After the Chamber of Secrets, Hogwarts, and Ginny Weasley he woke to find himself staring blankly up at a grey ceiling beneath a pile of blankets that seemed much too warm given the heat. Outside he could hear a few distant birds twittering along with the laughter of children, but inside the room there was only the sound of his own breathing. Without thinking he turned his head to survey the room and found himself looking sideways at Harry Potter.

He remembered her walking towards him, the steady fall of her footsteps, a constant interval that could not be deterred. Dressed in white she had seemed in that moment to represent Death than any grim reaper ever could. Her eyes, that green color the shade of the killing curse, had seemed so terribly empty then as if he hadn't existed there at all.

She looked smaller now, dressed in brightly colored but cheap muggle clothing, a frayed secondhand green sweater and worn shorts. She seemed overwhelmed by her attributes as if her small pale body could not quite handle the weight of her curling hair, her eyes, or even her expression. She was curled on a chair in the corner, simply watching him, saying nothing even as he blinked back at her and wondered how he was to place her within his mind.

The girl who lived, he'd always cringed when Ginny had referred to Harriet Potter as that, as if she was something special somehow responsible for his other's death when she had only been an infant. No, that baby had not been the girl who lived, it had been the girl who lived who'd slaughtered a basilisk and then turned those cold eyes to him.

Now they regarded each other, Tom bringing himself up into a sitting position, feeling weak and atrophied in this new somehow deliciously real body he was in. He had forgotten the world, inside the diary, and even cramped in this drab room beneath covers in what must be summer he felt wonderful. He felt, for the first time really, that life was somehow beautiful.

Sitting up he realized that he wasn't wearing any clothes, however the girl had gotten him a body then it hadn't been through the diary, as he'd been wearing his Hogwarts uniform in that transparent form. A girl her age would have blushed at the sight of the shirtless Tom Riddle in a bed, most likely her bed, staring back at her but she did nothing only held his gaze as if there was nothing out of the ordinary beyond his presence.

Finally she said, "You came back."

He found his eyebrows lowering and a response on the tip of his tongue, I wasn't aware I had gone anywhere, but he said nothing. He had decided somewhere between waking and this moment, that Harriet Potter wasn't human, not in the way that most humans were human. There was something off about this girl, different, and until he knew what it was he wouldn't unduly provoke her.

She lowered her knees until she was sitting in the chair normally, pale bare feet barely touching the floor, an awkward smile found its way onto her lips an expression she was clearly unfamiliar with, "I didn't know if you would, it took a while to find you, and then when I called it was almost like you didn't want to answer."

It was clear that the girl wasn't going to clarify what was going on, not without some input from Tom, and he was beginning to feel impatience in his ignorance. He could not sit naked in a bed forever after all.

"Who are you?" He repeated that final question from the Chamber, the one that seemed somehow more important than the others.

She looked surprised at first, as if she wasn't quite sure why he was asking, "Harry Potter," She said at first but then she appeared to think about it a bit and a bitter smile stretched across her features, "Oh, right, that's not what you mean."

"No, it isn't, Harry." He said scathingly but she didn't flinch at his tone or give any indication that she had heard him, instead she looked steadily down at her feet and sighed before looking up.

"I tried telling people, wizards and… witches, when I first went to Hogwarts. I thought everyone would know, because, well because they said they were magic. They're not really magic though, they're almost magic, and I guess that's good enough for most things but… Do you know about witches Tom?" She asked those haunting green eyes staring into his intently.

"Female magic users, why yes I am aware." He responded drily.

"No, witches Tom, I'm talking about witches." With that stood from the chair and walked almost silently to the window where outside the blue sky could be seen overhead and a few green trees waved in the summer breeze.

"You see, even though I was raised by muggles, I knew about magic for a while. At first they were just accidental magic, the things that most people did, the Dursleys always hated that. They told me I was a freak, and well, I guess I am but that's not really the point. For a while it was always things like that, disappearing onto the roof, talking to snakes… Kyubey came when I was nine and then..."

