Chapter Text
Well Before
“The one with the power to conquer the Dark Lord will rise,
born to a line cloaked by death, to a father of thrice seven years,
and the Dark Lord will mark him as an equal,
for he will have power he knows not,
and both must fall at the hand of the other
for each one’s heart shall keep the other’s beating.”
Gellert Grindelwald blinked, shaking off the trance. “Sorry, what was I saying?”
Having grabbed a quill the moment the prophecy began, Albus Dumbledore recounted it faithfully, word for word. As he spoke of a family line “cloaked by death,” the two youths shared a conspiratorial smile.
Then Albus reviewed the words with a slight frown. “But who could this Dark Lord be?”
Hair flecked gold by the summer sun, Gellert raised his hookah to his lips and took a lazy puff. “I’m sure I couldn’t imagine.”
After
“Look, I ought to be going after Tom Riddle even if no one else will. Especially if no one else will. As long as it takes to get him.”
Proclamation complete, Harry (wayward Junior Auror) does his best not to quail under his boss’s glare of death. He’s gotten quite familiar with Auror Zhang’s displeasure, the look that means he ought to still be in first-year field training classes right now. It also means he ought to be on probation for his disobedience last weekend, when he ignored direct orders from his superior to go home for two days and take a damn break. He would be on probation if he was anyone else, in any other year.
But he’s the boy who lived, the man who killed the Dark Lord, and the Ministry needs every hand on deck in the chaos after Grindelwald’s death. No one’s going to kick him out for the crime of getting all his assignments done early and then working overtime. The rest of the office is thankful he’s so dedicated to tying up every loose end in the war.
And if his focus on Riddle tends towards the obsessive, it’s because they all want to forget him entirely, and he simply can’t let that happen.
Out of equal parts concern and obligation, Zhang turns her sternest look on him and the files he’s trying to show her, the ones he spent all weekend gathering. “Tom Riddle was underage when he was recruited. He wasn’t a Dark Lord, no matter what he might’ve told you. Compared to Grindelwald’s real soldiers …“ She waves at the wall behind them, covered with the jeering portraits of their Most Wanted targets. “Your Tom was barely out of diapers.”
“That’s only because he was above them all! He practically admitted he was calling the shots …”
“Potter.” She claps a hand on his shoulder. “Promise me you won’t go out of bounds with the Riddle case, alright?”
“… Alright,” Harry says after a few moments.
The feverish look melts from his eyes, replaced by weary resignation. Across the table Zhang breathes a sigh of relief, clearly certain that’s the end of that.
That’s not the end of that.
Harry will solemnly swear, on any sacrament you want, that Tom Riddle is up to no good. That’s the safest bet in his world, even if he can’t prove it right now. All the signs are there. The Ministry’s surveilling owls and collected copies of multiple coded letters, passing back and forth between Riddle and the darkest potioneers in the business, known for crafting poisons and plagues. Then Riddle got spotted up in Scandinavia, near the workshop of a mind-magic specialist expelled from Durmstrang twenty years before Grindelwald made it fashionable. Throw in the rumors out of Albania six months back, and the horribly suspicious silence ever since, and Harry’s positive the world’s got another Dark Lord on its hands.
And if the Ministry’s too busy chasing down hundreds of more substantial leads to catch one runaway nineteen-year-old, Harry will do the job for them.
With a sigh he drops into his chair to face off with a formidably thick book on wandlore, borrowed with considerable effort from the Unspeakables’ archives. He’s searching up the Elder Wand now. It’s one of the fancier treasures Tom pilfered that night at Nurmengard, and the legends claim it’s capable of unmatched horror and mass destruction. If another Dark Lord’s going to explode from the edges of society brandishing a stick of doom, Harry ought to know exactly how it works. He reads all about its blood-soaked history, about an intricate chain of murders committed for the sake of mastery ...
“Oi, Harry!” Ron’s face pops up suddenly in the Floo.
Harry glances at the clock to find it’s already half past nine. His heart sinks.
“Ginny and Mum drew up three new guest lists today, but they need you there for the final call, and apparently all the prices are shooting up every day so Mum’s going spare ..."
“Right, right, I must’ve lost track of time.” Again. “Let me just …”
He scrawls a note, asking the Unspeakables’ librarian not to collect the wandlore book for another day, and slaps it atop the cover. Then he gathers his things and jumps into the fireplace, scattering Floo powder all over in his haste. There’s already a fine layer of glitter caked into the grout. It’s hardly the first time he’s rushed out late, realizing a wedding appointment had entirely slipped his mind.
