Chapter Text
Daphne is a sad, penniless orphan with no prospects or surviving family to speak of.
(No, she’s not.)
The old Greengrass house looms like a creaking, half-rotten hilltop specter on the outskirts of town.
Daphne has always been drawn to it—inexplicably, irreverently—but the nuns are creative enough with their punishments that she’s never quite dared to cross the threshold; never quite dared to slip through the imposing, needle-spired gates, past the rusty hinges and the towering cast-iron, and explore whatever long-broken hints of the aristocracy remain in the rubble.
She’s never quite dared to do a lot of things.
Now, though.
Now, she has a third-class train ticket to nowhere in one hand and a mostly empty rucksack in the other and there’s really nothing stopping her, is there?
The cobblestone drive is smooth with age, mossy around the edges, and she feels a faint thrill of recognition as she takes a breath, fills her lungs with the loamy, autumn-crisp breeze, a telltale tingle scraping down the ridges of her spine; horse hooves clopping, carriage wheels spinning—she can hear it, if she just shuts her eyes and focuses, she swears she can—
A daydream, then.
Lips quirking, she plucks at the drab gray fabric of her dress. Her boots are scuffed, pinching her toes, and her nails are cracked and uneven. The nuns had cut her hair with kitchen shears before tossing her out, and there were bruises dotting her ribs, a waxy patchwork quilt of barely visible scars coating the backs of her knuckles.
She matches the house, at least.
Daphne pauses with one foot on the crumbling brick steps leading up to the front door. The splintered wreckage of it—gorgeously, lovingly crafted, twelve feet tall and peppered with engravings, elegant, nonsensical swirls, twining vines of ivy and long-stemmed roses, as delicate as they are vicious—is giving her a fleeting, hard-to-catch sense of déjà vu, like she’s seen it before, like she’s been here before, this exact, precise spot with this exact, precise view.
She shakes her head.
There’s a harsh, piercing cry, and a crow swoops down, rustling the branches of a nearby apple tree.
She steps forward.
The inside of the house is simultaneously everything and nothing like she was expecting it to be, and she isn’t sure if she’s disappointed by it or not. The floors are scratched and moldy, the ceiling weather-warped and sagging, the wallpaper peeling and the chandeliers cobwebbed and the atmosphere oppressive, unsettling, the hallways and the furniture and the paintings, the tapestries, riddled with bullet holes and smeared with blood.
Daphne shivers and drags her feet and wanders, a little aimless, a little frightened, clutching her rucksack to her chest in a pitiful parody of a real hug.
Her heart is racing.
Her pulse is hammering.
A swampy knot of unease is tying itself tighter and tighter in the pit of her stomach.
She blinks once, and then twice, and then three times, instinctive, disconcerted—because there, there, right in her periphery, just out of her field of vision, a sputtering candle, a formless shadow, an opulent silk ballgown twitching around the far corner while an orchestra climbs an unsteady ladder into the swaying, topsy-turvy rafters of an unmistakable crescendo; and there, too, a shattered window and a flaming glass bottle and a vibrant red cape fluttering in the frosty winter wind, twinkling blue eyes and a hard, triumphant smile—an eerie mismatch that she’s convinced she must have imagined. Must be imagining.
An extremely morbid daydream, then.
Except—
The air stirs.
The floorboards groan.
And then a large, masculine hand is grabbing her elbow, jerking her backwards, and her hat is flying off, taking her hairpin with it, causing her slightly messy braid to unravel as she spins around—
He’s handsome, is her first entirely inane, entirely inappropriate observation.
He’s livid, is her second.
She shrinks away, closer to the wall, close enough for the heavy, ostentatious gilt frame of a painting—a portrait, faded and torn, of two little girls in lacy white pinafores sitting on a rocking chair—to dig painfully into her lower back.
“Please,” Daphne whispers, voice trembling, “I’ll go, I promise, you don’t have to . . . to hurt me.”
