Chapter Text
“Stay together,” Mrs. Cole said sharply, pulling a sallow-faced orphan whose name Tom had never bothered to learn back towards the group by the shoulder. “And stop that sniffling! We don’t have all evening to dally. It’s nearly curfew.” She gestured impatiently, urging the shuffling crowd of her charges forward. Her lined face pinched in fear and her eyes flickered around the entrance to the underground station, darting up to glance at the darkening night sky with growing apprehension.
Tom bit back a sigh. Most of the houses and tenements around Wool’s had already disgorged their inhabitants and he could hear (and, to his great disgust, smell) the masses clustered in the dubious shelter of the Tube stop ahead of them. He picked up the pace, pushing through the whispering crowd of children impatiently as he made for the worn stone staircase. The German planes never arrived before full dark. The threat of Britain’s anti-aircraft guns on the coast kept them at bay until the last strip of daylight bled from the sky, but he saw no reason to pin his life on something as tenuous as a poorly trained muggle soldier’s ability to aim . Behind him, he could hear the chatter of the children pick up, then the shuffle of feet as they followed him down into the underground haven.
Martha Cooper waited at the bottom of the stairs, worrying the hem of her apron between her tremulous fingers. She spared Tom a smile, but the expression was as thin and worn as the rest of her. “Anthony’s held us a place against the far wall,” she told him softly, dull brown eyes unfocused and vague. Tom nodded stiffly and scanned the edges of the crowded room, searching for the familiar navy blue uniform of the local constable. He spotted his target standing in a cluster of nervous, shouting women, hands spread in a conciliatory fashion as he tried to talk them down. Tom’s lips thinned as he watched the scene unfold. He couldn’t hear what they were saying at this distance, but their intent was clear; they wanted the clear stretch of tunnel reserved for the orphans for themselves.
Scowling, Tom glanced behind him. The first of the brats following behind him had reached the bottom of the staircase and were clustered around Martha’s skirts. He grabbed for the closest one, a small boy who had shown up a week after Tom had returned from Hogwarts, and dragged him to his side. “Do you see that man?” Tom asked, not bothering to hide the bite of annoyance in his voice. The boy tried to pull away and Tom shook him sharply once, tightening his grip on the coarse fabric of his shirt. “The officer, standing by the back wall with the women. Do you see him? ” He allowed his words to drop into a dangerously low hiss.
“Yes!” The child cringed away and Tom didn’t bother to hide his contempt. “I see ‘im, I see ‘im! Lemme go!”
“Good,” Tom drawled. He released his captive and shoved him forward roughly, ignoring the way the kid stumbled from the force of the push. “That’s where we’re staying tonight. Go.”
The child immediately ducked out of reach, tucking his thin blanket roll under one arm and darting into the crowd towards the constable as instructed. Tom glowered, then turned to fix the rest of the small group with a gimlet stare. They watched him back, ratlike faces pinched with hunger and wary distrust. Tom rolled his eyes at the sight of them. Pathetic. “Well?” He snapped, gesturing imperiously with one hand towards their fleeing peer. “Go on.”
After an exchange of timid glances, the other orphans edged around him and began to follow the fleeing boy into the crowd. Tom leaned against the entrance wall by Martha and watched them trickle past, fixing his face into an angry mask in an unspoken encouragement to scurry faster-- or else . He could hear Mrs. Cole’s piercing, angry voice echoing down the staircase towards them as she herded the rest of the unwanted muggle brats into the makeshift shelter. The doors would be closing soon and no one wanted to be caught outside a shelter for the night.
“Thank you, dear,” Martha’s quiet voice was accompanied by a soft pat on his upper arm. Tom jolted, surprised by the touch, and turned to look down at the gentle elderly woman. She smiled up at him ( when, Tom wondered idly, had he grown taller than her? ) and let her apron drop from her gnarled fingers with a sigh as she admitted, “They never listen to me quite as well.”
