When Nico cut Voldemort in half, something ugly and fragile snapped.
The main soul chunk screamed, scattered, and got eaten by horny lightning slime.
The rest of the soul, the pieces glued into jewelry and junk, flared.
Far away, locked in a warded drawer in Malfoy Manor, a plain black diary twitched.
Then it bled.
A thin trickle of ink seeped out from between its pages, soaking into the bottom of a stack of documents Lucius Malfoy had definitely never read but kept because they were expensive.
The ink crawled.
The drawer warmed.
Lucius noticed.
Not because fate whispered to him.
Because the furniture was misbehaving.
---
He was in his study, trying to pretend the weird lurch in his Dark Mark earlier was just a side effect of being bound to an egomaniac, when the bottom drawer of his desk clicked open on its own.
He froze.
Furniture did not open itself in Malfoy Manor without permission.
He set his quill down with exaggerated calm and walked over.
The drawer was open just a finger's width.
A blot of black was slowly spreading under the papers.
Lucius' eye twitched.
He pulled the drawer fully open.
The ink was oozing from the edge of a familiar battered notebook, its pages clamped shut, cover trembling like something inside was trying to breathe.
Lucius stared.
"…That's new," he muttered.
He picked the diary up carefully, flicked his wand to clean the ink stain, then set the book on top of the desk.
It shivered faintly in his hand.
He didn't like that.
He also didn't like not knowing why it was doing it.
Curiosity and control issues shoved caution aside.
He opened it.
---
The inside was not blank anymore.
Across the first page, jagged black lines had written themselves in cramped handwriting that was not his.
> WHAT HAPPENED.
The words were a little shaky. Not dramatic and composed. Raw.
Lucius sat slowly.
He smoothed his features into polite interest. "You tell me," he said under his breath.
He took up a quill and wrote, just below:
> To whom am I speaking?
The ink on the page blurred.
New letters formed with more precision this time, like the act of writing calmed whoever was inside.
> Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Who are you.
Not Lord. Not Voldemort. Just Tom.
Lucius frowned, very slightly.
He knew the name. He'd seen it in old, carefully restricted files. Brilliant Hogwarts student. Model boy. Went nowhere, officially.
Unofficially: disappeared into whatever his Lord had become.
Lucius dipped the quill again.
> Lucius Malfoy.
I am a… supporter of your future self.
Tiny pause on future.
The diary did not respond immediately. Then, slowly:
> Future.
How far.
Lucius considered how much to say.
> He is known as the Dark Lord.
Your followers carry his Mark.
I am one of them.
Ink pooled at the center of the page, then spiraled outward like a small, controlled explosion.
> So he did it.
Good.
That enthusiasm was deeply unpleasant.
Lucius kept going. He couldn't help himself.
> Something… flickered.
Some disruption.
The Mark stuttered.
Then this book woke up.
This time the reply took longer.
> I felt him.
Then I didn't.
Something broke.
No drama, no "NOOOO." Just a clinical observation that his other self had probably just been murdered horribly.
Then:
> If he fell, the Horcruxes stayed.
I am one of them.
I am not supposed to wake up alone.
Lucius swallowed.
"Comforting," he muttered.
Ink scraped shakily.
> You opened me.
You are marked.
That means you are his.
> For now, yes, Lucius wrote.
> Then you are useful.
Lucius stared at that last line for a long moment, not sure whether to be offended or flattered.
"Charming," he said.
He started to write a measured response about loyalty and opportunities, but the pen jerked in his hand as the words on the page overrode his.
The diary wrote over his incomplete sentence.
> I need to know what happened.
I need to know what I became.
I need eyes.
Lucius' breath slowed.
The feeling that he was the one interviewing the book flipped.
"You are a fragment," he said quietly to the page. "A memory. A…backup."
Ink flickered like restrained impatience.
> A fragment. Yes.
A complete mind. Also yes.
I can think. I can plan.
I am not content to rot on a shelf.
Lucius' fingers tightened on the quill.
He knew arrogance when he saw it. He usually liked it better when it was his.
> What do you require? he wrote.
The answer was very simple.
> A better vantage point.
Lucius blinked. "What does that even–"
Words still forming:
> Your Lord never trusted anyone enough to tell them everything.
But he trusted himself.
I am him before he had everything.
I want to see what he built.
I want to see how he failed.
The last word was written with precise, vicious satisfaction.
Lucius read it twice.
"You're planning to… audit him," he said. "From beyond the page."
> Call it that.
You want him back.
I want to know what I am picking up if I help.
We can agree: we both need me out of this book.
Lucius' mind went straight to if I help revive him, he owes me.
Greedy, short-sighted, suicidal.
Classic Malfoy.
He wrote, pulse ticking up:
> Is that possible?
The ink scratched.
> With enough magic.
With a body.
With a conduit.
> A conduit, Lucius wrote slowly, is…?
> Someone close to him.
Someone carrying his Mark.
Someone ambitious enough to open cursed objects alone.
Lucius' eyes narrowed.
"That sounds very specific," he said.
> It is.
The page warmed under his hand.
Not hot. Just… aware.
> You are already touching the book.
That is enough.
Lucius froze, realizing his fingers had rested on the margin while he read.
The paper felt strange now. Not like paper. Like something thin and alive stretched too tight.
A small, rational part of his brain whispered: Stop.
It was outvoted.
> What would you gain? Lucius asked, still playing for control.
> A body, Riddle wrote.
What would you gain?
Lucius didn't even have to think.
> A Dark Lord who owes me personally.
Information the others don't have.
Favor.
> Power, the diary translated neatly.
The chance to be closer than the rest.
You want proximity.
Lucius could almost hear the amusement behind that last part.
