Harry Potter disappeared three years after the war.
No letter. No funeral. Just a faint ripple of wild magic and a single word scratched onto a stone bench in Godric’s Hollow: Peveril.
Now, nearly a decade later, Tom Riddle is trying to live quietly. Not as Lord Voldemort. Not even as a man with ambitions. Just Tom, owner of a slightly crooked second-hand bookshop tucked between an enchanted tailor’s and a cafe that serves suspiciously good treacle tart.
He lives by rules now. No big magic. No manipulation. No digging into the past.
Then he walks in.
Tall, tired, and strange. Not Harry Potter—not exactly. But close enough. This man wears his magic like a cloak of smoke and stormlight. His eyes burn green, yes, but there’s something ancient behind them. Something watchful. And his presence makes the wards curl and twist like they’re remembering an older kind of fear.
“Name?” Tom asks, suspicious.
“Peveril,” the man replies. “Harry Peveril.”
Tom almost laughs. Almost throws him out.
But then Harry smiles, weary and sharp all at once, and it hurts to look at him too long. His magic hums with something Tom hasn’t felt since he last held a Horcrux in his hand. Except this doesn’t feel like death. This feels like time. Like old bones and ancient promises. Like something that was never meant to be human.
And Harry doesn’t seem entirely sure that he is anymore.
They circle each other like wolves, warily and with too much history between them. Harry claims he’s just passing through. Tom knows better. There are strange symbols appearing around town, old magic pulsing beneath the cobblestones, and Harry sometimes wakes screaming in languages no one’s spoken in millennia.
Tom wants answers. Harry doesn’t give them.
Instead, he helps around the shop. Reads late into the night. Leaves feathers in strange places and salt around the windows. He talks to ravens. The neighbors begin to whisper.
And Tom, against his better judgment, begins to care.
Because no matter what Harry is now, he’s lonely. Lost. Grieving something he won’t name. And Tom—who once thought himself incapable of anything but power—begins to want to understand. To help, even.
But the more he learns, the more he begins to suspect: Harry didn’t survive the war. Not truly.
Something else did.
Something with his face, his memories, his grief. And that something is starting to remember why it came back at all.