Harry Potter x Tom Riddle fanfic where Harry travels back in time to Wool’s Orphanage as a baby and everyone thinks his birthday is in October

Question

In this fanfic, Harry Potter travels back in time to Wool’s Orphanage as a baby and everyone thinks his birthday is in October. It’s a Harry Potter x Tom Riddle fanfic. It has a lot of chapters (I think 20+). The chapter were decent length, maybe 1000+ words at least.

Harry gets bullied kinda (Tom kind of bullies everyone) but Harry and Tom have a special connection. There was this one scene where Tom puts a snake in one of Harry’s friends (a girl I don’t remember the name of) bed and Harry finds out and is caught by the matron (wrong place wrong time) and he gets smacked in the hands. Tom Riddle watches and it’s Tom’s birthday and as Harry walks out of the room (I think kitchen) he says happy birthday instead of blaming Tom.

There was another part where Harry was being chased, something about soccer and older teens, and he was in a tree without climbing it and Harry falls but Tom saves him somehow. I think his was when they found out they were different.

They go to Hogwarts and I believe Harry was Gryffindor and Tom was Slytherin like normal. Harry is into astronomy and stars in general and he does quidditch. They eventually get together but their relationship was kind of messed up as Tom kept trying to control everything and keep Harry to himself but Harry doesn’t realize this and starts to lose his friends who are only trying to help Harry (Tom didn’t wake Harry from a nap when it was practice time and Harry has missed practice(s) before and this was his last chance(?) and his friends get mad at Harry who promised he would be there).

Tom is protective of Harry even before the relationship happened. The special connection is hard to explain (I don’t really remember how it worked) but sometimes they have the same dream and the ones I remember was about the future or the present. The present one was when Tom found Harry in a closet at Hogwarts when Tom’s “friends” locked him in overnight and Harry is claustrophobic (before this incident). The future was when Harry dreamt that Tom was looking all over Hogwarts for him but Harry was nowhere to be found (I suspect he went back to the future but the story wasn’t there yet).

It’s been a few years since I read this. I can’t remember if I read this before or after I moved (I moved almost 2 years ago). I believe it was on ao3 but I can’t be too sure. I don’t think I subscribed/followed it at all and I tried to look through my history but I delete my history every once in a while (both ao3 and internet history whatever). I have been looking but I can’t find it (not very hard to be honest) but I really loved this fic and when I was reading it it was ongoing. I don’t know if it’s completed or not now. It is rated R/explicit if that helps. I remember Harry was conscious about his “knobble knees” as well.

Answer 1

I think this is A Sky Far Away, by SeaDreaming!

I found it by doing a Google search for site:archiveofourown.org "harry" "wool's orphanage" "october" where it is the fourth result. When Googling the fic name on its own, it looks like it was posted on FanFiction.Net at some point but has since been deleted.

Unfortunately, it comes with the following notice at the beginning, and there are only four chapters reposted (last updated in October 2018), so only a small part of it is available!

Okay so I've been getting a looot of people asking me where this story went. I originally took it down because I didn't have time to update and I honestly wasn't very happy with it. But, because I know taking it down disappointed a lot of people, I've decided to put it back up. However, as I re-post chapters, I'll be making changes to the story. Some will be minor, and others will be quite significant. The general plot-line will be the same, but some elements might be noticeably different. I'm hoping to make the story a little more succinct, as I know one of the most common complaints I was getting was how long it was taking for me to get to Harry going back to the future.

My goal is to hopefully post a chapter every one to two weeks until we get back to where we left off.

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Similarities: here's the author's summary.

Harry is mysteriously sent back in time on the night his parents are murdered, without any knowledge that he's from the future. He ends up in 1927 and is found on the doorstep of Wool's Orphanage. Growing up in an orphanage is never easy, especially when the resident bully, Tom Riddle, hates him for no apparent reason. It doesn't help that Harry can see into Tom's mind and he's often haunted by strange dreams. Even when Harry's tumultuous relationship with Tom begins to grow into something more, they still have many challenges to face — such as Harry suddenly being thrown back into his own time. How will he adjust to the future and finding out what really happened to his parents? More importantly, what will happen to him and Tom?

Googling the fanfic yields a dead link to Chapter 17, so I'm guessing it went on for a while. It's Mature rated and has a Harry/Tom relationship. There are only four chapters available, but his birthday is celebrated on October 31st, and there's a scene involving a snake in a girl's bed which sounds exactly like the one you described above. It looks like everything involving Hogwarts was in later chapters which I can't find. I had a quick look on Wayback Machine and Google caching but couldn't see anything - good luck searching!