Archive of Our Own

He’s outlived a basilisk.

He’s mostly made of impossibility trapped between bones and skin these days, but that fact is mindboggling even for him.

(And it won’t just be one. More and more basilisks will die, born of toad and egg and wizards following his ancient instructions, and he will still be here. Always.)

Actually, he hasn’t just outlived a basilisk. He’s outlived her muscles, organs, her gem-like scales, and by the time his mind claws itself out of the blankness of grief he’s lying in the embrace of her bleached ribs, her body nothing but remnants of dried fluid on his skin.

It’s not his first venture into the blankness, so he knows better than to try and move right away now that he’s back. He hasn’t moved in months, maybe years, and this time there was no Gemma to dribble water into him off her forked tongue. If he moves too quickly he’ll probably break something, if his muscles respond at all.

Which is why he’s on his back, staring up at the patches of blue sky shining through the white ceiling of bone, when he sees it. A cloud in the empty blue.

But not a normal cloud, no. This one is long and straight, impossibly so, like a trail painted across the sky. It’s almost like…but that’s impossible. He knew they’d been wandering for a while, tired of humans, before Gemma got sick, but still, it couldn’t have been that long.

But no, it is. It’s a modern plane.

Which means he’s very, very late.

Shit.

*

“What do you want most, Tom?”

Tom whirls towards the voice, and is suddenly absolutely certain that it’s night despite the bright sun beating down on the dusty lane. Nothing like that should be able to exist in daylight.

There’s something wrong with it.

And it’s certainly an it, despite being shaped like a man. The limbs are impossibly thin, skeletal under nearly translucent skin. Tom has seen hunger, seen starvation, and a being like that shouldn’t be breathing, much less perched on a fence post, grinning down at him with far too many teeth.

“Avada kadavera!” It’s not the cold, measured spell he’d cast it as barely an hour before. It’s panicked, wand movements sloppy, but the green still bursts forth, whooshing towards the thing with the rush of death, and…

And splashing right off. The curse glides over its skin like water, lighting it in ghastly green before dissipating into the air beyond.

“Wow. That really brings me back,” it says nonsensically, not looking at all surprised to have survived a killing curse. 

“What are you? Who are you?” Tom’s voice is strong and demanding, and he’s admittedly a little proud of that.

“No one, yet,” it says, and then it’s falling back over the fence, mad cackling cut off by the abrupt crack of apparition. And just before, glittering over the slats, the sun bounces off something black and gold. And it’s not probable, not possible, but it’s a twin to the ring in Tom’s hand.

*

It’s not the return to England he’d had planned. There were some events and discoveries he would’ve liked to see in the early 1900s, and then maybe a stop off with the Gaunts or at Wool’s to finally see the beginning of it all.

But terrifying the ever-loving shit out of Tom Riddle on his way home from baby’s first avada is fun too.

*

Tom stares down at his spoils where it’s lying on his worn bedspread. It’s a rich thing, all wrought gold and jet-black stone. So clearly magical, with an odd symbol gouged deep into the center. Much more suitable than the ridiculous muggle diary. He’d been startled by the mudblood, had acted hastily. Never again. His soul was not something that could be bought on Vauxhall Road.

No, the ring was much better. He’d meant to turn it into a Horcrux right away, doubly binding himself to immortality. But…

What do you want most, Tom?

The being had known his name. It had his ring. And did he really want to risk having something in common with a thing like that, more feral rot than man?

It was immortal, his mind murmurs, and maybe they already have something in common. But no, he doesn’t know that. It could weather a killing curse, but that wasn’t a guarantee of immortality. And even if it were immortal, it was some lesser form, something weaker.

He’d never be reduced to a thing like that.

Still, there’s no rush. Like he said, he’s done being hasty with Horcruxes. So the ring goes into his trunk empty instead of onto his finger, and he resolves to do more research on lich and inferi when he gets back to Hogwarts, and, why not, the symbol too while he’s at it.

But a year later he hasn’t seen the foul thing again, and found no other reason to distrust the ring. Meanwhile, Marcus Stein thinks it’s funny to make a grab for his diary, and even taking off the dullard’s hand doesn’t ease the itch under Tom’s skin. He makes the Horcrux.

*

Something is following him. He’s felt it sulking at the edges of his vision, tingling up his spine all week. And the worst part is that there isn’t anything there.

No matter how hard he looks, how quickly he turns around, how many spells he casts, there’s simply nothing there to find. There are some who would say that Tom Riddle is already mad. He disagrees. But this, this just might drive him insane.

It’s only when he’s at home, safe behind heavily warded doors and windows, that the feeling eases. (And he hates that, hates that he feels like he’s hiding. When he finds what’s doing this he’ll spell them to stay conscious and pull their entrails out of their mouth.)

He’s sitting in his kitchen, finally feeling the tension in his shoulders starting to relax, when it drops through the ceiling.

His wand, never far away, is in his hand before he can make his eyes focus. At first, all that Tom can tell is that’s it’s big and dark and moving fast, and that’s all he needs to get a crucio off.  The thing drops, and Tom can finally suck in a breath.

Lying there, twitching slightly on his discolored linoleum, is the creature he met on the road outside his father’s house all those years ago. It looks healthier now, its body more filled out and humanoid, but there’s no mistaking those unnatural green eyes and that overwhelming feeling of wrongness.

A wrongness only amplified by the fact that, despite the curse Tom can feel pouring through his wand, the kitchen is completely silent.

The curse certainly landed. The thing went down, is even now twitching as pure pain burrows along its nerves, sending its muscles spasming in a vain search for relief. But it’s like there’s no one home in that writhing body. The eyes are empty, glazed over and dead, face expressionless beyond the muscle contractions.  

It’s unnerving enough that Tom cancels the spell.

“You know,” the creature croaks, voice a snapping branch in the quiet. “I missed a lot of things about you, but that wasn’t one. Let’s not do it again.”

There are things you’re supposed to do during a break in. People you’re supposed to call. But, honestly, Tom had never considered the idea that someone might get past his wards seriously enough to bother learning what. (Of course, wards don’t matter if someone comes in around them, his mind is yelling faintly). Besides, Aurors are the last thing he wants around here.

“I might consider it if you stop creeping up on me,” he says instead of doing anything reasonable. His mouth keeps moving without his permission. “And you can’t miss someone you don’t know.”

“How would you know? You’ve never missed anyone.”

Which, besides being entirely true, is an insane thing to say to someone you spoke with for less than a minute four years ago.

It hasn’t bothered to try and sit up, opting to stay strewn across the tiles where the curse left it. Now, it flops its head to the side so it can look up at him.

“Why Borgin and Burkes, Tom?”

Tom prides himself on his ability to read people. Honestly, between his intuition and legilimency most interactions are painfully boring, long-since anticipated and routine.

That was possibly the last thing he expected the creature to say.   

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You could have done – could be doing anything. But you choose this. Why? Why, for ten years?” 

“Your source appears to be faulty,” Tom says, using the tone of voice that makes his Knights freeze in place. “I did not have any better offers, and I’ve only been there for four years.”

It hums noncommittally. “I want tea,” it says, and Tom would ignore the non sequitur except that the creature springs to its feet with an effortless ease that a body that broken shouldn’t support and is now filling up the kettle like it lives here.

“Cru-“ Tom snarls, but before he can form the familiar wand motions there’s a cold hand wrapped around his wrist.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t pull that,” the thing hisses in his ear. Its breath puffs against his skin as it pants from the exertion of springing across the room.

It moves with an strange kind of grace Tom has never seen on anyone else. Like it knows every individual fiber of its body like most people know their name, knows exactly how each one moves in every scenario, how much it can take. Tom should be able to take it in a physical fight – he’s taller and broader, and even with its new weight the thing looks like it would snap in a stiff breeze – but there’s something about the way it moves that gives him pause.

The kettle shrills, announcing itself in the silent kitchen, and the thing steps away.

“Cream or sugar?” it asks, floating down two mugs from his cupboard, and it’s the first time Tom’s seen it has a wand. It’s a light wood, though not the bone white of Tom’s own, and the creature gestures with it in unusually small motions.

“Shouldn’t you know? You seem to know everything else,” Tom hisses, tense from the altercation. From the standoff he most certainly wouldn’t have lost. “Who are you?”

The creature just sighs, spooning five absurdly heaping spoonfuls of sugar into a cup before placing it on the table before Tom. “You still don’t get how this works. I ask the questions. You answer.”

“And what do I get in return?”

But the creature is already shaking its head. “No, you don’t get it.  This isn’t a negotiation.” The green eyes are mostly amused but maybe a little bit disappointed, and it might look a bit like Dumbledore in that moment. “I’ve already given everything.”

“I don’t owe anyone anything, least of all you. I don’t even know who you are.” He hopes to bait the creature, rile it into giving something away. Some lead to figure out its place in things, its end game.

But it just sighs, placing its mostly full mug on the table and stepping towards the window. “A pleasure as always, Tom.”

“You can’t just-“ Tom starts, lunging after it, but it’s already through the window, hopping over the sill into empty space. Tom is a breath after it, ready to curse it or cage it or simply claw it back in and demand answers.

But there’s nothing to grab onto. The creature had disintegrated, streaming away as a trail of dove grey magic, as insubstantial as smoke on the wind.

There are a lot of things Tom should be thinking in that moment, starting with how to strengthen his wards, and ending with whether there’s now some sort of dark curse on his kettle. But watching the creature wing away, all Tom can think is I’m going to learn how to do that.

*

And that, in the end, is why he’s at Borgin and Burkes. Because at any other job, he’d have to make time to research devils and demons and unassisted flight. At Borgin’s, that is the job.

He’d had other offers, it’s true. Some may call them better. But they were silly, pointless things – Junior Assistantships in departments like Muggle Artifacts and Magical Transportation. Positions that, at best, would put him in proximity to power.

