Archive of Our Own

Lord Voldemort paced the narrow confines of his cell—up and down, up and down.

Eight steps, pivot, eight steps again. Like a wind-up toy. Or a predator trying not to gnaw off its own foot.

The room itself was barely a room. Just enough space for a cot with a mattress that looked—and smelled—like it belonged in a museum of suffering. No window. No furniture. No toilet.

That last omission had been deliberate. A standard chamber pot had been deemed too dangerous—too much water, too many variables. They’d worried he might speak to it. Charm it. Summon some ancient, serpent-bodied monstrosity from the plumbing. Parseltongue had a way of making the impossible seem imminent.

Instead, they escorted him to the facilities under armed guard every few hours. Dignity wasn’t part of the arrangement.

He was washed twice a week, sponge-and-bucket like something medieval, while a team of silent, wandless guards watched for signs of smuggled curses or concealed marks. Afterward, they dressed him in standard-issue robes—grey, utilitarian, fastened at the back like hospital gowns.

Let the murderous bastard be scrubbed like a floor. Let him stink. Let him remember.

If Voldemort noticed the indignity, he didn’t show it.

The orb flickered faintly in Harry’s palm, casting dull blue light against the rough stone walls of his post. He shifted in the hard-backed chair, joints aching, and scratched at the stubble along his jaw. The tea he'd brought in a thermos had gone cold hours ago, but he drank it anyway—just for something to do.

Harry rolled his shoulders, trying to work out the tension, but it only made his restlessness worse. His legs ached to move, his hands twitched for something to hold, something to do. He reached out and tapped the orb’s casing again—pointless, really—but it buzzed faintly in acknowledgment.

He hadn’t always been here. Not like this.

They all thought he was mad for wanting this job. Said it with their eyes, mostly. Not out loud—not to him. But he’d seen it. In the long silence after he’d submitted the request. In the way Kingsley had reread the form three times before asking, “You’re certain?” In the sideways glances from the committee. In the memo that arrived three days later, unsigned but stamped in wax, assigning him to full-time custodial oversight.

Not Auror work. Not even Ministry work, really.

Custodial.

Because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? Watching him sleep. Escorting him to piss. Supervising sponge baths while wandless guards scrubbed the Dark Lord like a dying dog.

No one else had lasted more than a month.

It wasn’t the threat of violence. He hadn’t spoken since that first day—hadn’t cast, hadn’t cursed, hadn’t even looked at anyone for longer than a heartbeat.

No. It was something else.

Something about being in the same room as him. Breathing the same air. Watching the hands that once held every wandless death in Britain open for inspection like a prisoner’s. Watching the creature who made mothers hide their children submit to a sponge and a bucket of cold water.

Most people couldn’t stomach it. The collapse of myth. The quiet, enduring wrongness of it all.

But Harry? Harry could do it. He had to.

Sometimes he still remembered the look Ginny gave him when he signed the final clearance papers. Not angry. Not confused. Just… empty. 

Like something in her had finally stopped waiting for him to come back.

“You’re wasting your life,” she’d said. “That thing took everything from you.”

And maybe that was why.

Ron had tried to laugh it off—called it his “Death Eater trophy job.” But even he couldn’t quite meet Harry’s eye.

Only Hermione had understood. Or nearly. She’d sat beside him in the Ministry’s dim little briefing room, her fingers curled tight around a mug she hadn’t touched.

“Is this how you’ll forgive yourself?” she’d asked softly.

Harry hadn’t answered. He’d just nodded at the contract, and watched the ink seal itself in black.

Now here he was. Nine years later. Drinking cold tea and watching his worst nightmare pace the length of a box no larger than a Gringotts vault. Because no one else could. Because no one else wanted to.

Voldemort didn’t flinch. He hadn’t reacted to anything since that first furious outburst: “POTTER! I’ll kill you!” Spat with the full weight of prophecy and personal insult as they dragged him through the containment wards.

He’d seen Harry waiting—tall now, broad-shouldered, all Auror muscle and hard lines—and his fury had detonated instantly, like no time had passed at all.

As if the war hadn’t ended. As if the boy he’d tried to kill had no right to become a man.

A warden. His warden.

That had been eight hours ago. He hadn’t said a word since.

Which, frankly, was a relief.

He’d spoken in Parseltongue during the first couple of hours—long, slow sentences that made Harry’s skin crawl. No one else had been able to listen for more than ten minutes. Ron had thrown up. Hermione had gone quiet in a way that frightened him more than when she’d screamed. It was too much. The sound of it. The meaning behind it. The voice Harry still heard in his sleep.

Kingsley had lasted longer—but even he eventually left, jaw set like stone.

He’d paused at the door. Glanced back at Harry, still standing in the observation alcove, eyes fixed on the orb.

A flicker of something had passed over his face then. Not doubt. Not command. Just… regret.

Like he knew what it meant. What Harry was giving up.

His best Auror. His golden boy. Reduced to a forgotten post in the earth’s marrow, guarding a creature the world no longer cared about or feared.

But Kingsley hadn’t said a word. Just nodded. And walked away.

This… place, wherever it was, was warded beyond comprehension. The cell itself was sealed so tightly with layered enchantments that even thinking about a wand inside it produced a faint static hum, like magic short-circuiting. No one could cast in there. Not him. Not Voldemort. No one. The walls swallowed spells. The orb was the only safe window in or out.

And it was quiet. Too quiet.

Voldemort still wasn’t speaking. Just pacing, a polished silhouette of a man who shouldn’t be alive. Who shouldn’t be handsome, either. But he was. Not the snake-thing Harry had fought in the forest or in the final ruin of Hogwarts. This version was older, but strangely intact. Composed. Elegant, even. The years had dusted his temples with silver, made his cheekbones even sharper. His robes were regulation grey, but somehow he wore them like tailored couture.

And those eyes. Still red, but no longer glowing. They burned. Measured. Like he was waiting.

He tried not to remember the first time he’d seen him after the war. Not truly. Not from a distance, or through memory, or nightmares. But face to face.

It had been nearly a year after the battle—after the burial mounds and funerals and trials. After training. After Harry had earned the Auror robes that still didn’t sit quite right on his frame. He’d asked, quietly, to see the prisoner. Just once. Just to understand what they were guarding. Kingsley had granted it with a sigh and a long look Harry still didn’t know how to interpret.

They’d taken him deep underground—down corridors that pulsed with containment magic, past wards thick enough to hum against his skin. A single guard had opened the viewing chamber for him. No introductions. No warnings.

Just light. Stone. And Voldemort.

Not the skeletal thing Harry remembered—no snakelike flatness to his face, no gleaming bone-pale skin stretched thin with madness. No. He looked like a man again. Or close enough to trick the eye.

Older than Riddle, older than the ghost-boy who had haunted the diary, but bearing the same fine-boned elegance. Same cruel mouth. Same unfathomable stillness. His hands were folded in his lap. His back was straight. And when he turned—just his head, just enough to acknowledge Harry’s presence—those red eyes met his like they’d been waiting.

Harry hadn’t known what to do. What to feel. His body had flinched, ready for battle, but there was nothing to fight. No wand. No words. Just a man in grey robes and iron restraints, sitting like a guest in his own tomb.

He hadn’t spoken. Neither of them had.

But Harry had stood there longer than he meant to. Long enough to watch Voldemort blink—slow, deliberate—as if to say you came all this way just to see what I look like now.

And maybe he had.

Maybe that’s when the idea had started. Quietly. The thought that someone had to stay. That someone had to make sure this—this—wasn’t just buried and forgotten. That power like his didn’t sleep. It waited.

Harry hadn’t asked to return right away. But he hadn’t been surprised when he did.

Harry hated how aware he was of it all. Of the line of his shoulders. The neatness of his hands. The way he moved like someone used to owning the ground beneath his feet.

“Still at it, huh,” Harry muttered to no one, rubbing his eyes. The orb didn’t respond. Voldemort didn’t either.

The minutes dragged, measured in sips of cold tea and the steady cadence of footsteps on stone. Harry stood, paced a bit himself, sat back down. Pulled off his jumper. Put it back on. Checked the orb’s stabilisation runes. All fine. Still pacing.

He sighed. It wasn’t the watching that got to him. It was the waiting.

Something was coming. Had to be. Voldemort wouldn’t be silent unless he was planning something. And yet here he was—pacing. Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again.

Harry leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. He stared into the orb like it might blink first.

“You’re going to crack eventually,” he said softly, not expecting an answer. “And when you do, I’ll be right here.”

The pacing continued.

Harry sat back again. And he watched. It hadn’t always been like this. The pacing had started three hours ago. Relentless. Measured. A loop that never faltered.

But before that, there’d been stillness. Scary stillness.

The first two hours of Harry wardening Voldemort’s captivity had been all sound and fury. Curses Harry didn’t even recognise, and some he unfortunately did—obscene, old, foul enough to curdle the walls. The kind of Parseltongue that made your insides go cold even if you didn’t speak the language. But Harry did speak it, and those first two hours had made him regret it.

And then… silence.

At hour three, Voldemort had sat. Not like someone defeated. Not even like someone resting. He’d lowered himself to the cot like a man choosing stillness. Intentional. Back straight, long legs folded awkwardly on the too-short frame. Eyes closed. Hands folded neatly in his lap.

Meditating.

Or pretending to. That thought made Harry itch.

He remembered staring at the orb in those long moments, thinking, He’s planning something. No one like him just… breathes.

Four hours in, Voldemort hadn’t moved. Not a twitch. Not a blink. Not even the rise and fall of breath Harry could usually detect if he watched long enough. It had been like watching a statue sculpted out of fury. Every now and then, Harry would lean in closer to the orb just to make sure it was still working. Still real.

Then came the fifth hour.

At first, just the smallest things. A twitch of his index finger. A subtle tremor in his eyelids. Barely noticeable—except Harry had noticed. He’d been cataloguing everything. He couldn’t help it. He’d memorised the exact angle Voldemort sat. The scuff mark beneath his left boot. The pattern his breaths should have made against his chest but hadn’t.

And when the twitching started, Harry had sat up straighter.

It was like watching a fault line prepare to crack.

Then the snarl came—low and wet and venomous. Parseltongue, spat like venom: "Ssilthishthar."
Harry didn’t know the word. But he felt it. Rage and shame and something else underneath—something wretched and coiled.

And then he stood.

No preamble. No dramatics. Just an abrupt rise and the beginning of that now-unbroken pattern: eight steps, pivot, eight steps again.

Harry watched the first few rounds in silence, stunned by how sudden it had been. The transformation from stillness to motion. From silence to movement. From frozen intent to a creature pacing its cage.

And he hadn’t stopped since.

Six hours. Harry knew because he’d counted. Tracked it obsessively. Two hours of cursing. One hour of silence. Three hours of movement. Six. Still no signs of fatigue.

What disturbed Harry most wasn’t the pacing itself—it was how clean it was. How unhurried. Like it was a ritual. Or a discipline. Or a punishment.

“He’s doing it to stay sane,” Harry muttered. Then, after a beat: “Or to go mad exactly on schedule.”

The orb pulsed faintly in his hand. Not in response—just its regular heartbeat. Unbothered. Steady. Everything else in this hidden fortress felt like it was crumbling inward—walls too close, magic too dense, time folding in on itself.

Harry scrubbed his face with both hands and leaned back in the chair again, the bones of it creaking beneath him.

He tried not to look at Voldemort’s feet anymore. Tried not to track the rhythm with his eyes. But they followed anyway. His thoughts ticked in time with the steps, forming questions he didn’t want to answer.

What happens when he stops again? What happens when he decides the pacing isn’t enough?

Harry didn’t know. So he stayed. And he watched.

They'd eventually assigned Harry full-time rotation. Not because he wanted it—he didn’t—but because he was the only one who could hear the language and not lose his mind. If Voldemort had started casting spells in Parseltongue, they’d needed someone who could interrupt. Translate. Respond. Counter-curse. Something.

So Harry had stayed.

And when the others stopped volunteering, they stopped replacing them.

First it was the language. Then the pacing. Then the sponge baths. Then the escorts.

There weren’t enough trained staff. Or maybe there were, and no one wanted the assignment. One by one, they faded off the roster. Until Harry was the only name left.

Now it was just him. He brought the bucket. He held the sponge. He waited outside the lavatory.
He watched Voldemort dress himself in backwards robes with hands too steady for someone so clipped of power.

Because what else could they do? What else would he let them do?

He still remembered the first time he stepped inside the cell. Not the outer corridor, not the observation alcove. Inside.

The air had felt… wrong. Not heavy, exactly. Not dark. Just off. Like a room that didn’t want him in it. A space too used to silence.

Voldemort had been sitting on the cot. Back straight, hands folded, head tilted just slightly—listening.

It was to escort him to the bathroom. Standard protocol. No wand, no eye contact, no sudden movement. Open the outer gate, lower the wards, wait. Speak nothing but Parseltongue. Keep him docile. That was the idea.

Harry had brought his wand anyway. Out of habit. Out of arrogance. Out of some stupid, unconscious need to feel armed.

He never made that mistake again.

Voldemort surged the moment the lock disengaged.

A blur of grey robes and bared teeth, the cot screeching against the floor as he launched. Not toward the door. Not even toward Harry.

Toward the wand.

He hadn’t even hesitated. No questions. No feints. Just a straight, brutal lunge for the wand holstered at Harry’s side. Like an animal who knew exactly where the meat was.

Harry saw it half a second too late.

They collided hard—shoulder to chest, bone to bone—Voldemort’s hands clawing for the wand, his face a mask of hatred and something worse: hunger. A need so primal it curdled.

The wand slipped free. Skittered across the floor. Under the cot.

And then it was just them.

No magic. No words. Just fists and fury. Elbows and knees and teeth.

Voldemort slammed him into the wall, fingers twisted in his collar like he meant to throttle him with the fabric. Harry grappled back, fists in the regulation robes, driving his shoulder forward to crush him against the stone.

It was clumsy. Brutal. Humiliating.

No training. No technique. Just years of war distilled into one awful, panting knot of muscle and spite.

He remembered the smell of him—stone dust, cold sweat, something older underneath. Remembered the look in his eyes when Harry finally pinned him—just for a second—before shoving him back and dragging him to the ground.

A noise had torn from Voldemort’s throat then. Not a curse. Not a threat.

Something feral. Like an animal caught in its own trap.

He didn’t speak after that.

Not for three days.

The sound of constant pacing daily—leather on stone, soft and regular—reminded him of the last duel. Not the noise of it. The rhythm. The certainty.

Voldemort had circled him then, too. Not like this. Not silent. But with that same certainty of ownership. As if Harry’s life already belonged to him.

But Harry hadn’t died. He’d wanted to. He still did, sometimes. But he hadn’t.

And now here they were. One of them walking in circles. 

The other watching. Just like always.

── ◈ ──

9 Years Ago, The Final Battle

The sky had cracked open like a wound.

Ash rained through the branches of the Forbidden Forest, fire licking the trunks like tongues. Trees groaned under the weight of flame. Somewhere behind him, a centaur screamed. Somewhere ahead, Hagrid’s sobs were swallowed by smoke. And Harry stood—alive.

He shouldn’t have been.

That was the plan. That was the promise. Walk into the clearing. Let it end. He’d watched Snape’s memories in the Pensieve, hands still wet from the man’s final breath. He knew now—everything. Why the scar had always burned. Why he had to die. Why Dumbledore had looked at him that way.

And still—he hesitated.

Just a breath. Just long enough to want to live. Maybe it was Hagrid, bound and bloodied like a trophy. Maybe it was Sirius’s voice in the dark, his parents beside him in ghost-light, the cold brush of Remus’s fingers. Or maybe it was just cowardice. He didn’t throw the Resurrection Stone away.

He didn’t step forward into the killing curse. And the forest had answered with war.

Voldemort’s scream had torn through the trees—raw, incandescent. Not fear. Rage. Insanity. He’d lifted the Elder Wand and cast the first curse, wild and volcanic. Green fire seared through the clearing. Harry moved before he thought. No more Expelliarmus. No more mercy.

He met it. Spell for spell. Rage for rage. Lightning slammed into bark. Soil exploded. Shadows ran screaming.

The Elder Wand pulsed in Voldemort’s hand—until it didn’t.

“Expelliarmus!”

Harry’s voice cracked like thunder, and the wand—his wand—leapt into his hand as if it had been waiting.

The moment it touched his fingers, the forest changed.

Power surged through him like blood returning to a dead limb. A flash behind his eyes. A hum beneath his skin. The Cloak around his shoulders burned cold. The Stone in his fist burned hot. And the Wand—

The Wand knew him.

He was no longer a boy with borrowed power. He was something else. Something whole. The Hallows had chosen him. And the forest bowed beneath his will.

The Master of Death.

The explosion of magic cracked the sky in half.

Trees didn’t just fall—they folded. Lightning split sideways across the clearing, carving trenches in the earth. Fire roared up like it had been summoned. And in the blaze-lit chaos, even the Death Eaters stopped moving.

They stood at the edges of the clearing—pale, wide-eyed, mouths open but no sound. Wands forgotten. Spells un-cast. Watching.

Hagrid, shackled and bloodied, lifted his head. His eyes—so often full of warmth, of grief, of belief—were wide with something else entirely. Awe. He had seen giants fall, had buried friends and beasts alike—but he had never seen this.

Never seen Harry like this.

The magic thrashed through the trees like a god awakening. The wind was no longer wind—it screamed. Roots tore free from the earth. The world recoiled.

Voldemort staggered—but didn’t fall.

Snarling, he tore a wand from the hand of a nearby Death Eater—shoved the man aside like carrion. No hesitation. No pride. Just instinct. Desperation.

They clashed again—harder, faster.

It wasn’t a duel. It was devastation.

The air warped around them, torn open by the force of their magic. Trees splintered like matchsticks. Stones cracked and exploded. Lightning laced the soil. Every spell they cast shattered the world a little more. Fire and ash spun in spirals. The clearing became a wound.

Voldemort screamed words that had no place in the living tongue—spells with too many sibilants, too many teeth. Magic scraped the bone when it hit. He carved a sigil in the air with a stolen wand and shrieked, "Taph’ras al’Senneth!"

A black whip of energy shot forward—serrated, seeking. It wasn’t meant to stun or kill. It was meant to erase.

Harry threw his hand forward, not even raising the wand—just instinct, will, the pulse of the Hallows answering as one. A dome of white-hot light burst outward from his chest, eating the curse mid-flight. When the light cleared, Harry was already moving, cloak billowing, wand blazing like a sword of flame.

Another curse. Voldemort hissed, "Threxus!" and the very air screamed. Gravity twisted. The ground buckled beneath Harry’s boots.

He didn’t flinch.

“You’ve always underestimated me,” Harry said, his voice low, steady.

Then—“Incarcerous Tempest!”

Golden chains erupted from the sky like lightning bolts, slamming into the ground where Voldemort had stood. He vanished in a blink, Apparating sideways—not real Apparition, not with the anti-Displacement wards around them, but something worse. Something older.

He reappeared in a smear of black, already casting.

Harry parried with a wave of his wand, and a wall of molten air rose between them. The spell hit it and dissolved, howling.

“Avada Kedavra!”

Green light again. The old curse. The favourite.

Harry caught it.

He didn’t deflect it—he caught it. The Cloak shimmered in response, unfurling across his chest like liquid silver. The curse hit him full-on—and hissed out in a breathless flicker, snuffed like candlelight between his hands.

Even Harry froze.

The world held its breath.

He stared at his palm, blinking once. The flesh was unburned. Warm. Still humming from the contact. Around him, the air tightened like lungs drawn too deep.

A gasp went up—sharp and collective. From the Death Eaters. From the Aurors. From Hagrid, somewhere behind him, his mouth slack with disbelief.

Even Voldemort had faltered.

For the first time in years, Harry saw fear on that face. Not caution. Not disdain. Fear.

And just beyond the swirling fire line, through the smoke and chaos and hovering bodies, Harry caught a flicker of pale hair. Narcissa Malfoy—watching. Still. Her gloved hand over her mouth. Her eyes wide. Terrified.

He didn’t have time to register it.

Because the moment passed—and Harry moved.

Not with spells, not with tactics. With fury. With finality. With everything.

Each step cracked the earth beneath his boots. Every swing of the wand drew arcs of white-gold fire that scorched the sky. Magic didn’t follow him—it answered him. The air sang as the Elder Wand blurred in his grip. The Cloak whipped behind him like storm-wind. The Stone pulsed in his palm like a second heartbeat, searing-hot.

He didn’t chant. He didn’t shout. He willed.

Voldemort reeled, backpedaling, shielding, snarling like a cornered thing. But Harry was faster. Stronger. Whole.

He flung a curse that wasn’t a spell—it didn’t have a name, only a shape. Pure force, wild and gold. It struck Voldemort square in the ribs, sent him spinning.

Another blast caught his shoulder, tearing through the edge of his robe.

He staggered, wand flailing. “Crucio!” he howled, too late, too sloppy.

The red bolt cracked across the space between them and shattered against Harry’s shield. No recoil. No pain. Just steam and silence.

"Stop fighting me!" Voldemort howled.

“You never understood, did you?” Harry had stepped forward, eyes glowing now with something not quite mortal. “You thought power was about taking. About owning. But it was always about bearing.”

He lifted his wand. The earth trembled.

“Pax Mortem.”

A ring of pure light exploded outward. Every Death Eater at the edge of the clearing dropped to their knees, gagging, blinded. Hagrid covered his face. Even the flames bent backward, pushed away.

Only Voldemort remained upright—teeth bared, chest heaving, grey robes hanging in shreds. His borrowed wand shook in his grip, cracked at the hilt. Blood ran from his mouth in a dark smear. The fire around them had died to embers.

Harry stood before him. Still. Silent. Cloaked in power he hadn’t earned. Crowned by silence.

He could end it. He should have. He didn’t.

Because something still clung.

Nagini was already dead—Neville’s doing, as he’d later learn. And the rest of the Horcruxes had long since been destroyed. The cup. The locket. The diadem. The ring. Even the diary, long before all this.

But not the last.

Because the last had never left.

It was buried in Harry’s chest, low and burning. A sickness he could feel if he breathed too deep. It hummed in time with the Wand, with the Stone, with the Cloak that fluttered around his shoulders like a shroud. It hurt to know it. To feel it. To still be it.

And Voldemort couldn’t die until it was gone.

Harry had known that. He’d known it. That’s why he’d walked into the forest. Why he’d looked death in the face.

But he hadn’t died. He couldn’t even do that right.

He remembered that moment—standing before Voldemort, heart hammering, stone in hand. He’d seen Hagrid bleeding in the dirt. Heard Sirius’s voice in the dark. Watched his mother whisper “be brave.” And all of it—all of it—had buckled beneath the one thing he couldn’t silence.

He didn’t want to die. And in that breath of cowardice, that single shiver of want, everything had changed. The stone had stayed in his fist. The spell had missed. And he had lived.

So now he stood there—whole but wrong. Powerful but ashamed. No sacrifice. No clean ending. Just a boy who flinched and a war that refused to die.

And Voldemort—ruined, cornered, gasping—still lived, too.

So Harry did the only thing he could.

He bound him—flesh to magic, bone to name. With chains made of light and silence and will. He drove the magic into the ground, wove it through Voldemort’s veins, stripped the stolen wand from his fingers and ground it to dust beneath his heel.

He summoned the Aurors, not to execute—but to witness.

And then he gave the order.

"No Dementors. No wand. No death. Not yet."

Because he knew. In the marrow of him, he knew it wasn’t over. That it couldn’t be over. That something ancient, poisonous, unfinished still clung to the both of them. Something that would never leave him so long as it lived inside him.

The last Horcrux wasn’t in some hidden heirloom. Not in the dark.

It was in Harry.

The forest had shown him that truth. The Wand had confirmed it. The Stone, in its silence, had forgiven it. But knowledge wasn’t absolution. And so, instead of an ending, Harry asked for a cell.

He told them what they didn’t want to hear—that Voldemort couldn’t die. But not how, just that death would be a mistake. That the only way forward was containment. Not execution. Exile. A prison beneath the world. Wandless. Magicless. No windows. No voice.

Let him live, Harry had said—but let him rot. Strip him of his magic, his rituals, his grandeur. Reduce him to skin, to bone, to hunger and breath. Turn the Dark Lord into a man—and that would be punishment enough.

The Ministry had been in shambles then. Its walls still scorched, its offices half-empty, filled with ash and shock. But Harry was the Boy Who Lived. The Boy Who’d Ended It. They listened.

And they built it.

A fortress beneath the earth. Sealed with blood and fear. A place where magic frayed at the edges and the air tasted like nothing. A place for monsters too dangerous to kill.

They buried him alive.

And then they moved on.

The Prophet printed praise until the ink ran dry. Statues were raised. Toasts were made. The world rebuilt itself on the bones of its fallen.

But Harry—Harry lingered.

He never went back to Hogwarts. Never set foot in the Great Hall where Remus had bled into the stone, where Tonks’s fingers had gone slack beside her husband’s, where Fred’s laugh had ended mid-breath. He couldn’t face the Headmaster’s portrait. Couldn’t bear Snape’s eyes behind the glass. He couldn’t even look at the sky over the Astronomy Tower without remembering who had fallen from it.

Instead, he drifted.

Ron and Hermione married. Moved into a cottage with a yellow door. Laughed again. He was happy for them. Almost.

Ginny tried. And so did he. They shared a house. A bed. Even a few quiet mornings where it almost felt like hope. But it was always a little too far away. She lived in the light. Harry... didn’t.

He wore heroism like a suit too tight across the shoulders. It pinched. It itched. And eventually, he stopped pretending it fit.

So when the opportunity came—when the position opened, when the fortress needed a warden—Harry didn’t hesitate. While others whispered of promotions and retirement and the slow, clean life of peacetime, Harry walked into the Ministry and signed the forms.

Not Head Auror. Not a hero. Just the man who watched Voldemort sleep.

Hermione had found him in the briefing room, sitting beneath the flicker of a half-broken light, fingers hovering above the signature line. She didn’t try to stop him. Not really. She just stood there, mug in her hand, arms wrapped tight around herself like the warmth couldn’t quite reach.

“Oh, Harry,” she’d said, voice quiet as parchment. “You don’t have to do this. What you’ve done… it’s enough.”

But Harry had only looked at her—really looked—and said, “No. This is how I’ll remember.”

She’d crossed the room then and wrapped her arms around him. Held him like something fragile. Not to stop him. Just to bear witness.

And when he signed, the ink sealed itself in black.

Like mourning. Like prophecy. Like fate.

── ◈ ──

The tray clanged off the stone wall before Harry even crossed the threshold.

Soup—what little of it remained—slid down the frame in greasy trails, starchy and beige, like something vomited by time itself. A splatter hit his boot. Perfect. Lentil again.

Voldemort stood just behind the splash zone, grinning like a schoolboy caught mid-arson. His lip was split open, probably self-inflicted, teeth pink with blood.

“Dinner,” Harry muttered, not bothering with preamble.

Voldemort didn’t respond. Just laughed—low and guttural, rust against rust. It didn’t sound amused. It didn’t sound sane. It scraped through the warded air and left a residue behind. Like soot in the lungs.

Harry stared at the wreckage for a beat too long. Then, with all the grace of a man counting to ten through clenched teeth, he set the second tray down—well out of reach—and turned without ceremony.

He didn’t come back that night.

The next morning, the smell was already waiting.

Rotten potato. Fermented broth. The iron tang of blood. It clung to the corners of the cell like mildew, like guilt. Harry gagged once, quietly, and set the bucket down.

He said nothing.

Didn’t even look at the cot.

Just crouched—knees popping in protest—and began to scrub.

The rag came away streaked red-brown. The mop water bloomed pink, swirling in lazy spirals like some horrible potion gone wrong. He didn’t ask how blood had gotten there. Didn’t want to know. Probably Voldemort licking the inside of the mug again out of sheer spite.

At the far end of the room, Voldemort stood perfectly still. Arms crossed. Head tilted. Watching.

Harry didn’t glance up.

He finished the floor in silence, jaw clenched, breath slow and controlled. His shoulders ached, fingers red and raw from the rag work, and his right eye twitched in time with every drag of cloth over stone. The mop water had turned the colour of bruises. He didn’t ask what part of the mess had come from Voldemort’s mouth and what hadn’t.

When it was done, he straightened slowly, joints crackling, and wiped his hands on his trousers like it mattered. He didn’t speak. Didn’t offer so much as a glance toward the figure standing statuesque against the wall.

He left.

The door groaned shut behind him.

And for a moment—just a moment—he let himself believe that maybe, just maybe, the worst of it was over. That Voldemort would tire of the performance. That one of them might eventually run out of venom.

He should’ve known better.

Because the next night, the mug came first.

Then the tray.

Then Voldemort.

It was almost impressive, really—the choreography of it. One ceramic missile whizzing past his temple, the next rebounding off the wall like a discus. Then, just as Harry lifted the replacement tray to shield himself, Voldemort lunged.

Grey robes, sharp elbows, too many bones. The man moved like someone who’d never learned to fight properly—but who’d compensated by deciding rules were optional. It wasn’t a duel. It wasn’t even a brawl. It was a bloody tangle of limbs and old rage.

They crashed into the wall. The cot screeched backward. Voldemort clawed at Harry’s belt, no finesse, just instinct—always reaching for the wand that wasn’t there.

“Still trying,” Harry grunted, ducking a wild elbow.

Fingers like iron closed around his forearm. Then—teeth.

Pain flared sharp and sudden as Voldemort bit the meat of his hand, hard enough to break skin. Harry hissed, shoved forward, twisted his hips. Muscle met bone in a brutal snap of motion, and suddenly Voldemort was pinned—spine flat against the stone, Harry’s wrist to his throat.

They locked eyes.

And then—he smiled.

“You bleed,” Voldemort rasped. “Good.”

Harry’s grip tightened. Just a moment. Just enough.

It would be easy, wouldn’t it? One shove. One crack. Let the wards see what kind of punishment this deserved. The prison wouldn’t care. No one was watching. No one ever was.

Instead, Harry shoved him back, let him fall gracelessly to the cot, and turned toward the door.

He didn’t bother retrieving the tray. Left it lying where it had landed, upturned and steaming.

Because this was hell. Because he’d chosen it. And because part of him—the part that still wore the cloak of a war hero like it itched—thought maybe, just maybe, he deserved it.

But if he’d thought that was the worst of it—the flying crockery, the brawls, the ever-present threat of being bitten again—he was wrong.

Because the worst scuffle between Britain’s most infamous dark lord and its most exhausted warden hadn’t come over food.

It had come over soap.

Technically, Voldemort wasn’t allowed to bathe himself.

That particular clause had been added after Week Two, when he'd apparently coaxed a water pipe into forming a snake during a routine hygiene visit—spoke to it in Parseltongue, charmed it with something old and oily and wrong, and used it to incapacitate one of the Unspeakables. The man still flinched at the sound of running water.

So. No more solo baths. No open plumbing. No water sources left unattended.

Which meant the task of scrubbing down the Dark Lord had fallen, rather spectacularly, to Harry.

The official term in the rota was hygienic maintenance. But Harry preferred the honest version: sponge baths from hell.

He came prepared. Bucket. Rag. Gloves. Wandless, of course. The mop handle had been sawed blunt at both ends and the soap was Ministry-issued—unscented, unremarkable, and barely capable of cutting grease. The water had gone cold on the way down the lift. Not that Harry cared.

What he did care about was the look on Voldemort’s face when he entered.

Not fury. Not mockery. Not even the smug, cruel anticipation Harry had grown used to.

No. This was worse.

This was indignation.

Pure, unfiltered offence. The outrage of a man who once demanded tribute in gold now being confronted with a mop and a bucket of tepid water.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Harry muttered, already regretting everything about the day, the job, his life choices, and possibly the invention of soap itself.

He set the bucket down, rolled up his sleeves, and braced for impact.

He didn’t have to wait long.

The bucket hit him square in the chest before he’d finished standing upright. Cold water sluiced down his front, soaking through the wool of his uniform and dripping in miserable trails beneath his collar.

Soap clung to his eyelids. Something slimy slid down the back of his neck. He blinked once. Twice.

Then turned very, very slowly toward Voldemort. The bastard looked satisfied.

“You think this is funny?” Harry asked flatly, water dripping from his chin.

Voldemort didn’t smile. But his silence was somehow louder than a cackle.

Harry stood there for a long moment, sodden and seething, arms dripping and breath tight. He could feel the cold settling into his bones. The cell stank of stone and damp cotton. His boots squelched when he moved.

Without a word, he bent, retrieved the upended bucket, and left the room.

The door sealed behind him with a soft thunk.

He left the mess. Left the stink. Left Voldemort to stew in it.

Let the proudest monster magic had ever made sit in his own filth for a week, because the Ministry had one rule carved into every warden directive: Never leave anything behind that can be turned into a weapon.

So Harry didn’t.

And for four days, he didn’t try again.

Not with water. Not with soap. Not even a fresh rag. He did the bare minimum—brought the food, escorted the bathroom visits, watched for signs of psychosis or escape attempts. The brawls had lessened, mostly out of mutual exhaustion. Voldemort hadn’t lunged in days, hadn’t thrown a tray or bitten a forearm. He’d taken his meals without fanfare. Used the lav without protest.

But Harry could feel it. The agitation.

It was in the pacing.

Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again.

But the rhythm was off. Just slightly. Barely noticeable. But Harry noticed.

The stride was sharper now. Quicker. Less like ritual, more like constraint. He turned tighter at the edges, cutting corners, jaw working like he had something sour in his teeth.

And the smell—Merlin, the smell was growing unbearable. It clung to the corners of the cell like smoke that couldn’t find a chimney. And Voldemort hated it. Harry could see it.

It wasn’t just in the pacing. It was in the way he moved. Stiff, agitated, wrong. His fingers flexed compulsively. He adjusted the collar of his robe more than usual. Smoothed it. Brushed imaginary dust from the sleeves.

He hated being unclean.

That was the thing Harry had noticed, quietly, after the first week. Beneath all the theatrics—the threats, the silence, the sharp-toothed violence—Tom Riddle was a man of immaculate habits.

He folded his blanket with military precision. Placed his slippers in the same spot every night. Ate with delicate, oddly old-fashioned manners when he wasn’t trying to murder someone with a soup spoon. Even his pacing had a kind of brutal elegance to it—like someone reciting Latin verse in motion.

And now? Now he looked like he was crawling in his own skin.

Harry sat outside the cell, fingers curled around his cold thermos, and watched the screen as the great Lord Voldemort tugged at the collar of his robe for the fourth time in two minutes. His hair—because yes, it had grown back, thank you ancient blood rituals—was matted at the temples. Grease slicked the roots. There was a faint shadow of dried sweat at the base of his throat. His nails—normally clean, trimmed, obsessively so—showed faint smudges of grime beneath the cuticle.

Harry sipped the tea. Made a face.

“Miserable bastard,” he muttered, more to the orb than anyone. “Bet you’d murder for a hot rinse.”

Inside the cell, Voldemort adjusted his cuffs for the sixth time. Then stilled.

And turned.

Not just another pivot. Not part of the pacing. He stopped mid-step, spine straightening, head lifting—not with the languid grace Harry had come to expect, but something colder. Measured. Intentional.

His gaze cut to the far wall.

Harry froze.

He didn’t want to believe in that old superstition—that you could feel someone watching you. But Merlin help him, he did now. The temperature in the corridor didn’t change, but something in his chest pulled taut, like a violin string drawn too tight.

Through the orb’s lens, Harry saw it.

Red eyes. Sharp. Direct. Locked on the mirrored surface as though he knew exactly where the line of sight ended.

It wasn’t some accidental glance. It wasn’t guesswork.

Voldemort was looking at him.

And the expression he wore…

It wasn’t triumph. It wasn’t rage.

It was a grimace. Tight. Controlled. But unmistakably edged in discomfort.

Not the pain of injury—Harry had catalogued that look too many times in too many battlefields. No. This was something different. This was resentment marinated in reluctant need. The expression of a man—if he could be called that—finally cornered not by chains, but by humiliation.

And still, he didn’t look away.

Harry found his mouth dry. His tea long forgotten.

He reached out, slow and unthinking, and tapped the edge of the orb’s casing. Just once. Like a test. A confirmation.

Voldemort blinked.

And then—just barely, just for a second—his chin lifted.

It wasn’t a nod. Not quite. But Harry had seen battlefield surrenders that looked less formal.

He stared back, fingers resting on the rim of the thermos. Waited for the denial. For the second lunge. For the inevitable spit or slur.

But none came.

Only that look. Stillness, finally earned through something worse than force.

Harry exhaled—slow, careful.

Then rose to his feet, joints stiff, back sore, and reached for the standard-issue mop bucket.

“Well,” he muttered, dragging it down the corridor. “Guess even Dark Lords get itchy.”

── ◈ ──

The cell was colder than usual. Harry swore the stones had learned to hold grudges.

He set the bucket down with a thunk. Cold, soapy water sloshed over the rim, trailing across the floor in thin, shining rivulets. His gloves were tucked beneath his arm. The sponge rested like a dare atop the folded towel. Standard-issue everything.

Voldemort didn’t move. Didn’t speak. He just stood by the cot, pale against the grey, watching Harry with something unreadable in the corner of his mouth.

Harry cleared his throat, once. Useless.

“You know the drill.”

He didn’t expect obedience. He expected resistance. Or silence. Or maybe that slanted, vicious smile Voldemort reserved for things he found beneath him.

What he did not expect was for Voldemort to untie the back of his robe without breaking eye contact.

The fabric slipped from his shoulders with soundless ease, pooling at his feet like smoke. Beneath it: skin. Pale, unmarked from a distance, but layered with history up close. Scars like lashings. Faint lines like old binding spells. Runes etched in deep grey around each wrist and ankle, pulsing softly beneath the skin like buried embers. Even here, in this fortress built to eat magic, they hummed.

Harry froze.

Just for a second.

Because Voldemort was naked, and he was... comfortable.

Every inch of him stood exposed—spine straight, chin lifted, like a general awaiting armour. He didn’t hide. Didn’t flinch. He simply existed, bare and unashamed, as if his body were not a body at all but a weapon forged and catalogued long ago.

“Well?” came the voice—cool, dry, unhurried. “What’s the matter, Potter? Expecting scales?”

Harry’s jaw twitched. “I expected a little modesty.”

A soft, humourless chuckle.

“Please. Modesty is for men unsure of their bodies. Or their power. I’ve been stripped of one. Why should I feign the other?”

Harry said nothing. Just reached for the gloves.

Voldemort tilted his head, studying him. “Tell me—did they train you for this? At the Ministry? Or did you volunteer for the intimacy?”

“Shut up,” Harry muttered, slipping on the gloves.

“Why? Embarrassed?” Voldemort’s lips curved, but not kindly. “You’ve seen me bleed. Break. Crawl. And this is where your courage falters? How disappointingly sentimental.”

“Not sentimental,” Harry said through gritted teeth. “Just not interested.”

“Mm. Liar.”

Harry stepped forward, bucket in hand, and Voldemort stilled—not out of obedience, but anticipation. Like a man settling in for a massage rather than a bath. A prince awaiting his valet.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Harry muttered.

“I don’t need to,” Voldemort murmured. “That’s your specialty.”

He turned. Presented his back.

Harry swallowed. Hard. Then pulled on the gloves.

He’d done this before. As an Auror, as a medic, as a man who’d once had to scrape blood and magic off prisoners so volatile they couldn’t be left to their own reflection. This wasn’t new.

But it felt new.

He dipped the sponge in the water—still cold—and wrung it once. Water pattered against stone. Then he stepped forward.

The first touch landed at the shoulder. Voldemort didn’t flinch, but Harry saw it—goosebumps, rippling up along his arm, the body reacting even when the mind wouldn’t show it. Harry said nothing. Just moved methodically, clinically, as though Voldemort were a mannequin and not the monster who’d once split the world open with a word.

He scrubbed the collarbones, careful but firm. Dipped again. Moved to the back. Ribs. Spine. Shoulder blades so sharp they jutted like wings beneath skin.

The scars there told a story Harry didn’t want to read—too symmetrical, too cruel. Binding rituals. Magic that had once burst from his veins now sealed in by pulsing grey runes. They glowed faintly with every pass of the sponge. Un-killable magic. Even here. Even now.

Voldemort didn’t speak.

The skin was cool. Unblemished, save for a lattice of faint, arcane scars that mapped themselves like veins. The nipples were small, pink, hardened from the water. Human. Startlingly so. The reality of it made Harry's stomach lurch—not from desire, never that—but from the jarring intimacy. The normalcy.

Voldemort breathed evenly. Not calm, exactly. But composed. Like a man tolerating inconvenience.

Harry moved on.

When Harry moved to the chest, he kept his touch quick. Efficient. Down the arms, each finger cleaned with sterile precision. Then down the flanks. Hip. Thigh. The sponge moved, cold and steady, and Harry didn’t let his hands shake. Couldn’t.

And then—

Well.

There was only so much he could ignore.

The cock hung, pale and soft between Voldemort’s legs—flaccid, unimpressive, startling only because it existed at all. Harry hadn’t let himself imagine this part of the job, hadn’t needed to—but here it was. Awkward. Obvious. Human.

Too human.

He hesitated for half a breath. Then bent, murmured something like apology (to himself, maybe), and wiped it down with ruthless detachment. One swipe. Then another. No lingering. No thought.

Still, it lingered in his mind. The absolute wrongness of this—of washing the man who killed so many, who broke the world, who still stood like a ruined monument to power.

By the time he reached the knees, the bucket was nearly black with filth.

He stood again, sponge dripping.

“You’re done,” he said roughly, already peeling off the gloves.

But Voldemort didn’t move. Harry turned toward the door. And that’s when the hand caught his wrist.

It wasn’t violent—just sudden. Just there. Pale fingers curled tight around his wrist, the thumb pressing directly against his pulse.

Harry froze.

Voldemort looked up at him then—hair matted, clinging to his temples in wet tangles. His body was clean now, shining faintly in the lamplight like polished marble. His scent had changed too—no longer stale and unwashed, but neutral. Almost human.

“My hair,” he said simply.

Harry blinked. “What?”

“My hair,” Voldemort repeated, tone dry as bone. “You missed it.”

Harry looked down at the bucket. At the sodden sponge.

Harry blinked again. Like an idiot.

Because Voldemort looked, somehow, offended. Not outraged. Not amused. But insulted, like Harry had forgotten some vital courtesy of a duel. You’ve scrubbed my arse, Potter, but heaven forbid you forget the scalp.

“Right,” Harry muttered, dragging a hand down his face. “Of course.”

He glanced at the bucket, then back at the man still holding his wrist. Still naked. Still staring.

“I’ll need more water.”

Voldemort didn’t answer. Just let go of him with a look that said see to it.

Harry left, boots squelching.

When he returned, the bucket steamed faintly in the cold air. He’d gone up four levels to the staff washroom just to find something that smelled—not like bleach or dust—but clean. Eucalyptus and mint. A bar of soap wrapped in brown paper. Probably another warden’s doing, if he had to guess. Or some well-meaning junior archivist who thought the Deep Cells deserved a touch of civility.

Harry dropped it beside the bucket with a grunt, then stripped off his gloves and tossed them aside. They’d be useless here—Voldemort’s hair was too thick now, too matted, too human. He’d need actual hands.

Gods help him.

He dipped the sponge, then his fingers, and moved behind him.

“Head forward,” Harry said.

Voldemort didn’t reply. But he obeyed.

The hair was longer than it looked from the observation orb—curled faintly at the nape, knotted in places. Grease clung to the roots like wax. Harry tried with the sponge first, dragging it through in slow, efficient strokes, but it snagged almost immediately, catching in the tangles. The water darkened fast. It wasn’t enough.

Harry sighed—long, through his nose—and dropped the sponge. He dipped his bare hands into the bucket. Warm, not hot. Good enough.

Then, carefully—reluctantly—he touched Voldemort’s scalp.

Not roughly. Not gently. Just firmly, like he’d done it a hundred times before. Like it didn’t matter. He pressed water into the roots, dragged his fingers through, loosening the worst of it with short, mechanical strokes.

Voldemort didn’t speak. But his shoulders dipped, almost imperceptibly. A kind of stillness that wasn’t surrender, exactly, but… restraint.

Harry kept going. Rinsed, lathered, dragged the mint soap across his palms, worked it through the strands. The scent rose slowly, crisp and clean, fighting its way against the stench of stone and sweat and something old beneath it.

And beneath his hands—goosebumps again. So faint they could’ve been imagined. A shiver, maybe. But Voldemort said nothing. So Harry didn’t either.

He focused on the scalp, the base of the neck. Rinsed again. Repeated. The soap foamed now, clinging to Harry’s wrists, his nails, sliding down Voldemort’s spine in thin white threads.

It was horrible. Intimate. Silent.

But it was working. The smell changed. The filth ran clear.

And then—his fingers brushed the back of Voldemort’s neck. Accidental. Brief. A slip of motion as he adjusted the sponge.

But Voldemort shuddered.

Not violently. Not visibly. Just a flicker beneath the skin, like a current passing through the muscles of his spine. A tremble too controlled to be fear. Too quick to be anything but real.

Harry’s breath caught. His fingers froze.

And then—worse—his scar burned.

Not the searing agony of a curse, not the sharp-hot spike of rage that used to come with visions of blood and graveyards and snakes. No. This was softer. Stranger. A kind of satisfaction. Like something low and ancient inside him was purring.

The Horcrux. It stirred.

Not violently—but pleased.

As if Voldemort, deep and buried and somehow still entangled in the fibres of Harry’s soul, was… content.

Clean, the feeling whispered. Finally.

Harry jerked his hand back like he’d been scalded. His breath hissed between his teeth, but he didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Just waited, counted three slow heartbeats, then forced himself to rinse the soap away.

Don’t think about it. Don’t give it power.

He finished the task mechanically. Neck, shoulders, down the spine. The water was cooling fast, but Voldemort didn’t flinch. Didn’t move at all, in fact—except for that single, silent tremble still echoing in Harry’s bones.

And Harry, at last, dropped his hands with a breath that sounded far too much like relief.

“There,” he muttered, throat dry. “Now you smell like a bloody herb garden.”

Voldemort didn’t thank him. Of course he didn’t. He just reached for the towel with the slow, measured grace of someone reclaiming a little power. A little self.

Harry didn’t wait for a parting remark. He stood, wiped his hands dry on the same towel (because fuck it), and retrieved the bucket with a wet slap of boots against stone.

As he stepped toward the door, Voldemort finally spoke.

“Next time,” he said, voice low and measured, “start with the hair.”

Harry didn’t turn.

“Next time,” he muttered, “you can bathe your own damn scalp.”

But he didn’t mean it. Because they both knew there would be a next time. And Harry would still be the one holding the soap.

And something in him—something small, scarred, and entirely wrong—wouldn’t mind.

── ◈ ──

He came into the cell screaming.

No theatrics. No last words. Just rage—howling, unformed, volcanic. The Dark Lord dragged in chains like carrion, lungs split raw with fury, voice unraveling into long threads of Parseltongue that made the stone bleed cold.

They hadn't known what to do with him. Not really.

They'd built the prison like a tomb—layered with dead magic, sealed in blood and theory and hope. And for a time, it worked. He couldn't cast. Couldn't Apparate. Couldn't speak a single word of true power without the wards hissing back.

But words weren’t all he had.

So he screamed. Day after day, hour after hour, language rotting into sound. He spoke spells he couldn’t cast, summoned things that wouldn’t come. He bit one warden clean through the forearm—tongue slick with copper, laughing, laughing, as they dragged the man away. He whispered to water. Sang to metal. Charmed a chamber pot into writhing once—just once—before they took it away forever.

They tried silence after that.

Guards who couldn’t speak. Rooms without corners. Food slid in on spell-slick trays, cold and beige and meant to sap the will to live. His robes were changed while he slept—dosed, unconscious. When he woke, he was clean and furious and covered in runes he couldn’t see.

He tore them off with his nails.

Once, he caught sight of himself in a reflective plate left too close to the wall. Saw the bones in his face, the hollows beneath his eyes. Saw the way his skin no longer gleamed white like marble, but grey—like ash.

He struck it with both fists until his knuckles split open. It wasn't strategy. It wasn't even revenge. It was refusal.

Refusal to be seen like that. Refusal to exist in a box they built for men. He was not a man. He was more. He had shed skin and name and body for something better. And now they had caged him in it.

So he howled. He paced. He tore the seams from his cot and braided them into sigils. He spoke to the bolts in the floor until they glowed red with heat. He licked blood from the edge of a silver spoon and saw something—old magic, wrong magic, enough to kill a man if he’d just had one more second—

But they’d stopped that too. Changed the uniforms. Took away the metal fastenings. Gave the wardens cloth pins and gloves stitched with wards. Spoke only in code.

He stopped understanding them. Stopped trying.

Except when they whispered.

They thought he couldn’t hear. Or maybe they thought he wouldn’t understand. But he always understood. Even in madness. Especially in madness.

And that’s how he learned.

Nagini. Dead.

Not lost. Not hidden. Not betrayed.

Beheaded. In front of witnesses. With Gryffindor’s sword.

He didn’t move when he heard it. Not at first. Just sat on the cot, eyes open, hands slack, heart doing something strange and human in his chest.

Then he screamed.

Not rage. Not strategy. Grief. Real and raw and unbearable.

She had been the last. The last hum of his soul that he could feel. The last Horcrux that breathed and moved and curled beneath his touch. He had made her with care. With intention. She had been his—his warmth, his vengeance, his anchor in a body that was no longer his own.

And now she was gone. Cut down like a beast. In a crowd. By a boy with a sword.

He stopped speaking after that. For weeks.

Not out of strategy. Not even rebellion. But because language no longer meant anything. He forgot English. Forgot Latin. Slipped fully into Parseltongue, but even that began to rot at the edges—words collapsing into sound, syllables curling into hisses. He spoke in loops. Echoed the same phrases over and over, old mantras from rituals long dead. Not to cast. Just to hear.

Eventually, even that unraveled. He forgot his name. For three full days, he couldn’t remember it.

Not Lord. Not Riddle. Not Tom.

He looked at his hands and didn’t know whose they were. He tried biting off a finger. Just to feel something that belonged to him. The blood was real. The pain was real.

But the self? The self was gone.

All that remained was pacing.

Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again.

The walls didn’t move. But sometimes—when the lights flickered—he swore they leaned inward, just slightly. Just enough to press against his skull.

Time became strange. Liquid. He slept with his eyes open. He counted the veins in his wrist instead of the hours. Every breath sounded like someone else's.

They sent healers. Unspeakables. Curse-breakers and mind-flayers. None stayed long. He bit one. Drove another to tears just by looking at her. The youngest one screamed when he spoke in Parseltongue.

So he whispered it, later, when the lights were off. Just to hear the sound of someone else's footsteps running.

He remembered the Elder Wand in flashes.

The feel of it—wrong in his hand. The way it resisted. The way it screamed when Potter caught it. That stupid boy. That cursed, lucky boy. He'd tried to kill him so many times, and each time—each time—he slipped away.

And now, in the silence that stretched between screams, Voldemort began to wonder.

Not with rage. Not with strategy. There was no room for conquest in this kind of stillness. No grand plan to unfold, no battle to be won. Only questions. Heavy, clinging, inescapable. They came to him in fragments at first—shards of thought breaking through the fog.

How had the wand betrayed him?

It had been his by right. By death. By design. He had killed Snape for it. Taken it with blood still warm. And yet—it hadn’t yielded. Not truly. Not in that final clash beneath the burning trees. It had leapt for Potter’s hand like a pet returned to its master. Why?

How had the boy survived?

He cast it. Not some flinch, not some half-curse mumbled in desperation. Avada Kedavra, clear and resounding—ancient, perfect. He felt it leave his wand like a blade unsheathed. He saw it strike, saw the boy caught in its emerald glare like a moth in flame.

There was no deflection. No shielding. No clever Protego or sacrificial ward. It hit him.

And still—he lived.

Not stumbled. Not scarred. Lived.

There had been a moment—just a breath, really—where the clearing held its silence like a body holding its last gasp. Where even Voldemort had felt it. The old magic rippling through the trees, through the stone, through his wand hand—wrong.

The curse should have taken him. The boy had faced it without defence. Had stood there, eyes open, hands slack, as if he meant to meet death like an old friend.

And yet—he rose.

As though nothing had happened. As though the most perfect, final magic in existence had been... tolerated.

It had broken something in Voldemort, that moment. Not just his pride. Not just his faith in prophecy or wandwork or the thousand dark rites he’d bound into his very blood. It had cracked the spine of certainty. Shattered the idea that power, when absolute, could never be thwarted.

The wand had faltered. The boy had lived.

He should have died.

But he hadn’t. And worse—he had won.

Voldemort remembered it with agonising clarity. Not the duel itself, though that too lived behind his eyes in sharp fragments and scorched air. No—the boy's face was the part that haunted him. That quiet, terrible expression. Not victory. Not even relief.

Pity.

Like death hadn’t come for him. Like he chose not to die. That was the moment Voldemort had known. Truly known.

The curse had not failed. The boy had refused it.

And Voldemort had not asked how—not at first. He had raged instead. Had clawed at the walls of his cell and spat curses in tongues that rotted the air. Had spoken in Parseltongue until the walls wept with magic and the guards begged to be reassigned. He had relived it, night after night—the green light, the boy’s stillness, the failure.

But now, in the quiet spaces between madness, the question began to take root.

How?

What magic allowed the soul to deny death?

What power let a boy—no longer a boy—walk away from the one spell no one walks away from?

Not blood. Not love. Not prophecy. He had accounted for those. Had dissected every variable, broken them open like bones for the marrow of their meaning. And still—he lived.

Voldemort sat with the question now. Not because he wanted to. Because it refused to leave. Because it stalked him like the pacing. Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again. Thought for thought. Name for name.

The Hallows.

He’d always thought the wand was enough.

The other two were trifles—myths, children’s stories. A stone that raised the dead? A cloak that turned shadows? Nonsense. Sentimentalities for fools and wandless dreamers. But the wand—the wand—he had wanted. Coveted. Claimed.

And it had betrayed him.

Not because he was unworthy. Never that. But because the boy had held something he did not. Not strength. Not cunning. Not even courage.

Completion.

Voldemort had pursued power in fragments—splitting himself, rending his soul, drinking the dark draught of immortality in draughts of horror. But Potter? That boy had gathered power whole.

Had he claimed them all?

The wand, yes. He remembered the moment. How it leapt to Potter’s hand as if it knew him. As if the wood itself had been waiting.

The cloak—he’d had that, hadn’t he? Even as a child. Slipping past Death Eaters, vanishing into thin air. Too consistent for trickery. Too precise.

And the stone—could it be? Had he found it? Hidden it, held it, pressed it into his palm while death approached and chose not to answer?

The Hallows. All three.

Master of Death.

The phrase used to make him scoff. A fable. A title conjured by fools who didn’t understand what death meant. But now—

Now it tasted different in his mouth. Like prophecy. Like regret. He had gone hunting for pieces. For power carved up like meat. And the boy—the boy had gathered something whole.

He should have chased them all.

He should have torn apart the earth for them. Should have scoured every grave and tale and bloodline. But he hadn’t. He’d gone for the wand and dismissed the rest.

Because he thought he was already greater than Death. But Potter had made Death kneel. And that, Voldemort thought bitterly, was the difference between victory and defeat.

Between legend and exile. Between a god ascending—and a man entombed.

And that was when he thought of her.

Of Nagini.

His last Horcrux. The final tether. She had died in public. Beheaded like a common beast by Longbottom—Longbottom, of all people—with Gryffindor’s sword. It should have ended there. The rest were gone—he had felt their absence like teeth pulled from bone. The diary. The cup. The ring. The locket. All severed. All lost. And now Nagini. Gone. The line should have snapped.

So why was he still here?

Why did he wake each morning in this stone womb with a heart that still beat, with fingers that hadn’t withered, with skin that hadn’t decayed? Why did he still feel?

The answers didn’t come. Not in words. Not yet. But they began to coil at the edges of his thoughts—soft, insidious. Not certainty, but suspicion. Not knowledge, but dread. Something was wrong. Or perhaps—something was still unfinished.

They still called it imprisonment. The guards. The papers. The whispering fools in black who came with clipboards and did not meet his eyes. But he had stopped thinking of it as punishment. It was containment, now. A suspension of meaning. A long, surgical silence in which only the world outside continued to breathe. Here, in this stone crucible, time moved differently. Or not at all.

There were no clocks in the cell. No calendar carved into the wall. No sunrise to track across the floor. He learned the seasons by sensation alone—the scald of winter bathwater on his spine, the press of summer heat beneath the roof vents when they cracked open for five sanctioned minutes of air. Even those rituals grew muted. Mechanical. Forgettable. All save one.

They never opened the door fully anymore.

Not since Year Two.

He remembers it with terrible clarity. Not as days, but as incidents. The year of screaming spells into stone until the language itself blistered. The year of silverware filed against concrete, of sigils carved with spoons and blood and teeth. The year of the warden who lost an eye—torn from its socket in a moment of communion too close to violence. After that, the guards stopped pretending he could be managed.

They sent Unspeakables. Silent men in robes that stank of wards and buried gods. They did not speak, but they watched. Took notes. Reinforced the door with something older than spellwork—something that hummed when he slept and burned when he did not.

Even they did not stay long.

He watched them thin out. Grow nervous. One blinked too often. One flinched when he smiled. The last left shaking, and did not return. No replacement came. No explanation was offered. Only the door, sealed tighter. Only the silence, stretching wider.

Even rage, he learned, had its limits.

By Year Three, he began to feel it—the slow rot of stillness. Not the kind that screams, but the kind that softens the walls, leaches the bite from thought, dulls even hatred into habit. Power, once ritual, had become routine. Rage no longer flared; it flickered. Not because it had vanished—but because it had nothing left to consume.

He told himself it was strategy. Survival. Adaptation to an enemy he could no longer touch. But even lies require listeners, and he had none.

And so, he began to think.

Not the spiralling, frantic scheming of old. Not the blood-hot obsession with Potter or prophecy or the shatter-point of the wand. This thinking was different. Cold. Surgical. There was no one left to perform for. No followers to rally. No snake to whisper to in the dark. No war to cast his shadow across. Just stone, and silence, and the soft hiss of his own breath.

So he turned his gaze inward.

And what he found there was ruin.

He began, of course, with the wand. With Snape’s death, and the betrayal of its loyalty. With the boy—always the boy—and the moment the curse struck true and failed. But clarity, once summoned, does not obey.

It spread. Invasive. Unrelenting.

He could not stop seeing it: the architecture of his own undoing. The empire of isolation he had built stone by stone. The punishments meted out not for treason, but for fear. Lucius, broken under too many expectations. Bellatrix, turned rabid by the weight of unshared power. Barty—mad, loyal, discarded. The Lestranges, used like blades, dulled and tossed aside. Even Severus, his most useful piece, his careful blade—spent and sacrificed.

He had kept secrets from them all. Hoarded power as if it would rot in others' hands. As if divinity could not suffer proximity. He had ruled through silence, commanded loyalty through terror, and wondered—truly wondered—why no one had caught him when he fell.

In the quiet of his cell, Voldemort was forced to admit: He had no one left to betray him, because he had trusted no one long enough to be betrayed.

The rage stopped tasting like power. He told himself he hadn’t given up—only changed strategies. He listened now. Collected news from careless whispers. From the backs of passing wardens and the tired jokes of the older guards.

The world had moved on.

“No one says my name with fear anymore,” he whispered once, to the wall. “Only theory.”

He puzzled over the wand again. Over Severus’s death. “Why didn’t it obey me?” he asked aloud, knowing there would be no answer. “I killed its master.”

But the deeper he thought, the more the rot revealed itself. The madness had crept in with the Horcruxes—small at first, then cavernous. He had believed splitting the soul would make him immortal. Instead, it had made him monstrous. Wild. Inhuman.

Now—horribly, uncomfortably—he was whole.

And for the first time in half a century, Voldemort felt something close to lucidity.

He reviewed it all. Every failure. Every assumption. Every lie he had told himself and called it prophecy. Every punishment inflicted to remind the world he was still feared. He sat for hours like a monk in penance, motionless on the cot. So still that one guard dropped his tray in fright. He didn’t blink.

“What was I thinking?” he asked himself once, low and stunned—not with regret. But with clarity.

He replayed it all. Not just the final duel, but every moment that led to it. The choices that felt like genius then, now gleaming with stupidity in retrospect. He had mocked Dumbledore’s belief in love, in unity, in trust. Called it weakness. But what had his own doctrine bought him? A graveyard of followers. A boy who pitied him. A wand that refused his hand.

He spoke less. Slept more. Let the pacing become penance. Not performance, not defiance. A ritual of recognition. Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again. With each turn, he mapped the limits of a world he had ruled—and lost—without ever understanding.

By Year Three, he did not rage. He remembered. And the remembering was worse.

By Year Five, the cell no longer felt like punishment. It felt like prophecy fulfilled.

There had always been a cell, he realised—only now was he small enough to see it. Not the stone and warded walls, but the shape of his own life, pressed inward by power until it was hollow at the core. This was no longer exile. It was the truth made manifest: the self, stripped of pageantry.

He ate when the trays appeared. Slept when the lights dimmed. Listened when the guards forgot they were being listened to.

Sometimes the whispers reached him. Through stone, through idle muttering, through the casual disdain of men too young to remember fear. He learned what he could. The Ministry was stable. The boy—Potter—was gone, or silent, or irrelevant. And his name—his name—was spoken only in academic tones, buried in case files and containment manuals.

The Riddle Case, they called him. V-Mort Suppression Protocol. Clinical. Cold.

Once, a young warder called him it. Another, laughing, said the remnant.

Voldemort laughed too. Quiet. Long. Unbelieving.

Because they weren’t wrong.

By Year Six, he stopped answering to titles.

No more Dark Lord. No Serpent of Death. No Master of Anything. Those names belonged to firelight and banners and bodies laid at his feet. He let them rot. The only name he kept was his own.

Voldemort.

Not because it held power. But because it held shape. A spine, a seam. Something intact in a world that had forgotten him.

And yet—still—they fumbled it. Said it wrong. Softened the “t,” avoided the vowels. One guard—a boy, no older than Draco had been—called him Mr. Riddle, voice shaking like a clock about to break.

Voldemort didn’t correct him.

There was nothing left to correct.

By Year Seven, even the ritual lost its teeth.

Eight steps. Pivot. Eight steps again. Not for meaning. Not even for rhythm. Merely to hold the body together. A kind of somatic tethering, like breath or blink or blood flow. Maintenance, nothing more.

He no longer tested the walls. Had long since ceased muttering in Parseltongue to the bolts in the floor, or pressing his palms to the runes carved into the far corner. Magic did not answer. Dreams did not come. Only the shape of his body, repeating itself in time.

Still, he watched.

He watched the guards. The bend of their necks. The way their shoulders lifted when they laughed in the corridor, forgetting he was listening. He studied their habits. Not with purpose—but with presence. The way an old spider might watch the wind.

The new ones didn’t flinch. They didn’t know who he was. Not really. They saw a man—silent, strange, half-mad—sitting on a cot with hair grown too long and eyes that no longer glittered red. Some called him sir. Some said nothing at all.

None said Lord.

