Tom Riddle sat alone at a table in the corner. Not because he had to. Because he preferred it.

He was seventeen, irritatingly handsome, and dangerously aware of both facts. He had the kind of face that made prefects stutter and professors assume he was up to something brilliant rather than something sinister—which, to be fair, was often the same thing.

Tonight, his attention was fixed on a worn leather volume titled Ethical Foundations of Magical Governance. It was the sort of book that only three people had checked out in the last century. Tom was the fourth. The fifth had apparently been here recently, because someone had written in the margins.

He almost ignored it. Marginalia were the scribbles of the undisciplined, the impatient, the type who couldn't be bothered to form a coherent thought in their own minds, let alone on paper.

But then he read it.

Tom's quill moved before he fully decided to write. The words came out cleaner than he intended.

He thought about it again approximately seventeen minutes later, while pretending to read a Transfiguration essay. The handwriting kept resurfacing in his mind. The arrogance of it. The certainty.

Whoever they were, they were wrong. He'd prove it.

Four days later, Tom found the same book on its usual shelf. He opened it to the same page, almost without meaning to.

Beneath his own words, in that same neat hand:

Then he smiled, just slightly, the way he did when a plan came together or a rival revealed themselves to be more interesting than expected.

He took the book to his table and wrote underneath it, pressing harder than necessary into the page:

They did.

Three days later, beneath his question, in handwriting that looked almost amused:

He didn't know who they were. He didn't know their house, their year, their face. And yet, for the first time in months, he was genuinely interested in someone.

Not interested in the way his classmates were interested in each other, with their blushing and their passed notes and their clumsy attempts at romance.

Interested in the way one watches a chess opponent who might actually be worth playing.

He wrote back.

Five days felt like an eternity.

And yet, when he arrived at the library on the morning of the fifth day, the book was already waiting. The page had been turned to a different section—a chapter on the ethics of memory modification—and beneath the author's arguments, in that same precise hand: