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Tom Merope Riddle was born in the orphanage, minutes before her mother died.
The mother named the baby Tom Marvolo before it was born, after the babe’s father and grandfather, but she told those names to the midwife attending her when she still had a few hours left of her labour.
Considering that the mother died before the midwife and the novitiate assisting her could be sure she even knew she had birthed a daughter, not a son, the midwife (a young woman named Edith Carey, not yet jaded by her profession) decided that it was best to keep the first name the mother gave her. Perhaps the father could find the baby that way, if he grew a conscience.
But a mother should make a mark on her daughter, and so Edith wrote down Tom Merope Riddle on the birth certificate, so that Merope Riddle would be remembered by her daughter.
Edith cleaned the baby, swaddled her, and placed her on her dead mother’s chest.
The baby spent seven hours with her dead mother, the novitate caring for her, and checking on the other babes in the orphanage.
The undertakers took the woman away to a pauper’s grave just after dawn.
Baby Tom screamed in the novitate’s arms, as she awkwardly hushed her, unpracticed in newborns.
The matron directed the men on how to remove the body without inconveniencing the staff, by taking her out through the back alley where some of the older orphans were already at their chores.
The sisters called her Thomasina, the cook called her ‘foundling brat’ (because that’s what she called all the girls, who at least weren’t the boys who she called ‘foundling bastards’). The kids called her Tommy, or called her nothing much at all. It wasn’t until she was six and the latest adoptive parents were looking over the kids like they were picking out a new hunting dog, asking about it’s breeding, and it’s capacity to do chores, that she really figured out how strange her name was.
“I thought you had a lad named Tom, about the right age?” the prospective father said, looking over the row of them, all dressed in their Sunday clothes.
Tom shifted in her light blue dress, which was slightly too short on her. It had been many orphans’ best dress before her, and it would become an every day dress after her.
“The matron gave me a list. There was a Tom.”
He was like the usual men who came: he was only looking at the boys. He wanted a lad who would be helpful to him, not a daughter he’d have to worry about. Sometimes the ‘fathers’ looked at the girls closer than they ought, and it set Tom’s hackles up, so Tom prefered the men who only wanted boys.
“I am Tom, sir.” Tom said, stepping forward. She was trying out ‘being helpful’, lately, which seemed exhausting, and it wasn’t working out as well as she’d have hoped. But the sisters who managed the orphans day-to-day liked her well enough, and the younger children were easier to manage with a smile.
The father laughed, looking down at Tom’s neat dress, and braided hair, and the pinafore with rather excellent roses she’d stitched along the hem.
“I should have you before the courts for misleading advertising, if that one’s a Tom,” he said with a sneering laugh. Mrs Cole giggled with him.
“This is Thomasina, Mr Harper.” Mrs Cole announced.
“I am Tom.” Tom insisted. “I was named after my father.”
“Well, he wasn’t much of a father if he accepted a daughter with a son’s name.”
“He’s dead, sir.”
“Of course he is. That’s why you’re here.”
Then the prospective-father turned away, and gestured to Harry, Lawrence, and Robbie. “Let me chat to the lads, then.”
The next morning Tom and the other girls rostered on for laundry were working in the courtyard beside the big laundry vats.
“Miss Carey shouldn’t have been allowed to name you Tom,” Sister Genevieve said, as Tom helped her untangle the wet laundry, squatting beside the mangle which was being worked by some of the older girls.
“Didn’t my mother name me?” Tom asked, because that was what she had been told.
“Well, yes, girl, but she named you before you were born, and she had got it into her head that if she had a son her husband would come and take you in. Never even entertained that she might birth a girl, I suppose. Some women are like that. They think they said the right prayers, or did the right ritual, or ate the right herbs, and they’ve magicked themselves a boy.”
“So my mother did name me.”
“She named you Tom Marvin—no, not Marvin, it was a stranger name than that, I’ll remember in a minute—but it was after your father and her father. Miss Carey kept Tom, in the hopes that maybe your father or his kin would find you that way. Changed your middle name to match your mother, of course, though it isn’t like Merope is a common name for a lass either.”
Tom nodded, thinking that through.
“Who is Miss Carey?”
“Ah, she’s Mrs Knox, now. She was the midwife who attended your birth.”
“She let my mother die?”
Sister Genevieve looked over at her, and Tom did her very best to look old and sensible, and worthy of being given proper answers.
