They didn't know what happened, only that the last thing they'd remembered was that the sun had been setting, and now it was rising. Looking at each-other they found that they dearly loved each-other despite the fact that the day before Tom had found Merope to be pitiful and ugly as sin.

Had it only been the day before? It had seemed years and years, but he didn't know why since all he could remember was the day before...

The week they had spent apart had seemed to be the longest and dullest in their lives. It had seemed so sudden to everyone else when they'd eloped, but it strangely hadn't seemed sudden to them. It had just seemed natural. They'd run to London because it was the most exciting place they could think to go after a lifetime in a small town. Everything happened in London.

Life in London had proved to be harsh ad dull. Because Tom's parents had refused to support him, they'd eventually run out of money after Tom had been fired from the last of a string of menial jobs that he hadn't been suited for despite the fact that he was both stronger and faster than his life as the son of a wealthy family in whose home he'd never had to lift so much as a finger could explain.

One day, when it became clear that they both would end up starving soon, Merope did the hardest thing she could do, something that devastated them both. She let Tom go.

"Your parents said they'd take you back." Merope said as she handed the last of their meager savings over to her husband since it was barely enough to get only one person back to Little Hangleton where she'd sworn never to return.

"But what of you?" Tom had asked, his hand trembling, knowing his wife would need some of the money she was giving him for their coming child.

"You know how you can know something you've forgotten with your head with your heart?" Merope replied. "I know with my heart that there's someone out there who won't abandon us, someone who'll come for us."

They embraced one last time.

"Don't worry Tom, I'll see you again someday." Merope said before she finally let him go.

That had been the last time Thomas Riddle son of Thomas Riddle had ever seen his wife. When he'd gotten home, his family had put out a story for why he was back without his wife, and he'd said nothing. Instead, he had stood waiting by the window, waiting for his wife who would always be his one and only, waiting for a sound that only his heart remembered. When his son had shown up after more than sixteen years of waiting, his horror - unlike that of his parents - hadn't been over the existence of his strange and powerful child, it had been over realizing that he and his wife had been well and truly abandoned by someone whose name he could not recall. Someone in whom his heart had placed the entirety of his faith, because whoever he was, he'd never let him or Merope down before.

In a planet-sized library a man with hair and teeth that would put a young Hermione Granger's to shame rapidly paled as he dropped the children's book he'd been reading as a voice from a couple lifetimes ago screamed the names of two of the companions who had been torn from his side far too soon.