Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

He’s more myself than I am.
Whatever our souls are made of,
his and mine are the same.

–Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights

Harrielle Potter is many things.

She’s The-Girl-Who-Lived, a legend made flesh. A Triwizard Champion with a spine of steel, forged in fire and fear. 

The Undesirable Number One. A child soldier who rode dragons, battled Death Eaters and hunted horcruxes. A girl who wears her scars and bruises like medals pinned to her chest.

A war hero. Someone who walked into death with her eyes wide open and came back alive to tell the tale. 

Yes, Harry is many things. But today… she’s also a girl teetering on the edge of a breakdown.

She’s expected tonight at the ministry gala, a ball held in celebration for the 6th anniversary of the Battle of Hogwarts. 

Another evening of forced charm and empty conversations, of clinking champagne flutes and boring speeches. She’ll be expected to smile until her cheeks ache, to shake the hands of strangers, to answer press interviews, and to pose a few shots for the morning papers.

Another night playing her part in the grand theatre of Britain’s wizarding society while she’s crumbling from the inside bit by bit. 

Another play of pretend. 

Another quiet death by a thousand expectations.

Harrielle was laden with grief, with sadness, with so much regret it chokes her when she tries to breathe.

She might have killed the monster who gave her the scar on her brow, but Voldemort had been tethered to her soul. Tom Riddle had seeped into her bones, twisted into her magic, lived in the shadows of her mind... so when she won their final duel and the last piece of him left the mortal plane for good, Harrielle had never been the same again.

She killed him and won the war but it didn’t feel like victory.

The storm brews in her chest as she stares blankly at the dress draped across her bed. She’ll need to wear that later tonight as Britain’s Golden Girl, but she wishes she could just stay in bed all night, wallow in self-pity, and then cry herself to sleep. 

But she cannot. 

The war has ended but they still expected things from her. 

What more does she need to lose? More of herself? Perhaps, her sanity? 

Harrielle thinks her sacrifices and all the deaths had all been for nothing. Voldemort and his cruel plans for domination are all but crumbled dust. But the world? The world went on like nothing changed. The Ministry is still the same. Unfairness and inequality cloud over society. Justice came first for the wealthy. Bigotry might have toned down a bit, but bloodline is still as important as ever. Names still have power, no matter who won the war.

Tom Riddle is dead, and yet the world remains the same.

How dare he?

How dare he brand her soul, carve scars across her skin, crawl through her mind… only to die by her hand and leave her to carry the echo of it all alone?

He haunts her still. In memories. In dreams. In the spaces between her heartbeats. He’s everywhere when she closes her eyes but nowhere in her reality.

So Harry keeps the broken pieces of him, still clinging to the ghosts of Tom that are now hidden in a box beneath her bed: the diary, the ring’s stone, the locket, the cup, the diadem. 

Treasures and terrors…

Relics of a man who became a monster, a myth, a tyrant… and then ashes on a battlefield.

She couldn’t keep Nagini, though. 

Harry had buried the snake near the Whomping Willow, where the roots run deep into Hogwarts soil. A parting mercy for Tom, because the castle had once been his only home. 

Voldemort had no grave. The order made sure of that. 

After the Dark Lord fell in his final stand-off with Harrielle, his corpse had been burned immediately by Fiendfyre, until he was nothing but blackened smoke and dust in the wind.

“Just to be sure he doesn’t come back,” Shacklebolt had said grimly after casting the spell.

So that had been it.

Tom had no marker. No headstone. Nothing left for the world to remember him by.

Except for the pieces Harry took home unbeknownst to anyone. Everyone else thought his horcrux vessels had all been lost in the chaos of the Battle of Hogwarts.

But she kept them.

Because letting them go would mean letting him go.

And she wasn’t ready for that.

Sometimes, Harrielle thinks she’s going mad. All this sorrow. All this rage. She doesn’t know how to keep it all in control.

With a grunt, she grabbed the nearest object she could find— a hairbrush—and hurled it across the room. It crashed into the vanity, the mirror shattering into a spiderweb of cracked glass. Tears came then, spilling over before she could stop them. She sobbed, loud and messy, and didn’t bother trying to muffle them anymore. 

Nobody else could hear her here in Grimmauld Place since she lived there alone.

Perhaps the portraits down the hallway could, but they’re used to her meltdowns by now. And Kreacher knew to leave her be when she had these episodes. 

Shattered glass glints like starlight on the floor, and her breath hiccupped in uneven bursts as she pressed trembling fingers to her face. 

Her throat ached from her anguished cries and her chest tight with rage, grief and shame.

The shame was the worst of it all. 

What would her parents say? Harrielle never cried like this for them, but she does for their murderer. If they could see her now, they would be so disappointed.

What would Sirius think of her? Mourning the man who tore Harrielle's own family apart, who caused deaths by the thousands.

It’s shameful how her heart ached for him.

She did not understand why she mourned him. She hates that she mourns him. 

Why? Why does she miss him? 

She hated him. He was cruel. He was terrifying. He ruined her life. 

And yet… she weeps for him. 

Somewhere along the way, he stopped being Voldemort to her. He stopped being her nemesis the moment he died. He just became Tom.

He might be the Dark Lord who terrorized them all but Tom… Tom had been her soul. 

Harry doesn’t understand it at all, and that terrifies her because she feels so much for him.

She could not tell her other friends—not Hermione, not Ron, not Ginny, not any of them. They wouldn’t understand. They’d look at her like she had gone bonkers. If any of them found out, they'll lock her away behind the walls of the Janus Thickey Ward and whisper about how she had finally cracked. The press would have a field day and the wizarding world would tear her apart all over again.

So no, she doesn’t speak of it.

She just cries in the dark, alone. Like the plenty of times she has done so before. Later, she’ll paint on her brave face again. Smile for the cameras. Sign a few autographs. Mingle with people who think themselves too important. And act her part for the evening as the wizarding world’s savior. She loathed doing this every damn year. They all celebrated the death of a man Harry wept for the most. They would toast to the “great service” she did for the world, while she did herself a disservice in killing half of herself. 

Harrielle felt like this was some sort of big conspiracy against her. A total shitshow. She wanted to scream. She wanted to throw more things. She wanted to blast off something with a Bombarda. She wanted to find someone to blame for what she had to suffer and endure…

Who else can she point fingers to when all those involved in making her life a misery were all dead? 

Tom for marking her as his equal and starting it all. This madness. The war. Everything.

Her parents for having a child whilst fighting battles bigger than themselves, condemning her to a miserable fate tied to a fucking prophecy.

Dumbledore for all his manipulations. For leaving her to be abused in the muggle world. For shaping her as his main pawn in his godforsaken war. For sending Harrielle to her own death. 

She never had a choice. They had all chosen this life for her.

More objects were thrown. More things hurled across the room. By the time Harrielle was done, it’s like a herd of hippogriffs had trampled in and put the place in its sorry state.

She’s still filled with fury and sorrow, but now felt better after channeling her emotions outward.

A knock echoed through the silence, sharp and polite. Hearing her sobs, Draco didn’t wait for an answer and opened her door, knowing exactly what to expect as he had seen her like this before. Still, he sighed softly upon seeing the wreckage Harry had become.

Draco and his mother had been turning points in the war. First at Malfoy Manor with the incident involving the snatchers, and later in the Forbidden Forest when Harrielle walked to her supposed death. If not for their actions, the war might’ve ended very differently. Death Eaters or not. Dark or not. After all, isn’t Severus Snape the same? A former Death Eater who still did his part to bring all the madness to an end. 