The man—tall and young and pale, black-haired and red-lipped and sharp-featured and composed despite the anger lurking in the depths of his clear, dark, almost colorless eyes—slowly releases her arm, gaze flicking from her face to the painting behind her. He’s wearing a sleek, well-tailored pair of plain gray trousers, polished boots and a matching waistcoat, his shirtsleeves folded up to his elbows and a hint of stubble dusting the hinge of his jaw.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, and his accent is crisp but not quite natural; deliberately imperfect. Deliberately neutral. “What’s your name?”
She swallows. “Daphne.”
“Daphne,” he echoes, barking out a short, humorless laugh. He studies her intently, thoughtfully, his eyes narrowed, his lips parted, and then glances at the painting again. “Daphne, Daphne. Daphne. Last name?”
“I don’t—I don’t know,” she admits, and she should be used to the ensuing stab of frailty, of vulnerability, like an exposed nerve, an open wound, but it still stings. It still burns. “I’ve never had one.”
Abruptly, he starts to smile, really smile, truly smile, and it’s slightly crooked, wholly magnetic, more cunning than bashful, offering her a brief glimpse of neat white teeth and slyly captivating charm and it transforms him, utterly, widens the too-patrician slant of his nose and softens the cut of his cheekbones, the shape of his mouth—because he’s so much more than just handsome.
It’s the unhappiest smile she’s ever seen, and her scalp prickles with dread at the thought.
(No, it doesn’t.)
“The massacre,” Tom Riddle begins, leaning sideways into the grimy periwinkle walls of a virtually untouched drawing room. “What were you taught about it?”
Daphne twists her fingers together in her lap, shifting restlessly on the edge of the settee. It isn’t comfortable, but the worn bottle-green velvet is as luxurious as it is distracting. She suspects she might be overreacting—to him, to the situation, to the settee. She’s never performed particularly well under pressure.
“The Greengrass family,” she says cautiously, “they were all—murdered. Slaughtered. The first of the aristocrats to go. It’s what sparked the revolution. The—the Greater Good.”
Tom crosses his arms over his chest and jerks his chin towards the warm yellow glow of the oil lamp. “They had daughters. Two of them. Astoria, the younger sister—she survived, actually, but the older girl—” He stops, licks his lips, and then smirks. “Her name was Daphne.”
Daphne freezes, breath hitching, and bunches her hands up, reflexively straightening them back out, the weight of Tom’s words—this stranger’s words, this stranger who doesn’t feel anything like a stranger, who’s hardly even treating her like one—settling over her like a curse. A spell. A bad omen.
“I don’t—”
The drawing room door crashes open.
“Tom, Tom, I think someone else is here, there are footprints in the . . . in the foyer . . .” The man—short, young, skinny, wild-haired and harried-looking and so much less intimidating than Tom Riddle—trails off as he notices her. No, as he stares at her. Aghast. Nonplussed. There’s a dull gold watch chain peeking out from his waistcoat pocket, and an ill-fitting haughtiness to his demeanor, the kind that used to come from private tutors and dancing lessons and old money. “Is that who I think it is?”
Tom snorts. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
The man furrows his brow, visibly incredulous. “You don’t be ridiculous! Look at her!”
Tom’s mouth twists. “Lestrange.”
“What?”
“She,” Tom emphasizes, nodding at Daphne, “is the answer to all our problems.”
“Because . . .” Lestrange’s eyes go wide. “Of her uncanny resemblance to a dead girl?”
Daphne flinches. “Excuse me,” she finally interjects, her toes curling inside her boots, “what are you talking about?”
Tom peers at her, patronizing, speculative, before flapping his hand, gesturing to the motheaten curtains and the tarnished candelabra and the dusty cuckoo clock hanging above the mantel.
“Astoria Greengrass is searching for her older sister,” he says.
Daphne pinches her fingertips together and glances at Lestrange, who’s ventured farther into the room, his expression more troubled than befuddled. “I thought the older sister was . . . I thought she was dead. Everyone said she was dead.”
Tom shrugs, noncommittal, apathetic, and then sniffs. “Astoria Greengrass has apparently been informed otherwise.”
