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.