Chapter Text
Hey guys, long time no see!
I'm back with a new idea, that simply wouldn't stop nagging at me to write it. I even dreamed of the characters and the story.
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Disclaimer: the characters and everything entailing to Harry Potter franchise does NOT belong to me in any sense of the word, obviously.
English is most definitely not my first language, in fact, it is my fifth language. So, if there are any mistakes please point me to it, and I'll make sure to correct them. I, of course, do not have a beta, so spelling mistakes or grammatical errors should definitely be expected. Although, I'll do my best to read the draft before posting it. After all, I like a nice, clean story just as much as the next person!
It had all begun with a prophecy.
As such things often do.
A prophecy concerning a boy born as the seventh month breathed its last, born to those who had thrice defied him, thrice stood between the Dark Lord and his ambitions, and thrice survived the encounter. A prophecy concerning the defeat of Lord Voldemort himself, or so the interpretation ran. Prophecies, as any sufficiently learned practitioner of the Dark Arts would tell you, were rarely so obliging as to speak plainly.
On the night of the thirty-first of October, 1981, Lord Voldemort came to Godric's Hollow.
He came without ceremony and without doubt, which was perhaps the most dangerous thing about him. Lesser men announced themselves. Voldemort simply arrived, a displacement of cold air, the silent extinction of every nearby flame, the particular quality of silence that descends when all creatures with any sense of self-preservation have already fled.
His purpose was uncomplicated: to eliminate, with all appropriate finality, the singular life that might one day stand between him and everything he had built. The father was of no consequence. The mother even less so, except that he had, in a moment of rare and somewhat distasteful concession, given his word to spare her. A promise made to his most valued servant, and therefore a promise he would, on this occasion, keep.
One might reasonably wonder why the Dark Lord would concern himself with the wishes of those he considered instruments, not confidants.
The answer, were one foolish enough to ask it, was Severus Snape.
Bellatrix was his most fanatical follower, devoted in the way that fire is devoted to whatever it happens to be consuming. She required no reason. She required only direction, and she would burn accordingly. She was useful, after a fashion, and entirely his.
But Severus was something else altogether.
Severus Snape was the youngest Potions Master in three centuries. His spell-craft was original, not the borrowed, recombined work of lesser minds, but genuine invention, the kind that suggested the underlying magical theory had been understood rather than merely memorised. His Occlumency was, if Voldemort were inclined towards honesty, very nearly a match for his own. Not quite. But very nearly, which was itself a remark worth making.
In Severus, Voldemort recognised something he had, over long years and deliberate effort, methodically excised from himself: a reflection. A generation younger, considerably less refined, still carrying the inconvenient weight of sentiment, but recognisable, nonetheless. Cunning. Precise. Ambitious in the particular way that only those who have had ambition beaten out of them in childhood, and chosen to cultivate it regardless, ever truly are.
A true Slytherin. Not the posturing variety. The kind that survives.
And so, yes. He would spare the Mudblood, for Severus's sake, or rather, he would extend to her the opportunity to spare herself. To step aside. It was, if one considered the magnitude of what was being offered, a remarkable gesture. To stand within range of the Dark Lord's wand and be permitted to walk away was not a commonplace occurrence. It was, in fact, entirely without precedent.
If the girl was foolish enough to refuse, if she chose to beg, or argue, or otherwise waste what little time remained to her on gestures of maternal heroism, then the consequences were, strictly speaking, her own affair. Severus would understand. Severus was, above all else, a practical man.
The Dark Lord arrived at the cottage with the particular composure of a man who has already, in every meaningful sense, won.
And why should he not? He was immortal, or near enough as to make the distinction academic. Five Horcruxes, each one a tether binding him to the mortal world, each one housing a fragment of a soul that had been, through considerable dedication, carved into precisely the architecture he required. Seven pieces in total, including the central self, the sovereign fragment, the one that wore his face and spoke with his voice and walked, tonight, through the gate of a dead man's garden.
One more, after tonight. One final Horcrux, made from the death of a prophesied child, and the working would be complete.
It was, he reflected, an elegant conclusion.
