"You want us to go back?" Tom said. He was looking at Dumbledore with actual incredulity in his eyes. "Back to Wool's"
"It is your home," Dumbledore said gently. Fall had turned to winter, which had in its own time become spring. As the school year drew to its inevitable end, Tom had asked which of his classmates would he spend the summer with. Dumbledore's response had been unexpected.
Harry was equally displeased. "I want to talk to Dippet," he said.
"Headmaster Dippet," Dumbledore corrected him, "and it will simply not do, my dear boy. Hogwarts students cannot stay here over the summer, you cannot simply invite yourself over to the Malfoy's or the Nott's, and you have no place else to go."
"Nevertheless," Harry said. "Headmaster Dippet is, as you pointed out, the headmaster of the school."
"And he leaves these sorts of matters in my hands," Dumbledore said. "As I was the one who found you, you remain my responsibility."
Tom's eyes narrowed as he watched the old man smile at them with sorrow in his eyes, his hands spread as if there were just no other options. "There's a war about to start," he said. "Do you even know what a war is?"
"Of course I do."
"Do you know what a war does?" Tom pressed. "What bombs do? They burn things. They burn houses and shops and the people inside them too."
"I am sure you will be fine," Dumbledore said. "Muggle Britain is hardly going to get involved in that German mess. Do you two boys have any other questions for me?"
Harry and Tom exchanged looks and plastered identical, ingratiating smiles on their faces. "No, sir," Tom said.
"Have a good summer," Harry said.
They were out the door and down the corridor before either of them spoke. "It's no different," Tom said.
"You thought it would be?" Harry asked. He pulled a snitch out of his pocket and tossed it casually into the air where it fluttered for a moment as if it might escape before he grabbed it again. He let it go again as Tom watched, then a third time. "The games are better."
"The power is better," Tom said.
"Malfoy and Nott are better than the other orphans."
"Though not by much."
"Wool's," Harry said. "Again."
"Not forever," Tom said.
They didn't say more than that. They finished the year; they packed their trunks; they rode the train back to London with the rest of their classmates and neither of them said a word to anyone about where they were going. Tom shook Abraxas' parents' hands and said how nice it was to meet them while Harry charmed the Notts. Then, when everyone was safely out of sight, they apparated back to their manors in the countryside or whatever lovely houses waited for them with caring parents and warm meals. They began to drag their trunks through the streets on the long, miserable walk to Wool's. They could have asked for help. Any one of their friends' parents would have made the trip easier with a smile, but neither boy needed to consult with the other to know that was right out.
No one wants to really see how bad an orphan's lot is. It's one thing to pat yourself on the back and be pleased that your child has made a friend who isn't quite as well off. You can talk about how Hogwarts opens doors to different experiences and children from different backgrounds. That Tom Riddle, easily the most gifted boy in their year, or so Abraxas tells me. That Harry. A Quidditch marvel. We'll be winning the cup with him flying for us. So many warm, wonderful lies they could all tell themselves, but if they saw behind the curtain the story would shift. It would change. It would become uncomfortable.
"It's one summer," Harry said.
"It's all the summers," Tom said. "Until school is out and we can do magic on our own."
Harry looked at him as they trudged through the darkening streets. He had to shift arms so that he could pull his trunk with the other hand. They weren't even half way there and his shoulders ached from the strain and his hand was cramping up. "Bastards," he said.
"Like everyone else," Tom said. Did you really expect it to be different? he might as well have said.
Since neither of them had, however much they might have hoped, they finished the walk in silence. When they reached Wool's the matron was out, but one of her aproned minions opened the door and regarded them with visible displeasure. "That fancy school kick you out?" she asked.
"It's summer holiday," Harry said. "Schools do close."
"Unlucky for us," she said, but she stepped aside and let them enter. Someone had tried to lay claim to Tom's bed, but he dropped the trunk at the foot and just looked at the miscreant until he scrambled off the neatly folded, thin blanket. He'd find a bed in a less well-situated spot in the room. Or he wouldn't. Harry dropped his trunk at the bed next to it and rubbed at his arm. "Don't suppose there's dinner," he said.
"You missed it," one of the other orphans said.
"No one knew you was coming back," said the girl in her apron. She'd followed them up without offering to help drag the trunks and stood in the door of the older boy's dormitory now.
"Don't suppose you can heat something," Harry said.
"Don't suppose I can," she said. "Breakfast's at six."
"Thanks," Tom said. He tipped his head at the door and it swung shut with a long bang that made several of the boys nearer to it flinch. Harry looked at him. They weren't supposed to do magic out of school. The threat had been levied with serious reminders and stern looks.
"It can get worse?" Tom asked.
Harry flung himself down on his bed. Beds at Hogwarts had been soft and deep and warm. The cold familiarity of springs and flat pillows felt like a home he'd never escape. At least it was summer. At least they wouldn't freeze. "I guess it can't," he said.
Tom leaned over and set a hand on his arm. "We take what we want," he said.
Time flows strangely when the country is at war and even more strangely when you are pulled back and forth between two worlds.
One world was filled with bombs, deprivation, and the sneering condescension of a woman who saw them both as destined for the poorhouse. The fancy school magnified the dislike Mrs. Cole had already felt. Stay in your place she might have been saying with every hard word and every unfair punishment she doled out. Don't you think that school makes you better than the rest of us.
