Riddle Me This, Tom...
Tom could admit that leading Hermione into Knockturn Alley was not kind, gentlemanly, or safe. But he did not claim to be any one of those things. He knew he was a rotten boy—had heard the whispers of his evilness his entire life. Those wind-torn gossips had been carried to him for good reason. It was not as though he urged the insipid girl to follow him; she should have known by now that Tom had little appetite for the feelings of others. He was filled with ideas and emotions much more important. Involving himself, but that was beside the point.
Dissuading Hermione would have been a fruitless endeavor anyway, so why would he waste his breath on it? He knew how carelessly she behaved. It was in her nature, her childish and spoilt personality. A perfectly appropriate consequence for her misplaced judgment of him.
He had never said he was good.
Well, he had never been told it either. It had always been assumed that he was an unsavory boy, pleasing to look at, not so much to meet.
It was a wonder that Hermione had landed in Gryffindor with how she simpered in Knockturn Alley, although, he supposed he could see it with how obnoxiously stubborn that lot was. They were also thick-headed, their minds wedged between grand vocations of chivalry and exuberant positivity, and it did not seem to be the right place for someone like Hermione. Tom himself would sneer at the golden placemats in their Common Room, no doubt. Set fire to the maroon walls. Incinerate one of those vile gingers infesting the dorms. He did not like it, and it was hard to imagine she could either.
Tom could not imagine himself in any house besides Slytherin, yet, conversely, he hated his own house as much as he despised muggle London. Could there be no respite? Why was he the bearer of all life’s miseries? It was clear to Tom that every Slytherin far and wide found his presence as tolerable as expired cheese, all because he was not pure-blood. They had even gone as far as to call his blood dirty! Tom reacted accordingly; a dead bird here, accidents on the ever-changing staircase there. No one connected such odious coincidences to him—he was much too sneaky for that, and their attempts at doing so were negligent, pathetically so.
It was humorous, almost. Tom had even begun contemplating doing such things for entertainment. He reveled in his housemate’s plight and found amusement in every yelp of pain or groan in disgust. How could such clumsy, indolent fools ever compare to someone of his stature and position? Still, for an arduous period, he had, yet again, reconsidered the notion that he was special.
Thankfully, this blight in self-judgment was false, another insecurity bred from an insufficient understanding of the world around him, just like that time with Hermione. Even though there were people who could wield magic, they could not triumph over it as he did. They seemed to merely be vessels of something much greater than themselves, containers for the rampant beauty coursing through their veins. Tom was nothing of the sort and he refused to be. Magic was his tool, he bottled it, controlled it, and he could never fall so far as to have it overtake him.
Yes; he was still special.
The only reason Tom did not victimize his fellow peers as much as he did at the orphanage was due to the ever-present Dumbledore. He seemed to have eyes on his rear end; there was no other explanation for how he swooped down on Tom at the barest whiff of mischief or humor. No other professor suspected him to be the sullen, rotten Tom that escaped London. Here, he was bright and level-headed, mature beyond his years, someone to revere. Tom bathed in their praise and languished in their preference for him. He suspected he would have to give up on cajoling Dumbledore, though, as nothing seemed to weasel out the professor’s disapproval of him.
The man seemed to favor Hermione, though. Tom nearly winced at the thought. He took notice of how Dumbledore chose to call on her before him when they raised their hands to answer questions. He also awarded her house points for the most ludicrous reasons: “Ten points to Gryffindor for exemplary wandwork!” or “Five points to Gryffindor for such a candid essay!” And Hermione’s already bloated self-esteem would expand to the size of her hair, such an eyebrow-raising feat that its occurrence warranted house points, seeing as Dumbledore doled them out for less. There were many a reason for him to be given house points, he was more deserving of them, and yet he remained as starved as the forgotten Hufflepuffs were. In the circumstance that Hermione outdid Tom in anything to reasonably sanction the treatment she received, it would be the day he packed his meager belongings and banished himself to the Forbidden Forest. Surely, even the centaurs would take pity on such a pathetic defeat.
“Tom, would you want to sit with us?” He felt the blood rush to his face as the insufferable Haneda offered his pitiful embraces of friendship toward him. “Me and Eddie are just doing some final touches on Binn’s assignment.”
Tom turned to face the two Slytherins. Haneda the pure-blood and his pet half-blood, Richmond, had been canoodling over their essays for the past hour, rubbing together their two brain cells to configure enough synonyms to describe Bragbor the Boastful’s impact throughout history. Tom had already written two feet on the subject, although he was garnering more considering the outrageous historical footprint the goblin had managed to stamp into existence. It was quite annoying, honestly, for Tom refused to be anything less than deeply thorough in every assignment. It ensured he was ten steps ahead of everyone.
He masked his annoyance toward his housemates with a controlled grin. A pitiful display, even for him. Anyone with half a brain could see that it was a sham, but thankfully Haneda and Richmond’s emotional quotient shined as brightly as their intelligence quotient, two dull flickers of light amongst Tom’s sun.
He did not want their pity. Just because he was sitting alone in the library did not mean he needed something as frivolous and unenjoyable as company. Remaining friendless was a personal decision, unlike Hermione’s, who was studying alone at the table to the left of him. A person repellant, if he had ever seen one.
Sighing, Tom turned down Haneda’s offer, who shrugged, masking his disappointment. Hanead probably supposed Tom was a perfect fit for his motley crew. But Tom refused to join the pure-blood’s gang of misfit inbreds, running about the castle in all their outcast glory. Dumbledore might look upon such callous behavior with joy, but Tom found it repulsive, and he would never join them and their misplaced pride toward their tainted blood, spurred on by a pure-blood, no less.