When Harry returns to the office in the morning, the book’s disappeared.
Nurmengard
Nurmengard had moving staircases. As Harry hurled himself across the gap onto a landing, down a drafty portrait-lined corridor and past a suit of clanking armor, he found himself undeniably reminded of Hogwarts.
When he died here, at least he could pretend it was Hogwarts.
He ran from Grindelwald. Invisibility Cloak flapping around his feet, he ran through the halls, through one ghastly dungeon after another, losing himself in the labyrinth, only to turn the corner and find Grindelwald waiting for him. With one flourish of the Elder Wand, black flames walled them in, blocking off both ends of the corridor.
“So you must fall, and I with you,” Grindelwald remarked, sounding more curious than anything else. Despite the cloak, he stared unerringly into Harry’s eyes. “A strange fate to be sure ..."
Harry threw out a cutting curse to the heart, only to have it batted away.
“I would dismiss this prophecy entirely if anyone but I made it.” Grindelwald continued his monologue as if uninterrupted. “You are, I’m sure, in possession of many admirable qualities. But Albus himself would struggle in a duel at this level, if we could still raise our wands against each other. Your cloak may shield you for a time, but it will be mine soon enough. What other secret weapon do you have, I wonder, that you could ever dream of conquering me?”
For an instant, the black flames behind Grindelwald parted, and Tom Riddle slipped inside, as quiet and self-assured as Harry ever remembered him. His eyes met Harry’s for just one moment and then flickered back attentively to his Lord.
For his part, Grindelwald acknowledged him with an elegant half-bow. “Mr. Riddle. I understand the two of you have met.”
“Once or twice,” Riddle replied, his voice sharp with humor even as his face remained expressionless.
Grindelwald turned back to Harry, his brilliant teal overcoat billowing as he did. “I am afraid my Sight must have erred this one time. Now that Mr. Riddle is here, I’m quite sure only one of us must die tonight.”
New fury clogged Harry’s throat, pressing hard against his scar. Fury at Grindelwald, who sent his right-hand woman to murder him as an infant. Fury at Riddle, who seemed to have at last replaced her. It was Grindelwald who was making death threats, all grand gestures and bright colours and pureblood ease. Yet Riddle seemed equally frightening, small and quiet and dressed in plain black, waiting like a shadow behind him.
Grinning, Grindelwald lifted the Elder Wand.
After
Draco Malfoy (pureblood scion, former Slytherin sixth-year, one of the only survivors of Riddle’s little jaunt out of school and into open warfare) turns himself in, spilling his guts in his plea for amnesty. His information is vague and outdated, but frightening nonetheless. He warns of a dark future. He warns of a new Dark Lord: three syllables that force a shiver through Harry, despite the warmth of his morning coffee.
He hasn’t heard anything from Riddle in half a year though. No one has. There’s a possibility that Harry dismisses out of hand, that Tom Riddle died quietly when no one was looking, already lost forever to the shadows.
One section of Malfoy’s testimony is blacked out in the Daily Prophet’s version. Classified.
“Sorry, love.” Harry glances at his living room fireplace, where Ginny’s just appeared with a basket of Mrs. Weasley’s rolls. Too late, he remembers they had plans to share breakfast today. “Have to head in early.”
She forgives him easily, opting to instead head in early to the Quidditch pitch. With a couple rolls stuffed in his pockets, he dashes to work to grab the Aurors’ unredacted copy of the interview. He hones right in on the secret part.
On the part where Malfoy whispers of Horcruxes.
“Strangest signature of my career, that was.” Auror Morgan breaks into Harry’s reverie, storming into the office with grand angry clomps.
“But it just didn’t match any Dark spell,” her trainee says, following closely on her footsteps, looking exhausted after a night shift. “It doesn’t match any known spell at all, not unless I really bungled those detection charms …”
“You did fine, it must’ve been accidental magic,” a third Auror assures her. “All instinct, no technique to track. Just a child getting spooked by those Muggles fighting. We’d better tell that new team, their Trace doesn’t work as well as they’re claiming.”
“It can’t just be that,” Morgan exclaims. “How could the Trace miss that? And what child could do a thing like that in the first place?”
“Sorry,” Harry cuts in, walking over to their desks with the testimony still in his hands. “What happened to you all?”
“Nothing worth your time, to be honest,” Morgan replies. “Can’t imagine it’s war-related.”
Harry shrugs. “I could use a break from … all that.”
She examines him for a few seconds, probably judging his Hippogriff-nest hair and undereye circles like Zhang always does.
