In another life, Tom Riddle would have taken the scraps of respect he’d earned over the last four years and immediately leveraged them into something greater. In another life, he would have spent the year searching high and low for the Chamber of Secrets, and once he found it, he would have revealed his Slytherin ancestry to his housemates. He would have entered 5th year in the lower-middle of the ladder of the Slytherin hierarchy – having fought and bled to get there based on nothing more than his brilliance, his magical might, and his impeccable manners and flawless social mask – and left his 5th year at the top, climbing his way up with his ancestry and the threat of Slytherin’s monster at his back.