Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Well Before

“The one with the power to conquer the Dark Lord will rise,
born to a line cloaked by death, to a father of thrice seven years,
and the Dark Lord will mark him as an equal, 
for he will have power he knows not,
and both must fall at the hand of the other
for each one’s heart shall keep the other’s beating.”

Gellert Grindelwald blinked, shaking off the trance. “Sorry, what was I saying?”

Having grabbed a quill the moment the prophecy began, Albus Dumbledore recounted it faithfully, word for word. As he spoke of a family line “cloaked by death,” the two youths shared a conspiratorial smile. 

Then Albus reviewed the words with a slight frown. “But who could this Dark Lord be?”

Hair flecked gold by the summer sun, Gellert raised his hookah to his lips and took a lazy puff. “I’m sure I couldn’t imagine.”

After

“Look, I ought to be going after Tom Riddle even if no one else will. Especially if no one else will. As long as it takes to get him.”

Proclamation complete, Harry (wayward Junior Auror) does his best not to quail under his boss’s glare of death. He’s gotten quite familiar with Auror Zhang’s displeasure, the look that means he ought to still be in first-year field training classes right now. It also means he ought to be on probation for his disobedience last weekend, when he ignored direct orders from his superior to go home for two days and take a damn break. He would be on probation if he was anyone else, in any other year.

But he’s the boy who lived, the man who killed the Dark Lord, and the Ministry needs every hand on deck in the chaos after Grindelwald’s death. No one’s going to kick him out for the crime of getting all his assignments done early and then working overtime. The rest of the office is thankful he’s so dedicated to tying up every loose end in the war.

And if his focus on Riddle tends towards the obsessive, it’s because they all want to forget him entirely, and he simply can’t let that happen.

Out of equal parts concern and obligation, Zhang turns her sternest look on him and the files he’s trying to show her, the ones he spent all weekend gathering. “Tom Riddle was underage when he was recruited. He wasn’t a Dark Lord, no matter what he might’ve told you. Compared to Grindelwald’s real soldiers …“ She waves at the wall behind them, covered with the jeering portraits of their Most Wanted targets. “Your Tom was barely out of diapers.”

“That’s only because he was above them all! He practically admitted he was calling the shots …”

“Potter.” She claps a hand on his shoulder. “Promise me you won’t go out of bounds with the Riddle case, alright?”

“… Alright,” Harry says after a few moments. 

The feverish look melts from his eyes, replaced by weary resignation. Across the table Zhang breathes a sigh of relief, clearly certain that’s the end of that.

That’s not the end of that.

Harry will solemnly swear, on any sacrament you want, that Tom Riddle is up to no good. That’s the safest bet in his world, even if he can’t prove it right now. All the signs are there. The Ministry’s surveilling owls and collected copies of multiple coded letters, passing back and forth between Riddle and the darkest potioneers in the business, known for crafting poisons and plagues. Then Riddle got spotted up in Scandinavia, near the workshop of a mind-magic specialist expelled from Durmstrang twenty years before Grindelwald made it fashionable. Throw in the rumors out of Albania six months back, and the horribly suspicious silence ever since, and Harry’s positive the world’s got another Dark Lord on its hands. 

And if the Ministry’s too busy chasing down hundreds of more substantial leads to catch one runaway nineteen-year-old, Harry will do the job for them.

With a sigh he drops into his chair to face off with a formidably thick book on wandlore, borrowed with considerable effort from the Unspeakables’ archives. He’s searching up the Elder Wand now. It’s one of the fancier treasures Tom pilfered that night at Nurmengard, and the legends claim it’s capable of unmatched horror and mass destruction. If another Dark Lord’s going to explode from the edges of society brandishing a stick of doom, Harry ought to know exactly how it works. He reads all about its blood-soaked history, about an intricate chain of murders committed for the sake of mastery ...

“Oi, Harry!” Ron’s face pops up suddenly in the Floo.

Harry glances at the clock to find it’s already half past nine. His heart sinks.

“Ginny and Mum drew up three new guest lists today, but they need you there for the final call, and apparently all the prices are shooting up every day so Mum’s going spare ..."

“Right, right, I must’ve lost track of time.” Again. “Let me just …” 

He scrawls a note, asking the Unspeakables’ librarian not to collect the wandlore book for another day, and slaps it atop the cover. Then he gathers his things and jumps into the fireplace, scattering Floo powder all over in his haste. There’s already a fine layer of glitter caked into the grout. It’s hardly the first time he’s rushed out late, realizing a wedding appointment had entirely slipped his mind.

When Harry returns to the office in the morning, the book’s disappeared.

Nurmengard

Nurmengard had moving staircases. As Harry hurled himself across the gap onto a landing, down a drafty portrait-lined corridor and past a suit of clanking armor, he found himself undeniably reminded of Hogwarts.

When he died here, at least he could pretend it was Hogwarts.

He ran from Grindelwald. Invisibility Cloak flapping around his feet, he ran through the halls, through one ghastly dungeon after another, losing himself in the labyrinth, only to turn the corner and find Grindelwald waiting for him. With one flourish of the Elder Wand, black flames walled them in, blocking off both ends of the corridor.

“So you must fall, and I with you,” Grindelwald remarked, sounding more curious than anything else. Despite the cloak, he stared unerringly into Harry’s eyes. “A strange fate to be sure ..."

Harry threw out a cutting curse to the heart, only to have it batted away.

“I would dismiss this prophecy entirely if anyone but I made it.” Grindelwald continued his monologue as if uninterrupted. “You are, I’m sure, in possession of many admirable qualities. But Albus himself would struggle in a duel at this level, if we could still raise our wands against each other. Your cloak may shield you for a time, but it will be mine soon enough. What other secret weapon do you have, I wonder, that you could ever dream of conquering me?”

For an instant, the black flames behind Grindelwald parted, and Tom Riddle slipped inside, as quiet and self-assured as Harry ever remembered him. His eyes met Harry’s for just one moment and then flickered back attentively to his Lord.

For his part, Grindelwald acknowledged him with an elegant half-bow. “Mr. Riddle. I understand the two of you have met.”

“Once or twice,” Riddle replied, his voice sharp with humor even as his face remained expressionless.

Grindelwald turned back to Harry, his brilliant teal overcoat billowing as he did. “I am afraid my Sight must have erred this one time. Now that Mr. Riddle is here, I’m quite sure only one of us must die tonight.”

New fury clogged Harry’s throat, pressing hard against his scar. Fury at Grindelwald, who sent his right-hand woman to murder him as an infant. Fury at Riddle, who seemed to have at last replaced her. It was Grindelwald who was making death threats, all grand gestures and bright colours and pureblood ease. Yet Riddle seemed equally frightening, small and quiet and dressed in plain black, waiting like a shadow behind him.

Grinning, Grindelwald lifted the Elder Wand.

After

Draco Malfoy (pureblood scion, former Slytherin sixth-year, one of the only survivors of Riddle’s little jaunt out of school and into open warfare) turns himself in, spilling his guts in his plea for amnesty. His information is vague and outdated, but frightening nonetheless. He warns of a dark future. He warns of a new Dark Lord: three syllables that force a shiver through Harry, despite the warmth of his morning coffee.

He hasn’t heard anything from Riddle in half a year though. No one has. There’s a possibility that Harry dismisses out of hand, that Tom Riddle died quietly when no one was looking, already lost forever to the shadows.

One section of Malfoy’s testimony is blacked out in the Daily Prophet’s version. Classified.

“Sorry, love.” Harry glances at his living room fireplace, where Ginny’s just appeared with a basket of Mrs. Weasley’s rolls. Too late, he remembers they had plans to share breakfast today. “Have to head in early.”

She forgives him easily, opting to instead head in early to the Quidditch pitch. With a couple rolls stuffed in his pockets, he dashes to work to grab the Aurors’ unredacted copy of the interview. He hones right in on the secret part.

On the part where Malfoy whispers of Horcruxes. 

“Strangest signature of my career, that was.” Auror Morgan breaks into Harry’s reverie, storming into the office with grand angry clomps.

“But it just didn’t match any Dark spell,” her trainee says, following closely on her footsteps, looking exhausted after a night shift. “It doesn’t match any known spell at all, not unless I really bungled those detection charms …”

“You did fine, it must’ve been accidental magic,” a third Auror assures her. “All instinct, no technique to track. Just a child getting spooked by those Muggles fighting. We’d better tell that new team, their Trace doesn’t work as well as they’re claiming.”

“It can’t just be that,” Morgan exclaims. “How could the Trace miss that? And what child could do a thing like that in the first place?”

“Sorry,” Harry cuts in, walking over to their desks with the testimony still in his hands. “What happened to you all?”

“Nothing worth your time, to be honest,” Morgan replies. “Can’t imagine it’s war-related.”

Harry shrugs. “I could use a break from … all that.”

She examines him for a few seconds, probably judging his Hippogriff-nest hair and undereye circles like Zhang always does.

“That’s fair.” She pulls out a charmed quill, and it hovers over an empty office form, waiting to record her report on the incident. “East End of London,” she dictates, “near the docks, around 2am. Looks like a brawl broke out with a bunch of drunk Muggles: mostly fists, at least one knife in there. Then a chunk of road blew up and threw everyone apart. There’s a fifteen-foot hole in the street right now. Muggle authorities are investigating it as a gas leak, but there’s heavy magic residue all over the site.” She frowns at whatever her quill’s written. “Really heavy. But not properly formed.”

The quill scratches out its prior sentence and rewrites it.

Harry winces. “How many deaths?”

Her trainee answers, “None so far. Which might be more evidence this was accidental, no malice at all …”

“But,” Morgan says sharply, lax quill jerking to attention again, “we’ve got five Muggles in the hospital. They don’t suspect it’s magic. Head injuries and intoxication made the collected memories useless.”

She pulls out a small vial, preserving the eyewitness memories. 

Harry eyes the silver threads inside, which seem unusually short and dim. “Do they remember what the argument was about?”

“They barely remember their own names,” Morgan sighs. “Might’ve just been angry drunks picking a fight.”

“There’s an establishment nearby,” her trainee pipes up, now referencing an annotated magical map of Muggle London, “where men are known to court other men. That’s something Muggles might not have been happy with, isn’t it?”

Harry winces harder, suddenly reminded he’s the only non-pureblood in the group. “Yeah, that’s putting it lightly.”

Morgan pushes the vial of memories across her desk, towards Harry. “Zhang’ll have my head for this … but they’re yours, if you feel like checking them out.”

Harry looks down at the testimony he’s still holding. As part of his Auror training, he read a paragraph or two about Horcruxes, but that’s not enough for him to know how they work, really. Riddle’s always been ten steps ahead of him, and it’s not nearly enough for Harry to catch up. He’s already got more than enough to research.

But the tattered silver threads call him anyway.

He slips the vial into his pocket, just as his boss sweeps into the room. “I’ll do that.”

“Please tell me you’ll get out of the office by eight tonight,” Auror Zhang tells him that night, leaning close to his chair and lowering her voice. “You’re the brightest star this team has seen in years, it’d be a tragedy for you to burn out.”

“I’ll do that.”

“And I’ll make Morgan tell me, if you’re still here when she comes in.”

Harry rolls his eyes and repeats his promise.

By the time she’s left the office, he’s spotted the loophole. He can work just fine outside the office, especially if he can find something in the field worth investigating. Nothing too dangerous, nothing that he shouldn’t look at alone.

Feeling awfully like a Slytherin, he plucks the memory vial from his pocket and tips its frayed strands into the office Pensieve. Immediately he’s pitched forward, falling straight into a poorly lit scene from last night. Everything’s unstable and hazy (either because of the alcohol or because of the concussions, or both), but he hears raised voices, Cockney accents that blur together …

Until one voice cuts through them, posh and forceful and somehow sharper than the rest. Harry can’t make out a single word, but his heart races at the sound, races far ahead of his head. In the corner of his eye he sees a tall, lithe figure in what Muggles would consider an unfashionably loose overcoat. The man’s features are veiled by shadow, impossible to hold onto no matter how Harry squints. The only thing that’s clear is the knife in his hands, flashing about as a threat.

The Pensieve flings Harry back out. He stumbles backwards, unusually destabilized, and collapses briefly in someone else’s chair.

After failing to calm his breathing for several minutes, he heads to the crime scene.

Harry’s got no evidence to speak of. Nothing concrete, nothing he could bring to his superiors. Morgan ultimately labeled this case as an excessive bit of underage magic, not worth investigating, and all the evidence says she’s right.

He circles the site, now blocked off by Muggle workmen attempting repairs. It’s a gaping chasm, cutting off traffic on both sides of what was once a well-used road. A quick detection charm confirms what Morgan had said. There’s heavy ambient magic still lingering from a burst of accidental spellwork: an impressive but undoubtedly messy show of power. At first the signature looks raw and unrefined, like an untrained child’s magic running entirely wild. But some peaks seem abruptly clipped off, as if there are unnatural constraints at play. The magic just feels stunted, somehow.

Taking a detour down a couple other roads, Harry circles back to the other side of the chasm. From there he tries following the magic’s trail, but it peters out within a block. He redoubles the wards shielding him from Muggle notice and activates a Sneakoscope, only to have it fling itself off his palm into the street, spinning at top speed with a deafening whistle. Apparently, he’s standing in a den of Muggle deception and villainy. After sprinting to recapture it, he swaps it for a different Dark Detector, tuned specifically to signs of dangerous magic.

Watching it carefully, he begins a sweep of the surrounding area. It remains stubbornly quiet. He wanders the streets, eyes peeled for trouble. After half an hour, he puts up another ward to filter out the rather unpleasant air pollution.

It’s a noisy neighborhood. It’s crowded, and full of life even after night falls. All around Harry hears people greeting each other, and hollering at each other, and coughing on each other in the thick smog. They ignore him, and he sizes them up and ignores all of them, searching for any bit of magic…

A blood-curdling shriek pierces the air, coming from a nearby block of flats. It’s followed by a bout of cursing (the non-magical kind) from an open second-story window. Harry casts a spell for better eavesdropping.

“One of his ‘pets’ got out again,” a woman cries. “Snakes in the plumbing? Makes me miss the rats!”

Before he knows it, Harry’s hurled himself inside the building. His Dark Detector’s still silent, so he stows it away and knocks on the woman’s door. He knocks again and waits through a series of crashes until a woman flings it open, pale and panting hard.

“I heard something about a snake?”

She nods, chest still heaving from terror. “That Riddance, or whatever his name is, keeps a bunch of them in the room above me. He swears they’re under his control, but why do I keep finding them in my kitchen sink, hm?”

He talks her down from full-blown panic and talks her into showing him the snake in question. Sure enough, there’s a brilliant green-and-black snake coiled up in the kitchen sink, apparently sleepy and content. The woman thanks him profusely as he pulls on a set of protective gloves (dragon-hide, though he tells her they’re just regular embossed leather) and coaxes it into a large copper pot. Promising to return it as soon as he can, he exits her flat again and heads upstairs, to “Riddance.”

To Riddle.

Riddle must live in this building. It’s the only thing that could make sense, between the extraordinary levels of magic, the half-dead Muggles, and the multiple snakes. It also makes no sense at all. The magical signature had seemed immature, yet Riddle’s magical powers had always been precocious. The signature had also seemed constrained, yet Riddle prided himself on acting freely, exactly the way he wanted, taking orders from only Grindelwald until he didn’t do even that. And the man in the memory had wielded a knife in battle, yet Riddle held himself far above anything so Muggle. He’d never stoop so low. 

(Especially not now. By all accounts, Tom Riddle stole all the choicest weapons in Nurmengard’s collapsing armoury for himself.)

Harry approaches the door, keeping a careful hold on the pot as he does. His Dark Detector remains stubbornly quiet, which means Riddle’s invented a whole new class of anti-Auror spells to hide his sinister doings, and Harry throws up every kind of shield he can think of. Then he whispers “alohamora” and braces for incoming fire.

Instead, the lock clicks right open.

For several minutes, he waits to be shot in the face, all the while absent-mindedly scratching an itch on the back of one hand. The longer he stays safe, the more convinced he gets that he’s walked into a deadly ambush. There’s got to be a nasty curse on the lock, just waiting for him to let down his guard so it can lop off his head.

Still alive several minutes later, he takes a tentative step forward and opens the door with a wave of his wand. Though it creaks ominously, it swings open, exposing what seems at first like a small, empty, ordinary Muggle flat. A closer look breaks that illusion. There’s an iron cauldron bubbling in the kitchen. Snakes in various shades lounge on the kitchen counter, swiveling their heads to hiss at him. There’s a tin of Eeylops Owl Treats on the windowsill.

The Elder Wand’s casually lying on the bedside table.

A gnat flies out the door, circling Harry’s head. An equally irritating ethical concern buzzes into his awareness. Officially speaking, the Aurors gave up their wartime powers last month, and so he can’t enter a wizard’s residence without permission, a warrant, or evidence of imminent danger to innocents. Unfortunately, he has no evidence that Riddle’s rogue snake is actually venomous, and he never got a warrant for this address because Riddle was untrackable, totally lost to him until only a few moments ago.

But if he leaves to get a warrant, Riddle will slip through his fingers again like so much sand. It’s simply unacceptable.

With a few butterflies in his stomach, Harry reconciles himself to the only good option. He has to continue this search and find something thoroughly incriminating, the seeds of Riddle’s next evil plan, the proof of “imminent danger to innocents.” He’ll find it, and he’ll lie through his teeth and pretend he knew about it before beginning his search. It’ll be his word against the new Dark Lord’s. He won’t be beaten, no matter how much Slytherin charisma Riddle brings to bear.

Cautiously, he slides one foot over the threshold onto the unvarnished softwood. It’s old and pitted, and it’s stained with what looks to be spilled dragon liver juice. Only that doesn’t make sense; Riddle kept his potions station obsessively neat in school. Next he notices that the cauldron’s on the stove. The lit stove. It’s relying on Muggle gas lines for heat, though any potioneer worth their salt lights their own fires with magic, maintaining rigorous control over the temperature. 

Harry tips the pot he’s holding, and the serpent slides onto the floor, moving steadily towards a dish containing several dead rats. The snakes seem well-supplied. As far as human food goes, there’s a few cans, a bag of fresh carrots, and some stale bread. When he checks, the cabinets turn out to be full of potion ingredients instead.

Harry plunges deeper. Beyond the kitchen is the sleeping area, all in one cramped room, made more cramped by the junk littered everywhere. Muggle clothes lie in baskets, some garments jumbled, the rest folded with just enough imprecision that they must’ve been handled by hand. Between them are treasure chests sealed with containment charms and stinking of Dark Magic; the Dark Detector finally chirps with concern as one box rattles at his feet. Muggle and magical books are lumped together, stacked in precarious piles. A few lie open on the unmade bed; they all show rather gruesome views of human anatomy, which is the first unsurprising thing about this whole night.

The whole flat hangs in a state of barely-controlled chaos. Harry wonders if someone else already tore this place apart before he even got here, some careless thief or murderer, because Riddle wouldn’t willingly accept any of this. Tom Riddle was nothing if not impeccably put-together at all times. 

(Not all times. He wasn’t that first day on the train, or that night on the seventh floor of Hogwarts that Harry tries not to think about. Riddle wasn’t put-together for one instant later on, falling into the belly of an entirely different castle. With a firm push, Harry puts all that from his mind.)

Warily, he picks his way towards the Elder Wand, only to be stopped by rows upon rows of protective runes, etched into the wood of the nightstand. He scans the room again and sees another row of runes cut into the ceiling. He recognizes this formula. It’s taught to all Aurors as a potent but unconventional defense mechanism, a back up way to protect oneself without using a wand or expending much energy. The trouble is that the runes are finicky, prone to failing unless they were written just so.

“Enemies who trespass here, choke.”

A simple phrase. Simpler than he’d expect from Riddle, but it ought to do the job. Harry lets out a long exhale, grateful that there must’ve been one line out of place somewhere. That error saved him from dying, windpipe clogged with his own saliva.

Not that he can spot the mistake. The runes were carved neatly by a perfectly steady hand, cutting straight through to the fluffy blue asbestos. 

He bends down to inspect the unconventional but equally neat runes surrounding the Elder Wand. One seems strangely familiar, a compound rune built around the sign of the Hydra; he can’t quite place where he knows it from. After a moment he begins copying the whole set of runes onto a separate piece of parchment, because the Auror Office needs to know what twisted formula Riddle’s invented ...

“Make yourself at home, please.”

Harry whirls about, wand extended, heartbeat pounding, and there he is. Tom Riddle stands squarely in the center of the doorway, entirely alive, dressed in Muggle clothes but wearing a smirk no pureblood could match. His wand is nowhere to be seen. Yet his voice drips sarcasm like a basilisk’s fangs drip poison, and for an instant Harry is frozen, suspended by the mere sight of him.

He swiftly recovers. “Where are the rest of Grindelwald’s Acolytes? Are they all following you now?”

Riddle lifts an eyebrow, still not moving to draw his wand. “Where’s your warrant?”

Against his will, Harry flushes. “I’ll have a warrant before you can blink.”

“Will you? The Wizengamot just granted a full pardon today, to anyone who joined the cause at Hogwarts while underage,” he retorts. “After all, it wouldn’t do to show favoritism to a Malfoy.”

Harry can’t confirm or deny it; he’d been paying attention to the substance of Malfoy’s testimony, not the legal posturing that followed it. But the heavy irony in Riddle’s voice rings true. 

So Harry grabs for firmer ground. “This ‘Morsmordre’ spell I keep hearing about, is it really for signaling your army? How many thousands have you got, so far? Did you keep all of Grindelwald’s people? Just ascend to his same throne?”

“I don’t know what Dark wizard you’ve been tracking,” Riddle says smoothly, the sarcasm mellowing to something even more treacherous, “but he sounds thoroughly marvelous.”

In two years, nothing’s changed between them. With just a few words Riddle’s slipped entirely under his skin. Harry hates it.

He doesn’t utter a jinx, not yet, because they’re in the middle of the East End and Riddle hasn’t struck first and Zhang’ll have his head if he starts a duel here. It was clever of Riddle to pick this spot, and clever of him to stand there without making a single threatening move, without giving Harry the slightest pretext for attacking. Every move’s been calculated by a mastermind.

“I know everything you’re up to,” Harry spits.

“You know nothing that matters,” Riddle replies, infuriatingly even-toned.

“How many Horcruxes have you made?”

“None.”

At least he didn’t bother pretending to have never heard of Horcruxes at all. Harry’s almost flattered.

He imbues his retort with all the sarcasm he’s got. “Oh, no. You’ve probably got all seven corpses under your belt already. Just a benefit of serving the ‘greater good,’ right, my Lord?”

Riddle’s eyes flash, almost red for just a moment, and he steps into the room. Harry hastens back on instinct, colliding with the side of the bed. 

“Right,” Riddle chuckles, even as he reaches back and manually pulls the door shut. Still laughing and laughing without a hint of humor, he gestures at the chaos around them. “Welcome to my Nurmengard. This is undoubtedly how a burgeoning Dark Lord set on immortality would choose to live. Fantastic detective work, Potter, the Ministry would fall without you.”

With every poisonous jibe he saunters closer. Despite the fact that he has a wand out and Riddle doesn’t, Harry starts to feel strangely cornered.

“Why’d you attack all those Muggles?” he demands.

“Self-defense.”

“You fractured their skulls!”

“Those barbarians started it,” Riddle snaps, and for one moment the anger in his eyes flares. “They always do.” He breaks off to stifle a cough with his elbow and then resumes his speech in a more measured manner, rattling off facts with as much passion as Professor Binns. “Of course it’s well-established that you hate me, you won’t leave me alone until we’ve carved out each other’s hearts, you’ll never want me as anything but a corpse, and so on. For legal purposes though, what do you really have on me?”

“I have so much on you,” Harry yells. 

He’s aware he’s the only one yelling. Tom Riddle sounds insultingly calm and reasonable, all hidden blades and carefully measured rage. Harry’s the one who’s flared like Fiendfyre meeting fresh air, his whole body set on edge by Riddle’s presence. He waits for Riddle to contradict him, or to gloat because Harry can’t prove anything criminal in a court of law.

Instead Riddle just stares at him, teeth worrying his lower lip. For one moment, his boundless blustering confidence seems shaken.

“You don’t know what you have on me,” he finally whispers, almost a hiss. “You can’t even begin to imagine it.”

“I’m sure I can’t. How could I comprehend the ambitions of Europe’s latest Dark Lord?”

Harry isn’t sure when he and Riddle got into each other’s faces, but they have, and Harry’s brain starts cataloguing the finer details. Riddle’s hair remains locked in its old gelled prison, carefully brushed back except for the one curl that drops across the left side of his face, too artful to be accidental. But otherwise Riddle’s aged in the past two years. He looks older and a little worn-down, not unlike the flat around him. 

Riddle opens his mouth for a cutting retort and ends up coughing instead, recoiling and pulling a handkerchief out to cover his mouth. It’s monogrammed with the initials “TMR." In gold, of course.

“Are you ill?” Harry says, out of a mix of surprise and obligation. 

“Terminal heart disease,” Riddle instantly quips back, shoving the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Either arrest me or get out of my life.”

“Or …”

“Or I’ll have you arrested for breaking and entering. Go back to your office and your friends and your precious fiancée.” He spits each word like it tastes foul on his tongue. “And keep your mouth shut about seeing me. If you know what’s good for you, Potter, you’ll let me alone.”

Harry bristles at the threat, but Riddle’s gotten the moral high ground for once in his life. Legally speaking, Harry’s the one who shouldn’t be here, and Riddle’s giving him nothing to work with, no concrete grounds for suspicion. The broke Muggle act isn’t remotely convincing, it must be a cover for some new evil plot, but Harry can’t prove it just yet.

And he won’t ever be able to prove it, not if Riddle gets him thrown off the Auror force first.

“Fine.” Harry surrenders through gritted teeth. “Don’t let your snakes bite me on the way out.”

“I’ll consider it.”

Carefully avoiding the adder that’s now slithered up to give him a death stare, Harry stalks out of Riddle’s tiny flat, spelling the door open with a bang.

“Give my love to Miss Weasley” are the last words he hears, right before he Apparates into thin air.

Chapter Text

Before

All the other compartments on the Hogwarts Express were full. Not bursting, exactly. But they all contained groups of people who seemed to know each other already, busy with lively conversations about textbooks and broomsticks and something called Exploding Snap. Harry had passed one jolly compartment after another and moved on quietly, not wanting to disturb them.

In time he arrived at the last compartment on the train. Only one boy sat there: small, maybe a first-year like Harry. Maybe he was even smaller than Harry, plain clothes hanging loose on his frame. There was something too sharp about his features, like maybe he’d never quite had enough to eat either, and Harry couldn’t help feeling an odd swell of kinship.

Then the boy looked up at him with a murderous glare, suddenly shoving a pile of dark cloth off his lap and out of sight. 

“Yes?” he snapped.

Harry blinked. “Can I join you?”

His eyes narrowed. Harry realized suddenly that the boy wasn’t looking at him anymore, just at the scar on his head. He braced for another round of thanks or near-worshipful fawning, just because of a battle he only recalled as a blur of green light …

“You’re an orphan,” the boy remarked instead.

“… I am.”

“I didn’t realize. You don’t look like an orphan.”

Harry looked down at himself. He was wearing his new robes from Twilfitt and Tattings, the first clothing shop he’d spotted at Diagon Alley; all the wizards and witches had been running around King’s Cross in robes, and he’d pulled his on in hopes of fitting in. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

The boy pursed his lips, and Harry got the impression he was running a hundred mathematical calculations in his head. The result was seemingly favorable, because he gestured at the empty seat across from him. “Fine. Just don’t get in my way.”

“Thanks!” 

The boy blinked, apparently caught off-guard by Harry’s grateful smile. 

“What’s your name?” Harry asked, dragging his trunk into the compartment.

“Tom. And you’re Harry Potter.”

Harry nodded in confirmation, falling into his seat just as the train lurched forward.

Tom sniffed. “Everyone’s already talking about you.”

He said it like a bad thing. Though Harry wanted to ask why, Tom had already turned his attention away, pulling the heap of fabric back onto his lap. Harry leaned forward for a closer look and realized it was a set of school robes. They were a spotty faded grey, made from scratchy-looking wool that had pilled in some places and been torn in others. On the seat beside Tom, a copy of one of the first-year textbooks lay open, showing a picture of flowing purple formal robes. 

“I got my robes second-hand as a challenge,” the boy suddenly announced. “It’s just silly to buy new, when you can transfigure old ones to look even better. Tinguo.” 

Smoke wisped out of his wand and soaked into the pile of clothes, dyeing it a pure black. 

Harry’s eyes went wide. “Brilliant.”

Tom glanced up again, glaring at him though Harry couldn’t think of anything he’d said wrong. He wondered whether Tom’s face was just set that way.

“I’d have done that,” Harry added, suddenly nervous, “bought second-hand robes and just fixed them up, except I don’t know how yet.”

Tom looked at him a bit longer, searching for who knows what. For an instant, his glare seemed to soften to a genuinely puzzled frown. 

But before Harry could be sure, Tom had looked back down at his robes. He kept casting that same spell, turning the fabric black one patch at a time. When that was done, he reached into his trunk and fetched the Charms textbook too.

“It’s practice for multiple subjects,” Tom muttered as he began casting a new spell, which mended the little holes in the wool. Harry wondered why he sounded so defensive, when no one was attacking him.

Harry supposed Tom’s display of power should’ve made him nervous, in case all the other children were already so far ahead in the curriculum. But something told him Tom wasn’t exactly typical, even for a wizard. There was something peculiar about the focus with which he pored over every inch of his robes, attacking the shabby fabric with spells like it had personally insulted him. His wandwork got faster and faster, and his voice got steadily more confident, and his spells began fixing all his robes at once. Returning to the Transfiguration book, he began changing the very texture of the fabric.

“Panmuto.”

Suddenly, all of Tom’s robes turned to a very shiny satin. 

“Panmuto,” he said again, now more forcefully.

They exploded with thick black fur.

“Panmuto,” he almost shouted.

They turned to a translucent, almost indecent chiffon. Harry’s eyes went round as saucers. Tom stared down at it. 

Harry gulped, “You can ask one of the older students to help …”

“No.”

Tom seemed frozen with horror except for his wand hand, which was almost imperceptibly shaking.

“… Then take mine.”

Harry got up to begin removing his robe. In a flash, Tom’s head whipped up, his glare now hardened to a scowl.

“I don’t need your robe,” he spat, visibly offended.

Startled, Harry looked down. “… Oh. Don’t worry, I’m still dressed under this.”

“That’s not …”

Tom faded into silence, and the two boys stared at each other in equal bafflement. Then, without looking away, Harry reached down and undid the clasps on his robe, sliding off the fine merino wool. As he bunched it up, it occurred to him that perhaps it wasn’t wise to entrust Tom with it, given the fate that had befallen the rest of the boy’s robes.

“Sorry if it’s not the right style or something,” he mumbled, handing it to Tom. When Tom didn’t take it, eyes flitting between the cloth and Harry’s face with inexplicable suspicion, Harry just dropped it on the seat next to him and sat down again. Tom ignored both it and him.

A cart rattled up just then, bringing all manner of magical snacks. 

“Anything from the trolley, dears?”

Sitting ramrod straight, Tom shook his head, giving the cart only a cursory scan before looking back at his book. “Not for me. Candy’s bad for your health.”

Slightly chastened, Harry put most of the Galleons back into his money pouch. He threw an extra smile at the trolley lady to balance out Tom’s rudeness and pointed at a box of jelly beans. “How about one of those?”

It turned out even one Galleon was far too much to pay for a single box of candy. By the time Harry had collected all his change, dropped it all on the floor, and picked it up again, Tom had at last acknowledged Harry’s robes. He prodded them at first, like he was afraid they might blow up. Then Tom took some of the fabric and rubbed it between two fingers curiously, over and over again. Chewing a toffee-flavored jelly bean, Harry watched nervously as Tom creased his brow in furious concentration and raised his wand again…

“Panmuto!”

Tom’s own robes suddenly turned to wool. To merino wool, matching Harry’s, though Tom’s shade of black was slightly darker.

“You fixed it!” Harry exclaimed, grinning widely. Tom handed back Harry’s robes and put one of his own on. His glare was gone, replaced by almost incandescent satisfaction.

Harry poured out a bunch of beans. “We should celebrate! Here, this one smells like garlic, it can’t be that bad for you …”

Tom gave him another baffled look, as if this was all a trap that he couldn’t quite figure out. To be fair, Harry wasn’t sure he could figure out garlic jelly beans either.

After a moment, Tom accepted it and popped it into his mouth. His whole face screwed up with revulsion. At the sight, Harry burst out laughing.

And after another moment, Tom cracked a smile too.

After

It’s a trap.

It’s always a trap, with Riddle. The first time Harry met him, he was transfiguring old third-hand robes to make them look new and expensive, like a Malfoy’s. He’d never willingly descend into what Slytherins loudly derided as “Muggle squalor.”

Not unless it’s a sham and a trap. A bit of misdirection, where he pretends to be a reformed, repentant, harmless Muggle-lover to draw attention from some far more gruesome secret.

The next day, Zhang darts Harry with endless suspicious glances. He supposes he deserves them. A couple hours back they were chasing down a “Greater Good” fanatic, one dead-set on breaking the Statute of Secrecy by setting Piccadilly Circus on Fiendfyre. Inevitably the confrontation escalated to a wild magical brawl, and Harry got clipped by an Impediment Jinx and nearly disabled by a Cruciatus, all because he can’t concentrate on the here and now. He blames Riddle. Concentration’s impossible, now that Riddle’s back in his life.

“Go home,” Zhang says afterwards, when the Healers finally let him out of their sight. “Go to the Weasleys’, tell your fiancée you’re injured, let Molly feed you a whole pot of soup. Boss’s orders.”

