London, July, 1943. The city was still charred around the edges, scorched by a war that neither the Ministry nor the Daily Prophet dared name directly, though its smoke curled even into Diagon Alley’s shadows.

The Muggle world pressed heavy in the air—the clatter of trolley buses, the snap of ration paper, the acrid tang of coal fires and nerves. It was a city pretending not to be broken.

Abraxas Malfoy moved through it like he’d been carved from a different century. Tall, faultlessly dressed in a tailored charcoal coat that shifted green at the hem when the light dared catch it, he navigated the grimy cobbled pavements with a disdainful grace.

Muggle London offended him on a molecular level—the smoke in his cuffs, the shouting, the senseless optimism painted across the propaganda posters peeling from every wall.

He was here for a reason. A necessary one. Tom had insisted—a flat, something with privacy, anonymity, no enchantments to trace. Abraxas had handled it, of course.

Falsified documents, obscure records, a quiet bribe to a Ministry clerk who now thought Riddle was the orphaned heir of some obscure foreign diplomat. It had taken hours of silent wandwork, subtle Obliviations, and an afternoon spent among the ink-stained archives of the Muggle-born Registration Commission.

Now, with the deed tucked into an inner pocket and the soot of the city biting at his teeth, he made for the telephone box that served as a Ministry entrance—near Holborn, wrapped in fog and disdain. He hated touching anything in Muggle London. The door handles were always sticky.

He turned the corner with that coiled stillness he wore like a second skin— just enough presence to part the crowd without lifting a hand—when someone collided with him. Not brushed, not passed—walked directly into him.

His breath stopped.

He did not stumble. Abraxas Malfoy did not stumble. But his posture shifted, slightly, with the impact. A jolt of real contact. His gloved hand reflexively caught the stranger’s arm to steady them, and in the heartbeat that followed, his gaze—cold, clinical, built to assess and dismiss—fell upon you.

And it did not dismiss.

You looked like everything he’d been taught to disdain; unmarked, unshielded, Muggle—and yet the organ behind his ribs made an indecipherable sound. Not a flutter. Something deeper. A quiet recognition. A wrongness that felt like hunger.

He could hear Riddle’s voice in the back of his mind, half-mocking: “Fascination is for poets, Brax. You’re a strategist.”

Your eyes met his, and he hated the fact that it mattered. That it struck. He let go slowly, as though the contact had burned, but his fingers lingered half a second too long. That single moment stretched, took root. The air between you changed.

“Miss,” he said at last, voice low and crisply precise. He looked down at you not with disdain, but scrutiny, like something rare he hadn’t decided how to classify. “You might consider watching where you walk. Though I admit there are worse men to collide with.”

His chin tipped, just slightly. Assessing. Cataloguing. Intrigued despite himself. And then, deliberately, he offered his name—not out of politeness, but purpose.

“Abraxas Malfoy,” he said. “And you are…?”

He didn’t smile, not really. The corners of his mouth lifted, just enough to suggest that he might, if you gave him reason.

It was idiotic. Undisciplined. Dangerous. But as he stood there, the street noise dimming, the telephone box behind him forgotten, Abraxas Malfoy knew one thing with blinding clarity:

He would not be leaving just yet.