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When Tom Riddle first caught sight of Harry, he could have sworn that something in him gave a little unnatural tug at the sight of her, like his heart was attempting to squeeze betwixt his ribs and get to a magnet buried in hers. She might have felt it too, because her eyes swept right over all of the other older boys, who were standing straight and attempting to look strong so that someone would want to take them, and met his instead. Her eyes were poisonous green behind her cat eye glasses and wild fringe, and Tom felt an unsettling feeling in the core of what made him him, the part of him that did strange and freakish things, as if that powerful part of him was trying to warn that whatever happened next, whatever it was, there would be no going back and no recovering. This would make or break him.
Her hair looked like a tangle of messy raven feathers, her face was pale and a scar cut right through her eyebrow in an almost menacing way, had it been a man. For a woman, it was just an unfortunate mark that may have prevented her from finding a reliable husband. Her lips were red but didn't look painted, and the shape of her face was downright ephemeral. She looked like she was the vampiric lifestyle given form, that women on street corners wanted to live, and old wives called callous and indecent. She wore no wedding ring, but instead a slip of a delicate gold watch hung from her dainty wrists, and her shoes were worn but of good quality, and if she was able to consider adopting a child without a husband, she must have been at least somewhat well off.
So he ignored the warning feeling in his gut, and mimicked the other boys for once, straightening up and pasting on an expression that most would consider "cute". It was only an act, but if it would make her notice him, than so be it. He just needed to get out of this place. The plan could be changed from there.
As she led him down the steps of the orphanage with a hand he didn't need or want but accepted nonetheless, her fingers were as cold as the metal of her watch, and her smile followed him in a way that felt a bit suffocating in its sudden care. Her poison green eyes were sick with love that he didn't remember having been there before, and Tom could feel the power in him edging away. He held her hand tighter.
Her house wasn't a mansion by any means but it was nicely sized, with a very tall white fence and gate that hid the yard from view at the street, and a pile of soggy newspapers on the sidewalk in front of it. She walked right over them, and she was still just scarcely holding Tom's hand, so he followed. The gate closed softly behind him, leaving him in a yard of slightly tall grass with a small smattering of rose bushes and a pot of overgrown herbs by the steps. The house from the outside wasn't anything particularly special, with the exception of the large black cat he could see sunning in one of the windows. Inside, the rooms were big and decorated with strange painting and knickbacks, and the ceiling above him glistened with stars that he swore seemed to twinkle.
He fell asleep that night in a room that he would make his own, nested within a mass of navy sheets and rediculously fluffy patterned comforters, more pillows beneath his head than any single person could ever reasonably need, and, just because Harry had provided it and probably expected him to love it, a stuffed rabbit in his arms. It bore a unusual likeness of the real thing, and reminded him of a little lifeless body hanging from the rafters while another boy crouched crying beneath it.
Life with Harry quickly became a bit of a queer blur. He'd though he'd have to do something, work or chores or something, to earn his keep. That was what generally happened for boys who were adopted. But Harry... just left him be.
Well, that wasn't right. He was rarely actually alone. If Harry was not there, a silent sweet presence sitting in the background and brushing fingers over his forehead as she hovered nearby, the black cat, Severus, was. Severus followed Tom around the house like a dog rather than a cat, perching in a windowsill or mantle to keep an eye on him as he would groom his great fluffy black ruff, not unlike a lions mane. Tom had asked what breed Severus was, to have such a lion-like look about him, but Harry had only laughed like he'd just told some great joke in comparing the cat to a lion, and gave him a slow, soft kiss pressed near his ear.
But regardless of Harry's almost constant nearby-ness or the cat that followed him with unusual loyalty, Tom couldn't help feeling like he was left mostly to his own devices. He was free to do whatever he wanted. All that was required of him was that he tolerated the feeling of bright green eyes burning into his back.
He could settle himself crosslegged on top of the desk in the library and read books written purely as fiction, of which Harry seemed to have an astounding number of. There were dark murder mysteries, Faerie tales and lore, old memoirs and diaries detailing the depressing lives of girls and boys in the Victorian Era, death-enchanted tomes of poetry and verse, and a large collection of books about such taboo subjects as magic, where crusty pages told recipes for deadly concoctions and dusty covers held the life stories of wizards like Merlin and accounts of the Salem witch trials. One notable stack sat right next to the desk, nearly as tall as it, and contained books that detailed magic spells and curses for battle, and one book that looked newer than any others, a biography about a man named "Albus Dumbledore".
