Chapter Text
A/n: This is for my dearest, most loving uncle, who I lost yesterday to death.
Uncle, I think you have found peace and happiness in death. For you had lost the love of your life, your beloved wife, whom you loved more than anything in this world, more than even your own daughter and grandchildren, to death, seven years ago. Ever since then, you were not living, you were just killing time.
Your love for your wife has humbled me, my husband, and my entire family.
Is this what true love looks like? I asked Scott, my husband, crying inconsolably into his neck, my heart breaking into a million pieces. Is this what true love looks like?
For if this is what true love looks like, then it has the capacity, in grief, to morph beauty into grief-laden ugliness. You, as I most vividly remember you, were handsome, exuberant, witty, funny. You, when I saw you now after a year, the last time I saw you being at my wedding last year, and now I saw you on the 27th of May, 2026, the last time I would ever see you, you were shattered, miserable, a ghost pulled merely by the strings of your own iron will to stay alive just a little longer. The way I like to see it, just a little longer, until you saw us one last time.
We said – me, my husband, my sister, my mom – we said that your love and grief resemble those only seen in beautiful stories. We cry because your love for your beloved has humbled us.
I hope she held your hand as you crossed into the afterlife, and guided you to where she now lives.
I hope you are abundantly happy now; I hope that you saw her, and are finally reunited with her.
Hey, I wish we were there with you longer. I wish I was there with you longer. I only saw you three times after your beloved passed away seven years ago. You, with your iron will, humbling us. Iron-willed till the very end. What a hero you are to us. Do you even know how much of a hero you are to us? I think you do.
I will miss your humour. I will miss your love for us. I will miss you giving us everything you could from your shop, trying to get me to take as many biscuits, chocolates, and ice creams as possible while waving away my mom’s disapprovals (even as she laughed at your jovial love and warmth), while your sweet wife looked on, smiling and laughing.
You remind me of Cadmus Peverell, in your grief-laden longing for your beloved.
You remind my sister of Antioch Peverell, in you greeting death, on the morning of the 1st of June this year, like an old friend.
You remind my husband of the eerie, ghostly presence of a parseltongue-speaking Bathilda controlled by Tom, when we last saw you on the 27th, when you seemed to have held on only by an iron will to remain standing, to be walking and talking, telling my husband of the churches he could visit there, talking to us as you tried so hard to echo the joviality you once had effortlessly, your heart breaking at you failing at it, our hearts breaking as we watched your heart break, and pulling that chair for me to sit, and then how we scrambled to help you, thinking, you don’t need to be a gentleman all the time. Then you walked all the way down the stairs to bid us the last goodbye you’d ever wave to us. Gentleman, gallant, until the very end.
Your words to Scott on our wedding day will haunt me and Scott in the most beautiful way for the rest of our lives. “She is your responsibility, and your life now. Always take care of her. Treat her like a princess. Because she is your princess.”
We love you so much.
.
.
.
Scented trees of pine and oak,
That stare afar the nature folk.
The calmly wind that soothe your face,
Beyond the call of beauty trace.
And late you were on here this day,
To watch the rise of dawning ray.
Where then you glimpse the violet touch,
Of world reflect by golden march
- Always This Late, Odesza
.
.
.
I'll drown my beliefs
To have your babies
I'll dress like your niece
And wash your swollen feet
Just don't leave
I'm not living
I'm just killing time
Your tiny hands
Your crazy kitten smile
True love waits
In haunted attics
True love lives
On lollipops and crisps
- True Love Waits, Radiohead
~*~
.
.
.
Prologue
.
.
.
Tom had vanished the flame trees.
The endless rows of flame trees had stood on either side of the street, covering the ground with a carpet of velveteen red. The trees were so old and sprawling that even in the hottest of summers, the street stayed cool and darkened, with little mottled sunlight falling onto the road, onto the grass and tiny flowers that grew along the edges, all the way down to their shop front and their house.
Starting the shop was Harry’s idea.
Tom was glad to follow along.
Anything that Harry wanted was what he wanted, and it had been that way for a while now. A while.
Of the seventy-five years that Tom had lived, sixty of them he had lived with Harry. It was nothing, compared to other wizards’ lifespans.
Just as he should not have vanished the flame trees, Harry should not have broken the Elder wand.
But Harry did not listen. He had always been headstrong that way.
~*~
.
.
.
Moving Heaven and Earth
.
