Okay so here's a new story! I was just sort of sitting there thinking, what was Voldemort's time in school like? And this came from my musings. Leave a review please, and tell me if you like the story.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Tom Riddle Jr… I do own Albus Severus Potter though ;) Psh yeah right. I don't own him either or any of the other characters. Grr.

Silver Moonlight

Tom Marvolo Riddle aimlessly wandered the halls of the only place he could call his home. His fingers lightly traced the stone walls as he walked, enjoying the cool feeling.

No one passed the handsome boy in the corridors, seeing as it was well past midnight. No one would dare get him in trouble, especially the Headmaster, Armando Dippet. The only one who would even care that he was wandering when he shouldn't was that old buffoon, Professor Albus Dumbledore, the transfiguration teacher. He wandered up several flights of stairs and around the several levels.

He must have been on the seventh floor when he stopped in front of a window that interrupted his fingers from the rhythm of the cool stone. Tom looked across the grounds of Hogwarts, the full moon illuminating everything. The white light reflected off of the lake and revealed trees around the edge of the water that would have been difficult to spot in the darkness. At the edge of the grounds, a line of thick trees prevented anyone from seeing past there, the Forbidden Forest.

Out of the forest stepped three creatures, the moonlight casting their eerie shadows beside them that followed them. The thestrals were awful looking creatures with slimy armored-skin encasing their skeletal forms that were still painfully visible. Two could be no more than tiny babies and they played with each other, which involved harmless biting and tackling, with unheard snorts and grunts. Their mother, who had been trying to eat some of the sweet grass, moved herself between them, successfully putting an end to the siblings' fight.

A sigh condensates on the window as snow peacefully floats from the sky to the earth. Why couldn't he have that? Why was Tom deprived of a mother and siblings and a father who wasn't a stupid muggle when all of the people around him could blissfully spend their Christmas with their parents and brothers and sisters?

Tom hated the stupid orphanage he was forced to every summer. Every summer he pleaded with Dippet, and every summer, he was denied the ability to stay in Hogwarts over the summer. He had to return to the muggle world where everyone was certain that he was a freak, where everyone shunned him and didn't treat him with the respect the respect he deserved.

He was a bloody wizard! He was someone with amazing abilities, and they had the nerve to call him a freak. Muggles were below him. They should have been worshiping the ground he walked on, like almost everyone at Hogwarts did, and savoring the taste of his shiny shoes. But there he always ended up, stuck in a stupid orphanage with snot-nosed little children that had to be cared for by him, since he was virtually the oldest one there.

And of course, to make matters worse, he was stuck with his muggle father's name that wasn't worthy of such a brilliant wizard like him. It was so common that he could walk down the streets of London and hear it twenty times, each time knowing that it was someone else. The condensation had gathered on the window, obscuring the peaceful thestrals; he absentmindedly wrote his name on one section of the huge window.

He looked at each individual letter. Tom Marvolo Riddle. He wrote another phrase in the condensation next to it: I am Lord Voldemort. It was a very nice sounding name, and he loved the way the words rolled off his tongue as though they were made to be exactly like that. He smiled.

"Tom? Tom Riddle?" A soft voice startled him out of his thoughts and he swiped his sleeve across the window and wiped the words away.

A girl stepped out of the shadows. She looked like a very tiny thing. She looked barely more than 5'3" and she had the sort of face that reminded Tom of fairies. She had the lightest of blonde hair that shimmered almost blue in the moonlight. Her skin was a beautiful ivory and she had long, delicate fingers that brushed her hair out of her eyes. Her eyes were blue. The bluest blue he had ever seen. They were comparable to the deep blue of the night sky that even had stars making her eyes seem to glitter. She wore a gold nightgown that hugged her curves and shimmered with every move she took. He noticed that she was barefoot, having just padded through the castle silently. Tom realized that she looked like the essence of the moon had been trapped in a mortal body and shone through her.

"I-I, er, yes, I'm Tom Riddle." He stuck his hand out as customary, caught by surprise by the girl, which made him stutter, something that had only ever happened once or twice.

She ignored his hand and pulled out her wand, using it to charm away the fog on the window. She looked over the scene that he had been gazing at, the only difference being the growing blanket of snow that had driven the thestrals off into the comfort of the forest.

She didn't offer her name, perhaps she was waiting for him to ask, but he was painfully aware of everything about her. Kamaria Hale was a girl in the same year as him, seventh. Tom could tell just by the way she talked that she was one of those filthy muggleborns, but he could never bring himself to insult her by calling her a mudblood. She was one of those brave Gryffindors, and it was stupid how foolish she could be at times. She seemed so delicate, especially when the moonlight shone on her iridescent skin, making her seem even brighter like moonlight.

She was the complete opposite, though, it seemed to Tom. Where he knew how to play his cards right, she would throw them all away, not knowing what she was doing. Although she seemed exactly like the moon, she lacked the same grace, and he had seen her trip over her own feet more than once while he could run over a boulder and never lose his balance. She was exotic, what someone would imagine as a blue flamingo amidst those that are pink. Tom, although he knew how to flaunt what he had to charm others, was plain, so ordinary, especially in comparison to her. She, unlike him, could walk through a room and just make boys woozy, while he would have to walk through with the right gait, a bright smile, and just the right words to make a girl feel even a tenth of that.

