Chapter Text
(Now)
Harry is sixteen, wandless, alone and running away from home. He makes it only three blocks from Privet Drive before Dumbledore finds him, lending halt to his flight from the death he has left in his wake.
The streetlamp behind him flickers out, announcing the headmaster’s arrival. Like a shadow looming, reaching a hand out towards him, the next one also dies. The pounding footsteps of Harry’s desperate plight stutter to a halt, bringing him to stillness beneath the single remaining streetlamp of Wisteria Way. Harry doesn’t turn to look at the approaching silhouette, instead lingering beneath the streetlight.
So quick, Harry thinks almost hysterically, yet too slow.
He looks up at the sky descending; the light catches the ceaseless drops cascading down, streaming from some invisible, dark point above him. His messy black hair is plastered to his face, running down pale skin. He feels them linger on his lashes, like the promise of kisses.
Too late too late too late it hammers in time with his heart. His desperate plight stutters to a halt beneath the only lamp still lit. Above him the drops hammer down.
The old man's shadow steps forwards to meet him. "Harry." His face is creased with worry. Harry wonders what he sees. A boy, messy hair plastered with rain to his head, green eyes wide and desperate, pupils still slightly blown as if in panic, lips red as he worries them with his teeth, his whole posture a stuttered, anxious thing. Skittish, like a cornered piece of prey.
The air is saturated with the rush of the rain, a quiet muted sound blanketed around him. The raindrops descend like falling stars, the light encased in each glistening sphere as they plummet to the ground, illuminated for but a moment before extinguished. Harry breathes between lightfall, each rise of his chest a flittering, ethereal thing. His heart is a staccato beat anchoring him to the ground.
His heart will always beat for someone else, but in this endless moment it beats for him and him alone. His mind is so empty—
Harry is flesh and bone standing in the rain. He thinks he is cold but he can’t feel it. His body is a clumsy thing he has to control, to lift his hands to brush raindrops from his brow as he turns to look at Albus Dumbledore. He does not have words, not quite yet. He is nothing but a body right now, breathing in time with the world.
"You shouldn't be wandering, Harry. These are dangerous times."
Always disapproving. The old man had never liked them; had barely hidden his unease beneath that gentle, benign grandfatherly attitude.
Dumbledore watches him, does not reach for him. He sees too much, Harry thinks. Good. He'd have been disappointed if the doddering old man facade had extended to the man's sense of danger. And right now Albus Dumbledore is looking at Harry Potter not with the kind pity one looks at a victim, but with the wary eyes of someone observing the predator in their midsts.
When Harry speaks his voice is rougher than he expected, as if still hoarse from screaming. "I can't really stay at the Dursley residence anymore."
A long sigh, drawn out, the years of Harry asking, dancing around the question ‘would I be able to stay somewhere else… for the summer…?’ screaming between them. A repeated query year after year, despite already knowing the answer.
“They are your family.”
Something about Harry's silence, or maybe the way his eyes flit away from Dumbledore’s gaze must make the old man uneasy. He takes a step forwards, the street-light glinting off his half-moon glasses. The rain still cascades down around them; Harry is soaked through but Dumbledore has some charm on his robe that repels the worst of it. It does not stop several droplets clinging to his long white beard or glasses, and he watches them roll down with gravity, avoiding the man’s eyes.
“When you are with your aunt, you are safe. No danger can touch you. And right now you are in more danger than ever. Harry, Voldemort has returned.”
Harry doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look surprised or shocked or worried. “Yes,” he says, surprisingly agreeable. “He has.”
Dumbledore swallows; a rough, reflexive motion, “Harry—”
But he hasn’t finished, gaze flickering up, green eyes to meet those wintery blue so that the man will see the truth of his words echoing down the corridors of his mind. “He killed them.”
Dumbledore's face folds like crinkled paper. He lurches, and it's hard to tell if he is reaching for Harry, to clasp a withered hand around the boy's shoulder, or if he's flinching back.
But nobody ever accused Dumbledore of being stupid. Misguided. Well intentioned in the way they always are, to their own detriment. Before him stands a boy. Alive. Hallow. Hale. Pale and too skinny, yes, but still breathing. Standing under the rain as if revelling in his own mortality. “Did he?” It is not a question, despite the tonal lilt at the end. It is a quiet, pondering observation and Harry wonders what realisations accompany it. What images the man sees kaleidoscoped in Harry’s jade-green gaze.
