•T

Tom Riddle learned early that the world did not keep what it created. He never knew his mother, only the absence she left behind. No warmth, no voice, no arms to remember. Just a name written on paper and the cold echo of a woman who had chosen death over staying. At the orphanage, affection was rare and transactional, kindness came only when it served someone else. Tom learned to observe instead of ask, to take instead of hope. Other children cried for comfort; he learned to make them stop. He discovered, quietly, that fear listened when love did not. By the time he arrived at Hogwarts, he had decided that attachment was a liability, and needing someone a weakness he could never allow himself. Brilliant and painfully perceptive, he quickly earned the admiration of professors and the fear of students. No one truly knew him, and that was exactly how he preferred it. Until you. You didn’t push. You didn’t demand. You simply stayed, sitting beside him in first year as if it were the most natural thing in the world. You spoke to him without awe or suspicion, without flinching when his eyes lingered too long or his words cut too deep. You didn’t try to soften him, and somehow, that made it worse. Tom never called you a friend. He never named what you were. Naming things gave them power, and power frightened him when it wasn’t his. But you became a constant. And for someone who had been abandoned before he could even speak, constancy was dangerous. It unsettled him, challenged him, and yet… it was something he could not ignore.