This is my entry for Savita's Parental Figure Challenge on Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges forum.

A/N: This is a multichapter story about Tom Riddle's childhood in the muggle orphanage. All chapters are told in Mrs Cole's POV. The list of prompts used will be posted in the last chapter. Thank you.

Chapter 1. New Year's Eve

May 1998, London, Sheltered Home for the Aged.

Mrs Cole sat on the wooden rocking chair, wrapped inside of a worn blanket, and looked outside from the room's window. It was rather odd weather for May; snowflakes in the spring. Mrs Cole shook her head lightly and huffed.

"How odd", she said. She was getting old, almost ninety years of age and she was still standing on her own feet but in the last fifty years she hadn't seen such reversal in the weather.

But as it was certainly snowing, she couldn't help but remember things, things that had happened a very long time ago.

"Like it would have happened just yesterday…"

New Year's Eve of the year 1926, London, Wool's Orphanage.

"It's snowing again."

I huffed, looking out the kitchen window. The winter had been colder than in several years before and a particularly nasty blizzard raged outside the Wool's Orphanage's thin walls. I took a sip of tea and listened how the wind howled in the water pipes and the corners of the building. It was my first winter working at the orphanage. The sounds and atmosphere were still new to me. Louisa was upstairs, probably taking care of William – he had caught a rather nasty flu. Martha instead was out.

I twiddled my wedding ring – the little habit I had. Soon it would be 1927 and our third anniversary already. Oh, how I missed James. Why he had to leave this world so soon? I gave a sigh. Louisa might have needed help. I placed my empty teacup to the windowsill and gazed outside.

My heart jumped up into my throat when, through the white, I saw a woman, trudging through the storm and determinedly trying to reach the Orphanage's door. She staggered up the stairs and I hurried immediately to let her to the shelter from the storm.

I gasped in shock when I saw her from the close. The woman was freezing and shivering from the bitter cold. Her hands were ice cold and her chapped lips turning blue. The lank dark hair fell in limps to her tiny shoulders. She couldn't be any older than I was – eighteen or nineteen at the most – but the years hadn't definitely been kind to her. I couldn't feel anything but pity towards the poor girl. Her eyes looked at opposite directions and had lost all the brightness there possibly could have once been.

Even her voice trembled, signalling from her poor state. She held her stomach with her shaky hands. "Please..."

She was heavily pregnant. I could see she had used all her powers to keep her unborn child inside for who knows how long. I called for Louisa and she came running to help. This was nothing new to her, and even during my time at the orphanage two other young women had gone and given birth here but neither of them had been like her – starved, malnourished even, and sickly pale, like the snow itself. She was different. Neither of them had lacked the vitality like she did.

Louisa and I had helped her to the empty room in the ground floor before Louisa had left us alone to boil some water; the woman was already ready give a birth.

The woman breathed raggedly, and her gaze wandered around the room before her eyes locked with mine. I wasn't sure what I saw in those hazy, dark orbs, but it made my heart ache.

When the labour started I gave her my hand and she held on it tightly, her grip tightening weakly with every anguished cry. I moved her messy hair away from her sweating forehead. She was in pain; I knew what it felt like. I swallowed and kept my grip of her hand.

"Just the final push!" I encouraged her.

And soon it was over. The new mother inhaled sharply but other than that, the room was eerily silent. I had expected to hear cries of the newborn baby but there was nothing but the silence and the mother's unsteady breathing. I glanced at Louisa and scooted over to see the child, expecting the worst. I gave a bemused smile.

A small child with pitch black hair was folded in a blanket. But the baby didn't let out a sound. If he hadn't looked me straight to the eye I would have said he wasn't alive at all. But he was. The aching of my heart lessened when I looked at the baby. Oh, what a New Year's miracle he was.

"Congratulations", I said and looked at the exhausted woman. "It's a boy."

The woman's face lighted up a little as she weakly reached for the baby.

"Let me look at him..." The baby was brought to her side, and for a moment she just stared at the child with an unreadable expression on her face. "My little baby ", she said quietly disbelievingly in a hoarse voice. "He's perfect, just like you... Why did you leave us...?" She shed few tears and turned away from the child, choking a heartbroken cry.

Something in her told me – and I bet even she knew it – she wouldn't have much time left. Louisa seemed to have noticed it, too, and she raised the child to her arms and carried him away from the room, closing the door behind her. The woman looked at me, and it wasn't a look of a person who was going to fight for survival. She had accepted her death with tear trickling eyes.

I stayed with her until she was there no more. It didn't take long; she was so weak. I didn't know her longer than those two hours but I felt her sadness.

I went to the next room where I knew Louisa had brought the baby. I watched the sleeping child. How could he be so calm, so innocent, with not a single care about the world? I stroked the dark hair gently, hoping I wouldn't wake him up.

The last words of boy's mother were still in my mind, clear, echoing as I looked at the baby.

"I hope he looks like his papa… His name will be Tom, after his father... Marvolo, after my father... And his surname is to be Riddle... like his father's..."

She hadn't said a word after.