And yet.
As conclusions go, this one proved rather less conclusive than anticipated.
He remembers offering the girl the opportunity to step aside. Three times, no less, which was, by any reasonable measure, two times more than she deserved. He had been, in his estimation, extraordinarily patient. Patience was not a virtue he had ever particularly cultivated, but he recognised its tactical utility, and he had deployed it this evening with something approaching generosity.
She had declined. Repeatedly. With increasing fervour.
Voldemort had always maintained a scholarly curiosity regarding the more inexplicable varieties of human behaviour, and the particular species of stubbornness that compelled an unexceptional witch to place herself, wandless and alone, between her infant son and the most dangerous practitioner of the Dark Arts in living memory, that was, he could admit, a specimen worth examining. Perhaps, once the war was won and Wizarding Britain had been brought to order beneath his hand, such studies might provide diversion. The taxonomy of human foolishness. He imagined it would be a very long book.
But that was a project for another evening.
He had lost patience with her in the end, as he always did, and he had, with the brisk efficiency of a man resolving an administrative matter, relieved her of her continued existence.
Then he had turned to the child.
The boy was doing precisely what children of that age could be expected to do, particularly those who had just watched their mother fall: he was wailing. Loudly, and without any apparent intention of stopping. Voldemort had regarded him with something between irritation and fleeting, almost involuntary interest, because the child had his mother's eyes, and they were the most extraordinary shade of green.
What a pity, he had thought, with the detached aesthetic appreciation of a man who has never once allowed sentiment to interfere with practicality. Slytherin green, of all things.
He had raised his wand.
Avada Kedavra.
And then–
Pain.
Oh, but the pain.
He remembers naught but pain.
He cannot determine whether he is still standing, or whether standing is simply a concept that no longer applies to whatever he currently is. There is no floor beneath him that he can feel, no air against his skin, no sense of orientation whatsoever, only the thought, cycling endlessly through whatever remains of his consciousness:
My head hurts so terribly.
Over and over. Like a prayer, or a complaint, or both.
In truth, his head felt as though it were being methodically split apart, not cleanly, not with any surgical precision, but torn, and then reassembled, and then torn again. A ruthless, rhythmic agony, as though someone had taken hold of the very essence of his mind and beaten it against something unyielding, again and again and again, with neither haste nor mercy nor any apparent intention of stopping.
He attempted, in his stupor, to move. To turn. To sit. To perform any of the small, automatic acts by which a conscious being confirms that it still occupies a body. His limbs declined to participate. They were there, he was reasonably certain they were there, and yet they answered nothing. As though the connection between will and matter had been, quietly and thoroughly, severed.
Perhaps, he told himself, this is simply the aftermath.
Perhaps he had returned to Malfoy Manor and simply did not remember the journey. Perhaps the ritual, the final ritual, the last Horcrux, the closing of the great working he had spent the better part of two decades constructing, had taken more from him than anticipated. Seven pieces was an ambitious composition. Perhaps the seventh had cost him more than the previous six combined. Perhaps–
Perhaps. Perhaps. Perhaps.
But there was something beneath the maybes. A nagging quality, small and persistent and deeply unwelcome, like a draughty window one cannot locate. Something that whispered, in a register he did not care to examine too closely, that this was different. That the creation of a Horcrux hurt, yes, had always hurt, each one leaving its mark on what remained of him, but it had never hurt like this. Nothing had ever hurt like this. In fifty years of deliberate and wide-ranging exploration of the Dark Arts, he had never once encountered a pain that rendered him quite so thoroughly helpless.
He would not say the word, even to himself.
He was not afraid. He had abolished fear, or something close enough to abolition that the distinction hardly mattered. He was simply… alert. Attentive to a situation that had not yet resolved itself into something he could adequately categorise.
He attempted to focus. To gather whatever will remained to him and use it as a lever against the darkness. But his thoughts were uncooperative, surfacing and dissolving before he could take proper hold of them, slipping between his fingers like smoke.
Why would I have such an excruciating pain in my head?
The question arrived with more force than the others.