The Elder Wand book is back on his desk, once again wrangled from the Unspeakables’ clutches. It calls to Harry. Unfortunately Zhang calls louder, eventually steering him away from his desk. “I don’t want you back here until you’ve had a solid ten hours of sleep, you hear me? It’s dangerous for all of us, if you’re not at your best …”

He lets her maneuver him towards the fireplace, guilt churning in his stomach. She’s expressly told him on multiple occasions to let Riddle’s case go, because it simply isn’t a department priority. Harry has nonetheless remained convinced that, if he lets Riddle go, his entire world will burn down as a result. So he’s wound up barging into a private residence without permission, and he’s used his Ministry position to threaten someone who is (by the merest legal technicality) innocent. Worst of all, he’s handed Tom Riddle enough blackmail material to get him fired.

So Harry listens to his boss, and he dutifully steps into the fireplace and heads to the Weasleys’. It’s overflowing with warmth and food and good company, as always. Ginny arrives soon afterward, ruddy-cheeked from Quidditch practice, and seeing her immediately cheers him. 

Before he knows it, Harry’s roped into a lively argument over whether they ought to wear dress robes for the wedding or borrow the local Muggle tradition of a suit and a white gown. Mr. Weasley comes down strongly on the side of Muggles, while Harry admits he’s partial to the white wedding dress himself. But Ginny and her mother are both far more passionate about dress robes, and Harry admits defeat long before there’s real animosity. Mrs. Weasley commends him on his excellent taste and thrusts a shrunken box of roast chicken into his hands as he leaves. The entire time, she frets over his injuries and the dangers of battle.

“I know,” he tells her. “Trust me, I know.”

Too soon, Harry leaves the Burrow and finds himself back in his own dark flat. It’s just past nine, hours before his usual bedtime. He knows if he tries to sleep now, he’ll only waste half the night tossing and turning and overthinking.

So before he knows it, he’s Apparated back into the center of Muggle London.

He lands just outside Riddle’s door, wand out. The second his feet meet the floor he’s casting every diagnostic spell he’s ever learned, feeling for the new wards Riddle undoubtedly put up after his last visit. Oddly, he finds nothing.

But a Hominum Revelio confirms one person’s on the other side of the door.

One of his detection spells gives out a pop, and Harry hears footsteps, and the click of a lock. Riddle pulls the door open, dressed in robes that could pass for a particularly flowy Muggle overcoat. 

Harry eyes the fabric, its shimmer just barely visible to a magical eye. The fabric’s undoubtedly woven with a pre-cast Shield Charm. It’s not the finest armor out there; the charm would rapidly degrade after only twenty hits at most.

Of course, Riddle could bolster his defenses with the Elder Wand, which he’s currently pointing at Harry’s chin.

Riddle arches an eyebrow. “You really got the warrant? Give me a moment to draft the Wizengamot appeal …”

“Er, I don’t have a warrant,” Harry admits. As Riddle moves to shut the door in his face, he blurts, “I brought chicken instead.”

Riddle freezes. Slowly, he pulls the door open again, bafflement clear on his face. “Excuse me?”

“This isn’t an official visit,” he says, improvising wildly as he fumbles through his pockets. “You can’t report me for Auror harassment, this is strictly a social call.”

“I’m sure that’s why I heard forensic detection spells,” Riddle answers wryly.

“Can’t one Hogwarts dropout say hi to another?” Just in time, Harry pulls out the box Mrs. Weasley packed for him and enlarges it. Opening the lid, he proudly shows Riddle the roasted wings inside. “Consider it a housewarming gift!”

Riddle peers inside and then gives him a scathing look. “What exactly is your plan here?”

“I’m pretty sure that’s my line,” Harry replies, rather than admit that he hasn’t got one.

“I assume the marinade contains Veritaserum …” His jab gets interrupted by a hissing near his feet, because the smooth snake has slithered up to the threshold of the door and begun butting Riddle’s shoe with its head. Staring down, Riddle hisses back at it. Against his will, Harry finds this as impressive as anything.

“It appears …“ After a quick back-and-forth, Riddle redirects his attention to Harry … “That, to my snakes, you smell delicious.”

Harry does not shiver at the smile gracing Riddle’s face, predatory and darkly amused. He simply sets his jaw and extends the box. “Then they can have it. It’s not actually poisoned.”

Riddle stares at the box like it’s a trap before relenting and taking it. “I hope you don’t expect me to invite you in, just because you bought me dinner.”

Harry’s cheeks warm as he catches the implication, and Riddle smirks. Still not giving Harry any semblance of legal permission to enter, he takes a step away to grab a plate off the counter. Setting aside the Elder Wand, he empties the chicken onto the plate, and then he takes a knife to cut the meat into slightly smaller pieces, and then he bends down to place the dish on the floor, calling his pets from where they’re lounging near the lit stove with more Parseltongue.

It’s very domestic. Painfully so.

And Harry’s suspicions grow with every movement Riddle makes. Through five-and-a-half years of schooling, Riddle had relied on magic every moment he could, always keeping a year ahead of everyone else in the Charms curriculum. He’d used magic flamboyantly, to pack his trunk and write his essays and slice his toast. He’d gotten horrifically obnoxious once he made it to wandless magic; he’d go through entire Potions classes without getting out of his seat, just watching his knives do the chopping perfectly for him.

“What flavor of jelly bean did I give you,” Harry blurts, “the first time on the Hogwarts Express?”

Riddle twists around, a strange look on his face. “You really think I’m an impersonator? ”

“That’s not an answer,” Harry replies steadily.

Riddle’s jaw tightens for one mysterious moment, and Harry realizes that he doesn’t remember. Such a little detail wouldn’t be important to Riddle, just one more strange incident in his introduction to the magical world. So much of those early days have smeared together in Harry’s mind too; the Hogwarts Express is the only thing that stands out clearly amidst all that wonder and spectacle …

“Garlic,” Riddle mutters. “Do I get to ask something in return?”

“You think I’m an impersonator?”

“Well,” he says, tilting his head thoughtfully, “the last time we met, you were deeply convinced that our stories end with mutually assured destruction. Yet I’m noticing a distinct lack of Killing Curses.”

“Fine,” Harry huffs. “Do your worst.”

He regrets that wording immediately, fully expecting Riddle to take advantage. Maybe ask about that time in the Come-And-Go Room. But Riddle only furrows his brow nervously. 

“How did you end up engaged to Weasley?”

Harry frowns. “You’re supposed to ask me something you already know, so you can check if I’m lying.”

“Answer the question, Potter,” he snaps.

Harry blinks. “I suppose it just made sense. We dated a bit at school, you know …”

“Yes, I noticed,” Riddle says, lip curling. 

“Right. Well, after Nurmengard, she was in Paris at one of the magical hospitals. Because one of your Inferi …” Harry pauses, swallowing against a swell of old anger. “Decided to eat a chunk of her dad’s leg for dinner.”

“Not one of mine,” Riddle corrects quietly.

“What?”

“I overrode the hunger, mine focused solely on their orders.”

“Congratulations,” Harry bites out, entirely sarcastic. “You must be so proud.”

Riddle rolls his eyes. “You reunited in Paris, then what?”

“Why do you care? Are you planning to hold Ginny hostage or something?”

“For what? That’d be counterproductive. What happened next in your little romance?”

He says it casually- too casually. Though he’s now pointing the Elder Wand non-threateningly at the floor, his grip has turned his knuckles white.

“Paris was …” Harry clenches his eyes against the onslaught of images, of the City of Lights blazing with Fiendfyre when he stumbled back from Nurmengard. “Too much. And Grindelwald was dead, and it seemed like the war might finally be over, and … I dunno, Riddle. I was so glad to see her okay. Ginny was the one girl who was always with me, you know?”

“I thought that was Granger.”

Harry shook his head. “We weren’t talking much back then. She’d told me to stay at Hogwarts and let Dumbledore and his army handle Grindelwald.”

“I rather agree with her.”

“She said it was suicide.”

Riddle doesn’t have a smart response to that. He only straightens further, posture becoming even more perfect.

“But I was alive,” Harry whispers. “And Ginny was there. And she’s smart and funny and gorgeous and kind and I like her, I always have ...”

Harry doesn’t know why he’s telling all this to Riddle, of all people. But far from declaring such maudlin sentiments beneath him, Riddle listens to it all, drinking it in with a bizarre expression on his face. It’s not even a calculating look for once. More like nostalgic.

“So, erm … yeah. Her dad woke up okay, and everyone was celebrating, and next thing I knew, I’d proposed,” Harry admits, more than a little sheepish. “Am I the real Harry Potter? Do I pass the test?”

Riddle was staring at him again, now with the strangest mix of disbelief and melancholy. “Yes. I’ve got no doubt this was all really you.”

“Yeah?”

“You declared undying love for someone without nearly enough evidence.”

“Hang on, what do you mean ‘evidence’?”

“Without any forethought,” he hisses. Any trace of softness is gone; his porcelain features are twisted with inhuman cruelty. “In the heat of the moment, in a crisis practically guaranteed to fuel terrible decision-making, with no real hope for long-term happiness but that your ‘heart’ was in it.”

What the hell?

“What the hell, Riddle?” Harry spits. “She’s the love of my life!”

“She was convenient, in the right place at the right time! You would’ve chosen Chang or Patil or any of your other sweethearts if they’d been there instead!”

“That’s not true, and why do you care?” he cries, equal parts stung and confused.

“I don’t, obviously!” Riddle breaks off, racked by another fit of coughing, twisting around and hiding his face. Then he spins right back around, just as intense as before. “I’m simply discussing recent developments in your life. That’s what one school dropout ought to say to another, isn’t it, in a strictly social call?”

“You’re really horrid, you know that?”

Another cough. He recovers to sneer, “Don’t come back unless you need something real.”

Harry, as a responsible and mature Auror, does not charge into Riddle’s flat, but he can’t let Riddle have the last word either.

“What could I ‘need’ from you?” As Riddle dissolves into yet another bout of ugly hacking, Harry wrinkles up his nose. “God, Riddle, take a cough drop!”

Like an afterthought, Riddle lifts the Elder Wand. Before he can use it, Harry Disapparates.

Nurmengard

With pure murderous intent, Grindelwald aimed the Elder Wand at Harry’s heart.

“It’s dangerous to kill him,” Riddle remarked dispassionately, speaking over the crackling black flames. Harry had seen him display more interest when talking about the weather, at least on Quidditch mornings.

“Oh?” Grindelwald asked, wand unwavering. 

“There’s the chance the prophecy will hold. Dumbledore had your blood for far too long, and it’s not impossible he tied Harry into your pact. If that’s the case and either of you goes for the kill, you’ll both drop dead on the spot.” 

Grindelwald rapidly shook his head. “There was no tampering, when you returned the vial to me.”

“No tampering that we sensed,” Riddle said, sounding uncharacteristically wary.

Grindelwald only scoffed, eyes reflecting the black flames around them. He waved the Elder Wand about casually, just to extend his gestures as he spoke. “Albus is a cunning wizard, but I daresay I am a shade more skillful.”

Harry’s eyes darted about, searching for any form of escape as the two Darkest wizards in the world chatted about his imminent demise. Finding none, he began whispering every defensive spell he could think of, weaving a shell of shields around himself just the way Professor Merrythought had taught him.

“Dumbledore claims to care about all his Gryffindors,” Riddle replied. He projected profound unconcern towards Harry’s efforts, though he must’ve known about them. “Potter could be useful alive, as a hostage.”

(It sounded like he was trying to be genuinely helpful, to Grindelwald but also Harry. The act didn’t suit him in the slightest.)

“Oh, but if Albus truly cared, he wouldn’t have sent this trusting lamb in here to the slaughter.”

Harry nearly abandoned his defenses to lash out again. He bet he could get a Cruciatus to stick right now, fueled by a flare of protective rage, because they were lying. The Dark Lord was supposed to be raging across Paris right now, raising armies from the catacombs. That’s where Dumbledore was, at the center of the battlefield, frantically banishing the thousands of skeletons currently pouring out of the ground. When he sent Harry into Nurmengard for a secret side mission, to steal back the vial binding the blood pact, they hardly knew anyone was home. None of this was according to plan.

“Wouldn’t he?” Riddle said, perfectly dry. “I thought having Albus Dumbledore care about you shortened one’s life expectancy.”

A terrifying grin electrified Grindelwald’s face, and he let out a crackling burst of laughter. “You do have precedent on your side.” 

Riddle snorted. “Still, Paris must’ve made him even more desperate than we planned.”

“Hmm.” With something almost like nostalgia, Grindelwald murmured, “I did hope he’d confront me himself before he fell back on the prophecy.”

And even as Harry muttered “Repello Inimicum,” he grit his teeth in frustration at them both. Dumbledore was trying desperately to confront Grindelwald. That’s why he wanted the blood vial back in the first place, so he could try another round of methods to destroy it. He didn’t even believe in the prophecy, not really; when Harry asked, he’d just smiled cryptically and said these things had a funny way of working themselves out, though never the way one expected. Dumbledore didn’t think that Harry had to kill Grindelwald, and he didn’t believe that Grindelwald’s death would kill Harry too, and he certainly wouldn’t throw Harry into Grindelwald’s warpath tonight, without warning, just to trigger that turn of fate. 

Channeling all that spite into his magic, Harry finished his cocoon of defensive spells. It was some of the best spellwork of his life, and it’d hold for several minutes at least, against anything but Killing Curses and mental manipulation. This was when Grindelwald straightened his wand arm again, now pointing at Harry’s brain. “Imperio.”

A sudden calm slipped past Harry’s walls and seeped like a cool mist into his mind.

Just take off the cloak, it whispered. It longs to be with its brothers. With its true master.

“Like hell it does,” Harry muttered, forcing out the words. 

“Imperio,” Grindelwald repeated, even more authoritatively, but Harry only clutched the cloak harder, digging his hand into the folds of the fabric. He kept from looking right at Grindelwald (eye contact could strengthen the caster in battles like these), so his gaze landed on Riddle instead. The mere sight of Riddle filled him with boiling fury, enough to fight Grindelwald’s curse.

The longer he struggled, the stranger Riddle’s expression got, lit up from the inside. If Harry didn’t know better, he might have mistaken it for pride.

Chapter Text

After

This has gotten ridiculous.

The initial feverish excitement over locating Riddle abates, now that Harry’s found him again in the exact same place and verified he wasn’t just a dream. It’s replaced by mortification. Harry showers, changes and climbs into bed, all while mentally kicking himself.

He’d shown up at Riddle’s door and offered him a nice chicken dinner.

Really?

He falls asleep marveling at that. When he wakes up, he’s stunned to find that ten-and-a-half hours have passed in solid, unremarkable slumber, not a nightmare in sight. His head feels clear for the first time in a long while, at least where Riddle’s concerned. In the bright light of late morning, he organizes his thoughts.

Riddle told him to stay away until he had something better to go on. In retrospect, Harry’s inclined to agree. Though Riddle had caused more havoc than soldiers thrice his age, the pardon for underage recruits has effectively rendered his war crimes unprosecutable. Legally speaking, Harry ought to back off until he has more evidence. Practically speaking, every time he and Riddle collide, there’s an unavoidable chance they’ll both end up dead.

(At a guess, that’s the real reason Riddle’s been avoiding violence. He’ll delay their real clash until he’s successfully made a Horcrux, a way to slickly cheat the inevitable.)

But Harry can’t leave Riddle alone, not forever. The unfortunate fact is that Riddle’s spent years straying down a dark path, towards Dark Magic and who knows what else, and Harry doesn’t want to let him fall much further. And even if he wasn’t worried about Riddle’s future, there’s too much unresolved in their past for Harry to just let him go. He can’t remember too much of the three-way duel at Nurmengard, it all blurs together in a haze of adrenaline and Unforgivables and black fire, but he’s positive the sequence of events didn’t make sense to him at the time. Grindelwald and Riddle had both spoken at length, incomprehensibly, sometimes seeming to go against each other, which seems quite strange in retrospect. What’s stranger was the way magic had behaved, for all three of them. Focused solely on staying alive, Harry didn’t understand any of the deeper machinations at the time. 

He’d bet anything that Riddle grasped them all.

Then there’s the fact that Riddle’s behaving even more strangely now. Riddle hasn’t welcomed him warmly, but he hasn’t attacked or tried half as hard as he could to shut Harry out, which is perplexing. Then there’s the Muggle flat, the disarray, the lack of magic even for private convenience- none of it fits the boy Harry had known for six-and-a-half years. It’s a mystery. 

The aspiring detective in him screams that it needs solving.

The responsible adult in him tells him to get dressed, go back to the office, and focus on his assigned cases like Zhang wants him so badly to do. So that’s what he does.

Really, this time.

For weeks, he keeps his head down and his mouth shut, and he reads through reports from Auror forces on the Continent and helps out with their cases. They’re nasty cases too. Grindelwald’s creepy skull hookah showed up again, when a witch in Leningrad tried smoking it and choked to death, lungs filling with volcanic ash. A couple informants tried revealing where the Acolytes’ safehouses were and dropped dead in Auror custody, hearts stopped by old Unbreakable Vows that they didn’t remember making. And then there was the newly-discovered underground prison where Grindelwald had rounded up fifty of his most powerful enemies for “experimentation.” Apparently he’d been searching for new twists on the Unforgivables. Most of them were now being transferred to St. Mungo’s Janus Thickey Ward for a lifetime of care.

“It says,” Morgan whispers in horror, “he stripped three of them of their magic. Left ‘em like Squibs.”

Examining the report by her side, Harry shivers. “Is that even possible? Magic’s innate, you shouldn’t lose it if you have it.”

Morgan flips the page, lands on a particularly grotesque photograph, and hurriedly flips again. “According to the Healers, a few particular torments can bleed the magic right out of you.”

She taps a finger on the relevant paragraph, and Harry leans in to read the Healers’ scrawl. It confirms what she’d just said. Grindelwald had identified three different mechanisms to torture the magic out of his enemies, all involving prolonged exposure to extraordinarily Dark Magic. In all cases, the process took months of abuse. First Grindelwald stripped them of their control, forcing their powers to regress to a childlike, almost feral state. In the short term, victims’ magic seemed to get stronger, lashing out defensively like an Obscurial’s might, and they were prone to episodes of explosive accidental magic which left odd magical residue all around the prison.

Local Aurors are now busy quantifying the residue. Harry stares at the charts, marked by strange jerky lines. The magical signatures aren’t quite like the ones in the East End. They aren’t much different either.

“Then one day,” Morgan murmurs, fingering her wand seemingly without meaning to, “they snapped. Woke up and just…had no magic anymore.”

Harry resists the urge to reach for his own wand and assure himself it still worked for him. Instead he keeps reading. Two of the victims are dying fast at St. Mungo’s, succumbing to other lethal curses, their magicless bodies failing to respond to most healing potions. The third, newly rendered vulnerable to Muggle disease, had died in the prison of whooping cough.

Harry’s mind drifts to a memory of Riddle coughing. The cough seemed persistent and out of control. And Riddle would have tried hard to control it; after all it kept ruining his soliloquies.

“I … I need to go. Have some personal stuff to see to.”

Morgan nods sagely. “Zhang’ll be happy about that.”

Harry forces a smile, though he rather doubts his boss would be happy if she had the entire story.

He rushes out, Apparating directly to the door of Riddle’s flat, head once again buzzing with questions and speculation. Under it all thrums a new, unfamiliar anger.

He lands practically on top of Riddle.

Riddle’s dressed smartly in what might be work clothes; that’s the first thing Harry notices. He’s in a black Muggle suit, its slightly old-fashioned, minimalist cut still reflecting austerity measures from the war. His cloak is draped over one arm, and his cheeks are flushed from heat, even though the building is chillier than ever.

The second thing Harry notices is the goblins’ silver knife Riddle’s got at his throat.

It’s shaking. Riddle draws back almost immediately, eyes widening in recognition as his gaze darts up and down Harry’s person. He shoves the knife back into his pocket. His wands are nowhere to be seen, even though he clearly believed himself under a lethal threat. And though Harry would probably be missing several bones right now if Riddle had pulled a wand, his heart sinks anyway.

“I didn’t expect you back,” Riddle says warily. “You surprised me, that’s all, I’m no longer in the habit of antagonizing Aurors …”

“Did Grindelwald torture you?” Harry cuts in. He barely recognises this strange, dark voice as his own.

Riddle blinks, displaying what looks like honest surprise. “Why do you ask?”

“Your magic’s gone.”

He stares at Harry, and for a moment the mask truly falls. Still, Harry can’t even pretend to understand the jumble of expressions flying before him, not until Riddle’s face settles on determination.

As grim and resolute as a soldier going to war, Riddle lifts his chin and pulls out his key. “Why don’t you come in, Potter?”

That’s an invitation. That’s legal permission to enter Riddle’s personal residence, defensible even in a court of law. A little shell-shocked, Harry follows him in when he unlocks the door. He flirts with the idea of trying to search the place again, now that he’s gotten in legally.

He keeps his focus on Riddle instead.

Hanging up both his cloak and jacket, Riddle saunters over to his stove where a potion’s simmering away. The rosy bubbles popping on the surface suggests that it needs prompt attention, but Riddle just stops to peer into its depths, back towards Harry.

“He did it to three other people that I know of,” Harry says, balling his fists. “He burnt the magic right out of them.”

“I was at the height of my power when he died,” Riddle replies, still turned away. “You of all people should know that.”

“You could’ve gotten hit by a curse later on. I dunno, maybe he built something into Nurmengard’s wards.”

“Interesting theory, detective.” Riddle starts to reach into his back pocket where his wand should be, only to stop himself. He prods the potion with a wooden spoon instead before turning back around, eyes alight with frightening mischief. “If I didn’t know better, I’d be touched by your concern.”

And Harry is concerned, and he’s getting more so with every word out of Riddle’s mouth. Yes, Riddle was wasting his powers on Dark Magic, but those powers were his to waste. The idea that Grindelwald stole that choice from him makes Harry feel sick.

“What would you do about it, if Grindelwald did torture me?” Riddle questions with unnatural energy, gesturing theatrically like Draco Malfoy, like it’s all one brilliant joke. “Resurrect him to kill him again? Let me know if you do, I can offer tips for the Inferius …”

“Riddle!”

“Why do you care?” Riddle suddenly demands. It’s the same question Harry asked him, the last time they spoke.

Unlike Riddle, Harry wants to answer it, but he can’t speak. His anger’s lodged firmly in his throat.

In time, Riddle gives up on him. His face goes utterly blank.

“He didn’t steal my magic.” Riddle’s words are devoid of intonation, except for the slightest emphasis on “he.” “I wish he had; I would have found a way to steal it back.”

“Then who did it, if not Grindelwald?”

“This is my own doing,” he admits, after waiting just a moment too long.

Harry gapes at him. “But … how?”

There’s just the slightest tightening around Riddle’s mouth; it betrays devastation. Rapidly, Harry’s brain fills in the gaps, the shameful mistakes that must have happened, even if Riddle can’t admit to them.

“So,” Harry finally deduces, “you did something stupid, got involved with some kind of dangerous power too big for even you to handle, and then everything blew up in your face and you lost your magic. Did I get it?”

“Perfectly,” Riddle mutters.

“So what- or who- did you get into trouble with?” Harry prompts.

His brow darkens. “Something dangerous. I’ll admit I underestimated its strength, as well as its potential for mass destruction. It rivals any Dark Magic either of us has heard of. I would’ve been better off never knowing its power at all.”

“Could you get any more vague?”

Riddle served him a dirty look. “If you’re concerned for yourself, don’t be. It might be inherited; I’ve certainly got family precedent working against me.” His nose flares, an ugly sneer. “Regardless, you’ll never have this sort of trouble. You’re far too …”

He trails off and gestures at Harry, head to toe, proving that he could in fact get more vague.

“Far too what?” Harry prods with a frown.

Riddle looks at him, falling silent, and then shakes himself from his reverie. “I swear none of this will ever matter to you.”

“Maybe I won’t lose my magic, but it still matters!”

“What possible reason …” Riddle jumps, interrupted by sudden sizzling as his potion brims over. Streaks of angry magenta froth down the side, pooling in the grates of his lit stove. Harry whips out his wand.

“Don’t!” Riddle explodes into action, brushing past Harry to rush over to his nightstand. “It’s just a low-grade Cough Potion, like you recommended, it won’t set the building on fire.”

“But it needs to be stirred by a wand!”

“In what direction? What’s the starting point and radius? How many cycles will it take?” Riddle barks, seizing the Elder Wand and striding back to the cauldron. He stares at it for a second more without touching it. Then he returns to his nightstand. “Out of the two of us, I have more faith in my knowledge of sixth-year potions.”

“You dropped out halfway through the class!”

“At least I was awake for the half I attended.”

With a wince, Harry concedes the point. “You know, you could just tell me how to help.”

Without replying, Riddle drops the Elder Wand back among its protective runes, long fingers closing around his yew wand instead. He sweeps back to the cauldron, rolling back the sleeves of his shirt.

“Squibs can’t do potions,” Harry adds quietly, nearly apologetic. “Every potion requires magic, even if it’s just a little spark.”

“I’m aware,” Riddle says flatly, face once again entirely hidden from Harry.

Then he straightens his back, steeling himself against disaster or disappointment, and dips the tip of his wand into the potion. He stirs it deftly, four times in a tight counter-clockwise circle. Instantly the roiling liquid settles and turns a pleasant lavender.

Harry narrows his eyes at the potion, which clearly just responded to magic. To some persistent sliver of Riddle’s magic. “Grindelwald’s victims lost all their powers. They wouldn’t be able to do even that anymore.”

“As I’ve been telling you, I’m not one of Grindelwald’s victims,” Riddle answers, turning off the stove and moving the cauldron to a cool burner. Setting his wand aside, he takes a row of glass bottles out of a cabinet and starts filling them one at a time, with his bare hands and a spoon. The bottles don’t look like regular potions equipment. With a little amusement, Harry realises they used to hold Muggle fizzy drinks, though presumably Riddle’s cleaned them out thoroughly.

“Can I help?” Harry asks.

“I can manage,” Riddle replies shortly. He proves himself right; though he’s abandoned his wand, not a single drop spills as he bottles his potion. Harry watches him for just a moment, appreciating his efficient, inhumanly precise motions. There was a reason Slughorn had fawned over him in every class until the end of fifth year, a reason besides the brains and the power and the popularity.

More subdued, Riddle lets out a muted sigh. “The offer is appreciated. I’ll admit the wand component failed, the last three times I tried to brew this.”

“What changed?”

Riddle glances back at him with a half-smile. “This time I had moral support.”

Harry snorts, because there’s no chance Riddle actually believes in the power of “moral support.” The sentiment’s far too Gryffindor for his tastes, or worse: Hufflepuff. Riddle smiles too. Then his gaze lingers for a second, studying Harry with strange curiosity, before snapping back to his work.

“I thought you’d be more … pleased,” he remarks while he stoppers the last bottle. He scoops the rest of the potion into a mug and begins to sip it. “I’ve successfully eliminated myself as a threat, with no cost to you.”

“Sure, but anything that could do this to you is an even bigger threat.”

Riddle scoffs into his cup. “I won’t argue there.”

“Look, Riddle.” He pauses as Riddle proceeds not to look at him at all, instead pulling a nearly empty bottle of Mrs. Skower's All-Purpose Magical Mess Remover from a cabinet and pouring some on the potion-splattered grate. “I need some kind of clue about what this is. Are you in trouble with a person? A group?”

Seemingly fascinated by the mess on his stove, Riddle plucks a handkerchief from his pocket (a white cloth dotted with red, it must be some fussy floral design), deems it unsuitable, shoves it back in his pocket, and pulls a different scrap of cloth from a nearby basket. With it, he begins scrubbing with uncalled-for force.

“Did you touch the wrong artifact?” Harry keeps trying. “Or did you do the wrong ritual …”

“I can’t tell you,” Riddle suddenly answers, dropping the rag like it burned him and spinning back around.

Harry grimaces. Riddle’s pardon covered his actions in the war, but it won’t extend to other crimes. At a guess, he’s gotten himself cursed doing something horrifically illegal after the war, and he might not be thrilled about disclosing that to a literal Auror.

“Right,” Harry says slowly. “I mean, obviously I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just asking, off the record, unofficially, if I could hypothetically request some library books from the Department of Mysteries to see how someone could lose their magic, which area I should be looking at …”

“Harry.” 

He immediately falls silent as Riddle gives yet another one of those considering looks, lower lip again caught between his teeth.

“I’m less concerned that you’ll press charges,” Riddle finally admits, the words sounding like they’ve been tortured out of him, “and more concerned that you’ll laugh in my face.”

Harry’s eyebrows jump. “I wouldn’t do that!”

“You’ll laugh,” Riddle says with that dictatorial certainty, “and that’ll make it worse.”

“Come off it, nobody’s ever died from being laughed at a little.”

“I have no interest in being the first.”

“Hey, I wouldn’t laugh in the first place, this is serious stuff!”

“Serious,” he agrees, lips tightening, “and stupid. I fear that I’ve been mortifyingly stupid.”

Despite his best efforts, a nervous chuckle squeezes its way out of Harry’s throat, born of surprise and sheer confusion. “You’re a lot of things, Riddle, but you’ve never been stupid. I don’t think you have it in you.”

Riddle laughs too, a sharp ugly thing. One of his serpents has slithered up to him on the kitchen counter, and he strokes its coils mindlessly, gently. “I had one weakness, and I let it ruin me.”

Harry can’t imagine what Riddle means by “weakness.” He had seemed practically omniscient, as students went. But maybe he’d struggled in one class, or on one kind of spell, and it had come back to bite him. 

“Okay,” Harry says. “It doesn’t seem like this is an imminent threat to the public, so I’m not going to make you talk.”

Riddle purses his lips as if he’s displeased, for some reason, but he doesn’t say anything more.

“Unless you need me for something, I’ll just …” When Riddle remains silent, Harry fumbles for the door and lets himself out.

“Harry?”

He looks back.

“I won’t mind if you stop by again,” Riddle says, with a soft contemplative look on his face. “Try not to get killed by someone else out there, won’t you?”

Before

“Riddle, Thomas!”

From the Gryffindor table, Harry watched Tom cross the Great Hall, pitch-black robes swirling around him, and wished for a moment that he’d asked for Slytherin after all.

Swept up in the excitement of moving staircases and talking portraits and seven subjects, he nearly forgot the peculiar boy from the Hogwarts Express. They had History of Magic together. Tom (no, they weren’t really friends, they weren’t even in the same house, so he was “Riddle” now) stood out only because he seemed genuinely fond of the subject. He took copious notes and asked what Harry guessed were relevant questions. It was a genuinely impressive show of Slytherin deception, because nobody could actually be that interested in Binns’s lecturing.

Then came the flying lessons.

Harry’s broom sprang into his hand the second he called it. Most of the other children managed it on the tenth or so try. One straggler after another grabbed hold of their broomstick, until there was only one voice remaining.

“Up,” Riddle said, over and over. He’d sounded imperious at first, but as giggles went up around the class (loudest from the Slytherins), his composure had broken down into almost frightening anger, his extended hand vibrating with suppressed energy.

Harry couldn’t understand why he was quite so upset; no one really needed a broomstick, not with the Floo Network that was now being connected to almost every magical household in Britain. And flying lessons were ungraded, so trouble here couldn’t affect the rest of his Hogwarts career. But he’d been upset over the robes too, hadn’t he, when his charms hadn’t worked quite how he wanted? Harry wondered if Riddle was just angry all the time.

Their instructor eventually summoned the broom and handed it to him, and he accepted it with a stern set to his jaw. As they got into the air, Harry once again outstripped everyone, managing loops and narrow turns by the end of the hour, elated by flight. In contrast, Riddle’s expression stayed stormy, his broom refusing to rise more than five feet into the air and moving in little jerks. It kept lurching underneath him, as if it was trying to shove him off.

It succeeded eventually, dumping him in a heap on the ground. Riddle immediately pushed himself to his feet. He kept his head low, maybe to inspect his robes for dirt he could charm away. Maybe because another round of tittering had started up among the Slytherins.

Harry swept past two Slytherins in the air. He heard one laughing: “What else would you expect from a Mudblood?”

The instructor called everyone back down just then, collecting their brooms again. “If you’d like to practice more, you can sign out a broom on Fridays after dinner for supervised practice.”

“There’s not much point yet,” Ron told Harry as they headed back inside. “The Quidditch teams don’t really take players until third year. Maybe second if you bring a really fancy broom.”

“I was thinking of trying out anyway,” Harry said, trying to keep his hopes up. “Just in case something’s open.”

“Gryffindor only needs Beaters this year, and they’d be mental to let a first-year do that …”

Ron started explaining how Bludgers were more vicious and bloodthirsty than the average Dark Wizard, and nobody in their right mind would try whacking one around until they’d hit a sizable growth spurt. Still, Harry couldn’t resist the itch to get back into the air.

By Friday night, most students had stopped caring about broomsticks, thoroughly exhausted by a week of other classes. Hermione (whom Harry had instantly taken a liking to; while Ron was put off by her intensity, she was downright relaxed compared to Riddle) was already arranging her weekend study plans over dinner, while Ron was busily defending his favorite Wizarding Chess strategy to half of Gryffindor. Nobody commented as Harry slipped away, heading to the school broom closet.

It was quiet and nearly dark; the pitch was lit by staggered rows of floating lanterns. A seventh-year signed out a broom to him briskly before redirecting her attention to a Quidditch game over in New York, currently being broadcast over the radio. She would presumably intervene if a student fell off their broom from a dangerous height, but she didn’t seem inclined to help much otherwise.

So Harry took his broom out to the pitch and found himself alone, except for one boy with a green scarf fluttering around his neck.

Harry recognised him first by the way his broom moved, lurching over and over again, doing its level best to throw Riddle off. After he clung on for a few desperate seconds, both the broom and its rider nose-dived into mud. It was from a height of only ten feet. Their supervisor didn’t even look up. Harry rushed over anyway.

“Up,” Riddle was saying by the time he approached. “Damn you to hell, you bloody twig. Up, or I’ll set you on fire …”

Thoroughly engrossed in his tirade, he didn’t seem to notice Harry approaching, not until one of his trainers hit the mud with a particularly loud squelch. Riddle flinched and then froze.

