(no subject)
I wasn't going to post this at all originally, but Katie made me. ::cries::
The Nothing Language
Tom Riddle speaks German and Russian; he can read Latin and a little corrupted New Testament Greek, but he doesn't know any French at all.
However, it's not like he really needs to. Even though the Nazis are gone out of Paris, there are still plenty of wizards who speak it in the city.
***
The great statue of Lavoisier that used to stand at the Church of the Madeleine is gone, melted down during the war to make metal for German guns. Tom can still see where they prized the statue off, where they cut Lavoisier's feet from the pediment before they wheeled him out. There is nobody to keep him from running his fingers over the jagged edge.
Tom has no idea who Lavoisier is. The best student out of Hogwarts in a century, and he doesn't know that matter is made up of molecules, that the space between particles in even the hardest, densest bronze is proportionately greater than the stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between a man standing in America and his brother standing on a beach in Portugal. Tom would laugh at you if you suggested such a thing. Things feel solid underneath his fingers, so they must be solid. His ideas, Salazar's ideas, about the superiority of Purebloods feel solid, so they must be solid, and they fill Tom's conception of the world, leaving no room for doubt, for the emptiness of the atomic theory or even the idea of particles too tiny to be seen even by a Magnifact spell.
Tom does, however, understand the emptiness of human hearts and of human ways very well.
***
Cornelius Fudge invites Tom Riddle to come to dinner with him and his friends. He's actually supposed to be meeting Tom at the Church of the Madeleine, but he's running late because he got caught up in traffic, or so he says.
There are very few private cars in Paris so soon after the war is over. There isn't much gasoline available for private consumption, and even wizards have to walk. Cornelius's cheeks are flushed red when he jogs into the church, and while he's able to pick Tom, standing in the nave of the church with his hands clasped behind him, Cornelius stumbles a little over the words. He's out of breath. There's dust on his clothes. Petals from the chestnut trees that are in bloom all over Paris at this time of the year, the edge of a silver hipflask peeking out of his robe pocket, and a few drops of rain running down his cheek and onto the collar of his shirt from the shower that came and passed while Tom was running his fingers over the base where Lavoisier used to stand.
"Do you speak any French?" Fudge asks Tom, in English, as they walk out of the church together, companionably as Fudge's father, who arranged this meeting and who paid for Tom's passage over, may have wanted.
Tom shakes his head. Fudge remembers Tom, vaguely, from seeing him at school. Riddle was four years below Fudge, but Fudge remembers seeing a dark head with pale skin and cheap clothing bent over library books once or twice, remembers coming out of office hours for a professor and finding Tom, waiting, with questions about an extra research project that he was doing.
"Non," Tom says as they turn the corner. He has his hands in his pockets, and he smiles at Fudge when Fudge looks up. "That's the only word I know in French."
***
Cornelius's friends speak little English. The little that they know, they've picked up from Americans that they've met both in Muggle cafes and in wizarding ones - there are plenty of American wizards in Paris now, come over with the American Muggle troops.
So it's all slang out of their mouths. They know the names "Grable" and "Roosevelt" and "Ginger Rogers," and maybe the name of the President of the American witches and wizards, but little else.
Their accents notwithstanding, none of this is intelligible to Tom. He doesn't know who Roosevelt is, or Ginger Rogers. There are pictures of various Muggle stars on the walls of the restaurant, but he doesn't recognize them, or understand what they're doing on the walls of wizarding establishment, doesn't understand their appeal. To him, a grable is a dusty-colored bird whose appearance is regarded as a sure harbringer of hailstorms in certain Hungarian villages. Turner is shorthand for a Timeturner.
There are other languages that Tom could speak with Cornelius and his friends, of course. He could use his Latin. He could even use his Russian on the one beaky-nosed intellectual down at the end of the table; he fancies himself something of a Marxist, and he carries no money even though his father is one of the richest wizards in Paris from his profits in the war.