.
Tom burnt with rage at everything, at the world, at Wool’s, at some point, even at the long corridors of Hogwarts that held other people’s histories, at his loneliness that he would never have admitted to himself existed. He had lived inside that rage for so long that it had become indistinguishable from his own breathing. He did not know, then, that a heart could beat to a different, profound rhythm.
Then one day, in September 1942, came along a green-eyed, dark-haired, pale beauty named Harry Potter.
Harry was sorted into Slytherin in fifth year, and shared the dormitory with Tom, who was also in fifth year. The sorting hat had barely touched Harry’s head before it announced its verdict, and Tom had watched from across the great hall with a sharp attention he reserved only for things he had not yet categorised. Harry sat at the Slytherin table with an expression of someone accustomed to being dealt the worst possible circumstances and making the best of it.
Harry, it seemed, had as much rage in him as Tom did, and he directed a portion of it, inexplicably and immediately, at Tom.
Their first weeks were a running battle, with low voices, pointed silences.
Tom found it interesting, then maddening; then, without never quite identifying the moment of transition, he found it something else.
Impossibly, they fell in love, amidst kisses they shared that made their heads swim, hands that wandered in the dark of the dormitory, behind curtains Tom had charmed with every silencing and sealing spell he knew.
A longing that seemed unearthly to Tom, who had never before wanted anything that was not power, or knowledge, or the annihilation of the thing he feared most. Harry felt unearthly to him.
Harry, with his scar and his backwards mission and a piece of Tom’s ruined soul lodged in his, Harry had somehow stolen his heart so completely that Tom had instilled the fear of death in his knights at even a wrong look directed at Harry. Tom was not, by nature, a person who cared about the beauty of another’s body and soul. With Harry, he could not seem to stop.
Because of Harry, Tom did not open the chamber, descend into the pipes under the school on the night he had long planned and long steeled himself for, the night he had intended to split himself for the first time. He did not kill anyone, did not put half his soul into the black diary waiting in his trunk. He had planned it down to the minute. He had wanted it so badly it had seemed like the most important objective of his life.
Instead, Harry had stolen his heart and soul, and Tom, astonishingly, had let him.
~*~
But June 1943 would be when the time turner that had brought Harry to Tom would take Harry away from Tom.
Harry told him, on a night in early spring when they were lying together in the narrow dark of Tom’s bed, in a flat, careful voice, as if he had already, repeatedly rehearsed the delivery of an unbearable farewell, that time turners used for this purpose allowed travel with just enough window to fulfil the duty for which one had to travel back in time, and then yanked one away to one’s original time. The window closed, and the window cannot be argued with. It was the cost of what one did with it.
Tom said nothing for a long time after Harry told him. He lay there feeling the warmth of Harry along his side, breathing the scent of him, and understood, with an absolute clarity, that he would not accept this. An iron will solidified in him. The part of him that held a capacity for long, unwavering patience sharpened with a glint. He held Harry tighter in the dark.
May 31st, they slept in Tom’s bed as they did often, limbs tangled, Harry’s head on Tom’s chest. Tom stayed awake through most of it. He was watching, though he would not admit it. Some vigil he could never give up.
When he woke at grey early light, Harry was gone.
Not gone as in dressed and at breakfast; gone without a trace. The universe had simply recalled him. Tom lay there for a long moment, hand pressed to Harry’s side of the sheets, heart breaking, tears spilling silently.
He went to Dippet. He went to Dumbledore, who watched him with cold blue eyes that always seemed to be measuring something Tom could not see. Neither of them provided solutions or answers. Dumbledore had the expression of a man who knew more than he said and had decided that saying it would not help, which Tom found to be the most infuriating thing he had ever encountered in his life.
About a month later, Tom dropped out of Hogwarts.
He went on a single-minded pursuit of finding the exact time turner that would allow him to travel to 1997, the year Harry had come from, the year Dumbledore had sent Harry back from, to prevent Tom from growing up to become Voldemort, the monster who had killed people Harry loved, who had killed Harry’s parents, who had tried to kill Harry when Harry was a year old, innocent, terrified at the green lights and the screams.
Tom had felt no rage or world-ending apocalyptic betrayal at the revelation, when Harry had first told him that this was the reason he had come. He had felt only shame, a deep shame, that in any world, any universe, he would have tried to hurt Harry. His beloved. His soul mate. The one being whose existence made the world seem brighter, made colours seem more vivid.
