Tommy-Boy [A Tom Riddle Story]

001 | Property of C. A. Redburn

LONDON, ENGLAND
1 SEPTEMBER, 1942

Tom's Point of View

Ah, London. The eternal motherfucker.

Rain poured down upon me with all the violence of a vengeful god. It tested both my patience and the tenacity of the hairstyle I'd spent all morning shaping. It took time and effort to look this good – it was hard work, you know, but the British weather didn't know and it didn't seem to care much, either.

I shoved a dripping lock of hair out of my face and walked on. My shoes sloshed around in an appetising mix of rainwater, mud and whatever else was being regurgitated from the city's sewers. I couldn't see the end of the street through the rain curtain. My skin was frozen. All was grey and grim around me.

I scanned the buildings I passed – all modernist, blocky, bricked abominations, insults to architecture and suckers of joy. Military adverts were plastered all over the city. Subtle lines like VICTORY NOW and BEAT THE JERRIES and FIGHT FOR YOUR KING seemed to jump at me from every wall in the neighbourhood, printed in bold neon on drawings of patriotic soldiers waving the flag around.

People sped about the streets in chaos, like a swarm of insects, ever agitated by some thing or another. Automobiles lined up at a stoplight. A chorus of honks, loud enough to wake Beethoven himself, sounded as the first in line took a second to move. Then came some shouting, then some cursing in what I assumed was supposed to be the English language, then they all sped away, spraying me with more of that delicious gutter juice.

London. A breeding nest for all the wretched evils of humanity.

London. The city I'd been born and raised in.

Since I'd left for Hogwarts, I hadn't spent more than two months a year here, but every time I was forced to come back, it felt like another eternity spent within the spiked gates of Hell. I was a wizard for most of the year – a popular, charming and intelligent young man, gifted in the art of magic and humble in his origins, with the world practically at his feet, waiting to be conquered.

But, whenever the summer holidays rolled back around, I had to shed my cloak of greatness, board that godawful train back to Satan's lair and be reminded of what I really was –

Tom Riddle, the filthy, common Mudblood.

To be fair, I didn't really know whether I was a Mudblood or not. It was a bit of a gamble, really. Having been an orphan for most of my life, I had no way to check with my parents and knew next to nothing of them.

My father, with whose name I'd been blessed, had vanished from the face of the earth even before my birth.

No Tom or Thomas or any other kind of Riddle could be found in any of the pure-blood ancestral records I'd researched, and I'd concluded that even if he had been a wizard, he couldn't have been a very important one, anyway, and I was better off telling people he was either dead or nonmagical.

Then there was my mother, of whom I only knew that she'd been the daughter of a man named Marvolo (from whom I'd gotten my middle name) and that she had died just moments after birthing and naming me, which – frankly – wasn't a very magical thing to do. And, though the orphanage nurses who'd met her never said it outright, rumour had it that I hadn't exactly gotten my looks from her.

So that was me – the product of some Muggle prat who was potentially dead and doubtlessly unaware of my existence and a hag who, out of all the people she could've gotten herself knocked up by, had chosen him, and out of all the places she could've given birth in, had chosen the rattiest Muggle orphanage there was in London, dooming her newly born son from the start.