After Hallowe'en 1981

For the longest time, the world consisted of pain, and nothing but pain. What was he feeling that pain with, in the absence of a body? How did he know he was alive anyway?

Lord Voldemort (né Riddle) was not asking either question. He could not. He was quite unable to think.

A moment of clarity came and passed like lightening, followed by more pain. Then another clear moment. Many moments of clarity. Like stars in a cold winter sky, they provided little light and no warmth.

At some point he realised that the moments of clarity happened when he chanced upon small animals and possessed them, and that the moments ended when the strain to think human thoughts destroyed the tiny animal brains.

Then the deer he had used for that insight died as well.

Luck helped. Somehow, he found a bird. Somehow, he managed not to kill it while it took him to the next human, but he drove the human into madness when, in his impatience, he forced thoughts of arcane disciplines into a mind that had never heard of the most basic magic.

Somehow, one fact stayed with him: in order to think properly, like somebody who is awake and focused, not like a sleeping person, he needed a living brain. A ruddy organ. Weak flesh.

And he needed it.

(Much later he will say drily that spectacular new magic, such as surviving the loss of one's body, comes with with spectacular new problems. He will remember the well-known alchemical basic that some phases – such as gaseous forms – are more volatile than others. But he's not there yet, not by a long chalk.)

Luck remained moderately helpful. As he had chanced upon mice and boars, he chanced upon a nursing home. Old and decaying minds. Just the place to perfect his light touch, or so he thought.

In reality it turned out to be the single most frustrating experience in his existence.

The problem was not that possession is nothing like the Imperius; that possession is an agreement between two parties. That he would have to offer his intended host something, and hope that it would be accepted, and if it was accepted, the host and he would have to agree on terms.

The next problem was that all these people wanted was ...death. Preferably after their respective kids had been there one last time, but if that was not possible, then tonight (in their sleep) would do as well. If he could grant them that, he was welcome to their brains.

They finally agreed on nice, sugary, and well-crafted hallucinations. (Voldemort could not start decimating nursing homes. At the state he was in, even the attention of muggles was dangerous.)

Picture a nineteen seventies student, stack of punched cards in hand, waiting in line for his little program to be fed to the one, huge, slow computer on campus. Picture Lord Voldemort, snatching happy memories out of the minds of people, not to use them for torture, but to make up waking dreams of big family reunions. All the while trying to snatch some brain activity for his own thoughts.

Luck enjoyed the joke for a year or two, then put a visiting teenager in his way. Also with an appreciation for hallucinations. Of course, Voldemort fled the nursing home. Of course he latched onto the first whiff of magic he got outside. Having put his time in hell to good use, he now navigated minds until he found a suitable long-term host. (That process included no journeys to distant countries, no matter what Albus Dumbledore would later tell a confused twelve-year old.)

Luck, witnessing his next choices, temporarily acquired the human anatomy required for a long-suffering sigh.

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