"Maybe that is why he wants to give it all away, no?" one of the other boys at the table says as he takes a sip of the wine that they have been having with dinner. He has better English than most, and Tom could carry on a sort of creaking conversation with him, or he could use Cornelius as an interpreter.
Instead, Tom uses his German. His pitch-perfect, Berlin-accent German, though sometimes, Tom will slip into different dialects, just to show that he can. Bavarian German, for example, or German as it's spoken once you get toward the south a little and it starts feeling the blue seas of the Mediterranean and the pressure of Romance languages.
The dinner that night is served on little white plates with a blue ocean scene painted on the edge and a girl painted in the middle. The idea, Tom supposed, was that the food was set on the plate, and as you ate the food, you got to see little bits of the girl. A little bit of pureed potatoes over her breasts, a piece of chicken over her face so that you couldn't tell whether she was a brunette or blonde or redhead until you ate that, and a piece of asparagus laid against her thigh and cut so that it looked like it was disappearing into her.
It's what you get when you have dinner next door to a brothel, Tom supposes. Their waiter is a man, like in most French restaurants, but the maitre d' is this girl wearing a garter belt and a uniform that was rather shorter than that.
"My father's footing the bill, you know, for this whole night out. In honor of you coming, he said, and gave me a whole bag of Galleons," Cornelius says. His friends call him Neil, but the way it sounds on their tongues, it sounds more like Nell.
"No," Tom says, smiling down at his plate. The girl drawn on it winks and shifts a little underneath the food, and he looks up at Fudge with a smile. "I like my girls fully dressed and real. Pass me the bread please, Cornelius."
There's no response. Tom repeats the request, but then he realizes that Fudge is staring up on stage -- the lights in the restaurant are starting to dim. The silver curtains on stage are drawn up tight together, and then, out steps this almost naked girl standing on stage. She's got a pair of white parakeets perched on her shoulders, white feathers hanging from a necklace, and another bunch hanging from a golden belt. The French boys at the end of the table abruptly go quiet for a minute, then explode into cat-calls. They forget all about their food.
"That's why they call this La Place des Animaux, Tom. I hear there's a girl with a snake due later," Fudge says to Tom, shouting to be heard over the catcalls and the whistles. The girl is shouting too, a song about Noah and the forty days of rain and how the little birds had no shelter from the torrents, and Cornelius keeps his eyes on her the whole time he's talking to time. "Yes, a girl with a snake. That should be quite to your taste, shouldn't it?"
***
Snakes don't smell like anything at all. Tom learned this soon after he learned he was a Parseltongue. He'd had a suspicion of it before, just from thinking about how unnatural the women who visited the orphanage in their furs and snakeskin shoes and heavy perfume were.
Give a snake his choice, and he will make himself smell exactly like his surroundings so that nobody can sniff him out, and for all that this girl was wearing what looked like scales of gold out on the stage like one a yellow variant of the green tree snake, she turned out to have regular smooth skin, and her room smelled like roses or lilacs or something else - Tom couldn't figure out exactly what it was, but it was something floral and tense like that.
"They put things in your food," the girl says, smiling a little as she closes the door to her room. "That's probably why you're feeling the way you do. This is your first time at a place like this, isn't it?"
Tom shrugs a little and looks around. Canopy bed. Long low desk with gilt trappings on the side, though he really doubts whether this girl can even read or write because there are no books or papers on the desk, just a long low cage that's done over in gilt, just like the rest of the room and the leaf on the girl during her act.
Without it on and without the lights from the stage, Tom can see that she has pale skin, skin as pale as the shirt that he's wearing. Red hair to contrast against the dark green of the snake she shares her act with, and Tom bends down in front of the cage to look at the snake inside, who looks back at him as steadily as he looks at her for a moment. Then, she shifts a little, pulling coils along coils, then lays her head down on top of the topmost coil.