Tom allowed a thin smile to crack his angry mask as he inclined his head. Of all of the workers who had come and gone through Wool’s Orphanage during his miserable childhood, only Martha and Mrs. Cole had remained. Martha had never been much of a caretaker--too slow, too simple--but she had been kind to him in her own distracted way. She had been one of the few adults who had ever bothered. Tom wouldn’t go so far as to say he was fond of her, but she was definitely… tolerable.
“My pleasure,” Tom murmured, turning his piercing gaze back towards the last few lagging orphans. They paled and sped up. “We started too late--” again , Tom refrained from adding, annoyed at the delay but too smart to chastise the one muggle adult who didn’t loathe his presence. Mrs. Cole had gone back to her office for a ‘nightcap’ after dinner that had turned into three or four and had apparently lost track of time. “-- and I don’t think Mr. Hill could have held our spot for much longer.” Tom’s gaze flickered back to the navy-clad officer, Anthony Hill, who had abandoned his conversation with the anxious housewives to help organize the influx of orphans.
Most of the children left at Wool’s were young. The boys who had tortured Tom in his youth were long gone, having jumped at the chance to sign up for the army. The promise of steady meals, regular paychecks and the respect a man in uniform could muster had swayed them over before the war had begun to worsen. That those meals were of a poorer quality than even some of the dreck that passed for food at Wool’s, that a warzone lacked places to spend those paychecks and that the respect a uniform bought you meant nothing when there were no eager women near the charnel house of the front, well, those facts had seemed to escape them. They had lied about their age and signed their lives away, and the army was desperate enough to take whatever boys were foolish enough to offer themselves to the cause.
Tom's upper lip curled up in a sneer. Idiots. At least they were gone. The older girls had trickled out in a similar fashion, signed up to work as land girls, nurses or simply off to seek the sudden abundance of factory jobs available to them with Britain’s workforce so depleted by the war effort.
Tom didn’t care. He was just happy to have them elsewhere. Their beds at Wool’s had been filled quickly enough. The steady bombing of the blitz had left many children orphaned and homeless, so there were always new faces sleeping in the rickety cots. They all quickly learned not to bother him . Tom might not have been able to use his wand, but wandless magic was untraceable and a simple stinging hex was easily within his capabilities. Most of the time, Tom didn’t even need to resort to such overt tactics. Over the years, Tom had learned how to gather his magic around his shoulders in an invisible mantle of power that even these dim-witted muggles could feel, making dread and a chill fear rolling over them when they dared to get too close. Between that handful of simple tricks and the rumors that already haunted his footsteps, passed down from orphan to orphan, Tom was left to his own devices and that was just the way he liked it.
Mrs. Cole stomped down the staircase, huddling deeper in her ragged coat despite the choking heat of summer. It was the last day of July and the weather was miserable, hot and sticky without a cloud in the sky. The air was choked with ash from the fires that raged every night along with the dust from pulverized masonry and there hadn’t been a drop of rain to alleviate the dry heat in two weeks. She came to a stop before the two of them, her pockets clinked loudly and Tom sneered. Mrs. Cole had brought her gin with her.
“Well?” Mrs. Cole barked, bloodshot eyes darting between Martha and Tom. “Everyone accounted for?”
“We’re all here,” Tom lied easily, keeping his face blank. She nodded sharply and marched off, trailing after the children with a heavy tread that boded ill for anyone who caught her eye. Martha scurried after her with an apologetic glance at him over her shoulder.
Tom snorted under his breath and let his stiff shoulders relax. Like anyone cared enough to count the brats . Mrs. Cole herself didn’t know how many children were in her charge these days. The newer orphans were often dropped off without paperwork and were as likely to vanish during the day as return. It didn’t matter. She lied about their headcount to anyone who asked regardless and wheedled extra rations out of every halfway-sympathetic government official she could get to listen to her.