Did the spell backfire?
He dismissed it immediately, with the reflexive contempt the idea deserved.
The child was barely a year old. The child's magical development was at its most rudimentary, instinctive stage, entirely incapable of anything so sophisticated as deflecting the Killing Curse. The notion that a boy in his cot, wailing over his dead mother, had somehow bested a wizard five decades his senior, had bested him, the most dangerous practitioner of the Dark Arts in living memory, the heir of Slytherin, the architect of the most comprehensive dark working in centuries…
Absolutely not.
Lord Voldemort could not have died. The very sentence was a logical impossibility. He had five Horcruxes precisely for a contingency of this nature, five anchors, five tethers, five reasons that death was not a door he could be made to walk through. If something had gone wrong tonight, and he was increasingly, reluctantly conceding that something had, then he had returned. He was always going to return. That was the entire point.
No. He needed to wake up. Immediately.
He had gone to Godric's Hollow. He had dealt with the Potters. He had returned, he must have returned, and presumably, in the private celebration that followed, he had allowed himself somewhat more than his customary measure of drink. He had been imagining Dumbledore's face, no doubt. That particular expression the old man made when things went irrevocably wrong, the way the light went out of those absurd blue eyes behind half-moon spectacles, and he had raised a glass, and then perhaps another, and now here he was.
Indisposed.
Temporarily.
Yes. That was the explanation. The only explanation. The one he would accept, because it was the correct one, and because Lord Voldemort did not entertain alternatives that required him to have lost.
He would accept no other conclusion.
He would not.
And yet, even now, even here, wherever here was, he could not entirely silence the part of his mind that analysed.
It was instinct, older than ambition, older perhaps than fear: the compulsion to understand. And what had been done to his thoughts had the particular texture of spell-work, sloppy spellwork, at that. As though someone had attempted a Severing Charm on his very consciousness and gotten the incantation approximately half right. The kind of mistake that produced not a clean cut but a tearing. A fraying at the edges.
Strangely, it was this thought, this small, precise, almost academic observation, that finally gave him purchase.
He accumulated himself, piece by careful piece. Gathered what remained of his will from wherever it had scattered and pressed it, quietly and with great deliberateness, back into something resembling a coherent whole. It took longer than he would ever admit, and cost considerably more effort than it should have. But gradually, reluctantly, as though his body considered the matter negotiable, his back straightened, and his eyes opened.
His vision swam. Blurred. Then resolved itself through a haze of faint crimson, like looking through water with blood in it.
And what he saw, once the red receded, was a desk.
Heavy, dark, made of burled wood in the manner of furniture that has not been chosen so much as inherited, the kind that suggests weight and permanence and a certain indifference to whoever happens to be sitting at it. It dominated the immediate field of vision with the quiet authority of something that has been in the same position for a very long time.
In the centre of the desk lay an open notebook.
The pages were coarse, yellowed at the edges, the particular colour of paper that has been used and handled and thought over rather than merely written in. And the title, if it was a title, if such a word applied to whatever had been inscribed across the top, was written in a deep, unnatural black. The lettering was not printed. It was not even precisely written, in the ordinary sense. It seemed, somehow, to occupy the page with more presence than ink had any business possessing.
Is this my table? The thought surfaced before he could stop it. From Hogwarts. When I was a student.
Because it was familiar, wrongly familiar, in the way that dreams occasionally assembled convincing approximations of real places from slightly incorrect components. The proportions were off. The atmosphere was off. And yet.
The notebook looked, with an specificity that made something cold move through him, extraordinarily like his diary. The one in which he had, all those years ago, secreted the first fragment of his soul. His first Horcrux. He had been sixteen, and furious, and magnificent, and entirely certain he was the cleverest person in the building.
He moved his eyes. If he could see, he would assess. That was simply how he was constructed.
To the left of the not-diary: a stack of books, arranged with the particular neatness of someone for whom neatness is a discipline rather than a habit. To the right: a wall inset with greyish-white pipes, old ones, the functional Victorian sort, from which wall lamps extended on short brackets. The lamps were classical in design, each roughly half the size of an adult head, a cylinder of clear glass caged within a grid-work of black metal. Gas-style fittings, though whether they burned gas or something else entirely was not immediately apparent.
