The first time Tom killed himself he was forty-two but didn't look a day over twenty-three.

It hadn't been planned. That is to to say, he hadn't spent weeks agonising over the decision or anything like that. He simply woke up one morning, visited the cafe on the corner around from his flat in muggle London, ordered his regular tea with bacon and egg sandwich, sat down at his usual table in the back and flipped open the paper with the intention of keeping up with the goings on in the world in which he barely spent any inadvertently opened up at the obituaries to find the young faces of a newlywed couple, Helen and Richard Granger, staring, unmoving, up at him.

It took him a few minutes to realise what he was looking at. That it was the obituaries and not the wedding announcements. But no, the word was printed in bold capital letters at the top of the page and-

Dead. At the tender age of twenty-one. They'd barely been married a week before they'd been caught up in a bank robbery and murdered.

He left the cafe before the waiter with the crooked teeth that asked him for the sports section of the paper every time he went in there could put his food down. He didn't watch where he was going, he simply let his feet wander until he came to the edge of the footpath and stopped.

All around him muggles were moving, living, loving and had no idea what the handsome young man in their midst was thinking or feeling. Tom didn't really know either. But he looked up and saw a bright red vehicle, a bus, coming down the road and -

Screams erupted and vehicles screeched to a halt and the body of Tom Riddle smashed against the front of the bus and broke.

But Tom Riddle had already been broken before he'd even spotted the bus.

"I'm bored," Abraxas muttered. Tom looked up from his diary, from recording the secret of immortality and all future dates that he needed to keep a track of and frowned at him.

"How on earth, could you be bored on a day like today?" Thoros muttered from Tom's other side, not bothering to open his eyes much less look beyond the patch of grass upon which the group of seventh year boys were laying. "Exams are over. We graduated this morning. Our lives begin tomorrow. There is nothing boring about that."

"But we're just sitting here. We could be making mischief or raising hell or-"

"Have you forgotten that I'm still Head Boy?" Tom asked, closing his diary and shutting it away into his satchel. "That technically I can't endorse any sort of misbehaviour."

"Oh come on, Tom," Avery chuckled, "one final night of debauchery won't kill us. What's Dippet going to do? Take the badge off you?"

"No," Thoros answered for him, and Tom raised an eyebrow in his direction. "Dumbledore's dead so there's no-one whispering into his ear about how Slytherins should be punished for every single little thing. But that doesn't mean we have to be careless."

Tom stood and hitched his bag onto his shoulder. He let his gaze follow the shoreline of the Black Lake, let himself enjoy the shrill shrieks of laughter and the happiness of his fellow students before he began to stalk off in the direction of the castle. "Quite right Nott," he said when he felt the other boys, his knights, step into line behind him.

"Where have you been?"

Tom glared at Abraxas over the rim of his champagne glass and the other man squirmed in his seat. "That is to say - Tom - you've been missing-"

"I haven't been missin-"

"-For four years and none of us, none of us knew how to get in con-"

"-I left perfectly reasonable instructions with Nott about how to contact me if it was an emerge-"

"-well he didn't bloody well share them when I needed yo-"

"Malfoy. You becoming formally engaged to the witch you've been betrothed to since birth is not an emergency."

Abraxas snapped his mouth shut and Tom could see that he was biting on his tongue. Honestly, the man was ridiculous. It's not like he'd meant to disappear for so long but-

He'd worked out in his last reincarnation the secret of immortality. Dumbledore was dead. He had his trophies - Helga's cup, his mother's locket and Rowena's diadem. He didn't need to spend another three years training as an intern in the DOM when he already knew all the secrets it held. He didn't need to stay in England when there was so much magic out there just waiting to be re-discovered and introduced to civilised society again. He'd visited the young Grangers and set every imaginable- and some of his own design- wards upon them so that no harm would, or could, befall them. At least not before they'd had their first born. Not before they'd had Hermione.

There was also the small issue of Grindelwald. Tom hadn't had to deal with the man before - Dumbledore always had. But Dumbledore was dead now and Tom had noticed when he'd been travelling Europe that the longer Grindelwald was allowed to roam free, untethered and without a clear opponent, the more difficult Tom's life was going to be in the long run. The idea that he'd be taking on one of the darkest wizards their world had ever encountered left a funny taste in his mouth. He was not a good guy, and really Grindelwald was nothing but a footnote in his past, but things were different now.

Things were very different and he needed a plan. Which was why he'd returned to England - to his knights.

Malfoy's voice snapped him from his thoughts. "Well," he drawled, in that way that only a Malfoy could, "what's the plan now?"

Tom smirked at him over the rim of his own glass.

"This," Rosier, who was crouched down behind an empty bin in a deserted alley in Berlin whispered, "is a terrible idea."

Abraxas opened his mouth to protest but Tom glared across the dark alley at the pair of them and they promptly shut up. When their target appeared at the end of the alley, they quickly set off after him. Hidden beneath disillusionment charms, the three Englishmen followed quickly and quietly until the man came to a sudden halt.

"I know you're there," he said in perfect English and three of them stiffened. Abraxas shot Evan a glare as though it was his fault they'd been caught out. "Come out to play," he sneered. Tom's eyes narrowed at the taunt, and he stepped out of the shadows, removing his charm and faced their target head on while Rosier and Malfoy stepped out of the shadows behind him. "Oh! I see you brought some playmates."

Tom fired a bombarda and dove out of the way of an Avada. He blinked when it crashed into the brick behind him, surprised that the German was going straight for the kill. He flicked his eyes in his friends' direction and was pleased to note their determined faces before the three of them began to fire spell after spell towards the end of the alley.

Tom was surprised by how swiftly the man dodged them, ducking and diving as the three of them unleashed their arsenal of spells against him, all except that infamous green one. They wanted to get information, after all, and it was incredibly tiring and tedious to do so with a corpse. Tom had first hand experience.

When the man had eventually tired himself out, Rosier conjured a chair and bound him to it - summoning the wizard's wand in the process whilst Abraxas erected strong privacy charms around the alley so that not a sight or sound could escape their small bubble.

"You could have made this so much easier," he said, "you could have joined us. Now though," he sighed dramatically, stepping forwards, "now you're going to pay dearly for your mistake. You picked the wrong horse i'm afraid."

Tom didn't let him reply. He simply jerked his wand and entered the man's mind.

When he emerged from it a few minutes later, he not only had a wealth of knowledge about Grindelwald and his schemes, but also a reminder of something he hadn't thought about it decades.

Because whilst the man knew a lot of things about how Grindelwald ran things, he'd also reminded him of a much more important fact that he hadn't entertained in a long time.

Grindelwald was still the the wielder of the elder-wand.