“That’s fair.” She pulls out a charmed quill, and it hovers over an empty office form, waiting to record her report on the incident. “East End of London,” she dictates, “near the docks, around 2am. Looks like a brawl broke out with a bunch of drunk Muggles: mostly fists, at least one knife in there. Then a chunk of road blew up and threw everyone apart. There’s a fifteen-foot hole in the street right now. Muggle authorities are investigating it as a gas leak, but there’s heavy magic residue all over the site.” She frowns at whatever her quill’s written. “Really heavy. But not properly formed.”
The quill scratches out its prior sentence and rewrites it.
Harry winces. “How many deaths?”
Her trainee answers, “None so far. Which might be more evidence this was accidental, no malice at all …”
“But,” Morgan says sharply, lax quill jerking to attention again, “we’ve got five Muggles in the hospital. They don’t suspect it’s magic. Head injuries and intoxication made the collected memories useless.”
She pulls out a small vial, preserving the eyewitness memories.
Harry eyes the silver threads inside, which seem unusually short and dim. “Do they remember what the argument was about?”
“They barely remember their own names,” Morgan sighs. “Might’ve just been angry drunks picking a fight.”
“There’s an establishment nearby,” her trainee pipes up, now referencing an annotated magical map of Muggle London, “where men are known to court other men. That’s something Muggles might not have been happy with, isn’t it?”
Harry winces harder, suddenly reminded he’s the only non-pureblood in the group. “Yeah, that’s putting it lightly.”
Morgan pushes the vial of memories across her desk, towards Harry. “Zhang’ll have my head for this … but they’re yours, if you feel like checking them out.”
Harry looks down at the testimony he’s still holding. As part of his Auror training, he read a paragraph or two about Horcruxes, but that’s not enough for him to know how they work, really. Riddle’s always been ten steps ahead of him, and it’s not nearly enough for Harry to catch up. He’s already got more than enough to research.
But the tattered silver threads call him anyway.
He slips the vial into his pocket, just as his boss sweeps into the room. “I’ll do that.”
“Please tell me you’ll get out of the office by eight tonight,” Auror Zhang tells him that night, leaning close to his chair and lowering her voice. “You’re the brightest star this team has seen in years, it’d be a tragedy for you to burn out.”
“I’ll do that.”
“And I’ll make Morgan tell me, if you’re still here when she comes in.”
Harry rolls his eyes and repeats his promise.
By the time she’s left the office, he’s spotted the loophole. He can work just fine outside the office, especially if he can find something in the field worth investigating. Nothing too dangerous, nothing that he shouldn’t look at alone.
Feeling awfully like a Slytherin, he plucks the memory vial from his pocket and tips its frayed strands into the office Pensieve. Immediately he’s pitched forward, falling straight into a poorly lit scene from last night. Everything’s unstable and hazy (either because of the alcohol or because of the concussions, or both), but he hears raised voices, Cockney accents that blur together …
Until one voice cuts through them, posh and forceful and somehow sharper than the rest. Harry can’t make out a single word, but his heart races at the sound, races far ahead of his head. In the corner of his eye he sees a tall, lithe figure in what Muggles would consider an unfashionably loose overcoat. The man’s features are veiled by shadow, impossible to hold onto no matter how Harry squints. The only thing that’s clear is the knife in his hands, flashing about as a threat.
The Pensieve flings Harry back out. He stumbles backwards, unusually destabilized, and collapses briefly in someone else’s chair.
After failing to calm his breathing for several minutes, he heads to the crime scene.
Harry’s got no evidence to speak of. Nothing concrete, nothing he could bring to his superiors. Morgan ultimately labeled this case as an excessive bit of underage magic, not worth investigating, and all the evidence says she’s right.
He circles the site, now blocked off by Muggle workmen attempting repairs. It’s a gaping chasm, cutting off traffic on both sides of what was once a well-used road. A quick detection charm confirms what Morgan had said. There’s heavy ambient magic still lingering from a burst of accidental spellwork: an impressive but undoubtedly messy show of power. At first the signature looks raw and unrefined, like an untrained child’s magic running entirely wild. But some peaks seem abruptly clipped off, as if there are unnatural constraints at play. The magic just feels stunted, somehow.
Taking a detour down a couple other roads, Harry circles back to the other side of the chasm. From there he tries following the magic’s trail, but it peters out within a block. He redoubles the wards shielding him from Muggle notice and activates a Sneakoscope, only to have it fling itself off his palm into the street, spinning at top speed with a deafening whistle. Apparently, he’s standing in a den of Muggle deception and villainy. After sprinting to recapture it, he swaps it for a different Dark Detector, tuned specifically to signs of dangerous magic.
