Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Harry tells himself he should be happy with how things turned out.

By the end of the school year, 6 months after Harry’s arrival in 1943, it’s become routine for Harry to walk to breakfast every morning from the Slytherin dorms to the Great Hall alongside Tom.

Sometimes, their heads are bowed together, and they’re whispering animatedly to each other in their shared secret language. Sometimes, they’ve just come off a private fight, and Tom’s expression is stone-cold and Harry’s shoulders are stiff, but still, Harry trails behind Tom for the rest of the day, not caring if he looks like a lost, kicked puppy until Tom decides he’s suffered enough and starts talking to Harry again.

Harry’s not quite sure what they are. Boyfriends, maybe?

He certainly hopes so, though they’ve never quite had the ‘relationship’ talk.

But Tom Riddle doesn’t seem the type to do relationship talks. He’d probably laugh at Harry and then shove Harry’s head down onto his dick.

--

Earlier that day, they had gotten into such a disagreement, the same one as always.

But Tom held all the cards, and he knew it.

“Please...” Harry begs. “Please, put it... put it back in me. I need to feel it again.”

Tom smiles down at him, vicious and coldly amused.

“No.”

Chapter Text

Harry goes to class, but it’s gotten worse; there are some days where he feels worse than before he arrived, and he knows—he knows—he can’t let himself get back into that state again.

--

And then Tom goes and splits his soul with the ring.

Harry realizes his presence in 1943 must have accelerated the timeline somehow—and now, Tom’s gone and killed all his relatives on the Riddle side, more than a year before he otherwise would have.

At nights, Tom feels colder still. Harry tries to keep him warm, crawling over him in his bed and trying to slot himself in that perfect place curled up against Tom’s chest with the diary tucked next to both of them underneath the pillow that they share, but Tom’s skin now has a permanent chill to it that no warming charm can fix.

The ring makes itself hard to resist, sending pulsing waves of heady dark magic towards Harry, enticing him, beckoning him closer, and Harry takes both hands and clasps Tom’s hand that’s wearing the ring and holds it to the left side of his chest, right above his heart.

Unlike the diary, Tom keeps the ring with him at all times.

Harry begs to wear it; Tom says no.

He begs to carry the diary around now that Tom has two Horcruxes; Tom smiles coolly and again says no.

Harry ends up skivving off all his classes for a few days and spending the entire day hugging the diary to the place where he can feel the empty gaping hole in his chest.

When Tom orders him to get his shit together because Harry’s behavior reflects poorly on Tom, Harry says the alternative is throwing himself off of the Astronomy Tower, and wouldn’t that be an even worse look for Tom.

Tom throws him a disgusted look, then a stinging hex for good measure, but he leaves him alone for the rest of the day.

Even with the physical reassurance of the diary pressed against his chest, Harry still has panic attacks thinking about how fucked he would be if Tom takes his horcruxes out of Hogwarts; or what would happen if he hides them in the Gaunt shack or somewhere new, somewhere that Harry can’t find them.

--

Tom didn’t need Harry; he alternated between amusement and tolerance. But Harry needed Tom to breathe, to survive.

After the war, he’d already seen how horrifyingly bad it could get without.

In return, Tom got something out of it too. He got to affiliate himself with the Potters, a pureblood family with no Dark Arts scandals. (Even the Malfoys had suffered the indignity of a Ministry raid or two that turned up dark artifacts at their manor.) Harry had gotten to know the Potters in this time. Fleamont and Euphemia were so desperate for a child of their own that they had welcomed Harry in with open arms and didn’t look too closely after he’d presented the Gringotts blood test results confirming he was a Potter. They were considered new money but rather respectable, and even held an inherited Wizengamot seat.

But most of all, Harry’s Parseltongue intrigued Tom, who was determined to figure out the source of it. It had caught Tom’s attention from the start, exactly as Harry had intended.

Parseltongue was Tom’s primary claim to his Slytherin ancestry, and some mysterious transfer student, who could also speak it, showing up rather randomly made the skill look a tad... common.

It had the potential to dilute Tom’s ability to consolidate power. Unless he was able to present a united front with Harry, claim Harry as his own.

If Harry could continue to hold Tom’s interest, let Tom think he was too valuable of an ally to let slip away, then he’d be able to keep spending time in Tom’s presence.

And wasn’t that the whole point of everything?

--

The emptiness returns—that black screaming void that never really went away—it always returns, no matter what Harry does—and it always feels a thousand-fold worse, eating at the wound inside of Harry’s soul like a corrosive acid.

--

Nothing is enough—Harry comes to realize—nothing will ever be enough.

He’s always going to feel empty inside—this endless void inside of him that he had thought being near Tom would fix. Or being near one of Tom’s horcruxes would fix.

He’d been so sure that one of those things would help him feel whole again.

But nothing had worked. He still feels broken, no matter what he tries.

Except—

—unless—

There’s 1 last thing Harry can think of.

It’s a possibility he hadn’t wanted to consider. He thinks he might have known it all along—the only possible end state for his problems. But he hadn’t wanted to admit to himself.

The only thing that might work.

He needs to get the missing piece back. He needs to be a horcrux again.

--

Harry drags himself to class. He drags himself to Knight meetings and to Quidditch practice, and he tries not to bother Tom about needing to be around the diary or the ring, not even once.

When he sees that Tom is in as good of mood as can be expected, that’s when he begs Tom to make him into a horcrux again.

“—I know you’re trying to make seven in all, and wouldn’t it be extra security to have a living one? No one would ever suspect, and—”

“You?” Tom interrupts Harry in the middle of his rambling. “What makes you think—” he starts laughing.

“You can do it, I know you can,” Harry says earnestly in his most encouraging voice, widening his eyes and leaning closer to Tom. “It would be an incredible feat of magic, but if anyone can figure out how, it’s you.”

“I’m sure I can, but—” Tom dissolves into more laughter.

“What’s so funny?” Harry demands.

“You’re fucking insane,” Tom says, reaching a hand up to wipe away tears from laughing so hard.

“Um,” Harry says. “Okay?”

“Oh, and by the way—” Tom shoots Harry a half-cocked grin, finally recovered from his laughing fit, “The answer is no.”

“Why not?” Harry tries to keep it from sounding like a whine.

Tom shrugs and turns his attention back to his book, effectively dismissing him.

Harry tries bribery now that he's struck out with flattery. “I’ll help you find the other vessels for your horcruxes, or with your Prefect rounds, with whatever you need—you know, you can stay with me this summer! You won’t need to go back to the orphanage in London!” he declares, triumphant.

“Or I can stay with you this summer without giving you a piece of my soul in return,” Tom throws out carelessly, flipping a page in his book.