Tom smiles and as part of his turning around to look at the girl, he flips the catch to Nagini's cage open, doing it so casually that even though the girl sitting right across from him, she never notices.
"Your snake's name is Nagini," Tom says. He still has his drink from downstairs in hand. "And as far as she knows, she's the last snake of her kind. Did you know that snakes like her give birth to their young alive, just like human women do? Nagini is almost three hundred years old."
The girl lifts her eyebrows at him, but she doesn't say anything. Instead, she just sits down on the edge of the bed. She pats the spot next to her, but Tom remains standing, the ice cubes slowly melting in his drink, and he just smiles at her.
So she giggles a little and starts to undo the clasp of her gown, but Tom then puts his drink on the puts his hand over hers. "Why don't you go and lie down on the bed? I'll go put my drink down."
She opens her mouth to say something, but Tom puts smiles again. "I like my girls fully dressed," he says.
His lips feel a little odd with the translation charm laid across his lips, and Tom can already feel the sweat start to prickle along his forehead from the heat in the brothel room, so hot that the windows are fogged up, and humid, too, from the bowls and bowls of flowers set all around from her admirers. He puts his drink down on the little nightstand next to the bed - there's a clock on it, but it's not running, and Tom sits down on the bed next to her. He even shifts the pillow underneath her head so that she's more comfortable lying there in her green silk gown.
Tom is still wearing his shirt, buttoned up to the second button, though he's rolled his sleeves up. Tom puts his hand on her cheek, and she smiles a little drowsily up at him as she reaches to put her hand over his. "They put things in my food, you know. So I won't get frightened on stage, so I'll behave. It's frightening working with a snake like that."
Tom slides his hand down from her cheek to the tip of her chin. His fingers are a little damp from the sweating glass. A little cool, too.
"Do you know that you're not supposed to keep snakes like Nagini in places as humid as this? She's a desert snake, not a jungle snake. She lives under the sands."
"You like that snake better than you like me," she says and turns up her mouth, but she doesn't try to get up again. "Are you paying to do it with me, or to do it with my snake?"
"Neither, really," Tom says, smiling a little, and she turns up her soft mouth at him again, but before she can really puzzle out what he means by that, she turns her head just enough so that she can see the broad, blunt head of Nagini rising up over the edge of her bed.
She opens her mouth to scream, but Tom clamps his hand down over her mouth, then, and he uses the weight of his body to keep her pinned to the bed while Nagini winds around her waist, and Tom puts his other arm down over her shoulders to hold her still while Nagini gets a good grip around her torso.
The snake is fifteen feet long. The girl is five foot six. Twenty seven inch waist. Nagini goes around four, five times, then starts to tighten, scales sliding around scales until she gets up to six turns around the girl.
The girl keeps trying to bite Tom's hand, but Tom keeps his hand cupped so that her lips just brush his palm, over and over, as she keeps trying to scream, and the feeling is much like she's just kissing his hand
***
"Did you have a good time with your girl?" Fudge says that night as he sits down on his bed. Tom is set up on the sofa outside in the parlor, but the only fire that's lit in the little flat is in Fudge's bedroom, and there is a little chill in the night. A little rain, too, and it misted them on the way back from the brothel.
His robe and Tom's robe are hanging in front of the fire now. Tom shook the rain out of them and arranged them on the dryer, and now Tom's nudging Fudge's shoes into a neat little row at the foot of the bed.
"I did," Tom said, then, looking up. "You'll have to thank your father for me."
Cornelius smiles, then, and settles down lower in bed. He's saved some of the money, actually. Negotiated a deal with the madame of the brothel for bringing Tom there and for bringing his friends, so she paid him a little and cut the bill, though she did draw up a forged one for Cornelius to send to his father. Girls are expensive; so is dinner at the Black Cat, and Fudge Sr is rarely so open with his pocketbook. Cornelius has to weasel and beg for each advance on his pocket money - he assumes that his father is partially financing this trip for Riddle because Tom is, and with a bit of a smirk, Cornelius draws the covers up to his chest -- the combination of the wine and the girls and smugness promises to send him off to sleep fairly quickly.