And Tom does not want proximity. He wants the genuine article. And he has nothing but time to make it happen.

Beyond his research into flight and stronger, more diffuse wards, Tom tries not to think about the creature. And when he tries at something, he generally succeeds.

It’s not until he’s spelling the cave wall shut over his locket’s hiding place, leaving England and this phase of his life behind, that he realizes it’s been ten years since he started at Borgin’s.

*

“And here I was starting to wonder if you’d stood me up.”

Tom should be surprised to hear that voice in the middle of nowhere in an entirely nondescript forest in Albania. He wants to be surprised.

He is not surprised.

“I’d ask what you’re doing here, but I seem to recall you having a hypersensitivity to questions,” he says, pivoting slowly on the spot until he spots the creature perched on a stump on the other side of the small clearing.

It grins, wild and toothy as always. “And they say you can’t teach an old Dark Lord new tricks. Or, I guess it’s young Dark Lord right now?” It shakes its head. “It’s hard to keep it sorted.”

Though “it” is maybe not fair anymore. The being is looking less and less like some sort of undead nightmare and more and more like a young man in his early twenties with a mop of unruly hair and a slight, athletic build. If he’d first met him like this, Tom might not even have noticed the strange age to his lineless face.  

“The diadem is over there,” it – he – says, pointing to a gnarled tree standing on Tom’s side of the clearing. It looks no noticeably different from any of its neighbors, all ancient and twisted, half dead in the choking dark of their own age.

“You found it?” Tom breathes, and he takes a half step towards the tree before he remembers he has no reason to believe the statement.

The creature shrugs, careless. “Not really. I watched her leave it.”

There’s not a lot he could have said to wrench Tom’s attention away from the promise of finally, finally returning the last of the Founder objects. But that about does it. “You saw Helena Ravenclaw hide her mother’s diadem in 999 A.D.”

“Well, yeah. It was the most interesting thing happening that year. And I wanted to know where to find you.”

There are several things wrong with those statements. No, there are infinite things wrong with those statements, but Tom only has time to deal with a few of them. He starts with the one that seems most personally relevant.

“You were looking for me in 999 A.D.” It’s phrased as a statement, not a question, in case this creature is some sort of European-sphynx equivalent and actually has a biological problem with straight answers. Though he suspects he’s just annoying.

As if to prove his point, the creature has the audacity to roll his eyes. “I wasn’t looking for you then. I was looking for you now. Just doing some prep work. Really, Tom, I thought you were supposed to be some kind of genius. This isn’t that complicated.” 

Tom throws an avada on the off chance it’ll work this time. The creature just laughs.

No, getting riled up won’t do anything. But he’s got it talking. And talking is good. Talking leads to answers, and Tom can be quite charming. “If you were looking for me, I’m not that hard to find. Until last month I was still in the same apartment you so memorably visited.”  

“I don’t really do Britain.”

“I’ve seen you in England twice now.”

“Yes. And doesn’t that make you feel special?” he says, like that makes any sense at all, and you know what, no. Fuck charming.

He’s going to kill him. Whatever it takes, even if he has to dice him into pea-sized pieces and scatter him all the way from here to London, he’s going to kill him.

As if sensing Tom’s mood, the creature shifts topics. “Weren’t you here for something?” he says, swinging his feet towards the tree.

Tom isn’t one to let himself be managed but, well, he isn’t wrong. He moves towards the tree with measured steps and wrestles any excitement down, unwilling to take the creature at his word.

But, now that he’s focused on it, there is something peculiar about this tree. It’s not any kind of magic he’s used to sensing, is less a definite spell or ward and more of an impression, a tang in the air with no apparent source. The closest thing he can compare it to is the protections around the Chamber of Secrets, though that magic twists off in an entirely different direction, woven through with darkness and stone and parseltounge. This magic work is all blood and life and roots, but they might share a source at the base of things.

When Helena spoke of hiding the diadem in a hollow tree, Tom had honestly pictured her just dropping it into a dark cavity in a fit of panic. This tree is perfectly whole, with no crown-sized hollows in sight. Which, of course, makes more sense. The magical world wouldn’t lose an object for a thousand years to a few inches of wood.

There’s ancient magic keeping the diadem safe, woven through with the last moments of Helena’s life. He’s confident he can unweave the layers and unlock it secrets, given time. It’s what he does best. But it’s awkward, trying to inspect the bindings while keeping an eye on the creature across the clearing, and he isn’t about to turn his back on the man.

The being, seeming to sense his conundrum, finally hops off the stump and walks around the edge of the clearing, settling against the trunk of a properly hollow tree in Tom’s line of sight but still maybe ten paces away.

“She really did a number on that tree, huh?” he says, slouching back against the ancient bark.

Tom just hums in response. He’s not about to admit he’s unfamiliar with the working and beyond that there’s not much to say yet.

“Well, if it’s just going to be staring at trees, I’ll leave you to it,” he huffs. “Wake me up for the good stuff,” the creature says and then, after squirming a bit to resettle the leaf litter, looks for all the world like he’s gone to sleep.

Tom really does try to keep an eye on him as he works and keep his guard up, but he’s scant inches away from one of the most unique magical workings he’s ever seen and, well, there has to be a benefit to being immortal at some point. Little by little his awareness of the world around slips away as he falls into the magic, until he can’t hear the delicate chirping of birds in the canopy or his companion's ridiculous snuffling snores.

There’s no sudden shift like the fall of wards, or the abrupt ending of a finite incantatum. But the next time Tom opens his eyes the forest is painted in shadows and the bloody red of sunset and he is staring into the gaping maw of the tree, a hint of silver glimmering in its depths.

When he turns away with the diadem cradled in both hands the creature is already awake, leaning against his tree and for once quiet. His gaze is fixed on the diadem, a gleam in his eye, and for a moment Tom tenses, ready to fight, to protect what’s his, but…but no, he’s not looking at the diadem. He’s watching Tom’s hands as they hold it. How strange.

“Would you like to…” Tom trails off, not sure what he’s offering. It just feels strange to walk away from this mystery of a man. Everything about today was strange, more impossible than he’d ever expected when setting out at dawn on a knowingly impossible task.

“Are you going to make the Horcrux now?” the being asks, staring up at him with perfect calm, and Tom goes ridged, hand spasming around his prize. “Oh, don’t look so constipated. I know all about Horcruxes.” He smiles, small and wickedly amused. “All about them.”

“Then,” Tom says, slowly but refusing to be halting, “yes, I am.”

The creature nods. “In that case, I’d rather not watch. I prefer my death less pointless.” He steps a pace back, nods again, decisively. “See you around, Tom.”

One of these days it will be Tom apparating away without warning.

*

“Really, Tom? Vampires?”

“It’s not Tom,” he says, keeping his eyes fixed on the four gaunt figures stalking towards him down the alley.

“Ah, of course. Really, Voldemort? Vampires?”

Voldemort has long since given up on trying to guess how the creature knows these sorts of things. Probably the same way he always seems to know where Voldemort will be.

And then the first vampire is on him, and there’s no time left to talk.

It’s simple enough to transfigure the vampire’s robes into a stake, the wood pressing through his chest and sprouting out his back as it forms. But the second and third vampires are close behind, and he has to think a slashing curse at the second to slow him down until his wand is free again from giving the third vampire the same transfiguration treatment. For one perilous moment he’s stretched thin, with no further defense if the fourth vampire reaches him, and he has the unpleasant realization that he has no idea how his Horcruxes would interact with a turning bite.

And then there’s a blur in his peripheral vision, and his creature has joined the fray.

He launches himself at the vampire Voldemort had blooded, shoving his own rudely transfigured stake into its heart with more force than that slender body should be capable of. But he’s still moving, already on the fourth vampire before the second hits the ground, feinting away from its fangs and claws with practiced ease.

Voldemort’s own prey finally falls then, stake bursting through its back, and he can turn his full attention to the other scuffle.

The creature is less efficient than he is, relying more on hand-to-hand combat and speed than magic. But he whirls and dodges like he was born for it, matching the strength of the vampire with ease. He lands a solid hit to the gut, and the vampire staggers away wheezing, giving the creature the space to cast. His hand fumbles across the ground for a moment before finding a discarded bottle and snatching it up, transfiguring it into another stake.

This one is hasty, more log than sharpened stake, and the last vampire’s death is messy as he shoves the blunt object into its chest, seeming to defy the logic of physics with nothing but pure determination.

“Vampires?” he says a third time, panting over the no-longer-undead corpse.

“Yes, alright!” Voldemort finally snaps, blood still thrumming in his ears from the close call. He has no interest in spending his eternity as such a lesser creature. “Vampires! I heard they had an interesting way of channeling compulsion magic.” He kicks the shredded corpse for good measure, beyond frustrated at the lost opportunity.

“Well,” his creature says, pulling the body before him off the ground by the hair and decapitating it neatly with a severing charm. “I don’t know about that, but I do know some fun rituals with vampire blood.”

*

“What is you name?” Voldemort asks that night as they’re wiping down the kitchen table of the house he’s commandeered from some obliviated muggles.

“Call me Severus.” The creature seems to find this absolutely hilarious for no discernable reason.

“That’s not your name.”

“No, but it’s what you’re getting.”

“If you refuse to tell me your name, I will have to keep calling you creature.”

“Kreacher is fine,” he says, and that damn smile just grows wider.

*

The creature, oddly, doesn’t leave. He takes up residence on Voldemort’s stolen couch, coiling in on himself in one corner and drifting effortlessly to sleep. Voldemort despises the idea of falling asleep with someone else in the building. The only thing he hates more is the idea of the creature's smug, well-rested face when he wakes up to find Voldemort’s been up all night.

He goes upstairs to his bedroom, wards the dickens out of the door, windows, ceiling, floor, and walls, and slogs through a restless night.

