(Tomarry - HP/TR) Burnt Ice Cream

Part I

Tom Riddle knew that there were few certain things in life. He could believe that something was absolute, engraved in truth and then the next day it would disappear, as if it never had existed. That had been tough to accept a few years ago, but he'd grown since then. He'd matured. He understood that life was a cruel and heartless beast, and that he shouldn't rely on anyone. Nothing was constant, nothing lasted, and Tom was a stronger person now he accepted that.

Unfortunately, there were always exceptions to that rule. And the exceptions never boded well for Tom.

Stupidity, in it's endless and limitless forms, always managed to surround Tom. That never changed. The prejudice from a few of his housemates always lingered, neverminding that he'd long since established himself in the hierarchy – in other words, at the top. The one exception he was currently battling with might just possibly be the worst, however; no matter what he did, the summer holidays were always awful.

Even as a child, with the hope of magic naught but a faint whisper on the wind, he had detested the six week break at the orphanage. Oh, he could try to spend most of his time cooped down at the local library, until Mrs Cole cottoned on to his escapades and forced him to spend the rest of his time locked away in his room. The summer holidays since he had entered Hogwarts were even worse, because he knew about magic, he knew how his classmates would be spending their vacation – dotted all over the world in various grand manors and country retreats – and so it made his suffering all the worse for it.

He'd had hope that this summer would be better. Over the school year he had sent a stream of letters out to various shops, outlining his goals and attributes, and how he could become an asset to them. He'd practically exhausted the Hogwarts owls with his endless correspondence, and swore that they went out of their way to avoid him when he visited the Owlery, their fragile wings flapping and leaving a cascade of feathers as they tore out of the tower.

He had managed to arrange a job down in Diagon Alley, however, having received a respectable number of responses from the various businesses. After much deliberation, he had settled on working as an assistant in a second-hand book shop. The pay wasn't brilliant, and the prospect of his classmates seeing him in such a demeaning position was frustrating, but it was worth it.

The owner of the shop was a cackling old witch, skin long since withered down to the bone and beady eyes sunken back into their sockets. When she laughed – which she often did, at Tom, for reasons he hadn't quite guessed yet – her solitary three yellow teeth dangled from the cavern of her mouth and Tom couldn't tear himself away from the sight, watching in gross fascination as the teeth threatened to fall out as she tilted her head back and chortled.

For all her faults, however, she let Tom read the books, free of charge. Whenever the shop was empty and derelict of customers – which was quite often, to be honest – Madam Medea would let Tom hole himself away in a darkened corner of the shop, curl up on a dusty armchair and devour whatever book had taken his fancy. And there were plenty of books that Tom was interested in.

During the months at Hogwarts, he'd started to delve deeper into the Dark Arts, having easily obtained a permission slip from his teachers to enter the forbidden section in the library. He'd taken to practicing in the Chamber of Secrets, which he had only recently discovered, and even now he could still feel the dark magic creeping under his skin and crawling over his bones. Tom couldn't stop if he wanted to - it truly was an addiction.

Luckily for him, the second-hand shop was filled with large mounds and toppling stacks of dusty books across a wide range of subjects, from deeply obscure and specific magics practiced by a handful of shaman in far-off countries, to handwritten journals of long-forgotten witches and wizards which were saturated with notes and experiments. In Tom's opinion, this shop was a goldmine – and he was getting paid to be there.

One day, however, Tom's content bubble burst, as it always must do in the summer holidays. Madam Medea had wagged one old, crooked finger at him and cackled.

"Doxies! Doxies in the carpet! Doxies in the chairs!"

Madam Medea was far too stubborn to hire any help to clean up the pests for her, and instead ruthlessly banished all the infested items in the shop, including his reading armchair. When he had brought up the issue with her, the witch jabbed a gnarled finger at a door Tom hadn't noticed before, which wasn't surprising, considering that the whole shop was basked in shadows.

"There's some seats out there. Don't bring them in, they'll ruin the atmosphere of the shop," Madam Medea barked at the teenager, and Tom secretly thought that the so-called atmosphere of the shop had been ruined the day the witch had decided that sunlight was a commodity, shrieking 'Elitist!' at Tom whenever he dared open the heavy drapes to let an inkling of natural light through.

So that was how Tom came to be perched on an old and cracked plastic decking chair, heavy stack of books by his feet and squinting at the words in a blood magic tome, the sharp sunlight battering down on the scruffy courtyard. It was a small area, no wider than three metres at most, with chipped grey paving stones covering the ground and tufts of green moss erupting between the cracks. The busy clatter and shouts of Diagon Alley rang over his head, but he was otherwise largely isolated from the hustle and bustle by walls on all sides.

He had cast a charm over the shop's doorway which would alert him to any customers. It was the only way he could get away with being absent at all other times – Madam Medea didn't care too much for the success of the shop, but Tom would be pushing the limit of her apathy if he didn't attend to the customers at all.

All in all, he was managing quite well, lazily reading the ninth chapter of the book, and he was just about to learn a most fascinating blood ritual involving the carcass of a recently slain Puffskein, when a door opened.

Not his door, but the one next to it – the door to the neighbouring shop which shared this courtyard for whatever reason. Tom watched in detached silence as a messy-haired teen clumsily stumbled out of the doorway, managing to trip over an uneven paving stone but right himself just before he and his towering ice-cream clattered to the floor. The youth beamed, plonking himself cross-legged onto the ground and started licking away at the ice-cream without so much as an introduction.