Watching it carefully, he begins a sweep of the surrounding area. It remains stubbornly quiet. He wanders the streets, eyes peeled for trouble. After half an hour, he puts up another ward to filter out the rather unpleasant air pollution.
It’s a noisy neighborhood. It’s crowded, and full of life even after night falls. All around Harry hears people greeting each other, and hollering at each other, and coughing on each other in the thick smog. They ignore him, and he sizes them up and ignores all of them, searching for any bit of magic…
A blood-curdling shriek pierces the air, coming from a nearby block of flats. It’s followed by a bout of cursing (the non-magical kind) from an open second-story window. Harry casts a spell for better eavesdropping.
“One of his ‘pets’ got out again,” a woman cries. “Snakes in the plumbing? Makes me miss the rats!”
Before he knows it, Harry’s hurled himself inside the building. His Dark Detector’s still silent, so he stows it away and knocks on the woman’s door. He knocks again and waits through a series of crashes until a woman flings it open, pale and panting hard.
“I heard something about a snake?”
She nods, chest still heaving from terror. “That Riddance, or whatever his name is, keeps a bunch of them in the room above me. He swears they’re under his control, but why do I keep finding them in my kitchen sink, hm?”
He talks her down from full-blown panic and talks her into showing him the snake in question. Sure enough, there’s a brilliant green-and-black snake coiled up in the kitchen sink, apparently sleepy and content. The woman thanks him profusely as he pulls on a set of protective gloves (dragon-hide, though he tells her they’re just regular embossed leather) and coaxes it into a large copper pot. Promising to return it as soon as he can, he exits her flat again and heads upstairs, to “Riddance.”
To Riddle.
Riddle must live in this building. It’s the only thing that could make sense, between the extraordinary levels of magic, the half-dead Muggles, and the multiple snakes. It also makes no sense at all. The magical signature had seemed immature, yet Riddle’s magical powers had always been precocious. The signature had also seemed constrained, yet Riddle prided himself on acting freely, exactly the way he wanted, taking orders from only Grindelwald until he didn’t do even that. And the man in the memory had wielded a knife in battle, yet Riddle held himself far above anything so Muggle. He’d never stoop so low.
(Especially not now. By all accounts, Tom Riddle stole all the choicest weapons in Nurmengard’s collapsing armoury for himself.)
Harry approaches the door, keeping a careful hold on the pot as he does. His Dark Detector remains stubbornly quiet, which means Riddle’s invented a whole new class of anti-Auror spells to hide his sinister doings, and Harry throws up every kind of shield he can think of. Then he whispers “alohamora” and braces for incoming fire.
Instead, the lock clicks right open.
For several minutes, he waits to be shot in the face, all the while absent-mindedly scratching an itch on the back of one hand. The longer he stays safe, the more convinced he gets that he’s walked into a deadly ambush. There’s got to be a nasty curse on the lock, just waiting for him to let down his guard so it can lop off his head.
Still alive several minutes later, he takes a tentative step forward and opens the door with a wave of his wand. Though it creaks ominously, it swings open, exposing what seems at first like a small, empty, ordinary Muggle flat. A closer look breaks that illusion. There’s an iron cauldron bubbling in the kitchen. Snakes in various shades lounge on the kitchen counter, swiveling their heads to hiss at him. There’s a tin of Eeylops Owl Treats on the windowsill.
The Elder Wand’s casually lying on the bedside table.
A gnat flies out the door, circling Harry’s head. An equally irritating ethical concern buzzes into his awareness. Officially speaking, the Aurors gave up their wartime powers last month, and so he can’t enter a wizard’s residence without permission, a warrant, or evidence of imminent danger to innocents. Unfortunately, he has no evidence that Riddle’s rogue snake is actually venomous, and he never got a warrant for this address because Riddle was untrackable, totally lost to him until only a few moments ago.
But if he leaves to get a warrant, Riddle will slip through his fingers again like so much sand. It’s simply unacceptable.
With a few butterflies in his stomach, Harry reconciles himself to the only good option. He has to continue this search and find something thoroughly incriminating, the seeds of Riddle’s next evil plan, the proof of “imminent danger to innocents.” He’ll find it, and he’ll lie through his teeth and pretend he knew about it before beginning his search. It’ll be his word against the new Dark Lord’s. He won’t be beaten, no matter how much Slytherin charisma Riddle brings to bear.
