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Great and Terrible Things	By : TheRiddleHouse Category: Harry Potter > General > General Views: 2975 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Harry Potter, and I make no money from writing this fanfiction.

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CHAPTER ONE
Witchcraft and Wizardry

1937

Death came draped in a white sheet, as if covering the too-still form of a lifeless boy could bring decency and dignity to the indecent and undignified.
Sammy Harlow was the third child at the orphanage to succumb to the flu in as many weeks, and Mrs. Cole had ordered that no one should enter Room 29 (just two doors down from Tom’s own quarters) until the body was taken care of. But some of the boys had decided to sneak into Sammy’s room, and Dennis Bishop dragged Tom along.
It smelled awful, like sweat, vomit, and loosened bowels. Like bodily weakness made into a scent.
“Pull down the sheet,” Dennis said, and he pushed Tom closer to the bed.
There was little and less that scared him, but when Tom tried to reach out and grasp the linens that concealed Sammy, he found himself frozen. Afraid that if he touched the body, then the illness that had killed this other boy might kill him too, and then he’d be just another cold corpse under a white sheet. A child that was born and lived and died in the same dreary place without doing much of anything that mattered. Insignificant and unremembered.
He backed away from the bed, and even though he felt ashamed of himself for this fear, he knew he had to get far away from Sammy, and quick. But Dennis, a foot taller and a stone heavier than Tom, caught him by the shoulders and said, “You’re not going anywhere, Riddle.” He held him still, made him stay and watch as Allen Polliver uncovered the body.
Sammy’s freckled skin looked waxen and bloodless, his limbs motionless, rigid. With the sheet thrown off the corpse, the smell of death was stronger now, and Tom felt bile rise in the back of his throat. He tried to throw Dennis off, but the older boy wouldn’t let go. The more he struggled, the harder Dennis held him, until Tom could feel bruises blooming on his upper arms.
I hope he dies, I hope he dies like Sammy. Sometimes, if he wanted it enough, Tom could make bad things happen to the people who hurt him. Nothing happened now, though, no matter how much he willed it.
“What’s going on?”
It was Mrs. Cole, and Tom had never been happier to see her ugly, old face.
“Nothing,” Dennis said, hurrying to let go of Tom. “We was just—”
“I don’t care what you were ‘just,’” Mrs. Cole said. “I told you to stay out of here. Now get back to your rooms before I take a strap to the lot of you.”
Tom didn’t need telling twice. He went to his room, got in bed, buried himself beneath the thin blankets, and tried to sleep. But he couldn’t stop thinking about the thing that used to be Sammy Harlow. There was something about its lack of movement which unnerved him. An unnatural stillness that bespoke the lifelessness of the body.
Tom rolled over, and the new pressure on his sore arm hurt, but this pain was nothing to the fear he felt. The flu had already claimed three children. What was to stop it from taking a fourth?
So Tom tossed and turned, worried himself nearly sick, and did not sleep.

