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threesentenceficathon!jocundasykesTom Riddle doesn’t get sent back to Wool’s once wartime panic starts up—he’s sensibly remanded into the custody of a volunteer with a house in the country, like all London children.
A series of summers in his friendship with Edmund Pevensie, or, the story where Tom Riddle gets a partly-decent childhood.
Having recently finished reading Maurice, I immediately turned to AO3 to scavenge for fic that would give me some shade of that high. I return bearing two recs, both somehow crossovers, and I love that.
The Measure of Love by fengirl88
T, 2.2k, The Great Gatsby/Maurice crossover, Nick Carraway and Clive Durham
An Englishman and an American meet in a New York diner.
This was a beautifully-written crossover of two great books. Having recently read/reread both of them, I was delighted to find it. The author treats both Nick and Clive with subtlety: their conversation conveys multiple things at once, and we get to see from Clive’s POV how he picks up on the hints and implications of the offer for more. I love the choice to parallel these characters as men who have survived a great shock—it’s unrequited love, yes, but it’s also a specific tragedy and unexpected change in life direction. Nick is that man in its immediate aftermath, still physically shaking from it, and Clive is the veteran recognizing the ache of an old wound which still plagues him years on. It’s heartbreaking for both characters, especially the ending’s choice to dwell on what-could-be (but won’t).
Divagations of a Prig, Or: the Risley Reshuffle by HotUtilitarian
E, 8.9k, Maurice (stealth David Blaize crossover), Clive Durham/Maurice Hall
Risley and Clive compete for Maurice's affections. It changes a few things.
This is gorgeous, just a wonderful pastiche of the Edwardian novel, wherein one can keenly feel the author’s research and experience with the style. But while the prose will catch your eye to start, the characterization is what will keep it—Clive Durham gets the consideration that E. M. Forster sets the foundation for, but didn’t love him quite enough to follow through on. Well, I love Clive, and this author does too.
Clive’s repression is woven into his character through his intellectualism and snobbery so tightly that he jumps off the page, a fully-realized person. The sex is incredibly hot—both the sex he has with himself and what he shares with Maurice—but so are his reflections on life and self, especially his references to the Phaedrus. And, happily, sex doesn’t change the essential core of Clive; the bittersweet ending continues the romantic push and pull between him and Maurice. I wouldn’t want their differences to be brushed aside in service of a tidy romance, and this gracefully avoids that outcome.
Tom Riddle, Voldemort—and I will never forgive the AO3 tag-wranglers for separating these two—is a character who rarely gets to shine in his own right. He’s more myth than man. But he is something unbelievably special when an author digs past that surface and presents something of the person he might have been. How better to do that than through romance?
This week sees the end of Ouroboros, one of the most widely-known recent fics to take on his character. That story pairs Tom with himself to deliver a beautiful deep dive into his mind from all sides: what was Voldemort like after two wars? What would Tom have been like if he’d been raised differently? What does it mean for Tom to care about the people in his life?
You’ll see those questions, and more, reflected in each of the stories below. I’ve selected 14 different pairings, all rare (so no Harry), that run the gamut. There are dark fics which merit archive warnings (noted in my summary), there are light-hearted stories, there are Toms and Voldemorts who don’t feel affection, who deeply feel affection, and whose emotions can’t be determined for sure. These cover his boyhood and his young adulthood and his wars and after his wars. There are Voldemorts at the height of their power and Toms without anything, paired with peers and subordinates and authorities. I’ve hit the major tropes of his character, so you will find something familiar if you go looking.
What unites all of these recs is that the stories say something about Voldemort as a person. He is a man, his motivations are questioned, his thoughts and feelings are at the heart of each of these. Reading all of them would give someone a very solid foundation for thinking about his character, and I would encourage anyone to consider a pairing, a time period, or a premise that they haven’t before.
My selections include mostly stories on AO3, but not all were initially found there. I’ve been collecting Tom Riddle fic for months, and I claim no impartiality—these are stories that were meaningful to me in my journey with the character. There is one self-rec, please skip “Beautiful Sleepyhead” if that bothers you, and there are two stories with strong content warnings in their summaries. The following fics are ordered alphabetically by pairing partner.
You can find the AO3 bookmark collection for these recs here.
And it makes sense for Tom more than nearly anyone else in HP. Tom was born into an era that is the subject of so much literature, so it’s easy to find another person kicking around postwar Europe if that’s your goal. He’s an archetypal character, the villain seeking immortality, and can be matched against other villains with the same aims. Hell, even his quest to recover lost artifacts turns into the basis for two of these works—Tom Riddle has the perfect combination of a recognizable context and character model, plus the ambiguity of his canon timeline, to slot him alongside so many other fictional figures.
I want to pause on some of these themes for a second. Immortality or relationship to age, for one, is something that comes up in three of these pairings: the Darkling and Koschei the Deathless are both immortal characters in their own canons, and Edmund Pevensie is not immortal but has aged and de-aged repeatedly in his travels to and from Narnia. The HP series doesn’t give us nearly this wealth of different perspectives on age and immortality, which is fair—HP makes it clear that immortality is unnatural and undesirable, and Flamel is notably a ‘good person’ because of his willingness to accept his own death—but for a character as obsessed with the idea as Tom, some emotions can only be explored when you match him with another character who has a complicated relationship to aging. Even someone like Indiana Jones, not immortal and not trying to be, has an interesting perspective to bring to a story because he has seen so many other quests for power gone terribly awry.
Of course, the other thing we get from crossover pairings is the ability to match Tom with a villainous character. And whether you’re a fan of conflict at the start of a relationship or not, I think there’s something to be found in putting two villains together: moral arguments, when they exist, are rarely about whether death is necessary but about what kinds of death are best used when; the entire concept of either a redemption arc or a breaking bad arc can be thrown out a window. It’s a space wherein our two villains are allowed to be themselves, and the reveal of the extent of each character’s villainy becomes a strange form of celebration. This is challenging to achieve if one sticks to HP canon alone, whereas crossovers are a fruitful space.
My selection methodology was to read every crossover fic with a clear focus on Tom Riddle or Voldemort on AO3. I found crossover pairings by visiting the meta pages for the Tom Riddle, Voldemort, and Tom Riddle | Voldemort tags—I may have missed some pairings for Tom Riddle, as the character has over 300 child relationship tags and AO3 cuts off at 300 displayed. If you know of any ships I missed and should check out, do tell! I’ll also make a note here that one of these fics is my own—if self-recs bother you, skip Bluebird.
The following five fics are ordered by wordcount. Let me know what you think!
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