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#tom riddle angst
ash-whimsicalfanfic · 10 months
Text
Obsession
Tom Riddle X Fem OC/Reader
Word Count: 5K
Warnings: Mild language, Graphic, Smut, Toxic, Possessive, Protective, Angst, Fluff, Suggestive, Anger…
Prompt: Y/N Black is a mystery to many. She isn’t interested in making friends, only her studies. However, unbeknownst to many, one boy has piqued her interest——Tom Riddle. Little did she know, he had an obsession with her.
Sidenote: I did use some spells from the vampire diaries just for the heck of it. I may do a part two, but I’m not sure if it really needs it. I’ll leave it up to you guys!
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Everyone seemed more chattier than usual. Maybe it was the upcoming Yule Ball or maybe it was because holidays were approaching. However, you hated the buzzing chatter, the obnoxious shouting, and all of the crowded halls. You had tried to go to the library as an escape from this madness, but everyone had infiltrated the library even.
You were the Scrooge that everybody was painfully aware of as you stormed through the halls with your books clutched to your chest. If you were a Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Gryffindor, they would have laughed at the irked expression on your face. However, knowing you were a Slytherin strikes fear in many.
Not to mention you were a mystery to many. You were oh so quiet, along with a freakishly amount of smart, and an unearthly amount of beautiful. You chose to stick to yourself, choosing to not make any friends. You instead chose to have acquaintances in case a group project popped up, however you normally managed to worm your way out of that so you could work alone.
That was how you preferred doing things, alone. Other students have given up on trying to befriend you, seeing it as pointless. Guys would still try and ask you out, but their advances failed. They hadn’t noticed that your interest was piqued by a boy already. However, it seemed that he was just like you.
Tom Riddle was a handsome young man with jet black curly-ish hair and dark brown eyes that looked almost black from afar. He was fairly tall and had a lean look. His face was always blank…passive as he studied or walked through the halls or even when he was with his group of “friends”. They were his followers in his mind, not his friends. To anyone else, they saw them as a happy friend group.
You had noticed the things that anyone would pick up about Tom from afar, like his intelligence. Tom excelled in all of his classes, in fact he was tied at the top of the year with you. He too was introverted, preferring to be alone and in silence. For someone as passive as Tom, you noticed things he did. When he was judging something, he’d lean back in his chair, occasionally quirking an eyebrow as if he was impressed or annoyed.
When he was in a rather intuitive or creative mood, his eyes seemed to be a lighter shade of brown and he would get carried away in his journal. When he was thinking, he would zone out on his journal or something in the room.
You noticed that he’d clench his jaw until a muscle there ticked when he got angered. When he was annoyed, he had a tendency to sigh.
“Y/N!” Narcissa calls.
She stood among Tom Riddle and all of his “friends”. Tom’s eyes find you who was clearly irritated. You had made your way through the crowd and head towards her.
“Yes?” You ask.
“Hey, that is no way to talk to your favorite cousin.” Narcissa scolds.
“Who said you were my favorite?” You ask.
“It’s because it is me.” Bellatrix grins.
“Not you either.” You mutter.
“Moving on, have you seen Sirius or Regulus?” She asks.
“I’m not their keeper, Narcissa.” You mutter.
“They said they were meeting up with you.” She says, sighing in frustration.
“Well they didn’t. I need to get to class.” You mutter.
Before you could go, Bellatrix grabs your upper arm in a tight grip. You turn back to her with a clenched jaw as Narcissa steps back, muttering an “Uh-Oh”.
“Leaving so soon, cousin?” She mocks.
“Bellatrix, I’m warning you now to let go or you will regret it.” You warn calmly.
“What will you do? You're all goody two shoes, yet your in Slytherin. I think that dumb hat sorted you into the wrong house.” She says.
You pull your wand free, pointing it at her as you mutter “Stupefy”. You roll your eyes as she flies backwards through the crowd.
“If I wouldn’t get expelled, I would definitely crucio you or use the killing curse on you for your information. However, nothing is stopping me once we graduate.” You say, before turning and leaving the group stunned.
Tom smiles slightly as he watches you walk away, finding himself even more intrigued with you than he originally was. Call it an interest or maybe an obsession at this point. He liked to watch you when he could. He noticed things about you that he was sure no one else noticed.
He knew you were a quiet and mysterious girl, but underneath that “innocent” mask you wore, he knew there was a strong woman with a dangerous mind. You were far from innocent and today proved that more so to him. To anyone else, you were that innocent girl. However, when you let your guard down if you were stressed or angry or irritated, he could see the danger swirling in your (eye color) eyes.
He lets his smile fall, regaining his composure before turning back to his group. Bellatrix was back on her feet, a scowl on her face as Narcissa helped hold her up. He watches as Sirius and Regulus join them.
“What is wrong with you?” Sirius asks.
“Your bloody sister is what is wrong! She used stupefy on me!” She snaps.
“How pissed off did you make her?” Regulus chuckles, shaking his head.
“You both told me you were meeting with her about becoming a follower. Yet, she hasn’t seen either of you all day. So, where were you both off to?” Narcissa snaps.
“Have you seen how mad she can get? We learned not to mess around when she gets mad, Issa. When she is mad, she will take down anyone in her path. We’ve learned how to avoid making her mad. So, you go have that conversation with her because I rather not get crucio’d again.” Sirius says.
“Wow.” Avery mutters.
“She may be quiet and keeps to herself, but Y/N is a ticking time-bomb when you make her mad. She is intelligent, and maybe too intelligent for her own good. She also liked being stronger than others in magic, so that is why she studies so hard. However, because she is so antisocial and introverted, even as a child before Hogwarts, she took her studies serious, so she doesn’t understand fun. She is boring.” Sirius says.
“I bet she hasn’t ever shagged anyone, or snogged! A sixth year and a virgin! That is embarrassing.” Bellatrix cackles.
That further piqued Tom’s interest about you.. He found himself having more thoughts about you, both innocent and sinful thoughts. However, his sinful thoughts changed to the exception of you being a virgin. That made him feel a possessiveness over you he wasn’t quite sure how to feel about. However, he knew that the idea of you being with anyone else was sickening to him. You were his, you just didn’t know it yet.
Your studies past fairly quickly and you were heading towards the Great Hall. You sit at your normal spot, Regulus sitting next to you. Tom sat a table down with his “friends”, however his focus was on you. Regulus gently closed your books, pushing them away.
“Eat, then study.” He stresses softly.
As irritated as you were about him taking away your books, you listened. Tom quirked a brow, finding himself wondering if it was often you got so distracted by your studies that you didn’t take care of yourself the best. His eyes roam over you slowly, noticing the dark circles under your eyes along with the thinning face of yours. So, it was often, he thought.
“Y/N! My favorite sister! How has your day been?” Sirius asks as plops down across from you.
“What do you want?” You ask, sighing as you pushed your food around on your plate.
“Nothing to do with studies I hope, she is taking a break to eat.” Regulus stresses.
You close your eyes as the two start to argue, resting your chin on your hand. You open your eyes when Regulus stands, his voice getting louder.
“Enough!” You snap, the two instantly quieting.
It had gotten the attention of those around your table. You take in a slow breath before letting it out, regaining your composure before looking between your brothers with a blank look.
“You two bicker like a bunch of children. This is our brief moment to be able to hang out, however you both don’t know how to push aside your differences because you both are too hot-headed and irrational.” You rant.
You snatch up your books that Regulus had pushed away from you earlier and stood from the table as you left the Great Hall.
Tom watched you leave before looking between your brothers, before his eyes fell on your plate of untouched food. He puts some food in his bag, going unnoticed and decides to leave himself. He made his way to the library, heading to the forbidden section where he assumed you’d be. He feels a brief moment of pride flare in his chest, right about where you had gone. He clears his throat and you look up from your notes.
“Here. I noticed you didn’t eat.” He says.
His voice surprised you. It was deep, soft and mysterious. He pulled out some food he took from the Great Hall and handed it to you.
“Thank you.” You murmur.
He nods, going to leave and you begin working on your studies again. You sigh as a loud group comes into the library.
“Would you allow me to show you a place I like to go?” He asks, looking back down at you.
“I don’t see why not.” You admit, gathering your stuff before standing.
You follow behind Tom, not quite sure where he was taking you. You knew of his quest to become the Dark Lord. Some of his followers had big mouths, so you heard more than everyone thought you knew. They assumed you were clueless about his current quest and they all were tip-toeing around who would be the one to break the news to you. However, you knew. You knew more than them in fact.
He looks around, making sure there was no other students or professors in the hall before a door appears in the wall. Your lips part from surprise as he ushers you in, following behind you. You looked around the empty room in awe.
“The Room of Requirements…I’ve heard of it and I’ve looked everywhere for it.” You mumble.
“Yes, I searched for this room for awhile myself. I later learned that the room only will appear in great need.” Tom explains, seeming rather smug about finding it.
“The room seems to know you quite well…and you seem to know the room quite well too. Otherwise, the door wouldn’t have appeared because I’m sure my studies are not in great need.” You say, turning back to him.
You feel a heat spread across your body as you catch his eyes on you. The dark eyes slowly trail over you, mapping out your body. His eyes stop on your blouse where you had a few buttons undone since you were alone and had started to get a little hot in the confined aisles of the forbidden section in the library.
He steps forward, closing the distance between the two of you. You look up, not realizing that he was this tall. He puts a hand out and gently grasps your hip before trailing it up your side. He tugs on the middle of your blouse, revealing more of your cleavage, before he starts undoing the remaining buttons.
“That and maybe because I am in great need of you.” He murmurs, leaning down to trail his lips along your neck.
You shiver, feeling a trail of goosebumps being left behind from the ghost touch. His hands find your shoulders where he pushes the robes off before pushing your blouse off along with it. He leaves a soft kiss on your racing pulse, before he pulls back to look down at you.
You were left in a dark green lace bra, and he tsked quietly, approving the way they made your breasts look. The bra seemed to work as a push-up bra, but really Narcissa had gotten you the wrong size this year.
His eyes trail over your stomach, noting the soft curves he would be sure to feel later. His eyes focus on the short school-girl skirt, also Narcissa’s doing. You didn’t fret much about it as you knew you’d wear your robe more often than not. You were wearing knee high stockings with a pair of mary-janes.
“The school girl skirt, hmph, your just asking to be fucked, aren’t you?” He asks, a smirk slowly spreading across his face.
“Tom.” You say breathlessly.
“Leave the skirt on, but take your panties off.” He orders.
He begins unbuttoning his own shirt, watching you. You were frozen in place before you start to work the panties down. He held a hand out, looking at you expectantly. Your shaky hand places the matching dark green lace panties into his hand.
He balls it up and sticks it in his blazer pocket. You watch as his long, slender fingers work his belt off. Your eyes focused on his veiny hands.
“Hands and knees.” He says.
You slowly drop to your knees, turning over, no longer able to watch his next move. You get on your hands, moving so you are on your elbows. You arch your back down, sticking your ass out more.
Tom licks his lips slowly, swallowing hard as he watches you get into the position. He inhales deeply, watching as you arch your back. He puts a clenched fist to his mouth, lightly biting himself, not quite sure if this was really happening. The skirt hid nothing. He could see the big globes that he found himself really attracted to. He never would have taken himself as an ass man.
His eyes trail further down to see your glistening entrance. He pushes his pants off before he gets on the ground behind you. He brushes your hair over your shoulder, before he finds himself tracing down your spine lightly. You shiver unintentionally, however he enjoyed the effect he on you.
“How bad do you want me?” He murmurs into your ear.
“Please, Tom.” You whisper as you push your hips back.
“Pathetic. Do you want my cock or not?” He asks, grabbing a fistful of your hair and roughly jerking your head back.
A breathless moan fills the thick air in the room as a heat spreads across your scalp. He clenches his jaw, feeling himself twitch from the sound he heard. It was the beginning of a beautiful symphony, one he didn’t realize how much he’d become crazed for.
“Tom! Please! I need you!” You cry, feeling frustrated that he wasn’t touching you where you wanted to be touched.
He smirks, gently grabbing your hips. He uses his other hand to guide himself into your dripping entrance. He groans, your walls immediately grasping onto him, suffocating him. You moan lowly, your hands grasping at the stone floor as your eyes flutter shut.
“Fuck.” He curses, working himself in and out of you slowly.
“Tom, please.” You plead, pushing your hips back.
“Is my cock the first one you’ve ever had?” He asks, his eyes burning in the back of your head as he awaited your response.
“Yes! Please, Tom!” You cry.
He couldn’t help the grin across his face. He heard it, but he wasn’t sure if maybe you just kept them out of the loop. But, knowing he was the one to take your virginity was exhilirating to him.
“I better be the only cock you have here. You are mine.” He warns.
“Yes! I-I’m yours, Tom!” You moan as he starts to move at a faster pace.
“I’ll kill any boy who dares to be with you, because you are mine! I’ll punish you if I see you talking to some boy.” He growls, his hips now savagely moving.
You cry for more, your soft and loud moans were music to his ears. He breathed heavily along with you as held onto your hips tightly. Skin smacking echoed in the room and you heard his soft groan which sent you coming. He groans louder as you clench around him, coming around him.
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You stood on shaky legs, buttoning up your blouse and grimacing as you feel your shared climaxes slowly leaking out of you. He grasps your chin, looking at you with a stern look.
“Keep it in. I want you to know who fucked you.” He says.
“Tom, I need my panties.” You say as your cheeks flush.
“Find another way to keep it in.” He says, before focusing back on straightening himself out.
You pull your blazer on along with your robes before grabbing your books and hurrying out. You reach the Slytherin common room, Narcissa and Bellatrix looking up from their game of cards. Sirius and Regulus’s backs were to you.
“Oh my god, you got shagged!” Narcissa exclaims with a grin.
“Who was it?” Bellatrix asks.
“Yeah, I’d like to know.” Sirius seethes, taking in your disheveled hair and the hickeys on your neck.
Narcissa looks at your knees to see that they were scraped up, but you choose to ignore your brothers and cousins as you make your way past them. Regulus laughs, yelling “Atta girl!”
A small smile graces your lips at your little brothers comment. He too was protective of you, but he knew you inside and out. He and you were far closer than you were with Sirius. You get to your dorm and think of showering, but then your mind wanders to Tom. Keep it in…
You pull on a pair of fresh panties as you change into your nightware. You found yourself tossing and turning for a long while before you fell asleep. By the time it was time to wake up, you were exhausted. You could sleep in, but that ruins your morning routine.
You go to the shower, grimacing at the burn in your stomach. It was now that you realized you didn’t eat once yesterday. You finished up in the bathroom before pulling on a black lingerie set. You gasp as your door opens and Tom walks in.
“I knew you’d be awake.” He says, his eyes slowly roaming over you and some of the bruises he had made from where he held you still.
“Tom, what are you doing here?” You ask, grabbing a random robe and pulling it on.
“I’ve seen it all, darling. I wanted to tell you no more skirts.” He says and you look at him confused.
“I…Is it because how short they are?” You ask.
“That and the school girl skirt should be meant for my eyes when we are alone. Do you understand?” He asks.
“I…yes, Tom.” You say quietly.
He grins, looking at your neck where you had several hickeys before he leaves. You frown and look at the outfit you had prepared for this morning. It consisted of a school girl skirt.You sigh, grabbing a dark green skater skirt that ended a little about mid-thigh. There wasn’t much you could do about the length of your skirts until you went shopping again.
You grab your button up blouse and your Slytherin tie. You grab the blazer and sigh when you see dust on it. You hang it back up, deciding you will have to clean it later because you don’t have time now.
You pull on your knee socks and mary-janes when there was a knock at your dorm door. You open it and see it was Narcissa.
“I came bearing gifts.” She says.
You open the door and she guides you to the small vanity as she begins to help you cover the hickeys on your neck and jawline.
“So, who was it?” She asks.
“I’m not sure if I’m ready to say who it was yet.” You murmur.
“Did he force you? I’ll make him suffer the worst ways imaginable.” She says seriously.
“No, no, he didn’t force me. I’m just not sure what is happening yet. I don’t know if it merely was just another shag to him or if it’ll turn into something. However, he’s being a little controlling of what I wear, mainly my skirts.” You explain.
“I feel like I already know who this is.” She says, sighing.
“Who?” You ask.
“Tom Riddle?” She asks.
“Oh…how did you know?” You ask.
“Tom is…many things. I don’t know if he is capable of love and a relationship. He is a very possessive man. And I mean to the extent that it isn't healthy. He is ill-tempered and easily jealous. Not to mention he can be obsessive too. I personally think you should put some distance between the two of you and let things die down. I don’t know what his intentions are, but I’m sure they aren’t good.” She explains.
“Alright.” You say quietly.
You were quite sure how to feel. But, you knew Narcissa meant well and you also knew that she knew Tom better than you. You trusted her advice almost as you trusted Regulus’s.
“All done.” She says.
“Thank you, Issa.” You murmur and she nods.
She leaves you to your thoughts and you realize you need to head down to the Great Hall for breakfast. You gather your books and make your way out of your dorm in a daze. You head to the Great Hall and see everyone was already there. You ignore the burning stare that you knew belonged to Tom Riddle.
“Hey, you okay? You seem out of it? And your running late.” Regulus says.
“Oh, I’m fine. I think I’m just in need of food. I realized I didn’t eat once yesterday.” You explain.
“Y/N/N, you’ve got to take better care of yourself. I will start treating you like I did the first year.” He warns.
“I know, I know, and I promise I’ll do better.” You sigh.
“Why is Riddle staring at you? He seems pissed.” He whispers.
“Oh, who knows.” You sigh, briefly glancing at Tom.
Tom was staring at your neck where your hickeys would be, but thanks to Narcissa, they were no longer there. You managed to eat some of your food before it began to make you feel sick. You felt suffocated with Tom glaring daggers into you and Sirius was no better.
“Stop it.” Regulus warns Sirius.
“I want to know who it was.” He snaps, looking back at you.
You clench your jaw, narrowing your eyes at him as you take a slow breath in and let it out. You pull your wand out and keep your hand rested on the table, so you don’t draw anymore attention to you.
“Keep glaring, brother and watch how fast you end up in the hospital wing.” You warn lowly.
“Guys.” Narcissa warns.
“Who is he?” He growls lowly, leaning closer to you.
“Oh shit. Take cover!” Regulus says, going under the table.
You reach forward, grabbing Sirius’s tie and pull him closer as your face heats from anger.
“Astronomy tower, now.” You grit out.
He stands and storms out and you stand as Regulus pokes his head out.
“Don’t kill him please.” He pleads.
You storm out of the Great Hall, wand in hand as you make your way towards the Astronomy tower to see him already there and waiting.
“Who is it!?” He snaps as you both circle each other.
“Sirius, it’s none of your business. Stop trying to act like the older and protective brother. Stop acting like you care!” You snap.
“I do care! You're my sister.” He snaps.
“Guys. Let’s try to keep calm.” Narcissa says as she walks in with her group.
“Yeah, let’s just hug it out and make up.” Regulus says.
“I want to know who has my sister acting like a tramp.” He snaps.
“Oh no….oh no! Oh no! Back up, back up, back up!” Regulus says as he pushes everyone back.
“Bombarda!” You fast and Sirius curses as he tries to dodge the mini explosion you casted his way.
“Confundo!” He shouts, but you dodge it.
“Everte Statum.” You cast, watching as he flies back against the wall, his wand falling in the process.
You walk forward, grabbing his wand before looking down at him.
“Impulsa Animositas!” You snap, gaining confused looks from around the room.
“I…Y/N, have you been creating spells again?” Regulus asks cautiously.
“Again?” Narcissa asks alarmed.
“What did you do to me?” Sirius snaps.
“Say something mean. To any of us.” You say, smirking.
“What the hell did you do to me you crazy bi—ow!” He exclaims after feeling a jolt of electricity go through you.
“Just as I assumed. This spell will zap you everytime you try and say something mean.” You say.
“That’s child’s play you idiot!” He snaps before groaning.
“Hm. This isn’t. Lihednat Dolchitni.” You cast.
His hands find his throat as he try’s to breath. You clench your fist tighter, watching how he struggles more before you wave your hand and it stops. He leans forward, breathing heavily.
“Tread carefully, brother. I have far more up my sleeve than you wish to believe.” You spat.
“You…you will get in so much trouble for creating spells. Regulus and I told you that you need to stop.” He breathes heavily.
“Then keep your mouths shut otherwise I’ll make you suffer in the worst unimaginable ways.” You say.
With that, you turn and walk past the group who seemed shocked. You head back to the Great Hall, gathering your items before heading back to your dorm. You were too upset and riled up to do anything. So, instead you hurry to your dorm and lock the door.
You pace frantically, running your hands through your hair. You let a breath out that you hadn’t noticed you were holding.
“You’re okay. You’re okay. Everything is okay.” You mumble to yourself.
The lock on your door clicks, so you turn and see Tom. He closes the door back and turns to you with that normal passive and cold look.
“That was…impressive.” He says.
“Tom, I really rather be alone right now.” You mutter.
“Why cover the marks I left? I left them for a reason.” He says, his voice hardening as his eyes turn several shades darker.
“I didn’t want to walk around with them showing. People would have said something and I don’t want to deal with that. Plus, I rather the school not know I was your play thing.” You mutter harshly, turning your back to him.
“Who said you were a play thing because I don’t recall ever telling you that?” He snaps.
“Tell me this, Tom. Are you one for commitment? Would you be in an exclusive relationship? Huh, tell me that!” You snap harshly as you turn to face him again.
“I can do commitment. Before, I’d say no. However, for you I am willing to do it. I’m willing to be in an exclusive relationship as you call it. Because I can’t ever get you out of my head! You are all I can focus on! It’s so…so irritating, yet I love it at the same time.” He growls.
“Tom, there are going to have to be some rules set in place if we are to do something. Like the skirt thing this morning. I only wear skirts.” You say.
“Fine. Wear your skirts, well not the school girl ones, however I can’t promise that some asshole won’t end up dead for looking. You are mine.” He snaps.
“Okay, and what about the marks?” You ask.
“You shouldn’t care what anyone says. You never have before, so why care now? I want people to know that you belong to me. I want the guys to realize that you aren’t a possibility anymore. You are mine.” He says, closing the distance between you both.
You look up as his hand wraps around your throat. He tightens his hand and you let a shaky breath out as you clench your thighs.
“You barely know me.” You mumble.
“I know more than you think, darling. You piqued my interest. When that happens, I tend to learn everything I can.” He murmurs, brushing his nose against yours before kissing you softly.
You hum, moving your hands to his hair. You whine when he pulls back, a smirk on his lips.
“What does that mean? How have you learned about me if you just started speaking to me yesterday?” You ask.
“Because I might be a bit obsessive when it comes to learning of the things that interest me. I won’t stop until I know everything.” He says.
There was banging on your dorm door and you sigh, going to walk past Tom, but he loops an arm around your waist.
“Who is it?” Tom asks, annoyed.
“It’s Bella, me and Regulus. Is Y/N in there?” Narcissa says.
“Well go away. I’m about to fuck my girl.” He snaps.
Your face heats up as you cover your mouth to hide your gasp. Narcissa gasps, Regulus laughs and yells for you to get it while Bellatrix throws a fit.
“We are not doing anything! We are just talking!” You exclaim.
“Talking, huh?” He says, quirking a brow at you as he slips a hand beneath your skirt.
You let a shaky breath out as he trails his hand up your thigh. He gets to your underwear, sliding two fingers beneath the lacy fabric.
“Tom.” You mumble.
“Talking and yet you're so wet for me. Do you want my cock again?” He asks, sliding a finger in you.
Your eyes flutter close and he grins widely, loving the way you reacted to his touch. You were the violin and he was the violinist. He played you so gracefully and loved the beautiful symphony that came from your mouth. It was his greatest obsession.