They are burdened by Dark Marks and darker choices, but they were the catalysts in the backdrop of Harry’s glory.

So Harrielle had vouched for the Malfoys during the trials. Lucius still went to Azkaban but Narcissa and Draco were spared the punishments. 

And something shifted in their relationship after that. The distance between them narrowed. From enemies, they became civil. Then cordial. Then something warmer… friends at first, until it felt like family.

Draco’s still an insufferable prat, but their petty rivalry has long since dulled. These days, they only trade sarcastic barbs instead of hexes and curses. They had actually become closer over the years. 

Harry had even given them access to Grimmauld Place. A rare privilege. But the house recognizes them, they were Blacks by blood, and Grimmauld Place does not forget its own.

And over the years, Harry came to recognize them as part of her formed family too, like how Hermione and the Weasleys are to her in some ways more than others.

“I cannot say I understand your pain,” Draco says quietly. “But wipe those tears and your snotty nose. We have to go. Mother insisted I drag you out of this hellhole now. As the guest of honour for the gala, you can’t be late.”

Draco had seen her in this state one too many times before. He could never show her other friends her misery and melancholy because they would never understand. Draco was the last person she thought who could sympathize with her, but he always did.

He never knew the exact reasons why, as she never outright told him before, but Draco knew she weeps for the man they all feared and loathed once. 

Draco never judged. 

Maybe because he understood how being stuck in a situation one never have a choice for felt like. 

Maybe this was why they had become closer over the years.

And to that… Harry was thankful.

“I just don’t feel like going to the party,” she murmured, “I feel like shit.”

“We all feel like shit.” He said in a flat tone, not judging, just a matter of fact. “But if you don’t go, the press will write absurd things about why you’re not there.” 

She knew Draco’s words to be true.

Harry had enough bad experiences with the media to last her a lifetime.

“Alright, I’ll go,” she said with a deep exhale. “But I won’t stay longer than I should.”

He smiled at that. “Get dressed then.”

Harrielle wiped her tears off and tried to calm herself down.

The sound of the fireplace downstairs echoed through the open door, signaling the arrival of somebody else. 

After a minute and the sounds of footsteps nearing, Narcissa came into view.

“What’s taking so long?” She looked stunned at the mess of the bedroom and Harry who’s still undressed.”

“Harry had nerves like always… you know she still hates crowds and remains awkward as ever at parties." Draco gave an excuse on her behalf. 

Not entirely believable. But Narcissa didn’t press much.

“Well… we can’t have that.” The elder Malfoy muttered, “Only thirty minutes before the gala starts. You don’t have much time. I’ll help you get dressed.”

“I’ll wait for you downstairs then.” Draco closed the door behind them.

Narcissa lifted her arm and flicked her wand in a wave, the room righted itself again.

The mirror mended in soft clicks of silver light. The hairbrush went back in its proper place and every clutter vanished to where they belonged. The wall sconces flickered on, spilling warmth into the gloom of her room. The green dress floated gently off the bed, all the wrinkles smoothed out, the silver embroidery clearer and more defined.

Harielle shrugged off her dressing robe, letting it fall in a heap at her feet, then quickly put on her evening gown for the gala with Narcissa tightening up the lace of her bodice.

This was not the first time the Mrs. Malfoy had assisted her in dressing up for an event.

With her victory against Voldemort, Harry had become the official face of Wizarding Britain and her name had become well-known even outside the country. Her celebrity status never died down even if more than half a decade had passed since the war. So everything about her was being watched by the public, particularly in big events like this. 

Good thing Narcissa was always ready to help and offer her expertise in fashion and beauty trends. Even her female friends like Hermione, Ginny and Luna were not much help when it came to these things. 

Mrs. Malfoy helped fix Harrielle’s face with charms and cosmetics.

Glamours swept over her face, tear-reddened eyes fading until they looked right. Powder dulled the shine of her tears. A touch of blush to the cheeks. A bit of shimmer at the lids. A press of rouge and gloss to her lips. Then the wild curls of her hair were tamed with spells and hair tonics, twisted and pinned into a shape fit for the occasion. Not a strand out of place. 

Narcissa called to Kreacher, murmuring something, then the elf came back holding up an old jewelry box, likely salvaged from somewhere in the old creaky house. She added the final touch. It’s a jeweled clasp, silver inlaid with emeralds. Then the earrings, the necklace, the ring. All matching. All fitting Harry’s look for the gala.

“There,” said Narcissa, stepping back to admire her work. “Green and silver have always been your colour. They bring out the sparkle in your eyes.”

Harrielle caught her reflection in the mirror. 

She looked different... 

Regal. Poised. Unbreakable. 

But inside, she felt small and broken. 

Still hollowed by war. 

Still haunted by the boy from a diary with too many names and too many pieces left behind.

Chapter Text

Harry had canceled every appointment on her calendar. She hadn’t met any of her friends. She had piles of unopened letters. She even instructed Kreacher not to open the door for any visitors because she did not want to be disturbed.

She hadn’t left Grimmauld Place in days.

The house was locked tight under layers of wards, keeping people out.

Inside, she searched for answers. Answers to why she was still so affected by Voldemort’s death, even after all these years.

She’d finally figured it out that day, the answer she had been digging for, something she found hidden in the Malfoy’s private archives, which Narcissa had let her borrow. It was an ancient, nearly crumbling copy of The Book of the Dead, written by Egyptian wixens thousands of years ago. The kind that were too rare to be found anywhere else.

It talked about death. Souls. Rituals. What happened after the last breath and sometimes, what happened before it, when meddling with soul magic was still a common practice and not just a cursed academic interest.

Harrielle had only expected theories. She found something else.

The answer was as simple as it was horrifying… their souls had touched.

What happened between them was exactly like the ancient magical rites used for marriage bonding, the kind of ceremonies performed only during days when magic was most potent in the mortal planes. Like samhain, solstices, equinoxes. Rites where both intention and power mattered.

And there’d been plenty of that when it happened…

Because when Voldemort came to kill her decades ago, it hadn’t just been a random night of murder. Because Tom was a dramatic bastard, he had just to pick a magically potent day of the year. And the Dark Lord had accidentally completed one of the oldest rites in the magical world that Samhain in 1981.

A magical union. An archaic marriage. And a Horcrux.

All in one lovely, trauma-packed night.

Harrielle summoned a bottle of Bordeaux and drank from it like it was Draught of Peace, as if it could give her the numbness and calm she definitely needed right now.

She’d unknowingly married her would-be murderer when she could barely walk and talk. Then fought with him a couple of times years later before finally killing him for good. And now she was emotionally wrecked, totally unstable, and probably in a spiritual breach and had broken too many magical laws in Britain as that kind of marriage rite had long been outlawed.

She took another long swig and let her head fall back with a groan. 

This had been her fifth bottle of alcohol. Maybe sixth. She lost count after the fourth.

The door creaked open.

“Salazar’s bloody balls,” Draco’s voice echoed into the room. “It stinks here. Did you bathe in alcohol?”

Harry had forgotten that she gave the Malfoys access to the house. Maybe it was a good thing because at least somebody could find her corpse if she accidentally died from too much grief… or alcohol poisoning.

“Mother asked me to check on you,” Draco added. “You’ve been a cryptid for weeks and haven't owled back any letters sent your way.”

