Her Dark Artifice [t.r]

Chapter 19: Vice or Virtue

XIX

Yesterday

"Yes, come in," she said, hovered over copious amounts of paperwork, pen in-hand with ink smudged against her skin.

The door opened and Mrs Cole briefly looked up from her desk. She was the youngest out of all the matrons at Wool's, having started her employment at only nineteen years old in the winter of 1926. A previous blank expression metamorphosed into a quizzical look on Mrs Cole's small, pale face framed by a head of curly, honey-blonde hair.

"Tom," she said, incredulously, in that same shrill voice Tom had grown to detest since his infancy. A voice that rang through the walls of Wool's whenever the orphans stepped out of line, a voice he'd come to acquaint with certain admonishment. Punishment - whether it be corporeal or verbal abuse.

Tom was always being punished as a child at Wool's, and from a very young age, he'd learned to weaponise psychological warfare on the matrons.

If Tom couldn't beat people physically, he ought to have utilised exhaustive mental efforts as a means to assert dominance.

But in a twisted, sad sort of way, Sarah Cole was the closest thing to a mother Tom Riddle ever had. His own had died during childbirth, in this very building, an apparent sick-looking young girl no older than Mrs Cole was herself at the time, all those years ago.

A filthy muggle. His own mother.

Tom gently shut the door behind him.

"What are you doing here at this time?" Mrs Cole demanded. She had a frightened look in her wide, blue eyes as if she did not know what she ought to have anticipated. She was very pretty, and had an angelic, doll-like appearance. She didn't look like she was in her mid-thirties.

Tom had never come back early before; it was clear that he detested the orphanage he grew up in. He never fit in. He was always an outcast there. At Hogwarts, it was different. He instantly became someone else entirely. Why would he willingly have wanted to return to a place like Wool's where he was not respected, not revered, where he wielded no substantial nor formidable power, and was viewed like a monster by weak, pathetic, spineless younglings like Dennis and Amy?

Weak and spineless - everything Tom disliked in a person.

Mrs Cole had a framed brass photograph of her and her husband on her desk amidst an array of books, fountain pens, and documents. It caught the sunlight streaming through the narrow window, reflecting the weak, golden glare of the winter sun. The entire office had a very sterile feel to it, like a doctor's office, Tom thought, and the only things that made it seem human were Sarah Cole herself, the sunlight through the window, and the photograph of Sarah and her husband David Cole standing side-by-side in what appeared to be their wedding day wherein Sarah looked a lot more youthful and joyous -- less jaded and monotonous, the breathing personification of Wool's building itself.