Chapter Text
𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚙𝚊𝚛𝚔:
Grace Lewis woke up in a stranger’s bed with the kind of panic that lives just behind the teeth—hot, silent, and stifling. The ceiling above was foreign: too ornate, too pristine. Not her flat. Not a hospital. Not anywhere she’d ever been.
She sat up quickly, heart hammering, and the world tilted. Her limbs felt wrong. Her balance was off. Her weight shifted differently. She swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood—only to stop cold. Her hands were too large. Her body too tall. The reflection in the mirror across the room made her blood run cold.
A man stared back at her. Blonde. Handsome. White. Vaguely familiar in a wax figure sort of way.
It was even stranger because she remembered dying—a hit and run.
“What the fuck,” she whispered, reaching for the face that was no longer hers.
And then the flood came.
Memories—his memories—crashed into her like a tidal wave. Childhood arrogance, a mother’s hollow praise, the empty shimmer of fleeting fame. Lectures at Hogwarts, letters from admirers, carefully staged heroics—all of it clawed through her mind like an infection, overlaying her own life as a sister, daughter, lover, and clinical psychologist from a far different world.
Grace clutched the edge of the dresser, gasping. There it was—that familiar sensation, the one she’d read about in dissociation studies but never experienced: the soul staggering to fit itself into a space that wasn’t built for it.
She was Gilderoy Lockhart. November 1982. Wizarding Britain.
Naturally. She’d landed in fucking Harry Potter.
According to his memories, the war was over. Tom Riddle—Voldemort—was dead, supposedly killed by Harry Potter.
Britains wizarding world exhaled, not in triumph, but in something like relief, jagged and uneven. Streets once haunted by shadows now rang with cautious laughter, but beneath the cobbled calm, the cracks still yawned wide and hungry.
Death Eaters were hunted like vermin—flushed from hiding holes, dragged to trial, or simply vanished. Some bought their silence with gold and blood. Others wore new masks and slipped quietly back into society, unmarked and unpunished. The Ministry, desperate to reclaim authority, posed as saviors. Its officials gave speeches with trembling hands and smiles stitched too tightly to be real. They promised healing. They promised justice. They promised peace.
But she knew that wasn’t true.
She knew better.
Not just because she knew the future—thanks to the Harry Potter books and films—but because peace was never permanent. It was a pause, tense, and breathless, between storms.
But most importantly, she was in a male body. It should have disturbed her more, but it didn’t. Grace was still herself, but she was also him. Her genitalia didn’t faze her—it just was. So, it was fine, she supposed.
✎𓂃
People found Gilderoy Lockhart charming—if shallow. That was just fine to her. The world liked shallow; it made them feel safe. Shallow people didn’t challenge your beliefs, didn’t force you to look inward. They were entertaining, forgettable, easy to place in neat little boxes.
He smiled, bumbled, preened. He played the part to perfection—a caricature of vanity and self-importance. Even his colleagues dismissed him as harmless: a fool who had stumbled through life buoyed by good looks and a silver tongue.
Grace saw the truth; she knew the patterns.
Behind every practiced smile was a scalpel. Behind every idiotic quote, a man deeply, painfully aware of his inadequacy. Lockhart wasn’t stupid. He was desperate. And desperation, in the right hands, was power.
She wasn’t here to play savior or saint. She was, however, efficient. She would keep the persona they expected. She would be the Lockhart they adored. And slowly—carefully—she would make it mean something.
The first thing she needed was truth.
And she knew exactly where to start.
✎ᝰ
𝚆𝚑𝚢 𝚅𝚘𝚕𝚍𝚎𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚝:
Grace had seen his type before.
Not magical, of course. But human.
Disturbingly human.
In her own life, before the merge, she had spent years studying pathology, trauma, and the darkest corners of the human psyche. She had worked with arsonists, narcissists, and children who wore polite smiles while describing how they’d kill their parents if given the chance. And yet none of them held her attention the way Tom Marvolo Riddle Jr did.
Perhaps it was because she knew a version of him—the one she grew up watching. It wasn’t the magic that fascinated her, nor the war crimes. Those were just weapons. It was the man who remained the mystery.