“I’ll never betray you, you can trust me.”

“I know you won’t.”

“Then why—"

“The idea is certainly an intriguing one, and it does have certain merits in terms of pushing the bounds of known magic, but...” Tom shrugs.

“What?”

Tom sends him a smirk. “Maybe I like you better this way.”

--

Tom would wake up with Harry fully impaled on his cock, roll his eyes, and mutter, “Christ,” not caring that he sounded like a common muggle when half-asleep. He’d move to push Harry off, but Harry would beg and beg for just a few more minutes of contact, of feeling Tom inside of him once again, the only time he felt anywhere remotely near whole.

This was their status quo. Harry couldn’t ask for anything more. He had tried, and been refused.

He got to have Tom’s cock inside him anytime he wanted, but what he really wanted was Tom’s soul.

--

“Please, please,” Harry pleads, as spring gives way to summer. “I’ll take better care of it than anyone alive, you know I will. Please, it hurts so much, you’re the only one that can fix it, I’ll die if I don’t feel it again.”

“You’ll die if you keep pestering me,” Tom says lightly, turning a page in his book without glancing up.

--

Tom strokes down the side of Harry’s face. “You wear my pain so well.”

“Would you reconsider?” Harry whispers. “Please?”

Tom smirks. “The answer’s still no.”

“You’re the only one—” Harry’s voice is cracked and broken, “—you’re the only one that can fix me.”

“Well,” Tom says slowly, his eyes staring into Harry’s intensely. He darts his tongue out and traces up the line of tears trickling down Harry’s cheek. “I guess you’ll just have to live without being a horcrux.”

“No,” Harry moans. “Tom, please, you’re the only one who can help me. I’ll do anything, I’ll tell you everything. How I know Parseltongue, anything you want to know about your future, how to—” he swallows. “How to defeat Grindelwald, now that Dumbledore’s gone and won’t be able to do it.”

“Are you – is this – are you running that seer grift again?”

“No! It’s not a grift!” Harry protests. “I really can tell you things about your future. Important things.”

Tom licks up the other side of Harry’s face. “It’s ok. I know you’ll tell me anyway,” he whispers in Harry’s ear. “Besides, I like you better this way. Your eyes are very pretty in their desperation.”

This isn’t over, Harry thinks. He thinks about ways to make Tom make him his horcrux. He’s barely functional now, but he managed to come back to the 1940s, didn’t he?

He’ll figure out a way. Then he could go his separate way, once the missing piece of soul was rightfully restored in him.

Right?

--

As summer approaches, they settle into a routine that helps keep Harry grounded despite the feelings of hopelessness that still overwhelm him on occasion.

At the very least, he’s not... alone anymore. He’ll give Tom somewhere to stay this summer that isn’t war-torn muggle London, so they can spend the summer together too. All he asks for in return is to spend enough of each day in Tom’s presence so that the indiscriminate darkness that once overtook him doesn’t again spiral out of control.

Since he has no way out, the only thing he can do is cope. Until he can find a way to convince Tom to make him into a horcrux again.

Harry tells himself he should be happy with how things turned out.

Chapter Text

Hagrid is expelled anyway. Harry sighs. He tried.

--

Harry’s relief is short-lived.

Tom disappears for a day. The ache inside of Harry becomes nearly unbearable by nightfall.

But then, shortly before curfew, Tom comes back.

Harry can immediately tell something is different.

Tom looks like a wreck, with red-rimmed eyes and a waxen pallor, and he’s shaking. It’s well-hidden behind his marble-like exterior, but Harry can tell.

Tom somehow feels both less and more.

“Oh my god,” Harry whispers, horrified.

This time it wasn’t Myrtle.

Tom had used Dumbledore’s death to create a horcrux.

--

Harry feels it pulsing at him from across the small aisle separating their beds.

Thick, cloying waves of dark magic creeping out from underneath Tom’s pillow. The heavy, oily tendrils extending in Harry’s direction and making him choke on them.

The dizzying force of it wraps around Harry and calls out to him like a siren song.

He buries his head under his pillow, and it takes every last ounce of strength to force himself to stay in his bed and not physically maul Tom.

--

He cracks after about 3 hours.

In the middle of the night, no more than a few hours after Tom came back from creating the first horcrux, Harry pads over to Tom’s bed and slips in. He wraps himself behind Tom, who makes no move to shove him off. Tom is freezing cold, as frigid as ice, even under the thick sheets.

Harry tries to warm him up, rubbing the flats of his palms across Tom’s shoulders and back.

It doesn’t work. Tom remains cold to the touch. He’s shaking underneath Harry’s tender touch.

The diary is under his pillow. Harry can still feel the magic calling to him, drawing him in, sending thick, intoxicating waves of magic in his direction.

He allows himself to slide one hand under Tom’s pillow and grip the spine of the diary.

Immediately, a calm settles over his mind and trickles into the cracked edges of his soul.

He doesn’t think either he or Tom gets a wink of sleep that night, but at least Tom allowed Harry to hold him in his arms until the washed-out grey of dawn starts filtering in through the lake water.

--

They don’t talk about that day that Tom was away.

Harry tries to arrange things so that he always gets fucked on top of Tom’s bed—not his own bed, not in an empty classroom, not in the Prefects’ Bath.

In this way—with the horcrux underneath him and Tom on top of him—it’s the closest to normal he’s felt in a long time.

--

After sex, lying in bed together, Tom grabs Harry’s hand which is holding on tight to the diary that he keeps under the pillow and pulls it off his horcrux.

“You know what it is,” he says simply, without any paranoia or fear, only a mild curiosity for how Harry could have figured it out.

“I swear I won’t tell anyone,” Harry immediately replies, begging with his eyes for Tom not to throw him out, not to cut off his access to either Tom or the diary.

Tom studies him for a moment. “I know you won’t betray me,” he says lightly. “Besides, we’d go down together for the Dumbledore incident.”

Harry’s chest aches with the implicit trust that Tom was placing in him—the same trust he must have later placed in Lucius and Bellatrix and Regulus for them to guard the other precious pieces of his soul.

“Did it hurt?” Harry blurts.

Tom looks at Harry like he’s an idiot. “You saw me that night,” he finally says after the silence has stretched on for a while.

“Does it still hurt?”

“It feels like something that’s been cut out of me that will never heal.”

It’s a feeling that’s familiar to Harry.

“I know,” Harry whispers, and he holds a trembling hand up to Tom’s chest and presses it flat. He imagines himself running his fingers along the torn edges of Tom’s ripped-open soul.

