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The first wizarding house Tom Riddle ever visited was Grimmauld Place.
He was invited by his classmate Orion over the Christmas holidays during his fourth year. By then, Tom was accustomed to the particular sentience Hogwarts possessed—the moving staircases, secret passageways, and his favourite discovery: a room containing mountains of lost and forgotten treasures.
But during those weeks with Orion and his family, Tom learned that magical homes had more personal quirks.
As an invited guest, the house was kind to him. The blankets on his bed were warmed to his preferred temperature. The robes he wished to wear drifted from the wardrobe, perfectly pressed. In the vast library, he only had to think of a subject, and stacks of relevant books would come flying toward him.
The orphanage was drab and gloomy. His Slytherin dormitory was comfortable—but no more comfortable for him than for anyone else.
Tom longed to live in a place like Grimmauld one day—somewhere that felt truly his.
As much as he dreamed of living in a home like it, Tom never actually expected to move into Grimmauld someday.
Then again, he had also never expected to become a fragment of a soul trapped inside a ring, be freed by a boy prophesied to destroy him, fall in love with that same boy, and ultimately assist him in killing an older version of himself.
So, really, the house was pretty mundane in the grand scheme of what Tom had been through over the past few years.
Tom and Harry stood at the front door, facing peeling emerald paint, a serpent-shaped knocker, and the number: 12.
“I haven't been in here in ages,” Harry confessed. “I don't know what sort of state it'll be in.”
As the heir to the House of Black, Harry’s touch was enough for the door to open.
When Tom stepped forward, he promptly found himself lifted clean off his feet.
“What are you doing?” Tom demanded, cheeks burning.
“It's tradition,” Harry said, settling him into a bridal carry. “I'm supposed to carry you over the threshold.”
“I'm not your wife,” Tom grumbled, but only half-heartedly. Truthfully, he enjoyed the reminder of just how strong Harry was.
Before Tom’s mind could start examining all the ways Harry could put that strength to use in their new bedroom—he was gently lowered to his feet.
He sneezed immediately.
Eyes watering, he swiped at his face with his sleeve as dust rose up in clouds, invading his lungs and suffocating him where he stood.
“Yeah,” Harry sighed. “It needs some work.”
An understatement, if Tom had ever heard one.
It was nearly impossible to reconcile this dilapidated tomb with the immaculate dwelling Tom remembered so vividly.
After days of cleaning, battling against hordes of doxies, and narrowly avoiding the loss of his nose to a particularly aggressive teacup, Tom posed what he believed was a very fair question.
“Do we have to live here?”
Tom had seen Harry’s vaults. They could afford to live in any house they chose, anywhere in the world.
In fact, Tom imagined there were a fair number of witches and wizards out there who would happily gift Harry a home outright, purely out of gratitude for preventing their world from falling to ruin.
Harry looked down at the Persian carpet, which appeared to be stained with an alarming amount of blood, and shuffled his feet. “But it was Sirius’s house. He gave it to me. I can't—”
Tom sighed, moving closer to slip his arm around Harry’s shoulder.
“It's important to you,” he said, pressing his lips to his temple. “We’ll make it work.”
It did not take Tom very long to regret those words.
Grimmauld Place, Tom quickly concluded, actively despised them both and would greatly prefer to be left alone to rot in peace.
Cleaning was tedious, but easily enough managed with magic. Yet, it mattered little when decades of dust seemed to accumulate when a room was left unattended for only a handful of hours.
A portrait of Walburga Black haunted the entryway. Tom had known her back in school—the horrid little bitch—and did not particularly care for her ghastly face being so prominently featured in his home.
While no spell had succeeded in removing her, putting a curtain over her kept her quiet most of the time. Unfortunately, it seemed that the curtain moved on its own to unveil her at the most inconvenient of moments.
In that same entryway, there was a hideous troll-leg umbrella stand that despised Tom specifically.
It lay in wait, positioning itself with malicious precision to trip him whenever he passed. He had burned it to ash himself—personally—and yet, the following morning, it had been back.
Tom groaned in pain from where he had fallen, the umbrella stand inching closer, obviously gloating.
“I will tear you to bits with my bare hands,” Tom told it.
With his words, the curtain covering Walburga’s portrait moved and a blood-curdling scream filled the air.
“CATAMITES. MUDBLOODS. BEFOULING THIS SACRED HOUSE WITH THEIR DEGENERATE DEEDS! A DISGRACE TO THE VERY NAME OF MAGIC!”
“Oh, do shut up, you cow!” Tom shouted back. “I was Head Boy! You barely scraped by with four OWLS! Which one of us is the disgrace? My boyfriend saved the world! Your husband had to put a bag over your head just to produce an heir!”