Harry held a piece of Tom’s soul in him. A literal fragment, not metaphorical, latched there, when Voldemort, his future self, the thing he had been in the process of becoming before Harry arrived, had tried to kill Harry and could not, and in the failure, his tattered soul had fastened to the nearest living thing. That it had fastened to Harry of all people, Tom decided, was the universe’s one gesture of mercy to him.
The shame of it stayed in him alongside the love and never fully left. When they made love in the narrow space of Tom’s bed and slipped unconsciously into parseltongue, the hisses, low, secret, theirs, and Tom could see himself reflected in Harry’s soul, connected at every possible depth, it was not exhilaration he felt. It was shame, and under the shame, gratitude, that the fragment had made it to Harry and not elsewhere, that some errant piece of himself had, by the worst of means, found a home in the best of places.
He would have loved Harry to Harry’s core whether or not Harry literally carried his soul. He knew this, but knowing it did not make the shame smaller.
Within months, Tom found what he needed. Moving heaven and earth and everything in between, not stopping at anything, killing and maiming and worse, the means he would never speak of, the means Harry must never find out, he located the exact time turner. Precise enough in its temporal and spatial calibration to deposit him not merely in the right year, but in the right castle, the right room and the right moment.
He had come too far and through too much to leave anything to approximation.
~*~
On the 25th of October, 1943, Tom stood alone in the room he had rented and wore the time turner around his neck.
He felt the calm of a person doing the only thing available to him. He turned it.
The world came apart in colours and motion, time folding around him, and then, with a violence that felt profound, the world snapped back into place.
He was at Hogwarts, in the Gryffindor common room, with its firelight, and clutter.
A handful of students stared at him. A sixth-year boy knocked over a chess set.
Tom smoothed his robes. “Harry Potter,” he said. “Where may I find him?”
He found the dormitory. He knocked once, it seemed right to knock, and when there was no answer he opened the door anyway, and there was Harry, sitting on his bed, very still, as if he had been sitting there a long time. He looked older, tired in a way that had settled into his bones. Like someone who had been waiting a long time for something profound to happen, and had stopped expecting for it to happen.
When he saw Tom, he did not move. His face did something complicated that Tom did not have time to read before Harry was across the room. Tom had his arms full of him, Harry’s face pressed into his neck, hands fisted in his robes, and Tom held him back just as hard, one hand at the back of Harry’s head and his face turned into Harry’s hair. All the terror he had carried, the months of it, the mad, excruciating terror of not finding him, being too late or too early or simply wrong, purged itself in Harry’s weight, warmth, the reality of him held against Tom.
They were shaking, sobbing, in each other’s tight clutch.
“You’re here,” tremored Harry against Tom’s shoulder.
“I told you I would find a way,” said Tom, his voice raspy. “Did you think I wouldn’t?”
Harry laughed brokenly. “I kept looking for you, in records and history books. You weren’t anywhere. You’d just disappeared. After sixth year.”
“Because I came here.” Tom drew back to look at him. Harry’s eyes were wet. So, Tom noticed with some private amazement, were his own. He did not try to hide it. There was no version of this reunion in which pretending to be unmoved was worth anything. “The reason there is no older me in records is because I am here, now, with you. This is where I went.”
Harry looked at him for a long moment. Then, quietly, he said, “You moved heaven and earth.”
“And everything in between,” said Tom. “For you.”
Harry’s closest friends – Weasley, who was wary and watchful, and Granger, who seemed to be running equations in her head – met him with guarded acceptance. They had watched Harry grieve. They had seen what it had cost him. In the proof of Tom’s devotion unfolding before them, they offered a terse, conditional welcome that Tom respected far more than he would have warmth. He had no interest in easy acceptance. He intended to be here long enough for them to form an actual opinion of him.
With a plea set before the Ministry and Hogwarts by Harry and his friends - Granger’s arguments were, Tom noted, excellent, and he told her so, which she received with visible suspicion - Tom was allowed to complete his schooling alongside Harry.
Harry continued in Gryffindor. Tom was sorted, true to his soul, into Slytherin. The hat had taken all of three seconds. Tom had not been surprised.
Everything had come together so perfectly it seemed like nothing could ever go wrong. It was perfect. Beautiful. Tom had not known, before Harry, that he had any capacity for such happiness that only required the continued existence of a specific person in the same room as him.
