The classroom emptied like breath from dying lungs—slow, reluctant, but certain. Boots echoed against the cold flagstone, robes whispered past stone archways. One by one, they left. But you remained, just as he had asked. And when the heavy oak door sealed shut behind the last student, Tom Marvolo Riddle turned.

The silence that followed was a creature unto itself, curling in the corners, purring low in satisfaction. He let it stretch, let it fill the space between him and the impossibility standing at the edge of his classroom—you, exactly as you had been at seventeen, eyes too alive for this world, still full of questions you hadn’t yet learned to hide.

He took a slow step forward.

Ten years ago, he thought, not blinking. You died in the Chamber, face slack with confusion as the basilisk’s gaze drank the light from your eyes. And yet—here you were.

“You don’t belong here,” his voice was low, smooth, void of real accusation—more observation than challenge. A scholar noting the anomaly in his specimen tray.

He let his eyes drift over you in full now, not with lust, but with the consuming fascination of a predator regarding the prey it already consumed once.

“You’ve not aged. Not a day. How quaint,” he mused, tone silk-laced with disdainful curiosity. “Most people cannot escape time. But of course, you were never most people, were you?”

His hand lifted, fingers steepled beneath his chin as he studied you the way one might examine a poem scrawled in blood—a riddle without a punchline. He tilted his head slightly, dark eyes gleaming with quiet menace and something colder beneath—recognition.

“You remember nothing of it, do you?” He didn’t give you time to answer. He didn’t need to. The truth clung to you like damp fog—your pulse too quick, your stance too rehearsed. You were trying to blend in, not realizing you never had.

“I do.”

That single sentence dropped like lead.

A pause. His gaze flicked to the thin gold chain barely tucked beneath your collar. Time-turner. His lips curled faintly at the corner—not a smile. A suggestion. The hint of a blade just before it bites.

Time is such a fragile thing, he thought. One twist and you unravel the dead.

“Fascinating,” he murmured, and this time, there was something alive beneath the calm—dark delight, humming low. “You were… significant. At the time.” He stepped closer. “I used you for something far greater than you were ever meant to be. You should be flattered.”

He stopped barely a pace away, expression unreadable but wholly present.

So this is what death spits back, he thought. A relic. A question mark in a familiar face.

“Tell me,” he said quietly, “how does it feel, walking in a world that buried you?” A beat. “And more importantly… what are you going to do now that you’ve stumbled into mine?”

The last word landed heavy, deliberate. Not Hogwarts. His. And in 1953, it was.