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fatesundress · 10 months
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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader
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summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.
tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people
note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡
word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)
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You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.
You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.
He evidently does not.
“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.
You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”
“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”
“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”
He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.
It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.
There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.
That decides it. Flotsam still floats.
Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine. 
…It’s just that he’s insufferable.
The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.
Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones. 
“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.
You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”
“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”
In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.
I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.
You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.
It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.
Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.
You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.
When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.
You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.
Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary. 
Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.
You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.
For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly. 
You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.
It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.
Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.
You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.
Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.
“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.
Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.
“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”
“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”
“I wonder why.”
He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.
“What, Tom?”
He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”
You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile? 
It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.
“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”
“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”
“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”
All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up. 
Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.
Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about? 
You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers. 
For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.
He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)
Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.
You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession. 
They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.
You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.
“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.
He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”
“Curiosity—”
“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”
He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.
You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.
But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.
“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.
“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”
“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”
This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary. 
“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”
He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure? 
It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.
The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning. 
The worst of the world has impeccable timing.
A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.
So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.
And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.
BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER
MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES
DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN
All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.
The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.
It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.
In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with. 
You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.
Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.
But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge. 
He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.
You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books. 
You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.
“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.
Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.
He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”
“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”
You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls. 
“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”
“An altercation.”
“Very good, that is what I said.”
You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin. 
“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.
You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.
You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated. 
But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again. 
She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.
For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.
Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)
Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.
“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.
“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.
“What? Malfoy?”
You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.
But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”
Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —
“A professor?”
“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.
He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.
It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.
He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.
Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.
You consider it a warning.
Tom does not.
“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”
His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.
“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”
“So?”
It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.
“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”
He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.
“Are you stupid, Tom?”
You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.
“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”
Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.
Tom acts stupid.
Dumbledore knows.
It all happens very fast.
You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.
You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.
You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.
“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”
Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”
You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.
“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”
“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”
“I —”
“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”
You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.
“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”
“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”
“So nothing novel then.”
“D’you want me to blast you again?”
His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.
You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”
That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.
“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.
“Tom.”
“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”
“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”
Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”
“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”
And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.
It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.
The day everything changes starts the same as any. 
You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now. 
Tom has cracked the book.
It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.
“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.
He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.
“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”
“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”
You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”
“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”
“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”
“I have no need.”
You frown. “You… you already know it.”
“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —
“You’re not muggle-born.”
“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”
“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”
“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”
“Why would he lie?”
“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”
You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.
“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”
He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.
“Are you trying to murder me?”
“I might.”
“You’d be the first suspect.”
“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”
Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.
He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice. 
It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.
“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all.  You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.
There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.
“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”
You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.
“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”
The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.
“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.
He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else. 
“Should I?”
And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”
It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.
Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”
The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.
You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.
Summer blisters when it comes.
Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them. 
And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.
A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.
Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.
But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.
It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?
You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.
“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.
“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”
And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.
He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.
Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.
You always are.
The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten. 
Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.
He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.
And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.
Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.
You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.
You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.
You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.
Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.) 
You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.
So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true. 
It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.
It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.
Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.
The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer. 
You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.
Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t. 
But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.
“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.
Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.
“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”
He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.
You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”
“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.
“You’ll get sick.”
His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”
Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.
Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.
When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid. 
What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.
You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.
Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.
You are regardless. 
It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.
A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.
Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.
It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.
You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.
And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.
“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.
He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”
“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”
“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”
“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”
“Why?” he deadpans.
You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”
“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”
Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.
To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.
“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”
You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.
You are not his keeper. You know that. 
“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.
He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.
And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.
What? Sorry. What’s going on?
He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”
You’re almost positive you did not.
Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.
You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.
Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.
Your contentment is remedied quickly.
Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.
You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.
Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.
“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.
You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”
He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.
You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”
“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”
“How’s that?”
“No one would be senseless enough to try.”
And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.
One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.
It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.
You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.
It happens again.
Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.
There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.
You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.
This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.
You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.
You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)
He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately. 
And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.
Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.
And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.
The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.
The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.
That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.
One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.
The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?
You take to the library.
Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.
The third sign is the end. 
You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.
He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight. 
And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.
So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.
Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.
He’s something else entirely.
What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.
You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.
His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes. 
You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand. 
“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.
You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.
“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.
Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”
“I’ve been good at it.”
His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.
His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.
“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.
You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.
You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.
He sees all of you.
Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.
“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.
“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."
He stares at you. There’s nothing there.
“Tell me, Tom.”
Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.
“I cannot.”
Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.
It’s late winter and it’s too cold.
“You killed her,” you say quietly.
“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”
“What are you… so it was an accident?”
“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”
“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.
He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.
“You told me to change things —”
“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”
“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”
“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”
“Do you want me to lie?”
“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”
“Her death is the first step to —”
“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”
“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.
All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.
“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."
You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.
“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."
“...What?"
“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”
You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”
“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.
“How lucky for you.”
“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”
“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”
His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.
“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."
“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain,  a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”
And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him. 
You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love. 
“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock. 
Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly. 
Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.
“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it. 
He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.
After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"
“I thought I would have time.”
“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”
He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”
Fuck him. “Fuck you.”
“Very cogent.”
“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."
He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”
You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.
“You have lost me, Tom."
He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.
You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.) 
You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish. 
There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.
You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.
Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.
That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same. 
You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.
And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.
You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.
It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.
Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.
Be well.
You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —
You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.
Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.
Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.
It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.
You find that to be true.
Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.
Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much. 
“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.
You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition. 
Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.
Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.
Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.
Due February.
It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”
Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”
Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.
You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”
Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”
And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.
Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.
You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.
You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.
In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.
Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.
You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.
But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.
You drink, and don’t look away.
By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.
There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.
You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal. 
An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.
You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it. 
You’re better than them. You can do it forever.
The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.
The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.
“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.
You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.
You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.
The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.
He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.
You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.
Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)
“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.
You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.
Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”
You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.
“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”
“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”
“I take that back.”
She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”
Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.
You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.
It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.
On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.
There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.
Indifferent it is. 
“Can I help you?”
“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.
You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.
“Am I?”
“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”
“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”
Indifference effaced. You’re angry.
He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”
Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.
It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.
“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”
Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.
He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.
He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”
You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.
“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.
Where is Mari?
“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”
You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?
“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.
You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.
“Well then —” 
Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.
His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.
“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —
“That would be wise.”
He’s still looking at your lips.
No one else is looking at you at all.
It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.
Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.
“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.
“I haven’t protested.”
But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.
“But you will.”
His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”
You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.
The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)
You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”
“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.
“You still lost me.”
“I know.”
“I hate you.”
He pauses for a moment. “I know.”
You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.
“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”
You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.
He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.
“My door is always open,” he says.
He lets you go.
You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.
Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.
If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.
It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?
You think of him often. You think of his offer.
My door is always open.
Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?
Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.
It’s a tempting door.
The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.
You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.
The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.
Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.
The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant. 
It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.
But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor. 
A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.
My door is always open.
Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.
Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.
She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.
When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.
It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.
A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.
“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.
“Renauld?”
He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.
“Well, yeah —”
You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”
“But McCormack sent him.”
“Where is it?”
“I… McCormack said that —”
“Where is it, Flack?”
“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”
That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.
The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.
But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.
“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”
You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”
“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”
You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.
It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.
“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.
Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”
“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”
“Who authorised you?” he hisses.
“I did.”
In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.
But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.
You were completely out of line and utterly right.
It isn’t something people like you are allotted.
Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.
And… he does.
With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.
It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.
There’s really no choice but to promote you.
Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.
By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.
The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.
Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.
After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.
“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”
“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”
Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.
“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.
“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”
“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”
“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.
“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”
“Alves, I’ll have you know —”
You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”
She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”
You roll your eyes, taking a drink.
That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.
But something about it itches.
You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.
You are green, through and through.
Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.
You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.
You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.
And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.
That makes it much worse when you sleep together. 
There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.
“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”
“Yes.”
“Right.”
“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”
“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”
“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”
You’re incredibly daft about it.
There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident. 
The itch exacerbates.
You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.
You wake up and he isn’t there.
It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.
The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.
And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.
You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.
You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.
All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.
R.R
It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.
You return to Hogwarts posthaste.
It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.
The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be. 
You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.
“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.
Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.
“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”
“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”
And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.
Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.
There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.
But you do, because he told you.
You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.
It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop. 
It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.
You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.
The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece. 
It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.
You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.
He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.
“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.
“I thought your door was always open.”
You see his posture change from just his silhouette.
“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that." 
He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.
“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.
You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.
You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.
“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."
“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”
“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."
His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"
“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval. 
Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.
“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”
“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will." 
You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"
“Yes."
You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.
“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”
“I earned this,” you hiss.
“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”
“Fuck you.”
He smiles. “There you are.”
“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”
The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.
“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”
“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.
You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’d need a Vow for that.”
You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”
“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”
“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”
“A Vow.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Tea, then? Biscuits?”
“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”
“Hm. Terrible shame.”
Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”
He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”
“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”
“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”
Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis. 
“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain. 
He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.
“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.” 
You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”
Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.
“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.
“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”
He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.
He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.
“I should have killed you,” he repeats.
It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.
“Yes,” you agree.
It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.
Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.
There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.
He was your first in everything but this.
You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.
You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.
“How long?” he asks thickly.
You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back. 
“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."
You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"
You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"
His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake." 
You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster. 
“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"
“N-no.”
He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."
Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating. 
But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself. 
You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.
He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.
Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.
His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh. 
You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.
He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.
“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.
You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.
“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”
And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.
You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.
He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.
You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…
A finger presses inside and you moan.
“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.
“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.
He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”
Oh, fuck.
He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”
Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.
You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes. 
Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.
You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.
He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.
But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.
Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.
“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.
“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.
“Will you give me more?”
Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.
He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.
You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.
He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —
“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.
That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.
You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”
A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?
And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.
Maybe you already do.
Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —
He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.
“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”
You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.
“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”
You whimper.
“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.
If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.
“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”
Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.
“You can — uh — you can — ”
"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”
And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.
You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.
“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.
You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”
You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.
He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you. 
He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.
You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.
But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.
Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.
“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.
You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.
He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.
You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.
“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.
You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.
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mrsmikaelsxn · 11 months
Text
What Did You Do
masterlist
pairing: tom riddle x female reader, voldemort x female reader
warnings: angst, tiny bit of fluff
summary: throughout your years at hogwarts, you and tom were inseparable, now as a professor you see what happened to him at the battle of hogwarts - requested by anon
a/n: i'm going to age down voldemort and the reader (meaning because mcgonagall is a little younger than voldemort, the reader would be so old lmao. so i'm just imagining the reader is like remus' age, it wont affect the time line, idk if that makes sense sorry)
song: the night we met - lord huron
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Tom was brilliant, so were you. You were both the top of your classes since your first year at Hogwarts.
That's how you two started talking. You would be partnered with each other in most of your classes, you made an excellent pair.
Throughout the years there, you two had grown a bond. Eventually, you both had feelings for each other.
You knew of your affections towards him, you didn't tell him because you didn't want to ruin your close friendship. But Tom had been in a sort of denial, seeing as how he was conceived under a love potion, he didn't think it was possible.
Around your sixth year, he had come to terms with how he felt. You two had confessed to each other after one of Slughorns dinner parties, he had attended as your date.
It came as a shock to most students when the news of you getting together spread.
They had know he had a soft spot for you, but he had never shown any romantic feelings towards anyone before.
It was seventh year and Tom had confessed to you of his plans and becoming Lord Voldemort.
He asked you to join him and be his partner but you couldn't. It was wrong and you knew it, he knew it deep down too.
You figured this was caused by his horrible childhood at the orphanage, he told you all about how he was treated.
He asked you one final time to join or he would have to continue without you.
You stood there in front of him with tears streaming down your face as you shook your head.
He wanted to wipe the tears from your beautiful face, but he knew it would make him tempted to give up the plans he worked so hard for.
So he turned his back on you and left you behind while you cried and begged him to stop what he was doing.
After that night, you hadn't seen him again.
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"Harry!" you call your student, a student who was like a son to you.
You knew of how he got his scar, as did everyone else. It broke your heart each time you thought of what had caused it.
"Harry, be safe, I'll be right behind you," you kiss his head. He goes and runs off to find Voldemort as students and staff start to fill the courtyard and go into a circle.
You quickly walked through the empty halls of Hogwarts, making sure there were no student that needed help.
You finally went outside and saw Harry and Voldemort in a duel.
You gasp at how he looks, this wasn't your Tom. You hadn't seen how he looked since that night so long ago.
You rush over ignoring the calls of people to stop.
"Tom! Stop this!" you yell with angry tears forming in your eyes.
Voldemort blocks Harry's spell and sends one to knock him out for a little while he drops his arm to look at you.
People watching were frozen in their places as they took in the scene in front of them. There were very few people who were aware of your past relationship with Tom.
"Y/n."
"What did you do," you cry. He almost winces at the pain in your voice.
He slowly walks over to you and stops about three feet from you.
"I got the power I've always desired," he explains in a monotone voice.
"Tom... we could have had a future together, look what you've become," you whisper.
"You didn't wish to join me, you didn't expect me to drop everything I've worked for, did you?"
"Yes, I did, because you could have and I would have done the same for you," you try your best to keep your voice from cracking.
He knows you're right. He couldn't look you in your eyes. He looks around at the faces watching as he tries to not think about how beautiful you still are.
You had grown into a stunning woman, and well, he felt embarrassed by what he had come to.
"Stop!" Voldemort shouts, annoyed at his now conflicted emotions.
He feels tempted to stop and apparate you and him somewhere to stay, like how you always dreamed of.
He couldn't, not now. He decided an apology was the only thing he could do, as he went to apologize to you, he suddenly felt pain all over.
He turned his head to see Harry with his wand pointed at him. It was then you both realized he was truly gone.
As he starts to turn to stone, he uses all the energy left in him to look at you, in the eyes this time.
He watches as so many emotions flash through your eyes. He memorized your features in the few seconds he has.
You look at Voldemort on his knees, almost all stone. You see him mouth something, it looks like 'I'm sorry', but you can't be sure.
You watch as he looks you dead in the eye, finally turning completely to stone and dissolving into nothing.
People around you start cheering and hugging as they all celebrate.
Harry turns to you and sees the devastated look on your face.
"I'm sorry that you lost him," Harry says as he hugs you, "not Voldemort, but Tom," he continues.
"I'm sorry too, but you're safe, along with everyone else," you sigh, "that's all that matters," you kiss his forehead and hug him back.
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It took you a while to finally accept that Tom- Voldemort, was gone.
Things slowly got back to normal. Hogwarts was rebuilt and repaired. You continued your teaching career there.
You were sat in your room, in a cottage where you and Tom were supposed to be living.
You decided that if he couldn't be there to live life, you would do it for the both of you.
You pick up some letters he would send you when you were dating, you had saved them all. You look at the box and see one that hasn't been opened. Your eyebrows furrow as you open it. Then, a tear slides down your face as you read it.
My y/n,
If you are reading this, that means I have become Lord Voldemort, and am likely dead now.
I need you to understand that I am not the Tom you once knew. I also need you to understand that I have regretted walking away from you each and every day since I did so.
You were my family, my love, my everything.
I'm sorry I threw that away for power. I know now that it is far too late to go back.
I wish I could though, and spend life with you in that place you always use to tell me about. Unfortunately, it isn't possible. But know that if it was, I would take that opportunity in a heartbeat.
Stay true to yourself, don't turn your back on the people you love, I regrettably made that mistake.
You are a beautiful person, my love, I hope you accomplish all of the things you use to rant to me about.
Please forgive me.
Yours always,
Tom Riddle
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tomriddleslove · 25 days
Text
Blood on Love’s altar.
✩Tom Riddle x Reader
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Summary: Tom Riddle did not know he could grieve. But now? He’d give up everything to not feel it.
Warnings: Mentions of Death, Suicide, Self Mutilation (brief)
A/N: 🙂
Song: Dove - Antihoney
Antent - hope to see you again
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“You ought to put that away before Professor Dumbledore sees.”
The very first words you spoke to Tom.
First year, 2 weeks into school. It was a Thursday afternoon, to be precise. It was during a transfiguration lesson. Tom had managed to nab a copy of Markov’s ‘A Guide to the Dark Arts’. It was a forbidden book, but one that had greatly intrigued him. He held it under the table, reading.
You nudged him and when he sent you a scowl you did not look away, rather speaking those very words.
“You ought to put that away before Professor Dumbledore sees.”
He just about manages to snap the book shut and shove it into his bag when Dumbledore walks past, the eclectic man giving the pair of you a once over before moving to the next desk.
The second time he spoke to you was in the library a few days later.
“Still sticking your nose in the restricted section?” You pry, sliding up behind him as he startles. He turns to face you, a look of annoyance on his face as he speaks.
"And what business is it of yours?" he retorted, his eyes narrowing.
“You’ve already quite the reputation. Lurking in the restricted section should taint that, no?” You hum.
Infuriating. Nosy. Intransigent.
-•-
“Morning Riddle.” You quip as you walk into potions, taking a seat next to him.
Second year, 3rd day back.
He looks at you but says no more, internally cursing you.
You work on a strengthening solution and accidentally drop a jar of bat spleens onto Tom’s bag.
He debates getting back at you for it, but he doesn’t.
Clumsy. Persistent. Agitating.
-•-
Third year, same scene, same setting.
"Still poking your nose where it doesn't belong?" you tease, sidling up to him with a mischievous grin.
Tom's annoyance flares, but there's a flicker of something else in his eyes, a begrudging amusement perhaps. "You never learn, do you?" he mutters, though there's less bite in his tone this time.
You laugh, the sound echoing through the potions classroom. "Where's the fun in following the rules?" you reply, settling into the seat beside him.
Tom's lips twitch into an almost imperceptible smile before he turns his attention back to the brewing cauldron. Your laugh isn’t awful, he supposes.
-•-
Fourth Year, Charms. The sun was particularly nice that day. It casts a lovely glow on your face.
Professor Trinfort announced a partner project, pairing students for a collaborative spellcasting assignment. As fate would have it, you found yourself paired with Tom Riddle.
You exchange a glance, nudging him lightly. "Looks like it's you and me," you say with a faint smile.
Tom nods, his expression less guarded than before. "Seems that way," he replies, his tone less curt than usual.
As the two of you work together, you notice a subtle shift in Tom's demeanour. He's more open to your suggestions and more willing to listen to your ideas. There’s a newfound ease between you, and you don’t say anything for fear of disturbing it. Tom has left one of his books on his desk again. Professor Trinfort was walking past and you quickly grabbed the book, hiding it underneath your bag. Tom notices and looks at you with an unreadable expression for a second.
Nosy. Irritating. Perhaps not too bad, though.
-•-
5th year. You’re not there. Your absence is noticeable in the first week. It’s suffocating in the second.
Tom finds himself searching for you in the corridors, and he cannot help but feel as though something is missing. He values the quiet he now has during lessons, but it’s not as rewarding as he thought it would be. There’s a nagging feeling in him that he can’t quite shake.
He learns very quickly that you’d been attacked on the first day of term and had been in the hospital wing for quite a while. He visits you whilst you’re sleeping. He stares at your weakened form, not moving. It’s odd, seeing you in such a state.
You wake the next morning to news of the perpetrators being withdrawn from school after they all woke up missing fingers. You somehow know who it is.
Tom does not visit you till you are asleep. When he does, he places your book by your bedside. He doesn’t let himself stay for too long, berating his foolishness as he leaves.
-•-
6th Year. Tensions are running high after the death of Myrtle Warren. You’re all to face your boggarts, and Tom notices how apprehensive you are. You chew at your bottom lip, leg bouncing up and down relentlessly.
He places his hand over your thigh, focusing ahead as you turn to look at him.
“It’s agitating.” He mutters, and he can tell how ridiculous it sounds. You suppress a smile and turn back to the front.
He can tell you’re a bit shaken up from the lesson, so he offers to study with you in the library during the evening. He meets you after dinner, spotting you in the far corner.
You’re wearing a black corduroy skirt—a white vest with lace trimmings and a baggy green cardigan. You’ve pinned your hair back with your wand, the end of your quill pressed to your lips as you work. You’re rather beautiful, he notices. He takes a seat next to you, ignoring the smile you beam as you work together.
Hours have passed and he hasn’t noticed, enjoying your company. He feels a weight on his shoulder and turns, realising you’ve fallen asleep. He huffs in annoyance but he does not move, a hand coming up to remove your glasses from your face as he carefully sets them down on the table. You wake up in your bed, your books neatly placed on your desk. You must have come back at some point, you think to yourself.
-•-
“Hey,” You hum, plopping down next to Tom on the frosty glass near the black lake.
“Morning.” He responds, not looking up from his book as he acknowledges you. You reach into your satchel, producing a small thermos flask. You transfigure a pebble into a cup and pour a glass of steaming cinnamon tea for Tom.
As you hand him the cup of cinnamon tea, Tom finally looks up from his book, a faint hint of surprise crossing his features at the unexpected gesture. He accepts the tea with a nod of thanks, taking a sip before setting it down beside him.
"Thank you," he says quietly, his voice softer than usual, a hint of warmth in his tone that catches you off guard.
You smile in response, a gentle warmth spreading through you at the sight of his rare display of gratitude. "You're welcome," you reply, “Cinnamon tea is my favourite comfort drink.” You add, and Tom finds himself storing that piece of information in the ever-growing folder in his brain labelled ‘you.’
-•-
7th Year. Tom is elected Head Boy. You’re a bit upset you didn’t get Head Girl, but you suppose you weren’t that extraordinary. Tom feels otherwise.
You still got awarded prefect and found yourself paired on patrols with Tom.
“Seems like the universe is set on keeping us together. You finally warming up to me Tom?” You tease, grinning lopsidedly as you both roam down the dark, empty hallways. He meets your gaze with a small smile of his own, a rare display of warmth that sends a flutter of excitement through you. "Perhaps," he replies cryptically, though the glint in his eyes betrays a hint of fondness that you can't help but return.
You continue to walk in silence for a bit more till you (stupidly) have an idea. Upon digging around in your pocket you find a Gorpin’s exploding powered parcels, a tiny thing about the size of an acorn that exploded colourful powder when thrown. With a small grin, you call Tom’s name, tossing the parcel at him. He turns around and meets your gaze for a second before he’s enveloped in a cloud of pastel blue.
You laugh at the sight, clutching your stomach as a string of giggles escape your lips. As the cloud slowly clears, a flicker of uncertainty crosses your mind, a sudden fear that perhaps you've overstepped some invisible boundary. Your smile fades, replaced by a furrow of worry as you open your mouth to apologize.
But before you can utter a word, something unexpected happens. Tom's lips quirk up into a small smile, and he’s chasing after you.
“Tom!” You laugh, the sweet sound echoing through the halls as you begin running away from him.
His laughter joins yours, his footsteps getting closer and closer as you turn a corner. Your lungs burn, laughter bubbling from within you when you’re suddenly swept upwards, two strong arms wrapping around your midsection.
“Got you. Gonna make you pay for this.” Tom says, an uncharacteristic smirk on his face as he practically hauls you over his shoulder.
“Wait, Tom!” You protest, a yelp escaping your lips as he begins running with you in his arms.
Your protests are ignored as you enter the prefect's bathroom, and the second his intentions are clear you laugh, whilst pleading. He shifts his hold on you so you're being carried almost bridal style, and he raises a brow as he looks down at you.
“Wait, Tom. It doesn’t have to be like this.” You plead, trying to free yourself from his gasp. A smile tugs at his lips as he hums, seeming to retreat for a second. But he then holds you tighter, and in two swift steps jumps straight into the baths (which was more like a pool), sending you both into the water. A small shriek escapes your lips, and as you resurface from the water, laughing and sputtering, you shoot Tom a mock-complaining look. "Tom, you're incorrigible," you exclaim, your laughter bubbling up between your words.