“YOU FOUL CURR! I SHALL CURSE YOU!”
“With what wand?” Tom asked. “You can't do anything to me! You're dead!”
“Stop fighting with the portrait and come have breakfast!” Harry called from the kitchen.
"Coming, darling," Tom said sweetly, giving Walburga a parting glare as he stood.
And while Tom had given up on his nefarious plots, he still had an appreciation of the macabre. Yet that appreciation did not extend to the mounted heads of the Blacks’ former house-elves, which stared down at him with eerily vacant eyes each time he climbed the staircase.
They made Harry deeply uncomfortable as well, but when he attempted to take one down, it lashed out with razor-sharp teeth. The bite caused a cursed necrotic infection that required emergency treatment at St. Mungo’s.
They decided to leave the heads alone after that.
But the item that caused Tom the most grief was the bathroom sink.
Aesthetically, it was gorgeous. Silver serpents decorated the taps, and the basin was crafted of gleaming, polished obsidian. Masterful craftsmanship, he had to admit.
Unfortunately, it was also possessed.
Every time Tom tried to use the wretched thing, he was met with a nasty surprise. Jets of water erupted without warning, soaking him thoroughly. The water alternated between boiling hot and freezing cold. Often, the taps shifted just out of reach whenever he tried to grasp them. Occasionally, a rotten stench drifted out of the drain and filled the entire house.
One morning, when Tom washed his hands, instead of water, fresh, warm blood poured from the spout.
Tom recoiled, genuinely startled. Since his life had more recently taken a far more peaceful and domestic turn, the sight of sudden blood was destabilizing.
Muttering curses to himself, Tom walked back through the bedroom to make his way to the nearest available sink.
“Bloody hell, fucking piece of shite wanker—”
“Alright, Tom?” Harry called from the bed, not looking up from his Quidditch magazine. “You're sounding particularly Dickensian this morning.”
Harry glanced up then, eyes moving to Tom’s steadily dripping hands.
“Christ,” he said. “Tom. What the hell? Did you kill someone?”
“No!” Tom snapped. “It's the bloody sink again! I swear it has it out for me!”
Harry’s eyes widened in recognition. “Ah, okay, that's alright then. Because I was about remind you—”
He gestured to the decorative pillow beside him, with a cheerfully cross-stitched slogan: Killing Is Bad!
With a huff, Tom rolled his eyes and left the room, a trail of blood dripping behind him.
Tom had always been an early riser.
At Hogwarts, he had been happy to spend his mornings in solitude, sipping his tea in a nearly empty Great Hall as he ruminated over the day’s plots.
Tom still woke early, but these days he enjoyed staying in bed, looking down at Harry, still sound asleep beside him.
Harry’s cheeks puffed slightly as he breathed, his body pressed close to Tom. It was such a beautiful display of trust—allowing Tom near him in such a vulnerable state. It filled Tom’s chest with a warm fondness each time he witnessed it.
Tom reached out, brushing a stray curl from Harry’s forehead. His fingers lingered, then slid down to cup his cheek, giving it a soft squeeze.
He did not want to wake Harry—not yet, anyway—but Harry's form was far to tempting for Tom to manage to keep his hands to himself.
Plop.
The moment of peace was interrupted by a great glob of something thick and sticky landing right on Harry’s darling little nose.
Plop. Plop.
Tom looked up, groaning in exasperation. Above him, golden syrup was dripping steadily from the ceiling.
“Whassamatter?” Harry mumbled, blearily raising his head.
“It seems our house detests the very idea of a nice Sunday lie-in,” Tom said.
“What the hell is it?” Harry asked, pushing himself upright as the substance continued to rain down on them.
Then to Tom’s mounting horror, Harry swiped up a glob of it on his finger and moved it toward his lips.
“Stop!” Tom shrieked. “You cannot just—you fool!”
Harry licked it off his finger. He hummed thoughtfully, lips smacking, before his face lit up.
“It’s treacle, Tom!” Harry said, delighted. “See, our house doesn’t hate us at all!”
The glumbumble was a magical creature rather similar to a common bee, only it was entirely black and produced treacle rather than honey.
However, it was important to note that the treacle glumbumbles produced was not the sort one would use in a treacle tart.
Consumption was strongly discouraged, as it induced an overwhelming feeling of melancholy.
“It’s useless,” Harry groaned.
He lay limply on the sofa, eyes red and swollen.
“What’s the point of going on? Our bloody house hates us, Tom.”
They had relocated to the living room while Tom floo-called an emergency exterminator to deal with the infestation in their attic.
