Chapter Text
1933
The Benson girl is not very pretty, Mrs. Cole reflects, poking her head out of the office to peer at her. She sits on a rickety chair in the dim hall, legs dangling above the floor. She has a head of downy straw blonde hair gathered into a bedraggled braid, and there are stains on her coat and a hole in her faded stockings. She studies the grain of the hardwood floor intently, dust motes dancing in the air around her head. She puffs her cheeks out and blows into the air, the hunches her shoulders when she feels someone watching her.
Little Amy Benson can be no older than five or six, but when she glances up at Mrs. Cole she feels a distinctive prickle on the back of her neck. She has felt it many times before, just not like this. The feeling of wrongness persists until the girl averts her gaze. She has dull blue eyes, as if they were painted on her long ago. Her entire face gives off the impression of a slightly battered babydoll. Her skin has a sallow tint to it and mouth is slightly too large for her face, even puckered in a familiar childish grimace.
“They’ve gone, then,” Miss Patrick says, coming round the corner. She folds her arms just under her chest and studies the Benson girl. “Shame, it is. She seems a sweet thing.”
“It can’t be helped,” Mrs. Cole shakes off any lingering unease in favor of a return to her usual briskness. “Show the girl to her room, why don’t you, while I finish up this report.” She steps back into the office, closing the door firmly behind her.
Miss Patrick senses nothing peculiar about the girl, whom she grasps firmly by her slightly clammy hand and leads up a flight of stairs and down a noisy corridor. Two older boys race past, ignoring her bark for them to stop running, and there is the faint wail of an infant. Miss Patrick pushes open a door at the end of the hall and ushers the girl inside the small, cramped room. “Aren’t you lucky,” she says with forced jubilance, “you’ll have your very own room…” She struggles to recall the child’s name beyond ‘Benson’.
“Emily,” she settles on with a quick smile of reassurance, setting the girl’s small case of things down on the plain cot. “We’ll send someone up with some bed sheets and a pillow in a bit. You just unpack your things like a good girl, alright?”
“Amy,” the girl says, and Miss Patrick pauses in the doorway. “My name is Amy.”
“Short for Amelia?” Miss Patrick tries to cover up her momentary embarrassment, although children’s names get mixed up all the time, and there’s already two Emily’s here, so she’ll just have to get used to it.
“No,” says Amy Benson, with a slightly affronted look. “Just Amy.”
“That’s a shame,” Miss Patrick titters. “Amelia would be such a pretty name, don’t you think? But Amy’s lovely as well. Now, go and get settled, dear. We’ll have dinner in a little while.” Amy, she thinks as she goes. It does seem to suit her. A little name for such a little girl. Amelia would be too proper for her. She seems rather the Amy sort.
Amy Benson stands in a small, empty room and stamps one foot, then the other, on the ground. She wants to flail and pummel something. There is too much rage for her small body to hold. She wants to go home. She wants a warm house and soft toys and something sweet to eat. Now she throws her tantrum in silence, mouth opening and shutting like a fish, storming around the room, bumping into the cot and chair and desk. She clambers up onto the windowsill and slams her hands against the window. It shudders, then swings open.
Cold spring air rushes in, and Amy recoils. It has only just stopped raining outside. Mist pools in the narrow courtyard below. The smell of wet stone and leaves permeates.
Amy scrambles down from the desk, somewhat appeased, and then something rattles across the floor outside and rolls to a stop, lodged under her door. She drops down to her bony knees, ignoring the dull pain from the floor, and crawls forward to examine it. A scarlet marble glints in the waning late afternoon light, caught within the door frame. She prods at it with a finger, and it pops out and rolls into her waiting palm as if beckoned.
Her door clicks open and nearly clips her in the face. It could be a sudden draft, but Amy is doubtful. Her fist clenches shut around the marble. It is pretty. She could look at it for hours, the way it catches the light. It’s almost like a sweet. Want curls up in her chest like a cat. She thinks she’ll keep it. A gift from the big grey orphanage, just to her.
“That’s mine,” comes a thin, cold voice, and she sees the boy across the hall for the first time.
His room is directly across from hers. He is pretty, she thinks, like a drawing from a book. The lines of his face are smooth and pale. His hair is dark and neatly parted. He holds himself very rigidly, like a miniature soldier or a wind-up toy. “That’s mine,” he repeats, sharply.
“It was under my door,” she says, pressing her fist against her chest. Her heart swells underneath it. She wants it all the more now, as if he is an extension of Wool’s solid stone walls, come to reclaim her prize. She deserves it. She has been so good today. She did not cry once, not in the hackney, not on the doorstep, not in the hall. She is still not crying; her eyes are dry. She blinks heavily as if to prove it.
“I dropped it,” says the cold grey boy, taking a brief step forward. He raises his chin ever higher; it was already at an imperious tilt. “Give it to me.”
Amy wrinkles her nose as if to refuse, but starts to relent. If she does not give it back he might tell Mrs. Cole or Miss Patrick. Or worse, the other children, that she is a greedy little snatcher of toys, and then no one will want to play. And she will be even more miserable than she already is. Her clenched fist relaxes slightly and she steps forward to give it to him. But she resents it all the same. She got her hopes up. It is such a pretty little thing. She just wants it, is all. She’s not quite sure why it matters so much. She just wanted something all her own.
She presses it bitterly into his impatiently outstretched palm, and the glass marble sizzles, pops, and melts into his hand. He yelps, she gapes, and drops of molten glass spatter across the floor and both their clothes. He wrenches his hand away from her, clutching it, and in between the pain and shock on his face she sees fury come waltzing in. She braces for a blow; he is not much bigger than her, but he seems the sort to make the most of what he’s got, which is likely a stinging hand.
