Extra Ordinary (Riddle Era)

Chapter 32

Tom watched Steele disappear behind the shelves and then he watched the darkness for a while longer, intending to count a full minute and instead simply staring and staring and losing track of the time, the darkness between the books an echo of the void inside his head. He didn't know how much time had passed, how long he held there, frozen, some silent battle of willpower raging in the blank expanse of his thoughts, but eventually he moved, the battle won. Or lost. And then, and only then, he let himself look back down at the page she had laid before him.

On its own, it wasn't much. It was an old book, a first edition of Nature's Nobility: A Wizarding Genealogy. It was a book he had opened only to skim. After all, the name Riddle wasn't a pureblood name and though Nature's Nobility claimed to deal with all wizarding families, it tended to define 'wizarding' the way the strictest of the pureblood families did.

In hindsight, it was a foolish thing not to have read it more closely. A foolish thing to have made assumptions about the heritage he knew next to nothing about. Because it was undeniable that staring up at him from a page was a name he had never seen anywhere else. A name that belonged to him.

Marvolo.

When Tom was younger and just starting to realize that people didn't just show up to claim orphans, especially not after seven years, he had asked the matron of the orphanage what she knew about his birth. It was a common enough question, he supposed, and Mrs. Cole had looked at him without surprise and had given that pitying frown he had hated for nearly as long as he'd been able to speak. And then she had told him everything anyone knew about his family: His mother had come in off the streets, ragged and dirty and desperate. She had given birth to him in the orphanage and refused to even hold him. She had offered no motherly affection, no touch or kindness before she died. She had given only a name. A name and two paltry clues by which to find out more.

His last name was Riddle. His first name was Tom, for his father, and his middle name was Marvolo. For his grandfather.

And Steele was right about one thing. Marvolo wasn't a common name. He had never, in all his searches of the records, both muggle and wizarding, come across any mention of anyone else named Marvolo. Until now.

Marvolo Gaunt.

Tom stared at it, feeling frozen for too many long seconds before he shook himself and traced the tree down, searching for something that mattered more than a name. And he found it. Sort of.

Marvolo was listed as having two children: Morphin and Merope.

Tom felt something inside him slip sideways, the displacement of an invisible crutch, an ever so slight tilting of the world that he couldn't possibly have put a name to.

Tom's father was named Tom Riddle, not Morphin Gaunt. Which meant...

His mother was a witch. His mother was magic.

And yet his mother had died, dirty and exhausted and without a thing in the world to call her own except a son she hadn't bothered to even touch, much less stay alive for.

Tom shoved himself back from the table, standing up suddenly, needing to move, to dislodge the thoughts in his head and fill the space with something else because that resentment was old. Very old. It had existed for as long as he could remember, had redoubled that day when Mrs. Cole, oblivious to the fuel she was adding to an invisible fire, had let slip that she'd wondered if his mother might have known she was sick because wasn't it the oddest thing, she hadn't even wanted to hold him.

She hadn't even wanted to hold him.

It should have meant nothing. Tom had spent a lifetime telling himself it meant nothing. She had been dying, why would she have wanted to hold a child, even if it was hers. Even if she was the only family that child would ever know.