“By who?” Daphne blurts out, hurrying to add, “It’s just—that’s really very—it’s been fifteen years. Isn’t it odd? That she would believe—that?”
Tom shrugs again, grimly amused. “She’s spent most of her life heavily guarded and understandably paranoid, with no one for company but what few foreign supporters the aristocracy has left. A kind of self-imposed house arrest. She’s likely just desperate to believe she isn’t alone.”
At that, Daphne registers a pang of sympathy—muted, poignant, deeply buried, an indulgence she rarely allows herself because she’s spent most of her life without any tangible assurance that it matters. She doesn’t have a past, not really, and she doesn’t have a future, either, not unless she goes out and steals one for herself.
But then—
She’s struck, hard, by the meaning of all of this—Tom’s ambiguous remarks about her name, Lestrange’s far less ambiguous remarks about her appearance—and she frowns, tucking a flyaway strand of hair behind her ear.
“You want me to . . . pretend?” she hedges, scandalized. “To be her older sister?”
Tom doesn’t outwardly react. “There’s a bit more to it than that, but for now—yes. That’s what I want.”
Lestrange awkwardly shuffles forward. “I know that sounds . . . ah, cold-blooded, but it’s really for the be—”
“It sounds cruel,” Daphne interrupts, biting down on her bottom lip to hold in the rest of her tirade. She isn’t certain where it’s coming from. Why she’s bothered. Why she cares. “It sounds . . . I’m sorry, but I can’t. I can’t do that.”
“Oh, are you busy?” Tom asks snidely, pushing off from the wall, sauntering towards her—predatory, confident, deceptively graceful. “Are you on your way to something better? Do you have any plans beyond a cotton mill, if you’re lucky, or a brothel, if you aren’t?”
Daphne flushes and ducks her chin, wilting under his scrutiny, unable to muster a response.
She isn’t, of course, busy, and she isn’t, of course, on her way to something better, and she doesn’t have any plans. Not real ones. Not good ones. She’s as untethered as she’s ever been, as she’s ever going to be, adrift and directionless, alone, and perhaps that’s why she feels such an unexpected sense of loyalty, of kinship, to this girl she’s never met. It’s sentimental, though. It’s idiotic.
It’s wasteful.
Tom stops next to the settee, and there’s a beat of silence, tense, anticipatory, before he bends down, leaning in, and asks, “May I?”
“May you—what?” Daphne stammers.
He meets her eyes, no, catches her eyes, and the intensity is overwhelming, disarming, and it hits her the very same way the fear did the summer the nuns insisted she learn how to swim—like merely dipping her toe into the river water could be fatal, could leave her sinking and drowning and gasping for breath.
“May I touch you, Daphne?” he murmurs.
She hesitates.
But then she nods, quickly, unsteadily, and he reaches out like he’s gentling a skittish horse, carefully plastering his hand to the arch of her spine and pushing in, straightening, molding, correcting her posture, the shape of her, in one long smooth stroke.
His palm is warm and firm and electrifying where it rests against the small of her back, and she vows to ignore it.
(No, she doesn’t.)
The train rumbles through the countryside, chugging past yellowing grass and thatch-roofed villages and soot-streaked inns, vast, slinking swathes of moorland and swooping arcs of pastured meadow and a storm cloud-crinkled horizon.
Daphne sits in a private, mahogany paneled compartment, idly trying not to grimace too obviously when the boning of her new corset digs into her ribs; additionally, there’s the urge to fidget, too, with her elegantly upswept hair—new—and her plum-purple silk brocade dress—new—and the delicate dusting of rice powder on her nose, to mask the freckles—new, new, new, it’s all new, it’s all strange, it’s all uncomfortable, and that fact is compounded, made infinitely more complicated if not outright worse, by Tom.
By how Tom keeps stealing glances at her.
A little bit hungry, a little bit smug, a little bit intrigued—but mostly, no, entirely like she’s a hard-won carnival prize, a long-coveted family heirloom, and he’s not about to give her up without a fight. Without a war.