“It wasn’t no human’s fault that your mother passed. God let your mother die, lass. It was her time, and she’d had a rough go of it. She’s at peace now. We all know that bringing life into this world is dangerous business.”
One of the older girls, MaryLou, the one with long red hair who looked too Irish for any English family to adopt, laughed. “All women’s business is dangerous business.”
Lucille nodded, rather seriously, and Sister Genevieve pursed her lips.
“God doesn’t give a woman any burdens she isn’t equipt to carry.”
“Just a few more babies than she can afford to feed,” Lucille griped.
Tom knew she was different. Of course she did. She was not an fool.
Things happened when she wanted them too.
Sister Genevieve said Tom was charismatic, which she explained was a compliment which means people like to follow you.
That was true. Tom’s experiments in being helpful meant that she had become very good at making the other children like her, the younger ones especially. But that was about people.
Sister Genevieve’s answer didn’t explain how Tom could get the crack in the window to seal without touching it. Or how her winter coat was always the warmest, even when everyone else was freezing. Or how the snakes down near the river warned her when Mrs Cole was searching for her.
She didn’t really need to use those abilities on people, though, since she was pretty and persuasive enough to get them to do what she liked anyway. It was more fun if she got them to do what she needed without risking any of them thinking she’s possessed by demons, so she supposed she was different, as well as charismatic.
Tom liked getting other girls to do what she wanted, and she was working on finding how to make the boys obey as well as the girls did. She had found it easiest to get her way if she told the other girls that they are pretty, or clever, or kind, and then direct them the way she wanted. Younger boys were easy, but the older ones who leered were difficult to manage without scaring them.
Tom had scared a few of the younger boys with a cooperative snake she had found in the garden. Running forward in order to ‘protect’ the youngsters had got her an extra slice of suet pudding, which she bartered for Sally’s newer pillow.
But she had used her special skills to sabotaged little Ellie from being adopted, because Ellie was far too useful and compliant. Ellie was Tom’s, and she wasn’t allowed to go and be helpful to some woman who pretended she wanted a daughter. No one normal wanted any of them. Tom was saving Ellie by keeping her for herself.
Tom remembered the injustice that lodged in her belly like a cankerous sore, a bone-deep infection, the one time she used her… thing, her difference, on one of the boys. She had only been eight. Hamish had deserved it. Tom had defended herself. She’d used her fists, and used her difference to hold him in place, and Hamish’s blood had been hyponotically bright where it landed on the tiles of the scullery.
She’d wanted to rub his face in the smear of his own blood on the floor, so she had.
Cook was the one who found her. Tom had just been watching over Hamish, waiting for him to get up, curious to see how long it would take. He was whimpering, holding his stomach protectively, and she liked listening to him whine.
Cook dragged Tom from the scene, her hand bruisingly tight around her upper arm.
“You foundling brat,” she said, shaking Tom more venom than she usually did. “Acting like one of these bloody foundling bastards.”
Cook dragged Tom to Mrs Cole, even when Tom tried to stand on her own. Cook had picked a speed faster than walking but slower than a run, so that Tom was tripping to avoid being yanked off her feet.
“I caught this brat abusing one of the boys,” Cook announced to Mrs Cole.
Mrs Cole put down her ledger book, looking Tom over like she was seeing her entirely differently. Tom was used to Mrs Cole liking her, or trusting her with the younger ones, which was as close to respect as an orphan girl could get. It was unsettling to be looked at like that by Mrs Cole. Like she was a dangerous little brat of an orphan. Like strangers on the street looked at any of them.
Tom put on her best contrite smile. Eyes wide. A little quiver at the corner of her mouth, like she was holding in tears. She knew what worked.
The boys fought all the time, and she had watched how they got away with it.
“The brat was kicking him, when he was already on the floor. There’s blood in the scullery. The scullery.”
“Because he cornered me in the scullery,” Tom said.
“Who was it?”
“The one with the curly hair and brown trousers,” Cook said.
Mrs Cole looked at Tom.
“It was Hamish McBride, ma’am.”
“Hmmm,” Mrs Cole said, tapping her fingers on the desk.
Cook snorted.
“The bastards, they’ll never be more than criminals. I saw you kick him, when he was already down. Do you want to be a boy? Acting like one of those. Barely civilised, not worth the lessons we give them?”
“Thomasina? Do you have an explanation?”
“I was scared. I tried to get out, but he was blocking the door. And he’s so much bigger than me. I didn’t think I’d actually hurt him.”
