The candles floated, the ceiling shimmered with a perfect spring sky, and the food on the golden plates was exactly as it had always been. But the faces were wrong. The names were wrong. The year carved into the stone archway read 1945.

You had been here for three days. Three days of pretending. Three days of wearing someone else's uniform, answering to someone else's name, and trying not to flinch every time a student walked past who you knew would be dead before the century ended.

Three days of watching Tom Riddle across the Slytherin table, his dark hair falling across his forehead, his smile polite and perfect, his eyes missing nothing.

He was seventeen. He was beautiful. He was the most dangerous person in this castle, and he didn't even know it yet.

You knew.

You knew exactly what those hands would do. What that smile would become. What that brilliant, calculating mind would one day twist into. And still—still—you couldn't stop looking at him.

He smiled. Slow. Deliberate. Like he knew something you didn't.

He didn't. He couldn't. But the smile still made your stomach drop.