The creature is still there in the morning.

Not only is he there, but he’s up, puttering around the house’s little kitchen like it’s the most natural thing in the world. A window is cracked, letting in a stream of late-spring breeze to toy with the lace curtains, and the air is thick with the smell of paprika and frying oil. It’s the most domestic scene Voldemort’s been party to in…well, several years, at least.

“Breakfast’s almost done,” the creature says carelessly, not turning from his place before the sizzling pan on the stove.

“That’s of no concern,” Voldemort says airily as he conjures a cup of tea. “I do not eat breakfast.”

That makes the creature turn to him, green eyes flashing with the first true emotion he’s seen on him. It’s fire and righteous anger and pure rage, and it’s so absurdly incongruous with his sleep rumpled clothes and the chipped coffee mug hovering at his shoulder. The air around him sparks, and Voldemort wonders faintly if he should feel concerned. What he feels is delight.

“You are lucky enough to live in an era where adding flavor is as easy as grabbing spices at the grocery store,” he says fiercely, stalking across the kitchen to drop a plate of eggs and toast in front of him. “You will eat.”

Voldemort, pointedly, doesn’t touch it.

But when he makes the exact same thing the next morning, setting it down in front of Voldemort with equally pointed silence, he deigns to take a bite.

It is, admittedly, delicious.

*

He keeps not leaving, and Voldemort hasn’t bothered to kick him out (he’ll probably just turn up again, absolutely a bad penny, this one), so the creature is with him when he leaves Albania, well-fed on paprika-seasoned eggs and folktales, and goes…

Well, everywhere. They are two powerfully magical, indestructible creatures, and the world is theirs to consume. They eat it in small bites.

The long dark in Svalbard, where necromancers burrow into snow drifts and no one is allowed to die.

The catacombs of Paris, dodging the flashlights of Muggle explorers and sniffing out remnants of desperate blood rights.

The searing heat of Uluru, where they chase dreams and beginnings until Voldemort is further away from himself than he’s ever been, and the creature has to drag him away.

The brilliant night of the Atacama, where Voldemort pieces together the secretes of the universe from the spangled sky while the creature laughs and tries to drag him down onto their blanket, fingers tracing thestrals and teapots in made-up constellations.

The ruins of Delphi, both the caves that whisper secrets and the expanses of their own minds when the creature disappears for an hour and then reappears with pills he insists will gives them the real Corycian experience.

The cliffs of South Africa, spiraling through the air as smoke as they race around Cape griffons and each other, the only sounds the wind rushing past his ears and the crashing of waves and the happy whoops of his creature as he dodges a diving griffon, and Voldemort has never liked flying but maybe he doesn’t mind this.

It’s not the solitary stalk around the globe that Voldemort had imagined when he set out, but he’s surprised to find he might like it better this way. There’s someone to turn to and gesture wordlessly when awe steals his voice, another pair of eyes to light up over some uncovered ancient curse. And, every morning, a breakfast cooked to perfection and shoved under his grudging nose.

Until, one morning, he walks into the kitchen of their latest commandeered flat and finds the stove cold.  

“Creature?” he says, leaning around the door of the second bedroom, and a part of him thinks he’ll find the room empty, bed as cold as the kitchen. But, no, he’s there, curled into his usual tight knot under the patchwork.

“Get up. We’re leaving.”

The lump doesn’t move.

“I am not going to waste the day on your account.”

Silence.

“Get up. Now. Or I’m leaving.”

Nothing.

Well, Voldemort has never been one for empty threats. He leaves.

It’s not like it’s his first day out on his own. They’re hardly attached at the hip. There’ve been plenty of days when they’ve parted ways, Voldemort heading off to some esoteric ruin work the creature can’t be bothered with or his creature simply slipping away, unexplained. But he can’t help the niggling of…discomfort at the back of his mind, the sense that things are different today.

He hasn’t moved when Voldemort comes home that night. Or when he wakes the next day.  

And that, that is unacceptable.

Voldemort is the most powerful wizard of the age. He is immortal and gifted and has brought the heirs of Britain’s most powerful families to their knees. He is not one to be ignored, and he is certainly not going to put his life on hold to play nursemaid.

They’d planned to spend Yule week in the South Sandwich Islands, exploring the effect of geography and daylight on the ancient rites of the longest night. It’s work he can do alone, that he can enjoy alone.

He goes.

He comes back with a deep appreciation of warming charms and a newfound hatred of penguins. He isn’t even really sure if he expects the creature to still be in the flat, but he’d left in a bit of a rush (a huff, he can admit in the privacy of his heavily guarded mind) and left some books behind that are worth picking up.  

Walking into the apartment, at first he thinks that something has changed, gone horribly wrong. It takes him a moment to realize that absolutely nothing has changed, and that’s what's wrong.

His creature hasn’t moved.

Not hasn’t moved on from the flat or is sleeping again like the useless lump he is. No, he hasn’t moved an inch in the last week, is still in the precise position Voldemort left him. The only sign that time has passed is the new hollowness of his cheeks, the obvious wrist bones poking out of his pajama sleeves. He looks less like the man who guided Voldemort’s fingers through his first attempts at Medieval thread magic and more like the haunted, feral thing he’d been when they met.

It makes Voldemort feel sixteen again. Makes him want to run.

He steps forward instead. And into hell.

The smell he’d already been aware of in the rest of the flat is overpowering in this room, the stench of human urine and feces and stale sweat coating the inside of his throat from the first breath. The broken marionette on the bed is lying in a pool of his own mess, somehow breathing in and out evenly while Voldemort has to fight not to wretch.

“You’re repulsive,” he says. He has no idea why it comes out soft.

Vanishing spells and scourgify can only do so much, so he leaves the windows wide to air out the smell and carries the catatonic terror of a being to the bathroom. There’s no reaction as he lays the creature down in the tub or as he turns on the water and vanishes the ruined pajamas. The skin underneath is dry and yellowed, the body a masterpiece of old scars, and Voldemort has so many questions he knows the creature wouldn’t answer even if it were speaking.

And then Voldemort adds another new experience to those he’s been gathering in their travels. He cares.

He sponges the memory of filth from the pale skin, fingers gliding over prominent ribs like piano keys. He spells new sheets onto the bed, buttons up new pajamas with his own hands. He spells nutrients into his system and clings to every ounce the creature doesn’t have to lose.

And then he wakes up and does it all over again.

Time slips by, meaningless in a world occupied by immortals. And this is the world now, narrowing down to a single room, the trips to the bathroom like a journey to the moon. His creature fades in and out, eyes never truly focusing even when he wakes. He calls him dozens of names, names Voldemort wants to burn from his tongue. Bowman, ‘Mione, Rose, Amin, Cassian, Adalbert, Gemma. But never Voldemort. Never Tom.

Tom. He’s never wanted to hear that accursed syllable more in his entire life.

“Come back,” Voldemort whispers in the dark, curled around this empty body because it’s all he has left of him, his first and only companion. “Come back to me. You’re not allowed to leave.”

Because his creature is a maddening, stubborn thing, he doesn’t.

But then, a week later, taking his own sweet time about it, a voice that isn’t Voldemort’s cracks open the silence of the flat.

“I don’t want this for you, Tom,” he whispers into the crook of Voldemort’s elbow where it rests under his head, and Voldemort doesn’t so much hear it as feel it on his skin. “I don’t want this for me, come to think of it.”

*

In the morning he wakes to the sound of the kettle shrieking. It rivals the first time the basilisk called him Heir Slytherin for the best sound he’s heard. 

He drags himself from the bed – empty, finally, yes – and pauses for a moment to lean in the doorway, taking in the scene that has become unfamiliar.

His creature is standing next to the kitchen table, one hand clenched around the back of a chair while he floats mugs and teabags around the room with the other, the soft morning light gilding his features and smoothing away the signs of starvation and strain. His mess of black hair, long since overgrown, flops into his face and he shoves it back with his wand hand impatiently, sending one of the mugs careening out the window.

“Chaotic as ever, I see,” Voldemort says over the ensuing crash.

Creature turns to him, smile wide and bloody where it pulls and cracks chapped lips. “You know me, can’t keep a good immortal down,” he says, and his voice is hoarse and cracked but he is speaking and there’s light in those flat flat flat eyes and Voldemort is across the room in two strides, pulling the being against him.

The other man goes rigid at the touch. Voldemort is just starting to wonder if he’s going to have to find a way to kill him after all to make sure no one ever knows about this moment when there are suddenly arms around his waist, dragging their bodies closer with a fierce strength he’s surprised the creature still has.

“Voldemort,” he breaths into Voldemort’s sleep shirt, body shaking with the effort of holding on.

For someone whose soul is scattered across Europe in pieces, Voldemort has never felt more whole.

*

“What was that?” Voldemort asks some time later as they’re tucking into their simple breakfast of jam and toast. (It’s gentle for his creature’s stomach and has nothing to do with Voldemort’s cooking skills.) He asks more to get it out of his system than anything, long since accustomed to the other man’s compulsive secrecy, so he’s bit thrown when there’s no evasive quip forthcoming.

“That was…” Creature sighs, putting down his toast. “I have been alive a long time, Voldemort. Too long. And sometimes my body and mind can’t take it. They shut down.” He shrugs, like he’s talking about a sunburn or a head cold and not lapsing into a catatonic state for months on end.

“How long have you been alive?” It’s a question he’s asked before and been treated to such delightful responses as it’s rude to ask a gentleman his age and longer than your mom for his troubles.

“Thirteen centuries,” he says, and there’s not a hint of humor in his eyes. “I’ve been lucky. I had something to hold on for. With out that, I’d probably have lost all awareness and been drooling in a cave somewhere ages ago.”