Mrs Cole looked Tom up and down.
“I expected better of you, Thomasina. Violence? From one of my girls. You’re an influencial member of our community, Thomasina. The little ones look up to you. For good reason. What if one of the younger girls had seen you? What if the girls had followed your example? We’d have anarchy within a week, and ruined girls besides.”
Tom restrained the urge to bare her teeth.
“Of course, ma’am. I let my—I was scared, and I reacted without thinking. I was just trying to get away. You know what Hamish is like. He likes to—well, he uses his fists on us.”
“Boys will be boys, Thomasina. It’s our job as women to look beyond that, and it’s certainly your job as the best of our girls to not lower yourself to their standards.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You’ll have punishment in here with me, every night for a fortnight. No need to let the girls know what happened.”
Tom thought that keeping it a secret was extremely unlikely, since the orphanage ran on gossip and intrigue.
“Of course, ma’am.”
“And Hamish?”
Cook sneered at her.
“He’s been punished quite enough, don’t you think?” Mrs Cole remarked.
Hamish was back in his dorm room by that evening, with a tale about having been confronted by a whole gang of town kids wanting to beat up some orphan together.
Sister Genevieve had charge of some of Tom’s secret punishments, where she wasn’t even allowed to let on that she wasn’t just being helpful to Mrs Cole or the other staff.
“Boys aren’t like girls,” Sister Genevieve said. “They use their fists and their feet to solve problems, but we have other skills, don’t we, Thomasina? We have our words, and our wits.”
“Yes, Sister, we do.”
“Good girl. You keep that in mind next time one of them causes problems.”
Tom definitely kept that in mind.
By the time Professor Albus Dumbledore knocked on the door of the orphanage, Tom (Thomasina, to the staff, even Cook now, and Tommy to the other kids) was established as a clever, reserved, and well-behaved leader of the younger girls and boys. A reliable member of the schoolroom, and a help to the sisters. (So long as no one expected her to deal with anyone younger than four, as she was rather hopeless with the youngest children.)
Tom was in the schoolroom when the visitor arrived, watching over the younger boys doing their math work, but she could see the hall and Mrs Cole’s office through a crack in the propped open door.
“Good morning, ma’am. My name is Professor Albus Dumbledore. I am here to visit with Tom Riddle,” the man who knocked on the door said. He was wearing old fashioned clothes, including a Victorian cape, which wasn’t that unusual among older persons, except that the colours were unlikely and bright, in a plum purple velvet which probably cost more than the orphange had to feed them for a year. That didn’t even account for his boots, with a heel, in bright red leather.
Mrs Cole looked the man up and down, with that calculating way she had of sizing up an adoptive parent.
“May I ask what about?”
“I have Mr Riddle down for a place at the school for which I am deputy headmaster, Hogwarts. It is a highly selective boarding school in Scotland, for bright children.”
Mrs Cole started laughing.
“Ma’am,” the man said, “may I ask what is so amusing? I assure you, even orphans can be exceptionally bright, and my school has a long standing scholarship program.”
“Her name is Thomasina Riddle,” Mrs Cole corrected. “So regardless of what Tom Riddle’s scholarly achievements are, I very much doubt if your school will be wanting her.”
The man looked down at a piece of paper in his hand, back up at Mrs Cole, and then peered around the door as if to check if he had the right address.
“Ah. I suppose Tom is a reasonable shortening for both Thomas and Thomasina, and it did not occur to me that—Well. Mistakes in records are occasionally made, of course. Luckily, I can still speak to Tom Riddle. Thomasina Riddle, of course.”
“What need do you have to speak to the girl?” Mrs Cole asked, sharp and defensive.
“The school I represent accepts both boys and girls.”
“A boarding school with mixed sexes? Are you mad? Do you also have a creiche that opens at fifth year for all the bastards fathered on the girls?”
The man looked a little flustered, now.
“Thomasina is a good girl. Helpful and polite and pretty. I won’t have her ruined just because you’ve made a mistake on your paperwork.”
“My apologies. I misspoke. The school I teach at has a sister school for female pupils, named Hogsmeade, and I am sure that once I take Tom Riddle’s records to the deputy headmistress of Hogsmeade,” he said with some emphasis, “she will agree with me that Thomasina Riddle deserves the very best education possible.”
Mrs Cole looked down at the letter in the man’s hand, which must have been addressed to Mr Tom Riddle.
