Lalaloopsy

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tomes and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any. 

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless. 

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that. 

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end. 

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is. 

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —” 

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “You seen the shite the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a bloody Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? How about you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Breathe for me.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses. Maybe you're trying to convince yourself.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s finally him, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Breathe for me, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you like they despised to ever be parted, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet. You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on for a while. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You gasp into his shoulder at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“You would, wouldn't you?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — ah — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He brings you to his bed after and you let him, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

The London market was thick with the smell of damp earth and rot, a grey morning that mirrored the drab walls of Wool’s Orphanage. Seven-year-old Tom Riddle walked with a focused, solitary gait, his hands buried in the pockets of a coat that was two sizes too large. He had been sent on an errand, a task he performed with a silent, resentful efficiency.

​As he turned a sharp corner away from the main thoroughfare, he saw a man. The man was breathless, his movements jagged with a panicked sort of cruelty. He hauled a heavy, stained burlap sack toward a pile of refuse, dumping it onto the cold cobblestones with a sickening, heavy thud. Before the man retreated into the shadows, he drew back a heavy boot and delivered a final, vicious kick to the centre of the bundle.

​Tom stopped. He did not call out; he did not run for help. He stood like a statue, watching.

​The impact caused the coarse neck of the sack to spill open. A small girl, no older than Tom himself, slumped forward. She was a map of tragedy—her skin a mottled landscape of deep purples and angry reds, her small frame broken by a violence Tom only understood as a tool for the strong.

​Slowly, painfully, she lifted her head. Her eyes, clouded with a haze of pain and fading life, searched the empty alley until they locked onto his.

​Tom looked back. He didn't see a person; he saw a flickering candle. He watched the way her small fingers twitched against the grit of the pavement, and how her breath hitched, rattling in a chest that could no longer support the weight of the world. She stared at him, her gaze a silent, dying plea for a mercy he did not possess.

​He watched until the light in her eyes finally extinguished, leaving them hollow and fixed on nothing. He watched until her last breath escaped in a thin, ghostly wisp.

​Once the stillness was absolute, Tom didn't blink. He didn't feel the sting of tears or the weight of guilt. He simply turned away. He adjusted the collar of his coat against the biting wind and continued his walk back to the orphanage, his footsteps steady and rhythmic, leaving the girl and the sack behind in the dirt.

The iron gates of Wool’s Orphanage creaked shut behind him, but Tom didn’t hear them. He climbed the stairs, his shoes clicking rhythmically against the wood, and bypassed the other children in the hallway. They avoided his gaze as they always did, sensing the coldness that clung to him like a second skin.

​He entered his small, sparse room and shut the door. The click of the latch was the only sound in the tiny space.

​Tom sat on the edge of his narrow bed, his back perfectly straight. He didn’t drop his head into his hands; he didn't tremble. Instead, he simply existed in the stillness. The image of the girl in the sack flickered in his mind for a brief second—the way her eyes had been so wide, the way the purple bruises had looked like ink spilled on parchment—but he didn't find it upsetting. He found it curious.

​Death was so quiet. It was a cessation of movement, a finality that he found oddly orderly.

​He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small, stolen thimble he had taken from the market earlier in the week. He placed it on his bedside table, aligning it perfectly with the edge of the wood. His mind moved on to his evening studies, his lessons, and the way the shadows were beginning to stretch across the floorboards.

​To Tom, the girl was already a ghost of a memory, a discarded thing in a city full of discarded things. He sat in the gathering dark, perfectly calm, waiting for the dinner bell, unaware that the air in the room was beginning to grow unnaturally cold.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The walls of Wool’s Orphanage were porous things, letting in the damp chill of London and the muffled sounds of crying children, but lately, they had begun to feel thick. For three days, a prickle had lived at the base of Tom’s neck. It was a phantom weight, the sensation of a gaze so heavy it felt like a physical touch. He would whip his head around in the dining hall, eyes narrowed and predatory, only to find the other orphans staring into their thin gruel. He would turn quickly in the corridors, but the shadows remained empty.

​By the fourth day, the irritation had boiled into a cold, sharp rage.

​Tom retreated to his room and threw the bolt. The afternoon light was a sickly grey, casting long, skeletal fingers across his floorboards. He stood in the center of the room, his small chest heaving slightly.

​"I know you are here," he said, his voice low and jagged. "Show yourself. I will not be trifled with."

​Silence met him—the heavy, oppressive silence of the house.

​Tom closed his eyes. He didn't have a wand, and he didn't have a name for the power that lived in his blood, but he knew how to pull on it. He reached deep into that cold well inside himself and commanded the air to reveal. He pushed his will outward, a wave of invisible force that made the dust motes dance frantically and the windowpane rattle in its frame.

​The air shimmered. It rippled like water disturbed by a stone, and suddenly, a shape coalesced.

​A sharp gasp fractured the quiet.

​A girl stood before him, but only for a heartbeat. As soon as her form solidified, she scrambled backward, her feet never quite touching the floorboards. She moved with a strange, fluid grace, passing through the solid wood of his closet door as if it were nothing more than mist.

​Tom’s eyes widened, but he did not move. He crossed the room in three strides and yanked the closet door open.

​She was there, huddled beneath his two spare shirts. She was crouching, her knees pulled to her chest, her head tucked low to hide her face. But Tom saw enough. He saw the curve of her jaw and the specific shade of her hair.

​The market. The sack. The rattling, final breath.

​The memory surged in his mind—the smell of the refuse and the cold indifference he had felt as her eyes went dark. But here she was, transformed. The girl in the alley had been a skeletal, broken thing, a map of bruises and shattered bone. This girl looked... whole. Her skin was pale but luminous, her cheeks held a soft fullness, and her limbs were no longer twisted by violence. She looked healthy, save for the fact that she was translucent, glowing with a soft, pearlescent light.

​"Come out," he commanded. He didn't ask; he dictated.

​She flinched, pulling further into the shadows of the small wardrobe.

​"I said, come out."

​He softened his voice just a fraction—not out of kindness, but out of a calculated need to lure her. It took several long minutes of him standing there, a silent, dark sentinel, before she finally moved. She didn't walk; she drifted, floating inches above the floor until she stood in the center of the room, bathed in the fading sunlight.

​"Why are you following me?" Tom asked, his eyes scanning her ghostly form. "What are you?"

​She looked at him then, her eyes wide and hauntingly familiar, though the glassiness of death was gone. She looked puzzled, her brow furrowing as she reached out a hand that shimmered like a heat haze.

​"I don't know," she whispered. Her voice sounded like wind through dry leaves. "I don't remember... anything. Just you. I woke up in the dark, and your face was the only thing I could see."

​Tom stepped toward her, and instinctively, she drifted back. "You’ve been stalking me for days. You are a nuisance. Go back to wherever you came from."

​A look of profound sadness washed over her features. She looked down at her hands, which were beginning to fade at the edges. She tried to move toward the door, to drift through the wall, but as she reached the threshold, she was jerked back as if an invisible tether had been snapped taut.

​She let out a soft, frustrated sigh. "I can't leave, Tom."

​He stiffened at the sound of his name on her lips. "Don't call me that. And what do you mean, you can't leave?"

​"I've tried," she said, her voice trembling. "I go to the gates, I go to the street... and I am pulled back. I am bound to you. I don't know why, and I don't know how, but wherever you go, I am forced to follow."

​Tom looked at her—this girl he had watched die, this witness to his own coldness. She was a tethered spirit, a living poltergeist tied to his very soul. He felt a flicker of something—not guilt, but a strange, possessive curiosity.

"I don't care about your memories or your confusion," Tom snapped, his voice cutting through the chilly air of the room like a blade. "You are a distraction. I have no use for a lingering shadow that stares while I sleep. Leave me. Now."

​She flinched as if the words had physical weight, her luminous form flickering like a candle caught in a draft. Her lips parted as if to protest, to explain the invisible tether that felt like a lead weight in her chest, but one look at Tom’s dark, uncompromising expression silenced her.

​A wave of profound hurt washed over her features, making her glow dim to a dull, bruised grey. Then, with a soft, shuddering exhale, she didn't move toward the door or the window. Instead, she simply dissolved. The pearlescent light retracted into her center until she vanished entirely from his sight.

​Tom stood still, his eyes scanning the empty air. He could no longer see the curve of her shoulder or the way her translucent hair caught the dim light, but the room didn't feel empty. The air remained unnaturally cold, and that prickle at the base of his neck—the heavy sense of being watched—remained.

​She had obeyed his command to leave his presence, but she hadn't gone far. He could feel her drifting somewhere within the stone walls of the orphanage, a silent, invisible observer tucked away in the rafters or the shadows of the hallway, bound to the rhythm of his heart whether he permitted it or not.

​He sat back down at his desk, picking up a book, but for the first time in his life, the silence of his room felt crowded.

That afternoon in the dusty light of Room 27 was Tom’s first interaction with Y/N, the moment the girl from the sack became the ghost in his shadow.

​In the years that followed, the orphanage grew smaller, but Tom grew larger. He moved through the world with a terrifying, quiet gravity, and Y/N was the moon that circled his dark planet. At first, he viewed her with the same clinical detachment he gave his stolen thimbles and yo-yos—she was a tool, a weapon that didn't require a wand.

​When Mrs. Cole or the matrons sought to "discipline" him for his coldness or the strange things that happened in his presence, Tom would simply look at the corner of the room. He didn't have to speak. Y/N would feel his pulse quicken, feel the sharp edge of his resentment, and she would act.

​He told himself he was merely using her. He watched with a smirk as the Matron’s keys vanished from her hip, or as the woman’s tea turned to ice the moment she touched the cup. Y/N had a particular distaste for the woman; she didn't need Tom’s orders to breathe a freezing frost down the Matron’s neck or to slam a door just as the woman passed. It was a symphony of chaos, and Tom was the conductor.

​But as the years bled into one another, the lines of the contract blurred. Tom found himself seeking her out, not for a task, but for the silence they shared. She was the only thing in the world that knew the truth of his power, the only witness to his rise who couldn't—or wouldn't—judge him.

​By the time Tom was eleven, his indifference had curdled into something far more dangerous: possessiveness.

​He didn't just want her around; he required her presence. If she drifted too far down the hallway to watch the other children play, he would feel a hot, restrictive ache in his chest—the physical manifestation of their bond—and he would call her back with a mental snap of his fingers. He hated the way she looked at the others with a lingering, ghostly curiosity.

​She belonged in his room. She belonged in his shadow.

​He would sit at his desk, his homework spread before him, and watch her out of the corner of his eye as she practiced making herself solid enough to touch the objects on his shelf. He never told her that he had watched her die. That secret remained locked behind his teeth, a foundational stone of his ownership over her. He had seen her at her most broken; therefore, he was the only one who could truly claim her wholeness.

​To the world, Tom Riddle was a brilliant, solitary boy. To Y/N, he was the center of the universe. And to Tom, Y/N was no longer a haunting—she was his first, and most precious, piece of property.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The platform at King’s Cross was a cacophony of steam and sound, a sensory assault that made Tom’s jaw tighten. He stood among the crowd, a small, dark figure in a sea of vibrant robes and screeching owls. But his stillness was a lie. Internally, he was braced against the frantic energy of the girl beside him.

​Y/N was practically vibrating. She wasn’t walking; she was a blur of translucent light, darting toward a stack of trunks only to be yanked back by the invisible cord that connected them. Every time she reached the limit, Tom felt a sharp, electric tug at the center of his chest. It was a physical warning, a reminder that their souls were stitched together with jagged thread.

​"Stop it," Tom hissed, his voice barely audible over the whistle of the train. "You are making me look like a fool."

​Y/N drifted back to his shoulder, her eyes wide and reflecting the scarlet sheen of the Hogwarts Express. "Tom, look! The owls—they can see me! One of them blinked at me!"

​"I don't care about the livestock," he snapped, gripping the handle of his trunk until his knuckles turned white. "If you don't compose yourself, I will find a way to bind you to the floorboards of the orphanage and leave you there."

​It was a hollow threat—he knew, and she knew, that the distance would likely kill him before he even reached Scotland—but it served its purpose. She lowered herself until her feet hovered just above the grime of the platform, though her fingers still twitched with the urge to touch the magical steam.

​The trouble began on the stairs of the carriage.

​As Tom began the ascent, a group of older students pushed past, their laughter booming in the narrow space. One of them, a boisterous boy with a heavy trunk, swung his luggage dangerously close to Tom’s head.

​Instinctively, Y/N surged forward to shove the boy back. Her protective streak was a wild, unrefined thing, and in her haste, she forgot the tether. She flew past the limit with the force of a gale.

​Tom didn't just stumble; he was launched.

​The cord snapped taut, and Tom felt as though a hook had been driven into his heart. He was jerked upward, his feet leaving the metal steps as he was dragged toward Y/N’s shimmering form. He collided with the boy in front of him, sending them both sprawling onto the floor of the train in a heap of limbs and robes.

​"Watch it, first-year!" the boy grumbled, shoving Tom off.

​Tom scrambled to his feet, his face flushed with a rare, hot embarrassment. His eyes found Y/N immediately. She was hovering near the ceiling of the corridor, looking down at him with a mix of horror and sheepishness.

​I'm sorry, her voice drifted into his mind, no longer a whisper of leaves but a direct, echoing thought. He was going to hit you.

​Tom didn't answer with words. He reached into that cold space where their bond lived and pulled. It was a mental lash, a command for her to return to his side. Y/N gasped as she was dragged down from the ceiling, her form flickering violently until she was tucked into the shadow behind his heels.

​"You will stay within my reach," Tom thought at her, his mental voice dripping with venom. "You will not move unless I permit it. You will not breathe unless I allow the air into your lungs. If you humiliate me again, I will ensure the next seven years are a slow, agonizing death for us both."

​He found an empty compartment at the very end of the train and slid the door shut. He didn't sit; he stood by the window, staring at the blurred reflection of the girl standing behind him.

​"This is a world of rules," Tom said aloud, his voice regaining its calm, terrifying cadence. "I intend to learn every one of them so that I may break them. You are no longer a girl, Y/N. You are a secret. My secret."

​Y/N didn't flinch. Instead, she tilted her head, a small, knowing smirk tugging at the corners of her mouth. She didn't look like a prisoner in a golden cage; she looked like the only person in the world who knew the punchline to a joke Tom was still trying to tell. She drifted closer, her pearlescent glow reflecting in the dark glass of his eyes, and reached out a hand. Her fingers stopped just short of his sleeve, the air between them humming with the static of their bond.

​"I'm your only friend, Tom," she whispered, her voice light and teasing, entirely unfazed by his dark proclamation. "And you're stuck with me. Literally. And you don't scare me anymore."

​Tom didn't snap back. He didn't even look at her. He simply turned to watch the London skyline disappear through the window, his expression unreadable. To anyone else, he looked cold, indifferent, and solitary. But he didn't pull away from her shimmering presence, and he didn't command her to vanish back into the shadows.

​"I don't need friends," he replied, though the venom was gone from his tone, replaced by a weary sort of acceptance. "I need shadows that know their place."

​"My place is right here," she countered, drifting even closer until she was almost leaning against his shoulder.

​Tom let out a breath that was almost a sigh—a sound he would never admit was one of relief. He watched her reflection in the glass as she began to marvel at the moving clouds, her amusement bubbling over in soft, silent giggles. He told himself he kept her close because she was a tool, a secret weapon, a piece of property. But as the train sped toward Hogwarts, he found that the crowded compartment felt just a little bit more tolerable with her translucent weight anchored to his soul.

The Great Hall was a cathedral of light and magic, but Tom walked through it as if he were already its master. Above him, Y/N was a silent whirlwind of translucent joy, her eyes wide as she took in the thousands of floating candles. She dived through a banner, laughing when the velvet didn't even ripple, and circled Tom’s head like a halo of pearlescent mist.

​Tom remained a statue of indifference. He didn't look up, even as his name was called.

​He sat on the stool, the heavy, tattered leather of the Sorting Hat dropping over his eyes. For a moment, the world went dark.

​“Ah,” a small, gravelly voice whispered in his ear. “A thirsty mind. Plenty of courage, too... and a thirst to prove yourself. But what is this? You haven’t come alone, have you, Tom Riddle?”

​Tom stiffened, his hand gripping the edge of the stool. In the darkness of the hat, he felt a flicker of movement. He tilted his head just enough to see Y/N through the frayed hem of the fabric. She was hovering inches away, her face full of pride, her eyes fixed on him with unwavering devotion.

​The Hat went quiet for a long time. It wasn't talking to Tom anymore. He felt the brim of the hat shift, almost as if it were looking at the ghost girl. Finally, the Hat sighed, a sound of profound pity that made Tom’s blood run cold.

​“SLYTHERIN!” it shouted to the hall.

​Tom stood, his expression composed, and began the walk to the green-and-silver table. Usually, this was the moment Y/N would be pestering him, poking at his ear, or making fun of the older students' ridiculous hats. But as he sat down, he realized the air behind him had gone still.

​Y/N had tucked herself into his shadow, her form so dim she was nearly invisible. She didn't look at the enchanted ceiling. She didn't look at him. She was a silent, faded stain on the stone floor.