By Year Eight, the days blurred entirely. No memory of meals. No sense of when the lights rose or fell. The pacing remained, but it untethered from thought. His body moved because it remembered how. He marked time by his own degradation—by the callus worn into the heel of his palm from bracing against the wall, the frayed edge of the cot he rubbed between thumb and forefinger until the nail cracked.

By Year Nine, even the silence stopped feeling sharp.

He no longer felt anything. Not anger. Not grief. Not even the cold clarity that had once replaced them. He had become an object of interest, not dread. They studied him. Took readings. Whispered notes to floating quills while he stared at nothing.

They brought Unspeakables again. He didn’t look at them.

He forgot what month it was. What season. Whether the guards had changed shifts. He thought he might be forgetting words—whole languages, vanishing from inside him. Sometimes he mouthed spells, but not in any tongue that sounded familiar. Just noise. Just breath.

He was not dying. He was not healing. He was being preserved.

Once, he pressed both hands to the floor and whispered a spell so old it cracked his tongue to speak it. Nothing happened. But something answered in him—like the echo of a heartbeat in a sealed jar. Faint. Distant. But there.

And he understood.

This was not life. Not death. It was the breath before the sentence ends.

He had not aged. His skin remained smooth. His bones sharp beneath it. His eyes, dull though they were, had not sunken. His breath remained steady. Too steady. Like the moment in the forest had never passed. Like Potter’s refusal had suspended him—trapped him in a state not built for humans to survive.

A limbo he’d crafted for himself.

And so he paced. And he watched. And time went still.

Until the day it shattered.

It was routine by then. The lav escort. The slow, quiet procession through corridors carved in silence and layered in runes. One guard ahead. One behind. No words exchanged, only clipped gestures. His wrists were always bound, his pace always measured. He didn’t resist. Hadn’t for years. Submission had long ceased to be surrender. It was just function. The cell, the chain, the walk—his world was clockwork now. A procession of sameness, mechanical and stripped of meaning.

And then the door opened.

It was nothing, at first. The same hallway. The same air, sterile and still. But something had changed. Not the light. Not the smell. Something deeper. An unease in the air—an instinct. A presence.

There was a third figure in the corridor.

Not a guard. Not a healer.

Potter.

The recognition was instant, chemical. Not boyish anymore—no softness, no clumsy limbs. He stood taller than Voldemort remembered. Broader, heavier through the shoulders. Combat-trained. Muscled. No longer hiding behind robes two sizes too large or adolescent posture. A wand was strapped to his side like a second limb, his jaw sharp, his expression unreadable.

But it was the gaze that pierced.

Potter looked at him. Measured him. And what Voldemort saw in that gaze was not hatred. Not even caution.

Indifference.

As though he were a box checked. A ghost pinned in formaldehyde. A threat no longer feared, but filed.

Something inside him buckled. Not physically—his body didn’t lurch—but something internal coiled and snapped. Fury surged up his spine, wild and ancient and hot. Not strategic, not theatrical. Emotion. Real and shameful.

He moved before he could stop himself. The chains clanged. The guards swore. His throat cracked open.

“Potter!” he screamed. “I’ll kill you! I’ll rip the skin from your bones, I’ll—”

But they were already on him. Hands at his shoulders, his wrists. A ward flared at his neck, silencing the next word before it formed. He thrashed—not to break free, but because the humiliation was too much. He had shouted. He had begged to be acknowledged. And Potter—Potter—hadn’t even flinched.

He was dragged backward, still snarling, until the cot caught the backs of his knees. They shoved him down like a beast that had forgotten its chains. His chest heaved. His fingers clenched. Something in his veins itched, electric. Old magic—slumbering too long—had stirred.

Potter said nothing.

He turned. Walked away. Not with triumph. Not with mockery.

With disinterest.

Didn’t even spare him a second look.

Voldemort sat motionless long after the door shut. He felt his own breath. Heard it, even. Too loud. Too fast. His pulse thundered in his skull. His mouth was dry. The cell had not changed—but he had.

Because for the first time in years, he felt.

Not clarity. Not madness. Rage.

It unsteadied him. It shamed him.

And it told him something he wasn’t ready to know.

He was not empty.

Not yet.

── ◈ ──

It begins as performance. Strategy. Control through chaos. Voldemort knows the timing of Harry’s visits down to the second—footsteps in the corridor, the soft grind of the final ward disengaging. He prepares accordingly. The tray isn’t simply thrown; it’s launched with precision, high and fast, the soup exploding across stone like bile from a corpse. When Potter enters, he’s met with lentils and blood and a smile that means fuck you. Voldemort’s lip is split, self-inflicted. He grins through it. Says nothing. Let the silence work.

But Potter doesn’t rise to it. Doesn’t flinch. Just sets the second tray outside the warded reach like Voldemort is an animal in a cage. Then he leaves. No insult. No lecture. Just... leaves.

The silence is worse than fury. It lands with weight.

The next morning, Potter returns with a bucket. A rag. He doesn’t even glance Voldemort’s way. Just crouches, knees cracking, and begins to scrub. Like Voldemort is the mess. Like this place has reduced him to grime beneath another man’s fingernails. Voldemort watches, still and silent, but inside, something scrapes. He’s being ignored. Managed. Sanitised.

So he escalates.

That night, he hurls the mug first—ceramic sailing past Potter’s head—then the tray, rebounding off the wall. And finally, himself. He lunges. Not with magic, but with bone and fury. No form, no finesse, just teeth and elbows and rage. He breaks skin. He tastes Harry again. Blood coats his mouth like communion wine. It feels right.

But Potter fights like someone who’s survived too much. He pins Voldemort fast, arm to his throat, breath steaming with control. Voldemort meets his eyes and smiles, the blood making him feral. You bleed. Good. It's a victory, however small.

And yet—Potter doesn’t retaliate. Doesn’t punish. Just throws him off like something beneath notice and walks out. Leaves him there, breathless, bloodied, dismissed. No repercussions follow. No further guards. Not even questions.

That’s when Voldemort understands. This isn’t mercy.

It’s indifference.

So when Potter returns the next day with the bathing bucket, Voldemort wastes no time. He throws it straight at his chest, douses him in cold water, soap, and contempt. The look on Potter’s face is almost worth it. Almost. But then—he leaves. Silent. Again.

And he doesn’t come back.

Not with another bucket. Not with soap. Not with anything.

The filth begins to build. The sweat. The oil. His hair mats at the roots. His robe clings unpleasantly to his spine. He catches his own scent when he moves too quickly. It sinks into his skin, into the stones, and Voldemort knows—Potter is watching. Somewhere behind a warded orb, sipping his tea, noting each flicker of discomfort with clinical detachment.

Voldemort doesn’t break. Doesn’t pace like prey. But he does look.

He turns. Deliberate. Intentional. His eyes find the mirrored surface, find the watcher. He doesn’t speak. Just lifts his chin. Not a nod. Not quite. But enough. A signal.

It’s the worst kind of surrender—chosen, not taken.

When Potter returns, Voldemort doesn’t waste breath. He disrobes without instruction, lets the robe fall like smoke at his feet. Stands tall, bare, unashamed. If he must be washed like livestock, he will not do it cowering. Let Potter look. Let him see what war has made. A body carved with ritual. A life preserved in scars. A ruin, but still a monument.

Potter washes him with all the warmth of a mortician. Hands gloved. Motions clinical. Eyes carefully averted. Voldemort doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak. Endures it like the price of breath. It’s not dignity, but it’s not defeat either.

Until the end. When Potter turns to leave, Voldemort grabs his wrist. Not harsh. Not cruel. Just there. His thumb presses against the pulse point—steady, alive.

“You missed my hair,” he says.

The words are deliberate. Not petty. Not theatrical. Just true. If he is to be handled like something incapable, then the task will be done properly. Fully. With precision.

Potter leaves again, jaw tight. He returns with new water. A bar of soap that smells of mint and memory. This time, he doesn’t use gloves.

The hair is worse. It snags. It resists. And then—Potter’s hands. In his hair. On his scalp. Firm. Familiar. The touch of someone who has done this before. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just... carefully.

Voldemort doesn’t move. But inside—something knots.

Because it has been years since anyone touched him without violence. Because the soap smells clean. Too clean. Because the hands in his hair don’t belong to a Ministry drone or a terrified Unspeakable. They belong to Harry fucking Potter.

And Voldemort feels it—the involuntary shiver when fingers brush the base of his skull. Not pain. Not pleasure. Something quieter. More dangerous. A memory trying to claw its way back into a body that no longer dreams.

And then Potter’s hand brushes the back of his neck.

Just a flicker—fingertips dragging across the spine, adjusting the sponge. A nothing motion. A servant’s gesture. But Voldemort feels it.

Not the touch.

The pulse.

Magic hums beneath the skin. Not Potter’s usual magic—wild, golden, annoyingly righteous—but something else. Older. Deeper. Familiar in the marrow. It slithers across his nerves like oil over glass. Warmer than it should be. Dense. Anchored. Soul-rich.

He stiffens. Almost flinches. Because he knows that magic.

Nagini.

That’s what it is. That same resonance. The one that used to curl through his ribcage when she coiled around his ankles. The low thrum of connection. The weight of his soul—fragmented, stretched—but still his. That shard had lived in her. Warm. Animal. Faithful. He could feel it when she was close. It vibrated in his bones.

He feels it now. In Potter’s touch.

No. No, that’s not possible.

His mind turns, sharp and fast. The locket. The diadem. The ring. Nagini. He counted them. He felt them die. Each loss a wound. He’d know if one remained.

Wouldn’t he?

It has to be something else. Some residue. Some leftover thread of prophecy or wand-lore or shared blood. Some echo from the forest—the curse that should have killed him and didn’t. Some curse of Potter’s own making, tangled in fate and foolishness.

But the feeling answers him.

That’s the worst part.

Like a door creaking open. Like a serpent lifting its head. Not sentient. Not aware. But familiar. As if some part of him—dormant, buried, presumed dead—has just recognised its master.

His throat tightens.

He says nothing. Doesn’t move. Lets Potter finish the wash in silence.

But inside, he’s spiralling.

Because that hum—that awful, soul-slick resonance—shouldn’t exist.

He closed his eyes, just for a moment. Felt the water drip from his scalp. Let the breath catch and slow.

No, he told himself. It can’t be.

But deep in the pit of him—beneath every ward, every rune, every clawing scrap of pride—something stirred.

And answered.

Yes.

── ◈ ──

He does not sleep. He never has.

In this hollow place beneath the world, time coagulates—thick and airless, unmoving as blood left to rot. The stone breathes no warmth, offers no rhythm. Nothing shifts but memory—and even that is too exact, too honed, to be called dream.

Tom Riddle—no longer Lord Voldemort, not truly—sits with his back to the wall, unmoving. Eyes open. Watching the dark.

He remembers the forest. The boy. The curse. He remembers the moment of death—not his own, but the one that never came. The Killing Curse had struck. That much is certain. The wand obeyed. The boy stood still. And yet—he had not fallen. Not truly. Not wholly. There was a shudder, a silence. A recoil not seen but felt. Something had twisted, not shattered. Something had fled.

It is only now, centuries deep and silence-rich, that the question forms. Not a cry, not an accusation. 

A whisper. “Is that what happened?” 

And once spoken, it cannot be unspoken. 

He replays the moment, as he has done a thousand times, but now through new eyes. The Hallows had circled them both—Potter wrapped in the Cloak, armed with a wand that would not bend, dragging with him a Stone that could not save. Yet it was not those relics that gave him dominion. It was something else. A resilience. A tether. A mark.

He will mark him as his equal.

Was it prophecy or curse? The scar, yes. But more than that. Something buried deeper than skin or fate. Tom Riddle stares down at his own wrist, pale beneath the dim candlelight, as if seeking a scar that does not exist. He sees nothing. But he feels it—that twist beneath the surface, that strange resistance that had always eluded reason. Not power. Not pain. Possession. Not of himself. Of Potter.

Tom Riddle sits with his back against the wall, unmoving, eyes open to the dark. He does not sleep. He watches the stone instead, as if waiting for it to shift. But it never does. Only memory moves here—slow, deliberate, unkind.

Godric’s Hollow. A nursery cloaked in shadow. 

A child barely breathing, wrapped in a blanket stitched by hands now long buried. He remembers the house—how easily it opened. The parents—how quickly they fell. The wand in his hand. The boy in the crib. The curse. He had spoken the words. Had meant them. Had felt the surge of magic break free like blood from a vein. But then—nothing. No death. No silence. Only agony. An agony so absolute it had erased everything else. He remembers the scream. Not the boy’s. His own. He remembers falling, not to the ground, but out of himself, as if his soul had torn and scattered like ash in wind.

Had it happened then?

He had not prepared a vessel. Had not planned the split. But something had broken—oh, he had felt it. Felt the rending, the flaying, the unbearable rupture at the core of him. Had his soul, in its terror, in its instinct to survive, reached out? Had it found the only living thing in reach—and buried itself there, like rot in fruit? He remembers the boy’s eyes. Green. Wide. Still watching him even as he ceased to be. The boy had lived. And he—he had become something less than ghost. No body. No name. Only a tether. Only a mark.

He had wondered for years why death never came. Why resurrection was possible. Why he had endured when others had not. Now, decades too late, the shape of it begins to take form. The boy who escaped. The scar that burned. The pull between them—unseen but absolute. He does not need a wand to know. He does not need a spell. There had been no ritual. Only terror. And it had been enough.

Perhaps he had made a Horcrux then. Not out of triumph. But pain. Accident. Instinct.

Perhaps that is why he cannot die. Why the boy could never be free of him.

He closes his eyes, and sees again the crib. The curse. The green light. The scream.

The boy had lived. And so had he.

“No wonder I cannot die,” he breathes, dry-mouthed and trembling with stillness. “No wonder he cannot be rid of me.” 

The final Horcrux. And he never even knew.

He does not move. Not yet. The thought settles in his bones like ash—lightless, final. Tom Riddle sits on the cot, hands slack in his lap, gaze fixed on nothing. But inside him, something stirs. He does not hunger. He does not rage. This is not about revenge. Not now. He needs proof. Certainty. He must touch the tether again. Let it flare beneath his skin like blood warming through a limb long-dead. Not to flee this place. Not yet. He is not ready for the world, nor is it ready for him. But he must know. Must feel it.

Let Potter come again, as he always does. With the cloth and the basin. With the stooped reverence of guilt mistaken for duty. Let him kneel and press cool fingers to his forehead. Let him speak those low, tired greetings that are not quite indifference. Let him touch. And this time, Tom will not flinch. He will not recoil from the contact. He will meet it. He will feel. He will reach back—not with flesh, but with something deeper. Older. The thing that binds them.

The corridor beyond flickers with torchlight, faint and steady. Footsteps murmur in the distance, soft as breath. Still, he waits.

He thinks he watches me. But it is I who waits.

His mouth curves—not in triumph, nor in madness. But in something cold and clear. A recognition. A return.

Let him touch me again—and this time, I will not flinch.

── ◈ ──

Voldemort is up to something.

Harry can feel it.

Not in the air—no, the prison is sealed, pressurised, scrubbed of all ambient magic and temperature and time. Nothing breathes here but them. Not in the wards, either, which remain unmarred, unbroken, sealed as tight as they were the day they carved the first sigil into the stone.

But in the gaze.

That is where the change blooms.

Small, deliberate shifts. A sidelong glance, more curious than contemptuous. A flicker of attention that lingers a breath too long when Harry steps into the room, bearing the heavy tray or the iron key or the silence between them. The way the Dark Lord’s eyes track him now—not like prey, not like prophecy fulfilled, but like a question. Something pondered. Measured.

Alive.

Harry doesn't speak of it. He has learned, over the centuries, that naming a thing gives it form. Gives it teeth. Instead, he watches. Measures. Times the glances. Counts the seconds between each blink when he brings the food, untouched. When he unlocks the rune-sealed door and says nothing. When he fits the manacles to those ruined wrists and leads him—always silent, always bound—down the corridor to the lav.

There, only there, Voldemort is chained. Ritual. Necessity. A precaution more symbolic than practical now, since the runes are etched bone-deep around his ankles and wrists. They hum against Harry’s magic when he touches them. Whisper their own dead language. Sing of containment, of cost.

Inside the cell, there are no chains. No need. Only stillness. Only the endless, watching eyes.

It’s the ease that unsettles him most.

The ritual without resistance.

There was a time—long buried beneath dust and calendars—when Tom Riddle had fought him like fire fights drowning. He had raged in ancient tongues, hurled curses thick with blood and grief, flung his body against iron and silence until something cracked. Once, Harry had to stun him just to drag him to the lav. Once, the chains had teeth.

But now—

He lifts his wrists before Harry even asks. Turns with quiet precision, spine straight, so the clasps can lock around him cleanly. During the baths, he stands motionless, skin steaming, ribs bared like surrender. Not defiant. Not docile.

Willing.

Harry never touches him. Not really. The gloves stay on—thick, charmed leather, lined in dragon-hide. The sponge is wielded like a scalpel: methodical, impersonal, damp with scentless water and antiseptic spells. Every movement clinical. Every gesture rehearsed.

It has to be.

And yet.

There are moments—small, slow treacheries of proximity.

When Harry passes the tray and those pale fingers hover too near the rim. Not close enough to be explicit, but close enough that the Horcrux pulses low behind his ribs. Or when he leans forward under the sponge, exposing the nape of his neck, letting Harry scrub just beneath the jaw—close enough to feel breath, close enough to wait.

Harry always moves away. Fast. Too fast.

And each time, something inside him clenches. Not from fear—but from the pull. That deep, coiling pressure that starts in the scar and winds inward. The Horcrux—it notices. It thrums. Not with pain, but something worse.

Recognition.

As if it’s reaching out, answering something in him.

And Voldemort— Voldemort feels it too. Harry knows he does. He sees it in the way his lashes lower for half a second too long. The soft flare of his nostrils when Harry withdraws. The twitch in his jaw. Barely there. But there.

Not fury.

Disappointment.

This time, when Harry approaches with the manacles, Voldemort’s gaze flickers downward—once, then up again. He lifts his wrists in perfect silence, but there’s something coiled beneath the gesture. Not challenge. Not even amusement.

Just... suggestion.

“You haven’t changed your gloves in days,” he says, conversational. Almost idle. “Are you running low?”

The question hangs between them. Thin as thread. Weighted like stone.

Harry doesn’t answer. Doesn’t flinch. Just fastens the cuffs with the same deliberate pressure, eyes fixed on the metal, not the mouth.

Voldemort doesn’t press. He never does.

But he smiles—just a little. Like someone testing for cracks in old stone.

And Harry—Harry feels it. In the scar. In the bone.

Something waking. Something waiting.

── ◈ ──

The air in Ottery St. Catchpole smells like earth and summer and burning toast.

Harry stands awkwardly in the Burrow’s front garden, hands buried deep in his coat pockets as Ron wrestles with a sun-bleached parasol and Hermione laughs from a wicker chair. Her belly rounds gently beneath her cotton blouse—soft, full, impossible. He hadn’t expected to feel so… distant. She catches him looking and gives him a smile like a lifeline, like she knows.

“Third trimester’s been fine,” she says, easing back as Ron finally stabs the parasol into place. “I just keep craving ice. Constantly. Like I want to chew it. Ron thinks the baby’s part troll.”

“Rubbish,” Ron mutters, wiping his forehead with a grunt. “She’s going to be brilliant. Already kicking like she’s got a wand up her sleeve.”

Harry smiles, but it doesn't reach. “I’m happy for you. Both of you.”

Hermione’s gaze lingers a little too long. “And you?” she asks gently. “How’s the… work?”

He doesn’t answer right away. How do you explain a cell carved into the earth? A body you sponge clean with gloves on? A silence that stares back like it remembers your nightmares?

Instead he says, “Fine.”

Ron says something about the Cannons’ new Keeper. Hermione hums and offers him lemonade. The sunlight feels wrong on his skin.

There was a fire lit. There were biscuits cooling on the counter. The clock on the wall still bore his name—but the hand never pointed to Home. Only Unknown. Sometimes Danger.

They didn’t talk about it. They never did.

They sat for an hour. Maybe two. Hermione asked him about work, and he answered in vague evasions. Ron asked nothing at all. But he watched Harry carefully, in that way he’d always done when they were fifteen and fighting dragons inside themselves.

Before he left, Hermione pressed a hand to his arm.

“You can still come back,” she said. “Whatever it is you think you’re paying for, Harry—it’s been paid.”

He didn’t answer. He only looked at the hearth. At the place where Fred should have been.

He Apparated home to the flat in Godric’s Hollow with a splitting headache and a sinking gut.

Ginny was already there.

The flat smelled faintly of liniment and hair potion. There were broomstick bindings on the floor and a half-empty bottle of Firewhiskey on the table. She stood by the window in her Harpies jacket, hair swept up, skin still flushed from the wind.

“You’re back,” she said, without looking.

“So are you,” he answered.

A long pause.

“I saw Hermione,” he added, as he shrugged off his cloak. “She’s pregnant.”

“I know. I got the owl weeks ago.”

“Did you visit?”

“Of course I did, Harry.” Her voice snapped—quick, sharp, brittle. “Just because you haven’t doesn’t mean the rest of us haven’t moved on with our lives.”

That did it.

“Right, of course,” Harry said, voice rising. “Because playing Quidditch half the year in a different bloody country is exactly what I’d call moving on.”