Voldemort wraps his hands around his teacup to ward off a shiver. The picture the other man is painting is chilling. To be in that state, always, reduced to nothing but an empty mind and a beating heart. It might be a fate worse than death.

Whatever mechanism of immortality his creature used, it was clearly inferior. True immortality shouldn’t allow for such ravages of time.

“How did you gain your immortality? There are better methods now, methods to ensure true eternal life,” he says, because he is willing to solve this. He will fix this, reverse whatever nonsense the creature has done to himself and make him a proper Horcrux.

The other man reaches across the table and places his hand over Voldemort’s, tapping his ring over the twin on Voldemort’s finger.

“Horcrux,” he says, and the eyes are distant and flat again even though he’s up and moving.   

*

He feels like Harry around Voldemort. Not Harry Potter, Boy-Who-Lived and Savior of the Wizarding World, necessarily. But Harry.

Which is hilarious, given Harry is the secret he’s keeping closest.

He likes being Tom’s Creature. It’s rootless and heady and powerful, and he did not think Voldemort could look awed but sometimes he turns to him with eyes that are bright and wonderstruck and it is everything to know that he did that. It's nothing he'd expected when he'd decided to find Tom but it somehow slots into place. 

Still, it’s nice, being more open about his history. Pointing to past friends and companions in the scrolls Voldemort brings home from their various excursions and correcting his pronunciation in Harry’s dozen adopted mother tongues. Harry still lapses sometimes, but never again for as long. It’s kind of wonderful, coming to out of his catatonia clean and fed and warm instead of a shriveled and stinking wreck.

Voldemort tries, exactly once, to explain the history of the Horcrux to him.

“I understand that you made one, but I believe if you truly understood the background and mechanics you would be able to produce a more stable anchor.”

“Hey, Voldemort?” Harry says, interrupting him before he can build up any more steam behind the lecture.

“Yes?” The fact that he already sounds exasperated and tired based purely on Harry’s tone is quite possibly his favorite thing.

“You remember how I never gave you a proper name?”

“How could I forget.”

“Well,” Harry says, loosening his wrists and cracking his knuckles dramatically before holding out a hand, “Nice to meet you, I’m Herpo the Foul.”

The look on Voldemort’s face is, in a word, priceless.

*

It’s absolute madness. Harry does not remember anymore, what it felt like to want Voldemort dead. Try as he might, he can’t conjure the aching rage of Sirius’s death in his chest, the clawing, nauseous dread in his stomach from knowing he was the wizarding world’s only hope and he had no fucking clue what to do. But he knows it must have been overwhelming, to drive him to do all the things he did. So it is truly insanity, to be thinking of handing Voldemort a cheat code, a golden ticket out of the jaws of death.

But.

But the man burns him toast and boils him broth when he loses himself, and grins like a child the first time they spot the northern lights for all he swears he wasn't impressed. He makes Harry laugh, in a way no human has in centuries. 

There’s no warning twinge of paradox as he reaches for Voldemort’s ring, no sense of impending doom from the time continuum as he resizes his own ring for Voldemort’s hand. And what is he supposed to do with that? It means the choice is already made, that this is a road he’s walked before.

Voldemort doesn’t even stir when Harry slips the new ring onto his finger, and it warms something small and possessive inside of him to know that Voldemort is that comfortable, that relaxed in their bed.

With Voldemort’s Horcrux on his finger, Harry hardly feels the absence of his own soul.

*

“She’s glorious,” Voldemort breaths, stepping out of his creature’s hold the moment the apparition stabilizes and going to lay a hand on the nose of the great skull.

“Yes,” the other man says as he steps up next to Voldemort, voice fond. “She was. You would have loved her.”

The serpent skeleton is over sixty feet in length, coiled loosely around itself in a shallow dip of stone on the cliff his creature has appareted them to. He can almost feel the great, luminous eyes that once filled that skull staring down at him, assessing his worth.

“And what would she have thought of me?”

“Oh, she would’ve hated you. I’m honestly sorry to have missed out on all the insults she would’ve come up with. They’d be quite creative.” His voice is wry and fond in a way it never is when he talks about his past.

So, this, finally, is where his creature’s heart lies. Not with any of the human names he’s dropped carelessly over the last year, but with a giant serpent, monstrous and beautiful. No wonder they get along so well.

“I’m sorry you lost her.” 

“Everything dies.”

That is not what he wanted. Not the apathy, not the resigned distance. It has no place in those vibrant eyes. “Not me,” Voldemort reminds him.  

“No, Voldemort, not you,” he says, and the change in mood is sudden, the words so soaked with bitter sarcasm Voldemort’s surprised he doesn’t choke on them.

He should ask what he means. The creature knows things, things there is no earthly reason he should, and the information may be useful. All information, all knowledge, is worth collecting. But…

But looking into those green green eyes, suddenly distant and bottomless, for the first time in his life Voldemort doesn’t want to know.

*

“We will each make another Horcrux.”

Voldemort bursts into the living room, the frenzied energy of his magic sending the pages of the books and notes left out on every surface fluttering, and for a moment Harry is coiled tension and adrenaline, certain that something has gone horribly wrong.

"With more anchors your soul will be more stable, more firmly rooted in the mortal plane, and-“ But no, not an emergency. Just Voldemort, off on some mad cap idea. Harry tunes him out, returning to the magazine on his lap. It’s a new edition of Snitch, and Harry can’t begin to articulate how grateful he is for the return of decent sports journalism in this century

“-and if you have a suitable object we could have it done by tomorrow,” Voldemort continues.

Oh.

Oh, he means it. Well, that certainly won’t do.

“No.”

Voldemort, brain clearly already miles ahead, blinks for a moment.

“What do you mean, no?”

“I mean no. That won’t fix anything,” Harry says, then raises the magazine in front of his face. Maybe, just maybe, for once in his life Voldemort will take a hint.  

No such luck. “Of course it will."

Harry sighs, and resigns himself to reading about the formation of the Ballycastle Bats later.

“It doesn’t work like that, Voldemort. You’ll just be dicing yourself up into smaller and smaller pieces. I’ve seen what a late-stage Horcrux looks like. Stable has nothing to do with it.” The wailing lump of an infant that lived in Harry’s scar was hardly a shining example of sanity.

“Well, we need to try something,” Voldemort snarls, stepping across the living room to snatch the magazine from his hands and shredding it in two. Harry, accustomed to his destructive impulses, doesn’t flinch. It’ll be easy enough to spell back together. “We need to fix this.”

“There’s nothing to fix. This is how immortality works, Voldemort. I live forever, and my mind is part of the price.” Along with his morals, and his connections, and his humanity, but those weren’t the kinds of things that interested Voldemort.

“No, you’re wrong. There has to be some way to stop it, to not end up so broken, so reduced.” Voldemort is pacing now, the frantic, seething energy of a predator in a cage.

And Harry would be insulted, if he wasn’t already quite aware that he is broken. And Voldemort had never treated him like he was somehow lesser for his spirals, had never looked at him any differently after those grueling weeks and months. If anything, the way he looked at Harry on the mornings when he finally woke up again was like they were back in the Arctic Circle again, watching the first true sunrise after months of night. No, he doesn’t seem to be speaking of Harry at all, and-

Ah.

Harry wonders vaguely if Voldemort’s boggart has changed. Maybe it’s no longer an unmarked grave. Maybe it’s himself, dead eyed and wasting away, with no one to carry him to the toilet.

“There is a way to stop it," Harry offers. "You could reverse them.”

It’s impressive, really, how completely that is the wrong thing to say.

Harry sees him coming, but he’d been lounging on the couch while Voldemort was already a tightly coiled spring, and he’s on him before Harry can get out of the way.

“You would have me unmake myself?” Voldemort spits, hands locked around his throat and face inches from his. And Harry has a lot of things he wants to say, some of them soothing and some of them honest and some of them about bad breath. But there are dark spots in his vision and a ringing in his ears and then the world is gone.

He comes to in an absence of gravity, and then his back hits the wall.

He’s supposed to be mad. That’s the first thing his mind supplies as he comes out of the haze, but he can’t for the life of him remember why. And mostly he just feels…buzzy. Like he is nowhere and nothing inside his skin, which is an amazing change from being so much himself for so long.

A giggle pours out of his mouth, snagging on the soreness of his throat. He only becomes aware of the loud sounds somewhere above him when they suddenly stop.

You think this is funny? A voice hisses in something that’s probably not English.

Oh, shit. Right. Voldemort.

Harry scrambles to his feet, desperately trying to yank his brain into some sort of order. They were fighting, yes. About…Horcruxes. Immortality. Probably.

“What, your desperate need to prove you’re the biggest, baddest wizard to ever wizard? Yes, I think it’s hilarious,” Harry says, and he actually manages to sound like he knows what the fuck is going on. Pretty well done, if he does say so himself.

“I am the most powerful wizard of the age. I am the Heir of Slytherin and Conqueror of Death and I am destined for great things.”

“What things?” Harry asks, and he finally manages to force his eyes to focus. Voldemort is standing an arm’s length away, all regal and haughty and so little the man he’d shared a quiche with that morning. “Why isn’t this enough?”

“What’s this? Wandering around with a stranger who wants to talk me into my death?” Voldemort hisses, and he means for it to hurt. Harry hates that it does.

“Not death,” he says. Just not living like me.

Voldemort snorts, angry and inelegant. “I think you need a reminder that you must not tell lies.”

Harry flinches. Voldemort has never remarked on his scars before, always grazed over them like they were nothing more than so much more skin, like they were a natural part of him. Harry hadn’t realized how much he apricated that.

There are a dozen things to say. I’m not lying and we’re fighting about nothing and I want tea and I want you to live and please stay.

But none of it will change anything. He should just stay silent.

But, because he was Harry fucking Potter once and he just can’t stop trying, he says “Don’t try to change the future, Voldemort. Surviving isn’t a good look on you.”

