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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.

Chapter List
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CHAPTER THREE
Terrible Things

1937

Mrs. Cole took them to the little village of Crandall’s Cliffs in the middle of August, and Tom knew as soon as he saw the place that this was where he would get his revenge on Dennis and Amy. He’d been waiting for the right moment, a way to get them somewhere far off and private, so that they wouldn’t be heard and interrupted. This is perfect.
It was a lovely day, the sky overhead bright and blue as a robin’s egg, with fluffy clouds slowly drifting across its great expanse, as if they had all the time in the world. The air smelled strongly of salt and seaweed, the scents of the ocean carried from the water below to the cliff top above by the warm summer breeze.
“I need you to distract Mrs. Cole,” Tom whispered to Adriana. “Just keep her busy so she doesn’t notice me and Dennis and Amy are missing.”
“Sure,” she said. “Where are you taking them anyway?”
“Down the cliff. That’ll be revenge enough, don’t you think?”
Adriana gave him a measuring look. “You sure you can do that?”
“Yes. And if I got to I can always drop Dennis,” he said, only half-joking. He wouldn’t mourn Dennis a bit if the boy were to break his neck.
“Be careful,” Adriana said. “And Tom…”
“Yes?”
“Don’t get too carried away, all right?”
“I won’t,” he said, even though he didn’t quite mean it.

She’d done her best to keep Mrs. Cole busy, stirring up a fight with Rachel and Ashleigh. But Dennis and Amy had been gone with Tom for nearly an hour, and Adriana knew that if they didn’t come back soon, the matron would be bound to notice.
So she snuck away from the group and carefully approached the edge of the bluff. It was a sheer drop, at least a hundred feet. White-crested waves rushed against the rocks below, the low tide churning amidst boulders. Adriana stood at the precipice for a long while, and then she stepped off into thin air. She did not expect to fall, and so she didn’t. Her own power cloaked her, protected her from gravity as she made the descent, but she could feel something else, an electrifying energy in the air—Tom.
She chased this feeling into the sea, like a fairytale girl following breadcrumbs. It was cold, and her clothes billowed about her, weighing her down as she treaded water. She felt along the rock face, not sure what she was looking for, until she came upon a fissure in the cliff. Adriana swam inside, found herself surrounded by darkness above and below, with nothing to guide her. The tunnel was narrow, no more than three feet wide, but she swam further, beckoned into the black.
And then she heard it: the faint echo of human screams, soft from this far away, but full of anguish, full of pain. The screaming grew louder the further she swam, punctuated by cries and pleas that went unanswered.
What are you doing, Tom?
Light flickered up ahead, its golden glow reflected off the water and wet rock in a thousand sparkling shards, and she could see now that the tunnel opened on the left. Adriana swam faster, until she felt her breath coming short, until she reached the mouth of the cave. Steps were carved into the stone there, and she climbed them, out of the water and up into the cool, subterranean air. Shivering and panting, soaking clothes sticking to her body, Adriana stepped into the cave, and the sight she faced was one she would never forget.
Tom had conjured a fire somehow, blazing flames that were suspended in midair, and the scene unfolded before her in flickering shades of red and yellow. Amy and Dennis lay on the ground, writhing, screaming, and Tom stood before them, a look of unadulterated glee distorting his handsome face into something less human, almost bestial. His shadow loomed large on the cavern wall, dancing with the firelight, greater than the boy who had cast it.
“That’s enough!” Adriana shouted, and Tom turned. His expression of pure, wild happiness turned to anger as quick as flipping a coin, heads to tails in a heartbeat.
“What are you doing here?” he asked. “I told you to—”
“I don’t care what you told me,” she said. “Let them go.”
“Go away,” he said. “This isn’t your business.”
Adriana pointed at the boy and girl on the ground. “Look at them. Look at what you’ve done.”
Tom spared Amy and Dennis a cursory glance. “It’s nothing they don’t deserve.”
She shook her head. “I’m taking them back up.” Practicality might sway him more than appeals to his conscience, so she said, “Besides, Mrs. Cole is already looking for you lot.”
Tom scowled, but he walked over to Amy and pulled her to her feet by the front of her dress. She stumbled and nearly fell, just barely managed to stay upright. Dennis he kicked in the ribs, and the older boy curled in on himself, sobbing. “Get up,” Tom said, “or I’ll make you.” Dennis hurried to stand, and like Amy he was trembling all over, his broad face tear-streaked and splotchy.
“If Mrs. Cole asks where we were, you say we went exploring,” he said. “Got it?”
“Y-yeah,” Dennis said, his deep voice cracking. Amy nodded furiously and took hold of Dennis’ hand.
They left the cave together, all four of them changed irrevocably by the things Tom had done.

