Chapter 7
EVERYTHING CHANGED IN 1971.
Tom had already known it would be a stressful year: Heading to Hogwarts would put everything he’d done to the test, and six years of consideration hadn’t strengthened his resolve. The political landscape of Wizarding Britain was even more volatile than it’s Muggle counterpart, as Abraxas had found out the hard way when Tom backstabbed him back ( still one of the best moments of his life); if something were to happen in the Leach Administration, he’d be looking support elsewhere.
That thought was how Eileen found him sitting at the table long before breakfast, mindlessly drumming his fingers.
“Everything alright?” she asked. She hadn’t seen Tom this nervous in a good long time.
“Thinking,” Tom mumbled in response.
“About what?”
Tom merely gestured to the calendar on the wall, date reading “July 31st, 1971.”
“Hogwarts,” Eileen realized, and Tom nodded.
“I remember when I first went,” he explained, head resting against his hands as the memory flashed through his head - Dumbledore’s visit, the trip to Diagon, the journey from Nine and Three-Quarters - and finally, the searing pain as Tom realized his level in this new society, the same one that vexed him now. “I hope Severus’s first year doesn’t go the same way.”
Eileen reached for his shoulder, gripping Tom in a way that brought him back to Earth. “It won’t. Not if we’re here,” she said, with such a look of hope and sympathy that Tom was happy to leave it there. For the near helpless women he’d found back in Cokeworth, that incorrigible place, she’d grown into a confident mother; Tom often had to remind Severus how good of one he had.
“Besides,” she added, “you’re not the only one going crazy over Hogwarts.”
“Oh?”
“Sev,” Eileen explained, using the nickname Lily had given him. “He hasn’t left his room all day, but I know from gardening earlier that he’s pressed right against the window sill.”
Tom laughed. “You know,” he chuckled, “if I’d known in advance it was coming, I would’ve done the same.”
Eileen shook her head before sitting down next to him. “And I remember being just like him. Of course, it was mainly because my parents didn’t want me to turn out a squib.”
“You turned out worse, Eileen; you’re a free thinker.”
Eileen laughed herself before they were interrupted by the door opening. They were soon greeted by Lily Evans, the red haired, green eyed girl who’d seem to herald the beginning of the Trio’s new lives. She’d grown no less inspiring for them, always a guiding light.
“Lily!” Tom exclaimed. “A pleasant surprise. Anything going on with your parents?”
“No, it’s alright, Mr Riddle,” she reassured. “You don’t need to always ask about them, you know?”
Tom doubted that: He’d had plenty of experience with tradition-obsessed elders before in the Wizarding World, but, other than his former matron, he hadn’t been aware the Muggle World fostered such people. Especially that Petunia . It seemed three names was two too many for her to comprehend a mother, father, and son having. (“I would prefer Riddle ,” she’d said on meeting Eileen. “And I’d insist on Prince ,” she’d responded in turn.)
“He’s just making sure you’re alright,” Eileen explained. “If it helps, he was the same with me back in our school days.”
“That’s why I’m here, actually,” Lily interrupted. “I remembered that Sev was going to get his school letter soon, and I wanted to congratulate him.” If you listened close enough, you could hear the excitement in her voice. Magic had been a bit of an open secret between them and the Evans Family, but Lily had been the only one of them to question them further on it.
“Well, don’t worry,” Tom said, “I’ll make sure he writes you.”
“You’d better!” the headstrong girl said, making Tom laugh again.
He was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming down the stairs.
“Mum!” they heard Severus say. “Mum! Uncle Riddle! It’s here !”
“Well, don’t just tell us about it!” Lily said, quite unaware of how loud they were being. “Show us!”
Severus held it up like a Seeker would a Snitch, and indeed the thing would’ve had wings only a moment earlier: The Hogwarts Crest was a black blur until the boy held it steady, becoming the sigils of each house ringed around an “H”, and the address beneath it materialized in green ink:
Mr Severus Snape
2nd floor, first to the right
Riddle Manor, Little Hangleton Yorkshire
In an instant, all the cramps that had kept Tom seated vanished in pleasure.
It still wasn’t enough to keep him from noticing the other owl at the window as the others celebrated. Thinking it was the Prophet, Tom got up and opened the window, only for the bird to fly in and land on the table next to Lily. “Stubborn,” Tom commented without thinking too much until he noticed the letter clutched in its claws.
