A/N: Sooooo… school has started. And I'm utterly exhausted. Updates are at an all-time low but I'd hate to drop out of the contests I've already joined. This is un-Beta'd – since I'm a professional procrastinator – so if you see any errors, feel free to point them out! That includes non-British things. I'm American, but I do try! Anyway, I'm a bit loopy right now. Lack of sleep and all that.
Oh. Right. This is for astronaut's disorders competition. I think. Except I'm far too tired to go look up the real title.
Disclaimer: I just started high school. -shivers-
So unless you're saying I have some fountain of youth thingy, no, I do not own this marvelous series.
)O(
The first time Tom Riddle sees blood, he is four years old and in his room, alone. He pulls a bit of wood from his palm – old, splintering orphanage doors – and watches as the bead wells up. It's not particularly pretty with the shine or the feel or the dark of red on white, but the taste when he sucks it clean is –
Well, it's marvelous.
The second time is on Tom's sixth birthday when he's victim of a beating. Jonathan Blake smacks him a few times with a stick he found – trying to act tough for the little girl he fancies – and Tom sits still as his skin rips and blood streams down his face. Later he fingers the cuts on his neck and his arms and wonders why, exactly, there's a tight knot of pleasure coiled deep in his gut.
The third time is when he trips and falls and skins both of his legs and the children are laughing and taunting and it hurts and he's angry, so angry, that something that isn't him but's inside him all the same rises up, hot and thick and all-encompassing, to make them scream as welts burn through their skin – to make them feel the pain he feels –
Later the matron lashes him twenty times over to make sure he knows that it – whatever he did – will not be allowed. Tom doesn't mind because the warmth of the blood running down his back is soothing, in a way.
And then, through the years and years of hell, there's so much blood that Tom loses count – blood when he falls, blood when he cries, blood in the spittle he coughs up when there just isn't enough to eat; when the hunger pangs have been plaguing him for so long that he's numbed to them, in a way.
Then it's winter of his tenth year and Tom is so cold, just a shivering little boy, and he's wearing a new pair of poppy-red mittens. The throbbing ache in his stomach has gotten so much worse, and a half-cup of milk just isn't enough. He's outside, staring into the mug, and trying to focus his power when –
"Gimme, Tom."
An older boy, tall and freckled with spider-thin hands. Tom doesn't deign to respond with a glare.
"Those gloves. I'm older – gimme or I'll take 'em by force." And the boy's nails leave bloody furrows in Tom's arm as the gloves are snatched away.
Tom stills. He feels the anger rising – that hot, heavy, thing that won't let him be – and then Sarah Ann stops by and asks him where his mittens went and –
That's when it all changes, because then Tom Riddle's hands become forever stained with red.
Kneeling over the little girl's corpse, white and still and thin like a doll, Tom licks the blood dripping from his fingers and he's sated. He's beaten them all, those silly orphanage folk; he's gone beyond their claims of 'too poor' and 'not enough' and he, Tom Riddle, has found his addiction. He's heard William talking before, about spirits and liquors and the rich tang of wine, but Tom doesn't see how alcohol can be preferable to the thick, savoury, shiver-inducing –
It's his nepenthe. In that split moment of bliss all this hell is forgotten – wiped out of his brain.
Tom meticulously cleans his hands, one finger at a time, until they are no longer red and indicative of his crime. He picks the little girl's bones dry, then, because the drink hasn't fully quenched that pulsing ache deep in his gut.
After all, he's been taught to never waste food when it's there.
Afterwards Tom uses his freakishness to make the mangled corpse disappear, to scrub the last stains from his coat, and to scrape any remains of that filthy little girl from the cobble-stoned path. He walks out from behind the orphanage and joins the rest of the children, erasing their surprise with a burst of his will.
And Tom Riddle will never go hungry again.
)O(