London, England
1936

Tom Riddle, as it turns out, isn't in the library for books.

Now that she is spying on him officially, Hermione is careful not to make a sound while the little ghoul of the orphanage makes himself at home. He sits in the old musty armchair that is likely home to mice - judging by the holes in it - and he calmly begins emptying his pockets of pencils. As he lays the pencils down on the table in a perfect row, she waits in trepidation for him to do something awful. Will he grow horns in what he believes is the privacy of his own company? Is he going to howl like a werewolf or speak in tongues? Martha said he was very strange.

She stays watching, but Tom Riddle doesn't turn into a devil or start howling anytime soon. He simply begins to draw in a notebook.

For two hours.

Hermione is stuck with him for every minute of it. She stays crouched behind the bookshelf at first, in agony with leg cramps and boredom. The longer she sits there, the more accustomed she becomes to Tom Riddle's presence, and soon, the scratching of his pencils is like a lullaby to her ears. She looks at him cautiously. He is drawing the room and totally ignorant of her, and he scratches his nose every now and again, turning it black with graphite. She smiles at the seriousness in his face and the mess on his nose, she doesn't think he will catch her hiding after all. Great Expectations is still lying open in her lap, just where she left off it. She could read for a little while to pass the time...

"Hello? You there, girl."

It's a boy voice speaking, and he sounds impatient. Hermione feels someone kick her in the arm and groans.

"Get up. You're going to get us in trouble with the fat witch. Up!" She is kicked again.

"Stop that," she says irritably, yawning. "What… what witch are you talking about?" Her eyes adjust to the bruise-colored light of evening visible from the only window to the outside. The cold light is spilling over a boy standing over her, he looks like an angel washed in blue paint. Except that he looks too annoyed to be angelic and his nose is covered in pencil marks. She sits up – and screams in pain when her head smacks into the bookshelf. The shelf rocks ominously to the right as if to tip over, then lands again at the last second. Hermione grabs her aching forehead with a groan. How embarrassing.

"I mean the matron," Tom Riddle answers. He is looking at her like she is a dead rat he found in the furnace. "There aren't real witches here in London. Obviously."

"Oh, do you mean Mrs. Cole?"

He rolls his eyes at her, as if her question is too stupid to even answer. Hermione is finding that she likes this boy less and less with each passing moment. Even if he does look like a fairytale prince, with his dark hair and darker eyes.

"You shouldn't sleep in here," he says, leaving her there to return to the old armchair. He picks up his notebook gently, as if it is a newborn or something equally precious. "I've heard the books back there have lice. Your head could be crawling with them by now."

"Books can't have lice, they don't have any hair," Hermione says incredulously, but she touches her hair anyway. It feels bushy and large as usual, but it isn't itchy. She puts her hand back down when she catches Tom Riddle smirking at her. "But I suppose you know that already. You just want me to leave so you can have the room to yourself!"

"She has a brain," he replies in a taunting voice. "Shocking."

Hermione flinches. She feels more hurt by the insult on her intelligence than she ought to. How can she be wounded by a grouchy boy that she didn't know but a day ago? Her eyes narrow in anger. "You're one to talk, Tom Riddle. You've lived here your whole life and you haven't gotten a single friend. What kind of boy is too stupid to make friends?"

"What kind of girl snores like a bear with asthma?" he snaps angrily.

"What kind of boy is always alone?" she yells at the top of her voice. He smiles at her. It is not a friendly smile, it is cruel, and his words are soft with menace when he speaks.

"Go to hell, Hermione."

That shocks her. She has never heard someone that is not a grown-up cuss before – and never has she been the object of cussing! But it seems that Tom Riddle has already forgotten about her. He crouches in the pit of the armchair, looking deep in concentration over his drawing, and there is a scowl on his face that makes him look like a cherub turned into a gargoyle. How he can make his pretty face look so terrible with anger is pitiful.

"Are you stupid? I said, go away," he hisses, like a snake that has been poked and prodded into deadly irritation. So he hasn't forgotten her after all. "I hate you!"

"You hate me?" She's surprised.

"Yes."

"That was awfully fast."

Tom Riddle looks at her for a moment longer than he had before, to see if she is joking or not. He scoffs finally at the apologetic smile she gives him. He suddenly reminds her of a character from another Dickens' book: Mr. Scrooge.

"You aren't clever," he says. "I don't want to make friends. I am alone by choice, not by accident. And you are breaking my concentration."

"Your concentration of what?"