Instead of being upset that someone knows his secrets, Tom seems glad to have someone to brag to and confide in, and he spends a few hours going into detail about how cleverly he had pieced together the horcrux creation ritual from archaic, out-of-print texts and how he’d modified the ritual for his purposes to make multiple further down the line, while Harry is just happy to be able to hold Tom against his chest for a few precious, uninterrupted hours.

--

Sleeping with Tom kind of works for a while. When Tom fucks into him, Harry imagines it filling the empty space inside his soul where the horcrux had been.

--

But when they’re apart, it still hurts.

Harry, in fact, thinks it might be getting worse.

--

Tom leaves his diary in the room during the days.

On the worst days, Harry skips classes just to hold the horcrux to his chest and try to feel normal again.

Tom finds him on the floor of their shared dorm room, curled around the diary.

“It feels so good,” Harry slurs, rocking himself around the diary clutched to his chest on the plush green rug. “It feels so good, please don’t take it away.”

Tom kicks Harry in the abdomen until Harry loosens his vise-like grip on the diary. He bends down to scoop it up, eyes passing over Harry’s prone form. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Why weren’t you in class today?”

“I can feel you in it,” Harry whimpers. He pushes himself up to a seated position and stretches an arm out. “Can I have it back now?”

Tom appears to be thinking for a while. “You’d sooner give your life than let anyone else touch it, would you?”

Harry looks up at him, eyes feverish and wild. “Yeah,” he promises. “No one’s ever coming near this.”

Tom nods, a grimly satisfied expression on his face. Harry can read the conclusion in his eyes. He couldn’t have asked for a better guard for a piece of his soul.

--

Harry misses more classes as his obsession with holding the diary horcrux only grows.

But like sex, the diary too is a temporary balm.

Harry does still have to go to some classes, Quidditch practice, meals—he has to attend a minimum of classes to not get kicked out of Hogwarts, but it hurts him to be away; it hurts not to be around the horcrux all the time.

Harry begs to carry it around. “Please, I promise I’ll take amazing care of it, please, please, I need it, and you won’t even notice it’s gone.”

“It stays here.”

“I’m with you the whole day,” Harry whines.

Tom says no, heading towards the exit of their dorm room.

“You’re much more useful to me if I don’t give you what you want,” he says, carelessly tossing his verdict over his shoulder on his way out.

--

The diary horcrux isn’t enough; skin on skin contact during sex isn’t enough.

It addressed a symptom, not the root of the issue. It kind of works—when Tom is inside him or when he’s clutching the diary to his chest, Harry is able to forget the empty missing piece inside of him—but the rest of the time, he feels as bad as he did when he arrived in this time.

And he can’t have that happen again.

--

Harry is at his wit’s ends.

He can’t keep living this way. It’s terrible.

What he glances in the mirror, he sees that he looks about as wretched as he feels—scar standing out in stark relief against skin that’s never been this pale before, dark shadows under his eyes, red-rimmed irises. Almost like...

He shakes the thought off.

He still feels like he’s living a cursed half-life, but at least he’s better off than he was before.

--

Tom again wakes up fully buried inside of Harry.

“I needed to feel you inside of me,” Harry blurts as soon as he sees Tom is awake.

“If you keep this up—” Tom threatens, “—the next time you feel a body part of mine inside yours is when I slice open your stomach and yank your guts out inch by painful inch.”

Harry’s eyes widen. What Tom had just said sounded downright romantic to him; his chest aches with an immense longing for more contact, more anything, as he continues to grind downwards on Tom’s lap. “Yes, and while you’re in there, can you also wrap your hand around my heart, so you can feel how it beats for you?”

He thinks that’s where the soul is. The heart, right?

Tom stares.

“Get out.”

Harry doesn’t move.

Tom shoves him off, and Harry topples onto the floor in a tangled mass of limbs and sheets.

--

Even constant contact with the diary horcrux provides barely any relief after a while.

Harry really is in despair now.

He blew up his life, traveled back in time, starting fucking a teenage Voldemort, and even, in his desperation, is guarding one of his horcruxes instead of trying to destroy it, but it still wasn’t enough.

--

Tom wrests the diary away from Harry and forces him to go to class since, “It doesn’t reflect well on me, to have one of my Knights continually missing class.”

Harry scowls. “I’m more than just one of your Knights. You make it sound like I’m Malfoy or Lestrange or whatever.”

“I will break it off if you don’t get yourself together,” Tom threatens.

“Hah! So you admit that we’re together? You can’t break up with me if we’re not first dating!”

Tom hisses something in Parseltongue that Harry doesn’t catch and stalks out of the room, his diary tucked under his arm.

--

Harry goes to class, but it’s gotten worse; there are some days where he feels worse than before he arrived, and he knows—he knows—he can’t let himself get back into that state again.

Chapter Text

As the days lengthen and winter starts to lighten into spring, Tom edges ever closer to discovering the Chamber of Secrets. Harry starts getting nervous when he finds Tom studying old floor plans of Hogwarts that map out the plumbing system.

Would I show Tom the Chamber of Secrets in exchange for a reciprocal touch?, Harry wonders to himself over and over again in the dead of night after everyone’s gone to sleep and he’s posted up in his regular station in the aisle between his and Tom’s beds, trying with every last ounce of self-control not to dart a hand out and run it along the side of Tom’s slumbering face, down his neck and body and—Harry probably wouldn’t be able to stop—and ruin everything.

One day soon, in a moment of desperation, he whispers to Tom after class, “I know what you’re looking for. I can help you, in exchange, in exchange for—” he licks his lips nervously, “—I can help you, if you want.”

Tom gives him a cool look.

“I don’t need your help.”

“Come on, haven’t I proven myself enough—"

“No,” Tom interrupts. “I can find it by myself.”

--

But then Tom lets Harry get a tiny bit handsy on the walk back from Slughorn’s next party after they’ve both had their fill of elf-made mead, and that clears up the cloud of gloom that had descended over Harry when his offer had been rejected.

Harry is left feeling pretty confused by the mixed signals, until he realizes, much later, when he hears the basilisk’s ravenous, sibilant hisses through the pipes again for the first time since his second year, that Tom actually found the Chamber of Secrets and woke up the basilisk, but hadn’t wanted Harry to know.

Oh shit.

--

As the days tick on, Harry starts getting worried about Myrtle and, by extension, Hagrid. Would it still play out the same way that it did the first time around? He doesn’t want Myrtle to die and Hagrid to get expelled due to his inaction.

He’ll figure out something to prevent Myrtle from encountering the basilisk, probably hex Olive Hornby into the hospital wing for the rest of the semester, so that Myrtle wouldn’t need to run into the girls’ bathroom to cry several times a day.