Amy and Dennis never did say what happened in the cave. Mrs. Cole questioned them gently, then sharply, but they stuck to the story Tom had ordered them to tell.
Adriana didn’t like what she’d seen of him that day. If not quite surprising, Tom’s cruelty unsettled her. He was vindictive, quick-tempered, hateful, dishonest, and there was no limit to his malice once you earned his ire. What did it say of her that she felt drawn to him anyway? Tom might be all of those things, but he was also brave and brilliant and clever, and she had never met anyone like him.
Still, she tried to stay away from him after what he’d done to Amy and Dennis, to get a little space and think, but Tom didn’t allow it. He came to her room at all hours of the day and night, sometimes with a toy he’d stolen off one of the other orphans, sometimes to show her a new skill he’d mastered. He sat with her at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and when Adriana told him plainly to leave her alone, he simply said, “No.”
She wondered why he was putting forth so much effort to get her attention, but then Adriana realized she was his only friend, just as he was hers. He couldn’t afford to give her up.
It wasn’t his insistence that persuaded her to speak to him again, but rather the simple, strange reality that she cared for Tom Riddle and did not want to lose him.
So when he came to her room with a small-spined novel and offered to teach her to read, she said, “Fine, but you better not treat me like I’m stupid.”
“I’d never,” Tom said, “You’re the smartest person I know. Well, besides me.”
“That was almost nice,” Adriana said. “Are you sick?”
“Shut up and listen.” He opened the book and asked her to read it aloud, so he’d have some idea of what she already knew. Adriana stumbled through the sentences, guessing at half the words, and Tom stopped her after a few pages.
“You’re trying to just remember the words on sight,” Tom said. “That’s what your problem is.”
“What d’you mean? You’ve got to learn words to read.”
“Yeah, but Mr. Caulfield says you learn words by figuring out their parts first—what they mean, how they sound…”
Tom didn’t tell her anything much different than what their teacher explained, but he had a way of speaking that made her want to listen. He was surprisingly patient when she didn’t understand, but mean if she acted obstinate or lazy. And he did something Mr. Caulfield hadn’t thought to do: he gave her good reasons why she should want to read.
“You can go to some other place,” he said, “any place in the world that you want.”
There was nothing else he might have said that would have appealed to her more.
“You’re good at this. Teaching, I mean.”
Tom smiled, and it couldn’t be more unlike the gleeful grin she’d seen on his face in the cave; this expression was softer, it brought out the dimples in his cheeks, and if anything, it made him even better-looking than usual. “That’s what I want to be someday. I’m gonna go to university and become a professor.” He cocked his head to the side, as if trying to puzzle out something he’d never thought of before, and asked, “What about you? What will you be when you’re grown up?”
“An explorer,” Adriana said, without hesitation. “I want to go everywhere there is.”
Tom nodded. “And I’ll go with you when I’m on my summer hols.”
Adriana smiled and held out her hand, and they shook on it.
Sometimes, when she was tired of struggling through a text, she’d hand the book over to Tom and just listen to him. He had a pleasant voice, neither deep nor high, and he read as fluently as he spoke, confident and precise with his words.
When they weren’t reading or practicing with their powers, Tom and Adriana would often sneak out of Wool’s and run around London together. They roved the streets, browsed books at the library, and stole from the candy shop. Adriana liked the red-hot jelly beans, how the almost painful bite of them amplified their sweetness. Tom said he didn’t see how something hurtful could taste good, but then he didn’t even care for candy, so what would he know about it? He traded his own sweets for all manner of things at the orphanage, and when someone refused to barter he bullied what he wanted out of them anyway.
The autumn flew by, a succession of ever-cooler days spent learning to read and exploring her own little corner of the city. Maybe because she’d spent the first ten years of her life largely confined to one room, Adriana found that she loved the freedom of wandering, the thrill of discovering new places.
She turned eleven on the tenth of November and rather expected the day to go by unremarked upon. But Tom woke her that morning with a rough shake and said, “Get up. I want to give you something.”
Adriana yawned, sat up, and rubbed the sleep out of her eyes. “Why?”
He gave her a look like she’d said something particularly slow. “Because it’s your birthday, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said, “but how d’you know that.”
He shrugged. “I snuck into Mrs. Cole’s office and looked at your file. Anyway, here you go.”
Tom shoved the gift at her like he couldn’t get rid of the thing quick enough. Adriana untied the little twine bow that held the newspaper wrapping all together and uncovered a mahogany jewelry box. It was highly polished, and some careful carpenter had carved vines and leaves into the wood. There was a look of almost-newness about the box, but when Adriana opened it, she found a few pieces of jewelry already inside: a brass brooch, colored glass earrings, and a silver chain. The necklace she recognized straightaway; Ashleigh Carlisle wore it all the time.
She knew Ashleigh came from a once-wealthy family because she never shut up about how it was just a matter of time before some rich uncle would come and take her home. Adriana wouldn’t have believed a bit of Ashleigh’s story, except that the girl did have a number of fine items from her life before coming to the orphanage. Her favorite thing to brag about was this very silver chain, which had once belonged to her mother.
“Ashleigh wouldn’t have given this up without a fight,” Adriana said. “What did you do to her?”
Tom frowned. “What does it matter? Don’t you like it?”
Adriana had little interest in the jewelry, but she found the box itself to be beautiful. She traced the engraved vines with her finger. “I do.”
“It’s yours now,” Tom said. “Don’t worry ‘bout how I got it.”
She dumped the necklace, brooch, and earrings onto her bedspread. “All right, but give these back to Ashleigh. I don’t want them.”
Tom pocketed the jewelry and promised to return it. He started to leave, maybe to go talk to Ashleigh, but Adriana stopped him. “Thanks,” she said. However he’d gone about doing it, he’d thought to give her a birthday present, and that was a luxury she hadn’t expected to ever enjoy again.
Tom was many things, Adriana knew, but no one could accuse him of being predictable.