“May I speak to the girl, and talk through this opportunity with her?”
Mrs Cole scoffed. “No need to get the girl’s hopes up. I’ll grant you, she’s a clever one, but there’s nothing for her but perhaps a place at a secretarial school, or being a teacher herself. But she’s pretty enough to get a marriage offer from someone with better prospects than the rest of my girls.”
“I assure you, Tom Riddle, whatever her gender, has a place at my—at the Hogsmeade school.”
“I’ll not have you talking fantasies and turning the girl’s head. If a teacher from that sister school comes and says they’ve a place and scholarship for Thomasina, I’ll let that woman speak to her, but not before.”
Tom spilt a glass of water over Ellie to cause a distraction, and excused herself to fetch a towel. She intercepted the strangely-dressed man at the gate, her two black plaits flapping behind her.
“Hello, Miss,” he said, “did Mrs Cole want me back?”
“I am Tom Riddle,” she said. “How do you do?”
“Ah,” the man said, his voice a bit lofty. “How lovely to meet you, Miss Riddle. How do you do? I am Professor Albus Dumbledore, a teacher.”
“I saw you have a letter for me.”
“I have a letter for a boy, as you probably know from eavesdropping on myself and the matron. You should be careful with that habit. People who eavesdrop don’t necessarily hear nice things.”
Tom restrained herself from rolling her eyes, and looked up at the man pleasantly, with her best compliantly contrite expression. No orphan would learn anything at all if they didn’t eavesdrop.
“However, you do have a letter that is mine. You have a letter for Tom Riddle. My name isn’t actually Thomasina, it’s Tom. My mother named me before I was born, after my father.”
“That would explain our records, of course.”
“You know my father? Did my father put me down for the school? Without knowing I was born a girl.”
The man froze, flipping the envelope in his hand.
“No, I don’t believe that is what occured. We have other methods of finding students who would be a good fit for our school.”
The man looked over Tom’s shoulder, back towards the open door of the orphanage, and then did something strange with a stick that slid from a long pocket in his ridiculously lush velvet suit.
It was like Tom’s ears got shut off, the noise disappeared so quickly. Tom jumped, looking behind her to see that the orphanage was still all there, and the children working and talking in the courtyard hadn’t disappeared.
It was unnerving, and Tom looked up at this man with caution. She used sound like all unwanted orphans did: she used it to orientate herself, to know who was coming, to know when to duck and when to turn around and look beautifully innocent, even to orientate herself when running errands into the city.
This man was powerful—perhaps he was like her, but it wouldn’t do to show that he could do something she hadn’t (yet) figured out how to do. Making the other kids be quiet, or appear quiet to her at any rate, might be a blessing. Probably a curse, though, if it meant she couldn’t hear them coming.
“Sir?” Tom said, and hoped she looked beautifully attentive and appropriately awe-struck.
“I am simply making it so we are not overheard, Miss Riddle.”
Tom nodded.
“I am utilising magic, to do so, which I am rather sure is something you have figured out for yourself.”
Tom nodded again, tucking her hands behind her back.
“You have made strange things happen, perhaps? Managed to reach things which should have been too high? Or found that your favourite dress had mended itself overnight? Things of that nature.”
Tom nodded, while inside scoffing at the idea of having a favourite dress in a place like this, or that anything as simple as mending needed magic.
“You overheard what I said to the matron, I suspect, about a school which has a place for you. A scholarship as well.”
Tom let hope flare on her face, so she looked appropriately awed, because if there were other people like her, then maybe she could have more than just Ellie and the girls to boss about. Tom could have more than the life of domestic contentedness Sister Genevieve whispered would be the best Tom could hope for.
“My school is a school for learning magic, and it is a school for both boys and girls. It truely doesn’t matter that I came expecting Mr Riddle, and found Miss Riddle. Magic does not distinguish. We all have wands, and they are our strength.”
Tom found herself actually caught up, for a moment, in the fantasy this man was talking about. She looked at the stick in his hand. A wand.
She wanted one desperately.
A school where girls and boys both had wands. They both had power. No one could hold her down just because they were stronger, and if she used magic on a boy, that was only right, since he could use magic on her right back. Theoretically. She would just have to be stronger and cleverer than him.
The boys here in the real world can’t hold her down. They can’t do that anyway, not to her.
She can do magic, not just talk her way into being too pretty and helpful to doubt.