“I’m not sure death threats are really the way to go here,” Harry said, stopping a safe distance away. Out of punching distance at least, even if Riddle could still hex him.

Riddle spun around, now turning his death glare on Harry. “There must be a way to fly without these things.”

“I’m pretty sure if there isn’t, or it would’ve been invented by now …”

“I’ll find it myself,” he snapped. “Broomsticks are stupid. And so is Quidditch.”

When Professor Dumbledore first met Harry back at the Dursleys’, he’d told him that James Potter had been one of the best Seekers ever seen at Hogwarts. On principle, he felt a flare of irritation. “What’s wrong with Quidditch?”

“The Snitch is hilariously overvalued,” he sneered. “A hundred-and-fifty points for one ball? It makes most of the action completely irrelevant, they should just get rid of Seekers entirely.”

“If you hate flying and Quidditch so much,” Harry shot back, cut to the core, “why don’t you just forget about it?”

“Because everyone else loves it!” Riddle burst out, the supervisor’s head jerking up across the pitch. “The way everyone talks about it, it’s like you’ve all been Confunded! There’s this fourth-year in Hufflepuff, Nellie Smith, who can’t even make a match into a needle, but she’s some sort of fantastic Beater and Slytherin can’t get enough of her! It doesn’t even matter that she’s a Mudblood!”

There was that word again. Blinking, Harry asked, “What’s a Mudblood?”

Riddle stared at him. 

“I heard someone say that at the flying lesson too,” Harry added, awkwardly. He’d thought it a jab at Riddle’s athletic abilities, like his blood was too sluggish for exercise, but he might have been wrong.

“… were they talking about me?”

“Yeah,” Harry said with a frown, “I guess they were.”

Riddle’s face went unnaturally blank. With tight, jerky movements not unlike his broomstick’s, he grabbed the broom off the ground and began marching back towards the closet.

Defeat didn’t look right on him.

“Wait,” Harry confessed before he could stop himself, “no one’s going to take me seriously, but I want to try out for the Gryffindor team next year.”

Riddle claimed not to like Quidditch, or broomsticks, or any of it. But Harry couldn’t help being reminded of Dudley, who spent five months begging for a BB gun for Christmas only to declare his hatred for it within minutes, cursing and crying and “accidentally” peppering the wall with pellets. It had been a tantrum for the ages, and all because he hadn’t hit his chosen target on his very first shot. The BB gun went into a spare room, out of sight under the bed, never to be mentioned again. (This counted as a victory at the time, because if Dudley ever developed good aim, Harry would surely be his favorite target.)

Harry looked at Riddle, dragging the broom through the mud, and wondered if maybe he didn’t hate broomsticks at all.

“Maybe we can practice together?” Harry ventured.

Riddle froze. His whole body got even tenser, and Harry nearly reached for a wand, in preparation for whatever jinx was coming his way.

But then he turned around and nodded. “I’d like that.”

And despite the night chill, Harry felt warmed through.

Chapter Text

After

“So they checked, and I got the Quaffle in from 378.2 feet away, horizontally speaking,” Ginny reports, aglow with triumph. “And according to Gwen, the Cannons thought they were hallucinating at first, even though that’s not the trickiest goal we’ve ever seen …”

“Hey,” Ron interjects, “forget Hogwarts! You were bloody fantastic, there’s never been anything like it in a real game. The Cannons didn’t know what hit ‘em.”

Everyone at the table exchanges glances, shocked to hear such anti-Cannons sentiment out of Ron’s lips. Harry grins and raises his glass in another toast. 

Zhang had practically pushed him out of the office for the first game of the Harpies’ season, and it was a glorious showing. Ginny had been in top form, breaking the professional world record for the longest-range goal. The spike of adrenaline still hasn’t fully faded from that moment when Ginny took a sudden vertical hairpin turn, accelerating wildly into a dive on her brand-new broom and then leveling out to hurl the ball across more than half of the pitch. Harry had recognised that maneuver just a heartbeat before the crowd …

“Oh look, the Prophet’s photographers want to see you!” Mrs. Weasley announces, opening a letter. “The move’s going to be named the Weasley, the sports page just made it official …”

“I thought moves get named after their inventors,” Harry blurts before he thinks about it.

Ginny starts to say something, but Ron beats her to it, face darkening. “Come on, you think anyone’s going to name a move after him?”

“… No, I guess not.”

An uneasy silence falls over the table.

Mrs. Weasley breaks it, chair scraping as she abruptly stands up. “Rice pudding, anyone? Harry, I found a recipe with cloves and allspice. I thought it might remind you of home.”

“It smells perfect,” Harry assures her a moment later, when she waves her hand and drops a bowl full of pudding in front of him. She watches him eagerly as he tries his first spoonful …

And chokes up.

(He’d grown up smelling all sorts of sweets and never tasting them, not until now. Aunt Petunia never let him try anything, even as she lavished Dudley with desserts until his stomach was as spherical as a gulab jamun. Which, for the record, was another delicious sweet Harry never got to try.)

“It is perfect,” he says, blinking back tears. There’s a sea of Weasleys giving him identical grins right now, as he shovels another heaping spoonful into his mouth.

He leaves the Burrow well-fed and extra-warm, thanks to the new Harpies scarf and jumper he’d bought with Ginny’s discount, both made with Permanent Heating Charms. The conversation had rebounded quickly, as Fred and George began planning a line of merchandise in honour of “the Weasley,” placing bets on how soon they could make her stardom outshine Harry’s. The whole evening seemed charmed and golden.

There’s no reason why pictures of a cold, barren Muggle flat popped up in Harry’s head, all through the evening.

The last time he visited Riddle’s flat, Harry had noticed a flat pink-and-white stone by the fireplace. Most of the snakes had curled up on it. Riddle might’ve purchased a Self-heating Sunstone for them, like Neville had for Trevor. Yet he didn’t seem to have taken any such measures for himself.

The fluffy scarf that Ginny tied around Harry’s neck, wrapping it twice for good measure, suddenly seems extravagant. A little too tight for comfort.

“Riddle?”

Harry knocks again for good measure, but the door doesn’t open. He toys with the ethical questions around forcibly opening it, just to make sure Riddle hasn’t been killed by one of the enemies a budding Dark Lord is obliged to make. Aurors have the right to storm a home for the sake of protecting its residents, if there’s overwhelming proof they’re under attack.

On the other hand, he has no such proof. It’s only nearing nine, but Riddle could be asleep. Or he could be out, doing errands. Or he could be off frequenting that establishment, near the road he’d blown up. Or he could have already visited said establishment and brought home someone considerably more entertaining. Harry’s suddenly tempted to run and pretend he was never here in the first place.

At that moment, the door creaks open.

“Are you alright?” Harry asks.

“I’m perfect,” Riddle retorts, right before his knees buckle.

Harry leaps forward to catch him as he sinks against his door, back of his head thudding against the wood.

“This is no worse,” Riddle mutters, eyes fluttering closed, “than the first time I tried that Quidditch spinning trick.”

“That bad, huh?” He lifts one hand to Riddle’s flushed forehead and finds it fever-hot. Riddle must still be unsteady, because he presses into Harry’s touch for a moment before rocking back again. He looks drawn and exhausted, curls mussed, face nearly as pale as his white nightshirt. It’s a thin, loose garment, flowing past his knees. His bare feet stick out underneath, and with a spike of alarm Harry realises his legs (once strong as any Quidditch player’s) now look fragile and spindly. 

“My magic came back after you last stopped by,” Riddle says, snatching back his attention. “Not at full strength, my eleven-year-old self could have still hexed me into oblivion …”

“Your eleven-year-old self could’ve hexed most grown wizards into oblivion,” Harry comments.

He scoffs. “Possible. I found the words for the Killing Curse in first year, you know.”

Harry’s eyebrows disappear behind his hair.

“Regardless, I thought I’d take the chance to try a healing elixir. Something to boost a wizard’s considerable natural immunity.”

“Please tell me you had a qualified Healer brew that for you,” Harry interjects. That sort of potion can be magically exhausting to make, even for a potioneer at the top of their game.

Riddle pauses. “I got it from an expert in human anatomy, yes.”

Harry eyes him, debating whether to prod further at that questionable wording. Riddle holds his gaze, one eyebrow arched.

“So what went wrong?” he asks instead, looking Riddle up and down again. Healing elixirs are supposed to make you feel better after all, but Riddle looks like a dead man walking.

A moment later, he realises he’s still got one hand wrapped around Riddle’s worryingly thin arm. Harry pulls it back quickly, self-conscious.

Riddle pauses again. Then he pushes the door closed behind them and walks at a slightly rushed pace to his bed, sinking down onto the mattress as soon as he can. “The elixir backfired. It appears I no longer have a wizard’s immunity to boost.”

Harry winces; Squibs and Muggles are known to react unpredictably to magical healing methods. It’s the main reason their world’s Healers haven’t rebelled against the Statute of Secrecy on humanitarian grounds, to magically eliminate all the illnesses so common among Muggles.

“So all this …” He gestures vaguely at Riddle. “It’s a side effect of the healing potion?”

“Of course,” Riddle smoothly assures him. A moment later, he picks up a teacup from his nightstand, a perfectly ordinary teacup just sitting beside the Elder Wand, and begins to sip from it. “If you’re planning to steal the Deathly Hallows, now’s your best chance. I estimate you’ve got a 37, 38% chance of getting them both.”

Harry looks around the flat; he can’t see the ring, but it’s probably nearby. Nonetheless he stays where he is, standing just out of gobbling distance of the snakes on the sunstone, and just watches Riddle. The man (aspiring Dark Lord, right-hand to Grindelwald) now has the health of a Muggle, more or less. Harry tries to imagine Riddle going through head colds like Dudley had every winter, red-nosed and bleary-eyed and unable to pronounce half the sounds in the English language. His lips twitch with the urge to smile.

“What?” Riddle asks with a curious tilt of the head.

“Sort of hilarious, isn’t it?” Harry replies. “You fought a war to subjugate ‘inferior Muggles,’ and now you’re stuck getting sick like them?”

Riddle opens his mouth for a witty retort.

Then he starts coughing. He starts coughing, and he doesn’t stop, rummaging amidst his blankets until he finds a white handkerchief and shoves it over his mouth. He coughs like he’s trying to expel both his lungs from his body as Harry stares mutely, caught off-guard by the ferocity of the attack. Mouth agape, he waits for it to pass …

Against the pure white of the handkerchief, blood blossoms red.

Still coughing, Riddle instantly crumples the handkerchief. He carefully conceals the spot, a second too late.

“… you lied,” Harry breathes.

Riddle downs the rest of his tea before replying, “What about?”

He says it casually. Harry can only stare, thinking back to past coughing fits, to a handkerchief spotted red by what he’d thought was a floral pattern …

“This isn’t just a potion side effect.”

Riddle’s eyes flick to the handkerchief. His fist closes tightly around it, crushing the linen folds, but his voice remains eerily calm. “It’s nothing you need to worry about.”

“I grew up with Muggles, Tom,” Harry snaps.

They both grew up with Muggles, and their Muggle diseases, and their Muggle tragedies. 

They both know what blood on a handkerchief means. 

“Nothing you need to worry about,” Riddle says again, with the slightest weight on “you.” His face remains infuriatingly blank. “No one will catch it. I consulted a plague specialist who usually prefers to spread disease, but she put an Anti-Contagion Veil around me, strong enough to last the rest of my life. So you have no reason to be concerned.” His voice gets quiet. It’s not subdued; it’s venom. “I’m so glad you’re finding this hilarious, Potter. Goodness knows I live to entertain.”

“That wasn’t how I meant it,” Harry says, equally quiet. 

He doesn’t know what else to say.

Eventually Harry reaches up for his green-and-gold Harpies scarf. “This has a Heating Charm on it, if that’d help at all. Slytherin green too,” he adds, rambling, “I figure it’ll fit your wardrobe.” 

Riddle stays statue-still, expression inscrutable. Harry unwraps it. Then he pulls off the jumper too, leaving them both at the foot of the bed.

“Can I get you a Fever-Reducer Potion?” Harry asks haltingly. “There’s a, erm, a 24-hour pharmacy now at St. Mungo’s …”

“I’ve inflicted enough potions on my body for one night,” Riddle interrupts. His phrasing is elegant as ever, though he slurs some of the words.

Harry tries to imagine what Mrs. Weasley might do in this situation, since she’s the most comforting person he knows. “Would you like … soup?”

The wards at the Burrow will let him in at all hours, and even if Mrs. Weasley’s gone to bed, he can surely sneak some leftovers out of the kitchen. It’s so packed with good food, he doubts anyone would notice.

“I’m not hungry.” Riddle sighs. “Why don’t you go home? Or sneak back into the Weasley’s house, spend the night celebrating your fiancée’s ‘new stunt.’”

His tone is as poisonous as expected, but he’s dropped his head into both hands, massaging both temples. For a moment, Harry’s tempted to reach for him, to fold him into the tightest hug he can offer. Harry restrains himself, being sensibly afraid of having a goblin’s silver knife jammed through his windpipe.

“… Can I come back soon?”

The picture of exhaustion, Riddle nods without meeting his eyes. He’s begun rubbing his chest, pressing at some ache Harry can’t see. Trying to do no further damage, Harry slips out of the flat.

He steals one glance backward to see Riddle reaching for the scarf, just before the door swings shut.

“Hey, do you have a minute?”

Hermione blinks down at her fireplace, where Harry’s head has just popped up. Recovering quickly, she waves a hand, and three animated quills on her desk stop their writing. “Of course, come on in.”

Harry steps on through, landing a couple floors above his own office, in the legal wing of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Hermione beams up at him and gestures at a nearby chair. “Make yourself at home!”

“Actually,” Harry says carefully, looking at the rows of young lawyers working beside her, “is there any chance we could get a more private spot?”

Hermione lifts her eyebrows. “Is this official Auror business then?”

She darts to a nearby bookcase and begins reaching for the massive book that lists all the Auror regulations, as if she hasn’t already memorized the whole thing.

“Erm, not quite.”

She whips her head around and gives him a piercing look, clearly biting back a host of questions. “There should be a conference room free.”

He follows her down a hallway into what looks uncomfortably like an interrogation room, even after she waves her wand and turns the spartan wood chairs on each side of the table into plush armchairs. She sits down in one of them and immediately begins speaking.

“Please tell me this isn’t about Tom Riddle.”

“I … what? Why would you assume that?”

“Because the last time you asked me for a private meeting like this, you were asking for a list of ways to conduct an unsanctioned manhunt without technically breaking the law.”

“Yeah, but how’d you know I was looking for Riddle?” he exclaims.

She replies with an unimpressed look. “I really hope you haven’t crossed any lines looking for him. He might’ve gotten away with his crimes during the war, but he’s bound to have done something else awful since then, and I don’t want our case to get thrown out because you gave him a legal technicality.” She shudders. “God, he was a nasty piece of work.”

“Well, I need your help on some research, and it’s … not about law this time, not really.”

She furrows her brow before chuckling. “I’m flattered, but don’t Aurors have access to the Unspeakables’ library now? I can’t imagine how they organize their information, but they’ve got far more texts than I do and they can answer queries at twice the speed, at least.”

“Maybe, but they don’t know enough about this.” Harry checked. “Probably because they don’t really study Muggles much.”

That snags Hermione’s interest; he recognises that dogged gleam in her eyes from nights in the Hogwarts library.

She leans forward, chin resting on folded hands. “Tell me more?”

Before

There was just something wrong with Riddle. Something wrong in how he was made, an imbalance buried deep in his body. It was the best explanation for why he couldn’t float on a broom for more than five seconds without flipping over or totally crashing, even after he and Harry swapped their broomsticks.

Floating easily a few feet above the ground, Harry squinted down at him. “Maybe you should keep your hands further away from your body, to get more stability?”

Riddle glared back at him. “Do you think I haven’t tried that? Malfoy got into the air even before you did, and I was copying him exactly.”

“Ah.” Harry scratched his head, perplexed. Their instructor had complimented Malfoy on having the best posture out of all of them, after which he’d told everyone loudly about how he’d been zipping around on the best broomsticks money could buy since before he could walk. If Riddle had mimicked Malfoy, then Harry couldn’t think of any physical reason for his broom woes.

So, Harry reasoned, it was a mental issue.

“Do you have vertigo?” Harry asked, only for Riddle to shake his head. “Do you have trouble balancing on one foot?” Another shake. “Are you afraid of heights?”

“Of course not,” Riddle snapped. “That’s idiotic.”

Surprised by the viciousness, Harry blinked. “A lot of people are scared of heights.”

“I have no reason to be,” he reported, lifting his chin.

Harry tried to come up with a response for that, about how it didn’t seem like fear was always reasonable, but Riddle resumed speaking before he could.

“I got chased off a cliff one time,” he said flatly, “but that didn’t matter. I flew to safety, and I made both of them regret it. I’ve practically forgotten the whole thing.”

Harry floundered, still stuck on the part where Riddle apparently fell off a cliff and didn’t die.

“I was fine,” Riddle finished. “I’m fine.”

Though he sounded aggressively insistent about this, Harry had some doubts.

“I have an idea,” Harry said, after a couple seconds’ contemplation. “Why don’t we both get on a broom together? Even if it starts acting up with you, I’ll just slip in and, er, intervene somehow.”

He tried to sound more confident than he was, but he was sure Riddle would see through the act.

“… worth a try.” Riddle shrugged.

It was a little awkward, figuring out how they could both be on the broom at once. Eventually they decided Riddle should sit up front, so he could take the lead on steering. Harry sat just behind him, chest pressed to Riddle’s back. After a few seconds of looking for alternatives, he wrapped his arms around Riddle’s frame and clung on for dear life.

In the back of his head, he again noticed how Riddle was about as thin as him.

“Kick off now,” Harry called, and Riddle did.

Outwardly, Riddle was calm as anything. But the broom felt skittish, jittering underneath them, even though it had been smooth and reliable when Harry used it himself a few minutes earlier.

Even though they were barely a foot off the ground, Harry felt Riddle go totally rigid.

“Hey,” Harry said, “breathe. Just keep breathing.”

With a shudder, Riddle sighed, some of the tension melting out of his frame. The broom began to settle down.

“I can feel it,” Harry said. “The broom. I promise, if you fall, I’ll catch us both.”

“I thought Gryffindors weren’t afraid of snapping their necks,” Riddle said, though he was still too out-of-breath to properly land a taunt.

Harry graciously chose not to reply. “Okay, can you go a little higher?”

Riddle took another deep breath, and then another after that, ribcage pressing strong and vibrant against Harry’s arms. The broom steadied, until it reacted as well to Riddle as it had to Harry.

A dark chuckle was Harry’s only warning. On instinct, he tightened his arms around Riddle.

Then Riddle swept them both upwards, rocketing into the sky. 

After

A few nights later, the Weasleys busy themselves with a simultaneous chess tournament, Ron playing against all his family members at once. Sitting out the chaos, Hermione passes Harry a folder.

“I went through every wizarding source I could find, along with the newest Muggle medical texts,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I asked my parents too, just to check the Muggle facts.”

Harry nods. “What’ve you got?”

He hadn’t given her the full story; it would have raised too many questions, and he had the feeling Riddle wouldn’t like having his secrets spilled. So he just told her that he was working with a possible informant. They weren’t currently under suspicion of any crimes themselves, but they knew enough about Grindelwald’s affairs to be useful to the Aurors and yet paranoid about joining their side in any official capacity.

“I think you’re being lied to.”

His eyes flick down to the folder. “How so?”

She pauses, perhaps caught off-guard by his lack of surprise. “Your informant told you that Grindelwald didn’t torture them, but it really is the likeliest explanation, given the case studies coming out of St. Mungo’s just now ...”

“What else could it be?” Harry prods.

She gestures at the folder, and he opens it to find a list of notes on the Dementor’s Kiss.

“People don’t do magic after the Kiss either,” Hermione says quietly, as a peal of laughter rings from the chess games. “It’s speculated that they can’t. It’s such a wound to the soul, their magic’s just been cut out of them.”

Harry tightens his jaw. “You think it could be Dementor exposure?”

“Theoretically speaking, yes.” Hermione nods. “But they can still hold a coherent conversation, can’t they?”

“Coherent, yeah.” Maybe not a polite conversation, but Harry takes what he can get.

“That’d be incredibly odd,” she says with a grimace. “Magic is primal, Harry, it’s core to who we are. I imagine a Dementor deprives their victims of speech well before they can get at magic.”

“Right,” Harry mutters.

“So then I thought it’s perhaps some new magical creature Grindelwald created, maybe a Dementor hybrid …” They both simultaneously shiver. “But any creature that evil would have had even the weakest Dark Detector wailing. Unless …” Her eyes light up. “Unless someone stole all your Detectors beforehand, and found a way to completely disable them!”

Harry gives a minute shake of his head. “Doubt it. The Inimical Inhuman Investigator was still working fine, at our first meeting. It warned me about some kind of cursed object on the floor.”

Hermione hums, thinking it over before concluding, “It can’t be a magical parasite then.”

“Are there any other possibilities?”

She suddenly snorts, flipping to the next page, which is covered with scrawled quotations. “Ah. Well, for completeness I found a lot of 14-century courtly love poems where wizards ran around swearing that Cupid had robbed them of their powers, and their only hope was to get true love’s kiss, or … well, more than a kiss.” She tsks, shaking her head. “They were obviously exaggerating for artistic effect. Got a bit too close to coercion, for my taste.”

Harry squints at a couple flowery verses, mimes gagging, and turns to the next page. It’s more familiar, an annotated selection of photographs off the Aurors’ Most Wanted list. It goes on for a few pages, and Harry realises Hermione put a few other pictures here.

A younger Riddle looks up at him in his school robes, Prefect badge still gleaming. He offers Harry his most winning, angelic smile.

“What’s this about?” Harry says quietly.

“Maybe they’re just lying by omission,” she suggests. “Maybe it wasn’t Grindelwald personally doing the torturing, just someone else who could replicate his methods. I put together a list of all the candidates I could think of.”

Harry makes sure to look over the list carefully, not letting his eyes linger on any one picture. It’s a terrifying assembly of Dark practitioners. Yet Harry can’t imagine anyone short of Grindelwald having that much power over Riddle.

“The other possibilities,” Hermione adds, “are that they’re lying outright. They might just be faking, to make you let your guard down. Or maybe this is an impersonator who isn’t as strong at magic as their target, and this is just a cover story for why.”

“I thought of all that.”

“And you believe them anyway,” she says with a sigh, right as an argument breaks out mid-game. Apparently, Fred and George had just issued commands at the same time, confusing their pieces and executing each other’s moves. 

Disconcerted by her silent judgment, Harry flips to the next page, finding a large diagram of a tube-like organism. “What’s this?”

“Tuberculosis.” Seeing Harry’s confusion, Hermione shifts in her chair and taps the picture. “It’s all the result of that tiny, entirely non-magical parasite. Rather a lot of people have some tuberculosis bacteria in their bodies, and if they’re somehow weakened or they’re simply unlucky, the disease flares so they develop symptoms.”

“People used to call it ‘consumption,’ didn’t they?” 

“Yes.”

“Why was that?”

She screws up her face. “Muggles used to think it was a pretty, fashionable disease. Poetic, even. But … you remember that time Ron tried to turn meat into Swiss cheese, but he’d broken his wand so the Transfiguration sort of got stuck halfway?”

“Yes?”

“That’s what organs look like, if tuberculosis decides to eat through them. It consumes you, from the inside out.”

“… right.”

Looking somewhat nauseous, Hermione motions for him to flip to the next page. “Here’s the list of common symptoms. Your informant might be able to manage some of these with magic, even if they can’t take full-strength healing potions to tackle the root cause.”

Harry skims the symptoms: cough, loss of appetite, fever, and more. “These are bad, but … are they necessarily fatal?”

Her eyes light up again, this time with delight. “So that’s the good news! Next page, you’ll see a list of drugs that Muggles are working on right now. It seems like tuberculosis is really curable for the first time in history, if you just get access to the right medicine.”

“That’s fantastic,” Harry exclaims.

“Yes,” Hermione agrees, “as long as the drug side effects don’t kill you instead.” Harry scowls, and she throws up her hands helplessly. “They’re highly toxic experimental chemicals, they aren’t perfectly understood!”

“Hey there!”

Harry forces himself to look up from the note scrawled at the bottom of the symptom list (“untreated, majority patients die <2 years from symptom onset”), up to Ginny, who’s waltzed over from the game. She drops down on a third chair. Quickly, Harry flips the folder shut.

“I’m not the first one out,” Ginny says, lifting her hands defensively. “That was Fred, but now he’s teamed up on George’s game. I can’t tell whether he’s actually helping or giving him bad advice as a joke, though …”

As she chatters about the chess games, Harry’s eyes drift back down to the note.

“So,” Ginny says, leaning forward, hands clasped and elbows on her knees. “What’ve you two been whispering about?”

“Work things,” Hermione answers. “Classified, I think.”

“Right,” Ginny says with a knowing grin, “‘classified.’”

Hermione chuckles. The Ministry’s known for over-classifying everything, even the full list of Quidditch fouls, and the Weasleys have a healthy disrespect for their red tape. Mr. Weasley’s spilled plenty of curious tidbits to his children over the years, and Harry’s confided in Ginny on more than a few cases of his own.

“It’s private,” Harry says, a shade too cold.

Ginny lifts her eyebrows. Her eyes flick down to the folder, which Harry’s now gripping a shade too tightly. Hermione’s watching him too with open surprise.

Then Hermione clears her throat. “Say, Ginny, are you planning to try for the World Cup team? I read they’re trying to find a whole new set of Chasers …”

“Can I take off early today?” Harry asks, as brightly as he can.

Zhang looks at him suspiciously. “Wedding plans finally catching up to you?”

“Er … yeah.”

“Nice though it is that you’re remembering to maintain a personal life, I do need you to finish the Fletcher report before you vanish.”

Harry taps a file already lying on Zhang’s desk, half-buried by other paperwork. “Already done.”

“Ah. In that case, go choose your colours or rings or whatever weddings need nowadays.”

Looking harried, she sends him off with a general wave towards the door, reburying her nose in a forensic report from a whole other robbery case. Under ordinary circumstances, Harry would offer to stay and help her.

He doesn’t, because he’s got to go commit a robbery of his own.

He feels a bit of guilt, snatching a vial from the stores of a Muggle medical council, but he sets it aside and Apparates directly to Riddle’s flat, practically buzzing with excitement. It’s still mid-afternoon, and after a few failed attempts at knocking Harry realises Riddle must be well enough to have gone out and do … whatever he busies himself with all day.

Harry walks down the stairs and runs into the woman from that first day, when one of Riddle’s snakes had gotten loose. She’s holding two children firmly by the hand.

“You again,” she says.

“Any more snakes bothering you?”

She shakes her head. “Not since you showed up. Must’ve talked some sense into the lad.”

Harry smiles, though he rather doubts that. “Do you know where he is now?”

“He’s got a job, hasn’t he?” she says, shushing the girl who tugs at her. “I’ve seen him a couple times, in that pawn shop down the block. Dunno why he bothers wearing such a fancy suit in a place like that, but the lady always did put on airs …”

The stairs creak behind Harry.

“Talk of the devil.” With his most charming smile, Riddle comes up the stairs. His pace is slow, but it could pass for dignified rather than weary. He seems to have recovered from his last bout of illness, except for the lingering thinness.

“My flat?” he asks, and Harry follows him right back up.

“I think I figured out how to cure you,” Harry announces once they’re safely inside. He pulls out a flask with a flourish, placing it on Riddle’s kitchen counter.

“Please tell me you aren’t looking for the Elixir of Life,” is the instant reply. “Most everyone who does just poisons themselves, Flamel’s the only one to get close …”

“Better,” Harry says.

Riddle lifts his eyebrows.

“Okay, not better for you personally, but it’s great for the world. That …” He gestures proudly at his stolen vial, trying to imbue his voice with as much drama and mystery as he can. “Is a very special, life-saving substance called streptomycin.”

He lets the word hang in the air for a moment. Riddle considers it, seeming properly impressed …

Then he rolls his eyes. “You’ve been talking to Granger.”

“Hey,” Harry protests, “don’t knock it just because it’s Muggle medicine!”

“I’ve looked into all the ‘Muggle cures,’ thank you, starting with fresh air, sunlight and ass’s milk.”

Harry sighs as sarcastic sneering warps Riddle’s handsome face. “This isn’t fake, they’ve got real science behind it this time.”

“I know they have.” Riddle’s voice rises, snakes on the counter instinctively curling away from his rage. “I’m about to die, Harry, do you honestly think I still care what’s Muggle or not?”

The retort dies on Harry’s tongue as those three words crash over him. Stripped of his defenses, he drowns.

Tom Riddle’s barely twenty. He’s stubborn, and powerful, and diabolically creative, a Quidditch veteran in the prime of his life. He survived life in Muggle London, at the height of two World Wars. He survived Grindelwald without an apparent scratch.

Tom Riddle is dying.

“But … Hermione said streptomycin works, it’s going to save millions,” Harry says, floundering. 

“She’ll be proven right,” Riddle comments quietly. He leans down, resting his arms on the counter and stroking one of his serpents. Perhaps it’s a ploy to hide how he’s too tired to stand unsupported.

Perhaps it’s a way to keep his eyes down, out of sight.

Harry persists. “Then why don’t you try taking it?”

“Because I already did.” Riddle sounds defeated and Harry hates it, more than ever. “I tried it, and I tried the up-and-coming rival drug, and I tried an imaginative range of magical potions and poisons. I underwent vivisection in an attempt to have my diseased organs Transfigured back to their original state.” Harry listens in horror as Riddle recites his ventures, as if reading off a particularly macabre checklist. “I consulted with both a painter in France and a necromancer in New Orleans about transferring me to a portrait or a new body with more or less my original sentience, if not my soul. I completed several blood transfusion rituals, in the hopes of restoring my powers with someone else’s magic, if not my own. I also tried several times to make a Horcrux.” 

With that, Riddle falls silent.

So, Harry notes, every single scheme on that list would have involved multiple severe crimes, if executed in Britain. A responsible Auror would set their personal feelings aside just now, to pursue those cases single-mindedly. To lock up Riddle at any cost.

(As long as he’s known her, Zhang’s prodded him to keep up a personal life, with steady bonds to family and friends. Harry would swear under Veritaserum that she had Ginny in mind, and all the Weasleys, and Hermione the budding lawyer. Not the sort of hardened criminal he’d sworn to chase into Azkaban.)

“Every one of these plans has failed spectacularly,” Riddle says softly. “I’m taking suggestions.”

An easy option floats to the top of Harry’s mind: the cloak. Riddle has two out of three Hallows, and Harry’s got the third. Maybe possessing all three can stave off his death, making him impossible for bacteria or anyone else to kill …

He drags himself back from that precipice; no matter how pathetic Riddle seems just now, Harry can’t go and make him Master of Death. Not with what he’s seen. Not with the prophecy. That’d be too reckless, even for him.

“What happened,” he asks instead, subdued, “with the streptomycin? Why doesn’t it work?”

Riddle plucks the flask off the table, rolling its long neck between his long fingers. “It works. I’m sure it and its peers will work for millions of Muggles. But chemicals like these are dangerous, and there was a chance they would kill me faster than the disease. This bottle here, if you took it all at once, would rival Acromantula venom for kidney damage.”

Harry grimaces.

“And I still had some of my magic, when I was experimenting with Muggle medicines, so I thought I needn’t inject too much of their poison. Just a sensible, moderate amount.”

Harry shivers. It could be from the perpetual draft, blowing through the paper-thin walls of this flat.

“As it turns out,” Riddle continues, with the same patient, detached tone with which he’d once explained difficult Potions questions, “if you expose these bacteria to threats without quite wiping them out, they survive, and they learn. Almost like goblin’s silver; the toxin strengthens them. They become invulnerable to it.”

Harry drops his head into his hands. “Do you mean …”

“I am the inventor and sole carrier of the most untreatable strain of tuberculosis in history.” A cruel, sarcastic smile twists his face. “The Aurors should be on their knees, thanking me for not selling it. I know specialists who’d pay a fortune.”

Riddle places the flask back on the counter with a final-sounding clink. Harry stares at it, hope slowly draining out of him.

“Warn me if you’ll need a handkerchief to mop up your tears,” Riddle says dryly. 

He delivers it like the absurdest of jokes. But a pebble lodges itself in Harry’s throat, and for a second he really is at risk of needing that handkerchief.

“Why don’t you put that medicine back where you found it?” Riddle’s humor softens, tinged by thoughtful melancholy. “I doubt you covered your tracks as well as I did, and an upstanding Auror mustn’t be caught stealing life-saving drugs from Muggles.”

“I … right,” Harry says in a hoarse whisper. He puts away the flask again, tucking it into an Undetectably Extended pocket. Next, awkwardly, he takes out a pair of dark green woolen socks.

Riddle stares at them. “So Dumbledore’s addled your mind for good?”

Harry laughs, impossibly, a faint wet chuckle. “They’re charmed to always be the temperature you want them.” He pulls out a matching hat. “I read that you’ll be having fevers and chills, and with the insulation in this flat or, erm, lack thereof …”

As he trails off, Riddle picks up the hat. He folds his hands in the fabric, seeking its warmth perhaps on instinct.

“You changed the colour, didn’t you?” he murmurs.

“Panmuto, yeah. They used to be red, didn’t want to give you an excuse for tying a sock around my neck.”

Riddle tilts his head, like he’s contemplating it. Instead, he brushes back his curls with one hand and tugs the hat onto his head.

“Peak of fashion.” Feeling somewhat steadier, Harry offers a wry grin. 

Mirth flashes across Riddle’s face like lightning, before fading something more calculating. Darker, and yet hopeful.

“Potter.” He leans forward, steepling his long fingers. “Could you explain to me why you’re doing all this?”

Because Harry feels sorry for him.

That’s the easy answer. Honest, too, but Riddle’s always held fast to his pride, hating pity and charity. It’s kinder to lie.