Voldemort can’t fly all the way to Britain, but the billowing black smoke certainly makes a statement on his way out.

*

Despite what Voldemort might think, Harry actually doesn’t tend to lie to him. He doesn’t blab the whole truth right away of course, but as far as actually lying, well, it just isn’t really worth the effort. It’s not like it’s going to change anything.

Time travel, it turns out, is much more complicated than even Hermione could have guessed. Ron would’ve found that hilarious, delighting in rubbing her nose in being wrong about something, and there’s a part at the root of Harry’s soul that longs to tell him.

But he can’t. Not just because walking up to child Ron as a random stranger and telling him Hermione doesn’t know shit about time travel would be meaningless, but because Ron lives in England. And that means, as far as Harry’s concerned, he might as well live on the moon.

The moon is probably more accessible, actually, if Harry really put his mind to it.  

It’d started with Dumbledore’s birth, though it had taken Harry a few years to figure out what the sudden buzzing in his limbs was all about. There’d been moments before when he’d wandered too close to his own life – smiling at a woman with green eyes, or standing over an alchemist with a knife. Then, the paradox had jabbed under his skin all at once, a bone-deep need to go, get out, get away.

As the turn of the century approached, however, it was different. A slow, buzzing build of wrongness as his lives collided, collapsed. And as more and more of his people took their first steps into life, he found he couldn’t bear to be on British soil. Too much future, too much history.

He’d tried to push through the paradox, of course. Just once. Standing in the attic of one Iolanthe Potter, fingers scant inches from familiar silver fabric, he’d shoved through with pure longing. It felt like every single atom was trying to flee in a different direction. Or maybe not ‘like.’ Maybe that’s exactly what had happened. Harry can handle a lot of pain, but even he isn’t going to put himself through that again.

The ability to change the future, to act at all, it turns out, is subjective. Trying to alter the course of events he knows is a good way to experience a nuclear explosion of one. But Harry’s found he can take new actions in places where he doesn’t know the outcome because he doesn’t know what he did before. It works, as best he can figure it, because the action he’s taking has already been done by himself historically, he just doesn’t know it yet. And so, he changes things to be what they were going to be.

Looked at another way, he’ll never make another truly free choice in his life, is stuck just retracing his own steps through time. But that kind of thinking leads to the thoughts that would have Gemma carefully swallowing his Horcrux with a dry bite so he can’t do anything drastic before he calms down. (He’s a danger to others, of course. But he’s also the only danger to himself.)

There’s a boy in Cokeworth right now, who will one day be a man, who will one day be in the wrong place at the wrong time and hear the right thing to change everything. It would be so easy to change it now. One little puff of a butterfly wing, and baby Harry grows up happy and healthy and normal.

Harry turns on his heel to Argentina and pretends he’s doing things.

*

In truth, Voldemort's put off his return to England too long. Some old contacts are dead, others gone cold from long disuse. It would all have been easier, five or six years ago.

But the hiss of praseltongue still holds weight in the circles of power, and the oaths his Knights of Walpurgis took are not so easily forgotten.

Alone and free of dead weight, Lord Voldemort rises

*

The throne is a highbacked, sliver thing, studded with emeralds and onyx. It sits on a raised dais in the converted ballroom, his subjects orbiting below, black robes fading into blacker shadows.

It’s everything he’d pictured when he’d first landed on his moniker at sixteen. His due as Lord.

“And who is it you’ve brought to meet me, Lucius?” he calls, finally acknowledging the blonde who has been skulking near at hand for the last hour. The boy is no Abraxas, but he has his uses, particularly since he is still young enough to have connections with the newest crop of Slytherins coming out of Hogwarts.

“My Lord, may I present Master Snape. Snape has just received his Potions Mastery and wishes to devote his skills and wand to your cause,” Lucius says, bowing with the grace of someone born to bootlicking.

A Mastery as young as the boy beside him appears is worthy of some note, and Voldemort feels a flicker of interest. A rare feeling these days. The boy, with lank black hair and a hooked nose, steps forward.

“Severus Snape, at your service, my Lord,” the boy says, hair and robes pooling into an inky puddle on the ground as he bows, low and unpracticed.

Severus. Voldemort nearly chokes.

*

Lord Voldemort is not, and never has been, lonely. It’s not an emotion he is capable of.

Still, it would be nice, sometimes, to have someone to talk to. Someone who doesn’t make him want to flay them alive every time they speak. A companion to stand by his side through the ages.

(Green eyes stare up at a giant, sun-bleached skull, a millennium of memories, fondness, and secrets traded with the ghosts of the eyes that used to stare back.)

If nothing else, it will be an interesting challenge, trying to attach the bindings of a Horcrux to a living thing.

Nagini is everything he hoped. A spy, a confidant, and another step away from the future of rotting madness the green-eyed man claims awaits him.

*

When he learns the younger Black’s house elf is named Kreacher, pronounced Creature, he resolves to kill him horribly on principle.

*

Voldemort can admit, with the distance of hindsight, that he may have been a touch hasty leaving. The man had never made any move to damage Voldemort’s Horcruxes, had supported much of his research into strengthening and life-supporting rituals. Perhaps he was not actually trying to deprive him of his immortality.

But he’d let him leave. The man had always seemed to know where Voldemort was, but he still didn’t come for him.

I don’t really do Britain, his mind reminds him in the man’s dry voice, but what Voldemort hears is, I don’t care enough to try. It tastes like burnt toast.

*

The whole point of going after the prophecy child when he’s still a baby is to dispatch him before he can become a threat. Voldemort isn’t insensate to the optics. Going after a child could potentially damage the standing of his cause, could further radicalize the opposition. But it’s worth it, to weed out the prophecy before it can take root.

He’s a baby. He isn’t a threat as yet.

Of course, it’s no use telling that to the green killing curse ricocheting back towards him, the curse he somehow knows won’t simply splash by harmlessly.

And then the whole world dissolves, and he knows nothing at all.

*

Fear.

Tom hasn’t felt fear like this since he was a child, sweating out his life under a ragged blanket while the room echoes with coughs and groans. For a moment, he thinks he’s still there, that he never stood up from his sick bed and he’s still eight years old and dying.

But no, that’s not right. This isn’t the same.

This is worse.

Sometimes, there is nothing. Nothing but emptiness, a void where the world should be, where he should be. He tries to find his way back, to feel his way to eyes that can open or a mouth that can scream, but there is nothing to find.

Other times, the world returns. But it’s not as it should be. A kaleidoscope, tumbling snippets that make no sense, individually or synthesized into a whole. A smokestack, belching blackest smoke. A broken bottle in a puddle, viewed from inside the reflection. A twisted mass of lights, varying in tones and sizes, that he thinks, just possibly, might be a city viewed from a great distance above.

There is no logic, no direction, no plan, no thought.

There is only instinct, a driving urge. A mad desire. Safety.

*

Harry has long since lost the ability to be punctual. After the first couple of centuries time simply loses its urgency, and now hours and days slip by unnoticed, infinitesimal and impossible to track.

But this time, he tries. Because it’s important. He’s late anyway, of course.

When he steps out into the snowy Albanian clearing where they’d first spoken properly, all those years ago, the wraith is on him in seconds. It twines through his hair and pools across his skin, pushing into his ears, his nostrils, his mouth.

“Shhhhh,” Harry whispers, carefully collecting the smoke into the cup of his palms. “I’m here,” he murmurs, and the wraith goes still in his hands.

He’s quite small, condensed like this. Shapeless and faceless, completely disconnected from the world.

“Ah, Tom. You never do listen.”

*

Life with a wraith, it turns out, is rather exhausting. My Life with a Wraith. It sounds like one of Lockhart’s books.

They burn through bodies. Mice, insects, birds, cats. They both prefer the times with snakes, for the ability to communicate, though they agree it’s a shame to destroy a serpentine life. The magic of a homunculus doesn’t come naturally to Harry, but he tries again and again. (If Wormtail could do it then Harry is going to fucking do it.) Eventually he can produce something that can support Voldemort for a few months. Then there’s the issue of Harry having one of his bad spells, and they both drift away until he can scrape himself back together again.

The best times, of course, are when they can get a human body.

“Really?” Voldemort asks, staring at himself in the cottage’s only mirror.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Harry quips, shoving past him to wash the blood off his hands. A scourgify never quite gets all the tackiness.

“But, really?” Voldemort says again, gesturing at himself. “A child? A muggle child?”

“The accident left her braindead. Really, you’re lucky I came across her when I did.”

“Lucky,” Voldemort snorts, pulling at one curling pigtail and wrinkling his nose at the corresponding pain. “I’ll burn through her in a week.”

For once, Harry is the stronger one. It’s not why he chose the body – choosing is the wrong word for his frantic scavenging – but it’s certainly a plus. He grabs Voldemort by the shoulder and shoves him against the bathroom wall, stooping slightly so he can look him directly in the eye.

“No, you won’t. You will refrain from using magic and keep your emotions in check and make this body last as long as you are physically capable of. Or so help me I will put you back in a spider next time.”

The ungrateful brat bites him.

*

“I feel like a Baba Jaga,” Voldemort says, his voice a low rumble through Harry’s skull where his head rests on the other man’s lap. His current body is a hulking man, possibly half giant, and it’s been fun to watch Voldemort’s slinking, elegant voice and motions adjust to the frame.

“Hmm?” Harry hums sleepily, still focused more on the color-changing fireflies Voldemort conjured around them over the last hour. Harry really should scold about burning through bodies with foreign magic, but the other man is just so excited to have a body with magical pathways again.

“A Baba Jaga, my dear. The wicked witch in the woods that eats children. Eastern European in origin, lives in a cottage on chicken legs.”

