Chapter Text
It had started when Tom was out collecting blackberries - one for him, one for the pail, one for him, one for the pail. Aunt Charlotte had promised a pie if he could bring home enough. Then a man was suddenly there. A man with one blue and one brown eye.
"Give me the ring," he said. "The one your mother left you."
Tom stepped back instinctively. He had only one thing from the mother who had died in childbirth - a ring that he wore around his neck, being too large for his small fingers.
(He'd do anything to go back to that moment and just give the ring to the man. Maybe then, the man wouldn't have used a red light on Tom that made him scream, and if Tom hadn't screamed, then Betty wouldn't have come running.)
"Don't you dare hurt Tom!" He'd have been appalled to have been rescued by his 12 year old foster sister in most circumstances, but the man had just pointed a stick at him, sending red light at him that that had hurt worse than the time he'd broken his arm. Worse than the time the baby goat had butted him between his legs. Worse than when he'd met his real father and realised the man didn't want him.
The Rileys, cousins of the Riddles, might not want him either, but they kept him as a favour to the Riddles. He thought the Riddles probably paid them to do it, at least until it was time for him to go to boarding school.
The only person in the world who had wanted him was Betty Riley, his foster sister. She had decided, at two years old, that the new baby in the household was to be hers, and ever since then, she had been his caretaker, his best friend, and his partner in crime.
When she'd heard him screaming, she'd showed up and handled it. She'd punched the man hard, and the red light and the pain had stopped. Betty was just reaching the age where she wasn't supposed to know how to do things like throw a punch, but she was still a farm girl, athletic and strong.
"Go away, muggle, this doesn't concern you," the man said.
She stood between him and Tom. "Leave my little brother alone!"
The man with strange eyes gave her a wicked smile. "You're lying. Tom doesn't have any siblings. His mother died in childbirth and his father is ashamed of him."
"Well you're wrong, Mister. He's my brother, and if you want to hurt him, you have to get through me!"
Tom had always known his foster sister (sister - after today he'd always say sister, without qualification…) was brave. He'd seen her in scraps before. But he'd never seen her face down a full grown man intent on murder with utter fearlessness.
The man said something that didn't make sense in any language Tom knew, and a green light came out of his wand. And then Betty was… she couldn't be dead. Not dead.
Tom took the ring - the only thing he'd inherited from his mother, that he wore on a leather string around his neck - out from under his shirt and offered it up. "Fix what you did to Betty and you can have it," he said, his voice trembling.
"Was that so hard?" the man said, as he snatched the ring. Then he flashed his stick.
The green light came out again, and for a moment everything went black.
When he woke up, the man was gone. Just gone. But his clothes were there. The stick was there.
Betty was there.
Dead.
Tom took his ring back from where it had fallen. He hated it. He wished he had just given it to the man when he had demanded it. But Betty had died for that ring. So he had to keep it.
He took the man's stick too. He considered breaking it in half, but then thought he might be able to learn how to make the red light and the green light. If he could, he wanted to make that man hurt for a long time before he made him dead.
Tom knew he needed to tell someone that Betty was dead. But he couldn't leave her.
Tom Riddle was numb when more people in strange clothes appeared, and explained to him that he was a wizard. No, more than a wizard, he was the Boy-Who-Lived, who had stopped Gellert Grindelwald. Who had survived his killing curse. He held onto the ring that the wizard had wanted and wished he had just handed it over.
"Shame about the muggle girl," the man said. He was wearing some sort of outlandish dress. "We'll have to obliviate her family."
Tom didn't know what the word 'obliviate' was exactly, but he took Latin in school. "You're going to use magic to erase her?" he asked. He'd learned just enough in the last couple of hours. Enough to know that they thought he had power, because they thought he'd done something to stop a bad wizard. He straightened his spine, lifted his chin, and practiced the cold voice that his grandfather, the squire, used, when he was displeased. "Don't you dare make anyone forget my sister! She saved my life!"
He got his way in the end. No one forgot Betty. They made it look like she'd had a bee sting, and there was a large funeral, where the pastor spoke of God needing a new angel. Tom sat with his Riddle grandparents, and they told the Rileys they'd be sending Tom away to school early.
His grandfather took him to his study for a serious talk. "Witchcraft is a sin. If you choose to go with those people, you will never be welcome in this house again."
Tom raised his chin. "I've never been welcome in this house, Sir."
So many people in the wizarding world wanted to adopt the Boy Who Lived that they did something that probably made sense in fairy land - they asked the prospective parents to put on a tatty old hat, then finally asked Tom to put it on. After the hat spoke the names of his new foster parents (magic sticks, green death light, talking hats, stupid clothes... Tom was keeping a list...) he went home with Mr and Mrs Prewett and met his new foster sister. At least Muriel was nothing like Betty. She was the same age as Tom, scrawny, ginger, and was rarely seen without a book. She was his main source of information about the wizarding world, and he soon decided that there was room in his heart for a second sister.