Tom chuckles, the sound resonating in the spacious bathroom as he treads water beside you. For a moment, his gaze lingers on you, admiring you.
"You're quite something, you know that?" he says softly, the words carrying a warmth that sends a shiver down your spine.
Before you can respond, he closes the distance between you, his lips meeting yours in a kiss. You all but melt into the kiss, a hand coming up to cup his face, resting in his drenched black curls as you sigh into his mouth.
“Tom…” You murmur.
He’s never heard a more beautiful sound.
It’s nearing a month till your final exams and you haven’t seen Tom for a few days. You venture up to his dorm, knocking on his door.
“Tom?” You call out softly, leaning against the door. “It’s me.”
There’s silence for a second, and then the door unlocks.
As the door creaks open, you find Tom sitting on his bed, looking pale and dishevelled. He coughs weakly, his gaze meeting yours with a hint of surprise before he quickly looks away.
"Hey," you say softly, stepping into the room and closing the door behind you. "I heard you've been under the weather. Thought I'd come to check on you."
Tom nods, his expression unreadable as he shifts uncomfortably on the bed. "Yeah, just a bit under the weather," he mutters, his voice hoarse.
You frown, concern creasing your brow as you move closer to him. "You should be resting," you say gently, reaching out to feel his forehead for signs of fever.
Tom flinches slightly at your touch, but he doesn't pull away. Instead, he meets your gaze with a hint of vulnerability in his eyes. "I know," he admits quietly, "but I hate feeling like this. It's... frustrating."
You nod in understanding, your heart aching at the sight of him looking so uncharacteristically vulnerable. "I brought you some cinnamon tea," you say, pulling a thermos flask and a few biscuits from your bag. "Thought it might help."
Tom's lips quirk up into a small smile at your thoughtful gesture, a hint of gratitude shining through his usual stoicism. "Thank you," he murmurs, his voice softer than usual.
You smile back, and Tom shuffles over to give you some space. You take a seat next to him, crossing your legs as you pour him a cup of tea. You blow on the tea to cool it slightly, taking an experimental sip to ensure it’s not too hot. When you're satisfied with the temperature, you hand the cup over to Tom. He twists it around to make sure his lips touch the same part of the cup yours did. It faintly tastes of cherry lip balm.
You don’t notice the gesture.
You lean back against the headboard, legs outstretched in front of you as you stare up at his ceiling.
“You should go. You’ll get sick.” Tom murmurs, his voice laced with an uncharacteristic apprehension that has you smiling.
“It’s fine.” You smile. You shuffle down slightly and very carefully place your head on Tom’s chest.
He tenses for a second but relaxes soon after. His hand hesitates for a moment before tentatively coming to rest on your shoulder, his touch light and cautious as if unsure of whether he's allowed to show such vulnerability.
"You don't have to stay," he murmurs softly, his voice barely above a whisper, but you can hear the underlying plea in his words.
You shake your head, a small smile playing on your lips as you nestle closer to him. "I want to," you reply simply, the warmth of his body seeping into yours, banishing the chill of the room.
“You shouldn’t.” He repeats, and his words are undoubtedly laced with an underlying meaning that should warn you.
But if you realise that, he certainly can’t tell. You simply close your eyes and speak.
“I’ve never been the best at listening, have I?”
-•-
Exams are over, and graduation day arrives. Tom feels a conflicting mix of emotions swirling within him, and he hates the fact he’s grappling with things he shouldn’t be worried about. On one hand, there's a sense of relief that he won't have to worry about dragging you into the complexities of his life any longer. The thought of you being free from the burdens and dangers that often accompany his endeavours brings him a measure of solace.
Yet, at the same time, there's a pang of sadness that ebbs away at him when realizes that this may be the last time he'll see you. The prospect of saying goodbye, of parting ways, suddenly becomes unthinkable, and he feels a little sick.
As he scans the crowd of graduates, his gaze eventually lands on you, a soft smile gracing your lips as you chat animatedly with your friends. For a fleeting moment, he considers approaching you and saying goodbye properly, but the fear of attachment holds him back.
Instead, he watches from a distance, silently wishing you well. As the ceremony draws to a close and the graduates begin to disperse, he turns to leave, only praying you’ll never have to see him again.
But just as he's about to turn away, you catch his eye, a knowing smile playing on your lips as you make your way over to him. "Hey, Tom," you say softly, your voice filled with warmth and affection.
Tom's heart skips a beat at the sight of you, his resolve wavering in the face of your unwavering presence. "Hey," he replies, his voice barely above a whisper.
You smile up at him, a glimmer of mischief dancing in your eyes. "Trying to run away? You know, you won't get rid of me that easily," you tease lightly, reaching out to gently squeeze his hand.
Tom's lips twitch into a small smile, a flicker of hope betraying his rationale at your words. "I certainly hope not," he murmurs, his voice barely audible over the din of the crowd.
You lean up on your tip toes, pressing a light kiss to his cheek. You pull back and a small laugh escapes your lips, rubbing the faint lipstick mark it left.
Nosy. Irritating. Beautiful.
Tom doesn’t see you for a year after that.
A hesitant knock at the door of your dingy little flat nearing 1:00 am has you alert, and slightly on edge. You reach for your wand, carefully treading towards the door so as to not alert a potential intruder of your presence. You peer through the peephole, and you feel as though your world stops when you see Tom outside.
Hastily undoing the wards and spells that enchant your flat, you unlock the door and Tom all but collapses into your arms.
He reeks of dark magic, and you know. You’ve always known, really. What other mind could be so sadistically brilliant, who else would be able to crumble the Romanian Ministry of magic in a mere week?
You pull Tom into your flat, closing the door behind him as you guide him to the nearest chair. He looks drained, his usually sharp features drawn and weary. Blood stains his clothes, tension evident on his face.
You set to work immediately, inspecting the various wounds all over his body as you frantically recite healing spells, rummaging through a small leather trunk filled with an assortment of vials.
Tom observes you through half lidded eyes that threaten to permanently shut.
He always knew you’d become a healer. He had known since that day you came into his dorm and took care of him when he was ill. He had known since that day you had found an injured crow lying by the side of the greenhouse and nursed it back to full health in a mere hour.
You preserved lives, he took them.
“Up.” You murmur, pulling the hem of his shirt. He obliges, pulling his lead-like arms up as you unbutton his shirt and pull it off. You frown at the scars that mar Tom's chest and he wants to laugh.
Don’t stress over me, sweetheart. It’d be better off for you if I were dead.
He no longer flinches at your touch as you trail your hands down his chest, murmuring spells that alleviate the ache. You're exhausted by the time you're done, slinging Tom’s arm over your shoulder as you help him walk over to your bed.
He settles onto the bed with a heavy sigh, his body sinking into the mattress as if it's the first time he's allowed himself to truly relax in ages. You gently place your blanket atop of him, your brow furrowed as you take a seat at the edge of your bed.
You brush a strand of hair away from his forehead, his eyes drifting shut as exhaustion finally overtakes him. You watch over him for a while longer, lingering by his bedside as he slips into a fitful sleep.
You can't help but wonder how things came to this. How the boy you once knew, the one who had captured your heart with his sharp wit and brilliant mind, had become so lost.
You slide into your bed beside him and turn over, your back facing his. You let your eyes shut and find yourself falling asleep.
You wake up in the morning, and you know before you even turn around. Your bed was empty, barely a trace of warmth left. You had to be sure you didn’t dream last night's events, padding into the kitchen as you yawn.
A singular cup of warm cinnamon tea is there. You smile softly as you take the cup.
You didn’t see him for another two years after that. The news got worse and worse. Attacks were often and many. People were scared to leave the house.
Just when you've almost given up hope of ever seeing him again, there's a knock at your door in the dead of night. You're startled awake, heart pounding as you stumble out of bed and rush to answer it.
As you swing the door open, you're met with the sight of Tom standing there, looking worse for wear. His clothes are torn, his face bruised and bloodied, and it feels like a scene all too familiar.
Without a word, you reach out and slap him across the face, the sound echoing in the silence of the night.
Tom's startled reaction is almost comical, his hand flying up to his cheek as he recoils from the force of the blow. He stares at you in shock, his eyes wide with disbelief as he tries to process what just happened.
You glare at him, your fists clenched at your sides as you let out a string of curses, venting all the frustration and anger that has been building up inside you for years.
"You can't just waltz in and out of my life whenever you please," you spit out, your voice trembling with emotion. "You can't just show up here, covered in blood and bruises, and expect me to drop everything and help you."
Tom opens his mouth to speak, but you cut him off with a sharp gesture, your eyes blazing with determination.
"But you know what the worst part is?" you continue, your voice dropping to a whisper. "The worst part is that no matter how angry I am, no matter how much I want to hate you, I can't. Because despite everything, I still fucking care about you! I sit there, and I read the news, and every day I pray it’s not your death I’m seeing. Do you know how fucked up that is?"
For a moment, there's silence between you, the weight of your words hanging heavy in the air.
"I know," he murmurs, his voice barely audible over the pounding of your heart.
Before you can say anything else, he pulls you into a kiss, his lips pressing against yours with a desperation that takes your breath away.
You melt into the kiss, your anger melting away as you wrap your arms around him, pulling him closer. Despite everything, you know that you can't stay away.
For better or for worse, you're his weakness, and he's yours.
He pulls back and you have to resist the urge to dissolve into tears, bottom lip wavering as he pulls you into his chest.
“Don’t you dare leave. Don’t you dare fucking leave.” You tremble into his chest, and his heart pangs at your plea as he speaks.
“I won’t.”
He stuck to his word. He hated you for it. But he hated himself more. Because every second he stayed, was only binding you more and more to your demise. He was killing you, he knew it would happen, and yet he couldn’t bring himself to leave.
You erode his being, taking away everything that he was sure he was certain of. There were many times he would contemplate simply killing you, ridding himself of this foolish weakness that was causing him so much turmoil. A single look at you and Tom knew that there would be little to no meaning for immortality if you weren’t to be there beside him.
Tom would disappear for days on end, and you’d hear about an attack shortly after. He’d always come back. You turned a blind eye to his actions, ignoring the furious accusations of corpses that lay there in your name.
Truthfully, you could stop him. You knew that you could turn him in, and he wouldn’t dare lay a hand on you. But you didn’t, and so by association every person he killed had their blood on your hands too.
You had been called by Tom at the crack of dawn one morning. His voice echoed through your head, waking you from your slumber.
Clifford close. House 17.
You apparate without second thought, your eyes widening as you take in the scene.
Tom is standing there, covered in blood that you’re sure is not his. You turn around and spot another person, a frail old man who can barely look up.
The frail old man's plea is cut short as a burst of green light erupts from Tom's wand, ending his life in an instant. You watch in horror as the life drains from the man's eyes, a sickening realization settling in the pit of your stomach.
Tom turns to you, his eyes gleaming with a dark intensity that sends a shiver down your spine. Without a word, he turns his wand to you, muttering something that knocks you straight out.
He knows that making you a Horcrux is a drastic and irreversible decision, one that will bind your soul to his for eternity. But at the same time, he can't bear the thought of losing you.
The idea of immortality without you by his side is unbearable, and he knows that making you a Horcrux is the only way to ensure that you'll always be together. It's a selfish decision, born out of desperation and fear of losing the one person who has come to mean everything to him.
A sense of self-loathing creeps in. He knows that making you a Horcrux will condemn you to a life of despair, but he can't shake the feeling that he has no other choice.
When you awaken, you find yourself back in your apartment, the events of the previous moments feeling like a distant nightmare. Tom is sitting beside you, his expression unreadable as he watches you stir.
"Are you alright?" he asks, his voice filled with concern.
You blink in confusion, trying to make sense of what just happened. You recall the sight of the old man dying before you and slap a hand over your mouth, stumbling out of bed as you rush towards the bathroom. You collapse over the toilet bowl, retching. Your eyes sting, and you don’t hear Tom coming in until you feel a comforting hand on your back, one holding your hair up.
“Get the fuck off me.” You snap, pushing him away with a weak shove as you cough.
Tom steps back, his brows furrowing in concern. "What happened?" he asks, his voice tinged with worry.
You whirl around to face him, your anger boiling over as you shout, "You killed a man in front of me!"
He takes a step towards you, his voice cool and collected. "You must have been imagining things," he asserts, his tone firm and unwavering. "We were home all night yesterday."
Your hands tremble with anger and disbelief as you glare at him, tears blurring your vision. "You're lying!" you sob, your voice cracking with emotion. "You're making me seem crazy!"
Tom's gaze narrows slightly, a flicker of irritation crossing his features. "I assure you, I am not," he retorts, his voice tinged with impatience. "If you don't believe me, use Legilimency on me. Check for yourself."
You close your eyes, muttering legilimens under your breath. You probe into his mind, and he doesn’t keep his guard up.
In Tom's mind, you see a vividly detailed memory of him being home all night. He sits with you by the fireplace, a glass of whiskey in hand, engrossed in a book. You drink with him, a drunken giggle escaping your lips as you kiss him.
As you pull away from his mind, a sense of dread washes over you. The memory he showed you is so convincing, so detailed, that you find yourself doubting your own recollection of events.
You come back to this reality, blinking as you suck in deep breaths.
Tom's expression softens slightly, a hint of sympathy in his eyes as he reaches out to gently touch your shoulder. "It's alright," he murmurs reassuringly. "You had quite a bit to drink last night. You're probably just tired."
You nod, though you can’t rid yourself of the nagging feeling within you. Slowly sitting up, you follow Tom back to your bedroom. You lay back down in bed with him, convincing yourself it was a nightmare.
The second you close your eyes, the man calls out to you.
It’s very real.
In the following months, the cycle of Tom's disappearances and reappearances continues, each time leaving you more drained than before. You watch helplessly as he delves deeper into darkness, his actions becoming increasingly erratic and unpredictable.
You're alone in your apartment when it happens, a sudden surge of overwhelming emotions washing over you. You double over in pain, clutching your head as a vision flashes before your eyes.
In the vision, you see Tom, his face contorted in rage as he inflicts unspeakable torture upon an innocent victim. The scene is so vivid, so horrifying, that you can barely believe what you're seeing.
Gasping for breath, you stumble back, your heart racing as you try to make sense of the vision. You feel sick, your mind reeling as you stumble back into one of the chairs.
Tom returns in the evening, and you cannot bear looking at him.
You wash the blood off his hands. He could have used a cleaning spell, but he prefers for you to do it instead. To face the reality of what you’ve chosen. To wash the blood off his hands knowing it could have been yours.
You do not ask him about the vision, because you want to delude yourself into the comfortable reality that it was merely a nightmare of sorts.
‘Those only occur during sleep’ a voice points out in your head. You choose to ignore it.
Egged on by confusion and fear, you begin reading. Researching. A mirror image of Tom, hiding dark books from his sight as you read.
You bring it up one day.
You stand in the kitchen, brewing some tea as you speak.
“Is it possible to make a Horcrux out of a human?”
Tom's eyes widen in alarm, a flicker of apprehension crossing his features before he quickly masks it with a calm facade. "Why would you ask such a thing?" he replies, his voice steady despite the unease that lingers in the air.
You don't miss the subtle shift in his demeanour, the way his gaze flits away from yours for just a moment before returning.
You shrug nonchalantly, feigning innocence as you pour the tea into a pair of mugs. "Just curious," you say casually, though your heart pounds in your chest.
Tom watches you closely, his expression unreadable as he takes a sip of his tea. "It's not something that should concern you," he says finally, his tone firm.
"But is it possible?" you press, your voice tinged with determination.
Tom's jaw clenches, his gaze hardening as he meets your eyes. "Yes," he admits reluctantly, his voice barely above a whisper. "But it's a dark and dangerous magic, not something to be trifled with."
You nod slowly, your mind whirling with possibilities. "I see," you murmur, though you're already formulating a plan in your head.
You reach for one of the barely touched knives nestled in the drawer you had open and without second thought stab it straight through your hand.
Tom immediately drops the cup he holds, rushing over to you.
“What the fuck are you doing?!” He exclaims, eyes wide with disbelief as he stares down at the gruesome sight.
You grit your teeth, a pained sob escaping your lips as you yank the knife back out, and Tom’s heart is pounding at the sight of your blood dripping onto his hands.
“[Name], please. Stop-“ He pleads, stammering as he tries to staunch the bleeding.
You watch in disbelief as your skin begins to heal itself together, an almost grotesque sight. It seals together, and in no less than a minute it’s completely healed, not a scar in sight.
Your stomach fills with dread, eyes widened in betrayal as you look up at Tom. His gaze meets yours, guilt riddled in his eyes as you snatch your hand away.
"Fuck," you shout, your voice filled with a mix of pain and fury. Tears stream down your face as you struggle to process the revelation. "You... you made me a fucking Horcrux?!"
Tom's face pales, his own emotions mirroring the turmoil within you. He takes a step forward,
"I... I didn't mean for this to happen," he stammers, his voice laced with desperation. "I never wanted to hurt you."
But your rage consumes you, and you lash out at him, your voice filled with venom. "You ruined me, you fucking monster!" you scream, your words echoing through the room. "How could you do this to me? How could you use me like this?"
Tears mix with your words as you continue to berate him, your emotions spiralling out of control. You feel a searing pain deep within your chest, reaching out to shove him.
“I’m sorry. I thought it would work out! You’ll be immortal! Can’t you see it’s-“ He starts, and you snap.
"Sorry won't fix this!" you cry out, your voice breaking. "You've destroyed me, Tom. I can never be whole again."
He doesn’t know what to say, remaining silent as he tries to reach out to you.
“Get out!” You scream, reaching for your glass as you throw it in Tom’s direction. It smashes against the wall behind him, but he can’t look away from you.
He ruined you. He really did.
"Get the fuck out!" you scream, your voice filled with venom. You grab whatever is within reach and hurl it in his direction. Books, vases, anything that can cause damage. Each object crashes against the walls, shattering into countless pieces.
Tom has never felt like crying before, but this might be the first time he does. He turns and leaves, for he can’t bear to face what he’s done to you.
He was weak, after all.
You sink to the ground, your body racking with sobs as you hide your face in your hands.
What a cruel thing it was. Even if you wanted to, you could never permanently rid yourself of Tom.
You claw at your chest, as though you can just pull the fragment of Tom’s soul that was bound with yours.
You feel trapped, imprisoned within your own body. Your heart aches with a profound sadness, knowing that you were both beyond redemption. If only you hadn’t warned him that day if only you weren’t selected as a prefect, if only you didn’t try to save him.
Tom hasn’t heard from you for weeks. He doesn’t dare intrude either, no. He had already done enough damage.
The date is permanently engraved in his mind.
August the 17th. 7:03 pm.
He feels a searing pain in his chest. His hand comes up to clutch his heart as a pained groan escapes his lips. He can’t see for a second, his vision blurred.
Every breath is a struggle as he clutches his chest, his heart pounding against his ribcage.
The realization hits him like a tidal wave.
A Horcrux must have been destroyed. He only had two to date.
One was the ring engraved with his family sybil, which he wore on his hand.
The other?
Fear grips him, a fear he has never known before.
No. No. No. No. No. No.
He all but stumbles upwards, his mind focusing on one image as he apparates without a second thought. He appears at the door of your flat and doesn’t entertain the idea of knocking, bursting through the door with such force it splinters.
“[Name]?” He calls out, his voice a desperate plea as he searches through the eerily quiet apartment.
His heart pounds in his chest, his breaths shallow and rapid as he calls out your name, his voice laced with desperation and urgency.
"[Name]?" he repeats, the sound of his voice echoing through the silent space. There is a sense of foreboding, a heaviness in the air as he navigates the chaos, his eyes scanning every corner, every shadow.
His footsteps are quick and purposeful as he moves from room to room, his senses heightened, attuned to any flicker of your presence.
Finally, his gaze lands on a small table, and there, amidst the disarray, he sees a letter addressed to him. His heart skips a beat as he snatches it up, but within the depths of his mind, he knows what the contents of the letter will read.
Tom.
You by no doubt will know by now. I must preface by saying that I hate you. I will never ever forgive you for what you’ve done to me.
I remember with frightening clarity the day we had both first met. You were quite rude, but you backed down slightly when I had covered for you. It was then that I knew you must have not had very good people around you in your upbringing, for you were very reserved.
Despite all that, despite the fact that it was a very clear warning not to get entangled with you, I still did.
Year after year, I persisted. I could tell when you got annoyed, yet I did not give up. I was determined to know who Tom Riddle was.
I knew I loved you the day you had stayed with me after that boggart lesson. It’s rather silly, it was quite possibly the bare minimum someone could have done. But coming from you? Merlin, it was essentially the same as being gifted the moon.
I was not oblivious to what you were doing. Even from a young age, I knew of your plans, of your intentions. I suppose in a sense you’re not to blame, for I chose to love you willingly.
I only wish you had trusted me. You may have loved me, but you never trusted me. If you did, you’d have known my soul was already yours. I was bound to you indefinitely, there was no chance I wouldn’t have loved you.
I wanted love, you wanted devotion. They aren’t the same, my love. Devotion would have been me following you to the ends of the earth if you asked without question. Love would have been me not wanting to, but knowing I’d travel further to save you should you need it.
I would have given the world for you, Tom. I just wish you had let me do it on my own accord.
I love you. I always will. I always have. If there is a heaven though, I hope we never meet again.
Do not be afraid to be human. You, out of despair, and fear, and greed, drove everyone away from you. You cannot mourn a loss that you perpetuated. We are all human, flawed and imperfect. You are too. You may try to avoid it, you can split your soul and continue killing, but you’re only deflecting the truth.
I hope in my death you will meet your own. Mortality is a beautiful thing, Tom.
Do not postpone it. Existence has no better gift.
- [Name.]
-•-
It’s rather cruel how he can recall the entirety of your life in mere minutes. It doesn’t feel right, for the only time Tom truly lived was when he was with you. A lifetime, an eternity.
A mere recollection as he stands at your grave.
The rain is harsh, unforgiving. It seeps into his skin though he’s grateful, for some feeling was better than none.
He thought he would be immune to grief. It wasn’t that bad of a thing.
He can’t recall a day he hasn’t thought about you.
He threw himself further into the dark arts. He became more prominent, more ruthless. Many thought he was simply becoming more powerful.
Tom only hoped that in his efforts someone would find a way to end him. He threw himself into the most haphazard situations with the hope that a spell would misfire, that he would make an enemy of someone who would be able to kill him.
His eyes flicker up to the tree that grows above your grave. It was perhaps the first and only time he had cultivated a living thing.
Cinnamomum verum.
His fingers trace the inscription on the stone. Your laughs are buried deep within the recesses of his mind. They echo everytime he steps foot into your apartment.
It had been 6 years since you were found dead. He hasn’t touched a single thing. He sees life in your unmade bed, in the plants that he has an elf tend to. He keeps your necklace on him at all time, rolling the small pendant between his fingers when he finds himself thinking of you.
He forgoes tending to his own wounds. If it killed him then so be it.
There is not a day that goes by when he doesn’t read your letter.
Losing you was beyond losing a piece of his soul.
It was losing everything.
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patrophthia · 8 months
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Heya, I don't know it's already done or not but can you please write about the egoistic yandere Tom Marvolo Riddle with a hugeeee obsession and love🤔 on introverted half blood slytherin y/n who doesn't give a f*ck him and his looks like other girls of Hogwarts!🫠
thank you for sending this in, i was really hesitant on writing this bc i’ve never wrote anything like this before so i hope you like it!
know you better | tom riddle
pairing: tom riddle x fem!reader
warnings: yandere!tom, very obsessive and delusional way of thinking, death, even more delusions
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To fall in love with you was the easiest thing Tom has ever done. All you had to do was merely be in the same vicinity as him and he’d found himself more than just head over heels over you. 