“Because I’m not legally bound to arrest you at the moment,” Harry says instead. “And well, I’m not good with prophecies. I’d like to imagine, with your skillset and … special knowledge, you can do more good than harm going forward.”

For one fleeting moment, Riddle looks wrecked.

Nevertheless he rallies with a condescending smirk. “So you’re recruiting me for the Aurors, then? Shall I count on you for a glowing reference?”

Harry rolls his eyes. “I take it back, you’ll never do us any good.”

“Don’t tell anyone I said so, but the way around the Unbreakable Vows is to directly look at their memories,” Riddle suddenly declares. “Not to detect whether they made a Vow, Grindelwald Obliviated them too well for that, but to interrogate them. The Vows punish them if they talk about what they know, not if they simply show you. If you require lasting evidence or otherwise find Legilimency impractical, use a Pensieve.”

Harry gapes at him, because that … is genuinely helpful. He’s never had a source killed mid-confession for breaking an Unbreakable Vow they didn’t remember, but it’s only a matter of time. His colleagues will be thrilled by the insight.

“Consider your gifts and food and …” He gestures vaguely at Harry. “Company paid for.”

Chapter Text

Before

“So I guess we can’t have a Bludger to practice with,” Harry said glumly.

“We can, we’re just not officially allowed to.”

“… can you go sneak one out?”

“I can,” Riddle said. “I’m just not going to.”

“Why not?” Harry demanded.

“Because I don’t want to die young!”

Riddle and Harry had a standing appointment. Every Friday night, they played the world’s smallest game of Quidditch, just the two of them trying to chuck a single Quaffle through the goal hoops. There were other children around some days now, wobbling around mere feet above the ground, but they had the good sense to keep out of the way of Harry and Riddle, whizzing overhead in their own private games.

Unfortunately, they couldn’t practice their Beater skills. Apparently the use of Bludgers was categorically banned, outside officially sanctioned Quidditch events.

Resigned to a boring night without any broken bones, Harry kicked off the ground, holding their borrowed Quaffle. After several months, he was still the stronger flier of the pair, but Riddle had developed (or perhaps simply revealed) a diabolical creative streak. While Harry tended to monopolize the Quaffle, winning more goals simply because he had more opportunities to score, Riddle made expert use of what time he did get with the ball. He attempted shots while flying at intimidatingly high speeds, sometimes barreling through a hoop right after the ball. He looped around behind the hoops and made goals from the wrong direction. He found a way to spin the Quaffle so it arced strangely through the air, never moving quite like Harry expected to. Worst of all, he feinted constantly, flying as if he was aiming for one hoop and then throwing the Quaffle at another hoop entirely. More often than not, Harry fell right into his traps.

Riddle’s constant Slytherin trickery made Harry better, in the long run. He figured out how to spin the ball too, and he got a little better at reading Riddle’s body language. Over time, he began incorporating Riddle’s schemes into his own repertoire. By the end of the year the two of them were causing each other equal amounts of confusion.

“Wood saw us practicing last week,” Harry told Riddle one Friday, just before summer. “Told me he’ll find out how to send a Bludger after me if I don’t try out for Chaser next year.”

The corners of Riddle’s mouth jerked upwards. “Congratulations.”

His joy sounded less than genuine. Harry wondered if he was in fact jealous.

“Once you have real practices to attend, I suppose you won’t need …” He gestured at the both of them, floating lazily a few feet above the grass.

Oh. Maybe it wasn’t jealousy.

“I can keep practicing with you,” Harry offered, “at least until you make Slytherin’s team too.”

Riddle’s eyes narrowed. “I’ll tutor you in Potions next year.”

That took Harry by surprise. “What?”

“Slughorn’s ignoring your errors this year because you’re famous, but he won’t be able to keep it up. Second-year recipes are much less forgiving.”

“I know, but … why are you helping me?”

Riddle suddenly steered to the left, lazily spinning through the sky. He’d gotten fond of rapid twists and turns that left Harry dizzy.

So Harry couldn’t quite make out his face as he replied, “Because I don’t want your charity.”

In third year, Riddle made the Slytherin team. Not properly; he was on reserve, training to replace their seventh-year Keeper, and so he never played a game all year. Maybe it was a good thing that he was nowhere to be seen, because it gave Gryffindor a hope of snagging the Cup two years in a row. Harry spent every match exploiting Riddle’s tricks for all they were worth, racking up one goal after another. Still, as he watched Slytherin’s newest player swan around the pitch, he couldn’t help missing his old practice partner a bit. Malfoy might’ve had more style and speed (thanks mostly to the state-of-the-art brooms his father bought for him and all his teammates), but he didn’t quite have Riddle’s taste for shock value.

Surrounded by Gryffindor friends and newly established as a just-above-average Potions student, Harry barely talked to Riddle anymore. They saw each other across classrooms, and they made polite conversation at Professor Slughorn’s little “Slug Club” parties, which Riddle seemed to inexplicably enjoy. At Christmas, once Harry had given up trying to make small talk with his date Pavarti, he settled for watching him across the room. Riddle had brought some platinum-blonde Slytherin girl from the year above them. They were deep in conversation with one of Slughorn’s guests, a distinguished Runes scholar, energetically discussing the “true meaning” of Grindelwald’s symbol and how it wasn’t so bad at all. Entirely absorbed in themselves, none of them seemed to notice the horrified looks shooting their way.

“Simply a theoretical discussion,” Professor Slughorn said, sidling up to Harry with a kindly smile. “Nothing to be concerned about at all.”

Nurmengard

Harry grit his teeth and struggled against Grindelwald’s Imperius, refusing to surrender the Invisibility Cloak. He kept his eyes fixed on Riddle, the whole way through.

Then all at once Grindelwald ripped the Imperius away and replaced it with a wordless volley of massive Explosion Charms, the detonation rattling the very walls of the castle. Figures in the nearby paintings ran out of their frames, screaming and seeking cover. Harry threw out an easily deflected Stunner and then turned his attention to the cocoon of shields he had built, frantically repairing the new fractures. He was able to fix them as fast as they appeared, right until Riddle joined the fray.

Extending his yew wand, Riddle cast a series of specialised shield penetration charms, so specialised Harry had never seen them before. They didn’t target Harry’s person, instead aiming expressly at the shields he had constructed. And of course they punctured his defenses instantly, like needles compared to Grindelwald’s battering rams. Their hooks lodged somewhere deep inside, resisting all attempts to shove them away. After rapidly assessing the damage, Harry gave up on saving his walls.

He turned his focus outwards. While the shields still held at all, he went on offense, targeting both Grindelwald and Riddle with an array of jinxes. Grindelwald briefly paused his own attacks to throw up shields. Riddle didn’t, simply dancing out of the way of Harry’s attacks while keeping up his own steady stream of curses. None of the magic they were throwing around was lethal, strictly speaking. Almost none of it was legal either, by British standards.

“Reducto,” Riddle called, apparently not as obsessed with wordless magic as he’d been at Hogwarts. “Silencio. Expulso.”

And right on cue, Harry cast the standard countercharms. His wand reacted almost before he did, relying on well-trained instinct, just like they were back in Merrythought’s Defense class.

“Crucio,” Riddle hissed for the fifth time that night. 

But for the first time, the red light crashed straight through Harry’s shields, whizzing past his ear. Suddenly feverishly hot, Harry threw out a particularly vicious Flagrante curse, possessed by a sudden urge to roast Riddle alive in his robes.

Inevitably, Riddle dodged it, ducking behind one of Grindelwald’s Shield Charms. “Expelliarmus!”

A mere Disarming Charm sounded ridiculous, coming out of Riddle’s mouth. In a bizarre comedy of errors, Grindelwald had raised his own wand at just that moment, so Riddle’s charm flew straight into his hand. The Elder Wand flew out of Grindelwald’s grasp, and Harry shouted “Stupefy,” aiming straight at the Dark Lord’s heart …

Grindelwald dragged the wand back into his other hand, wordlessly and wandlessly. Harry’s Stunning Spell bounced off yet another shield, rendered utterly pointless. Grindelwald launched one more bomb and shattered Harry’s defenses for good.

Harry kept his wand pointed at Grindelwald, refusing to flinch. “Flipendo!”

A feint. At the last second, he shifted his aim to Riddle, still looming behind Grindelwald, perilously close to the wall of black flames. Split-second shock flashed across Riddle’s face as the Knockback Jinx hurtled towards him, threatening to shove him back into the fire. He didn’t duck, or sidestep it, or speak at all.

But a silent Shield Charm blossomed from the end of his wand, cast seemingly on instinct. 

Their spells collided with a giant boom, more profound than anything Grindelwald’s explosions had managed, and a fragile golden thread appeared. It spun from Harry’s wand to Riddle’s and bound them inextricably together, and their wands began to vibrate, and their connection swept them off their feet as golden threads exploded all over, weaving a tight cocoon around just the two of them. Grindelwald was flinging more curses at him, but they scarcely mattered; none could pierce the shield of light. Harry barely even noticed the flash of green through the thick golden web, his ears and his heart both full of phoenix song.

The contest of wills began. Harry knew what was coming this time, and he rapidly won it, efficiently forcing Riddle’s wand to spill its secrets. Momentarily conquered, the narrow spindle of yew belched the shadow of one past spell after another. Out spewed all the curses from tonight. Then came a spell Harry didn’t recognise at first, a malformed skeletal phantom that began crawling towards Riddle. It was joined by another, and another, until an entire army of writhing skeletons was clawing its way towards him, and all the phoenix song in the world couldn’t stop the chill running down Harry’s spine. 

(He’d hoped against hope that it was Grindelwald’s army of Inferi currently overrunning Paris, Grindelwald’s army that had come swarming out of Muggle battlefields, out of solemn military tombs ripped open and looted for their treasure.

No.

It was Tom’s.)

The thread broke, dropping them back to the ground. Harry landed on his feet. Riddle didn’t, momentarily disappearing under a swarm of angry ghosts. His first Banishing Charms had no effect, nor did a set of blindingly bright hexes that went pinging into the walls. Riddle kept thrashing about and physically shoving the phantoms  away, temporarily reduced to fisticuffs. Harry stared at the scene with grotesque fascination, even as he began rebuilding his own broken wards.

Grindelwald was staring too, ignoring Harry entirely in favor of Riddle. A curious series of expressions flickered across his face. “I never knew you and Mr. Potter were so intimately entwined.”

Riddle’s head briefly surfaced as he got to his feet and met Grindelwald’s gaze. His face was dark, almost feral with rage or perhaps fear. The two wizards exchanged looks, holding an entire conversation in silence, both in on some secret that Harry didn’t know.

“No!” Riddle exploded. It was the only warning Harry got.

“Avada Kedavra,” roared Grindelwald, just as Harry abandoned his shields to shout, “Expelliarmus!”

The Elder Wand spat out green light. Red burst from Harry’s wand, but it never quite reached Grindelwald. Instead the two spells smashed into each other in midair and exploded with one more thunderous crash.

Face illuminated by one brilliant emerald flash, Grindelwald fell backwards, arms splayed, mismatched eyes rolling upwards. Harry stumbled back, pushed by the force of the explosion, but he stayed standing.

The Elder Wand flew through the air. Riddle caught it, with the unerring skill of a Keeper.

After

Harry gets the book discussing the Elder Wand again, loaned out for one night by the Department of Mysteries’ library. Zhang shoots him a look of warning when she leaves the office, reminding him that they’re scheduled for a raid at dawn. He nods pleasantly at her and returns to his reading.

The Elder Wand’s been used for an awful lot of murders throughout history. It’s famously steeped in blood, and Harry reads every recorded case thoroughly, trying to unravel a mystery. Obviously Harry killed Grindelwald, but he doesn’t understand how.

The fact is that there’s no known countercharm for the Killing Curse. The only ways to avoid one are to get out of the way or else hide behind some significant physical barrier. One can get hit with a Killing Curse and survive, but only if the caster is magically weak or psychologically not committed to the murder. Furthermore, according to the book, the Elder Wand’s Killing Curses are uniquely potent. They can blast through multiple stone walls with ease, and they leave their victims dead even if murderers cast the curse merely on a half-hearted whim.

And yet Harry stopped Grindelwald’s curse with a mere Disarming Charm. Even more bizarrely, the curse instantly rebounded and killed Grindelwald.

Previously, Harry reflects, there was one other documented case of the Killing Curse rebounding. Vinda Rosier tried to kill him as a baby, only to have her own curse turned on her, repelled by Lily Potter’s sacrifice. Yet nobody died for Harry that night at Nurmengard; nobody even came close. So sacrificial blood magic just can’t explain it.

Given that, Harry’s concluded that Grindelwald died because of some quirk of the Elder Wand. It’s possible the normal rules of magic just don’t apply to the Deathly Hallows. For hours, Harry pores over yellowed pages, trying to work out the magical mechanics of why the Elder Wand would turn on its master. 

He ought not to be here at all. The duel has gotten muddled in Harry’s memory, one giant chaotic mess of shouted spellwork and fire and not-quite murder attempts, but the one thing he knows is that Grindelwald’s dead. That should be all that matters. When he’s talked about that mystery with Ron and Ginny, they’ve both counseled him to put that night behind him. Grindelwald got what he deserved, they insisted, and there was no point to Harry beating himself up over it after it was done. Hermione agreed, once she did some research of her own and found no meaningful corollary worth pursuing.

And yet Harry sits at his desk past ten, analyzing every single line of a blood-soaked history, unable to shake the feeling that he’s missed something.

“The Elder Wand has been known to punish in creative ways those who wield it against the will of their rightful masters, bending the energy of magic itself in directions that defy logic.”

Harry frowns at that line, written in cramped lettering and smudged by a years-old water spot. He copies it out and frowns at it some more. 

The book goes on to describe a particular anecdote; apparently a thief once snuck through a window and summoned the Elder Wand while its owner was sleeping, but the window squeaked when he tried to sneak back out. Awakened by the noise, the wand’s mistress leapt out of bed, physically grabbed the wand back, and attempted to kill the intruder by shoving him back into a fireplace. Unfortunately for her, the wand had switched its loyalties, refusing to kill its new master, and so the curse backfired and neatly defenestrated the witch, pushing her out the window to a lethal fifty-foot drop.

That isn’t what happened in Nurmengard. There was no way the wand considered Harry its rightful owner even before Grindelwald’s death. After all, he hadn’t landed a single successful hit on Grindelwald. No attacker had in years, not since Grindelwald got the wand to begin with. This line can’t explain why that Killing Curse slew its caster instead of its intended victim.

But it could explain something else entirely.

“Harry?” Ginny’s head peeks out of the fireplace. “Didn’t you get my letter?”

Harry looks at the paper airplane at the edge of his desk. It was white, not purple like the Ministry’s work memos, and he’d meant to get around to reading it, but then he saw the library book next to it and everything else had sort of faded into the background. He grabs it now, unfolding it to reveal Ginny’s handwriting: “We got the cake samples today! The moondew cream goes bad fast, but if you get home by seven it should hold up.”

Harry glances at the clock and winces.

“The cream’s curdled,” Ginny informs him. “Mum tried a freezing charm, but that didn’t stop it.”

Harry winces again. “Sorry, I’ve just been trying to get a look at this book for weeks, I swear I didn’t notice you wrote …”

“Well,” Ginny sighs, “we’ve still got two edible flavours. Can you come now?”

“… give me an hour?”

She leaves him to it, and he scans the book’s index at breakneck speed, squeezing out every remaining bit of knowledge on either wand loyalty or the Deathly Hallows. An hour and ten minutes later, he slams it shut, scrawls out a note of thanks for the librarians, and rushes to the fireplace.

The bottom floor of the Burrow’s empty, except for Ginny. She waits by the kitchen table with two small pieces of cake.

“The sugar work’s deflated a bit,” she observes. “But it’s still sugar …”

“So it won’t taste any worse for the wear,” Harry concludes with a laugh, sitting down beside her.

She takes a spoonful from the first slice (a citrusy elderflower) and playfully lifts it to his lips. A second late, he takes a bit of the other cake (dark chocolate with coffee) and feeds it to her too. Then they each try the other flavour, and their eyes meet.

“So that’s an obvious winner,” Ginny says.

“Yep,” Harry agrees.

“Elderflower,” she declares, right as he blurts, “Chocolate.”

They gape at each other in comical shock.

Then Ginny shakes her head, laughing. “I’ll order one layer of each.”

“Sounds good to me.”

“And they’ll match,” she chuckles, gesturing at the cakes. Both cakes are white; Harry suspects heavy illusion magic, especially in the case of the chocolate-coffee frosting.

Harry hums in agreement.

Ginny raises an eyebrow, leaning forward. “Look, if you don’t give a damn anymore about all the wedding details, you could just tell me. Mum and I can handle it all.”

What?

He frowns, tilting his head. “What made you think I don’t care?”

“I don’t know.” She waves a hand at him. “How about the entire way you’ve been acting?”

Ah.

“… I was excited, I swear. It just doesn’t seem to really, I dunno, matter as much now.”

Now Ginny’s frowning with concern, leaning back and crossing her arms. “Look, as long as you turn up sober with dress robes and a ring, I’ll be happy. But there is something off with you. Is there trouble at work?”

Harry nods. His troubles with Riddle aren’t “work,” strictly, but they fall into the general category.

She sighs. “Dad told me Zhang worked her last trainee into a St. Mungo’s bed. I thought she’d start caring after that, but your hours are still awful.” 

Harry ought to tell her that Zhang acts caring towards him, maybe overly so. It isn’t her fault Harry’s busy at all hours, driven to distraction by the endless Riddle drama.

“Yeah,” he says instead. “They really are.”

“You can talk to me.” Ginny reaches out and wraps her hand around Harry’s. “Especially if it’s something about the war, I went through that too, you know.”

Harry swallows the urge to correct her. Of course her family fought in the war, and she trained to do the same. Of course she had to watch the Weasley family clock spend hours with hands pointing at “Mortal Peril.” Of course she sat vigil at her father’s hospital bed.

She did go through the war.

But she didn’t see Grindelwald in the heart of Nurmengard, throwing earth-shaking Bombardas around the way Dumbledore threw house points at Gryffindor. She didn’t see Riddle in the aftermath, standing glorious amidst the wreckage, terrifying and strange and vulnerable. Harry doesn’t think she’d understand it, even if he explained.

“I don’t think I’m in danger,” Harry says cautiously. “It’s just that I’ve just been working on a particularly strange mystery …” A riddle, his brain provides unhelpfully. “And it’s hard to unravel.”

“What’s it about?”

Me. Him. The Deathly Hallows. Our entire damned lives.

“I’m honestly not sure yet,” Harry answers, awkwardly.

He can see Ginny wrestling over whether to push, but she decides against it. “You’re sure you’re not in danger?”

“No more than usual.”

She purses her lips, looking behind him at the family clock. “Dad’s adding you this week, so at least I’ll know if you end up in mortal peril again.” 

Harry offers a wan chuckle. “Really part of the family, huh?”

“Of course you are.” She smiles at him, twisting his whole heart. “I shouldn’t keep you, not with your early start.”

After a quick good-bye kiss, Harry leaves. It feels oddly like a close escape.

“I brought you two servings of potato-leek soup, from the Three Broomsticks.”

Riddle takes Harry’s offering, inspecting it with hungry eyes. “The Auror Office is wasting time, looking for Abernathy on the Continent. It’s true that Grindelwald sent him back to America.”

“I also brought you two types of cake.”

“Start looking in Florida.”

Harry snorted, shaking his head. “You know, this’d be easier if you’d just spill everything you knew about Grindelwald at once.”

Mouth half-full of soup, Riddle hums in warning. “I do that, and I’ll put myself at the top of a hundred hit lists around the world. Which ordinarily sounds like my idea of a fun week, but I’m not currently in the position to present a proper challenge.”

“Ah.”

“I suppose the murder shouldn’t frighten me at this point,” he muses, “but the inevitable accompanying torture remains a concern.”

“Right,” Harry says. “Fair enough.” 

“Would you mind taking your wand,” Riddle says, seemingly engrossed with his soup, “and waving it two times over that cauldron on the stove? It’s a standard Appetite Restoring Potion from second-year, just needs the finishing touch.”

Eyes firmly downcast, Riddle starts opening the boxes of cake, even though he’s barely begun his soup. Harry can’t tell if he’s lost interest in it or if he’s busying himself, trying to cope with the indignity of asking for help.

“Left to right and then top to bottom,” Harry says. “Right?”

“Yes.” Riddle’s still looking down, apparently fascinated by the spun sugar nest that’s remained intact atop each slice.

Harry waves his wand, at exactly the correct angles with precisely the right twist to his wrist. He doubts he’d remember the wand movements for a random potion at all if Riddle hadn’t spent second year drilling him, the both of them huddled over far more advanced books in the library. Riddle had spent all year tearing Harry’s essay drafts apart, ruthlessly critiquing the facts and the logic and also the writing style, but he’d always helped Harry pick up the pieces afterwards.

“These are wedding cakes, aren’t they?” Riddle suddenly remarks. “The white frosting rather gives it away.”

Harry turns back. “Yeah, Ginny and I had extras from our tasting.”

Riddle suddenly tugs a handkerchief from his pocket and holds it to his mouth, closing his eyes to stave off a choking fit. A few harsh coughs nonetheless force their way out. 

Then the moment passes. Putting the red-dotted handkerchief away, Riddle returns to his soup.

“Her mother ordered some Indian desserts too,” Harry says, in a tone he hopes passes for normal. “I’ve never had them, but apparently they’re these fancy swirly things, all red and gold.”

“How very Gryffindor of you.” Riddle reaches for the handkerchief again, clenching his fist around it and breathing very, very carefully. He takes a long sip of water and swallows hard, managing not to cough.

Harry stops trying to make conversation. He doesn’t know why, but he has the feeling he could just make things worse. 

Crisis temporarily averted, Riddle tries a bit of each cake, taking dainty bites. “Elderflower and lemon versus chocolate and coffee?”

Harry nods. “We’re getting one layer of each.”

“I hate to break up a potential marriage, even of pastries,” Riddle remarks, “but these flavours don’t work well together.”

Harry grimaces. “Well, that’s the compromise we’re going with.”

“I assume your fiancée fought for the elderflower,” he murmurs. “It’s a wizarding classic.”

Harry nods. “Do you have a favorite?”

“Chocolate and coffee,” he admits. “Very Muggle of us both.”

Harry gasps in mock shock. “Do you mean to say you might like a sweet, even though candy’s so bad for your health?”

Instantly getting the reference to their very first meeting, Riddle glowers, equally mocking. “Don’t you know it’s cruel to laugh at a man on his deathbed?”

Harry nearly laughs. He means to laugh, but he can’t. Not about this.

Riddle narrows his eyes and then returns his attention to the slices of cake. His dainty bites get closer to stabbings. 

“I know you don’t want to talk about how you lost your magic,” Harry says, “but I just have one question.”

“I might not have a straight answer,” Riddle replies. “In fact, I probably don’t.”

“… You’re being punished for my sake, somehow, aren’t you? And it’s because you grabbed the Elder Wand that night?”

The working theory: when Grindelwald died, he lost the loyalty of the Elder Wand, which chose Harry as its new master. Riddle tried to use it in some way Harry wouldn’t have approved of, and the wand went overboard in punishing him. It bent magic itself. It tried to bend the magic out of him.

A most curious look steals across Riddle’s face. “... One could say that.”

“I don’t want this for you,” Harry breathes.

Riddle smiled back at him, mouth pressed into a hard, joyless line. “Perhaps not anymore.”

Harry recalls it, the righteous, glorious rage that had swept him up that night. He’s not sure whether the Elder Wand was acting of its “own” volition, or if it was taking cues from him. It might have been taking cues from him.

(And if Harry’s honest, he’d been frozen by creeping dread, in the weeks after Nurmengard. Murder was supposed to shred one’s soul, after all. It was supposed to leave behind confusion and guilt. But Harry never properly intended to kill Grindelwald, it just sort of happened in the heat of the moment, and he didn’t feel any different afterwards. When his friends noticed how quiet he’d gotten, how tricky it was for him to talk about killing Grindelwald, Dark Lord though he may have been, they counseled him to let go of his guilt, since he’d been left no other choice. He didn’t know how to explain that he only felt guilty because of his lack of guilt, because what did it say about him that he could kill a human being, any human being, without the slightest hint of remorse?)

(Harry’s eyes drift to the Elder Wand, lying about harmlessly like any other stick. The remorse finally starts to seep in.)

“I don’t believe you‘ll die with me,” Riddle intones, breaking into his musing. “Our lives aren’t magically tied in any way I know of, and I’d say the same under Veritaserum.”

“Maybe I’m not even the child Grindelwald meant,” Harry says quietly. “Maybe it’s just one of my descendants, fighting a war fifty years from now.”

“I don’t think about prophecies anymore,” Riddle sneers. 

He wields his fork delicately again, inserting the tines into the spun sugar and pulling it apart from the inside. His attention is now fixed on the happily bubbling potion, and he’s ceased eating. Harry suspects he’s forgotten about the food in front of him.

The potion’s colour is darkening, from a pastel blue to a brilliant turquoise. Harry’s positive it’s ready, so he conjures a goblet and draws a sensible dose into it. Riddle seems to need immediate appetite restoration.

“Here.”

Riddle accepts it, pinching the stem between long, thin fingers, and then swirls the potion once, examining the colour and sheen. “You remembered perfectly.” 

He sips from it like it’s a fine wine, warily. Harry wonders whether it’ll work properly for him, or whether his body’s so depleted of magic that it’ll reject the help instead. He resumes eating a few moments later. With fierce, almost violent efficiency, he forces his way through both slices of wedding cake.

Chapter Text

Before

“Slytherin’s extra confident this year,” Wood relayed over breakfast, just before their first match of the year, Slytherin vs. Hufflepuff. “Half of it’s because the Malfoys upgraded their brooms again, but I hear it’s also because that Tom Riddle’s a Keeper now.”

“In more ways than one,” Katie Bell said, throwing a meaningful look at Alicia. The two of them dissolved into red-faced giggles a moment later.

(Apparently Riddle had hit a growth spurt over the summer since third year, suddenly becoming deeply blush-worthy. Among the female population of Hogwarts, Harry had heard several different conversations dissecting Tom Riddle like a Herbology specimen, evaluating his physique and facial features in gruesome detail and speculating on parts unseen. Though Harry had never considered himself particularly vain, he couldn’t help a pang of jealousy.)

“Focus,” Wood barked. “Alright, so Riddle’s the same as any other player. We’ll watch him to find his weak spots, but don’t let the rumors scare you, yeah?”

“Riddle has murdered the Quaffle.” Lee Jordan’s amplified voice rang throughout the pitch. “I’ll repeat: Tom Riddle has murdered the Quaffle.”

In Harry’s opinion, Lee was exaggerating for dramatic effect. At worst, Riddle had only heavily dented the Quaffle, so that the normally spherical ball could now be worn as a hat. Harry was more concerned that Riddle had left a permanent scar on Tony Rickett’s face.

“That’s a foul,” Ron muttered behind him. “That’s got to be.”

One of Hufflepuff’s Chasers had gotten the Quaffle into the scoring area, aiming for a goal. A hulking Hufflepuff Beater, Rickett decided to help by smacking a Bludger at Riddle, theoretically distracting him. He didn’t predict that Riddle would intercept the Quaffle before the Bludger got to him.

And nobody predicted that Riddle, instead of ducking or dodging like a sensible person, would use the Quaffle to smack the Bludger right back into Rickett’s nose.

“According to Quidditch Through the Ages,” Hermione piped up, “the full list of fouls is actually classified to prevent players from getting the wrong sort of ideas. No one has a full copy unless you’re a qualified referee or a high-ranking official at the Department of Magical Games …”

The game had been halted. Chaos was breaking out on the pitch. The other Hufflepuff Beater was currently shaking her bat at Riddle’s head. Riddle lazily threw the dented Quaffle back at her, only to have it plummet to the ground like a stone, its magic clearly disrupted by the collision.

“There’s got to be a rule in there against this,” Ron declared. “There’s no way anyone’s allowed to hit a Bludger unless they’re a Beater.”

At that moment, Lee begins speaking again. “The referee rules that all players are allowed to hit Bludgers, even if they aren’t Beaters! It appears this unconventional tactic is in fact not banned by the enigmatic list of fouls, which begs the question of what in the world is …”

Ravenclaw was the next victim to fall.

Cho Chang was a brilliant Seeker. She was graceful and swift even without a fancy new broom, sweeping high above the other players. She looked down on the pitch like a queen, like an untouchable divinity high above the rabble.

Her best feature, in Harry’s eyes, was that she was slowly driving Draco Malfoy mad.

She was excellent at feinting (and Harry would know, as a master of misdirection in his own right), and so she frequently dove into the fray of the game, pretending to have spotted the Snitch. Malfoy repeatedly raced after her, blocking Slytherin’s own Chasers from lining up their goals and nearly colliding with Bludgers. He’d catch on when she slowed down and began floating back up to her usual vantage point, serene above the chaos.

The fifth time Cho dove, Malfoy didn’t follow her, simply rolling his eyes in such a theatrical fashion that the entire stadium could tell.

Riddle had just intercepted the Quaffle. He hadn’t let a single goal through yet, defending the goal hoops with skill that even Harry found uncanny; Hufflepuff had won their match only because they caught the Snitch. Both teams’ Chasers and Beaters were crowded near Slytherin’s scoring box, all jostling to get the ball.

Riddle ignored them all, instead diving and throwing the Quaffle down, right into Cho’s path. Like a swarm of insects, all the Chasers and Beaters went after it, practically shoving each other out of the way, and Cho slowed, forced to swerve hard to avoid the scuffle. At that moment Malfoy seemed to remember there was a game on, swooping under everyone else with a hand outstretched …

“Malfoy has the Snitch!” Lee exclaimed. “Slytherin wins the match, 270 to nothing, proving once and for all that good sportsmanship really doesn’t get you anywhere nowadays …”

“From now on,” Wood whispered over dinner, despite having cast an excessive number of privacy wards, “we’re keeping our plans for the Slytherin match under lock and key. I mean it, I’ve got a cousin in the Auror Office and I’ve asked for advice on the latest security spells.”

“Come on,” Fred guffawed. “Isn’t that paranoid, even for you?”

“I’ve talked to both the other captains,” he hissed back, eyes bright with genuine panic. “They said the same thing. It’s not just that Riddle’s a great Keeper; the entire Slytherin team got twenty times better this year, excepting Malfoy. They all know what their enemies are going to do before they do it. Odds are they’ve stolen the tactical notes. That or the rumors are true, and Riddle’s learned how to read our minds. And that obviously means we ought to all take a quick course on Occlumency …”

Several of Wood’s privacy wards were meant to deflect attention; it should’ve taken Dumbledore himself to notice them at the table. Still when Harry looked up he found Riddle watching him from across the hall.

Riddle offered him a smile. A sweet smile, like Riddle was genuinely pleased to see him.

Harry didn’t trust it a bit.

Harry was in love. 

Every day, he found himself slipping into mid-class fantasies of marriage. Every night, he was tortured by dreams of prolonged snogging. And once he missed the Quaffle three times in one match, too dazzled to pay attention to his own teammates, he couldn’t deny it any longer.

Cho Chang was his soulmate.

Slughorn’s Christmas do was approaching, with another round of strong suggestions that guests all bring dates. That meant there was only one crisis in the world Harry needed to worry about.

(Besides the newspaper articles on how Grindelwald was claiming new territory every day.)

“It’s obvious to anyone with eyes that you fancy her, so just ask her out,” Hermione told him in her most soothing tone. “You’re both Quidditch players, you have plenty in common. The worst that could happen is she’ll say no.”

Harry didn’t know how to explain to her that, if she said no, the ensuing embarrassment would be a fate worse than death. He simply simmered over in silence, focusing harder in the library than he had since Riddle’s tutoring sessions as he pored over stacks of “How-To” romance guides. Instead of incantations, he practiced various opening lines under his breath. He agonized over whether to play it casual, or whether he’d be better off commissioning a sonnet, buying out a flower shop and perhaps dropping to his knees with a ring.

His ruminations stretched for weeks, until he at least had the perfect speech ready. He approached her on the day before the party: “Hi Cho, Professor Slughorn’s having a little get-together for the holidays. I was wondering if you’d like to come with me?”

He delivered it with his friendliest smile and only stumbled once. It was a roaring success in his opinion, right until Cho’s face crumpled with pity.

“Oh, Harry,” she sighed. “I’m sorry, but I’m already sort of seeing someone else.”

Harry stammered incoherently for a bit, attempting to scrounge up the nerve to lie and clarify that he only was asking her out as a friend, before he decided to cut his losses, thank her for her time and flee. He tried asking Hermione instead, only to be informed that Ron would certainly fail History of Magic if she didn’t spend the next 24 hours rewriting his term report. She then informed him that no self-respecting girl would go out with him on such short notice, when it was so incredibly clear they were a last resort.

This was how he ended up facing Slughorn by himself the next night, utterly self-conscious about the fact that he was alone in a room of happy couples.

“Harry, my boy! Didn’t you catch that note about plus-ones on the invitation?” Slughorn’s voice boomed through the room; Harry could feel the eyeballs swiveling towards them. He tried to ignore his current unease, focusing instead on how Slughorn had curled his mustache extra-festively for the occasion.

“I. I did, Professor,” Harry squeaked out. “It’s just that I ran into a, uh, slight problem …”

He was trying to come up with words to explain his situation without losing every last shred of dignity when a dark figure approached him from behind.

“In that I was delayed,” Riddle said, smoothly linking their arms together. “My apologies, Professor, I got caught up in that delightful book you recommended, on wizarding fairy tales.”

Slughorn’s bushy eyebrows sprung up. “I admit I didn’t expect the two of you to come together, but you make a handsome pair. A handsome pair indeed.”

“Thank you, we thought it’d be nice for rival Quidditch players to appear together,” Riddle said instantly, pulling Harry closer before he could protest that no, they weren’t a pair at all. “It might calm some of the nasty, completely baseless rumors flying around this season.”