She turned, eyes blazing. “Don’t you dare throw that in my face. You volunteered for this—this prison. You chose to lock yourself away with him—”

“I’m the only one who can!” he shouted. “You think I wanted this? You think I enjoy—”

“Don’t pretend you hate it,” she cut in, voice trembling. “You live down there like a ghost. You breathe him. You haven’t touched me in months. You don’t even look at me when I owl—”

“Because you don’t get it!” he roared. “None of you do! He’s still alive. He’s thinking. He’s waiting. And if I leave—if I slip up—he’ll win, Ginny. He’ll win.”

“You’re obsessed.”

“You’re gone half the year!”

“I come back!” she yelled. “I come back, and you’re never here! I ask you what we’re doing, Harry, and you never have an answer!”

“I don’t know!” His voice cracked. “I don’t know when I’ll be ready for any of it—marriage, family, a fucking future. I can’t even sleep through the night, Ginny. I can’t breathe when I’m not down there—because at least then I know where he is.”

A silence stretched.

“Hermione’s pregnant,” Ginny said quietly. “She has a life. A future. She fought the same war. And she still—”

“Don’t,” Harry snapped, voice hoarse. “Don’t use her against me.”

“I’m not,” she said. “I’m using me. I want that, Harry. A life. A partner. I want to know when you’re going to ask me to marry you.”

His mouth opened. Closed. Nothing came out.

She laughed—just once. It was a sound without humour. “You can’t even say it.”

“It’s not that simple,” he muttered.

“It is,” she said, sharp now. “It’s exactly that simple. You either want this, or you don’t. I can’t live in this half-life anymore. I don’t see you. You come back like a ghost and disappear before the sheets even go cold.”

He flinched. “That’s not fair.”

“Neither is wasting years of my life on someone who keeps running from it.”

Something in him cracked—rage, grief, shame. He grabbed his cloak from the back of the chair.

She blinked. “What are you doing?”

“I’m going back,” he said, already halfway to the door.

“Harry—”

“You want simple?” He turned to look at her, eyes dark. “This is simple. I can’t be who you want.”

And then he was gone.

Ginny stared at the door. She did not follow.

── ◈ ──

The warden nearly bowls Harry over in the corridor.

“Bloody—slow down,” Harry mutters, stepping aside just in time to avoid being shoulder-checked.

“Sorry, sir—he’s, ah…” The man glances over his shoulder like something might follow. His jaw is tight. Hands trembling. “He’s not been… easy. Today.”

Harry raises an eyebrow. “He’s never easy.”

“No, but—today was different. He was talking. Asking things. Names. Like he knew—like he heard things he shouldn't have.”

Harry’s stomach drops. “What names.”

The warden flinches. “Mine. My daughter’s. Said she played Chaser for Appleby. I—I don’t know how he knew.”

Harry exhales through his nose. Not a sigh. Not quite. “Go,” he says. “I’ve got it.”

The warden doesn't need telling twice. His robes vanish around the corner, boots echoing up the stairwell like retreat.

Harry lingers a moment outside the reinforced door. Steel. Runes. Silence. He presses a hand to the cold stone. Feels the hum beneath.

The fight with Ginny still thrums in his blood. His shoulders ache from holding in too much, his mouth from keeping it shut. He should’ve stayed in bed. Should’ve slept. Should’ve not come back down here this raw, this visible.

But he had. Of course he had.

He opens the door.

The moment he steps inside, the air changes. It always does.

No temperature. No scent. No light but the flickering torch and the low rune-glow from the ward lines etched into the walls.

And him.

Tom Riddle sits on the cot, shirtless, damp. His skin gleams in places—water still clinging to the hollows of his collarbones, dripping down the line of his spine. The robe has been stripped and folded with mockery-precise care at his side. His eyes are half-lidded. Waiting.

“I’d wondered if you’d bother showing,” he murmurs.

Harry says nothing. Just sets down the bucket. Pulls on the gloves.

“Your little shadow was quite… delicate. I think I frightened him.” A pause. “Or perhaps he realised who was really in the room.”

“Stop talking,” Harry says, quiet. Even. He wets the sponge.

Tom doesn’t. Of course he doesn’t.

“You shouldn’t leave them alone with me, Potter. They’re so—eager to prove themselves. But I only have eyes for you.”

Harry scrubs across the shoulder blades, deliberate. Mechanical. Pretending his pulse isn’t a war drum.

“I’m flattered,” he says, dry.

“Oh, you should be,” Voldemort hums. “It’s not just loyalty, of course. You’re simply more… interesting than the rest. And I admit—there’s something about our routines I’ve come to find almost intimate.”

Harry clenches the sponge.

“But really, what does draw you back? I’d assumed you finally left for good. But here you are again. Always you. With the gloves. With the bucket. Tell me—was it guilt that called you back? Or did she?”

That lands.

Harry goes still.

Voldemort tilts his head, eyes glinting. “Ginevra, isn’t it? Ginger hair. Excellent Seeker. Popular in France, I heard.” He smiles, slow and feral. “She’s been quite busy in your absence.”

The sponge drops.

Harry’s fists clench.

“Funny, I thought I heard the guards talking about some lover’s quarrel. Something about rings never given. Beds never warmed. Cold sheets. Cold wives.”

Harry doesn’t speak. He just moves—fast, reckless.

In one motion he grabs Voldemort by the throat and shoves him back into the wall. The chain rattles where it connects, but the runes flare dull blue—they hold.

“Shut up.”

Voldemort grins, teeth white in the half-light. “Ah, there you are.”

They don’t fight like men. Not anymore. They fight like ghosts clawing through the wreckage of themselves.

Harry’s knee hits the cot, then bone. Skin slips wet beneath his grip. Voldemort twists—no wand, no weapon, just instinct and history. His nails rake Harry’s side, catch skin. A head butt. A shove.

The basin crashes to the floor.

Water spills like blood across the stone.

Harry doesn’t care. He sees red.

For months—no, years—he’d held control like a blade. Not out of pride, but necessity. A discipline forged in war, honed through silence, polished every day with the ritual of survival. He’d endured Voldemort’s every taunt with the grace of a seasoned soldier and the cynicism of a man who no longer bleeds easily.

When Voldemort sneered about Lily—your mother died screaming, Potter, and for what?—Harry had only tilted his head, voice dry as bone:

“You’re one to talk about dying in vain, Tom.”

When Voldemort muttered about Sirius—your precious godfather lasted what, fifteen years?—Harry had answered without blinking,

“At least he stayed dead.”

When Voldemort smiled too wide, too slow, and whispered, You remember the forest, don’t you? The way the air tasted? The moment you thought you’d die?—

Harry had simply raised an eyebrow.

“Remind me—who walked away?”

He’d wielded sarcasm like a shield. Let wit dull the edges of pain. He never let the Dark Lord see the bruises beneath. Never let the insult land.

Even when Voldemort described in grotesque detail how Lily must have fallen—Did her legs give out first, or was it the shock? Was there blood, Potter? Was she beautiful when she broke?—

Harry hadn’t flinched. He had dipped the sponge again. Let the silence stretch. Then murmured,

“Careful. You’re starting to sound human.”

That was his power: denial with precision. He never gave Voldemort the pleasure of watching him splinter.

But now—

Now all the wit is ash on his tongue.

All he sees is Ginny’s face. Her voice. The way her mouth trembled before she laughed without humour and said you can’t even say it. The space beside her in the flat. The ring never given.

And this man—this thing—naked and wet and smug and alive, digging claws into the last thing Harry hasn’t buried.

Voldemort is laughing. Winded. Bruised. But laughing.

“Touched a nerve, did I?” he hisses, voice thick with victory. “Was it the girl? Or was it the truth?”

Harry slams him back against the tiles. The bucket overturns beside them, water sloshing violently across the floor, soaking into Harry’s robes. A rag slips underfoot. His knee skids. His hand catches the wall.

“You don’t know the truth.”

Voldemort’s voice lowers, darkens. “But I feel it, Potter. In you. Every time you touch me. Every time you don’t. You’re rotting from the inside out—and I’m the only one who sees it.”

And that—that—is what breaks him.

Because it’s true. Because Ginny said the same thing, without saying it at all. Because the silence Harry has lived inside, the ritual of restraint, the gloved hands and antiseptic water and never letting it land—it was never enough.

Voldemort surges forward, a flurry of wet limbs and sudden movement, laughter cutting through the stillness like a curse.

They crash. Hard.

Harry’s shoulder slams into the basin. Voldemort’s spine hits tile. They grapple in the spill of water, fists crashing, elbows sharp. Skin on skin. Wet and slick and slipping. Voldemort’s robe is already gone—discarded hours ago. His body gleams under the torchlight, spectral and real all at once. Harry’s soaked to the bone, robes dragging, weight heavy and trembling with rage.

Voldemort lunges again, aiming for the throat.

Harry snarls—something wordless—and tackles him sideways.

They hit the cot.

Hard.

It creaks violently under them, frame threatening to splinter. The old mattress hisses beneath their weight, soaked now too, steaming faintly with heat and breath. Harry lands on top, straddling him, hands fisted in the hollow of Voldemort’s collarbone. His legs pin Voldemort’s hips. His fingers are trembling.

Voldemort is breathing fast, mouth split and leaking red. His lip curls.

“You’re not angry at me,” he whispers. “You’re angry you came back.”

Harry presses down—hard. His palms shove against slick skin, against collar and sternum, forcing him flat.

“Shut up.”

The voice barely sounds like him.

Voldemort only grins, teeth bloody. “That’s it.”

Harry shifted to shove him harder, rage still snarling hot in his chest—but his knee landed wrong. The angle was sharp, unbalanced, pressing down hard into the vulnerable inside of Voldemort’s thigh.

Voldemort winced.

Not dramatically. Not enough for anyone else to notice. Just a flicker of pain—a momentary tension around the eyes, the brief curl of his lip where blood already welled. But for Harry, it was enough. Enough to stop him.

He froze.

His hands were still wrapped around Voldemort’s wrists, pinning them to the mattress above his head. His thighs straddled narrow hips, his weight pressing the other man down into the soaked cot. Voldemort’s chest rose and fell beneath him, breath shallow and fast. His skin was slick with water from the half-finished sponge bath, soap clinging in patches to collarbone and ribs. Hair—thick now, black again, no longer the snake-pale scalp of war—clung in dark curls to his forehead.

And in that instant, the adrenaline faltered. The red haze that had carried Harry this far—through Ginny’s words, through the fight, through Voldemort’s taunts—thinned just enough to let something else in. Something worse.

Heat.

And then—his scar burned.

Not like it used to. Not the white-hot blaze of danger or hatred. This was something stranger. Slower. A curl of warmth that wasn’t pain at all. Not sharp, not searing. Just... there. Low and steady, like an ember catching.

Harry inhaled, sharp and shallow. The thrum followed, deep beneath the skin—through his chest, behind his ribs. The Horcrux. He could feel it. Not stirring in alarm, not bristling in rejection—but reaching. As if recognising something. As if answering.

It pulsed once.

A slow, deliberate throb of pleasure.

Harry’s breath hitched.

His body betrayed him in the same instant. That same traitorous hum coiled downward—into heat, into friction, into hardness. No poetry in it. Just blunt, pulsing awareness. His cock stirred against soaked robes, pressed tight between their bodies. His knees ached against the slick tile, wet from spilled water and soap. The whole cell smelled of stone and sweat and heat.

Voldemort’s ribs shifted beneath him, shallow breaths dragging his chest up and down against Harry’s. The pulse at his throat fluttered—alive, steady, there. His legs were lean from confinement, not strength, and still Harry held him down with humiliating ease. One wrist in each hand. Pinned. Spread. Straddled.

Too easy. Too close. Too fucking much.

And Voldemort—Tom bloody Riddle—was looking up at him. Eyes burning crimson, wild and half-lidded, breath catching on blood-slick lips. His hair was damp, black again, no longer the snake-thing from the war. Thick curls clung to his forehead. Soap lather still clung to his chest in streaks. He was still naked. Still wet. Still beneath him.

And Harry—finally, finally—saw him.

Not the monster. Not the name. Just the man. Just Tom.

Tom Riddle, pinned and panting on a cot. Wet. Wounded. Alive.

He was beautiful. Horribly, violently so. Not soft or gentle—never that—but sharp like glass underfoot. Cheekbones high and harsh, lashes heavy with water, mouth painted with his own blood. Thin, yes. Starved by years in a cell. But there was elegance in the ruin. A body made not to be loved but endured. A body that had survived. And Harry, gods help him, felt it.

Felt everything.

The shameful, slow throb of arousal. The blood moving beneath his skin in ways it shouldn’t. His body responding before his mind could catch up. Cock hard, breath shallow, skin too hot despite the freezing stone beneath them.

Panic surged. He tried to pull back, to shift away—but it was already too late. Voldemort felt it. The tension. The heat. The hardness pressed against his hip through sodden fabric. And Harry, in the same moment, felt something else.

Voldemort. Hard.

The twitch of him, unmistakable, where their hips aligned. That low, dangerous heat between them. His cock, half-hard and wet, pressed shameless against Harry’s thigh.

A pause stretched between them—humid, filthy, electric.

Then, with deliberate slowness, Voldemort shifted beneath him. Just enough to grind upward—friction against friction, wet skin against wet cloth. A movement that said I know.

Harry bit down on a noise—somewhere between a gasp and a curse—and didn’t move. Couldn’t.

Voldemort’s lashes flicked up. His eyes locked onto Harry’s face, and fuck, the look in them—predatory, smug, practically glowing with the thrill of it. But his breath caught—just slightly. His chest rose, shaky, ribs straining beneath wet skin.

When he spoke, the words came on an exhale, wrecked and unguarded.

“Ah—” A gasp, a tremor. “You feel it too.”

Harry didn’t speak. Didn’t dare.

He was still holding Voldemort’s wrists. Still straddling his hips. The bucket had spilled across the stone floor; water puddled beneath the cot, soaking into Harry’s knees. There was no sound now but their breathing, the slow dripping from the edge of the basin, and the traitorous pound of Harry’s heart.

And then the adrenaline faltered. The fight drained out. And something colder began to rise.

Not rage. Not lust.

Horror.

His hands. His body. His breath still caught from the friction, from the heat. Voldemort’s wrists beneath his fingers were narrow, almost delicate. The chest beneath him still moved with breath. And Harry had felt it. Had wanted—

His stomach turned. Shame bloomed like rot behind his ribs.

He wanted to scream. To hit something. To vanish. To undo.

But he didn’t move.

Because he couldn’t look away from the man beneath him. From the knowing smile. From the blood curling at the corner of that mouth. From the eyes that were no longer victorious, no longer cruel—just sharp. Awake. Watching.

Voldemort tilted his head back against the pillow, smile widening through the pain. Blood still painted his mouth, gleaming in the dim light like wine on marble. His eyes—crimson and half-lidded—never left Harry’s face.

And then, slowly, deliberately, he arched up.

Just a breath of motion—his spine lifting from the cot, hips pressing into the cradle of Harry’s thighs, bare skin slick and shameless. It wasn’t need. It wasn’t even pleasure.

It was possession.

A claim.

His voice was barely a whisper, wrecked and triumphant. “You should’ve stayed away,” he breathed. “You were doing so well.”

That broke the spell.

Harry jerked back like burned, the motion graceless, panicked. He scrambled off him, feet slipping in the spill of water, crashing shoulder-first into the wall. He didn’t feel the pain. Didn’t look back.

Didn’t look at the pale, glistening body stretched out on the cot like an invitation. Didn’t look at the blood-wet smile. Or the arch of the spine. Or the way Voldemort watched him go—hungry, satisfied, knowing.

He just grabbed the gloves. The sponge. The empty pail.

And fled.

The cell door slammed behind him with a sound like judgment.

Inside, Voldemort lay still, wrists limp above his head, eyes fixed on the ceiling. His chest rose slowly. His lip still bled.

And on his face—twisted, unreadable—was a smile.

Thin. Crooked.

Triumphant.

── ◈ ──

In his panic, Harry had forgotten the most basic necessities.

He’d barely managed to dry himself, stumbling half-dressed from the bathing chamber as if outrunning what had just happened. What he'd let happen. He hadn’t looked back. Couldn’t. He’d fled like a child in the dark—unthinking, half-mad, mouth still tasting of steam and blood and something older than either.

It had taken a full ten minutes of conjured cold water and deliberate grief to make it stop. He’d had to summon the dead—his parents, Sirius, Fred, Colin Creevey—and hold their names like anchors in his mind while he forced his body to obey. 

Disgust followed swiftly. A thick, suffocating revulsion that coated his throat like bile.

What the fuck is wrong with me.

He tried to tell himself it was Ginny’s absence. Ginny, flushed and laughing, pinned beneath him on a summer morning. That was it, surely. 

That it had been too long since he’d taken her to bed, too long since he’d felt anything but the cold numbness of stone corridors and Tom Riddle’s silence. He was a man, not a monk. A lapse. That was all. A misfire in a starving body.

But no lie stuck. Not really.

Still. The memory of those red eyes narrowed in something like want—of that ruined mouth, parted and waiting—

Harry gritted his teeth hard enough to ache. He’s not human. He’s not. You know what he’s done.

Wizards rarely fall ill. Magic shields them from the petty aches of Muggle frailty—colds, flus, the small miseries of flesh and climate. Curses kill quicker, and war has no patience for sniffles.

But this body—this cursed, desecrated body preserved by ritual and time, by soul anchors and failed resurrection—was not wholly wizard, not wholly alive. Magic swaddled it, but not gently. Not always.

So when morning broke, grey and unsparing, it found the Dark Lord shivering.

Harry didn’t notice at first. He arrived with the breakfast tray as usual—lukewarm tea, eggs he wouldn’t eat, a crust of toast untouched since autumn. Rituals mattered. Structure kept madness at bay.

But when he opened the cell door, the tray nearly slipped from his hands.

Tom Riddle lay motionless on the cot, still half-wrapped in the sodden remnants of his robes. The linen beneath him was damp with cold. Hair clung to his forehead. His skin was flushed, fever-pink, and gleamed with sweat.

For one breathless moment, Harry thought he was dead.

Then—

A sound. Barely a sound. A soft whimper, hoarse and low.

Harry dropped the tray.

He crossed the room in three strides, knees slamming into stone as he reached for him. Fingers found the sharp ridge of a too-prominent cheekbone, then slid to a brow burning with unnatural heat.

“Voldemort?” His voice cracked. “Tom—?”

No response. Only another faint breath, ragged. A tremble through too-thin limbs.

Panic rose again, but this time it wasn’t lust that sparked it. It was guilt.

He hadn’t dried him. Hadn’t transfigured blankets. Had left him soaked and exposed on freezing stone because he’d been too ashamed to look at what he’d done.

This wasn’t penance. This was neglect.

This was cruelty.

Harry didn’t leave.

He didn’t go home, didn’t change, didn’t report the lapse in protocol. The tray lay abandoned by the threshold, its contents slowly congealing. The corridor remained empty, its silence thick with judgment.

He stayed.

Because he hadn’t done his duty. Because a prisoner—any prisoner, even this one—deserved not to be left shivering in wet clothes on a slab of stone.

Because he’d touched him, and then fled. Because he hadn’t had the courage to stay and undo what he’d done.

He worked in silence. No charms. No spells. Not here. Not in the Hollow Fortress, where magic warped and twisted on itself and refused to obey.

So he used his hands.

He stripped the sodden robes, fabric peeling away like damp skin. Riddle didn’t stir. His lips were pale, parted. His breath came shallow.

Harry fetched blankets from the hidden cupboard in the corridor and laid them over the too-still frame. But the heat didn’t return. The flush only deepened.

By nightfall, he sent the owl.

The mediwizard arrived before dawn, his face pinched and expressionless, wrapped in sterile wards and a muttered distaste. He didn’t speak to the patient. Barely looked at him. When he did, it was with thin-lipped revulsion.

“Fever,” he said, after a brief, gloved examination. “Bad. Borderline septic.”

Harry stood rigid near the cell’s wall, arms crossed tightly over his chest.

“No magical intervention,” the mediwizard muttered, setting down his satchel with a faint grimace. “Fortress protocols.”

Harry’s jaw tightened. “Nothing?”

“No charms. No spellwork. The suppression field will strip it before it touches skin.”

He paused, then added, more grudgingly, “Potions—some—will hold. The ones brewed outside the wards. If they’re administered manually, and in small enough doses. Anything more than that, and the ward field destabilises.”

“Which ones?”

“Fever draught. Blood-replenishing. Calming agent. You’ll need to monitor reactions closely. There’s no magic to catch things if they go wrong.”

He packed his kit without another word.

Harry didn’t move until the echo of his boots had vanished up the stairwell.

── ◈ ──

Looking after a sick Voldemort, Harry thought grimly, was like looking after a sick, petulant child.

If the child had committed genocide, spat venom through cracked lips, and glared like a dying wolf—only to refuse the potion and call you a coward for offering it gently.

Harry had to bite the inside of his cheek to keep from snapping. He thought of Teddy, years ago, feverish with dragon pox, crying for Andromeda. He remembered the soft cloth, the tiny spoonfuls of syrup, the stories whispered to soothe the tremors.

This was nothing like that.