If he joined Haneda’s group, he’d be admitting he was less than. That the magic running through his veins was, somehow, stolen. Tom could never accept such blasphemy. He knew nothing of his father or mother, except for the horrid peasant name they cursed him with, but he knew deep within him that at least his father had been a wizard. His mother was not a possibility, considering the shameful way she met her demise. On the slimy street of London of all places. He sneered. She may as well have birthed him a sewer. It would certainly be cleaner.
Tom risked another glance at Hermione. She hadn’t bothered to reach out to him since that day in Diagon Alley when he had charmed her parents. He still felt a burst of pride at that—it was all too easy for him to woo the Grangers. He could not see past the girl’s bushy hair to glimpse her face, but he could see her parchment, and she only had about a foot and a half of Professor Binn’s assignment done. When she glanced up at him, Tom did not bother to hide his gaze or pretend he was not looking. He found no reason to pretend they did not share an odd history, and according to the withering glare she shot at him, she did not care for hiding her animosity toward him.
Good.
Tom’s wooden seat began to feel much too cramped, and he started to neatly pile his homework together, before heading toward his most-frequented area of the library. He worked his way to the back, before heading down a flight of stairs and settling himself amongst the numerous rows of records of wizarding history. He reckoned he would be down here for at least another hour, scouring the ancient papers for a grubby, ickle name: Riddle.
Each night, before he slipped into bed, Tom would think of the locket. He thought of how it entranced him, how it called for him. He imagined it wriggling in that pruning man’s hands and bright anger sprung upon him. How he longed to punish that lowly Neanderthal for touching it when it spoke to him. It opened upon his command, answered so readily for him, as though it was made for his touch. Tom spoke to it the same way he spoke to snakes. He wondered if something had been embedded into the locket. He wondered who had owned it—certainly not that decaying corpse in Knockturn Alley. No, it was someone of great power, someone like him.
Turning over in his four-poster, he reached a hand out to touch the brilliant green snake strung long across the canvas’ face. Growing up, Tom had thought himself incapable of love, but his reverence for Hogwarts proved that to be false. Here, he was well-fed and rested—every night a feast of meat and potatoes, pumpkin pasties, and candied apples. Each week, his cheeks turned a bit more full, yet that despicable orphan was etched into his skin, carved into the marrow of his bones so that he had to control the urge to fist the glorious food in front of him, pretend as if he had not been living off of scraps his whole life. He still remembered the grimace on pasty Abraxas Malfoy’s face after they had been sorted. There he sat, besotted at the decadence around him, unknowingly painting an intricate red sign across his forehead, screaming: I DO NOT BELONG!
Tom gripped his sheets in rage. They would learn that he was their better, as soon as he discovered his true heritage, which, admittedly, he was not having much luck with. A month had passed without a whisper of progress, no evidence that his father had even attended Hogwarts. It was disturbing. Maybe he was eliminated from the textbooks? Had he done something dreadful enough to warrant a purging of the name Riddle? No, that couldn’t be it—if something as baroque as that had occurred, the name Riddle would be hinted at everywhere.
Frustration ebbed away to reveal an earnest drowsiness, fogging his thoughts in a drowsy haze. That night, he dreamt that he led Dumbledore to the Astronomy Tower and had prophesied his professor’s demise with the guidance of the twinkling helium balls in the sky. The centaurs had taught him how to predict the future, and now he was a seer, something much more important than a transfiguration professor.
When Tom awoke, he had forgotten his dream, as usual. His day passed as it always did—not remarkably, all things considered, but by his standards, exceedingly well, for he was in Hogwarts, and there were a myriad of wonders that he discovered every day—in the Great Hall, the Bell Tower, the Viaduct Courtyard—he could not imagine a place as beautiful. There were so many secrets embedded in its hallowed halls, always a strange, foreign event happening. Tom’s first year was filled with the splendor he had only dreamed of.
Sometimes he would simply pace the grounds, his homework left for another time. He would walk to the Quidditch pitch or the owlery, despite one or the other being filled with sweaty teenagers and bird poop. The thought of not scouring every bit of Hogwarts was unimaginable. One time, he ran a lap around the Black Lake, and another time, he had snuck out to the edge of the Forbidden Forest. There were many a secret room he had found, too many steel toads he had peered into, certainly more than he could count. Not a second of his free time was wasted sitting, besides the time he allotted for reading and work.
Yet, by the end of his first year, he had still barely grazed the surface of the great castle, and his sadness for it was so thick that it was repulsive. He sat alone on the train ride back to London, each passing second stealing a little bit more of his contentment, replacing it with misery, misery, misery. When the train stopped, his eyes almost felt misty. Tom longed to be in his true home, and when he finally stepped off the train and back into his miserable reality to find Mrs. Cole waiting for him with a look of trepidation on her face, for a second, he wondered if any of it had happened. Maybe it was all a dream.
But he also never remembered his dreams.
Tom took one miserable step after the other toward the busted-up excuse of a car that the orphanage used to get around. Its musty scent was unfamiliar to him, with how little he was allowed to leave the orphanage. The entire ride to Wool’s, he thought of Hogwarts. He fantasized about it while he cleaned the toddler’s shoes and scrubbed the floors. He imagined it as he sat in the orphanage’s barren garden—could almost smell the sweet air of the highlands, rather than the smog of London. He hugged his legs with his arms and rested his head upon them.
August had never felt so far away.