She trailed off, lost in some memory or another, leaving Tom to sit there and stare intently at her from the bed. Talking to snakes, she had said, as if it were a parlor trick. He had thought the same, snakes were never particularly interesting, but talking to snakes. There were no parseltongues left, with the defeat of his other only Tom should have remained, but talking to snakes.

For a horrifying minute he regarded her carefully, marked their similarities, and wondered again why the dark lord Voldemort would feel the need to massacre a family and kill their infant child. Pale sin, dark hair, delicate features, he marked them all and had the horrifying image of himself and a young Lily Evans locked away in some room. Parseltongue, she'd said, as if it meant nothing.

"Tom, if you could wish for anything, anything at all with no limits what would you wish for?" She asked suddenly turning from the window to look at him.

He didn't have a response at the time, all he could do was stare at her, and think how horrifically similar they were at the end of things.

Her story came in fits and bursts, she seemed uncomfortable telling it, and even by the end of breakfast when she had aided him down the stairs and into an empty kitchen and proceeded to make a hurried but surprisingly homey breakfast he was certain he had not heard all of it.

She claimed that wizards and witches, the kind he knew about, weren't real magic users.

"Sure they use magic, but they don't really use it, I mean at first I thought it was the same thing but it's not. They're limited and they don't even really know it." She said with a smile that was almost apologetic as Tom's expression had darkened. She used the word they though, not you, and he couldn't help but wonder how he had been pulled out of that supposedly ignorant group.

There were only a few real magic users, and often times they were muggles, she called them magical girls. Only adolescent girls, she said, could become magical girls and of those only a few had the potential. In a large city like London there had been three of them and within magical Britain, as far as Harry was aware, there were only two.

Distracted by the food he'd made no comment; he'd forgotten the sensation of taste, so that even ordinary orange juice and slightly charred bacon seemed overwhelming. Not bad or good simply too much, he ate it anyway.

"To become a magical girl you have to make a contract with Kyubey, he's um, he's kind of like a magical cat I guess. In exchange for a wish, a wish about anything at all, he turns you into a magical girl." After that small explanation she'd looked rather distant, looking away from him for a moment before turning back with a graver expression.

There was a price to the wish, and they were all made aware of it from the instant the contract was introduced. It was the duty of magical girls to fight witches, terrifying beings who hid in labyrinths, unseen to the normal eye who spread chaos and despair in their wake. Many of the unexplained suicides, murders, and cults were the cause of unseen witches according to the little girl.

You only got one wish, only one wish and then there was no turning back, so even when Kyubey had approached her she had known that she'd had to think long and hard about it.

"I was still living with the Dursleys then," She said, as if that was supposed to mean something to him, "I thought I was thinking hard about it, and I knew that there was only one thing I really wanted, but I wasn't really thinking about it and I didn't even realize it. You shouldn't use magic for other people, you should only use it for yourself, because terrible things happen if you don't really mean it."

"I," Tom said with a sly and crooked smile, "have never had that particular issue."

Oddly enough the girl smiled back, an innocent awkward smile, and once again he was struck with that horrified thought that they looked altogether too similar. There were times when she seemed like a little girl, when she let that cold mask of war drop from her face, but Harry Potter was always on edge.

She wouldn't tell him what she wished for that day, only a vague half answer that he didn't truly believe because he didn't believe anything of her story anyway. On living by herself, alone in a house in the muggle suburbs she'd just shrugged and said that the Dursleys and her had stopped seeing eye to eye very soon after she had become a magical girl.