“You’ll drink it,” Harry said now, voice low. “Or you’ll die. And I won’t be the one to stop it.”

The man on the cot gave a sound that might’ve been a laugh—or a curse. It ended in a wet cough. His face, still fever-flushed, twisted in pain. Sweat slicked the hollow of his throat, and his hair clung to the curve of his jaw. A pillow Harry had transfigured from an old robe sat damp beneath him.

“You sound… concerned,” Voldemort rasped, eyes slitted like a serpent too weak to strike. “Touching.”

“Shut up and drink.”

The small vial trembled slightly in Harry’s grip. He brought it to the man’s lips. Voldemort bared his teeth. Bit at the rim like it was poison.

It was poison, in a way. Bitter, bilious stuff. Harry knew—he’d tested the draught himself before giving it to him.

Voldemort choked as it slid down. Tried to spit it back. Harry forced the rest in with a rough tilt of the chin, hand steady against the slick curve of a fevered jaw.

“You’d let me drown,” Voldemort coughed. “You’d like that.”

“You’re not dying on my watch,” Harry said. “You don’t get to make this easier.”

He wiped the man’s mouth with a cloth—rough, not gentle—then ran it across the burning slope of his forehead. The fever radiated like a furnace beneath skin too pale, too thin. Tom Riddle looked half-starved. Human. It was almost unbearable.

“Don’t touch me,” Voldemort hissed.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” Harry muttered. “You’re burning alive.”

He wrung out the cloth in the basin beside the cot, then laid it again on the man’s brow. Voldemort shivered violently beneath it, breath ragged, teeth chattering. The cot creaked with each spasm.

Harry watched him for a long moment.

This wasn’t penance. This wasn’t justice.

This was care.

Brutal, grudging care for the last person on earth who deserved it.

And yet he stayed.

── ◈ ──

At first, Harry thought the silence was a fluke. A trick of exhaustion. He entered with the tray in hand, jaw tight, posture braced for the usual onslaught of vitriol.

But the prisoner said nothing.

Tom Riddle sat quietly on the cot, back straight, hands folded loosely in his lap. The fever had broken days ago, and with it, the edge of feral delirium had dulled—but what remained was worse. Focused. Intent.

He was dressed now. Hair combed. A towel hung neatly from the basin. The cell had been tidied—by whom, Harry didn’t know. He hadn’t asked the mediwizard. He hadn’t dared ask himself.

“You’re late,” Tom said softly.

Not a taunt. Not even a complaint. Just… awareness.

Harry ignored him. Placed the tray down. Left without a word.

The next day, it was the same.

And the next. And the next.

The brawls stopped. No more snarling. No more hexed food trays or shouted curses through the bars. Voldemort—the thing that was Voldemort—watched him with unnerving calm. Quiet as a flame waiting to catch.

And slowly, Harry began to realise: it wasn’t peace. It was precision.

He’s planning something.

It was in the way Tom looked at him—direct, deliberate, unblinking. As if studying a weak spot in armour. As if learning the shape of a wound. He no longer looked monstrous. He never looked monstrous.

He looked beautiful.

That, Harry knew, was deliberate.

The hair, now shoulder-length, was brushed to a sheen. The robes clung flatteringly to a leaner frame, tailored just so. He ate little, but enough to recover. His voice, when he used it, was low and careful. Musical. No longer the hissing bile of old. He spoke Harry’s name like a spell.

And Harry—damn him—responded to it.

He didn’t want to. He told himself he didn’t.

But it was getting harder to believe that when Tom Riddle no longer looked like death.

He wore the grey prison robes differently now—tied loose at the waist, sleeves rolled to the elbow. Nothing overt. Just enough to bare the fine bones of his wrists, the dip of his collarbone, the pale, careful body beneath. The red in his eyes had darkened, cooled—no longer raw and glowing like coals, but tempered. Controlled. Intelligent. They caught the light differently now. Flickered. Watched.

And his face—

Merlin, his face.

It had changed. Not physically. Not really. But it moved now. Expressive in ways it hadn’t been before. The stillness was studied. The silences calculated. He smiled with one side of his mouth—never both. He tilted his head when Harry spoke, like he was listening for something just beneath the words. And when he blinked, it was slow.

Measured. Human.

Or near enough to convince.

“You want me,” Tom said one evening, when Harry lingered too long by the table. His voice was low—hoarse from disuse, but warm. Almost soft. “Don’t deny it.”

Harry flinched. The words weren’t cruel. They weren’t a threat. They sounded like… pity. Like seduction with nowhere left to go.

“You burn for me,” Tom went on, his gaze fixed and unblinking. “The murderer of your parents.”

“Shut up,” Harry snapped. His voice broke on it.

“You’re sick, Potter.”

“I said shut up.”

But Tom only smiled. Not like he used to—not the madman's grin or the boy-prince’s sneer. This smile was quiet. Certain.

Like he already knew the ending.

“You’re mine.”

Harry slammed the door so hard the tray clattered from the table. Bread rolled off the edge. Something spilled—soup, maybe. He didn’t check.

He didn’t come back the next day. Or the one after that.

He left the trays at the threshold and walked away, fists clenched until the bones in his knuckles throbbed. He counted the steps down the corridor. Recited the names of the dead like a rosary. Anything to stop the image from creeping in:

Tom Riddle, red-eyed and half-reclined on the cot. Pale wrists against grey cloth. That voice, low and ruined, saying his name like a prayer.

Voldemort had stopped brawling.

He had stopped fighting.

Instead, he waited.

Still. Patient. Devastating.

He had found something far more powerful than rage. More intimate than torture. More binding than prophecy.

Desire. Shame. Recognition.

He made himself beautiful again. For him. He made himself familiar.

And Harry hated—hated—that it was working.

But hate isn’t enough to stop it. Not anymore.

His world begins to unravel.

Ginny leaves.

There’s no shouting. No thrown plates or shattered hexes. Just silence—hollow and heavy as a closing door. One morning, across the breakfast table, she looks at him for a long time. Her tea goes cold in her hands. And then she says, simply, “You’re not here anymore.” Her voice doesn’t shake. She’s not angry. She’s just tired.

And she’s right.

He hasn’t been here—not really—for years.

She doesn’t demand answers. Doesn’t beg. Just folds her robes neatly into a case, pockets the photograph of Molly from the mantel, and walks out the door with the brutal grace of someone who has finally stopped waiting to be chosen.

Within the year, she remarries. A rival Quidditch player—handsome, affable, sun-warmed. The sort who remembers birthdays and doesn’t wake in the middle of the night gasping from dreams he can’t name. He treats her like something precious.

Harry doesn’t attend the wedding.

Ron and Hermione move forward, as people do. They have a daughter with wild curls and fierce eyes. Then a son. They name him Fred. Their home is filled with warmth and laughter and the quiet endurance of love that has survived war and memory and all the things that could’ve broken it.

Time passes. Their hair greys. Their hands wrinkle.

And Harry—

Harry stays behind.

He forgets birthdays. Forgets to respond to letters. He’s too tired to lie and too ashamed to tell the truth. At first, they try. They send owls. Invitations. A new jumper from Molly at Christmas. But grief has its limits, and so does patience.

Eventually, the letters stop.

He stops going into town. Stops Apparating entirely. The world narrows to the Fortress and the long walk down into the dark. Grimmauld Place gathers dust again. The war memorial in Godric’s Hollow grows moss. And the boy who once bore a prophecy becomes a ghost in his own story.

Teddy grows up.

The boy who once rode on Harry’s shoulders now stands taller than him. His hair settles into a deep, Lupin brown. His voice loses its lilt. And for a while—longer than Harry deserves—Teddy keeps coming back.

He visits during school holidays. Writes long letters about Hogsmeade weekends and the trouble the Weasley kids got into. He sends photographs. Drawings. A pressed flower from a girl he’s too shy to name. He asks questions, always gently. Waits for answers that never come.

But even Teddy learns.

He grows into a man with his father’s eyes and his mother’s stubborn fire. Becomes an Auror. Falls in love. Gets tired. Stops asking.

The last time Harry sees him, it’s at King’s Cross, years after he should’ve stopped waiting. Teddy lifts a hand. Smiles, but it’s dimmer now—more memory than joy. And then he boards the train and disappears into the smoke, leaving Harry behind like an old ghost at a war monument no one visits anymore.

Time becomes a closed fist. Tight. Merciless.

And the world—the real world—moves on.

Harry doesn’t.

He stays in the Fortress. In the cold. With the past. With the silence.

With him.

And it shows. Not in the way others expect. Not in a limp or a cough or a stoop of the spine.

But in the fact that it doesn’t show at all.

Harry doesn’t age.

Year after year, he stares into the mirror above the basin and sees the same man staring back. No grey. No lines. No softening of the jaw or thinning of the hair. He still looks like he did after the war—twenty-five, maybe thirty at most. Lean. Tired. Young.

Too young for the weight he carries.

At first, he tells himself it’s just good genetics. A fluke of magic. A side-effect of surviving a Killing Curse—or three. But the truth coils closer each year, whispering from the mirror like a curse he can’t un-hear:

You’re the Master of Death.

And so he glamours himself.

Not dramatically—just enough to match the lives that have moved on without him. A streak of grey at the temples. A few crow’s feet at the eyes. A careful dulling of skin. It doesn’t hold under the Fortress’s wards, of course, but it’s enough to fool the reflection in town. Enough to look like someone who belongs among the living.

Enough to pass for a man who has not been left behind by time.

But in the Fortress, there are no lies. No illusions. Only cold stone, and the prisoner who never looks away.

And Harry, eternal.

Alone.

Until the voice behind the bars says his name like it still means something.

And when night falls—and the dreams come—Harry lies awake and wonders if this is what penance really looks like: not death, but survival. Not pain, but permanence.

A life in the dark. A love that should never have been born.

But still breathes.

The nights are worst.

That’s when the dreams return—vivid, aching, wrong.

Red eyes, bright as fresh blood. Skin slick and warm under his hands. A mouth curled into something knowing. Possessive. Almost tender.

A voice, silken and low, curling through the dark like smoke: You’re mine.

He wakes shaking, breath ragged, hand clenched in sweat-soaked sheets. Shame creeps in before the light does. He scrubs at his face. At his chest. At the place that burns.

He doesn’t understand it.

Why him. Why, after all this time, Voldemort still clings to him like a thorn buried beneath skin. Why the hatred hasn’t rotted away, but grown roots. Why rage now tastes like longing, and desire coils like punishment beneath his ribs.

He tells himself it’s the Horcrux—that final sliver, still hidden inside him, still anchoring them both.

But deep down, in the places he doesn’t speak of—not even to the dead—Harry suspects the truth is worse.

That it’s not magic binding them anymore.

It’s want. It’s recognition. It’s something he’s earned.

And then—just as the dust settles, just as he convinces himself he’s imagined it—something shifts again.

── ◈ ──

There were years, Harry supposed.

He didn’t count them anymore. The calendar above the basin had stopped being accurate somewhere between the final Dementor cull and Teddy’s second promotion. He hadn’t replaced it. The tick of the pocket watch he kept in his breast pocket was still regular, but the date wheel never turned. He liked it that way. It made the silence easier to bear.

These days, Tom read the paper.

Harry brought it in with the breakfast tray—always The Prophet, sometimes a Muggle edition if he passed through town. It rested neatly beside the toast. Tom didn’t thank him. He never had. But he read it thoroughly, meticulously, fingers smoothing the folds with a care that bordered on reverence.

Harry used to take it away half-read. Now, he waited. Sat on the bench by the door and watched the way Tom’s eyes flicked line by line. He read everything—politics, war reports, Quidditch standings. Even the classifieds.

“You missed a blotch,” Tom said once, without looking up. “Page six. Someone’s looking to sell a self-milking goat in Wiltshire. I imagine that sort of thing would interest you.”

Harry snorted before he could stop himself. “You think I collect livestock?”

“I think you’ve been alone too long,” Tom said mildly, flipping the page.

There wasn’t heat in it. Not mockery, not quite. Just observation, laced with something that might’ve been amusement. Might’ve been something else.

Harry didn’t answer.

That was how it was now—droll, sparse exchanges like static between frequencies. Most mornings passed in silence. But not all. Not anymore.

“Kingsley’s still Minister,” Tom murmured another morning, glancing at the front page. “Remarkable. I’d have expected the electorate to cannibalise him by now.”

“They tried,” Harry said. “Didn’t take.”

Tom’s eyes flicked up. “You’re not as funny as you think you are.”

“And you’re not as human as you pretend to be.”

A beat. Then—quietly, almost warmly:

“Not yet.”

That stayed with Harry longer than it should have.

It was lunch.
A Wednesday, maybe. The tea had cooled beside the plate. There was half a boiled egg, untouched, and a slice of toast gone damp at the edges. Tom Riddle ate slowly. He always had—measured bites, deliberate. Like rationing was a ritual that never left him. Even now, with years between him and starvation, he treated each meal like a lesson in control.

Harry leaned back on the bench, arms folded. He hadn’t meant to linger. He rarely did. But today… the quiet wasn’t pressing. Just present. Like dust in the air.

“Do you ever think about what you’d eat if you were free?” Harry asked, not quite knowing why.

Tom looked up, one brow arched. “What an oddly sentimental question.”

Harry shrugged. “You don’t have to answer.”

There was a pause. Then, unexpectedly: “Treacle tart.”

Harry blinked. “You’re joking.”

“I’m not.” Tom lifted the tea, sniffed it, and set it back down without sipping. “The matron used to make it on Christmas. One of the few things they didn’t ruin with tinned milk and despair. I stole a second slice once.” A beat. “Blamed it on a boy named Michael. He was caned. I wasn’t.”

Harry stared. “Did you feel guilty?”

“Of course not,” Tom said, almost cheerfully. “He was an idiot.”

Harry rolled his eyes and looked away, but he was smiling, faintly.

Then—he snorted.

It escaped before he could stop it. Just a small, involuntary puff of air through his nose.

Tom narrowed his eyes, affronted. “What.”

“Nothing,” Harry said, clearing his throat and looking studiously at the wall.

“No,” Tom said, eyes sharpening. “You laughed.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

Harry hesitated, then muttered, “Treacle tart. It’s my favourite too.”

A long pause.

Then, slowly, Tom blinked. “Another thing we share. How repugnant.”

Harry gave a noncommittal shrug, trying to ignore the way something warm and strange curled in his chest. He told himself it was absurdity. Coincidence. Not… familiarity. Not recognition.

Another silence stretched—comfortably this time. Like a coat neither of them wanted to take off too soon. Harry didn’t move. Neither did Tom. The air between them no longer crackled with tension—it simply settled.

Tom pushed the toast aside with the tip of one finger, idly. “I’m tired of The Prophet.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “Since when?”

“Since the war ended,” Tom said dryly. “They’ve turned fear into an industry. And column inches into opiates. Yesterday they printed an op-ed about cauldron thickness. It was three pages.”

Harry huffed a laugh. “You’ve memorised it, haven’t you.”

“I could recite it in my sleep,” Tom muttered, more sour than amused. Then—his voice shifted. Grew quieter. More musing than speaking.

“I read a book there,” Tom said, voice thinner now, more musing than speaking. “When the nuns weren’t paying attention. There weren’t many books, and even fewer worth the paper. But this one… It was about a creature called a hobbit.”

Harry frowned. “That’s not real.”

“No,” Tom said. “But it should be. He lived in a hole. Hated adventures. But he was dragged into one anyway. Something about a ring.” His eyes flicked up, amused. “I related, obviously.”

Harry raised an eyebrow. “You saw yourself in a hobbit?”

“I saw myself in the ring,” Tom said, lips curling.

Harry didn’t respond to that. He didn’t like how close it rang.

“What was it called?” he asked instead.

“The Hobbit. I remember because it had a dragon in it.” Tom gave a small, almost wistful sigh. “I liked the dragon.”

Harry couldn’t help it. “Of course you did.”

“I think it was called Smaug. Terribly vain. Slept on gold. Breathed fire. Killed by a peasant with an arrow through the heart. The usual lesson in humility.” He licked his fingers clean of egg and added, “There was another book. Longer. I never read it. Someone else borrowed it and never brought it back. I think it had elves. More rings. Darkness.”

Harry found himself leaning forward. “What was it called?”

Tom tilted his head. “Something theatrical. The Lord of the Rings, I believe.”

Something about the phrase unsettled him. He carried it with him all the way back through the winding corridors, up through the frostbitten stairwell, into the dusty alcove he still called a study. That night, he scrawled the title down on the corner of a parchment.

Three weeks later, he found it in a Muggle bookshop in Edinburgh. Three volumes, worn covers, yellowed pages. The man at the till gave him a nod of approval.

“Big fan of Tolkien?”

Harry lied without blinking. “Always have been.”

He read them in the Fortress, at night, with the fire low and a quill stuck between his teeth. He expected nonsense. Fantasy, indulgence. But there was something in the bones of it that hooked him. Sorrow drawn across lifetimes. Power that came at the price of self. The burden of something too ancient to destroy and too dangerous to yield.

He dog-eared a passage about Frodo’s wound not healing. Another about mercy. He lingered on the lines about carrying burdens not meant for you—about shadows that never quite let go.

And when he returned to the cell, tray balanced in one hand, he did what he always did: set it down. Waited. Pretended.

Tom looked up from the cot, robe half-fastened, hair damp. The usual performance. But there was a flicker of stillness when their eyes met—expectation, drawn like thread between them.

Harry didn’t sit. Didn’t stay.

He only said, “You know, I think you misremembered. Smaug wasn’t killed by a peasant.”

Tom blinked.

“Bard was a captain,” Harry continued, voice even. “He used a black arrow. Forged iron.”

A pause. Then—

Tom’s eyes lit, and something almost delighted—almost boyish—crossed his face.

“You read it.”

Harry shrugged. “Curiosity.”

Tom hummed low in his throat. A sound like silk unspooling. That smile returned—dangerous, soft, sharp as satin.

“And what did you think of the ring?”

Harry met his gaze without blinking. “I think you’d have lost to Sam.”

That earned it: a laugh. Guttural, startled. Honest. The sound unsettled something in Harry. It was too human. Too real.

“Would you like to read it?” he asked, before he could stop himself.

Tom stilled. His head tilted, slowly, warily. Like a predator sensing a trap—or a gift he didn’t trust.

Harry didn’t meet his eyes. Just reached into the satchel, withdrew the first volume—spine worn, pages slightly curled—and set it down beside the tray.

“I’ll collect it tomorrow.”

He turned before Tom could answer. Before that look in his eyes could turn heavier, sharper.

But behind him, as he reached the threshold, he heard the softest breath—barely sound at all. Surprise. Maybe reverence.

He didn’t look back.

The book stayed.

And Harry left with a weight in his chest that didn’t feel like regret.

It started with The Fellowship of the Ring.

Harry didn’t intend to leave it behind. Not really. But Tom had finished the first volume too quickly, and something about the way he turned the final page—quiet, like mourning—made Harry pause at the threshold the next morning.

So he brought the second. Then the third.

Tom didn’t thank him. But the books stayed.

The week after, Harry added a copy of Great Expectations he’d never finished. The week after that, The Secret History. Then a Muggle newspaper left behind. A poetry chapbook Hermione had sent years ago, unopened until then. A biography on Grindelwald, annotated heavily in the margins.

Eventually, he brought in a narrow shelf.

Simple pine. Charms-free. Fitted against the far wall of the cell like it had always been there. No announcement. No explanation.

Tom only glanced up once as he placed it.

“You’re nesting,” he said, flatly.

Harry didn’t reply.

But by winter, the shelf held a dozen titles. By spring, two dozen. Some fiction. Some history. One dog-eared Hogwarts textbook neither of them admitted to reading. And one slim notebook with a broken spine—never opened, but placed carefully between the rest.

Tom read everything.

And Harry—Harry stopped pretending it wasn’t a kind of companionship.

He didn’t call it kindness. He didn’t dare call it care.

But some days, when Tom passed him a finished book with a marked page or a raised brow, Harry lingered at the edge of the cot just a little longer.

Just long enough to listen.

── ◈ ──

It began the way it always did.

With silence. With steam.

With the sound of water dripping steadily into the drain at the centre of the stone floor.

Tom stood as he always stood—bare, unashamed, arms loose at his sides, posture impeccable despite the years. The runes etched along the wall flickered faintly, ward lines glowing low, soft as candlelight. His feet were bare. His expression unreadable.

Harry didn’t speak as he stepped inside. He never did. The sponge was already damp in his hand. The soap—eucalyptus and mint—rested on the small stone ledge beside the basin, exactly where he’d left it the day before.

They had made a ritual of it. A choreography so precise it had become almost sacred in its austerity. Harry never looked below the collarbones unless he had to. He scrubbed without staring. Touched without thinking. His gloves kept him distant. Kept him clean.

But tonight—

Tonight, something was different.

Tom didn’t speak. That wasn’t new. But the quiet tonight wasn’t defensive or bitter. It was… still. Like deep water. Like a breath held too long.

Harry swallowed and stepped behind him.

The smell of the soap rose sharp in the warm air—herbal, clean. He’d grown used to it. Had even started buying that brand on purpose. Stuck to the same glass bottle. Let the label wear down with time.

He wet Tom’s hair with cupped hands. The strands darkened instantly, curling with weight. Tom didn’t flinch.

