Summary: In which Tom Riddle never went to Hogwarts. Instead, he learned to grow up and have fun.

Rating: K+

Characters: Tom Riddle, Skull de Mort

Tags: gen, slice of life, humor, parody

Disclaimer: Characters are property of J. K. Rowling and Amano Akira

When he was younger, he had been a naughty boy.

He hated being picked on; he hated being weak. (He still did!)

He told himself that he would get them back one day. He swore on it; it wasn't right, what they did to him.

But as he grew, he realized that, unfortunately, that was the course of the way things were; children were the cruelest of creatures, especially as they did not understand how much pain they could cause. So he never struck back. He couldn't bring himself to do so; not when they didn't understand.

Into his teenage years, the harassment stopped. At least, openly so. From (most of) the males. On the other hand, the females stepped up their game.

He never thought that his teenage life would be worse than when he was a child.

They began to corner him at every turn. Ladies from the factories began to whisper about him; the tailors and seamstresses smiled at him as he walked into their doors. The librarian's daughter flushed riper than an apple every time he brought his books to be checked out or in.

Even the girls from the orphanage who used to curse him and throw rocks or laugh at him as the other kids poked at him were now, instead, knocking on his door or asking him to sit by their side at the orphanage's food table.

He, invariably, shuddered and broke away from those crowds at all costs.

In his panic, he chose to dive into bushes and run into the woods around the orphanage or blend into a crowd just long enough to skip into a building. Usually a barn, if possible.

It was just a constant cycle; rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat.

One day, the young boy stumbled into something he hadn't seen very often in his little shell of suburbia: a circus, with its colours flashy and dazzling, a distant paste of palettes that clashed with his small-town world and the garish greys of his time.

He poked his head in and dug into his pocket for the ticket fee, though he grumbled about the cost - factory-boys like him barely had time off, and they didn't make too much. It had better be worth it, he told himself as he plucked his body into a seat.

Unfortunately, it took only a few acts into the show for him to realize that he was bored. Definitely, most definitely, bored. A lot of these were tricks of intrigue, sure; but the more he thought about it, once someone learned the trick, would the magic still exist?

It upset him to think that way because he felt sorry that he thought the circus was much more exciting than being a factory worker. He was about to leave, but the sound of a roar, a mechanical one, broke through the air and his head unwillingly whipped around. His legs carried him back to the front row, and he stared, mesmerized.

The dance of death lay before his eyes, and he could scarcely believe what he was seeing. He couldn't believe his ears, either. The mad laughter, the cacophony of roars, the riot of the crowd; it was everything he had never known.

And all of a sudden, Tom Riddle knew what his future was going to be.