Right before he does, though, he thinks he hears Tom say something.
Tom is sitting at the foot of the bed in an armchair, his profile outlined against the fire, and apparently drowsing off with the warmth. The drying clothes are spread out next to him, making a straight line to go with the straight lines of Tom's face, and for a moment, Cornelius is going to ask Tom what he said.
After another moment, though, Cornelius smiles secretly in the dark and holds very still in bed: he thinks he's heard Tom saying "Neil, Neil," in his sleep, as he drowses by the fire. It would be gauche to disturb a boy in his affections, and Cornelius Fudge smiles, again, even more pleased. He rolls over in bed, then, and pretends that he has been asleep all this time, that he has heard nothing.
When Fudge is a man of thirty two, when he has already lost his youthful slimness and his good looks, when he is starting to pick up the florid complexion that he'll carry until the day that Lord Voldemort kills him by bursting every strained blood vessel in his body - Fudge will tell intimate friends and those that he wants to impress that when Lord Voldemort was still Tom Riddle, he whispered Fudge's name in his sleep after a night on the town.
Cornelius Fudge is wrong about that, though, as he is wrong about so many things.
Tom is not calling his name. Tom is not calling anybody's name. Tom Riddle does not call anybody's name out of need; Tom Riddle only calls his own name, and that night by the fire, in the beautiful apartment on the Rue des Chats-qui-peche, Tom is saying the German word for nothing, because that is what Cornelius Fudge and this world of delicious dinners and pretty girls and gaiety means to him.
Tom puts his hand in his pocket, and he feels the slow, steady pulse of Nagini shrunk down to an inch for every two feet of length, and he feels her coil around his wrist, grateful for the warmth.
Nothing, Tom says
And nothingness is what he will bring to the petty people who espouse it.
The Nothing Language
Tom Riddle speaks German and Russian; he can read Latin and a little corrupted New Testament Greek, but he doesn't know any French at all.
However, it's not like he really needs to. Even though the Nazis are gone out of Paris, there are still plenty of wizards who speak it in the city.
***
The great statue of Lavoisier that used to stand at the Church of the Madeleine is gone, melted down during the war to make metal for German guns. Tom can still see where they prized the statue off, where they cut Lavoisier's feet from the pediment before they wheeled him out. There is nobody to keep him from running his fingers over the jagged edge.
Tom has no idea who Lavoisier is. The best student out of Hogwarts in a century, and he doesn't know that matter is made up of molecules, that the space between particles in even the hardest, densest bronze is proportionately greater than the stretch of the Atlantic Ocean between a man standing in America and his brother standing on a beach in Portugal. Tom would laugh at you if you suggested such a thing. Things feel solid underneath his fingers, so they must be solid. His ideas, Salazar's ideas, about the superiority of Purebloods feel solid, so they must be solid, and they fill Tom's conception of the world, leaving no room for doubt, for the emptiness of the atomic theory or even the idea of particles too tiny to be seen even by a Magnifact spell.
Tom does, however, understand the emptiness of human hearts and of human ways very well.
***
Cornelius Fudge invites Tom Riddle to come to dinner with him and his friends. He's actually supposed to be meeting Tom at the Church of the Madeleine, but he's running late because he got caught up in traffic, or so he says.
There are very few private cars in Paris so soon after the war is over. There isn't much gasoline available for private consumption, and even wizards have to walk. Cornelius's cheeks are flushed red when he jogs into the church, and while he's able to pick Tom, standing in the nave of the church with his hands clasped behind him, Cornelius stumbles a little over the words. He's out of breath. There's dust on his clothes. Petals from the chestnut trees that are in bloom all over Paris at this time of the year, the edge of a silver hipflask peeking out of his robe pocket, and a few drops of rain running down his cheek and onto the collar of his shirt from the shower that came and passed while Tom was running his fingers over the base where Lavoisier used to stand.