“Dray…coh,” Harrielle slurred, not lifting her head. “I killed my husband.”

“Where’s the body? Should we burn it or bury it?” 

She snorted, then hiccuped. “I’m serious, I meant your Dark Lord. The one with the nose problem.”

That got his attention.

“What exactly are you saying?”

Harrielle rolled over in the armchair dramatically.

“Old rites. Samhain. Tom trying to kill me. And instead—ta-da!—magical marriage! Surprise! I’m the widow of Voldemort.”

Draco deadpanned at her. “You’re joking.”

“Do I look like I’m joking? Actually, don’t answer that.” She groaned, hugging the bottle of wine to her chest. “Gods. I used to be a bloody horcrux and a tragic bride. I had—hic—no idea.”

Draco looked down at Harrielle, who was now slumped half-prone in her arm chair.

“So you’re telling me that Voldemort tried to murder you—”

“—as he always did,” she mumbled.

“—and accidentally magically married you and made you into a Horcrux?”

“Uh huh.”

“And then you killed him.”

Harrielle’s head flopped toward him like a reanimated corpse. Her eyes were bleary. She raised a trembling finger.

“I am—hic—your lord’s wife. You must kneel before me now.”

“Absolutely not.”

Then she started to sob again.

Phineas Nigellus Black sighed heavily from his portrait, eyeing Harry with pity. 

“She had been like this all day,” he said to Draco. “First she cried. Then she tried to summon him but terribly failed. Then she hexed the armchair for looking too smug.”

“I loved him,” Harrielle wailed.

“You hated him.” Draco corrected her.

“I used to hate him,” she shouted, nearly falling off the chair. “Now I don’t. We were doomed, Draco. The most literary kind of love!”

Draco ignored her declaration, then took one look at the coffee table, which was covered in ancient books with titles like Magical Unions & Soul Bonds, Marriage Rites Through the Ages, and an ancient copy of The Book of the Dead.

“What the actual hell are you reading?”

“History,” she slurred. “Or my—hic—wedding album.”

Draco blinked. “You cannot seriously tell me you were really married or that you were in love with him.”

“Really?” she snapped, jabbing her wine bottle toward him, “why else would I have been haunted by his absence, even if it’s been years since I offed the bastard?!”

“I don’t know! Maybe because you made out with his horcrux and sleep with it?”

“I did NOT make out with a horcrux!” She paused. “It’s an inanimate object and I only sleep with—”

Draco held up a hand. “Nope. Stop. Don’t need that mental image.”

“I meant to say I sleep with it under my bed!”

Draco sighed as he watched Harry have her drunken tantrums.

“I’m a tragic widow!” she cried again. “And no one brought flowers to my wedding! Or cake!”

Phineas tsked loudly. “You didn’t even register the union with the Ministry. That had been a very tacky elopement.”

“It wasn’t an elopement! It was an attempted murder!” Draco tried reasoning out with these insane people.

One was a dead man’s portrait while the other a dead man’s wife, apparently. 

“Same thing, really,” Phineas shrugged.

Draco pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re saying Voldemort married you by accident, made you a horcrux, and then you killed him. And now… what? You want me to plan a magical annulment? Is that even a thing?”

Harrielle wiped her nose on a robe sleeve. “I don’t know. Maybe just… hold my hand while I spiritually detox from being a dead dark wizard’s wife.”

He made a disgusted face at her. “I’m not holding your snotty hands.

Harry ignored that insult.

“I need him alive.” She whined, arms flailing sideways. “He didn’t even give me anniversary—hic—presents.”

Draco spotted the bottle slipping from her hand and caught it with a quick Accio, preventing it from shattering.

“Also,” she added with a weak grin, “next time someone calls me unmarried at a ministry gala, I’m gonna say ‘Widowed, actually’ and watch the color drain from their face.”

He had long ago accepted that nothing about Harry Potter was ever going to be normal, even during their student years at Hogwarts.

And now, well into adulthood, nothing has changed. 

She still operated at a level of chaos that could make even a seasoned Death Eater break into stress hives.

He called Kreacher to clear away the mess of scrolls and parchments, tipped-over wine bottles, and all those ancient books with ominous titles. Then he summoned blankets, set a ward so she wouldn’t wander off and accidentally swan-dive off the roof, and transfigured an ottoman into a comfortable armchair beside her.

Draco sat there, elbows on his knees, staring at a drunk Harrielle. 

He muttered under his breath, exasperated, “Of all the people she could be married to… it had to be the bloody Dark Lord.”

Then he slumped in his chair, wondering what the heck could possibly go worse from here on.

Harrielle woke up in the armchair, blinking at the too-bright light and the unbearable pounding of her skull.

She glanced at the grandfather clock at the corner of the sitting room, hand hour pointing to nearly noon.

The smell of aged parchment and Firewhisky still clung to her skin, but someone—likely Draco, the long-suffering angel of tolerance—had left a hangover potion on the small table beside a glass of water and a note in his spiky cursive.“Do not bathe on Firewhisky again.”

She downed the potion in one go, gagged dramatically, and dragged herself into the bathroom to scrub away the regret and dried eyeliner from her face. She sat under the steaming water for nearly an hour, silently begging the gods of magic and wine to smite her just a little bit. Or at least reset her life to pre-cosmic-marriage.

By the time she strode down the stairs in a fresh robe—black, naturally, the mourning widow aesthetic— the clock had long struck past noon. She shuffled into the dining room.

And there, seated at the table like he lived here, was Draco.

Reading the Prophet. Drinking tea.

He looked up with a raised brow, as if this were a perfectly normal Tuesday.

Harrielle blinked. “Why are you still here?”

“Preventing another Dark Lord from rising because you were so drunk last night and started summoning soul remnants at 3 a.m.”

She narrowed her eyes. “I did?”

“You were saying things like ‘Horcruxed Housewife of Hell.’ I didn’t think leaving you alone was a good idea.”

Harry dropped into the chair across from him with all the grace of a dying swan. “I was fine.”

“You woke me up at midnight and cried your eyeballs out because you said your wedding didn’t even include a first dance.”

She scowled. “Well, it didn’t.”

Draco folded the newspaper and placed it aside. “You’re an unholy mess.”

“I’m a widow.” She sniffed dramatically. “Let me mourn.”

“You’re also emotionally entangled with a genocidal maniac, who somehow turned a murder into a marriage ritual. That’s not mourning. That’s the plot of a banned romance novel!”

Harry stole a bread roll from his plate and tore it apart.

“Do you remember when the biggest relationship issue I had was when I snogged that Ravenclaw girl in fifth year and everyone said I was going through a phase?” she muttered. “I hope this was just as simple as that. But no! Nothing would ever top being married to him.”

“I hoped all your issues were a phase. Now you’re more of a mess than you ever had been before.” 

“Everything in my life is so extra. I couldn’t just be a vaguely mysterious woman with a flair for sarcasm and good shoes.” She groaned dramatically. “I had to become Mrs. Voldemort, Widow of the Dark Lord, Magical Soul Dumpster of the Damned.”

“You’re like a cursed goblet, really,” Draco teased her.

“Thank you,” she deadpanned.

There was a long pause as she quietly snatched another piece of bread while Draco poured her a cup of tea.

She looked at him sideways. “You’re not going to leave today, are you?”

He sighed. “Not until you’ve stopped quoting ancient wedding rites and threatening to summon your ‘husband’ from the beyond for closure.”