Spring came to London suddenly. One day there was snow in the courtyard, ice slicking the stoop, and a coldness pervaded every inch of the orphanage. A special coldness that came from months of winter weather worming its slow way through brick and mortar, into the walls and the floors and every space in between, until it finally sunk its careful claws under your skin.
One day there were all of these things, and the next, none. Green leaves seemed to come awake overnight, the trees covering their bareness, modest after a season’s naked hibernation.
Most of the bigger children had chosen to take advantage of the surprising warmth outside, to soak up the sunlight and play in the mud, but the little ones remained indoors, listening to Martha read.
Tom would never admit it, but he liked fairy tales. Stories of the grand and impossible, full of magic, adventure, and comeuppance. Today he sat in the hall just outside of Martha’s room, playing with the yo-yo he’d liberated from Norman Baxter, while the older girl read “Snow White.” This one was his favorite from the Grimms’ book; he loved the ending, where the old queen was forced into red-hot iron shoes. He could picture it, metal glowing like the burning coils on the kitchen stovetop. Flesh blistering and smoking while the evil stepmother danced to her death.
Just now, Tom heard Mrs. Cole, and he hastily stowed the yo-yo in his pocket.
“...Room 29 is free,” she was saying, and her sharp voice had taken on an unusually soft tone. “That’s where you’ll stay.”
Mrs. Cole rounded the corner with a young girl in tow. She was about Tom’s own age, with long, dark red curls and skin so fair that his first stupid thought was that she looked like Snow White. Except Snow White was supposed to be beautiful, and this girl was too scrawny to be pretty. Her neat shirt was crisp and well made, her skirt clean and unwrinkled, but both hung off of her delicate frame. She looked like a pauper masquerading in a rich girl’s clothes. And there was something wild in her pale eyes that reminded him of the street children the orphanage took in every year—mongrels from the gutters of London, like Dennis. She carried a small, sad sack of things in one hand (relics from her previous life, he assumed), and a worn out teddy bear in the other.
Bruises colored her shins and knobby knees. Some purple, some blue, some the sickly yellowish green of the nearly-but-not-quite-healed. Pink welts striped her legs too, upraised like bee stings, but thick as his thumb. There was a precision to these marks, an odd, intentional symmetry, and even at ten Tom was educated enough in the ugliness of the world to understand that none of this was accidental.
He might have felt sorry for this girl, if he ever felt sorry for anyone. But there was something in the way she carried herself that repelled pity.
“Get off of the floor, Tom,” Mrs. Cole said. “And go outside. You’re too old for story time.”
“Don’t want to go out there. It’s gonna rain.”
She sighed and ran a hand through her hair. “There’s not one bloody cloud in sight. What on earth makes you think it’s going to rain?”
“I can smell it,” Tom lied. Truly, he just didn’t want to deal with Dennis and his cronies.
Mrs. Cole pursed her lips. “I don’t have time for you right now,” she said. “Come on, dear, I’ll show you to your room…”
The redhaired girl followed Mrs. Cole, and as soon as they were out of sight, Tom pulled the yo-yo from his pocket and began to play with it again.

The room was clean, if small and spare, and Adriana felt too thankful that she didn’t have to share her space to mind the simplicity of her new quarters. Mrs. Cole’s gruff gentleness and curiosity were almost too much to bear; she couldn’t have tolerated a roommate’s kindly inquisition too.
After the matron left, Adriana sat on the bed, ignoring the springs poking her through the mattress, and unpacked her bag. Most of her things had been left behind, but she’d had time to grab a few changes of clothes, her spinning top, a hairbrush, a picture book, and Mr. Bear. He looked a little worse for the wear, as the stitching along his back was coming undone, white cotton stuffing peeking through the hole.
She hid the teddy bear beneath the bed, out of sight, so she wouldn’t have to look at it, and put everything else in her wardrobe. Then Adriana lay down, stared up at the ceiling, and imagined different figures in the brown water stain there, like finding shapes in fluffy clouds, or constellations out of stars. It looked, she thought, most like a skunk.
Beautiful.
This would be her home for the next eight years, so Adriana thought she and the skunk had plenty of time to become good friends.
Her stomach rumbled—she’d had nothing to eat but bread for the last two days, and little enough of that—but Adriana was used to being hungry. The light-headed hollowness was familiar to her, as expected as the sting of a leather belt. She ignored the dull ache of her empty belly, just like she ignored the bruised and welted tenderness of her back and legs.
It should hurt more than this, to be thrown away like so much trash, but abandonment felt startlingly like freedom. She would not examine the reasons why her mother had left her here.
She would, Adriana decided, never think about that again.