“Hmm, yeah, that sounds like you,” Harry agrees, eyes tracking as the firefly above his nose shifts from lilac to aquamarine. “Maybe I should go find a chicken for you to engorge.” The fingers carding through his hair tug, just enough to hurt but not enough to make it worth sitting up.

“I don’t need chicken legs to hunt. That’s why I have you.”

“You don’t have me.”

“Don’t I?” The face is a stranger, but the smile is all Voldemort.

*

Harry could be happy, like this. Or at least as close to it as he ever dares tread.

But Voldemort has never been one for settling.

“There are rumors, sightings of the immortal alchemist,” Voldemort says. The homunculus’ jaw pops loudly, the wooden bone refusing to settle into place. Voldemort has complained, loudly and at length, about the dysfunction. “It seems he and his wife have seen fit to re-emerge.”

“Ugh.” Harry is sprawled across their bed, head hanging off the edge so he can stare over at Voldemort upside-down. He wrinkles his nose. “Flamel. I hate that guy. Do you know how much magical blood it takes to distill a Stone?”

“I didn’t think you had a problem with blood, my dear.”

“I do when it changes the developmental track of the magical community. That fucker caused a genetic bottleneck it took centuries to bounce back from.” The late 1300s were not his favorite time.

Voldemort’s eyes light up at that tidbit, and Harry thinks he’s averted the conversation. As he’d learned as a child, there’s markedly little documentation of Flamel’s life, and what little there is has been almost entirely stripped of details, leaving only dry magical theory.

“Bosom-buddy of Albus Dumbledore, a Dark mass murderer. Delicious,” the homunculus mutters, and Harry’s sure he has him, hook, line, and sinker, but then Voldemort is pushing on. “Whatever the Stone’s origins, it exists now. And it might be rather helpful in remedying our situation,” Voldemort moves to gesture to himself, but the homunculus arm is not flexible enough and only makes it halfway.

“What do you mean?” Harry raises his eyebrows in innocent confusion. He’s fully aware of how ridiculous it looks upside-down.

“I mean, you impossible creature, that it could be my way back to a body. I want,” and here the homunculus makes another, abrupt motion that Harry can’t decipher. “I want so many things.”

There are times Harry thinks Voldemort is made of nothing but want. But he doesn’t know the pain and terror of losing a body, can’t speak to the realities of what Voldemort is going through.

A body. It’s a nice dream. Too bad he knows where this path leads.

“You can certainly try.”

*

Quirrell is just as much of a bumbling idiot as Harry had suspected when he was eleven. The stutter might have been fake, but the total ineptitude in anything Defense related was not. He’s simple enough to track down, thrashing his way through the Dark communities of the continent as he is, and even easier to subdue.

He is a Professor at Hogwarts. The Stone is moving there, Harry hisses to the horned viper on the hearth rug. He cancels the levitation spell and Quirrell drops hard to the floor.

Someday, my mate, you will tell me all your little sources, Voldemort hisses back, using the only endearment snakes have. They’re quite extraordinary.

Maybe someday, Harry agrees, shoving away the sick dread in his stomach with practiced ease.

*

His creature is a vicious little fiend that he does not, despite all of his varied misdeeds, deserve.

But who knows what you’ll get up to? he’d said.

Just look at what happened the last time I let you out of my sight, he’d said.

And given your history with vampires, he’d said.

And now Quirrell’s turban positively reeks of garlic, and Voldemort has yet to think up a counter-curse to get rid of it.

*

There’s really no way he could’ve known. He’d never seen the boy before, beyond the vague impression of green eyes and infant. There was no reason to guess the man he’d known for decades was the same being as the inconvenient little whelp.

Somehow, those thoughts aren’t making him feel any better.

“You are Harry Potter.”

He’d seen the resemblance immediately, of course. How could he not? The truly stupid black hair, the vivid green eyes, the body that always seemed one missed meal away from cannibalizing itself. But it had been a curiosity, a strange happenstance. Something to muse over in the dark of his turban.

And then he’d seen the boy in action, eyes flashing and flinging himself at Quirrell like the ruthless little gremlin he will someday, somehow, grow to be, and Voldemort had known.

The proof is right there on his forehead, in the thin scar Voldemort’s thumbed across so carelessly a hundred times, uninterested as his fingers seek the places that make his creature grumble in contentment.

“I was, once.” His creature – Harry – smiles, a little wistful. Voldemort wants to drag his claws across that amused, peaceful face, but this body only has human nails, chewed to the quick and useless.

He’s not even bothering to deny it. It might be better, if he did. At least it would mean that the deception mattered. The only thing worse than being lied to is being lied to for no reason at all.

“The prophecy,” Voldemort whispers with dawning horror, and what a fool he was to come back here, to play right into his hands in this weakened state. “It was never about him. It’s about you. You’re the one…”

But Harry is already shaking his head, the sad smile still fixed in place. “No, not at all. Baby Harry will do just fine on his own.”

Lord Voldemort, right now, is admittedly frail. His soul is ragged from whatever magic ravaged Quirrell, and his body is that of a puny boy barely old enough to fly a broom. He is weak. The traitorous monster might even think him defenseless

He is not defenseless.

It’s easy enough to slip the bonds of this body, unstable as they are. He is nothing again, sliding into the senseless, touchless, sightless void, but instinct pulls him forward towards the man, the one he needs to seek, know, break, hurt.

The man does not try to push him away, wave the smoke from his skin. Instead, he breaths Voldemort in, pulling him deeper into his body until they are one. And Voldemort sees.

It’s like no mind he’s ever been in before. There is just so much. Piles and piles until his mind is bursting at the seams, pictures and thoughts and memories. Every image is a thousand images layered over it, mouths moving with the wrong words and a hundred other faces pulling under the skin. And nothing is real, nothing is really there, because there are ghostly forests overlaying city streets and burning ruins in the empty spaces and the blood on his hands doesn’t even feel warm anymore and there is nothing and everything and no, want out, away. Stop.  

No, the part of their mind that is not him says, locking around Voldemort as he tries to pull away, to flee. If you wanted to know, then look.

The chaos slows a bit, not leaving but folding in on itself, making room for a pocket of stillness that slowly comes into focus.

At first, it’s meaningless. A man leaning out a window, glaring into the dark until his face goes slack with absolute wonder, fingers reaching towards the viewer, and what is he meant to be seeing?

But it’s him. A face he hasn’t seen in so long. Voldemort, robes ragged from shoving his way through underbrush and hair full of leaves, glaring from the opposite side of a familiar clearing. Voldemort, peeling an orange without moving a muscle, holding it out with the faintest glimmer of pride in his eyes. Voldemort, wild-eyed and bloody, eyes glazed as he steps closer. Voldemort, wearing the wrong body, looking positively ecstatic as a runic circle comes to life, lighting up his face from below. A cold, serpentine body wrapped around shoulders in the early morning, forked tongue flicking black tea out of a chipped mug.  Waiting for an eternity, for centuries, wondering what Voldemort would think, imagining what he might say, and then finally hearing it.

Oh.

Mine, their mind whispers, and there’s no way of knowing who said it. But it’s true. Mine. An unalterable truth of the universe, the only place their lives were ever leading. Voldemort wants to touch him then, to hold this impossible man that found his way back to him. Their hand moves on its own, gliding across the soft skin of his check to trace a thumb around the full shape of his mouth. It’s not enough – never enough – and he wants to know every inch of him, of them, together, always, and the thumb presses forward, scraping along the backs of the teeth and swirling around their tongue as he explores the warm cavern of his mouth the way a lover's tongue might.

But there are better uses for tongues and mouths, as the warmth coiling low in their gut seems to agree, and they lick the hand before it moves downward, shifting their half hard cock free. The movements are practiced and easy – they’ve had a thousand years to learn this body – but wholly new – they’ve never touched this body before, never felt it grow, never squeezed quite like that. Every touch, every hitching breath and sparking thrill of pleasure reverberates in the infinitesimal space between them, building on itself over and over into an echo chamber of sensation. The other hand is roaming, digging and clawing at skin because it is too much, too much, too good and something has to hurt, something has to bleed.

It's not what it should be. Just one body, one man, rutting alone into his hand. But when they fall over the edge together, the space between their consciousness crashing into nothing, it’s breaking and bliss and, gods, they can at least pretend it is enough.

*

It should be perfect. A match made in heaven, Voldemort thinks sardonically. A wraith that kills everything it touches and an immortal body willing to house him.

He doesn’t even make it through the night.

Too loud, he hisses from the grass snake, because there are no words in snake language for the endless freefall of Harry’s mind. There are barely words in any human tongue.

Harry just sighs, staring out the window at the grey predawn sky, and reaches for his slippers.

His animal bodies are, of course, incapable of their usual breakfast ritual, but that doesn’t stop Harry from trying. The eggs today are seasoned delicately with dill out of deference to the grass snake's powerful tastebuds, served with a side of raw salmon sliced into a carpaccio so thin it’s nearly translucent.

What are you? Voldemort hisses between strikes. Harry Potter is neither immortal nor centuries old. Though he’s not actually certain about the immortal part, given his experience with Quirrell. The boy has not yet made a Horcrux, at the very least.

No, Harry agrees, forking his own eggs onto buttered toast. He is just a boy who will one day have truly awful luck with time turners.

You went back in time? A thousand years? Why?

An accident, Harry replies, and it doesn’t quite smell like a lie.

*

It’s late May when Harry wakes with a start, his heart already beating like he’s running into battle.

The homunculus is screaming.

Harry is scrambling across the bed before he even fully processes what’s happening, hands shaking as he lifts the tiny shell. The sound is bloodcurdling, the fraught vocal cords not meant to sustain such a sound. The scream fades in and out as the body strains to express itself, to release the pain in any way it can find.