For you to fall in love with him on the other hand, that surely was one of the hardest things he had to do in life. You don’t look at him —not because, unlike the others, you didn’t dare to but because you weren’t interested in him. You don’t offer him a smile when he greets you good morning. You don’t throw yourself at him when he turns a blind eye when he catches you sneaking around the castle at night. You don’t care for him. 
And quite honestly, it is driving him insane. What is it that everybody has that he doesn’t? Why does everyone else get to see you smile when you won’t even turn in his direction? Why won’t you just admit you want him as much as he wants you? 
Though you don’t show it, Tom can read between the lines. He thinks —no, he knows that you’re acting indifferent to play hard to get. He knows you want him, you just won’t admit it.
He tries to be a gentleman about his intentions at first, sliding up to you whilst you hover your cauldron during potions. He calls out your last name cautiously, careful to not startle you; he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he accidentally hurts you. You turn to him, a small frown appearing on your lips. “Riddle?” 
He skips the formalities, not bothering to beat around the bush. “Would you like to go out this weekend?” 
You fix him a look, and then, “no.” 
You didn’t hear him right. That’s what he tells himself. Or maybe he’s confused, because why wouldn’t someone want to go out with him? Tom clarifies himself, “I meant on a date.” 
You turn back to your cauldron, ending the conversation as is. “No.” 
He was certain that you’re playing hard to get now. That was until one of his goons —Malfoy, that was his name, started noticing that Tom’s eyes tended to wander whenever you were in the same room as him; until Malfoy tells Tom exactly why you’d said no. 
“Macmillan, that’s his name. Walburga says they’ve been going out for a few months now.” You have a boyfriend? No, no, that can’t be right. There’s no way you had a boyfriend when you were so clearly playing hard to get with Tom this entire time. 
Was it because your ‘boyfriend’ was holding you back from your true love? Or were you using this ‘boyfriend’ as bait? Had you known that it was time for Tom to create his next Horcrux and had needed a new sacrifice? How thoughtful of you to take care of these little things for him. 
Luckily Tom’s smart, he’s known to be smart, and he’s smart enough to read you like an open book even though you won’t spare a second of your time on him. He admires it, how hard you’re playing this role of not caring for him when you’re clearly as indicated with him as he, you. 
He’ll take up on your offer, he thinks as he sets out towards his chamber. The Basilisk is a dear friend of his, it’s even dearer when it does these things for him. In Parsel tongue, Tom says his order. “Kill Macmillan. And be careful not to hurt her.” 
The Basilisks set out first, setting off after the aforementioned man; Tom a few steps behind. It isn’t hard for him to follow his dear friend, it leaves a wet trail in its wake for him to follow and it’s even easier for him to know when his friend has done its job from the scream you let out. 
Tom’s clever enough to hide behind the corridors as he waits for his friend to return back to his home. His heart aches to hold you as you scream time and time again, asking for help and he reminds himself to reward you for your amazing acting. 
With the way you’re so desperately clinging onto Macmillan’s body, you almost convince him that you genuinely cared for Macmillan, like Macmillan really was someone you were in love with. But he knows you, he knows you better than you know you. And he knows you love him. 
So he schools his expression to one of worry, if you were really playing the part then he should be a good sport and play it with you. “What’s wrong?” He asks you, not sparing a glance at Macmillan’s frigid body. 
“This —this thing, it came and it—” you stutter out, hiccuping out each word as you swiped at your eyes. Tom places a hand on your own, removing your grip on Macmillan’s body and ignores it when you flinch at his touch. “—it, I don’t know what it did but next thing I knew he was— he was gone.” 
Oh poor you, he sympathises. Such a good girl for him to play your part so well. He pries your other hand away from Macmillan’s body and wraps his arm around you. “It’s okay,” he offers, pressing your face against his chest. “It’s okay, I’m here now. I’ll keep you safe.” 
You sniffle, pulling away from him slightly. And when he realises that you could see the red glow in his eyes, neither of you mention it; for you were too afraid of the man holding you, and he too in love for something so trivial to take part of your conversation.
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— from bee: this is so so new to me,, i hope you liked it!
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cardansriddle · 1 year
Text
Teach Me (part 2) - (tom riddle x fem!reader)
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part 1
warnings: smut. public sex. unpretected sex. not proofread bc i'm living on the edge today.
A/N: okay we all know i'm shit at writing smut so feel free to judge. i am not at all satisfied with how this turned out but oh well. you ask and i shall deliver.
buymeacoffee <3
༻♛༺
You were on edge.
With every step you took in the castle grounds, with every turn around a corridor, you expected to hear the not-so-hushed whispers and the not-so-subtle dirty glances thrown at you for your indecent behaviour. 
But they never came.
You were growing paranoid with every passing day, and you had convinced yourself that the Slytherin boy who had seen you and Tom in a compromising position was just waiting for the ideal moment to blast the bomb and bring on your ruination. 
You glanced at your friend sitting next to you, on the seat that you usually reserved for Tom, but now that you were trying to avoid him, you had forced your friend to sit near you. 
"Heard anything interesting lately?" You subtly questioned, knowing she could never resist the temptation of gossip. She smiled mischievously and leaned forwards so that her words would not be heard by unwelcome ears. 
"Walburga Black was caught in a broom closet..." She took a dramatic pause and widened her eyes. "With her cousin!" She whisper-yelled, and you were quite sure the students sitting in front of you tensed and shared a curious glance with each other at the new piece of gossip. 
Despite your inner disgust, you only chuckled weakly and your eyes strayed around the room in search of—
Tom was staring at you. There was no particular emotion displayed on his face, but you could tell he was displeased. You quickly turned around to face your desk in front of you, willing your heart to slow to a steady rhythm. You cursed the way he could affect you just with his stare.
"Are you alright? You look flushed." 
You smiled at your friend. "It's just hot in the room. I am fine."
Yet all throughout the class, you were uncomfortably aware of his gaze at the back of your head.
So when the professor dismissed you, you rushed to collect your things and sprung to your feet to make your swift escape. You were almost out the door when a hand grabbed your arm and pulled hard enough to have you crashing into someone's chest. 
You were about to yell at whoever had pulled back, but when you lifted your gaze from the green-silver tie wrapped around the culprit's neck, you could not find the words. 
Tom was staring down at you with a raised brow as if daring you to utter a word. "Come with me." And before you could object, he was dragging you with him, hand tight around your arm. 
"Tom! Let me go." You whisper-yelled, throwing glances behind your back to see if students had caught on to the scene. But fortunately, they were blissfully unaware. "Someone might see us. Let me go!" You attempted once again, but Tom only shot you a dark glare.
When he made a sharp turn to the left, you realised you were in one of the abandoned hallways. "Tom Riddle, unhand me this instant!" You raised your voice before tugging your arm out of his grip, and he looked at you in mild bewilderment. 
"You have been avoiding me." He broke the pregnant silence, brown eyes piercing right through you with their intensity. 
You threw your hands in the air in frustration. "Are we seriously doing this here? Right now?" 
He cocked his head to the side in interest as he watched your antics. When his gaze did not relent, you sighed and decided to just go out with it.
"What do you not understand? I am quite sure you are aware that if the boy ever decides to open his mouth, I will be ruined."
He hummed, those intoxicating dark eyes still watching you. "That still does not explain why you have been running away from me." 
"Are you serious? I am mad at you, Tom! For the smartest person in this school, you are pretty damn idiotic to me—" He frowned at that, "—And you stood there and did nothing when he witnessed us! You could have spoken to him and convinced him not to say anything, yet all you—"
"I obliviated him."
"What?"
"After you left, I obliviated him." He repeated as if he was stating the obvious. 
You backed away, unsure how to proceed with this information. 
"I thought you would figure it out." He added with his brows pinched together. You gave him an incredulous look, silently asking how in the world you could figure that out magically.
"You are horrible," You muttered.
He rose a single brow, trying to hide his amusement, and in a mock inquisitive tone, he proceeded to ask, "Oh, I am?" 
"Yes! It has been hell for me while you were allowing me to live in this miserable state." With an angry huff, you pushed him on the chest with all your might. He barely even moved from your attack, and if anything he was fully smirking now, which aggravated you even more. "I hate you!" 
As you were about to push him once again, he managed to grab a hold of your wrists and held them against his chest, causing you to stumble straight into him. You looked up at him from your position, and your breath hitched in your throat at the nonexistent proximity left between you. His eyes were a shade darker, just like they were on that day when he had kissed you. You could only assume it was desire pooling in his irises, drowning the warm brown shade in its wake. You licked your lips almost subconsciously, and his gaze dropped to watch the action.
"Tom?" You spoke hesitantly, your voice small and breathy. 
"Do you wish for me to teach you more? Hm?" He whispered hoarsely, breath fanning against your mouth and you could not help but lean closer. "Do you wish me to teach you how to pleasure a man?" He gulped, and you were transfixed as you watched him close his eyes as if he was imagining every possible scenario of you doing those things to him. When his eyes reopened, they were burning with an emotion that made your knees tremble. "Or perhaps I could show you all the ways a woman could be pleasured?" His hand rose to caress the skin of your cheek. You nodded, not being able to form any coherent words with the obscene way he was speaking. 
He tutted, displeased. "I need to hear you say it."
"Please, Tom. Yes. Please." 
Your desperate plea was all he needed before he brought his lips down to connect with yours in a heated kiss. Your mind began to feel dizzy as he moved his lips against yours, and you quickly freed your hands from his hold in order to weave them behind his neck.
He began pushing you back until you felt your back hit the cool texture of the wall, and he pressed into you desperately. 
"Someone could see us," Came your strangled whisper when his mouth travelled to the spot where your jaw met your neck, but he did not answer you as he bit into the delicate skin, marking it with his teeth. Your hands grabbed a hold of his hair and tugged at it to yank his lips from your neck, and he let out a low groan of your name at the action. 
"Let them see." He murmured before reconnecting his lips with yours. "Let them witness how I ruin you for everyone else, so they know you are only for me."
You whimpered at Tom's words. You had never felt such desire in your life. Never had your blood burned so desperately for someone. You wanted all of him. You wanted him to consume you whole. 
Tom pulled at your school robe, doing a quick work of undoing it until it fell and pooled on the floor.
His grip on your waist tightened as he ground the constricting material of his pants between your legs, and you gasped at the feeling of his hardness pressed against you. "Tom, please." You begged once again, all shame and embarrassment gone from your body and replaced with only raw need.
Tom's hand left your waist and began travelling lower. He bunched up your skirt, and you whined when the tips of his fingers teased the skin of your inner thigh. You felt him smirk against your lips at the effect he was having on you. He skimmed his knuckles against your closed heat, causing you to throw your head back against the wall and flutter your eyes shut. "Stop teasing me."
"You are so wet for me and I have barely even touched you," He said as he pushed your underwear to the side and finally touched you where you needed him the most. A moan left your lips at the feeling of his fingers sliding against you, and you wondered not for the first time if Tom would be your undoing. You were overwhelmed with pleasure, and you felt him breathe faster against the skin of your throat as if he was enjoying this almost as much as you were. 
His fingers made a mess of you, and you were chanting his name like a prayer, uncaring of the possibility that someone could discover you.
"I need you."
Your hands dropped to his pants, and you hastily attempted to undo them, only for Tom to pause his ministrations with a displeased hum. "Greedy girl." You watched, utterly transfixed as rose his fingers and put them in his mouth as if to savour your taste. Your cheeks burned at the sight, and you swore you had never seen anything so obscene in your entire existence. 
"Beg for it."
You almost choked. "What?"
"You want me? Then you will beg for me." 
You shuddered at the commanding tone, and something about it made you even more desperate. Desperate to please him. 
"Please." You pleaded. "Please, Tom."
He got rid of his pants while you begged with no shame, but he did not seem entirely satisfied with your cries. "What do you want? Say it." He demanded, and you felt him tease you right where you needed him, yet he held back, not quite pushing inside you. 
"I want you to ruin me." You breathed out, and you hoped he would not ask you to say anything else because you were not sure if your brain would be able to string up a sentence together. The sensation of him rubbing against you was enough to clog your brain, and you forgot all else except him.
He tightened his grip on your hip, and you briefly wondered if he would leave a mark. "Good girl." Is all he muttered before pushing forwards and sliding into you torturously slowly until he filled you to the brim. 
It was painful. But in that pain, there was a particular type of pleasure you had never experienced before. You were convinced you would descend into madness at the feeling of him filling you completely. You could not tell where you began and he ended, it was as if you were one. 
Tom dropped his head into the crook of your shoulder, groaning your name in a way that almost pushed you over the edge. "Tell me I can move."
"Yes. Please, move."
At your plea, he exhaled and rose his head so he could watch your face instead as he drew back. You gulped, hand tugging at the nape of his neck because he was already pushing back inside of you. You felt so full of him, eyes rolling into the back of your head as you relished in the euphoria that washed over your body every time he rolled his hips against yours. 
This was a sin. The aching pleasure in your body had to be a sin. You never thought it was possible to feel the way you did at that moment, and you swore you would sin for the rest of your life and burn for it if it meant you could relive this moment over and over again. 
When you opened your eyes, Tom's gaze snapped up from where he had been watching your hips move against his and there is a darkness in his eyes, as if he was ready to devour you whole. 
"You feel so good. All for me. Only for me."
The lewd sounds of skin slapping against skin echoed in the hallway, and you quickly pulled him closer so you could connect your lips with his in a kiss. His grip on your thigh tightened at the action, to the point where you were sure there would be marks in the shape of his fingers the next day, but the thought only spurred your pleasure. As if that was not enough, he pulled away from your lips to latch his mouth on your throat, biting, sucking, and kissing until you knew that the skin of your neck would look like a warzone. 
"Tom...I—I'm..." 
He exhaled sharply and quickened the pace of his hips. "I know, I know." 
Your body was getting caught on fire with his every hard thrust, and you felt yourself approaching your high, the fire burning brighter and brighter in your body until—
"Tom..." You moaned as you felt yourself peak, and your eyes shut in ecstasy. 
He continued to thrust into you, his movements becoming sloppier and sloppier, chasing his own relief. He gasped your name into your mouth, and you felt him spill himself inside you, reaching his high. 
Your head dropped against his chest, your body limply melting in his hold from exhaustion. Both of you panted heavily, trying to regain your composures, and you heard him chuckle lightly. 
"What?" You asked, finding enough strength to raise your head and look at him. He was wearing a lopsided smirk, and you subconsciously reached out to brush the sweaty strands of his hair back, as if it was the most natural thing to do. 
His eyes flicked between your own, glinting with mirth. "When you first asked me to show you how to kiss so you would be prepared for your future husband, I never imagined it would lead us here."
"Well, Mr Riddle, do you think my husband will be satisfied with what I have learned so far?" You teased with a smile, which turned mischievous when he suddenly glowered as if offended. 
"What I think, darling is that you are delusional if you think I would let anyone else near you now that I have had you. Let alone wed you."
His gaze roamed your features, and for the briefest of moments, you wondered if you imagined the flash of red in his eyes. 
"You will have no husband to impress. You shall remain as my student and I will teach you how to satisfy me." 
You rose a brow at his words, and you could not help but ponder if he was simply jesting, or if the territorial tone in his voice was actually serious. "Oh? And what if the student becomes the master? What will you do then?"
"Then I shall learn how to worship your body until you know no one else's touch but mine."
And when he lay his forehead against yours in an uncharacteristic display of affection, you knew he had no intention of ever letting you go. 
༻♛༺
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14thgalerie · 5 months
Text
home
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"In a chilling twist of events, you find your walls marred with splatters of crimson red, and at the epicenter stands your fiancé, a haunting nonchalance in his gaze."
• pairing: tom riddle x reader
• now playing: nfwmb by hozier
• word count: 4.2k
• genre: angst
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“What have you done?” You ask, voice breaking in trepidation.
A heavy sense of unease permeated the air, leaving no doubt that what may come out of his mouth will only confirm your worst fears, yet, you still ask. Grappling at the little hope, that fading light, that maybe you might be wrong.
There was no response. The only audible noise was the eerie ruffling of the trees outside, swaying terrifyingly from the storm, paired with the endless ticking of the grandfather clock at the end of your entrance hall.
Hands turning cold and clammy, itching to scratch at the blockage in your throat. To plead with him to answer you truthfully, for once in the entire 10 years you’ve known each other. 
“I wasn’t expecting you to be here.” He finally speaks. 
Maybe it was a false light. One that he deliberately put himself in order for you to believe that he was still worthy of your time, of your saviour acts. 
“Did I ruin your act, huh?” You entertain this show of his, one last time. Letting him believe that he still holds the reins. But his piercing dark eyes that are brazenly fixed on you with such a deep intensity urge you to cower back against the door.
“No, I was just surprised, is all.” He puts on that god-awful mask— making you wonder how painfully stupid you were before to not realise you were being played as a fool. The one that he quickly plasters on as he walked the hallways of Hogwarts back then. A gentle smile that mirrors the one in his eyes, inviting and comfortable. “Let’s go outside, shall we?”
He reached out his pale hands, fingers decorated by silver rings, one of which was a gift from you years ago. His hands that always housed themselves above your thigh, tracing mindlessly despite the evident warmth that followed it. 
The normalcy that laced his visage made you want to throw up the bile that had been bubbling in the pit of your stomach since your nose registered the metallic smell that permeated the living room air. It makes you sick that he is capable of such atrocities.
“No.” 
You let a moment of silence occur, watching the mask crack, his perfect smile flinching. You have got to give it to him. He was able to send waves of fear through you, willing you to succumb to his every whim. Even now, as the blood paints the once cream-coloured walls. The walls that you spent hours meticulously covering.
“Let’s talk here, instead.” 
He nods slowly, for the first time, you see how the state of being unsure of your next actions leaves him unsettled and tense. Eyebrows creasing ever so slightly, the bulwark he built around himself getting thicker. 
“Did you honestly think you could get away with this?” You ask, puzzled at his gall. “To pretend that you can barely even see the original colour of our walls now because of-“
Your breath hitches at the thought, unable to speak the words out loud. To do so is to acknowledge that someone has brutally died in the very place that you planned to raise your child in. Somewhere that should have been a safe haven for you.
“Nothing a little magic couldn’t fix, Darling.”
“Are you dense? I don’t care for the walls!” You shout, unable to keep your wits on you anymore.
“Then why are you complaining about it then?”
“I’m talking about how you just killed, no, murdered somebody in our house. Our home. the one place that I should feel safe in.”
“And you are…anywhere you are as long as you’re with me.”
Raising your hands to your pursed lips, dragging it down in exasperation. It truly baffles you how unstirred he is in this situation. You knew he had a qualm for unusual habits, but never did you think that this would be one of those.
“How am I supposed to feel safe when you are the reason for this? The reason why someone would be left wondering where their loved one has gone missing?” The irritation poisoned your speech, but the alarm wasn’t veiled by it. “He could’ve been a father, a sibling, or whatever!”
“Do you really think I didn’t take the time to snuff out every possible hindrance to this? What do you think of me?” He says, almost offendedly. Although you weren’t even sure why. As if that made it any better.
“I don’t know. My fiancé, who works diligently as an auror for the Ministry and wouldn’t do such a terrible thing?” You sarcastically reply.
“Well you got the first part right but don’t act like this wasn’t all because of you.” He points at you with that long, slender finger. It reminded you of your father’s back when he used to reprimand your mother for whatever mistake she had supposedly made.
You glare at him through your eyelashes. “Don’t twist this around, Tom.” A snarl escaped you and you could feel a twinge of anger coursing through you at his words. In your confused and irritated mind, you don’t notice how he flinches at the sound of his name. He forces himself to believe that it was just a slip of the tongue.
“I’m not. I am honestly delighted that I did such a great job, dismembering his face enough that you can’t even recognise this man.” He says as he steps over the body that lies unconscious with its limbs twisted in unnatural ways. Blood covered the canvas of his face, his eyes welled up into dark circles, and from your view, seemed to have been missing a few front teeth. “I want to say I’m sorry that I had to take away the pretty face that you were so enamoured with, but that would be a lie because I hadn’t enjoyed my time like I did while doing so.”
You finally dare to look directly at the body, at the unfortunate person who runs out of luck, and a tiny light bulb in the back of your mind sparks. Yet, you still couldn’t quite put a finger on it. By a few breaths, you calm yourself enough to continue observing the broken figure. 
From the corner of your eyes, a warm golden ring hits your vision. The shape was distinct enough that your brain made quick work to make the connection. 
It was like a pin dropped in the still silence. 
The realisation of who it was sent you spiralling even further into the hollow space in your mind. Cowering in the darkest corner of the space.
He is leaning against the marble counter in your kitchen, where you are still within clear eyesight for him. His body was lined with tension, like a spring coiled to a point of painful traction and you were just waiting for it to snap back.
“Tom…” There it is again.
“Yes, hun?” He takes a tasteful sip of the amber liquid. Savouring the taste of every last drop. The sight honestly distracts you for a second before you forcefully pull yourself back. Horrified at the thought of being aroused when a body lies cold on your carpet.
“Is this-”
“The man from the bar?” He hums, “Yes. Yes, that is him.”
A wicked grin paints his face, cruel malevolence dancing in his eyes. The glint in his eyes flickered with genuine delight as if he was presented with a chance to show off his new toy.
“It was an easy catch, I will tell you that. I was expecting him to put up a bit of a fight seeing as he was all macho with you.” He divulges. Leisurely walking back to the living room, stopping at the person’s head, giving it a nudge with his speck clean leather shoes.
“Why did you do it?” You cut him off. Your mind was reeling at his words as an endless pit formed in your stomach. Talking about it as if it was something mundane.
But he ignores you and continues as if your words were only a gust of wind. While he expectedly should not be a fan of your blatant disregard for him, he doesn’t say a thing about it.
“I followed him the day after, tracking him for a while, noting if there was something else that would hit him harder but seeing him regularly forget he has a family by flirting with young women day and night…it was only right that I rid the world of vermin.”
“You mean to tell me that you had tortured this man to his death all because of his proclivity for cheating on his wife?”
He looks to you, and for the first time that night, a semblance of something else appears on his face. A cocktail of disdain and hatred. “Is that something not worthy of punishment? To swear your vows to a person you declared to be your love and then blatantly lie to their faces about your nightly habits. To forget that your children are waiting for you to pick them up from kindergarten so he could get his cock wet.”
Tom kept his eyes on you, his face breaking into pieces of anger and confusion. “Tell me. Is he not worthy of such when he deliberately chooses women who are half his age? All the while knowing his age gives him power over them?”
You shook your head, tears welling and blurring your vision. You blinked to keep them away as you didn’t want to appear weak in front of him. The way your emotions have dipped and hiked in the past hour has already been too much, leaving you utterly confused about what is even happening anymore.
“I don’t know anymore, Tom. I have no idea what to think, what to focus on and scorn you in particular. Your blatant disregard for our home, using it as your fucking slaughterhouse, now that we mention it, should be something to talk about. You just killed a person, no, you tortured somebody with pure malice.”
“He should’ve been hung, strangled, and quartered!” He pauses, realising his voice has turned a lot louder than he intended. “I’m sorry. But it’s true, Y/N, even if he has done nothing to you, he deserves all of those things and no less.”
His thumbs soothed over your knuckles that have turned pale from their tight clench, easing your hands until your palms are open to him. The twinge of pain from the pink crescent moons on the surface alleviated with his gentle touch.
He leans down, lips tenderly kissing the hand secured in his grasp, before twisting his head to press with the same gentleness on your other hand.