"Drawing," he says gloomily. "Although at this rate, I think I will be doing little more of that tonight."

"Drawing? Can I see it? Or are there multiple?"

"There are multiple, and no, you cannot see."

"Why not?"

He ignores her. She stands next to him, breathing down his shoulder until his whole body turns visibly rigid with the effort not to attack her. She even has the gall to take the notebook straight from his hands.

"I can see why the others don't like you," she says, flipping casually through his notebook. Tom Riddle stares at her mutinously, curling and uncurling his fists as if he is fantasizing about strangling her. The look on his face would have made her shiver if had she been looking. But she isn't looking at him. "They say mean things about you, and I didn't believe them at first. Then you called me stupid and said you hated me, so I am having second thoughts about you. Wow, these really are quite good. How do you do that?"

"Do what?" His voice is a snarl.

"How do you make the shadows look so... ?" She can't think of a fitting word to describe the black weight of the teacup on the page. It has a delicate crack on the lip, which seems to her sad and mournful. But Hermione is the master of finding words and she will find this one. She touches the teacup to find the secret, and her finger has barely grazed the page when it is ripped away. She cries out in surprise.

"Don't touch it with your filthy hands!" Tom Riddle is obsessively inspecting the pages for rips and fingerprints. "The grease on your fingers will smudge the pencil. Then it will be ruined. And if you ruin my picture, I would make you very sorry."

Hermione balls her fists with a disbelieving scoff. "You couldn't make me sorry if you tried, Tom Riddle." But the second that Tom Riddle looks up at her with a chilling gleam in his eyes, so dark they look like the ashes of a dead fire, she regrets saying anything at all. She wasn't trying to make Tom Riddle want to kill her. She just wanted him to stop looking at her like a dead rat he found in the furnace.

The look he is giving her now is worse.

"Do you know that I've heard about you, too?" he says softly. "Hermione Granger. The girl that ran away from her crackwhore mother. The know-it-all that never shuts her fat mouth. The boys in the dormitory talk about you – oh yes, they do." He is smiling now. Smiling at her discomfort. "They say the wickedest things about girls and their naughty bits, but they aren't half as nice to you. Billy made a bet with Peter that your hair would clean the floors as well as a broom does if they cut it off in your sleep. Everyone else agreed that you talk too much and think so highly of yourself. They all hate you. Even the girls."

"You're lying," Hermione says, her voice a hoarse whisper. His smile falls from his face like a crescent moon vanishing from the sky at night. What is left behind is a vast and terrible darkness, as frightening to look at as it is beautiful. She can't look away. She doesn't know if she wants to look away.

"Am I?" The pencil in his hand suddenly cracks in two pieces. She jumps at the sound it makes, clean and absolute.

"Yes. And you don't scare me, Tom." This is a big lie. The biggest lie she has possibly ever told anyone, and the sweat pooling in her armpits proves it. She keeps her arms glued to her sides so he won't see. But the next thing Tom Riddle says shocks her.

"I hate that name," he confesses, rolling the pencil pieces around in his palm. His white skin turns black with graphite, and she remembers that his nose is still dirty. He is only a boy drawing, she assures herself. He isn't a ghoul to be scared of.

"That's silly. Why would you hate your own name?" She waits for him to answer, but he doesn't. She says, "You hate a lot of things."

"What's your point." His voice is flat and chilling.

Hermione laughs nervously. A strange look comes over Tom Riddle's face when she does, and at first, she thinks he is angry with her for laughing at him. Then he relaxes his grip around the broken pencil she suspects he was preparing to throw at her face. "I suppose it is silly," he says finally, in a lighter voice.

She nods in agreement. "And odd."

His face hardens. Just like that, he is holding the pencil stubs like weapons again. "Odd?"

"Not the bad sort of odd, the good sort. I find it interesting." Hermione is retracing her steps quickly, running back to the safety zone where Tom Riddle doesn't look at her as though he wants to bury her in a ditch. "I really do like your pictures," she says, changing the subject. "I'm sorry if I got my fingerprints on them." He relaxes slightly at that.

"You didn't."

"Then…I'll leave now. Goodbye."

"Do you really think I'm not scary?" Tom asks in a musing voice, as if she hadn't said anything at all. Hermione tenses in surprise. But it isn't his words that have shocked her. She looks down at her hand in Tom Riddle's hand, which is a mystery in and of itself, and then she looks at his night-colored eyes narrowing on hers in suspicion. Does he know that he grabbed her hand? Why did he do that? Suddenly, Martha's warning words come rushing back to her. He's a little funny. He makes bad things happen.