Tom knew Mrs. Cole was trading the extra supplies for her gin supply, he just didn’t care . This summer, like every summer since his second year, Tom was subsisting off of the magically preserved supplies he had wheedled out of the Hogwarts house elves and hidden in his trunk. The smart orphans were working their own scams to stay fed. The rest, well, they’d either learn or they’d have to make do on whatever Wool’s provided. They could starve for all he cared. Tom was never going hungry again.
Tom only bothered to show up to the orphanage meals to keep up the pretense of needing what pitiful scraps were on offer. He had warded his trunk to hell and back, but he prefered not to tempt fate and make anyone curious about what sort of goodies Tom might have stowed away. Desperation could make anyone, even children, dangerous. Tom was proof of that. Pushing off the wall, he trailed after Martha.
As he made his way through the crowd, ugly stares dogged his heels. Tom kept his face distant and his eyes fixed straight ahead, refusing to allow the hate and grief that festered in those angry gazes to cow him.
“Coward,” one woman hissed as he walked by. “You should be ashamed of yourself, hiding with the children like that.”
“Shirker,” muttered another. Tom felt his eye twitch, but he kept going.
He could hear the women continue to whisper venomously to each other in his wake, but it wasn’t the first time Tom had heard those words and it wouldn’t be the last. Able-bodied men were a rare sight in London these days. The war had eaten them all up. The conscription age had dropped to 18, and, although Tom was only 15, he looked older than his years. Good food and a healthy environment had led to a growth spurt that left him broad-shouldered and towering over his malnourished peers when he returned for the summers. Most of the time his apparent maturity was a boon, allowing Tom to walk and talk with an authority that soothed the adults around him and encouraged them to trust him. Here, trapped in the hellscape that was muggle London, it worked against him. He looked like he belonged on the front lines and the idea that he could escape the fate of the ‘beloved’ relatives of the women left behind fanned their sorrow and desperation into hate.
As if Tom would ever allow himself to be forced to fight in a pointless muggle war. Let them talk. By the time he was of age to be recruited, he would be gone.
Tom clenched his teeth as he settled in the alcove along that back wall that he had claimed as his from the very first night. His blanket and pillow were already there waiting for him, carried down by one of the younger orphans. It was easy to bribe or threaten the children into doing tasks for him when he needed it. With the sugar rationing making treats impossible to find, it was amazing how many favors he could buy for a handful of penny sweets. Tom leaned against their meager cushioning like a king upon his throne, arranging his legs in front of him in a graceful sprawl and allowing his eyes to close as he attempted to block out the noise of the room.
The tube station was small and hot, thick with the fetid stench of unwashed bodies and sour fear. People were crammed in together like sardines, desperate to take advantage of the thick walls and protective barrier of earth of the temporary shelter. Tom tilted his head back and let the cool tiled wall behind him pull the heat from his body as he listened to the crowds settle down for the night. Anthony and Martha were conversing somewhere to his right and Tom could smell the bitter tang of juniper from his left that clearly announced what Mrs. Cole was up to. A loud thud rang through the room as the heavy doors at the top of the shelter entrance slammed closed and the sound in the room dropped for a moment as everyone held their breath.
Night had arrived. Blackout was in effect. Soon, enemy planes would be flooding the skies above London, searching in the gloom for the darkened city and dropping bombs in lines of hellish fire as they sought to tear the heart out of Great Britain. Tom licked his lips, mouth gone dry. Unconsciously, he let his hand drop to the small satchel at his side, fingers tracing the worn patterns embossed into the leather surface. He could feel the slim black diary inside it, beating like a second heart, and he let the dark magic of it wash over him in a comforting wave.
Tom wasn’t like the rest of them. Tom had nothing to fear. Tom was immortal , he had faced death and the frailties of his own human nature and he had overcome them.
If only he could convince his own traitorous racing heart of this fact.
Damn Dumbledore for putting him in this position in the first place. Tom had schemed and wheedled and plotted to the best of his abilities, trying to convince his followers to open their homes to him for the summer holidays, but Dumbledore had been there at every turn to block him. His eyes would twinkle and he would smile so sadly , so wisely as he explained to the already reluctant pureblood parents why it was best for Tom to stay at the orphanage. After all, he murmured, apologetic and oh so reluctant to interfere, it was best for a child to stay with their guardians, particularly in such trying times .