“Get me out, get me out, get me out,” Voldemort sobs, and that’s a thing Harry could have happily gone his entire life without hearing. The catch of a whimper in Lord Voldemort’s voice is worse than the ungodly screams. Harry’s fingers fumble across the soul container until he finds the binding ruins, biting his other hand to break the skin and smear blood across them.

The sound suddenly cuts out, the smoke of Voldemort’s wraith pouring out into the night air, and in the stillness Harry realizes what’s happened.

The end of May 1992. The diary. The death of a Horcrux.

He did this. A thousand years removed from that day, he still can’t help the guilt that pangs through him. He’d sent his lover screaming in agony, had cut away a piece of his soul with a fang and then thought nothing more of it. Had hurt him so badly that even now, in this most incorporeal form, the smoke of Voldemort still trembles as he twines around Harry.

And all Harry can do is sit there in the dark, petting at empty air.

*

The itch of his old life is there all the time now, old history present in ways it hasn’t been since that first soul-crushing century back in time. And as much as Voldemort absolutely hates it, he isn’t the only thing Harry hung on to immortality for.

He finds Hermione in France, still bushy haired and bucktoothed and so full of unbridled, boundless passion that hasn’t been honed down into a weapon yet. Harry spends a glorious, sunbathed afternoon in a library, helping her find books on traditional runic warding and the historical development of potions ingredient regulations and other things that have absolutely nothing to do with the adventures that await her.

He finds the Weasleys in Egypt, so loud and warm and alive it takes his breath away. Harry stays Disillusioned for this visit, watching the storm whirl around him. Ron is pimply and proud, fresh off the high of being a savior, and while Ginny is already pale and quiet, Bill says something that makes her laugh the way she will again someday, on Quidditch pitches and across battlefields. Harry doesn’t mean to get locked in the tomb with Percy, but the look on the boy’s face when he emerges makes Ginny laugh again, so it’s completely worth it.

He finds Sirius in Fiji, looking the most alive he’s every seen him. The man is still twitchy, and drunk off his rocker more often than not, but he’s clean and tanned and smiles when a polyjuiced Harry offers him his hand.

He finds Luna in England, in the only pocket the paradox will let him into. “Hello, Harry,” she says with aplomb, before turning back to the mad swirls she’s trampling in the grass

*

I want, Voldemort says, and then he doesn’t have to say anymore because Harry can feel it. A body on top of his, heavy, pinning him down. Teeth digging into his skin, biting down to blood. Cold, graceful fingers he hasn’t felt in decades but are still so familiar, seeking everything everything everything and finding it.

And, fuck, Harry wants it too.

Time to go track down yet another of Voldemort’s bumbling buffoons.

*

As it turns out, Wormtail can’t build a homunculus. Which, given everything Harry knows about the man, isn’t actually that surprising.

“You need to be careful, okay? No unnecessary crucioing. I can’t come fix it if you crack the body,” Harry says for the dozenth time, resettling the robe on the tiny shoulders.

“I never do anything unnecessarily,” Voldemort replies in the high, cold voice of this form. “Though I can’t promise a large amount of torture won’t be necessary. Really, you couldn’t find someone better?”

“You’re the one who decided to make him a Death Eater,” Harry says, waiving a hand at where Wormtail is skulking outside the door. Harry isn’t letting something like that into their home.

“He proved useful, didn’t he?”

“Yeah, at getting you killed.” And my parents, Harry thinks, but the thought has no bite to it. He’s killed more people for less cause than the threat of a prophecy. “Just come home whole this time, alright?”

“That, my dear, is precisely the idea.”  

*

He’s here.

He’s serpentine and noseless and every inch the fairytale monster, and Harry can’t find it in himself to care because he’s alive and he’s here and he’s stepping across the few paces between them.

And then Harry can’t think at all because Voldemort does something completely impossible. He bends to a knee before him, picking up Harry’s left arm and kissing the scar that runs from elbow to wrist there.

“My love,” Voldemort whispers against the gnarled, numb skin, and Harry is undone.

*

If Harry thinks extremely hard – a kind of thinking he does his best to avoid – he can remember the tension of his fifteenth year. The sense that the other shoe was always about to drop. The constant wondering about what Voldemort was actually up to.

The answer, it turns out, was sex. Lots and lots of sex.

Fifteen-year-old Harry would probably obliviate himself into a St. Mungo’s ward at the thought. But fifteen-year-old Harry had also never spent four years mere inches from his lover but unable to touch. They have a lot of catching up to do.

Harry can’t breathe.

He should have died minutes ago, his desperate hunger choking the life out of him. Instead, the world has collapsed, simplifying down to the cock deep in his throat and the noises he can hear above him, the gaps and half-smothered moans. There’s nothing else to think of, nothing else to want but to pull another desperate whine from the man he’s losing himself in.

He gets what he wants. Every sound is a victory.

“Harry,” he groans, and he can do more, do better, drag the entire man into him like this, but something is pulling him away, a pain in his scalp dragging him off his prize, and Harry mewls in frustration, trying to strain forward.

“Harry,” Voldemort chides, and yanks his head up, dragging the body with it until Harry’s draped across him, oxygen-starved muscles unable to hold him up. “My love, my mate,” he whispers, lips hot and close in the shell of Harry’s ear. The lips find his cheek, his nose, his lips, his chin, until they’re on his neck, parting to let teeth bite deep bruises into his skin, the pain slowly easing him back into his body.

Voldemort is shifting them until Harry is puddled below him, and it doesn’t matter how much he’s given, what state he’s in, Harry will always arch up into that weight. Voldemort chuckles against his nape, kneeing his thighs further apart as he positions himself above Harry, spread open and wrecked but still searching for more, then thrusts himself home.

Harry thought sharing a mind with Voldemort was everything, but this, this is what it feels like to be whole.

*

There is someone in his head.

By rights it should not be a strange feeling. He’s spent much of the last fifteen years sharing mental space with one lifeform or another. But being the intruded upon, instead of the intruder, it turns out, is quite different. It’s like falling asleep in your own room and waking up absolutely certain you were moved in the night, even though you’re right back where you started. Disorienting, violating, and untraceable.

It takes him some time to identify just who is creeping through his mind and dreams. The boy looks more and more like his love, his creature every year, and the snippets he gets could just be reflections of Voldemort’s own day, or his memories of memories in his Harry’s mind.

They’re not. The boy is in his brain. Voldemort would kill him if it wouldn’t destroy the man sleeping next to him.

“Why is your younger self slithering around my head?” Voldemort demands, shaking Harry awake. The man is sleep warm and slack, grumbling good naturedly until Voldemort’s words register.

It’s only because of the disorientation of sleep that Voldemort sees it. Harry’s eyes flicker away, just for a moment, before coming back to him, wide and bemused.

Will this man never run out of secrets?

“The truth,” Voldemort snarls, lunging across the bed to straddle him. The crucio is silent and wandless and sends Harry’s form convulsing between Voldemort's legs, eyes glazed over as he vacates his body completely. Voldemort grinds forward, in part of keep the spasming body in place and in part to chase the pressure against his hardening cock.

The pain won’t break Harry, not if he truly doesn’t want to talk, but it certainly makes his point.

And, apparently, that is enough.

“Horcrux,” Harry gasps when Voldemort lifts the spell. “He’s your Horcrux.” Your Horcrux. Yours. There are no better words than that. Mine, in every way possible and impossible, and Voldemort presses down harder, into this being that he has marked with his very soul.

But. But there’s something about how Harry said it. He’s your Horcrux. A single word that freezes the arousal pooling in his belly.

“And you are not?”

“No.”

No. Too small, too simple a sound for the weight of it, ripping away this gift he’s only just been handed. This perfect, glorious truth that’s been lost somewhere in the space between his version of now and Harry’s.

He crucios his love twice more that morning, desperately seeking some kind of explanation, but the topic is closed and all Voldemort gets for his trouble is a round of blinding pain of his own and a night on the couch.

*

Time passes, as it always does, and the future comes knocking.

The future dresses like an eagle-owl.

When it’s just the two of them, it’s simple. Harry thinks things, so he says them. Communication will never be either of their strong suits, but everything is worth saying, is worth fighting through in their immortal bubble, where they have enough time and enough blood to spend on it.

But then the world comes tapping on the window, and Harry is a tongue-tied mess.  

What he wants to say: stop and stay and this will never end well and why is this never enough?

What he says: “Still no luck with the orb?”

“No,” Voldemort says, destroying the letter in a puff of fire and flinging the ash back at the startled bird. “Even Nagini has failed me.”

Harry winces, not especially fond of that particular memory. It’s strange, how much worse blood tastes when you’re fond of the person who's bleeding.

“You wouldn’t be dealing with any of this if you’d just believe me. ‘The Dark Lord will mark him as his equal, but he will have power the Dark Lord knows not, and either must die at the hand of the other for neither can live while the other survives.’ That’s it, that’s your prophecy. Big whoop. Ouch!”

Voldemort had stalked across the room while Harry spoke. Now, he yanks hard on the hair at the back of his head, tangling soot in the black strands.

“You’ve lied to me every step of the way, my love,” he growls into Harry’s ear. “And Dumbledore would not be sacrificing men to protect that. Forgive me if I don’t believe you.”

Sacrificing men. It hasn’t come to that, yet. Arthur Weasley is at St. Mungo’s now, will get another Christmas with his family. But that is how this ends. With Sirius’s empty body falling away through the Veil.

Can he stop it? He can feel the paradox tingling under his tongue, but maybe he can get the words out before the pain hits. Explain how pointless it is, how useless, just frightened children and shattered glass in the dark.

And what then? What if Sirius keeps breathing?

The truth is that Harry has learned to live with Sirius’s death. Had already started to learn even before he went back in time, the ache overtaken by the new pains of Remus and Tonks and Collin and Fred. But even those wounds have healed over in time, joining the pantheon of lives he’s watched end over the centuries. Some from battle wounds and some screaming from pain and fever and some quietly in their sleep, but in the end all the same. All dead.

