Lord Voldemort's life was a disaster.
London, never a city able to cope with the heat, was sweltering that summer. By the middle of August, the orphanage was unbearable, its walls seeming to sweat, its air thick with the grimy stench of too many poor and worthless children crammed into one place.
He spent most of his time wandering the city, as was his habit, ignoring the hole in the sole of his loafers, and the old boys in the Home Guard who blustered around the place, and the easy women whose boyfriends were getting shot to ribbons in Europe and who were looking for a good time. He helped himself to treats from shop shelves and market stalls that Mrs Cole's ration book would never have had a chance of stretching to, relying on a charming smile to lull shopkeepers into a false sense of security and an impressive time over a hundred yards to make a quick exit if a policeman spotted him. He read his notes on Horcruxes, and got ahead on NEWT work, and got absolutely nothing for a perfect baker's dozen Outstandings on his OWLs because nobody at Wool's knew he was a wizard, they didn't have any money for celebration gifts anyway, and Mrs Cole was generally of the opinion that he was possessed by a demon. He would have said the same thing about her, if he spent enough time in her company to do so.
Instead, he left the orphanage each morning at the crack of dawn, returned for his meagre dinner, and then slithered off to his bedroom, sometimes allowing himself the treat of making Billy trip over his own feet and fall down the stairs on his way.
And he spent each day in walking.
And he mused on the question of failure.
There were no two ways about it. The Chamber of Secrets business had been a disaster. The petrified Mudbloods had been restored to full health without any lasting damage and everything in the school was right as rain again. He had spent the past year assuring the Knights that he was the greatest of his line to walk the halls of Hogwarts since Slytherin himself, that he would eradicate the filth which was staining the castle and watch it rise again to its former glory. And in the end the only thing he'd managed to kill were some roosters.
And even that had been harder than he was expecting.
He had been distracted. That was the problem. He had been distracted by Myrtle, and her talk of the school being closed, and the fear that had given him about having to go back to Wool's permanently, and the fact that she was truly abysmal at Transfiguration.
(Dumbledore's fault, he was sure.)
It was bizarre, he reprimanded himself constantly, that somebody so unprepossessing should be occupying such a colossal amount of his time.
She had some hidden depths, of course. She had a cruel streak he rather liked - she had very nearly sent Igor Bagman to his death when she hexed his broom, and had merely shrugged when he pointed this out. She listened to him adoringly, eyes gleaming in a devoted way he'd never managed to coax from the Knights of Walpurgis. She had become doggedly loyal from just the briefest burst of acknowledgement. She had introduced him to Witch Weekly - to which he had taken out a subscription in Abraxas' name - and its plethora of macabre potions recipes, one of which he had used to burn the tedious Mudblood who sat next to him in Herbology's skin clean off. She beamed at him from the Ravenclaw table every mealtime and was delighted to receive an imperious nod of the head in return, which he felt certain would be a mannerism he retained in his dark lord days. She continually brought little things to him - the magnificent chocolates she had foisted on him in October had been followed up with a steady supply of chocolate frogs and cauldron cakes, which he was growing quite fond of - and never seemed upset that he offered her nothing in return.
Well, except for attention. He was having to dispense huge amounts of that in order to keep her under control. She seemed to exist in a state of perpetual agony even he couldn't comprehend, and he'd grown up in a detestable slum surrounded by Muggle idiocy. The fact that her enemies had been so easy to eradicate didn't seem to have done anything to relieve her of her misery. Every other word she said was little more than tedious gossip, or whining about how unfair her life was, or wittering about her obnoxious Muggle family. He was sure that listening to it was causing his prodigious brain to atrophy.
He never sent her away, though. That was the odd thing. He had even worried once or twice that he quite liked listening to her inane chatter. That he might even have been waiting for her in the library.
But he dismissed that at once.
It would all change in September. He would see to it. He would get his plans for immortality and unassailable majesty back on track. Maybe he'd kill Myrtle, since she would be so clearly surplus to his requirements, and use her demise as the first death-defying fracturing of his soul.
No.
No, that would be... foolish.
She was useful enough. She knew all sorts of information about the castle and its inhabitants. He would never have got the idea to blame the Basilisk's attacks on an acromantula if her complaints about Hagrid's idiocy hadn't roused his attention enough to command Romulus to start tailing the enormous oaf. She asked him lots of interesting questions about magic and managed to keep up with a fair amount of it. Perhaps she could even be trained in the proper sort of stuff. The dark stuff.
She was a Mudblood, of course, which was unfortunate. But not insurmountable. So was he, by the standards of some of his friends' bloodlines, and it had ceased to matter the moment he commanded it to.
One's Muggle lineage can always be neutralised.
***
He didn't write to her.