"Do you speak any French?" Fudge asks Tom, in English, as they walk out of the church together, companionably as Fudge's father, who arranged this meeting and who paid for Tom's passage over, may have wanted.
Tom shakes his head. Fudge remembers Tom, vaguely, from seeing him at school. Riddle was four years below Fudge, but Fudge remembers seeing a dark head with pale skin and cheap clothing bent over library books once or twice, remembers coming out of office hours for a professor and finding Tom, waiting, with questions about an extra research project that he was doing.
"Non," Tom says as they turn the corner. He has his hands in his pockets, and he smiles at Fudge when Fudge looks up. "That's the only word I know in French."
***
Cornelius's friends speak little English. The little that they know, they've picked up from Americans that they've met both in Muggle cafes and in wizarding ones - there are plenty of American wizards in Paris now, come over with the American Muggle troops.
So it's all slang out of their mouths. They know the names "Grable" and "Roosevelt" and "Ginger Rogers," and maybe the name of the President of the American witches and wizards, but little else.
Their accents notwithstanding, none of this is intelligible to Tom. He doesn't know who Roosevelt is, or Ginger Rogers. There are pictures of various Muggle stars on the walls of the restaurant, but he doesn't recognize them, or understand what they're doing on the walls of wizarding establishment, doesn't understand their appeal. To him, a grable is a dusty-colored bird whose appearance is regarded as a sure harbringer of hailstorms in certain Hungarian villages. Turner is shorthand for a Timeturner.
There are other languages that Tom could speak with Cornelius and his friends, of course. He could use his Latin. He could even use his Russian on the one beaky-nosed intellectual down at the end of the table; he fancies himself something of a Marxist, and he carries no money even though his father is one of the richest wizards in Paris from his profits in the war.
"Maybe that is why he wants to give it all away, no?" one of the other boys at the table says as he takes a sip of the wine that they have been having with dinner. He has better English than most, and Tom could carry on a sort of creaking conversation with him, or he could use Cornelius as an interpreter.
Instead, Tom uses his German. His pitch-perfect, Berlin-accent German, though sometimes, Tom will slip into different dialects, just to show that he can. Bavarian German, for example, or German as it's spoken once you get toward the south a little and it starts feeling the blue seas of the Mediterranean and the pressure of Romance languages.
The dinner that night is served on little white plates with a blue ocean scene painted on the edge and a girl painted in the middle. The idea, Tom supposed, was that the food was set on the plate, and as you ate the food, you got to see little bits of the girl. A little bit of pureed potatoes over her breasts, a piece of chicken over her face so that you couldn't tell whether she was a brunette or blonde or redhead until you ate that, and a piece of asparagus laid against her thigh and cut so that it looked like it was disappearing into her.
It's what you get when you have dinner next door to a brothel, Tom supposes. Their waiter is a man, like in most French restaurants, but the maitre d' is this girl wearing a garter belt and a uniform that was rather shorter than that.
"My father's footing the bill, you know, for this whole night out. In honor of you coming, he said, and gave me a whole bag of Galleons," Cornelius says. His friends call him Neil, but the way it sounds on their tongues, it sounds more like Nell.
"No," Tom says, smiling down at his plate. The girl drawn on it winks and shifts a little underneath the food, and he looks up at Fudge with a smile. "I like my girls fully dressed and real. Pass me the bread please, Cornelius."
There's no response. Tom repeats the request, but then he realizes that Fudge is staring up on stage -- the lights in the restaurant are starting to dim. The silver curtains on stage are drawn up tight together, and then, out steps this almost naked girl standing on stage. She's got a pair of white parakeets perched on her shoulders, white feathers hanging from a necklace, and another bunch hanging from a golden belt. The French boys at the end of the table abruptly go quiet for a minute, then explode into cat-calls. They forget all about their food.
