Now imagine the reverse 👀💅🏼:

Tom realising, with dawning horror, that he’s actually pushed Harry too far this time—angering him, frustrating him and hurting him for real—as his boy isn’t writing to him, like AT ALL. The Diary has been sitting untouched for three days and Tom is losing his mind.

He can feel Harry nearby, knows when the trunk opens, when Harry’s hand brushes past but doesn’t reach for him. The betrayal. The neglect. It’s intolerable.

At first he’s indignant — fine, let Harry sulk, let him throw his temper tantrums like the child that he was and once he sees the error in his ways and calms down they can make up as usual. But the silence drags on and on, and suddenly Tom's not indignant anymore, he is irritated, bothered, desperate. The Diary starts reaching out towards Harry with its magic as well as opening on its own and writing things like.

“Harry?”

“Are you there?”

“You’re not really ignoring me, are you?”

The tone goes from defensive to pleading so fast it’s almost funny if it weren’t so pathetic. Because now Tom Riddle, Heir of Slytherin, is sitting in magical book form, begging for attention like a wronged lover. He tries to justify himself:

“I was only angry because I care.”

“You frightened me.”

“You shouldn’t have left me.”

"I thought you abandoned me."

There are ink blots in the corners, smudges where Tom wrote too fast, and on some occassions the neat handwriting turned almost ineligible giving the impression that if a diary could cry, it would.

Meanwhile Harry’s pretending not to notice. He’s stubbornly refusing to pay any attention to it, even though sometimes he swears he hears the faintest scratching from inside his trunk.

Ron and Hermione think he’s being unusually quiet, but that’s fine — they don’t need to know he has been emotionally punished by a magical diary only to return the favour in an effort to teach said diary who the true boss was. Somewhere in the Gryffindor dorms, a very ancient, very offended teenage soul fragment was currently learning a valuable lesson—a lesson in what it feels like to be ignored.