Tom would look at her, jaw set, and count the days until they were done. Harry's arms would cross and as the years went on his green eyes grew harder and harder every time she criticized his hair or his work habits.
If the one world was nothing but grim reality, the other was color and magic, and it was all through a glass window neither of them could quite pass. Orphans were interesting, certainly, and the purebloods had managed to talk themselves into believing anyone quite as good at magic as Tom was had to be a foundling, but he still didn't have a family. He still wasn't important and neither was Harry even though he could fly better than any of them. Harry, who could find a snitch in a rainstorm fit to drown you, was good enough to drink with, but not the sort of boy you took home to mother, not the sort of chap you invited to the club in the summer. I wasn't that teachers didn't adore them both. Tom, especially, had a knack for wrapping even the most reticent of teachers around his thumb. He was so clever, so good looking, so charming and deferential that, one by one, they fell in line. It made them feel good to like him. It made them feel tolerant. They could tell themselves that they recognized talent wherever it lay, even in the Muggle orphan. They could tell themselves they weren't biased towards children from good families.
Tom smiled at their condescension every time.
Harry grabbed the Snitch, won their games, and smiled just as falsely when they marveled at how a boy with no advantages could be so good at flying.
If you let them see your anger, you'd already lost.
Year followed on year, each tiny exclusion a growing slap, until it was the start of September I, 1942 and time to start their fifth year. Harry passed the paper over toward Tom, who'd been folding his school robes with almost maniacal precision. "Churchill survived the censure motion," he said.
"Good on him," Tom said. Wool's had survived the Blitz, but with years of blackout curtains and fires. It was just as they'd predicted when Dumbledore had first sent them back to a Muggle world on the verge of war, which had left Tom even colder than he'd been. "D'ya think that means we'll all be getting beer for Christmas?"
Harry snorted. "You'll get nothing and like it," he said.
"They'll get nothing," Tom said.
"And we'll get everything," Harry replied. It had become a mantra of sorts. "Grab your trunk. Time to get to the station."
"No tests this year," Tom said.
"You sound almost disappointed."
Tom shrugged. "I'll find out who we are," he said. "Extra library time."
Harry didn't think that was possible. He, quite simply, didn't exist. He grabbed his trunk and with tugs and pulls and more than one illegal charm to lighten the load, they made their way to the train, into a compartment, and sagged with relief against the plush red seats. Students went by, most waving to the pair of them, but moving on to see their own friends. Tom had managed to make being invited to sit with him an honor and he could cut pretenders down with a word or two. When a clever, popular boy decided to lacerate you, the seemingly casual words could stick all year. Most people opted to avoid it.
Not Malfoy, of course. Not Nott. When they arrived, they flung their own bags down and stretched out on the seats with their gleaming shoes and pressed trousers, evidence of the wealth they barely understood. "How was your holiday?" Malfoy asked. "Ugh, I envy you. London, and girls and fun. I was practically a prisoner on that estate. My father spent the whole summer lecturing me about responsibility."
"Oh god," Nott said. "The responsibility lecture."
Tom laughed. It was a warm, good-hearted sound that acknowledged their travails while dismissing them. "They needn't worry," he said. "You'll both grow up into neat little copies of your fathers and some day, you'll be telling your own sons the same thing."
"I won't," Nott said. He almost bristled under that too-accurate assessment. He reacted the exact way Tom had intended and it would have been funny if it weren't so bloody predictable. Harry had to keep himself from yawning in Nott's pompous, worried, aristocratic face. "You've got things planned, Tom," Nott went on. "I know you do. And you know we're in."
"What I have planned," Harry said, neatly turning the conversation away from specifics, "is not knocking some girl up. I don't suppose those responsibility talks included how to do contraception charms?"
"Not a thing in Muggle orphanages?"
Harry snorted. "More like masturbation will make you blind."
"Well," Malfoy said, "that explains your eyesight issues."
"Sod off," Harry said, then pried the door to the compartment open again and kept it from shutting with his foot. He grinned at girls as they walked by, one after another. More than half stopped to chat with the charming Quidditch star, forcing other people to wiggle around them with grumbles in the tight train passageway. By the time the Hogwarts Express had lurched to a start, Harry had half-promised three girls he'd catch up with them at school and told one Mavis Hazelton he'd meet her up by the front once they cleared London."
"You sure aren't a lavender boy," Nott said, half admiringly, half begrudgingly, as Harry finally let the door shut. "Did you see the curves on her?"
"You thought I was?" Harry asked. "And, yes, I noticed." It would have been hard to miss.
"All those Quidditch showers," Nott said with a bit of a shrug and a definite leer.
Harry's look of withering contempt made Nott shrink back a little. "You sit here and think about all the arse you want," he said. "I'm off to see if I can get some of the old slithery with the lovely Miss Hazelton. See you three failures when we get to Hogwarts."
. . . . . . . . .
A/N – I am so sorry for the long delay in updating. The idea of having to slog through all those early years of school made me want to poke my eye out with a fork and I wasn't sure how to manage a graceful time jump. This might not qualify as graceful, but it's a definite jump to the year when the murders began. Thank you all for your patience and your support.
Many thanks to MaelstromGirls for a very thorough beta job! The issues were myriad and vast.