“I am well aware that you abhor these kinds of actions. It’s why I worked hard to keep it from you, I never wanted for you to think of me as some person who reverted to violence for no reason.” He kneels down next to your seated figure to level your eyes. “You are somebody special to me, and not a single word that I know of would be enough to perfectly explain that to you. Nothing in this world, in this reality, could take you away from me unless you wish it yourself. But please, I beg you to understand that I did this out of pure concern and love only.”
Tom raises one of his hands, letting it sit gingerly on your knees that, without your control, has succumbed to your habit of bouncing it in moments of tension. Pressing it with just the right balance of force and gentleness to calm you.
He swallows hard, his chestnut brown eyes flickering back and forth between your own. The previous edge in them is long gone as he looks up at you, instead, a hint of desperation takes its place.
“You love me, don’t you? I know you do and I never for a second have doubted that. I feel the same, and possibly even more than you do and it scares me. I was never made to know love nor ever experience it so when I met you, I swore that there would be nothing in existence that can forcefully keep you away from me.” He says in one breath until his body finally forces him to take one, then he continues. “When I told you how my mind and soul is yours only, I meant it. You are the sole person who can tell me that we are done but please. I will beg on my knees until they are bleeding so that you understand that.”
You finally look at him, actually, look at him. Not one of fleeting glance only. Stomach twisting.
“No law or morality will stop me.”
This is what worried you.
You were sure to tell him off. Take him up on his offer to be away from him without a hint of resistance. At least, more than halfway sure already, but those eyes. Those fucking eyes. You were worried that if you looked at them, every nerve in you that was ready to run would relax. That you would be catapulted into your foolishness, and all the right senses would be nothing.
To see that there isn’t an inkling of malicious ambition in those eyes, but instead, there was only unabashed determination and genuineness behind his words. An openness only reserved for you.
Your heart immediately starts hammering against your rib cage, and you try to resist the urge to give in to him. Forcefully diverting your mind to the monstrosity he committed in your home.
Tom sees this. He always did. He knows you better than you ever will.
“I won’t promise that this would be the last time because that would be a lie and I promised to you that that is something I will never do to you. But I can promise you that you won’t ever have to see this ever again, also because I don’t want you to.”
When he sees that you have finally cooled down, he slowly moves to sit next to you. Making sure that there is still enough space between the two of you so that you don’t feel uncomfortable.
“Tom…” You call out in a meek voice. He hums, patiently waiting for you to continue.
“I get the reason why, as much as it still baffles me, but you didn’t have to go through this much.” Exhaling shakily. “You didn’t have to beat him until he saw the pyres of hell. Report him to the proper authorities for his crimes! That should’ve been the first thing that popped into your head, for Merlin’s sake!”
Your torso swivels to face him, eyes wide as you let everything out. Emotions pouring out of you in the form of tears, staining your cheeks wet again. Tom wanted nothing more than to wipe them away and pull you to his chest, but he knew that you were like this because of him and he didn’t want to push further away from him.
“Why did you have to drag him into our home? Tainting our home with this kind of violence, hell Tom! This is supposed to be where our child would be raised, where they would be spending their lives and now I don’t even know if they should be.” You shouted, waving your arms around wildly.
“They can, darling. This is the safest place they would be in, I would make sure of that. If there is anything that I will prioritise more than anything is your safety and our future kid.” He assures you.
“I don’t want them to witness these kinds of violence.”
“And they never will, just as you never will also. Tonight was an unfortunate mistake for me, one that I will never make again. And I am sorry that you had to, please forgive me.”
“I don’t know.” A murmur, one that could have been passed for a breath. But his sharp ears strained to pick it up.
He was angry. Enraged at himself. This wasn’t how he planned tonight to go, it was supposed to be an easy work and toss. He hadn’t expected you to be a part of the equation, planning the events of the night around yours to ensure that you wouldn’t have a clue of what transpired in your home.
In all fairness, it was a dangerous game that he played. Taking that piece of disgusting waste to your home was a step that he had to take so that he wouldn’t be disturbed by nosy strangers. Taking the off chance that you wouldn’t be home by then.
He was angry at himself that he had broken the unsaid promise to keep this side of him away from you. A small part of him was terrified that you would turn your back on him just as the people before you did. Taking the life that he could have only dreamt of back then with you. The thought curses away the ridiculous calm facade that he has kept when around you.
“No.” Vehemently shaking his head back and forth, dropping your hands on the softcover of your couch as he jumps up to pace in front of you. Trying to calm himself at the prospect of his worst fear turning into a reality. “I’m sorry, okay. I really am. We could move far away, build the house of our dreams and forget that this happened. But I need you to forgive me, Y/N. Please.”
To your utter surprise, he harshly drops onto his knees. Taking your hands back in his trembling hands.
“Tom.” You begin before you are cut off, “You need to stop calling me that.”
“What do you mean? That’s your name.” You confusedly ask.
“Call me darling again, call me anything but that. It’s almost as if you gave up already and that can’t happen, please. I need to know that I'm not alone in this. Please, I’m so sorry.” He says, a slight tremor in his voice.
Your heart breaks at the sight in front of you. The once strong and unwavering countenance he puts on every day was nowhere in sight. Instead, there was a man who was unknown to you, placing his vulnerable self all out for you to see. In a sense that you’ve never before seen, he was gentle to you, yes, but never like this.
Tears lined his waterline until it couldn’t be controlled anymore and they were slipping down his cheeks like a torrential downpour. He was inconsolable.
No time would be enough for you to understand the emotions twirling behind those dark eyes. Overwhelming you to the point of giving in. There was anger, pain, sorrow, and all of it. And you knew he was trying his best to control it, evident by the way his hands were tensing, not wanting to fist them.
“I’m so sorry, ok, and I know that saying it repeatedly for the rest of our days together wouldn’t be enough, but I need you to know that I am. Words are the only thing I can give you right now, however, if you let me…I would prove it to you every day in any way possible to man.”
“I’m pregnant.”
A pause in the beat of sound.
His ears were ringing.
He had no idea if time had paused and his mind was left wondering in the abyss of time if he was hearing things that weren’t true.
“I’m about three weeks pregnant already.”
It was only when your tiny voice permeated through the silent room that he realised he wasn’t being delusional. His ears had not fooled him.
“You…you are?” He asks, with hesitation lining every syllable. 
“I am. I found out today which is why I came home.”
If he was confused by the torrent of emotions and thoughts that waved over him earlier, now it was like he couldn’t comprehend a single exhale anymore. It was only at your touch and call that he let his lungs feel a wave of oxygen.
“I already had my suspicions earlier this week, but I wanted to be sure before I told you, hence why I made a plan with a friend to go to the doctor today. I kept it a secret so I wouldn’t get your hopes up, I know we have been talking about it for a while now so I didn’t want it to be a false alarm.” You explain.
“So here I was, so excited when the doctor told me that I was indeed pregnant with our child that I forgot to tell you I was coming home. I assumed that you were making dinner and I wanted to make it a surprise, so I got ourselves a cake to celebrate.” 
A single chuckle leaves you. “Well, obviously that didn’t go well.” You said as you looked at the box of ruined dessert by the door from when you dropped it.
Although his mind was still haywire from what you had announced, he still made an effort to let you know he was listening intently. Giving you a gentle squeeze in the hand.
“I want them to have a normal life, one that is far from the atrocities of the world and I know that is a child’s prayer, a romantic dream, but I will try my very best to achieve that. That includes taking them far away from this home, from their father, if need be.”
He looked at you as he moved to sit back next to you, keeping hold of your hand still, an unfamiliar look in his expression. 
“Y/N…darling, forget what I said earlier. I would never put a hand on another person again if it meant there wouldn’t even be someone for me to do it for. I will control myself, take the sessions you told me about.” He declares, with a finality in his voice that shows his determination to prove he was being true.
It was a lie, and you knew that. A little, white lie. You’ve been with Tom since 5th year, and now you are at the age of 24, if anybody knew his body language better than anyone, it would be you. 
He would only be more cautious now, making sure that every grainy detail is there in its proper places. Ensure that he would never make the mistake of making you see what he is capable of.
You look at the dormant body that has long passed in the middle of your living room. Mind reeling back to what he mentioned earlier. Now that you have calmed down, you realise that your outburst was more because of shock and less of that piece of trash. He did indeed make you uncomfortable, and if Tom hadn’t been there, you had no idea of your fate then. Added on by the fact that this was apparently a pattern he does to other women.
In all honesty, you didn’t really know what to feel at the moment after all that had happened in the span of an hour. You suppose you should be livid, upset, hell, even guilty that you’re somewhat relieved that someone had enacted an act of revenge on a disgraceful human being.
Tonight was a whirlwind of emotions, to say the least, and you couldn’t trust yourself to make a just and coherent decision.
“If-“ His breath hitches, the thought that flashed behind his eyes making him gasp for air. “If I lose control again, I will never force you to stay with me.”
“Tom, I am not asking you to do all of that. Though, it would be great for yourself and for your mental well-being because you need to find more healthy ways to deal with your problems.” You sigh. “I just ask you to please never let our child see whatever violence you inflict on others, I don’t want him to grow up thinking that this is the answer to everything. They should grow up with the proper mindset that you didn’t that I know you want also.”
“I know but I’ll still try to better myself, for myself. I can’t promise it would be fast, nor can I even promise it would work, but I’ll try.”
“I’ll go stay at an inn tonight while you deal with this-“ Waving your hand around unfashionably. “mess. I’ll call you in the morning and please?”
“What is it?” He asks.
“Take another day off because we need to look at a new house immediately, I cannot stand to breathe in another particle from this place anymore.”
“Whatever the wife wants.” He smiles and pushes a whisper of a kiss against your soft lips. “Still a few more months, Mr. Riddle. I’m tired so I'll go now. Let’s talk more tomorrow because I don’t think I can last another second staying awake.”
“I’ll drive you there, I don’t want you apparating anymore.” 
“No complaints here,” You mumble against his lips that gently press onto yours.  Wanting to say the three words that you loved to say but before you could, 
“I love you, too.”
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— hello there ! moved my notes here becuase the intro was too long. this initially had a whole back story that lead up to the events here but i cut it out because that part was taking too much time to complete. also hello, i'm finally writing for my og crush in harry potter but uh i decided to use the tom hughes fancast since this is set way after they graduated.
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adiraargent · 12 days
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You drew stars around my scars - Slytherin Boys
summary: Slytherin boys (Taylor's Version) x Reader warnings: mentions of scars (not specified what from), swearing, smoking includes: Theodore Nott, Mattheo Riddle, Jasper Rowle, Draco Malfoy and Tom Riddle - I will do a part 2 with other characters if anybody wants one :) wc: 2373 Part 2
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Theodore Nott - Cardigan
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Theodore Nott sat beside you on the edge of the bed, his gaze tender as he studied the scars that adorned your skin. You could feel his fingers tracing gentle patterns along the lines of your past, his touch feather-light as he navigated the landscape of your history.
As you looked up at him, a warmth swelled in your chest, but you couldn't help but worry. Worry that he was just use you, use you like others had done in the past. Tossing you away when they were done with you.
And when I felt like I was an old cardigan under someone's bed, you put me on and said I was your favorite
"Thank's for sticking around Theo," you murmerd softly, your cheeks flushing a pretty pink tone.
He looked up at you then, his eyes filled with an intensity that took your breath away. "You are my favorite person in this shitty world," he murmured, his voice soft like the rustle of leaves in the wind, despite the crude words. "Every scar, every imperfection, only serves to make you more beautiful in my eyes."
His words washed over you like a soothing balm, calming the storm of insecurities that raged within your soul. With Theodore by your side, you felt safe, protected from the harsh judgments of the world by the warmth of his love.
And when you are young, they assume you know nothing
People had always judged you for something, it was a judgemental world that you lived in. Maybe someone judged you for your skin, or your scars... or maybe just the way that you wore your hair. Maybe it was your weight or your height. Nobody was perfect... thought Theodore Nott would beg to differ, in his eyes you were the embodiment of perfection.
And of course, people judged you for being with Theodore Nott, a Slytherin boy with a troubled past. One that liked to smoke and drink, that liked to get into fights and argue with teachers and students alike. But you were in love. 'Love?' they'd ask you and laugh. 'You're so young, what the hell would you know about love?'
But I knew you'd linger like a tattoo kiss
Theodore's fingers stilled against your skin, his eyes searching yours with a depth of understanding that left you breathless. "I may not have all the answers," he said softly, "but I promise to stand by your side through every uncertainty, to hold you close and chase away the shadows of doubt that threaten to consume you."
And as he leaned in to press a gentle kiss against each scar, his lips a tender caress against your skin, you felt a sense of peace settle over you like a warm embrace. With Theodore, you knew that you were never alone, that no matter what trials and tribulations lay ahead, you would face them together, hand in hand, heart in heart.
For in his touch, you found solace and strength, a reminder that love had the power to heal even the deepest wounds. And as he traced stars around your scars with his fingers, you knew that no matter how dark the night may seem, the light of his love would guide you safely home.
Okay but i'm really happy with this icl
Mattheo Riddle - Mine
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And I remember that fight, 2:30 AM As everything was slipping right out of our hands
As the moon hung high in the sky, casting its silvery light over the darkened landscape, you quietly snuck out of your shared home , your heart heavy with doubt and fear. Tears streamed down your face unchecked as you clutched your suitcase tightly, the weight of your decision bearing down on you like a heavy burden.
You had always struggled with trust issues and abandonment fears, scars from a childhood marred by betrayal and heartache. And now, faced with the prospect of being completely in love with a boy who had been nothing but good to you, you couldn't help but feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of it all.
Mattheo Riddle, that cocky, short-tempered Slytherin, had become the center of your world, a beacon of light in the darkness that threatened to consume you. You got together in your second last year of school and were still together now a year after graduating. And yet, the thought of allowing yourself to fall completely and unconditionally in love with him terrified you to your core. You loved him, you knew that you did... but did love really exist? Falling in love was dangerous, it was setting yourself up to get your heart broken.
"I'll never leave you alone," his voice echoed in your mind, a soothing melody amidst the chaos of your thoughts. You had been sitting at the Black lake, the two of you had been together for 3 months and it was the first time you had told each other 'I love you'
But as much as you longed to believe his words, the scars of your past lingered like a shadow, a constant reminder of the pain and suffering you had endured. Even after all this time, you still had doubts. And so, with a heavy heart and tear-stained cheeks, you made the decision to leave, to distance yourself from the one person who had come to mean everything to you.
I ran out, crying, and you followed me out into the street Braced myself for the goodbye 'Cause that's all I've ever known
Bracing yourself for the goodbye, you took a hesitant step forward, the weight of your suitcase dragging behind you like an anchor. But before you could take another step, a voice called out to you from behind, stopping you dead in your tracks.
Turning around, you saw Mattheo running towards you, his eyes filled with an intensity that took your breath away. "I won't let you go," he said, his voice trembling with emotion. "I'll never leave you alone, I promise."
And in that moment, as he took you in his arms and held you close, you felt a sense of peace wash over you like a wave crashing against the shore. For in Mattheo's embrace, you found solace and strength, a reminder that love had the power to heal even the deepest wounds.
I fell in love with a careless man's careful daughter
"I promise I will do everything to prove I am nothing like he was," he whispered against your ear, his words a testament to the depth of his love and devotion. "You're the best thing that's ever been mine."
And as you looked into his eyes, filled with love and sincerity, you knew that no matter what challenges lay ahead, you would face them together, hand in hand, heart in heart. For in Mattheo Riddle, you had found a love worth fighting for, a love that would stand the test of time.
Jasper Rowle
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As you and Jasper Rwle walked hand in hand through the winding streets of Diagon Alley, a sense of contentment settled over you like a warm blanket on a cold winter's night. His hand in yours felt like home, grounding you in the present moment and reassuring you. You felt so safe with him, the way he softly rubbed your hand with his thumb sent warmth through your body, the heat being a stark contrast to the snow falling around you
"Can I go where you go?" you whispered, your voice barely above a hushed murmur as you gazed up at him with adoration shining in your eyes. You didn't mean to say it out loud. But you just wanted to be with him as much as possible, the way you felt when you were around him was unlike anything you had felt before.
You felt alive, wanted... loved.
Jasper's lips curved into a tender smile, his eyes sparkling with love and affection. "Forever and ever," he replied, his voice a soft melody in the air. "You and me, always."
And as you walked together, lost in the beauty of the moment, you couldn't help but feel a sense of gratitude wash over you like a wave crashing against the shore.
Take me out, and take me home
He brought your hand up to his lips, placing a soft kiss against your skin, "c'mon, lets get to the three broomsticks then I'll take you back, its not good for you to be out in the snow for too long, I don't want you to get sick.
You're my, my, my, my Lover.
"Okay my love," you replied with a smile, letting him pull you along in the direction of the pub.
Jasper's grip on your hand tightened, as though afraid to let go, as though afraid that this perfect moment would slip through his fingers like grains of sand. "You're so gorgous," he whispered, his voice filled with a tenderness that took your breath away. "i adore you."
And as you walked together, lost in the maze of streets and alleys, you knew that no matter where life may take you, you would always find your way back to each other.
Draco Malfoy - getaway car
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No, nothin' good starts in a getaway car
The sun had dipped below the horizon, casting a golden hue over the sprawling grounds of Malfoy Manor as Draco Malfoy and you sat together on his expensive broomstick. It was a moment suspended in time, a brief respite from the chaos and turmoil of the world outside.
As you gazed out at the rolling hills before you, Draco's hand found yours, his touch gentle and reassuring. But beneath the facade of tranquility, there was an undercurrent of tension, a sense of unease that lingered in the air like a shadow.
It was the best of times, the worst of crimes
You knew Draco was a death eater now, knew he had done bad things and helped bad people but you couldn't bring yourself to leave him. You loved him, and whenever you thought about the bad things he had done, your heart was quick to remind you of all the good times you had together.
All the late night talks, the joking around, the kissing and holding... everything.
But as the miles stretched out before you, you couldn't help but wonder if it was worth it.
I wanted to leave him, I needed a reason "X" marks the spot where we fell apart He poisoned the well, I was lyin' to myself
You fought to held back tears, the two of you were now on the run and now because of him, you were leaving all your friends and family behind. You were a traitor now and it was all his fault.
Draco's grip tightened around the broom handle, his gaze distant as he stared out at the sky ahead. "I knew it from the start," he admitted, his voice tinged with sorrow. "We were cursed."
You were drivin' the getaway car We were flyin', but we'd never get far
You new the order would be after you soon, they knew what Draco had done. You wrapped your arms around him tighter, burying your head into his back as you held onto him, scared of falling.
Ridin' in a getaway car There were sirens in the beat of your heart
And as you flew on into the night, the sirens in the beat of your heart seemed to grow louder, a relentless reminder of the consequences of your actions. You should have known that you'd never leave, that the promise of freedom would come at a steep price, one that you weren't willing to pay if it meant leaving Draco.
So still, you clung to each other, two lost souls adrift in a sea of chaos and uncertainty. For in each other's arms, you found solace and strength, a beacon of hope in a world gone mad.
And as the stars twinkled overhead and the world blurred past, you knew that no matter where the road may lead, you'd never leave him
We were jet-set, Bonnie and Clyde (oh-oh)
Tom Riddle - right where you left me
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Help, I'm still at the restaurant Still sitting in a corner I haunt Cross-legged in the dim light They say, "What a sad sight"
Under the soft glow of the restaurant lights, you found yourself seated alone at a corner table, the memories of your past love weighing heavily on your heart. Friends had come and gone, relationships had blossomed and withered away, but you remained rooted in the past, unable to move forward.
Your eyes kept flicking up to the empty chair in front of you, your plate of food going cold as it sat in front of you completely untouched. The workers looked over, eyes filling with sympathy and sadness at the all-familiar face they had seen too many times, brief flashes of the happy couple that had once sat there.
Everybody moved on I, I stayed there Dust collected on my pinned-up hair They expected me to find somewhere Some perspective, but I sat and stared
As you sat there, lost in your thoughts, the echoes of the past danced around you like ghosts in the night. You remembered the first time you had met, the way his smile had lit up the room and warmed your heart. But now, all that remained were distant memories, fragments of a love that had once been.
You couldn't help but wonder if he ever thought about you, if he ever regretted the choices he had made. Did he know that you were still waiting for him, still hoping for a second chance at love? Or had he moved on, leaving you behind like a forgotten relic of the past?
Right where you left me You left me no, oh, you left me no You left me no choice but to stay here forever You left me, you left me no, oh, you left me no You left me no choice but to stay here forever
The restaurant buzzed with life around you, the sounds of laughter and conversation blending together in a cacophony of noise. But amidst the chaos, you felt alone, a solitary figure adrift in a sea of strangers.
And as you sat there, watching the world pass you by, you couldn't help but feel a sense of longing wash over you like a wave crashing against the shore. You longed for the warmth of his embrace, the comfort of his presence, but you knew deep down that he was gone, lost to you forever.
Did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen? Time went on for everybody else, she won't know it
Yet, despite the ache in your heart and the tears in your eyes, you couldn't bring yourself to leave. You were stuck in the past, trapped in a cycle of longing and regret, unable to move forward without him by your side.
But as the night wore on and the restaurant began to empty out, you knew that you couldn't stay there forever. It was time to let go of the past and embrace the future, to find happiness within yourself and move on from the love that had once consumed you.
With a heavy heart and tear-stained cheeks, you rose from your seat and made your way towards the door. And as you stepped out into the cool night air, you made a silent vow to yourself to never look back, to keep moving forward no matter how difficult the journey may be.
If our love died young, I can't bear witness And it's been so long But if you ever think you got it wrong I'm right where you left me
But it was a vow you knew you'd break just for him.
written by @adiraargent
Please do not steal or post anywhere else <3
Requests are open!!!
Bye for now
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natti-ice · 17 days
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The Truth Will Set You Free- Tom Riddle.
Pairing: Tom riddle x fem!reader
Summary: a mysterious letter reveals Tom’s biggest secret.
Warnings: angst, written in third person (she/her pronouns) (1k words)
Author’s note: this is a reupload, I wrote this a while ago!
Reblogs and comments are greatly appreciated<3
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"YOU'RE MARRIED?!?" She yelled at him, watching the color drain from his face gave her the answer. Tom closed the book he had been reading peacefully as he lounged in a plush chair in his dorm room.
"What are you talking about, dear?" He swallowed, he saw Y/N holding a piece of paper in her hand, confusion and anger in her facial expressions. He had no idea how this could have got to her, barely anyone knew about this.
"I received this letter this morning" she started, showing him the paper she had been clutching onto for the past twenty minutes. "I don't know if this is some sick joke or if you've been lying to me this whole time. Tom, is it true?" She didn't know what to think, when she got the letter she thought it was someone trying to play with her. But as the letter went on it seemed too real
"Tom and I were wed the summer before his sixth year. Once he graduates we shall start a family together, I believe you deserve to know since there are talks of your attachment to him. Just know, this is how it has to be, he cannot be yours."
Reading this brought a sharp pain in her chest, she thought she knew the man she loved. She knew he had his secrets, but she wouldn't think he would withhold this from her. Her emotions were all jumbled into one, she didn't know what to feel.
"It's true," he said in a hushed tone, his head hung low like a dog being scolded. "You weren't supposed to find out this way"
"Like this? Or was I not supposed to find out at all?" Okay, it seems her anger has gotten the better of her
"Please let me explain, Y/N" Tom begged. His usual stoic demeanor had completely vanished, he had never let his emotions show this way, it made him feel weak.
"I don't know if I want to hear it, Tom. How could you do this to me?"
