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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
- 5
- 6
CHAPTER SIX
Hogwarts

1938

“No,” Adriana said flatly. “I’m not telling you where my common room is, or how to get into it.”
Tom had waited in the entrance hall for ten minutes, hoping to catch her before breakfast, and now she wouldn’t even listen to him.
“Oh, come on.” He smiled as winningly as he could. “We never keep things from each other.”
Adriana snorted. “You lie as easy as breathing, don’t you?”
“I’ll tell you how to get into Slytherin,” Tom said, voice low.
“Doubtful,” she said. “Now move, I’m hungry.”
He followed her into the Great Hall. “I’ll just figure it out on my own,” Tom warned.
“You do that.” Adriana took a seat at the end of the Gryffindor table and helped herself to a goblet of pumpkin juice.
Tom found Grayson and Alphard sitting with Celeste’s older brother, whose first name he learned was Adrastos. He helped himself to a plate of eggs and sausages, deliberately skipping the porridge (which he could never eat again and it would still be too soon). The boys talked around him more than to him, which irritated Tom. He didn’t like being ignored, but short of interjecting himself into a conversation about magical sports that he only half understood, there wasn’t much he could do about it.
His first class was Transfiguration with the Ravenclaws. He got lost when the staircases changed and turned him in the entirely wrong direction. Last night, he’d thought the moving stairs were spectacular, but now as he ran through the corridors, already tardy and growing later still, he decided they were more annoying than anything else.
By the time he found the class, Professor Dumbledore was in the middle of demonstrating inanimate to animate Transfiguration by changing a goblet into a rat, and Tom’s interruption drew every eye in the room.
“Good of you to join us, Tom,” said Dumbledore.
He couldn’t quite tell whether the professor was being serious or sarcastic, but Tom took a seat at the front of the room and said, “I’m sorry I’m late. I got lost.”
Dumbledore smiled gently and said, “Understandable. Hogwarts is a tricky place to navigate, even for those of us who have called the castle home for many years. Just the same, perhaps you ought to leave earlier if you want to make it to class on time.”
Tom nodded, said, “Yes, sir,” and pulled out his copy of A Beginner’s Guide to Transfiguration. He’d already read the book cover to cover, but studying magical theory and seeing it in practice were quite different.
Dumbledore returned to his demonstration, transforming the sleek, grey rat back into a silver goblet. Tom watched hungrily, ready to try it himself, so he was disappointed when Dumbledore distributed matchsticks to everyone in the class and told them to change them into needles. He had done this kind of work wandless at the orphanage a hundred times before, and he accomplished the task on his first attempt.
“Wow,” said Celeste, who was seated to his right. “How’d you do that so easily?”
“Dunno,” said Tom, shrugging. “It just comes naturally.”
“Well I’m jealous,” said Celeste, but she was smiling all the same. “Care to help me?”
Tom never passed up an opportunity to show off, so he pushed his desk closer to Celeste’s and talked her through the process. How the magic wasn’t in the words at all, really, but just inside of you, and you had to bring it out. To force your will onto the obstinate matchstick until you convinced it to be something else.
“I did it!” Celeste said. Her needle was a little thick and somewhat dull, but it was certainly a needle nonetheless.
Tom made himself smile, as if he much cared about her success.
Things would be different here than at the orphanage, he’d already decided. He wouldn’t spend another seven years hated and ridiculed, not if he could help it. Tom intended to get ahead, and in order to do that, he was going to have to hide the parts of himself that people didn’t like.

Tom was different. When he was not with her, he spent all of his time with his Housemates, and after Ignatius made fun of the way he talked, he began to imitate his peers’ refined speech. Gryffindors and Slytherins shared Potions and Defense Against the Dark Arts together, and his behavior in class and out of it couldn’t be any more different than the way he acted at the orphanage. He was kind and respectful toward teachers and students, always quick to help anyone struggling with their coursework, and his general demeanor was brighter, more friendly.
Adriana hated it.
This wasn’t the Tom she knew. He was studiously crafting a facade to hide his true self behind, and Adriana couldn’t understand why. Did he care so much about what other people thought? She’d never gotten the impression that Tom gave a damn about anyone’s opinion apart from his own (and occasionally hers).
