“Operation Pied Piper”

Summary: Young Tom Riddle encounters the horrors of the Blitz and, in this AU, is saved from it by Operation Pied Piper.

A/N: This story is not entirely accurate, historically speaking. It is an AU. In reality, the Blitz did not start so early and Tom Riddle was not likely to have been evacuated form London.

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created and owned by JK Rowling, various publishers including but not limited to Bloomsbury Books, Scholastic Books and Raincoast Books, and Warner Bros., Inc. No money is being made and no copyright or trademark infringement is intended.

/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/

“You can’t make me go back. I’ll die there,” Tom pleaded.

“Now, now, Mr. Riddle. There’s no need to be melodramatic,” Dumbledore said kindly.

Tom turned to the Transfiguration teacher with dismay. He didn’t know why this man was here, only that he would never do Tom any favors. Having done nothing to Professor Dumbledore in his two years at Hogwarts, Tom couldn’t understand why that was, but he knew that patronizing tone all too well; every prospective parent that came to the orphanage used it when they told him they wouldn’t be choosing him but they just knew that he would find the right parents for him any day now and he shouldn’t give up hope. Yeah, right. Tom thought sarcastically. He turned his gaze back to Headmaster Dippet.

“Please,” he begged. He hated begging, but was prepared to demean himself to avoid London with its planes overhead shooting and the orphanage with the shortages and rationing adding to the cruelty of life for its children.

Headmaster Dippet had the gall to look at Professor Dumbledore before answering.

“I don’t think we can allow it, Tom. I’m sorry. You’ll have to go home for the summer just like the other students,” the Headmaster said.

“The other students aren’t going home to cities with air raids every night! The Ravenclaws and Hufflepuffs were invited to the country estates of their founder’s heirs to get them out of danger. They’ll be safe behind ancient wards.”

“What a pity the Slytherin heir hasn’t made such an offer,” Dumbledore said.

“Have Sir and Lady Flint invited any Gryffindors?” Dippet asked Dumbledore curiously.

Dumbledore shook his head in the negative.

“I can’t go back to London! Even the Ministry left. St. Mungo’s too!” Tom insisted.

“Students can’t stay here over the summer,” Dippet said, sounding apologetic.

“Don’t you have any friends that you can visit for the summer, Tom?” Dumbledore asked.

Tom glared at him. “You know full well that I’m not welcome in my friends’ homes. They’re parents don’t associate with mudbloods like me.”

“Well perhaps friends in other houses?” Dumbledore asked.

Tom scowled at him and gave up, turning back to Headmaster Dippet.

“Please, Headmaster. With rationing, I won’t get hardly anything to eat. There are air raids every few nights. People are dying.”

Dippet seemed to waiver and may have been about to agree but Dumbledore stood.

“That’s enough, Mr. Riddle. We cannot allow you to stay here and if you have made no arrangements for yourself, there is nothing we can do but send you home on the Hogwarts Express tomorrow.”

Tom’s face twisted into anger. “You’re going to send me out to die just because I’m not one of your precious Gryffindors?” he accused.

“That was uncalled for, Tom,” Headmaster Dippet interrupted. “I think it’s time you return to your Common Room.”

Dumbledore held the office door open while Tom engaged in some silent pleading with the Headmaster.

Dippet inclined his head towards the door.

Tom felt his hope drain away. Before he realized it, Dumbledore had taken him by the shoulder and led out of the office. The door was shut in Tom’s face, leaving him in the dark corridor alone. He sank to the floor. He didn’t know what to do.

The men inside the office started talking again. Tom could just make out what they said through the door.

“You know I respect your opinion Albus, but perhaps we should make other arrangements for Tom,” Dippet said.

“It isn’t our job. Despite what Horace may think, we cannot treat any student as special. Mr. Riddle should have made his own arrangements before now.”

“He’s a twelve year old boy. We don’t expect anyone that young to handle such serious matters as this,” Dippet argued.

“No. We expect parents and guardians to do so. Riddle has guardians who are well experienced in caring for children. I’m sure the muggles will have made arrangements to keep him safe.”

“I don’t trust them with our kind, Albus. Besides, Tom is one of our most promising students –”

“And your personal favorite,” Dumbledore interrupted.

“Oh, come off it, man. You play favorites with your Gryffindors as if they could do no wrong, especially when they’re up against the Slytherins.”

Dumbledore’s reply was cold. “Such matters aside, you chose me to be your Deputy and my opinion should count for something more than Horace Slughorn’s.”

Dippet sounded decidedly placating when he answered. “It does, Albus, it does. There’s no need to get angry. We already sent the boy away empty-handed.”

Tom was shaking with anger. He hated Dumbledore. He pulled himself up and stalked back to the dungeons raging mad.

/-/-/-/-/-/-

Tom sat, silent and still, staring out the window of the Hogwarts Express as it raced towards London. His classmates in the compartment with him ignored his presence completely as they played Gobstones. At some point, though, they must have switched to Exploding Snap because suddenly Tom was jerked from his stupor by the sound of the cards exploding.

“Stupid children!” he shrieked, lunging at them. “Put those away! Some of us are going home to air raids. Is it too much to ask for one last hour without explosions!?”

The children all had shocked and startled looks. Tom was frightening them. His ‘cross me and I’ll hurt you’ expression even had the youngest girl in the bunch shaking.

“Sorry,” they muttered as they cleaned up the game. It was quiet for a while after that.

Tom returned to his stupor, feeling somewhat better and not really knowing why.

