I don't write fanfiction. And if I did, it wouldn't be Harry Potter fanfiction. And if it were, it certainly wouldn't be a long weird thing about Voldemort losing his powers and eventually ending up driving an old Volvo and painting houses in western Massachusetts.


This was inspired by dorrie6's landlord's housepainter, explanation (of sorts) here. Beyond that, I'm not sure where this came from, except I had to be at work today and it was really, really slow.

The Last Exile of Lord Voldemort

Well. It wasn’t how he’d imagined things working out. When he’d imagined failure at all (and he did so only very rarely, and only because he was at heart a thorough person), he’d thought of Azkaban, or the Dementors’ Kiss, or even, at least in the early years, death. Not this.

Right up until the end, he had thought he would win, and even now it was hard to see just how he’d failed. But in that last battle, he and his army had been defeated, and he had found himself completely without magic – his once-great, then mostly-lost, then great-again powers had been destroyed, apparently permanently, by that ridiculous band of children, academics, and Ministry rejects who had allied themselves against him.

The spell that took Lord Voldemort’s magic had knocked him unconscious, of course. And so while what was left of the Order of the Phoenix tried to round up what was left of the Death Eaters, and what was left of the Death Eaters tried to blast what was left of the Order of the Phoenix into oblivion, he shivered in the cool summer night, oblivious, unaware of the curious turn his life had taken.

Thinking about it later, the only thing he could figure was that no one had known how to look for him except by looking for his magic. Which only made sense; what was he in body, really? As it turned out, his body seemed to be that of a middle-aged Muggle (or should it be Squib? What did you call the non-magical child of a witch-Muggle union? What if that non-magical child had once been the most powerful wizard of his generation?). All the glamours and appearance spells he’d used to confuse and frighten had fallen away with his magic, and he didn’t look at all like the Dark Lord he had once been.

When he came to, the battlefield was mostly empty; a few wizards circled the periphery, looking for bodies or survivors. He’d instinctively cast an invisibility spell, one that should have been easy for a wizard of his powers, even without a wand, but nothing happened. He’d begun to realize, then. He felt for his magic the way an amputee might feel for his missing limb, and he found nothing.

Voldemort had been broken before, of course. But this was worse; this was the worst. The first time the Potter child had stolen his magic, it had been painful, and he had been weakened, but this time he was fundamentally changed. He told himself not to give up hope, that his magic might return to him, but he knew with a sick kind of certainty that this was a forlorn hope.

There was nothing for it but to run; he wasn’t sure whether the wands he saw glowing from the other side of the field belonged to his side or the other, but in his current state he didn’t think much of his chances with either faction. He struck out across the field, away from the lights, in what he thought was the direction of the nearest Muggle town. He ran until he had to jog, jogged until he had to walk, and finally stopped on the outskirts of the town, where he curled up and went to sleep on a park bench.

Just a few hours after he’d gone to sleep, a policeman poked at him, hollered for him to wake up and clear out. Half-awake, he’d thrown out his empty wand hand and screamed, “Avada Kedavra!”

The policeman was neither amused nor dead. The policeman asked if he had a name. Slightly more awake, he said, in what should have been an extremely dangerous voice, but came out rather gruff and sleep-slurred, “I am Lord Voldemort.”

It didn’t take much more of this to convince the policeman that this particular vagrant might benefit from a trip to the station, and possibly another to the loony bin. Lord Voldemort was questioned, and held for observation for a week and a half, at the end of which he told them that his name was Tom Riddle, that he’d grown up in an orphanage in London, that he was currently unemployed, that no, he didn’t have a passport or any other form of identification, and that he was feeling much better now, thank you very much, and could he please leave.

The psychiatrist who’d examined him was still a bit skeptical; she would have guessed this man to be in his mid-fifties, but according to his story he couldn’t be much younger than 80. But there was a Tom Riddle in the records for the orphanage, and his descriptions of his childhood there seemed accurate enough, and though she found him unsettling, he didn’t seem dangerous. The hospital gave him a train ticket for London, where he said he lived, and the psychiatrist decided not to think about him any more.

He was free again, and beginning to worry about his financial situation. Even aside from questions of food and shelter, he needed to get out of the country as quickly as possible; every day he stayed here he risked being seen and identified by a witch or wizard who had once known him. He needed Muggle money. He had never kept much of it on hand, finding that it was generally easier to just kill Muggles than to try to pay them for anything. And though, even now, he had caches of wizarding money hidden all over the country, and secret bank accounts accessible only to him, he’d need to go to a wizarding bank to exchange it, and the risk was too great. If the Death Eaters had fallen, he’d most likely be captured, and if the Death Eaters were in power he didn’t much like the idea of visiting Diagon Alley without magic.

He had a few items hidden away that he thought he might be able to sell to a Muggle pawnshop -- carpets, chalices, lamps, cabinets. They were devilishly difficult to find; he’d hidden them with magic, and he’d intended to retrieve them with magic. But fortunately he remembered the location of one of his bolt holes, and after a few hours beating away at a magically sealed door with a length of pipe, he managed to get in.

They didn’t fetch as much as he would have liked, only a few hundred pounds all told. He applied for a passport and booked a plane ticket for New York, round trip so as not to arouse any suspicion. He lived on takeaway curry and slept in a filthy rooming house for a month while he waited for his passport and the ticket. He bought himself a few extra sets of clothes and a auitcase from the Oxfam shop. Most days he didn’t leave his room except to eat and to use the toilet. He was afraid that if he left the building he’d run into an old enemy or an old friend. By now, it was pretty clear that the Death Eaters had been defeated, or that they had gone terribly soft. If Lord Voldemort had still been in power, even the Muggles would have known. Now there was only Tom Riddle. That was what it said in the rooming-house guest book, that was what it said on his new passport, that was what it said on the ticket for JFK that he would use to escape the country forever. He did not speak the name.