So, one Saturday when they were exploring the castle together, hurrying along the corridors and up staircases, stopping to look into new rooms or check behind tapestries for secret passageways, she asked, “Why are you pretending to be someone you’re not?”
Tom opened a heavy wooden door and peeked inside. “Nothing in here but old broomsticks,” he said. “Let’s carry on.”
She followed him to a tapestry of a witch playing a lute.
“Are you going to answer my question?” Adriana asked.
“Not in the middle of the hall where anyone could hear, I’m not.” Tom lifted the tapestry, said, “Well, look at this,” and disappeared behind it.
Adriana followed him inside and found a lovely music room. There were instruments of all kinds, an upright piano and cases full of horns and woodwinds. Other than this fine display, the room boasted only a grate, currently empty of fire, and a blue velvet couch.
Tom took a seat at the piano and tried his hand at playing whatever song was printed on the music sheet. The sound was halting and clumsy, if not utterly awful, but Adriana said, “I suggest you stick to magic.”
He scowled at her and said, “I’d like to see you do any better.”
“Not going to happen.” Adriana remembered with sudden clarity the sharp sting of her mother’s hand across her cheek the last time she sat at a piano. She’d grown tired of Mum’s criticism and in a fit of temper used a little magic to improve the grace of her playing. Her mother hadn’t liked that, not one bit.
Don’t think about those things.
“Well?” Adriana asked, forcing herself to stay in the present, not to cringe at the shadow of memory. “Why are you putting on such a show?”
Tom said, “It’s simple: I want to do well here, to succeed, and I can’t manage that if everyone hates me.”
“I don’t understand why you care so much,” she said.
“I’m ambitious, or didn’t my two-second Sorting already tell you that?” Tom asked smugly.
Adriana smiled, took a seat on the soft couch, and said, “I had a clue before your Sorting.”
“Why did yours take so long anyway?” he asked. Tom remained on the piano bench, idly striking lone keys for the fun of making noise, she supposed.
“The Hat couldn’t decide between Slytherin and Gryffindor,” she said.
“Well it chose wrongly,” Tom said. “You belong in Slytherin.”
With me, he didn’t say, but she heard it all the same.
Adriana shook her head. “No, the Hat was right.”
She missed being able to sneak into Tom’s room at night, to know where he was most of the time because they shared their own small world. But she loved the warmth of her tower and enjoyed the company of her Housemates more than she had liked any of the children at the orphanage (apart from Tom). The other Gryffindors could be reckless, but Adriana didn’t hold that against them, because she was guilty of the same.

His first months at Hogwarts passed swiftly, full of exploration and study. Tom managed to insinuate himself among the pure-blood children, and he learned as much about the wizarding world from them as he did from his professors. Celeste was quick to explain the particulars of blood purity, and Alphard gave him a lesson on the political storm at the Ministry. A tug-of-war between the old way—“Supremacy for the supreme,” as Adrastos put it—and the new—calls for greater equality for Mudbloods.
The ambiguity of Tom’s heritage put him in a nebulous place within their circle. He could be anything, so befriending him was a gamble. Celeste was the warmest toward him, and he used that to work his way in with her older brother. Once Adrastos approved of him, most of the others fell in line. His own skills quickly earned the admiration, if not the respect, of most of his Housemates, but there were some, like Alphard’s older sister Walburga, who disliked him regardless and weren’t afraid to show it.
Tom quickly learned that there was a hierarchy in Slytherin, a ladder of sorts, with each rung a social position dependent upon talent, breeding, and social graces. He had magical skill in spades, and he discovered that when he put his mind to it, it was easy to play the games of politics and gossip that the pure-bloods seemed to thrive on.
Life outside of his House remained endlessly fascinating to Tom. Hogwarts was a maze of secret passages, changing staircases, trick steps, and doors that weren’t doors at all, but rather solid walls just pretending. But nothing compared to learning magic, exerting his will over the natural order of things until they changed at his command.
