The rest of that night was spent sleepless at the kitchen table, a kettle filled with tea placed before them both, and the clock ticking in the background.

It seemed their act of playing house had momentarily ended, of course he had not realized they were playing house, or rather that she was playing house. That's what it seemed though, an empty doll house, filled with furnishings she did not need and a sense of normality that could otherwise not be found in London amidst the junkies and the witches. Her witches, not his, never his.

It had seemed odd, a little off and perhaps a bit surreal, but at that moment it was more unnerving than he had ever found it before.

Just where had Harry Potter found this house empty of people but filled with furnishings? Or had she found it empty at all? What had Dumbledore and his cronies made of it, of her, their messiah with too green of eyes playing family with no one to point to as a father or a mother?

Magical girl, witches, labyrinths, these were not her true secrets. They were only secret in that no one believed them, no one looked for them, and so they became her secrets by default but she had other deeper secrets that he had not yet even glimpsed.

A father should know his own progeny, half of her was him, and yet while he saw himself so clearly in her he only saw the image and nothing behind it. The glass which made that reflection was obscured so that he could only glimpse himself.

In the end it was him who broke the silence, "So these witches are in the magical world as well?"

Harry started; she had been lost in her own thoughts for some time, staring into the walls as if they contained all the stories in the world, "Yes, as far as I can tell wizards are mostly unaware of them though."

"Mostly?"

"Dementors," She said quietly in a voice that was still distracted, "Are probably familiars, too weak to create a labyrinth, too small to disguise themselves properly. I've never seen one in person so it's hard to tell but from the description… Well, they do sound a bit familiar."

She smiled briefly at her own pun before sipping at her tea with that lost expression, "Magic, as wizards know it, is a watered down version of what we use. They seem satisfied with it, for the most part anyway."

She stopped then allowing the silence to grow once more, not clarifying her words in the slightest, and perhaps she merely lacked the experience. She had only been in the magical world for two years, first and second year spells would seem like child's play to her (they had been to him), but all the same it was disquieting to think that she saw so little in them. Then again, with the image of her battling in his mind, how could he disagree?

With that speed, that raw power, she would have an auror on their knees within seconds. There was something to be said for that.

"How many witches do you typically kill while at Hogwarts?" It was the first time he had so bluntly asked about her occupation, and in her attention, how she set down her tea and turned to him with a cold glance it showed.

It seemed she had preferred it when he hadn't really believed, when he had allowed her to act as she would but didn't really believe, or rather didn't truly know. She had liked it when he thought witches, her witches, were these silly little things that any competent wizard could handle if they existed at all.

Or perhaps it was how he said it, killed, in the manner that she did. There really was no getting around it though, and perhaps that was why she didn't respond directly even as she glared, she killed witches in the night. No, killing was too weak a word, she slaughtered them like cattle.

"Not too many, Hogsmede is small, and Hogwarts is even smaller, that being said Hogwarts is a surprisingly violent and angry place… As you may have noted so things do turn up every once in a while. You know, when I first met you, I thought you were a witch."

Her eyes seemed to bore through him, dissect him, as if he was some lab specimen on a table and once again he found himself wondering why he was here and why he was still alive. He had been at her mercy, more than at her mercy, in the Chamber of Secrets and yet here they were playing house as if none of it had ever happened.

She allowed him to incite revolution, to research what exactly his other self had been doing for fifty years, to get his grips on reality but that was just it she allowed him to do it. Had she truly been what he had been expecting, a girl vengeful over the death of her parents, he would have been dead long ago.

"You felt like a witch, the notebook felt like a labyrinth, but at the same time…" She paused as if searching for the right thought and then said, "Witches don't talk, can't talk, I have never heard one speak. They're mindless beings filled with anger and chaos, they just destroy, and kill that's all they do. You were angry, you brought about feelings of despair and rage, you brought death and blood to Hogwarts' doorstep but you weren't mindless. Witches don't take human form and they don't talk."