Tom had no way to object, not without explaining the conditions in which he lived to his followers, and that was simply not an option. He had fought too long to claw his way to the top of the social pyramid, to claim his throne as King of Slytherin. He couldn’t risk it by exposing how weak his roots were, how easily he was disregarded and mistreated by muggles . Tom might have had his peers firmly collared, but his hold on the leash had to be light. A heavy hand would ruin him, declare him unfit for the sort of delicate social maneuvering that occupied higher society.
Besides, the parents of his housemates weren’t exactly friendly to begin with. Tom couldn’t walk around proclaiming his heritage at the top of his lungs. Not after the fiasco with the basilisk. So it was just so easy to brush off a muggleborn who was overreaching their place.
Tom was forced to grit his teeth and bite his tongue as every possible family was talked out of helping him by a pair of roguishly twinkling blue eyes and a charming smile. There was little his Knights could do without betraying his trust, and, in the end, Tom had been forced to return to Wool’s yet again.
Never mind that Tom’s ‘guardian’ was Mrs. Cole. Never mind that an underfunded, understaffed orphanage was a home by only the meagerest definition of the word. The building was little more than a (mostly intact) roof and a few drafty walls. Never mind that an already-meager store of supplies was now diminished to the point of questionable survival by the pressure of a war. No, Tom seethed, shifting his legs restlessly. Dumbledore didn’t care about what happened to him.
In the depths of his mind, behind the strongest Occlumency barriers he could raise, Tom wondered if maybe, his ‘accidental’ death was the point . Tom had always had a sixth sense for danger. He had dealt with human predators all of his life, both as a young child left to fend for himself in the dirty, impoverished streets of London and as the devil’s child of Wool’s, the unholy threat who had been forced to polish his rough accidental magic into a weapon that could keep him safe. Tom knew what it meant when people looked at him with that sort of darkness in their eyes. He could taste the promise of future pain in their false smiles.
Dumbledore had decided Tom was a threat before he had walked in the room and set the wardrobe of a young boy on fire under the pretense of teaching him a lesson ( as if, Tom thought bitterly, he hadn’t already learned to recognize a bully when he saw one) . That belief in Tom’s dark nature had only been cemented by an unknowing child’s careless confidence, a whisper of, I can speak to snakes, that had condemned him as evil in the eyes of a man who should know better . Dumbledore had always been suspicious of Tom, had never given him the benefit of the doubt. He was condemned beyond any hope of redemption in the man's eyes.
Not that he needed redemption. Not that Tom cared. Not, Tom thought, clutching his bag tighter to his side, that Dumbledore was a threat to him any longer . He had his horcrux. He was a rising Dark Lord, a fury, a force of nature and Dumbledore would pay in the end.
Tom steadied his breathing, letting himself fall into the regular patterns that preceded meditation as he marshalled his thoughts. He took his fear and fed it to the smoldering coal of hate in his chest bite by bite. He wouldn’t die, couldn’t die . He was better, smarter, stronger. Tom had proven it, hadn’t he? He had strode into the darkness, plumbed the depths of secret magics that no other living wizard dared to meddle in and returned a conqueror. Tom had fought death and triumphed . It fled before him now, as all things would in time.
Curling up on the thin padding of his blanket, Tom listened to the night. The bombs never fell in regular patterns; they would come in bursts, dropping in a line of death and fire as planes swept through the sky above the blacked out city. If you had good ears, you could hear them scream as they fell, a high, whistling sound like the cry of some unholy bird of prey. For now, the air above him was still, but the floor beneath him trembled at irregular intervals as distant shockwaves rolled through the earth.
It had begun.