She'd said he could, but he had no interest in wasting his time reading letters in her squat, childish handwriting, which would probably be full of the same interminable whinging as her conversation was. Perhaps she would be disappointed in him for his silence. Perhaps she would sulk like his friends' girlfriends - the only women he knew - did when they were late to romantic liaisons or the flowers they sent weren't gaudy enough. No matter. That would only make it easier to get rid of her when the new academic year began.
And if he'd memorised the address, what of it? He had an exceptional memory. The information had been retained by accident, it was his nature.
And if sometimes he passed by the street where she lived on his walks? Well, it meant nothing. It didn't take that long to walk from Spitalfields to Walthamstow. He certainly wasn't going out of his way to look at the red, square little house, with its blackout blinds and its bower of rambling roses around the door - such a far cry from the grey slab of the orphanage that it almost seemed like an illustration from a fairytale - in which Myrtle lurked, probably leafing dully through Dumbledore's tedious fourth-year preparatory materials, her hair - the nondescript brown of mice, or honey - a flyaway halo in the heat of the day.
***
His train would leave Euston at noon. Providing he made the connection at Preston on time, he would be in Little Hangleton just after six.
It was all planned. The prodigal son's homecoming. He would walk into his ancestral seat - probably some genteel pile which made Malfoy Manor look like a hovel - in the rolling green of the Lancashire countryside and be welcomed with open arms by a council of other Gaunts, all of whom would have the same dainty, aristocratic features which had always made him stand out against the heavy-set, pudding-faced whelps who otherwise got left at Wool's by dead women. And they would tell him how to open the Chamber with more success next time, and what his mother's name was, and how they would assist him in his plans to destroy Muggles and their psychiatrists and their orphanages and their priests until wizards ruled in majesty over the whole world.
He hadn't slept a wink the previous night. There was too much humming within him, too great a sense of purpose, of destiny. He had forced himself to remain in bed until half-past five, staring at the shadows lengthening and receding across the cracked plaster of his ceiling, before he had risen, dressed, and whirled out of the front door without telling a soul where he was going. Let them come to their own conclusions. He was never coming back.
He had not intended, of course, to find himself trudging all the way to Walthamstow, as London came alive in the early morning.
He just wanted a look at the house, he told himself, as he watched it sit, rosy in the new light. To remind him that he was leaving the Muggle world, and the cosy artifice of its domesticity, entirely behind today. That was all. There was no heaviness in his chest as he walked away from it, past a newsagent's, and straight into -
'Tom?'
'Good morning,' he said, taken aback at how he was taken aback to see her in Muggle clothes - a prim cotton sundress, tight on the waist, and white socks - with a copy of the Daily Mirror under her arm.
'What are you -?'
'I was just out for a walk.'
'I didn't know you lived round here!'
'I - well -'
'Have you eaten? Mum's just started breakfast. You'd be more than welcome.'
'I don't -'
Myrtle looked up at him cheerfully. 'It's fine. I know you've probably got house elves waiting at home with some magnificent spread. God, I think I'd kill to be able to eat like that everyday. You're so lucky. I've had six weeks of rationing and I'm going absolutely mad. I just want some real sausages. When I'm at Hogwarts -'
'I live in an orphanage,' he said, cursing himself for letting the words be wrenched from him against his will. It had been the mention of the ration book which had done it. It was driving him insane as well. 'In Spitalfields. There are definitely no house elves there.'
'What - I thought -'
'I'm not a pureblood,' said his idiot mouth, while his brain screamed at him to shut up. 'My mother was, but she died giving birth to me. My father was a Muggle. I have no idea what happened to him.'
There was an unwelcome wobble in Myrtle's lower lip. 'I'm sorry.'
'I didn't ask you to be.'
'I still am,' she said, resting one small hand on his arm. 'It must have been very hard.'
It had not been, once he discovered how to make people afraid of him.
'My grandma was brought up in a workhouse,' Myrtle said, in a solemn tone. 'She's an orphan too.'
'I see,' he said, not really caring at all.
Myrtle scratched her arm with stubby, bitten nails. 'The offer of breakfast still stands.'
'I'm supposed to be -'
But she was looking up at him - the watercolour-light of quarter-to-eight undulating across her glasses like technicolour across a projection screen - like a dog might look at its master, and he realised that he was hungry - starving even - and his feet hurt and he'd forgotten to bring a book to read on the train journey north and what if the Gaunts threw him out because of who his father was and -
'A cup of tea couldn't hurt,' he heard himself choke out.
Myrtle beamed at him.
***
Lord Voldemort was having a psychotic episode.
He was hallucinating. He had to be.
That was the only explanation for it. He was experiencing some incredibly realistic delusion, complete with smell and taste and sound, which was rotting his brain. Maybe they'd carted him off to Bedlam. Maybe he was still in the orphanage, rocking backwards and forwards, staring at the white-washed walls utterly convinced that they were the soft cream colour of the Warrens' front room while Mrs Cole rolled her eyes and said 'I told you so' to the doctor.
