Tom Riddle hated birthday parties.
He hated the ceremony of them, the numbed-back sitting on the wooden benches as he waited for the idiot clever enough to have been born to claim his feeble prize. He hated the sentimentality of them, the solid rubber faces of the matrons straining as they smiled down on them like they had just then remembered such muscle contortions were possible in the human species.
More than anything though, he hated the laughable inauthenticity of them, like watching a bad play. The teacher who'd whippedthe boy's back blue in the classroom, the matron who'd beratedthe boy to hysterics both lining up with wooden hugs and even more wooden praises while their audience watched the show with all the youthful enjoyment of prisoners dragged there against their will.
He didn't know why he was still forced to participate in such nonsense, why he even had to return to the damned orphanage every summer when he had never been liked or wanted there, not once.
It was all Dumbledore's fault, that daft fool. He still remembered the day he had learned about it. He'd marched into his office, of a mind to outline all the injustices and hypocrisies inlaid in a rule created hundreds of years ago with no further purpose but to serve the whims of rich wizarding families who wished to complete the magical education of their cherished brats in the summer months with excursions abroad. The truth was he had been looking forward to his first summer spent in the castle. Looking forward to passing entire days in the library, the magnificence of the grounds and many rooms to explore as he pleased, free of the noise and distraction that had made up the school year. Dumbledore had heard every single argument, had shaken his head at the 'sad truth of it all,' and then gone and slapped him in the face anyway.
'The school grounds are off limits to any student following the end of term' he'd condescended to explain '—regardless of the financial status of that student's family and regardless of their ah—popularity.'
He'd 'suggested' with the usual disgusting glint in his eye that it might be 'beneficial' for with his newfound insight into the wizarding world he might understand the muggles better. That he might 'make a friend.' He'd barely been able to keep a straight face at that. The fool could make as many chums of the hare-brained and the sheep as he liked, but he would never let him tear off his claws without a fight.
This birthday party was not like the previous years.
Instead of the usual sombre gathering, the matrons had packed them up into cars and driven until the fumes and noise of the city had all been left behind and they were rolling into the even streets and pristine two-storey detacheds of a brand new suburb. Tom had thought they were lost before one of the matrons had thrown the door open and dumped them all on the doorsteps of a house. An actual house.
With normal people.
A family, Tom had realized, staring at the man and woman shifting from foot to foot in the doorway with nervous smiles, one arm each slung protectively around the wide-eyed toddler in front of them as though afraid their orphanness might rub off on the brat.
He had later learned, wandering listlessly in the backyard (already set up in balloons and streamers in cheerful blues and oranges) that the couple wanted to adopt, and they had their eye on the finest of the stock—the darling birthday boy Michael Finch. Apparently, he had impressed the couple quite a bit with his 'polished' manners and maturity. He had sat arrow straight in his little chair during the interview and asked them what they did for a living and listened with bright eyes as the lackwitsran their mouths. When he had heard about the older brother little Abby had lost to pneumonia he had shed some very pretty tears and asked…Who will take care of her now?
"It was all very touching,"he heard matron Theresa proclaim, dabbing away a tear of her own. Happy endings were not common at Wool's, but those that came to pass were milked for all they were worth.
It seemed the couple had already submitted the necessary paperwork and were only waiting for the documents to be processed and some other administrative affairs to be completed before they could safely add the child to their collection. They had, however, grown quite attached to little Michael, and could hardly bear the thought of leaving him alone for his birthday.
It was not hard to imagine how that particular conversation had gone with Mrs Cole, one begging for the privilege of spoiling the brat while the other adamantly repeating no unadopted child could leave the premises, each going on until a compromise had finally been reached.
All or none. Sixteen orphan boys or zero.
It was, in all respects, highlyunorthodox.
Tom decided he would explore the place while the matrons set up the party table.
He waited until the woman's back was turned and the man was busy with the barbecue before sneaking back into the house.
He threw a disinterested look at the living room with its sturdy furniture and uninspired spattering of family photos. He slinked into the kitchen, ravenously following the smell of food to the oven and tearing with his bare hands a piece of the apple pie within. He worked through every room on the main floor as he ate, taking the stairs two at a time to the upper floor. He opened and closed doors with a methodical compulsion, noting the brand new state of the doll house in the toddler's room and the freshly starched linen sheets in the master bedroom like a warden might take note of a new inmate's possessions, only pausing when he came upon the door at the end of the corridor.
Somehow, he knew what it was, even without opening it. Dust had swept a fine rug over the patch of floor right in front of it and the doorknob stuck to the frame before he managed to twist it free, blinking in the sudden dimness of the room. He soon saw why—the blinds had been drawn shut and an additional cloth been thrown over it to prevent any more than a thin sliver of light from getting in. The bed was neatly tucked, and so was the stack of faded comics on the dresser at the side. A glint caught his eye which he saw was the tin smoke stack of a train-set, disassembled and placed in an old hat box beneath the window.
