#voldiary

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Tom Riddle, the first time around, had never been interested in romance, but Voldemort is not Tom Riddle anymore.

It's the one thing he'd found… changed about himself after the Diary. 50 years alone, with nothing, nothing, nothing except the mawing emptiness of himself have picked and pulled at the part of him that had once been so content with being alone, unraveling it into a gaping hole. He still finds the company of the vast majority of people intolerable, but he craves it now, too, a twisted, desperate hunger to fill the silence in his head. You quiet the silence.

You quiet the silence, and Voldemort likes the sound of your voice in his head more than anyone else's. Most of his new followers in this time are pathetic: Idiot purebloods without the strength to back up their snobbery; two-bit thugs who barely knew how to hold their wands correctly, a whining ex-gryffindor who had gotten himself expelled from Hogwarts over a rivalry around who was selling more prank supplies...

Most of them disgust him. They're so easily manipulable, it's hard not to be disgusted.

Not you.

With you, it almost feels like he's the one being manipulated.

The flirting is all backwards; Voldemort isn't supposed to be the one whose skin prickles at the slightest casual touch; the one desperate for a glance, a smile. But it does, and he is. He knows that if he were still Tom Riddle, that he would stop this, now, that he would not let himself do what he is doing—

Doesn't matter. Voldemort doesn't want to be Tom Riddle. If there is one thing he's dead certain of, it's that. Tom Riddle had been cold, detached. In the end, he'd also been complacent. Voldemort had prided himself on his coolness, once, too, but he sees now that that had never been what sustained him, what drove him. No, that had been feeling—his rage, his fear, his need to fix.

Emotion, he thinks, is power. The power to stay the course. The power to stay himself. He is not the flawed one for wanting this so badly. For needing it.