She's sweating again.

"Are you truly not scared of me?" he repeats, and he twirls his fingers through hers, tightening them so she can't move away. Somehow, she knows instinctively that what he is asking is not in fact a question, it is a challenge. She hesitates.

"No, I'm not scared."

He stares at her a moment longer, as if testing her face for lies, and Hermione stands her ground this time. She thinks it is this refusal to look away from him that makes him come to a decision about her. Hopefully, a good decision.

"In that case…" Tom Riddle says meaningfully, and he begins to stand with her hand still locked in his. She realizes how much taller he is than her – taller than most of the boys at the orphanage, in fact, and he isn't even the oldest! "I shall take you to your dormitory, Hermione." He speaks in a natural way that is so charming it is eerie. She can't tell if he likes her or not, or if he merely hates her slightly less than everyone else. He is more puzzling to her than Great Expectations. And he is more exciting, too, seeing that he isn't a book. "In the morning, I can save you a seat in the eating hall. We'll have breakfast together if you like."

"Oh, I – er – thank you." She's both pleased and frightened by his change toward her. Is he always this temperamental? "But I think boys and girls are supposed to eat separately."

"Mrs. Cole will make an exception for us. Seeing that we're friends now."

She looks at him, stunned and a little touched. "We are?"

"Of course we are." Tom is staring at her for a second longer than is polite, and she finds herself squirming like bacteria under a microscope. But he is only a boy looking his full of her. He is only a boy.

Mrs. Cole has always been concerned in one of her little charges in particular. The little boy, Tom Riddle, isn't like other boys his age. He has never been like the others. When that peculiar woman stumbled in on a rainy night eleven years ago, she bore a baby on the floor of Wool's Orphanage and died straight after. It was Mrs. Cole's duty to see after the abandoned baby boy, the poor wretch that he was a mere minute into the world, already motherless and unloved. The mother, while not soft on the eyes, did not look anything like the beautiful baby in Wool's Orphanage that night. He was an angel. He never cried or woke any of the helpers for nursing at night. In fact, he didn't do much of anything. Tom Riddle did not giggle or scream or coo like a normal baby.

It is not a sane thing to say, but Mrs. Cole swears on her mother's grave that Tom Riddle used to glare at her when he was an infant. When he grew teeth, he would nurse the helper's breasts until they bled, and they were forced to bottle him at that point. Then he had a bizarre habit of hissing at people when he was two years old to express his dislike of something, as if the boy fancied himself a snake… But he grew out of those things as one grows out of old clothes, leaving the old behind for newer and better fashions.

Mrs. Cole has always wondered if Tom Riddle would grow out of his strange ways. He is a very handsome boy. If he were a little warmer to people, then he might have been adopted by now, but the boy has always seemed to prefer his own company to others. Or so she'd thought until now. She has seen a magnificent change in him recently, and it is all thanks to the new girl, Hermione Granger.

Every day, Mrs. Cole watches the two of them cheerfully. Tom is the perfect gentleman to the girl, and it is all very heartwarming, because they are so young and innocent. He walks Hermione from place to place, sitting by her at meals with Mrs. Cole's sacred permission, and he shares the Bible with her in the chapel on Sundays. The only downside of the matter is that whenever the two are seen together, they are holding hands and whispering clandestinely. The whispering bothers Mrs. Cole. What secrets can children have?

But she lets them be while they are young and innocent. Like his bizarre habits before, she is certain that Tom Riddle and Hermione Granger will outgrow each other in due time. It is only natural for the young to have silly phases.

"Where are we going, Tom?" Hermione says, annoyed. "We're going to get in trouble." Tom is leading them away from the other children, who are still assembling in the parlor, and he is dragging her back upstairs. She recognizes the route and realizes suddenly where they are headed: Mrs. Cole's office. "What are we doing here?" she whispers. "We're going to miss the parents-"

"No, we're not," he says breezily. Tom never has a worry in the world. She, on the other hand, worries about everything. "Only you are missing it."

"Why is that?" she demands. She has to wait for an answer when they run past Mrs. Cole's office and stop at an unfamiliar door. Tom yanks it open with all of his strength, revealing the...

The boiler room?

"Because you're going to wait for me in here." Tom looks excited as he explains the plan to her, making it clear that he has been thinking over this for quite some time. "I'm going to be downstairs with everyone else, keeping cover for you, and then I will come back when the parents are gone. No one will ever know that you're here."