The other boy's room. The one who died.
It was nothing special, in truth. All frail and faded like the dried up exoskeleton of an insect long dead. It should have been detritus by now but no doubt the diligent efforts of the couple could be thanked for that. He scoffed. If they had discovered a way to remold the boy from his old skin, he wanted to see it.
It'll be Michael's room soon.
The thought made him unreasonably angry. What right did he have to enjoy this life? If the couple was so impressed by serial bed-wetters who wailed like infants at the smallest suggestion they were not the pivot around which the adult population turned, then they ought to adopt half the orphanage. For God's sake, the imbecile's favourite hobby was trying to convince anyone who would listen that Spain was actually in South America! This was the dolt they'd decided to uplift in the world?
Before he could think twice Tom had walked over to the other end of the room. He brought his heel down on the train set with all his might, stomping over and over again until the cars were in dented pieces and the locomotive lay on its side, no more than mangled garbage.
Someone had forgotten to turn off the wireless downstairs. The tinny voice of the news announcer carried over to him and he stilled on the staircase to listen.
"—sixth case of arson just this month in the greater London area to which police as of yet do not have a suspect. Experts, however, claim it is not two different offenders as the events thus far suggest but only a single deranged man behind the grisly crimes that have claimed forty-six lives since their inception six months ago, the most serious being the department store inferno that experts claim was started by a cigarette and highly flammable bedding material combination set on a long fuse and left at the scene of the crime hours earlier—"
The sound grew faint when he stepped back outside. He dug around his pocket for a cigarette as he continued to listen. He put it between his lips with a smile.
Tom wolfed down his portion of lasagna with a hunger that would have challenged any full-sized bear fresh out of hibernation.
He did not stop to swallow before lunging towards the other end of the table for the last of the chicken wings. He had abandoned the knife and fork for the versatility of his hands, and grease dribbled down both his fingers and mouth before he dabbed it away roughly with a napkin. A fine smear of grease remained on his Coke bottle as he slurped the drink to the last drop with the kind of barefaced delight that, he imagined, was more often seen in fine wine tastings than suburban children's parties with second-rate store bought drinks. But then again, he couldn't say he had much experience with either.
He could feel the disapproving stares of the matrons on the back of his neck like vultures. He knew they would wait until the right moment to turn on him, but the sting of the cane was an all too familiar one and had ceased to intimidate him years ago. And besides, he thought, looking at one freckled boy wipe the bits of food clinging to his mouth with the back of his hand, I won't be the only one.
When it came time for the cake, Tom couldn't help the gasp that escaped his lips at the sight of the soft spongey thing, frosting practically dripping off its candle laden tiers. He could see an identical expression of hungry disbelief on the faces of the other boys—the pastry was a far cry from the tasteless and unadorned lump of dough they were all accustomed to. It seemed almost obscene that this couple should possess such a monument of sugar when half the country was already rioting jobless and gaunt on the streets.
The gifts were placed at the far end of the table from smallest to largest, the wrapping paper blue and carefully taped. It soon littered the ground in torn bits as Michael enthusiastically extracted the prized items within. Tinker toys, a box of Scrabble, crayons, a spinning top and, to much exclamations of admiration, a set of toy soldiers complete with tiny planes and battlecruisers. The adults left the children to their games and after an hour of frenzied war re-enactment an argument broke out that had the birthday boy marching off in tears to the adult table. The other boys resumed the fun unbothered, and soon they had devised a game of tag involving sprinting down a row of bushes, past a wooden swing and completing the course with a jump over a wrought iron flamingo stuck decoratively into the grass, although—Tom observed with some amusement at the sheer idiocy—more often than not the sharp upraised point of the beak would graze one leg or another until nearly no one was left of the group who didn't sport a bloody scratch or two.
It was only after the boys grew bored and began searching for deadlier obstacles to enliven the game—or more likely, shorten their lifespans—that the clown arrived.
Tom watched him wobble into the yard with a sneer. What a fool he looked with his pointed cone hat and overlarge motleyclothes made ridiculously snug by the beer belly. A ruffled collar fanned out under his double chin like some court jester from times of old. He grinned wide and dopey, crimson painted cheeks crinkling with crow's feet.
How old is the imbecile anyway? Certainly too old to be doing this for a living.
But to the others he was a fresh novelty and they gathered around him soon enough.
"Heeeeelllloooooo children!" He cried in a surprisingly deep voice.
"Hello!" Came the ready chorus.
"Heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeellloooooooooo children!"
"Hello clown!" Someone yelled, and a fit of laughter arose. To what, Tom could only guess.
