Tom Riddle is being beaten to death.

He deserves it, obviously, but it still rankles.

"-touch her again!" roars the man with the cricket bat. Tom feels the rather stupid desire to tell him he won't touch her again, she's already broken, and he doesn't play with broken toys. Instead, his broken fingers grope for something, anything that he can use to hurt the man who's going to kill him. He finds nothing. He chokes, and hacks a gobbet of blood onto the already filthy pavement.

The bat comes down again with a crunch. Tom's vision goes dark.

The light fades back in.

There's a woman holding him in her arms. They're on a stone bench, in some kind of temple. Water's flowing somewhere nearby. He smells something sweet and spicy, maybe incense.

She strokes his cheek. "You really are an idiot," she says gently.

"No I'm not?" he says, for want of a better response.

"Of course you aren't. You're a genius."

She means it. Somehow, this is much more insulting.

"But, really, you could've put this off for years. No one else was in a hurry. But that's you, isn't it? Rushing to get to the bad part."

"...sorry, who the fuck are you?"

Tom attempts to sit up, stop being - held, cuddled, whatever.

No he doesn't.

"I'm Chanabiel. Once damned, twice blessed. We're going to be working together."

"According to whom, exactly?"

Struggle struggle.

That's just undignified.

"You, of course!"

And the memories snap back into place. A little curiosity shop. A bargain that, in retrospect, can't help but seem a bit Faustian.

"Oh."

Tom's body stills.

"You wanted to fix me."

"We really do have more in common than you think," she notes. "I just... win. Instead of losing."

Twitch. "Easier to do when you're an angel, I imagine. I can't see a chav with a cricket bat pulverizing your skeleton."

"Oh, love, we both know that's stupid. You didn't lose because of the cricket bat. You lost because no one liked you enough to tell you he was coming."

She strokes his hair, softly. "Because people hurt you, and you thought the only way to be safe was to be like them. Because by the time anyone told you different, you were proud of the wretched little thing you'd become, and they were trying to take that from you, and it was the only thing you had that was yours. Because you're wrong."

"I'm going to make you so right," she whispers, "that if you saw the man you'll be, you'd want to kill him. And he'd want to help you right back."

And then he's back. He's back in that filthy little alleyway, and the cricket bat is on the ground, and that girl's older brother has two fingers to completely the wrong part of his neck.

From that point of contact, the man's skeleton blossoms. A fractal rose garden, lace and lattice, expanding and reaching outwards and sloughing off the flesh in search of art. It takes under a second, and by the end of it, there's nothing left but an edifice of wrought bone and a pool of red-brown sludge seeping down a storm drain.

He doesn't have time to scream, but that instant of agony tastes delicious.

Tom stands, perfectly steady, and conjures his robe in the form of a funereal black suit. Then the diadem of Dominion, platinum settling around his temples with the pearl above his face. (That seems to take care of his Mother-allotted hat requirement, which is fine by him.) Then his rod - an ebony cane, with a silver serpent's head.

He conjures a little portal for a hand-mirror. ...he looks like some kind of banker-wizard-pimp.

He tweaks the suit, sliding it along the axis from Saville Row to Valdemar, until it's ornate and silver-trimmed enough to fit the crown. For the rod, he gives in to the desires he was ignoring - make it a proper staff, they said, coiled silver with a damned orb on the end. He does.

Now he's a wizard. A wizard king, maybe.

The sculpture, he reluctantly crumbles to dust. It won't help the Veil any to leave art around. There's still a little puddle of idiot underneath. He unlaces his silken trousers and pisses on it, to help it down the grate.

"Goodbye," he enunciates, "to you and everyone like you."

He laces himself back up. Then he puts a hand on the back door to the chip shop, opens it up, and steps through it into his flat. He's got a few personal articles to retrieve before he goes to the moon.

II. there's one born every minute

The moon is interesting. It isn't a silver desert, though that can be seen outside the windows. It's a bustling metropolis, full of more kinds of people than he's ever seen (fatuously, since he'd only ever seen humans). There's greenery, not lush and wild and everywhere, but tidy and richly green and certainly enough to put London to shame.