Next to the not-diary: a bottle of ink.
Next to the ink: a pen.
A pen.
Voldemort regarded this for a moment with the expression of a man who has found something mildly offensive in an otherwise tolerable situation. He was quite certain - certain - that even as a student, even in those early years when he had been carefully and methodically constructing his identity from the rubble of Tom Riddle, he had never once used a pen. Pens were Muggle instruments. Quills were the wizarding convention, and he had adopted wizarding convention with a thoroughness that brooked no exceptions. Even then. Especially then.
So. Not his room from Hogwarts.
But it was the next object that stopped him entirely.
He stared at it. He blinked, which was not something he did often or easily.
A revolver.
Brass, or brass-adjacent, the kind of metal that had been handled enough to develop a particular quality of worn warmth, like something that had been carried rather than merely stored. It sat on the desk with the absolute composure of an object that considered itself entirely at home, completely indifferent to the fact that its presence here was, by any reasonable measure, inexplicable.
What in the bloody hell, and Voldemort, who prided himself on precision of expression and had not used that particular construction in some decades, could not, on this occasion, locate a more adequate formulation, was a revolver doing on his desk?
He had grown up in a Muggle orphanage. He had spent years surrounded by Muggle objects, Muggle furniture, Muggle architecture, Muggle war — and he had never, not once, encountered a firearm at close quarters. They were Muggle weapons of the most tediously physical variety, entirely beneath the attention of any serious practitioner of magic, interesting only as an anthropological curiosity.
And yet here one sat. As though it belonged.
He looked up. Looked properly, for the first time, not at the objects but at the room.
This was not his dormitory. Not the cramped, grey-walled cell at Wool's Orphanage, not the Hogwarts dormitory he had shared with boys he had, even then, considered essentially decorative, not his Prefect's quarters, not the Head Boy's room with its particular atmosphere of institutional dignity.
This was nowhere he had ever been.
Things took a further turn for the worse, which was, given the existing circumstances, a feat Voldemort would not have thought geometrically possible.
It began with the light.
The desk, the notebook, the ink bottle, the revolver, all of it was draped in a layer of deep crimson, as though the room itself had been dipped in diluted blood. He had assumed, initially, that this was a consequence of whatever had been done to his head. A perceptual error. A symptom.
Then he looked up toward the window.
Hanging in the middle of the sky, against a backdrop that could only be described as black velvet, not night, not darkness, but something with the particular quality of theatre, of a curtain deliberately drawn… was a moon.
A crimson moon.
Silent. Still. Enormous in a way that moons had no business being, glowing with a light that was not quite light so much as the suggestion of it, the way a dying fire suggests warmth without providing any.
Lord Voldemort decided, with more composure than the situation warranted, that he had lost his mind. Entirely, irrevocably, and possibly permanently.
The horror that followed this conclusion was not loud. It did not announce itself. It moved through him quietly, the way cold water moves, finding every gap, every unguarded place, and settled somewhere beneath his sternum with the patient permanence of something that intended to stay.
He stood up abruptly.
His brain, which had apparently not been consulted on this decision, registered its protest immediately and with considerable force. A throbbing pain detonated behind his eyes, his balance dissolved, and he sat back down with a force that was significantly less dignified than anything Lord Voldemort had ever permitted himself in public. His buttocks meeting the burled wood chair with a thud that echoed off the unfamiliar walls.
He sat there for precisely as long as it took him to decide that sitting down was not acceptable.
Then he propped himself against the edge of the desk, straightened by degrees, and looked.
The room was not large. Two brown doors, one on each wall, plain, functional, the kind of doors that exist to divide spaces rather than to impress anyone. Against the far wall, a low wooden bed, narrow enough to suggest its occupant had never been expected to be comfortable, only horizontal. Between the bed and the left door, a cabinet, its two doors hanging open with the absent-minded negligence of someone who had left in a hurry, five drawers beneath.
