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saintsenara · 1 year ago

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bookbinding tom riddle/myrtle warren teen | 35.5k words

‘men like practical women, pudding,’ had always been mum’s advice. men who like country walks don’t want girls in vertiginous high-heels, they want girls in wellington boots. men who like hearty meals don’t want girls who’ll only eat lettuce. men who are in trade unions don’t want girls who don’t pay the greengrocer on time.

men who are orphans, who believe themselves damned and are too thin and don’t sleep properly and live their lives sustained only by a current of murderous fury, require a different type of practicality. they don’t need to be soothed by a wet blanket - with those girls, they’ll push their luck and get into trouble and end up either in hospital or in prison.

they need a girl who’ll take charge and keep them on the straight-and-narrow, since they've made such a hash of managing their own lives so far.

which will win: sixteen years of planning for brutal world domination, or one (1) teenage girl?

this piece was written for week nine of @ladiesofhpfest, on the theme of heartthrobs and heartbreaks [you can find the masterlist for this week's fics here].

tom riddle and moaning myrtle may not be an instinctive pairing for that theme, but i like a challenge...

fortunately, so do they.

bookbinding is, at its heart, a romantic comedy, which means that it’s crammed full of lovely tropes and character archetypes.

there are some author's notes under the cut. let’s dive in.

our cast of characters

our heroine is, of course, moaning myrtle.

myrtle is someone who is not treated particularly kindly by the canon narrative, even though she ought to be objectively sympathetic by virtue of being a murder victim.

on the one hand, this is because she is sincerely and extremely annoying, and harry - from whose perspective the narrative is written - is a teenage boy with a low tolerance for irritation.

but, on the other, she is a victim of one of jkr’s worst tendencies: defaulting towards describing characters whom the audience is not supposed to regard as heroic as physically unattractive (and, especially, describing them as either fat or unusually thin). jkr also has a tendency to write women whom the narrative considers insubstantial in character as emotionally volatile and demonstrative: myrtle’s theatrical wailing and oversensitivity, for example, puts her in the same category as characters such as lavender brown and cho chang - not villains by any stretch of the imagination, but not people whose emotions really deserve to be taken seriously. the ‘good’ women of the series - ginny and hermione chief among them - are not emotionally repressed, but they are emotionally controlled.

i’ve always really disliked this - indeed, i’ve always thought that there’s a slightly victim-blaming tone to myrtle’s canon death (that is, that if she wasn’t crying in the loos about something trivial - olive hornby teasing her about her glasses - then she’d have been fine), rather than a message that voldemort’s bloodlust was unstoppable, and most of his victims were ordinary people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

the flip side of this is that myrtle makes a great rom-com heroine - the awkward nerd who ends up with the hottest boy in school is a popular trope for a reason. but, all too often, the heroines of these pieces of media end up conforming to stereotypes in the other direction; the ‘weird’ girl is actually cool, the ‘ugly’ girl takes off her glasses and is hot. the harry potter series already uses this trope with hermione - who only needs one hair product to transform into someone who looks as though they belong on the arm of an international quidditch star - and i thought it was trite when it was first published and i still think it’s trite now.

so it was important to me, then, that the myrtle of bookbinding wouldn’t transform either physically or emotionally beyond the changes which happen to all of us as we go from being fourteen to almost-nineteen. [after all, one of the reasons why the canonical myrtle acts the way she acts is because being perpetually fourteen must be hell - as she tells us here.]

it was also important to me that the characteristics and actions which jkr tends to take a dim view of in women would end up being myrtle’s greatest strengths. her pettiness can be a bad thing (she saves tom from dumbledore - her least favourite teacher - the night he kills the school roosters, allowing the chamber of secrets to be opened), but it also brings her power, not least since she is unwilling to let tom win any arguments. her tendency to seek out gossip and eavesdrop on the staff table ends up saving the world, when she informs tom that the school will be closed if the basilisk’s attacks continue. her predisposition towards wallowing and her own experience of sadness and loneliness makes her emotionally sensitive and good at reading people (as draco malfoy can attest). the fact that she is bullied gives her a certain devil-may-care attitude towards embarrassment. after all, buying chocolates for tom riddle and being rebuffed is probably less humiliating - in the world of the teenage girl - than olive hornby pointing out your spots.

so why shouldn’t myrtle get a hot (and only mildly terrifying) boyfriend? as a treat.

dear old tom marvolo riddle is many things.

he is a connoisseur of dark magic, a brilliant pupil who aspires to be a mass-murderer, a profoundly- traumatised orphan seeking a place in the world.

he is also a cringe teenage edgelord, who spends most of his time in the library doing extra reading and making up anagrams of his own name for fun. [which is of course why, like all teen edgelords in the 1940s, he has a performative interest in communism.]

