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For the first time in fifty years, Tom Riddle opens his eyes. He opens them to the sight of the Gryffindor girls’ dorms and his eyes are a warm brown instead of a pale blue, but beggars can’t be choosers. He has one shot at coming back to life and Ginny Weasley is it. Irritating and childish as she may be, he will have to deal. It’s made easier by the fact that when he grips the girl’s wand, not yew but at least not holly, he feels his own magic surge through it. It’s only temporary—he doesn’t have enough power to truly regain his form yet—but it’s thrilling. A hundred hours of talking with a little girl was worth it.
Except, as he sits up in his bed, his surroundings dark and the moon shining through the open curtains, he feels something at the back of his mind. It’s not Ginny—no way is little Ginny powerful enough for the force he feels. It pops inside him like a burst of apparition and then he understands, because he can feel the power that sustains the sudden connection. It’s his own, his and—
“I’m not going to kill her just for blushing and stalking me all the time,” a boy whines through the mental connection. “Stop telling me to solve all my problems through murder.”
A deeper voice, the one whose magic Tom knows so intimately because it’s his own, replies, “Then stop bothering me with your moronic little problems. I’m a Dark Lord, I have better things to do.”
“My problems are important to me as yours are to you,” the boy huffs. “You whine to me all the time about how the unicorn blood screwed up your resurrection and left you without a nose—”
“Those are my private thoughts you little—”
“What the fuck,” Tom thinks, forcefully enough that it zings through the connection and stops the other two in their tracks. He can feel them, their shock at another person joining them. At least it had been Tom’s own voice through the connection and not Ginny’s.
“Who are you?” the younger one asks.
Tom can feel the sensation of someone poking at him. Not hard enough to get into his thoughts, but enough for it to be worrying. This whole connection is worrying. “I am Tom Riddle. And you?”
“Harry Potter,” the boy replies.
The other voice is guarded as he asks, “Diary or diadem?”
Cagily, Tom replies, “Diary. I assume you are my older self?”
“Wait, what?”
“When I was young, I split myself into several objects to preserve my immortality. This is one of them given form, myself when I was sixteen. I will have to remind Lucius of his orders when I finally call my Death Eaters to me,” says Voldemort, the piece of their soul that has been active while Tom slept. Tom won’t call him the main piece, because Tom is not lesser. He is younger, he may be temporarily weaker, but he is not the lesser of anyone, least of all himself.
“Is he, well, real?”
“I’m as real as either of you,” Tom snaps. “My soul is just as strong as yours. More, if you’ve split yours so many times that there’s just as little of you as there is of me.”
Voldemort’s anger thrums through the bond. “You are a child, Tom. You haven’t seen true pain or battle. Your soul is easily squashed.”
“Stop that,” Harry says. “Sorry, he gets like that sometimes. But he can’t hurt you any more than I can hurt you or you can hurt us. Last year, his skin touched mine for the first time—through the teacher he was possessing at the time, but that’s a long story—and all of this happened. Any damage he tries to do to me hurts him just as much through the connection. If you’re a part of it now, then you’re just like me.”
“Did you have to tell him that?” Voldemort hisses. “If he wakes up the rest of my horcruxes I won’t have a moment alone in my head.”
“You already don’t,” Harry says, cheerfully. “Tom, I can feel you nearby. Are you in Gryffindor tower?”
Tom considers lying, but it’s useless if what Harry is saying is true. And the boy seems to be uninterested in harming him—unlike his older self. “I am.”
“Neat. I’ll be down in the common room in a minute.” Harry’s side of the connection becomes muted, though Tom can still feel his emotions and a hint of his thoughts.
“You will refrain from making trouble from me,” Voldemort says, his voice glacial.
Tom blames the fact that he’s possessing a Gryffindor for the fact that he says, “We’ll see.”
And with that, he shuts the door of his own side of the connection. Or rather, he tries to. It stays open a sliver no matter how hard he tries, and Tom has the horrible realization that he’s traded a life of boredom for a life of no privacy at all. It’s still better than being stuck in a book.
He slips a pair of boots onto Ginny’s tiny feet and steps out of the room. The stairs are winding, the torches on the wall so dim that he can barely make his way down. But at the bottom is a roaring fireplace with several red and gold couches beside it. A dark-haired boy that Ginny has spent hours describing to him sits on the arm of one of the couches, his legs swinging as he watches the fire. Tom takes a seat in the nearest couch and meets a pair of eyes a startling shade of green. It’s the color of the killing curse, the last thing he saw before his part of the soul was banished inside the diary.
“Tom?” Harry asks, surprised. “Are you possessing Ginny?”
“I am,” Tom replies. He can’t keep the scowl from his face, though it must look ridiculous on the girl’s face. It rankles to have no body of his own. It’s a weakness he must rectify immediately, or his older self will take advantage. He won’t rely on Harry’s assurance that Voldemort can’t destroy him—or worse, force him back into that diary. “She was the one who opened my diary and succumbed to my magic.”
Harry nods. “Okay, first thing we have to do is get you a body, because mate, you can’t keep Ginny’s. She’s a pest but she’s Ron’s pest. I’ll help you get a better one. It can even be male.”
“With enough magic I can form in the image of the body I once had,” Tom says, unwilling to spend the rest of his life possessing people. Not out of any ridiculous morals, but because he wants a body that’s completely his own.
A stair creaks somewhere behind them and Tom’s long red hair flips around as he turns his head. But it’s only a sleepy redhead making his way down the tower. One of Ginny’s brothers, though he can’t tell which one from sight.
The boy’s eyes widen as he sees them. “Harry? Ginny?”
“What is it, Ron?” Harry asks.
“Woke up and didn’t see you. I didn’t realize you were, uh—” Ron looks between them and catches Tom’s eyes, which Tom attempts to fill with everything he will do to the boy if he doesn’t leave now. “Right, I’ll just...” He waves his arm. “Bed. Don’t, um, you know what, never mind.” He spins around, still muttering about little sisters trying to steal his friends.
“That’s Ron, he’s Ginny’s brother,” Harry says as though he thinks Tom will care. He laughs at the face Tom makes. “Hey, until we get you your body, you have to make nice with them.”
“Why are you doing this?” Tom asks, mystified. It makes no sense for this boy who once destroyed a version of him to look at him with such ease.
Harry smiles a little, firelight dancing across his features. “Can’t you feel it? We’re the same.”
He reaches a hand out and takes Tom’s. Tom stifles his gasp. The connection flares so brightly between them, two souls so intertwined that Tom doesn’t know when one ends and the other begins. Harry’s soul, so whole and strong, and his own patchwork soul completely unwilling to break away from it.
“I see,” Tom says, grasping Harry’s hand tightly with his own small, freckled hand. He understands now—and he knows he will do everything to make sure that none of the other pieces of himself awaken. Harry’s soul is his. His and Voldemort’s.
Far away and yet so close, Voldemort says, “On that, we agree.”