Tom Riddle had never liked flying. Even just watching a Quidditch match made him queasy. The 747 from Heathrow to JFK wasn’t as gut-wrenching as a ride on a broom, but it was a good deal noisier, and somehow more cramped. He slept fitfully under the too-small British Airways blanket, or gazed out the window at clouds or nothingness.

Finding work in New York was easier than he had expected. He got a job working in a used record store where the manager wasn’t too worried about documents and legality. Tom didn’t know anything about Muggle music (at least not since the end of World War II), but people asked him for advice anyways, and his accent seemed to give him credibility. He picked up the basics pretty quickly, and once again found use for his favorite sneer. He still despised all Muggles, but somehow managed to muster up a little more contempt for the ones who came in looking for “Baby One More Time.”

He shared a two-bedroom split in the East Village with Sean, who waited tables at the restaurant two doors down from the record store. They didn’t see much of each other, because Sean mostly worked closing shifts and Tom worked during the day. Tom suspected that Sean was deliberately avoiding him, but he couldn’t prove it, and Sean usually paid the rent on time, so he didn’t say anything.

Tom didn’t make friends. Occasionally he’d go out for a beer with the other people who worked at the record store, but they all seemed so young. They were all in their early twenties, and none of them had ever had awesome magical powers or tried to take over the world. He despaired of finding anyone with whom he had anything in common. Most people seemed to find him creepy.

He was promoted to assistant manager at the record store. He took evening classes at the library: cooking, computer skills, home decorating, tarot, simple household repairs. He watched Buffy every Tuesday night. He wondered what was going on in the magical world, and wondered whether he’d ever know. He had dreams where a copy of the Daily Prophet blew up against his legs as he unlocked the record store in the morning, but when he picked it up the pictures were blurry and the words gibberish. Sean moved in with his girlfriend, and Tom found another roommate through an ad on the record store bulletin board. She seemed to avoid him, too. Things kept going on this way.

Things changed, though. The terrorist attacks on September 11th shocked Tom. He had come to regard the Muggle world as boring and safe and predictable in ways that the wizarding world had never been, and at first he hadn’t believed that the towers had been brought down without magic. The terror and the mourning and the rumors and suspicion in the city felt eerily, unhappily familiar. The latest roommate cried alone in his room.

It wasn’t long before the owner of the record store decided that, in what he described as “the new immigration climate,” employing illegals was too big a risk. He gave Tom some extra cash as severance. Tom decided to use it to get out of the city, to somewhere more peaceful and less scarred. He bought some high-quality forged papers and a second-hand (or, more probably, fifth-hand) Volvo and drove north through Connecticut. The car was not as good a deal as it had seemed. It gave out in Agawam, Massachusetts, not even three hours from the city.

The mechanic said the Volvo was fixable, and that it would cost a couple hundred bucks. But it would take at least a day, for arcane reasons that Tom didn’t understand. Tom suspected that the mechanic was screwing him over. Tom thought: I was Lord Voldemort. Then he asked for a ride to the nearest city. He explained that he didn’t have a phone number right now, but that he would call as soon as he did. He took a room at a fleabag motel in Springfield, called the mechanic, and waited for his car to be fixed.

The day needed for repairs turned into a week, and even a fleabag motel gets expensive after a while. Tom decided western Massachusetts was as good a place to stop as any. He took a one-bedroom apartment in West Springfield and started looking at classifed ads in the local papers. He decided to use the knowledge he’d gained in his evening classes to set up as a handyman. He repaired drywall, installed carpet, did interior painting. He tried not to think how much easier, how unnecessary it would all be with magic. He taught himself to whistle as he worked; he found that this made him seem less strange, and that people seemed to like him more when he was whistling, though mostly they still kept their distance. Whistling stopped him from muttering Unforgiveable Curses under his breath. Whistling helped stop him from thinking how easy it would have been to kill them all.

He started saving money, something for his old age. He wondered when his old age would be; was he aging like a Muggle or like a wizard? Was that a new wrinkle? Had he been spending too much time in the sun? What was wrong with his back? He started drinking. Work and alcohol seemed to be the two best ways to avoid the questions that were always circling in his head: how long could he keep this up? Would the Ministry of Magic find him, or the Order of the Phoenix? Or Homeland Security or Immigration or the IRS?

He went on like this. He took as much work as he could, working fifteen-hour days rather than go home to his demons. In his dreams he had magic again, but he didn’t use the curses he longed to hurl at people during the day. He dreamed of going about his ordinary work, but with his old powers. He dreamed of paint that didn’t need to be stirred, and of carpet that stuck down without tacks. He dreamed of magical drywall patches. In his dreams he shielded furniture from dropping paint with old copies of the Daily Prophet, but he still couldn’t read the articles or see the pictures.

Sometimes he’d think he heard someone whisper “Voldemort.” On his lunch break, and at night when he couldn’t sleep, he scanned the sky for owls. He lay awake, thinking of his Death Eaters, of basilisks, of boy wizards, and of phoenixes; he thought about going back and living as a Squib, about Azkaban, about fifty more years of painting houses, about dying alone in a Muggle nursing home.

Then in the mornings he got up, packed his brushes and rollers and tools in the back of the Volvo, and drove out to work. Waited for the hammer to fall. Wondered who would catch up with him first. Remembered that he had been Lord Voldemort.