if I could request a one-shot or even just head canons of unsphere what Tom is like with the twins when they are babies
Tom obviously would be a very chill parent as he is not in any way purely motivated by fear:
Tom Marvolo Riddle had never known his mother. From what he’d seen in his uncle’s head, he thinks that he was probably better off dead than raised by such a weak woman. But he hadn’t know that when he was a child. He’d longed for a mother, seen other children chosen and taken to better homes. Then, a little older when he’d understood that she’d dumped him with Muggles and promptly died, he’d longed for a father instead, and then he’d decided than longing made him weak.
Tom Marvolo Riddle does remember his father, though he can hardly say he’d known the man. All he knows of him is the fear and rejection he’d seen in the man’s eyes when he’d taken in the son who looked so like him.
He’d never intended to become a parent himself, until Hermione dragged him out of his deathless unexistence and back into a mortal body. He’d never imagined it. Never seen it as a possibility.
And now here they are, these two tiny, screaming, helpless things and if Tom is…
Tom is furious.
Tom Marvolo Riddle had spent his whole life running from anything he thought made him weak, until it caught up with him, all at once. But as his daughter’s tiny fingers clutch at his finger he thinks he has never known weakness. He stares at her. She is so small, the smallest thing he’s ever seen, surely. Surely too small to survive. Next to her, her brother gurgles, dark blue eyes curious. Clever. Aware.
“They’re perfectly healthy,” Hermione insists, and “They don’t need a bodyguard, Tom,” and “Really darling it’s perfectly normal for babies to get colic,” and -
He dreams, dreams that they are broken. Dreams he loses them. Dreams they are in the crib the night he goes to the Potters. The tide comes into the cave and they float away from him and he cannot reach them. Death, robbed of Tom, comes for them black-cloaked and green-eyed.
He stops sleeping.
He wards their room. He casts protective spells on their tiny soft bodies, on every item of furniture in the Idunna house and the castle in Wales.
He doesn’t understand how Hermione can sleep. He is always up first when they cry, handing them to her as she puts them to her breasts. He interviews and rejects twelve nannies before she steps in.
Finally he collapses and he sleeps, chest tilted over the two tiny bodies.
When he wakes up she is there, frazzled and exhausted and beautiful and strangely amused. She tells him, again, to relax. To go downstairs and join Cerdic for dinner.
He hasn’t let them out of his sight for two weeks. He can’t. He wants to destroy the world, take away anything and everything that could ever hurt them.
“Tom,” Hermione says kindly, “you were the bad thing in the night that you’re afraid of. Nothing and nobody is going to come for them with you downstairs and me here. Go away.”
It’s a terrible realisation, a worse penance than he could ever have designed. To want to protect the very thing he sought to harm in that other past life.
“Alright,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I just -”
“I know.” Hermione lies down beside him, careful not to disturb the sleeping infants. “Love is terrifying.”