Disclaimer : I Do Not Own Harry Potter.

Written for Hogwarts Games.

Prompt: Restrictions No Dialogue.


He watches the children run around and scream with laughter. He cannot understand what they have to be happy about when they have no parents, the only toys and clothes they have are tattered, broken hand-me-downs that no one else wanted.

The one thing they crave is to be loved, but he no one loves them and no one loves him. He doesn't want or need anyone to love him, love is a weakness.

He hates these children while he is one them in the sense he is a child and is stuck at the orphanage like everyone else, but other than that they are as strange to him as he is to them.

They cry and whine when they're hungry, hurt or ill whereas he grits his teeth and silently accepts that his stomach will remain empty, no one cares that he's hurt and when he's ill that he will receive no comfort.

He doesn't sit around dreaming of a rich couple walking through the door and they take him to their great big house where he'll have everything his heart desires. He knows that it will never happen so what's the point in wasting precious moments dreaming about something that isn't ever going to happen.

The only way out of the orphanage is to wait until you old enough to leave or die. Some those who giggling now won't make through the winter and he feels nothing over it.

All he cares about is that he makes through the winter, he's seven years old and the only thing in the world he fears is death.

Ever since he was old enough to understand what death was it was something that scared him. It was why he was in this place because his mother had died, he isn't sure about his father.

He almost hopes that he is because if isn't, then it means he could have grown up in a proper family home instead of here surrounded by children that hated him and adults who thought he was peculiar.

Tom understood why the other children hated because he scared them and he refused to live in a childish fantasy that the next would be any better than the previous one.

He wasn't like them and never would be like them.