Cautiously, he slides one foot over the threshold onto the unvarnished softwood. It’s old and pitted, and it’s stained with what looks to be spilled dragon liver juice. Only that doesn’t make sense; Riddle kept his potions station obsessively neat in school. Next he notices that the cauldron’s on the stove. The lit stove. It’s relying on Muggle gas lines for heat, though any potioneer worth their salt lights their own fires with magic, maintaining rigorous control over the temperature.
Harry tips the pot he’s holding, and the serpent slides onto the floor, moving steadily towards a dish containing several dead rats. The snakes seem well-supplied. As far as human food goes, there’s a few cans, a bag of fresh carrots, and some stale bread. When he checks, the cabinets turn out to be full of potion ingredients instead.
Harry plunges deeper. Beyond the kitchen is the sleeping area, all in one cramped room, made more cramped by the junk littered everywhere. Muggle clothes lie in baskets, some garments jumbled, the rest folded with just enough imprecision that they must’ve been handled by hand. Between them are treasure chests sealed with containment charms and stinking of Dark Magic; the Dark Detector finally chirps with concern as one box rattles at his feet. Muggle and magical books are lumped together, stacked in precarious piles. A few lie open on the unmade bed; they all show rather gruesome views of human anatomy, which is the first unsurprising thing about this whole night.
The whole flat hangs in a state of barely-controlled chaos. Harry wonders if someone else already tore this place apart before he even got here, some careless thief or murderer, because Riddle wouldn’t willingly accept any of this. Tom Riddle was nothing if not impeccably put-together at all times.
(Not all times. He wasn’t that first day on the train, or that night on the seventh floor of Hogwarts that Harry tries not to think about. Riddle wasn’t put-together for one instant later on, falling into the belly of an entirely different castle. With a firm push, Harry puts all that from his mind.)
Warily, he picks his way towards the Elder Wand, only to be stopped by rows upon rows of protective runes, etched into the wood of the nightstand. He scans the room again and sees another row of runes cut into the ceiling. He recognizes this formula. It’s taught to all Aurors as a potent but unconventional defense mechanism, a back up way to protect oneself without using a wand or expending much energy. The trouble is that the runes are finicky, prone to failing unless they were written just so.
“Enemies who trespass here, choke.”
A simple phrase. Simpler than he’d expect from Riddle, but it ought to do the job. Harry lets out a long exhale, grateful that there must’ve been one line out of place somewhere. That error saved him from dying, windpipe clogged with his own saliva.
Not that he can spot the mistake. The runes were carved neatly by a perfectly steady hand, cutting straight through to the fluffy blue asbestos.
He bends down to inspect the unconventional but equally neat runes surrounding the Elder Wand. One seems strangely familiar, a compound rune built around the sign of the Hydra; he can’t quite place where he knows it from. After a moment he begins copying the whole set of runes onto a separate piece of parchment, because the Auror Office needs to know what twisted formula Riddle’s invented ...
“Make yourself at home, please.”
Harry whirls about, wand extended, heartbeat pounding, and there he is. Tom Riddle stands squarely in the center of the doorway, entirely alive, dressed in Muggle clothes but wearing a smirk no pureblood could match. His wand is nowhere to be seen. Yet his voice drips sarcasm like a basilisk’s fangs drip poison, and for an instant Harry is frozen, suspended by the mere sight of him.
He swiftly recovers. “Where are the rest of Grindelwald’s Acolytes? Are they all following you now?”
Riddle lifts an eyebrow, still not moving to draw his wand. “Where’s your warrant?”
Against his will, Harry flushes. “I’ll have a warrant before you can blink.”
“Will you? The Wizengamot just granted a full pardon today, to anyone who joined the cause at Hogwarts while underage,” he retorts. “After all, it wouldn’t do to show favoritism to a Malfoy.”
Harry can’t confirm or deny it; he’d been paying attention to the substance of Malfoy’s testimony, not the legal posturing that followed it. But the heavy irony in Riddle’s voice rings true.
So Harry grabs for firmer ground. “This ‘Morsmordre’ spell I keep hearing about, is it really for signaling your army? How many thousands have you got, so far? Did you keep all of Grindelwald’s people? Just ascend to his same throne?”
“I don’t know what Dark wizard you’ve been tracking,” Riddle says smoothly, the sarcasm mellowing to something even more treacherous, “but he sounds thoroughly marvelous.”
In two years, nothing’s changed between them. With just a few words Riddle’s slipped entirely under his skin. Harry hates it.