London had a grey Christmas, if not a white one. Sleet slicked the city streets all through the middle of December, and it was so miserably cold and wet that no one wanted to go outside. Tom spent most of his days with Adriana, huddled under blankets in the attic, turning matches into needles, playing games, and reading. It had almost surprised him, how quickly she picked up on the written word once she set her mind to learning, and these days she was coming to him with books as often as the other way around.
Come Christmas morning, she woke him by pulling off his covers and saying, “There’s a decent breakfast for once, and we better go downstairs before the older boys eat it all.”
Tom muttered complaints and derided the orphanage food, but he got up just the same. They went to the refectory together, took seats at the end of their usual table, and piled plates with fried eggs, bacon, and toast. Adriana ate as slowly and precisely as she always did, but for the first time since he’d met her she helped herself to seconds.
Some enterprising person had erected a small, scraggly evergreen in the main hall, strung popcorn and tinsel around it, and topped it with a painted star. Tom would have put money on the secret decorator being either Martha or Jamie, both of whom were shamelessly sentimental.
When he made fun of the tree, Adriana said, “I like it, even if it is a bit shoddy.”
“It’s a piece of rubbish wrapped in more rubbish.”
She shrugged. “I really don’t care what you say. I think it’s nice.”
“Don’t tell me you like carols too?” Tom asked.
Adriana smiled and began to hum “Away in a Manger.”
“Oh bloody hell,” he said.
They spent the rest of the morning listening to Martha read from the Bible. Tom wouldn’t have bothered (he found most of the stories in the Good Book to be both stupid and dull), but Adriana said that she was in the mood for a good fairytale, which made him snort. So he sat with her at the back of the group and whispered blasphemous jokes in her ear until they both erupted in laughter. Martha frowned, said they ought to search their souls if they found the birth of our Lord funny, and kicked them out.
“Did you see her face?” Tom asked, still laughing. “‘Search our souls.’”
After disrupting Martha’s Bible reading, he and Adriana played penny poker in his room. Tom lost spectacularly but refused to quit even when he ran out of money, and he bet a stick of gum on the next hand. He lost again, then sulked while Adriana gathered up her winnings.
“Gambling on Christmas Day,” she said. “We’re probably going to hell.”
“Nobody’s going to hell. There’s no such thing.”
“You really don’t think so?” Adriana asked. “What happens to you after you die, then?”
Tom didn’t like to think on that. “Nothing, I guess.” He tried his best to sound casual instead of afraid, but by the odd, gentle look Adriana gave him he didn’t think she believed his act.
That night, Tom lay on his back in bed, thinking about the emptiness that must follow death. The yawning absence of thought or feeling or existence. He closed his eyes against the darkness and tried to sleep, but he couldn’t, not with this kind of fear twisting his stomach, because even if he was wrong and there was something after, he didn’t like to think what that might mean for him.
The door opened, creaking on rusted hinges, and Adriana slipped inside. Without even asking, she climbed into his bed and curled up next to him. It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to go away—because he did not, at this moment, feel like company—but then Tom saw the tear-tracks on her cheeks.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Adriana said. She sniffled and wiped at her face. “It’s stupid. I just had a bad dream.”
“What was it about?” Tom asked, as curious as he was concerned. So little seemed to scare Adriana, and he couldn’t imagine what might frighten her enough to make her cry.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said. “I just want to be here, with you.”
Adriana reached out and took his hand, threaded their fingers together. Tom’s first instinct was to pull away, because no one had ever touched him like this before, seeking comfort or giving it, and he didn’t know what to do. But there was also something about the contact that he liked. Her hand was soft and slender, much smaller than his own, and yet they seemed to fit together, the way unalike puzzle pieces complement one another.
“Can I stay?” Adriana asked.
If they were caught like this Mrs. Cole would thrash them both, but since when had he worried about that old bat?
“Of course,” Tom said. “Always.”
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Great and Terrible Things