Along the wall at standing height ran more of the greyish-white piping he had noticed earlier, and connected to it — connected to what should have been a simple heating conduit — was a mechanical device of considerable complexity. Gears. Bearings. Components he could identify by function if not by name, exposed and interlocking with the quiet confidence of something engineered rather than enchanted.
He filed that away. It would mean something, eventually.
In the right-hand corner near the desk: a coal stove, iron pots, soup pots, the accumulated ironmongery of a functional if modest kitchen. Simple. Practical. Victorian, in the specific material sense, not the aesthetic one, but the utilitarian one, the sense that these objects had been made to last and had done so without any particular interest in being admired for it.
He knew of these objects. He had not thought about them in years. Had, in fact, invested considerable effort in not thinking about them, but the body remembered what the mind preferred to forget. Kitchen duty. Garden duty. The particular texture of institutional life, the rotation of tasks designed to occupy children who had no one to occupy them otherwise in the orphanage. He had terrorised his way out of those rotations eventually, of course. But before that. Before he had understood what he was and what he could do.
He had stood in rooms that looked very much like this one, and he had read whatever books he could find, because books were the only thing in that place that had ever treated him as though he might amount to something.
The décor was Victorian. Not approximating it, genuinely it, or something so close as to make the distinction academic. 1850s to 1900s, if he had to place it. The proportions, the materials, the aesthetic logic of the space.
He turned toward the right-hand wall.
A dressing mirror. Two cracks running across the glass in thin diagonals, the kind of damage that happens from age or impact and is never repaired because the cost of repair exceeds the perceived value of vanity. Plain wooden frame, simple pattern, the mirror of someone who checks their appearance out of necessity rather than habit.
He looked into it.
And his mind, which had, until this moment, maintained a fairly impressive standard of operational composure given the circumstances… stopped.
Black hair.
Brown eyes.
A linen shirt, slightly rumpled. A frame that was lean to the point of being conspicuous, not gaunt, not unwell, but the particular thinness of someone who had not, recently or perhaps ever, been adequately fed.
And a face.
His face. Unquestionably, undeniably, with the painful specificity of something one cannot argue oneself out of: his face. Young. Symmetrical. Possessed of the kind of bone structure that poets wrote about and painters requested and people noticed from across rooms.
He had not seen this face in a very long time.
He had not been this face in longer still.
He looked about twenty-two, because he was twenty-two, or whatever this assembled, restored, pieced-back-together version of him amounted to, and the last time he had genuinely inhabited this face, this body, this particular arrangement of Tom Riddle, he had been in the process of becoming something else entirely. Something that had considered this face a necessity. Something that had, piece by deliberate piece, traded it away.
He stared.
The face in the mirror stared back, brown-eyed and extremely good-looking and openly, stunned.
If not for the pain, still present, still insisting on itself, radiating from somewhere behind his eyes and across the whole of his body like the aftermath of something catastrophic, he would have suspected an illusion. A particularly elaborate and malicious piece of Legilimency. Someone inside his head, rearranging the furniture.
But illusions did not hurt like this.
And the face in the mirror did not waver.
Voldemort dragged his mind back by force.
He had always been good at that, at locating the fraying edge of his own composure and pulling it taut before it unravelled entirely. It was one of the few disciplines he had cultivated not from ambition but from necessity, back when he had been small and powerless and surrounded by people who would have used any visible weakness against him. He breathed. Once, twice, a third time, each breath deliberate and measured, until the panic retreated to a manageable distance and left something cooler behind.
And into that cooler space, memories arrived.
Not his memories. Or rather, not only his.
Tom Riddle. Citizen of the Leon Kingdom, Northern Continent. Awwa County, City of Tingen. Recent graduate of the Department of History at Khoy University, twenty-two years of age, possessed of no particular fortune and no particular prospects, but in possession of a mind that had always been, by any objective measure, considerably sharper than his circumstances deserved.
The memories settled into him with the quiet inevitability of sediment. He did not choose to receive them. They simply were, in the way that inherited knowledge always is, present before one has decided whether to want it.