So it seemed the other shoe had dropped, at the cold look in her eyes he realized the jig was up for both of them, it seemed they would come to the true motives of things at last. Now that they had gotten to know each other a little better, "Is that why I'm here, for your curiosity?"

"I guess, partly, there are other reasons." Placing her fingers together she paused and finally said, "You aren't human but you're not a magical girl, a witch, or even a familiar."

"No, I'm not." He said coldly, "But then, you aren't really human either."

"No, I guess I'm not."

Only a little while after that she left the table, done with their conversation and drifting off into her bedroom, leaving Tom behind with tea and thoughts swirling in his head.

Tense was too strong a word for the weeks that followed. In the morning Harry returned to her more usual demeanor, that casual child's act that she liked to put on her for herself, and it seemed that the conversation and the events of that night had been more or less put aside.

There had always been hints that she had suspected him of being something other than human but they had only ever been hints and in attempting to reclaim Voldemort and discover her biological relation to him it had seemed unimportant. Whatever webs she wove she was only twelve years old, a child, and there was no doubt that he could leave if need be.

He still felt that he could leave, that her offer had been genuine, but leaving no longer seemed to matter. In discovering something of her true nature, in what it truly meant to be a magical girl, he realized that if she needed to find him she would and it was as simple as that.

She knew he was a horcrux, as he had initially suspected but disregarded in the notebook, she simply didn't have the word for it. Being a horcrux, rather than a wizard or even a dark lord, had been what had saved him in the Chamber of Secrets. He wasn't quite certain what to make of that.

What would a young Tom Riddle, a Tom Riddle who lived in a surreal world in which he battled nightly for the equivalent of a food supply, what would he do with a manner of creature that was not quite human?

Still, she made no move, and so things settled into what they had been before. He found his way to the couch and watched her magical girl shows with her, the Japanese imports featuring young girls in fashionable outfits and as they watched she routinely had commentary.

"That's the most unrealistic part." She said one day staring at the screen with dull eyes.

"Hm?"

She pointed, the animated girls on the screen were hugging each other and laughing in relief at the defeat of an enemy, "The friendships, magical girls don't have friends. It becomes too hard to relate to normal people, next to them you feel old and tired and covered in blood, and as for other magical girls… Well, that never works out well."

He noted then, staring at her face, that contemplative frown that she had not included him in either of those categories. He was not a human but he also wasn't a magical girl and for a surreal moment he wondered if it hadn't been as simple as that.

There had been a time, when he was young and weak, before Hogwarts and bitterness had set in. That he had wondered if there wasn't someone out there that he could relate to, some mentor or peer, that would not be as extraordinary as him but would be vaguely similar.

He had little faith in humans and later in wizards but if he had come across some third unknown category of being; well who's to say he wouldn't have tried as well?

Still she had secrets, more secrets than he would have suspected even from the girl who lived, she was almost drowning in her secrets.

There were still photographs on the wall, ones that he had overlooked before as they had seemed unimportant, but now he found himself staring at each and storing each image in his memory. Many were of Harry herself, a younger Harry, smaller and thinner but remarkably happier. There was no edge in her eyes as there was now, and her grin seemed real, without shadows inside it.

(On finding those, on seeing that bright smile, it had hurt for a moment in a way he couldn't really describe. That he had never seen her that happy, appeared to be incapable of bringing that expression to her face, in spite of the fact the he was her true father.)

Here she was in the park, there outside of muggle school, always with that bright smile as if the world was made of miracles.

There were no recent pictures of her, none of her in wizarding attire, only that age that golden age that looked as if it was only a few years before.

Most were of Harry, this young strange Harry he didn't know, but there were others as well. One, cut off at the edges as if someone had been cut of the frame, featured two young attractive people blinking back at him in a wizard's photograph. A young woman with red hair and green eyes and a young man with glasses; smiling at the camera with expressions that only seemed happy, their eyes were vacant.