I tried to save them, I watched them bleed out as he slit their throats, the platitudes crowd up on Harry's tongue but are never born. He doesn't bother: he senses the futility of it.
“You're covered in their blood, Harry.”
Harry had grown used to the rain seeping cold through his clothes; he had forgotten the red that had been there to start with. Under his nails sits a red-brown line, the streak over his cheek and nose is rain smeared almost lovingly down his skin. If he were to lick his lips he thinks he would be able to taste the iron tang of bloodied lips on his.
“What are you doing, Harry?” Dumbledore asks. He sounds scared. He sounds apprehensive. He holds his antiqued wand loosely in his hand, not yet a threat. The potential of one. “Lord Voldemort is a threat to you.”
“Is he?” Harry says, that same flat statement that Dumbledore had just delivered to him, reflected back.
He does not bother to explain. He does not even attempt to put words to it. Tom Marvolo Riddle I Am Lord Voldemort Voldemort is my past present future; Lord Voldemort is Harry's maker and destroyer. Tom Riddle is Harry's in every sense of the meaning.
Dumbledore holds out his hand. “Come, Harry. You're not safe. Lord Voldemort has risen once again. There are no blood wards to protect you now.”
Harry’s smile is almost kind. “Have you not worked it out yet, Professor? You’re always so many steps ahead and you tell me you didn’t see this coming?”
Dumbledore looks pale. He does, for the first time Harry has known him, look his age. The hand held out to him wavers, fingers curling over nothing as he lowers it. “I had wondered,” he barely dares breathe. “I had wondered how he returned. How he slipped back to life without friends or followers or a body. What did you do, Harry? What did Lord Voldemort promise you?”
“Everything,” Harry whispers.
*
(Then)
He is born drowning.
Water fills his lungs, his eyes, his stomach. It is hot and heavy and vivid red, the claustrophobic warmth of a mother's womb cloying and stifling and cleaving the air from him. He tries to breathe, to suck in oxygen to dying cells and there is only liquid wrapped around his throat.
To let go and give up would be the sweetest thing. The cruelest thing. The panic hurts. The body knows the fight, the arms flail but they’re sluggish in the thick liquid embrace. The pressure is a hug that grows tighter and tighter until it chokes, gravity making each cell of his body so heavy until it’s easier to not move at all.
There is a point where there is no pain; the flesh stops fighting, the burn for air is no longer registered. The inevitability of it is a desolate sense of peace and stillness.
Water fills his lungs. His vision goes spotty and then black.
And then a small hand curls around his wrist.
The fingers are cold. They are so cold compared to the heat of him. Small ice shards that sink bone deep. They tug on something in him; faintly at first but then sharper. Pain lancing deep into the heart of him. It pulls him up until he’s choking, until there’s air, cold and bitter around him. Until he’s sprawled on ice cracked out around him next to a boy with dark hair and dark eyes.
The taste of oxygen is sweet. It doesn’t register at first over the taste of salt water and bile at the back of his throat.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out an apology to a relative who isn’t even there. “The ice was thin. I didn’t mean to.”
They are on the edge of an ice-coated pond. His glasses are cracked. There is salt in the air and gulls screaming overhead. There is a plunging cliff to one side with a cave opening like a gaping mouth. There are fine silver scars on his left hand; the reason he writes with his right now. His shoes have holes in them and their shirt is several sizes too large. He is staring at a boy with dark eyes and dark hair and he is staring at a boy with bright green eyes, bird-bone thin.
Their vision stretches out over two perspectives. Their minds tangle together and they’re shivering. He’s shivering. He’s so hot and yet he’s cold, ice making a home in his veins. Teeth chatter together in his mouth, a rattling hiss curls at the back of his tongue.
“Are you okay?” the boy with green eyes asks, messy hair plastered to his face. “Did you fall in too? I thought you had drowned—”
The world around him exists in different shades. And the boy exists in two forms, reflections of the other. Slowly, haltering, he breathes in.