Tom Riddle was the worst-case scenario in the psychologist’s handbook: highly intelligent, deeply traumatized, pathologically self-possessed. A child raised without warmth or identity, gifted enough to manipulate adults by the time he could string lies into sentences. A boy who was never taught empathy—only control. And then they handed him a weapon.
They called him He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. They whispered his euphemism like it might summon him. Like he was something ancient, unknowable, inhuman.
But Grace knew better. Monsters weren’t born.
They were shaped.
And the wizarding world had shaped him.
It was easier, of course, to treat him like a myth. A cautionary tale. He Who Must Not Be Named. That title alone stripped him of humanity and, in doing so, absolved the world of its part in creating him. As long as Voldemort remained a specter in the dark—an evil born, not made—no one had to confront the uncomfortable truth: he was a product of their world.
They could pretend there was no fault in the system that raised him. No guilt in the Ministry that ignored him. No rot in the culture that taught blood superiority in hushed lessons beneath gilded ceilings. Tom Riddle didn’t invent hatred. He didn’t even innovate cruelty. He refined what had always been there.
They called him a maniac—and that was true. But he was also something more: a mirror.
He manipulated the same institutions that had empowered men like him for generations—used and abused the very mindset that had been ravaging the magical community since long before Gellert Grindelwald charmed Europe into complacency. Riddle simply turned whispers into declarations, biases into banners.
No blame to be shared. No warning signs missed. That was the lie they told themselves.
Because to admit otherwise would mean looking inward.
And no one wanted to see the next Voldemort already sitting at their dinner tables, teaching their children, shaking hands in Parliament robes.
That was dangerous.
That was lazy.
So Grace made a decision. She would not be moral, but she would be precise. She would give the world exactly what it feared most:
A mirror.
The Rise and Fall of Voldemort would not be a condemnation. It would be a case study. She would document every phase of his life—his orphaned childhood, his school years, his careful unraveling. No embellishment. No flattery. Just facts.
She would humanize him.
Not to excuse. But to expose.
Because if they understood what made Tom Riddle, maybe they’d stop making more like him.
And maybe, just maybe, they’d fear less the man who 'died'—and more the society that built him.
✎ᝰ
𝚁𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚊𝚛𝚌𝚑 𝙸𝚗 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚂𝚑𝚊𝚍𝚘𝚠𝚜:
Grace knew the moment the idea crystallized: Gilderoy Lockhart could never publish this.
His name, at best, conjured charming tales of dragon-slaying and dazzling smiles—at worst, the punchline of a dozen scholarly jokes. No one would take the man seriously if he handed them a manuscript dissecting the origins of Voldemort. Not the academic circles, not the Ministry, and certainly not the public. His entire persona was a carefully curated performance: crisp robes, exaggerated tales, an idiot’s grin—intentional, all of it. A fool’s mask to lower defenses.
But this book? This would demand fear. Thought. Self-reflection. It would be dangerous.
And if they knew it came from him, they wouldn’t even read it.
So she gave birth to a ghost.
Elias Thorne.
Not entirely fictional—just reanimated.
Thorne had once been real, in the most forgettable way. A lonely man with grand ideas, poorly written letters, and no one who cared enough to remember him. He’d mailed his theories to every known wizarding publication, mostly concerning obscure wizarding lineages and supposed Grindelwald sympathizers in the Wizengamot. Nobody ever published him. Few even replied. During the chaos of post-war trials in 1981, he vanished. Some assumed suicide. Others didn’t notice at all.
No family. No friends. A name lost to the paper trail.
Perfect.
Grace forged the rest. A modest estate in Knockturn Alley with enchanted locks and dust-thick windows. A “trunk of unpublished works” discovered by a discreet broker. A forged letter of sale. It was simple enough—especially with Gilderoy Lockhart’s reputation for eccentric interests and antique-hunting. He’d acquired the chest, she told them, only to discover a manuscript inside, nearly complete. The work of an anonymous mind from the war’s ashes.
The story of Tom Marvolo Riddle Jr.
From there, the real work began.
Gilderoy’s smile opened doors. She used it without shame. Winked, nodded, cooed. Let her fingers brush sleeves. Let her eyes shine with artificial admiration. She played Lockhart like a violin, milking his charms to gain access to closed libraries, secured records, and private war correspondence. When charm failed, misdirection and forged credentials took their place.