She ended their little breakfast, which seemed to be mostly for him than for her, with a summary of contemporary events while he was gone as she so eloquently put it, "There's another magical girl in Hogwarts, I don't know if you know her or not, Luna Lovegood. Anyway sometimes when you make a wish your magical abilities reflect on the wish you made, you can still do lots of other magic, everything a wizard or witch can do but you really specialize in that area. Luna asked about seeing things so she's good at noticing certain details that others might overlook. Ginny had the potential to become a magical girl, Luna saw it, and when you took her down to the Chamber I couldn't just let her die like that if she had another way out." She trailed off here looking strained, that cheerful smile dropping from her face and leaving her looking old, finally she shook her head as if to clear bad thoughts and continued.

"Ginny's at home now, Luna's teaching her the basics, and when school rolls around again we'll patrol Hogsmede, and Hogwarts. You'd be surprised how many witches wind up in Hogwarts, well I guess you wouldn't because, I suppose the whole witch versus witch thing is rather confusing."

Tom didn't say anything, even as the girl stacked the dishes and appeared to end the conversation, he just kept looking and thinking and attempting to piece it all together. She had seemed more Slytherin at school, in her own home with him dressed in a man's black work robes that she had managed to find in her closet she looked almost like a Hufflepuff, the best ones though were the ones that wore the faces of Hufflepuffs but had the eyes of Slytherins beneath it all.

She said that he could leave whenever he wished and he had a feeling this was more or less true, in spite of the flashes of memory to that moment in the Chamber he did not think that if he truly wished to leave this little girl could detain him, in spite of that he stayed.

There were several reasons for this action.

One was that he needed a place to regroup and lie low for a while, the diary, the basilisk, Ginny had turned into a catastrophe and only because of Harry Potter's unknown schemes and whims was he even alive. If he truly wished to act, to retake his title and the wizarding world, he would have to think long and hard about his options and resources. Harry's empty house was just as good a place to do that as any other, besides who would look for the memory of Tom Riddle in the home of the girl who lived?

There was also her, after the first week he still wasn't sure what to make of her. For the most part she seemed like a normal girl, but then, she was trying very hard to seem like a normal girl. There were very large cracks in the mask she wore. She appeared to have no adult supervision and yet the house was filled with adult clothing, items, and various other objects that Harry seemed to have no interest in. She disappeared every night before Tom went to sleep and would often times return only after he had woken up looking worn, exhausted, and sometimes covered in wounds. When confronted by other children she often acted awkwardly as if she wasn't quite sure what to make of them but with Tom she was quite content to play the role of the younger sister.

She was an enigma in every sense of the word and whenever he looked into those green eyes he couldn't help but wonder why and how she had called to him and brought him back from the nothingness in the Chamber of Secrets. It would not do to forget that she was a Slytherin, whatever her true intentions she would not reveal her hand this early in the game.

The last reason was perhaps the most disturbing to him but it was the thought that resounded in his head whenever he first caught sight of her smile up at him as if the world was made of sunshine and birdsong. Bastard daughter, his bastard daughter, his other's bastard daughter who spoke to snakes as if she was born to it and who's family had been slaughtered by a dark lord for seemingly no explanation. Sometimes, looking down at her it was like looking at the twelve year old version of himself, all dark hair and pale skin.

It haunted him. To justify to himself that it had not happened, that it could not have happened, he needed to observe her to look at her and see anything but himself. Dark hair was a dominant trait, many people had pale skin, but parseltongue was rare and that worried him.

So he stayed in her empty house feeling as if he was playing doll, schemed and planned his takeover of the wizarding world at night when she was walking alone beneath the street lamps hunting for witches, and dissected her taking her apart piece by piece inside his mind until she was nothing more than her components.

Still, when she returned every morning, the circles under her eyes but a smile on her face nevertheless he knew that he had come no closer to understanding how she ticked than he had the day before.

And every day, as if on clockwork, she'd say, "Good morning sunshine, the Earth says hello. You really don't sleep much, do you Tom?"

Author's Note: And the mystery surrounding Harry deepens, also Tom's having a possible fatherhood crisis and is much disturbed as he should be. Thanks to readers and reviewers, you guys are great. Reviews are greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Puella Magi Madoka Magica