"Impressive," hisses the snake that wasn't there before, currently wrapped around his shoulders.

Tom startles. "Who the bloody fuck –"

But it is immediately magically obvious that this is that familiar he was told about. So he unruffles his feathers as well as he can and pretends he wasn't surprised in the first place.

"Oh, don't even bother. I'm enough of you not to care."

This is a lie. The snake is highly amused, which Tom knows, because the snake knows it.

"Grand. Wasn't I supposed to need some kind of ritual to get you?"

"Aren't you clever! I don't know either, but I've got a hypothesis: An easy enough ritual can be simplified to the blink of an eye, if you're trying, or if you're powerful enough to push through. And say what you will, you're powerful enough. So there may be an adjustment period wherein you produce magical effects... not accidentally, but by coincidental desire."

"You're trying to tell me I'm magically incontinent."

"Bless you, it all depends on your outlook. Better to have too much magic than too little, eh?"

It's odd, hearing a platitude like "it all depends" and knowing that someone actually means it. He feels some part of himself rising to snap back about it, but what would be the point?

Instead, he keeps looking for someplace he can get directions. He needs to find a Hawthorne outpost of some kind.

Well, here's a witch in strict-looking black leather robes and a severely pointy hat, with a wand, which she is using to gently tap...

that's a twelve-year-old boy with a polearm? And silver-filigreed plate armor. Being wand-tapped.

How utterly provincial. Tom himself had the option to awaken into a changeling; clearly the tween is one of those. Or something weird is going on, but Occam's Razor.

He approaches the suspiciously kinky-looking witch. "Hello – I'm terribly sorry, but are you affiliated to Hawthorne? I'm to apply for tuition but I don't know the procedures, really, I just awakened."

The obvious changeling turns to look at him. "Hail!" he says chipperly. "You've found the right place, this nice lady is a professor there."

The nice lady huffs. "Stand still."

"Oh, my apologies." He turns his head back into place, eliciting another, even more annoyed huff. "She's taking my particulars so I can get a wand!"

"I'll be free as soon as he can stop jittering for three seconds," she mutters.

Big smile. "Sorry! It's exciting!"

...the possibility that this is an actual twelve-year-old can no longer be discounted.

"We might be here a while then," he says conspiratorially.

Giggle!

"–there, I've got it," the witch crows. "If you'll hand over your rod I can make the adjustments."

"What kind of adjustments?" the boy asks, handing over his glaive.

"I just need to inscribe some runes on it."

"Oh! Well, um, there might be trouble with that?" he apologizes.

"Trouble like what?" The witch points her wand at the polearm and twiddles it magically, in such a way as to elicit a laser-like beam of blue light, which touches the haft and immediately melts into so much blue Gatorade.

"That," he apologizes further as ex-laser puddles around their feet.

"We should find somewhere to get dinner," the snake comments. "We've already got a show."

"It's immune to magic," the boy frets.

The witch starts making the laser juice disappear. "Then how do you cast through it?"

"Well, it's not immune to mine," he says. "That'd be silly. It's my rod. But if anyone else does magic to it, well." Broad downwards gesture.

"Can it be mundanely etched or carved?"

He rubs the back of his head. "Not... really. I'm the only one who can change it at all."

"Then it can't be a wand," the witch sighs. "Not unless you find some way to carve it to within a micron of precision yourself. And without a wand, you may find Hawthorne a difficult place to study."

"How much Witchery would it take to do that kind of carving himself?"

"Fourth, at least. And you do have the potential for that, but –"

"I'll do that then," he interrupts.

"You don't want to just enroll with Arcadia? They won't need you to do anything so onerous, and they're a fine second option."

The boy shakes his head. "Mistress Thistleheart, I don't know how much you know about my case, but – I'm an amnesiac. I don't know anything at all, except that I need to go to Hawthorne." He taps his skull. "There's nothing else in here, so nothing else matters."

