:One:
Tom Riddle had always been special.
No, special wasn't the right word for it. He was peculiar, strange, unusual. Different.
When the other children went out to play, he stayed inside the decrepit building, silently watching the light filter in from the dirty windows, creating dark shadows against the gray walls. He spent days alone, thinking. Wondering what he wanted to do with himself.
He had been at the orphanage much longer than any of the others had. He was now a part of the place... there was no orphanage without Tom Riddle.
There was a box in his closet. Everything in it was a memento, buttons and toys and pieces of cloth, all from children who had learned their lessons at his hand. The box itself was a memento, a very special moment in time.
They mocked him, the others did. Calling him weird and excluding him from their conversations, under the false impression that he actually wanted to take part in their stupid mutterings. He only smirked when they taunted him, because he knew he could make them pay.
He could make them hurt.
The thought of watching them thrashing and screaming in pain filled him with a deep sense of contentment. When the matron wasn't looking, when those dark shadows on the walls filled up the whole room, that was when they would know who truly was the inferior one.