As for Hagrid... The acromantula, at the very least, had to go. That way, Hagrid wouldn’t be expelled for keeping a quintuple-X rated magical creature on school grounds.

Which is how he finds himself dragging Tom down to a disused storage closet deep in the bowels of the school where Hagrid had been keeping his pet acromantula in a locked trunk.

Tom stares down at said trunk with his arms crossed, a mixture of disgust and exasperation on his handsome face.

“You want my help with what now?” he hisses.

The trunk rattles ominously, jumping up into the air on one particularly violent shake.

“Just help me take it out of the school.” Harry tries to put on his most winning smile.

Tom kicks the trunk a couple of times with his foot, but the rattling only grows more frantic. “It’s not my problem.”

“Come on, it’s a quintuple-X rated magical creature, even you know that it has no place in a school.”

Tom stares down at the trunk, unconvinced. Throughout this whole time, he hasn’t flinched once or any shown fear, only side-eyed the trunk with an annoyed expression. That, at least—Harry thinks—is something he can genuinely admire.

“Ok, how about this?” Harry wheedles. “We can take it up to the classroom we use for Knights meetings, and we can all have a go at killing it.” (He doesn’t feel particularly bad about killing Aragog, knowing that the bastard tried more than once to eat Harry in the future.) “It’ll be good practice for everyone to try out casting curses on a living target that’s normally impervious to most magical spells, wouldn’t it?”

He sees Tom start to relent. “Fine,” he sighs, picking up one of the handles of the rattling trunk.

Harry grabs the other handle before Tom can change his mind. The trunk swings in between them, knocking into the sides of their thighs as they walk in stride with each other, settling back into their usual patterns of mocking banter and provoking each other, half in English, half in Parseltongue.

Tom threatens to drop the trunk on Harry’s foot when Harry teases him about how he’d heard from Lestrange that Tom came, apparently for the first time in his entire Hogwarts career, to watch school Quidditch games after Harry had made the team mid-year, when—

When they see none other than Dumbledore rounding the corner.

Tom immediately stiffens. “Follow my lead,” he hisses to Harry in Parseltongue, before straightening up and plastering on what Harry calls his Head Boy smile—completing the look with innocently widened eyes and a totally faked earnestness.

“Good evening, Professor,” Tom says politely and keeps walking. Dumbledore has no reason to stop them and demand to search the trunk if they don’t give him one.

Harry, too, smiles brightly at Dumbledore, trying to pretend like they’re doing a perfectly normal thing on this perfectly normal Wednesday evening.

“Good evening, Mr Potter, Mr Riddle,” Dumbledore nods at them as he passes them. His sharp blue eyes spark with suspicion when he glances at Tom, but his gaze softens when he looks over at Harry.

They’ve almost made it—Dumbledore’s retreating form is nearly gone when Harry risks a peek backwards—when the trunk gives another violent rattle that jostles it out of their hands, and Harry cries out with an Ow!, when it slams into his knee on the way down.

Dumbledore moves in a flash and somehow materializes right behind them. The trunk gives another loud, incriminating rattle from the floor.

“I must ask you to show me what’s in the trunk,” Dumbledore says in a grave voice, wand out.

Harry doesn’t see how they’re going to get out of this. They’re both going to get kicked out, and oh god, Tom is going to hate him for getting him expelled, and Harry’s family is going to be so disappointed in him, and what if Tom refuses to talk to him ever again—

“We don’t know,” Tom’s voice cuts in smoothly. He looks unfazed. “Harry came across this abandoned trunk in the dungeons earlier this evening and asked for my help in bringing it to our Head of House so that he can examine it more closely.”

“For some reason,” Dumbledore says, piercing blue eyes sweeping over Tom and Harry both, “I find that hard to believe.”

“It’s the truth, sir,” Harry pipes in. “I heard the rattling and thought I needed to alert someone, but it seemed too dangerous to leave it behind while I went to go find Slughorn, so I waited next to the trunk until Tom found me on his Prefect rounds.”

“Please know that you both will be held accountable for whatever is in your physical possession at the time.” Dumbledore’s eyes have turned to ice, and his voice is downright cold and steely, the friendly grandfather façade entirely dropped. “Now, open the trunk, please.”

Harry falters.

Tom shrugs and gives Dumbledore a cold, assessing smile, then aims a deliberate kick at the side of the trunk. It rattles threateningly again.

Then in one swift motion, he casts, “Alohomora,” at the trunk and tips it over with another kick.

In a flash, the huge deadly black spider launches itself out of the trunk at the closet living target and sinks its piercer into Dumbledore’s chest before any of the three of them can react.

Whatever Dumbledore was expecting to see, it sure as fuck wasn’t an Acromantula, judging by the horrified expression on his face as he seizes up in pain and the light of life leaves his eyes.

Harry moves to cast a Protego over himself and Tom, but he sees it isn’t necessary. Aragog is ignoring them, occupied with draining Dumbledore’s body of all nutrients and starting to bind him up in silk to preserve his fresh kill for the next few weeks.

“Did you know that would happen,” Harry asks dazedly when he gets his voice back again.

“I didn’t.” Tom also sounds dazed, but he flashes Harry an awfully smug smile, looking positively delighted with this turn of events. “But I figure it’d at least distract him while I figured out how to modify his memories so that he wouldn’t remember finding us here.”

“What!? How is that a foolproof plan?” Harry demands, voice rising in outrage. “You thought you’d just perform a little bit of casual Legilimency on the most powerful wizard alive while one of the world’s deadliest monsters is just - just —” he waves an arm about in the air, gesturing wildly, “—just running amok right next to us!? What the fuck did you expect the spider to do!!” he howls, forgetting to stay quiet.

“Would you rather have gotten expelled, Harry?” Tom retorts.

Harry feels a hysterical bubble of laughter threaten to burst out of him.

Until this moment, he hadn’t realized how impulsive Voldemort must have been in his youth, though he did have an inkling that his first few murders were committed entirely by accident with no careful planning.

Hell, even coming after Harry as an infant to murder him after hearing half a fucking prophecy was downright impulsive. It was almost a Gryffindor-ish quality. No wonder the teenage version of Voldemort got along so well with Harry, connecting with him in a way that Tom didn’t with his other Slytherin classmates.

“God, this is so fucked.” Harry groans in frustration, running his hands through his hair. “We have a deadly acromantula loose in the school and a dead Deputy Headmaster. What do we do now?” he asks.