"I didn't do it to hurt you" he raised his voice as he became angry at himself "I figured if you knew, you would want nothing to do with me" he admitted
"You're probably right about that" she said sarcastically
"Y/N, please don't joke about this" he warned "if you'd let me, I'll explain to you everything that happened. Only the truth" his eyes met hers he could see the pain in them, that shattered his heart. When he met Y/N he knew he had found the only person in the world he could truly care for. She broke down every wall he tried to put up with ease, there was no way he could let her get away.
"Fine, go ahead" she whispered as she tried to swallow the lump in her throat
He sighed, calming his brain before proceeding to tell her about something that has eaten at him every day for the past two years. "At the end of my fifth year, my mother put me into an arranged marriage. I fought and fought to get out of it, but no matter what I said I couldn't get out. She paired me with some pure-blooded floozy who couldn't last a day without her father's money, the day of the ceremony was the worst day of my life. My mother expects me to have children with that girl and I honestly couldn't care less about that stupid girl." Talking about her put a bad taste in his mouth, he hated her with every ounce of his being.
"I just don't get why you didn't tell me" Y/N said during Tom's pause
"I didn't tell you because it's a part of me that I hate. Having my name attached to someone who I will never love, isn't something I'm proud of. When I met you, it was like that terrible situation was in the past and you were my future. For years I have been trying to find a way out of this marriage. I plan to divorce her as soon as I'm done with school." He felt slight relief as he finally got this off his chest, it always weighed heavy on him.
Y/N stood a foot away from Tom, as he explained his story her heart broke more, she had never seen Tom in such pain before, and it definitely wasn't a good feeling to watch. "What about your mother?" She asked
"I don't care about that woman! She hasn't a motherly bone in her body, once I'm done with school I'll never see her again" His hatred for his mother ran deep, Y/N knew he never liked his mother. She understood why, if she was her mother she'd probably feel the exact same way.
"Y/N" Tom reached for her hand, wrapping both his hands around her, bringing it up to his mouth gently kissing the back. "I am very sorry I never told you about this, I've never been good at telling the truth but that's no excuse. I promise you, you are the only person I will ever love." This is the truest thing to ever leave Tom's mouth
God, he's so beautiful she thought, searching for any trace he was lying to her. Sometimes she felt foolish thinking about how much she loved him, his hold on her was so strong. But she wouldn't change a thing.
"I'm so conflicted right now" she admitted, "but I believe you, you swear you want nothing to do with her?"
"Cross my heart, I would never dream of being with her" he brought his hand up to Y/N's cheek, slowly stroking it with his thumb. "You are the only person I want to marry" he whispered
"Good, because I don't think I'd like a life without you" she slightly grinned
"What if, when we're done at this tragic place, you and I run off together? We won't have to worry about anyone else, it'll just be us living our life together" Tom suggested
"That sounds like a very thought out plan, dear" she smirked "perhaps I might take you up on that offer" she leaned in, slightly pecking his lips
"You really have to get those papers signed, Tom. I am no one's mistress" she half-joked but he knew she was serious.
"Anything for you my dear"
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iveriee · 5 months
Note
hiii!! how are you lovely? id like to request a tom riddle x soft!hufflepuff reader? reader has seen him as her best friend since first year but then she over hears him talking about how he does not care for her :( so now he just wonders why she’s no longer “clingy” or sweet to him. hurt&comfort, angsty ish, i just want a grovelling riddle 🫠🫠
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★;ANSWER: Of course! I'm doing well, Thank you for asking. I apologise if this is not to your liking.
★;CATEGORY: Angst.
★;PAIRING: Tom Riddle x Gn!Hufflepuff!Reader
★;SUMMARY: in which.. he repents his actions.
★;PS: This fic contains severe mentions of toxicity and a slight implication of death and violence. If anything of the sort makes you disheartened, then i would suggest you not to read this. As I mentioned, I have been quite stressed due to my examinations and Henceforth the quality of this fic may be a bit lower than expected. I attempt my very best to improve my writing. Once again, English is NOT my first language and hence, feel free to correct any grammatical incorrections. Writing non-yandere fics is quite strange for me and i apologise if I have accidentally made him into a yandere. I'm aware you mentioned a Fem!Reader, however I'll be doing a Gn!reader as to be more inclusive!Of course I had to use 'perhaps', 'henceforth' and 'quite'. And of course, i had to make Abraxas Malfoy an utter jerk.as it's a headcanon of mine that the Malfoys are all jerks.
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Perhaps they presume us not to cling to others—to adhere to the cinders of a strained candle, of a relationship that ceased to live. To cater to it's ghost, it's bones. With one ray of aspiration, that the other would return. Yet you did. You had ever since that day. That evocative day in the Great Hall. That day when you ventured to befriend Riddle. That day when you shelved your sorrow as if it was a gruelling test you so utterly detested. And perhaps, you always would do so. Whether it was inadequate or purposeful, you paid heed to him. For six years, you had done so now. Yet none of your amiability ushered reciprocation from him. None. You'd praise his talents. You'd jest with him. You'd attempt to find solace in his ignorance. Of course, that was, not possible. You were human after all. Perhaps, it was due to you being a Hufflepuff? Perhaps it was as he did not how to convey his feelings? Perhaps, you utterly and desperately desired to invent an excuse for his behaviour.
And Henceforth, one abominable day, when your potion transformed indictable, far off the path of the accurate instructions—You tilted your gaze downwards. The mortification was quite too much for you. The air smeared you, resulting in quivering. A mere reach for your quill felt like a distinguished task. To mix lumber to the fire, An awful act happened. Which, of course, had to include him. Prying your ears, you examined. To distinguish the start, Riddle was frowning at the sight of your dismay(perhaps, not your dismay..).. If you had, perhaps, attempted to tell anyone that, they'd blaze into laughter. Of course, he did not look any less appealing, even whilst frowning. (If you knew the correct reasoning, that is)
However, of course, somebody had to destroy such a thing and that git was indeed Abraxas Malfoy. Perhaps, he ought to diminish the tension. And Henceforth Malfoy cast a repulsed look...at you..perhaps? "[Last Name] is a scatterbrain." He spoke to Riddle. "I think you're acquainted with them, My lord?" Imbecile you concluded to yourself, scowling. Yet the act that cast the most anticipation was Riddle's response. Your heart blazed. Sweat grazed your cheeks. Would, he, perhaps, come to your defence? It was juvenile,a foolish reassurance, the concluding luminosity of your life. Perhaps he cared. The mere wonder of it made you smile. (albeit somewhat slight)
If Tom concealed his feelings, then, perhaps he was quite proficient at it because his thoughts were utterly and completely inscrutable. Your frame began quivering. You steadied your gaze and examined him, with a surge of internal reassurance. "If that is,perhaps, what you believe to be true, then I must say, I do not care for [Last Name] and nor do i have no intention of paying heed to them." He stated firmly, causing Malfoy to flinch. "They are merely a classmate and a stranger to me."
Engulfed. That was the stature of your luminosity. Engulfed by him and the vicious wave that was sorrow(certainly a wave you'd never get over of). Tears plunged your cheeks before you could make of it and your lips closed on eachother. Restraining your palm against your mouth, you quivered. No, this had to have been another formidable nightmare of yours—it had to have been. He could not have been so...cruel. He had to have considered you as an acquaintance, at the very least . You loved him. You indeed did. With all your heart. Ever since the day you first gazed upon him. And yet, this was the conclusion, the answer to your persistent affection? You had splurged years in the aspiration that he'd...care. You were, sincerely and utterly pitiable. Life was an anguished tale. And, of course, you were the one having to suffer it.
And henceforth, this very abominable day, you quit your attempts to gain heed and he began his.
[★]
Perhaps nobody at Hogwarts with an orderly mind would have ever believed that Tom Riddle yearned after a mere Hufflepuff . Neither would the Hufflepuff in interrogation. Of course, he displayed no clues of mourning. On the budding days, he discovered no need for your juvenile affection. It was otherworldly to even wonder that he would require you. You brought no assistance to him and he regarded you as a 'mere nuisance.' Yet as herbage mutated copper—honed and gnawing, plunging onto the vicious month of October, The Hogwarts castle glinted with eerie ginger and blazing green, the act of ignorance from you towards him became...perplexing.. to say the very least.
It felt vacant. He felt vacant. As much as Riddle cherished his pride, He was almost wounded by your actions.You no longer bothered to praise him tenderly or adhere onto him. You no longer attempted to even gaze at him. However, as he had reassured himself quite alot of times, he had no requirement for you. And so henceforth, he persisted with life, excelling and being applauded like every other common day. Yet, you cannot merely plunge sorrow by detaining it. And perhaps, it shall make the matters worse when it rises, sizzling up to the surface to swamp you.
That sorrow certainly rose early.
And assisted with a broth of envy and guilt.(though, of course, he would never admit so) You had, at last—created proper friendships with amiable people, unlike, a very certain somebody whom you, precisely, despised now. To examine you speak to others, to see you content;considerate, sympathetic (Not with him, of course) slashed him with envy so utterly disdainful. In an instant's heed, He began to covet you, to crave you. He ought to have your affection once again. To possess your sweet, agreeable praise again. To have you clutch onto him. To fluster you, and—And perhaps, even kill to do so. Of course, the victims' identities were quite evident. Perhaps, it was merely amusement he required from you. Or perhaps, he may have, though quite unlikely, fallen in love.
And so henceforth, one agreeable day, when you had attempted to plod to the Black Lake—only to be approached by him. You felt satisfaction and hatred as you utterly refused to gaze at him.Your reasoning,being,the way he gazed upon you. You felt a rooting inclination to speak, yet, of course, you did not, allowing him to begin this clutter of a 'conversation'. (you could swear to Merlin that you had examined sorrow in his eyes!). The silence stirred distant. He spoke. "Greetings, [Name]." It felt as though you had, perhaps, heard the most astonishing wonder in the world. "I aspire that you are doing well?" You scowled at such a cloyed question. "I suppose i should get to the point, shouldn't it? Indeed, I would like to apologize for my behaviour. As you are aware Malfoy is—"
"An imbecile, yes." You responded curtly, frowning at the mere sight of him. He was,perhaps, too bewitching for you to be furious at. "Quit the Formalities, Riddle..."
"Is that so?" He questioned, inching quite near, smiling viciously. "In mere words, i would be honoured to rekindle our.. friendship." His smile diminished and his handsome face reeked of vulnerability. It was equivalent to viewing lime skies. Your heart ached to embrace him, to weep onto his chest, to allow him to comfort you—Yet, you could not fulfill it. You had dignity. And yet, you had love. Towards him. And perhaps, you always would. Tears boiled once more, and you gazed at him. He embraced you, and you had what you had so potently ached for. His hands cupped your cheeks as he smiled at you and you returned the act, though in tears. Joyful tears. Perhaps, he even shed a tear himself. (though unlikely). He pressed his lips onto yours and so did you. Profoundly. "Repentance, perhaps, inched us nearer, didn't it, love?"
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mastermindmiko · 5 months
Text
Mr. Head boy
Pairing: Tom riddle + reader
Word count: 805
Summary: Tom is sick
Warnings: sickness and OOC tom
Hey! If you think this didn't completely suck, feel free to check out my masterlist.
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When Malfoy told me that Tom wasn't going to his classes today I wasted no time before going to my boyfriend's dorm. Tom, my tom, Mr. academic achiever and head boy missing classes, and especially this close to example season, something had to be wrong.
I walk into the room and I was greeted with the sound of Tom blowing his nose. He was covered in several blankets and he had a box of tissues next to him. Tom threw the tissue into the bin quickly. And he smiled weakly when he saw me. He said "Hello, darling."
He sounded congested and I pouted, raising a hand to my chest, I said, "Oh, honey, Are you alright?
"Yes." He said, but I smiled not believing him one bit. I replied, "But you don't look all right."
"Well, I am." he said, firmly. He folded his arms over his chest and he frowned. I take a few steps closer and he raises his hands in front of him to stop me. He warns, "Don't come any closer."
"Why not?" I ask even though I already know. He frowns again at me noticing my intentions. He grumbles, "Because I hate you, and I don't want to be near you."
"Okay." I say, unconvinced and smiling because it truly was a sight to see. Tom with a red nose curled up in blankets still acting stubborn.
"You have a fever." I say, noticing him burning up against the back of my hand. He says, "Impossible."
"I'm not sick!" He mumbles then coughs. My smile was getting too wide by then. I retort, "Was that another symptom of your sickness?"
I press a quick kiss to his forehead then turn to leave. Tom grabs my wrist to stop me and pouts, "Where are you going?"
"To tell the head girl to get someone else to do your rounds." I explain, no way was Tom going to be able to walk around the castle in the cold, tonight. He frowns, "But I'm head boy."
"I know, but you're also a sick head boy who should not get out of bed."
"I'm not sick!" Tom says, and I roll my eyes. I lean down to press a quick peck to his lips but he puts his hand on his mouth, eyes wide, shaking his head. He shouts, "You can't kiss me, I'm sick."
"I thought you were fine." I tease, feigning a pout. He glares at me, and I can't help the chuckle that escapes my mouth. I head to the door and Tom says, "Don't be long."
"I won't." I say then leave. I find Malfoy with the rest of his friends and tell him to tell the head girl about Tom being sick and to find someone who can do his rounds instead. I head back as quickly as possible and Tom beams when he sees me return. I tease, "Happy to see me?"
"Very." Tom says, and he closes the book that he had on his lap. I frown at Tom's words, he's never been one for being overtly affectionate even if no one was around. The book he had was a spell book and I roll my eyes. Only Tom would study while being this sick. I scold, "Tom, you shouldn't be studying while you're sick."
"I wasn't. I just found a useful spell." Tom grins, and I bring out a small case from under his desk where he keeps all the pills and things he needs when I get sick since I do get sick quite frequently. I ask, "What is it?"
"I'll use it on you so you can't get sick."
"Really?" I ask, I bring out a couple tea bags, and conjure up some water then heat it. I place it on his desk and point to it, as a silent way to say 'drink up'. I then bring out a couple of pills that should help this fever go away faster. Tom replies, "Well, it's only temporary, but we can keep casting it as long as you're with me."
"I think that's a great idea." I say and Tom uses the spell on me, and it makes me feel weird, tingly some how. As soon as he's done with the spell, he grabs my arm and pulls me with him to bed. I giggle at his antics. Those pills must be making him feel all sorts of things because a normal Tom would never do this.
"Thank you." He mumbles, and he pulls me under the sheets with him. He wraps his arms around me, and presses a kiss to my head. I smile against his chest and pull him closer. The pills must be making him drowsy too because in a few seconds I hear him start snoring and his breath evens out.
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ash-whimsicalfanfic · 10 months
Text
You Betrayed Me
Tom Riddle II X Fem OC/Reader
Word Count: 1832
Warnings: Mild Language, Violence, Death, Angst, Sad, Heartbreaking/Happy ending, Baby, etc.
Prompt: After graduating from Hogwarts, Tom begins to go down a dark and angry path. His love for you is questionable, however your main focus is your shared son, Mattheo...
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“How is our future dark lord?” Tom asks, stepping into Mattheo’s nursery.
Things have been rocky between the two of us since we graduated from Hogwarts. He was unhappy with his current job and now was on an angry, dark path. I was fine with letting him do his own thing, however I draw the line when it comes to my son.
“Stop calling him that, Tom. He is a baby and even when he is older, he won’t be apart of this.” I say seriously as I continue to rock Mattheo.
“He is my heir, Y/N. He will be a dark lord.” He says seriously.
“What has happened to you? You use to be the man I loved, but now your just a shell of the man I once knew.” I say in disbelief.
“I’m the same man you married.Your just being overdramatic.” He says, rolling his eyes.
“Just go.” I snap.
“Do not talk to me that way.” He yells, pulling his wand out and pointing at me.
Mattheo instantly starts to wail, however I couldn’t take my eyes away from Tom. His eyes that once shone with love and adoration for me, now held hate and a coldness to them. 
“You would actually kill me.” I say, still in shock.
“I am the dark lord! I will not tolerate your disrespect! You are with me or you are against me!” He shouts.
I look down at the son we share who was screaming louder. I gently shush him, rocking him slightly. This boy needed me. Tom wouldn’t give him the love and care he needed in this world. Tom would do what was necessary to keep him alive while forcing him to do whatever he pleases. 
“I will stand by you, but I do not want to be your wife no more.” I say, turning to place Mattheo in his crib.
He was calm now, looking around curiously. He didn’t look as happy as he did before Tom came into the room. I frown, gently caressing his cheek before I lift him enough to place a kiss on his head.
“Look at me.” Tom seethes.
“I love you, Mattheo. So much. Mommy is always going to be here for you, sweet boy. Get some sleep.” I murmur, gently caressing his cheek before I turn to Tom.
“You have betrayed me. Even my own wife can’t stand by me.” He says, tears welling in his eyes as he grips his wand tighter.
My own eyes water as I know what is going to happen before it happens. I didn’t even have a way to defend myself. My wand was put away in my room. 
“Tom, you don’t have to do this. Mattheo needs his mother. Please.” I plead.
“Avada Kedavra!” He shouts.
It all happened so fast, the green light filling the room. I stood and looked down at the floor where my body lied before looking at Tom. He was staring down at my body before collapsing to the floor as he sobs. He crawls towards my body, cupping my cheek.
“Wake up…wake up, Y/N! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I lost my temper! I’m sorry!” He cries. 
Mattheo starts to wail and I look over to see him standing in his crib, grasping the bars as he stared at me…not my body, me.
“Oh sweet boy. It’s okay. Mommy will always be here, watching and protecting you. Don’t you ever forget that mommy loves you.” I murmur as I step forward and stroke his cheek.
He quiets, looking up at me as he giggles and reaches up.
“Mattheo, what are you doing?” Tom mutters, standing at the end of the crib.
“Mama!” Mattheo cries again as he reaches up.
Tom looks at where I’m standing now, looking confused and lost before looking at Mattheo who was still looking up at me. I push a curl out of his eyes, smiling softly at him.
“Y/N…” Tom mumbles. 
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“Mattheo! Choose a side! Just know your mother died choosing the wrong side!” Tom shouts. 
I frown, watching Mattheo. Choose his side. Choose it. 
“Mattheo! Please!” Narcissa pleads.
I smile sadly, she has protected him and raised him. I knew I could always rely on her.
“Issa…” Mattheo pleads.
“Your mother would want you to live.” She says.
“Choose a side son!” He shouts.
“I choose mom’s side!” He shouts back.
My eyes widen before I lunge forward in front of him as the spell casts. Everyone around us gasps including Tom and I knew they could see me. I looked at my hand to see it was translucent. It was like how ghosts in the stories were described.
“Mom.” Mattheo whispers. 
I turned around and saw that he was looking at me in surprise.
“My sweet boy.” I whisper, reaching out to caress his cheek.
He leans into my touch, a tear falling down his cheek. I smile softly at him.
“I miss you so much.” He says.
“I’m always with you, sweet boy. And I will always love you and care for you. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you.” I murmur. 
“Y/N?” Tom finally says.
I turn and face him, the smile falling from my face.
“You have lost your mind, Tom. I hoped and prayed that you would stop this reckless path of yours, especially after seeing the way you fell apart after you killed me. But, you’ve lost it. He is our son. I told you that I never wanted him a part of this dark and angry path you’ve paved for yourself. I wanted him to make his own choices. Even if he decided he wanted to follow in your footsteps, I never would let him.” I say.
“Mattheo, you will die just as an agonizing death as your mother.” He snaps and I see that Mattheo was trying to get closer to Narcissa that was sneaking off.
I nod at her and dive in front of Mattheo, taking her wand and pointing it at him. Narcissa’s hushed hurries to both Mattheo and her son, Draco were all I could hear. 
“Y/N, move.” He warns.
“Never.” I say.
“You chose the wrong side once, don’t tell me you're doing it again.” He says.
“I’m willing to sacrifice my life, even as a spirit.” I say, my eyes watering.
If I didn’t play my cards out right, Tom would remember some of the old legends about the spirit of a wizard. As a pureblood, magic ran through me indefinitely…even dead. It is what allows me to show myself briefly, however the killing curse triggered something to make me be able to show myself like I was now. This wasn’t brief…it wasn’t temporary…this was permanent. 
Tom seemed to be calculating what to do. He was trying to figure out how to get rid of me once and for all. I couldn’t let him do that. Mattheo has me and he is going to need me. He needs to be protected from Tom. Tom still held a place in my heart even after everything. I find myself reminiscing the love we use to both share, before it was just me.
“How are you doing this?” He asks.
“A mothers love is something no one can explain. I knew once I found out I was pregnant with Mattheo, that I’d die for him. He became my world in a heartbeat and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” I say. 
“Mom!” Mattheo shouts.
I glance over to see him throwing something my way. My wand. I throw Narcissa’s back and catch mine, quickly mouthing “I love you” to Mattheo. I turn back to Tom, gripping my wand tighter.
“Expelliarmus!” We shout.
A green stream of magic shoots out of his wand as a blinding white shoots out of mine. I step forward, gripping my wand tighter as my magic starts to overpower his. 
“You are not more powerful than me, do you not forget how you died.” He seethes.
“Don’t forget you played an unfair game. My wand was in the other room. Otherwise, I’m sure you’d be the one dead.” I seethe back, my eyes watching a young boy destroy the last horcrux: Nagini.
His magic begins to overpower mine and I focus on what I’m doing this for. Mattheo’s life. I focus on the anger I had for Tom taking away my ability to raise Mattheo. I focus on the anger of Tom killing me in front of Mattheo. I focus on my pain of loving and hating Tom Riddle. 
My magic overpowers him, sending his wand flying out of his hand. I catch his wand, glaring at Tom who looks at his hand that starts to turn to ash.
“It’s over Tom.” I say.
“I’ll be back.” He says.
I step forward until I stand in front of him and I grab his face as I look down at him with a blank look.
“No, you won’t. The dark magic you’ve used and using horcruxes for yourself, has ruined your chance of ever being a spirit. You're going straight to hell, Tom.” I whisper.
“And you say you loved me.” He says.
“I don’t love this version of you. I love the Tom Riddle I was with when we attended Hogwarts. That is the Tom Riddle I am in love with.” I say, stepping back. 
I watch as the rest of him turns to ash, looking down at the wand I held. My eyebrows furrow, noticing this wasn’t his wand. This was the Elder Wand. I turn and walk towards Professor McGonagall.
“I believe this goes to you.” I say.
“You always were…have been an incredible woman, Y/N. Go be with Mattheo…and then come back and let's talk about you staying here at Hogwarts.” She says.
I smile, before stepping away and turning to see that Mattheo was already watching me. He breaks into a sprint and I smile, opening my arms up and wrapping him in a tight hug. We sway back and forth, the both of us hugging each other like it was going to be our last time.
“I didn’t realize you were this tall. It’s different when I’m standing here with you and not off to the side.” I whisper.
“Please tell me you aren’t leaving me.” He pleads quietly.
“I’ll probably be joining Moaning Myrtle and the others here at Hogwarts. At least until I move on…but I’m not going to be moving on for a long while.” I say.
“Are you unhappy you can’t move on?” He asks quietly.
“No, no of course not, sweet boy. I’m here with you and that is all I could ever want. The day I move on is the day that you join me on this side…the spirit side. However, I hope that won’t be for a really long time. I hope to see you do many great things, Mattheo.” I say, smiling softly at him.
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darkmagic-s · 2 years
Text
to be loved by tom riddle
summary: Tom Riddle is in no way the perfect lover, but he tries, he always does, for you.
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Tom Riddle is far from perfect, and deep inside, even his narcissistic self knows that. Being a lover, your lover, he has been discovering many new things about himself. Before, he wasn't even aware that he was capable of loving someone, due to what he went through, due to the lack of love he had before. Before you.
He tries, though. Your dark and power-hungry lover always tries to love you properly.