Magic, and others like her, and a place where it didn’t matter she was born a girl, and mayeb she won’t even be expected to live within the confines of feminine duties and expectations.
If they all have magic, and it’s the same for both boys and girls, then it doesn’t matter than boys have stronger muscles, when she has a smarter intellect.
“I would be interested in hearing more about your school, Sir.”
The man’s eyes sparkled behind half-moon spectacles.
“I will let one of our female teachers know of your interest, and Mrs Cole’s objections. Expect a visit shortly, Miss Riddle.”
The teacher who visited, a few days later, was an older woman, older than even Sister Benedicta, and said she was Professor Galatea Merrythought, and she specialised in defense against dark magics.
“Miss Riddle, I’m sure you have many questions,” Professor Merrythought said. Tom poured her tea in the little sitting room off Mrs Cole’s office. The Matron would obviously rather be in the room with them, as was proper, but the Professor had convinced her that she needed a few minutes with Tom alone, and after a moment of strenuous objection Mrs Cole had smiled gilelessly, and closed her own office door behind her.
It was rather creepy, watching Mrs Cole lose all sense of self in a glint of a moment and the pointing of a stick of wood.
Would the Professors do that to the children? To students, when they disobeyed, or spoke out? Change their mind with a wave of their stick?
Professor Merrythought followed Tom’s eyes towards Mrs Cole’s closed door.
“Using magic against muggles—that’s what we call non-magical folk—is useful to keep the Wizarding World’s secrets, Miss Riddle.”
She tapped her wand against the doily-covered table, mending a tear in the lace with a single gesture. Ellie was the best at delicate sewing, but she hadn’t had time for mending something so time-consuming.
Tom had a moment of self-conscious panic, wondering if the Professor could read her mind, and see the dark thoughts she had had about Dennis Bishop. She had been defending herself. That was what she held in the front of her mind, as the teacher’s deep brown eyes looked down at her.
She hadn’t done anything to him with magic, anyway. She just made sure he knew that Amy and her were off limits. Sister Genevieve had known, and she’d smiled, and given Tom a little slice of seed cake the next week.
Tom had been tempted to do it again, for more seed cake. Billy probably needed an education as well. Like Hamish had needed to be brought down to earth with knowledge of his own uselessness, and a few extra threats once the bruises had faded.
“We run a respectful school at Hogwarts. We have inter-house competitions, and we hold the occasional dance for pupils to mingle and socialise, and we expect our students to throughly apply themselves to their studies, like any prestigious school of the muggle world.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
“We do not expect any less of our muggleborn students than we do our pureborn ones, and you will not be coddled.”
“Of course not, ma’am.”
“You will have to work hard, Miss Riddle. Attend your lessons, read your texts thoroughly, and practice the practical applications of magic every day.”
“I would expect nothing else. I just want to learn,” Tom said, her eyes wide with wonder and awe, and the Professor responded well to that, softening around her mouth.
“Good. With that attitude, you might be a valuable member of the Hogwarts community. Aim for Hufflepuff, even if Ravenclaw might suit you better. They are the most accomodating to the needs of a muggleborn student.”
“Hufflepuff, ma’am?”
“The house best known for hardwork, and loyal friendships. Ravenclaw for book learners. Gryffindor for impulsive risktakers, and Slytherin for the ambitious.”
“The houses are mixed sex?”
“Yes. But the Hufflepuff girls are the most useful—to the other students, of course. Sometimes the Ravenclaws are most useful to the staff, of course, depending on our needs. Assistants and tutors for the younger years are often Ravenclaws.”
“Ravenclaw girls? Or boys?”
“Both. Either. They’re all swots. But Hufflepuff is where a clever muggleborn student wants to be.”
“Of course. I can see why Hufflepuff might be helpful to a new student.”
“I’ll talk to the matron, and then let’s see if we can find you a wand and a few of the supplies that you can’t get from the school. You’ll have to do without your books until term. We have enough of them on hand, but I don’t have the funds to purchase your own copies.”
After Professor Merrythought left to talk to Mrs Cole, Tom very carefully re-ripped the doily, so that nothing would have changed.
It wouldn’t do for Ellie to think that Tom had taken her job from her, or for anyone to expect magic of Tom’s new school opportunities.
Tom spent the train ride to Scotland doing her best to stay out of the attention of other students, while cataloguing everything she could see, and carefully rationing the bread Cook had given her for the journey.
Across a lake in twilight light, with a castle looming above her.
