other functions) – he ought never to have looked at Tom that way over the things in the box.

Perhaps it's since he's putting that embarrassment about his trove so firmly out of his mind that, as September draws nearer, he finds himself still dawdling about crossing London to get his things for school. He isn't given to procrastination, ordinarily. Yet the firm admonition – You will return them to their owners, with your apologies – it's no nearer to being bearable. Tom knows this about lessons from adults: That they'll make them as pride-breaking as possible, because they want children bent to their will more easily as adults, when the children have aged out of whatever spine they began with.

It unnerves him to think that he's going somewhere that people can do the things he can do: Make others confess to lies. Move things with their minds. Influence animals to act upon their owners …. It's like being the contents of a goldfish bowl tossed unceremoniously in a lake. But he can't not want.

And it's almost certainly not an asylum.

It's the thought of the wand that finally spurs him, as the hot season's August murders July and drags it away. He can't wait any longer to possess such a thing. His palms beg for it to lie across them. His fingers ache to caress its length and feel the point of its tip. Though he's been told nothing of this magic, he fancies that there's one waiting for him, just like Professor Dumbledore's but unlike: utterly Tom's own.

Yet he can't get it until he's done as he was told. Who knows if this barman whose name he irritatingly shares was told of his task? How big is this world, anyway? How many people do you have to have before you get a Ministry? And how many of them will know some way to find out if a hypothetical cardboard box has been appropriately emptied?

But try as he might, the apologies he can't think of a way to bear. Let the Professor know what he wishes when Tom arrives at the school. Let him punish. Let him deprive. Tom will have a wand by then, a wand of his own, and let them try to take it.

Consequently, it's in the dead of the night that he steals about on his humiliating errand. The yoyo on the foot of a bed. The thimble back in its basket. The checker balanced atop the bottle cap that has long since taken its place. If anyone sees him, they're too intimidated to stop him. The toy soldier in the pocket of a patched jacket. The pocketknife slipped into a slovenly drawer. The torn page from someone's favorite book replaced inside its cover.

Every single thing taken from him – the things he was forced to show, he's now made to trade away for a future. He feels every one of them leave him. Like he's shedding what he's managed in the way of worthy triumphs. Being obliged to shed them. He can only tell himself he's making room for new ones as he tosses the now-empty box back onto the top shelf of the wardrobe, where it shuffle-rasps to a halt against the leather bag of gold coins like pirate doubloons hidden there.

He tosses and turns in bed again, seeking some angle at which the thin sour breeze outside actually touches him through his thin, too-small nightshirt, and at last he pulls the blankets up tightly despite the heat, wriggles out of his underwear and takes his small self in a slight, long-fingered hand. He has to pull his palm back and spit in it, uncouth, but better than the sweat chafing him as he stretches the foreskin over the end of a prick unused to being so alert inside his short charity-boy trousers as it has been tonight. He rolls over, his shoulders hunching, his lower body pressing against the shapeless mattress, desperate against sheets worn skin-soft by the years he's slept on them.

Maybe – uneasily – maybe not much like Admiral Perry or Alexander the Great at all to like giving things back – didn't like it though – not at all –

But he's young and small and overeager, so it takes only a few moments of garbled thoughts about condescending blue eyes, about opening his box slowly before that cool, controlled gaze and having no choice but to have his spoils and his pride calculatingly taken, about the potential punishment to come for having made the methodical surrender in the wrong manner, a surrender eclipsed by thoughts of the new treasures tomorrow – magical things that will be really his.

Only a few moments, and the sheets need washing again and Tom's asleep.