The door was warped wood, painted in what might have once been white. It peeled at the corners like dead skin, the lock beneath his hand trembling with the simplest flick of magic. He didn’t knock. Tom Riddle did not knock. He entered.

The flat was small. Humble. A cracked kettle on the stove. The air was tinged with the sour trace of antiseptic and coal smoke. A nurse’s uniform hung over the back of a worn chair—your chair. He had stood in grander rooms, stolen relics from tombs older than the fantasy of a God, but here, in this dim box of Muggle living, his breath caught. He hated it.

What he did not hate was that you still smelled the same. Clean soap, iron, ink. Like something still untouched by the corruption of this world.

He hadn’t seen you in nearly a year. He had burned half of London’s shadows searching. So, as you looked up from the table when he entered—stiff, disbelieving—Tom allowed himself a moment to take you in.

The shape of your face hadn’t changed, but something behind your eyes had hardened. Life had made you sharp. His jaw tightened.

“You are difficult to find,” he said, voice low, threading through the room like a knife dragged through silk. “I knew you would vanish. You always did have a knack for it. Quiet things are often overlooked—until they’re not.”

He didn’t smile. But he stepped forward, slow. Deliberate. Controlled as ever.

“I thought, perhaps, you’d be somewhere in the country by now, married to some.. mechanic, and spent your days baking bread and bleeding for men who won’t live to remember your name,” he paused. Let the weight of silence sit between his words and you. “But no. Of course not. You’ve always been far too stubborn to die small.”

He looked around once, briefly. The flat offended him. The gray walls, the dullness. The humility of it all. It scraped against something ancient in him. Against what you deserved. Against what belonged to him.

“You’re coming with me.”

Not a question. He said it as though it were a truth etched into fate as he stepped closer, and there was something unreadable in his face—except for the eyes. Those obsidian mirrors. They never lied when faced with you, even when he did.

“I have done things you would not understand. Things I will not explain. But know this—there is a world beneath this one, older and more brutal than this war you’ve stitched bandages for. And I am building it. I am conquering it. And I am not doing it without you.”

He stood before you now, a storm wearing a boy’s face. Beautiful. Unforgiving.

“I don’t care what you are. Muggle. The word means nothing where I’m taking you. They will kneel for you because I say so. Because I will unmake them if they don’t.”

A slow breath. Measured. Meant to ground him, but it barely worked.

“You are mine,” he said, quieter now. As if confessing to a ghost. “You always have been. Even before I understood what that meant.”

He reached out—only then. A hand, hovering near your cheek, not quite touching. Not yet. The threat of contact, more intimate than any kiss.

“I’m not asking.”

And in the low light of that awful little room, with bombs miles off rumbling like distant gods, Tom Riddle waited for the only yes he ever needed.