​Tom’s triumph felt suddenly hollow. He ignored the polite applause of his new housemates, his eyes fixed on the empty space beside him where she should have been hovering. He wanted her to be his shadow, yes—but this version of her, this hollowed-out quiet, felt like a door slamming shut in his face.

​The Slytherin boys’ dormitory was cold and smelled of lake water. Tom had arrived before the others, claiming the bed furthest from the door. He locked the door with a flick of his fingers, his eyes scanning the room until they landed on the corner.

​"Come out," he said. His voice was soft, lacking its usual edge.

​Y/N coalesced slowly. She looked smaller than she had this morning, her edges blurred and fraying like old lace. She wouldn't meet his eyes.

​"You were quiet," Tom said, stepping toward her. When she flinched, he stopped. He forced his features to relax, his voice dropping to a tone that was almost... gentle. "The Hat spoke to you, didn't it? Tell me what it said."

​Y/N trembled, her form flickering. "I’m scared, Tom."

​"Tell me," he repeated, his possessiveness flaring. "I will not have secrets kept from me in my own room."

​She looked up then, her eyes shimmering with ghostly tears. "It warned me. It said that if the professors saw me—if they knew I was bound to you—the Ministry would come. They would take me away, Tom. They don't allow... things like me. Especially not Muggles. They’d find a way to sever the tether."

​Tom’s jaw tightened. The thought of the Ministry touching his property, breaking his bond, ignited a cold, murderous fury in his chest.

"They will not touch you. I will ensure it," the words vibrating with a quiet, lethal promise. "The Ministry is a collection of fossils and fools. They see what I allow them to see, and I allow them to see nothing."

​He sat on the edge of his four-poster bed, the green velvet curtains casting a submerged, emerald light over his pale skin. He looked at Y/N, whose form was still shivering, her pearlescent light dimming into a sickly grey. It grated on him—this display of weakness. He needed her sharp. He needed her capable.

​"Enough of this," he said, his voice regaining its transactional clarity. "If you are to remain hidden, you must become more than a hovering nuisance. You must master the physical. If you cannot touch the world, you cannot defend yourself—or me."

​He gestured vaguely toward the heavy leather trunk at the foot of his bed, which stood open, his neatly folded school robes spilling out.

​"Use the magic I gave you," he commanded. It was a lie, of course—the magic was hers, born of her death and her tether—but he liked the framing. It made the power feel like a gift he had bestowed upon her. "Make yourself dense. Move my clothes to the chest box. I want them organized by weight."

​Y/N’s flickering slowed. She looked at the pile of heavy wool and then back at Tom. The profound, tragic fear in her eyes began to recede, replaced by a familiar, flickering spark of annoyance.

​She drifted toward the trunk, her feet finally making a soft, ghostly thud as she allowed herself to become heavy enough to graze the floorboards. She reached for a robe, her fingers passing through the fabric twice before she let out a frustrated huff and concentrated. With a sudden surge of effort, her hand solidified, and she hoisted the robe into the air.

​"I know what you’re doing, you know," she murmured, her voice like the rustle of silk. She tossed the robe into the wardrobe with more force than necessary. "You aren't 'training' me, Tom. You’re just too lazy to unpack your own trunk."

​Tom didn't look up from the book he had pulled onto his lap, but the corner of his mouth quirked—a rare, sharp movement that was the closest he ever came to a genuine smile.

​"I am a prefect in the making," he replied smoothly. "I have much more important things to do than fold socks. Besides, you need the practice. You’re still leaking light at the edges."

​Y/N rolled her eyes, a gesture so human it almost made Tom forget she was a corpse he’d met in a gutter. She picked up a stack of silver-trimmed ties, her translucent fingers tightening around them.

​"You’re a tyrant," she whispered, though there was no heat in it.

​"I am a realist," Tom corrected.

​As she worked, moving back and forth between the trunk and the wardrobe, the oppressive chill of the room began to lift. The "tether" in Tom’s chest settled into a comfortable, low-level hum. He watched her from the periphery of his vision—his shadow, his ghost, his secret.

​She was right, of course. He was using her. But as he watched her small, glowing hands meticulously arrange his things, he realized that the Hat’s warning hadn't just angered him—it had terrified him. Not because he feared the Ministry, but because for a split second, he had imagined the silence of a room that was actually empty.

​He turned a page of his book, the sound crisp in the quiet dormitory.

​"When you're finished with the robes," he said, his tone back to its cold, imperious baseline, "the books need to be alphabetized. And don't think I didn't notice you hiding that stolen quill in the rafters. Bring it here."

​Y/N let out a long, dramatic sigh that made the candles flicker, but she didn't stop working. She stayed in the light of his emerald curtains, a permanent fixture in a world that would never understand why Tom Riddle never felt alone.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

Years later

The wind at the height of the Astronomy Tower didn't feel like air to Y/N; it felt like a physical embrace.

​She wasn't bound by the clumsy physics of the living anymore. With a sharp, joyful kick, she launched herself away from the stone battlements, soaring out over the Black Lake. For a few glorious minutes, she forgot she was a ghost. She forgot the smell of damp earth and the heavy weight of the tether that usually anchored her to Tom’s side. Here, in the open sky, she was a streak of pearlescent light against the bruising clouds of a Scottish afternoon.

​She dove toward the water, her fingers grazing the surface—not breaking it, but sending a shimmer through the reflection of the castle. She had become an expert at her own invisibility. Over the years, she had learned to weave her own ghostly essence into the ambient magic of Hogwarts. She layered concealing spells like fine silk, masking her glow until she was nothing more than a trick of the light or a sudden, unexplained chill.

​She spent an hour drifting near the edge of the Forbidden Forest, watching a pair of Hufflepuffs whisper over a forbidden stash of firewhiskey. She hovered behind a gargoyle, eavesdropping on Professor Slughorn’s hushed conversation with a Ministry official about "extraordinary potential."

​Tom will want to hear about that, she thought, a small smile playing on her lips.

​Suddenly, the tether in her chest gave a sharp, insistent tug. It wasn't the violent jerk of their childhood; it was a rhythmic, pulsing pull—a summons. Tom was in his private chambers, and he wanted her back. Now.

​She didn't grumble. Instead, she banked hard to the left, flying back toward the castle with a speed that made her edges blur. She slipped through the stone walls of the Head Boy’s suite, phasing through the heavy oak door as if it were a shadow.

​The room was warm, lit by a crackling fire and the low glow of a green-shaded lamp. Tom was sitting at his desk, surrounded by maps and ancient, leather-bound volumes. He didn't look up as she coalesced, but his hand—the one holding a silver quill—stilled.

​"You're late," he said. His voice had deepened over the years, losing its boyish reediness for a smooth, velvet authority.

​"I'm exactly when I meant to be," Y/N countered, drifting over his shoulder to look at his notes. She let herself become solid enough to feel the warmth of the fire. "Slughorn is worried about the Ministry's new 'Internal Security' audit. He was sweating, Tom. It was quite pathetic."

​She began to rattle off the secrets she had gathered—the whispers in the corridors, the names of the students who were beginning to fear him, and the exact location of a hidden passage she’d discovered behind a tapestry on the fourth floor. She spoke with a bright, eager energy, her translucent face glowing with the pride of a job well done.

​Tom finally turned in his chair. He looked at her—really looked at her. In the firelight, she looked less like a phantom and more like a girl, her skin radiant, her eyes wide and full of a devotion that no living creature had ever offered him.

​"You were outside again," he said, his voice dropping an octave. "I felt you over the lake. You were flying too high, Y/N. Too fast."

​"The concealing spells were perfect, Tom. No one saw—"

​"I saw," he interrupted, standing up. He was a head taller than her now, a figure of dark elegance. He stepped into her space, his expression stern. "If a stray spell hit you, or if a passing owl disrupted your focus... I cannot protect you if you are a mile away from my reach. You are careless with your existence."

​It was a scolding, sharp and familiar, but Y/N didn't flinch. She looked up at him, tilting her head with a shy, knowing smile. She let her form soften, her gaze dropping to the silver badge on his chest before looking back into his dark, searching eyes.

​"I just wanted to feel the wind," she whispered, her voice a soft, melodic hum. "I wanted to see the world so I could bring it back to you."

​The cold, hard line of Tom’s jaw wavered. He stared at her, the lecture dying in his throat. He reached out, his hand hovering just an inch from her cheek. He couldn't feel the warmth of her skin, but he could feel the static of her magic, the vibration of the soul that was literally stitched to his own.

​His expression crumbled, just for a second, into something desperately human. He didn't see a tool or a secret weapon. He saw the only person who had ever truly known him—the only one who had watched him become a monster and decided to stay.

​"You are a plague on my focus," he murmured, his voice lacking any real bite. He let his hand drop, but his gaze remained fixed on hers, softer than he would ever admit to another living soul. "Stay here. In the shadows. I have found a text about the deep foundations of the school... I want to show you."

​He sat back down, and Y/N drifted into the seat beside him, her shoulder overlapping with his. Tom Riddle, the boy who would be King, reached out and adjusted the lamp so the light fell across the pages for her to see, too. He wanted to rule the world, yes—but as he looked at the girl who lived in his shadow, he realized he had no intention of doing it alone.

They spent the night in that gilded cage of a room, weaving ambitions out of ink and whispered theories. Y/N had grown remarkably adept at manipulating the world around her. As Tom read, she amused herself by making her magic tangible; she conjured a miniature, ghostly illusion of the Hogwarts castle that floated above the desk, its tiny towers spinning in a slow, ethereal dance. Occasionally, she would brush a solid finger against his hand just to see him twitch—a reminder that she was more than a memory.

​As the fire burned low, casting long, skeletal shadows against the stones, the playful air between them shifted. Y/N watched the way the orange light hit the sharp planes of Tom’s face, and the question she had asked a hundred times before rose to the surface of her mind, unbidden.

​"Tom?" she asked, her voice small and brittle.

​He didn't look up from the parchment, but his quill paused. "Yes?"

​"Why was my soul tethered to you?"

​The silence that followed was heavy, suffocating. Tom’s eyes remained fixed on the Latin script before him, but his mind was elsewhere—back in a damp, rot-scented alleyway in London. He could still see the seven-year-old girl in the burlap sack, the way her life had flickered like a dying candle, and the way he had watched with a cold, predatory curiosity.

​He knew the answer. He had always known. It wasn't destiny or a grand magical design. It was a freak accident of a young boy’s uncontrollable, hungry magic. When her soul had tried to flee her broken body, his magic—already warped by his desperate need for possession—had reached out and snagged it. He had caught her like a stray bird and caged her within his own orbit before she could cross the threshold of death.

​He had stolen her afterlife before he even knew what a Horcrux was.

​But he would never tell her. He looked at her now, seeing the trust in her luminous eyes, the way she leaned into him as if he were her only anchor in a void. If she knew that he was the reason she was trapped, that he was the silent witness to her final, agonizing moments who had done nothing but watch... the tether would become a chain.

​"I don't know," he lied, his voice perfectly steady, perfectly hollow. He finally looked at her, his expression a mask of practiced mystery. "Some souls are simply meant to be entwined, Y/N. Perhaps the universe knew I would have use for a shadow like you."

​He reached out and, for the first time that night, he placed his hand directly over hers. He couldn't feel her pulse, but he felt the hum of his own magic reflected back at him. It was a secret he would carry to his grave—a foundation of blood and indifference that he would never risk breaking. Not for the world, and certainly not for her.

​"Don't dwell on the past," he whispered, his grip tightening just enough for her to feel it. "The 'why' doesn't matter. Only the fact that you are mine."

​Y/N searched his face, looking for the truth she sensed was hidden behind his dark irises, but Tom Riddle was a master of his own history. She eventually sighed, leaning her ghostly head against his shoulder, choosing to believe the lie because the alternative was a loneliness she couldn't imagine.

​And in the quiet of the Head Boy's room, Tom sat perfectly still, holding onto his ghost, his secret, and his first true piece of property.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The Slytherin dungeons were a place of cold stone and green-tinted shadows, but Tom’s private prefect chambers were an oasis of controlled silence. The only sound was the rhythmic scratching of his quill against parchment as he finished his Advanced Arithmancy essay. The fire in the hearth crackled, casting a warm glow over his sharp, handsome features.

​Without a sound, the air beside him shivered. Y/N appeared, leaning casually against the edge of his heavy oak desk.

​She reached out, her fingers—now capable of moving physical matter—idly tracing the spine of one of Tom’s leather-bound books.

​"Are you ever going to take me out of this castle, Tom?" she asked, her voice no longer a whisper of wind, but clear and melodic. "Actually out? Hogsmeade, the town... anywhere. I’m tired of being cooped up in the boys' dormitory all the time."

​Tom didn't look up from his parchment. "The castle is the safest place for you. Outside, the tether might stretch. I won't risk it."

​"It’s not just the boredom," she sighed, drifting a few inches off the floor to sit on the corner of his desk, right over his notes. "I’ve seen... disgusting things in the dorm. Things I’d very much like to forget."

​Tom’s quill stopped mid-stroke. A dark blot of ink bloomed on the parchment. He looked up, his dark eyes narrowing into predatory slits. "What things?"

​Y/N rolled her eyes, unfazed by the intensity that made most seventh-years tremble. "Oh, please. You know what teenage boys are like. They think they’re being quiet at night, but I have eyes, Tom. And ears. Half of them are jerking off under their silk sheets, and I have to float outside the window and stare at the Giant Squid just to maintain a shred of my dignity."

​Tom’s grip on his quill tightened until the wood groaned. A cold, sharp heat flared in his chest—a mixture of disgust and a violent, protective possessiveness. The thought of those "lesser" boys exposing themselves, even unknowingly, in the presence of his spirit was intolerable.

​"Which boys?" he asked, his voice dropping into that dangerous, silken register. He leaned forward, attempting to loom over her, to use the physical intimidation that worked so well on the rest of the world.

​Y/N didn't flinch. She simply tilted her head, a playful smirk dancing on her lips. She had grown used to his moods, his shadows, and his demands. She knew the monster better than anyone, and she had learned long ago that his bark was far worse than his bite when it came to her.

​"I'm not telling you," she said lightheartedly. "You'll just hex them into the hospital wing, and then I'll have to deal with a grumpy Tom for a week."

​Tom stared at her, the muscles in his jaw working. He wanted to demand names, to purge the dormitory of anyone who had dared to be "disgusting" near her, but he forced himself to breathe. He remembered the Third Year. He remembered the agonizing month of silence when he had lost his temper and she had "ghosted" him—vanishing into the stone walls of the castle and refusing to manifest, no matter how much he bled his magic into the air to find her. That month had been the most hollow of his life.

​He couldn't lose her again.

​He sighed, the tension leaving his shoulders, though his eyes remained dark. "You are mine, Y/N. I don't care if they can't see you. The fact remains."

​"I know, Tom," she said softly, reaching out. Her hand felt like a cool mist against his cheek, but he leaned into the touch, closing his eyes. "I'm always here. Whether you like it or not."

​"I like it," he admitted, his voice barely audible. "But if I catch one of them... I won't be so lenient."

She sighed and floated away in the room.

The silence in the chambers was brittle. Tom watched Y/N as she drifted aimlessly, her translucent form passing through the heavy velvet curtains and out again, a restless shimmer of light. She didn't complain again, but her sigh echoed with the weight of centuries, though she had only been dead for ten years.

​Tom looked down at his books. Knowledge was his greatest pursuit, but it was becoming increasingly difficult to focus when the air in the room felt charged with her melancholy. He knew the risk. Hogwarts was a sanctuary, but it was also a prison of eyes. The Grey Lady, the Bloody Baron, the Fat Friar—they were everywhere, and should they spot a spirit tethered to a student, a spirit that didn't belong to the castle's history, the questions would begin. And Dumbledore... Dumbledore was always looking for a reason to peel back the layers of Tom’s life.

​But he couldn't stand the way she was flickering, her light dimming with every passing minute of boredom.

​"Fine," Tom said, the word snapping like a twig in the quiet.

​Y/N stopped mid-air, spinning around to face him. Her eyes were wide. "Fine? Fine what?"

​"We will go," Tom said, closing his Arithmancy text with a decisive thud. He stood up, smoothing the front of his perfectly pressed robes. "I have a late-night pass for the grounds. We will go as far as the Black Lake. But you must stay within my shadow. If I sense another spirit, you vanish immediately. Am I understood?"

​Y/N didn't respond with words. Instead, the room erupted into motion.

​She let out a joyous, melodic laugh that seemed to vibrate the very stones of the dungeon. She flew across the room, a streak of pearlescent light, circling the chandelier until the crystals chimed against one another. Her energy flared, her form becoming so dense and bright that she looked almost solid, almost alive.

​Before Tom could warn her to settle down, she was in his space.

​She didn't just drift near him; she threw her arms around his neck. For a spirit, she possessed a startling amount of strength when she was happy. Tom felt the sensation of her embrace—it wasn't warm like a human's, but it was electric. It was like being submerged in a cold, rushing stream, a million tiny needle-pricks of magic dancing across his skin.

​He stiffened instinctively, his breath hitching. He wasn't a man who enjoyed being touched, but this was different. This was his magic reflecting back at him. He reached up, his hands hovering over her back, feeling the resistance of her form.