...huh.

Tom idly hopes the boy isn't actually twelve, because honestly that's kind of hot. Not that he wouldn't go for it anyway, but he's dimly aware that it wouldn't be a great look.

The witch shrugs. "I cannot and certainly will not stop you. Welcome to Hawthorne, John Doe; if and when you do reach the fourth rank, reach out to a staff member for a diagram of the runes to apply."

"Yay!"

"We love to see a happy ending."

"My turn, then?" Tom asks. "Do you start tapping me all over too, or do I have to render a formal application first?"

"Why don't we start with your highest ranked magic?" Thistleheart suggests. "–in words, please. Would that I didn't have to specify."

"You wouldn't like the demonstration at all," Tom agrees. "Necromancy, fifth rank."

Eyebrows rise. "You're right, that sounds like a dreadful mess. What's next highest?"

(John's ears prick up a little, and he looks evaluatingly at Tom.)

Tilt of the head for the boy.

"Divination four, then witchery three," for the lady.

Eyebrows stay up. "Not bad at all... alright, I'll start my divinations now. Stand still."

Tap tap tap tap tap tap tap. John sticks around to watch.

Standing still is not actually difficult, if you are not twelve.

"Alright. If you hand over your rod, I'll inscribe it, unless yours is also invulnerable."

If John were slightly more of an anime boy, he would in full-on Nyoro~n mode. As it stands, he just looks bashful.

"It isn't yet!"

He hands it over while expertly concealing that his emotional response to doing so is abject hissing terror.

Lasers! The rod is thus inscribed. "And I can open a portal to Hawthorne for you two, if that'd be more convenient than going yourselves?"

John nods. "Thank you very much, ma'am," he says, bowing.

"You'll make me blush."

Through the portal they go.

"Did I hear her right, your name is actually John Doe?"

"Yes." Blink. "Is that... funny?"

"It's the name for a man who doesn't have a name. Which I suppose, if you've got no memory..."

"Huh! That is funny. The witches who found me didn't seem very amused when they named me that, but some people are difficult to read."

Hawthorne comes into view as they exit the portal.

The main castle is very much like a European citadel or château, and it's also very much like a mountain range – two mountain ranges, really, one in the negative space of the other. The moonlight is the warm yellow of "morning," with a thin blue glow from the other side of the "sky." The streets outside the castle are lined with crooked storefronts, all bright with flickering green motes of witchfire set into mirrored lanterns, and there's plenty of wide open spaces lit by only the moon. Witches are everywhere, chatting as they walk in and out of shops, picnicking with their homework out on the greens, and buzzing through the sky like dragonflies.

It straddles the line admirably between "Halloweentown" and "the home you didn't know you missed".

He's more impressed than he was by the moon, for some reason. Maybe it just feels realer. Maybe it's that – the witches aren't just bustling along like any city's denizens, they live here. They're living in the space, not just moving through.

John looks somewhat awed, himself.

"...it's bigger than I thought things were," he says slowly. "I haven't seen many things, or at least I don't remember seeing them. But it is... really big. Right?"

"Yeah. Yeah, I... think it's bigger than anything I've seen either. And I've seen some fairly big things."

Nod.

"Why are you a necromancer?" he asks, apropos of nothing.

"Because it's versatile, and powerful. And... it can make me safe."

"So you were scared."

What is this.

"I guess I was."

John smiles earnestly. "I'm glad. I'd rather be friends with someone who can admit when he's scared than someone who can't."

"Is that what we are, then? Friends?"

"I think so. I've never had one, you understand, but I think that's what they are."

Tom thinks it over. This boy, this John Doe, he wants to be friends. What is this, primary school?

(An ally wouldn't go amiss, though, if he can use that glaive...)

He's already insufferably nice and Tom has barely even met him yet.

(There's a mystery in him, too. And if nothing else, he'll be fun to break.)

He's never needed friends before.

(You lost because no one liked you enough to tell you he was coming.)

"Maybe we'll have to find out what friends are together."