“I don’t believe the house was at fault this time, darling,” Tom said. “The creatures have likely been nesting there for decades. Frankly, one must wonder what Kreacher was doing all that time.”
Harry suddenly sat upright, a finger pointing at Tom in accusation.
“Don’t speak about him that way!” he wailed. “He was grieving, Tom!”
Harry sniffed loudly, clutching a decorative throw pillow to his chest.
Tom kindly did not point out the stitching that read: If You Don’t Know What It Is, Don’t Put It In Your Mouth!
“His best friend drowned in a lake of inferi!” Harry continued, voice breaking. “And poor Kreacher couldn’t even help—he just had to watch with his big yellow eyes and his little bat ears—”
“Apologies, darling,” Tom soothed. He moved over to Harry, withdrawing a handkerchief from his pocket and holding it out. “That was insensitive of me. Just remember that Kreacher is much happier these days at the House-Elf Retirement Home we sent him to.”
Harry took the handkerchief and blew his nose loudly.
“He’s the best at pickleball,” he said.
“The very best,” Tom agreed. A very vicious opponent on the court.
“They’re not going to kill the glumbumbles, are they?” Harry asked in a small voice.
“I specifically told them not to,” Tom said.
Personally, Tom would have preferred immediate and total eradication of the little beasts, but Harry was a bit sensitive about that sort of thing—even when not experiencing magically induced melancholia.
“I’ve already written to Hagrid about transporting the colony to the Forbidden Forest.”
To Tom’s surprise, instead of making Harry happier, his statement brought on a renewed cascade of tears.
“Hagrid!” Harry choked out. “Poor sweet Hagrid! You ruined his life!”
Tom’s jaw clenched in annoyance. That was ancient history—rather below the belt to bring up now. Besides, Tom and Hagrid had worked everything out. They played bridge together every fortnight.
Tom exhaled deeply, reminding himself that Harry was not in his right mind at the moment, and it would be foolish to take any of his words to heart.
“And Myrtle!” Harry sobbed. “Merlin, poor Myrtle! Poor miserable, moaning, moping Myrtle!”
Tom stared at him in disbelief.
Myrtle? Now Harry was crying over the degenerate ghost who made a hobby of spying on him in the bath?
Tom very much hoped the effects wore off soon. But until then, he needed to escape somewhere to wait it out—far away from all the weeping.
“This is fantastic,” Harry said, smiling. “You’ve really outdone yourself.”
Tom preened. He watched, deeply satisfied, as his beloved continued eating—clearly savoring every bite of the meal Tom had carefully prepared for him.
All was well. The effects of the treacle had worn off after a few hours. The glumbumbles had been removed without incident, and their bedroom had been fully cleansed of treacle.
And now, they were celebrating.
Cooking had even been a relatively peaceful experience. There had been no mysterious fires or disappearing ingredients. Tom had only been targeted by a single rogue carving knife—gracefully dodged.
Tom was beginning to believe he and Harry could actually make a home here.
Then came the knock.
“We aren’t expecting anyone, are we?” Harry asked.
Tom shook his head.
After a number of increasingly firm reminders, Luna Lovegood had finally stopped showing up unannounced to inspect his ears for nargles. The rest of Harry’s friends were decent enough about following common etiquette.
“Then who—”
Harry’s fork clattered onto his plate, his eyes widening as they fixed on something just beyond Tom’s shoulder.
Slowly, Tom turned.
They were dining in the kitchen. Behind Tom was a glass door that led out into an overgrown and murderous garden that was currently awaiting Neville's intervention.
And beyond that door—
was the sink from the bathroom.
Knocking.
One of the taps had formed into a small, perfectly articulated hand. It stretched forward and tapped against the glass, almost politely.
Harry laughed nervously. “Er… are you going to let that sink in?”
Tom rose to his feet, deliberately striding toward the door and pulling it open.
He swiftly raised his wand, pointed it at the infernal basin, and bellowed, “Avada Kedavra!”
A blast of green light blazed from his wand and the sink exploded into thousands of glittering pieces.
Calmly, Tom shut the door.
He turned back toward Harry, smiling faintly as he dusted debris from his robes.
“We have pots de crème for dessert,” Tom said.
Harry stared, mouth gaping.
“Er, Tom?”
“It was somewhat uncouth,” Tom allowed, “but necessary. We will simply acquire a replacement tomorrow. A sink that is worthy of us.”
Knock.
Tom turned on his heel, reeling.
There was the sink, whole once more.
The little hand tapped again with an air of impatience.
“That is it!” Tom snapped. “We are moving out!”
Harry nodded immediately. “Right. Yeah. I think that's for the best.”