​"Thank you, Tom! Thank you!" she whispered against his ear, her voice buzzing in his brain.

​He didn't pull away. For a fleeting second, he allowed his eyes to close, grounding himself in the strange, chilly weight of her. His possessiveness flared again, but this time it wasn't a snarl; it was a silent promise. He would give her the world if it meant she stayed this vibrant, this tethered to him.

​"Stay close," he muttered, his voice sounding uncharacteristically thick. "If you wander, I’m locking the door next time."

​"I won't," she promised, pulling back just enough to beam at him, her face radiant. "I’ll be your shadow. I promise."

​Tom adjusted his prefect badge, his expression returning to its mask of cold composure, though his heart was thudding a rhythm he couldn't quite control. He opened the door to his chambers, stepping out into the darkened corridor of the Slytherin common room, with Y/N invisible but pressed tightly to his side, her presence a cold flame guiding him into the night.

The walk from the castle to Hogsmeade was a study in contrasts. Tom moved like a shadow, his gait measured and his eyes constantly scanning the perimeter of the path, while Y/N was a firework. As soon as the village lights flickered into view—yellow and warm against the blue-black of the Scottish highlands—she seemed to vibrate with a kinetic, restless magic.

​"Stay within five paces," Tom hissed, his voice barely a murmur, but his hand was white-knuckled inside his cloak, gripping his wand as if he could use it to anchor her to the earth.

​Y/N didn't hear him, or perhaps she chose not to. She was a streak of silver in the dark. As they entered the main thoroughfare, she dove toward a stall selling enchanted sweets. She didn't just look; she passed through the wooden counter, her form shimmering through the jars of Acid Pops and Chocolate Frogs.

​A group of villagers stood huddled near the Three Broomsticks, laughing loudly. Y/N, emboldened by the crisp night air, flew straight through the center of them. The laughter died instantly. A woman shivered violently, rubbing her arms.

​"Dreadful chill," the woman muttered, looking around with a confused frown. "Felt like someone walked over my grave."

​"Y/N," Tom warned, his heart hammering against his ribs.

​He hated this. He hated the lack of control. In his chambers, she was his; here, she was a part of the world again, a wild thing that he could only loosely leash. He could feel the tether in his chest—it felt like a thin, vibrating wire of ice that grew tauter the further she drifted. If she went too far, he feared the wire would snap, leaving him hollow and her lost to the ether.

​But then he saw her face.

​She was hovering near a florist's stall, though the flowers were mostly dried husks in the winter cold. She was spinning slowly in the air, her arms outstretched, her eyes closed as she breathed in the smells of woodsmoke, ale, and pine. She looked so achingly alive that for a moment, the memory of the burlap sack and the muddy alley felt like a lie.

​She looked happy. Truly, purely happy.

​Tom stood in the shadows of an alleyway, watching her. He ignored the suspicious glance of a passing wizard. His entire world was narrowed down to that one luminous figure dancing between the stalls. He felt a strange, painful contraction in his throat. He told himself it was the cold, or perhaps the frustration of her disobedience, but deep down, he knew it was the realization that he would do anything to keep that expression on her face.

​He would build her a kingdom of ghosts if she asked for it.

​Y/N suddenly zoomed back to him, her face flushed with ghostly color. She didn't stop until she was inches from him, her energy buzzing so loudly he could hear it.

​"Did you see, Tom? The lights! And the people! I forgot how much... how much noise there is!"

​"You're being reckless," he said, though the bite was gone from his tone. He reached out, his hand passing through the space where her shoulder was, catching only a hint of her resistance. "The tether is pulling. If we stay much longer, I won't be able to hold you."

​"Just a little longer," she pleaded, her eyes shining. "Let’s go to the edge of the woods. I want to see the trees without the castle walls in the way."

​Tom looked at the dark treeline and then back at her. The risk was astronomical. If she vanished into the woods, he might never find her in the dark. But the way she looked at him—with a trust he knew he didn't deserve—broke his resolve.

​"To the trees," he conceded, his voice low. "And then we return. No arguments."

​She beamed, and for a second, the darkness of the town seemed to retreat. She didn't fly ahead this time; she stayed right at his shoulder, her invisible hand tucked into the crook of his arm as they walked toward the forest, a boy and his beautiful, broken secret.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

A few days later

The scratching of quills against parchment was the only sound in the Advanced Arithmancy classroom, a rhythmic, hypnotic pulse that Tom usually found soothing. He sat with his back perfectly straight, his own quill moving with surgical precision. But then, the world tilted.

​It wasn't a sound, but a sensation—a jagged, white-hot shriek that tore through the center of his chest. The tether, usually a low-frequency hum, suddenly vibrated with such violence that Tom’s hand jerked, sending a thick blot of ink across his perfect equations.

​His heart hammered against his ribs, not with fear for himself, but with a sudden, sickening vacuum where Y/N’s presence usually resided.

​"Mr. Riddle?" Professor Vector started, noticing him rise abruptly.

​Tom didn't answer. He didn't need to. A commotion erupted in the corridor outside—shouts of alarm and the heavy thud of running feet. He moved with the grace of a predator, his Head Boy badge catching the light as he shouldered past his classmates.

​"Make way," he commanded, his voice a low, dangerous snap that cleared the hallway faster than any spell.

​He followed the psychic trail of agony to the second-floor girl's lavatory. The air outside the door tasted of ozone and ancient dust. Tom stepped inside, slamming the door shut and engaging the locking charm in one fluid motion.

​The scene was a wreck. Water hissed from a cracked pipe, pooling on the floor. In the center of the room, a younger boy lay sprawled against the porcelain sinks, his eyes rolled back, his breathing shallow and rattling. Tom didn't even check the boy's pulse. His eyes searched the shadows, the rafters, the mirrors.

​"Y/N?" he hissed.

​The room was empty. But the tether was screaming. It was no longer a pull; it was a frantic, fading signal. He closed his eyes, reaching into the cold void of his own magic, and felt her. She wasn't in the castle. She was moving, a streak of raw, unbridled pain flying toward the dark, jagged treeline of the Forbidden Forest.

​Tom didn't take the stairs. He found a window in the West Tower and used a cushioning charm to hit the grass at a dead run.

​The Forbidden Forest swallowed the light of the afternoon, replacing it with a suffocating, emerald gloom. The air here was thick with the scent of damp pine and rotting mulch. Tom tore through the underbrush, his cloak snagging on thorns, his breath coming in sharp, ragged plumes. He followed the silver-white throb of her soul until he reached a clearing where the trees grew so close they looked like the bars of a cage.

​There she was.

​Y/N wasn't floating; she was collapsed against the gnarled roots of an ancient oak, her form flickering so violently she looked like a dying star. She was weeping, but no tears fell—only a soft, luminescent mist that dissolved before it touched the ground. Her hands were clutched to her head, her fingers digging into her ghostly temples.

​"I remember," she choked out, the sound like the cracking of winter ice.

​Tom slowed his pace, his boots crunching softly on the fallen leaves. He felt a cold dread settle in his stomach. How much?

​"The belt," she whispered, her eyes wide and fixed on a horror he couldn't see. "The smell of stale ale and the way the floorboards creaked before he reached the door. I can feel the weight of his boot, Tom. I can feel my mother’s silence—the way she looked at the wall while I screamed."

​She looked up at him, and for the first time in years, she didn't see her anchor. She saw a witness to her shame. "Why is it coming back? The grey walls, the cold... the way he looked at me like I was a thing to be broken."

​The forest around them seemed to lean in, the shadows stretching toward her. A low wind moaned through the high canopy, shaking a rain of dead leaves over her shimmering form. She looked small—exactly like the seven-year-old girl in the alley, despite her older appearance.

​Tom reached her, dropping to his knees in the dirt. He didn't care about the mud staining his expensive trousers. He reached out, his hands trembling slightly as he framed her face. He couldn't grasp her firmly, but he poured his own magic into her, trying to stabilize her flickering form, trying to drown out the memories with the sheer force of his will.

​"Listen to my voice," he commanded, his tone a desperate, sharp iron. "That world is gone. Those people are dust. You are here, with me. You are mine, Y/N. Do you hear me? You belong to the present."

​"It hurts," she wailed, her form turning a bruised, angry purple. "It's so heavy, Tom. Why did they hate me so much? What did I do to deserve the sack? The dark?"

​Tom flinched. The 'sack.' The memory of her final moments was scratching at the door of her mind, threatening to tear down the beautiful lie he had built. He pulled her closer, his chest aching with the physical strain of the tether. He wasn't just holding a ghost; he was holding the evidence of his own greatest sin.

​"You did nothing," he whispered, his voice cracking. He pressed his forehead against hers—cold meeting cold. "You are more than their cruelty. You are the shadow that walks with a King. Forget them. Let me be the only thing you remember."

​He stayed there in the rotting heart of the forest, his arms wrapped around a girl who was mostly smoke, waiting for the screaming in her soul to go quiet. He watched the shadows of the trees, his eyes predatory and dark, silently daring the universe to try and take back the soul he had stolen. She didn't remember the alley yet—she didn't remember him watching her die—but as she cried into his shoulder, Tom knew the foundation of his world was beginning to crack.

The air in the clearing was static-heavy, the silence of the Forbidden Forest pressing in like a physical weight. Tom held Y/N, his arms wrapped around a form that felt increasingly like trying to catch smoke in a gale.

​As her sobs subsided into a hollow, rhythmic trembling, Tom felt a new sensation through the tether. It wasn't the jagged edge of her pain, but a terrifying, smooth slide—a thinning of the thread. He looked down at her hands, which were draped over his dark sleeves. The pearlescent glow was no longer vibrant; it was translucent, almost grey, the color of a fading morning mist.

​The realization hit him with the force of a physical blow.

​The return of her memories was re-syncing her soul with the moment of her death. By remembering who she was, she was remembering that she was supposed to be gone. The magic he had poured into her for years—his own dark, hungry essence—had acted as a preservative, a golden sap trapping a prehistoric fly. But she was a Muggle soul, a fragile thing never meant to withstand the radiation of high-level sorcery or the weight of a decade in the world of the living.

​She was leaking out of existence.

​"I feel... light, Tom," she whispered, her voice so thin it barely stirred the air. Her eyes were still clouded with the images of her father’s house, but the terror was being replaced by a strange, glassy peace. "The cold isn't so sharp anymore."

​"Don't," Tom snapped, his fingers tightening around her shoulders. "Don't you dare feel light. Stay heavy. Stay with me."

​He poured more magic into the bond, a desperate, forceful surge that made the grass around them turn black and wither. He saw her form flicker, a momentary surge of brightness returning to her eyes, but it was like pouring water into a sieve. The more she remembered of her life, the less she had to hold her here.

​She didn't know. She thought it was just the exhaustion of the memories. She didn't see the way her legs were beginning to dissolve into the shadows of the tree roots, or how the tether between them was fraying into a million tiny, glowing wisps.

​Tom’s mind, usually a cold and orderly library, became a frantic battlefield of theories and forbidden lore. He couldn't lose her. Not now. Not when he was so close to the power he had dreamed of. The thought of a world where he walked the corridors of Hogwarts—or the streets of London—without that familiar, ghostly weight at his shoulder was an obscenity.

​He looked at her, his expression a mask of terrifying resolve.

​"You are going to be fine," he said, his voice a low, vibrating lie. "We are going to the library. I will find the anchor. I will find a way to stitch you to the marrow of my bones if I have to."

​A Horcrux, his mind hissed. A vessel. A permanent home.

​He had researched the concept of soul-splitting, but he had always envisioned it as a way to preserve himself. Now, the path shifted. If he could not keep her as a ghost, he would house her in an object. Or perhaps, if his theories on the Dark Arts were correct, he could bind her to his own life force so completely that death itself wouldn't know which soul to claim.

​He stood, pulling her up with him. She stumbled, her feet passing through the top layer of soil before she caught herself.

​"Tom?" she asked, sensing the sudden, sharp shift in his aura. "You look... different."

​"I am focused," he replied, his eyes dark and fixed on the castle towers in the distance.

​He didn't tell her that her edges were disappearing. He didn't tell her that her very essence was being reclaimed by the void she had escaped in 1934. He simply took her hand—solidifying his own grip with a surge of will—and began the long walk back to the school.

​Every step was a battle. He could feel her slipping, the tether stretching thin as a spider's silk. He began to recite the incantations of binding under his breath, a rhythmic, dark chant that kept her form anchored to his side.

​He would graduate. He would rise. And he would find the ritual to make her eternal. Even if he had to tear the world apart to find the thread, he would never let her go back to the dark. To Tom Riddle, love was not a release; it was a permanent, unbreakable cage.

​And as the sun set behind the mountains, casting a long, blood-red shadow across the grounds, Y/N followed him, unaware that she was a dying flame, and he was the one holding the match.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The Restricted Section of the Hogwarts library was a graveyard of forbidden thoughts, and Tom Riddle was its most diligent gravedigger.

​For three weeks, the Head Boy had barely slept. He sat at a small, isolated table hidden behind the stacks of Magick Moste Evile, the light of a single, guttering candle casting a flickering, sickly yellow glow over his features. His cheekbones had become sharper, his eyes sunken into dark hollows of obsession. Before him lay a sprawling map of ink—transcriptions of ancient Sumerian soul-binding rituals and fragmented notes on the alchemy of "Fixed Spirits."

​Beside him, Y/N was a soft, fading blur.

​She hovered near the tall, arched window, watching the moon rise over the Astronomy Tower. She felt... strange. It wasn't pain, exactly, but a profound sense of hollowness, as if the gravity of the world were slowly losing its grip on her. She reached out to touch the spine of a book, but her fingers passed through the leather like a cold breeze.

​She turned to look at Tom. He was muttering under his breath, his quill scratching so hard against the parchment that the tip snapped. He didn't even swear; he simply picked up another and continued, his movements frantic and jagged.

​"Tom," she whispered. Her voice was a mere vibration in the air, a sound like dry grass brushing against stone. "You’ve been here for three days. You’ve missed your patrols. The professors are asking questions."

​Tom didn't look up. "Let them ask. They are children playing with matches. I am looking for the sun."

​"You're scaring me," she said, drifting closer. She tried to place a hand on his shoulder, but she felt the shield he had erected—a shimmering, invisible barrier of his own magic that kept her tethered to his physical space. It was warm, but it felt restrictive, like a cage made of sunlight. "Why are you doing this? I’m fine. The memories... they’ve stopped coming so fast."

​Tom finally looked at her. For a split second, the mask of the brilliant Head Boy slipped, revealing the terrified, possessive seven-year-old from the orphanage. He saw her—really saw her. She was so transparent that he could see the titles of the books on the shelves behind her through her chest.

​His heart lurched in a way that felt like a physical wound.

​"You aren't fine," he hissed, his voice raw. "You are disappearing, Y/N. You are leaving me, and I will not allow it. I did not pull you from that gutter just to watch you dissolve into nothing."

​Y/N froze. "Leaving you? What are you talking about? I'm right here."

​Tom realized his mistake—he had let the truth bleed out through his desperation. He quickly smoothed his expression, but the fire in his eyes remained. He reached into the air, his fingers twitching as he adjusted the invisible threads of the tether, pulling her a few inches closer to his side.

​"The magic of this castle is... unstable," he lied, though his voice lacked its usual silken conviction. "Your memories are causing a temporary fluctuation. I am simply finding a way to stabilize your form. A permanent anchor."

​He returned his gaze to the book, his eyes landing on a passage about The Living Vessel. The text described a way to house a soul not in a ghost, but in an object of great personal significance—an object that would be sustained by the life force of the caster.

​A sacrifice, the book warned. A life for a life to seal the bridge.

​Tom’s eyes narrowed. He thought of the man in the alley—the one who had kicked the sack. He thought of the world full of "disposable" people who had no purpose. If a life was required to keep Y/N anchored, he would provide a dozen. He would turn the world into a slaughterhouse if it meant she remained his shadow.

​"I don't need an anchor, Tom," Y/N said softly, unaware of the dark path his mind had just taken. She floated down until she was eye-level with him, her face full of a heartbreaking, innocent concern. "I just need you to come to bed. You're going to make yourself sick."

​"I am never sick," he replied, his voice regaining its cold, iron edge. He reached out and, using a surge of will, managed to catch her hand. For a fleeting second, it felt almost solid. "And I am never wrong. You will stay, Y/N. By my side, or in my heart, or bound to the very ring on my finger. But you will stay."

​Y/N looked at their joined hands—the solid, living boy and the fading, ghostly girl. She felt a shiver of dread that had nothing to do with her memories. She didn't understand the magic he was hunting, but she understood the look in his eyes.

​It wasn't the look of a friend. It was the look of a man who was preparing to go to war with Death itself. And she realized, with a quiet sort of horror, that in Tom Riddle’s world, even a ghost wasn't allowed to be free.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

For weeks, the shadows had seemed to grow teeth, biting into the corners of the room as Tom’s obsession deepened.

Y/N hovered at the edge of the desk, her form a flickering, bruised violet. She looked down at the open tome Tom had been scouring—Animae Cruentis, a book bound in something that looked far too much like human skin. Her eyes, wide and translucent, scanned the jagged Latin.