"You should go back to your dormitory," he said after he had regained at least some composure. "It's dangerous for people like you out here at night. We wouldn't want anyone to die."

The people in the school had been in a panic when children had started being attacked. Only he knew that it was a basilisk running through the pipes, and only he knew that at this particular moment the gigantic snake was tucked safely away, deep beneath the girls' bathroom on the first floor. Of course, no one suspected that Tom was the only one who could control it. Who would ever suspect grateful, marvelous, charming Tom Riddle?

Kamaria knew what he was referring to, and she whirled on him with a hiss that was worthy of Parseltongue. "Whatever is doing this is an awful creature! And I refuse to be trapped in my stupid dorm because of it! Did you know that Professor Dumbledore told me that I should take caution when walking down the halls and always go with a teacher? It's embarrassing! I already have kids laughing at me behind my back because I'm a stupid mudblood, and now they get to add that I'm always stuck with a teacher!"

Her chest was heaving with the release of the words that she had surely been holding for a long time. Her perfect blue eyes glinted with a fury that Tom knew so well, but he could tell that she was frightened because of it, too. He couldn't help asking, "Some bloody creature wants to kill you, and you're only concerned about what kids are saying behind your back?"

Kamaria's blue eyes began to shine more brightly with something that Tom had only seen from the really tiny little children at the orphanage. Was she really about to cry? Her voice was thick with the restrained tears. "Oh, excuse me, Tom Riddle. I forgot that your life is always perfect and that you can't comprehend that maybe it isn't the same way for everyone!"

His black eyes flashed with fire. How could such a lovely girl be so vile to him? "You think my life was bloody perfect? It's living hell."

Big blue teardrops fell from her eyes. One splattered onto the floor. "Oh, yes! It's such a burden to have all of the teachers and the whole bloody school body wrapped around your finger! I'm lucky if Dumbledore respects me, and he's the kindest teacher at school!"

"You think that just happened? And you don't know how awful my summers are! I have to stay at a bloody orphanage because no one, not even my stupid muggle dad wants me!"

Her crystal eyes widened as did Tom's. No one, save the teachers, knew that he was a half blood. But it didn't deter her for long. "At least your mum's not in the asylums because she let it slip to her friend that I can do magic, and at least your dad doesn't let you stay with him, just so he'll have his own slave to pick up him and his beer bottles when he's passed out on the floor!"

Kamaria put her back to the window and slid down it until she was curled up at the bottom, sobbing into her knees. And then she started whispering, so quiet that Tom had to sit down practically on top of her to hear it.

"When I was a little girl, child services came in and took me away from my real mum and dad. I know they weren't magical because I remember them. Only a few blurry memories but I would have remembered magic. They put me in an orphanage until I was six, and then they sent me from foster home to foster home. I always had to move because I was a freak and could do things that no one else could. No one understood me."

She took a shaky gasp and Tom found himself wrapping his arms around her tiny body, holding her close. He wondered at the motion. He had always wanted a mother to hold him like this, but here he was doing it for a girl that he fancied.

Her voice was louder when she spoke this time. "I blew up half of a house one time. I-I just got so mad that my older foster brothers picked on me. The boys were hurt but they lived, and I came out of the center of the blaze with barely a scratch across my left cheek. When I was seven, I flew around the house, and the newly married couple was so terrified that they threw me out of the house without waiting for the adoption company. It was like people avoided me as if I were the plague.

"I guess I should be used to being classified as a freak, but here I thought I would be happy. I was here in a whole school of freaks, surely someone would understand me. But nobody did. And everyone considered me weird and not as good as them when they knew I was a mudblood…"

She sobbed harder. "And then you were there! And you made everything so much worse. Everyone knew that you had grown up in the muggle world, and your life became perfect while mine crumbled to ashes."

"But don't the best flowers grow from ashes?" Tom asked softly.

She looked up, slightly shocked. Her nose had turned a bit red and there was just one red spot beside her left red-rimmed eye. She smiled a little bit. And then she surprised him by leaning her head onto his chest, like it was the most natural thing in the world. He was amazed by how much he liked it. She sniffled. "Thank you. You make me feel like I can become something amazing.

He smiled a natural smile unlike the one he used in public to make girls swoon. "I'll help anytime, Kamaria"

She smiled back at him and they watched the snow pile up outside. Christmas was only days away, and the students were getting anxious for break. The white fluff that covered the earth and et it sleep was only a sign that it was coming sooner.

Tom found himself speaking to her, asking her something. "Kamaria? What do you want for Christmas? If you could have anything at all, what would you wish for?"

"Hmm…" she mused. He could feel her easy breathing against him as she calmly kept her eyes on the snow. "Mistletoe," she answered quietly. "I've always wanted to be kissed. What about you? What do you want for Christmas, Tom?"

She finally looked up at him with her blue, blue eyes. He smiled for her benefit. "I think I would want a better life, for both of us, without those bloody orphanages."

She giggled and blushed, obviously happy that he wanted to help her life, too. Tom leaned down and softly kissed Kamaria on the lips that were soft and warm.

At least, if he couldn't have his impossible wish, she could.

Okay, so this is where your opinion comes in. Click the button below and tell me how you liked it or how you hated it and how I could make it better. I think this will be a one-shot but if you like this storyline, tell me and I'll keep writing cuz I really like writing about this! Review!