“Excellent thinking as always, Tom! We could do with a bit more house unity in these dark times ...”

Riddle quickly guided (dragged) Harry both away from a beaming Slughorn.

“Completely baseless?” Harry muttered under his breath. “Malfoy’s practically shouting from the rooftops that Slytherin’s cheating and getting away with it. And you nearly caused an eleven-broom crash last game!”

“Seeing how Chang had enough sense to avoid it,” Riddle replied pleasantly, “it would’ve been a ten-broom crash at most. And honestly, I don’t think you care about the rest of them.”

Harry rolled his eyes and scanned the room, which was full of extraordinarily distinguished guests, none of whom he could tell from Adam. “Do you know any of these people?”

“Do you read?” was Riddle’s response.

Harry shot him a nasty look.

“Look,” Riddle said, surveying the room with a hunter’s eyes, “I’ll release you into the wild shortly. If you want to hoard snacks and then run back to your dorm, I’ll even make your excuses to Slughorn. But bear with me for one conversation.”

“Why?”

“You see the man with the green scarf in the corner over there?”

Harry looked. “The one who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else?”

“Randolph Spudmore,” Riddle informed him. “His family makes broomsticks. They just released the Tinderblast.”

“The one that got pulled for failing all its safety tests?”

“Good, you know it.” Riddle unlinked their arms to retie the green scarf around his neck, arranging it so the silver “S” was front and center. “Also, it only failed four out of five. The responsiveness was the best ever seen.”

“Why do you care about a broom that wants to kill people?”

“Because it only wants to kill the average flier, so I’m not feeling particularly threatened,” Riddle said, his diction brutally crisp. “And because if I make prefect instead of Draco, I don’t want to spend next year dependent on the Malfoys’ generosity.”

At that moment, Spudmore disappeared down a hallway, towards the loo. Harry feared that Riddle might chase him down, but he simply sighed instead. “Should we get drinks first?”

Harry assented, and they made their way to the main table, where Riddle instantly reached for a pitcher of orange liquid. “Pumpkin juice for you, I assume?”

“How do you know that’s my favourite?” Harry narrowed his eyes.

“Because I’ve learned all the Gryffindor Quidditch players’ favourite foods, in order to efficiently poison you before our big game,” Riddle immediately replied. Seeing Harry’s look of horror, he rolled his eyes. “Because the other options are water, ice water, and mead that an aspiring Prefect couldn’t possibly offer you.”

“… oh.” That’d explain it. “Pumpkin juice is fine, thanks.”

Riddle poured some out, chuckling. “It’s incredible you think I’d need to stoop as low as poison to beat you.”

“Hey,” Harry protested as he accepted the goblet. He’d watched carefully to make sure Riddle didn’t spike it. Too carefully. Wood’s paranoia was contagious. “Maybe nobody’s gotten a Quaffle past you yet, but I promise you, I will.”

He paused, fully expecting Riddle to jeer back and escalate the trash talk.

“Excellent,” Riddle said, pouring a cup for himself. “I look forward to the challenge.”

Harry searched hard for the mockery, but he sounded truly sincere.

“Hey, why’d you show up alone tonight?” Harry switched subjects, a little uneasy. “I’m not ungrateful, but I thought half the girls in the school would kill to be where I am.”

“I asked Volant weeks ago,” Riddle told him. Harry didn’t know Volant personally, but the name brought up a vague image of a willowy fifth-year with auburn tresses. “She said yes, obviously, but when I went to meet her today …” He lowered his voice. “She confessed that she’s actually madly in love with me and that she hopes to be Mrs. Riddle soon.”

Harry’s eyes bulged out. “What’d you do?”

“I will steadfastly deny it if you tell anyone,” he murmured back, leaning closer to let Harry in on the secret, “but I may have broken down laughing.”

Harry’s jaw dropped.

“Needless to say, she wasn’t in the partying mood after that,” Riddle continued, voice strung tight with suppressed amusement. “I’m not sure she’ll come out of mourning until after the break.”

“Why would you laugh at her?” Harry whisper-shouted.

“I couldn’t help it! Can you imagine being that in love with someone who barely knows you exist?” Riddle’s mouth twitched ominously at the corners. “I’d die. I would honestly rather die.”

“You are such a piece of work!” Harry replied, attempting indignation on poor Volant’s behalf. It didn’t work well, since he was suppressing a laugh too.

At that moment, Spudmore returned.

“Come on, darling.” Smirking, Riddle drained his goblet, dropped it on a tray floating nearby and strode over. Harry followed him into battle, still holding his cup. “Mr. Spudmore!”

Spudmore, a mousy-looking man who looked twenty-five at most, was utterly shocked that anyone wanted to talk to him. Freezing like a deer in dragonfire, he didn’t move an inch away from Riddle, though it seemed like he might very much want to.

“It’s an honour to meet you,” Riddle exclaimed. He skipped the usual handshake; Spudmore, whose hands were both jammed in his robe pockets, seemed to appreciate it. “I heard from Professor Slughorn that you were Slytherin's most violent Beater.”

Harry just barely kept the shock off his face.

“Do you play Quidditch too?” Spudmore asked hesitantly, eyes darting between them both.

“I play for Slytherin,” Riddle answered. “But more importantly, Potter here is one of the finest Chasers Gryffindor’s ever had.”

So that sounded like the nicest thing Riddle had said about anyone, ever. Harry watched Spudmore catch onto “Potter” and then scan him head to toe, eyes lingering on his lightning scar. Spudmore suddenly began cowering even more intensely, but it seemed like ordinary “I’m near a famous person” nerves, as opposed to the “I adore the Dark Lord who ordered you killed as a baby” kind. They exchanged nods in greeting.

“Gryffindor’s had loads of great Chasers,” Harry said. “I really don’t know if I’m the finest …”

“He’s humble too,” Riddle interrupted. “At least near you. Just a few minutes ago he was regaling me with threats of how utterly he plans to crush my defenses.” Harry gave Riddle a look, unimpressed by the exaggeration. Riddle happily ignored it, relinking their arms while adding, “If Slytherin loses the House Cup this year, it’ll be his fault entirely.”

“Unfortunate,” murmured Spudmore.

“Isn’t it?” Riddle chirped, pressing a little closer to Harry. “And of course we’re on the same brooms. Nimbus 1600s …” Spudmore’s nostrils flared in reaction to a competitor. “They’re a solid choice, but when absolutely everyone who matters is on one, broom quality stops being a distinguishing factor.”

“I dunno,” Harry interjected. “I’d say it’s a distinguishing factor that the Nimbus hasn’t given anyone whiplash yet.”

Spudmore paled, no doubt recalling the safety reports specifically mentioning the high risk for whiplash among Tinderblast riders. But a second later he lifted his chin and puffed out his chest, as if preparing for a counterargument …

“As you can see, he’s a Gryffindor through and through,” Riddle said. He sounded for all the world like a peacekeeper, but Harry had a feeling he and Spudmore were both falling into a trap. “Brave and loyal, even to a brand. Of course, in fairness to your family’s work, it’s possible to avoid getting whiplash even on a broom with such an exceptional turning circle. You can just add a specialised protective spell, if you’re wearing enough armor.”

“Only Keepers tend to wear so much,” Spudmore sighed.

“Then we’re lucky I am one,” Riddle said with wildly uncharacteristic pep.

“Didn’t the Thunderblast fall out of the sky if you tried flying it for a long time?” Harry protested.

“For a long distance,” Riddle corrected, giving him an indulgent smile that Harry didn’t believe one bit, “if I’m correct. And that’s only because the broom’s power is focused on providing exceptional speed and agility instead.”

Spudmore’s cheeks flushed a bit. “Yes,” he said with more verve. “Yes, you understand what we’ve accomplished, even if most people can’t.” 

He shot Harry a look of decided disapproval. 

“And of course, a Keeper has to keep inside one small scoring box, so there’s no point at all to having a broom built for distance. It’d be a waste,” Riddle mused, as if speaking off the cuff. However, Harry was starting to suspect that Riddle rehearsed this. He probably practiced more for this than Harry had for asking Cho out.

Nerves falling away, Spudmore’s eyes lit up with interest. “You’re right! With our acceleration, there is a niche market of Keepers who’d appreciate it, and that could help us raise the money to work out all the smaller quirks for a general audience.”

“That’s brilliant,” Riddle gasped, as if he hadn’t worked this all out himself already.

“And I’ve got another experimental broom you might be interested in,” Spudmore said, now transformed into a chatterbox. “It won’t be ready for public sale for years and years, but I’m thinking of calling it …”

Harry politely excused himself, citing a pressing bit of end-of-term homework. Riddle thanked him for the lovely night. Harry gave him a long look, begging him to understand the implied eyeroll.

“Good night, sweetheart.” Harry aimed for stomach-turning sweetness, like Aunt Petunia talking to Dudley; it was payback for the “darling” from earlier. He kept up his smile even as Riddle glowered at him. Then he left Riddle to jauntily talk his way onto a wooden death trap, some experimental broom titled “the Firebolt.”

After

“I brought you a kettle that’ll pour infinite tea,” Harry says. “In return, I’d really like you to spill your deepest secrets.”

Holding one of the inaugural teacups, he sits down in a plush armchair he conjured near the fireplace. He intends to leave the chair here for Riddle’s use, a bit of luxury in this rather bare flat.

Riddle sips from two cups of his own, alternating between tea and a Fever-Reducer Potion Harry just helped him brew. 

Considering Harry’s declaration, he bites his lip pensively. “On the subject of Grindelwald … there’s really not much else that I’d be safe saying, just now. I’m at risk of being attacked by old ‘friends’ as it is, I won’t invite extra trouble by leaking all their secrets.”

“I guessed all that, actually,” Harry says. “I just wanted you to tell me how Slytherin really won those two Quidditch Cups.”

Riddle tosses his head back with a laugh, a rare, genuine burst of happiness. He’s grinning when he recovers enough to say, “With prodigious skill and an unwavering devotion to fair play.”

“Right.” Harry smirks. “And I’m a Hippogriff.”

Riddle shakes his head, still openly grinning. “Cheating’s a long and glorious tradition in Hogwarts Quidditch, I just happened to be particularly dedicated.”

“So you admit Slytherin cheated.” Harry can’t help smiling too. After spending years accusing Slytherin of foul play, he’s a little giddy at actually getting proof.

“Flagrantly,” Riddle confirms. “I was the de facto leader of all illicit activities, and I was nothing short of brilliant.”

“Do tell.”

“I may have staged a full-blown Ministry break-in one spring,” he reveals, preening. “In order to get the full list of fouls.”

“You didn’t.”

“You might want to pass that on to your bosses. The security at the Magical Games office got breached by a pack of fourteen-year-olds.”

Harry puts aside his cup in order to drop his hand into both hands. “Rumor had it you were peeking at other teams’ playbooks.” 

Wood was utterly convinced of it. He’d constructed two decoy sets of tactics just to throw Slytherin off the scent, though it never seemed to make a difference.

“Lies and slander,” Riddle retorts brightly. “We considered that, but it was too easy to get tricked by fakes. I just learned the Disillusionment Charm instead and watched all your practices from the stands.”

Harry groans. “I heard you also learned Legilimency just to guess what we were up to.”

“Half-true,” comes the reply. “I did hone my Legilimency skills for Quidditch, but it was too risky to read players’ minds.”

“So what, you read the referee’s?”

“No, the balls’. You remember how you could communicate mentally with the Sorting Hat? The Snitch and the Bludgers maintain a similar illusion of sentience; it was easy enough to track their velocity and whether they’d sensed someone nearby.”

“So that’s why …”

“Why I knew when Seekers were feinting and when they weren’t,” Riddle finishes, as if he read Harry’s mind just now. 

Riddle’s lounging on his bed, the Harpies scarf thrown haphazardly around his neck, charmed hat tugged over his head. One snake lies draped on his lap, and he’s petting another that’s curled on his pillow, and he looks light and happy, almost radiant. Harry feels it too, as he looks back on a lifetime of half-shared memories.

“I think you beat my dad’s circle for managing mischief,” Harry replies, caught in a state of awe.

“Tell my legend to future generations.” Riddle waves an airy, imperious hand.

Harry grins. “This is how you want to be remembered?”

In slow-motion, Riddle’s fragile joy crumples in on itself, like a paper tossed into flames. Mere fever can’t explain the brightness of his eyes as they drift to his nightstand, masterfully gouged with runes that could disembowel a person; between his two teacups, there’s still the Elder Wand.

For once, Riddle doesn’t try to hide his pain, simply inhaling and releasing a shuddery sigh. “There are worse legacies to leave.”

Chapter Text

Before

Cho squeezed Harry’s hand, clutching it for dear life. Harry had dreamed of exactly this for many months.

Cho squeezed Harry’s hand while calling out for her boyfriend, Cedric Diggory. This was not in the dreams.

Tom Riddle (fifth-year, recently crowned Prefect, bane of Draco Malfoy’s existence) was newly armed with a “Firebolt” (a knobbly, unpolished, experimental broom that looked like it had been torn right off the Whomping Willow, carefully stripped of most common-sense safety features and allowed in competition only because Slughorn had begged Dippet). He seemed nigh-unstoppable now. Of all Hogwarts’ Chasers, Harry alone had managed to sneak the Quaffle past him last year, and Riddle had only grown bolder over the summer. If his new broom lived up to its reputation, it wouldn’t matter if Draco missed the Snitch every time; Slytherin had a shot at winning the Cup on goals alone.

But at the moment, Slytherin had only 60 points. If Hufflepuff caught the Snitch now, they’d win by a comfortable margin of 90 points, and Cedric had just pulled into a dive that suggested he’d caught sight of his target. At that moment, Riddle intercepted the Quaffle, earning a round of booing from Ravenclaw, Gryffindor and Hufflepuff fans, who had all closed ranks against Slytherin.

“Don’t you dare start spinning,” Harry said under his breath.

Riddle suddenly started spinning.

Lee Jordan was pulled away from his microphone before he peppered it with swears, because he and the entire school knew what was coming. The Firebolt (due to the aforementioned shortage of safety measures) had exactly zero turning radius plus dangerously fast acceleration. Riddle exploited these facts to grab the Quaffle and then spin like a top, making everyone dizzy just by looking at him, gaining speed at a wild pace, and then suddenly flinging the ball away. It hurtled at breakneck speed towards its target, though it was impossible to guess which of Slytherin’s Chasers Riddle would aim for until the very last moment …

Cho screamed.

Riddle let go of the ball, and this time it didn’t go towards any Chaser at all. Instead it barrelled towards Diggory, as terrifying as a Bludger. More terrifying, because Quaffles weren’t supposed to kill you, and Diggory didn’t notice the incoming missile until it hit his broom with a giant crack.

Diggory went spiraling towards the ground. His body seemed intact, but the bristles of his shiny new Cleansweep were bent at a concerning angle. Cho ran away, completely forgetting Harry in her haste to get to Cedric. Right on cue, a time-out was called, and the two teams’ Captains devolved into an argument over whether that was a valid move or whether it was a foul, and whether there was even a point to having fouls if Riddle still got to do whatever he wanted.

Ginny scooted in a little closer. “They need to rewrite the rules for Riddle, if he’s going to play Beater and Keeper.”

Harry hummed in agreement.

“They could start by giving a penalty for his hair gel.”

Harry burst out laughing. Ginny (newly detached from Cormac McLaggen, not that Harry was tracking such things) smiled back at him and then dove into a stream of commentary, just as curse-laden and twice as caustic as Lee’s. “He has to be using Dark Magic. Even Malfoy looks a mess by now, why else would Riddle’s hair still be stuck to his scalp like a giant leech …”

In Slytherin’s match against Ravenclaw, Riddle forewent the spinning one time. Harry breathed a sigh of relief, right until Riddle sprang straight into the air instead, building up speed with a few utterly ridiculous, vertical hairpin turns and then shooting forward. Just before he crossed the bounds of the scoring box, he released the Quaffle, ignoring all the players and aiming just a little to the left.

The ball flew forward like a bullet from a gun, hurtling straight across the pitch into one of the opposing hoops.

The audience exploded again, in fury over the fact that Riddle was trying to render Chasers, Beaters and Seekers irrelevant. But Ginny had just returned to the seat next to Harry after placing a bet against Slytherin (out of spite rather than strategy, because the odds were terrible). Harry forewent the booing to instead look over at her as he waited for the action to restart.

For the first time, he noticed how very fetching she looked, bundled up in Ravenclaw blue.

Oddly, Harry was grateful that Riddle was breaking the entire game of Quidditch, because the Great Hall bubbled over every day with complaints about his reign of terror on the pitch. It was a conversation topic Harry vastly preferred to the real reign of terror Grindelwald was conducting outside Hogwarts’s walls.

One night, it wasn’t only outside the walls anymore.

Harry woke up to find half the staff table empty and the rumor mill working overtime. With dark circles under his eyes, Dippet stood and announced that the Ministry would be placing Dementors around the school, to ensure everyone’s safety. There was, therefore, no need to panic. 

Even though one of Grindelwald’s top thieves had been apprehended after breaking into Hogwarts, into Dumbledore’s personal study.

When Slughorn’s Christmas invitation came through, Harry asked Ginny out that night.

“As friends,” he tacked on, because Ron had somehow materialized a few feet away and was attempting to cast the Killing Curse with just his eyes.

Ginny accepted the invitation with an easy smile and an inquiry about the dress code. Harry must’ve imagined the initial disappointment on her face, when he specified “friends.”

On a glum, overcast day, Slytherin once again took on Gryffindor.

While Gryffindor was only thirty points down, Harry scored a goal against Riddle. The stands let loose a tsunami of cheering, louder than any Seeker got for catching the Snitch. Riddle caught the Quaffle a second after it zoomed through the hoop and acknowledged Harry with a tip of the head and an amused smile. Harry backed up, fully expecting Riddle to start spinning and then launch the Quaffle into his face, but he mercifully hurled it at one of his own house’s Chasers instead.

Harry looked into the faculty box, where Professor Dumbledore usually conjured massive stone lions that roared in support, but found him oddly missing. He’d been missing more and more classes in the past month. 

(There were whispers that he’d at last properly entered the war.)

Harry’s focus snapped back to the game. Katie had just snatched the Quaffle away from Slytherin and was racing it back towards Harry. She tried throwing it to Angelina, right as Crabbe (a player so agonizingly dim Harry could hardly blame Riddle for trying to do the Beater’s job for him) aimed a Bludger at her head …

It completely missed her and hit the Quaffle instead. Its magic once again thrown off-balance by the collision, the Quaffle went rogue, spiraling upwards like it thought it was a Snitch. Everyone waited hopefully for a time-out to be called.

When it wasn’t, Harry groaned and followed it up, even as it disappeared into the low-hanging clouds. The cheering of the crowds faded into the unnaturally chilly mist, as he kept his eyes peeled for any sign of movement …

Something dark shifted at the edge of his periphery.

Harry whipped his head around. Too late, he made out the wispy black shapes swooping through the clouds. A second later he recognised the creeping cold, and the inexplicable sadness, the certainty that he was just doomed to a short, joyless, loveless experience because he wasn’t capable of earning anything more.

A second after that, he grabbed onto what Professor Merrythought had said one time, when asked about the school’s new guards. She’d said to seize one’s happiest memory, and out of desperation Harry shut his eyes and tried to come up with something. Anything.

His arms wrapped around Riddle in first year near this very spot, their broomstick shooting up into the sky.

“Expecto patronum!” he called, and white light blasted out of his wand. It took on the shape of a stag and galloped into the mist, running circles around him, illuminating the clouds from within.

The Dementors receded, but he could feel them taking his willpower with them. Suddenly exhausted, he pitched forward on his broom, barely able to keep his eyes open. Barely able to care that he’d gone into a spiral of his own, plummeting steadily towards the ground.

“Arresto momentum,” someone shouted as the stadium came back into view. The voice sounded familiar, and terribly desperate.

When he opened his eyes again, he was lying face-up on the grass, and all he could see was Riddle.

“Eat this.” Riddle shoved something into his mouth. “I just summoned all the chocolate from the crowd. Did you break any bones?”

Harry chewed and swallowed the candy (toffee milk chocolate from Honeydukes). He was remarkably pain-free, coming off a fall. “No, I’m not even sore.”

“Soul still attached to your body?”

“Seems like it?”

“That was extraordinary,” Riddle breathed, kneeling at his side. “To drive off a full clan of Dementors with, what, your first attempt at a Patronus?”

It was then that Harry realised Riddle was looking at him funny. He was ghostly pale, eyes glazed over like he was in shock, and smiling far more than a Slytherin ever ought to smile without a dead body nearby, and he was bent over and holding himself carefully, like he was in pain. Harry’s eyes slipped lower, to where his sturdy armored breastplate had ruptured in two.

“Get away from him!” Angelina suddenly hauled Riddle to his feet.

Riddle gasped in pain, whole face screwing up. Once on his feet, he immediately shook her off.

“What happened to you?” Harry demanded.

“I was distracted trying to save your neck, literally. Which is when one of your infinite Weasleys decided to whack a Bludger at me,” he hissed.

And now Harry noticed a massive altercation nearby; Fred Weasley and Flint, the Slytherin Captain, were both hollering at the top of their lungs:

“He pulled a wand on another player, which is massively illegal …”

“He stopped your best player from crashing!!”

“And it’s grounds for banning Tom Riddle from all Quidditch games, forevermore …”

“You can’t ban him just because he’s better than your entire team put together …”

“He is a walking insult to good sportsmanship!”

“You put a laxative in my cereal this morning!”

“Ignore them,” Riddle said shortly. Then he waved at someone. “Over here! Potter needs a Healer, right now!”

A Healer (dressed in St. Mungo’s uniform, probably an alumnus guest) rushed over, only to have Harry shoo him away. “I’m fine, Riddle needs it more than I do.”

“I’m fine, check him first!”

“All your ribs are broken!”

“Only four at the most!” Riddle exclaimed, forcing himself to stand up straight. “You might still have a concussion. You just fought off a pack of Dementors solely on the strength of your heart, you are not allowed to die.”

The Healer clearly found Riddle more intimidating and knelt down by Harry, beginning a series of diagnostic spells. Harry couldn’t blame him. There was something wild in Riddle’s eyes just now that made him dangerous to cross, that made it impossible for Harry to look away. There was a whole shouting match going on over whether to continue the match or reschedule it for another day, but Riddle didn’t seem to care and Harry didn’t either, too focused on figuring out what had shifted between the two of them.

“He’s perfectly fine,” the Healer said, magically amplifying the announcement.

“Oh, thank Merlin!” cried someone else. Harry sat up to see Ginny bursting from the stands, running over to him in a flash of red and tackling him back to the grass with a sudden, passionate kiss.

A new round of ear-splitting applause went up around him, complete with loads of wolf-whistling. Harry couldn’t care about anything but Ginny in his arms, for the very first time. He barely noticed Riddle swaying at the edge of his periphery, wrapping his arms around his chest as the pain at last got to him properly.

After

Breaking from custom, Harry Apparates directly to his own flat after work, because the day’s mission went horribly off-plan, and the paperwork spilled so far into the night that Riddle ought to be asleep by now. Harry fervently hopes he’s asleep by now.

He’d be surprised to see someone at his door, much less three someones, all with matching red hair.

“Ron,” Harry says in surprise. “Fred, George. What can I do for you?”

“Maybe let us in,” Ron says, oddly somber. “Might be best not to wake your neighbors.”

Harry frowns, even as he steps forward to unlock his door. “Did someone die?”

“Not yet,” Fred answers, sounding far too sinister.

Harry’s eyes widen, and he opens his door as fast as he can. They step over his threshold without triggering any of his wards and arrange themselves on his couch, side by side, wearing equally determined expressions. They remind him of a phalanx of Chasers, closing ranks as they go for the kill.

“Should I put tea on?” Harry says.

“Better not,” George replies.

“Right.” After a second, Harry sits down in a chair opposite them, feeling far too much like a criminal pinned in one of the DMLE’s interrogation rooms.

Fred looks to his right and George looks to his left, both turning to Ron.

“I’d better just … come out with it, I guess.” Ron sighs, fidgeting with his robe. “Are you cheating?”

“At what?” Harry says instantly. He’s got a couple bets placed on pro Quidditch games, especially on the Harpies, but he doesn’t ask Ginny for nearly enough information to run afoul of the gambling laws …

“On our baby sister?” Fred clarifies, and Harry’s world breaks in two.

“What?” he splutters, genuinely horrified. “Why the hell would you think that?”

“Because Dad talks to your boss,” George promptly says. “You keep all sorts of weird hours, and it’s not because she wants you to.”

“I keep weird hours because I’m a trainee Auror,” Harry replies hotly, “and the office is overwhelmed. I’m not going to sit at home knitting when there’s dozens of major war criminals still running loose.”

“Ginny never sees you anymore,” Fred points out. “She’s been doubling her Quidditch practices, because you’re never around.”

“Yeah, Harry,” George tacks on. “You’ve been missing all the discussions for planning your own wedding, it’s not a great look.”

“I was raised by Muggles, I don’t know if moondew blossoms are symbolically right for the bouquet or, or if the cutlery ought to have elven filigree! Ginny and your mum have got it all sorted, I’d just get in their way.”

“But Ginny says something’s up with you,” Ron says suspiciously. “We’ve all noticed, and she says she’s asked you and you’re not telling her.”

“A lot of things are ‘up with me,’” Harry snaps, feeling as if he’s facing another round of Grindelwald’s Bombardas. “I just had to end a war and clean up the mess, in case you didn’t notice.”

“Then why don’t you talk to her, let her in on whatever’s going on in that shaggy head?” George challenges. “You think I don’t open up to Angelina about the stuff I saw in Paris?”

Harry stutters for a moment, unable to find any adequate answer. 

The truth is he’s tried talking to Ginny before, and she’s always kind and happy to listen, but he can’t ever shake the feeling that she doesn’t quite get it. She wasn’t there in the war councils, as intelligence reports of the most gruesome sort rolled in from every corner of Europe. She didn’t have to simmer in that bizarre mix of pity and rage that a row between two ex-lovers had somehow escalated into a world war.

She didn’t know Grindelwald in his prime, at the height of his power in the belly of his own castle, ringed by black fire. Harry could describe his nightmares until he’s blue in the face, and she’d never really know.

“Where were you last night at eight?” Ron asks abruptly, voice going low and serious. “And don’t say work, Zhang told Dad she kicked you out right at six.”

He was with Riddle. He’d stopped bringing him food from the Burrow, it just felt weird in a way he couldn’t pin down, so he picked up shepherd’s pies from the Leaky Cauldron and rejoiced when Riddle ate a solid half of his.

“Having dinner in Muggle London,” Harry replies coolly. “I wasn’t aware that was a crime.”

“You sure you want to stick with that story?” George asks.

“It’s the truth! Why, where do you think I was?”

“We don’t know, exactly,” Ron says after a horrendously awkward pause. “But the Burrow’s clock keeps saying weird stuff about you for hours, practically every evening after you leave work. The hand just keeps moving between ‘Lost’ and ‘Home.’ With the occasional dip into ‘Mortal Peril,’ but that probably comes with your job …”

“And the last time the clock acted like this?” Fred cuts in. “Grandma’s hand kept jumping between ‘In Transit’ and ‘Lost’ …”

“Because she was jumping between a bunch of noblemen’s beds all over France,” George finishes, with a dark look in his eye.

Harry gawps at them. 

Briefly, he thinks of trying to explain the entire situation with Riddle to them. It won’t work. Riddle’s secrets aren’t his to share, and anyway they’d never understand how Harry got so tangled up with him. Harry doesn’t entirely understand it himself, why every moment with Riddle leaves him unsettled and yet yearning for more.

He thinks also of making a promise to them or even just to himself, that he’ll stop seeing Riddle so often and recommit his energy fully to Ginny. He dismisses that idea even more quickly because every moment with Riddle is precious now, slipping away like sand through his fingers.

“It’s broken,” he finally says, sounding broken himself. “The clock has to be broken. Why isn’t Ginny asking me all this?”

The three of them look at each other.

“Well …” Ron shifts again, even more nervous. “We talked to her first, and she told us where to shove it.”

“Not that she’d talk to us about anything anymore,” George mutters under his breath, “not when there’s Gwennie …”

Ron finishes, “She says you’d never touch anyone else with her in the picture.”

“She’s right,” Harry immediately exclaims. “You can give me Veritaserum, I’d say the same exact thing.”

“Don’t tempt us, mate,” Fred says under his breath, but Ron elbows him.

They sit for half a minute in the most uncomfortable silence Harry has ever suffered.

“Okay.” Ron finally breaks the silence, pushing himself off the couch. “That’s that, I guess.”

And the three of them shuffle out of the flat as Harry slumps over, wishing he could disappear into his armchair and never be seen again.

“What’s wrong?” asks Riddle.

Harry flirts with pretending nothing’s wrong at all. Riddle’s facing enough challenges as it is; he doesn’t need Harry adding his own non-problem problems with the Weasleys.

“The Weasleys think I’m stepping out on Ginny.”

Riddle had been reaching for his handkerchief, but he swallows sternly and lets it go, granting Harry a piercing, curious look. “Why would they think that?”

Harry shrugs helplessly. “They’re taking a load of clues and interpreting them entirely the wrong way.”

Riddle’s eyebrows arch elegantly. “You all deserve each other.” 

Harry glares at him, earning a snort.

But then Riddle tilts his head to the side, and Harry recognises that expression. It’s a dangerous one. He saw Riddle using it as a Prefect, the perfect mix of open, patient, and curious, calculated to coax first-years into confessing all sorts of nonsense. He would maintain it as he took off outrageous amounts of points (especially if the culprits were Gryffindors), all while making the culprits feel like they were perfectly understood and getting off easy.

“Is there someone else?” Riddle asks, sounding exquisitely non-judgmental.

“What?” Harry cries. “No! I’m not a cheater!”

His face instantly shutters up, and he grabs for his handkerchief, smothering a few stabbing coughs. “No, I didn’t think you had it in you. Pure Gryffindor honour and all that.” Setting aside his dinner half-eaten, he reaches for one of his snakes, a royal python that’s somehow the cuddliest of the lot, and bundles it into his arms. “How’s work? The shop’s boring me to death, I rely on you for excitement now.”

“Is your boss still evil?”

Riddle confirms it with a derisive scoff. He’s complained a few times about his job (a tragic necessity when maintaining a Muggle residence, because of the strict laws around creating or even converting currencies with magic). He’d complained most eloquently about his supervisor, who’s dared deem Riddle inadequate as a salesman. Never mind that Riddle’s a master charmer even without his magic, capable of selling pacifist life philosophies to a Bludger.

“I’d recommend my job to any aspiring Dark Lord,” Riddle says. “It’s an excellent way to build up one’s hatred for humanity.”

“Well, on the other side of the ethical spectrum,” Harry replies tentatively, “the Auror Office is working a case up in Yorkshire.”

That’s not a sentence that’d mean anything to the average wizard, but Riddle knows more classified secrets than Harry does, if for the wrong reasons. And that matters. It’s hard, having meaningful conversations about most of an Auror’s work outside the office, because having meaningful conversations means giving context, which means breaking a whole lot of confidentiality protocols and potentially putting the other person in danger. Worse, the subject material of such conversations veers towards the grotesque and the terrifying, and Harry would rather spare his friends the nightmares.

But for better or worse, Riddle was a nightmare himself. Harry doesn’t need to be scared of corrupting him.

Right on cue, Riddle’s eyes spark with recognition. “Interesting castles up there.”

“Aren’t they? You could say I was on a fishing expedition.”

“Humber?”

“Aire, actually.”

“Looking for a horror that can’t even be named, I assume,” Riddle rapidly concludes. The office is dealing with an old Celtic Dark artifact with a Taboo on its name. It’s not even slightly related to Grindelwald, but Riddle seems to know all about it anyway. Harry doesn’t know whether that’s frightening or heartwarming.

“How many beheadings has it racked up this time?” Riddle prompts brightly. He picks his dinner up again, appetite apparently restored.

“Uh. None, so far, but one lady had her eyeballs summoned from their sockets …”

“How’s work?” Ginny asks.

“Fine,” Harry says over dinner, acutely aware of Ron, Fred and George watching him. “How’s practice going?”

“Great,” she replies.

He glances at his hand on the family clock and finds it pointing steadily at “In Transit.”

Ginny nudges him gently. “Pass the cheese?”

Chapter Text

Before

Grindelwald hardly needed help setting the entirety of Hogwarts on edge, but the OWLs and NEWTs nonetheless came to his aid. The library, usually an oasis of calm, had turned into a battlefield, duels and fistfights breaking out as students fought over the most desirable books. Riddle insisted on serving himself wordlessly and wandlessly at every meal, as a way of thoroughly mastering Charms and also intimidating the competition; other Slytherins tried to follow his example and regularly wound up rushing out of the Hall in fury or tears, splattered with their dinner. Eerie anxiety thrummed through the entire castle, only intensified by the Dementors floating just out of sight. 

Harry attempted to find some peace and quiet by retreating to the Gryffindor common room, but Fred and George had decided to lighten the miserable school mood with impromptu firework displays. Given the daily reports coming in about Grindelwald’s ambushes, the explosions weren’t entirely amusing; Neville, whose parents had just been taken hostage, fled the room and hid under his blankets, and Hermione reacted by making a rule that Gryffindor would lose ten points for every firecracker lit.

Which is how Harry wound up sneaking to Dumbledore’s office, hoping he might intervene before Hermione single-handedly took Gryffindor out of the running for the House Cup.

He turned a corner and almost ran headlong into Riddle, who was stalking away from Dumbledore’s closed door.

They both stopped, only a few inches apart, and Harry froze, struck by the odd way Riddle was looking at him. He’d gone deathly white, and his eyes were searching Harry’s face intensely like he’d just seen a ghost.

Riddle recovered his voice first, though his eyes remained wide, almost frightened. “He’s not in.”

“Ah,” Harry says, before narrowing his eyes. “I just heard the door shut though.” 