A life for a life. The bridge is paved in bone.

Her gaze shifted to the pile of scrap parchment beside it. In Tom’s precise, elegant script, she saw a list. Names. Students she had seen in the corridors. A girl from Hufflepuff. A boy from his own house. Calculations of their worth, their "utility," and the volume of life force they could potentially yield for a soul-grafting ritual.

"No," she whispered, the sound like the snapping of dry kindling.

Tom didn't look up. He was hunched over a different scroll, his eyes bloodshot, his skin the color of curdled milk. "The calculations must be exact, Y/N. The vessel needs to be prepared. I’ve settled on the diary. It’s close to the pulse. It’s perfect."

"Tom, look at me!"

The command was a ripple of cold that made the candles sputter. Tom finally lifted his head, his expression a terrifying blank slate of clinical detachment.

"You’re going to kill them," she said, her voice shaking with a resonance that made the glass inkwell on the desk vibrate. "You’re planning to murder people to keep me here. You’re talking about sacrifices as if they’re ingredients for a potion."

"They are," Tom replied, his voice chillingly level. He stood up, the chair scraping against the stone floor with a sound like a scream. "What is a life compared to your existence? These are children who will contribute nothing to history. Their only value is that they are alive, and you... you are the only thing that matters. I will not watch you fade because of some misplaced moral tremor."

"I don't want it!" Y/N shrieked. The room seemed to contract. The emerald curtains at the windows whipped violently as if a gale had been trapped inside the stone walls. "I won't be the reason you become a monster. If the price of staying is blood, then let me go. Let me fade!"

Tom’s face contorted, the mask of the brilliant student shattering to reveal a raw, jagged fury. He stepped toward her, his hand reaching out as if to seize the very air she occupied.

"You do not get to choose!" he roared, his voice booming in the small chamber. "I found you! I kept you! You are mine, Y/N, and I do not lose what is mine! If I have to burn this castle to the ground to keep your soul anchored to this earth, I will do it without a second thought!"

"You're mad," she whispered, backing away, her form blurring into a frantic, static-heavy haze. "You’re a monster, Tom. You’re already the thing I was afraid of."

"I am the only one who cares for you!" Tom countered, his magic lashing out, a dark, oppressive weight that pinned her against the cold stone wall. "I am the only one who sees you! Without me, you are nothing but dust in a London alleyway! I saved you!"

The mention of the alleyway—the dark, the cold, the sense of being discarded—hit Y/N like a physical blow. The grief, the betrayal, and the sheer, unadulterated horror of his coldness boiled over. She didn't think. She didn't cast a spell. She simply exploded.

The magic she had borrowed from him for years, the power she had cultivated in the shadows, surged outward in a violent, prismatic wave.

CRACK.

The heavy oak desk was sheared in half. The bookshelves groaned as the volumes were launched like projectiles. Tom, caught in the center of the emotional blast, was lifted off his feet. He hit the far stone wall with a sickening, heavy thud, his head snapping back against the masonry.

He slumped to the floor, his eyes rolling back, a thin trail of blood beginning to leak from his temple.

The silence that followed was deafening.

Y/N stood in the center of the wreckage, her form glowing with a terrifying, incandescent light. She looked at the boy she had loved, the boy who had become her world, now lying broken among the ruins of his own ambition.

A sob racked her translucent chest, but it was a sound of finality. She couldn't stay. Not like this. Not as a trophy in a madman's collection.

She turned, her form dissolving into a streak of pale, mourning light. She passed through the heavy door, then the stone walls of the castle, flying out into the dark, freezing night of the Highlands. She didn't know where she was going; she only knew that for the first time in a decade, she was running away from the only anchor she had ever known.

Behind her, in the darkened room, Tom Riddle lay unconscious, the tether in his chest fraying, the silence of the room finally, truly empty.

The air outside the Head Boy’s chambers was a shock of ice, but Y/N didn't feel the temperature; she felt the vibration of her own panicked pulse. She was a streak of frantic, violet light, tearing through the stone veins of the castle. Her mind was a kaleidoscope of Tom’s bleeding temple and the jagged, murderous lists on his desk.

​"Monster," she whispered, the word echoing off the suits of armor. "He’s a monster."

​But as she rounded the corner of the Grand Staircase, she realized she wasn't alone. The portraits—usually dozing or whispering in the dark—were wide awake, their painted eyes tracking her luminous, erratic flight.

​"A poltergeist!" a 14th-century knight cried, reaching for his painted sword. "Alert the Headmaster! A dark spirit is loose!"

​"No!" Y/N shrieked, skidding to a halt in mid-air. Her form flickered violently, her edges sparking with the raw, unstable magic she had just unleashed on Tom. "I’m not—I’m a student! Please, just listen!"

​She reached out a hand toward a portrait of a kindly-looking witch, her fingers trembling. She wanted to explain, to beg for help, but her touch was no longer a ghost’s sigh. It was a live wire. As her translucent hand grazed the canvas, a spark of blue-white energy jumped from her fingertips.

​The oil paint hissed. A small, orange flame bloomed on the corner of the witch's silk gown.

​"Fire!" the witch screamed, scrambling to the edge of her frame. "She’s burning us! The ghost is a pyromaniac!"

​"I didn't mean to!" Y/N cried, her voice cracking into a shrill, haunting frequency. Desperate to fix it, she swiped at the flames with her hands, but her panic only fed the magic. Instead of smothering the fire, her touch acted like bellows. The orange lick of flame roared into a hungry blaze, leaping from the witch’s frame to the heavy velvet curtains nearby.

​The corridor was suddenly bathed in a hellish, dancing orange light.

​"Stop it! Please!" Y/N begged, her hands moving in clumsy, frantic circles. She tried to conjure water, a trick Tom had taught her, but the memories of her father’s belt and the cold alleyway were clogging her focus. Instead of water, a burst of concussive force erupted from her palms, shattering the stone balustrade and sending a rain of debris down into the moving staircases below.

​Paintings everywhere began to flee their frames, a chaotic exodus of two-dimensional figures screaming for Dumbledore, for Dippet, for anyone.

​"I'M NOT A MONSTER!" she roared, the sound echoing through the castle like a thunderclap.

​She turned to the fleeing figures, her eyes glowing with a terrifying, incandescent light. She tried to grab a passing ghost—the Fat Friar—to make him listen, to make him stay, but her fingers passed through him with a violent, electric crackle that sent the spirit reeling.

​"Stay! Just listen to me!"

​But they wouldn't. To them, she was a shimmering, screaming nightmare, a manifestation of the very darkness they feared. She saw the reflection of herself in a suit of armor—a jagged, terrifying silhouette of light and fury. She looked exactly like the thing Tom wanted her to be: a weapon.

​The guilt and the terror merged into a single, high-pitched shriek. It was a sound that didn't belong to the living or the dead. It was the sound of a soul breaking.

​With a final, violent surge of energy, she launched herself upward. She didn't use the corridors; she phased through the ceiling, through the floorboards of the owlery, and out into the vast, indifferent sky. She flew higher and higher, the air thinning, the castle becoming a toy at her feet. She didn't stop until the moon was the only thing looking back at her—a cold, silver eye in the dark.

​With a soft, dying sob, she collapsed into the vacuum of the night, disappearing into the silver haze of the moonbeams.

​In the Head Boy’s chambers, the silence was absolute.

​Tom Riddle’s eyes snapped open. The room was dark, save for the dying embers in the grate and the flickering light of the fire in the hallway. He groaned, his hand going to the sticky, drying blood on his temple.

​He reached out. Not with his hand, but with the tether.

​The hollow ache in his chest was a physical void. The connection was there—a thin, vibrating wire of silver that stretched out of his heart and disappeared through the stone wall—but it was slack. The rhythmic, comforting hum of Y/N’s presence was gone.

​He scrambled to his feet, his breath catching in his throat. He threw open the door, ignoring the smoking ruins of the corridor and the distant sound of teachers’ voices.

​"Y/N?" he whispered, his voice cracking.

​He searched the shadows. He searched the rafters. He reached into the dark, pulling on the tether with every ounce of his will. He could feel her—she was still on Earth, still tied to the blood in his veins—but she was far. Too far to reach. Too far to hear.

​For the first time since the orphanage, Tom Riddle felt the crushing, suffocating weight of being truly alone. He stood in the wreckage of his ambition, his eyes fixed on the distant, silver moon, and realized that in his quest to keep her forever, he had finally driven her into the one place he couldn't follow: the light.

The Grand Staircase was no longer a place of architectural wonder; it was a throat choked with smoke and the high-pitched wails of the painted dead.

​Albus Dumbledore stood at the center of the carnage, his auburn hair silvered by the coating of stone dust that hung in the air. His wand was a blur, weaving complex cooling charms to suppress the magical fire that had eaten into the heavy tapestries. Behind him, Professor Galatea Merrythought was corralling a swarm of frightened third-years back toward their dormitories, her voice sharp with a fear she couldn't quite hide.

​"It was a wraith!" a portrait of a fat, balding wizard shrieked from a scorched frame. "A banshee with the face of a girl and eyes like white fire! She tried to murder us all!"

​The student body was a sea of whispers and pale faces. They huddled in the shadows of the arches, their eyes darting toward every flickering candle flame, terrified that the 'dark spirit' would return. The atmosphere was thick with a new, jagged paranoia—the kind that Dumbledore knew would not be easily soothed.

​"Quiet!" Dumbledore’s voice didn't need to be loud to command the room. It carried a weight of authority that silenced the sobbing portraits. He looked at the shattered stone balustrade and the peculiar, scorched signature of the magic left behind. It didn't look like a spell; it looked like an explosion of raw, untethered emotion.

​He turned his head, his blue eyes searching the crowd. "Where is the Head Boy? Where is Mr. Riddle?"

​But Tom Riddle was already gone.

​He moved through the back corridors of the castle like a wraith himself. He ignored the prefects shouting for order and the frantic ringing of the school bells. His steps were long and predatory, his face a mask of such terrifying stillness that even the ghosts who saw him pass flattened themselves against the walls to avoid his path.

​He didn't care about the fire. He didn't care about the broken stone or the questions Dumbledore would surely ask when the sun rose. Those were the concerns of a student, a boy playing at being a leader. He was beyond that now.

​He reached the edge of the Forbidden Forest, the cold night air biting at the drying blood on his temple. He stopped, closing his eyes, and centered his entire being on the center of his chest.

​The tether was there.

​It was no longer the vibrant, humming chord of their youth. It felt like a frayed wire, vibrating at a frequency so high it was almost a pain. It pulled upward, toward the sky, toward the silver, indifferent disc of the moon. He could feel her grief—a vast, cold ocean that threatened to pull him under. She was out there, drifting in the vacuum of her own terror, convinced she was the monster the portraits had called her.

​"You are not leaving me," Tom whispered, his voice a jagged promise to the dark.

​He didn't have a broom. He didn't have a plan. But he had the bond. He reached into the deepest, darkest well of his magic—the part he had been hiding from the world—and pulled. He didn't pull her back to him; he used the tether to launch himself after her.

​With a violent crack of displaced air, Tom disappeared from the forest floor.

​He moved through the night sky not with the joy Y/N had felt, but with a grim, relentless efficiency. He followed the silver thread through the clouds, his cloak snapping like a whip behind him. The higher he went, the thinner the air became, the cold beginning to crystallize on his eyelashes.

​Finally, he saw her.

​She was a tiny, flickering spark against the vastness of the moon, a wisp of purple and white light that looked as fragile as a breath on a mirror. She was huddled into herself, her knees pulled to her chest, drifting in the silent, star-strewn void.

​Tom slowed his ascent, hovering a few feet away. The tether between them was glowing now, a bridge of white-hot silver in the darkness.

​"Y/N," he said. His voice shouldn't have carried in the thin air, but through the bond, it sounded like a bell in the quiet of her mind.

​She didn't move. "Go away, Tom. They’re right. I’m a monster. I burn everything I touch."

​"Then we will burn together," Tom replied, his voice devoid of his usual manipulation. It was just a cold, hard fact. He drifted closer, reaching out across the void. "The world is full of things that deserve to be ash. Why do you care what a few pieces of canvas think of you?"

​"I almost killed you," she choked out, her form flickering as if she were about to dissolve.

​"And yet, I am here," Tom said, his fingers finally brushing the edge of her translucent sleeve. The static of her panic buzzed against his skin, but he didn't pull back. He gripped her, his magic acting as an anchor, forcing her form to solidify against the vacuum of the night. "I told you. You are mine. Heaven, hell, or the moon—it doesn't matter. I will always find you."

​He pulled her toward him, and for a moment, they were the only two souls in the universe, suspended in the cold, silver light. Y/N looked at him—at the blood on his face, at the madness in his eyes—and realized that the tether wasn't just a magical accident. It was her destiny. She couldn't be a monster without him, and he couldn't be a King without his shadow.

​The descent back to earth was silent. Tom held her close, his cloak wrapped around her shimmering form as if to hide her from the stars. He knew the world below was waking up to a nightmare, but as he looked at the girl in his arms, he didn't feel fear. He felt a dark, intoxicating triumph.

​The hunt was over. But the war for her soul was just beginning.

The forest floor was a tapestry of silver and shadow as Tom descended, his boots hitting the damp earth with a finality that felt like a gavel. He didn't head for the castle gates. Instead, he steered them toward a secluded hollow where the roots of a dead rowan tree twisted like skeletal fingers.

He knelt, pulling a small, black-clad book from the inner pocket of his robes. It was blank, its pages pristine and hungry.

​"The fading has to stop," Tom said, his voice a low, rhythmic vibration. He laid the diary on the flat stone of the hollow, his movements precise despite the tremor of exhaustion in his hands. "I can feel the thread fraying, Y/N. If I don't anchor you now, there will be nothing left of you by dawn."

​Y/N drifted beside him, her form so thin that the moonlight passed through her as if she were made of glass. She looked at the book—a mundane, leather-bound thing—and then at Tom. She saw the desperation he tried to hide behind a mask of clinical focus. She saw the boy who had watched her die, and the man who was willing to commit any atrocity to keep her from doing it again.

​"Will it hurt?" she whispered.

​"No," Tom lied, his eyes fixed on the inkwell he was unscrewing. "It will feel like falling asleep in a room that finally has walls. You will be safe. No one can touch you. No one can see you unless I allow it."

​He began to chant, the incantation a jagged, ancient string of syllables that seemed to drain the light from the clearing. He used his own blood, still wet from the gash on his head, to trace a series of runes onto the first page of the diary. The tether in his chest began to pull—not outward toward the moon, but downward, toward the paper.

​Y/N felt the vacuum. The book began to glow with a faint, pulsing light, matching the rhythm of Tom’s heart. She knew that once she entered that ink, she would be his in a way that surpassed even the tether. She would be his memory, his secret, his soul’s silent partner.

​She looked at him one last time—the sharp line of his jaw, the dark intensity of his eyes. She knew the risks. She had seen the sacrifices he was willing to make. But in this cold, terrifying world, he was the only thing that had ever truly belonged to her.

​She gathered the last of her energy, pulling every stray spark of her essence into a singular, concentrated point of light. She didn't speak. She drifted forward, her form solidifying for one final, desperate moment.

​She pressed her lips to his.

​It wasn't the warmth of a living kiss. It was the sensation of a thousand winter stars exploding against his mouth—a flash of absolute, blinding cold that tasted of ozone and ancient grief. It was a kiss of gratitude, of fear, and of a devotion that had long ago transcended morality.

​Tom’s eyes widened, his breath hitching in his throat as the electric shock of her kiss surged through him, fusing with the ritual’s magic.

​"I trust you," her voice echoed in his mind, fading even as the words formed.

​Then, the light snapped.

​With a soft, rushing sound like the turning of a thousand pages, Y/N’s form collapsed inward. She was drawn into the diary in a swirl of pearlescent mist, the runes on the page flaring a brilliant, violent green before turning a deep, permanent black.

​The clearing went silent. The wind died down.

​Tom sat back on his heels, gasping for air. He reached out and touched the cover of the diary. It was warm—impossibly warm. He could feel her through the leather, a steady, calm pulse that was now perfectly aligned with his own. The fading had stopped. The tether was no longer a frayed wire; it was a sealed circuit.

​He closed the book and tucked it against his chest, right over his heart.

​"I have you," he whispered to the shadows.

​He stood up, straightening his robes and wiping the blood from his face with a flick of his wand. The Grand Staircase was still a ruin, and Dumbledore was still waiting with questions, but as Tom Riddle began the long walk back to the castle, he didn't look like a boy in trouble.

​He looked like a man who had just hidden his most precious treasure in the one place no one would ever think to look: inside his own dark, meticulous history.

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The air in the basement of the London flat was thick enough to chew, a stagnant soup of copper, sulfur, and the heavy, sweet scent of lilies—the smell of a funeral before the body is cold.

​Tom Riddle, no longer the golden Head Boy of Hogwarts but a shadow that moved through the back alleys of Knockturn Alley, stood over the ritual circle. His shirt sleeves were rolled up, revealing forearms corded with tension and stained with the remnants of a dozen different lives. For months, while he worked at Borgin and Burkes, he had been a butcher of souls. He had harvested the vitality of the unwanted, the blood of the "useless," and the bone of the forgotten. He had done things that would turn Y/N’s spirit into a shriek of horror if she ever saw the cost.