Still, to Tom’s disappointment, the coursework in his classes remained startlingly easy. He had hoped for more of a challenge when he came to Hogwarts, and he refused to wait years to learn anything difficult. Adriana, he knew, was having much the same problem. Her magic was as strong as his own, if less refined, and beneath the veneer of her poor education, she was ruthlessly intelligent. So they began going to the library to read texts meant for third- and fourth-year students. Tom was strictly interested in spellwork, learning new charms and jinxes, but Adriana spent as much time reading magical theory as its practical counterpart.
“I don’t know why you bother with that,” he said. “Knowing why a Summoning spell works won’t help you cast it.”
“It’s interesting,” Adriana said, as she turned a page of Hypagea Smith’s Arithmancy Unraveled. “Don’t you ever want to know something just for the sake of knowing it?”
“Of course not,” Tom said. “I want to know something so that I can use it.”
She smiled, as if his answer was perfectly predictable. And perhaps it was, because Tom didn’t care for anything that had no utility he could take advantage of. The only exception to this was Adriana herself, because he’d come to learn quickly enough that she couldn’t be manipulated.
On the day after Halloween, Slughorn asked both of them to join his Slug Club, a clique comprised only of Hogwarts’ best and brightest. (At least, this was how their professor pitched the invitation.) Tom agreed right away and encouraged Adriana to do the same.
“It’s stupid,” she said, once their potions master was out of earshot.
“But it could help us. Do you have any idea how many important people Slughorn knows?” Tom asked.
“Fine, I’ll be a member of the Slug Club,” Adriana said. “But only because I like Slughorn. He’s a good teacher—although he’d be better for the rest of the class if he didn’t favor us so much.”
It was true. Slughorn constantly bragged about their skills and awarded both he and Adriana House points for their exemplary work in his class. Most of the other teachers did the same, but Dumbledore was decidedly more reserved with his praise—at least where Tom was concerned. From what he heard, the Transfiguration professor didn’t dote on Adriana the way Slughorn did his favorites, but she was obviously the first-year he enjoyed working with most. Which was unfair, because Adriana had more difficulty in Dumbledore’s class than any other, leaving Tom the star student.
She might have raw power that could rival his, but Adriana lacked the sort of fine-tuned control over magic that came so naturally to him. And Transfiguration, more than any other discipline, required a kind of subtle restraint she simply hadn’t yet developed.
There was one thing Tom chose to study alone: genealogy. He came to the library without Adriana three times a week for two months and pored over every book in Madam Hart’s collection about wizarding families. At least one of his parents must have been magical, he was certain, and he suspected it was his father. After all, what sort of witch worth her salt would have died in the birthing bed?
So he looked high and low for a Riddle, any Riddle, for some shred of proof that his ancestry was as great as he was. But he found nobody by his father’s surname in any of the fat, dusty tomes on genealogy and family histories. As the weeks passed, and he continued to search in vain, Madam Hart began to give him a sympathizing sort of look that Tom hated. He could imagine how he appeared to the librarian: a poor orphan boy trying to find a phantom family within the dry pages of half-forgotten books. Still, he turned Madam Hart’s pity to his advantage and asked her if she could possibly obtain any new books on wizarding families.
“I’ll do a little research and see if there’s anything out there.” She smiled sadly and said, “Don’t hope for too much, though, dear. Whatever you’re looking for, if you can’t find it in the Hogwarts library, it probably doesn’t exist.”

It happened again on a cold November day shortly after she turned twelve. Adriana was in the common room, struggling to transfigure a chunk of iron into silver, when she felt a sudden surge of magic, filling her body and exploding outward through her wand. The blast destroyed the table she was working at; wooden shards flew in every direction, and it was pure luck that none of the larger pieces pierced a student.
A prefect, Rachel Goldstein, rushed to her side, and asked, “Are you all right?”
“I’ll be fine,” Adriana said. She closed her eyes to keep the room from spinning. She felt dizzy, lightheaded, and drained, as if every bit of energy had been sucked from her body.
Rachel said, “You’re going to the hospital wing. Come on.”
Too weak to protest, she suffered the indignity of letting one of the sixth-year Quidditch players carry her across the castle.
At the hospital wing, Madam Graham performed a perfunctory examination and asked, “Have you been sick recently?”
“No,” Adriana said. “No more than usual.”