The others silent now, Tom pried the envelope from the bird and paid it no mind as it flew off. The address read:
Ms Lily Evans
The Cottage Upon the Hill
Little Hangleton, Yorkshire
He shook his head in a combination of pleasure and nervousness.
“Lily, you aren’t going to believe this.”
***
The Evans Family had always been good and accepting neighbors, but this still took plenty of explaining.
“So,” Mr Evans said, finally breaking the silence at the Evans’ dinner table, though it was far after their meal. “Our daughter’s . . . one of you?”
“I suppose you could say that, yes,” Tom said, weary after a long explanation. “She’ll have to learn to express her magic somehow,” he continued, anticipating their questions. “Otherwise, she’ll- well, it won’t be healthy for her.”
“So,” Mrs Evans said, picking up where her husband left off. “Hogwarts?”
“It’s the best place for her to learn, I assure you.”
“A castle three hundred miles away, ‘the best place’? Are you pulling my leg?”
“Albert, stop it!” Mrs Evans snapped before her husband could start, before turning back to Tom with a faux-smile, one he imagined he’d given Abraxas years before. “I for one, Mr Riddle, think it would be quite well to have our daughter educated in your domain. You have been quite respectable, for as long as we’ve known you; who’s to say there aren’t more people like you Lily couldn’t make friends with?”
Tom nodded, throat too dry to speak: For as long as he’d known them , they’d come off as near puritanical, but now they were outright suffocating. How he’d ever stomached these kinds of conversations before, or how Lily managed to keep her temper under control during them, he would never know.
A few more nagging comments later and Mr Evans came round, right as the door to the dining room fell right off it’s hinges with Lily on top of it.
“Sorry,” was the only thing she could get out before Mrs Evans rounded on her.
“Lily! Whatever could have motivated you to do such a thing!”
“Oh, don’t worry, Mrs Evans,” Tom said instinctively, rising to meet her. “Sometimes, when untrained young Mages have a, uh, particularly strong , desire, strange circumstances can happen. I’m sure it was merely an accident,” he explained, glancing in Lily’s direction to cue her response.
“Oh, yes. Sorry again, Mother.”
“Anyway, it can be easily undone,” Tom continued, lifting Lily off the door and waving his wand; the hinges reassembled themselves in an instant. “Being a Hogwarts Professor, I should know these things,” he said.
Mrs Evans still looked somewhat crestfallen, but forgave Lily nonetheless. Mr Evans, on the other hand, looked a mixture of confused, but entertained. He rose up to follow Tom as the latter excused himself.
“Quite a feat,” the other man said. “And Lily’s capable of that, too?” He shook his head in near disbelief, which Tom found understandable.
“I just want you to understand Mr Riddle,” Mr Evans went on. “I’m worried about our daughter falling in with a bad lot, but if you work at Hogwarts- Well, I’m sure you could keep an eye on her, couldn’t you?”
At his words, Tom couldn’t help but think that Eileen’s parents didn’t want her falling in with a bad lot either. “Yes,” he supposed. “I could.”
“Thank you, Mr Riddle,” Mr Evans said, clearly grateful. “Goodbye , Mr Riddle.”
Tom only nodded. Just before he left, he caught a glimpse of Petunia, Lily’s older daughter: She must’ve overheard everything between him and her father, because she had an expression of pure envy on her face. Perhaps if she’d been just slightly better than her parents, Tom would’ve found her worthy of his empathy.
He walked back home instead of apparating. It gave him time to think about how, exactly, he’d convince Garlock to manage the school finances of yet another helpless Mage during his trip to Diagon tomorrow morning.
***
“You have a habit of handing me difficult situations, Tom,” was the only thing Garlock had to say on Tom’s explanation about Lily.
“Would cooing over beautiful children be one of them?”
She nearly threw him out empty-handed for that one.
They shopped around for school supplies after Gringotts, getting them their basic things from the list, extra potions supplies for Severus, a book on basic spells for Lily, and a gardening enclyopaedia for Eileen.
A sudden thought came to Tom’s mind after they passed left Flourish and Blotts: It was the place he'd been most entranced by during his first trip here. “Lily,” he asked, “have you ever thought about what you’d like to be yet? Now that you know that you're a Witch, I mean.”