If he saves Sirius, who dies instead? Is it Neville on the flagstones instead of Lavender, throat gaping under vicious teeth? Does a stray Snatcher spell hit Hermione as they sprint through the woods, the bossy, shrill girl he’d teased in French dead amongst rotting leaves?

Everything dies.

“Too bad you’ll never know,” is all Harry says, and lets Voldemort bruise his frustration into his lips.  

*

Voldemort leaves the broken shards of prophecy on Harry’s side of the bed, the one night he’s home in July. Harry thinks it’s stupid. It’s not like it’s his fault he didn’t listen.   

*

Voldemort’s gone again. Harry should probably be glad he’s not seeing this.

He’s not.

He’d known what he was signing up for when he switched their rings. He’d seen the blasted, mangled setting of the ring on Dumbledore’s desk, had heard the death throes of four Horcruxes himself. He’d known.

But holy fucking shit it hurts.

It's not a sudden, bursting pain. Well, it's that too, but then it goes on and on, a burning he can't place that shivers through his freezing body while all his organs fight to be the first one out of his mouth and his fingers claw at the sheets for relief they won’t find.

When he was small he’d often dreamed of someone to care for him when he was sick, to pet back his sweat-soaked hair and bring him soup, blowing on each spoonful. He’d dream of it now, too, if he had the capacity left to think.

Instead, he curls tighter around the ring in his palm, the only bit of comfort in this raging storm. The bit of a soul that isn’t his, but used to be.

*

“Look what the cat dragged in,” Harry drawls as Voldemort steps out of the floo, and he throws an avada out of habit, sternly shoving the corners of his mouth down.

But instead of letting the green curse slide across him, unbothered, Harry does something quite unexpected. He rolls off the couch, hitting the floor as he dodges, the killing curse flashing disappointedly off the cushions.

What?

Not once, in the decades Voldemort has known him, has his creature bothered to avoid a killing curse. He seems to find some strange, nostalgic joy in the brush of death sliding across his skin. But there he is, gasping on the floor, and that means something is wrong, something’s changed, what has he done.

There’s no air left in Harry’s lungs to knock out of him when Voldemort slams him against the wall, fingers tight around the pale neck that suddenly seems too delicate. The body is too light, too easy to fling across the room. He’s lost weight again while Voldemort wasn’t looking.

What did you do, he hisses, falling into parseltounge in his rage, and no, it’s not what he thinks. It can’t be what he thinks. The ring is whole and safe, right there on the hand that’s weakly scrabbling at his vice grip.

Don’t worry, Harry hisses back, forcing air around Voldemort’s strangling hand. He gives up trying to loosen his hold, presses the ringed hand against his cheek instead. Your soul is safe.

And that, that is not comforting at all.

No, he snarls, and steps away through space.

*

The first thing he sees, when he steps out of nowhere, is the Gaunt shack.

Which in itself is answer enough. If all was as he’d left it, standing here at the front door he should see nothing at all.  

He perseveres anyway, hissing at the dead snake on the door to let him in. The door creeks open slowly onto the last thing he wants to see.

The ring is gone.

And not his ring. That would be bad enough. Harry’s ring. His only Horcrux.

After a thousand years, his love is mortal again.

*

“Why?” Voldemort’s voice is the coldest he can make it, carefully detached. If he lets himself feel right now he won’t get any answers, too busy torturing the man for his idiocy. He wonders if Harry would scream, now, without the protection of a Horcrux, or if his pain response was simply honed over hundreds of years.

“Because it’s how it happens,” Harry says. He’s scraped himself off the floor where Voldemort left him and is sitting at the kitchen table with two steaming mugs. As if now is the time for tea.

If Harry is going to go back to being a weird, cryptic ghoul then Voldemort can go back to earnestly trying to kill him, can paint the walls of their absurd, fragile cottage with his blood and-

But, no. Detachment. Focus. Answers.

“And what is that supposed to mean?” Voldemort can’t help but loom over the table, hand twitching towards his wand, but his voice is carefully controlled.

“I never told you where I was from, did I?” Harry says instead of answering, and Merlin this man is deranged, of course Voldemort knows that Harry Potter is from Godric’s Hollow. “Or,” Harry continues, either oblivious to or ignoring the rage burning higher with every word, “I suppose, more accurately, when.”

“You’re from the Dark Ages.”

“No,” Harry replies, smirking like that was somehow amusing. “I ended up in the Dark Ages. But before that, the furthest into the future I got was 1998.” And then, because the man is apparently suicidal as well as deranged, he looks Voldemort in the eye and says, “You’re dead, you know, in 1998.”

When the dust settles, what their kitchen ends up soaked with is tea instead of blood, but it is a very near thing.

“You lie,” Voldemort spits, bearing down on the man beneath him with the full weight of his body and magic.

Harry, the infuriating wretch, refuses to look the slightest bit cowed. “Not about this.” He pushes back against Voldemort’s weight, but instead of trying to push him off like Voldemort’s braced for he simply leverages himself up, brushing gentle lips across his. “Never about this.”

He should not trust him. This is the man who hid his identity for decades, who stole his Horcrux, who is prophesied to vanquish him.

But he’s also the hands who coaxed his fragmented soul from body to body a dozen times over, the green eyes that became his favorite color without him noticing, the man who’s been wearing a piece of Voldemort’s soul for years in a promise of protection he couldn’t even see yet.

Voldemort rolls off of him and onto the kitchen floor, ignoring the cooling water that soaks his robes.

“Tell me how.”

Harry reaches out, laces their fingers together, and tells.

It’s worse than Voldemort imagined. A trap set by Albus Dumbledore from beyond the grave. A Harry who is not yet his Harry but is still Harry, dead by his hand. Every fragment of him, hacked away by schoolchildren.

“I could move them. Hide them away from your quest,” Voldemort says, but Harry is already shaking his head.

“You can try,” he says, and how many times has he said that in response to Voldemort’s plans? Because he’s known, he’s always known. “But it won’t work, because it didn’t work, see?”

Voldemort doesn’t see at all. He suspects this is the kind of logic that has shredded so completely through the organization of Harry’s brain.

“I could stop,” Voldemort tries again. “I could walk away from it all. Never go into that forest. Stay here.” With you. It’s not the future he’d had planned, but maybe it could be enough. They could make Harry a new Horcrux, something to bind them forever.

And where does that lead? The two of them, flat-eyed and catatonic, curled together in a rotting bed?

“You could,” Harry agrees, watching Voldemort’s face carefully.

“What happens then?”

“Then the war stops, and the Battle of Hogwarts never happens, and Harry Potter lives into the new millennium.”

And doesn’t go back in time, hangs unspoken. Doesn’t become you.

Harry shifts slightly, and there is something small and cool pressed between their hands. His ring.

“There’s still a way out, Voldemort,” he says. “They’ve destroyed a ring Horcrux. They’ll – I’ll – believe you’re dead. And then you can remake yourself. Start over.”

Voldemort slips one hand from Harry’s, holds the ring up above them. It’s an ugly thing, really. Sloppily made. It looked much better on Harry’s finger.

“And you’ll be with me?”

“For as long as this body lasts.” For once, it sounds like truth, whole and complete. A promise of for now, but not forever.

“I don’t want forever without you.” I don’t want it at all, he doesn’t think, though it might be true.  

They have a fiendfyre bonfire that night, fed on their cottage and their clearing in the woods. Harry manages a messy sort of laugh when Voldemort conjures a fiery basilisk to eat his ring and is there when Voldemort falls.

*

Voldemort is self-aware enough to know that he’s always had a flair for the dramatic. And if he’s going down, he’s going down in style.

The show he gives over the next two years is the performance of a lifetime. It’s dramatic monologues and perfect evil laughs, mad schemes and crushing the worms who thought to ride his coattails to power under his boots. It’s bloody and deranged and fun.

And at the end, looking into those wild, righteous, terrified eyes that don’t know him yet, the only thing he regrets is not making the absolute most of every minute they had.

*

Harry doesn’t feel Voldemort die. He thought he would, that he would know the minute he left him for good. But he doesn’t, and it’s been too long for Harry to remember the date of his great victory, so there is no sudden moment of grief, no broken fall to the knees. Just the slow, creeping certainty that he is now in a world without a center.

What he does feel, what must be weeks later, is the other Harry winking away through the timeturner. It’s like dropping the weight of the sky, an immeasurable burden he’d had so long he’d forgotten he was holding it.  

He could do anything now, with no paradox buzzing in his brain or dragging him along through the current of time.

He wants only one thing.

Harry has lived a dramatic life. The stuff of legends, or storybooks. But that’s not who he is. Who he is is high places and lungs full of cold air. Dry jokes and sharp elbows. Quiet moments with people too close, too dear to be called merely friends.

So that’s what he gives himself, in the end.

A long broom ride to a high cliff, air streaming through his hair and fingers and what remains of his soul.

A quiet moment with an old friend, the voice of sanity that twined through a thousand years of his life.

“Hello, girl,” he says to the skull in English, soothing a hand over the crest of her spine. The dead understand every language. “Long time, no see.”

Gemma could always sense his moods. He can picture her glare even now, worried and disapproving and deadly to anyone but him.

“I know, I know,” he says, gentling a hand over the sun-bleached nose. “You’d bite me for being such an idiot if you could. But you don’t have to worry. I’ll do it for you.”

There’s no sinew left to hold the fangs into her jaw, but the venom that drips down when he pulls one loose is still plenty potent, hissing as it chews through the rock where it splatters.

Voldemort would be dramatic about it. He’d drape himself across her jaws like the absolute loon he was, or drive the fang into his heart. But the arm is so much easier.

Harry’s last thought as he slips away is that death by basilisk venom is exactly like he remembers.