Then Harry removed the gloves.

Not new either—he always did, when it came to the hair. Too difficult to scrub properly otherwise. The first time, Tom had said nothing, only tilted his head slightly, as if granting some unspoken permission.

Now, he leaned forward.

Slowly. Deliberately. With a soft exhale—almost a sigh.

Harry paused.

His bare hands sank into the dark weight of Tom’s hair, fingers splaying through it, working in the soap. The scent bloomed stronger, sharp mint and green spice, and the heat of the cell seemed to pull closer around them.

Tom’s breath was steady. His back rose and fell with each inhale, slick with steam. The muscles there—long, lean, sharply carved from years of confinement—tensed beneath Harry’s knuckles, then eased.

Harry worked silently. His touch was practised now. Rinsed. Lathered again. He didn’t linger.

And yet—

His gaze drifted.

It wasn’t the first time. But it was the first time he noticed just how often he had looked before. The narrow slope of the spine. The curve of a hip too gaunt to be called full. The delicate shadows beneath the ribs. Tom Riddle’s body—even after decades imprisoned, even hollowed by silence and time—was a kind of terrible perfection. Clean lines. Precision.

He was beautiful.

Harry hated the thought even as it landed.

But he didn’t stop looking.

He stepped forward, sponge in hand, and began the second half of the ritual—the shoulders, the arms, the chest.

And that’s when it happened.

He swiped lower than intended—just slightly. The edge of the sponge grazed one of Tom’s nipples. Pink. Hardened slightly from the cold.

A sound escaped.

Sharp. Soft. A gasp—half-caught in the throat. Tom’s body twitched beneath it. His breath hitched.

Harry’s hand froze.

It was a mistake. It shouldn’t have happened. It should’ve been ignored.

But the sound had been too real.

Too… honest.

Harry didn’t move.

Neither did Tom. Not visibly. But his breathing grew shallow. Unsteady. His shoulders tightened.

Harry hesitated. Then, slowly, carefully, he swiped the sponge down again. Just a little. Just enough.

Another sound escaped. Louder. Ragged.

Tom’s hips twitched forward. Not a thrust. More like a flinch. Like something fighting to escape. His hands clenched at his sides, knuckles white.

And Harry’s mind went blank.

Merlin, he should have stopped.

But he didn’t.

The sponge moved again—downward now, slower. A careful sweep across slick skin, following the slope of one rib to the next. His hand moved with steady, deliberate care. Like he could pretend this was still part of the ritual. Still professional. Still the act of a warden washing a prisoner.

It wasn’t.

Not anymore.

Tom’s body betrayed him with every breath. His chest rose too fast. His stomach trembled. The muscles along his thighs went taut as wires. And Harry—Harry watched it all. Not openly. Not greedily. But with a stunned, breathless focus that felt too much like wanting.

The sponge passed again, catching the other nipple this time. Another gasp, sharper now—half-lost in the hiss of breath Tom tried to hold. His fingers flexed once at his sides. Then again.

But he didn’t move.

He didn’t tell Harry to stop.

Harry swallowed. His throat felt raw. The air was too warm. His gloves still sat, forgotten, near the basin. He could feel the heat of Tom’s skin radiating toward him, steam curling between them like smoke from a dying fire.

And then—curiosity cracked through the last of his discipline.

Not lust. Not hunger.

Just curiosity.

He shifted closer. Just a step. Close enough that his chest nearly brushed Tom’s spine. The sponge in his hand lowered again, this time tracing the line just beneath Tom’s ribs, where the skin was softer, where breath caught easier.

Tom exhaled—sharply, like pain.

Or pleasure.

Harry stared at the back of his neck, at the damp curls clinging to pale skin, at the faint shimmer of sweat that hadn't been there before. The tension in Tom’s frame had changed. Not bracing. Not resisting.

Open.

Vulnerable, in a way Harry had never seen.

He didn’t know what possessed him—but he let the sponge fall.

It landed softly near the drain, forgotten.

And then, bare-handed, he reached up.

Harry’s fingers brushed over the slope of Tom’s shoulder—bare skin, warm and damp, drawn tight over bone. He didn’t stop. Couldn’t. His touch drifted lower, slow as breath. Across the sharp blade of the scapula. Down the arch of the spine. Past the last ridged vertebrae where the skin softened, thinned.

Tom shivered beneath him.

Not dramatically. Not with resistance.

Just a single, involuntary tremor that passed through him like the echo of something long denied.

His head dropped forward. His breath hitched, then slipped out in a low, barely-audible exhale. The steam curled thicker around them, turning the air heavy, obscuring—but not enough.

Harry saw it.

Through the fog and the flicker of torchlight, he caught the shape of it: Tom’s cock, flushed and rising, half-hard where it curved toward his thigh. Not bold. Not offered. Just there—evidence of something unbidden, unbearable.

Real.

A flush crept up Harry’s neck. He didn’t move. Couldn’t. Every instinct screamed retreat, demanded distance, commanded decency. But his hand stayed, still resting at the base of Tom’s spine, feeling each shallow breath, each tremor of restraint.

And in that suspended moment, something broke.

Not loudly. Not violently.

Just—loosened.

Because after years—decades—of silence and denial, of sponge-baths delivered like penance and touch reduced to protocol, Harry felt the thing he’d buried for so long surge to the surface like a wound reopening.

Want.

Not hunger. Not lust. Just the deep, aching gravity of forbidden recognition.

The desire to know. To feel.

He leaned in. Closer. Close enough to see the line of Tom’s throat, the slick strands of hair clinging to his nape, the tension curling through his limbs like a bow drawn too tight.

It was a mistake. Of course it was.

But Harry didn’t step back.

Not yet.

Not when Tom was breathing like that. Not when his body was saying yes in every twitch, every tremble. Not when the steam clung between them like a second skin, and the silence had become something sacred. Something shared.

He was losing control.

And the worst part—the part that terrified him—

Was how much he wanted to.

The heat was unbearable.

Not the steam. Not the cell. Not the press of bodies too close, or the brush of skin against skin, or the taste of eucalyptus in the air. Not the sweat gathering at the hollow of his throat. Or the flush creeping down his neck. Or the fact that his robes clung too tightly, his trousers too heavy, his gloves still discarded somewhere on the floor.

Harry couldn’t breathe.

The air was too thick. The shadows too thin. The walls seemed to press inward, closing around them like a fist, like a vice, like a secret too long unspoken.

But still—

Still—

He didn’t move back. He didn’t look away. His eyes stayed fixed on Tom’s back, on the too-sharp line of his spine, on the dampness gleaming between the ribs, on the way his muscles tightened and released with each breath.

Tom didn’t turn around. Not quite. He didn’t meet Harry’s eyes. But he didn’t retreat.

And that—that was enough.

Harry’s fingers slid lower. Slow. Deliberate. Like a blade approaching a nerve.

Then—without thinking, without hesitation, without anything left between them but the soft hiss of the water and the smell of eucalyptus—he reached down.

And touched him.

One finger, then two. Barely a stroke. Just a light, explorative brush along the underside of his cock. A test. A question.

Tom’s breath caught. His hips twitched. His head tilted, ever-so-slightly, toward the ceiling. Toward Harry.

And it was enough.

A sound escaped Harry’s throat—something between a curse and a moan. 

He stepped around him.

Slowly. Soundlessly. One hand trailing across the jut of Tom’s hip as he moved, fingers grazing skin that felt like stone warmed to blood. He circled until he could see him—really see him—until they stood face to face in the steam.

Tom didn’t speak. He didn’t smile. His chest was rising too fast now, too shallow. His eyes shone, dark with something restrained. A line of tension cut through his jaw like he was bracing.

Harry said nothing.

He only reached.

One hand curled around Tom’s wrist. The other pressed low on his abdomen. He pulled—firm, deliberate—until Tom’s bare back collided with his clothed chest. Until the weight of him settled against Harry, wet and wanting.

The breath that punched out of Tom was not soft. It was guttural. Like surrender torn from the gut. His head dropped back, barely brushing Harry’s shoulder.

And Harry—

Harry’s hand slid down. Slowly. Purposefully.

He touched him.

His hand closed around Tom’s cock, and his own hips jerked forward in sympathy. Merlin. He was so hard. So hot. So heavy.

And Tom—

Tom didn’t resist.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t pull away. Didn’t even turn his head.

He just breathed—a soft, shuddering exhale that fogged the air between them. His neck arched slightly, throat bared, mouth parted on a breath that was far too close to a whimper. Not pain. Not protest.

Relief. Submission. Surrender.

Harry’s hand moved without thought. One slow stroke. Then another. The slide of skin on skin slicked by steam and sweat and the lingering wetness of the shower. Tom was hot in his grip—flush and flushed, half-hard no longer. Every twitch of Harry’s fingers drew a tremble through the lean frame against him.

His cock was heavy. Alive. Throbbing now against Harry’s palm with a want that could no longer be masked by silence.

Harry’s jaw clenched. His grip tightened.

He tried to be clinical. Precise. Like this was still some extension of the bath, of the ritual, of duty.

But the second Tom gasped—a low, broken sound that cracked at the edges—Harry felt something snap inside him.

Because it was real.

It was Tom. Wet and panting and trembling in his arms.

Another moan followed—soft at first, caught at the back of his throat, then longer, messier, torn from his chest with each stroke. Tom’s hips jolted forward, chasing friction, slick thighs brushing Harry’s as he tried—failed—to stay upright.

His knees buckled once. Then again. His breath caught in Harry’s ear, sharp and high. And then—desperate for purchase—his hands clutched behind him.

One braced against Harry’s hip. The other curled tight in the fabric of his damp robes, fingers flexing, gripping, trying to ground himself.

Harry’s whole body shuddered.

His cock was straining against the tight line of his trousers, aching with need. He didn’t thrust—not yet—but his hips rolled once, slow and hard, dragging himself against the curve of Tom’s arse with a breathless groan.

Tom whimpered.

Harry buried his face in the damp skin at the crook of Tom’s neck, the scent of eucalyptus and sweat and him choking his senses. His lips brushed the edge of a pulse point. He could feel it pounding—fast, frantic, utterly undone.

The sound of water was everywhere. A steady drip drip drip from the ceiling drain. The faint splash of pooled moisture underfoot. The wet slide of skin in his palm. And over it all—Tom’s breathing.

Broken. Wrecked.

Every inhale came sharp and shallow. Every exhale a whisper of need.

Harry’s hand moved faster. Firmer. The strokes more rhythmic now, less careful, more claiming. Each pass of his thumb over the leaking head made Tom twitch, made him gasp, made his fingers dig harder into Harry’s side like he didn’t know how to ask but couldn’t bear it to stop.

“Fuck,” Harry breathed, forehead pressed to Tom’s shoulder. “Fuck—look at you—”

Tom’s only answer was a strangled moan, hips jerking, jaw slack, spine arching as he bucked into the touch.

He was shaking.

His legs wouldn’t hold. Harry felt it. The way he sagged back against him, every muscle taut and trembling. He shifted his stance, one arm winding firmly around Tom’s waist to brace him upright, to keep him from falling apart.

Because he was falling apart.

And Harry—Harry didn’t stop him.

He just held him tighter.

And stroked.

The rhythm changed.

Not dramatically. Not suddenly. Just enough—Harry’s hand working harder now, faster, the sound of it wet and obscene in the steam-thick air. Skin on skin. The slick slide of his palm over flushed heat. The low, broken gasps spilling from Tom’s throat with every motion.

He was keening softly now, the sounds fractured—half-swallowed moans and stuttering breaths, no longer deliberate, no longer regal. Just human. Unravelled.

Harry held him upright with one arm wrapped firm around his waist, fingers splayed over his ribs like he could anchor him there—keep him from slipping into the stone or the silence or some unbearable place between them. But his own restraint was slipping fast, shredded by every shiver against his chest, every twitch of Tom’s cock in his hand, every gasping yes that never left Tom’s mouth but lived in his body all the same.

And Harry—

Harry was coming undone.

His cock throbbed behind his trousers, trapped against the seam, pressure building with a relentless ache that spread up his spine, down his thighs. He hadn’t touched himself. Hadn’t even meant to. But the friction—the press of Tom’s body against his, the way his hips rolled helplessly back into Harry’s groin, grinding into him, needing—it was too much.

The heat curled low in Harry’s stomach. Tight. Coiled.

His breath came sharp. Shallow.

He clenched his teeth—No. No, not like this—

But his body had other plans.

He bucked once—sharply—against Tom’s back. And then it hit him.

His release tore through him like a curse—sharp, sudden, devastating. He groaned against Tom’s shoulder, hips jerking, shame burning hot as his trousers were flooded with it. Sticky. Humiliating. Unwanted.

Tom gasped—more surprise than satisfaction. His whole frame jolted, like he’d been struck from behind. His hands tensed against Harry’s hips, and for one breathless moment, everything paused.

And then—he ground back.

Hard.

His arse dragged deliberately along the length of Harry’s cock, pressing into the wet spot at the seam, forcing his eyes up to the ceiling. Harry’s fingers clenched on reflex, nails biting into Tom’s ribs, other hand tightening around his cock.

“Nnngh—fuck—” He gasped, shuddering from the pressure, from the shame, from the fact that it wasn’t enough to make him soft. Merlin, he was still hard. Aching. Throbbing.

And Tom wasn’t stopping.

His head was thrown back now, neck exposed, throat bared, each breath a high-pitched whimper. The heat in his cock grew feverish, the skin flushed, the head swollen.

Harry’s hand moved.

Harder now. Faster. No pretence of control. Just the brutal rhythm of need and the way Tom was writhing against him, body begging, hips jerking forward in shallow, desperate thrusts. His head rolled to one side, damp curls brushing Harry’s cheek, lips parted on a low moan that cracked at the edges, became something broken and pleading and real.

Harry bit down on the skin below his ear. Tom gasped.

“Ah—ah—ah—” The sounds broke in his throat, sharp and high.

A sound tore from his throat—raw, wounded, aching—and he came. The release tore through him like an explosion, shattering every last trace of composure, of restraint, of anything but animal need and human relief. His whole body shook in Harry’s arms, his cock pulsing in his grip, spilling hot and wet over Harry’s fingers and the stone floor beneath them.

It seemed to go on forever.

And then—suddenly—it stopped.

Tom sagged in Harry’s grip, limp and exhausted and shuddering with aftershocks. Harry caught him against his chest, both hands bracing at his waist now, steadying him as his breathing slowed and his body went slack.

It was over.

The cell was silent except for sounds of their breathing. Harry’s heart pounded in his chest, a dizzying cacophony of panic and relief and disbelief.

He couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t move. Could only stand there, clutching Tom’s body to him, trying to remember how to breathe. To think. To do anything but feel the warmth of skin and steam and the shivers that still ran through them both like a current they couldn’t un-plug.

But slowly, eventually, the haze cleared. And the reality sank in.

What they’d just done—

What he’d just done—

Oh god. Oh fucking god.

Harry released him. His hands jerked back like he’d been burned. He stumbled back one step. Two. Three. The space between them widened. Became cold again. Became a cell, a prison, a chasm too vast to reach across.

Tom didn’t turn. Didn’t speak. But his spine went stiff.

Harry was frozen in silence.

He just stood there, staring, sweat beading at his hairline, blood roaring in his ears, unable to name the emotion in his chest.

And then—

Without a word, he turned on his heel and walked away.

He didn’t look back.

Couldn’t.

The walk back through the corridor was a blur.

He couldn’t feel his feet. Couldn’t hear anything but the roar of blood in his ears, the echo of moans he couldn’t un-hear. The door closed behind him.

Harry stopped.

The world seemed to tilt around him. His breath was shallow. Unsteady. His lungs ached as he swallowed once. Twice.

He’d lost control.

No—not lost. Given up. Handed it over. Consigned it to the void of his own want.

He couldn’t think. Couldn’t process. Not the shame. Not the fear. Not the fact that—somewhere in the dark—he’d stopped hating Tom Riddle. That the hatred had been replaced by something worse. Something he couldn’t bear to name. Couldn’t bear to look at head-on.

He didn’t remember returning to the surface.

Didn’t remember the cold air on his face or the clouds streaked red with sunset. All he could see was the cell in his mind’s eye. The steam coiling around them. Tom’s body—wet and wanting and writhing back against his.

He couldn’t breathe.

Couldn’t stand.

The world seemed to pitch around him, like the earth was shifting on its axis. He staggered against the outer wall of the Fortress, the stones cold and damp against his palms. He bent over, bracing himself, gasping for air he couldn’t quite reach.

His chest ached. His heart pounded. His throat burned.

And then, without thinking, he tore at his robes—fumbled with the clasp at his throat, the button at his waist, the layers that clung too tight, too constricting, like the truth he couldn’t escape.

The air hit his skin—cold and biting and sobering. He shivered. But the chill was welcome. It grounded him. Brought him back to the present, to the Fortress walls, to the fact that he’d crossed a line he swore he’d never approach, let alone breach.

He sank to the ground, robes abandoned, elbows braced on his knees.

And then, finally, the shame came. The horror. The reality of what he’d done, what it meant, what the rest of the world would say. How Hermione would look at him if she ever knew.

He buried his face in his hands, and for the first time in his life, Harry Potter wished for a way out. For a spell that could turn back time or a potion that could wipe his memory or a curse that would let him forget.

He sat there a long time, head bowed, the cold wind biting at his skin, the evening shadows growing long across the heather. He watched the clouds drift across the sunset, watched the sky turn slowly from red to violet, to indigo, to the cold grey of twilight.

And then, eventually, the panic ebbed.

The horror faded.

But the shame—the shame never left.

── ◈ ──

It began without warning. No tantrum. No outburst. No final threat to mark the shift.

Just—quiet.

And then something worse than quiet. Absence.

At first, Harry thought it was exhaustion. A mood. A ploy, even. Tom had always been theatrical in his silences, letting them stretch just long enough to make a man question his footing.

But this was not that.

The Prophet lay untouched on the tray. The spoon rattled once against the side of the bowl—then didn’t move again. The tea went cold. The toast sagged in the middle. And Tom—

Tom shrunk.

Not physically. Not quite. But something in him—of him—seemed to fold inwards. Like a flame that no longer bothered to burn. He sat, day after day, with his back to the wall, hands loose in his lap, and eyes that didn’t track movement anymore. Didn’t flinch when the tray arrived. Didn’t react when Harry said his name.

Didn’t see him.

At first, Harry forced himself to pretend it didn’t matter. He wasn’t here for company. He wasn’t here to be noticed. He was the warden. The final jailer of the last war. If Voldemort had chosen to rot in place, well—good. Let him waste. Let him vanish into the very silence he’d once weaponised.

But the lie didn’t hold.

Because Harry kept waiting. For the smirk. The hiss. The low, poison-laced voice calling him Potter like it meant something. He waited for the flick of a gaze, the curl of a lip, the rage that had once been their only shared language.

And he got nothing.

Not anger. Not pain. Not seduction.

Just... nothing.

He bathed him in silence. Sponge, water, cloth. The motions were the same. Familiar. But the body beneath his hands no longer reacted. No flinching, no muttered curses. Tom didn’t leer. He didn’t move.

Harry had to check, more than once, if he was breathing.

The next bath was clinical.

Harry brought gloves. Wore them. Kept them on even for the hair.

He didn’t speak. Didn’t pause. His movements were swift, mechanical. The sponge moved in precise circles, pressure even, hands steady. He avoided the collarbones. Avoided the ribs. Avoided everything that might be mistaken for memory.

Tom said nothing.

He didn’t flinch. Didn’t lean. Didn’t tilt his head the way he used to when Harry lathered his hair. He stood still, motionless as sculpture, eyes fixed somewhere far beyond the wall.

Harry washed him like he was made of glass. Or stone. Or something already dead.

The steam hung heavy in the air. The scent of eucalyptus clung to his gloves, sharp and unbearable. He didn’t look. Didn’t glance. Not even once. When the sponge slipped—brushed too near the hip—Harry jerked back like he’d been burned.

Tom didn’t react. Not even to that.

He just stood there—silent, bare, unresisting. Letting himself be handled without presence, without permission, without protest. He might as well have been a mannequin. A statue. A husk.

At one point, as Harry rinsed the soap from the nape of his neck, he thought he felt the faintest twitch of muscle—like a flinch remembered too late. But it passed. Like everything else.

By the time Harry reached for the towel, his hands were shaking.

He dropped it. Swore under his breath. Picked it up again without looking at the man in front of him. He draped it over Tom’s shoulders with a stiffness that bordered on cruelty.

Tom didn’t pull it tighter. Didn’t clutch at it. Just let it hang.

And Harry—Harry couldn’t breathe.

He fled the room before the towel hit the floor again.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

This wasn’t penance. This wasn’t balance. This was a man unraveling into dust—and Harry standing helpless at the edge of it.

He started bringing hotter food. Stronger tea. Books, again—ones he remembered liking once. He spoke more, too. Not kindly. Just enough. Enough to pull something—anything—from the hollow behind those crimson eyes.

Nothing.

Tom chewed in silence. Swallowed in silence. Slept in silence.

And Harry—Harry—began to ache.

He stayed longer than he should. Started speaking without provocation. Asking questions with no expectation of answers.

He missed him.

Not the man. Not the monster. But the friction—the fire. The way they had once screamed at each other with every breath. The way Tom had looked at him like a challenge, a mirror, a wound worth winning.