“Leave it be.” Tom is barely able to contain his gleefulness; his eyes are lit up in a wild, feverish excitement, and he seems so amped up on adrenaline it looks like he’s about to burst into a victory whoop. “If we tell someone we found him, we’ll just be questioned. The acromantula isn’t going anywhere; you know it won’t leave fresh prey that it’s just caught. Let someone else discover it and deal with being questioned.”

He tosses the incriminating trunk over to Harry, who catches it with both arms. “Get rid of this,” Tom instructs.

Hagrid was spared. Myrtle was still alive. Dumbledore’s life was an okay price to pay, wasn’t it?

--

No one gets very much sleep that night. The discovery of the acromantula and Dumbledore’s remains by another set of patrolling Prefects resulted in mandatory common room lockdowns for all the houses.

Most of Slytherin House is pretty stone-faced at the news that Dumbledore had died, though a few, like Walburga, don’t bother to hide their gleeful, vicious smiles. A few of the younger ones—first and second years—appear shaken and frightened that an acromantula had gotten loose in their school, but Slughorn reassures them that the deadly beast has been captured and will be executed.

People start trickling out of the common room by midnight, and by 1am, the common room is nearly empty. Harry heads to their dorm and sits behind his drawn bedcurtains, waiting for the rest of his roommates to fall asleep so that he can stand vigil next to Tom’s bed again.

To his surprise, his bedcurtains are pushed open, and Tom crawls onto Harry’s bed, his eyes still lit up and feverish from the thrill of their kill earlier that evening.

“I can’t stop thinking about what we’ve done,” Tom says in a low voice, staring hungrily at Harry.

He’d never made a move to reciprocate Harry’s stolen, fleeting touches before, so Harry is completely surprised when Tom shoves him back against his headboard and plants a rough kiss on him, shoving his tongue into Harry’s mouth.

Harry melts.

Something within him—something bright and golden and effervescent—bubbles up and flows through his veins with the honeyed lightness and euphoria of Felix Felicis.

It flows into all the cracks of his broken soul—soothing him like the endorphin rush that comes after a Cruciatus—and makes him feel whole for the first time in nearly 2 years, ever since that fateful decision in the train station to leave the horcrux remnant behind. It makes feel like he’s experiencing color and wonder and joy again for the first time after 2 years of living in perpetual darkness.

He feels something hard against his upper leg. Tom’s cock, already firm.

Tom growls into Harry’s mouth, nipping at his tongue, “I can’t believe we killed someone,” his voice rough and crackling with excitement like a live electric wire. “God, that’s so—” he moves down to Harry’s neck and attacks it with a frenzy not unlike that of a starved tiger ripping its prey’s throat out, “—that’s so... I’ve never done that with anyone before—" and Harry feels the stiff length against his leg continue to swell to full hardness.

Moving like someone caught under the obsessive thrall of love potion, Tom rips off Harry’s clothes and his own with a careless violence, pinning Harry to the bed with a bruising force, like nothing else matters than needing to possess Harry, to claim him in exultant celebration of their shared victory. He grabs Harry’s wrist and brings Harry’s hand down to fold around his now-freed cock—burning hot and smeared with dripping-wet arousal.

Harry can tell, vaguely, that he’s hard as well, but it’s not pressing or urgent—he would be content to drift along in this euphoric haze of dazzling pleasure, just pressed against Tom, luxuriating in all the points of warmth sparking along his skin everywhere that Tom touches, for hours and hours, without even needing to reach an end—and that this – right here – this is the end for Harry, the end that he had sought after years of loneliness and brokenness and pain.

He feels like he’s floating on a cotton candy-spun cloud, surrounded on all sides by warmth and springtime and sunshine—the connection between them humming and singing and bursting with phoenix song exactly like that time that his and Voldemort’s wands connected in the graveyard.

“Do you feel that?” Harry pulls back and gasps, pressing a hand against Tom’s heart. “Can you hear that? The—”

The connection between us, he wants to ask.

Tom shoots Harry a bewildered look, as though to ask him why the fuck did he stop. He shoves Harry’s hand off of his heart and places it tight around his cock again.

Harry feels none of Tom’s burning, animalistic urgency to celebrate their first kill together, but Tom doesn’t seem to feel any of Harry’s glorious, hazy euphoria – that magical transcendent connection – from just touching each other.

But it doesn’t matter – it doesn’t matter at all – because both of them want the same thing in the end—and without delay, Tom pushes into Harry, minimally lubed and prepped—and it hurts, it hurts Harry more than anything he’d ever done in bed before, but at the same time, it feels more healing than anything he’d ever done before either.

He’d spent months dreaming of this moment. In fact, he might have spent all his life dreaming of this moment, before he was even aware of, or able to put into words, what he was feeling.

He holds onto that feeling and lets it fill him and fill him until he feels the closest to normal that he’s felt for years—and it all comes crashing back down on him again when Tom comes inside of him and it’s all over.

--

The last time right after Harry had had sex, he’d ended up covered in blood sobbing on his kitchen floor with more blood streaking the walls and cabinets, but this—this—had helped him to forget.

--

Hagrid is expelled anyway. Harry sighs. He tried.

Chapter Text

He doesn’t know how Tom would respond to being touched. He’s never seen anyone touching Tom. Far from it. Everyone, except for Harry himself, keeps a cautious distance.

If he pushes too far and Tom gets irritated, it’d be nothing for Tom to cut him off, and then where would Harry go for his fix?

Their first brush is accidental when Harry’s tipsy coming back from one of Slughorn’s Slug Club networking parties. The parties are not too different from those that he remembers these from his own 6th year. He’s not surprised that Slughorn would invite him again. Harry shows promise in Potions (because he’s done all the classes already) and is the sole heir to the Potter line.

(Harry vaguely wonders, during some moments, if Fleamont and Euphemia’s eagerness to accept him meant that they would stop trying for James, if he’s wrecked the timeline enough that his own father would never be born.)

Bored with the small talk and Slughorn’s boasts, Tom had slipped out early, and Harry, of course, had followed him.

It’s a short walk back from Slughorn’s quarters to their common room entrance, but Harry hasn’t yet gotten used to drinking in his 16-year-old body. The heat of the firewhiskey lingers, searing a trail down the back of his throat and burning red-hot through his veins.

When he shoots out an unsteady hand to find his balance against the wall, he brushes against Tom’s arm.

That connection that he feels with Tom—that bright, glowing pulse of raw magic that courses through him when he hovers his hand over Tom’s still form at night—flares up a thousand-fold when his hand actually makes contact with Tom’s arm.

It’s so bright and startling and dazzling that it almost feels like an electric shock had run through his body. He swears he can hear a faint whisper of phoenix song reverberating in the air between them.

It feels like... coming home.