Tom asked the hat for Hufflepuff, because being helpful kept anyone from paying her the wrong kind of attention. Or for Ravenclaw, as she usually didn’t mind tutoring the younger kids (though with the amount she had to catch up, that wouldn’t be happening until at least the Easter term).
The hat laughed, deep in her head, and proclaimed:
“Oh no, lass, I know where you belong. SLYTHERIN.”
Tom wrote letters to the orphanage every week, as would be expected of her. One to Mrs Cole, one to Sister Genevieve to be read to the other Sisters, and one to Ellie to be read to the other orphans.
She spent the first week trying to suppress the urge to tell the truth to Ellie, and brag about her magic. Instead she undersells her skills at composition (half the students haven’t had formal education before; not even an orphanage schoolroom), and the compliments her Professors have left on the margins of her essays (which at least don’t sound magical, if she pretends Potions is Home Economics, and Herbology is Natural Sciences).
But she did spend the first few weeks at Hogwarts doubting her own mind.
She had seen people go mad before. She knew it wasn’t always obvious (and it doesn’t necessarily mean that they can never be sane again) but it seems much more reasonable that someone saw her speak to snakes, or hold another boy in place while she kicked him in the family jewels, and sent her to a priest to exorcise her.
Perhaps a that priest who thought her possessed had managed to get her into an asylum, and the last month has been an elaborate fantasy she’s constructed for her own edification, to pretend that she’s not strapped to a bed in an old Victorian building, because that would make more sense than roaming a Scottish castle learning magic.
It makes sense, she knows. More sense that she’s mad, than she was chosen and plucked into a magical world.
The idea that she’d made up Hogwarts as an escape from an aslyum crumbles with the first time she gets tripped down the stairs as she’s making her way to her dorm room from the Slytherin common room.
There’s something so viciously familiar in a brat or a bastard claiming superiority over her through physical violence. Pushing her down on her knees, like who is on their knees matters. It’s who has more brains that matters, not who they were born too, or if they managed to kick her once when she was down.
Tom was terrible with faces, but she excells at recognising hands and voices, scars and names. She remembers who called her a Mudblood, and the sound of each high pitched laugh.
Tom’s first year at Hogwarts rather squished her ambitions of a Wizarding World which gave her more options than the Muggle one did.
Tom had taken to studying in the Slytherin common room, unobtrusively taking up small slices of space near older students, preferably ones with important names to go with their taller frames. The girls were more reliable, if she was taking guesses based on the orphanage heirarchies, but mixed groups were also a decent camoflage, she had found.
“It’s the Wizarding World, not the Witching World. Not even the Wixen World,” Dorea Black muttered into her books, paying no attention to the slim form of Tom curled up with a text to study a few desks away.
“It was the Wixen World,” Dorea’s friend muttered back.
Tom looked up Wixen, or at least tried too. The Hogwarts library was rather slim on the idea, with a few pamphlets (which Tom suspected that Dorea or other students like her had planted on the shelves in the appropriate location), and some vague mentions in historical texts from the 12th to the 14th Century, when the term had been the preferred one to refer to the magical community of the British Isles.
Wizarding World had thrust itself upon them ever since, with small Wicca or Witching communities that had popped up afterwards. Isolated little hamlets, where they isolated themselves from the wizards for anything but ‘the needful use of procreation’.
But those were places where witches were more vulnerable to muggles, being groups of women living strangely on the borderlands, and being caught by witch hunting muggles and put to death. Probably with the wizards they left behind laughing at how silly they were, not able to cast a wandless, wordless, hands-bound flame freezing charm. When their wands had been taken by their fathers until they returned to marry the men the father’s had picked.
Abandoning the Wizarding World, the wizards had said, as they welcomed back single women who were the remains of covens and communities. The last left alive. The only ones who escaped the muggles.
Tom doesn’t make a single ally during her first year. She finds a few Hufflepuffs who will ask her for help with homework (Professor Merrythought was right about Hufflepuffs), but no one reliable. No one who is hers, not the same way that Ellie is. Not the same way that she holds sway over the younger children of the orphanage.
She will wait for next year, and that will be a good enough place to start. She’ll be older than a whole cohort, then. A year worth of new students, looking for an older friend to help them along.
Tom Riddle will make her own way.
She never expected anything different.
It’s not like she can make allies out of these Slytherin girls, her age but with more money and knowledge and family. She doesn’t have anything they want.
Not yet.