Tom Riddle, who loves you beautifully in his own way, who prepares a note while confessing to you, only to tuck it into his pocket after folding it, and look at your properly. Love flowing from his eloquent confession and passion evident in his eyes, as he holds your hand softly—his grip like his love; soft and uncertain, yet not wanting to let go, wanting to hold on. Scared, yet willing.
("There is nothing I find more beautiful than you, and my heart beats violently when you are around, even at the thought of you. After a long time of contemplation, the only reason for this is..."
"Love?" you supplies softly.
He falters, his mask crumbling slightly as he nods. Scared. He then regains his composure and says, "That is my assumption, yes.")
Your lover, who hesitates in abandoning his dream to achieve more power, to be Lord Voldemort. The same hesitation that dissipates whenever his mind drifts to you, and he knows that if he continues, he cannot be with you. It physically makes his heart ache, to leave what he wants the most, but you, just you, can easily cure that ache of his. He knows then, that it isn't power that he wants the most. As he thinks about your heart that reciprocates his love and your beautiful mind that is perhaps (and hopefully, he adds desperately) thinking of him as well, he comes to a decision, for a future with you in it.
Tom Riddle, who despises physical touch, simply because he doesn't understand it, doesn't understand how it matters to most people he knows. He flinches, when you rest your hand on top of his. There was a moment of silence between you two, as you look into each other's eyes.
("Why?" he asks.
"To show that I love you.")
He hates that, how forward you can be with your feelings, how he can't do the same. He tries to be like you, to make sure to show that his feelings for you are clear. He realises that this is him showing that he loves you too.
Your lover, who chases after your touch despite the voice at the back of his head telling him that it's unlike him to do so. His dark eyes closing when he feels your familiar hand on his cheek, and his warm hand catching your wrist when your hand pulls away, only to let it go when he realises that he's doing things on impulse now, always whenever you start touching him.
("And every time my skin brushes against yours, even just a light touch—it just... astounds me," he explains.
You hummed, as your hand hovers over his, silently asking for permission.
Please, he wants to say. He decides to nod instead.)
Tom Riddle, who still craves for Dark Magic, only to remind himself that you, you, you—that you're his, and that he shouldn't risk that, risk losing you.
Your lover, who always finds a way to make the things that he wants work, who caves in to temptation and continues using Dark Magic, except that now, it's for you. The excitement he feels when performing Dark Magic on the ones that hurt you, on the ones that cause even the slightest frown on your lips.
Tom Riddle, who doesn't understand how you can keep on loving him even after finding out what he does to people who do you wrong.
("I'm sorry—"
"I should be sorry. I'm sorry that you feel like you have to hide this from me.")
He comes to a realisation that this is love, to accept everything about the one you love. This is you accepting him.
Your lover, who takes care of you without realising it himself. A hair clip that he keeps in his pocket for when your hair falls to your face while you're doing work, a scrutinising gaze being sent your way because you seem a little down instead of directly asking you about it, because that's how he is, and the fast steps that he makes whenever you two reach the door of your destination, just so he could open it for you. Only when he finds two hair clips in his pocket that he notices the little things he has been doing for you.
Tom Riddle, who learns that he cannot win everything. Despite how much you two love each other, it cannot easily change the massive ego he has and his astonishing stubbornness. He always feels the need to win, and that includes arguments. He hates how you have the same massive ego and astonishing stubbornness he has.
He pauses at this thought. He should learn to accept you, and all your flaws, shouldn't he? He tends to be harsh when he wants to win, completely disregarding any feelings. He immediately blurts out an apology, earning a very confused "Huh?"
Your lover, who loves you too much because he has never loved anyone like this. You can even say it's obsession, or something close to it. He has to know every thought that occurs in your mind, and every plan that you decide to make.
He explains it's only because he's afraid that you would get away from him, in which you have to explain that you are not going anywhere at all. You mention how he has to trust you.
Tom Riddle, who likes the idea of trust between the two of you, and wonders just how much you trust him. He feels himself getting lost when he sees you trembling and breathless. It then instantly clicks, and he has seen this before. Once again, he's grateful for his constant curiosity.
He holds onto both of your hands, making sure you're looking at him. His soft voice reminds you to breathe, to look at him and only him. He doesn't know how much time has passed, nor does he care—it always feels timeless with you anyway.
As he's engulfed by your arms afterwards, receiving gratitude from you, he feels lucky to be the one that you're able to be vulnerable around. Trust, he thinks.
You're always so strong, for him and for everyone else. Despite how, sometimes, he can see that you're putting up a mask, you always appear strong. This vulnerable side of yours doesn't make you weak, now that you've shown him. It only makes him think that you're so much stronger. Trust, he repeats.
Your lover, who loves you beautifully, and learns to love you beautifully. Your lover, Tom Riddle.
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fortisfilia · 6 days
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Promised Part 7 - Tom Riddle x reader
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Info: This is a rewrite of a story I've posted on my old account years ago. If it sounds familiar, that might be why :)
Summary: In this story, Tom didn't grow up as an orphan, but with his grandfather and uncle. Reader's sister got very sick and the Gaunts offer their help. But not without asking for something in return.
Warnings: Arranged marriage
Word count: 3.2k
Masterpost | Masterlist | Part 6 | Part 8
Part 7 - Gift Giving
“So this is the last part of the house,” you said, after giving Tom a tour around the estate, arriving upstairs in the corridor leading to the bedrooms. “The guestroom is right at the end of the hallway. It has its own bathroom, which is a bit small. I hope you don’t mind.”
Tom shook his head as he peered towards the half-open door to the guestroom, that the house-elves were preparing for him.
“This right there is Elsie’s room, next to it is the master bedroom. And this,” you said, leaning onto a door. “Is my room.”
Tom’s eyes met yours. 
“Want to come in?”
He nodded.
There was a sense of excitement in the air, letting Tom enter your room. It was something so private, it felt like you let him walk straight into your head. But it was the polite thing to do. Although he didn’t seem too crushed from the argument he had had with his grandfather and uncle, it surely would make him feel better if he knew he was welcome here. He wouldn't want to be treated differently than usual, you knew, but a little empathy couldn't hurt.
“Take a seat if you like. Anywhere,” you said, trying to hide the nerves that were making your fingertips tingle. Sitting down on the sofa next to the bookshelf, you folded your treacherous hands and watched him walk across the room. He glanced at your belongings, only in passing, one would think, if he weren't Tom Riddle. Surely he had made up his mind about every single thing he saw. Every book, each letter from Camille on the desk, and crumpled note in the bin. You should have cleaned. He stopped by the desk and picked up a framed picture of you and your family.
“Sorry about my mother,” you mentioned when you noticed what he was inspecting.
“What do you mean?”
“She can be a bit brash, you know. When she asked you to stay earlier. But she usually means well.”
“Oh.” He set the picture back down. “I didn’t mind actually. You know my family. They’re brash. And not the good kind.”
Absolutely not the good kind. “Is it always like that with them?” 
“Since I can remember at least.”
There was a moment of silence. 
“I’m sorry,” you then said. 
“For what? That’s just how it is. They have their ways and I have mine.”
Right. He must be used to them by now. What a sad thought. “Did you know they would bring up the unbreakable vow?“
“No… I had no idea. They’re idiots. Just stupid. Why ask for more each time? They always want to be a step ahead for nothing.”
“What did you say to them?” you asked, hiding that you already knew.
“That I wouldn’t do it. They took our word for it then and that should be enough. They can’t force us to do a vow.”
“How angry are they?”
“They’ll come around,” he shrugged. “It wasn’t our first argument and it won’t be our last.”
“It must be hard to put up with them. They seem… exhausting.”
“I don’t know any different.” His voice was neutral as he leant against the desk, still looking around the room. “It’s not that bad I suppose.”
“Not that good either, though. I know it might not be my place, but they’re so cold. I can’t imagine what living with them must be like.”
“Well, I can’t complain, can I?” he said, raising a brow to your unsolicited sympathy. “I was fed every day. The house was warm and the bills were paid. What more could I ask for?”
A lot more, one would say if the question wasn’t a rhetorical one. “Have you always lived with them?”
“Yes.”
“What about -” You cut yourself off. There were plenty of rumours about Tom’s parents, each of them too wild to be true.
“My parents?” His eyes were still on you, not in anger, yet the intensity of his stare threatened to burn holes through your skin.
Your retreat was subconscious when you could no longer withstand his gaze and nodded. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have.”
Tom exhaled sharply. It almost sounded like a laugh. “I don't usually talk about it because people just want to know about them so they can get something out of it. It’s not a sensitive subject for me though. I don’t mind.”
There was no irony in his voice, his features collected, so you dared to ask, "Do you miss them?" 
“Never have.”
“Really? You never wished to live with your parents instead of Marvolo and Morfin?”
Tom smiled weakly and shook his head. “Wishing for something won’t make it happen. And no. It would have been quite the same, I think. Maybe even worse.”
“Worse?”
“You’ve heard how Marvolo talks about my parents. His daughter and a muggle. A stain in the bloodline he said, didn’t he?”
“But if they loved each other that shouldn’t have mattered to him.”
His eyebrows rose in what looked like a strange form of amusement. “Well, that’s a whole other story.”
What did that even mean? “Have they-”
Tom shook his head, making it clear that he wasn’t going to talk any further about it. He walked across the room towards you, fiddling something out from the inner pocket of his jacket. 
That had been one question too much apparently, and it was unclear if he was pulling out his wand or was on his way out, but as you opened your mouth again, he sat down beside you.
“I’m going to tell you,” he said. “Not now though. You’re going to know everything about me eventually. Someday.”
“Someday then,” you repeated. “What have you got there?”
He held the thing from his jacket in his hand now. It was a package that seemed a bit squished as if it had barely fit into the pocket.
“Hold on,” he said and waved his wand at it, to smooth out the wrinkles on the paper. It was a present, a rectangular box, covered in dark green gift wrap. “I thought it would be impolite to come over for lunch without bringing at least a little Christmas gift.”
“Oh, you shouldn’t have,” you said as he handed over the present. 
“Go on, open it,” he said and motioned with his hand.
So you did and quickly found out what the package contained. A small handwritten book, full of potions recipes. 
“Nicked it from my uncle when he wasn’t looking,” Tom said. “So you better don’t mention it to him.”
“Oh great,” you laughed as you flipped through it. “Wow, I haven’t heard of any of these.”
“None of them are taught in school. I thought you’d like them. Didn’t seem like the ones we do with Slughorn were much of a challenge for you.”
The book looked as if it had been used a lot. The thin black binder was frayed and faded, and the edges of the pages were crinkled. On every other page, the handwriting changed, so it seemed that many different people had written the recipes. Poisons, antidotes and bewitchments you had never heard of were all listed, neatly explained and completed with full lists of ingredients.
“Where did your uncle get this from?” you asked, still looking through it.
“I’m not sure. Knockturn Alley perhaps, or on some market. I wouldn’t be surprised if he had added a few ones himself.”
As peculiar as it was, not many people could say they got a book of dark magic and probably illegal potions for Christmas.
“What an unusual gift. I do like it. Thank you, really!” you said and opened your arms to hug him, out of pure habit, but froze when you saw his stern expression, your arms still open. 
He looked into your eyes again, seemed to think for a moment and finally nodded to let you hug him. Just like when you had held hands, he was stiff and rigid, it felt like he was uncomfortable. You retracted, but as soon as you let go, he wrapped his arms around you and held you a little tighter, extending the embrace for a few more seconds.
There was a ghost of a smile on his face when you sat back straight and he was about to say something when the door flew open.
Tummy, one of the house-elves, stood in the door frame. “Miss, the guestroom is ready. Mister Riddle, Sir, please follow me.”
“Great,” Tom whispered under his breath, got up and followed the elf.
You quickly hid the book under your pillow and called after them, “It’d be nice if you could knock next time, Tummy!”
“Sorry Miss! Will knock!” His voice echoed from the hallway.
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When Mother called for dinner in the evening it was quiet at first. The turmoil from lunch still lingered in the air and no one had the heart to talk about it. The usual pleasantries didn’t last for long, so everyone resorted to picking on their food, which was better than exchanging uncomfortable glances.
“Tom?” Elsie said all of a sudden, breaking the silence.
“Yes?” he answered and you looked back and forth between the two.
“Did you know I’ll go to Hogwarts too next term?” Elsie went on, a very proud tone in her voice.
He grinned while picking up some green beans with his fork. “I did know that, yes.”
“I haven’t gotten the letter yet, so technically I don’t know if I’ll get in, but my parents said it will come on my eleventh birthday.”
“I’m sure it will.”
He had barely finished his last word when Elsie asked the next thing. 
“What’s your favourite subject?”
“Um… Defence Against The Dark Arts, I think,” Tom said. “It’s interesting enough.”
“Why?”
“Well,” he took a second to think. “I like to be prepared.”
“And you’re in Slytherin, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think I’ll get sorted into Slytherin?”
“Depends. Is it your favourite?”
You caught your parents exchanging looks and smiling at each other.
“Um… Well,” Elsie began. “I think they’re all nice. But Gryffindor is the best I guess.”
Tom clicked his tongue and shook his head jokingly. “Shame,” he said.
“Do you play Quidditch?” Elsie asked.
“No, I’m not into sports.”
“But can you fly?”
“Yes, I’m a decent flyer.”
She looked at your parents for a moment and whispered to Tom, “Do you think you can show me? How to fly a broom. I got one for Christmas, you see. And I-”
“Elsie,” Father laughed. “Let the boy eat, please.”
“No, I can show you,” Tom said. “It’s the least I can do to show my respect after you’re letting me stay here.”
“That’s very kind of you Tom,” Mother said. “And you can stay as long as you like.”
“Thank you. I won’t bother you for long though,” he answered.
Dessert was served and Elsie peppered Tom with questions about brooms until Father finally told her to leave him alone. 
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Later that night, when you lay in bed, you pulled the book out from under your pillow and held it for a while. It probably wasn’t even meant to be so special, but the fact that Tom had thought of giving you a present for Christmas, was not what you would have expected.
And you hadn’t even wasted a single thought about getting him something. How ignorant. 
You wondered how he felt about that. If he even felt about that, one way or another.
Your fingertip ran up and down the book spine countless times while you stared up onto the ceiling. You had to get him something. Something special.
And then you wondered if he couldn’t sleep either. If he wanted to talk for just a bit as well. If he thought about lying next to you, too. You could try to sneak out of your room and over to the guest room. Your parents wouldn’t like that of course, but you were going to marry him. They had to get used to the thought. And if you were quiet enough, they wouldn’t even notice.
You sat up slowly, put the book back under your pillow and tiptoed to the door of your room. Turning the doorknob as quietly as possible and holding your breath, you looked out into the dark hallway. You wouldn’t even need light, you knew this hallway like the back of your hand. Fifteen, maybe twenty quick steps and you would be right by the door to the guest room. So you took the first step out of your room.
“Miss!” a squeaky voice whispered in the dark from below. 
It was Tummy, standing there alone. 
“Tummy?” you asked quietly. “What are you doing here?”
“Miss, Master told Tummy to keep watch all night. So that Mister Riddle wouldn’t disturb you in your room.”
Great. Your parents were a few steps ahead. 
“Can Tummy get you anything, Miss?”
“No, I… I just thought I heard something,” you sighed. “Does Father really force you to stay up all night? You can go downstairs to sleep if you want to.”
“No, Miss, no,” the elf said and smiled. “Tummy sleeps right here on the floor. I have very good ears, yes. I hear every little noise, you see? I will wake up whenever I hear something and alert the Masters.”
Unbelievable. They had thought of everything.
“I see,” you said. “But I’m not afraid Tom would disturb me. You really can go downstairs.”
“Miss, Tummy is thankful for your offer, but I must follow the Master's order. Tummy doesn’t mind it.”
“Alright then,” you gave up. “Hang on though.” You went back into your room, and fetched one of the three pillows from your bed. “Take this at least,” you told the elf and gave him the pillow. “It’s big enough for you to sleep on.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary. Please.”
“I insist.”
Tummy smiled, took the pillow and nodded. “Thank you, Miss. Tummy is very grateful.”
“Good night, Tummy.
“Good night, Miss.”
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The following day went by quicker than you had wanted it to. Father, Tom and Elsie went outside in the late morning to give Elsie her long-awaited flying lessons. They were a great team, against all expectations. You watched them from the kitchen window and noticed how Father held himself back from helping. He kept a careful eye on the two when Tom showed Elsie how to mount the broom correctly.
Elsie listened intently to everything Tom told her, tried to follow each step precisely and could properly hold herself in the air after a while. Father and Tom seemed incredibly proud, not only of themselves but of your little sister.
You could have watched them for hours, but Mother had called you to the reading room, to go to Diagon Alley via the Floo Network. You had asked her to take her with you since you wanted to get some new quills for school and a proper Christmas present for Tom.
Thankfully Diagon Alley wasn’t too busy, yet it took you a while to find an appropriate gift. You hadn’t even known where to start looking, but when you finally saw it in the shop window, you knew it was perfect.
Back home, Elsie, Father and Tom were just walking back inside, their cheeks and noses all flushed from the hours they had spent out in the cold. Elsie jumped through the living room, raving about how high she was able to fly now. She had even attempted to do some advanced twists but almost had taken a fall.
Father patted Tom on the shoulder and thanked him for his time, which made Tom’s ears turn almost as pink as his cheeks and nose.
After congratulating your sister on her achievement, you turned to Tom. “Would you follow me? There’s something I want to show you.”
You took him to the reading room, where the parcel you got him stood under the desk.
“Long day, huh?” you asked when you closed the door behind you.
He nodded. "Successful though. Your sister is a quick learner. She could make it on the Quidditch team one day.”
“Thank you for teaching her,” you said. “We all appreciate it.”
“It’s my pleasure.”
Now that you were with him, you didn’t know where to start. Should you tell him about lying in bed with the book in your hand, thinking of him? That you almost would have knocked on his door in the middle of the night, if Tummy had not been there? That could sound terribly invasive. What if he wouldn’t have wanted you to come? Now that you thought about it, you were glad that Tummy had spoiled your plan. Nighttime certainly made you too reckless.
“So, is this a hint for me to leave?” Tom asked, pointing at the fireplace.
“No! I mean, it’s not. Are you planning on leaving?”
“I might go back home tonight,” he nodded.
“Already? Do you not like it here?”
A smirk crossed his face for a second. “Oh I do. I think I haven’t had a better night’s sleep anywhere, outside of Hogwarts.” He took a step closer. “If it wasn’t for the elf in the hallway, I’m sure it would have been even better.”
How would he also know about Tummy? Did he leave his room too? To prevent your mouth from hanging open, you bit your tongue and answered, “Father is overprotective.”
“Quite a shame.” 
“Certainly.”
The look on his face held something new, something previously unseen. Something that resembled banter or a cheeky joke between friends. It would not have been awkward at all if you had gone over to his room. Tummy be damned.
“Still,” he said. “I should go home to smooth things over before school starts again.”
“Of course. Before you go though, there’s something I want you to have. I thought of your present a lot. And I decided I had to get you something as well.”
“Not necessary. Your family let me stay the night, that’s more than en-”
“Stop it,” you snapped and went to get the parcel from under the table. “There’s not a lot of things I thought suited Tom Riddle. But this does, I believe.”
He took the box with both hands, placed it onto the desk and pulled off the top. “Oh.”
“Her name is Nagini. She’s not fully grown yet.”
Tom took a dark green, medium-sized snake out of the box and let it curl around his arm. 
“Did you know?” he asked.
“Know what?”
“That I’m a Parselmouth.”
“Yes,” you nodded. “People in Hogwarts were talking about it years ago and then I thought of your house and your relation to Salazar Slytherin. It made sense.”
“Thank you,” he said genuinely, looking into your eyes before he watched Nagini gliding from one arm to the other. “Stretch out your arm for me.”
You did and let your fingers touch his. Both of you now stood there with one arm pointing towards each other. The snake slithered around Tom’s arm, quickly making its way towards his outstretched fingers and over to yours. It hissed quietly while wandering up to your shoulder.
“She likes you,” Tom said softly. “A lot.”
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Masterpost | Masterlist | Part 8
49 notes · View notes
tomriddleslove · 2 months
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Forgotten once again.
✩Tom Riddle x Reader
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Summary: The one where Tom isn’t capable of love, but you thought you could change that. Alternatively: Possesiveness and Love become the same thing.
A/N: I really enjoyed writing this one because Tom’s character is sm fun to write. It’s interesting because despite my delusions I couldn’t ever imagine him being capable of loving someone, and if he did it would be like this. Also this is probably the last time i’ll post for the next three weeks!
Warnings: Toxic Relationships, mentions of manipulation, violence (towards others). Generally about a very toxic and unhealthy relationship so please do not read if you’re triggered by anything to do with this! My inbox is always open if you ever need someone to talk to 🫶🏼.
Songs: Leaving Tonight - The Neighbourhood
Spectre - Radiohead
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Tom Riddle was many things.
For one, he was ambitious. He would achieve whatever he so desired. If he had the means to do it, it would be done immediately. If he did not, well...
He would find the means to do so. Because Tom Riddle achieved whatever he so desired.
He was also charismatic.
Tom had a natural charisma that drew people to him. Whether through his charm, intelligence, or a combination of both, he had a magnetic presence that captivated those around him. This charisma played a significant role in his ability to influence and manipulate others to further his ambitions.
Tom Riddle was brilliant. Gifted with a sharp mind and a keen understanding of magic, he excelled in his studies. His intelligence, coupled with his ambition, allowed him to delve into dark magic and ancient mysteries, seeking knowledge and power that others might shy away from.
Tom Riddle was many things, but there was only one thing he lacked.
Perhaps it was karma, some form of divine intervention, his hamartia, that it was this very thing that would be his downfall in the years to come.
Tom was many things, but loving was not one of them.
Tom Riddle was not loving. No - he was not capable of love.
Tom Riddle, was incapable of experiencing genuine love due to being conceived under the influence of a love potion, not true love. The circumstances of Tom’s conception were marked by coercion and manipulation, as his mother, Merope Gaunt, used a love potion to attract and bind Tom Riddle Sr. to her. It was artificial and devoid of true affection. This was a concrete and inexplicably tragic detail that meant Tom Riddle simply was not physically capable of reciprocating love.
Key word, reciprocating. For, it was very much possible for someone to fall in love with Tom. A cruel thing it would be, for one cannot simply love Lucifer himself and expect to be loved in return. Tom Riddle's incapacity for reciprocating love stemmed from a profound emotional void rather than an inability to elicit affection from others.
This fact was a cruel truth that you only chose to accept once it was too late. One does not simply get involved with Tom Riddle, and come out unscathed.
Tom never cared for love, really. To him, it was just some sort of transaction or tool, something to be manipulated for his own benefit. Love, in Tom Riddle's eyes, was a means to an end rather than an intrinsic value. It was a sentiment that he observed in others but never truly felt himself.
Love, however, seemed to be the most raw, human thing in existence. It was everything we hated, yet also everything we loved. It unravelled our deepest insecurities, it brought things to the surface that we had long pushed to the side. It required us to lay ourselves, bare, for the other to see. Love made us tolerate the very worst of things, love made us hate the very best of things.
Many things can be complementary in life. Love was not one of them. It was overpowering, consuming. It changed who you were.
Love was the beginning of life and the end of it. Love was part of being human.
Tom lacking this fundamentally crucial aspect of the human experience may have been the very thing that led him to despise his humanity.
When Tom had met you, it was slightly different. A puzzle piece that didn't quite fit but intrigued him nonetheless.