Instead she watches in awe as the bright pink purn on his white hand shrivels itself up into a much smaller mark, as if days have gone by in the span of seconds. “How did you do that?” he demands, and although his voice trembles with anger, she can see a newfound wariness in his eyes. He is thinking now. He is frightened of her, or almost there.
Amy has never frightened anyone before. She is proud that this severe boy whose hand she melted glass on was the first. She thinks he is probably used to the sensation.
“I just did,” she says simply, and then pouts. “But now the marble’s all gone.”
“You’re not supposed to be able to do that,” the boy says, as if the marble is now the least of his concerns. His voice takes on an unfamiliar, eager lilt. “You don’t know how. Neither do I. I never do, it just happens. What else can you do?”
Amy chews on her lower lip thoughtfully, then gives a lackadaisical shrug. “I dunno.”
He grabs her hand, and the burn scar rasps against her palm. “You didn’t burn yourself, just me,” he sounds almost as if he were praising her. “You’re good.” His grip tightens. “Not as good as me.”
Her door slams shut behind her, making her jump. He drops her hand. “What’s your name?”
“What’s yours?” Amy presses, taking on a more stubborn stance. She dislikes him for dropping her hand. She admires him for not crying. The burn may have faded but his hand must still hurt something awful. His eyes are as dry as hers, and significantly sharper. They gleam now, like a freshly polished floor.
“Tom Riddle,” he says quickly and as if he’s in a hurry to get past it, pushing it aside in the street. “Now yours.”
“Amy Benson,” Amy smiles, hoping to coax one out of him, curious what a smile might look like on a porcelain face.
Tom Riddle does not smile. “Follow me,” he says instead, turning on his heel, and heading for the stairs.
Amy draws back, not out of timidity but pragmatism. “Will they be angry if I go?”
“You won’t get in trouble with me,” he says, already clicking down the stairs. She thinks he is lying, at least a little, but her curiosity overrules her sense, and she follows him anyway.
He leads her down the winding staircase and through a back corridor behind what she thinks is the kitchen, from the smell. Then they come to a door, which he stands up on his tiptoes to unlatch, and pushes open. “You have to hold doors for girls,” she reminds him as he strides ahead.
He ignores her, and she steps out into the small garden. Most of the plants are shriveled and dead from the winter. Tom walks up to one of the garden boxes, and crouches down beside it. He whispers something for a few moments, and then pushes up his sleeve, laying his skinny arm down flat in the wet earth. A small snake noses its way up from the dirt and coils up his arm quite comfortably. Tom hisses something to it and then turns to her, gaze expectant.
“Say something.”
“Hello,” says Amy.
He scowls. “No. Talk to it. It’ll talk back.”
“Hello, Mr. Snake,” she tries again, and he exhales sharply through his nostrils.
“Like this.” He hisses one smooth syllable at the snake, who winds further up his arm and hisses gently in response. “It’s a she,” he adds, almost defensively.
Amy tries a hiss, but it sounds trite and shallow in comparison. The snake doesn’t so much as glance her way. Tom shrinks slightly in annoyance and disappointment, and lets the snake slither back down his arm and into the dirt.
“You can’t do it,” he says. “But you can do some things.” He glances around wildly, and then his flat gaze settles on something. He curls his fingers at it once, then twice, and as if blown by the wind, a stick comes drifting through the air and into his outstretched hand.
“Take it from me,” he says.
Amy steps towards him.
“Stupid,” Tom snaps, “with your mind.”
“I’m not stupid!” Amy flushes cherry red, has half a mind to storm back inside and not speak to him again. He’s strange and queer, this Tom Riddle, whispering to snakes and summoning sticks and making his skin grow back over his burns. “You’re mean,” she adds heatedly.
He glowers, but then appears to restrain himself. “Sorry,” he says, “Now just do it.”
“You’re not sorry,” she mutters, but she stares at the stick, imagines it’s something pretty, imagines she wants it until she does, thinks about how angry and unsettled he’s made her and she reaches out her hand and-
The stick tugs itself feebly against his grip, then sags back in dismay.
“You’re not as strong as me,” Tom sounds pleased, as if he’s glad.
“I didn’t want it that much,” she retorts. He tosses the stick aside like it’s nothing, regards her with what could almost be a half-smile.
“But no one else can do even that much,” he says, more to himself than to her. “You’re different. Like me.”
“Different how?” she frowns.
“No one else can do what I do,” he says, a note of smugness creeping in. “I can make things come to me, and go away from me. I can make snakes listen to me. I can do lots of things no one else can.”
“Did you ever melt a marble?” Amy asks, and he frowns, then admits sullenly, “No. Not yet. I will, though.”
“I’m better than you at that,” she crows, and he scowls, and the stick flings itself back up from the ground at her.
It pauses a foot from her face and bends itself backwards, cracking neatly into two halves, which drop to the ground at her feet.
Tom Riddle flinches, and she sees fear go skittering across his face.
“D’you have any more marbles?” Amy asks innocently.
At dinner they sit across from one another at the end of the table, and on the floor beneath them a marble rolls back and forth between their feet in a mock tug of war, until Tom bends her spoon backwards as she eats, splattering soup across her face, and wins. Amy shrieks, and his glass of milk shatters, sending the room into shocked silence.
At the other end of the table, Mrs. Cole feels a bit sick. She cannot quite place the feeling, but the thought, God, not another one, does cross her mind. What ‘one’ is, she could not tell you. Only that as she stares down the length of the table to watch the Riddle boy crunch glass underfoot and the Benson girl wipe soup off her face, a marble comes rolling out across the floor.