i always think it’s worth remembering this: that lord voldemort was once actually young. so much about the adult voldemort is presented as inevitable in canon - even the eleven-year-old tom we meet in half-blood prince is written off as fundamentally inextricable from the shape his adult self takes - that the potential that even tiny things would have had on the outcome of his life aren’t considered. i think this is a shame - and i think it’s a great oversight from the series, given its emphasis on the value of choice.

and these tiny things could have been profound - dumbledore making any effort to deal with the young tom’s crushing grief over the death of his mother, for example - but they could also have been the sort of thing which seems more frivolous - a first kiss, a friend you can chat shit with, a really good piece of chocolate - but which can have a huge impact on the rest of someone’s life.

the tom of bookbinding, then, ends up on the straight-and-narrow through a series of lucky accidents. and this does not require him to be all that different from his canon self - he’s just not a murderer. this tom retains all of the canonical voldemort’s best character traits - he has a surprisingly well-developed sense of honour (the voldemort who castigates wormtail for betraying the marauders would certainly be scathing towards the bullies who don’t have the courage to attack myrtle to her face), he’s very camp, he’s extremely thin, he’s prickly and sickly, he’s a magpie (that the canonical voldemort loves working in the antiques trade is a headcanon i am completely wedded to), he’s a pragmatist, he has a series of very defined mannerisms (he tilts his head to one side when considering things! he examines his hands! he paces!), he’s not somebody incapable of empathy but just someone who sees these things primarily through the lens of himself, he has a tendency towards magical thinking and a very idealised view of his lineage and his place in the world (it’s good for all of us that he never realises how wrong he was about the gaunts)...

and he is absolutely desperate for affection.

which myrtle gives to him, one chocolate frog at a time.

and it turns his whole world upside down. not that he’s prepared to admit it until the very end of the story, of course - before then, he justifies his affection for her as pragmatism (he doesn’t allow the basilisk to hurt her because that would make it obvious it was him who’d opened the chamber), but he’s lying to himself.

i’ve never liked the fanon that tom was bullied at school - he dislikes being condescended to about his background, but i don’t think anyone would dare mock him for it - and i’ve always assumed that his descent from slytherin is widely known in his house. this leads to the belief among the student body in bookbinding - which he is only too happy to encourage - that he is a rich pureblood from exactly the sort of background as his friends.

and i have always preferred the idea - in contrast to dumbledore’s belief in half-blood prince that voldemort has no actual interest in them - that the teenage tom’s ‘devoted friends’ are exactly that. he feels a great deal of affection for the knights of walpurgis in his own little way and they’re not ‘rigidly controlled’ by him (another dumbledore special - in bookbinding we see all of them clearly thinking that tom’s obsession with the chamber of secrets is insane, and conspiring to make him less of a boring workaholic). the issue is that - since all of them are loved and well-off - they can’t entirely appreciate the depth of his need to be paid attention. it’s a good job they have myrtle to pick up the slack.

fans of my other writing will recognise the standard cast of knights - romulus lestrange (having a much better time in this piece than in one year in every ten), abraxas malfoy, tarquin rosier (brother of domitiana), eadmer avery, iago carrow, augustus rookwood and so on.

[if tom has a best friend, though, it’s definitely the basilisk, who is an absolute sweetheart.]

the knights are certainly not good people - none of them have any qualms about disparaging myrtle for being muggleborn - but, crucially, they’re teenagers who have the option to choose a better path. [i’d like to think they’re all sincerely delighted for tom when they hear about his upcoming marriage, and salazar and merope jr. have a devoted team of uncles who don’t spare their blood status a second thought.]

and, as with tom, i therefore wanted to give them a chance to be teens. they’re all deeply uncool piles of hormones who drink in the hog’s head - which trips the adult voldemort up in half-blood prince when he comes to hogwarts for his job interview, exactly as it does for hermione in order of the phoenix - because they think it makes them look interestingly dangerous. [it doesn’t.]

they’re also all obsessed with getting their ends away.

writing tom’s sexual awakening made me chuckle self-indulgently at numerous points - the poor thing was spiralling! and i will never get over how a commenter pointing out that he behaves like ‘a chaotic slut’ at several points in this story made me scream! - and so i think that we ought to give props to the two other women who end up saving the world beside myrtle. antimony tremblay is named after a poisonous metal, but her willingness to throw herself at tom in slughorn’s cupboard ended up curing him of his tendency towards isolation and detachment. domitiana rosier - sister of agrippina rosier lestrange, tom’s scourge in one year in every ten, who is minding her own business here - has an imperious demeanour to match her name, and her lack of interest in tom’s muggle blood ended up curing him once and for all of his flirtation with blood supremacy (she also trained him very thoroughly on what to do in bed). she will get her lovely pureblood marriage and be happy enough, but she will always regard tom as the one that got away. even though he considers himself to have hit the jackpot with myrtle, he will be insufferably smug about this.