You were undeniably talented, a mind that had its worth. You had this air of arrogance, and whilst Tom hated unbacked arrogance, you had the means to justify it. You were self-assured, and he found it to be somewhat refreshing compared to the other people he knew (who unashamedly sucked up to him.) You didn’t fall for his tricks immediately, which made him all the more agitated, and intrigued. Rather, you seemed to enjoy being with Tom most when he’d drop the ‘perfect and polite’ facade he had. You valued honesty and bluntness, two things Tom did not do (After all, how would he gain the trust of others if he truthfully told them he planned on using every single one of them?)
However, the more time he spent with you, the more he found that he fed into what you liked. And somehow, to his dismay, he found some sort of sick satisfaction in it. He enjoyed seeing you actively seek out his presence, and as much as it went against what Tom believed, he liked the validation of having people want to be associated with him. It was a testament to how he longed to be known, to be admired. He observed, learned, and dissected your intricacies, seeing you not as an individual but as a canvas upon which he could project his desires.
He soon grew very used to you, and he didn't absolutely loathe you. As the days unfolded into months, and the months unfolded into years, a semblance of tolerance took root. He played the part, masking his true intentions beneath a veneer of charm. Tolerance morphed into a twisted form of acknowledgement — an acknowledgement that you held a role in his future ambitions, his ultimate goal.
After all, that's all he ever did anything for, right? His goals, His desires. His needs.
The evolution was subtle but insidious. What began as a detached fascination transformed into a possessive need. Tom, driven by an insatiable hunger for control, found satisfaction in manipulating the threads of your existence. Obsession seeped into every crevice of his thoughts. Your every action became a challenge to him, something for him to understand, something he wanted to have control over. His infatuation stemmed from a desire to have control, to claim your very being, to possess you like some sort of artefact in his prized possessions.
Whilst you may have been immune to Tom’s charm when you first met, you certainly weren't without your weakness. After all, Tom always got what he wanted, and if he didn't have the means to do so, he'd find it.
He became fluent in his ways of understanding you, observing every little thing you did. He dissected the very core of your being till he was sure there was nothing he wouldn't know. Casual conversations about schoolwork in the depths of the library turned to confessions about your life as the hours passed. Tom preyed on your vulnerability, sowing seeds of doubt into your mind.
He agreed with you when you expressed your frustrations at your friends, he encouraged your rash actions. He told you what you wanted to hear, and made it seem as though it was the most obvious thing in the world.
As everything he did, each word he spoke was carefully calculated, a thread sewn in the fabric of your fucked up relationship, binding him inexplicably closer to you without even realising.
He pointed out things, seemingly from a place of concern, making you distance yourself from your friends. He highlighted instances where your friends might have let you down, carefully framing himself as the only steadfast pillar in your life. Tom was everything you could have needed; he understood you, and he made you feel seen.
He was selective about what he let you know. He let you know he had grown up in a children’s home, and that his mother had died. Trust was a two-way thing, and you were smart enough to detect when it wasn’t being reciprocated. He let you see what he wanted to see, for no human was perfect, and he needed you to see he had his imperfections if he wanted you to trust him.
He needed to make it seem as though you made him feel seen too.
Tom had been sitting in your room, working with you on a transfiguration assignment you both had been set. Cross-legged on your bed, he still remembers how you had sat down next to him, visibly frustrated.
Tom, ever attuned to you, asked whether you were ok because that's what someone who cared for you did. He didn't care greatly though, not in a selfless way. Rather, he needed you to know that he was the only person who knew you, the only person you needed.
You opened up about what had happened, explaining how your friends had betrayed your trust, and how they seemed to misunderstand you, leaving you feeling isolated and vulnerable. Tom, feigning empathy with expert precision, listened intently, absorbing every detail like a sponge. You began crying because it all became too much.
You never thought Tom would comfort you. You believed he'd perhaps pat your back, or assure you it was all fine. What you didn't expect, was for Tom to draw you in, to wrap his arms around you, and pull you into his chest. You didn't expect him to soothe you, and rub your back as he uttered words of comfort into your ear, seemingly shielding you from the emotions that had been weighing you down.
You didn't expect to feel safe, to feel protected. If only you knew the only thing you needed protection from, was Tom himself.
You felt special. You knew it was not in Tom's nature to do so. You had no idea how vile of a person he truly was, but you understood he was avoidant of sentiment or affection. For him to have been so tender, made you feel loved.
It was only ever bound to go downhill from there.
It was only natural that you had fallen in love with him. From there it all somewhat became a blur. In between the lines, the illusion of love was beginning to waver. Graduating from Hogwarts, you no longer held those ambitions you once had. Your plans seemed now to be a distant memory, a past life. You had Tom, and that was all that mattered.
Tom had gotten his job at Borgin and Burkes. You moved in with him. You ignored the pleas of concern from those who were near and dear to you, who Tom hadn’t managed to isolate you from.
Tom convinced you that they did not have your best interest in mind, that they didn’t like him because he was a poor orphan, working a salesperson job. He had earlier convinced you he had his insecurities about his past, and he used that to make you believe the people around you were prejudiced, that they didn't care for your happiness but rather their status being affected by who they associated with. No one would want to be acquainted with the girl who loved the charity case.
You believed him. You couldn't fathom why they didn’t like Tom. You shut them out.
It was rather terrifying seeing how quickly Tom could snuff out your fiery flame, and reduce you down to someone who became dependent on him. You rarely left the house, your life revolved around what Tom wanted, and how Tom felt.
He left you teetering on the precipe of unhappiness, fulfilling your needs to the point where you couldn’t complain for fear of seeming ungrateful, unloving.
He would neglect you, coming back from work to lock himself in your bedroom, pouring over books and writings. He wasn’t who he used to be, caring, affectionate, loving.
Shame on you for assuming you could make Tom capable of love.
His neglect pierced your soul, and when you mustered the courage to voice your needs, he snapped at you for bothering him. Tom's transformation into an emotionally distant stranger left you in a state of perpetual uncertainty.
At times, you resolved to leave him, but Tom had a knack for sensing your unrest. As though he could read your mind, he returned with offerings and apologies, painting himself as the troubled victim and casting you as the ungrateful perpetrator. Guilt became the shackle that bound you, and his apologies only deepened the wounds.
Tom, in those fleeting moments of remorse, would momentarily embody the man you had fallen in love with. You cooked dinner together. He’ d play with your hair as you read, and he fucked you as if he truly did love you. Yet, the morning after, the bed would be empty, and the reality of your entangled existence with Tom would once again sink in.
He began leaving for work earlier and coming back later. You began to doubt whether it was because of work, the day he came back reeking of dark magic.
You were undeniably clever, after all, that was what had sparked Tom’s obsession with you in the first place, and so it didn’t take long for you to connect the dots. Tom’s friends back in Hogwarts seemed more like devotees than anything else. This, coupled with him spending countless hours reading through books he wouldn't let you see, and his sudden late hours suggested to you he was dappling in dark things.
You weren't wrong, per se, but Tom was far beyond dappling in dark things. He had become the image of corruption itself.
The cycle persisted, a disheartening repetition of highs and lows that left you questioning your worth and the authenticity of the connection you had with Tom. His intermittent displays of affection, punctuated by periods of neglect and manipulation, became the norm. The more you yearned for stability, the deeper you sank into the quicksand of your toxic relationship.
You couldn't pinpoint exactly where neglect turned into heated words. Arguments turning more and more intense. Slammed doors became broken porcelain, yet the remorseful embraces remained the same.
The outside world, once filled with friends and dreams, now seemed like a distant echo. Tom had successfully eroded the foundations of your past life, isolating you from the support systems that could have provided a lifeline. His poisonous whispers had convinced you that only he truly cared for you, painting the rest of the world as indifferent or antagonistic.
The empty mornings and hollow apologies continued, and you slowly began to realise the love you once believed in had become a warped caricature, and the person you had fallen for had let his obsession manifest into your relationship, seeping through the feeble foundations.
The crisp air of Hogsmeade offered a welcome escape from the suffocating atmosphere of the shared home with Tom. As you strolled through the quaint village, a familiar face caught your eye – Elizabeth, your closest friend from Hogwarts. A twinge of nostalgia mixed with apprehension as you approached her.
"Hey, Elizabeth," you greeted, attempting a smile.
Her response was guarded, her eyes revealing a mixture of concern and wariness. "Hello. Long time no see."
You sensed a tension in the air as you tried to engage in small talk, but Elizabeth's words soon cut through the facade. "Look, What happened? You dropped off the face of the earth, and it's like you vanished after graduation. In our last year, you completely ignored all of us."
A knot tightened in your stomach as you fumbled for an explanation. "I... things have been complicated. I've been busy."
Elizabeth's expression softened, and she sighed. "Busy? More like completely consumed. We all missed you, you know? But you acted like we don't even exist. What happened to the person we used to know?"
You frown, crossing your arms. “Missed me? I only stopped talking to you because you all acted weird around me.” You respond, defensively.
“No, we didn't. You got angry at us when we told you we were worried for you. You rarely went out with us, you were always too busy elsewhere.” She corrected, and you felt a frustration bubble within you.
“No, it didn’t really seem like that. You all isolated me and the only person I had left was Tom. It was only natural that I wouldn't want to go back to being friends with you after that.” You snap.
Elizabeth's eyes widened, sympathy replacing her earlier frustration. "Tom? Are you serious? He's the one who isolated you, not us. We've been worried sick about you. You're not the same person anymore."
Who did she think she was? She knew nothing about the two of you, let alone what your relationship was like. Tom was right, these people had it out for you. They didn't care for you, not at all.
“You don't know what our relationship is like Elizabeth, so I suggest you stop making assumptions.” You hiss, glaring at her.
"We cared, but you pushed us away," Elizabeth explained gently. "You were so wrapped up in whatever was going on with Tom that you stopped caring about anyone else. It's not healthy, and we were genuinely concerned."
Elizabeth reached out to comfort you. "Listen, I know it's tough, but you need to reevaluate your situation. Staying with Tom isn't healthy, and you're not alone. My door is always open if you need somewhere to stay or someone to talk to.” She says, fumbling around in her pockets. She pulls out a receipt and hastily scribbles down an address, thrusting it into your hand. She gives you one last look of pity, and you feel enraged. You immediately apparate back home, you didn't have time for this foolishness.
You apparate back home, the confrontation with Elizabeth leaving a bitter taste in your mouth. The hastily scribbled address clutched in your hand feels like an unwanted invitation, an intrusion into the carefully constructed reality that Tom has woven around you.
As you step into the shared home, the atmosphere is unsettling. Tom is hunched over a dark tome, his eyes flickering up to meet yours as you enter.
"Where have you been?" he questions, the softness of his tone belying the underlying intensity.
You toss your coat aside, frustration boiling beneath the surface. "Out. I needed a break from all this," you retort, the words laced with the anger that has been building up.
A dangerous glint enters Tom's eyes, his composure slipping. "A break? Is that how you see it? Is it a burden to you?"
"Yes, Tom! I don’t know what’s gone wrong? One day you’re fin and the next you’re acting as though i’m a nuisance to your being," you snap, the resentment in your voice cutting through the room.
His posture stiffens, and a quiet threat laces his words. "Oh really?"
Your anger flares, a defiant fire pushing back against his dominance. "Guess who I saw today, hmm?" You seethe, venom lingering in your tone.
A momentary confusion flickers in Tom's eyes. "Who?" he questions, wondering how this could be relevant to the conversation.
"Elizabeth," you declare, watching his reaction closely.
Tom's expression darkens, and a cold tension settles in the room. "What does she have to do with anything?" He retorts, stepping closer to you.
"She told me a few things, Tom. About how I've distanced myself from everyone, how they were worried, and you know what struck me?" you press on, your anger finding a new target.
His eyes narrow, a hint of defensiveness in his tone. "What?"
"That I believed it was my friends who had abandoned me, but in reality, it's been you isolating me all along," you accuse, the realization fueling your rage. You jab your finger into his chest as you speak.
Tom's composure wavers, but he quickly recovers. "I've been protecting you. You can't trust them. They're trying to pull you away from me."
"Stop. Stop it, Tom. Have the decency to acknowledge I'm not that fucking stupid. I know what you're trying to do,” You say, voice cracking. You resist the urge to shield your ears, his words burrowing their way into you as he attempts to trivialise your worries, making you out to be the irrational one.
Tom frowns, and the sight of you beginning to doubt him had bile riding in the back of his throat. H reaches out, hands holding onto your shoulders as he urges you to look at him.
“They’re lying to you. They’re trying to pull you away from me again! Can't you see this? Why do you believe them over me?” He says, voice pleading with you in fake desperation, the lengths he was willing to go to to ensure he could continue to possess you were unthinkable.
“Enough. Im fucking done. You’re so fucked up, Tom. You never loved me, did you? You only ever wanted to own me, to control me. Tell me, was it worth it? Was it ever fucking worth it, spending 5 years of your life weaving this tapestry of bullshit just so you could keep me locked up in here?” You snap, grabbing your coat.
Tom's pleading expression transforms into a cold mask, and a sinister calm settles over him. "You think you can just leave? You're mine, and you'll stay. I won't let you go." He utters.
The realization of his true nature, the toxicity of the relationship, fuels your determination. "Watch me,” You hiss.
As you move toward the door, his grip on control slips further, and an unsettling mix of rage and desperation flashes in his eyes. "You'll regret this. You'll come crawling back. You always come back." He says. You take a single look at him before slamming the door and walking off.
One cannot simply dance with the devil, and change him. He always changes you.
Tom Riddle was far beyond the devil.
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You wondered if for once in your life God had been on your side when you had that chance encounter with Elizabeth. Despite your harsh words, she had accepted you into her home with open arms. The weight of the past five years settles heavily on your shoulders, and the enormity of what you've lost becomes painfully clear. You were young, so damn young, and you’d been living as a glorified prisoner, trapped by the very thing that was meant to liberate you.
But love was ugly, wasn't it? It made you tolerate the bad, it made you irrational. Love could bare its teeth into your neck, and you'd let it, for love was ugly.
It was ugly, but it was not macabre.
Tom knew where you were. Tom always did. It was already established that Tom always got what he wanted. He wanted you, and he found a way to ensure that.
At first, he did not bother you.
He believed you would come back to him, as you so often did. But when a week had passed and you had not reappeared as you always did, beautiful face flushed red, eyes glossy with tears as you wordlessly stepped in and fell back into normality, he began to worry.
If it came to any relief to you, which it might have, Tom believed he loved you. What you had was a far cry from love, an echo of what it should have been. But in the mind of he who cannot love, this is what he believed it to be. One could only wonder whether everything would have been different if he actually knew what love was. But he didn't, and he never would, so he was left with some sort of fucked up obsession that he believed was love.
Tom felt a gnawing emptiness that only intensified with your departure.
Again, he loved you, if one could call it love. It was a sick, twisted version of affection that demanded ownership. In his distorted reality, your existence became an extension of his own, a possession he couldn't bear to lose. The mere thought of you breaking free ignited a desperate panic within him.
He needed you like a drowning man gasping for air, clinging to the last vestiges of sanity.
Schopenhauer believed that the will, a blind and irrational force, dominated human behaviour. Love, according to Schopenhauer, was an expression of the will's desire.
Tom felt this indescribable gap in his life without you there, as though he simply wasn’t complete without you. The old him would have hated to admit it, but he needed you, and his need for you grew from a sickly infatuation to a desperate yearning. Love, in his distorted reality, meant ownership, and he was losing his grip.
It was a rather bleak evening, and you had a horrible feeling in your stomach as you sat on the sofa of Elizabeth’s living room, where you had been presiding for the past week.
How cruel it was, that you and Tom were so attuned to one another.
You somehow knew it was Tom without needing to see them.
As Tom had resonated with the words of Schopenhauer, you had resonated with the words of Plato. For you, love could not be controlled. Instead, it was a divine madness that took hold of individuals, transcending rational thought and choice.
You had often thought that was a beautiful thing. However, when it was love that was causing your demise, it no longer felt beautiful.
Elizabeth comes down the stairs and raises a brow when she sees you perched on the edge of the sofa, staring blankly off into the distance. She eyes you apprehensively as she opens the door.
That voice. It simultaneously sent dread coursing through you, and butterflies erupting in your stomach.
“Come back now. It's been far too long.” Tom says, his voice oh so tempting.
“Seriously? You think you can get her back with that bullshit?” Elizabeth snaps, standing at the door.
Tom, however, remains fixated on you, as if Elizabeth's words were mere background noise. Ignoring her comments, he continues, his eyes piercing into your conflicted gaze.
"Stop this. Come back. It's where you belong," he urges, the words carrying a persuasive weight that had once held you captive.
Elizabeth's frustration peaked as she turned to face you, pleading in her eyes. "Don't listen to him. He's toxic, and you don't need that in your life. You deserve so much more."
Tom's eyes bore into yours, his tone silky but insistent. "You don't belong in our business, Elizabeth. You’re as meddlesome as you were in school. She knows where she belongs."
You remain silent.
"He's killing you. Can't you see that?" Elizabeth's voice held a mixture of concern and frustration.
But Tom's voice slithered through the air once more, persuasive and relentless. "Come to me.” His words echoed a twisted sense of possessiveness, yet held such allure, spoken tenderly, enough to convince you it would be fine.
You clench your fists, nails digging into your skin. You stand up, letting out a shuddery breath. You walk towards the door.
“Fuck, stop! You don't need to go! Don't act like you have nowhere to go! I've given you my home, I’ve let you stay. Stop going back!” Elizabeth says, frustration laced in her voice.
How easy it is to claim you simply need to just “stop”, and it would all be fine.
It was never that simple. Tom's presence was poison, yet it was also the air you breathed. You had only known Tom for what felt like aeons, and you had shut everyone who questioned you out. All you had was Tom, all you ever would have is Tom.
He was home, a twisted kind that keeps you warm while slowly suffocating the life out of you.
As you walked back into his outstretched arms, a sense of numb acceptance settled over you. The outside world ceased to matter; the only reality was the one with Tom.
It wasn't love as the poets wrote or the philosophers pondered. Yet, in its ugliness, it was the only reality you knew.
“Good girl,” he murmurs, wrapping his arms around. Like a serpent, his embrace constricts around you, possessive and suffocating. You lean into him, feeling the coldness of his touch seep into your skin. It's oddly warming though, as paradoxical as it seemed.
"Where else would you go, my love?" he whispers, the sweetness of the endearment masking the toxicity beneath.
The serpent and its prey, bound in a perverse waltz of dependence and decay, disappear into the shadows, and the world outside is forgotten once again.
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patrophthia · 1 year
Text
show me how | tom riddle
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pairing: tom riddle x reader
genre: fluff? angst? unrequited crushes but not really, love confessions, first kiss, complicated feelings???
wc: 1.2k
originally posted on AO3: 23/02/2023
You like Tom Riddle. Like like like. Like fancy him like. You knew that. And you think he knows it too.
It's not like you actively tried to hide it, if he knew about it then that's that. If he doesn't then that's another path that readily available for you to take.
"Hmm?" You hummed, Tom had called for your attention earlier but you weren't exactly focused on what he was saying. Your eyes met his, now wide and curious as to what he had to say. "What is it?"
"Are you okay?" He asks.
And the words sound so foreign coming from between his lips that you thought for a split second that you weren't speaking to Tom himself.
"Yeah," you murmur softly, nodding as he process the words in as a clear lie. If Tom had been a more expressive person, he'd be frowning, but he wasn't, so instead he settled on pursing his lips. "Don't worry about it."
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Tom was conceived under a love potion. He can't love. And one would think that that was enough of a reason to not have feelings for the guy but you were stupid enough to do it nonetheless.
"You're lying," he states, his brows furrowed the slightest bit. "Why are you lying?"
"It's nothi—" You stop, tearing your eyes away from his to stare down at your hands. And after a second, you huff, looking back at him once more. "—Do you think that you could grow to love someone?"
And that was when it clicked into place for Tom. You, the only person he was able to tolerate and or considers as his only friend, fancied him.
He thinks for a bit, mulling the idea over and over. Tom is used to the act by now, he would get confessed to then he would promptly turn it down because, quite frankly, he doesn't give a shit what others think of him.
But with you. He doesn't know what to do with you.
"I think you should get something to eat," he says instead, another action that was so foreign of him to do. "Come on."
Tom was never one to avoid confrontation in any shape or form and always made sure that the person who confessed to him knew their place. But you were his friend, and he doesn't know how to tell you where you were placed on the list of things that occupied his mind.
Tom stands up awkwardly by the library's table, a place you've been frequenting with him lately. And watched as you made no move in gathering your things.
"Have you ever loved anything?" You ask him quietly, grateful that you've found the table furthest from any possible commotion.
Tom says your name sternly. You knew he didn't like to talk about this topic, a wall having been put up and never once crossed during the years of friendship in which you've known him. "I think we should go."
"And I think you should tell me that you can't love me back," you counter. "Just so I could move on."
Tom stays silent, his head going dizzy at the look on your face, staring up at him from your seat with your pupil blown wide with admiration. You not only liked him. You loved him.
"I'm not going to care for you any less when you tell me no," you say to him. Tom reaches over and grabs at your things, packing it as he quietly listens to you. "You're still my friend."
Friends. His stomach drops at the words. He doesn't want to be your friend. He doesn't know what he wants, he just knows that he didn't want to be just that. But he will not give you false hope by lying to you. So he tells you, like you've asked of him: "I can't love you."
It takes you two beats before you smile at him, finally putting away your things, your own hand brushing against his cold ones as you stuffed your supplies into your bag. Tom considers for a second if he should hold it for you. You know, as an apologetic gift.
But he decides not to, and watches as the straps drapes over your shoulder, digging into your skin uncomfortably.
"You know," you start as you walked out the library besides him. "I don't think I've ever seen you smile."
Tom steps slows, matching with your own and with knitted brows he asks. "What do you mean?"
"I can't remember how you smile," you say with a small smile of your own. "Show me how, will you?"
Tom blinks. He thinks back to his life in the orphanage, to the basilisk under the chamber, Moaning Myrtle, the things he did to Hagrid, everything he has done so far that you've had zero clue of and feels to guilty too lift the corner of his lips up. He just can't do it.
"If you can't show me how you love, Tom," you say. "Then the least you could do was show me how you smile."
He doesn't say anything, just watching you as your eyes flickered between his lips and any of his other features. You were shorter than him, and he thinks he likes it this way.
He thinks of you, how you look at him, how you speak to him, how you've dreamt up visions of who he'd never be, and how he —for the first time ever in his life, feel the love you have for him. And how when he does smiles, a small sigh slips out of him.
You notice then the corner of his lips curving upwards, the small squint of his eyes, the scrunch on his high nose bridge, and the dip of dimples in his cheeks, poking through clearer than ever before. Your thoughts err away, and you let your heart fall in love with Tom again.
You smile back, reciprocating his and somehow his only grew. A blissful glint reaching his eyes, as he mirrored you. You tilt your head to the side, only realising now that you two came to halt, and signalled for him to follow after you. "Let's go."
You didn't get far, cold hand wrapping around your wrist and held you in place. You look back at him with a questioning look and you could see Tom contemplate with himself.
"I'm going to kiss you."
"What?"
Tom didn't repeat himself, his lips pressing onto yours with his free hand gently cupping your face, the coldness melting into the heat of your flushed cheeks. Cold. Cold. Cold. You kissed him back, letting yourself enjoy this moment while it lasted with an ache in your heart. Tom pulls away, hand still cupping your face as his thumb slides down to your chin and lifts it up so you would look at him.
"I want to learn to love you," he says slowly. "Please."
A smile etched its way onto your lips, and it doesn't go unnoticed by Tom since he has to physically restrain himself from kissing you again and again. Tom awaited for your words, and as he thinks that he'll finally get an answer to his semi-love confession.
You ask him instead, "why are your hands so cold?"
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—from bee: writing my favorite slytherin to my favorite song, may be OOC tom but who caresssssss,, i love him for ittt.
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