“Not really. A lot of things are starting to make sense now. But I don’t know what I want to do, no. I guess I’d have to know about this place more.”
“Did you know what you were going to do, Uncle Riddle?” Severus asked.
“Not really. I needed to know more, too. But I suppose you’d like to go into potions?” Tom thought aloud as the boy wandered over to a nearby apothecary.
“Why wouldn’t I? I’ve been doing it since I was five!”
Since he was five , Tom thought; he’d come a long way since then: You’d never be able to tell that he’d been near skeletal at that age, as Tom had him on restorative potions since then that had erased all signs of malnutrition. As he watched the boy wander from cauldron to cauldron, carefully deducing the contents of each, Tom saw not a trace of his father, or his mother, or even himself in the lad: He was his own person. (Hogwarts would hate him for that.) Tom wondered, as he remembered Mr Evans’ request, if the same thing was possible with Lily in the right subject.
As they wandered from place to place, checking off the Hogwarts-provided shopping list, they seemed to find one.
“What’s Quidditch?” Lily asked as they passed Quality Quidditch Supplies. “Do you fly in it?” she added excitedly, noticing the brooms in the storefront.
“Sweet Merlin! how’d we never tell you about Quidditch?” Tom exclaimed. “Well, you fly in it for one. You’ll take flying lessons at Hogwarts, come to think of it.”
“On brooms?!”
“What else?” Severus asked, only now looking up from his new potions book.
Lily seemed too excited to speak; only when Tom dangled the prospect of Fortescues did she budge from the storefront.
“I can’t wait to get there!” she said animatedly, in a way that made Tom wonder if she’d really come across such a focus on her life. He remembered how Quidditch had propelled him forward at Hogwarts, how all of a sudden he wasn’t just a bullied Half-Blood. He hoped this was the beginning of something more for Lily.
Time would only prove how much it would be.
***
When they got near the exit of Diagon, Tom found a familiar face.
“Narcissa?” he exclaimed. “Narcissa! Wait up a moment, would you?”
When he caught up with her, she turned around and faced him.
“I believe you’ll find it’s Heiress Malfoy , Professor Riddle,” she said in an acid tone.
In a few moments, she appeared different than she had all last year: The quiet, but happy girl had been replaced by a vindictive, Pureblood Witch.
He only understood when Eileen handed him a copy of the Daily Prophet. MARRIAGE SCANDAL! the headline of the Prophet read, followed by: Rita Skeeter discovers the secret love-life of the Black Family’s 2nd Eldest Daughter!
Tom could hardly stand reading it: Andromeda Black (Tonks now, he supposed) had been a star student in his 6th Year-Slytherin class. She would’ve graduated this year, meaning whatever marriage contract that had been signed beforehand . . .
It only took him a few seconds to find the words:
Andromeda Black had been predetermined by her parents to accept a marriage contract with Heir to the House of Slytherin, Lucius Malfoy. Lord Slytherin has stated that the contract shall be inherited by the Black next of kin, now known as Narcissa Malfoy. They will be married upon her graduation next year.
Malfoy . That name alone made the whole sordid affair worse just by it’s presence, let alone it’s prominent role.
“You knew the girl, didn’t you?” Eileen asked suddenly, interrupting Tom’s train of thought.
He nodded. “Andromeda was a good student.”
“Clearly that wasn’t enough. And it won’t be for Lily either,” she added. She leaned against the dining table where Tom had been reading, eyes focused on the opposite wall as the rain spattered the windows behind her. Underneath her neutral expression, Tom could see the slightest twinge of pain
“Promise me,” she said confidently. “Promise me that you won’t let Lily end up like her. Like me .”
Eileen was briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning, giving an eerie feeling about her, a sort of righteous disdain. Tom hadn’t seen her like this since he’d confronted Tobias once and for all seven years ago.
“I promise,” he said firmly. There wasn’t a way he could refuse.
Eileen nodded in response, rising from the table as the rain intensified outside. “Good night,” she said coldly, leaving Tom wondering if all the scars from her own disinheritance had fully healed, or if they had merely been reopened with Lily’s Hogwarts Letter.
But in the end, all Tom could do for Andromeda was do the same thing he’d done for Eileen thirteen years ago: Hope, no matter how much in vain, that she was alright.
And that Lily and Severus would be too.
But the year had only just begun.