​But he had buried those bodies deep. He had washed the blood from his hands until the skin was raw. All that mattered was the vessel.

​The diary sat at the center of the altar, its pages fluttering as if caught in a localized gale.

​"Now," Tom whispered, his voice a jagged, rhythmic command.

​He tipped the final chalice—a mixture of essence and ancient, dark alchemy—into the stone basin. The reaction was violent. A flash of blinding, visceral light erupted, turning the shadows of the basement into a flickering strobe of white and green. The stone floor groaned. The air hummed with a frequency that made Tom’s teeth ache.

​Then, the light began to solidify.

​It started with the skeleton—a flash of ivory rising from the liquid. Then came the intricate weaving of muscle and the delicate, blooming network of veins. It was a masterpiece of forbidden art. Tom watched with a predatory, reverent intensity as the skin knit itself together, a pale, porcelain landscape that covered the raw machinery of life.

​The final gasp of the ritual was a rush of air that snuffed out every candle in the room.

​In the sudden, heavy dark, the only sound was a soft, wet thud.

​Tom lunged forward, his wand tip glowing with a low, amber light. In the center of the basin lay a girl. She was no longer a wisp of purple light or a streak of silver mist. She was solid. Her skin was the color of cream, her hair a dark spill across the stone, and her chest... her chest was moving.

​A slow, shallow rise. A soft, rattling fall.

​"Y/N," he breathed, the name a prayer and a possession.

​She was naked, her form as vulnerable as a newborn’s, and completely unconscious. Tom didn't hesitate. He reached down and gathered her into his arms. The sensation was an electric shock to his system. For a decade, he had felt nothing but the cold static of her ghost or the warm hum of the leather diary. Now, he felt the friction of skin, the weight of bone, and the terrifying, beautiful heat of a living body.

​He felt the silk of her hair against his neck and the puff of her breath—actual, warm breath—against his collarbone.

​He wrapped her immediately in a heavy, fur-lined cloak he had prepared, shielding her from the damp chill of the basement. He didn't look back at the remains of the ritual—the broken glass, the spilled blood, the evidence of his descent. He carried her up the narrow, creaking stairs to his flat, his movements careful, almost tender, though his eyes remained dark with the secrets he would never tell her.

​He laid her on the bed in his sparse, immaculate room. The rain hammered against the windowpane, a rhythmic, London sound that had once heralded her death, but now served as the heartbeat of her new life.

​Tom sat on the edge of the bed, his hand hovering over her face. He traced the curve of her jaw, his fingers lingering on the pulse point at her neck. It was steady. It was real. He had cheated the void. He had stolen a soul and grown it a house.

​She would wake up soon. She would remember the fight in the hallway, the moon, and the diary. She would ask him how he did it. She would look for the kindness in his eyes.

​And Tom, the man who had murdered his way to this moment, would smile. He would tell her it was a miracle. He would tell her it was love. He would tuck her into his life like a stolen gem, and he would ensure that she never, ever saw the stains on the floor beneath her feet.

​"You're home," he whispered into the quiet room, his shadow stretching long and dark across the floor. "And this time, I’m never letting you go."

⋇⋆✮⋆⋇

The next morning

The first thing Y/N felt was not the magic. It was the weight.

​For a decade, the world had been a suggestion, a veil she drifted through. Now, it was a crushing, solid reality. The sheets beneath her were coarse linen; the air in her lungs was thick and tasted of rain and old wood; the heartbeat in her ears was a thundering, rhythmic drum that she realized, with a jolt of terror, was her own.

​Her eyelids felt like lead. When she finally forced them open, the dim light of the flat felt like a physical blow.

​"Tom?" she croaked.

​The sound of her own voice—vocal cords vibrating, breath catching in a throat that was no longer mist—made her gasp. She tried to sit up, but her limbs were uncoordinated, heavy as stone.

​Immediately, a pair of arms were around her. They weren't the static-charged fields of magic she remembered. They were warm. Hard. Solid. Tom pulled her against his chest, and for the first time, she felt the scratch of his wool coat against her cheek and the steady, thudding heat of his heart.

​"I'm here," he whispered into her hair. His voice was a low vibration she felt in her very bones. "You’re safe. You’re whole."

​Y/N let out a sob—a real, wet sob that left tears on her skin—and buried her face in the crook of his neck. She clung to him with a desperate, weak strength, her fingers digging into his shoulders. "I thought... the moon... the dark..."

​"It’s over," Tom said, his grip tightening until it was almost painful. "The diary served its purpose. I’ve brought you back. No more fading, Y/N. No more shadows."

​She pulled back just enough to look at him. He looked older, his face sharper and more beautiful in a way that felt dangerous. But his eyes—they were fixed on her with a hunger that made her shiver. "How?" she whispered. "The ritual... what did you have to do?"

​Tom’s expression didn't flicker. He reached up, his thumb tracing the line of her new, soft lower lip. He thought of the three men in the alleyway whose lives had been the fuel for this skin. He thought of the dark things he had promised the void to get her back.

​"A simple matter of advanced alchemy," he lied, his voice as smooth as glass. "A gift from the world to me, for my persistence."

​Y/N wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that this miracle was clean. She leaned her head back against his shoulder, closing her eyes and listening to the rain against the window. "I don't want to lose this, Tom. I don't want to go back."

​"You won't," Tom promised.

​Over her shoulder, his gaze drifted to the corner of the room where his traveling cloak lay, concealing the heavy, dark volumes of lore he had been studying. He thought of the name he was building in the shadows—Voldemort. He thought of the war that was coming, the blood that would need to be spilled to ensure his seat at the head of the world.

​He knew she wouldn't understand. She was a creature of light, a girl who wept for burnt paintings. She would hate the man he was becoming. She would shrink away from the things he was prepared to do to the "lesser" creatures of this world.

​But as he felt the warmth of her breath against his neck, a cold, final resolve settled in his chest.

​It didn't matter if she liked it. It didn't matter if she eventually grew to fear him. He had spent ten years stitching her soul to his, and he hadn't done it to let her walk away into a world he didn't control. He would build her a palace out of the ruins of his enemies. He would keep her fed, clothed, and beautiful, tucked away in the heart of his dark empire where the sunlight could never reach her.

​She was his first Horcrux, his first treasure, and his only weakness. And he would guard her with a cruelty that the world had never seen.

​"Sleep now," he murmured, pulling the fur-lined cloak tighter around her. "The world is different now, Y/N. But you have nothing to fear. I am the only master here."

​Y/N drifted back into a heavy, natural sleep, anchored by the heat of his body. She didn't see the way his shadow grew long and jagged against the wall, or the way his hand hovered over her throat—not to hurt, but to marvel at the pulse he now owned.

​The girl was alive. The monster was born. And in the quiet flat in London, the door was locked from the inside.

The rain follows you all the way to the gate. It streaks down the black bars, cold against your fingers as you clutch them and stare at the building beyond, Wool’s Orphanage, Mrs. Cole called it. The place looks tired, as if it’s been holding its breath for years.

Her lantern swings ahead of you, scattering light over cracked steps and puddles that mirror the yellow glow. You follow because that’s what you’ve been told to do, and because you have nowhere else to go.

Inside, the air tastes of dust and old cabbage. The corridors hum with quiet noises, footsteps too light to belong to grown-ups, the soft rustle of sheets, someone sobbing where they think no one can hear. You feel the pain of the children before you ever see them; it hums under your skin, heavy and familiar, though you don’t know why.

Mrs. Cole walks briskly, her shoes clicking against the stone floor. When she glances back at you, her face is sharp and tired, but her eyes hold something gentler. “You’ll sleep here,” she says, opening a door to a narrow room lined with iron beds and shivering shadows.

You nod, though your throat is tight. You don’t know how to thank her. You don’t know what else to say.

All you know, all you remember, is your name.

Everything before this moment is gone. The faces, the laughter, the warmth, all burned away, leaving only a flash of green light behind your eyes and a hollow ache where a life used to be. Seven whole years you can’t remember.

Mrs. Cole’s hand rests briefly on your shoulder. “It’ll get easier,” she says, as if the words might make it true.

When she leaves, the candlelight flickers. You whisper your name into the darkness, soft and certain, as if holding onto it will keep the rest of you from disappearing.

“Y/N L/N“

You take a slow breath and look around the room. Three iron beds stand against the walls, each with a thin mattress and a single gray blanket folded at the foot. The floorboards are bare and worn smooth in places, and a small, grimy window looks out onto a brick wall and a slice of rainy sky. There’s a wooden chest at the foot of each bed, and a cracked mirror hangs on the wall between two of them, reflecting the flickering candlelight in distorted shards.

A child with mousy brown hair sits on the bed closest to the door, watching you with wide, curious eyes. She’s maybe your age, maybe a little older, clutching a worn rag doll to their chest.

“You’re the new one,” they say, not unkindly. “I’m Amy. That’s Denis’s bed over there, but he’s outside playing in the puddles until Mrs. Cole catches him.”

They pat the space beside them. “You can sit if you want. What’s your name?”

“Y/N,” you say, your voice softer than you meant it to be.

Amy nods as if filing the name away. “That’s nice. Sounds like it belongs in a story.” She glances toward the doorway, her expression tightening slightly.

You follow her gaze.

A boy stands in the hall, just outside the room. He’s pale, with dark hair neatly combed, watching you with an intensity that makes the back of your neck prickle. His eyes are dark, almost black, and they don’t blink. He doesn’t smile, doesn’t move, just stares, as if he’s trying to memorize you.

Before you can say anything, Mrs. Cole’s sharp voice cuts through the quiet.

“Tom Riddle! What are you doing lurking about? Get away from there this instant!”

The boy, Tom, turns his head slowly, as if pulled from a trance. He gives Mrs. Cole a look that is neither frightened nor apologetic, just blank. Then he slips away down the corridor without a sound.

Mrs. Cole huffs, shaking her head. “Wicked boy,” she mutters, more to herself than to you. Then she raises her voice. “Dinner in five minutes! Everyone to the kitchen!”

Amy leans closer to you, her voice dropping to a whisper. “That’s Tom. Best stay away from him. He’s… strange.”

You can't shake the image of Tom's dark, unblinking stare. "What do you mean, strange?" you ask Amy, keeping your voice low.

Amy shifts on the bed, her fingers worrying at her doll's yarn hair. "He does things," she whispers. "Bad things. Animals get hurt when he's around. Billy Stubbs's rabbit… its neck was broken, and Tom was just standing there, looking at it. He didn't even cry. And he talks to himself sometimes, in a hissy sort of voice. No one likes him. Mrs. Cole calls him wicked all the time."

She glances toward the empty doorway again, as if afraid he might still be listening. "He steals things, too. Little things that go missing, and then they turn up in his drawer. He never gets in trouble for it, though. He's clever like that."

Footsteps echo in the hall, the clatter of many children heading toward the kitchen. Amy stands up, smoothing her worn dress. "Come on. We should go before all the bread's gone."

She offers you a small, sympathetic smile. "Just... don't be alone with him, okay?"

You follow Amy out of the room and down the dim corridor toward the smell of boiled potatoes and weak gravy. The kitchen is a large, steamy room with a long wooden table crowded with children of all ages. Their voices blend into a low, anxious hum.

Amy leads you to two empty spots on a bench. A boy with freckles and tousled hair is already sitting there, Denis, you assume. He gives you a quick, curious glance before turning his attention back to the slice of bread he's buttering.

You take your seat, and your eyes drift across the table almost against your will.

Tom sits alone at the far end. He's not eating; he's just staring at his plate, his expression perfectly blank. The children around him leave a noticeable gap, as if his very presence pushes them away. He looks up, and his dark eyes find yours immediately. There's no smile, no nod, just that same unnerving, focused stare.

Mrs. Cole claps her hands. „Eat, children!"

A bowl of thin stew is placed in front of you. As you pick up your spoon, you feel the weight of Tom's gaze still fixed on you, steady and unblinking, from across the room.

You force yourself to look away from Tom and study the other children instead. There’s a girl with a crooked braid who won’t meet anyone’s eyes, a boy who keeps kicking the table leg, a pair of twins whispering fiercely to each other. Their faces are pinched with hunger or worry or both.

Your gaze drops to your bowl. The stew is watery, with a few pale chunks of potato and carrot floating in it. The bread beside it is hard at the edges. A sudden, sharp wave of loneliness washes over you, so strong it makes your throat ache.

Why are you even here?

You don’t know. You don’t remember anything before the green light and the empty feeling. You don’t remember your parents’ faces, or a home, or a reason.

You pick up your spoon, but you don’t eat. You just stare into the thin broth, wondering if you’ll ever feel like you belong anywhere again.

Then you lift the spoon to your lips and take a small, reluctant bite. The stew tastes of salt and something faintly bitter, like old vegetables. It’s warm, at least, and the warmth spreads through your chest, easing the tightness there just a little.

Across the table, Tom is still watching you. But now, as you swallow, you see something shift in his expression, not a smile, but a subtle tilt of his head, as if he’s pleased you’ve decided to eat. It’s a strange, quiet approval that makes your skin prickle.

Amy nudges you with her elbow. “It’s not so bad once you get used to it,” she murmurs. “Better than nothing.”

Denis, on your other side, finally speaks up. “Sometimes we get jam on Sundays,” he says, as if offering a piece of valuable intelligence. “If you’re good.”

You nod, taking another spoonful. The act of eating feels like a small rebellion against the emptiness inside you. You’re here. You’re eating. You’re surviving.

Tom’s gaze doesn’t waver. It feels less like a threat now and more like… interest. Like you’re a book he’s decided to read, and he’s waiting to see what happens on the next page.

You lean closer to Amy, your voice dropping to a whisper that barely carries over the clatter of spoons and benches. "Why does he keep staring?"

Amy follows your gaze to Tom, then quickly looks down at her bowl. "I told you," she murmurs back. "He's not right. He does that to new people sometimes. Watches them. Like he's figuring out how to... I don't know. How to get to them."

Her expression grows earnest. "Just don't give him anything. Don't talk to him. He'll lose interest eventually."

But as you look back at Tom, you're not so sure. His dark eyes are still fixed on you, and there's a curious intensity in them now, not malice, but something like recognition, as if he sees something in you that no one else does.

You're caught in that silent exchange, a thread of connection stretching across the noisy room. Tom tilts his head slightly, studying you as if you're a complex spell he's trying to decipher.

Mrs. Cole claps her hands again. "All right, plates down! Everyone to wash up and then straight to bed. No dawdling!"

The spell breaks. Tom stands up smoothly, his bowl empty, and walks out of the kitchen without a backward glance. You're left sitting there, your heart beating a little too fast, wondering what you've just started.

You follow Amy back through the dim corridors, your mind still caught on that silent exchange with Tom. The orphanage feels different at night, the shadows longer, the quiet more profound, as if the building itself is holding its breath.

In your room, Amy changes into a nightdress without speaking. Denis is already in his bed, facing the wall.

"You should get ready," Amy says softly. "Lights out soon."

You change quickly and climb into your narrow bed. The sheets are rough and smell of soap and damp. Amy blows out the candle on the small table between your beds, plunging the room into darkness broken only by the faint gray light from the window.

You lie there, listening to Denis's steady breathing and the distant sound of a train passing somewhere in the city. Your thoughts drift, and exhaustion pulls you under.

In your dream, you're standing in a sunlit room you've never seen before. Books float gently through the air, turning their own pages. A quill writes by itself on a parchment that hovers mid-air. You reach out, and a small, carved wooden bird on a shelf trembles, then lifts into the air, circling your head before settling softly into your open palm.

You wake with a start, your heart pounding. The room is still dark. The wooden bird isn't real, but for a moment, the feeling of weight in your palm was.

The dream of floating objects lingers in your mind for days, a secret warmth tucked behind your ribs.

One rainy afternoon, when the other children are playing a noisy game in the common room, you slip away down a narrow hallway you haven't explored before. At the end is a door, slightly ajar.

You push it open.

The room is small and ugly, with peeling green paint and a single grimy window. A few shelves hold a sad collection of tattered books. Tom is sitting on the floor in a patch of weak gray light, a book open in his lap.

He looks up, and for once, he doesn't seem surprised to see you. His dark eyes study you carefully.

"This is the library," he says, his voice calm and clear. "Not that there's much to read."

"Hello," you say, and step inside.

The room feels smaller with both of you in it. Tom watches you, his expression unreadable. He doesn't smile, but he doesn't look angry either. Just... observing.

"You're the new girl," he says. It's not a question.

You nod, surprised he knows your name. "Yes."

He closes his book, setting it aside with careful precision. "Most of the others don't come in here. They think it's boring." He pauses, his dark eyes studying your face. "But you're different."

The words hang in the air between you. Different how? You think of your dream, of the quill floating above the desk. You think of the blue light that sometimes flickers at the edges of your vision when no one is looking.

Tom leans back in his chair, his fingers tapping lightly on the table. "Sometimes," he says, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, "I can do things. Strange things. Things that shouldn't be possible."

He watches you closely, as if testing your reaction. "The other children call me wicked for it. Mrs. Cole too, when she thinks I can't hear."