“Maybe I just wanted him to apologize for ruining my life.”

Draco gave her a flat look. “He tried to kill you many times. He’ll likely Avada you when he sees you again.”

“Doesn’t mean he didn’t owe me flowers first.”

He groaned into his tea. “Merlin save me, it’s like I’ve adopted a wailing banshee in a mourning dress.”

Phineas, lurking in one of the landscape paintings in the dining room, looks thoroughly entertained. “She’s grieving, boy. Let her wear black and wail.”

Harrielle raised her teacup in toast. “Thank you, Phineas.”

Draco rolled his eyes.

But he didn’t leave.

Because Draco may not have known what the hell to do with someone who accidentally married Voldemort, but she was family now. 

And Salazar help him, family looks after family.

Even the cursed, dramatique, emotionally volatile ones.

“I know it’s ridiculous,” said Harrielle out of nowhere, voice so small it sounded barely hers. “I know what he was. What he became. I’ve seen it all. Lived through it. Fought against it. But—”

Her hand trembled as she reached for her teacup.

“But sometimes, when I dream, he’s still just… Tom.”

Draco looked at her face.

She wasn’t being dramatic anymore. Not drunk. Not theatrical. Not sarcastic. She just looked crushed. 

“I keep wondering…” she said weakly, “if he’d have been different. If someone had loved him before the world ruined him. If someone had been there for him...maybe things would be different.”

Draco just stared. Not quite believing what nonsense Harry was saying right now. 

“Maybe that’s why he had been bound to me but I never got the chance to be anything for him.” Her voice cracked. 

Draco blinked once, twice, and then muttered, “What the fuck do I even say to that.”

Harrielle gave a watery chuckle. “Nothing. There’s nothing to say. He’s gone. And I feel like half of me went with him.”

Then she covered her face with her hands, and sobbed again.

Shaking sobs that had nothing poetic in them, nothing theatrical, just raw grief pouring out in uncontrollable waves. 

And Draco just sat there.

Frozen.

Speechless for a moment.

Because how do you console someone who has feelings for a Dark Lord and only realised it after she murdered him? 

It was tragic. Really. 

Harry wasn’t weeping for Voldemort. Not the megalomaniac, not the killer. She was mourning Tom, the broken man who never got to grow into anything else.

The one Harry never really had. 

Draco stood slowly.

Then awkwardly rounded the table and pulled her into a stiff hug, which she promptly melted into like a dying wraith.

“I’ve got you,” he muttered against her hair. “You absolute lunatic.”

Chapter Text

The sun rose and set, one day after another, and still Harrielle remained suspended in the same stage of grief. 

She spent most of her days like that.

She wandered from room to room in Grimmauld Place, sitting by the fireplace for hours on some nights, watching the embers die and reignite, telling herself that warmth could burn away the cold that often crept into her chest.

She moved through the hallways with quiet steps, letting her fingertips brush the wallpapered walls, drifting like a living ghost in an old empty house. 

Sometimes she stood by the window, staring out at the London skyline, letting the mundane bustle of the world remind her she was still tethered to life, even if on most days it felt as though she weren’t anymore.

Nights bled into mornings, and mornings bled into nights, each becoming more indistinguishable from the last.

Sometimes she held the Resurrection Stone in her hand. She did it all the time.

In her drunken state. In her sobbing state. Even in her sober state.

Like right now…

She sat with it resting in her palm, just staring at it intently, but she couldn’t bring herself to use it. 

Not when her head was clear and she could think straight.

She needed the burn of alcohol in her throat first. She needed that liquid courage, the blur of her mind, before she dared to cross that line again. 

Only then could she face the ghosts of her past.

Because this particular Hallow always offered glimpses of her family… flashes of her parents, her godfather, even some of her old friends from Hogwarts and the Order.

All the loved ones she’d lost.

But every time she saw their apparition, she dropped the Stone immediately, instantly severing the connection. Though she knew they were only a version of what they had been when they were alive and not an actual resurrection, she was sill scared to face them.

She’s afraid that they knew why she was reaching across the veil.

Afraid of what they might say.

Afraid of their judgment.

Afraid of their disappointment.

Because they had all died because of him.

Because of Tom.

Partly because of Harry too.

Despite that, she still thought of him, always imagining his face whenever she held the Resurrection Stone.

But Tom never appeared. Not any version of him. He never came. He was far beyond where Harry could reach him. So she knew if she tried again today, it wouldn’t be him that would materialize… it’d be the other ghosts she had been too afraid to face.

Harrielle rose unsteadily and went to her bedroom. 

She knelt beside her bed and pulled out a small wooden box from beneath it, tossing back the Resurrection Stone inside. 

The polished black rock rolled, hitting the sides before settling against the worn cover of an old diary.

It was small, bound in black leather that had already softened with age. Thin brass corners framed its edges, tarnished with time but still faintly gleaming. A dark hole gaped in its center, the wound left by the basilisk fang, the scar Harry had given it to kill a piece of Tom.

She brushed her fingertips over the jagged edge of the puncture, the leather cold beneath her skin, then Harry felt the familiar ache rise in her chest. 

Regret swelled like a tide, creeping up her throat until she could barely breathe. 

Her tears came again, blurred her eyes then spilled, little drops that rolled unheeded down her cheeks.

Harry picked up the diary and moved to her writing table. 

Her desk had been in that room long before she claimed Grimmauld Place as her own, likely as old as the house itself if not more, surface worn smooth by generations of use. Ink stains and shallow scratches marred its top, and the drawers creaked when opened. She sat down before it, the chair’s leg groaning softly under it.

The diary in her hand felt too light… far too light for something that once contained a fragment of Tom.

Harielle set it carefully atop the desk, right in the middle where the lamplight pooled faintly across the wood. The cover caught the glow for a moment, the old leather gleaming dull. She opened it slowly, the pages warped and stained, eaten by time and poisoned by venom. 

What had once been full of magic … full of words and whispers of Tom… now only hollow and silent.

It was blank. 

It was empty.

Much like how Harry felt after he died.

The only thing left of Tom in his old journal was the name he wrote on its first page and the year he got it. Harry traced the letters slowly with her thumb. 

Then she reached for a quill, fingers clumsy, ink trembling at the pointed tip. 

She recalled the first time she had written to Tom…

How careful and curious Harry had been then. 

How Tom’s replies had bloomed across the pages. Always in elegant script, each loop and line so precise, so alive.

Slowly, the ink dripped from her quill, leaving dark blots that bled into the paper. Not vanishing as they once had… a proof that it held magic no more … a proof that he was gone. 

Tom no longer lived in its pages.

Still, Harry wrote something to him.

A simple diary entry, but every word carried something more.

A lot of unsaid things. A lot of unresolved emotions. She didn’t care that Tom couldn't answer back anymore. 

Harry simply wanted to write in his diary again.

To fill its pages with her thoughts of him.

To let her words breathe where a piece of him once lived.

Harry knew there was no chance to bring him back, but she would keep him alive this way. Not as a sentient diary, not a fragment of a cursed soul, but through the words she would write about him.

Wasn’t that a kind of resurrection too?

To let him live again and again, not through magic, but through Harrielle’s ink-stained thoughts of him that would soon fill these pages.

Harry sighed, rereading the first entry she had written in the journal, before closing it shut.

Instead of sliding it back into the box beneath her bed, she pulled open one of the desk’s narrow drawers, choosing the only one with a lock. If she meant to keep writing on it, then it would be best to keep it there, close at hand.