Eyes wide, he glances at Tom, who just stares blankly back at him.

Harry falters. He’s not sure if Tom had felt it too.

Still, he mumbles, “That felt amazing,” leaning closer.

“What, this?” Tom brushes a hand up Harry’s arm, perplexed about the sudden fervor in Harry’s stare.

“Mm, yessh,” Harry slurs, feeling suddenly dizzy with all the sensation, slightly swaying in Tom’s direction, wanting to do anything to feel that delicious contact again.

Tom takes a step back.

“Please,” Harry begs. He doesn’t know what he’s begging for, maybe more contact, more anything. “You felt it too, don’t you? Didn’t it feel... you know... warm and really nice and like the first time you did magic?”

Tom throws Harry a strange look, and takes another step back.

Harry steps closer and sways into Tom, hoping Tom at least would let him lean, briefly, against his chest.

With the nimbleness of a skilled duelist, Tom quickly steps aside and lets Harry walk smack into the wall, knocking his glasses askew on his face.

With a groan, Harry slumps against the ice-cold stone wall of the dungeons. At least the alcohol is keeping him nicely warm on the inside.

“What is—what is wrong with—never mind,” Tom mutters, mostly to himself. Then he walks briskly away without turning back, plainly trying to put as much distance between himself and Harry.

--

Harry’s obsession with touching Tom only continues to intensify and grow. It’s obvious enough to everyone else in their dorm who can see the strange dynamic, and the rest of their classmates wisely decide to give the both of them a wide berth.

But Tom’s only response is to turn a sly smile in Harry’s direction and become ever more withholding, crowding into his personal space until Harry thinks he’d combust with the need to touch him, before abruptly pulling back without warning and ignoring him for the rest of the day.

The more withholding Tom becomes, the crazier it drives Harry.

--

An all-consuming fire’s been lit inside of Harry that he didn’t before know could exist. That brief moment he’d spent touching Tom was the best that he’d felt since he’d lost the horcrux piece.

His mind is filled with plots and plans and schemes of ways to bribe, barter, beg more contact from Tom.

Harry runs through what he even has to offer Tom. An affiliation with a respectable Pureblood family, traditionally Light-aligned, for one. That’s a feather in Tom’s cap that he didn’t have the last time around.

Spells and knowledge of magic that Tom doesn’t yet have.

Knowledge about the future, if he gets desperate enough.

He starts with magic, showing Tom useful spells and wards and techniques that hadn’t yet been invented in this time.

Tom seems to implicitly understand the quid pro quo, allowing Harry light glancing touches as Harry shows him new spells and the correct wand movements, with more touching than strictly necessary. The heady, overwhelming rush from feeling Tom’s skin beneath his makes Harry want to swoon.

Harry’s mind works overtime trying to justify it to himself—no, he’s not selling his soul to the devil, of course he isn’t.

The devil is selling his soul (or, at least, access to it) to Harry. He just doesn’t know it yet.

--

It seems like simply being in Tom’s vicinity, being allowed to touch him every once in a while, simply isn’t enough anymore.

Sometimes, Harry is unable to contain himself. The effort of pretending that he is fine overwhelms him, and he can no longer pretend.

“Please,” he chokes back a sob, not wanting to sound too pathetic. His arm starts shaking with the violent effort to hold it still and not reach out and grasp for any kind of contact with Tom. He can’t even articulate what he wants to ask for. “Please, can we—may I—?”

Tom pretends not to know what Harry is asking.

--

Harry doesn’t know what to do to make it stop hurting, to make himself stop feeling so empty, short of dying. If he even can.

Is he simply doomed to never feel whole again for the rest of eternity?

Once he dies, surely the pain would end. Surely he would reunite with that other piece of his soul, the piece left under the bench at the train station, that helpless-looking baby that had been left all alone—

And god, how had he been convinced to leave it behind? A part of his very own soul that had been with him since the age of 1, that was then torn out of him in the most agonizing fashion possible.

He’d cradle it within his arms and whisper reassurances to it and tell the little baby Tom that he loves him and would never let him be alone again.

--

As the days lengthen and winter starts to lighten into spring, Tom edges ever closer to discovering the Chamber of Secrets. Harry starts getting nervous when he finds Tom studying old floor plans of Hogwarts that map out the plumbing system.

Chapter Text

Harry, against all odds, had felt better—immeasurably better—since arriving in 1943.

He had picked a date before Tom had split his soul and created his first horcrux, so the missing piece of Harry—that vital, crucial piece—the same one that he’d been craving ever since the war ended—is here, in this time. Intact. Inside of Tom.

And being near it, being near such close proximity to Tom, is such blessed relief. It’s a soothing balm to the torn-apart remnants of his own broken soul.

It doesn’t fix the hole within Harry; it doesn’t fill the emptiness or smooth over the tattered edges of that eternally screaming gash inside of him.

But for the time being, it is the most relief that Harry had gotten in a long time.

Soon, though, the bleak, terrifying emptiness threatens to overtake him again.

--

Blood, splattered everywhere.

Harry’s hands are covered with it, as well as other viscera that he doesn’t want to think about.

The echoes of anguished screaming in his ear, followed by a final death rattle.

It’s just a flashback, Harry tells himself, trying to calm himself and pull himself out of the terrifyingly vivid dream that feels like reality. It’s a flashback, it’s a nightmare, it happened in a reality that doesn’t exist anymore.

Once in a while, the screams reverberate through his head and he can hear them in the room with him, as though it were all happening live.

His hands have—have they become claws?

In the midst of the scene straight out of a horror movie, the faintest whiff of hope.

The haziest, dimmest echo of Tom, but Harry can feel it—he knows it—it sings out to his fractured soul like a feeling of coming home—the thinnest thread that Harry ends up following through place and time.

--

When he first arrives in 1943, Harry makes sure he spends as much time in Tom’s presence as possible. It’s easy enough when they share a dorm and all the same classes.

They don’t even need to interact. Harry just needs to be in his vicinity, Tom’s magic and his whole, unfractured soul singing out to him and soothing the tender fractures in his soul, the jagged-torn-bleeding gashes where a fundamental part was unceremoniously ripped out of him.

Nights are the easiest time to edge his way closer to Tom, without any interruptions.

Their beds are only two feet apart, but at nights, Harry can draw closer, hovering just outside Tom’s drawn bedcurtains in the space between their beds.

He slows his breathes until it matches the pace of Tom’s steady, drawn-out breathing in his sleep.

Something’s broken inside of Harry, and he hasn’t needed much sleep since the end of the war. He posts himself up right outside of Tom’s bedcurtains through the night, swaying lightly on his feet as his mind relaxes into a trancelike, meditative state.