Grace dressed in borrowed robes and lowered her voice to whisper in archives no one visited. Made anonymous requests under fabricated names. Traded favors in pub corners for sealed court documents and half-burnt ledgers.
And in silence, she built the bones of something monstrous.
She studied orphanage intake logs from Wool's. Ministry neglect reports. St. Mungo’s early case files on trauma-induced magical outbursts in children. Letters written by Dumbledore, both the ones published and the ones they tried to bury. Whispers from Order veterans. Testimonies from Death Eaters that the court had deemed “inflammatory” and redacted. She compiled names, dates, behaviors.
She cross-referenced cruelty with cause.
Tom’s conception. A love potion and a Muggle heir: a magical assault dressed up as romance. His mother, Merope Gaunt, left to die in childbirth. His name handwritten in the orphanage’s log like an afterthought. No visitors. No family. Just him and the silence.
She tracked his childhood. The strange deaths. The incidents dismissed as coincidence. The absence of affection. The coldness of his caretakers. The boys who grew afraid. The girls who stopped speaking. The pet rabbit that vanished. The teen boy who never cried.
And Myrtle Warren. Her ghost never said the name, but Grace didn’t need her to.
She followed the bodies.
Tom's father. His grandparents. The housekeepers who vanished without note. A boy from the orphanage. A girl in a bathroom. His rise at school. His charm—borrowed, rehearsed, perfect. His darkness—quiet, calculated, precise.
She documented it all.
Not like a journalist desperate for scandal. Not like a novelist chasing plot.
But like a psychologist.
She dissected him: not just the murders, but the why behind them. The choices, the lessons, the reinforcements. She charted how the boy learned that control equaled safety, that pain demanded obedience, and that love could be poisoned. How his fear twisted into domination.
She wrote:
"Tom Marvolo Riddle Jr. was not a tragic figure. He was not an accident. He was engineered—by neglect, by bias, by a community that turned away when he needed witnessing. What he became was horrifying—but entirely logical. And that should terrify us more than any spell ever could."
And when she looked up, the manuscript bled across her desk—three hundred pages of blood, bone, and revelation.
No embellishment. No sanitizing. No euphemisms for rape, for murder, for purism, for systemic complicity.
She didn’t write it to mourn him. Frankly, if asked, she’d say the man could rot. She wrote it to warn them.
Because now she had to live here—and if the wizarding world insisted on raising boys like Tom Riddle in silence and shame, then it deserved to meet the next one in the dark.
And perhaps next time, they wouldn’t live long enough to read the book.
✎ᝰ
𝙿𝚞𝚋𝚕𝚒𝚌𝚊𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝙰𝚗𝚍 𝚃𝚑𝚎 𝚁𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗:
Grace printed ten copies by hand.
No publisher would touch it. Not because it wasn’t brilliant—but because it was true. And truth, in the wizarding world, was a loaded wand. Too dangerous to hold, too inconvenient to publish. They’d ask questions. They’d trace quills and spells. Someone would connect the dots to him. No, this book had to appear randomly. As if it simply emerged.
She paid for enchantments—old, obscure, and expensive. Charms that made her ink untraceable, that distorted her magical signature, that cloaked her owl deliveries in bureaucratic haze. Then she scattered the copies like seeds.
Three to bookstores known for taking in odd, controversial works: The Crooked Quill in Knockturn Alley, Obscura Press in Cardiff, and Ink & Iron in Edinburgh.
Two more, carefully mailed under Elias Thorne, arrived at The Daily Prophet and Witch Weekly. She knew exactly what they’d do with them. She wanted the outrage. Attention was its own kind of spell.
The remaining five she distributed like contraband—left one on a Ministry breakroom table between coffee cups and memos; another slid beneath a staffroom door at Hogwarts; one tucked behind a bottle of Firewhisky in the Leaky Cauldron; the rest left in obscure magical libraries, where the right kind of reader might stumble upon them.
Each bore the same black spine, stamped in quiet silver:
𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕚𝕤𝕖 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝔽𝕒𝕝𝕝 𝕠𝕗 𝕍𝕠𝕝𝕕𝕖𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕥: 𝔸 ℙ𝕤𝕪𝕔𝕙𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕘𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕝 ℙ𝕣𝕠𝕗𝕚𝕝𝕖.
