❝ I'm sorry you were not truly loved and that made you cruel ❞ Unknown
Celeste Baker just wanted her home and family to be safe and if that meant travelling back in time to stop it all, she would.
However, she wasn't prepared to be thrown into a gam...
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𝕿om Riddle could admit that Celeste Baker was an interesting specimen, to say the least. He could tell that there was something going on inside of her head that was different to his peers, something knowing. It was like she had a sixth sense for everything that was happening. He had caught on the moment that they were introduced, and one look in her eyes told him that Celeste knew something, either about him or Hogwarts but either way, she was hiding something.
However, every time he had thought that he was getting closer and closer to the truth, he found that she would dangle another piece of information in front of him that would either confirm or destroy his previous thoughts. She would make him think that his theory was correct, only to destroy it all with a single sentence.
It was infuriating.
It didn't help that she had taken his spot as one of the top students, always scoring higher in essays and how she had beaten him in a duel was still unknown to him and his friends. It was preposterous.
What sort of Beauxbatons student knew how to duel like that?
Of course, then Tom had looked into Beauxbatons, thinking perhaps Celeste was never a student there and she had instead been trained in duelling elsewhere, but no, there was a transcript with her name on it, confirming everything she had told him about her grades and her past at the school. Then he had thought maybe she was lying about the war, but their talk in the Astronomy Tower shattered that theory. Tom was very good at sensing when people were lying, and yet everything she had said to him was truthful. She was a pureblood witch, her family checked out. The Bakers had been staying in France for ten years or so, which would explain how she had come to be in France and then disappeared, and it was confirmed that Celeste was using the Baker family fortune.
All of this was annoying him.
To make matters worse, he had then thought that perhaps, since he was skilled at legilimency, he would use his talents to meddle in her mind and find her memories. But, alas, as seemed ever the case with Celeste Baker, his efforts were thwarted and he could not read her mind or search through her memories.
Again, she was infuriating.
Twisting through the corners of Hogwarts, Tom searched for a vantage point to watch the grounds and ponder his next move.
Celeste Baker was a riddle, an enigma, all wrapped up into a woman, who had beaten him at chess, insulted him consistently and unlike most women at the school, scowled whenever he was in a 100m vicinity of her. He needed a plan to deal with her, neutralise the wild card that she was, and get her onto his side and share his viewpoint.
When he turned the next corner, ready to head up the backstairs to the seventh floor, he was instead greeted with the very person who was occupying his mind and thoughts.
