Idea: Someone goes back in time and adopts Tom Riddle when he is supposed to get his Hogwarts letter. Rather than it being the usual crowd, it is someone who'd seen a bit of the harder side of life before attending Hogwarts and therefore could somewhat understand.
Dean Thomas knew that he had a limited amount of time in which to do this. Breaking into Albus Dumbledore's office was harder than it had been when the Transfiguration Professor and Head of Gryffindor had been Headmaster. Fortunately, what he needed was on the man's desk.
Harry and his lot had wanted to live and let live, as they didn't know whether or not a world without Voldemort would be worse than what they had now. There had been a sizable number of small fish that Voldemort had swallowed whole during his first rise. Any one or all of those fish could have caused innumerable problems.
He and the group he worked with were willing to take the risk even if it meant that they wouldn't be born. He had been the one to volunteer to go back and kill Voldemort even though it meant that he would be stuck taking the long way back to the twenty-first century.
Step one in the plan to kill Voldemort was naturally removing Tom Riddle's letter from Albus Dumbledore's desk. If Albus didn't know that there was supposed to be one more first-year, he wouldn't go looking for him until it was too late since today was the day the old man was supposed to head out and inform the Muggleborns of their new status as was tradition for the Head of Gryffindor since the days of Godric Gryffindor himself if the stories were to be believed.
Step two was to get to the orphanage and deal with Tom in a manner that wouldn't raise suspicions amongst the muggles.
By the time September 1st rolled around, Tom would just be a memory and he could make a new life in this world where record keeping was crap, especially in the Muggle world. Maybe he could even join the army or the RAF and fight Hitler's forces.
Dean knew not to expect much, but when he finally arrived at Wool's Orphanage, he found himself having flashbacks to the time that judge had sentenced him to a couple of months in juvie when he was ten to teach him a lesson and scare him straight after he'd been caught shoplifting. The place seemed to give off that same vibe for some strange reason. The inside of the orphanage which was apparently overcrowded and understaffed as was apparent even at this late hour as he drifted through the dormitories and individual rooms more firmly reminded him of his stay in juvenile lockup, as he could hear the sounds of a distant altercation in one of the rooms he'd not yet searched. From the sound of it, it was the usual: larger and older children preying on one or more of the smaller and younger ones.
He'd read a little bit about this orphanage in Voldemort's biography. Basically all there was about the place was Dumbledore's memory of the meeting with Tom Riddle and a little blurb about how Wool's Orphanage had tirelessly served the community for generations before it was closed sometime in the 1960s and torn down to make way for a block of office buildings.
The juvenile detention center he'd been held in for a couple of months because he'd been stupid enough to get caught lifting some snacks from a Tesco when he was ten also tirelessly served the community for generations, but that didn't make it a nice place to live.
All that was really known about Voldemort's childhood before Hogwarts was that he was born December 31, 1926, named after his father and maternal grandfather, had been an odd baby and a quiet child, had done something to a pair of orphans named Amy Benson and Dennis Bishop on a trip to the seaside, had hung Billy Stubbs (1923-1969)'s rabbit, and had stolen property from his fellow orphans. All but the last, Dumbledore had learned from Mrs. Cole whom he'd apparently...gotten drunk.
Gotten drunk? Gotten drunk?
The woman who was running this place got drunk in what had to be the middle of the day, mid-afternoon at the latest and possibly as early as mid-morning, considering when the letters were usually handed out. Holy shit. If that lady had been running things somewhere that dealt with kids when he was growing up, she would have been out on her arse faster than you could say "Screwdriver".
As he wandered through the darkened building which was run down but apparently scrubbed to within an inch of its life in search of his prey, he found himself reviewing what he knew about Voldemort's life here again. That's when red flag number two popped up.
How the hell had they been able to afford to take the children to the seaside every year when they obviously didn't have the funds to tend to building upkeep? The place looked like the last time it had been painted had been sometime around when Voldemort was born. Did they sell some of the kids or something?
He vaguely remembered hearing about a scandal where something like that had happened at a boy's home or something long before he was born, and the place had to close down. His Stepdad's dad had lived there before the place had been shut down and had described it as a living hell.
Insert bits here, Have Dean find Tom in another fight with Billy Stubbs.
Dumbledore had sent Voldemort back to this place every Summer? No wonder the kid became Voldemort. He'd have had some serious issues too if he'd been raised in this and just when he thought he was going to get out, someone pulled the rug out from under him and gave him the choice of either this or the street for a couple months every year. It probably wasn't much of a surprise that Voldemort's first killings after that Moaning Myrtle accident were his father and paternal grandparents.
Idea is that Dean Thomas adopts Tom rather than killing him. Title for story: Tom Thomas