She slipped the diary inside carefully, letting it rest flat against the polished wood.

A tiny brass key was still latched in the drawer’s keyhole. Harry turned it, but it refused to move. She tried again, twisting harder, but it held fast.

Her patience was running thin. 

So with a small exhale, she drew the Elder Wand from her pocket. She didn’t speak any incantation or spell… didn’t need to. She simply pressed her will into the wand, urging it to yield and do as she bid. The air around her stirred faintly as the ancient wood responded, a soft thrum rippling through her fingers. The brass key trembled once, twice, then turned with a reluctant click, the lock giving way.

Satisfied, she withdrew the key out and slipped it into her pocket, pushing back the chair as she stood and lay down on her bed, wishing to rest, likely to end up sobbing again as she closed her eyes shut.

She never noticed the faint shimmer that lingered behind. Golden light flickering in the keyhole, pulsing like a heartbeat, before fading away like scattered mist in the air.

It was the summer of 1948.

Three years since Tom Riddle left Hogwarts with outstanding marks and a name spoken in tones that wavered between admiration and fear.

Three years since he had stepped into the real world, only to find it far less satisfying than he expected.

He worked at Borgin & Burkes now. A shadow-soaked shop located deep in Knockturn Alley. Dust and dark magic clung to everything. The windows never caught the sun, the place mostly smelled of old things with a faint musty scent.

In there, the days were long and repetitive.

Magical artefacts and ancient relics passed through his hands. Cursed jewelry, blood-crusted daggers, old manuscripts and tomes about the obscure or forbidden, heirlooms and trinkets… all those items that their owners wanted to get rid of due to their complicated nature.

Tom catalogued and appraised every item that went into the shop, and manned the till at times.

There were idle days too, times when he could do nothing but listened to the creak of the warped floorboards as people come and go to look around, and the steady ticking of the old clock behind the counter, measuring out his hours in rhythm.

He lived a humble life by all accounts.

Tom Riddle had little in life. Modest job, modest salary, modest flat.  And yet beneath that burned a quiet fire that wanted more and more. An ambition too vast to be confined by such smallness.

He endures his current situation the same way one does with winter, temporary and necessary, a pause before his inevitable rise to power.

Truth be told, Tom could have lived a totally different life if he wished. 

Upon graduating years ago, the Ministry of Magic had offered him a post among their ranks, the sort of opportunity any young wizard would have taken. Stable work. Good pay. Perhaps get the chance to be promoted every once in a few years. The kind of future outlined neatly for an outstanding Hogwarts alumnus. Something he should have accepted if he wanted to live in normalcy  like the rest of the population.

But a mediocre life was simply not for Tom.

Mediocrity was the dullest kind of death, and he had always been afraid to die.

To him, death came in many forms—unfulfillment, confinement, insignificance.

To live and be forgotten was a fate worse than dying. 

To be ordinary and replaceable, a name lost to the dust of history… that was the truest kind of extinction.

To be bound, to be told no, to be watched so closely that every movement became measured… those were cages he refused to live in.

He wanted to move through the world unrestrained, to leave his mark carved deep into it, impossible to erase. He wanted to shape reality itself, to bend the rules of existence until they broke beneath his will.

He did not want to die through any means of death, be it metaphorically or real kind of dying. He wanted to live.

Truly live.

So he chose the unconventional path and worked in Borgin & Burkes. 

Here, in the artefact shop’s shadows, he could lead a life the way he wanted to.

Here, he could build the foundations of his future quietly.

Here, he could dream without eyes upon him.

After all, the kind of dream he dared to dream was the kind that burns and burns and burns. He wanted to bend everyone to his ideals and commands. He hungers for more than what the world is willing to give. 

Such great ambition could not thrive while working for the Ministry or in any institution that strictly conforms to the norms of society or the laws that govern the people.

So he must stay under the shadows and bide his time. He needed patience. He needed cunning. Then he would rise the way darkness does, slowly and quietly, unnoticed at first, until his glory eclipsed everyone else and the world had no choice but to kneel before him.

It would be a slow ascent, but that’ll be fine, even Rome wasn’t built in a day.

All great empires began small and were led by people like Tom… the kind of men who knew how to wait for their moment.

Tom had no doubt that his moment would come, and when it did, he would seize it with both hands and never let go. He would take the world apart piece by piece, reshape it in his image, until history itself bent around his name.

Until then, he’d remain where he was... 

He’d stay in the dim shop lined with shadows and shelves, full of all things dark, while he quietly fed the flame that refused to die within him.

The day felt the same as all the others whenever he did his shift in Borgin & Burkes. His minutes ticked by in steady monotony, each one bleeding into the next, the hours burning slow. The clock chimed past six when something flickered at the edge of his vision.

A faint shimmer from one corner of the shop.

There, half-buried behind a stack of old tomes and clutter, sat an antique desk.

The table was made of dark wood, its polish dulled by dust. It had stood there for as long as Tom could remember, serving as a makeshift shelf rather than something meant to be sold. Its price tag had yellowed with time, the amount written on it smudged and meaningless now.

A shimmer of gold still glimmered as he stood before it, visible only through the small keyhole, yet with the shop’s dim lighting, it was impossible to miss.

Tom stepped closer and tugged at the handle, but the drawer refused to budge. It was locked.

There was a key for it somewhere… he knew that much. 

In the back room, hundreds of them hung on rusted hooks, each with a tiny paper tag scrawled in Mr. Burke’s untidy script, each catalogued for some forgotten relic gathering dust in the shop.

Tom scanned the rows until his gaze caught on one near the end—a heavy brass key with an ornate design, its label chain yellowed and curling at the edges. The faded ink read "Antique Writing Table”

He returned to the desk, slid the key into the lock, and turned it. The mechanism groaned in protest before yielding with a click.

Inside, resting as though it had simply been waiting for him, lay a diary. Worn black leather, aged and damaged, puncture wound cutting through its center.

It looked almost identical to the one he bought at a muggle shop years ago, the diary he transformed into something more.

He turned it over in his hands. The leather felt cold in his palm, then he flipped it open.

On the first page, were the words he remembered writing back then…

T. M. Riddle
1943

His blood ran cold upon seeing it.

The handwriting was unmistakable. He turned the next pages, skimming through it. Most were blank. Except for the second page, the words were written in a way that avoided the punctured hole at the center.

30th June 2003

Hello Tom,

I know you aren’t inside your diary anymore, but I have many things to say, so writing here was the only way I could express everything since you left for good. 

How dare you! 

How dare you marry me without consent? You could have waited… maybe I would have said yes despite the damning circumstances.

We had a very disastrous marriage, if you could even call it one. No ring, no flowers, no affections from you, and yet here I am, still finding a way to cope after you’ve gone, trapped in limbo I couldn’t escape, wishing the last time we met in 1997 didn’t have to be like that. 

You were always so cruel to everyone, most especially to me, so I guess there’s no other way for us to exist than the only way we knew how. Wands always pointed at each other's faces. Curses flying back and forth. Both of us hell‑bent on hurting and killing each other all the bloody time.

We both lived a terrible life, didn’t we? 

Both childhoods spent in misery. Both growing up suffering too much in a world that offered too little.

Always running in parallel, like two tangent lines fated to share the same plane yet never met at a point where you and I could finally coexist in peace. Two wretched halves of a whole, circling the same ruin, bound by something neither of us ever asked for. And now look at us, despite all that happened between you and I, we were still tethered together. Beyond life. Beyond death. Beyond reason.

