Chapter Text
Tom Riddle was a quiet child.
Anna Cole had known him since he was a wee babe, helping to deliver him herself, and even then he barely made a sound. Most babies (the ones that lived anyway) wailed like they were struck by lightning, but Tom only let out the occasional sniffle or whimper. At first they were concerned with his health, if he would die in their arms, but he breathed and fed like nothing was wrong.
Something must have been wrong though, because Tom was never like the other children. He sat in his corner and watched the others like a lion watches a gazelle. He didn’t speak, didn’t laugh, didn’t play. He would talk to Anna if she approached him, but only in clipped no ma’am s and yes ma’am s. She thought it strange, but nothing to fuss about. She still had to get food on the table.
Then one day, as she was setting out the silverware for dinner, she felt a tug on her dress. She looked down and saw a pair of empty brown eyes staring up at her.
“Yes, Tom?” she asked, startled.
“Can I have an extra blanket?” His voice barely got above a whisper, but he met her eyes with unwavering confidence.
She sighed with pity. The winter had been merciless this year, and the pajamas they were given didn’t do much against the elements. “Let me see what I have, alright?”
Tom nodded, and took a seat at the dinner table.
Once the meal was over and all the other children ran off towards their rooms, Anna dug through a storage closet to see if she could find anything. Tucked up in the highest shelf was a scrappy little thing, barely big enough to cover a basket, much less a child. She turned to Tom and offered it to him with a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry, Tom, this is all I have.”
She expected him to be disappointed, but his face showed no emotions at all. He took it from her and murmured a soft “Thank you.” Then he was gone.
Anna didn’t think any more about the strange encounter in the days that followed, too busy making sure that Billy Stubbs didn’t eat the large spider in the corner of his and Rich’s room. Tom was once again a ghost, living but not quite there. He’d recently taken to sitting under the dining table, writing who knows what in a notebook he’d gotten for his birthday. Nobody bothered him.
“Alright, children, outside!” Anna opened the door wide open as a stampede of orphans rushed out of the building. There was only one missing.
“Tom!” she snapped. The boy showed no indication that he heard her, but he wasn’t fooling anyone. “Outside, now.”
He sighed softly, then tucked his notebook under his arm and crawled out from under the table. Tom walked towards the door like he was heading to his own execution. She scoffed. Kids.
George had decided the best game to play in their tiny yard was tag, so the space became a hurricane of running and screaming children. They ran into each other, into the fence, and face first into the ground. It was useless to try and stop them, and nobody got injured, so she sat on the porch and watched the chaos unfurl.
Of course, the only one not participating was Tom. He had chosen to stay close to the walls of the orphanage, sitting next to the bushes. He’d started rustling through them as if looking for something, but Anna couldn’t be sure what. When they went back inside, he came in empty-handed, he just cradled his notebook delicately in front of him.
In the weeks following, two things changed. Tom no longer resisted going outside during play hours, and had to be sternly ordered to come back in. He never played with anyone else, and did nothing but skirt around the edges of the yard as if on a treasure hunt. The second thing was that their insect problem seemed to vanish before her eyes. Billy’s spider was suddenly gone, as well as the cockroaches that lurked in the kitchen, and the beetles that attached themselves to the windows. They all disappeared.
Those two facts seemed completely unrelated until one fateful day.
It was a breezy spring afternoon, and all of the children ran around in the sun, shrieking in delight. They were all separated into their own little groups, some dashing about and others sitting in the grass. Tom was performing his peculiar ritual of wandering around the bushes, silent as ever.
Then something occurred that had never happened before. Amy got up from where she was playing with her doll, and walked over to Tom with a smile on her face. Anna couldn’t hear a word they said, but Amy’s wave and friendly smile said enough. The matron smiled too. It would be good for Tom to have a friend, and talk to the other children.
Tom didn’t seem to be talking much, but Amy wasn’t deterred. She pointed at Tom’s hands, and it was then that Anna realized that the boy’s hands were clasped together as if holding something. Amy was saying something else, Tom opened his hands, Amy leaned over-
She screamed.
Anna was running over there the moment the sound came out of the girl’s mouth, putting herself between the two children. Tom had closed his hands again, and his usually emotionless face was full of fear. His dark eyes were wide and his small frame was shaking.
“Mrs. Cole, he’s got a-a-” Amy just pointed at his hands.
“Tom, show me what you have.”
He shook his head furiously.
“Tom, show me what you have or you won’t get any dinner tonight.”
The boy deflated like a balloon, and he ever so slowly unfolded his fingers. There, sitting limp in his palms, was a dead rat.
Anna let out a cry and immediately smacked the rodent out of his hands. “Where did you get that?!”
Tom wavered like a blade of grass in the wind. He raised a shaky hand and pointed in the direction of the bushes.
Anna sighed. She thought she could count on Tom being well-behaved, but apparently not. “Right. I’m going to take this out to the dumpster, and you are never going to do such a thing again. Understand?”
She had just gingerly picked up the rat by the tail when Tom suddenly made a grab for it. “No! I need that!”
“Tom!” By now, all of the other children had stopped what they were doing and were watching the scene unfold. “Stop this behavior right now! You are not to play with dead things, do you hear me?”
