Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Tom Marvolo Riddle doesn’t pay much attention to those around him. He leaves the others alone and prefers that they do likewise.

At Wool’s orphanage, children come and go all the time. The younger ones sometimes leave with couples, while the older boys and girls must move on when they come of age. And death is indiscriminate when it snuffs out lives in the night. Every year the sick succumb to their illnesses, their bodies wrapped in sheets and taken from their beds. So why should he bother getting to know anyone when the odds were likely they wouldn’t be around in the future?

When a new girl arrives, despite himself, Tom watches her as she settles in. It’s only that her coppery hair and bright green eyes draw the eye, he rationalises. He’s never seen eyes quite like hers before.

Every day, he observes something new about her.

Of course, the first thing one notices about the girl is her scrawniness. All the children at Wool’s are skinny, but she is thin as a rake. Though she’s short, sticklike limbs give her the appearance of being taller than she truly is.

She likes to read, just like him. She carries the same well-worn book with her wherever she goes. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Tom sees her reading it in the orphanage’s courtyard. With her arms lifted to hold her book, he spots the distinct yellow-green of healing bruises peeking out from under the sleeves of her dress, ugly rings that wrap around the slightness of her upper arms.

The girl makes quick friends with Amy, Dennis, and Billy. Tom watches them across the courtyard before he stops himself and takes his book back to his room.

Tom doesn’t notice anything else after that because, he tells himself, he doesn’t actually care.

The clothes are stiff and itchy at Wool’s, though they fit better than what she was used to. As small and thin as she was, Holly Lily Potter was fast outgrowing her old, threadbare dresses. Long before they were hers, they’d been her aunt’s when she was a girl.

’I kept them for a daughter, but it looks like I’ll have to give them to you,’ Petunia had said bitterly as she took the dresses from a little trunk in the closest.

Why her aunt and uncle would have no more children, Holly couldn’t say. She’d only overhead them once lamenting that they couldn’t give her cousin siblings. If the way Dudley behaved towards her was any demonstration of how he’d treat a little sister or brother, then Holly thought it was just as well he wouldn’t have any.

The orphanage is not very welcoming with its small windows and narrow halls, but it’s a cut above living with the Dursleys. Here she isn’t the only child expected to carry out chores. And she isn’t awoken dreadfully early to complete them. Here there’s no trying and failing to navigate her uncle’s foul temper, only to be shut into the darkness of a cupboard. Here she might read any time she’d like, not only when she runs over to Mrs Figg’s or at school.

Holly quite likes it at Wools. Her only regret is that her aunt hadn’t left her there sooner. If only she had stood up to Dudley long before that summer.

Across the courtyard of the orphanage is a pale boy with inky black hair and a book in his hands.

Amy, the girl Holly shares a room with, catches her staring at him. She warns, ‘You should keep away from Tom Riddle.’

Holly turns her head to look at her. ‘Why’s that?’

‘Because,’ little Dennis adds, offering no explanation.

The oldest of the group, Billy, says, ‘He’s an odd one; funny things happen ’round him.’

‘Just... keep away,’ Amy repeats.

The other children seem to like talking to Holly, though she never says much of anything to them, does she? She answers their questions when they ask them and sometimes asks some of her own, but that’s all really. Still, they talk to her like they’re friends.

It isn’t something she’s ever known. Before Wool’s, Holly hadn’t any friends her own age. Dudley made well sure of that. Her only friend was old Mrs Figg from next door.

Like Tom Riddle, strange things happened around Holly. Because of it, she was made to go into the cupboard. Her wickedness was to be punished, her aunt and uncle had said. Over time the cupboard just became her place. Since Holly is well familiar with the loneliness of being different, of course she doesn’t listen to the other children’s warnings.

After a few days of watching Tom Riddle curiously, she makes up her mind and approaches him during the last week of school, when the children are all gathered in the schoolyard.

‘Hello,’ she says, sitting down next to him where he reads against the wall. ‘I’m Holly Potter.’

He doesn’t say anything, only looks over at her with eyes as grey as storm clouds and a blank expression on his face. He returns to his book, so Holly opens her own book.

‘What are you doing?’ Tom Riddle asks after a moment.

‘Reading,’ she replies, her eyes still on the page.

‘Yes, obviously,’ he says coldly. ‘But why?’

Holly lowers her book and looks into his narrowing eyes. ‘Well, I like to read and—’

‘You know what I mean.’

‘I’m sorry, but I don’t...’

‘Why are you sitting with me? Didn’t they tell you about me?’

‘Well, yes, they did, but...’ She falters under his unrelenting coldness.

‘Then why are you here?’

‘I—I thought we could be friends because—’

She doesn’t get to finish her sentence, to explain that she is different too.

Tom Riddle stands up. ‘—Well, we can’t,’ he says, ending their conversation and leaving her sitting there all alone.

Amy, Dennis, and Billy see the whole thing and come to sit with her.

Billy scoffs, ‘Don’t know why you’d want to be friends with him.’

‘I only thought that...’ Holly says. ‘Well, everyone needs a friend, don’t they?’

Nobody looks the least bit convinced.

Amy shakes her head. ‘Not everyone. Not him.’

Holly had never seen the ocean before. It’s so immense, extending on forever.

When she was with the Dursleys, they made it very clear she was a wicked wretch. Holly was a child of the Devil who must come to God’s light, they said. For some reason, their way of accomplishing that was to put her in the dark.

But maybe she wasn’t wicked after all. God had answered her prayers, hadn’t He? And now Holly was free of the Dursleys, free of the cupboard—out in the beauty of nature even. They were wrong about her, she decides, looking over the rocks and into the infinity of the sea, breathing in the salty, refreshing air.