"That's why they call this La Place des Animaux, Tom. I hear there's a girl with a snake due later," Fudge says to Tom, shouting to be heard over the catcalls and the whistles. The girl is shouting too, a song about Noah and the forty days of rain and how the little birds had no shelter from the torrents, and Cornelius keeps his eyes on her the whole time he's talking to time. "Yes, a girl with a snake. That should be quite to your taste, shouldn't it?"
***
Snakes don't smell like anything at all. Tom learned this soon after he learned he was a Parseltongue. He'd had a suspicion of it before, just from thinking about how unnatural the women who visited the orphanage in their furs and snakeskin shoes and heavy perfume were.
Give a snake his choice, and he will make himself smell exactly like his surroundings so that nobody can sniff him out, and for all that this girl was wearing what looked like scales of gold out on the stage like one a yellow variant of the green tree snake, she turned out to have regular smooth skin, and her room smelled like roses or lilacs or something else - Tom couldn't figure out exactly what it was, but it was something floral and tense like that.
"They put things in your food," the girl says, smiling a little as she closes the door to her room. "That's probably why you're feeling the way you do. This is your first time at a place like this, isn't it?"
Tom shrugs a little and looks around. Canopy bed. Long low desk with gilt trappings on the side, though he really doubts whether this girl can even read or write because there are no books or papers on the desk, just a long low cage that's done over in gilt, just like the rest of the room and the leaf on the girl during her act.
Without it on and without the lights from the stage, Tom can see that she has pale skin, skin as pale as the shirt that he's wearing. Red hair to contrast against the dark green of the snake she shares her act with, and Tom bends down in front of the cage to look at the snake inside, who looks back at him as steadily as he looks at her for a moment. Then, she shifts a little, pulling coils along coils, then lays her head down on top of the topmost coil.
Tom smiles and as part of his turning around to look at the girl, he flips the catch to Nagini's cage open, doing it so casually that even though the girl sitting right across from him, she never notices.
"Your snake's name is Nagini," Tom says. He still has his drink from downstairs in hand. "And as far as she knows, she's the last snake of her kind. Did you know that snakes like her give birth to their young alive, just like human women do? Nagini is almost three hundred years old."
The girl lifts her eyebrows at him, but she doesn't say anything. Instead, she just sits down on the edge of the bed. She pats the spot next to her, but Tom remains standing, the ice cubes slowly melting in his drink, and he just smiles at her.
So she giggles a little and starts to undo the clasp of her gown, but Tom then puts his drink on the puts his hand over hers. "Why don't you go and lie down on the bed? I'll go put my drink down."
She opens her mouth to say something, but Tom puts smiles again. "I like my girls fully dressed," he says.
His lips feel a little odd with the translation charm laid across his lips, and Tom can already feel the sweat start to prickle along his forehead from the heat in the brothel room, so hot that the windows are fogged up, and humid, too, from the bowls and bowls of flowers set all around from her admirers. He puts his drink down on the little nightstand next to the bed - there's a clock on it, but it's not running, and Tom sits down on the bed next to her. He even shifts the pillow underneath her head so that she's more comfortable lying there in her green silk gown.
Tom is still wearing his shirt, buttoned up to the second button, though he's rolled his sleeves up. Tom puts his hand on her cheek, and she smiles a little drowsily up at him as she reaches to put her hand over his. "They put things in my food, you know. So I won't get frightened on stage, so I'll behave. It's frightening working with a snake like that."
Tom slides his hand down from her cheek to the tip of her chin. His fingers are a little damp from the sweating glass. A little cool, too.
"Do you know that you're not supposed to keep snakes like Nagini in places as humid as this? She's a desert snake, not a jungle snake. She lives under the sands."
"You like that snake better than you like me," she says and turns up her mouth, but she doesn't try to get up again. "Are you paying to do it with me, or to do it with my snake?"