He tried the handle, found it locked, and that explained Riddle’s fright rather neatly. Harry whipped out his wand, just in case Riddle was thinking of wiping this incident entirely from his memory. “Want to explain yourself?”

Riddle’s gaze dropped to the wand before returning to his face. “He’s behind on returning homework,” he says breathlessly, perfunctorily. “I was just looking to see if he’d marked my alchemy essay, to study for OWLs, it doesn’t matter.”

Harry scoffed. “Of course he’s behind, he’s off helping the war effort! Honestly, Riddle, you broke into a professor’s study just for that?”

“Yes,” Riddle insisted with a threatening step forward, his usual composure shattered. “I did, but forget that, do you know?”

“Know about your essay? No, of course I don’t, people keep complaining that he plays favorites with Gryffindors but it’s nowhere near that bad …”

“Did Dumbledore tell you?” Riddle says again, more urgently.

Harry fell silent, entirely baffled. “Riddle, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you mean.”

For an instant, Riddle’s gaze was too intense to bear. Harry wanted to run and hide, but he couldn’t tear himself away …

Until Riddle sighed, and the strange bond between them snapped. Riddle stumbled back a few steps, seemingly drained. “Perhaps that’s for the best.”

“What are you on about, seriously?”

“Draco said there was going to be a surprise test next week,” Riddle blurted. “A OWL-style practical with real exam conditions, I was wondering if you knew what … which spell he’d be testing. Or spells.”

Harry squinted at him, trying to figure out why Riddle (unflappable teacher’s pet, perpetually smug about his intellectual superiority) was panicking as badly as Hermione over a pop quiz. On second thought, Harry doubted there was a pop quiz coming up at all. Despite her struggles with Divination, Hermione had a sixth sense for these things, yet she hadn’t been any more anxious than usual over Transfiguration.

“I bet Malfoy’s just riling you up,” Harry replied. “You’re more than prepared for whatever’s coming our way, you’re just getting paranoid over nothing.”

Riddle chuckled, a hard, humourless sound. “I really wish you were right.”

Then he swept past Harry, shoulders just barely brushing, his robes swirling around him as he strode out of sight.

“Will you help me study for the Defense exam?” asked Riddle.

The OWLs drove people insane, wiping their minds and replacing their personalities. The fact that Riddle (biting his lip, furrowing his brow, the picture of uncertainty) was once again asking for Harry’s help in an academic context simply proved it.

“Er,” Harry said intelligently.

“I should be fine on the written portion, but I’m concerned about the practical,” Riddle said, kneeling down on the grass of Harry’s outdoor study spot. “It’s just so different, you know; wizards who do fantastically in the classroom can freeze up when they get in a real duel.”

Harry nodded slowly, remembering the articles about Quirinus Quirrell’s breakdown. “That’s true.”

“So,” Riddle continued, smiling softly, “I thought we could try some practice duels. I’d so appreciate it if you could give me advice, and of course if I notice any weaknesses you could shore up, I’ll let you know too.”

“Don’t you dare,” Ron hissed, looking up from his own books to glare at Riddle. “You’re just going to hex him so he’ll never sit on a broom again.”

Harry expected Riddle to retort that he didn’t need to stoop so low, because he was already undefeatable on the Quidditch pitch. But Riddle’s smile just got nicer. “I promise, that wasn’t my intention. Only safe spells, of course. I’d be happy to practice out here, if you’d be more comfortable with that.”

He gestured around at the courtyard, with plenty of other students. Plenty of witnesses who could intervene and rush Harry to the hospital wing, if needed.

Harry strongly suspected that Riddle had an angle. Ron was probably right; this was just a ploy to keep Harry from ever opposing him in Quidditch again.

On the other hand, Harry had seen Hermione spiral into exam-driven despair these past few weeks. The worry on Riddle’s face looked equally genuine.

“… alright. Let’s do it.”

He’d never tried dueling Riddle before; Merrythought tended to keep Gryffindors far away from Slytherins in class, in hopes of preventing excessive injuries. Riddle first asked everyone else to move a safe distance away from their chosen patch of grass. Next, he erected transparent wards, to prevent bystanders from being injured by wayward spells or flying debris. Finally, he bowed to Harry, an elegant if old-fashioned move. A little awkwardly, Harry followed his lead.

“One,” Riddle counted. “Two. Three.”

Harry instantly began casting defensive spells, throwing up one shield shell after another. Riddle presumably did the same, but he began by tapping himself on the head, casting a Disillusionment Spell, and then conjuring a smoke cloud to further obscure himself.

“I can hear you casting your spells,” called Riddle’s disembodied voice from somewhere in the fog. “Solid protego horribilis though; it’d serve you well against an actual Dark wizard.”

Harry winced and lowered his voice, whispering the rest of his spells. He raced through all the decent defensive charms he could think of, just as the grass at the edge of his spells began to writhe. It turned to Devil’s Snare, tentacles attempting to burrow through Harry’s shields. It’d take them several minutes to break through, but Harry threw a quick bolt of light at them anyway, scaring them away. 

Then Harry let out a focused Explosion Charm, right at where he thought Riddle was. It was the obvious, state-of-the-art way to get through shields. It was dangerous too; Harry wouldn’t dare cast it on anyone less prepared.

The bolt of flaming red hurtled from his wand towards Riddle’s general area. Presumably, it wouldn’t shatter Riddle’s shields in one go, but the countercharm nonetheless blossomed from the fog, meeting it. Harry took a moment to admire that; the currently known countercharm was extraordinarily intricate, requiring a two-sentence incantation too slow to say in battle. Riddle must have pulled it off wordlessly.

Then Harry was swept off his feet.

A surge of energy sealed his hand to his wand, sending a sudden electric thrill through him, and a golden thread burst forth from his wand and tied him inexplicably to Riddle. They were both lifted into the air, phoenix sound blooming around them. Riddle must’ve abandoned the Disillusionment Charm, because Harry could see him clearly as he rose out of the fog, sharp features softened by confusion and wonder.

Golden light exploded all around them, and small golden bubbles appeared along the delicate string. Harry couldn’t guess what they meant, but he felt compelled to urge them towards Riddle. Willingly, they went, slipping into his wand.

Then the screams began.

Phantom shapes flowed suddenly from the yew wand. First came blades of grass, lengthening and growing into thick tentacles before vanishing into puffs of smoke. Then came a golden cloud of light, and a veil like a net that folded over itself several times. Both disappeared in turn.

“No,” Riddle cried. Harry could feel him tugging on the thread, thrashing and trying to get free, but their bond held fast.

A cross bloomed from the tip of Riddle’s wand. An upside-down cross, and then another, a whole row of upside-down crosses like some broken, desecrated cemetery. There were other shapes in between. Strange sideways crosses with threads dangling from them like the controller for a marionette. A few upright crosses, tinged green.

Finally came a flood of flames, like none Harry had ever seen. Voraciously hungry, they grew to tower ten feet tall and then morphed into a massive snake, no, a basilisk of gold, and Harry flinched on instinct from those eyes of blindingly bright, seething fire. It curled around and hissed viciously, its roar drowning out the phoenix song. Then it twisted about and lunged straight at Riddle.

The thread snapped. Harry fell to the ground, limbs windmilling, and immediately got back to his feet. Riddle remained in an unceremonious heap for several seconds, curling into a small ball as a phantom basilisk did its very best to swallow him whole.

When it too receded, Harry finally spoke. “What the hell was that?”

Gingerly, Riddle pushed himself up to a sitting position, slicked-back hair at last in disarray. His face was blank, yet there was something unspeakably threatening about the way he held himself. He looked like he was calculating his odds, a coiled serpent preparing to pounce as he surveyed the courtyard, finding no less than fifty students’ eyes fixed on him. They seemed mostly confused or awestruck, but Hermione was wearing a look of pure horror. She whispered something to Ron, whose expression darkened similarly, and Riddle’s fist clenched white around his wand …

“Mr. Riddle!”

Harry’s head swiveled to the entryway, where Professor Dumbledore stood. He must have just returned from his latest mission against Grindelwald. His normally sunny blue eyes had gone ice-cold, a chill sweeping through the courtyard like a Dementor had just descended.

Riddle’s head and shoulders dropped a half-inch, a show of understated, absolute disbelief.

“And Mr. Potter,” Dumbledore added, his booming voice now less soaked with loathing. “If you would join me in the Headmaster’s office, please.”

Jerkily, jaw twitching furiously, Riddle drew himself to his feet and marched after Dumbledore, with the air of a man going to his execution. After throwing a look of bafflement at Hermione, Harry followed them.

“Ah, Horace,” Dumbledore said when Professor Slughorn happened to cross their path. “You’ll need to join us.”

“What’s this about?” Horace looked curiously at Riddle, who maintained his stony silence, and Harry, who shrugged in utter bewilderment.

“A rather serious matter concerning a member of your house.” With that vague answer, Dumbledore resumed walking, sky-blue robes rippling wildly around him. Like a bit of paper swept up by a gale, Slughorn couldn’t help but follow him too, and soon enough the three of them were sitting opposite Headmaster Dippet, who looked about as perplexed as Harry felt.

“Are you familiar with the magical phenomenon of brother wands?” Dumbledore asked, pacing around behind their seats. When there was no response, he came to a stop behind Riddle. “Mr. Riddle?”

Riddle was still holding himself impossibly straight, tension thrumming through his whole frame. Oddly enough, he seemed to be holding back a laugh.

“Brother wands have cores from the same animal,” Riddle intoned. “Such wands are also sometimes described as … a married couple, unable to directly duel each other. Apparently, attempts to make them fight shall force an instance of Priori Incantatem, where one wand must reveal the spells it has most recently cast.”

“Shall I presume that you did not know that your wand core and Mr. Potter’s came from the same phoenix?”

Riddle murmured, “I cannot keep you from your presumptions, Professor.”

Harry gave Riddle a look. Riddle didn’t meet it, eyes fixed down on his yew wand. 

“I had the good luck to witness a mock duel between Mr. Potter and Mr. Riddle just a few moments ago,” Dumbledore continued. “A remarkable show of magic, but not concerning in itself. However, when their wands fully connected for the first time, Mr. Riddle’s wand confessed to performing certain other kinds of magic in the recent past.” 

Riddle inhaled deeply, steeling himself.

“By my count, there were thirteen instances of the Cruciatus.”

Both Slughorn and Harry twisted to gape at Riddle. Riddle didn’t look at either of them. His silence somehow shifted from stony to contemptuous.

Dumbledore kept talking, impossibly calm and measured. “I also noted seven uses of the Imperius and three of the Killing Curse, though I do not believe they slew any target that we would understand as having a soul. There was also a whole-hearted, full-bodied instance of Fiendfyre.” 

“It can’t be,” Slughorn gasped.

“It is entirely possible my memory was flawed,” Dumbledore said with a courteous tip of the head. “If Mr. Riddle disagrees with my accounting, he is welcome to offer his wand for inspection and thus correct the record.”

“Yes, of course,” Slughorn said, sounding more than a little desperate. “This is obviously just a misunderstanding. Come then, Tom, let’s just clear all this up …”

He reached over to pluck the wand away.

Riddle only tightened his grasp on it. “No, thank you.”

Slughorn froze, clearly shocked. He began speaking several times, only to trail off, stuttering impotently. “Let’s … let’s not be hasty. Tom, please, I’m sure there’s a good explanation for this …”

“With all due respect, Horace,” Dumbledore cut in sharply, “there is no adequate explanation for such conduct.”

“Durmstrang’s seventh-years study all three Unforgivables in class,” Riddle said, still refusing to look at anyone. “But of course, Professor Dumbledore, you must not have any tolerance for such exploration.”

“You’re a Prefect, for goodness’s sake,” Dippet cut in. “You of all people should know all four of those spells are strictly regulated on British land.”

“Ah, but Tom’s underage, and young students are prone to such indiscretions,” Slughorn blustered. “We can’t blow this out of proportion. Surely he didn’t try any of that on actual people!”

Everyone looked at Riddle, who now glanced at Dumbledore. “Do you have any evidence that I cast those spells on living targets? Please, feel free to investigate, I know how you hate secrets.”

“I hope you did not,” Dumbledore replied evenly. “Given your skill at conjuring animals, I suspect you would have no need, if this was all simply practice.”

“Practice for what?” Harry blurted. “Mass murder?”

“There’s no real harm to trying out a spell,” Slughorn said weakly. He seemed to regret that sentence the moment it left his mouth.

“Casting Fiendfyre on school property is itself worthy of expulsion,” Dippet argued with a frustrated flourish of his hands. “A spell like that has to move and burn, it could have engulfed the whole school! There is a reason only Grindelwald is a master of the Dark fires these days ...”

“The spell was well-controlled,” Dumbledore rumbled. “Better than one would expect on a first attempt. Regardless, it was too large not to have left grave destruction in its wake.”

“Then show me where the ashes are,” Riddle snapped, now fully twisting in his seat. “The Forest is still standing, the castle’s intact, the lake hasn’t evaporated overnight. No one’s dead, not even a house elf. Tell me, Professor, if I’m an uncontrolled arsonist what did I burn?”

The room fell into the most uncomfortable silence Harry had yet experienced.

“There will have to be consequences,” Dippet finally said with an even more grievous sigh. “A letter home to start, Horace.”

And Riddle laughed, a sharp bark that startled everyone but Dumbledore. “Oh, yes, I’m sure Mrs. Cole will be shocked.”

Straightening up in his seat, Dippet continued: “Furthermore, this behavior is simply incompatible with the status of a Prefect.”

“Ah, certainly,” Slughorn stammered. “Malfoy’s also mentioned his interest in the role once or twice, I’ll ask him if he’d like to step in …”

“Perhaps,” Dumbledore ventured quietly, “a ban from school Quidditch games would impress upon Mr. Riddle the seriousness of his crimes?”

Harry’s jaw dropped. Riddle flinched as if physically struck, but he quickly schooled his expression back into blankness. 

(Slughorn looked openly heartbroken, as the next two Quidditch Cups suddenly faded from Slytherin’s grasp.)

“Fine,” Riddle said through gritted teeth. “I’ve always thought Quidditch was a stupid game anyway. If we’re done here?”

After another moment’s silence, he ripped off his Prefect’s badge and dropped it on Dippet’s desk. Then he rose to his feet and went for the door.

Slughorn watched him go, rubbing away a bead of sweat on his brow. “I’ll be honest, Tom, I can’t imagine why you’d be looking into this sort of thing in the first place.”

“Because there’s a war on,” Riddle answered shortly, glancing back with one hand on the door.

“Your zeal is commendable,” Dippet remarked gravely, folding his hands and resting them upon his heavy gold belt, “but the resistance against Grindelwald depends on a high ethical standard. We do not need to stoop to such Dark tactics; they would only weaken our moral fiber…”

“Unless of course,” Dumbledore mused in an infuriatingly measured tone, as if it really didn’t matter one way or the other, “Mr. Riddle sympathizes with Grindelwald?”

That one question smacked Harry like a Bludger to the ribs, knocking the breath out of him. Another sickening silence descended across the room.

“Of course not, Professor,” Riddle finally answered in an equally calm fashion, though his eyes gleamed with emotions Harry didn’t dare name. “I don’t care nearly enough for the greater good.”

Stalking out, he slammed the door behind him.

After

Harry lingers too long at the door, peering at the glass cases inside. Eventually he takes the plunge.

“Hi,” he says to the shop clerk up front, a lady with improbably neat brown curls and incisive grey eyes. “I’m looking to buy a ring for my fiancée. Maybe something with a bit of history to it?”

She looks him up and down. “What’s your monthly salary?”

“… excuse me?”

“Oh, you must’ve seen the ads; an engagement ring ought to cost three months’ salary nowadays, no self-respecting woman would settle for less! But of course, between us …” she grants him an exaggerated wink. “We’ll get you a fabulous deal, just one month’s pay, and she’ll never be the wiser.”

“Er.” He scans the otherwise empty pawn shop. “Is Tom Riddle here? A friend of mine said to ask for him.”

“He’s making a delivery,” she says, gesturing outside. “Should be back in a minute, but I don’t send young lovers to him. Don’t have it in me to cause him the pain.”

Harry pauses. “Why would that cause him pain?”

She frowns at him. “I’ll have you know I’m a discreet woman. I don’t tell secrets that aren’t mine to share.” She instantly leans over a counter. “The truth is, though, he lost his sweetheart in the war. No one’s quite right after a thing like that, are they?”

“Erm … no?”

She straightens back up and taps the case in front of her, which boasts a large array of rings. “So what do you make, and how large is her finger?”

“I, uh, don’t make any money.” Not in Muggle currencies, anyway. “My mum left me a bit when she passed, but I’m looking for something nice rather than just … something expensive. And I’m not too worried about the size, as long as it’s pretty.”

She scowls at him. “What if it’s the wrong size and it won’t stay on her finger? Not many faster ways to ruin the moment.”

Harry doesn’t know how to explain to a Muggle that, if the ring’s the wrong size, he’ll just cast an Enlarging or Shrinking Charm on it. He’s about to suggest that his fiancée can just try a different finger when Riddle’s return to the shop rescues him.

“Oh.” Riddle stops on the threshold, seeing Harry. 

The lady looks curiously at them both. “So you two know each other?”

“We used to have some mutual acquaintances.” Riddle rapidly recovers, shutting the door behind him and pulling off the hat Harry had given him. “How may I help you …”

“The name’s Harry.”

“Harry,” Riddle says, a mischievous smile playing on his lips. “What might I offer you today?”

“Rings, please.”

Riddle freezes, and that’s when the lady decides to pounce. “I told him, you’re not one for that sort of thing. Young love and all that.”

Riddle closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Thank you for your consideration, Agnes, but I think I can muddle my way through.”

She stares at him in clear disbelief.

“Well, if you’re sure …” Muttering to herself, she sweeps away into the backroom.

The second they’re alone, Riddle gives him a meaningful look. “Forget everything Agnes told you.”

“You mean about the love of your life,” Harry says with a grin, “forever lost in the war?”

“Yes, Harry.” Riddle slaps one hand on the glass, eyes shining with humor. “The truth is I was secretly pining for Grindelwald all along, and all my issues with Dumbledore are because he got there first.” As Harry bursts out laughing, Riddle smiles, shaking his head. “In all seriousness, Agnes has a soft spot for star-crossed lovers. I used it against her to make her quit asking about my personal life, and ‘am I seeing a nice girl yet’?”

“You’re a little Slytherin to the end, aren’t you?”

“I think so, yes,” Riddle murmurs, growing thoughtful. “Are you honestly shopping for the wedding?”

Harry nods. “Yes.” He stops for a moment. “And Riddle? I would’ve invited you, but …”

“But your friends would Stun me on sight or worse.”

“… Right. Sorry.”

Riddle shrugs, plucking a set of keys from the drawer. “I wouldn't have accepted even if you did invite me; my masochism has its limits.” Before Harry can protest that weddings aren’t all painfully saccharine, Riddle asks, “What are you looking for? Any particular style or colour scheme?”

“Uh … I don’t have much taste in jewelry. Do you?”

“I have excellent taste in jewelry,” Riddle replies quietly, “thank you.”

Their eyes meet over the counter, and Riddle goes terribly still for a moment before shaking himself back to life. With a tiny snort Harry can’t even begin to decode, he bends to unlock one case and efficiently pulls out an engraved golden band with several shining red stones set deep in the metal. “Garnet and a high gold content. Someone like Malfoy would never buy it, but the engraving’s intricate enough that he wouldn’t be able to scoff at it either. Personally, that’s what I’d consider the perfect level of ostentation.” 

Harry laughs at the assessment; he can’t even disagree.

“I got the prior owner to sell it for a quarter of its real value, so the starting price is decent; please spare us both the humiliation of haggling.” Riddle lowers his voice to add, “Garnet holds onto communication charms well, if you’d like to enhance it. I sensed some light magical residue on it when I got it. Nothing alarming of course, but there’s something to be said for restoring it to a wizarding home.”

He places it on Harry’s palm, gently. Harry discreetly runs a diagnostic spell and picks up on the same thing, the light, harmless hum of a charm cast a long time ago. He closes his hand around it.

”I can’t guess if it’s to Ginny Weasley’s taste,” Riddle admits. “But out of everything in this god-awful shop you never should have entered in the first place, it’s what I’d pick for you.”

He makes it through the sentence before shoving his handkerchief over his mouth, small spots like garnets speckling the cloth.

“You found it fast.” Harry tries to chuckle, but he’s suddenly choked up. Perhaps it’s the symbolism of finally taking this step, as the wedding starts to feel properly real. Perhaps it’s the traces of an old magical history, because some days he still feels like the little Muggle boy who never thought he’d leave the cupboard. 

Perhaps it’s the way Riddle chose the ring for him, with such seeming sincerity, knowing full well he wouldn’t live to select a ring for himself.

The backroom door opens, and like a hurricane Agnes storms back into the room. Riddle’s bloody handkerchief is still in his hand, but her eyes slide right over it; it must be charmed to avoid Muggle attention. “Let me see what you’ve chosen. Tell me what the lucky bride looks like?”

“Erm.” Harry flounders momentarily. “She’s small but athletic? She’s got brown eyes and bright red hair …”

“Garnet with bright red hair?” she screeches. “See, Tom, this is why one must really get to know a customer before jumping to conclusions. Put that monstrosity away.” She turns her stare back on Harry. “What she’ll be wanting is a nice bit of green. Come over here, dearie, I’ve got this gorgeous bit of peridot set against silver, just waiting to be snapped up!”

Riddle accepts the scolding mutely, but his eyes have gone dead inside. He looks like he’d rather be in Azkaban. Harry imagines it’d be less psychologically taxing.

“Actually,” he says aloud, a little defensive, “Ri- Tom seems to know me perfectly. He couldn’t have picked better.”

“But have you seen the jade over there? A pop of green will look lovely on her finger, won’t it?”

“It’ll turn her finger green to match,” Riddle mutters darkly in Harry’s ear, “unless you transmute that copper.”

“Oh, my dear.” Apparently not hearing Riddle’s comment, she pleads with Harry directly. “At least take some time to think about it. This peridot’s only five pounds more … How much time have you got ‘til the wedding, hm?”

“Two and a half weeks,” Harry answers.

“Ah, more than enough time,” Agnes says, just as Riddle asks, “It’s that soon?”

And Harry can only watch in horror as Riddle clutches his handkerchief again and presses it hard against his mouth, as he devolves into his worst coughing fit yet. Agnes clucks over him, and she worries about how the “bad air” outside is clearly triggering his “asthma,” and he curls in on himself and coughs until his handkerchief is more red than not. When he finally straightens up again, he’s breathing hard, and his eyes are dangerously glossy.

“Perhaps I’d better take the day,” he says hoarsely.

He disappears with bewildering speed, leaving Harry to convince Agnes that, yes, he really does want the garnet ring, and no, he wouldn’t prefer this other garnet ring that’s twice the price and littered with diamonds. He returns to his lunch break unsettled, despite the ring now packaged snugly in his pocket.

“You’re alive,” he exclaims, when Riddle greets him at the door that night.

Riddle replies with a wan smile. “For now. Did you get the …”

“The ring you gave me? Yes, I bet Ginny’ll love it.”

“Perfect,” Riddle mutters. A little frantic, he runs to grab a vial of Cough Potion from a cupboard, removes the cap, and takes a sip, only to spit it out and succumb to an even more violent fit of coughing. Screwing up his face, he abandons the vial on the counter. “So that’s enough of that.”

“You’re reacting badly to potions?”

“Even worse than usual today. Perhaps I should be thankful, though,” he muses while pouring himself a cup of tea. “It got me away from you and Agnes. I swear that was the most humiliating conversation of my life.”

Harry lifts his eyebrows. “Even more than the time in sixth year?”

Riddle meets him with the most infuriatingly innocent look. “I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”

And then he dissolves into another bout of uncontrollable coughing.

Chapter Text

Before

Somehow, Quidditch made less sense without Riddle. As the strongest flyer on Gryffindor’s team, Harry ended up switching into the empty Seeker’s spot, now that he wasn’t the only Chaser who could dream of scoring points against Slytherin. Though he was objectively great at it, it was a lonely position, detached from the bustle of the main game. Flitting over the other players’ heads, he couldn’t help feeling somehow out-of-place. Unanchored.

In sixth year, he once again had only one class with Riddle: Potions. Riddle no doubt knew the answers to all of Slughorn’s questions, but he never spoke up anymore. Instead he let Hermione gather all the house points, withholding his usual sharp commentary, and without it, Harry found classes soporifically dry. Unable to focus, he began struggling on his assignments again; Slughorn hovered and tutted and snuck him special tips in what he clearly thought was a covert manner. In sharp contrast Riddle produced the most perfect brew every time, only to have his efforts pointedly overlooked. That was an obvious charade. Slughorn clearly hated every moment he couldn’t spend fawning over his favorite pet snake. 

Honestly, Riddle didn’t seem to care either way.

During every class he would sit on one end of the dungeon, in the back, as if he could fade from sight and thus memory. Harry always found himself sitting up front at the other edge. They never interacted, and Hermione insisted this was a good thing (“You don’t understand how Dark those spells were, I can’t believe he got away with just a slap on the wrist, he’s going to get people killed”). Ron agreed with her (“Some people are just wrong in the head, mate”).

Now as lost in Potions as he had been in first year, Harry stole backwards glances at Riddle. He sat back silently as his potions assembled themselves, only the slight wrinkle in his brow betraying the effort it took. Harry watched him, and he remembered the little boy learning to balance on a broom for the first time, and he wondered what the hell had happened in between.

Harry wasn’t looking for anything in particular. He just wanted to find a place to practice an unexpectedly tricky bit of Transfiguration, turning buns to a platter of hot sausages. Unfortunately food wasn’t allowed in the library, and he couldn’t practice in the Gryffindor common room unless he wanted to be laughed at the entire time, pelted with comments on the length and curve of his bangers.

So he happened to amble up to the seventh floor one night, his pockets full of bread he’d pilfered from the Great Hall. And he happened to notice an unassuming door under an archway, where he’d never noticed a door before. He knocked, got no response and then tried the handle.

Harry stepped into one of the strangest rooms he’d ever seen. It was a hall illuminated by dim torchlight, which shone on tables upon tables of odd artifacts. There were several vials filled with liquids that gleamed like oil. There were spools of ribbons next to coils of rope. There was a heap of equipment that looked like it was from Care of Magical Creatures, whips and buckles and paddles. There were paintings on the walls, making what sounded like noises of distress, but when Harry squinted he realised none of the subjects were fully clothed. None of them seemed to be in ordinary distress, either. And there was a table of statues in various materials, all of them shaped like …

Well.

Like sausages.

Harry walked forward in a fever of morbid curiosity, silently taking everything in, right until his feet got tangled in something and he tripped, falling hard against a table. 

“What the hell?” Riddle suddenly appeared, bare-chested and thoroughly flustered. He was clearly sitting on the floor; he must have been lying down just a moment back. His lower half was still hidden behind a piece of furniture, though Harry would be hard-pressed to say what kind of furniture. He’d never seen anything that shape before.

“Where’s your shirt?” Harry exclaimed. Looking down at what he’d stumbled over, he got the answer to his question. He simultaneously discovered the location of Riddle’s trousers.

“What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” Harry shot back. Then he took another look around. “What are you doing here?”

Riddle stared at him, and Harry realised he had the answer to that question too.

A heap of cloth materialised on the table nearest Riddle, who lunged and grabbed it before realising it was made of sheer black lace. 

“No,” Riddle snapped at the ceiling, in the same tone Hermione used to scold Crookshanks. Another pile appeared in the same spot. He pulled this one on, a solid, luxurious robe of rippling absinthe-green, and got to his feet, coming entirely into view. Despite being opaque, the fabric clung.

(Harry suddenly understood what all the girls were talking about, when they compared Riddle to Greek statuary.)

“You are really not supposed to be in here,” Riddle said with an aggrieved sigh.

“Hey,” Harry bit out, “I was just looking for a place to study, you’re the one who …” 

Trailing off, he gestured helplessly at their surroundings.

“I’m not saying it’s your fault,” Riddle said, face softening slightly as he cast his eyes about the hall. “It’s the room’s fault, I was quite clear that I was to be left alone, and I can’t imagine why it thought I re …” He trailed off too and shook his head. “Look, would you like me to Obliviate you?”

“No,” Harry said weakly, “but thank you for the offer. How about I just …”

He waved a hand at the door and then ran out through it. He doubted that Riddle actually cast anything, but he couldn’t help feeling thoroughly Confunded.

Harry and Riddle kept not interacting, but now there was an element of mutual mortification to it.

While looking at everyone but Riddle in the Great Hall at dinner, Harry asked Hermione a question. “Hey, I heard Malfoy talking about a special room that sometimes shows up on the seventh floor. Do you know what that might be?”

Hermione thought for a moment, clearly puzzled, before whispering, “It could be the Come-and-Go Room.”

“Ah,” Harry said after he finished choking on his pumpkin juice. “That sounds right.”

The school rumor mill was working overtime to cope with Riddle’s fall from grace. Students regularly came up to Harry to whisper about last year’s practice duel, which was now referred to only as “You-Know-When,” and to inquire whether Riddle had really cast twenty-five Cruciatuses on him. There were stories that Riddle was now actively recruiting for Grindelwald, converting all of Slytherin to the cause of slaughtering the Muggleborns in the castle, never mind that Riddle was a Muggleborn himself. And according to Ron and Hermione, Prefects were regularly having to dispel rumors among the first-years that Tom Riddle was already a full-fledged Dark Lord who had dominated Quidditch simply by putting all his opponents under the Imperius.

“He’s arrogant,” Hermione said, “and unsavory, and his ‘intellectual tastes’ are definitely criminal. But a group of Muggleborns just came up to me insisting that he’s secretly Grindelwald’s second-in-command, and honestly this has all gotten wildly out of proportion!”

Harry fidgeted nervously, and Hermione dropped the subject, assuming he was uncomfortable with discussing the Dark Lord. The real problem was Harry hadn’t yet figured out how to discuss Riddle without thinking of him in that room, with that green robe on.

Or worse: without that robe on.

But in the real world, Riddle swanned about like an emperor in now badge-less black. Whispers followed him in the hallways, and crowds parted to make way for him. He barely spoke to anyone out of the inner circle of Slytherin upperclassmen, which had quietly, unquestionably closed ranks around him. It had become his inner circle at some point, as if the same students hadn’t scorned him as a “mudblood” just a few years back.

Riddle never openly acknowledged his newfound infamy, but Harry could tell he knew all the outlandish rumors flying around him. Going by the confidence in his stride and the wicked sparkle in his eye, he was loving it.

He wasn’t invited to the Slug Club anymore, of course. Harry attended the holiday party with Ginny, who pulled him into a fascinating two-hour conversation with none other than Gwenog Jones. In the presence of her Quidditch idol, Ginny was practically giddy with happiness, and Harry found himself swept up easily by her enthusiasm. Slughorn stopped by and declared them the sweetest couple he’d ever seen, perhaps excepting Harry’s own parents. The whole room seemed to have a golden glow, decorated lavishly with ribbon and greenery and candles.

It shouldn’t have seemed so empty.

Harry always stayed at Hogwarts during the holidays. Riddle always did too, though in sixth year one might not have known it. Harry never saw him around during meals or in the halls or library; he even skipped the Christmas banquet, apparently preferring to skulk in some lonely corner. Professor Dumbledore was likewise conspicuously absent from the head table. Among those who remained, the merrymaking seemed strained. Even the Wizarding Crackers were less entertaining than usual, since all the younger Muggleborns kept flinching at the noise.

Luckily, the Weasley twins had fiddled with their fireworks so they detonated with the clanging of bells, rather than the ordinary booming. In honor of their innovation, they’d decided to sneak back into the castle and put on a New Year’s Eve show for all of Hogwarts and Hogsmeade. Somehow they’d roped Harry into scouting the Astronomy Tower the day before, to check that the wards hadn’t locked students out over the holidays. Warm and full after a winter feast, Harry bounded up the tower stairs …

Riddle was at the top. He was balanced on the very edge of the tower, legs dangling perilously over the precipice. One hand was curled loosely around a bottle, its long neck gleaming in the moonlight.

He glanced back and toasted graciously to Harry. “Potter.”

“You?” Harry said, mock-scandalized. “Drinking Firewhiskey?”

“Ogden’s Oldest Firewhiskey.” Riddle took a long swig, straight from the bottle. “I’m a master smuggler, haven’t you heard?”

“I did hear that, actually. Word on the street says you’re the clearing house for the world’s dragon egg trade.”

Riddle flung his head back to laugh, loose-limbed from drinking, the extraordinary sound ringing through their lonely tower. “Amazing how these things take on a life of their own.”

He considered the bottle for a moment and then conjured a glass, murmuring a long unfamiliar incantation. Harry didn’t catch it, too fascinated by the extravagant, wildly excessive beauty of Riddle’s magic. Streams of silver and gold wound from the bottom up, braiding themselves into an intricate goblet. Harry was about to point out how Riddle had left a diamond-shaped hole in the top when a dark gemstone materialised and slotted itself perfectly into place. Riddle poured Firewhiskey into it and offered it to Harry.

“Poison, I assume?”

“Please,” Riddle snorted. “Why would I want to? We aren’t Quidditch rivals anymore.”

“Because Grindelwald’s paying you to?”

He furrowed his brow. “I thought the story was that I’ve been hired to assassinate Dumbledore.”

“Well, you are an overachiever.”

Miraculously, Riddle laughed a second time; as he put down his Firewhiskey to draw his wand instead, Harry noted the bottle was already half-empty. “I am. Which is why I promise you, if I was trying to poison you, I’d have the tact to at least make a house elf do it. Accio, bezoar.”

Glass smashed somewhere far below them, and a bezoar soared right up into Riddle’s waiting hand. “Voila, your insurance policy.”

“Is either of us seventeen?”

“I’m close enough,” Riddle said. “As for you … it’s not as if I’m a Prefect, Potter. You can do what you like.”