Having seen it before, the other children aren’t enthralled with the view like she is. When Holly finally tears herself away from its splendour, she walks the grass. She watches everyone as they run about laughing with each other.

But not him. Tom Riddle sits in the grass, the very picture of quiet solitude. His face is as expressionless as it is at school and inside the walls of the orphanage. Until he sees a snake slithering up to him.

He has a nice smile, Holly thinks. What a shame he never does it.

When Tom opens his mouth and speaks to the little thing, the sounds that come out hold her in place. They’re peculiar, but something about them—

‘You’re such a freak, Riddle,’ Billy says as he comes to stand over Tom. ‘Look at him, hissing at snakes again,’ he shouts over to Amy and Dennis, who play too far away to hear him properly.

This doesn’t stop Billy, though. He catches Holly’s eye.

‘See?! As queer as we told you he was!’

Then he bends down and pushes Tom over.

‘Billy, stop!’ Holly cries out, only to be ignored. She feels her jaw tightening and her hands balling into fists.

‘Even snakes don’t want to be friends with—’ Billy starts, but he’s cut off as he’s knocked onto his backside by an invisible force. Just like Dudley had been.

Tom stands up and looks around. They make eye contact, and Holly knows that he knows.

‘You too?’ he asks, his storm-cloud eyes wide.

Billy coughs as he picks himself up, looking between Holly and Tom, his features twisted. ‘You’re both freaks,’ he spits, his eyes tearing up, and he rushes off.

Holly looks around too, realising Tom had been making sure no one saw what happened. Luckily, nobody is looking at them.

‘I can handle myself,’ he says indignantly. ‘I don’t need your help.’

But Tom doesn’t leave. They spend the rest of the trip in each other’s company.

They spend every day after that in each other’s company as well.

The other children stop talking to her, but it is no great loss to Holly. She hadn’t much in common with them anyway.

Nearly two weeks after the coastal outing, Holly can’t find Tom in his room or in the courtyard, so she walks the halls searching for him.

She turns the corner just as he slips into the room Billy shares with Dennis. They wouldn’t be in there, Holly knows. It was their day to help the older boys and girls in the kitchen. When she enters, Tom sits on Billy’s bed with the boy’s rabbit in his lap. He looks up at her with a furrowed brow but doesn’t comment on Holly having followed him.

‘What are you doing in here?’ she asks, watching Tom run his fingers through Peter Cottontail’s soft fur.

‘Billy would miss his rabbit terribly if something were to happen to it,’ he says.

The contrast between his gentle attention and his ominous words raises the hair on Holly’s neck.

‘You aren’t going to let him go, are you?’

’Maybe.’

She closes the gap between them to take the poor little thing and wrap it in her arms. ‘But why? If you want to get back at Billy, then get back at him, but leave little Peter out of it!’

‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ Tom says casually.

‘But he didn’t do anything to you. He’s just a little rabbit,’ Holly cries, too desperate to keep her voice from shaking. ‘Please, Tom! Please just leave him be!’

Tom breaks eye contact, looking unsettled by her outburst. ‘I’ll leave him alone. Just relax...’

Holly’s shoulders sag in relief as she sits on the bed next to him, still clutching Peter to her heart.

~

S E P T E M B E R

Very quickly, they become “Holly and Tom.”

Keep away from Holly and Tom, the children caution newcomers.

~

It’s odd, having someone to spend his days with. Odd... but not unpleasant; definitely not annoying, like Tom thought it would be.

Though it had been only a short time since they’d become friends, Holly is entwined into Tom’s life as though she was there all along. They sit together at mealtimes. They switch off reading aloud or read silently side by side in the orphanage’s courtyard and the schoolyard.

‘Did you learn to read before school?’ he asks one day in the schoolyard, looking over an illustration in Holly’s book, his fingers tracing the ears of a white rabbit.

Tom didn’t get the opportunity himself, but once he’d learned, he was very good at it when called to read aloud in class. Sister Mary Margaret was so impressed that she let him take books back to Wool’s and return them when he finished with them.

‘I did!’ Holly says. ‘My friend taught me. Mrs Figg. She lives next door to the Dursleys. She let me stay and read when my uncle Vernon would—when my uncle was cross with me.’

Tom’s eyes stall on the page, and he thinks of the month before, when Holly found him sneaking into Billy’s room to pay him back. He fully intended to steal the idiot’s rabbit away and leave it somewhere for Billy to find, but in the end, he couldn’t go through with it.

When Holly held the rabbit close and begged for its life, Tom’s mind filled with all sorts of unwelcome thoughts. Was that look on her face the one her uncle saw when the man was in a temper? Had she pleaded that same way with her uncle or silently taken his treatment of her? Did Holly come to Wool’s with other fading marks in places that nobody could see?

Looking into Holly’s wide green eyes that day, Tom had seen things. They were flashes from her, he knew. He saw her uncle’s ruddy face, spittle flying from his mouth and onto Holly as he shouted. He saw plump hands that gripped, wrenched, shook her; hands that pushed her into a cupboard and locked her in the dark before she could run next door to her old neighbour; hands that—

Tom’s gaze had dropped from her as though he’d been burned.

When he saw what her beastly uncle had done to her from her very own memories, he realised at that moment how truly pathetic it was for someone to harm those so much weaker than them.

Holly was right. If Tom was to hurt someone, they should deserve it.

One day, he thinks, Vernon Dursley will be sorry he ever laid a hand on his niece. The foul excuse for a man will regret his whole life.

There’s a long silence where neither Holly nor Tom knows what to say. The sisters call everyone back into the classroom before either can change the subject.