Because, if he hadn't gone mad, then he would have to admit that he was having a pleasant time with a group of Muggles.
And that would be insane.
The Warrens were horrifying in their ordinariness, everything he stood against. The father had some contemptible Muggle trade and kept wicket for a local team and spent his evenings in the Home Guard. The mother made her own clothes and followed left-wing politics. There were photos - unmoving - of a boy-in-uniform with the plump countenance they all shared, grinning from the mantlepiece - some older brother, whose name Lord Voldemort did not care to remember, who was currently having a good go at getting himself ripped to shreds in Malaya. They had an allotment, and a cat, and liked to have a family sing-song around the piano, and went to some inoffensive Protestant church on Sundays.
And they loved their daughter.
He had not had to peer long into Mr Warren's - behind the same moleish spectacles as Myrtle's - or Mrs Warren's - the same tepid hazel-green as her daughter's - eyes to see it. Their memories - of Myrtle making objects fly or clicking her fingers and making the roses round the door come into bloom - swirled into the air with only the gentlest press of Legilimency, and with them a whole pantheon of emotions he had not expected to find in Muggles' heads. The Warrens were proud that Myrtle was a witch, which was idiotic, since the fact of her magic gave her extraordinary power over them and they would one day be her slaves. They were excited to see her become more confident as she grew up. They were worried that she was lonely at Hogwarts. They were glad that she had met him, stupidly considering him to be all sorts of tiresome things, like 'sensible', 'intelligent', and - worst of all - 'handsome.'
They were never afraid of Myrtle, or angry at her for fits of accidental magic, or convinced there was something wrong with her. There had never been trips to the doctor or the confessional, or nights with supper withheld over some ridiculous infraction. There was none of the buzz which constantly assailed him in the orphanage, of people being afraid of him, or hating him, or thinking him ridiculous, or wishing his childhood bouts of scarlet fever had finished him off. They were just... nice.
He had absolutely no idea how to react to them.
'Myrtle says your favourite subject is Defence, Tom,' said Mr Warren, fiddling with the wireless while Mrs Warren bustled around with a teapot. 'That sounds eminently sensible to me, given the current state of the world, although of course I don't know anything about the magic side. I can tell you've got a good head on your shoulders though.'
There was not another man alive who would ever express such an opinion.
'Er - right,' said Lord Voldemort, for want of anything else to say.
'Bloody thing's borked again. Give me a hand with the screwdriver, would you, Tom?'
It was apparent that he couldn't refuse, even though he'd never been one for manual labour. He briefly considered just using magic. At least that way he'd be arrested and could leave the house. Plus, he could test his theory that he'd be able to break out of Azkaban...
But Myrtle smiled adoringly at him from the other end of the sofa and he stood up, passing his teacup to be clutched in her pudgy cherub's hands. Her entire complexion was covered in freckles, like the cinnamon sprinkle on the top of a rice pudding.
He'd never noticed that before
***
Tom Marvolo Riddle never caught his train.
Exhausted and confused after his morning with the Warrens, he went back to the orphanage in a daze and spent the afternoon being fussed over by Mrs Cole, who assumed he had caught a chill. The ticket office at Euston wouldn't give him a refund, and he had no money to make the journey north again that summer. He told himself that he'd do it the following year. For reasons we shall discover, he would not.
For the villagers of Little Hangleton, it was just a normal August day. The butcher and the baker went to work as normal, the servants in the Riddle House cleaned and gossiped, Frank Bryce spread manure on the rose beds, the flowers' perfume hung, heavy and redolent, around the fine manor house on the hill.
Thomas Fitzwilliam Riddle, who had been something of a recluse since he returned home at the age of twenty-one, having broken the enchantment which had enslaved him, spent the day reading in the morning room. The child he had left behind never once occupied his thoughts; but that was only to be expected, given the circumstances of his conception.
In the late afternoon, Tom walked in the gardens, stopping to chat to Frank as he manoeuvred some sweet peas around a metal frame with weatherbeaten fingers. It would take several more years for him to realise why he was so fond of Frank and why Frank was so devoted to him, and to take that gardener's hand in his long, thin one. It would take several more years after that for the British government to declare their love, as tender as a sapling, to be legal. But Tom and Frank were prepared to wait. By July of 1994, as a boy called Harry Potter slept uncomplicatedly in his bed in Godric's Hollow, Tom and Frank had spent the better part of half a century curled up alongside each other, the wounds of war and witchcraft healed.
Over the hill from the Riddle House, Morfin Gaunt spent his day with a bottle of firewhisky, muttering darkly about his sister and staring at his father's black-stoned ring. Undistracted by a mysterious visitor as the Riddles' dinner was being cleared away, he fell asleep right there on the table, knocking his candle over as he did so. He and his ring were burned to cinders as the shack went up around them.
All was well.