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It’s a perfectly normal afternoon when Voldemort’s wrist suddenly blooms red.
For a moment, he can’t believe it – a soulmate. He has a soulmate! The person who he has longed for since he first learned of their existence, who he has doubted even exists, who was designed by Magic and Fate to fit him so seamlessly he won’t even be able to imagine how he lived life before he met them. A soulmate, the one to love him who has never been loved, to need him who has never been needed, to want him who has never been wanted. A soulmate to spoil and protect and guard. A soulmate to share magic and knowledge and laughter with. Every fibre of his being longs for that not-so-distant future.
Then, reality sets in.
He isn’t looking at a wrist that isn’t his own right now. He wasn’t a minute ago. He isn’t seeing and hasn’t glimpsed his soulmate’s soul mark.
Instead, he is watching as black letters slowly crawl over his left wrist.
A
V
A
He has a terrible prediction.
D
A
He hopes, he hopes so dearly that he’s wrong.
Nothing for a beat, then, another word.
K
His hope shatters.
E
Fast now, as if the words know that he knows, that the bubble of tension and joy has popped into despair and desperation, that what should have brought happiness now only will bring regret.
D
Dread is all he feels as another letter appears, another one he has expected, another one that leads him straight to his soulmate.
A
Anxiety fills him like never before, and he hopes, he hopes, he hopes.
V
Voldemort is struck silent in terror, every ounce of his attention captured by the letters that show what he already knows, watching, hoping against hope that it’ll transform, that the letters will change their mind, erase themselves.
R
Rage, sudden, all-encompassing rage, for he knows, and he regrets. He raised his servants, his hand, his wand against his soulmate, his one and only.
A
And knowledge, undeniable, irrefutable, terrible knowledge, hits him like a Bludger.
He knows what this means.
He doesn’t have to look at his wrist to know what will happen next, having learned, having seen what will happen next, but he can’t avert his eyes, couldn’t rip them away if he wanted to.
Slowly, the words go from unfulfilled black to fulfilled red to dead grey.
Dead, just as his soulmate is dead. Dead, just as a young boy, barely having lived, is dead. Dead, just as Harry Potter is dead.
Voldemort doesn’t know how long he keeps staring at the words. The world could have ended and started anew for all he cares. In a way, it has.
Yesterday, he was plagued by doubts. He wasn’t sure if he even had a soulmate, if he even wanted one, if he would even find one that would fit the blood-trenched monstrosity that he has become.
Now, he wishes to go back to his blissful ignorance, if only it meant never having to experience this. His magic tears at him, at itself, desperate for the other half it was promised, it has longed for, it has reached out for. It feels like a comforting arm around his waist has been ripped off – not that he knows what that feels like, but what he imagines comfort to be. A weight he hasn’t even noticed disappearing drops back onto his shoulders, nearly crushing him.
But one thought focuses it all, stops the torment for but a second to pay attention – he will find out what happened, and he will do his soulmate right, if only after death. His soulmate, the one, the only one that might have been able to stick to him, to love him as he never has been loved, just as he has longed for ever since he was a boy, longer than he can remember.
Yes, in his death, he will blaze the earth for the one he would maybe have sacrificed it all for, had he known.
Oh, if only he had known…
Much, much later, when Hogwarts has survived a blood bath like the world has never seen before, when an entire generation of useless, brainless, meaningless wastes of space and air has been curbed, when unfair teachers and cruel children have been exterminated, when his rows of Death Eaters have been meticulously cleaned, when the ministry has been purged of all stains, and a broken man grieves the nameless memorial of a boy who just wanted to live happily, and only then, a new set of letters will make their home on a new-born’s wrist. The left will bear the now familiar and much hated and regretted and loved grey Avada Kedavra.
The right will hold the words this child will first say to the Dark Lord Voldemort many, many years in the future, the words that will gut him once more as they do every time he catches a glimpse of the black scrawled across his right wrist.
The babe, by then long since grown into a beautiful adult bearing the heaviest cross possible since infancy, will look with big, tearful eyes into an emotionless broken-soulless-hopeless-loveless-tired gaze and open full, red lips and utter in a soft, trembling voice,
“Will you kill me now, too, like you killed your first soulmate?”