Madam Graham frowned. “You don’t seem to have any of the common magical illnesses, but something definitely isn’t right. Your body is in the condition of someone recovering from a nasty bout of dragonpox—that is to say you’re weakened and suffering malnutrition. How well do you eat?”
“I have a hard time keeping a lot of foods down, so I don’t eat much,” Adriana admitted, and she could feel color coming to her cheeks. These things were personal, but if she wanted any chance of getting better she needed to cooperate.
There was a time when Adriana had no problems with food or controlling her magic, but that was before her mother started starving and beating her. But she wasn’t about to tell Madam Graham that.
“Can you perform magic?”
Adriana tried a simple spell, but the roll of bandages she attempted to levitate remained stationary. “No,” she said. “But my magic will come back. It always does.”
“This has happened before?” Madam Graham asked.
“Yes. It used to be more often, but I’ve only had two accidents in the last couple of years.” Ever since she’d been expelled from her family home and dropped at Wool’s Orphanage, Adriana hadn’t suffered the number of episodes she’d experienced beneath her mother’s roof. But it bothered her that something of the harm inflicted on her lingered under her skin, interfering with her ability to control her magic.
“I’m putting you on bed rest, here, for the next twenty-four hours, so I can keep an eye on you,” Madam Graham said.
“I don’t want to miss class,” Adriana said.
Madam Graham shook her head. “This isn’t a negotiation. Not even Headmaster Dippet can trump my say-so in this hospital wing.”
So Adriana changed into the colorless pajamas that Madam Graham kept on hand for just such situations and went to bed. The hospital cot wasn’t nearly as comfortable as her four-poster in Gryffindor Tower, but she was far too tired to care.
She woke to early morning sunlight, drifting in through the high windows, golden and bright, and the smell of lemons.
“Ah, you’re awake,” said Professor Dumbledore. He popped a yellow hard candy into his mouth. “I was beginning to wonder if you might sleep as long as Rip Van Winkle.”
“How long was I out?” Adriana asked. She still felt weak, but the dizziness and nausea were gone, and when she picked up her wand, she found that she could perform magic again.
“Almost two days,” he said.
“Oh. That’s longer than usual.” She yawned, stretched, and asked, “Can I go back to Gryffindor Tower now?”
“You’ll be free to leave soon,” Professor Dumbledore said, “but first we need to have a discussion about what happened in the common room.”
That didn’t sound pleasant or promising. “What do we need to talk about?”
“I spoke with Madam Graham,” he said, “and she told me that you’ve been experiencing these sorts of episodes, where your magic bursts from you without your control, for several years. Is that correct?”
“Yes,” Adriana said evenly. She didn’t like that Madam Graham had shared any part of their conversation with someone else.
Professor Dumbledore nodded. “I have to ask you a personal question now, the answer to which is none of my business, and I hope you don’t take offense. Have you ever suffered any kind of trauma in relation to your magic?”
Every other day for years, she thought but didn’t say.
“How did you know?” Adriana asked.
“Because I once knew a girl with a similar problem,” Professor Dumbledore said. The smile he gave her was soft and sad. “Her case was more severe than yours—she couldn’t control her magic at all—but if I’m not much mistaken you have the same condition.”
There’s someone like me?
“What happened to her? Did she ever get cured?” Adriana asked, and she couldn’t quite keep the hopefulness out of her voice.
“She’s dead,” Professor Dumbledore said. “But the cause of her death was unrelated to her difficulties with magic. And no, there was no cure for her illness.”
“I see,” Adriana said, and she felt her short-lived hope dissipate. She fidgeted with the sheet to have something to do with her hands.
“I’m sorry I don’t have better news for you,” Professor Dumbledore said gently. “I wish I could tell you that there’s a cure to the condition you’re suffering, but I think the matter goes deeper than any spell or potion can fix. The way your body handles and processes magic has been irrevocably altered because of the hurt you’ve experienced.”
Adriana wanted to scream, wanted to cry, but she’d learned years ago that hysterics earned you nothing but further pain. Dry it up, her mother used to say. Or I’ll give you another.
Oh how Mum must be laughing. Her dearest wish had been to stamp out her daughter’s unnatural powers, and now, years after the hateful treatment was over, Adriana knew what she’d always suspected: she was irreparably damaged.
- 5
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Great and Terrible Things