Truly pathetic, isn’t it?  Me, scribbling to a husband who never really existed in the way I might have hoped.

I keep telling myself I hate you, but grief… grief is such a strange liar.

—H.P.

Tom was frozen in his spot.

His eyes widened as he read each line, heart hammering not with fear, but with a creeping unease. The words—so pointed, so impossibly intimate—twisted around his mind, challenging every reasonable thing that told him what was written there was not true.

Because it sounded too genuine to be false… 

Then his eyes focused on the date again.

2003.

Fifty-five years into the future.

Something like this was impossible. How could his diary be here? And was it truly the one he owned? 

No one knew of its existence save for himself.

Not one person. Not his peers, not his followers, and definitely not Mr. Burke, who owned and supervised the shop he worked in.

Tom had kept his diary hidden.

It was his Horcrux, a vessel for his soul. Naturally, he protected it with care and would not have entrusted it to anyone for safekeeping unless it left him no choice.

So why had it ended up in a random desk drawer in his workplace? And in such a mangled state?

He did not feel any magic pulsing from it. The diary felt inert, lifeless in his hands. That alone triggered the alarm bells in his head.

He closed the journal sharply, pulse quickening.

Tom slammed it back into the drawer and shoved it shut. The sound echoed far too loud in the shop. He turned the key immediately, the lock clicking in place. His hands were trembling, not with fear, but with disbelief and anger simmering just below the surface.

Without a word, he gathered his coat and switched the sign on the door to Closed. He stepped into the cooling air of Knockturn Alley, deciding to head home. 

He needed to check if his horcrux was still where he left it, just to be sure.

His rented flat was small, a single bedroom flat in Horizont Alley, cramped but orderly, with simple furniture and its walls lined with shelves of neatly catalogued books he collected over the years. Tom headed straight for his old school trunk, dragging it out from beneath the bed. Beneath layers of old robes and schoolbooks lay the object he was looking for… his diary.

Untouched and unmarked.

Safe and whole.

He could feel the faint pulse of magic as he held it, thrumming and familiar, even through the protective layers of its leather cover.

Relief flooded him, but the feeling did not last.

Questions began to claw at him one after another, making him pace around the room.

How could there be another diary, exactly like his own?

Why did that entry bear a date so impossibly far into the future?

And most unnerving of all, why had the writer called him husband? He could not picture himself having a spouse, so utterly unfitting with the person he knew himself to be.

Who was H.P. ?

Tom did not know anybody who had those initials. 

He replayed the words he read from the journal in his mind over and over again. Tom was never one to dabble with silly things like feelings or sentiments, yet there had been so much emotion in that diary entry. He could neither relate to it at all nor could he understand how he had come to be associated with a person like that, much less be married to one.

And what sort of magic existed that allowed an object to cross through time like that? 

How could a mere desk drawer possess such strong enchantment?

Tom’s lips pressed into a thin line. 

He could feel his irritation building, teeth bared in silent frustration. 

He hated uncertainty. He hated being unable to solve any puzzling phenomena. He hated not knowing that kind of powerful magic brought back a diary from 2003 to 1948.

In spite of feeling vexed by the situation, the pulse of curiosity and fascination of this whole ordeal did not leave him, dragging him inexorably to find all the answers he wanted to know.

By dawn, he still had not slept. The questions refused to leave his head. 

When morning came, he returned to Borgin & Burkes early, before the alley had fully stirred. The shop was only a fifteen-minute walk from his flat, yet he covered it in half the time, sprinting across the cobbled streets with a strange thrill of anticipation.

He went straight for the antique desk, heart pumping in a way he had not felt since the night he split his soul in sixth year.

Tom fished out the key from his pocket, turning it slowly, then slid the drawer open beneath his fingers, but he found it to be empty.

No diary. No hint that it had ever been there. No trace of anything.

For a long moment, Tom just stared at the hollowed space. He felt the tiniest fissure of uncertainty crack through the carefully constructed walls of his mind…

… had he just imagined it all?

Chapter Text

All her life, Harrielle had wanted to be ordinary, the kind where she lived in peace and didn’t have to fear anything.

But a life like that was simply never hers to have.

Never ordinary. Never at peace.

It began in the cupboard under the stairs, that narrow and suffocating box of a life. Every night, she fell asleep wondering if the Dursleys would finally decide they’d had enough of keeping her. Every morning, she woke to the same truth, something that her relatives always reminded her… that she didn’t belong there. Harry tried to be quiet, to be helpful, to make herself small enough not to offend the world around her. But no amount of trying ever made her normal. 

She was different. Never ordinary. Very unnatural.

An anomaly.

When the Hogwarts letter came, she thought it meant salvation, a proof that there was a place in the world where Harry could exist as an ordinary girl among her kind of people. 

Yet even there, peace and a simple life slipped through her fingers. Surviving a killing curse had marked her as something else entirely.

 The girl who lived when she shouldn’t have. 

Still not ordinary. Still unnatural. Still an anomaly.

It had been a different kind of chaos. 

Strangers shook her hand and called her the chosen one. They smiled, they thanked her, they spoke her name with gratitude and too much expectations.

Something too grand for a girl who knew too little about her new world.

Harry told herself it would be alright, the interest in her life would fade, things would be better.

It never did.

Year after year, trouble followed her like it was her own shadow. If not caused by Tom, then by the rest of the world. 

That had always been the case... it's Harry versus everyone else.

Her enemies were many and they vary.

Death Eaters who cursed her name and hunted her relentlessly. The Ministry of Magic that praised her one day and condemned her on another. The public who looked at her with a mix of too much reverence or too many judgments, just depending on what headline graces the covers of the Daily Prophet.

To Harry, they were all the same. 

Some attacked with wands, others with words. Both left her with one too many scars.

The whole bloody world had made her suffer—the press, the public, the Ministry, even some of the people at Hogwarts, both students and staff alike— all of them had taken their turns, worshipping and condemning her in equal measure. 

To them, she was always The Girl Who Lived.

Never just Harry. 

Never someone ordinary.

And through it all, she kept moving forward. Kept fighting. Kept surviving. Because that’s what anomalies do, even when all odds say otherwise.

So Harry outlasted everyone who wished her harm. She struck down the Dark Lord and his army. She proved to the whole damn world that she could survive.

And she did, with flying colours.

When the war finally ended, the wizarding Britain had its peace. But for Harrielle, it never came.

She was the victor. The hero. The saviour. Yet… where was her peace?

The chaos didn’t end for Harry. It simply moved inside her. Now her enemies were invisible—regrets, guilt, memory, grief. 

All the strange ache that never left her. 

All the feelings she should never have felt at all. 

All of it tied to him.

To Tom.

It was easier to hate him. The problem was she did not hate Tom. Hatred made sense. It was reasonable. It was acceptable. 

But sorrow? Sorrow was treacherous, exactly what she felt for the man. It twisted and reshaped everything Harry thought she knew about herself. 

How could she feel so much for the Dark Lord?

Having an archaic marriage ritual with the man or not, it shouldn’t hurt like this. It shouldn’t feel like this.

People married. People loved. People lost… and then they moved on.

But she and Tom had never even had that kind of relationship or attachment. And yet, she was mourning him… she was missing him… she was wishing they had ended up on different terms… she was still too emotionally wrecked by Tom’s absence in her life.

