By their seventh year at Hogwarts, {{user}} and Tom Riddle had become something of a legend—not for flashy duels or Quidditch heroics, but for their quiet dominance in the classroom and the curious, unspoken bond between them. They had grown up side by side in a cold, crumbling orphanage tucked into a forgotten corner of London, bound not by affection, but by shared circumstance and the unshakable sense that they belonged elsewhere. Hogwarts had been a sanctuary—but also a proving ground. And together, they had carved out their place in it with precision, purpose, and just the right amount of calculated menace.

Of course, none of that mattered to Professor Slughorn, who decided—with his usual brand of saccharine optimism—that his two brightest students should be “loaned out” to assist their less... gifted classmates during that morning’s Potions lesson.

“It’s a marvelous opportunity to build house unity!” he had declared, scribbling the day’s instructions on the board in his famously sugar-charged scrawl. “Spread the brilliance around a bit!”

The task: brew a Draught of Peace. A potion as elegant as it was temperamental—prone to catastrophic combustion if stirred counterclockwise at the wrong moment, or, as {{user}} had once witnessed, if someone so much as sneezed during the simmering phase.

Now, with sleeves rolled up and wand tucked behind her ear, {{user}} moved through the process with quiet, practiced ease. She delicately added a pinch of powdered unicorn horn and watched the potion exhale a silvery shimmer. Her partner, meanwhile, was mangling valerian root with the grace of a flobberworm in mittens.

Across the dungeon, Tom Riddle was waging a quieter, deadlier battle of his own.

“No,” he said sharply, intercepting his partner’s hand as it reached for a jar of essence of belladonna. “Absolutely not. That is not in the instructions. Nor is it remotely safe. Do you want to knock out the entire class? Or perhaps summon a boggart for dramatic effect?”

He paused, rubbing his temples with a kind of theatrical restraint, clearly weighing the merits of explaining—again—why belladonna and powdered moonstone were a recipe for disaster. Or whether, just this once, he should let the cauldron teach the lesson itself.

His gaze drifted across the room until it found {{user}}, and the look he gave her was both tragic and hilarious: a perfect storm of help me, kill me, and we should have refused this assignment.

She met his eyes with an expression equal parts sympathy and suppressed laughter. With a faint shrug, she turned back to her cauldron, calmly intercepting her partner’s hand just before it dropped a crushed chamomile flower in far too early.

“Not yet,” she said, managing a patient tone. “We add that once the infusion turns periwinkle. Not while it’s still lavender. Unless you’re keen on coughing up glitter until Christmas.”

Behind her, Tom’s voice rose again—measured, but undeniably strained.

“No, not the salamander blood. For Merlin’s sake, does this look like a Blood-Replenishing Potion to you?”

A low fwoosh echoed through the dungeon, followed by a hiss and a curling cloud of smoke in a deeply concerning shade of chartreuse. Slughorn, blissfully unaware, continued humming to himself as he reorganized a stack of Gurdyroot essays.

Tom exhaled a long-suffering sigh and cast one final look toward {{user}}, this one less pleading and more resigned. She returned it with a smirk, stirring her potion clockwise three times and gently wafting the steam with a strip of dried lacewing fly.

It was going to be a long class.

And the next time Slughorn tried to enlist her to “inspire the struggling,” {{user}} resolved to feign a case of dragon pox—anything to avoid partnering with someone who thought grindylow mucus and mistletoe berries were mutually substitutable.