You take a small step into the room, the floorboards creaking under your weight. "What kind of strange things can you do?" you ask, your curiosity outweighing Amy's warnings.

Tom's expression doesn't change, but something flickers in his eyes, a spark of interest, or maybe satisfaction. He sets his book aside carefully.

"I can make things happen," he says, his voice low and even. "Without touching them. I can make animals do what I want. I can find things that are hidden. I can hurt people if they bother me, and no one ever knows it was me."

Your eyes widen, and a strange mix of awe and recognition blooms in your chest. "Do you really mean it?" you whisper, taking another step into the room. "Could you... show me?"

For the first time, Tom's lips curve into something that almost resembles a smile. It's small and sharp, but it's there. He looks pleased, not in a warm way, but in the way someone looks when they've solved a difficult puzzle.

He doesn't answer right away. Instead, he glances toward the door you left ajar, then back at you. "If I show you," he says quietly, "you can't tell anyone. Not ever. They wouldn't understand."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small, smooth stone, gray and ordinary. He places it on the floor between you.

"Watch," he says.

He doesn't touch it. He doesn't say any words. He just stares at the stone, his dark eyes fixed and intense. For a moment, nothing happens. Then, slowly, the stone begins to tremble. It rolls once, twice, then lifts an inch off the floorboards, hovering in the air as if held by invisible strings.

It stays there, suspended, for three heartbeats before dropping back with a soft tap.

Tom looks at you, his expression calm but expectant. "See?" he says. "I can do things they can't."

You stare at the spot where the stone hovered, your breath catching in your throat. "I've dreamed about things like that," you whisper, the words slipping out before you can stop them. "Moving on their own. Books... and a little bird..."

Tom's eyes sharpen. He leans forward, his gaze intense. "Tell me," he says, his voice low but urgent.

You swallow, the memory of the dream vivid behind your eyes. "There was a room, full of sunlight. Books were floating, turning pages by themselves. A quill was writing in the air. And there was this wooden bird... it flew to me. It landed right in my hand."

You look down at your palm, half-expecting to see the ghost of its weight still there. "It felt real. More real than this."

Tom is silent for a long moment, studying you with a new, deeper interest. "Dreams can be memories," he says finally. "Or warnings. Or... possibilities."

He picks up the stone again, holding it between his thumb and forefinger. "You're like me," he says, and there's a strange note in his voice, not quite warmth, but something close to recognition. "We're not like them. We're special."

He looks at you, his dark eyes holding yours. "We should keep this between us. They wouldn't understand. They'd call you wicked too."

You nod slowly, the weight of the promise settling in your chest like a second heartbeat. "I won't tell anyone”, you say, your voice firm despite the whisper. „Not ever."

Tom watches you for another moment, then gives a single, satisfied nod. He slips the stone back into his pocket. "Good," he says. "It's better this way. Just us."

He stands up, brushing dust from his trousers. The gray light from the window catches the sharp angles of his face, making him look older than seven, like a statue carved from something cold and permanent.

"We should go back before they notice we're gone," he says, but he doesn't move toward the door right away. He looks at you one more time, his dark eyes lingering on your face as if memorizing it. "You can come here again. If you want."

He turns and walks out, leaving you alone in the ugly little room with its peeling paint and sad collection of books. The air feels different now, charged, as if something invisible has shifted between you.

You stand there for a moment longer, listening to the distant sounds of children playing down the hall. Then you follow him out, closing the door softly behind you.

Days pass in a blur of routine meals and quiet observations. You find yourself watching Tom more often, noticing how he moves through the orphanage like a shadow, present but separate. Sometimes you catch him looking back, and that silent understanding passes between you again.

Then comes the storm.

It builds all afternoon, the sky darkening to a bruised purple. By nightfall, rain lashes against the windows, and thunder rumbles deep in the distance. You lie awake in your narrow bed, listening to the wind howl around the old building.

That's when you feel it, a strange, warm tingling in your fingertips, like static electricity but stronger. You sit up, holding your hands out in the dark. A faint, silvery glow begins to pulse around your skin, growing brighter with each heartbeat.

You stare at the silvery light dancing around your fingers, your breath catching. Instead of pulling away, you focus all your attention on it, willing the glow to grow brighter. You think of the floating stone, of Tom's calm intensity, of the wooden bird from your dream.

The light responds. It pulses, then spreads, wrapping around your hands like delicate lace made of moonlight. The tingling sensation grows warmer, almost pleasant, humming through your veins. You can feel it, a current of something alive and waiting, just beneath your skin.

Across the room, the candle on the small table flickers, though there's no draft. The flame stretches toward you, bending as if drawn by an invisible force.

You remember Tom's words: We're special.

This is what he meant. This is the difference.

The thunder cracks again, closer this time, and the whole room seems to vibrate with the sound. You look from your glowing hands to the storm raging outside the window, and a sudden, fierce certainty fills you.

You look around the dark room. On the small table between your beds sits a chipped cup. You fix your gaze on the cup, willing it to move.

At first, nothing happens. The cup stays stubbornly still. You bite your lip, frustration mixing with the warm hum in your veins. You think of the stone hovering, of Tom's calm certainty. You don't just want it to move, you know it can.

The cup trembles.

It's a tiny, almost invisible shudder at first. Then it rocks once, twice, and lifts an inch off the table. It hovers there, wobbling slightly, as if held by an unsteady hand. Your heart leaps into your throat.

You're doing it. You're really doing it.

The cup drifts toward you, slow and unsteady, before dropping back onto the table with a soft clink. The sound seems loud in the quiet room. Amy stirs in her sleep but doesn't wake.

You stare at the cup, your hands still glowing faintly. There's no doubt now. It's real. And Tom was right… you’re like him.

You need to find him.

You slip out of bed, your bare feet silent on the cold floorboards. The silvery glow has faded from your hands, but the warmth lingers in your veins, a secret fire. You pause by Amy's bed, listening to her steady breathing, then ease the door open and slip into the dark corridor.

The orphanage is different at night, all shadows and creaking wood, the storm still muttering outside. You know where Tom sleeps, in a small room at the end of the boys' wing. You've never been there, but you've seen him come and go.

Your heart beats fast as you pad down the hallway, past closed doors and the faint smell of damp wool. When you reach his door, you hesitate, your hand hovering. What if he's angry? What if he doesn't believe you?

But you remember the floating stone, his dark eyes watching you with that strange recognition. You knock softly, three quick taps.

For a moment, there's only silence. Then the door opens a crack. Tom stands there, already fully dressed despite the hour, his dark hair neat, his expression alert. He doesn't look surprised to see you.

His eyes drop to your hands, then back to your face. "You did it, didn't you?" he says, his voice low.

You nod, your voice dropping to a whisper that barely carries over the sound of the storm. "I made a cup float," you tell him, holding out your hands. They're not glowing now, but you can still feel the warmth humming just beneath your skin. "Can you teach me more?"

Tom's eyes gleam in the dim light. He doesn't smile, but there's a new intensity in his expression, something hungry and focused. "Yes," he says simply. „There’s a place," he says. "Under the roof. No one goes there. We can practice there."

He watches you, waiting for your reaction. "But you have to promise to do exactly as I say. Magic can be dangerous if you don't control it."

You nod eagerly, your eyes wide and bright in the dim room. "Is it really magic?" you whisper, the word feeling strange and wonderful on your tongue.

Tom's expression softens just a fraction, not into a smile, but into something like approval. "Yes," he says. "It's magic."

He moves to the door, opening it just enough to peer into the hallway. "Follow me. Stay close."

You trail him through the dark corridors, your heart beating fast with excitement and nerves. He leads you up a narrow, winding staircase you've never noticed before, its steps worn smooth by time. The air grows colder as you climb, and the sound of the storm grows louder overhead.

At the top, Tom pushes open a heavy wooden door. The room beyond is small and dusty, tucked under the sloping eaves of the roof. Moonlight filters through a grimy circular window, illuminating floating dust motes and a few forgotten trunks stacked against the walls. The space feels secret, separate from the rest of the orphanage, a world of its own.

Tom turns to you, his face pale in the moonlight. "This is where we'll practice," he says. "No one comes here. We'll be safe."

He gestures to the center of the room, where the floorboards are clear. "Show me what you did with the cup."

You take a deep breath, your eyes scanning the moonlit room until you spot a single, large dust mote drifting slowly through the air. You focus on it, hard, remembering the warm hum in your veins, the certainty you felt when the cup lifted.

At first, nothing happens. The dust continues its lazy descent. You bite your lip, frustration bubbling up. Then you think of Tom's stone hovering, steady and controlled. You don't just want it to float, you will it to.

The dust mote stops falling. It hangs in the air, suspended, as if caught in an invisible web. You hold your breath, keeping your gaze locked on it. Slowly, you guide it upward, making it drift in a small, deliberate circle.

It's not much, just a speck of dust, but it's yours. You did it.

You look at Tom, your eyes wide with wonder. He's watching the dust mote, his expression unreadable. Then his gaze shifts to you, and something in his dark eyes changes. It's not just approval anymore, it's something sharper, hungrier. Like he's found something precious that belongs to him.

"Good," he says, his voice quiet but intense. "Very good."

He takes a step closer, his shadow falling across you. "Now try something heavier. That book, over there." He points to a small, leather-bound volume resting on one of the trunks. "Don't just lift it. Bring it to me."

You turn your attention to the small leather book on the trunk. It looks heavier than dust, more solid. You take another deep breath, focusing all your will on it. You imagine it lifting, floating through the air toward Tom's waiting hand.

For a long moment, nothing happens. The book sits there, stubborn and still. You feel a flicker of doubt, but then you remember the cup, the dust mote. The warmth in your veins pulses, stronger this time.

The book trembles. Its cover shifts slightly, then it rises an inch off the trunk, wobbling unsteadily. You hold your breath, keeping your gaze locked on it. Slowly, painstakingly, you guide it through the air. It drifts toward Tom, moving like a leaf on a gentle current.

When it reaches him, it hovers before his chest for a heartbeat before dropping into his outstretched hand.

Tom catches it, his fingers closing around the worn leather. He looks from the book to you, and something in his expression shifts again. There's pride there, sharp and possessive, and something else, a kind of hunger that makes your skin prickle.

"Perfect," he says softly, his dark eyes holding yours. "You learn fast."

He sets the book aside and takes a step closer. The moonlight catches the sharp angles of his face. "We're going to practice every night," he tells you, his voice low and certain. "Just you and me. No one else can know what we can do."

He reaches out, his hand hovering near your arm as if he wants to touch you but isn't quite sure how. "You belong here," he says. "With me."

The nights that follow become a secret rhythm, you and Tom meeting under the roof, practicing until your hands tremble and your mind feels stretched thin. He teaches you control, precision, how to make objects dance through the air with just a thought. Each success makes his eyes gleam with that same hungry pride.

Then, one bright afternoon, you slip into the orphanage's small, neglected garden, seeking a moment alone. That's when you find her: a little, dark snake coiled beneath the rose bushes, her scales glistening with what looks like fresh blood. She's hurt, her breathing shallow.

You kneel without thinking, your heart pounding. "Are you alright?" you whisper.

The snake lifts her head, her golden eyes fixing on you. To your surprise, you understand her hissing reply as clearly as if she'd spoken English. "The two-legs with the stick hurt me. I cannot move."

You kneel closer, your hands trembling slightly as you reach out. "Let me see," you whisper, not sure if you're speaking English or the strange, hissing language that feels so natural.

You gently touch the scales near the wound. A deep gash runs along her side, oozing dark blood. She flinches, a soft hiss escaping her.

"It hurts," she says, her voice a pained whisper in your mind.

Your throat tightens. "I know," you murmur. „What is your name? I'm going to get help. Stay here.“ You hear her whisper: „Nagini“, before you move.

Tom. You need Tom. He'll know what to do, he always knows.

You run back into the orphanage, your feet flying over the worn floors. You don't stop until you reach his door, knocking frantically. When he opens it, his expression shifts from mild annoyance to sharp curiosity as he takes in your panicked face.

"There's a snake," you gasp, breathless. "In the garden. She's hurt. She talked to me, Tom. I understood her."

Tom's dark eyes widen, just for a fraction of a second. Then his face goes still, unreadable. "You understood her?" he asks, his voice low.

"She said the two-legs with the stick hurt her," you tell him, the words tumbling out in a rush. "She can't move. She's bleeding, Tom. We have to help her."

Tom stares at you, his expression utterly still. For a long moment, he doesn't speak. You can see something shifting behind his dark eyes, confusion, then calculation, then something sharper. Hunger.

"You understood her," he repeats, his voice quiet. "Word for word."

He steps out into the hallway, closing his door behind him. "Show me."

You lead him back to the garden, your heart pounding. Nagini is still coiled beneath the rose bushes, her golden eyes watching you approach. When Tom sees her, he stops a few feet away, his gaze fixed on the snake.

"Another two-legs," Nagini hisses, her voice weak. "Is he a friend?"

Tom's jaw tightens. He doesn't answer the snake. Instead, he looks at you, his expression unreadable. "I can't help her," he says flatly. "I don't know how to heal animals."

He kneels down, studying the wound with clinical detachment. "The cut is deep. She'll die without help."

You kneel beside Nagini again, your hand hovering over her wounded side. "I'm going to try to help you," you whisper, the hissing words feeling both strange and right.

Nagini's golden eyes fix on you. "You speak the old tongue," she says, her voice a pained whisper. "The two-legs who hurt me did not."

You nod, though you don't fully understand. You look up at Tom, who's watching you with that intense, hungry expression.

You turn back to Nagini, placing your hands gently on either side of the gash. You close your eyes, trying to push away the fear and the racing of your heart. You think of warmth, of light, of things being put back together. You remember the silvery glow that wrapped around your hands that first night, the hum of magic in your veins.

At first, nothing happens. Then you feel it, a different kind of warmth, deeper and brighter, starting in your chest and flowing down your arms. A soft, blue-white light begins to glow beneath your palms, spilling over Nagini's dark scales.

The light pulses, growing stronger. You can feel the magic working, knitting flesh and scale back together. Nagini lets out a soft hiss, but this time it sounds more like relief than pain.

Tom is utterly still, his dark eyes fixed on your hands and the healing light. His expression is no longer just hungry, it's awed, possessive, triumphant. Like he's found something even more precious than he imagined.

You push everything else away, Tom's intense gaze, the garden around you, even your own fear. All that matters is the warmth flowing from your hands into Nagini's wounded side. You focus all your energy on it, willing the light to grow brighter, stronger.

The blue-white glow intensifies, wrapping around Nagini like a gentle cocoon. You can feel the magic working, deeper than before, not just healing the surface wound, but mending muscle and scale, soothing pain, restoring strength. It feels right, like this is what the magic was meant to do.

Beneath your hands, the gash closes completely. The torn scales knit back together, leaving only a faint silvery scar. Nagini lets out a long, relieved hiss and uncoils herself, testing her movement. She slithers forward, her body whole and strong again.

"Thank you," she says, her golden eyes fixed on you with something like reverence. "You have the old magic. The true magic."

She coils around your ankles, her scales cool and smooth against your skin. "I will stay with you," she declares. "You are my speaker."

You look up, your hands still tingling with fading warmth. Tom hasn't moved. He's staring at you with an expression you've never seen before, awe, hunger, and something darker, more possessive. His dark eyes are wide, his face pale in the afternoon light.

For a long moment, he doesn't speak. Then he takes a step closer, his voice barely above a whisper. "What was that?" he asks. "That light... that wasn't normal magic."

You look up at Tom, your hands still tingling with the fading warmth. "I don't know what it was," you whisper, your voice trembling slightly. "But it felt right. Like... like it was supposed to happen."

As you speak, a sudden wave of exhaustion washes over you. Your legs feel weak, your head spins. You stumble forward, your vision blurring at the edges. Tom catches you before you can fall, his hands firm on your arms.

"Whoa," he says, his voice closer than you expected. He steadies you, his grip surprisingly gentle. "Easy."

You lean against him, your eyes heavy. The world seems to tilt and sway. You can feel his heartbeat through his shirt, steady and calm, a contrast to your own racing pulse.

"You used too much magic," Tom murmurs, his breath warm against your hair. "Healing takes energy. More than floating books."

He doesn't let go of you. Instead, he guides you to sit on the ground, his arm still around your shoulders for support. Nagini slithers closer, coiling protectively around your ankles.

Tom looks from the snake to your pale face, his dark eyes thoughtful. "You spoke to her," he says quietly. "You healed her with magic I've never seen before. Blue light."

He says the last two words like they're something precious and dangerous. His gaze holds yours, intense and searching. "Do you understand what that means?"

You shake your head weakly, the motion making the world swim again. You're too tired to think about what it means, too tired to think about anything except how heavy your eyelids feel, how your whole body aches with a deep, bone-weary exhaustion.

Tom watches you for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he sighs, a soft sound that's almost gentle. "You need to rest," he says. "Come on."

He helps you to your feet, his arm around your waist to steady you. Nagini follows, slithering close to your ankles as if she's afraid to let you out of her sight.

Tom leads you back inside, supporting most of your weight. The orphanage corridors feel longer than usual, the stairs steeper. When you reach your room, he pauses at the door, glancing down at Nagini.

"She can't come in here," he says quietly. "Amy will scream."

Nagini hisses softly, but you murmur to her in Parseltongue, "Wait for me outside. I'll come find you soon."

The snake reluctantly coils by the doorframe, her golden eyes watching you as Tom helps you to your bed. You collapse onto the thin mattress, your limbs feeling like lead.

Tom stands over you for a moment, his dark eyes studying your face. "Sleep," he says, his voice low. "We'll talk about this tomorrow."

He turns to leave, but pauses at the door, looking back at you one last time. His expression is that same mix of awe and hunger you saw in the garden. "You're full of surprises," he murmurs, almost to himself.

Then he's gone, closing the door softly behind him.

The days blur together after that, secret practices under the roof, whispered conversations with Nagini in the garden, Tom watching you with that same hungry awe every time your hands glow blue. Before you know it, it’s the week before Christmas.

You're sitting beside Tom at dinner, the usual watery stew steaming in your bowls. Around you, the other children point and whisper, their eyes darting between you and Tom. You've become a pair in their minds, the strange, quiet boy and the girl that follows him everywhere.

Your stomach growls loudly, a hollow ache that's become familiar. The portions are small here.

Without a word, Tom pushes half of his bread roll onto your plate. He doesn't look at you when he does it, his expression carefully neutral, but the gesture is unmistakable.

You look at the bread roll on your plate, then up at Tom. Your eyes go wide, touched by the gesture. Without a word, you break the piece in half and push one piece back toward him.

Tom glances at the bread, then at your face. For a moment, he looks almost surprised, as if he didn't expect you to share it back. Then his expression softens, just a fraction. He takes the piece and eats it slowly, his dark eyes watching you over the rim of his bowl.

Around you, the whispers grow louder. "They're sharing," someone mutters. "Like they're a proper family or something."

You ignore them, focusing on your stew. The bread helps, but your stomach still feels hollow. You think about Christmas, which is only a week away.

You glance at Tom. He's staring at his bowl, his expression closed off and cold.

You lean closer to Tom, your voice dropping to a whisper. "Are you excited for Christmas?"

Tom's spoon stills in his bowl. He doesn't look at you at first, his gaze fixed on the watery stew. When he finally speaks, his voice is low and flat. "I don't like Christmas."

He glances at you then, his dark eyes sharp. "Do you know why?"

You shake your head, waiting.

"Because it's a lie," he says, his voice barely audible over the clatter of spoons and chatter around you. "All those families outside, laughing and giving presents. They pretend everything is perfect. But it's not. Nothing is perfect. They're just better at hiding the ugly parts."

He pushes his bowl away, half-finished. "I hate watching them. I hate knowing they have something I'll never have."

His words hang between you, heavy and cold. You think of your own memories, or lack of them. The green flash, the hollow ache where a family should be. You understand his bitterness, but something in you rebels against it.

You want to tell him that Christmas doesn't have to be about perfect families. It could be about something else, something just for the two of you. But before you can speak, Mrs. Cole claps her hands, signaling the end of dinner.

Tom stands up, his expression closed off again. "Come on," he says, not looking at you. "Let's go."

You follow Tom out of the dining hall, your heart beating a little faster. When you reach the quieter corridor, you reach out and touch his sleeve, stopping him.

"Tom," you say, your voice firm despite the nervous flutter in your chest. "I want to make this Christmas special for us."

He turns to look at you, his dark eyes unreadable. "Special how?" he asks, his tone flat. "We're in an orphanage. There's no money for presents. No tree worth having. No family."

"I know," you say, holding his gaze. "But we have each other. And we have magic. We could make our own Christmas. Something just for us."

For a long moment, Tom doesn't speak. He studies your face, his expression shifting from skepticism to something more thoughtful. You can see him considering it, turning the idea over in his mind.

"You want to use magic for Christmas?" he asks, his voice quieter now.

You nod. "We could make decorations that float. Or warm the room without a fire. Or... I don't know. Something beautiful."

A faint, almost imperceptible smile touches Tom's lips. "You're determined," he says.

"I am," you tell him, your voice steady. "We deserve something good, Tom. Even if we have to make it ourselves."

You look up at Tom, your determination softening into curiosity. "If you could have one wish for Christmas," you ask quietly, "what would it be?"

Tom goes still, his dark eyes searching your face as if looking for a trick. The corridor around you is quiet now, the sounds of dinner fading behind closed doors. For a long moment, he doesn't answer. You can see him thinking, weighing whether to be honest or to give you the cold, dismissive answer he usually gives everyone else.

Finally, he speaks, his voice so soft you have to lean closer to hear. "To never be hungry again," he says. "To never have to share half a bread roll because there isn't enough. To have a room that's warm in winter. To have... things that are mine. Truly mine."

He looks away, his jaw tightening. "Not presents. Not toys. Just... enough. And no one to take it away."

His words settle in your chest, heavy and real. You understand, suddenly, that his bitterness about Christmas isn't just about families, it's about lack. About never having enough of anything: food, warmth, security, love.

You reach out without thinking, your fingers brushing his wrist. "We'll make it warm," you promise. "However we can. And we'll make sure there's enough, even if it's just for one day."

Tom looks down at your hand on his wrist, then back up at your face. His expression is unreadable again, but his eyes hold yours for a long moment. "You mean that," he says, not quite a question.

"I do," you tell him.

The days pass, cold and gray, and Christmas draws closer. You spend your time planning, whispering ideas to Tom under the roof, gathering what little you can for decorations. But one evening, as you're returning from the garden after checking on Nagini, you find yourself alone in a dimly lit hallway.

The shadows seem to stretch longer than usual. You're about to turn the corner when three figures step out, blocking your path. Billy Stubbs stands in front, his face set in a mean, pinched expression. Two older boys flank him, their eyes hard.

"Well, well," Billy says, his voice dripping with mockery. "Look who's all alone for once. No Tom to protect you."

He takes a step closer, and the other boys move to either side of you, cutting off your escape. "We're tired of you following him around like his little pet," Billy sneers. "Think you're special because he talks to you? You're just as pathetic as the rest of us."

Your heart hammers against your ribs, but you force yourself to stand still. "What do you want from me?" you ask, your voice steadier than you feel.

Billy's smirk widens. "We want you to understand your place," he says, taking another step closer. The hallway feels smaller suddenly, the walls pressing in. "You think you're better than us because Tom Riddle talks to you? Because you whisper to each other like you've got secrets?"

One of the other boys, a tall, thin one with sharp elbows, reaches out and shoves your shoulder. "We're tired of watching you follow him around," he says. "It's pathetic."

Billy nods, his eyes cold. "We're going to teach you a lesson. So you remember you're just another orphan. Just like the rest of us."

He grabs your arm, his fingers digging in painfully. The other two move in, blocking any chance of escape. They start dragging you down the hallway, away from the main rooms, toward one of the empty storage closets that no one uses anymore.

You struggle, but there are three of them and only one of you. Your mind races, searching for a way out. You think of Tom, of Nagini, of the magic you've been practicing, but right now, none of it seems to help.

Panic surges through you as they drag you toward the empty room. You can feel their hands gripping your arms too tightly, see the cruel satisfaction in Billy's eyes. You think of Tom's lessons under the roof, focus, will, intention. You think of the blue-white light that healed Nagini.

You stop struggling and close your eyes, just for a second. You focus on the magic humming in your veins, on the warmth that's always there, waiting. You don't think about floating objects or healing wounds. You think about pushing them away. About creating space.

A soft, shimmering glow begins to pulse around your hands. It's faint at first, then brighter, a pale blue light that spills into the dim hallway.

Billy and the others freeze, their eyes widening. "What's that?" one of them whispers, his voice shaky.

You open your eyes and push with your mind, not with your hands. The magic responds, flowing out from you in a gentle wave. It doesn't hurt them, it just pushes, like an invisible wall of air. Billy stumbles back, his grip on your arm loosening. The other two boys let go, stepping away with confused, frightened expressions.

For a moment, you're free. You stand there, breathing hard, the blue light still flickering around your fingers. Billy recovers first, his face twisting with anger and something else, fear.

"You're a freak," he spits, but he doesn't come closer. "Just like him."

He glances at the other boys, who look uncertain now. Then he takes a step forward again, his fists clenched. "That little trick won't save you," he says, his voice low and mean.

You don't wait to see if they'll overcome their fear. The moment Billy hesitates, you turn and run, your feet pounding against the stone floor. You can hear them shouting behind you, their footsteps giving chase.

You make it only a few yards before a hand grabs the back of your dress, yanking you backward. You stumble, losing your balance, and crash to the floor. The impact knocks the air from your lungs.

Before you can get up, Billy is on top of you, pinning you down. The other two boys grab your arms, holding you still. "Thought you could run?" Billy sneers, his face close to yours. "Thought your little light show would scare us?"

He raises his fist, and you brace yourself. But before he can strike, a cold voice cuts through the hallway.

"Let her go."

You look past Billy's shoulder. Tom stands at the end of the corridor, his expression utterly still and cold. His dark eyes are fixed on Billy, and there's something in them that makes your breath catch, a quiet, dangerous fury.

Billy freezes, his fist still raised. He glances at Tom, then back at you, his confidence wavering. "This doesn't concern you, Riddle," he says, but his voice lacks its earlier conviction.

Tom takes a step forward. "It does," he says, his voice soft but carrying. "Now let her go."

Billy hesitates for a moment longer, then his face hardens with stubborn anger. "Or what?" he challenges.

Tom doesn't answer with words. He raises his hand, his fingers curling slightly. Billy's body goes rigid, his eyes widening in shock and pain. He makes a choked sound, his hands flying to his throat as if something invisible is squeezing him.

The other two boys let go of you, backing away with terrified expressions. Billy drops to his knees, gasping for air, his face turning pale.

You stay where you are, frozen on the floor, watching in shock as Billy gasps and chokes under Tom's invisible grip. Billy's face is pale, his eyes wide with terror. He claws at his throat, making horrible, wet sounds.

The other two boys have backed all the way against the wall, their faces white with fear. They don't try to help Billy, they just stare, trembling.

Tom's expression doesn't change. His dark eyes are fixed on Billy, cold and focused. His hand remains raised, fingers curled as if holding something delicate. There's no anger on his face, no rage, just a calm, terrible control.

Then footsteps echo down the hallway, sharp and quick. Mrs. Cole appears around the corner, her face tight with alarm. "What in heaven's name-" she begins, then stops, taking in the scene: you on the floor, Billy choking, Tom with his hand raised.

Her eyes widen in horror. "Thomas Riddle!" she shouts, her voice sharp. "Stop that this instant!"

Tom's hand drops. Billy collapses to the floor, coughing and gasping for air. Mrs. Cole rushes forward, kneeling beside Billy, then turns her furious gaze on Tom.

"What have you done?" she demands, her voice trembling with anger. "Using your... your wickedness on other children!"

Tom doesn't answer. He just looks at her, his expression blank.

Mrs. Cole stands up, her face pale. "Two weeks," she says, her voice cold and final. "Two weeks without dinner. And you'll spend them in solitude. No Christmas celebrations. No contact with anyone."

She turns to you, her expression softening slightly. "Are you hurt, child?"

Before you can answer, she shakes her head. "Never mind. Get up. Both of you, to your rooms. Now."

Tom doesn't look at you as he turns and walks away. You watch him go, your chest tight with guilt. Because of you, he won't have Christmas at all.

A week passes, cold and quiet. Christmas Eve settles over Wool's Orphanage like a heavy frost. You walk through the dimly lit hallway, your footsteps soft on the stone floor. The usual sounds of children are muted tonight, everyone is in the common room, gathered around the sad little tree Mrs. Cole put up.

Then you hear it, a voice from the isolation room at the end of the hall. Tom's voice, but different. Thinner. Desperate.

"Please," he's saying, the word strained. "Mrs. Cole, it's so cold. Just another blanket. Or something to eat. Please."

You stand there in the dim hallway, your heart pounding. Tom never begs. He never shows weakness. But he's cold and hungry and alone on Christmas Eve, and it's because he defended you.

Anger flares hot and sudden in your chest. How can Mrs. Cole do that? How can she leave him cold and hungry on Christmas Eve? It's cruel. It's wrong.

The anger doesn't just stay inside you, it spills out. A soft blue glow flickers around your hands, pulsing with your heartbeat. You feel your magic lashing out without meaning to, making the nearby sconce flicker wildly. Shadows dance across the walls, stretching and twisting.

You take a deep breath, forcing yourself to calm down. The glow fades, but the determination remains, sharp and clear. You need to help Tom. You need to make this right.

You turn away from the isolation room and head toward the kitchen, your footsteps quick and quiet. The orphanage is mostly empty now, everyone gathered in the common room for what little Christmas cheer Mrs. Cole allows. The kitchen door is unlocked, and you slip inside.

The room is dark and cold, the stove unlit. You find a kettle and fill it with water. While it warms, you search the pantry. There, on a high shelf, you find a tin with two gingerbread cookies inside, probably meant for Mrs. Cole's own Christmas treat.

You take them, your hands trembling slightly. The kettle begins to whistle softly. You pour the hot water into a cup, add a tea bag you find in a tin, and stir in a spoonful of sugar. Tom's favorite.

You grab the tea and cookies, then pause. Tom said he was cold. You need more than tea.

You slip out of the kitchen and hurry to your room. The other girls are still downstairs, so the room is empty and quiet. You pull your thin blanket from your bed, it's not much, but it's something. You fold it carefully, tucking it under your arm with the tea and cookies balanced in your other hand.

The hallway is dark and silent as you make your way back toward the isolation room. Your heart beats fast, each step feeling too loud. You listen for any sound, Mrs. Cole's footsteps, other children moving about, but there's only the quiet hum of the orphanage at night.

When you reach Tom's door, you pause. You can't hear anything from inside now. He might be sleeping, or just too exhausted to make noise. You set the tea and cookies down carefully on the floor, then place your hands against the cold wood of the door.

You close your eyes, thinking of the lock. You've never tried to open a door with magic before, but you've moved smaller things. You focus on the mechanism inside, on the tumblers and the bolt. You imagine them shifting, turning, releasing.

A soft blue glow spreads from your hands across the wood. There's a quiet click. The door swings open just a crack.

Inside, the room is dark and bitterly cold. You can see Tom curled on a narrow cot, shivering even in his sleep. His face looks pale in the faint light from the hallway, his lips indeed tinged with blue.

You almost drop the tea and cookies in shock at how cold he looks. Setting them down carefully on the floor, you kneel beside the cot and take Tom's hands in yours. They're ice-cold, his fingers stiff. You close your eyes and focus, letting the warmth of your magic flow from your palms into his skin.

A soft blue glow surrounds your joined hands, gentle and steady. You think of warmth, of comfort, of the heat from a fireplace on a winter night. The glow spreads up his arms, chasing away the chill. Tom stirs, his eyelids fluttering open.

He blinks at you, confusion in his dark eyes. "What..." he begins, his voice hoarse.

"You were so cold," you whisper. "I brought tea. And cookies. And my blanket."

Tom sits up slowly, still holding your hands. The blue glow fades as you release the magic, but his hands feel warmer now. He looks from your face to the tea and cookies on the floor, then back to you. His expression is unreadable for a moment, then something softens in his eyes.

"You shouldn't be here," he says, but his voice lacks its usual edge. "If Mrs. Cole finds you..."

"I don't care," you tell him firmly. "It's Christmas Eve. You shouldn't be alone and cold."

You let go of his hands to pick up the tea. It's still warm from your magic. You hand it to him, then unwrap one of the gingerbread cookies. The sweet, spicy scent fills the small, cold room.

Tom takes the tea, his fingers curling around the warm cup. He doesn't drink right away, just holds it, letting the heat seep into his hands. He looks at you over the rim of the cup, his dark eyes thoughtful.

You look at him, and suddenly tears well in your eyes. "I'm sorry," you whisper, the words tumbling out. "I didn't want you to get in trouble for saving me. I didn't want you to suffer. And now... now Christmas isn't special at all. It's just cold and lonely for you."

Tom watches you, his expression unreadable. He sets the tea down carefully on the floor, then reaches out. His fingers brush your cheek, wiping away a tear. The gesture is so unexpected, so gentle, that you freeze.

"Don't cry," he says quietly. "It's not your fault."

"But it is," you insist, your voice trembling. "If I hadn't been there, if I hadn't used magic-"

"You were defending yourself," Tom interrupts. His hand drops from your cheek, but his eyes hold yours. "Billy and the others would have hurt you. I did what I had to do."

He picks up the tea again and takes a sip. The warmth seems to ease some of the tension in his shoulders. Then he looks at the gingerbread cookie in your hand.

"Is that for me?" he asks, a faint hint of something like amusement in his voice.

You nod, holding it out. He takes it, breaking it in half. He offers one piece back to you. "We'll share," he says. "That's what you do on Christmas, isn't it? Share?"

You take the half-cookie, your fingers brushing his. The gingerbread is sweet and spicy, a small burst of warmth in the cold room. You eat it slowly, savoring it. Tom does the same, his eyes never leaving your face.

When the cookie is gone, he finishes his tea. The color has returned to his lips, and he doesn't look quite so cold anymore. He sets the empty cup aside.