Feeling like this wasn’t normal. 

It wasn’t right.

So whenever she stared at herself in the mirror, she saw exactly what she had always been—not ordinary, not natural, an anomaly.

Because what’s normal about longing for the very person you were prophesied to destroy?

It’s cruel and tragic. Harry fulfilled her destiny, her fated prophecy, her purpose in life… but after Tom Riddle died, it seemed like she did too in spirit.

Maybe that was her curse from the beginning.

Not to live. Not to die.

But to exist somewhere in between, forever the exception to every rule.

A fucking anomaly.

Draco came barreling out of the fireplace, face grave and worried, as if expecting to find Harry in shambles again, like every other time he’d visited lately.

Maybe wasted again. Maybe in a fit of sobs again. Maybe both at once.

Instead, he found her standing before a mirror, unblinking and entirely motionless, staring at her own reflection as if she were waiting for it to say something. 

No tears. No alcohol. But still kind of lost.

“Earth to Harry!” he called out.

Harrielle blinked and turned toward him, eyes distant, before drifting slowly to the window instead. She breathed deeply, her gaze caught the sunlight for a moment, a bit glassy and unfocused.

“You seem far too deep in your thoughts to talk with me,” said Draco, stepping closer. From where he stood, her face was half-lit, half-shadowed. “What’s on your mind?”

“Anomalies,” she answered vaguely.

That was a strange answer.

Draco waited, expecting any kind of explanation. None came. 

He studied Harry quietly. Today, she didn’t look that terrible. Her eyes weren’t puffy and red, and she didn’t reek of firewhisky or wine. 

This was progress.

“You look less like a corpse today,” he said.

“Thanks for the compliment,” she replied dryly.

“I’m serious. You actually look better…  more alive.”

"I finally had enough sleep last night.”

Draco’s eyes narrowed. “Don’t tell me you’ve been taking Sleeping Draughts again.”

“I haven’t.”

“It’s either that or alcohol. So which one did you drown in this time?”

She exhaled sharply, rolling her eyes. “Neither, actually. No potions. No alcohol. Not even Muggle sleeping pills, if you must know.”

“If it’s true, then that’s nice to hear,” said Draco, visibly relieved.

She gave a faint shrug. “I found something else that helps. It doesn’t erase everything, but it makes it easier to breathe.”

That caught his attention. “And what exactly did you do?”

“I started writing.”

“Writing? Well, that’s a surprise.” Draco’s expression brightened. “What are you writing? Poetry?”

Harry shook her head. “A journal. But maybe it's better to call it as letters.”

“You’re writing letters? To whom?” He raised a questioning brow.

“I began writing to Tom.”

Draco froze mid-breath. His mouth opened, closed, then opened again before he finally slumped back in his seat.

“I thought you were getting better.” He sighed in exasperation. “Merlin’s beard, Harry… you’ve gone completely mental! Writing to a dead man?”

“What’s wrong about that?” she shot back. “It works, doesn’t it? I’m still grieving, but it helps me cope easier.”

Draco stared at her, torn between concern and resignation. It sounded mad. But then again, everything about Harry Potter’s life had been mad.

And if this kept her from shattering entirely… should he really argue about it?

“I’m not sure about your coping methods—”

“If you came here to lecture me, spare me,” she said, her voice soft but brittle. “I know it’s strange. I know it’s wrong. But it’s the only thing that’s helped so far.”

She scowled at Draco, visibly irritated now.

He raised his hands in surrender. “Alright, I’ll stop nagging. I didn’t come to lecture or annoy you.”

“Then what is it?” she asked, sounding impatient. “Why are you here?”

Draco reached into the pocket of his coat. “I brought you something.”

Harry looked at him warily as he pulled out a flimsy photograph and handed it to her.

She froze when she saw the moving image.

The young man in the picture turned his head slightly, seated on a high-backed armchair, a half-body image taken like an informal portrait. The photo looped as the man looked up and stared directly into the camera, eyes glinting as though aware of being watched or photographed, before glancing away again. 

Tom Riddle. Not the monster. Not the snake-faced dark lord. But the man he once was. Still human. Still handsome. Still himself.

Harry’s fingers brushed lightly over the image, tracing the contours of the man’s face. 

“Where did you get this?” she asked quietly.

Draco suddenly looked uncomfortable. “It… uh… was in the manor. I was going through some of my grandfather’s old albums. You know, those albums.”

Harry looked up, “What do you mean?”

Draco cleared his throat. “Those albums were filled with his friends and old associates. All of them had been followers of the Dark Lord and his cause.”

Harry absorbed this without shock, only quiet understanding. 

“Of course,” she murmured, “the Malfoys had always been his staunch supporters.”

Draco winced slightly. It was truth though. Something he can’t change. His family had always aligned with the Dark.

He changed the subject back to the picture.

“There were more photos of their group. But in the album, that one was the only solo picture of your Tom I found. I just thought… you might want it.”

Her gaze softened. “He looked like this when I met him in the diary,” she whispered.

She flipped the photo over.

 Draco already knew what was written on the back—the date it was taken and the Dark Lord’s name. Tom Marvolo Riddle.

She smiled faintly, though there was no mirth in her eyes.

Without another word, Harry called for Kreacher.

The elf appeared with a sharp crack, face twisted in its usual scowl. “What does the Potter brat want now?” he grumbled.

“A frame,” Harry said evenly, lifting the photo for him to see. “Something that fits this.”

Kreacher’s eyes bulged. 

His disdain turned to horror as he recognized the face, and he vanished with a pop, returning moments later with a small frame clutched in trembling hands. He stretched them out toward her, refusing to meet her gaze or look at the picture in her hand, then disappeared again without another word.

“What’s his problem?” Draco asked. “It’s a photo, not the bloody Dark Lord himself.”

She answered. “Just bad memories.”

Well… most of Wizarding Britain likely have at least one horrifying memory of the man. It was a given. Not surprising that he even causes terror among other creatures, not just with witches or wizards. Only Harry ever wanted to remember the Dark Lord in a different way. 

But then again, Harry Potter is not ordinary like the rest of them.

Harrielle slid the photograph into the frame, sealing it carefully with nimble fingers.

“At least now you’ve got something better to remember him by than those cursed relics you keep under your bed.” Draco said after a long pause, “Something normal for once.”

Harry huffed a soft laugh. “Thanks, Draco.”

“You’re welcome,” he said with a smirk. He didn’t expect her to suddenly pull him into a hug.

“You’re the best,” she murmured against his shoulder.

“I know,” he replied automatically, patting her back.

When she let go, she turned away and walked toward the staircase.

She moved through the dim corridors of Grimmauld Place, silhouette framed in the dim light from wall sconces and the shadows that never quite left the old house no matter what time of day. She climbed the stairs slowly, hand brushing the banister, steadying herself, not from fatigue but from an invisible load unseen by the eyes.

She had been like that after the war, moving as if she was being weighed down, likely from carrying too much grief and sorrow…

… all because of the absence of one man.

Draco followed her quietly up to the third floor, stopping by the doorway when Harrielle entered her room.

He watched her cross the space, heading straight to the desk by the window. There, she set the framed photograph down, the young Tom Riddle’s face catching the pale afternoon light.

Harry sat before it for a long time. Silently staring at the looping image of the Dark Lord, who was also looking straight in her eyes from time to time.

Making her sigh.

Making her put on a sad smile.