we have two final shout-outs.

the first of these is to myrtle’s parents. in canon, all the muggleborns we meet seem to extract themselves from their world of their birth - hermione, who ceases to spend any meaningful time with her parents from the summer before prisoner of azkaban onwards, and whose violence towards them in deathly hallows is never interrogated, is the main example. i’ve never liked this - since it’s undermining the point the series thinks it’s making about how blood-supremacists’ beliefs that the magical and muggle should never mix are wrong - and so it was important to me that myrtle came from a loving home which she regards as infinitely superior to the cruelty of the magical world, with parents who respect and encourage her magic.

like their daughter, the warrens are ordinary people who show how being ordinary can change the world. myrtle’s mother, in particular, is the best sort of activist - a normal woman who snaps one day and throws an orange at the prince of wales, who believes that the hard work of compassion is best done through plying tom with iced buns, who is stubborn and never gives up, who isn’t afraid of taking on the state (she’ll get her review into wool’s orphanage), who is happy to be giggly and silly, and who gives extremely good advice. men do indeed like practical women.

the second deserves to go to albus dumbledore.

beyond the fact that he takes against the young voldemort immediately on the basis of his own self-loathing, one of the canonical dumbledore’s flaws is his tendency to prioritise interesting people and take a lack of interest in those who are not spectacular. as a teacher, i can imagine him having little time for the average pupil - as myrtle certainly thinks.

but he learns an important lesson here. there is, as he tells us, beauty in the ordinary - and he recognises, long before tom does, that the beautiful ordinariness of teenage friendship, and girlfriend trouble, and chocolate frogs, and a brilliant (but strange and lonely) boy realising that the love of his life is the world’s most normal girl has altered the course of history. he throws himself sincerely into match-making from then on.

and he’s definitely invited to the wedding.

our setting

we get some hints in canon - especially in half-blood prince - that hogwarts is a school full of teenagers, doing what teenagers do, but harry’s whole ‘saving-the-world thing’ means that he’s a bit too preoccupied to notice what must be a fundamental truth: that hundreds of hormonal creatures, locked up together for months at a time with virtually no adult supervision outside of lessons, will be insatiable.

our setting is also the hogwarts of the forties. i had great fun with the period slang, as well as with the names - beyond the anglo-norman names i use for most of my purebloods (tremblay, duhamel etc.), reginald chive and hubert fawley owe something to p.g. wodehouse, autonoë dashwood-brandon’s mother had clearly been reading sense and sensibility, isabella spats is a distant relation to carmelita spats from a series of unfortunate events, sandraudiga rowle has a norse name like her nephew thorfinn, henrietta savernake is from the poirot novel the hollow, and igor bagman - canonically friends with augustus rookwood - is just as good a quidditch player as his son.

this time-period is, of course, when the second world war was taking place. i’m on the record as disliking the fanon that the canonical voldemort is traumatised by the war (especially the blitz, which he’s at school during), and here his main hardship - as it was for many people - is rationing. myrtle’s shared detestation of the practice is one of the things which really makes his feelings for her (something he’s not quite understood yet when they run into each other in chapter two…) click into place.

our themes

jkr’s lack of sympathy for myrtle contrasts with the fact that she clearly has a sincere dislike of female bullying - and, especially, the sort of petty sniping about appearance which is so profoundly damaging to teenage girls [i do really advise reading what she says about pansy parkinson on this matter.]

however, it’s always seemed to me that her view can be assumed to be that ‘good’ women simply suffer through this torment, knowing that they have the moral high-ground - hermione must, like myrtle in bookbinding, be isolated by being the only girl in her dormitory not in a cliquey friendship-group, but she never seems upset about lavender or parvati excluding her; luna, whose shoes are hidden like myrtle’s are (i think this must be a standard ravenclaw thing), simply shrugs everything off.

but i think that’s bullshit. myrtle is allowed to wallow in her devastation at being bullied and ostracised - and, especially, at her devastation at not ever knowing what she’s done wrong. bringing your own packed lunch, or spilling pudding down yourself, or being happy to receive a birthday present, or having an attractive male friend are such benign things, but they are also the sorts of things which trigger so much cruelty in the teen ecosystem.

i also thought it important that lot of myrtle’s bullying should be connected to being muggleborn. olive hornby doesn’t have the sort of name which indicates being pureblood in canon, but here she is one, and her relationship with myrtle is absolutely driven by the fact that she is an inherent insider to the magical world and myrtle isn’t.