After a moment’s deliberation, Harry grabbed both the goblet and the bezoar. Riddle’s chuckling bubbled up again, apparently irrepressible.

“You’re in an odd mood,” Harry observed. He took a seat on the floor near him, albeit further from the drop.

Riddle hummed and kicked his legs in the breeze, as if to confirm it.

Harry took a sip of his drink and instantly choked, as Riddle smirked diabolically. Still, it was no more lethal than any other Firewhiskey, and Harry took another sip as soon as his eyes stopped watering. He turned his gaze on the school below, majestic and peaceful, its eaves delicately outlined by icicles. A few windows were lit from the inside by flickering golden firelight.

“I don’t think I’ll ever recover,” Riddle breathed after a few minutes, “from how beautiful Hogwarts is.”

He’d plucked the sentiment straight from Harry’s brain (or he might have if Merrythought hadn’t worked a unit in Occlumency into the year’s lesson plan, thoroughly reinforcing what Wood had taught him). Harry remembered the both of them, climbing into a boat together in the first year, gasping in unison as the castle came into view for the first time. The memory lifted his heart to his throat.

Swallowing around the sudden feeling, Harry looked at the goblet more carefully, taking the time to appreciate the gorgeous, obsessive attention to detail. “I don’t think I’ll ever recover from how utterly overdramatic you get, with your magic.”

“You don’t like it?”

“I love it.” Harry drained the rest of the whiskey. “It’s ridiculous, and I want ten.”

“I thought you might,” Riddle said lightly. “I chose a red gem, in Gryffindor’s honour. Bloodstone.”

“Charming name.”

“Don’t judge it too quickly. It’s been used since ancient times for protective magic. For life and health and good fortune.”

“I didn’t think you knew about jewelry.”

He smirked, retorting, “I have excellent taste in jewelry, thank you.”

Harry ran his fingers over the stone and found it to be subtly engraved. “What’s it carved with?”

“I designed a new rune to represent myself.”

“Of course you did.”

Riddle chuckled. “It’s a mix of the Hydra, which represents the number nine, and Eihwaz, which originally meant yew.”

“Yew like your wand?”

“Yes.” He twirled it casually, rolling it between his fingers and making no motion to attack. “The meaning’s grown over time. Now it refers to defense. Protection.”

Harry’s focus remained on Riddle’s long, elegant fingers, left bare in defiance of the cold. Then it drifted to his wrists, the delicate veins just barely visible in the moonlight. “I put it on things that are precious to me,” Riddle kept saying. “It provides a measure of protection in its own right.”

Harry was only half-listening to the words, too entranced by Riddle’s voice, luscious and warm like hot cocoa.

“More importantly, it tells me if the target’s in crisis, so I can do my very best to help.”

Most importantly, Harry quite suddenly realised that he wanted Tom Riddle.

That was a fact. Inconvenient, unexpected, alarming, but a fact nevertheless. He looked at the goblet, momentarily hoping the whiskey had been spiked with a love potion, but the truth was his feelings had been brewing for years, hadn’t they? He’d known Riddle at eleven, proud and prickly and persistent to a fault. Riddle hadn’t wanted him, but Harry was drawn in nonetheless, like a moth to a flame. 

Years of buried longing swelled up now, as he found himself drawn to Riddle more than ever. Longing and affection and desire roiled together, suddenly raw and exposed on the surface of his mind …

“Grindelwald will try to kill you,” Riddle said abruptly.

“What?” Harry was momentarily distracted from his internal crisis. “You mean … he’ll attack the school?”

“I don’t know about that. But he’ll try to kill you, personally.” Riddle took another sip from his Firewhiskey and kept on talking, as if this was perfectly ordinary cocktail conversation. “He’ll fail. I don’t give a damn what fate says.”

“Fate?” Harry frowned, wondering if Riddle had had entirely too much to drink. Could Harry confiscate a bottle, even if he’d never been a Prefect? “Is this, what, one of his prophecies?”

Riddle hummed in confirmation, taking a recklessly long swig. “I can’t tell you about it, of course. You’ll just rush in to make sure it fulfills itself, with a heart like yours.”

“What do you mean, a heart like mine? How is my heart any different from yours?”

Riddle laughed again, now a harsh jangling sound. “They aren’t comparable organs, Harry, they’re practically from different species. But I’m trying to be good enough. For you, I’m trying.”

“Riddle, what are you talking about …”

Harry broke off with a hiss and dropped the goblet on the floor. It clattered against stone, the bloodstone’s inscription glowing red-hot, and the same shape was burnt into the back of Harry’s hand. He could feel it, even if his skin looked perfectly unhurt.

“A tattoo with invisible ink,” Riddle said. He’s suddenly on his feet, eyebrows arched in amusement, yew wand perfectly steady. “It’s not permanent yet, so you can’t know about it either. You can’t keep anything from tonight.”

Practically blinded by pain, Harry fumbled for his own wand. “Expelli-“

“Obliviate!”

Harry shuddered, trudging up the Astronomy Tower stairs to see whether it was off-limits to students over the holidays. He wasn’t sure when it had gotten so late; the new, stricter curfew must have snuck up on him. He walked around for a bit, ensuring that the area was all perfectly accessible for tomorrow’s show, and then hurried away again.

(Though he checked his pockets that night and found everything in order, he couldn’t shake the feeling like he’d lost something terribly precious along the way.)

He watched the Weasleys’ display from the ground floor the next night, unable to name the sudden hollow in his heart, doing his best to think of the fireworks and of Ginny and ignore it. He was lost deep in denial when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

“If you would, Harry, please join me in my office,” Professor Dumbledore said quietly, for his ears alone. Despite his auburn hair and smart eggplant robes, he suddenly seemed older, and far too tired.

Harry frowned. “Why, what happened?”

“I’m afraid Tom Riddle is gone.”

After

Tom Riddle is going too quickly.

Harry never really faced it, before. It seemed like Riddle’s condition had stabilized soon after Harry found him again, and the symptom control potions were half-working on him, and it seemed like maybe Riddle could cling to life even without most of his magic. It seemed like he could persist, day after day, through pure stubbornness.

But he’s been deteriorating slowly over the months, in subtle ways. And then something shifts that day in the pawn shop, and he shatters all at once, consumed by his bloody coughing.

The next night, Harry runs out of the office before Zhang can tell him to. He runs to the dress robe fitting Mrs. Weasley scheduled, agrees to the first style he’s shown, and runs back out again though Ginny hasn’t even made it in yet, caught up in a joint interview with Gwenog Jones. He rushes to Riddle’s flat, unable to shake the feeling that something’s gone horribly wrong.

He hears the coughing even before he opens the door.

“Harry?” Riddle attempts to push himself up from his bed, only to collapse backwards again. He looks frail, and exhausted, and he’s flushed all over from fever. There are glasses of potions that have been left half-full; Harry can only guess what side effects dissuaded Riddle from getting through entire doses.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” Harry says, breathless. “Don’t get up, I’ll grab you food right now.”

“No,” Riddle groans, sinking boneless into his pillows. “The potions for my fever and my appetite both backfired, I don’t want a single damn bite.”

“You have to eat,” Harry insists, fumbling around Riddle’s kitchen to at least fetch him a cup of tea. His hands are shaking. “You’ll die without food.”

“I’ll die anyway, who cares?”

That statement is so un-Riddlelike that Harry knocks a cup right over. “I care.”

Riddle mumbles something incoherent. Something like “Wish I believed that.”

He’s rolled over to watch Harry now, eyes following him though they’re glazed over with fever.

“Were you busy with wedding things?” Riddle asks. His usual air of detachment fails him, giving way to oddly earnest curiosity. His usual accent, the poshest Slytherin could offer, has disappeared. 

Harry nods, barely thinking. “Robe fittings.”

There’s a fragile hitch of breath. Harry braces for the coughing, but it doesn’t come.

“She’ll be beautiful, obviously,” Riddle murmurs instead, diction thoroughly shot to hell. “Lovely, and pure. And she makes you happy, which is what matters most.” 

Riddle’s gaze rapidly grows as vague and unfocused as his words, almost as if he’s falling into a Seer’s trance. Harry’s quite certain he’s never seen him so unguarded before, yet it somehow feels familiar.

“You’ll make it to your hundredth anniversary, bickering over Cleaning Charms versus Cleaning Potions. And you’ll stay alive in Elysium …” Something else shifts in the way he rambling, until he seems to be addressing himself even more than Harry. “… while I burn in hell, and we’ll both deserve it.”

“You need a Healer,” Harry mutters. 

“Go ahead,” Riddle replies, looking somewhere past him, “flipendo me into the flames for good this time. I won’t mind.”

Harry’s not sure whether Riddle heard him or not.

“… I’m calling a Healer right now,” Harry says more firmly. Obviously Riddle’s words are totally meaningless, just the product of feverish delirium and potions gone wrong, but they’re still alarming. “You’re worried about being found, but I know a couple discreet people outside the hospital system. There have to be more things we can try, because the thought of you dying from a lack of magic is ridiculous!”

“Imperio,” Riddle says, apropos of nothing, without a wand in his hand. “Obliviate, full-strength. Unicorn blood would just set my intestines on fire, the way I’m going. And I could say potions but I am better than her.”

As he pauses his monologue to choke up more blood, Harry conjures a pen and a paper and begins scribbling his plea on the spot. The Healer he’s thinking of charges through the nose for house calls; he instructs her to send the bills to the Potter account at Gringotts.

“But all that’s a bandage on gangrene,” Riddle says, balling up his handkerchief and casting it away, growing louder the less sense he makes. “Doesn’t fix the bacteria from the bloody filthy orphanage and doesn’t fix the root disease, because that’s just me. They were right, Harry.” Riddle’s stare is suddenly intensely focused and locked on him, demanding his full attention, begging for something Harry can’t begin to guess at. “You said I was tortured and you were right, but they were right first. They exorcised me three times because they couldn’t get it out of me, because I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” Harry pleads, stepping towards Riddle, wishing he’d just be clear for once.

“I was always wrong,” he mutters after a moment, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. With a moan he rolls onto his back again, eyes fluttering closed as the rage drains out of him, leaving absolutely nothing in its place. “I thought I could be good enough. As if I wasn’t the infection all along.”

Harry has no idea what that means, but there are sudden tears in his eyes. He hurries to blink them back.

“Of course ...” As he considers the ceiling, Riddle’s own eyes grow thoughtful, almost amused. “You won’t go down with me, will you? So I still win, and death and fate can both go to hell.”

Harry decides owls aren’t fast enough for this particular letter. “Don’t die in the next hour, okay? I just need to make one Floo call.”

“Harry?” he asks, voice small, eyes alighting on Harry as if just now recalling he’s got company. “Stay.”

“I can’t, but I’ll be back, promise.”

Heart twisting in his chest, Harry leaves Riddle.

Before

Riddle was Grindelwald’s second-in-command.

It was a new development, Dumbledore told Harry. A day ago, Grindelwald had likely never heard of Tom Riddle, Muggleborn Hogwarts sixth-year. But on New Year’s Eve, Riddle had turned seventeen and instantly Apparated out of Britain, showing up at the gates of Nurmengard with an array of gifts.

Gifts.

Riddle brought seventeen Slytherins, all of age. It seemed that they had all willingly defected to Grindelwald’s side, following Riddle like children trailing the Pied Piper. They would make excellent soldiers on the battlefield. They would make equally valuable hostages, used to press the great houses of Britain into submission.

Riddle brought three vials of Acromantula venom.

Riddle brought three litres of fresh basilisk venom, smuggled or stolen from who knows where.

Riddle brought another vial, stolen quite certainly from a cupboard beside Dumbledore’s bed. It stood at the center of a blood pact, Dumbledore explained, between himself and Grindelwald. It ensured that, if they faced each other in a duel and either of them made a move that could kill the other, they would both die for it. Dumbledore had spent years toiling to break that pact, only to have the crucial vial stolen away just as he approached a breakthrough.

Riddle brought the Resurrection Stone. It was a family heirloom, because Riddle wasn’t a Muggleborn at all. He was Slytherin through and through, in ways no one had expected.

Harry heard all this with a growing pit in his stomach.

“Did he say anything to you before he left?” Dumbledore asked urgently, blue eyes piercing. “Did he betray any sign of his intentions?”

Harry tried to recall. It seemed right that he should have known, that he wouldn’t entirely miss such a massive change in Riddle’s heart. But when Harry searched his memories, looking for the improbable compassion and understanding he had always held for Riddle, he found only a chilly void. It was as if a hole had opened in his own heart. 

He’d simply forgotten how he ever cared for Riddle in the first place.

Dumbledore finally sighed, unlocking his study door and leading Harry into the inner sanctum, up to a grand goblet he called a “Pensieve.” “You should know, Harry, that there is a prophecy.”

The Dark Lord will mark him as an equal, 
for he will have power he knows not,
and both must fall at the hand of the other
for each one’s heart shall keep the other’s beating…

With gifts, Riddle bought Grindelwald’s attention. He kept it with a breathtaking flair for violence.

He never deigned to enter the battlefield, of course. His fellow Slytherins fought and fell, one after another, but Riddle remained out of the line of fire, no doubt safely ensconced in a secret laboratory somewhere on the Continent. According to the Aurors, seventeen-year-old Tom Riddle wasn’t relevant to the conflict at all. They claimed he might have fled, realising how he was in over his head. They claimed he might have simply died without fanfare.

But as he and Dumbledore uncovered Grindelwald’s rapidly increasing arsenal of tactics, Harry recognised Riddle’s handiwork. Maybe, just maybe, he was at fault for the upgraded Inferi. He could also have made the untreatable, untraceable poisons.

And he was unquestionably responsible for the weaponised Bludgers, modified to hone in on victims and track them obsessively across battlefields, smashing spines and skulls with even more than the usual zeal.

Harry dropped out of Hogwarts before his seventh year.

Ron and Hermione tried desperately to talk him out of it. They both intended to go back after summer, to finish their magical training and avoid an absurd amount of danger, and he couldn’t blame them. They’d always been safe at Hogwarts after all; Grindelwald had never managed to do any real damage within its walls except with Riddle acting on his behalf. Furthermore, there was already a devoted international resistance movement moving against Grindelwald. It would hardly benefit from the help of three more seventeen-year-olds, none of whom had even graduated school. 

“But the prophecy …” Harry protested.

“Is unreliable and imprecise, like all prophecies are. Divination is a silly, silly subject,” Hermione spat, still bitter over receiving an “A” on that OWL. “Still I tried taking it seriously, and I looked up how the word ‘marked’ has gotten used in prophecies over time. Now, maybe Grindelwald’s more prone to poetic ambiguity than most Seers, because of his personality or because English isn’t his first language, but for the ‘Dark Lord’ to ‘mark’ you as his equal, I’m almost positive he’d have to do it himself. Vinda Rosier was powerful ...” She gestured at Harry’s scar. “But I doubt she could do it for him. Grindelwald hasn’t properly marked you.”

For no reason in particular, Harry found himself scratching the back of his hand.

“He hasn’t marked you as an equal,” she continued, “because this isn’t your war! There’s already an army that’s extremely well-organized and dedicated to stopping him, and if you want to join it and be really useful, you should finish your seventh year first, that material’s important! Of course you’re already a competent wizard, Harry, but with all due respect … there’s no way Grindelwald’s fate is going to be decided by one Hogwarts dropout.”

Harry heard out her entire prepared argument. He stuck to his decision anyway and hugged her goodbye, though they were both tearing up the whole time.

Dumbledore, who had taken a leave of absence himself, reacted to Harry’s news with quiet resignation. He simply informed Harry that he would be welcome back at Hogwarts in a future year, should he choose to return. Harry held onto the implicit promise that he’d be alive long enough to do that.

He couldn’t ignore the war any longer. Not now that Grindelwald had Riddle. 

Harry didn’t know why fate had decided to tie him of all people to the Dark Lord. Dumbledore had assured him, albeit in particularly vague wording, that prophecies could be misinterpreted, and that it wasn’t absolutely necessary for him to die in the war. Dumbledore still intended to get the vial back and break the pact. He intended to end the war by facing Grindelwald himself, without having to hold anything back.

“But perhaps,” he mused, “the true purpose of the prophecy is to prevent hasty killing entirely. This war could end with both you and Lord Grindelwald alive, with him imprisoned for the rest of your very, very long lives.”

Harry was incongruently pleased as he beheld the Inferi swarming Paris, no doubt personally overseen by Grindelwald. It meant he wasn’t at home, protecting the vial. 

Harry was full of hope, when he slipped away on Dumbledore’s orders to steal back the blood pact, from the depths of Nurmengard.

After

Riddle quits his job.

“What’d dear Agnes say?” Harry asks.

“That she saw it coming. Allegedly, the horrors of my star-crossed love have been whittling me down for months.”

Though he’s regained his wits after clearing that last disastrous round of potions from his system, Riddle can’t quite pull off the wry smile he’s attempting.

He quits his job. He quits leaving his flat at all.

He’s wracked with non-stop coughing and a fever that won’t break. Rushing from America to meet him the next day, the Healer insists on having a private conversation with her patient, asking Harry to leave the flat and putting up new privacy wards after he goes. When she sees him again, stepping out of the flat and closing the door quietly behind her, she looks grave.

“As you know, it’s a case of tuberculosis, contracted in his rather unsanitary Muggle childhood and resistant to Muggle drugs,” she says, after throwing up another round of wards. “It’s flared now due to a sudden weakening of his immune system, itself caused by a weakening of his magic.”

“Because he was tortured,” Harry sighs, rubbing his aching forehead, “whether he’ll admit it or not.”

“I can’t confirm that. He demanded the strictest confidentiality around the state of his magic, just after he finished interrogating my medical knowledge more thoroughly than my official examiners did.”

Next, she tells him there are no ethically sound options for treatment. Harry presses her on that, the “ethically sound” bit, because ethical concerns have never exactly stopped Riddle before. Unluckily for him, she’s entirely too discreet to give him any more information.

“His body is doing its very best to burn the infection away,” she tells him. “But without his magic, it is a lost cause.”

“So there’s honestly nothing you can do?” Harry says, in quiet disbelief.

She shakes her head. “But I have his permission to take him to St. Mungo’s, at the very end. It will help legally, to settle his affairs, and the Apothecaries there have ways of giving him … a more dignified death.”

“How long does he have?”

“A month or two. I am surprised he has survived until now.” She tips her head, eyes flicking up and down, inspecting him curiously. “Perhaps I shouldn’t be.”

Chapter Text

After

“I’m finalizing my will,” Riddle informs Harry. He wastes no time mincing words anymore.

He’s moderately coherent again, but there’s no pretending he’s alright, alternately burning up and shivering violently, no matter how many charmed blankets he wraps around himself. He’s taking assorted nutrient powders, Healer’s orders, yet they haven’t kept the weight from melting off him until he’s nearly as hollow as a skeleton.

“I see,” Harry says, almost in a whisper.

“The Resurrection Stone’s going to the Department of Mysteries,” Riddle reports apathetically, his voice a scratchy shadow of its former self. “According to the most reputable texts in the Department’s library …” Harry lifts an eyebrow at that, because Riddle definitely ought not to have access to that library. “It has an even more gruesome history than the wand. Madness, addiction, suicide … I met the prior owner, and I wouldn’t wish that fate on anyone I even remotely liked.”

“So you’re giving it to the Ministry,” Harry observes drily.

Riddle shrugs. “The Unspeakables are the most qualified possible owners. If they let it destroy them, it’s their own fault.” With the ghost of a smile in his eyes, he reaches for the Elder Wand, lying useless on his nightstand. “Speaking of artifacts that bring more trouble than they’re worth, I’d like to leave you this.”

He doesn’t hand it over just yet, simply turning it over in his own hands and then putting it back in its place. Harry doesn’t even think about taking it yet. Its loyalty is likely already his, and this would be the least bloody transition in the Elder Wand’s history, and Harry doesn’t want the damned twig at all.

“You can donate it too if you’d prefer,” Riddle declares matter-of-factly. “But when you take it, you’ll have to sign a contract swearing you aren’t Albus Dumbledore in disguise, you are not taking it on behalf of Albus Dumbledore, and to the best of your knowledge, information and belief this wand will not make it into the hands of Albus Dumbledore.”

Harry gives him a very strange look before he sighs. “… Fine. And thank you.”

“I don’t own much else that I can legally report at this point,” Riddle mutters, glancing about the barren flat. “The rest’ll be handled. Oh, if I leave you the Firebolt, will you promise not to break your neck?”

“That thing is a death trap.” He tries to laugh, but it comes out as more of a wet shudder.

“So that’s a yes?”

“Of course it’s a yes.” His eyes fall to the python currently wrapped around Riddle’s neck like a scarf. “What about …”

“Do you remember Rubeus Hagrid? He owes me.”

Harry groans, remembering a harmless, blundering boy who seemed as much Hufflepuff as Gryffindor. “Please tell me you’re not blackmailing him.”

“I tried to, but I don’t think he noticed the threat.” His lips twitch upwards, the first shred of actual humor to grace his face in days. “He’s agreed to take in my snakes. You see, I once helped him grow an Acromantula for half a year, inside Gryffindor Tower.”

“You what?”

“His gratitude is pure and everlasting,” Riddle says, somehow pulling off sincerity and utter contempt at the same time. “He’s vowed to treat my snakes like his own children. They’ll live like royalty, so long as he doesn’t accidentally sit on one.”

The snake hisses around his neck, and he reaches up to pet it and starts to reply, still in possession of his Parseltongue. But his throat catches on something, and he grabs for a handkerchief, only to miss and wind up catching the blood with the sleeve of his nightshirt. Hissing wildly, the snake tightens its coils, seemingly trying to comfort him by winding more closely around his neck. He strokes it, drawing Harry’s eyes to spindly, gentle fingers, and it curls its head protectively into the hollow of Riddle’s collarbone. For a moment, Harry wishes he could do the same.

The wedding’s in two days.

The Weasley brothers have planned a smaller party for the night before the wedding, in honour of both Ginny and Harry. “A hag night,” Ron calls it, “like hen and stag.” Harry thinks that’s just fine, as long as there aren’t actual hags involved (one tried to take a bite out of his neck at work, a couple weeks back). Invitations have gone out to a close-knit group of their old Hogwarts friends, plus a couple of Ginny’s favorite colleagues from work.

“Is there anyone else we should invite for you?” Ron asks the morning before. “Off-duty Aurors, up for a fun night out?”

Harry thinks of Riddle, practically bedridden, scarcely able to choke down a bowl of broth or a cup of tea. “No one for me, thanks.”

He tells Riddle about tomorrow’s hag night. “And then it’s the wedding, so I’ll be busy for the next two days. But if you need anything from me, you can send your owl, alright?”

Riddle starts to reply, jeering about the Weasleys’ likely taste in liquor, only to cough so badly he loses his voice for good. Once his chest stops heaving, he scrawls out a note observing he won’t be good company anymore. 

He tells Harry to go.

“I can if you want,” Harry replies after reading that note a few times. He pulls out an old radio, magically altered to record some of the sounds it played. “But I found this little shop that sells old Quidditch broadcasts. Really good matches, too. I found one with seventy-seven fouls and I thought of you.”

He places the radio in Riddle’s trembling hands. Their eyes meet for a moment, and Riddle’s eyes are treacherously glassy.

And all of the sudden Harry’s brimming over and breaking, wetness trailing down both his cheeks.

“I do not want your pity. I never have,” Riddle writes with a scowl. He shoves the paper at Harry with surprising violence, never mind that his own eyes are still red-rimmed.

Harry reads it and nods, roughly rubbing his cheeks dry. He doesn’t have names for all the feelings clogging his throat, but if he did, pity would be far down the list. 

“May I stay for a bit?” he ekes out, once more terribly unsure of where he and Riddle stand. “Could we listen to the start of the game together?”

Riddle’s jaw tightens, and his hand twitches around his pen, no doubt trying to muster up a “no.” Harry stays where he is, quietly awaiting his dismissal. 

With a sigh, Riddle picks up his pen.

“I’d like that very much,” he writes.

It feels odd, going to a pub after work instead of rushing straight to Riddle’s.

“A round of Firewhiskey for everyone,” Fred calls from a cozy back table in the Three Broomsticks. “Ogden’s Older, if you don’t mind!” He looks meaningfully at both Harry and Ginny. “You’ve both had Firewhiskey before, haven’t you?”

Ginny, who’s dressed in rich midnight blue with her hair elegantly rolled up, nods. “I have. Gwen’s got a tradition of trying all the local liquors, after every away game.”

“All of them?” George lifts an appraising eyebrow, like he’s seeing his baby sister for the first time.

Ginny rolls her eyes. “I don’t buy everything on the menu. Gwen does that, and I just steal her glasses when she’s not looking.”

“Speaking of dear Gwennie, where is she?” Fred asks.

“She’s held up at the Ministry, still appealing her suspension.”

Ron’s eyes light up. “After she snapped that Parisian Keeper’s broomstick, right?”

Harry frowns. “I didn’t hear about this.”

“I assume he paid good money to keep it out of the papers,” Hermione comments, Seeing his confusion, she clears her throat. “The other kind of broomstick, Harry.”

“Gwen was in the right, he was making comments about her breasts on the pitch,” Ginny says serenely. “And if you call her ‘Gwennie’ to her face, Fred, she’ll snap your broomstick too.”

The shots arrive a minute later, and Ron gets to his feet to make a toast. “To Harry and Ginny. May you have long and happy lives together …”

“And may you stop writing Harry love poems,” George interrupts, looking at Ginny, “now that you’ve finally got him for life.”

Harry’s eyes bug out. “Love poems?”

“Yeah, she’s been writing you sonnets from age eleven …”

Everyone trails off expectantly as Harry takes his first sip of Firewhiskey. It burns, but not nearly as badly as he feared. He swallows it easily.

“You’re sure you’re a first-timer?” Ron asks suspiciously, and Harry nods in reply. 

“Nice.” Ginny says. “Most people spit it back out.” Then she turns back to George in outrage. “I had seven different locking charms on my diary.”

“We know, you were practically begging us to read it!”

“He walks with gleaming locks like devil’s snare,” Fred quotes, one hand over his heart, “and with one glance he turns my heart to air. Should’ve been more like ‘tangled locks’ for Harry here, but otherwise, a poetic masterpiece.”

Though he hides his mouth with one hand, Harry can’t help the giggles threatening to overflow, much like the bubbles in the Butterbeer Hermione has sensibly chosen.

“I wrote that when I was thirteen,” Ginny says with remarkable composure, “and it wasn’t about Harry, actually. That was the year I fancied Tom Riddle.”

Harry chokes on his Firewhiskey this time and winds up spitting some of it back into the glass. On the bright side, he’s not as bad as Ron, who sprays his across the table.

“That evil prat?” Ron exclaims, even as he mops up the splattered liquor. “What did anyone ever see in him, I swear I don’t get it …”

The conversation turns into a paean to their old Quidditch days, and all the victories they would’ve won if Slytherin hadn’t elevated cheating to an art form. Then Ron starts talking about Britain’s World Cup prospects, now that the war’s ended and the competition’s been properly scheduled once and for all. Ginny confirms that, yes, of course she’s planning to try out for the national team, and Hermione begins waxing poetic about the legal challenges around Ireland’s bid for hosting the game. Fred and George start brainstorming a line of items to sell at the games, because they believe they can completely revolutionize the noisemaker industry. The others wince out of concern for their eardrums, but they hardly disagree.

The energy at the table is practically tangible, all their hopes overflowing for the future. Harry does his best to focus on the here and now, drinking one shot after another and drowning himself in the joyous noise, sternly pulling his thoughts away from a cold flat in Muggle London.

Gwenog Jones rushes in a few hours later, throwing open the door, declaring, “I’m back in the game!” and winning an instant round of applause from the entire bar. She swaggers over to their table, bearing some kind of special cocktail that’s been lit on (bright magenta) fire. Ginny practically glows in the light, dazzlingly happy.

“Potter, good to see you again,” Gwenog says, giving him a nod. “Ginny, you look drop-dead gorgeous, but.” Heedless of the fire, she drains her glass in one go. “If you want to try a Fiend-Fireball, go get your own. It’s your big night, no stealing little sips off me.”

Ginny begins protesting that she’d never do a thing like that, though her flaming red blush works against her. She and Gwenog strike up an immediate, easy conversation about the appeal, jabbering away about those tricky Parisian regulators. Hermione taps Harry’s elbow as he reaches for yet another shot.

“Harry,” she says, “you might want to ease up on the Firewhiskey a bit, for tomorrow.”

She says it brightly, but there’s concern underneath that he’s overdone it. He supposes she might be right; there’s a creeping tiredness under his light mood, the moment he lets himself think about it.

They all protest when he stands, but he makes his excuses and they murmur knowledgeably about how he’ll need to save his strength for tomorrow night. After a round of goodbyes that turns into another fifteen minutes of hilarity, he heads out, Apparates home, and does his damnedest to fall asleep.

Nurmengard

The black flames died, and the castle walls groaned, and Grindelwald’s corpse landed on the floor, sprawling. Ignoring it all, Harry and Riddle only had eyes for each other.

Riddle’s expression turned impossibly odd, terrifying and incandescent. He lowered both wands, yew and elder, and stowed them in his black robe. Then he lifted his hands in a sign of surrender.

(Harry didn’t trust it. Couldn’t. Rumor had it that Riddle had utterly mastered wandless battle magic, had found ways to break down walls on willpower alone.)

With hesitation that didn’t fit him, Riddle took a step forward.

“Harry.”

Harry blinked. Riddle hadn’t called him that, not since their first meeting on the Hogwarts Express, and he knew it. It was an appeal to sentiment, just a way to soften him up.

“I was never truly loyal to Grindelwald’s cause.” 

That one sentence twisted Harry’s heart with a stab of hope. He took a couple steps forward without meaning too, breathless. “You’re a spy?”

“… An official position would have been a death sentence. Grindelwald was a master Seer after all, that’s how Dumbledore’s last two assets got burned.”

He made his excuses elegantly. It was obvious Riddle still had his silvertongue, the forked tongue that led his fellow Slytherins to their doom. And though he hadn’t brought any obvious mind magic to bear, there was a moment when Harry wanted to agree with him, wanted to believe the regret and remorse spelled out clearly across Riddle’s face. 

But the war had opened a hole in Harry’s heart, so he didn’t dare trust either one.

“But the atrocities, I swear I haven’t been there. Not the fires, not the crashes …”

“Of course not,” Harry said. 

Riddle’s face brightened impossibly, as if he actually gave a damn what Harry thought. As if he wasn’t just laying the groundwork to use Harry to rehabilitate his own image, to slither back into society’s good graces. Harry kept his own features neutral.

“I didn’t think for a minute you’d do Grindelwald’s dirty work,” Harry said. “You just helped plan it all.”

There had been statues lining this hall before the duel reduced them to smithereens. Riddle goes still now, like he’s been reduced to a marble statue himself.

“The fires.” Control slipping, Harry’s voice took on new heat. “The crashes. The Inferi armies swarming Europe, you didn’t fight in the trenches with them, you just raised them and let them loose …”

“For a reason, Harry.”

“For the greater good, I’m sure.”

“For our good ...”

“Your hands are dripping blood!”

Riddle flinched for the first time tonight as Harry flung out those words.

“The blood pact vial,” Harry screamed, suddenly scraping his throat raw. All the frustration from years of war seethed over like a neglected potion; the castle walls themselves seemed to moan in sympathy. “Dumbledore was about to break it last year, but then you stole it for Grindelwald!”

“Albus Dumbledore had his hands on that for decades,” he hissed back. “If he was ever going to break it, he would have already, but his love made him weak. The only way Dumbledore would ever fight Grindelwald again was if Grindelwald broke the pact, and I tried to give him the chance!”

“You handed him the Resurrection Stone too,” Harry spat. “You became his personal necromancer, do you have any idea how much damage you’ve done?”

“I did the impossible,” Riddle said, advancing further, black cloak rippling around him like shadows in candlelight. “I spooked Dumbledore, I dragged him properly out of hiding. He was supposed to break into Nurmengard, not you.”

“You …”

“And I,” Riddle interrupted smoothly, “are not nearly so different as you seem to think. I made difficult choices, and you are free to dislike my methods, but I swear to you, Harry, my heart is in the right place.”

“You haven’t got a heart,” Harry muttered.

And Riddle genuinely laughed, a sound as rare as phoenix song. “Do you honestly think that?”

“In the past couple years, what have you done right, Tom?” he challenged. Riddle’s first name slipped out on accident.

“You’re still alive, aren’t you?”

He was. Harry was a boy who was still living, despite facts and logic and an ominous prophecy. Grindelwald had fallen, but Harry had not. That fact still hadn’t quite registered in Harry’s head.

“Grindelwald trusted me, so I stalled him,” Riddle said, no, crooned. “I convinced him you were better off alive, I bought time …”

“You launched five Cruciatuses at me!”

“And not one of them hit you. Do you know how much skill that took?”

“I think you can’t hit a target you can’t see,” Harry fumed. He was hot all over, a fact he blamed on the Invisibility Cloak still draped over his head. 

Riddle couldn’t see him, and yet he took another step straight towards Harry. When had he gotten so close?

“I’ll explain everything. Just listen to me, Harry,” he said, voice marred by uncharacteristic pleading.

“Like your Slytherins listened, and see where it got them …”

Harry’s protest faded as Riddle reached towards his face.

“Do you really care about the Slytherins?” Riddle deadpanned, hands hesitating. “Narrow-minded pureblood blood purists, too arrogant and entitled to see their deaths coming?”

Then he pushed back the hood of Harry’s cloak, carefully, with something approaching reverence. His face softened.

“You do,” he murmured, staring into Harry’s eyes, the very surfaces of their minds brushing past each other. Harry thought Riddle’s eyes might’ve turned red, like necromancers’ sometimes do, and something uncoiled in him upon seeing they were currently the same warm brown he remembered. “The same as always. So happy to fight, even for fools who don’t deserve it.”

(Somehow he made the insult sound tender.)

Harry was alive, and Grindelwald wasn’t. The prophecy had declared this impossible.