Making her lose herself for a bit.

Then she unlocked a drawer, pulled out an old diary, and opened it to a blank page.

Her quill dipped into ink. She paused, glancing once more at the photo—at the man who had both ruined and defined her life—and then began to write.

Draco’s curiosity got the better of him. He walked to where Harry sat, peering over her shoulder.

He caught a glimpse of the current line she wrote…
Dear Future Husband

He froze. 

Then very slowly, he stepped back.

It was too sappy for his taste, too dramatic, too personal.

“Uhh,” he muttered. “I’ll just leave you to your writing, shall I?”

He didn’t wait for an answer.

The Floo flared moments later, and then he was gone, leaving Harry alone in the quiet room with her ink, an old diary, and the man in the frame who would likely never write back to her.

Tom did his shift at Borgin & Burkes like usual.

He’d learned that routine could make even the strangest things seem ordinary, and that suited him just fine. He tried forgetting what happened with that cursed desk. With that glowing keyhole and that mangled diary that looked exactly like the one he owned.

He had decided not to think about it. 

If it only happened once, then he could just forget it ever happened at all. It was easier that way.

He made himself busy by organising the shop's inventory, balancing ledgers, inspecting new artifacts that came into the shop that day, even sold some ceremonial athame and a cursed necklace to an old pureblood witch with too many galleons to spend and too little sense to think. Tom bet that in less than a week, that cursed jewelry would come back in the shop and there’s one less foolish woman with a wand breathing in the world. That very luxurious looking necklace had been returning too many times in the shop, always taking the life of its last owner. But then again, these things didn’t matter to Tom at all. 

He spent the remaining hours of his shift behind the counter, waiting if any customers would still drop by.

He almost managed to convince himself that nothing out of the ordinary would happen to him again.

But anomalies had a way of finding him.

When the clock above the counter chimed six, the sound echoed low and hollow through the dim shop. That was when he noticed it again…

… the desk in the far corner.

The trace of gold glimmered in the drawer's keyhole, so golden and bright.

His breath stilled in his throat.

He crossed the room before he could stop himself, the wooden floor creaking under his boots. His fingers hesitated on the handle before he turned the key and opened the drawer.

The same mangled diary lay inside, the one from yesterday.

He pulled it out carefully, the leather cover  was warm against his palms, as if someone had just touched it moments before.

His pulse quickened as he slowly opened it.

There he found his name written on the first page. He turned the paper, the second entry was still there, the very same one he’d read yesterday. And then he found a new one on the next page, the smell of ink still new to the page, its black colour glinting in the low light.

1st July 2003

Dear Future Husband,

I’m writing this while looking at your photograph from 1943, imagining I am speaking to this version of you as I penned my thoughts into words.

I got your portrait from Malfoy. Yes, Draco Malfoy, one of your Death Eaters. 

Hard to believe, isn’t it? That he and I could get along. But he’s been good to me lately, patient even, which is saying something. He listens when I ramble about you or when I cry my eyeballs out because of you. Just that alone had my sincerest gratitude indebted to him. But I’m even more grateful upon receiving this photo of you.

Though I had seen you when you took me inside your diary and spoke to the version of you trapped in that sixteen year old body, I never imagined how you had been after that.

The man I stood face to face many times wasn’t so pleasing to look at like how you were in this photograph. You had hair. A freaking nose. And your eyes weren't slitted reds yet.

It’s strange, seeing you like this…

Human and whole in a way I’ve never pictured you as an adult before.

This 1943 image of you is by far my most preferred one, so this would be the one I would be speaking to whenever I write in your old diary. I think it is just right that I call you my future husband while writing to this version of you, as you were not mine to call then yet.

Well, truth be told, you had never been mine at all.

You and I were simply fated in a way neither of us fully understood. Something cosmic. Something prophesied. Something cursed.

Even if you were not mine to keep at all, I like writing in your diary as I did when you were still in its pages. Though you did try to kill me then. With our record of not getting along, I wonder, would you find me still insufferable? Would you get irritated by my ramblings? 

Whatever the case, I’ll keep writing. Maybe just so you could never find peace… because you never let me live in it either.

You haunted every part of my life, Tom.

You ruined my peace when you were alive, now you ruin it by being gone. Your absence left me in a never ending state of melancholy. 

Why did you have to die! It’s frustrating really, every time I remember about it, I question your choices in life and your lack of dueling sense whenever you point your wand at me. I thwarted your Avada with an Expelliarmus! And it's not just once. It’s all the bloody time, yet I still came out alive in each of our encounters.

Perhaps, you being my husband granted me that much leeway. Were you going easy on your wife? Or am I just turning too delusional?

Either way, it got me thinking deep.

Strange, how the universe worked, isn't it? 

How you wanted eternity, eventually lost it, yet still managed to keep it.

Just not in the way you planned. But you still lingered around. Because even in death, you found a way to stay in this mortal plane. You remain in thought, in memory, in the quiet ache in my chest that refuses to fade.

Perhaps that's your own brand of immortality.

The man who sought to be undying fell into the hands of death, now only lives on inside the girl who lived and died and lived again.

—H.P

Tom Riddle had only one thought after reading that diary entry...
What the bloody fuck?

He just stood there for a long time, staring at the page as if it might rearrange itself into something that made sense.

Too many things crossed his mind. Too many thoughts that didn’t fit together. Too many violent reactions. Too many questions. 

Who was H.P.?

How did she know the Malfoys?

And Draco Malfoy? He’d never marked anyone by that name as part of his Death Eaters. But the entry was dated 2003. Maybe Tom hadn’t met this Draco yet.

But how in Merlin’s name did H.P. knew about his diary?

How could she have been pulled inside it, as she claimed? The only person who could have done that was himself… or rather the fragment of him bound within it.

She wrote like she’d really been there. Like she’d seen him. Like she truly knew him. But perhaps she really did. The proof was right in front of him. If Tom considered this whole situation as real and not just a figment of his imagination, then H.P would really have his diary in the future. 

And then came the part that made his head hurt… 

Like yesterday, she implied Tom was her husband in the future and wrote about them being married.

Married.
He actually barked out a laugh at that, short and humorless.

Still, he couldn’t just ignore her words. They felt too real to be nonsense. Too specific to be sprouted lies. Too seeped with emotion to be false.

She talked about missing him. About his death. About him losing his immortality.

Tom’s hands clenched into fists at that.

He could feel the beginnings of a headache pressing behind his eyes. The idea of dying… of failing in his quest for thwarting death… was unthinkable.

He died?
He married someone?
He left behind a widow who somehow lived, and died, and lived again?

It was madness. Absolute madness.

And yet, he couldn’t look away from the words on the page.

Tom exhaled slowly, his anger cooling into something else... 
Curiosity. Interest.

Maybe he could use this to change his fate somehow. It’s best to think things through first before he does anything rash. 

If what she said was true, then whoever this woman was—his supposed wife—she couldn’t have been an ordinary witch.

Anyone who could reach across time and death to write to him wasn’t normal by any measure. Anyone who could defeat him in a duel wouldn’t be a nobody.

If Tom Marvolo Riddle were ever to be wed to anyone, it wouldn’t be some normal woman one could easily find anywhere else.

His bride would be someone who defied the laws of the world like he could. 

Someone powerful. Someone born to stand apart from the rest. Maybe even unnatural. But never ordinary.

It would be somebody who’s exactly like Tom.

Not just an anomaly.

Extraordinary.