A shift of movement. A stutter. The world breathes out with them and he looks at the brown-eyed boy across from him. “I’m Harry,” he says, cautiously, like this, too, is an uncertainty. “What’s your name?”
A name? There is a moment where he doesn't have a name. He is a shadow, a shard, a reflection. He is a flayed, bleeding ruin of a human ripped from his whole. A baby mutilated and born too soon, dragged into existence kicking and screaming and the boy's scar is bleeding a little, red red blood trickling down. He reaches out, presses curious fingers to it. "Tom," he says, the name so simple it's a wonder he didn't know it before.
Harry’s smile is blinding. The world fractures a little more. He wonders, for a heartbeat of a moment, if he answered the correct name, but decides then, Harry’s wrist still clutched in his, that it doesn’t really matter.
Harry exists and so Tom? Tom does too.
*
They die in pieces again and again.
*
(Now)
Grimmauld Place is a cold prison.
And oh they don't call it that. For your safety, they say, it's under Fidelius, it's to keep you safe, to protect you.
But Dumbledore watches him with cold eyes and Harry wonders who it is to protect, really.
"Oh you poor boy," Mrs Weasley coddles him, pushes food that he can't eat at him, not after months of living off table scraps and anxiety, like a hollow pit in his stomach. "Losing your aunt and uncle like that, it must be so difficult."
It isn't at all. It's the easiest thing Harry has ever done. He can't answer that, can only press his lips together and remember the fear in his aunt's eyes and the way his uncle's blood had spread patterns over the kitchen tiles.
He curls himself up in the drawing room, fingers dancing over a stolen cigarette pickpocketed from Sirius' jacket. The craving, the twitch in his fingers remembers cold stone hallways and the bustling London streets, remembers smirking pureblood Slytherins huddled in the courtyard, smoke spiralling into patterns around them.
"Ah. I had wondered where my cigarettes had gone."
Sirius is a dark shadow in the doorway. Gaunt and sallow, the man haunts his own house with a despondence and depression that have most of the Order avoiding the last of the Blacks.
"Can you pick up some more when you next go out?" Harry asks, breathing out a lungful of smoke. "Somehow I don't think Dumbledore will let me leave."
Sirius' laugh is the bark of a dog. "With Voldemort out there? He's going to kill you if he finds you. You barely got away from him once this summer already."
Is that the story they're telling, Harry ponders. "That's not what I heard Moody saying," he says, poking deeper, digging open the wound, tearing away the bandages of lies Dumbledore has tried to use. "Nobody has seen Voldemort, after all. Snape's mark burned black and you've a missing prophecy - yes, I know about the prophecy, I'm not meant to know about that, that's besides the point. Moody keeps looking at me like he wants to arrest me, Shacklebolt like he wants to shove Veritaserum down my throat and Remus keeps looking pitying."
"That's not—that is to say, Remus believes you. I believe you. Dumbledore mentioned you might be influenced—" Sirius confesses in a near whisper. Harry takes another drag of the cigarette. He wishes Sirius wouldn't coddle him. Wouldn't tiptoe around the point when Harry has spent the last week listening to the rumours.
"Influenced," Harry's perfected the art of the flat tone, no intonation lilt to invoke a question, just flat indifference hammered out dead. "Influenced to go on a murderous rampage?"
"I don't care about what Moody thinks. And those muggles were horrible, even if they were your relatives."
"They locked me in a cupboard."
"Families are shit, tell me about it."
"No, Sirius, they locked me in. That was my bedroom. I would spend weeks there. I used to think I'd die there and nobody would ever find me. That they’d forget about me, leave me to starve, that one day that door would close and never open again. So why don’t you ask what you came here to ask and be done with it?” Harry lets his head rock back, pressed to the sharp corner of the bookcase behind him. He watches Sirius blanch, verbally stuttering his way through several excuses and apologies before giving up, looking at where Harry just watches in amusement.
"Did you do it?"
"No," Harry says. "But I wanted to."
The exhale Sirius lets out is a shuddering, broken thing. No rants, no disappointed godfather acts. Just grief and so much regret. "I'm sorry," he says. "I let you down, Harry."
There is no point to this conversation. Harry loves Sirius dearly, but Sirius has never been there for him. He had not broken out of Azkaban for Harry. He had broken out of it to kill Peter. To avenge James.