In Tom’s opinion, the silence between waves was worse than the screams and cries that echoed through the shelter when an unlucky strike was close enough to rattle people awake. You could drown in a silence like that, thick enough to choke on and heavy with expectation. It pooled in the shadowed corners of the subway station and clung to you like tar, warping every familiar face into a rictus of fear. Death hunted in the quiet on padded feet, clever and uncanny, and, although he would never have admitted it out loud, even Tom felt the prickle of unease along the back of his neck as it ghosted past.
In the end, all Tom could do was wait for the bombs to trace irreverent patterns across the face of London, reducing entire streets to slag and rubble and leaving others untouched with a madman's whimsy. It was an arbitrary slaughter that cared nothing for the illusion of safety that mapped the invisible boundary lines of the haves and the have-nots.
Tom’s upper lip curled in a sneer. Safety. There was no such thing, not for the weak, not for the powerless . London had been evacuated months ago, women and children sent out to the countryside in a futile attempt to shelter them from the invasion that everyone knew was coming. The only ones who remained were the ones who didn’t matter : the poor, the necessary and the orphans. And Tom. Tom, who was better than them all, who would return one day to teach them all the price of ignoring him, of leaving him to sit here in the darkness and shake like he was just another one of the beasts.
As the night dragged on, Tom remained awake, listening and waiting . His fingers ached, clenched tight around the thin wood of his wand hidden in his pocket, and magic buzzed harshly in his bones as it demanded to be put to use.
Tom pushed it down ruthlessly.
Control. Control was the measure of a wizard, the difference between himself and the rest of the sniveling mob. They were weak, puling things, ruled by fear and animal instinct. Tom was different . Tom was better . He kept his breaths measured and steady, ignoring the stink of too many human bodies packed close together as he feigned sleep and counted the minutes in his head. He blocked out the sounds of muffled sobs, desperate prayers and the snores of the lucky (drunken, desensitized) few who managed to claim sleep and waited for the night to end.
Four hours, seventeen minutes and six seconds until dawn.
Only two years of Hogwarts to go. In two years, Tom would be seventeen and by the standards of the wizarding world, he would be of age. He could graduate from Hogwarts and vanish into the magical world for the rest of his (long, immortal) life. If the muggle war continued to rage on, an endlessly churning machine of death and bitter grief, what would it matter to Tom He would be safe. Nothing would be able to touch him.
He’d never have to sit in the darkness and wait for the whistle of a falling bomb to break the night again.
Four hours, twelve minutes and fifty-six seconds until--
Thump thump.
A double-beat on a drum broke the silence. The taste of magic bloomed on his tongue, cold and dark and powerful . The world seemed to stagger, trapping Tom in some unknowable stretch of time that could have fit between the rapid beats of his heart or stretched longer than a millenia, before it snapped and reality righted itself. Tom’s eyes fluttered open and he stared into the dimness as his ears rang. The shelter was quiet-- no one else had sensed, could sense what he had. Was it an explosion? Was it something else, something worse ? Had Grindelwald’s forces made landfall, striking ahead of the muggle troops at London’s heart in arcane ways unknowable to the pitifully blind muggles that surrounded him?
The sound had been so faint (so loud), so distant (yet close enough to rattle through his bones) that Tom would have thought he had imagined it if not for the bitter layer of magic that still coated his mouth. Tom froze, overwhelmed by the brief, yet unshakable sensation of being seen , of being hunted . He held his breath and waited in the gloom, waited for the sound-that-was-not-a-sound to repeat itself. He waited for the threat to show itself, to bare its fangs and strike .
He kept waiting for the rest of the night, shoulders hunched and fingers blanched white where they curled around the totems of his power, waiting, waiting, waiting . He waited through the bombs, through the wailing, through the frantic prayers and sailor-worthy expletives. When dawn broke across the world, he heard it again at last, ringing in his head like a second heartbeat.
Thump thump.
A threat. A lure. A taste of cool relief and power . Power with the promise of more to follow, if only he was clever enough to seek it. Tom turned his gaze towards the north, staring at the solid stone wall as if he could see through it. North, towards Hogwarts.
North, towards home.