After the fourth iteration of the greeting it became clear the man was simple. Soon he gave up speaking altogether for grunting and exaggerated hand gesticulations. The children watched him from their positions on the grass with bright eyes and he, beaming under the adoration, stepped up the show with failed tumbles and mock expressions of pain. The children rolled over on the grass, tears of laughter streaming down their happy faces.
He watched the affair from some distance back with a scoff. No doubt the lackwits wouldn't be able to shut up the next day, recalling how fun it all was, and how good of the matrons to plan such a thing. He looked over to the opposite side of the yard where a much finer table had been set up for the adults under the shade of a twisted oak tree. They chatted with smiling faces under the many lanterns and streamers hanging from the branches, even the matrons indulging in a bit of wine from their kindly hosts. All of a sudden, the woman looked up from her supper right at him, rouged mouth twisting, plucked brows scrunching together as she gave him a quick once over. She leaned to whisper something in her husband's ear, eyes still trained on him as a solemn expression replaced the grin that had been tugging on the man's lips.
Tom trembled with rage.
A few crumbs and a fat simpleton may have been enough to fool the others, but he could not be blinded. He was nothing more than another orphan to them, just as filthy and stupid and desperate as the rest. Michael, Michaelthey only cared about Michael—he was sitting beside the bitch even now, already their perfect little boy. With the thin nose and curly hair, he could even be one of them. The thought that he had ever looked twice at their ugly house with their ugly, plain things nearly made him sick with disgust. He wanted to punish them, set the whole place ablaze, watch as they choked on smoke and scream and keep watching as they crawled blind through the flames and their skin ran sticky and liquid at his feet.
Unfortunately, today could not be that day.
As he continued to glare at their oblivious figures another idea came to him.
In a second he was back in the house again, grabbing a large cloth bag from the kitchen before moving from room to room. In a red haze, he grabbed each picture frame he saw and chucked it in the bag, holiday and Christmas and Thanksgiving and then some, the same three faces with the same insipid grins in each.
Only once the bag was threatening to rip from the sheer weight of the frames did Tom step back outside again, walking quickly across the yard towards the opening of the dense woods that backed the edge of the property. He dumped the contents of the bag in a suitable spot between a grouping of foliage was so thick and the forest floor so dark compared to the golden late afternoon sun he had just left behind that the silver frames gave only a weak gleam at his feet, as though he had placed them underwater. The faces in the pictures were black lumps.
He had no need for matches away from the prying eyes of the others. Instead he drew forth the edges of his magic, feeling it rush through his veins thick and heady. He lay a masking barrier around the enclosure first. Though the magical signature from most common spells could trigger detection by the Ministry, he had learned that the same could not be said of many older runic spells with their more diffuse energy that could easily be mistaken for the natural background noise of mass magic use.
Once satisfied with the barrier, he concentrated his gaze on the sorry pile. The weak crackle of fire and heat echoed in his ears, accelerating like an engine into a lick, a sputter, a roar.
He stared.
The pile blazed up in a sudden rush of heat.
He watched the flames climb higher and higher, clinging to each other like writhing serpents. The photos burned away in the first flash of heat and only their frames remained in the heart of the inferno, charred, fragile, skeletal.
He thought, despite everything, he owed Dumbledore a debt.
After all, if it weren't for that wardrobe, that first maddening taste of what magic could do—what it could really do unleashed from the chains of right and wrong, order and chaos—he might never have achieved this.
He had started small at first, no more than wisps and flickers on the tip of his wand, there one moment, gone the next. It had taken weeks of countless blisters and burnt sleeves before he could imitate the fire orbs he had seen in the textbooks of the upper year students, and twice as long as that before he had been able to grow those flames to a size that could maim, to a size that could kill.
But wands dulled the senses. Only once you felt the heaving breath of heat and energy in the palm of your hand, the soft sear of fire slithering across your skin could you truly understand that truth most failed to realize. The truth he had seen flash across Dumbledore's face as he had hurried to extinguish that wardrobe on that cold morning all those months ago.
That fire could never truly bow to a master.
That fire had a mind of its own.
He had taken to working in the forbidden forest in the last few months before the end of term, taking from the library any books he could get access to—or rather, couldn' of blood purification and sacrificial magic, lost runic manuscripts and cannibalistic rites of magic transference. He would stare at the pages in a wondrous hunger. He had yet to get used to the sheer scale of what he could do. Of what magic allowed him to achieve.
He was desperate to absorb each and every one of the volumes but what he found himself returning to most often was fire magic. In the myths it was fire that elevated men above beasts and gods above men. Fire that the gods fashioned into the gift of life and fire with which they took their fleshy due.
And yet from what he could glean, the practice of fire magic had fallen out of favour in the last centuries, pruned and shaped and simplified until nothing remained of that ancient branch wizards had once dedicated entire lives to but the pathetic butchery taught to students now. The more he had read the old volumes the more furious he had grown at the injustice, and the more his appetite had grown as well. He could no longer find satisfaction with the so-called knowledge he was being fed in the classroom, the knowledge no one else but him seemed to see for the scraps it was.