“Relax, will you?” he eventually drawls, stretching his legs out in front of him and draping a careless arm across the back of the red velvet-upholstered bench seat. His fingertips graze the nape of her neck, a ghost of a whisper of contact that she can’t really imagine is by design but doesn’t quite trust isn’t, either. She barely manages to suppress an answering shiver. “We have at least a day of travel left, you’re going to give yourself a migraine.”
Lestrange huffs out a laugh, tugging at his cravat and flashing Daphne a friendly albeit tentative half-smile. “Tom’s right, actually,” he says apologetically.
“About what?”
“Mm? What’s that?”
Daphne stiffly scoots forward, pins and needles cascading down her legs. “Tom’s right about what?”
Lestrange snaps the pages of his newspaper. “You’re supposed to wear the corset, not the other way around.”
“Oh.”
“Are you alright?”
Daphne hiccups around a shallow breath. “It’s just—I think you tied the, the corset too tight, and I’m not used to . . . to doing nothing but drink tea, and I don’t . . . I don’t know what to do with—” She helplessly holds up her baby-soft, freshly manicured hands. “I don’t even know where you’re taking me.”
Tom taps the knob of her shoulder with his thumb. “Don’t phrase it like that.”
“I’m—excuse me?”
“We aren’t taking you,” he says. “We’re escorting you. You’re an active participant in your own destiny. Don’t forget that, and don’t you dare ever settle for less.”
Daphne blinks at him, taken aback by his tone of voice—sharp, quiet, cutting, irritated, vehement, rather like he’s reciting a religious affirmation to himself in the mirror, not speaking directly to her, directly at her—and then clears her throat as daintily as she can after a week’s worth of seemingly endless lessons from Lestrange.
“Tom just doesn’t appreciate the insinuation that he’s a kidnapper,” Lestrange says loudly, with a conspiratorial wink. “That brand of dirty work isn’t precisely his forte.”
“That’s . . . right, yes, of course. Not a kidnapper. I didn’t mean to—insinuate . . . that.” Daphne presses her lips together and swallows. “But that doesn’t, um, that doesn’t answer my question.”
“Oh, was there a question?” Tom asks mildly. “I couldn’t tell.”
Before she can respond, their compartment is rattled by an abrupt, nauseating jolt.
Distantly, there’s then the faint, whining, grinding shriek of steel on steel, the split-second slither of the train careening off the rails and whistling through the air and the echoing thumps of luggage falling off the racks and—
And a booming, explosive crash.
It’s chaos, after that.
There’s yelling and swearing and crying and screaming and Tom is leaping to his feet and grabbing her by the wrist, by the waist, shoving her towards the ground and then the window, back and forth, and then, finally, deciding to shield her with his much broader frame as he corrals her to the door.
“Don’t let go of me!” he shouts, dragging his had up and down the line of her back in what she—wildly, hysterically—assumes is meant to be a soothing motion. “We’re going to have to climb out before the fire spreads!”
“Before the what spreads?” Daphne bleats.
But the lamps are swaying, oil sputtering, flames rippling, glass darkening, and oh, oh, there it is, she can smell the smoke, smell the fire, hot and thick, heavy and acidic, and it’s positively stomach-turning, how it coats the back of her tongue, and it’s positively terrifying, how it drifts and swirls, closer and closer and closer.
“Go!” Tom bellows at Lestrange, kicking at the splintered, crumpled ruins of what had once been the door to the dining car. Daphne instinctively inhales, the ash charring her throat, her lungs, her soft palate, and then coughs and gags, twisting in Tom’s grasp to bury her face in his chest, in his neck, in the fabric of his jacket. “—the engine room, wherever the fire is, see if he left anything, you know what to look for, those stupid—those symbols, him and Grindelwald—”
Her ears are ringing.
And it isn’t the first time she’s had a stray, fleeting suspicion that there’s more to this ruse of Tom’s than he’s letting on; that he’s hiding something, something significant, something earth-shattering and shocking and gravely, personally secret—
But it is the first time it’s occurred to her to wonder if that something might be dangerous.
(No, it isn’t.)