Or he could explore the house, and pick up any of the multitude of trinkets or pieces of jewelry just laying around the house to spirit back to his own increasingly personalised room. Contrary to every girl he had ever met, Harry didn't seem to put much effort into keeping her home clean. In fact, the only thing that probably kept the house looking remotely reasonable and not like it had been the occupancy of twelve rambunctious bachelors, was the fact that it was so big and there were only two of them. Despite the books and bracelets and used glasses left around, and the tiny dragon and Faerie figurines lining the shelves that Tom could have sworn he saw move on more than one occasion, and strangely shaped bottles containing colourful liquids, and occasional just seemingly bizarre item laying about, such as a large fang roughly the length of Tom's whole hand and a painting of a girl wearing turnip earrings, titled "self portrait" propped up in one of the bathrooms, the house never seemed to appear as anything more than slightly cluttered. In fact, the further he ventured, the more he started to get the sense that it felt far larger inside that it had appeared from the outside.
This led to him deciding to go outside one evening, to take another look at the house from the outside and truly see how big it must have been, since every time he measured it from the inside he seemed to get confused for some reason.
He was down the first step before Harry's hand wrapped around his wrist, tighter than ever before. He turned with a start, and stared.
Her smile was as sweet as ever, but... it looked strange. As if... he wasn't sure really what it was. But Tom suddenly became aware that going outside was a very bad idea. The knowledge just popped into his head, and it felt very strange and foreign, because he had never thought such a thing before. But staring up into Harry's brilliant green eyes... he followed her back inside. Watched numbly as the door swung closed, and she sent him a soft smile that looked more unhealthy and frightening than he'd ever noticed before, and laid a hand lightly against his neck, making him notice for the first time how long and sharp her nails could be. She pressed a feathery soft kiss not to his cheek or forehead or near his ear, but into the corner of his lips, and leant back with a hissed whisper that had him widening his eyes as he recognised the language of snakes, a language he had never realised anyone else could speak. He looked up at her, in her messy ponytail and hand-knit scarf even though he had never seen her pick up a needle, and found himself understanding what his instincts had first been screaming when he first lay eyes on her, before he had unknowingly became so enchanted by her and used to finding her comforting.
He suddenly felt horribly like a butterfly trapped in a jar.
From then on, his childhood was a sick twisted haze that bounced between two poles.
One was spent basking in Harry's care, in her soft touches and possessive cuddles, in the way she draped extra blankets over him when he slept at night and the way she looked in red, the way she smiled and baked cookies and never told him not to read a book, the way she told him what emotions to feel and which to force to make his power obey him. How she would make flowers bloom from nothing in empty alabastron vases, and give him pink juice, and play board games with him, and treated Severus like he was human, and hissed lovely things to him like they were lullabies. The way she kept the drapes tied shut most of the time and watched him sleep at night and gave him that light, pleasant look whenever she felt he'd been perhaps eyeing the doorknob a tad bit too contemplatively.
The other half was spent desperately trying to escape.
It wasn't so much that Harry ever really hurt him or scared him, so much as it was the idea of imprisonment. He didn't want to be some caged bird, cut off and hopeless and never able to truly grow. The idea of growing old and graceless in this house filled him with a mindless sort of terror, something ancient that had been etched into his very veins from a very long time ago, perhaps since before he was even conceived. He didn't want this. He wanted to go out and conquer the world, pull the gears of the earth to a halt and watch steam rise and sirens blare as he slowly but surely climbed to the top and took over. He wanted power; always had. He wanted to be in charge, and watch people grovel and jump to do his bidding. And sure, if he asked Harry would slip quickly away to fetch him a glass of water, but that wasn't the jolt to his ego that he wanted and needed. Tom was a malicious and controlling child, and Harry was not the sort to be controlled in the way he wanted.
He wanted her, but he didn't want this. Oh Christ, how he didn't want this. This was being kept in a box by a little girl who didn't understand that he was a human being, not a pet. This was being pinned in place by a vicious captor whose best tool of imprisonment was a single look that could control his mind, seep into his thoughts and make him turn his head. It terrified him how much he had changed since he met her, and it terrified him that he still felt like he was changing. He felt like he was losing himself under her suffocating care.
He never succeeded in his escape plans. Harry was furiously resolute in her desire to keep him contained. He'd get to the door or be sliding up a window, only to feel a soft hand on his shoulder, dragging him back. His growing size seemed to have no impact on her, as even when he was nearly as tall as she was, she would still pull him back and fold him into his chest like some lost puppy. She made him feel horribly small and trapped, and disgustingly safe and loved. He hated it as much as he loved her.
He was somewhere in his teen years when it happened. He'd long since lost track of the days, as there was no calendar in their home and Harry didn't pick up the paper. He had counted the days at first, but at some point they'd inevitably became a blur.