𝔹𝕪 𝔼𝕝𝕚𝕒𝕤 𝕋𝕙𝕠𝕣𝕟𝕖.
𝟙𝟡𝟠𝟞
There was no foreword. No author’s note. Just a cold, clinical dissection of how a monster is made.
The backlash came quickly—like a curse rebounding.
Witch Weekly called it “a vulgar and tasteless smear campaign against the dead.” Their editorial board wrung their hands over “unfounded mental health diagnoses” and “dangerous speculation.” They highlighted excerpts out of context: “He was a system’s failure,” they quoted, as if to prove moral depravity. One columnist accused Elias Thorne of glorifying Tom Riddle—a “ghoulish fascination masquerading as scholarship.”
The Daily Prophet was no kinder. They labeled the book seditious. “Reckless armchair psychology,” the headline read. “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named was not a symptom—he was a madman. Period.” A second article suggested the mysterious author be investigated for sympathy with the Death Eaters.
Public sentiment swelled. The families of victims gathered to condemn the book in an open letter. One widow called it “soulless psychoanalysis.” A grieving father asked why anyone would “desecrate the memory of our dead by humanizing their killer.” Even Dumbledore, when pressed for comment, issued a carefully neutral statement: “Some inquiries are best left in the silence of history.”
Sympathizers didn’t take it any better. The revelation—no, the confirmation—that Voldemort had been a half-blood didn’t sit well with purist loyalists. They raged in corners of the country still painted with Dark Marks. Graffiti appeared overnight near the Knockturn bookstore: LIAR. TRAITOR. BLOOD-DEFILER. The staff received curses in the mail.
And one night, in the old cemetery near York, the grave of the real Elias Thorne was found desecrated. Dug up. Defiled. The name scraped off with acid magic.
When she read about it in the paper, Grace felt the twist in her stomach. A sharp, quiet guilt.
But not regret.
She knew the world would react this way. Of course it would. It was like any patient on the edge of reckoning: defensive, angry, clawing to preserve its self-image.
She scribbled it in the margin of her notebook:
Denial is the first defense of the infected mind.
They didn’t hate the book because it was wrong.
They hated it because it explained him.
Because it held up the mirror.
And mirrors were terrifying things.
✎ᝰ
𝚆𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚆𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚊𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍:
It didn’t sell. Not in the traditional sense. No bestseller lists, no book signings, no cheerful blurbs in storefront windows. The publisher didn’t exist. The author was dead. And yet, the book moved.
It slipped through hands like contraband, passed beneath tables at pubs and tucked beneath robes in Ministry corridors. It appeared mysteriously in the staff lounge at Hogwarts, dog-eared by Christmas. Students found it hidden behind old tomes in the library’s restricted section. Some professors denounced it publicly—then took it home quietly to read at night.
Witch Weekly refused to acknowledge it again, but one of their junior writers quoted it in a private letter that made its way into a thesis at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement. Someone mailed a copy to a St. Mungo’s ward for troubled youth. Another ended up in the waiting room of a wandmaker who'd fought in two wars.
It was never sold. But it was read.
Some called it slander. Others, propaganda. The Ministry refused to comment on how many sealed records had clearly been accessed. But the sharpest readers—the ones who didn’t flinch at uncomfortable truth—recognized what the book truly was: a reflection.
A reflection of the systems they had built. The cracks they ignored. The children they failed.
They saw that Tom Marvolo Riddle had not emerged fully-formed from shadow. He had been a boy first. A boy who had walked the same cobbled streets their children walked. Who had studied under the same professors. Eaten the same meals in the same halls. Slept under the same enchanted ceiling of stars.
He had been them, once.
And that—more than the murder, more than the war—was what unsettled them most.
Because if he could come from their world, then another one could too.
✎𓂃
Grace watched the ripple from afar.
She didn’t expect fame. She didn’t want it—not as Elias Thorne. But she had hoped for noise—some grand reckoning. A shift. What she got instead was a murmur. A whisper behind closed doors. The cautious turning of pages by people too afraid to say what they were beginning to suspect: that the world had helped create the boy who became Voldemort, and that it could very well do it again.