There is only one person who has been there for Harry and in return Harry will burn the world for him.
It is cruel to stick two souls together so closely, entwine them, weave them so perfectly together until they match each other's missing parts, until they can barely tell one from another, two shared symphonies between two souls.
It is cruel to stick two souls so perfectly together and then tear them apart and expect them to function right.
Harry had tasted freedom. Had seen his shackles broken only for them to close back around him, tighter than before. He savours that moment of being unchained—it had tasted like blood and rain and the sour taste of fear, still fresh on his tongue.
He skulks around Grimmauld like a ghost. This is not like last year in the wake of the dementor attack, filled with noise and Order members. No, the house is cold and empty. Harry is cold and empty, missing half of who he is. He listens to Moody and Dumbledore whispering and pretends he cannot hear the suspicion in their voices.
"The Auror report has there being only one magical signature at the house, Albus. The boy's lying to you."
"But the initial findings had two signatures, no?"
"The initial field spells were garbled. Distorted. The boy's signature on two wavelengths—how sure are you that the Dark Lord was there?"
Harry slips back upstairs, dodging Dumbledore's twinkling gaze. A part of him is still half-expecting the old man to drag him to the Ministry, throw him in front of a dementor or a killing curse.
He won't. The old man is kind. He will not kill the boy, no, he'll let someone else do the killing. In the man’s ideal world Voldemort ties the noose himself, and maybe that’s the reason why when Dumbledore isn't looking at him with suspicion, it's with curiosity for why Harry isn't dead already.
The cage of Grimmauld is the loneliest Harry has ever felt, alone in his head. Shouting into the void without the usual echo of sound back at him. There is no shadow at the corner of his vision, no slip-slide of memories bleeding and hazing his world. He has to go looking for his other heart, has to follow the rush of blood and magic to find where his other half rests. His soul is—
Busy comes through as a half-thought, half sense. Keep safe. Keep them distracted.
Harry is alone in this cloud of suspicion-loss-anger and his other heart sighs against him, the sensation of lips pressed to his forehead.
I'll come for you. Soon. Will you wait for me? his other heart asks. It's strange; they are not words. The other is no longer vocal reverbs in Harry's head, just the impression of words pressed between the thin walls of their mind.
Will you come for me? Harry asks back.
Always.
*
Harry is surprised Dumbledore allows him to return to Hogwarts for his sixth year.
“You must learn Occlumency. Professor Snape will teach you.”
Harry wonders how to explain that his mind isn’t really cut out for learning how to clear his thoughts. His mind is crystal facets refracted in a hundred pieces and has been since he was about four or five. He’s not sure of the exact age he was when he’d fallen through the ice. Dudley had shoved him and he’d skidded sideways, hand out for balance only for the thin coating of the pond to give way beneath him.
And they had woken, sprawled on the ice, too hot and choking on the taste of blood and salt, Harry’s mind blended into another, his vision doubled into two perspectives and for each beat of his heart there was an echo in his ears.
Magic isn’t real, Petunia had said, imaginary friends don’t really exist and magic isn’t real. But Tom is real and therefore when he opens a letter in green ink addressed to him, he’s not really surprised to find out magic is real too.
“I knew I was special,” they had breathed.
“Famous too,” Hagrid had said, gruffly, “Not a witch or wizard ‘o doesn’t know your name.”
They had frowned at that. “But I’m…I’m just Harry.”
Two conflicting ideas can be held together in one’s mind at the same time. He can be just harry and special in the same way he can be tom and harry together. He knows, intrinsically, that he is different, and that most witches and wizards likely do not have an extra shadow.
His thoughts double-bounce between them. Aunt Petunia sneers at them, calls them a freak and “the children at the orphanage called me that too,” Tom sneers and yes, Harry remembers that too.
“Better be GRYFFINDOR,” the hat calls, and it had taken its time talking through the options, and yet at the same time it had barely hesitated. Harry slinks to the Gryffindor table with the echoes of slytherin for you, of course in his ears and feeling Tom’s smug smile as he takes his seat at the table of green and silver.