He doesn’t utter a jinx, not yet, because they’re in the middle of the East End and Riddle hasn’t struck first and Zhang’ll have his head if he starts a duel here. It was clever of Riddle to pick this spot, and clever of him to stand there without making a single threatening move, without giving Harry the slightest pretext for attacking. Every move’s been calculated by a mastermind.
“I know everything you’re up to,” Harry spits.
“You know nothing that matters,” Riddle replies, infuriatingly even-toned.
“How many Horcruxes have you made?”
“None.”
At least he didn’t bother pretending to have never heard of Horcruxes at all. Harry’s almost flattered.
He imbues his retort with all the sarcasm he’s got. “Oh, no. You’ve probably got all seven corpses under your belt already. Just a benefit of serving the ‘greater good,’ right, my Lord?”
Riddle’s eyes flash, almost red for just a moment, and he steps into the room. Harry hastens back on instinct, colliding with the side of the bed.
“Right,” Riddle chuckles, even as he reaches back and manually pulls the door shut. Still laughing and laughing without a hint of humor, he gestures at the chaos around them. “Welcome to my Nurmengard. This is undoubtedly how a burgeoning Dark Lord set on immortality would choose to live. Fantastic detective work, Potter, the Ministry would fall without you.”
With every poisonous jibe he saunters closer. Despite the fact that he has a wand out and Riddle doesn’t, Harry starts to feel strangely cornered.
“Why’d you attack all those Muggles?” he demands.
“Self-defense.”
“You fractured their skulls!”
“Those barbarians started it,” Riddle snaps, and for one moment the anger in his eyes flares. “They always do.” He breaks off to stifle a cough with his elbow and then resumes his speech in a more measured manner, rattling off facts with as much passion as Professor Binns. “Of course it’s well-established that you hate me, you won’t leave me alone until we’ve carved out each other’s hearts, you’ll never want me as anything but a corpse, and so on. For legal purposes though, what do you really have on me?”
“I have so much on you,” Harry yells.
He’s aware he’s the only one yelling. Tom Riddle sounds insultingly calm and reasonable, all hidden blades and carefully measured rage. Harry’s the one who’s flared like Fiendfyre meeting fresh air, his whole body set on edge by Riddle’s presence. He waits for Riddle to contradict him, or to gloat because Harry can’t prove anything criminal in a court of law.
Instead Riddle just stares at him, teeth worrying his lower lip. For one moment, his boundless blustering confidence seems shaken.
“You don’t know what you have on me,” he finally whispers, almost a hiss. “You can’t even begin to imagine it.”
“I’m sure I can’t. How could I comprehend the ambitions of Europe’s latest Dark Lord?”
Harry isn’t sure when he and Riddle got into each other’s faces, but they have, and Harry’s brain starts cataloguing the finer details. Riddle’s hair remains locked in its old gelled prison, carefully brushed back except for the one curl that drops across the left side of his face, too artful to be accidental. But otherwise Riddle’s aged in the past two years. He looks older and a little worn-down, not unlike the flat around him.
Riddle opens his mouth for a cutting retort and ends up coughing instead, recoiling and pulling a handkerchief out to cover his mouth. It’s monogrammed with the initials “TMR." In gold, of course.
“Are you ill?” Harry says, out of a mix of surprise and obligation.
“Terminal heart disease,” Riddle instantly quips back, shoving the handkerchief back in his pocket. “Either arrest me or get out of my life.”
“Or …”
“Or I’ll have you arrested for breaking and entering. Go back to your office and your friends and your precious fiancée.” He spits each word like it tastes foul on his tongue. “And keep your mouth shut about seeing me. If you know what’s good for you, Potter, you’ll let me alone.”
Harry bristles at the threat, but Riddle’s gotten the moral high ground for once in his life. Legally speaking, Harry’s the one who shouldn’t be here, and Riddle’s giving him nothing to work with, no concrete grounds for suspicion. The broke Muggle act isn’t remotely convincing, it must be a cover for some new evil plot, but Harry can’t prove it just yet.
And he won’t ever be able to prove it, not if Riddle gets him thrown off the Auror force first.
“Fine.” Harry surrenders through gritted teeth. “Don’t let your snakes bite me on the way out.”
“I’ll consider it.”
Carefully avoiding the adder that’s now slithered up to give him a death stare, Harry stalks out of Riddle’s tiny flat, spelling the door open with a bang.
“Give my love to Miss Weasley” are the last words he hears, right before he Apparates into thin air.