He wrote:
> Yes.
The reply came back at once.
> Good.
Then lend me your hand.
Lucius actually laughed.
"You make it sound like a dance," he said.
> It is.
We both step.
We both change.
He hesitated. Just for a second.
Then he set his palm fully across the page.
It was such a small gesture for what followed.
---
The cold hit instantly.
Like plunging his hand into black ice.
Lucius' breath caught.
"Enough," he said automatically, as the chill crawled up his wrist. "Gently."
The diary was not listening.
Veins of ink shot out from under his skin where it touched the page, spiderwebbing up his palm, over his knuckles, like someone was writing words inside his flesh.
The pull started.
Not blood this time. Not just magic.
Something deeper.
Lucius' spine stiffened.
His wand hand twitched toward his pocket, but his arm wouldn't obey.
His heart kicked harder to keep up with whatever was being stolen; the beat turned erratic.
"You said–" he managed.
The words on the page blurred, then steadied.
> I said we both change.
I did not say we change equally.
The siphon yanked.
He felt his magic pour out of him, lines he'd spent decades refining, grinding away his mediocrity until only razor edges stayed.
They snapped, fed to paper.
His vision pulsed black at the edges.
He opened his mouth to scream.
Only a rough exhale came out.
---
The diary swelled, edges warping like it was breathing too hard.
Pages flipped on their own, ink pouring from line to line, pooling and folding into itself, gathering at the center like something enormous trying to stand up in very tight clothes.
Lucius sagged in his chair, eyes glazing.
His thoughts slowed, tangled.
Closer than the rest, he'd thought.
Special.
The last lucid flicker in his mind registered that he no longer felt the Dark Mark on his arm.
Then he didn't feel anything.
Lucius Malfoy's head dropped forward.
Dead.
His body sat propped perfectly upright by habit.
His hand stayed fused to the diary cover, skin colorless and thin.
---
The book convulsed one final time.
Then it split.
Ink and light and stolen life rushed together and up.
Words ripped off the page, spooling into the air, wrapping around an invisible skeleton.
They hardened into lines of bone and then flesh.
A thin, barefoot boy dropped onto the desk with a thud.
He landed in a crouch on the scattered papers, hands catching on either side of the diary.
Dark hair, neatly parted. Schoolboy build. Long fingers.
Eyes closed.
He inhaled sharply.
Then opened them.
Not snake red.
Not yet.
Dark brown shading impossibly toward red at the edges.
Tom Marvolo Riddle looked about sixteen.
He looked around.
His last clear memory in this fragment was ink, a bathroom, a dying girl trying to scream through flooding tears, a basilisk sliding away into the pipes.
Then black.
Now: an older man dead in a chair, a rich room, strange wards, old magic, expensive everything.
Tom blinked once.
Then he did what he always did with shocking new information: he filed it very quickly and then started prying.
He straightened slowly, standing on the desk in bare feet, ignoring Lucius' corpse entirely for the moment.
He flexed his fingers.
They worked.
He took a breath.
It hurt a little. Old smoke. Magic. But it was a breath.
"Well," he said softly. His younger voice was smoother than his future self's, less hiss, more charm. "That… was more literal than I expected."
He hopped down from the desk.
His bare heel knocked into Lucius' dropped wand. He picked it up, weighing it. The foreign wood and core tasted all wrong in his grip but the magic flowed.
Adequate.
His gaze slid to the corpse finally.
He studied the face. Registered the fine robes, the cane on the floor, the signet ring on cooling fingers.
"Malfoy," he said, recognizing the features from school, from gossip, from bloodlines he'd memorized like prayers. "You aged badly."
No answer, obviously.
Tom looked past him to the faint, burned-in sensation of something else that had recently broken.
Something bigger.
He closed his eyes, testing the connection.
There. Faint. Distant. The other pieces of him, lodged in objects. Ring. Locket. Cup.
And the absence.
Whatever the main self had been, wherever he'd taken their shared ambition, that had just been forcibly stopped.
He felt the echo like a tooth ripped out of a jaw he'd never seen.
A muscle in his cheek twitched.
"Sloppy," he said under his breath. "You got careless."
He looked back down at Lucius.
"Thank you," he added mildly. "It's good to know some wizards are still willing to die for me on sight."
He flicked the wand lazily.
"Incendio."
Flames leapt up around the chair, licking at robe and hair and the pile of papers Lucius had never filed.
Tom watched the fire for a heartbeat, then turned to the diary.
It lay open, pages mostly blank where the ink had peeled itself out to build him, with faint shadow-writing left sunk in the fibers.
He put a hand on it.
The connection was still there. He was the diary and the boy and the distant horcruxes, all at once, overlapping.
"Not going back in there," he told it. "But you did well."
The book didn't answer.
He snapped it shut, tucked it under his arm. It still felt useful.
The fire spread.
Tom walked through the smoke to the fireplace, bare feet silent on Malfoy marble.
He tossed a pinch of Floo powder, speaking the name of a forgotten safe spot he'd prepared when he was just a talented little monster planning for a very bright, very bloody future.
Green flame whooshed up.
He stepped in.
"Someone killed my future," he said quietly to himself as the fire took him. "Someone wore my face. Someone touched my followers."
His mouth curved.
"I want to meet them."
He vanished.
Behind him, Lucius Malfoy burned in his own study, killed not by destiny, not by loyalty, but by the most predictable thing in the world:
He saw a cursed object glitching and thought, this is my chance.
The diary disagreed.
It was Tom's chance.
And now there was a very annoyed, very sharp sixteen-year-old Dark Lord prototype walking around in a world that thought he was a middle-aged snake who'd just died.
Nico hadn't met him yet.
But the bill was coming.