Ron’s grin is warm and solid and real in a way a lot of things about Harry are not. Even now, six years on, there is still something so genuine about the other boy that even with his thoughts no longer having that echo, no longer bouncing back along switched souls, it is gratifying to slide into a seat next to his friend.
“Sorry about your aunt and uncle, mate,” Ron nudges him with an elbow. “Sucks you had to stay at Grimmauld Place all summer. Dumbledore said ‘no visitors’. Don’t know why, we stayed there last summer.”
“He thinks I’m unstable,” Harry says.
From his other side Hermione peers at him like a particularly curious bug. “Well that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she says, imperiously as if she, too, is still eleven and telling them i’ve read about it in hogwarts, a history.
“Not exactly like you were ever particularly stable,” Ron says with the bluntness of an express train and the intention of a particularly harmless kitten. He says it like it’s a fact: Harry Potter has never been right or sane and that the old man is an idiot if he hadn’t realised that. “Your propensity for finding trouble is unlike anybody else I know.”
Harry waits half a beat too long to react, waiting for his heart-soul to whisper in his ear and it’s only when there is only silence that he laughs, a short quirk of the lips and grateful grin. “He dragged me out once to help recruit a new Professor. Felt like a possession he was showing off,” he rolls his shoulders, arches his neck. The movement feels wrong in this body but he does it anyway. “Spent the rest of the time trapped in Grimmauld.”
“Which new teacher?” Hermione cranes her head, peering at the staff table. Slughorn is near the far end, sitting between Hagrid and Flitwick with his chest puffed out, although it’s hard to tell if that’s intentional or because his robes are a tad too small for him. Still peacocking, Harry thinks, the man never changes. And Harry should, by any account, be the prize of his collection.
Yet even hollowed out and missing half of himself there is still too much other in the tap of his fingers, the way Harry watches the world like he’s dissecting it. And he had rolled his neck then, habitual, a quirk that had not been his originally, and Slughorn’s fingers had gripped a tiny but too hard on his glass, nails blanching white.
Harry is surprised the man agreed to return to teaching almost as much as he is surprised to be here and not under house arrest. But, he considers, gaze flicking to where Dumbledore watches over, better to be here, under Albus Dumbledore’s watchful eye, than out there awaiting the Dark Lord.
“Is he going to be our new defence teacher?” Ron asks, mouth full of roast potatoes.
“Oh, no, he’s a potions master,” Harry says. “Snape’s teaching defence.”
“Well fuck.”
“Language, Ronald!”
*
(Then)
Harry Potter arrives at Hogwarts, eleven-year-old, too thin, too wary, Lily Evans’ bright green eyes glazed and distant in a way hers never had been and twitchy in a way James Potter would have sneered at.
Dumbledore watches him and wonders if he has made a mistake.
(It will not be the first time he worries about this.)
Harry goes to Gryffindor after a hat-stall, and his feet linger, body turned to the Slytherin table before he redirects to sit near Fred and George Weasley, their younger brother joining him shortly after with a grin.
He is a quiet boy. Dissonant in his movements and speech. Dull, Severus sneers, poor attention span.
Soft, Minerva says, rose-tinted lenses, reminds me of his mother. Has taken Granger under his wing after that dreadful incident with that troll.
Strange, Hagrid frowns, I feel like he’s not looking at me but someone else instead.
Quiet, Sprout says, although I hear him talking to himself. A bit anti-social.
Clever, Flitwick is thrilled, he’s a natural at magic, his theory is a bit outdated though…
The Hogwarts rumour mill follows at Harry’s feet and in part he does not regret his decision to keep the boy away from that. The stares at whispers burden the boy, make him hunch over defensively and hide further between the form of his two friends.
He is a strange boy, Dumbledore thinks. Bright and kind. So kind. Yet there's this etherealness to him, the way he walks through the world sometimes like he's not there. He's pale and sometimes Dumbledore thinks Harry is not breathing, more a ghost of a boy than a real person. The shadows move behind him and—
—and Dumbledore blinks and it is just Harry.
The boy ends up on the Gryffindor Quidditch team to Minerva’s delight. He dodges Severus’ ire in potions and, despite the Weasley-Malfoy feud of nearly three centuries, disregards Ron Weasley’s dislike of Lucius’ boy to treat Draco Malfoy with something more akin to polite disinterest and amusement.