It keeps the pain at bay and the nightmares away. If he never sleeps, he never has to dream.

Is this what gradually drove Voldemort mad too?

Once in a while, he’ll get flashes again of that bright sunny room, and blood splashed everywhere, glinting in the cheery morning sun, as vivid and ruby-red as Voldemort’s eyes. That desperate feeling of chasing after what he thought was the last elusive flicker of Tom’s soul left on earth.

It’s nothing compared to the real thing.

Over time, he grows bold enough to spell one of Tom’s curtains one-way transparent, and he watches Tom in his sleep, keeping silent vigil all night as the rest of their housemates slumber unsuspectingly.

The closest he dares to draw is half a foot away.

He wants so badly to touch.

He’s come so far, just to be half a foot away.

Any closer, and he wouldn’t be able to resist actually brushing his fingers across Tom’s face, through his curls, over his brow, across those elegant cheekbones, stroking the handsomely chiseled jawline.

He creeps closer.

Reaches a hand through a gap in the curtains before yanking it back.

After a while, he finds that he likes testing his self-control by hovering his hand less than a centimeter above Tom’s face.

Their connection is singing out in the sliver of space between them, making his fingers tremble violently with need. He’s amazed that Tom can sleep through it, that Tom doesn’t feel their connection as a living, breathing thing like Harry can.

He only returns to his own bed shortly before dawn every day. He gets very little sleep as a result.

It only heightens how dead and miserable he feels when he’s not around Tom.

--

When Tom smiles at him in that slow, sly way of his, or looks pleased whenever Harry can instantly master complex spells in their Defense class, faster than anyone else, or thoughtfully appraises Harry when Harry decides to say something to him in Parseltongue, it makes all the agony and pain fade away.

It’s like a beam of pure sunshine has lit up the darkest crevices of his broken soul and warmed even the parts inside of him that he’d thought had permanently settled into a frozen wasteland.

It’s the only time that Harry feels normal again. He forgets, for a while, the pain and the void inside of him, how much it hurts to draw in breath.

“Malfoy’s an idiot,” Harry would mutter under his breath, loud enough that only Tom could hear.

Or huddled together over their caldron in Potions class, he murmurs to Tom, “I know the book says to stir 20 times, but if you add an extra counterclockwise stir every 5 stirs, the consistency is much better.”

Or lingering behind after a meeting of the Knights of Walpurgis where all the boys show off their knowledge of dark spells and practice on each other, Harry waits until the last one has left the room and confides in Tom, “Here, let me show you this cutting curse, no wait, I promise you the Ministry doesn’t even know it’s been invented yet...”

He's playing with fire with that last one, but Snape is going to invent it in 30 years anyway, so what’s the harm?

It's worth it—everything that he’s done that’s brought him to this point is worth it—when he sees Tom’s sly smile briefly appear and his dark, cruel eyes softening with interest and amusement and a brief spark of happiness light up his carved-marble face.

--

Spending nearly all of his time next to Tom works, for a while, except for when it doesn’t.

How did Voldemort bear it? Living 55 years with this all-consuming, agonizing emptiness where vital pieces of his soul should have been?

Or maybe Voldemort never felt as desperate as Harry’s feeling. After all, the ritual to create the horcrux was specifically designed to extract a piece of the soul in a clean, surgical fashion. It was a deliberate, precise cleave, with dark magic to cauterize the edges of the wound in the soul afterwards.

That was not what happened to Harry in the Forbidden Forest. What happened to Harry, in comparison, was a brutal, messy hack job of an extraction, like conducting surgery to remove a tumor with the magical equivalent of a rusty spoon.

Despite spending the endless stretches of days and nights next to Tom, Harry’s still not whole.

Some days he gets by, and some days he slips back into misery, where all he can think is – it hurts it hurts it hurts, make it stop hurting –

He misses class sometimes to spend it on the floor of their dorm bathroom, retching and dry heaving while nothing comes up. Other days, a wave of pain and nausea bursts through him so acutely that he thinks he’s going to die. He gets sent to the hospital wing, but everything they can offer him (Pepper-up Potion? Really?) is a joke.

Fortunately, he’s taken all these classes before. He doesn’t have to try very hard to relearn the material and get good marks.

Coming here had been a short-term fix. It soothed the symptoms but hadn’t fixed the root of the problem.

He’s still broken inside. Nothing he’s done had actually fixed him, or healed him, or restored that empty missing piece inside of him.

--

Harry already spends upwards of 20 hours a day in Tom’s presence, pretty much every minute other than Quidditch practice and Tom’s Prefect rounds, but that’s somehow not enough.

Everything hurts all the time again, like it did before—his tattered, bleeding soul feeling like it’s screaming out in agony in the space between his teeth.

Harry’s more desperate than ever to fix it.

--

He doesn’t know how Tom would respond to being touched. He’s never seen anyone touching Tom. Far from it. Everyone, except for Harry himself, keeps a cautious distance.

Chapter Text

It was supposed to get better over time, Harry had thought. After the funerals and the initial wave of grief had passed.

When it didn’t, Harry was told it’d get better, easier, for him after the Hogwarts reopening ceremony.

And when that didn’t happen, he was told he’d surely be better by the time the 1-year anniversary of the Final Battle passed.

But he still spends every waking moment after the war feeling an excruciating emptiness inside of him that he had initially chalked up to the loss of so many that were dear to him.

But this—this wasn’t the pain from that kind of grief. This was different. He knew it, deep down inside.

It was like a part of him had been ripped out forever. Many nights, he’s unable to sleep, and when he does, he wakes drenched in sweat and tears, feeling—

He feels a vast, immense emptiness inside him; it gnaws and gnaws at him until it’s all that’s left of him.

Something is—

(The nightmares ebb and flow. Each time, Harry looks under the bench. There’s always a baby there. Take it!, something inside of him screams.)

—something is missing.

He wakes up to gouges in his headboard and bloodied nails. He wishes he can claw his way out of his own head, out of his bedroom in a newly remodeled Grimmauld Place, now bright and airy on the inside, that’s suddenly suffocating to him.

He wakes up heaving, frantic-panicked-empty that the horcrux is gone.

--

When he’s with Ginny is the only time that he doesn’t feel like a complete wreck.

There’s a familiarity about it, buried underneath her bright red hair that flows like flame. It doesn’t fill the emptiness in him, but it soothes him somehow, deep down in his soul.

He cradles her head (he wishes to crawl inside of it)—and he swears there is—there must be a trace, just the slightest trace of... of...

No. It can’t be. He’s imagining it.

And yet—

He swears he still feels the faintest imprint of Tom Riddle left inside of her mind.