As if it was happening in slow motion, she watched as quiet, timid, emotionless Tom clenched his fists. His eyes watered with angry tears. His frame went rigid and he bit his lip, hard enough to bleed. Then all of a sudden, the rat felt like it was butter in her hands and it slipped right down to the ground. Tom snatched it up and bolted inside, Anna close on his heels.
“Tom Marvolo Riddle!” she screeched. “Get back here this instant or I swear I’ll-”
The door to his room slammed shut and locked, cutting off her words. She pounded her fists on the wood, wondering what could have possibly possessed the boy. “Open this door right now!”
When Tom did no such thing, she stormed to the kitchen and opened the drawer next to the stove, pulling out a ring of keys. She fiddled with it, finding the one labeled TR, before going back to the door and turning it in the knob.
The moment Anna threw open the door, Tom jumped back, looking like a deer in headlights. The rat wasn’t in his hands anymore, and the top drawer of his dresser was fully open. She made a beeline for it, praying she wouldn’t find a horrific collection of dead animals-
But she didn’t. Instead, there lay a jet black snake, nestled in a scrappy white blanket and biting into a rat.
She almost fainted right then.
“Please, Mrs. Cole, I promise she’s harmless! She would never hurt anyone, she’s really friendly, I swear! I found her in the garden, and it was freezing, and I couldn’t just leave her there, so I took her inside, and please, please don’t make me get rid of her!”
Anna closed the dresser drawer.
………………………………………
The high-pitched whistling of a tea kettle echoed throughout the kitchen, snapping Anna out of the daze she had been in. She turned off the stove and poured the tea into two mugs, one for her and one for her guest at the table. She took a seat at the dining table and passed the second mug to Tom. He took a hesitant sniff.
“It’s lemon ginger. I know you don’t like peppermint.”
Tom hummed and sipped his tea quietly.
They had a moment of silence to let him settle down, before Anna had to get down to business. “Tom, you’re not in trouble.”
He looked up, surprised.
“You should not have taken that rat inside, or the snake, or kept it all a secret. But you’re not in trouble. You weren’t trying to do anything wrong, you just wanted to help. Right?”
He hesitated, then gave a slow nod.
Anna took another sip of her tea before placing it firmly onto the table. “But be honest with me. The winter’s been over for a while now, and you still kept that snake in your dresser. She can hunt for herself, she would have been fine. So why did you keep her for so long?”
Tom let out a sigh. “She was nice. It felt nice to have something to take care of. And I could…I felt like I could talk to her. It was like having a friend.”
“You could have talked to any of the children here, too.”
He scrunched up his nose like he’d just smelled something foul. “No, I can’t. They’re weird.”
Anna almost laughed. “So are you. Just…make an effort, okay? I know that they want to be friends with you, but they don’t talk to you because you distance yourself. Talk to them first. You might like them.”
“I…I don’t know how to talk to them.”
“You don’t have to know. Talk about something that interests you, or join a game, or play toys with them. Just be yourself. Can you do that?”
Tom hunched his shoulders, then softly muttered, “Yes.”
Anna smiled. “Good. Now, come on, we have to set your snake free.”
A few minutes later, Tom returned from his room, carrying the black snake in his arms. His lips were moving, but she couldn’t hear anything he was saying. They walked out towards the edge of the garden, forming a procession as they neared the end of the fence. It would have been better if they had a forest or marsh to leave the snake in, but they weren’t going to find any of those in London.
Tom gently set the snake down on the other side of the fence, sniffling. His mouth was moving again, too soft to be heard, and he kneeled down to look the snake in the eyes. The reptile slithered up to his hand, pressing gently as if to say goodbye, before she disappeared through the bushes.
Anna helped him up. “Did you name her?”
He rubbed his eyes. “Her name’s Viv.”
Feeling a little silly, she called out, “Bye, Viv! Thank you for being a friend to Tom.”
“She doesn’t understand English, Mrs. Cole.”
Anna scoffed. “What do you want me to do, hiss at her?”
For some reason, Tom found this extremely funny, and he laughed harder than she’d ever seen.
……………………………
The next morning, everyone had heard about the snake living in Tom’s dresser, and they had a thousand questions for him.
“Was it venomous? Did it kill anyone?”
“Did it really eat that whole rat?”
“Was it pretty?”
“How big was it?”
Tom seemed a bit overwhelmed by all the attention, but answered all of their questions in that soft voice of his. “I, um…made some drawings of her. Do you want to see?”
All at once, they exclaimed “Yes!”
For the next half hour, Tom flipped through the pages of his notebook, showing off some impressive drawings of Viv. He had a captive audience, and they hung onto his every word. When he ran out of drawings, a couple of kids came up with the idea to play Duck Duck Goose in the yard, and they all scurried off towards the door.
Before they did, though, Tom tapped Amy on the shoulder. “Uh…can I play too?”
There was a pause, before she burst out into a grin. “Yeah! Come on, I’ll teach you!”
Mrs. Cole felt her heart warm as he scampered off with the others, the blank expression he so often wore now a thing of the past. Now she only had to worry about explaining to the children why they couldn’t have a pet snake.