Albus gifts the boy his father’s cloak. Harry uses it to walk cold corridors but does not linger in front of mirrors, instead trawling through the library and several times ending up startlingly close to the Slytherin common room, although Dumbledore is unsure if this is intentional or not, nothing ever appears to come of it.
Dumbledore is pretty sure the hat almost called ‘Slytherin’, wonders if he should take the sign that it didn’t as relief or not.
He’s so busy watching Harry he doesn’t look at Quirrel until the other man is found dead in the forest, his face melted down to the skull and organs liquified. The Philosopher’s Stone stays safely hidden and Harry Potter has no near-death experiences that do not involve Quidditch or dragon smuggling.
Voldemort, if whatever is left of the boy that was once Tom Riddle is still out there, does not make any visible reaction or appearance to Dumbledore’s bait. And yet still, the signs are there and Dumbledore wonders.
*
This is what they do not say. Harry Potter is—
Apathetic. He watches Neville clutching a broken wrist, whimpering and doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move to help. He lets his fingers smear through the blood afterwards and a vicious delightful part of him wants to taste it on his tongue. He listens to Hermione and Ron speak of rules and morals and they know, hypothetically, what he is meant to do, but more often than not they do not care.
(“How restrictive,” Tom sneers, “Why can’t we make them hurt?”
“We can’t. It’s wrong.”
“Is it?”)
Bored. Magic is easy. It dances beneath their fingers. They are a child of magic and it adores him. The theory is harder, quills clumsy and writing is messy and whichever hand he uses it’s the wrong one. The books don’t always make sense, the rules of magic feel arbitrary and if there are limits to magic then they have yet to find them.
Curious. About, well, everything. Magic, mostly. Hogwarts welcomes them with open arms; she loves them, wraps warm tendrils of magic around him as they walk her stone floors. People also are fascinating; watching them react to chained events and the whispers that spread out make him think of dominos. Cause and effect. A butterfly flaps its wings and a hurricane hits the coast.
Not real. Harry slips along secret corridors he has no way of knowing they were there. He slip-slides the paths in his mind, listening to Tom rant about the purebloods and their belief that he is inferior. Tom’s still ranting when Ron walks right through him, startling Harry so much he flinches backwards and prompting Hermione to give him a funny look for a week afterwards.
A ghost. He turns to ask Abraxas Malfoy on pureblood etiquette and then the world shifts and it’s Draco, looking at him with bemusement. He follows the tail ends of Slytherin robes to class and ends up in the greenhouses with some Hufflepuff third years who coo at him until one boy with a handsome smile offers to walk him to transfiguration. Harry declines, turning to walk next to Druella Rosier who still doesn’t know how to treat Slytherin’s new resident mudblood.
Magic is not logical, and Harry-and-Tom are not logical. “Where do you go?” Hermione asks him, like she can see him wandering a different version of Hogwarts in their mind.
Harry just smiles.
(Piece by piece the horcrux remembers. And so, to, does Harry.)
Defence class brings them a headache and Tom watching Quirrel with a fierce eyed, hawkish look as if he might figure their teacher out if he just stares hard enough. Harry doesn’t like the class—the fumes stink of garlic, he feels raw and like he’s a second away from splintering apart.
“Do you sense it?” Tom says one day, pressing close, skin to skin. “Quirrel. He’s like us.”
Harry peers at their turbaned teacher, listens to the stuttering and shaking tone. Quirrel is grounded in a way Harry is not. He does not turn to look at shadows, he does not walk with an extra shadow.
But sometimes there is a lisp to his tone, an undercurrent of a hiss and a glint of red in his eyes.
He is not like them. Nobody is like them.
“Of course not,” Tom laughs, carding his fingers through Harry’s, bringing Harry’s knuckles to his lips and pressing his nose to them in gentle, cruel affection. “We’re special. There is nobody else like us, Harry.”
Be normal. None of that freakish behaviour. Petunia had ranted over and over, frying pan in hand and oblivious to where Tom stood next to Harry. She had been talking about magic, but even in the magical world Harry is different. Freakish. Unnatural. They are more than themselves.