No matter how much he tries to bat it away, the thought keeps creeping back and creeping back and takes root deep inside his brain like an invasive plant that spreads its curling tendrils across the desolate landscape of his broken thoughts.

His mind healer gives him mental exercises and even a booklet on ‘Dealing with Intrusive Thoughts’, but the notion doesn’t leave him alone. Once he starts thinking about it, he can’t stop.

--

That first year after the war, he and Ginny spent a lot of time talking through everything they went through. Separately with their respective mind healers, and together, with each other.

They work their way backwards—from Harry’s horcrux hunt and Ginny’s nightmare year in the castle under the Carrow siblings’ reign of terror, all the way back to Harry’s initial introduction to the magical world and that first day he’d set foot in the Leaky Cauldron and met Quirrell for the first time.

(If Quirrell were still alive, Harry would surely have stalked him down too and asked what it was like to have lived with a piece of Voldemort’s soul inside of him for a year. Maybe they could have formed a little support club between the three of them.)

They talk about Ginny’s other lost year, the year she spent under the control of the diary, the year that Tom Riddle spoke honeyed reassurances to her daily and soothed her fears and insecurities, became her best friend and learnt everything about her.

At first, it’s enough for Harry to hear Ginny’s secondhand account of her first year, but then, it gradually starts wearing thin and becoming not enough again.

She’s simply missing too many chunks of time. All Harry wants to hear about is what it had felt like for Ginny during the possessions—what it felt like being under Tom’s control when she killed the roosters and painted messages in blood on the walls of Hogwarts, and when she reopened the Chamber of Secrets and awakened the basilisk—what it was like to have Tom take over and ensnare her body and soul, to speak Parseltongue through her lips...

But she remembers none of that, to Harry’s great disappointment.

Harry even secretly puts her under Dreamless Sleep when she sleeps over, and tries to use Legilimency to draw these memories out of her, but it doesn’t work—those chunks of her are torn out forever.

She’s the only other one alive, though, that can understand what it feels like to house a piece of Voldemort’s soul that’s since been ripped out. And so Harry stays with her, because it’s the closest that he can come to feeling an echo of Tom again, even as he tells himself it’s not real.

--

Harry wakes up from nightmares over and over again, sobbing-heaving-clawing at his headboard.

He doesn’t know how much more of this he can take this, living a cursed half-life like this. Is this what it must feel like after drinking unicorn’s blood, like a constant punishment to be alive?

The edge of nightmares blurs into his waking hours. He has a panic attack in the middle of Auror training.

He’s put on a leave of absence from work.

He has another panic attack. Then a string of them.

He loses entire chunks of days.

Some days, it feels like his brain is leaking out from his ears.

He starts getting desperate. Even more than he’s already been. He’s missing a very part of his soul, after all.

He’s certain he’s going to die from this feeling. He even tries once, practically on a whim. He figures, things certainly can’t feel worse, so why not... Why not make it all stop.

He asks Neville for a mature Mandrake and doesn’t explain why. When Neville leaves, he yanks it out by its root.

But it doesn’t work. When he comes to, he’s lying in a puddle of his own blood with more blood trickling out of his ears, but the Mandrake has fallen into a nap, exhausted by the effort of its own temper tantrum from being uprooted.

The feeling of desolation, of a blank roaring emptiness inside of him, only gets worse with time, and he feels like he hardly has any threads of sanity left to cling to.

He tries again. This time, he stabs himself with illegally obtained basilisk venom and makes sure that he’s not within the vicinity of any phoenix tears.

Bright red blood gushing out of his sliced-open arm is the last thing he sees before the blessed blankness overtakes him.

He wakes up again, staring up into the concerned faces of Ron and Hermione, who promptly drag him to St. Mungo’s for an emergency suicide hold.

But they can’t hold him longer than 48 hours, and when his time is up, he immediately apparates out, despite their pleas.

Desperate for answers, he spends two weeks combing the dusty dirt ground of the Forbidden Forest until he finds the Resurrection Stone—he’d do anything to not feel this gnawing emptiness anymore, even it means that Voldemort’s ghost haunts him for the rest of his life.

But it doesn’t work. He can’t call Voldemort’s soul back. It’s already been fractured, so it never had a chance to pass onto the afterlife. Isn’t that what Dumbledore told him?

But the same thing happened to Harry—part of his soul got torn out. Wouldn’t that mean Harry would never be able to pass on either?

Is that why he can’t die?

Had Dumbledore known this?

--

Harry doesn’t know what comes over him, but one late Sunday morning after Ginny had stayed the night before, he feels a pulse of Tom Riddle’s soul. Like it was alive again, like it was right there in the room with him.

But—

That can’t be.

Tom is gone forever.

He turns around to see Ginny hand him a freshly-made, steaming cup of coffee with an adoring smile, his t-shirt sliding off one of her soft, freckled shoulders, brilliant red hair tousled and held up in a loose bun.

He feels Tom; Tom is here with them somehow; Harry knows it.

Ginny sees something in his eyes—perhaps something predatory and monstrous—and turns for her wand—but it’s too late, Harry’s too fast, she’s knocked to the ground.

Her head cracks open on the sparkling tile, spilling bright red blood all over the floor.

Harry can feel it pulsing at him from inside of her head.

He needs more. He needs to feel more.

He drops to his knees and cradles her head to his heart, but it’s still not enough.

It’s inside; he knows it’s inside.

He doesn’t even notice that he’s been clawing open her head to try to reach the vague shadowy echo of Tom inside her until he looks down and there’s only a bloody pulpy mass in his hands.

The floor is entirely covered in blood. He looks up. Vivid ropes of bright red blood are splattered all over the cabinets.

But Tom’s soul wasn’t there—there was nothing inside of Ginny—not since 8 years ago. He had imagined the whole thing.

The large bay windows in the kitchen and the glass in the bright skylights above him start to shatter and fall in glittering shards onto his body as the force of his magic lashes the room apart. He howls, as wild and primal as the wind, as the glass shards slice into him and the pain swallows him whole.

How can he face up to Ron and Hermione (oh god, especially Ron) after what he’s just done with his bare hands, in the midst of this madness that’s wholly consumed him?

He wants to die so badly. He tries to help death come faster. But even with gashes running down his whole body, slicing through major arteries and his blood splurting everywhere, it seems like he can’t.

If he can’t die, the least he can do is make his existence less miserable.

But the only thing that might help is surely impossible.

He needs to go back to a time when Tom Riddle’s soul was whole.

--

Impossibly, it works.

Harry, against all odds, had felt better—immeasurably better—since arriving in 1943.