She knew it wasn't going to enough, they were so deeply in love with their delusions of peace. They didn’t want to break it.
The book had spread, yes. It had unsettled. Provoked. Stirred quiet revolutions in careful minds. But the laws hadn’t changed. The orphanages were still underfunded. The blood status rhetoric still brewed in corners of power. The cycle, slowed, still turned.
And yet... there were moments. A young professor who changed how they spoke to difficult students. An Auror who paused before labeling a suspect irredeemable. A Slytherin prefect who found the book in a forgotten drawer and whispered, “He was like me.”
Moments.
Grace—still Gilderoy in the eyes of the world—collected them like artifacts. Quietly. Carefully. Each one a stitch in a wound she knew might never close.
She hadn’t written the book to mourn Tom Riddle. Not to redeem him, either. She wrote it to recognize the next one. And when he does show up again—well, at least he’ll be embarrassed. Small victories, right?
✎ᝰ
𝙼𝚘𝚟𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝙵𝚘𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚍:
The name Gilderoy Lockhart gleamed again—golden, grinning, and utterly unbothered. It sparkled on posters and book covers like a well-polished mirror reflecting only what the world wished to see. It was the name of a man who wore cravats in cursed tombs, who wrestled banshees while his hair remained unruffled. A name curated to perfection.
And no one—not one witch or wizard—ever looked past the shine.
The slim, unsettling book by Elias Thorne had all but vanished from polite conversation. It still surfaced in whispered debates at fringe academic gatherings, passed around under tables like contraband, read behind warded doors by those too curious for comfort. But to the public, it was a rumor. A fluke. A bitter, clinical misfit—written by no one living, belonging nowhere, and claimed by nothing.
Not once did the glittering crowds at Gilderoy’s book signings suspect the truth.
That was the thing about masks: if you wore them long enough, people stopped asking who you were underneath.
So Grace returned to him—Gilderoy—slipping back into the persona like silk gloves. She became again the man who smiled too widely, whose laugh always landed just a beat too perfectly. The peacock with perfect teeth and theatrical flair. He dazzled. He deflected. He gave people exactly what they wanted.
The next books were ridiculous, by design. Year With Yetis, Travels With Trolls, Gadding With Ghouls. High fantasy. High nonsense. Narratives scrubbed of grief and truth. Tales where the monsters were always other, always ugly, always slain. Where the hero looked suspiciously like the man signing books in violet ink.
The public ate them up. They always had. They always would.
Truth, she had learned, made people flinch. It spoiled dinner parties and splintered certainties. But fantasy? Fantasy sold. Fantasy soothed.
So she fed them fantasy.
But even in her performance, she couldn’t stop the small truths.
She planted them in pages, barely noticeable. A frightened child punished for magic he couldn’t control. A professor who ignored warning signs until it was too late. A dark wizard who once played the violin at twilight.
Not obvious. Never blatant. Just enough for someone paying close attention to pause.
Because stories—real stories—had a way of finding the right readers.
Grace no longer believed in saving the world. She didn’t believe in redemption, or revolution, or even justice. But she did believe in nudges. Small shifts. Quiet questions. A pebble in the shoe of the powerful. A child who read her story and wondered, Why does this feel familiar?
And sometimes, that was all it took.
Elias Thorne never published another book.
His grave remained desecrated—stripped of dignity, surrounded by overgrown weeds and the occasional nasty scribble carved into its marker. His name, when it surfaced, was spoken with derision. The Prophet still received the occasional indignant letter, furious that “some hack” had dared humanize a monster.
But in the back corners of restricted libraries, in private collections, in password-protected forums where scholars traded dangerous ideas—the book remained.
Still read. Still feared. Still quietly believed.
She visited his grave once.
Cloaked and unrecognizable, she stood in the brittle hush of twilight and left nothing grand. No wreath, no charm of remembrance. Just a small, flat stone, set carefully among others. A silent token.
𝒯𝒽𝒶𝓃𝓀 𝓎𝑜𝓊.
Not for the man. He had been no one, really.
But for what he became.
A shield. A phantom. A convenient corpse for the truth to wear.
Through him, she had done the most dangerous thing a liar could ever do:
She had tried to make people see.