Too soon, the train bumped and screeched to a stop at King’s Cross. Tom got out and hauled his battered, used trunk down with him. There was no one here to meet him: not on the magical side of the platform nor on the muggle side. He purposefully ignored the children being hugged by their parents, the fathers bending to take the heavy trunks from their sons, the mothers fussing proudly over their daughters. Tom walked as quickly as he could away from the Hogwarts crowd and hurried to another platform to catch a train to Vauxhall. He was alone: abandoned to the whims of life in the orphanage again. And this time it would be worse. He had read the newspapers and listen to the news on the Wizarding Wireless Network, both muggle and magical reports. He knew that rationing would make small meals smaller, clothing allotments less frequent, and outings nearly non-existent. Last August, when a fighter had crashed into an apothecary invisible to muggles and blown the whole block including the primary school sky-high, the government had announced that children would have to be evacuated from big cities. That was Tom’s only hope and yet, there was little chance he’d be sent to the countryside. Orphans weren’t anyone’s priority. The orphanage had only been given money to get about half its children out and billeted in the countryside but Tom was sure to be the last one out. The workers at the orphanage had told him that. He spent less than 3 months with them now that he had started boarding school. The available funds would go to getting children out who had no where to go, who would be in the line of fire year-round.

The Vauxhall train pulled in to the station and Tom again wrestled to get his trunk off. There was no one here to meet him at this station either. He began the walk to the orphanage, through eerily quiet streets, past people who hurried from home to work or school and hurried back again when once they would have stopped and talked, by craters where buildings once stood. This was a war zone and Tom should not have been here. He absently began tying the peculiar, one-handed, single string knots in the bits of twine that he had in a pocket of every pair of pants he owned because he had put them there for just this purpose. He walked on.

“Well there you are, boy,” the elderly matron called from the orphanage door as Tom came down the street. “Hurry up or you’ll miss supper.”

Tom hurried. At five ‘til five, he had only five minutes to get his trunk to whatever room they had assigned him this summer, clean himself up, and report to the dining hall or he would be going hungry.

Four and a half minutes later, Tom stood, slightly out of breath, at the 12 year olds’ dining table. He had put his trunk in the assigned room only to find that, despite there being six beds, he had had only one roommate. Dinner was served before Tom even realized it. That might have had something to do with the fact that his meal was nothing like what he was used to getting at Hogwarts, even a Hogwarts affected by rationing. There would be no occasional powdered eggs and certainly no fresh eggs on full and new moon days here since the orphanage did not have the school’s chickens. There would be fewer green vegetables like Hogwarts got from their kitchen gardens. There would be no meat from the market or from the sheep and poultry that Hogwarts had bought and set to graze on the grounds. No. Tonight’s meal was watery potato and leek soup with an unfortunate emphasis on the last of the strongly flavored overwintering leeks. The other children seemed impressed and that did little to settle Tom’s anger at being stuck here all summer.

After supper, Tom returned to his room. His roommate went outside to play among the rows of the orphanage’s backyard vegetable garden so Tom took the opportunity to do school work. He rarely had the chance when the rooms were full because he wasn’t about to let the muggles know that magic was real. They wouldn’t believe him anyways. He had tried once, when he’d been caught with his Charms homework but it had only resulted in his being teased mercilessly all of last summer. The boys thought he was stupid to believe that fairy tales could be real and even stupider to study them in school instead of learning what he’d need to know to get a job in a factory or mill so he wouldn’t be homeless when the orphanage kicked him out like they did everyone at the age of 18.

Soon the dwindling light put an end to Tom’s homework and the other children’s play. All throughout the orphanage, children put on nightclothes and cycled through the toilets brushing their teeth and relieving themselves. Tom noticed that the children had developed some new habits since he had last been here. They seemed almost to have a checklist of things they wanted to touch before lights out; shoes, blankets, good luck charms, and crucifixes seemed the most common. Tom absently glanced around at his things. His worn boots were on the floor beside his bed like always. He had no good luck charms and his only blanket he would sleep under. His wand was tucked under his pillow as usual. He wondered why his roommate seemed too obsessed with things being in their place. He hadn’t been that way last summer. He watched the boy walk from window to window, checking every blackout curtain, then they both lay in their beds and the other boy sighed and shut off the lights.

/-/-/-/-/-/

Tom was startled awake as the air raid siren blared. It was pitch black. He could here his roommate rushing about grabbing things and hopping on one foot and then the other as he stuffed his feet into shoes. Tom was right behind him, blanket in one hand and wand in the other, boots flopping unlaced around his ankles, his heart racing and his breathing fast and shallow. Children raced through the corridor and down the stairs. Tom followed them down to the basement. He had done air raid drills the previous summer but those had been during the day time. Now he was struggling to see in the dark, led only by dim lamplight.

The basement and stairs had no permanent lighting. There were tiny windows along the ceiling but those were blacked out. The children and staff hurried to huddle on old mattresses lying around the floor. They all seemed to have their place. Tom threw himself onto an empty on in the farthest corner from the windows. His heart was still racing and he couldn’t catch his breath. He nervously ran a shaking hand over the wood of his wand and wrapped the blanket tightly around his shoulders. The basement was cold and damp. It smelled of mildew. In the dark, it was frightening. The noises of the children sniffling and scratching, whispering and crying mixed with the distant sound of plane engines. Explosions could be heard in the distance. Tom flinched with each one. When the explosions finally stopped and the engine noises faded, Tom waited with baited breath for the all-clear siren. It was an enormous relief when, an hour later, it sounded and everyone filed upstairs and shuffled back to bed for the couple of hours that remained of their night.