"You should go back to your room," he says, but his voice lacks conviction. "Mrs. Cole will check on me eventually."

You pout, looking down at your hands. "I don't want to go," you admit quietly. "I missed you all week."

Tom goes still. He watches you for a long moment, his dark eyes thoughtful. The silence stretches between you, filled only with the distant sounds of the orphanage settling for the night.

"You missed me," he repeats, his voice soft. It's not a question, but there's something in his tone, surprise, maybe, or something warmer.

You nod, not looking up. "It was quiet without you. And... lonely."

Tom lets out a slow breath. He looks around the small, cold room, then back at you. "If you stay and Mrs. Cole finds you," he says, "you'll be punished too. No Christmas for either of us."

He says it matter-of-factly, but there's an edge to his words, a warning, but also something else. A test, maybe. To see if you mean what you say.

You finally look up, meeting his gaze. "I don't care," you tell him, your voice firm. "Christmas isn't Christmas if you're alone in here."

Tom's expression softens, just a little. The hard edges around his eyes ease. He looks at the blanket you brought, then back at you. "Fine," he says. "But you sleep on the floor. And if you get cold, don't complain."

He says it like he's doing you a favor, but you can see the way his shoulders relax slightly. The way he doesn't look quite so alone anymore.

You nod eagerly, relieved he's letting you stay. You take your blanket and try to make a comfortable spot on the stone floor. The floor is hard and cold, even through the thin wool. You spread the blanket out, then lie down, pulling the edges around you.

The cold seeps through immediately. You try to curl into a ball, to conserve warmth, but you can't stop shivering. Your teeth chatter softly, and you press your hands between your knees, trying to warm them.

From the cot above you, Tom lets out a quiet sigh. "Stop that," he says, his voice tired.

"I'm trying," you whisper through chattering teeth.

There's a moment of silence. Then you hear the cot creak as Tom sits up. He looks down at you, his face shadowed in the dark room. "You're shivering," he says, sounding annoyed.

"It's cold," you admit, your voice small.

Tom sighs again, louder this time. He shifts on the cot, making room. "Come here," he says, his tone begrudging. "Before you freeze to death."

You hesitate for just a second, then scramble up from the floor, bringing your blanket with you. The cot is narrow, but Tom moves over, making space. You climb in beside him, pulling your blanket over both of you.

The warmth from his body is immediate and welcome. You curl against him, still shivering slightly. Tom doesn't put his arm around you, but he doesn't move away either. He just lies there, stiff at first, then gradually relaxing.

The room is still cold, but here, under the blankets, pressed close together, it's warmer. Safer. You can feel your shivering slowly subsiding, replaced by a drowsy warmth.

You cuddle unconsciously closer to him, chasing his warmth. A soft sigh escapes you as you finally feel safe, truly warm for the first time all night. The tension leaves your body, and you relax fully against him, your head resting near his shoulder.

In the quiet darkness, you whisper, "Merry Christmas, Tom."

For a moment, he doesn't respond. Then you feel his arm shift. It doesn't go around you, but his hand comes to rest lightly on your back, a tentative touch. His fingers are warm through your nightdress.

"Merry Christmas," he murmurs back, his voice low and close to your ear.

You can feel his breathing slow and deepen as he settles into sleep. The cold room doesn't seem so threatening anymore, not with him here. Not with this small, shared warmth between you.

You close your eyes, listening to the quiet rhythm of his breathing. The orphanage is silent around you, the world outside dark and still. But here, in this narrow cot, with Tom's steady presence beside you, Christmas feels like something real. Something yours.

You drift toward sleep, wrapped in warmth and the unfamiliar comfort of not being alone. Tom's breathing has evened out beside you, his body relaxed in a way you've rarely seen. The hard edges he keeps up during the day have softened in sleep.

For Tom, this silent, stolen hour in the dark is better than any Christmas he can remember. No presents, no songs, no feast, just this: someone who came for him. Someone who saw him cold and hungry and said no. Someone who broke a lock with magic they shouldn't have, just to sit with him in the dark.

He doesn't know how to name what he feels. It isn't gratitude. It's something sharper, hungrier. It's the certainty that you are his now, in a way no one else has ever been. Your magic is his. Your loyalty is his. Your warmth beside him is his.

Outside, midnight passes. Christmas Day arrives quietly, without fanfare. But in a small, cold room in Wool's Orphanage, two children sleep curled together under a thin blanket, and a bond is forged that will shape everything that comes after.

For Tom Riddle, it is the beginning of an obsession.

You had spent the rest of the night shivering and reeling in your bed in the Slytherin dorms. Too many questions clouded your mind. Nothing about this situation made sense. You should be dead, but you're not, and somehow Fate decided to throw you back into the past, in the body of your seventh-year self at that. And why, out of all the possible parts in your life, did fate decide to throw you and bring you back to your seventh year?!

But that's beside the point. The point is you were back, and you have been given a second chance to live. Sure as hell, you would make sure in this life you lived the way you wanted. And with that thought, you patiently waited for the sun to rise.

The morning after your newly discovered dilemma was a blur. Getting out of bed, not that you slept at all, was more challenging than necessary, and having the care to make yourself look presentable seemed impossible. After months of being on the run and living in a tent, you couldn't have cared less about your appearance. That being said, you weren't there anymore; no, you were back in 1944 before the war. If you wanted your plan to work, there could be no evidence of your knowledge of the future. You had to act like the 'pureblood wannabe' you used to be in your school years.

It would be exasperating to act like the gullible and obedient fool you used to be; however, a necessary sacrifice of your pride. It was crucial that nobody could find out. Then there was the problem of your physical appearance. The numerous scars you've accumulated over the years would need to be glamoured invisible, especially the scar on your neck and shoulder running up onto the right side of your face, the scar you received from your self-inflicted Killing curse.

The next one to worry about would be the butchered scar etched into your arm, "mudblood." The particular scar would prove difficult to hold a glamor over regularly since the blade used was one cursed with a nasty type of dark magic. It would never heal or fade; the grotesque letters would forever be branded into your arm, the sore and elevated skin around the letters infinitely left to be a reminder of the painful memory.

Despite being back in the body of your seventeen-year-old self, you still held onto the war-ridden features of your future self. Once bright eyes were hollow and haunted, your unblemished body now ridden with scar after scar, and your mind forever remaining as of a tortured soldier.. It would be hard to assimilate back into the girl you used to be.

Nevertheless, you would have to find a more permanent way to hide the scars. It would be hard to explain why a seventh year at Hogwarts had several cursed scars in a highly protected school. In addition, your mannerisms would have to change. No longer could you be '(Y/n) (L/n), Freedom Fighter of The Order of the Phoenix'; you would have to go back to just being (Y/n) (L/n), Tom Riddle's loyal and faithful mudblood. You would have to stop the constant fits of "fight or flight" your body would no doubt put you in, and if things weren't difficult enough, it doesn't help that the entirety of Slytherin is made up of future Deatheaters. Deatheaters you have fought, death eaters that have killed your friends, and, of course, the Deatheater that tortured you for the span of weeks and who gave you your cursed scar. Avoiding them would be difficult and would undoubtedly draw more attention to yourself.

You left the Slytherin dorms only after knowing everyone had already left for breakfast. You didn't think you were quite ready to face the mess that would be walking into a busy Slytherin Common Room; there would be too many familiar faces and, of course, him. However, the painful coils of hunger soon took over your stomach, forcing you to start making your way to the Great Hall.

As you walked, you couldn't help brushing your hand over the unblemished walls of Hogwarts, ones not tarnished by war. Never did you think you'd see these halls' beauty again. Soon, before you knew it, you were in front of the doors to The Great Hall, the loud chorus of laughter and chatter breaching the old wooden doors and the smell of breakfast permeating the air, making you salivate. Merlin, when was the last time you ate? A question you could ponder on later. You raised one hand to push open the doors; your other left gripping your wand.

Immediately, you regretted your decision.

As you anxiously walked to the Slytherin table, you felt the predatory eyes of its inhabitants lock in on your frame. The grip on your wand got tighter, knuckles now turning white. You didn't dare look up to meet the many eyes you knew were on your form. Walburga must have informed the rest of the seventh years of your midnight 'episode.' Surely, that wouldn't be of any interest to Voldemort; it shouldn't be.

He hadn't paid you any attention since fifth year - not that you were complaining - so you were confident to say that your little episode shouldn't have roused his interest. That was until you felt the all too familiar heavy gaze you have grown to fear over the years. The eerie chill that went up your spine shortly after made you shudder violently, something the Dark Lord did not leave unnoticed. With a deep sigh, you took a seat, one as far away as possible from the head of the table where the Dark Lord and his Deatheaters sat. Unfortunately, due to the other years taking up the end and middle of the table, you found yourself closer to the very people you wanted to avoid.

Well, it couldn't be helped.

Quickly you grabbed whatever you could before stuffing it in your mouth. You tried to limit your pace and maintain etiquette, but after months of starving, you couldn't help yourself. The food was gone from your plate faster than you could comprehend, and you had to stop yourself from reaching out for another portion. Not only would it seem unbecoming to the rest of your house, but you doubt your stomach could handle any more food after the time your stomach spent constantly empty. The stares were getting worse. Grabbing your goblet filled with water, you drank slowly to ensure your breakfast wouldn't come back up. That would be most unfortunate, not to mention embarrassing.

Without sparing anyone else a glance, you darted up and rushed out of the Great Hall. Hopefully, everyone would simply categorize your skittish behavior as a byproduct of the "startling episode" you had last night. Mentally crossing your fingers, you made your way to Slughorn's Office. You desperately needed to re-learn your schedule since it's been almost six years since you've walked the halls of Hogwarts as a student. Slughorn being the Head of Slytherin meant the information you needed would be with him. The only matter now is coming up with an excuse for why you've forgotten your schedule mid-semester. It's a good thing old Sluggy has always been quite credulous.

____________________________

"Your schedule? By Morgana, it's the middle of the semester! Pray tell, however did you forget your schedule this late into the semester Ms. (L/n)?" Professor Slughorn inquired animatedly.

"Well, Professor, it was actually quite silly. I was trying to practice a memory charm, but embarrassingly enough, it backfired onto me. Thankfully it's only temporary, so I should regain my memory within the next day or so; I simply wanted to ensure I was prepared for the school day today and would be able to make my classes." You said, feigning embarrassment whilst adding the extra show of looking down in shame.

Hopefully, Sluggy would buy the 'embarrassed student act', which, much to your delight, he did.

Slughorn let out an amused laugh.

"No need to fret Ms. (L/n). Even the most established wizards and witches have faced hiccups when dealing with magic in their youth, but it takes an even more exceptional wizard to learn from their shortcomings. I'd advise you, Ms. (L/n), to take this experience as a lesson and to grow further from here. Actually, I'm sure if you asked Mr. Riddle, he'd be more than happy to help you! He's mastered almost any charm I can think of, yes!" Slughorn responded with excitement.

You cringed internally.

And there it was-the ulterior motive behind Slughorn's kind words. Slughorn thought Tom Riddle and you were close; in his mind, he thought you to be his future bride. It wasn't too wrong of an assumption. At one point in your youth, you also believed Tom Riddle to be your future husband. Plus, considering that you were the only girl Tom had ever been close to (that being said, only till your fifth year), it wasn't hard to assume the possible relationship between you two. Even so, Slughorn was still a bumbling, blind fool. You knew he was only kind to you because he thought you would be the 'Great Tom Riddle's' bride as if that was a great title to hold.

You gave him a strained smile, not that he noticed.

"Yes, of course. I'll be sure to ask Riddle if he has any time later to help me with charms. Thank you for your kind words and advice, Professor." You thanked him without any real admiration.

He replied with a jolly "anytime!" before he accioed a copy of your schedule and handed it to you. Finally, you had what you needed. After a quick goodbye to Slughorn, you left his office and started making your way to your first class whilst examining your schedule.

ℌ𝔢𝔯𝔟𝔬𝔩𝔬𝔤𝔶

𝔇𝔦𝔳𝔦𝔫𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫

ℭ𝔞𝔯𝔢 𝔬𝔣 𝔐𝔞𝔤𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔩 ℭ𝔯𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔲𝔯𝔢𝔰

𝔇𝔢𝔣𝔢𝔫𝔠𝔢 𝔄𝔤𝔞𝔦𝔫𝔰𝔱 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔇𝔞𝔯𝔨 𝔄𝔯𝔱𝔰

𝔗𝔯𝔞𝔫𝔰𝔣𝔦𝔤𝔲𝔯𝔞𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫

𝔓𝔬𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔰

ℭ𝔥𝔞𝔯𝔪𝔰

'Yup, seems familiar enough.'

You took your time, enjoying the Hogwarts of your youth, before you made your way to the greenhouse for Herbology. As you neared your destination, you couldn't help but dread attending the class. Tom, no, Voldemort would be here along with his merry gang of Deatheaters, and you would be expected to interact with them. You would have no choice; they would expect you to act like your younger self, meaning you would have to include yourself in whatever activities they were doing. You would have to cling onto their group as you used to in the past to avoid suspicion.

You sighed.

Even if you wanted to distance yourself-because, truly, you wanted nothing to do with them-you would have to do it slowly and carefully to deflect suspicion. You sighed again; it was way too early for this. With a heavy hand, you opened the doors to the Greenhouse and made your way to where the rest of your house congregated. You felt the burning stares pinpoint onto you as you walked further into the greenhouse, and you couldn't help but roll your eyes in an undignified manner. What a bunch of tossers; did they really have nothing better to do?

Slowly, you could feel your fear start to melt away. It was a bit laughable how afraid you were at first. Sure, young Voldemort's intelligence and cunning were nothing to underestimate, and you would undoubtedly have to watch yourself in his presence, however, this Voldemort was nothing compared to the Voldemort of the future. You could do this; Fate knows you've dealt with worse.

You claimed your place next to Antonin Dolohov, future Deatheater, and readied yourself for the boring lesson you knew was incoming. He glanced over at you, eyes squinting into a sharp glare. Rolling your eyes again, you ignored his presence and let your eyes aimlessly wander around the classroom. Green and red were separated, each at opposite ends of the greenhouse, little inter-mingling present. Again you found yourself becoming annoyed at the blatant display of house rivalry, although the rivalry between Slytherin and Gryffindor was more complex than just petty inter-house squabbling. This opposition against each other's house dates all the way back to Salzar Slytherin and Godric Gryffindor; Slytherins with their prejudice and unrelenting pride, and Gryfindors with their obnoxious ideals of good versus evil, black versus white, and their superficial understanding of 'what makes a person evil?'.

If any progress were to be made between students, both sides would have to forget their prejudices. Basically, meaning nothing will ever change; Slytherins will forever cling to their pure-blood propaganda, and Gryfindors will never give up their desperation to be the "heroes the world needs." Anyways, enough of your monologuing. You sighed as you continued to lazily trail your eyes over the Gryfindors across the room; many familiar faces were present, both dead and from the order. However, there was one specific person you were looking for: Flemont Charlus Potter. Or, as you knew him, Monty. The one true friend you had when you joined The Order. He was the only person in The Order that treated you as something more than an 'evil and conceited Slytherin" in your initial years after joining. However, you couldn't blame the others for their reactions. At that point, many had already lost their loved ones to Voldemort and his goons so you could understand the mistrust.

But not Monty, never him. He was everything to you. He was family, your 'brother,' a title he dubbed himself (not that you minded). You two loved each other. That very much was clear to anyone who watched you both interact. Dear Merlin, how you missed him. At this point in time, he would be a seventh year with you, sharing most of your classes, always crossing paths but never interacting. It pained you to think about how you were not friends (not yet anyways) or had yet to share his laughter. You could see it, him being at an arm's length away but always out of your reach.

Oh, how you wanted to reach out to him, tell him everything like how you did before, to confide in him, and to feel his comforting embrace. And if you did, you knew he would open his arms up to you as he did before; it was just his character to care and to be kind. You wouldn't; however, you wouldn't jeopardize his safety like that, especially so early on in the timeline too. If Voldemort even heard whispers about your sudden friendship with a Gryffindor from a rather prominent light family, he would make it his top priority to slaughter Monty and his family. If that happened, you wouldn't be able to live with yourself. So you won't seek him out. But just being able to see him, to hear his voice, will be enough; it has to be.

Eventually, your eyes landed on the boy you were looking for and Merlin, how you wanted to cry. There he was, Fleamont Charulus Potter, Monty, your brother. You could feel the sting of tears building up behind your eyes, a weakness on blatant display for everyone to behold, so you shoved the emotions welling into a pit in your mind. You shouldn't pay him any attention; it would put him further in danger. But before you could tear your eyes away from him, his honey-brown gaze flickered up toward you. His gaze moved over your figure, subtly analyzing it, recognition filtering across his face. His gaze softened before flashing you a bright smile, teeth on full display. You froze, breath hitching.

'No, no, it couldn't be.'

One of his teeth, his top tooth, was chipped. Albit it was barely noticeable; it was wrong. Flemont never had a chipped tooth seventh year. His teeth were in perfect condition until- until he chipped his top tooth in an accident involving a hippogriff. But that doesn't happen until three years after you both graduated from Hogwarts. Which means-