"But I don't want to hide," Hermione says, pulling away from him. "Besides, it's scary in the boiler room."

Tom frowns at her. "But you have to stay in here," he explains in a restrained voice, as if trying to control himself. "I planned this. I want you to do it."

"I want to meet the parents, Tom."

He bursts into cruel laughter at that. She scowls at him. "What?" she says defensively. "What's so funny?"

"You…you want to meet the parents…" he repeats through cackles. He stops laughing and stares at her incredulously. Suddenly, it is like she is staring into the black night again, an eternity of nothingness that stretches on forever and ever. Hermione tries to look away from him, but she can't manage to do it somehow. Tom Riddle has a trick of never letting her go. Magic, a little voice in her head whispers, but she knows those things don't exist. Tom is simply magnetic when he looks at her this way. He makes her feel like they are the only ones in the world.

She doesn't know if she likes the feeling.

"Don't you know what those people down there are like, Hermione? The rich snobs looking you up and down, examining the holes in your clothes and the knots in your hair like you're a used good for auction. Everyone knows they come here to laugh at us." Tom sounds bitter.

"They can't all be snobs," she says halfheartedly, but she isn't so sure anymore.

"You don't know them like I do." Tom sighs in exhaustion, as if it is tiring for him to explain it all. "Hardly anyone ever gets adopted at Wool's, especially not the old kids like us. I know. I've been here."

"But I thought they might want some of us," she says, confused. "Isn't that what the adults come here for?"

"They come for babies that they can't have themselves. When there are no babies here, they look for the next best thing – the little kids that are too young to remember they aren't their real parents. Look Hermione, don't feel bad about it," he says, seeing the desperate look in her face. He rubs the back of her hand soothingly. "I'm your friend, remember? And since I've been here the longest, I'm the expert on these things. You have to trust me."

Hermione stares at him uncertainly. Tom had been here longer than her, he knew more than she did. Although she hated to admit it. "Alright. I… I'll stay up here, I suppose?"

"Great." He shoves open the door to the boiler room and waves her ahead of him. It's dark and cramped inside. Musty-smelling. She stands carefully between the pipes and boiler.

"I'll be back in a few hours," he says, beaming at her. The door slams shut after him and Hermione hears him lock it from the outside to keep anyone from finding her. She sits down in the dark alone, hoping that he won't forget to come back.

London, England
1947 – present

"Errrmeeahne, fetch me the new order of bonnets for Miss Black! NOW!"

Hermione looks up from her half-eaten sandwich with a heavy sigh. This is supposed to be her lunch break. Not pretend-to-be-Madame-Pomfrey's-lapdog-while-being-paid-minimum-wage break.

"ERRRMEEAHNE!"

Or maybe it isn't her lunch break anymore. She jumps to her feet and dusts the crumbs from her apron before walking back into the store. The tidy seamstress shop she walks into is a cage of feather boas and ugly sparkled hats that seem to pain even the mannequins wearing them. She offers a polite smile at a toad-faced woman in her fifties and struggles to make it through the clothes racks to the other side of the store in one piece. The bonnets are in the storage closet.

She hates that storage closet. It reminds her of...

Never mind.

Hermione steps in the closet and pulls a box of new bonnets off the highest shelf, coughing in the dust bowl that follows it. In a moment, she is outside again in the comfort of the tacky seamstress shop, locking the door to the storage room with a relieved sigh. She balances the incredibly heavy box of fancy hats on her hip and tries not to think of boilers or groaning water pipes. She is panting.

Madame Pomfrey screeches her name again from the dress section. The sound pulls Hermione out of her thoughts like a bucket of ice water thrown over her head. She shakes herself and runs to her boss, to Miss Black and Madame Pomfrey feigning for an atrocious new bonnet. She hates her job, but she hates the reminders of him more. The days she isn't in the shop working too hard to remember him are worse than the days spent in there. So she tells herself.

AN: BHoC is back on the website hooray! I just decided last night to re-post BHoC on this site edited and a little revised. I was reading the PMs that you've all sent me since I took the story down a few years ago, and I've promised more than one person to send them a copy of the story, so I figured I would make it available to everyone again. I had about ten different copies of it in my laptop and they all needed improvement, so I will be slowly adding the chapters back to the story (improved!).

I want to thank everyone that hasn't forgotten about BHoC. This story is for you.

ImmortalObsession