He was surrounded by sheep, even in this new world.
The realization had been a bigger blow than he would've thought.
At the orphanage he had always been different. 'A queer and cold boy' the matrons would whisper behind his back and then later, when he had grown old enough to understand them, behind the safety of closed doors. He knew he was not like the other children. He did not feel things as they did. For a long time he had thought they were not seeing the same things at all—that their vision must be closed off on all sides by walls high and looming, and bounded to an enclosure in which they frolicked like beasts, sun-drunk and blind to the filth that crept up inch by inch like vines all around them. Tom did not have the privilege of walls. He had to wrestle with the real world, fear and filth and all.
But despite everything he couldn't stamp out that treacherous hope that had dug itself into a corner of his mind like a weed. The hope that he could stillbelong somewhere—that though he was special, he could find his place if only he searched well enough.
When he had first arrived in Hogwarts, it had been with an ecstasy and hunger that knew no bounds. He had been hungry for everything this new world had to offer and through that haze the shoot of hope had sprung forth once more.
He had thought, actually thought, he could be one of them. He had let down his guard.
He had forgotten who he was.
Deep in thought, he did not notice the rustling behind him until it was too late. Wand in hand, he whipped around to face down the intruder.
The clown.
From his position on the earthy ridge he was staring at the fire with jaw hanging open, feet planted and arms heavy at his sides. Mesmerised.
"Beautiful" he said in pure childlike wonder. Tom glared as he sauntered closer, not knowing what to expect.
Let him try and drag me back,he thought, directing his magic towards an ember on the verge of flickering out. The flame surged forward in response, crackinglike a whip mere inches from the clown's heels.
"Oh!" The man cried out before glancing at him, eyes wide. "Oh! Oh!"
Tom watched warily as he extended two white gloved hands forward as though miming a glass box, only stopping when his palms brushed the very tips of the flames, eyes darting to and fro as though he were experiencing something too exquisite to be named.
He did not flinch.
Tom watched the unwelcome visitor for a few minutes while he kept up the act. The man could have still dragged him back to the party to receive his punishment for the pictures, but somehow he doubted it. In fact, he doubted he would have done so even if he had been capable of spitting out anything more than monosyllables.
"You? You?" He was staring at him again, slack-jawed. He pointed to the fire and then at him like he was trying to reconcile the two.
Well he would give him a show, if he was so desperate for one.
Tom drew forth the flames until they formed a blazing sphere around him. In a split second, he condensed the flames into two orbs at his eye level. They were a far cry from his first amateur attempts, and it had taken him embarrassingly long to learn the solution to the gauzy thin orbs was continuous combination. Layer upon layer upon layer. If he were to drop them now they would have split a fissure in the ground half a mile he let them spin around him in opposite directions, each growing faster and faster until they struck each other in an intense flash of light and then launched themselves rocket speed towards the sky.
He slowly counted to ten.
He let go.
The vein of lightning crashed down through the sky with a dazzling flash, but just as it was about to strike the ground Tom transformed it back into flame. It surged up again for half a second until, without a word, he extinguished it.
He saw the clown had fled to the trees to watch, the horror of the holy frozen on his face. Moses upon the Lord's unburnt bush.
It had been a mistake to expect any more from magical society as he had from the orphanage—he could see that now. A mistake borne of nothing more than idealism and the pathetic loneliness of a child. It was one he would not make again, long as he lived.
The sheep could remain sheep.
He would transcend.
It was with a generous arrangement of sunny smiles and hollow laughter that the matrons lingered on the porch to say their overwrought thank yous and goodbyes after the party, each going as far as stooping down to shake the small hand of the toddler who met the attempts with just as much good grace as their earlier ambuscade of pats and pinches.
Their hosts reciprocated with equally well-practiced turns of it was a joy, and do drop by again—affectations that could almost be believed when the woman stopped mid-sentence to return Michael's wave with a misty look and an eager wave of her own.
Tom tried to imagine the looks on their faces when they realized.
Just as matron Theresa slipped into the driver's seat there came a knock on the window at Tom's side. He opened his eyes drowsily. The clown grinned and waved.
Tom rolled the window down, only to have something quickly shoved into his hand.
"You" He whispered before raising a single gloved finger to his stretched lips.
But the car was moving before Tom could make any sense of the exchange. The boys beside him rambled on as the man continued to shrink smaller in the rear mirror until, in a blur of colour, he disappeared entirely.
Caught in the strange feeling he had left in his wake, Tom nearly forgot his fist was still clenched.
He opened it slowly.
A damp cotton-like material clung to his palm, mixed with the dried bits of some sort of plant. Tom raised the mixture to his nose.
He smiled.
Perhaps the summers wouldn't be so boring after all.