Whatever the day was, Harry had slept in late. This didn't happen often, but it was generally the result of her drinking, which also didn't happen often. But for some reason he'd noticed yesterday that she wasn't following right behind him like usual as he moved between the rooms, and when he'd eventually found her in one of the sitting rooms, the one with the plush red couches and the painting of a magnificent castle over the fireplace mantle, she'd been ankle deep in bottles of fire whiskey. She took one look at him, another at Severus peeking around his legs, and burst into hot tears that made her face red and not quite ugly, but the closest to it he could recall her ever looking. She'd stood and stumbled over, given his lips a quick, vicious kiss, and told him not to look for her.
So, naturally, he did, but he never found her. This worried him for a long time, until he rechecked her bedroom once more and found she'd appeared since he last looked. She lay in a crumpled nest of sheets and throw pillows, her long legs thrown over the edge of the bed and her wild curly hair spread above her head like pooling tar, an apple with a sickly golden sheen clutched in one hand and rose scented wine in the other. He'd crept closer to her hazy, sleepy form and returned her kiss, tasting Faerie fruit on her lips. The urge to never stop was barely shrugged off, and as he stood again he wondered why none of this was like the families in the books, before he wandered off to his own bedroom, a thin blue book about old dark magicks and his little black diary in one hand, and a red and gold quill in the other. Severus curled up against his waist, and Tom fell asleep, dripping ink onto his pillows.
The next morning, Harry was still asleep. Tom had cereal, drank some coffee that proved just how bad at making coffee he was in comparison to Harry, and then his gaze caught on the unguarded door.
The next thing he knew, he was out the door, down the steps, through the gate he hadn't seen in years and barely remembered, and standing on a sidewalk. A few people bustled around already, their hats pulled over their ears and their coats buttoned tight. Judging by the chill stealing through his button up and knitted cardigan, it was winter. He hadn't seen or felt winter in far too long, and the feeling of cold tingling at his fingertips and the sight of his breath turning white in the air, filled him with a quaint sort of joy. He started to walk, with no real destination but for away.
By the time he reached something he vaguely remembered was called a bus stop, the pain in his chest had grown agonising, and he felt confused by the world he had first grown up in. He had spent too long in a warm world of flowers and meaningless manipulations, where the closest to unfamiliar was a new food and the closest to a crowd was being surrounded by mountains of books on every side. But here, he was suddenly aware that he hardly remembered any of this. Some of the people were nodding to each other as they passed other people. Was that normal or a trait belonging only to a certain group? Was he supposed to nod? That man giving him a desperate look, like Tom was everything he wanted and everything he could never have - what was that? What did that mean? A car trundled past, and he didn't recognise the model. The clothing had changed styles. He was used to Harry's long messy hair and skirts too short to be modest and too long to be fashionable. Now he was surrounded by women with short haircuts and men with gloves and hats.
He was suddenly aware that every person who passed him, as he paused to breath, was a separate person. With separate thoughts, and he didn't know any of them, couldn't trust anyone. He might have known Harry wasn't about to pull out a knife and brutally stab him. He didn't know that about any of these people.
How had he ever thought he could conquer and rule these people, when all it would take was a hand over his mouth and something sharp slipping between his ribs to silence him forever?
He let his magic lead him back. It had stopped warning him away from Harry years ago, and now pulled sickeningly towards her. Tom felt dependent and weak, but his feet kept moving. He felt empty without her nearby, and his ears rung with the absence of her sugary voice.
She welcomed him back with wide arms and a pained expression, breathed in his ear that if he ever did that again she'd carve out his heart and make him stay, and led him back into the house. The door swung shut. It wouldn't open again.
He had gotten his taste of the outside world, and found it no longer suited him.
And wasn't that just sad, he thought later that night, as Harry slept beside him, her arm over his chest and her sweater tickling his neck. He had gotten so lost in their tiny, narrow-minded world, he'd lost sight of everything. So many dreams had been unknowingly given up. Lord Voldemort would never exist. He would never be powerful, never rule. He would grow old and die in this house, just like any other painfully ordinary person.
His face was growing hot, and he could feel it twisting and crumpling. His chest felt tight and it hurt, and he wanted to curl up in a ball and never move again. His eyes were burning, but no tears spilled.
He didn't know how to cry.
So instead he did Harry a favour and pried out his heart himself, laying it on the bedside and curling himself around her, smiling into her hair as the feeling of breaking disappeared along with the unnecessary lump of flesh, and all his hopes and dreams along with it.
It had cost him everything to get to where he was. He might as well stay.