"Neither, really," Tom says, smiling a little, and she turns up her soft mouth at him again, but before she can really puzzle out what he means by that, she turns her head just enough so that she can see the broad, blunt head of Nagini rising up over the edge of her bed.
She opens her mouth to scream, but Tom clamps his hand down over her mouth, then, and he uses the weight of his body to keep her pinned to the bed while Nagini winds around her waist, and Tom puts his other arm down over her shoulders to hold her still while Nagini gets a good grip around her torso.
The snake is fifteen feet long. The girl is five foot six. Twenty seven inch waist. Nagini goes around four, five times, then starts to tighten, scales sliding around scales until she gets up to six turns around the girl.
The girl keeps trying to bite Tom's hand, but Tom keeps his hand cupped so that her lips just brush his palm, over and over, as she keeps trying to scream, and the feeling is much like she's just kissing his hand
***
"Did you have a good time with your girl?" Fudge says that night as he sits down on his bed. Tom is set up on the sofa outside in the parlor, but the only fire that's lit in the little flat is in Fudge's bedroom, and there is a little chill in the night. A little rain, too, and it misted them on the way back from the brothel.
His robe and Tom's robe are hanging in front of the fire now. Tom shook the rain out of them and arranged them on the dryer, and now Tom's nudging Fudge's shoes into a neat little row at the foot of the bed.
"I did," Tom said, then, looking up. "You'll have to thank your father for me."
Cornelius smiles, then, and settles down lower in bed. He's saved some of the money, actually. Negotiated a deal with the madame of the brothel for bringing Tom there and for bringing his friends, so she paid him a little and cut the bill, though she did draw up a forged one for Cornelius to send to his father. Girls are expensive; so is dinner at the Black Cat, and Fudge Sr is rarely so open with his pocketbook. Cornelius has to weasel and beg for each advance on his pocket money - he assumes that his father is partially financing this trip for Riddle because Tom is, and with a bit of a smirk, Cornelius draws the covers up to his chest -- the combination of the wine and the girls and smugness promises to send him off to sleep fairly quickly.
Right before he does, though, he thinks he hears Tom say something.
Tom is sitting at the foot of the bed in an armchair, his profile outlined against the fire, and apparently drowsing off with the warmth. The drying clothes are spread out next to him, making a straight line to go with the straight lines of Tom's face, and for a moment, Cornelius is going to ask Tom what he said.
After another moment, though, Cornelius smiles secretly in the dark and holds very still in bed: he thinks he's heard Tom saying "Neil, Neil," in his sleep, as he drowses by the fire. It would be gauche to disturb a boy in his affections, and Cornelius Fudge smiles, again, even more pleased. He rolls over in bed, then, and pretends that he has been asleep all this time, that he has heard nothing.
When Fudge is a man of thirty two, when he has already lost his youthful slimness and his good looks, when he is starting to pick up the florid complexion that he'll carry until the day that Lord Voldemort kills him by bursting every strained blood vessel in his body - Fudge will tell intimate friends and those that he wants to impress that when Lord Voldemort was still Tom Riddle, he whispered Fudge's name in his sleep after a night on the town.
Cornelius Fudge is wrong about that, though, as he is wrong about so many things.
Tom is not calling his name. Tom is not calling anybody's name. Tom Riddle does not call anybody's name out of need; Tom Riddle only calls his own name, and that night by the fire, in the beautiful apartment on the Rue des Chats-qui-peche, Tom is saying the German word for nothing, because that is what Cornelius Fudge and this world of delicious dinners and pretty girls and gaiety means to him.
Tom puts his hand in his pocket, and he feels the slow, steady pulse of Nagini shrunk down to an inch for every two feet of length, and he feels her coil around his wrist, grateful for the warmth.
Nothing, Tom says
And nothingness is what he will bring to the petty people who espouse it.