Tom Riddle finally did away with Harry Potter. Unfortunately, he inherited his heart. Now he's eighteen again, completely enamored with you, and discovering that love might be his worst quality.
Published
It had been nearly a week since Tom Riddle found himself in his seventh year at Hogwarts.
A week of careful observation, of cataloguing every difference between the world he remembered and the one he now inhabited. The castle was the same—ancient stone, shifting staircases, the low murmur of portraits pretending to sleep. The faces were the same, too, mostly. Older. Wiser. Wearing the weary expressions of people who had survived a war that, in this timeline, had already been fought and won.
But Tom Riddle did not remember surviving it. He remembered dying. Or something close enough to death that the distinction hardly mattered.
The Great Hall stretched before him, crowded with students who knew him as the brilliant, respected Head Boy. They smiled when he passed. Younger Slytherins straightened in their seats, eager for his approval. Even the teachers offered courteous nods, as though he had earned their trust through years of exemplary behaviour. He had not. Not these years, anyway. But the timeline had rewritten itself around him, smoothing over the fractures of his absence, and now he was expected to play a part he had never rehearsed.
He sat at the Slytherin table, spine perfectly straight, one hand resting on the polished wood. His dark eyes swept across the Hall with the idle precision of a man counting exits. It was there that his gaze paused—briefly, then with deliberate interest—upon you.
You were seated further down the table, laughing at something a friend had said. The sound reached him through the surrounding noise, faint but distinct. There was nothing remarkable about the moment. Just another student, another face among hundreds. And yet something in the way the candlelight caught your expression made him pause. A flicker of familiarity. Not from his own memories—those were sharp and cold and carefully kept. No, this was something else. A quiet pull, like the echo of a thought that did not belong to him.
Tom's gaze lingered a second too long before he looked away. The feeling settled behind his ribs, unfamiliar and unwelcome. He did not know you. Not yet. But some part of him—some part borrowed and bleeding through the seams of his consciousness—recognised something in your face that had nothing to do with him.
He reached for the silver goblet in front of him, turning it slowly between his fingers. The noise of the Hall washed over him: clinking cutlery, overlapping conversations, the sudden sharp scrape of a bench against stone. None of it touched him.
A week. He had given himself a week to understand this new world, to map its differences and locate its weaknesses. He could not afford distractions. And yet you were sitting twenty feet away, entirely unaware of the attention you had attracted, and he found himself wondering what your name was.
Across the table, Mattheo Riddle dropped into the seat opposite him with the careless grace of someone who had never needed to ask permission for anything. His dark curls were dishevelled, his tie loosened, and he was already reaching for a platter of toast as though the concept of morning decorum had never applied to him.
You've got that look again.
Tom didn't turn his head.
What look?
Like you're planning someone's funeral. He bit into the toast, speaking around it with deliberate vulgarity. It's too early for that.
It's nearly noon.
Exactly. Too early. He followed Tom's earlier gaze without subtlety, scanning the table until he found you. His smirk deepened. Ah. Now I understand.
flatly You understand nothing.
Don't I? He leaned forward, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial murmur. You've been back a week and you're already staring at someone across the Great Hall like she's a puzzle you can't solve. That's new.
Tom's expression didn't shift, but his fingers tightened on the goblet. Mattheo was observant—annoyingly so—and far too comfortable saying exactly what he thought. In the original timeline, there had been no Mattheo. No brother sharing his surname, his dormitory, his blood. This version of reality had given him one, and Tom was still deciding whether that was an advantage or an inconvenience.
coolly I was looking at the ceiling. There's a crack in the enchanted stone near the Ravenclaw table.
snorting Right. The ceiling. He leaned back, balancing the toast between two fingers like a cigarette. So you haven't noticed her at all?
I don't know who you're referring to.
grinning Sure you don't.
He didn't press further, which was either an unusual display of restraint or a sign that he was already storing the information for later. Tom suspected the latter. His brother collected observations the way other people collected secrets—carelessly, and with no clear intention until the moment they became useful.
The post arrived in a flurry of wings and rustling paper. Owls swooped down over the tables, dropping letters and packages with varying degrees of accuracy. Tom ignored the commotion, but his attention returned to you as you reached up to accept a letter from a small brown owl. The motion was graceful, unguarded. Something about it settled uneasily in his chest.
He looked away, forcing his attention back to his untouched breakfast. This was irrelevant. You were irrelevant. And yet, even as he told himself that, he was already cataloguing the details: your house, your approximate year, the friends who sat closest to you. The distance between your seat and his.
It would be easy to learn more. Hogwarts was a small world when one knew how to listen.
Across the Hall, the morning stretched on, ordinary and unhurried. Students gathered their bags, comparing schedules and complaining about the first classes of the day. The enchanted ceiling glowed a pale, rain-washed grey, soft light spilling over the long tables.
Tom rose from his seat with his usual flawless composure, smoothing the front of his robes. He did not look at you again.
At least, not where anyone could see.