There was not a garden at the orphanage. There was a bare courtyard, scrubby grass prescribed within its rectangular boundaries, and in the spring sometimes dandelions would bloom along the base of the building. Until Mrs. Cole took a pesticide to them, a little bottled Black Death for plants, and sprayed her chemical plague all over the yellow flowers.
There were four things Mrs. Cole did not tolerate, Tom had learned: laziness, dirtiness, optimism, and weeds. The dandelions were guilty on the last two charges, and therefore had to go, he supposed.
No, there was not a garden at the orphanage, but there were garden snakes, and one of them was the closest thing to a friend that Tom had. He called the fellow Nag, after the cobra from “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” because he believed that names were of the greatest importance and his only companion should not be without one.
Tom waited until the courtyard was empty to sneak over to the east side of the building and see if Nag was there. The last thing he needed was some busybody like Amy Benson spying on him and reporting to Mrs. Cole that crazy Tom Riddle talked to snakes.
“Are you there?” he asked.
“Here,” said Nag. “You were gone a long time.” The serpent slithered out of the grass and into his outstretched hand. He curled up into a comfortable coil and rested on the lines of Tom’s palm.
He never apologized (except when he had to pretend to be sorry to get out of trouble), and Tom did not start now. “Couldn’t be helped.”
They talked about small things and big things, and although the life of a garden snake was more boring than not, Tom listened, because it was nice to have someone listen back.
Then the front door opened, and he hissed a quiet goodbye to Nag before letting him slither into the grass.

Adriana’s first breakfast at the orphanage was porridge and milk. As was her second and third and fourth. The fare tasted plain, neither good nor bad, and it was regular, if repetitive. She could count on three square meals a day, heavy on bread and potatoes, light on meat, luxuries like butter altogether absent.
She did not like to eat in front of others. It was a struggle for her to keep certain foods down, and Adriana preferred not to have an audience when she fought this particular battle. But there was little choice at the orphanage refectory, where every table was overflowing with children. Today she found a seat with a group of girls about her own age: Amy Benson, Rachel Ross, and Ashleigh Carlisle.
Amy, a rat-faced girl who always shadowed Dennis Bishop, complained about the food and Tom Riddle by turns. “He’s just awful,” Amy said to Adriana, “you should stay away from him.”
“Hm.” Adriana took a careful bite of porridge. It was thick and clumpy, and it tasted like the color grey.
“He’s a thief and a liar,” Rachel said. “Did you know he took Norman’s yo-yo? And Patty’s mouth organ too!”
Adriana wasn’t sure which Tom was Tom Riddle. She’d met at least two in the last week. “Is he the blonde, freckled one?”
“No, that’s Tom Wilkinson,” Ashleigh said. “Riddle is the black-haired boy at the end of the table.”
She recognized him right away as the handsome boy that Mrs. Cole had reprimanded on her first day at the orphanage. His room was a couple of doors down from her own, and she’d seen him lurking about the hallway, playing with his (apparently stolen) yo-yo. He never seemed to have any friends about, and she figured his sticky fingers had something to do with that. Adriana hoped Riddle wouldn’t try to take anything of hers, because if he did, he would swiftly come to regret it.
Her first weeks at the orphanage passed uneventfully enough. The days were simple and straightforward: breakfast, schooling, lunch, schooling, recess, dinner, bed. Despite an initial attempt at friendliness, the girls in her year quickly realized that Adriana cared little for their company (or anyone else’s) and gave her the solitude she preferred without much fuss. It wasn’t that she disliked the other children—they didn’t much matter to her one way or another—but she was too used to being alone to know how to seek companionship.
Mother had rarely even let her out of her room, much less the house, and certainly never allowed her to attend school. Her early education had been sporadic at best, dependent upon her parents’ whims, and now that she was facing consistent classes, Adriana found that she was hopelessly behind. Mr. Caulfield, the elementary teacher, told her plainly that she was nearly illiterate and gave her the same thin books the seven- and eight-year-olds were reading to study from. This stung her pride, but not enough to motivate her to pick up The Little Elephant by John G. Goodman and give it more than a cursory perusal. Caulfield threatened her with paddling, called her stupid and ignorant in front of the class, then privately told her she was smart enough but lazy. Adriana ignored his backhanded compliments and his insults with equal indifference, and The Little Elephant went under her bed along with Mr. Bear, unread.
The orphanage was an unpleasant place, full of thuggish children and uncaring adults, and there were things about home that Adriana missed. The taste of her mother’s cooking, when she was allowed to enjoy it; a soft bed piled with warm blankets; the spicewood scent of Father’s cologne; and, most of all, her little brother’s infectious laugh.
Don’t think about that, she reminded herself.
Her bruises slowly turned yellow, then disappeared into the landscape of her skin, and for the first time since she was a very small child, she did not have to worry that new injuries would replace the old. Habits died hard, however, and each time Adriana felt her power welling up inside her, like water pushing against a dam, she invariably panicked. What if someone saw? What if they punished her for it, the way Mother always had? What if someone hurt her?
But curiosity won out over fear, as it often had at home, and so Adriana found every deserted nook of the orphanage and set about exercising the ability her mother so despised.