His father: Tom Riddle Senior, a sergeant of the Imperial Army, killed in a colonial conflict with the Southern Continent before his son was old enough to properly remember his face. The bereavement allowance had been modest but sufficient — sufficient to purchase an education at a private language school, which had laid the groundwork for a university entrance examination, which had led, eventually, to Khoy. A chain of small, contingent survivals. The story of a family making the best of what catastrophe had left them.
His mother: Merope Riddle, née Gaunt. A devotee of the Evernight Goddess, quiet and particular in her faith, who had died in the same year her son had passed his university examinations. As though she had held on precisely long enough to see him cross one threshold, and then decided that was sufficient.
His uncle: Mattheo Riddle, his father's markedly younger brother, young enough to feel less like an uncle than a slightly older complication, working as a clerk at an import and export company and supporting what remained of the family on a clerk's wages.
His sister: Delphini. Still a student. Still, presumably, at home.
They shared a two-bedroom apartment. The finances were, by any charitable description, wanting.
Voldemort absorbed all of this with the expression of a man who has received exactly the news he expected and finds it no more palatable for having anticipated it.
And then the word surfaced.
Hermes.
His eyes snapped to the open notebook.
As a history graduate – as this Tom Riddle, with his Tom Riddle's education – he had acquired fluency in two ancient languages. The Feysac tongue, considered the root of all Northern Continent languages, scholarly and archaic and prestigious in the way that dead languages always are. And Hermes, the language that appeared in ancient mausoleums, in texts concerning sacrifice and ritual, in the margins of documents that serious academics cited and superstitious academics quietly avoided.
He looked at the yellowed page, and this time the characters did not remain alien. They shifted, not visibly, not with any theatrical transformation, but in the manner of those visual puzzles where the image resolves suddenly and cannot then be unseen. One moment, marks on paper. The next: language.
He read it.
Everyone will die, including me.
The colour left his face with the quiet totality of a tide going out.
He leaned back from the notebook, instinctively, physically, as though distance might retroactively prevent the words from having entered his mind, and in the silence that followed, he became aware of something else.
A murmuring.
Faint. Sourceless. The quality of it was not quite sound so much as the implication of soun, the way one sometimes becomes aware of a conversation in an adjacent room without being able to distinguish words. He shook his head. Pressed the heel of his hand briefly to his temple. Told himself, with some force, that it was an illusion, that it had to be an illusion, because the alternative required a framework he did not yet possess.
His surroundings declined to change.
The murmuring persisted.
And his gaze, with the inevitability of a compass finding north, returned to the revolver.
He looked at it properly for the first time, not with the startled incomprehension of earlier, but with the focused attention of a man trying to solve a problem. And the problem was this: the family whose memories now sat in his skull, with their two-bedroom apartment and their clerk's wages and their dead father's bereavement allowance, could not possibly have afforded a brass revolver of this quality. Such things were not purchased on a historian's graduate stipend. Such things were acquired through means that warranted examination.
How did Tom get this?
He frowned. Turned the question over. Let his gaze drift downward as he thought…
And stopped.
On the side of the desk: a handprint. Dark red, almost brown at the edges, the colour of something that had dried partially but not entirely. Deeper than the moonlight. Thicker than the crimson veil that draped the room. Not decorative. Not ambiguous.
A bloody handprint.
He looked at his right hand.
He had been gripping the chair without realising it –knuckles pale, fingers locked– and when he turned his palm upward, the confirmation was immediate and unhelpful. Blood. His palm, his fingers, the webbing between them, all of it.
He stood.
The pain in his head had not diminished. It had, if anything, acquired a new quality, rhythmic, insistent, the specific register of an injury that has been ignored past the point of politeness. He thought, sourly, that it felt rather like ten consecutive rounds of the Cruciatus Curse, which was a comparison he was in a reasonably authoritative position to make, having administered that particular experience on a number of occasions and endured it on rather fewer.
Did the Killing Curse backfire and strike me in the head?
Even as he thought it, he was already moving toward the mirror.