in canon, we get the hint that bullying people over blood status is the preserve of slytherins with death eater sympathies, but this has always seemed reductive to me (not least because blood status drives so much of the ‘good’ side’s narrative - the weasleys are protected by their class, for example, and this changes how they interact with the world to a significant extent, as ron’s view of house elves shows). after all, the trigger for so much teenage bullying is difference of any kind - and muggleborns are objectively different from those raised in the wizarding world. [especially since, as tom himself points out, wizarding society is pretty medieval - they should think about opening cinemas.]

they are also subject to plenty of pressure. i liked myrtle’s fury at dumbledore trying to make her work hard in transfiguration simply because she wouldn’t want to let other muggleborns down (with dumbledore never stopping to think, for example, about how myrtle might be disadvantaged by things like the trace, which never applies to her pureblood classmates). tom, too, is a victim of this pressure. i’m always struck in half-blood prince that dumbledore never tells mrs cole that he’s a wizard, meaning that he must be the only child in hogwarts whose guardian - whose relationship with him is already poor - must have no idea where he goes all year. this is one of the main examples of dumbledore failing to understand the canonical voldemort’s disjointed sense of belonging, and how his isolation feeds his rage, and it was nice to resolve it here, as tom’s colossal abandonment issues become something he finds more manageable once he’s created his own place in the world, with his house, his rabbit, his job, and - of course - a family of his own.

our love story

because, of course, bookbinding is really about one thing: how love can save the world.

tom and myrtle are a crack ship, of course, but i do think that they can be made to sincerely work as a couple because they both have a fundamental need for attention - it’s why he flounces over to her when she’s crying in the library, it’s why she storms off after him when he snaps at her, it’s why their meet-cute is neither of them allowing the other’s emotional state to distract from what they want to say.

but their need for attention manifests slightly differently in each of them. myrtle needs affection as reassurance, tom needs it as validation - dumbledore presents his belief that he’s special, his breathless glee at someone taking an interest in him, his joy at being listened to by his death eaters, as arrogance, but it’s clearly caused by the fact that he wasn’t allowed to develop a sense of being wanted and liked as a child. together, tom and myrtle can provide each other what they need - his expectation that she should take an interest in his interests ends up making her feel cleverer and braver, her expectation that he should hold her hand and walk her through things she fears ends up making him feel comforted and wanted for the first time in his life.

after all, the chocolates upend tom’s whole world. and the idea of love-as-comfort - something which the canonical series relegates to a subordinate position far below love-as-suffering and love-as-sacrifice - is one of the key themes of bookbinding. tom always refers to his attraction to myrtle using metaphors of things which are comforting - the roses round the door of the house, honey (after all, he has a famous sweet tooth), the cinnamon sprinkle on the top of a rice pudding, milky tea, a feather bed, a blancmange which cools a sore throat - which seems to be something which has really stood out to many readers. and he seeks out this comfort despite not really knowing why - in chapter two, it should be emphasised that it does, in fact, take that long to walk from spitalfields to walthamstow; tom is making at least a fifteen-mile round trip daily to see myrtle’s house.

and myrtle - who is much more insightful than she’s given credit for, even in canon - understands this. it’s why she notices that tom’s need to comfort himself is lying under the sinister things he reveals to her in the cave. his belief that he killed his mother is something i’ve written about elsewhere, as is his belief that he was always a wizard but nobody understood that - and the self-protective anger in which he wraps his loneliness and grief is a favourite theme of mine to explore when writing him. the shells and sea-glass - a motif of his childhood throughout my writing - turn up in bookbinding too, when myrtle forces him to think about his childhood for the first time in years.

it’s also why she gives him the marriage certificate. it’s implied in canon that voldemort never knows his mother’s name, and myrtle finding it for him is - therefore - one of the most sincerely lovely things anyone has ever done for him and his sense of self. i think it’s for the best that he believes that his parents’ marriage was happy, even though i know that many readers have found this bittersweet to consider.

of course, the fact that they’re both equally stubborn also helps myrtle set tom on the straight-and-narrow as well. the fact that myrtle doesn’t share his love of hogwarts or his obsession with magic is something tom initially can’t comprehend, but he comes to understand how his feeling of not belonging in the muggle world is what myrtle feels in the magical one. by chapter six, he’s a paid-up muggle defender, proud of his background, much to his friends’ initial dismay.

this is a rom-com, though, so they still manage to break up for a bit - although tom, whose canon version is capable of a surprisingly steadfast faithfulness, remains loyal to myrtle the whole time (as she does, bar some igor-bagman-wrangling, to him). but myrtle manages to show some self-growth of her own and realise that she is being a bit of a drama queen. [who among us?]

the course of true love rarely does run smooth… but everything works out in the end.

and the love between the soon-to-be mr and mrs riddle brings about glimpses of the changed future which numerous readers have told me have moved them. my favourite? it has to be tom riddle sr. falling in love with frank bryce, a concept which now has me in a chokehold.

after all - to borrow a life lesson from tom marvolo riddle - there is always something that can be done to fix things.