Tom paid little attention to the girl who arrived with the new spring, but he noticed things about her in a peripheral sort of way: she spoke with a funny accent, almost like a Kraut; she ate neatly but slowly, as if careful not to make herself sick; and even after a few weeks at the orphanage, she seemed to have no friends. He did not bother to learn her name.
Tom expected nothing great or magnificent from this girl—and really, he hardly ever anticipated anyone doing extraordinary things, besides himself. So when he found her in a corner of the attic with a rock floating five inches above her cupped hands, he was surprised.
The stone fell into her grasp, whatever power that had held it suspended snuffed out like a candle. She looked at him with eyes as colorless as ice and said, “Don’t tell anyone. Please.”
Tom sat down on the dusty floor, and with the ease of many hours’ practice, he willed the rock to rise in an arc from her hands to his own. “You can do it too?” he asked, and he could not keep the eagerness out of his voice. There was someone like him. He was not, as he had always thought, utterly alone.
The girl didn’t answer, but when Tom sent the stone her way, she allowed it to float over her hands again. They went back and forth this way five times, ten, more, until Tom stopped counting and just played.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Adriana,” she said.
“I’m Tom Riddle.”
“Oh, I know,” she said. “The others talk about you.”
Tom scowled. “What do they say?”
“That you’re strange and a bully and you take things that aren’t yours.” Adriana spun the stone in a circle this time, a little pirouette in the air, before bouncing it his way. “Are you really a thief?”
Tom shrugged and said, “You don’t deserve to have something if you can’t keep it.”
He expected her to argue with this, but she didn’t.
After that day in the attic, Tom often snuck into Room 29 to practice with Adriana. He always had to seek her out, to convince her that they wouldn’t get caught. Sometimes she agreed, and they would spend an afternoon playing catch without using their hands, or growing flowers along the orphanage wall (dandelions, Tom insisted, just to torture Mrs. Cole). And sometimes she told him to go away and leave her alone.
Today, Adriana relented, and so they sat on her bed, changing glass marbles into stone.
“What d’you think it is?” Tom asked. “These things we can do?”
Adriana tapped one of her marbles, and it transformed back into blue glass. “Witchcraft,” she said, softly but certainly.
“Witchcraft?” Tom asked. “You off your rocker?”
She frowned at him, and with a flick of her wrist all the marbles vanished.
“Hey! What’d you go and do that for?” Tom closed his eyes and tried to pull the marbles back from wherever Adriana had sent them, but it felt as though the essence of the glass and stone had somehow merged with everything else in the room, and he did not have the finesse to put it back together.
“I guess you don’t deserve to have them,” Adriana said.
He didn’t like that, the way she used his own words against him so flippantly. In part because it was insulting, but mostly because she was right.
“Why d’you think what we do is witchcraft?” Tom asked.
She was quiet for a long moment. Then Adriana said, “My mother used to call me a witch, so I reckon that’s what I am.”
That statement inspired more questions than it answered. First and foremost, Tom wondered, if she was a witch, what did that make him? A warlock? Sorcerer? Wizard? And were there others like the two of them, or were they the only children in all of Britain to have this power?
Somehow, Tom doubted it.
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Great and Terrible Things