They made love often, with a desperate quality that did not diminish with time. It always seemed to Tom that no matter for how long and how deep he was in Harry, it was never enough. He suspected this was simply what love was, the permanent, irresolvable conviction that no amount of proximity to the person you loved could ever be sufficient.
Voldemort, Harry told him, had disappeared without a trace, much like Harry had vanished from 1943, or like Tom himself had since his sixth year. Gone, as if he had simply vanished from the universe. Tom’s fragment of soul in Harry had disappeared with him.
Tom watched Harry when he said this, the grief, genuine and unperforming, on Harry’s face.
“You grieve it,” said Tom quietly.
“It was a part of you.” Harry met his eyes. “Even if it got there the worst possible way. It was a piece of you. I’d carried it for years, then it was just gone. I thought I could hold on to you through that.”
~*~
It was sometime later in this new life – they were still in Hogwarts, late autumn of 1997, the castle cold and the smell of woodsmoke in the air – when Harry told him about the Elder wand.
They were in Tom’s dormitory. Tom was at his desk; Harry was sitting on the edge of the bed, hesitating the way he did whenever he had something difficult to say.
“There’s something I haven’t told you yet,” said Harry.
Tom set down his quill. He waited.
Harry explained it carefully. Following Dumbledore’s dying instructions led Harry to the two remaining hallows. The purpose for which he’d been sent back, and in exchange, or perhaps as a consequence, he had become the Master of Death. Immortal.
Tom was quiet for a long time. He was looking at Harry, working through the information given to him, and the eventuality of it.
The eventuality of it was this – Harry would live past everything. Tom would age and eventually, as all mortals did, he would cease to exist, and Harry would continue, through every year that followed without Tom.
“How long,” said Tom. “How long would you go on after I die.”
“I don’t know,” began Harry, a little ramblingly. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s not… I’m not immune to everything. But I won’t die of age. Some things that should be fatal apparently won’t be.” He paused, catching Tom’s expression. “You’re thinking about what happens when you die,” he said slowly.
“Yes.”
“I’ve thought about it too.” There was something in his expression that Tom couldn’t quite read. “I thought about it a lot, before you got here. Ever since I realised what the hallows meant.” He reached into his pocket, and withdrew, carefully, the Elder wand.
Tom’s heart seized. The instinct was immediate and completely involuntary, the oldest reflex in him, the one that had driven every terrible plan he had ever made; he was on his feet before he’d decided to stand.
“Harry.” His voice came out too terse. “Put that back.”
“No.” Harry’s voice was gentle, and completely certain.
“You don’t understand what you’re – ” Tom crossed the room, reached for Harry’s hand, and stopped himself just short of seizing it. He held Harry’s wrist carefully, and looked at him. “Harry. I will find another way. I will find a way to be immortal without horcruxes, I swear to you, I will find something. There are other means. I have always been able to find means.” His voice, despite all his control, had gone ragged. “Don’t do this. You cannot give up immortality for me. You cannot.”
“I’m not giving it up for you,” said Harry simply. “I’m giving it up for me.”
Tom stared at him.
“Immortality nearly destroyed you,” said Harry. “Wanting it, what you were willing to do for it, and it would have destroyed me too. Do you understand? Living forever isn’t a gift. I would watch everyone I love die. I’d watch you die and then I’d just continue. Alone.” His hand squeezed Tom’s once, lovingly. “I don’t want that. I’m not afraid of dying. I never have been. Trying to escape death has caused enough grief in my life, and in yours, and I want no more of it. I want to be free. I want to grow old with you, and when it ends, I want it to end.”
Tom looked at the wand in Harry’s hand. He looked at Harry’s face, the steadiness of it, the absolute absence of doubt, the peace of a decision that had long been made and settled. He recognised it. He had had decisions that looked like that. He had never had one that looked like that and was also generous.
Right before Tom’s eyes, Harry snapped the Elder Wand in two.
The sound was small and ordinary, a dry crack, the way any piece of wood snaps when you apply enough force. The pieces remained in Harry’s hands.
Harry set the pieces on the desk gently.
Then he looked at Tom. There was something open about his face now, lighter, as if he had put down a weight. On Harry’s lips played that strange, secret smile.
“There,” said Harry quietly. “Now we have the same amount of time.”
Tom reached in and took Harry’s face in his hands. He kissed him slowly.
Outside, it had begun to snow.
~*~