Harry was alive, and Riddle was too, and wasn’t that a miracle? Riddle didn’t move to kill him, only trying to sweet-talk him for his own inscrutable reasons. Harry couldn’t move away even if he wanted to, not while Riddle’s cocoa-brown eyes peered intensely into his own. Not while Riddle’s hands still rested on Harry’s back, still folded gently in the cloak …

Harry’s heart stopped.

Riddle was alive, and Grindelwald wasn’t. Riddle was standing over Grindelwald’s body, perfectly placed to take his throne. Riddle was wearing the Resurrection Stone on his hand, casually, and he had the Elder Wand in his pocket. Riddle was staring directly at Harry, no doubt using the subtlest Legilimency to freeze him and dull his reflexes, even as he dug his talons into the Invisibility Cloak. He watched Harry like a predator, like he meant to consume him whole.

Suddenly shivering despite the cloak, Harry realised he’d never mattered to Riddle at all.

“You,” he breathed. “You’re the Dark Lord in the prophecy.”

“… What?” Riddle’s brow took on that little furrow, like when he was concentrating on an exam. He sounded genuinely puzzled.

Harry stepped backwards, ripping the cloak from his grasp. “You won’t get your last Hallow.”

“I …” Riddle tripped over his words; Harry wondered when he’d last been caught lying. “That’s not what I want!”

“I have nothing to do with Grindelwald,” Harry said, not hearing Riddle’s protests as the pieces fell into place, forming the whole chilling puzzle. “Not really. He had my parents killed, but he’s left loads of orphans all over Europe. He was right, I’m not special! I didn’t know him, I’ve never met him before, I don’t have anything in common with him! The fact that I just killed him was sheer dumb luck!”

“It was anything but dumb …”

“There was never any reason for me to be bound by fate to Grindelwald,” Harry rushed on with now unshakable confidence. “But to you?”

Harry fell silent. Riddle’s face morphed again, warped by dawning horror.

“We are not going to kill each other,” Riddle said, though he sounded uncertain about it. “I’m not a Dark Lord,” he tacked on, a little late.

“Tell me,” Harry said, now close to begging himself, “that you haven’t got more than enough blood on your hands to win that title three times over.” A lump wriggled up in his throat as Riddle made no attempt to deny it. “I bet the only reason the world isn’t calling you the worst Dark Lord already is that you haven’t been caught yet!”

“Really?” Riddle spat. “After everything, after I’ve let you live, all you see fit to give me is death?”

In reply, Harry could only lift his wand.

Two words. It’d just take two simple words. Dumbledore confessed that he wished he’d said them to Grindelwald, years ago. And they’d backfire somehow like the prophecy demanded; they’d take Harry down with Riddle, probably because he had two of the Hallows under his command.

Riddle didn’t touch his own wands. That alone made Harry pause, the fact that Riddle’s only apparent reaction was to twist his face once more, one more blunt bit of manipulation. His stare seemed to be boring straight through Harry’s soul, and his whole face was screwed up with pain, with what a stranger might call heartbreak.

The floor rumbled, and then a volley of silver knives came flying around the corner, right at him and Riddle.

“Protego,” Harry yelled. 

The yew wand flashed into his face, as Riddle shouted the same thing. 

They both glanced behind themselves as identical masses of knives clattered to the floor just inches from their backs, deflected by each other’s shields. 

“The castle wards,” Riddle snapped, now reaching into his pocket to grab the Elder Wand. “They’ve sensed enemies present.”

At that moment, the floor groaned and then crumbled away, opening a chasm between them. Harry stumbled back to safety just in time. Riddle didn’t, plummeting into the pit. There was no chance he’d be killed by just a fall, and for a moment, Harry considered jumping in after him.

Instead, as bits of the wall started hurtling at his head with even more force than weaponized Bludgers, he turned and ran for his life. 

(He heard Riddle calling his name as he fell. The hole in Harry’s heart throbbed, begging him to turn back.)

Chapter Text

After 

Harry can’t sleep. He’s never felt right about what happened that night at Nurmengard, and in the darkness of his flat, the images torture him on repeat. Grindelwald shouldn’t have died, there was no reason for it. Riddle shouldn’t have just stood there and tried hopelessly to convince Harry of his good intentions, because there was no good reason for that charade either …

Unless it wasn’t a charade at all, and he was honestly telling the truth.

Harry’s memory of the duel has blurred into a frenzy of near-death experiences, but one moment suddenly sticks out. Riddle had tucked a Disarming Charm in somewhere between the Cruciatuses. It looked as though he’d been aiming for Harry, but Riddle was a master of feinting, of hiding his true target until the last possible second. He could have secretly been aiming for Grindelwald.

He’d certainly hit Grindelwald, though it hadn’t seemed to matter at the time; the man had summoned the wand back and returned instantly to full-strength Explosion Charms. But Harry leaps out of bed to rummage through the notes he’d taken, poring over that wandlore book …

"The Elder Wand has been known to punish in creative ways those who wield it against the will of their rightful masters, bending the energy of magic itself in directions that defy logic.”

Grindelwald’s death defied logic, but it wasn’t luck at all, was it? Harry knows exactly how he died. Riddle double-crossed Grindelwald during that duel, and he grabbed the Elder Wand’s loyalty, and he reversed Grindelwald’s Killing Curse. It was the one possibility Harry hadn’t even thought of at the time, that Riddle might have (in his own twisted, incomprehensible fashion) been somewhat on his side.

He thinks of it now. He believes it’s true, though he can’t quite grasp why.

When Harry finally wraps his head around this new revelation, light’s starting to creep through the window. He groans, drops his head against the table, and banishes Nurmengard from his head. Instead, he tries to imagine himself a hundred years from now, puttering around a garden with Ginny, bickering like an old couple at the peak of contentment. Maybe it’s the sleep deprivation’s fault, but he just can’t picture it.

(His brain provides another scene with treacherous ease: himself and Riddle when they’ve grown too old for duels, still fighting long-distance via rolls and rolls of parchment, debating whether Quidditch has gotten boring now that the death rate’s finally hit zero.)

He glances at the dress robes waiting in his closet, a flashy gold he might have picked too hastily, and then leaves them alone. Dressed plainly, he Apparates to the Burrow.

“Harry, dear!” Mrs. Weasley looks frazzled, still in her robe with her hair pinned up to set the curls. “It’s lovely to see you, but we weren’t expecting you for another hour at the earliest, I’ve only got the fruit platter ready …”

“That’s alright,” Harry says hurriedly. “I actually need to talk to Ginny.”

“Oh.” She glances inside and then back at him. “She came back late, I’m not sure she’s …”

“I’m up.” Ginny appears behind her, red eyes meeting Harry’s. “Never got to sleep, actually.”

Mrs. Weasley looks at the both of them, frowning, before she laughs it off. “Well, a few butterflies are to be expected, before the big day! I’ll leave you two alone, the cake’s coming any moment and I’ve got to get the stand all ready …”

They watch her go, waiting until she’s out of earshot to face each other again.

“So about last night,” she says, right as Harry blurts, “I haven’t been totally honest with you.”

Ginny freezes. “Why don’t you go first?”

Harry nods, stomach plagued by decidedly the wrong kind of butterflies. He starts slow, picking his words with caution. 

“You told me a while back to try and stop obsessing over Nurmengard, because thinking about killing Grindelwald would just make me feel awful and guilty when I didn’t need to.” As Ginny nods in confirmation, Harry’s voice grows stronger. “Well, I didn’t stop. And I … might’ve broken some rules and tracked down Riddle again.”

“Oh Merlin, what’s he up to now?”

“Nothing,” Harry says, thrown off by her grimace. “Actually, he’s terminally ill.”

Ginny blinks. Then she rubs an eye, as if expecting to wake up from an odd dream.

“… I’d say it’s what he deserves,” she finally comments, “but something tells me things aren’t that simple.”

“They’re not.” Harry lets out a long exhale, feeling something unlock within his ribs. “Things are bloody awful, actually. My brain feels like scrambled egg, and not because he’s Obliviated me.”

Ginny frowns. “Would you know if Riddle Obliviated you?”

Oh. Right.

“… I’m pretty sure it’s not because he’s Obliviated me, or Confunded me, or anything of the sort.” The seal’s broken, the truth’s flooding out in torrents, and Harry couldn’t stop the words if he tried. “When your clock says I’m ‘Lost’ and ‘Home,’ it’s because I’m at his flat, just to help him with food and keep him company, little things like that. I don’t entirely get why he’s sick in the first place …” Especially if he’s the rightful master of the Elder Wand, because there goes the torture-by-wayward-wand theory. “Because he’s chronically incapable of telling the whole truth; he’s still trying to keep me out of trouble or save his own image, I don’t know. But the fact is he’s going to die in the next month or two, and I’m not okay with it.”

That last sentence spills out of him, tearing through his throat, and he feels lighter the moment he admits it to someone else. Ginny seems to sense that, watching him with a look of concern.

“I can’t honestly say I care about Riddle,” she observes, “but that’s an awful thing for you to have to walk around with. Why didn’t you tell me earlier?”

“I don’t think he wants people to know … but he didn’t ban me from telling you either,” Harry replies, feeling his way through unsteady ground. “So I don’t know. It hasn’t felt right, to not just tell you. I don’t know why I felt like I couldn’t.”

With a slow nod, Ginny ingests the revelation. “I thought I was going crazy, you know. I could see something big was on your mind, we all could, but I thought, well, I’m your fiancée. If there’s something important going on then of course you’d tell me.”

The implicit reproach hangs in the air between them. Harry lets it sink into his heart.

“I’m sorry,” he murmurs. “I am so, so sorry.”

“Right.” Ginny isn’t meeting his eyes. Instead she looks down at her shoes, for so long that Harry glances down too, wondering if there’s something special about them. “So I have something to tell you too. You know Gwen?”

She looks back up to see Harry raising his eyebrows, amused.

“Oh. Right. Of course you do. Well,” she winces, “you’ve been busy, so I’ve been getting a lot of extra Quidditch practice in, what with the World Cup coming up.”

“Sure.”

“So I’ve been spending a lot of time with her,” Ginny says, surprisingly tentative.

“Because she’s the captain.”

“Exactly.”

“Right,” Harry says, now feeling completely lost.

“And then she had a few too many last night, after you left.” Ginny’s cheeks have been slowly taking on colour; by now they nearly match her hair. “And she told me that if I wasn’t engaged to such a nice bloke, literally the defeater of Grindelwald, she’d take me home and shag me senseless.”

“… Right.”

With a quiet clap she buries her face in both hands. “I don’t know if anyone else heard. But I don’t know if everyone else heard. There was really a lot of Firewhiskey.” 

“Ginny?”

“And I haven’t been flirting with her,” she insists, now digging her hands into her hair. “But looking back on it, I haven’t not been flirting with her.”

“Ginny.”

“Yes?”

“What do you want?”

Her face screws up in consternation. A second later, it loosens to quiet understanding.

“I’m not in love with her,” she tells him. “Not even a little bit.”

“I didn’t think you were.”

“But …” Ginny drops her hands and shrugs. “I’m not the little girl writing you sonnets anymore, either.”

Together they look about at the room, stuffed full with bouquets and paper lanterns, just waiting to be lit over the reception tonight.

“Would you want …” He pauses, checking the words a couple times, letting them settle into place. “Would you want to have the big party tonight, but maybe without the wedding first?”

And her eyes light up, the same way that used to make his heart hurt, back when he was just a fifth year. “Will you come with me, just as friends?”

“I’d be honoured.”

“Then yes.”

“And as an aside?” His lips quirk up. “I’m pretty sure Tom Riddle defeated Grindelwald, so Gwen has my full blessing.”

Ginny bursts out laughing.

It’s a nice Hogwarts reunion of sorts, once they convince Mrs. Weasley there’s no need for sobbing. Harry greets the guests with Ginny, arms linked in a show of solidarity as they explain that, no, they aren’t a couple anymore, and yes, guests are welcome to stay and enjoy the food even if they withhold their planned gifts. Luna insists on giving them their present anyways, a golden necklace with a charm that looks like a funny triangular eye.

“It represents the Deathly Hallows,” she explains dreamily. “Grindelwald gave them a sort of bad reputation, and so did the murders, and the hallucinations … but I believe they can do a lot of good. You’re lucky to come from the line of the Cloak, Harry.”

Harry thinks of Grindelwald’s prophecy, now rendered completely incorrect and irrelevant. The one with the power to conquer the Dark Lord will rise, born to a line cloaked by death.

“Thanks, Luna,” he says out loud. 

When she looks at them expectantly, Ginny passes the necklace to Harry, who reluctantly drapes it over his head.

“Look, there’s Dumbledore,” Ginny says, pointing towards a figure who’s just become visible in the distance. It’s bold to guess someone’s identity from such a distance, but nobody else would try to pull off such brilliant cherry-red robes, especially with the orange boots and the magenta hat on top.

Much of the crowd turns to stare at him, but Harry’s looking the other way, at the Healer he’d hired to see to Tom. She’s lurking at the other edge of the festivities, dressed in dark, out-of-place grey.

“Ginny,” he says quietly, “I think something’s up with Riddle.”

“Shocking.” She maintains the deadpan look for a moment, and then plants a quick kiss on his cheek. “Go do what you have to do.”

“Go get into Gwennie’s bed.”

She shoves him backwards with a scoff crossed with a grin, and he stumbles away smiling too, certain they’re causing confusion and not particularly concerned about it. Carefully picking his way through the crowd, he goes straight to the Healer. “What’s going on?”

“There are times when a Healer’s duty to protect their patients’ privacy,” she mutters, “conflicts with their duty to save patients’ lives.” 

Not quite meeting Harry’ eyes, she fiddles with the charm around her neck. It shows a silver serpent, coiled tightly around a wand.

Harry’s heart sinks. “Did he take a turn for the worse?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“Is he in St. Mungo’s already?”

“I can’t answer that.”

“I’m going to St. Mungo’s right now,” he declares. He waits a moment. When she makes no attempt to stop him, only tightening her fingers around the charm, he Apparates there in an instant.

A golden necklace thumps against his own chest as he lands. He shakes his head, pausing for a minute. Then he Apparates to his flat and pulls the Invisibility Cloak out of a hidden cupboard, newly reinforced with some of the runes Riddle used.

Armed with the cloak, he goes straight back. He frowns quizzically at the directory for a moment and then heads towards the elevator. He’ll try floor 2, “Magical Bugs” …

“What are you doing here, Potter?” snaps Auror Zhang, who’s standing in the elevator. The button for floor 2’s already been pressed.

“Er …” He steps in beside her and is spared the effort of answering as the elevator whooshes upwards. When it stops and they both stumble out onto the second floor, he demands, “What are you doing here?”

“Tom Riddle showed up, of all people.” She shakes her head in disbelief while striding up to the reception desk and flashing her badge. “Claims to be dying of some Muggle sickness. St. Mungo’s flagged it for us, of course.”

“I thought he wasn’t wanted anymore.”

“He isn’t,” she says with a sigh. “But it’s still protocol to have an Auror around, with Veritaserum concentrate in case of a deathbed confession. Not to mention …” She surreptitiously scans the waiting room. “In the off-chance that he really was as high up in Grindelwald’s organization as you’ve said, he could have a lot of criminal associates creeping out of the woodwork to visit him. But,” she scoffs, dismissing all that with a wave of her hand, “what are you doing here? It’s your wedding day, I marked down your vacation months ago!”

“I’m not here for work. Erm. I’m visiting Tom Riddle,” he says, both to her and the receptionist.

“Lovely, you’re on his approved visitors’ list,” the receptionist replies immediately. “Room 232, just down the hall.”

He turns back around to face Zhang’s shocked silence.

“… you said to get a personal life,” he mumbles before turning on his heel and fleeing.

Room 232 is quiet as a tomb. Riddle lies on the single cot, dressed in a hospital gown of pure, sterile white. A mediwitch is leaning over him, frowning as she checks his vitals with her wand. She looks at Harry when he opens the door. Riddle doesn’t.

“Oh, what rotten timing, Mr. Potter,” she says in a hushed voice. “He was quite sure no visitors would be coming. I did ask about other friends and family, but you were the only one on his list, you see …”

“He’s asleep?” Harry says, lowering his own voice.

She shakes her head apologetically. “Not exactly. He was just put into a magical coma. It’s the standard of care in cases like these, to give the body one last chance to fight the illness off. But with how little magic he’s got left …”

Breath hitching, Harry takes a jerky step forward. Riddle looks dead already, pale and guileless. Finally at peace. 

“You can say goodbye, though I’m afraid he won’t be hearing it,” she says, voice warm with compassion. Harry nods, barely listening.

Harry had said goodbye to Riddle, two nights back. They’d just made it halfway through the recording of that old Quidditch match, and Riddle had been writing out increasingly ridiculous theories on how the teams could’ve altered their stunts so they weren’t technically fouls (“If she’d just cast that cutting curse wandlessly, she’d still have been arrested, but at least her team wouldn’t have taken a penalty!”), and Harry had stood up in mock outrage and said, “That’s it, Riddle, good night.” He’d said it with an obvious laugh, without meaning it at all.

He has to say goodbye for good now.

He doesn’t know how.

The witch has turned around to consult some medical text, and Harry lifts one hand to brush Riddle’s cheek. He pulls it away a moment later, though there’s no one to catch him. No one to care.

(Riddle’s the one on his deathbed, but it’s Harry’s heart that’s forcing its way up his throat, shattering to pieces in his chest.)

“He won’t wake up again, I’m afraid,” she sighs, spinning back round and then moving to the door. “I’ll let you have your privacy.”

Right after the door clicks shut, Riddle shifts, letting out a quiet noise of pain. His eyes flutter open and come to rest on Harry.

“What’s wrong?” Riddle murmurs.

Unblinking, uncomprehending, Harry gazes back at him. “You … You’re supposed to be in a coma right now.”

“And I pulled myself out.” He lifts a hand effortfully, shows it to Harry and drops it promptly over his heart. “Paired signaling runes, my own design.”

He can’t see any ink on Riddle’s hand. It could be invisible, though.

“Where’s the other one?” Harry asks.

Then he slowly looks down at his own hand, just barely remembering the ghost of a burn.

“I Obliviated you afterwards,” Riddle says. His voice sounds tired but intact; a few hours without coughing must have restored his vocal cords. “I don’t regret it.”

Harry’s frown hardens. “How many times have you Obliviated me, exactly?”

Riddle lets out a long-suffering, rattling sigh, struggling to keep his eyes open, attempting to stare a hole through the sterile white ceiling. “Get the Veritaserum.”

“… What?”

“Don’t you dare submit anything I say to your office until I’m properly burned. Otherwise every other necromancer will go vying for the pleasure of desecrating my double-crossing corpse.”

“Right. Right.” Harry leaps up from his seat by Riddle, on the side of his bed. “One minute.”

Half-recovered from surprise, Zhang hands over the Veritaserum when he asks. “But you ought to have a registered stenographer there …”

“No time!” he calls, already flying back down the hallway to Riddle. The mediwitch had left a glass with a pitcher of water by Riddle’s bedside, and Harry tips half in the vial. It’s a concentrated powder, and he nearly sloshes some water over the rim in his haste to mix it. “Here.”

When Riddle tries to pick up the glass, his hands shake. Harry surges forward to help, bringing the rim to his lips, and Riddle visibly swallows down the potion. Soon his eyes focus on Harry, and he shifts a few inches up on his pillow, somehow growing more alert under Veritaserum’s influence.

“Go.”

“How many times did you Obliviate me?” Harry asks, firing syllables like bullets.

“Once. Sixth year. I needed you to forget that I’d put the rune on you.”

“Why’d you tattoo me in the first place?”

The Veritaserum loosens Riddle’s tongue, or maybe it’s the imminent death; Harry’s never heard him sound so open. “The rune’s only meant to activate if you’re in a truly horrific moment of crisis. And if you are, I’d want to know.”

“How did Grindelwald die, really?”

“Because I told the Elder Wand to kill him. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” Harry repeats with a slightly hysterical laugh. “Were you ever actually loyal?”

“To him?” He scoffs. “I told you, no. I know Muggles, you see, and I know their … artillery, and I know precisely how much pain they like to inflict on anyone ‘different.’ I wouldn’t dare break the Statute of Secrecy unless I had every recognised government of every magical species under my thumb, and perhaps not even then.”

“So you didn’t support Grindelwald at all, then?” Harry says, practically dizzy with relief.

“I won’t deny a certain attraction to his study of the Dark Arts, and to the scale of his ambitions.” Riddle’s eyes soften; searching under the glaring hospital lights, Harry can make out not a hint of red. “But Grindelwald also talked about helping magical children in abusive Muggle households. About getting justice. Establishing orphanages. I would’ve liked to work on that very much.”

The thought of Grindelwald working with young, vulnerable children is terrifying. Perhaps it should be equally frightening, where Riddle’s concerned. Still, the raw sincerity of his confession, backed up by Veritaserum, wrenches Harry’s chest.

“Is there anything I could’ve done?” Harry presses forward and clasps Riddle’s hand. “Is there anything anyone can still do, to keep you from dying like this?”

Riddle doesn’t struggle out of his grip, simply raising one eyebrow. “Tell me why you care. Why you’re here, and not at the wedding you’ve planned so painstakingly for so very long.”

“Ginny and I talked, and we sort of … grew beyond each other at some point.” 

Riddle wasn’t entirely wrong with that rant of his, when he accused the two of them of falling together out of convenience as much as intention. Not that Harry plans to admit it in so many words.

“She’s trading up to Gwenog Jones. Chance to get with a real celebrity,” Harry adds with a chuckle. “As for why I’m here and not busy dyeing my wedding cake anything but white, well, I consider you a friend now. Of sorts. I mean, I don’t actively want you dead.”

As Harry rambles, he feels more inadequate with every word. It’s not the first time Riddle’s asked him why he keeps showing up, and he’s never been able to explain it. He can’t explain the pull he feels towards Riddle, even to himself. 

Riddle closes his eyes with a minute shake of his head.

“I brought you the Invisibility Cloak,” Harry blurts, “just in case becoming Master of Death could save you.”

“Being Master of Death makes one much better at killing,” Riddle mutters, eyes still closed. “But it doesn’t reliably keep them from being killed. If it did, believe me, I’d have robbed you a long while back.”

“Worth a try though, isn’t it?” He rummages through his pockets and draws out the shimmering folds, shaking them loose. “Are you planning to abuse this? Go on a mass-murdering spree or something?”

“I’m not planning on it, no.” With difficulty, Riddle pushes himself up so Harry can drape the cloak over his body. “And if I was going to go on a mass-murdering spree, I doubt I’d be invisible. Makes it tricky to get the credit.”

“Was that sarcastic?” Harry asks as the entire Cloak unrolls itself, hem falling to his feet.

“Mostly. I could take credit whether I was invisible or not.”

Harry gives him a look.

“I have no intention of exploiting the Deathly Hallows,” Riddle abruptly declares, “to cause anyone hurt.”

It takes Harry’s breath away, that he can hear Riddle say something and simply, unconditionally believe it.

So he lifts up the Cloak, raising it over Riddle’s head. Riddle folds his knees up by his chest, and Harry carefully arranges the folds over him, watching his thin, fragile body be swallowed entirely. Riddle vanishes from his sight.

Harry waits.

And then a new burst of coughing breaks the spell. Riddle’s hands reappear to push back the hood.

“I don’t feel any different,” his disembodied head drily informs Harry. “Also, this is an extraordinarily valuable magical artifact; you could stand to clean off the dust.”

“Sorry,” Harry says for more than one reason. As an afterthought, he waves his wand, offering a quick Scourgify. 

Riddle’s fingers have curled around the Cloak’s collar, much like they did that night at Nurmengard. His eyes shine just like they did that night, lit by a fire Harry couldn’t name.

“Would you drink Veritaserum and tell me again, that you consider me a friend, of sorts, whom you don’t actively want dead anymore?” Though his voice is sarcastic, his eyes gleam with curiosity, hungry and wanting. “It’d mean a great deal, if I could properly believe it.”

After a second’s deliberation, Harry drinks the rest of the vial. The potion feels warm, blooming around his heart.

“Why are you here, Harry?” Riddle asks again. “Why do you care?”

“Because I’m madly in love with you.”

They both freeze. Riddle’s expression warps comically. Harry squints at the vial and lifts it up towards the light, to see whether the Veritaserum got swapped for Amortentia at some point. 

It didn’t.

He remembers it from the books they’d read together far before they were supposed to, back in second year. Amortentia would set his world on his axis, the clouds parting for one lightning-strike revelation. Any love potion would.

Yet the truth is he doesn’t feel different at all. There’s no sudden infatuation, no new obsession. It feels instead like stumbling on something he’d lost long ago, profoundly inconvenient and profoundly true, a core tenet of his world falling into place.

“I’m in love with you, Tom,” Harry says, testing how the words feel in his mouth. “I want you alive, and I want you, and it will break my heart to see you go.”

Riddle spends another moment frozen.

Then he collapses back on the mattress, laughing raucously, the whole cot shuddering from the force of it. It’s a suspiciously strong, vibrant sound, for someone on the verge of death.

“It’s not funny in the slightest,” Harry protests. He doesn’t know whether to be confused, indignant or terrified that Riddle’s about to croak for good.

Through it all, Riddle keeps on laughing, loud and obnoxious and alive, even as he tosses off the cloak like a rag and comes back into view. By some miracle, he doesn’t cough once through the whole spectacle.

“I’m not going to die now,” Riddle gasps out with a frenzied glow in his eyes. “God, we all misinterpreted the damn prophecy, didn’t we? The second heart in the object is literal, but the first one is metaphorical and we all missed it!”

“Riddle, I swear, if you don’t explain yourself this minute I’ll have to …”

Riddle cuts him off before he has to figure out his ultimatum. He practically tackles Harry, clawing at his robes and pulling him off-balance.

He pulls him into a kiss.

It’s a chaste but hard press of lips. Harry’s too shocked for comprehension at first, but Riddle stays there until he catches up, his lips insistent. A moment later, he pulls away and inspects Harry’s expression. 

Riddle’s eyes are dark with the open intent to consume. There was a time Harry ran from that expression.

When he attacks again at a slightly improved angle, Harry meets him. He starts to believe it in his soul, that this won’t be a last kiss, and Riddle’s whimpering against his mouth from something other than pain, and Harry means to devour every last one of those sounds for the rest of his life. If Riddle is Fiendfyre, threatening to consume his entire life and soul, Harry will burn gladly.

“We’re going to live.” When Riddle breaks away once more, breathless and flushed with life, his hands cup Harry’s face, utterly gentle. “We’re both going to live.”

“I knew you were dramatic,” Harry declares.

Riddle (no, he’s Tom now, like he used to be so long ago) hums in agreement, quirking one eyebrow. Lounging against the headboard of his cot as if on a throne, he sips delicately from his goblet. It’s his third cup of Parasite Dispatcher Potion in three hours, because his body’s magical immune responses have roared back to life and he’s going through healing potions as fast as St. Mungo’s cauldrons can churn them out, growing stronger and more spirited with each dose.

“I knew you were dramatic. You kill Dark Lords, and you murder unsuspecting Quaffles, and there was that time in sixth year on the seventh floor that we should definitely now talk about,” Harry says, still torn between ranting and laughing. “But I cannot believe you nearly died, when you could’ve just bought out Honeydukes like the rest of us.”

Tom scowls at him. It’d be terrifying, if Harry couldn’t see the adoration pouring out the eyes of the mask.

“It’s a genuine, documented medical condition,” Tom retorts. “Rare, but I’m not the first person to lose their magic from love, when it seems hopelessly unrequited.”

“You began losing it right after Nurmengard?”

“When you wanted me dead, yes.” He shrugs and keeps going before Harry can even try to soften that assessment. “You mustn’t take all the credit though; I theorize there’s a heavy genetic component.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s how my mother died,” he says, before draining the rest of his cup in one go. “She died in childbirth, despite being trained well enough in magic to avoid it. To her, my father was worth dying for.”

He spits out the words, bitter and desperately sad. Harry has never been able to resist helping him, even if Tom can’t ask for it.

So he takes the empty goblet from Tom’s grasp and replaces it with one of his own hands. “He might’ve been worth dying for, but you were worth living for. You always have been, even if she couldn’t see it.”

Tom replies with a tight nod, quickly reaching for the next potion to drink. It’s a nasty green, with a foam like moss floating up top. Examining it, Tom pulls a face.

Harry thinks of the ugly poison Tom must have fed to himself over the years, in the quiet of his own head. Some of it brimmed over and bled out of him, that one night after he helped Harry pick out Ginny’s wedding ring. Harry won’t pretend that his love, newly revealed, can instantly erase those wounds.

“And you’re worth loving,” he offers, quietly.

Tom’s eyes flick up, and there’s the subtle press of Legilimency, skimming over the very surface of Harry’s mind to see if he still means it, now that the Veritaserum’s worn off. He’s not sure Tom realises he’s reaching out this way. He doesn’t fight the prodding either.

He’ll wait a lifetime if he has to, for Tom to believe him.

“What do you want to do next?” Harry prompts, curled up at the edge of Tom’s bed. Tom’s an unstoppable force, and Harry’s an immovable object, and St. Mungo’s staff had precisely zero success in banishing him three hours back when the visiting period ended.

“I’ve planned a campaign of mass extermination,” Tom reports proudly. “I’m going to get revenge and drive this damn bacterium extinct.”

Harry rocks back, pleasantly surprised. “That’s … incredibly ambitious, and I support you whole-heartedly.”

“I’ll need your help with something else first.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, I intend to re-establish myself as an appreciated, if not upstanding, member of society.” Tom folds his hands behind his head and stretches out his long legs, brushing Harry’s thighs with his toes, settling in for an intense session of scheming. “It’ll be a good start, when the two of us win England a World Cup.”

“So after all this, you still think Grindelwald’s prophecy’s right?” Harry exclaims in disbelief.

“Oh, absolutely. I watched his delivery back in fifth year after … stumbling on Dumbledore’s Pensieve, and that prophecy is the genuine article.” Tom lifts the Elder Wand and swishes it, wordlessly refilling his cup with the latest prescription. Harry could have just poured it for him, but he won’t deny Tom his fun. 

“So you admit you’re a Dark Lord.”

“Retired,” he says, “unless anyone’s stupid enough to go after you again.”

“I suppose you ‘marked’ me up well enough.” Harry considers his hand, with the invisible tattoo. “I can’t believe you had the nerve.”

“That sigil saved you,” Tom sniffs. “Otherwise, I might not have known to intervene at Nurmengard.”

Harry concedes the point.

“And it was my heart that kept yours beating that night,” Tom continues. Every consonant turns savagely clear-cut. “Grindelwald dared aim a Killing Curse at you and I dragged it back into his chest, and I will never regret it.”

Harry won’t ask him to. Maybe he should be terrified, to face a man who can kill and never question it. But when it comes to Grindelwald, he doesn’t want Tom’s remorse.

“My heart kept yours beating too, didn’t it?” Harry muses, furrowing his brow. “If I’d married Ginny, if I was someone else who just didn’t have it in them to love you, you would’ve …”

“Withered away pathetically, yes.”

Harry exhales forcefully. “I had no idea, none, how much power I had over you.”

“The power to conquer a Dark Lord,” Riddle quotes. The violence in his voice turns to tenderness, equally raw and dangerous. “You’ve had it for years. Ever since you faced a whole clan of Dementors and lit up the entire bloody sky by the strength of your spirit, and your will, and your heart.”

He’d fallen from the sky that day. It was Tom who caught him.

“Do you … do you think we’ll fall?” Harry ventures. “By each other’s hands, I mean.”

“I’m counting on it.”

Harry’s eyes widen in alarm.

“You’re a fool if you think that I won’t, the moment I get out of here, push you onto the nearest available horizontal surface.”

Harry explodes with laughter and sudden, all-consuming gratitude. “Then I’ll return the favor.”

Well After

“The one with the power to conquer the Dark Lord will rise,
born to a line cloaked by death, to a father of thrice seven years,
and the Dark Lord will mark him as an equal,
for he will have power he knows not,
and both must fall at the hand of the other
for each one’s heart shall keep the other’s beating.”

Albus Dumbledore swirls about his goblet of sweet mango lassi, watching the happy couple at a most unusual wedding. Due to past tragedy, there’s no blood family present on either side. One party has filled that void with a horde of good friends, while the other seems to have chosen company of another kind. Albus has spotted no less than seven snakes, slithering around the party and causing repeated panic, curling up to sleep in the flower bouquets and under the heavy tablecloths.

(Speaking of tablecloths, they’re most curiously coloured. Almost the colours of Gryffindor house, red embroidered luxuriously with gold thread, but the scarlet has been darkened to the hue of dried blood.)

“A handsome couple, aren’t they?” Horace Slughorn says for the twelfth time tonight, tongue shaken loose by the free-flowing Ogden’s Oldest. “Have I told you, Albus, I remember the first time they went out together? Why, it was at one of my little parties, you know …”

Up at the head table, Harry Potter, wrapped up in robes of cream embroidered with bright red flowers, whispers something in his new husband’s ear. Dressed in pure burgundy, almost disappearing like a shadow beside Harry, he scans the room with an efficient, judgmental eye. Then he snorts and utters his reply, no doubt as sharp as a cutting curse.

Their eyes meet, and they share a conspiratorial smile.

A handsome couple, Albus will admit, but odd and mismatched in myriad ways. A Dark Lord (allegedly retired, and Albus intends to sit back and watch until he proves it a lie) is not the most intuitive match for one of the most honourable young wizards Albus has had the privilege to know. They are forces of nature, equal and directly opposite.

They rise from the table, intending to dance, but Harry goes down before they can, tripped by Gwenog Jones-Weasley’s rather extravagant train. Tom comes tumbling down with him rather than let go of his hand. Thus one falls by the other’s hand, for what Albus suspects is not the first time. They are somehow stronger for it.

Albus thinks back on that prophecy which he had puzzled over for hours one summer day, with Gellert still at his side. Funny, isn’t it, how these things work themselves out?