They’d never discussed it. Not really. Never lingered on the reality of it, never tried to put words to explain it. Harry looks at Tom; desperate and wide-eyed; the way one must look at their insanity in the mirror. “Tom,” he asks, voice smaller than he’d like, reaching forwards to touch the other boy. And beneath Harry’s probing fingers he’s real. He’s solid and warm and human. “Are you real?” he asks.
He looks up. The boy’s eyes are red. He sounds older in that second but raw. Torn open. “I am to you,” he says, after an eternity.
And that is all that matters really.
*
They do not meet the shadow behind Quirrel. But when in his classroom Tom presses close until Harry can feel him like a headache beneath his skull, an ache behind his teeth, taste beneath his tongue. He speaks-Tom speaks-they speak and their accent lisps almost sibilant. He catches sight of his own reflection and his green eyes are muddy and distorted in colour.
Quirrel vanishes at the end of the year and Dumbledore announces his tragic demise. He meets Harry in the lull after exams following a request penned by them regarding staying at Hogwarts over the summer. The text had the lilt of Tom’s slight calligraphy curl to Harry’s right-handed penmanship, neat and polite and surely he would have no reason to deny them.
The man’s smiles are gentle. Kind. He does not know, does not realise, Harry observes. Inwardly Tom seethes as Dumbledore speaks about sacrifices and his mother’s love.
“Your mother died to protect you. And the curse that was meant to kill you rebounded and hit Lord Voldemort instead.”
“How could love save me? That’s not a spell or magic or—” There’s a little bit too much of Tom sneering through Harry’s mouth but Dumbledore doesn’t appear to notice.
“Ah, indeed it is the oldest magic there is. Raw. Undefined. Undoubtedly Lily did something, but even I cannot fathom what. I was, however, able to preserve the spell at the home of her last living relatives. As long as you reside in the home of your aunt, Harry, her protection lives on.”
He sees the trap. He swallows, throat dry. “So I must return.”
“I am afraid so, my dear boy.”
Tom’s fury is raw acid dripped into an open wound. Harry smiles blandly and focuses his gaze on the old man’s beard, won’t meet that pale blue gaze. He cannot see Tom, his other half dislikes Dumbledore on some intrinsic principle and so lurks only in the pressure on his bones, the burn of his blood.
“And Volde—sorry, You-Know-Who—”
“Call him by his name, Harry. There is no need to be afraid of the name—it only exacerbates fear of the man behind the mask.”
“Why did he try to kill me? And is he…is he really gone?”
“Ah. I fear not. I fear whatever he has done to himself has left him unable to die so easily. No, he is out there. Skulking in the shadows, biding his time. But until then—” the old man claps his hands, “I believe I am keeping you from packing. You are no doubt looking forward to returning to your relatives.”
His retreating form ambles, almost totters away amicably. Harry stares after him, watching his retreat in silence for a long few minutes.
“He didn’t answer my question,” Harry says. “Why Voldemort tried to kill me… the greatest dark wizard, felled by a baby.”
“Because of love,” Tom sneers, and when Harry turns his head Tom is there, standing next to him. “What a foolish idea.”
“Not love,” Harry corrects. “Sacrifice. That’s not foolish, that’s base exchange principle. If done in the right circumstances, the right time…it was Samhain, if her intention was to die so I might live—”
Tom reaches out, presses his fingers to the scar that marks Harry’s brow. It is usually hidden under his messy fridge but Tom brushes it aside to trace the rough, scabbed line down Harry’s temple, following the path it cuts through his brow and just touching the top of his cheek. “Sōwilō. Victory. But for who?” Tom’s murmurs are soft sweet nothings in Harry’s ears. “This Lord Voldemort,” Tom says the name, mouths the syllables, stretches them out between his teeth and bites into them. “I want to be like him. So feared nobody dares to speak my name. Respected. Exalted. I shall be like a god.”
“You don’t want to be like him,” Harry says, too knowingly. “You want to be him.”
“No,” Tom denies with a mirror-shard grin. “I want us to be better than him. We’re meant for greatness, Harry.”
“‘We’?”
And Tom’s eyes find his, alight with a poisoned fever Harry can’t look away from. “You’ll be by my side, won’t you?”
Harry doesn’t have to think twice. “Always.”