Even looking at them, their images in a photograph, they were filled with nothingness; fake somehow.

The photos that weren't of Harry were hard to find, the ones of herself she seemed to disregard, to casually dismiss until she forgot their presence entirely but these ones she had searched out and had mutilated with scissors; condemned them to shadowed corners where they couldn't truly be seen.

Looking at the adult clothing and at James and Lily Potter's frames it seemed as if the clothes, both the muggle and the wizard clothes, would have fit.

Of course without measurements it was impossible to tell but all the same he couldn't help but connect the dots with a fragile line inside his mind. No true conclusion drawn, no explanation, but a connection.

The key was in Harry's past, in how she came to live in an empty house filled only with furniture, clothing, and nostalgia.

"You mentioned you used to live with your relatives, the Dursleys."

It had been one morning when she had gotten back from witch hunting, exhausted and on the cusp of sleep, dark shadows etched beneath her eyes as she gratefully took the tea he handed her. He had not gone himself, there was no longer a reason to risk his neck, now that he knew that there truly was a difference between Harry's witches and his own he saw no reason to see one in the flesh again.

Instead he waited for her to get back, before he went off to Knockturn Alley for connections or research, and had tea waiting.

"Surprised you remembered that." She muttered, as if she would have preferred for that to be the case, "Yeah, I lived with them for a while. They never really liked me, of course."

There were many things left unsaid in that, darker memories, but Tom had no true interest in those. He had his own memories of the orphanage to fill in the blanks, he knew exactly what ignorant muggles could be like to gifted individuals, it would be no different for his daughter than it was for him.

"I'm just surprised that you aren't still with them, you see the state doesn't usually take kindly to young girls living by themselves." His eyes flickered over to hers, to see if she stiffened or otherwise bristled, but she seemed as if she was still thinking over her distasteful relatives rather than anything else.

She shrugged, "When I became a magical girl, well it took freaky business to a whole new level." She snorted here as if this was a particularly witty statement before continuing, "Besides, I thought I'd…"

Solved it, he wanted to complete for her, she had thought that she had solved the problem. She didn't finish though, instead she trailed off, her frown increasing as an even darker memory worked itself to the surface in her head.

"Your wish?" He'd asked and here she did stiffen and looked over at him, her eyes like knives, but she nodded all the same.

"Yeah, my great wish." She said a cold smile painting her lips, the one he remembered wearing with his father's corpse on the floor before him, a bleak smile.

"Do I ever get to hear what this great wish was?"

She was silent for a few moments and in that silence he could feel the room growing colder until it seemed as if the air itself was frozen, finally in a voice he had only heard from her a few times, the voice of the girl in the Chamber of Secrets and the alleyway she said, "Don't ever ask a magical girl about her wish."

Looking through him, those eyes far too green for any normal girl, she continued, "How'd you end up a notebook, Tom?"

Personal, too personal, "Ah, I see."

In the tense silence they had waited, sipping their tea, and finally she broke the silence returning to the original topic of her relatives, "I wouldn't go back, even if they'd take me, even if they wanted me to I would never go back. Besides, a lot of magical girls end up living on their own anyway, I just started a bit sooner than most."

Had he had a way out of the orphanage, even at the tender age of nine or ten, he would have done the same; that much he understood. In some ways even the diary, condemned to his own head and consciousness for fifty years, was preferable to that damned orphanage.

Harry had secrets like being a magical girl and killing witches, secrets she barely kept that wizards and others merely refused to look directly at, but she had other secrets too. And they danced in the shadows of her eyes even as she watched television filled with animated cheerful girls surrounded by friends battling monsters.

Author's Note: So the mystery of Harry deepens at least for Tom; I've been thinking that we'll actually switch to Harry's point of view shortly so this is one of the few fics where I actually address those mysteries in a timely manner. Who would have guessed? Anyway thanks to readers and reviewers you guys are great.

Disclaimer: I don't own P3M or Harry Potter