Harry Potter Fanfiction: The Uncrowned King

When discussing this era, later generations tend to focus on Chief Coordinator Tom Riddle's institutional designs, but they often overlook one crucial fact: nearly all the original calibration data for technical standards came from the Flow Center Archives, where Amy Grint, the chief archivist at the time, checked every entry line by line. Her working method is usually described as “drawing a crooked cat in pencil wherever something was wrong.” For a long time, scholars treated this as a kindly joke, until someone cross-referenced every original manuscript marked “calibrated by A.G.” in the committee's public index with the formatting framework in Professor Riddle's published memoranda. The conclusion: the number of times their handwriting overlapped along the edges of the same clause's addenda far exceeded statistical expectations.

As for their private relationship, the mainstream media of the time never managed to define it precisely. Historians favor more cautious phrasing. Until the original confidentiality agreement personally signed by Professor Riddle is automatically unsealed, we can only borrow the oft-quoted footnote by Professor Torre, an Italian scholar: “They never needed any agreements between them. Agreements were for everyone else.”

Excerpt from A Popular History of Modern European Magic, Chapter Nine, Section 4

The whole story is complete and already in my drafts, including all the extras, so you can read with confidence. I'll probably post about two chapters a day. If you're enjoying it, please leave me lots of comments. This is purely my own personal daydream, and it's my first time writing a story, so I hope you like it.

I think that if anyone could enter Riddle's world, it would have to be at the orphanage. Because only at the orphanage had he not yet learned how to disguise himself. He had not yet learned to adjust his gentle smile to just the right angle, or to calculate the social weight of every sentence. At the orphanage, he was simply himself: clever, cold, lonely, angry, trusting no one and questioning every kindness. Amy entered his life at that stage. Not Tom Riddle of Hogwarts, the prefect, model student, and darling of every professor. She met Tom Riddle at the orphanage: the little boy who hid his Parseltongue notes beneath the floorboards of his bed, never left a mark when he fought the other children, and had a more calculating gaze than any adult. She saw the real him then, and wasn't fooled by the gentle smile he learned to wear later. He could never fool her from the start, because he had never tried to fool her. And she wasn't scared off, either. That's what sets Amy apart from every other heroine. The heroine who meets him at Hogwarts knows the perfect exterior he has already polished to a shine. Amy, who meets him at the orphanage, knows the rough stone, before its shell has formed. A gentle boy praised by the whole school, and a gloomy boy avoided by every child at the orphanage: if a girl stood beside him while he was still that gloomy boy, then no one who came later could ever mean as much to him. Because he doesn't have to imitate anything in front of her. He can relax. He can let her see the cup with the crooked cat drawn on it. He can let her catch him using the wrong color of ink in the archives. He can let her keep teasing him after his ears turn red, instead of immediately turning on her. He wears a mask in front of everyone, except her. Not because he doesn't want to wear one, but because she saw him without a mask at the orphanage, so there's no point wearing one now.

Theme: People should contribute to society and help it progress.