The figure in the glass still unsettled him, not with the raw shock of the first encounter, but with a quieter, more persistent wrongness. This was not him. Not in the literal sense, obviously, but not in the essential sense either. And yet, and this, inexplicably, was almost more disorienting than anything else - the scholarly bearing remained. The particular quality of attention, the way this face held itself when thinking. Some things, apparently, persisted across any number of catastrophic alterations to the self.
He leaned forward, closer, closer still, until his breath fogged the cracked glass.
The moonlight, that deep unnatural crimson, served as his only illumination.
He turned his head.
At his temple - at the corner of his forehead, where the hairline curved - there was a wound.
It was not a clean wound. It was not the wound of someone who had been struck or cut. The edges were burned, seared in a rough periphery as though whatever had caused it had arrived with tremendous and concentrated heat. The surrounding skin was dark with dried blood. And within the wound itself, just visible in the crimson light…
Greyish matter. Moving. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, in the manner of something that should not be moving and was doing so anyway.
He stared at it for a long moment.
He was not, as a rule, given to squeamishness. He had done things - had seen things, had caused things - that would have destroyed lesser constitutions entirely. But there was something about seeing this, about seeing a version of himself that had evidently decided, at some point, that this was preferable to living.
The appalment moved through him like cold water finding cracks.
That there could be any version of Tom Riddle, he thought, in any world, who would choose suicide over survival–
He could not complete the thought. It sat in him, unfinished, deeply offensive.
And then - in the way that significant realisations sometimes arrive precisely when one is already at capacity - he noticed the other thing.
He felt whole.
Not physically. Physically he was in a state that would have been, under normal circumstances, deeply concerning. But somewhere beneath the pain and the blood and the wrongness of the room and the crimson moon hanging silent outside the window, there was something that had not been present in so long that he had forgotten it was absent.
A completeness. A coherence. The sensation - almost impossible to articulate, familiar only in the way that something lost in childhood is familiar when unexpectedly recovered – of all of himself being present. Accounted for. Nothing missing. Nothing sealed away in a diary or a ring or a cup or a locket or a diadem, held at a remove from the central self to keep the whole architecture from being vulnerable.
He had not felt this since he was sixteen years old.
The last time, in fact, that he had been entirely himself.
He stood very still.
And then, with the slow and terrible precision of a man watching a logical proof reach its conclusion, he understood what it meant.
Whole.
Mortal.
No anchors. No tethers. No fragments of soul distributed across objects carefully chosen for their durability and obscurity. If he died here – when he died here, as all mortal things eventually did – there was nowhere to return from. No contingency. No failsafe. Nothing between him and the permanent, irrevocable, final ending he had spent the entirety of his adult life engineering elaborate protections against.
The horror that followed was of a different order than anything that had preceded it that evening.
It was very quiet, and it was absolute.
Guys, you may want to buckle up because this baby is going to be a long, long one.
If you think you may know this story, you may very well be right. LotM has my utmost love and respect. The story is beyond this world, and if you haven't read this piece of literature you are definitely missing out.
I have always, always, wanted to write a Tom Riddle-centric AU, where he is a BAMF, Overpowered protagonist. And watching the LotM donghua, compelled me to write this fic, with Tom Riddle as my MC. I'm currently reading the manhua as I write this fic.
This is clearly an AU, where the characters may seem OOC, but I will try to do each character justice, and still keep their core essence the same as HP. There will be no bashing of anyone in this, so if it is what you're looking for, then this fic may not be your cup of tea.
Lord Voldemort will learn, for the first time in his life, what it means to have a family who look at him like he hung the moon, a moon he has no memory of ever caring about.
The Dark Lord who cheated death a dozen times, who unmade himself in pursuit of immortality has woken up with nothing. No magic. No followers. No name that means anything to anyone.
I hope you have enjoyed this first chapter. I was so pumped, that I wrote about 5000 words in a single sitting, and have never been prouder. The words just flowed, and I hope this zeal keeps me going until we have reached the end! This is an extremely self-indulged story, because I'm currently in love with the world, and wanted to bring my fav characters into this world, and see how it turns out.