Now, there was no war left.

Just ruin.

Harry snapped one evening. He hadn’t meant to.

He’d stood too long at the edge of the cell, tray in hand, fingers clenched too tightly around the handles. His knuckles ached from it. His jaw, too. The body on the cot didn’t move. The same slumped posture. The same dull eyes. The same silence like snow falling on ash.

Something inside him—small, final—gave way.

“I’d kill you if I could.”

The words landed flat against the stone.

Tom didn’t flinch. Didn’t speak. Didn’t blink. It was like shouting into a well.

Harry swallowed. His throat was dry. “I’d enjoy it.”

There was a twitch then—barely a breath of it. A shift in the corner of Tom’s mouth. Not a smile. Not a reaction. More like a ghost of something half-remembered. A reflex long since buried.

Harry slammed the tray down harder than he needed to. The clatter echoed up the walls. The metal rang and then fell still.

“Say something,” he said, hoarse. “Say something, you bastard. Insult me. Threaten me. Tell me I’m still afraid of you. Be him again.”

The silence that followed wasn’t passive. It wasn’t resignation.

It was absence. Hollow. Like speaking to a corpse that still breathed.

And Harry hated it. Hated how much he hated it. Hated that he’d started coming here for the fight. For the burn in his blood. For the recognition in another pair of eyes.

And then—he said it.

The thing he’d promised himself he wouldn’t.

“Tom.”

The name left his mouth like a curse, soft and shattering.

It hung in the air between them like smoke. And for a moment, Harry thought he’d imagined the effect. That it was another cruel echo.

But Tom lifted his head.

Slowly. Painfully. Like it hurt.

Their eyes met.

Not like jailer and prisoner. Not even like enemies. Just—two men. Two shapes still breathing inside a war long buried.

And for one long, aching moment, Harry forgot how to breathe.

The air seemed thinner. The silence deeper. Something strange and terrible bloomed in the space between them. Not desire. Not hate.

Recognition.

And then Tom stood.

Every movement was deliberate, restrained. Not seductive. Not cruel. He moved like someone underwater—slow, careful, real. Bare feet against stone. Shoulders drawn but not hunched. He stopped just short of Harry—close enough that Harry could feel the breath of him. The heat rising off a body that had once been feverish and near-dead, now held together by quiet and something more fragile.

Tom’s eyes searched his face—unhurried, intent. They moved from Harry’s brow to his mouth, then back again, as though committing something to memory. And then, with a slowness that bordered on reverence, he began to lean forward. There was no arrogance in the motion, no sly seduction, no predator’s glint. It was careful. Soft. Like he didn’t know whether he was allowed to want anything at all.

He leaned in—not quickly, not hungrily. There was no force to it. No heat. Just closeness. Just breath. Just the unbearable suggestion of contact, like the moment before a storm breaks.

Harry didn’t move. Couldn’t. His body locked up, caught somewhere between disbelief and something older. Something worse. His lungs felt tight. His chest, hollow. The world had narrowed, drawn taut to the slant of that mouth, the line of that throat, the impossible nearness of another person reaching without expectation.

It wasn’t power that moved Tom Riddle. It wasn’t seduction. It was need.

The kind that doesn’t ask. That doesn’t bargain. The kind that surrenders.

Their mouths never touched.

Harry recoiled all at once. Not in anger—but as if yanked back by something inside himself, something buried and shaking loose. He stumbled, boots skidding over the stone. Two steps. Maybe three. The distance between them wasn’t far, but it felt like a cliff.

His breath came ragged. His hands were shaking. His heart hammered like a ward collapsing.

Not from desire. Not even from disgust.

From something worse. Something unnamed. Something true. Because he hadn’t been afraid of the kiss. He’d been afraid of not stopping it.

Tom didn’t chase him. Didn’t speak. He didn’t look wounded or ashamed. He simply… closed his eyes. Slowly. Like a door swinging shut somewhere far away. Quiet. Final. Not resignation, not punishment—just done.

Harry couldn’t look at him. Couldn’t bear the weight of those closed eyes, that absence of fire. Not after that.

He turned too fast, boots catching on the slick floor. He didn’t steady himself. Didn’t pause. He just fled, the way he always did when he didn’t know how to stay.

The door slammed behind him, louder than it needed to. It echoed in the hollow of his chest.

And inside the cell, Tom Riddle sat back down on the cot. Slowly. Deliberately. His spine straight, hands folded, chin tilted just so. Eyes open now. Breathing steady. He didn’t speak. Didn’t smile. Didn’t move again.

He was alive.

But something in him had gone out.

And in the stairwell above, Harry pressed a hand hard to his chest—like he could still hold something in. Like he could keep it from leaking.

He felt it.

Felt it like grief.

Later, long after the echo of the slammed door had faded, Harry stood at the viewing pane.

He hadn’t planned to return.

But his feet had led him here—half out of habit, half out of something worse. Something like guilt. Something like need.

The orb flickered. Dim. Pale. Casting the cell in the flat, colourless glow of surveillance. A god’s eye. Cold and unblinking.

Tom lay on the cot, his back to the door. The blanket had slipped from one shoulder. His hand curled loosely near his chest. Still. So still.

Harry watched for a long time. Said nothing. Breathed shallowly, as if even that might disturb the fragile balance of the moment.

And then—only once—he thought he saw it.

A shiver.

So faint it might’ve been a trick of the orb. A flicker in the light. A draft caught in stone.

But it looked like a tremble.

Like a breath held too long. A grief not sobbed, but endured.

And Harry—watching from above, from beyond, from elsewhere—let his forehead rest against the cold stone. Just for a moment.

He didn’t blink. He didn’t breathe.

He told himself it was nothing. A trick of the orb. A shift in shadow or cloth. Stone was cold at night—maybe it had been that. Reflex. Residue. Not a tremble. Not a break. Certainly not what it looked like.

Because it couldn’t be that. Couldn’t be him. Voldemort didn’t shake. He didn’t grieve. He didn’t lie curled on his side with his back to the world and his shoulders drawn tight like a man trying not to come apart. That wasn’t who he was. That wasn’t who he could be.

Harry pushed off the wall, breath held too long in his throat. Shoved the thought down where all the others went—into the hollow behind his ribs where he kept the things he couldn’t afford to believe.

── ◈ ──

The scrape of the spoon against stone echoed in the cell like a clock ticking too loud in the dark. The sound shouldn’t have meant anything. It was barely noise. Barely movement. But it was the only sound Tom had made all day.

Harry stood at the viewing pane. As always. As he had for hours now—well past his rounds, long after he should’ve returned to the surface. He told himself it was vigilance. Protocol. That he was observing, not lingering. But the lie didn’t hold water anymore. Not when he knew the truth. Not when he could feel it like a weight on his chest.

He was watching because Tom wasn’t watching him. He was watching because the stillness had changed.

There was no menace in the way Tom sat now. No poised silence, no carefully coiled malice. That silence had once meant danger—had once meant something was coming. But this silence felt like the absence after a funeral. Not peace. Not rage. Just stillness. Like something in him had burned out without ceremony.

Tom sat on the cot, spine too straight, hands folded politely in his lap like a boy at confession. He didn’t move. Not for the tray Harry had brought. Not for the shelf. Not even when Harry said his name, quietly, hours ago. And certainly not now.

Harry’s throat felt dry. His chest was tight. He wanted to speak. Some stupid line about the soup again—how the Prophet had another editorial on rising magical crime. Anything. Something to cut through the quiet. To pull him back.

But Tom moved first.

Not a flinch. Not a twitch. Just… shifted. Slowly. Deliberately. Like a marionette remembering it had strings.

He reached down, pale fingers curling around the edge of a slim book near his feet.

Harry’s heart stuttered.

It was the one he’d brought yesterday. A softbound volume of Muggle poetry. Something mild. Safe. A gesture, nothing more. But he’d chosen it with care. Fingers pausing too long over the shelf. Letting the weight of it settle in his palm like a thing that mattered. That might matter.

He’d carried it down into the cell. Set it on the shelf beside the tea. Pretended it didn’t cost him anything.

Tom stared at the cover for a long time. Then, without warning, he tore it down the middle.

The sound was clean. Efficient. Like cutting through flesh. Like a promise breaking.

Harry didn’t move.

His hands had curled into fists without permission. His stomach twisted. The shame came rushing back in a wave—sharp, stinging, awful.

Not at the torn book.

At the memory.

Steam. Heat. The wet slap of skin under his palm. Tom’s gasp. The way his spine had arched, breath hitching. How Harry’s own body had betrayed him—how he’d come with his hand wrapped around a man he swore he loathed.

He hadn’t stopped—not then, not until it was far too late. The shame of that clung to him like steam. Tom hurled the book against the wall; Harry flinched as it struck with a brutal, final thud, pages flaring like broken wings before falling limp. Then came another.

Tom was on his feet now. Fluid. Almost elegant. The way he moved when he was casting without a wand. Like the violence came from somewhere older than magic.

He ripped this one in half with both hands. Pages spilled around his feet like confetti at a funeral.

Then he turned to the shelf.

His chest rose and fell too fast. His fingers curled tight around the wood—tighter—until with a sudden, savage crack, he yanked.

The shelf shrieked.

The whole structure collapsed sideways, snapping where the supports gave way. Wood cracked against stone. Books tumbled. Spines burst. The air filled with the sound of torn paper and splintered wood.

Harry’s hand shot to the lock. He was shaking.

He shouldn’t be. This wasn’t a duel. It wasn’t a threat. But it felt like violence. Like Tom had opened his chest and let the rage pour out. And worse—it was Harry’s fault. All of it. The soap. The tray. The touch. The goddamned kiss that almost was.

The key jammed.

Harry cursed—sharp, breathless—and shoved harder. The lock caught, twisted, gave with a groan. He slammed his shoulder into the door and it flew open, the sound echoing like thunder down the stairwell. His boots hit stone two steps at a time, fast, reckless. The walls blurred.

“Tom!” he shouted, too loud, too raw. “What the hell are you doing?”

But he already knew.

Books lay strewn across the cell like corpses—gutted, torn, their pages scattered like feathers after a slaughter. The shelf was splintered, broken at the base, half-collapsed and leaning like a dying thing. Wood littered the floor in jagged shards. One length had been hurled across the room. Another lay near Tom’s feet, dark with blood.

He was standing in the wreckage like it meant nothing.

His breath came fast. Shallow. A slash of crimson ran down one hand from a fresh gash along the palm, but he didn’t look at it. Didn’t seem to feel it. His fists were clenched. His hair hung damp over his forehead in uneven strands, clinging to the sweat on his temples. And his eyes—

Not red.

Just dark. Human. And hollow. But burning with something Harry couldn’t name.

Tom didn’t answer right away.

When he did, the words came soft. Precise. Brittle as glass.

“I didn’t ask for the books.”

His gaze never lifted—just stayed on the pulp and ruin beneath him. The snapped spine. The torn covers. The poems Harry had thought might reach him. Soften him. Save him. Idiot.

“Or the tea,” Tom said, quieter now. “Or the soap you can’t stop buying.”

He could have spat the words. Could have sneered. But he didn’t. He just said them. Sharp and deliberate. Like knives laid out on velvet.

Then—finally—he looked up.

“I never asked for your hands.”

The breath caught in Harry’s lungs. Tom’s voice had dropped, gone soft in that way that wasn’t gentleness but cruelty in disguise. Cruelty shaped like truth.

“But you gave them anyway. Day after day.” A step forward—measured, steady, devastating. “Like penance.”

Harry didn’t move. Couldn’t. His throat was dry. His hands itched with remembered touch.

“I was trying to help,” Harry said, voice low. “You don’t get to turn that into—”

Tom cut him off with a look. Not cruel. Just tired. “No. You don’t get to pretend it was clean.”

The words scraped something raw. Harry’s mouth twisted, the old heat flaring to life like a match struck on bone.

“Stop putting things there that aren’t—” he snapped. A breath. A crack. “Just—don’t overthink it.”

And then—so soft it was almost tender: “Was that before or after you came in your trousers?”

Harry recoiled like he’d been struck.

Shame surged hot in his chest. His fingers curled into fists, not to fight—but to keep from trembling.

“You think that’s what this is?” His voice cracked—furious, but hollow underneath. “You destroy everything just to make me touch you again?”

He stepped forward. Slowly. Careful now. Like crossing a line he’d drawn and redrawn and never once honoured. His voice dropped, bitter.

“It’s not happening. Not again.”

But Tom didn’t retreat. Didn’t bare his teeth. He just watched him—unblinking, unreadable, like he was watching a story he already knew the ending to.

“Then why do you keep coming back?”

It wasn’t mockery this time.

Not in his voice. Not in his eyes. Just a quiet, terrible certainty—steady as gravity, sharp as a knife Harry already knew too well. There was no glee in it. No victory. Just the truth, spoken like prophecy.

“No one’s watching, Harry,” Tom said, voice soft. “You could leave the tray and go.”

He didn’t raise his chin. Didn’t bare his teeth. He took a step forward—measured, unhurried. Not predatory. Not pleading. Just there.

“But you don’t,” he continued. Another step. A breath closer. “You stay. Like you’re waiting for something.”

The words didn’t lash. They settled. Like dust in a crypt.

Harry’s jaw locked. He didn’t move. Didn’t breathe. His voice scraped out like a stone dragged across glass. “Don’t—don’t turn this on me.”

But it wasn’t a warning. Not really. More like a plea. A last attempt to keep the floor from crumbling out from under them both.

And then Tom’s expression cracked.

No flourish. No warning. Just the sudden rush of it—rage like a dam breaking, like fire flooding a body too long frozen.

“Then what do you want from me?” he screamed.

The sound shattered the air between them. It wasn’t just volume—it was rawness. It was breakage. Something guttural and childlike and ancient all at once. Harry flinched—not at the scream itself, but at the way it landed. The truth of it. The awful, ragged honesty buried inside.

Tom’s fists trembled at his sides. His chest rose in sharp, shaking bursts. His breath was torn from him now, and when he spoke again, it was hoarse—splintered.

“I gave you silence,” he rasped. “I gave you nothing—”

He choked on the next breath. His voice dipped, cracked.

“—and it’s still not enough.”

Harry stepped forward then, too fast, too angry, too close to something he couldn’t name. “You think this is about you?” he spat.

But Tom didn’t let him finish.

“Leave me the fuck alone!”

The roar hit like a curse hurled at the bones of the Fortress. It echoed off the stone. Rattled in Harry’s teeth. Tom’s hand slammed into the wall behind him with a crack. Blood smeared across the cold stone in a long, violent arc. He didn’t even look at it. Didn’t care.

“I want to be fucking alone!”

The words echoed off stone, violent and final. But it wasn’t the scream that hit Harry. Not the fury, not the way the sound cracked down the spine of the room like a curse too long held back. It was the eyes.

Crimson red. Not gleaming with power. Just wide. And wet. And empty. Eyes that had once commanded armies now looked like something hollowed out. Tired—not from time, but from being. From waking up in the same four walls every day and knowing there was no end.

For a heartbeat—maybe two—Harry couldn’t move. Couldn’t breathe. Because in that moment, he saw it. Saw through the fury, past the violence, beneath every mask and moniker.

Not the Dark Lord. Not the monster he’d grown up fearing. Not the warlord who’d broken the world just to remake it in his name.

Just a man.

A man who had clawed his way through death and immortality and the wreckage of everything he’d once believed in—only to end up here. In a cell. Barefoot. Bleeding. Screaming for solitude he couldn’t even choose.

And the tragedy of it, the quiet cruelty, was that he didn’t even have the right to choose that. Not really. Not in this place. Not in the prison Harry had built for him.

He didn’t get to ask for mercy.

But Harry gave it to him anyway.

His throat closed tight around the ache rising there—thick and sharp, like something unspoken had lodged behind his ribs and wouldn’t come loose. He swallowed hard. The words, when they came, were stripped of heat, stripped of righteousness. Just a breath pulled into shape.

“…Fine.”

He didn’t reach for him. Didn’t offer comfort. There was no soft touch, no apology, no salve. He didn’t look at the blood smeared on the stone or the splintered shelves or the pages scattered like feathers at their feet. He didn’t meet Tom’s eyes again. He simply turned, slowly, as though the weight of what they’d broken between them had gravity.

One step. Then another.

He walked past the torn bindings and the jagged edge of the shelf, past the ruin of all the quiet offerings he’d made without asking if they were wanted. Past the hollow where something fragile had tried to survive and hadn’t.

He left the tray behind.

He didn’t slam the door. Didn’t speak. Didn’t look back. He let the silence reclaim the space between them like a tide washing over wreckage.

And when he was gone, the air didn’t move.

Tom didn’t sit. Didn’t speak. He stood in the centre of it all—blood still slipping down his fingers, chest still heaving from the aftermath. The books lay at his feet, broken and useless. The shelf canted sideways like a snapped bone. The room was no longer a cell but a ruin. And he stood in the heart of it, breathing like a man trying to remember what it had meant to be seen—and not abandoned.

He remained where he was, not as a victor or a villain, but as something far more fragile—just a man, left behind in the silence.

── ◈ ──

The next day, Harry didn’t go down.

He made the rounds. Filed the daily reports. Replaced a ruined hinge in the East Wing. There was a leak somewhere near the central well, and the ancient pipes refused to obey the most basic of Muggle sealing kits. It was irritating, but familiar. Easy. Better than silence. Better than blood.

He stayed aboveground. Watched the wind move through the pines, fingers drumming absently against the empty tray. He even brewed himself tea—his own cup, untouched by ritual. But it tasted wrong. Too bitter. Or maybe just too clean.

He thought about going back.

Didn’t.

That night, he dreamt of books. Pages torn, crumpled, soaked in something sticky and dark. He woke with the taste of eucalyptus still clinging to his tongue.

When he returned the next morning—tray in hand, steps heavy but deliberate—he didn’t expect change. Not really.

The cell door groaned open.

And Harry stilled.

The broken shelf had been moved. Its jagged carcass was tucked against the far wall, neatly aligned as if awaiting burial. And in the centre of the room, crouched like a monk at prayer, was Tom.

He didn’t look up. Didn’t speak. But his hands were moving.

Slow. Precise. Careful in a way that felt almost reverent.

He was piecing the pages back together.

Each scrap was smoothed, flattened. Laid out on the stone like fragments of some sacred text. A corner here. A line of verse there. His fingers trembled only slightly as he fit them edge to edge, trying to summon wholeness from ruin.

Harry stepped in, quiet as he could, though his boots still scraped the floor. He set the tray down by the cot. The clink of ceramic echoed.

Tom didn’t flinch.

He just kept working.

“Oh, Tom,” Harry said softly.

That got a reaction.

Tom’s head snapped up. His glare was sharp enough to slice through stone. It said Don’t. It said Fuck off. It said You lost the right to pity me the moment you touched me like that and walked away.

Harry’s mouth went dry. He looked down, swallowing whatever apology might’ve surfaced. Instead, he crossed to the ruined shelf. The largest fragments were stacked already—Tom had done that, too. A small act of order.

“I can take the pages up,” Harry said quietly. “Use magic to repair them. It’ll be cleaner that way. Faster.”

Tom didn’t answer at first. Just stared at him, breathing shallow.

Then: “No.”

His voice was hoarse, but steady. “You don’t get to touch it.”

Harry nodded. Once. The words stung, but he understood. This was penance. The slow reassembly. The refusal of ease.

He cleared the broken shelf himself. Quietly. Piece by piece. He brought down a new one the next morning—plain, undecorated, pine like the first.

He said nothing as he installed it.

Tom didn’t speak either.

But the pages kept gathering.

And by the end of the week, the torn poem from the softbound volume had begun to resemble a book again.

── ◈ ──

The next week passed in silence.

But not the brittle kind—not the post-violence hush Harry remembered from war, or the empty numbness that had wrapped around Tom in the wake of the bath. This was different. Something quieter. Not peace—never peace—but persistence.

Every day, Tom gathered the pages.

He sorted them by hand, with the same reverence he’d once used to kill. Spine fragments were laid flat. Corners were fitted edge to edge, fingertip to fingertip. He didn’t ask for string. Refused glue. Refused help. There was no spell to make it whole—not here—and Tom didn’t want one. He assembled the wreckage slowly. Intimately. Like it meant something.

Harry didn’t speak of it. Didn’t ask. But he saw. The shelf, once bare, had begun to fill again. With paper held together not by magic, but will. Titles he remembered lifting from secondhand stalls or pulling from the Order’s ruined archives now sat like relics, thin and breathing and fragile with care.

The Fortress remained quiet.

The world didn’t ask for updates anymore.

No new visitors came. The last letter from the Department of Magical Containment had been dated six months ago, signed by an undersecretary Harry didn’t recognise. The new Minister—some bright-eyed McMillan boy with polished shoes and no memory of war—hadn’t mentioned the Fortress once in his public addresses. Not even in the footnotes.

Kingsley had been dead for years now. Buried in a state funeral with full honours, speeches about unity, wreaths of phoenix-feather and forget-me-nots.

No one remembered the man still living below the earth.

Sometimes, Harry forgot how long it had been. Sixty years. Maybe more. He didn’t count, not really. The Fortress had its own time, its own seasons. The shadows on the stone never changed. The wind at the highest stairwell always tasted like frost. Somewhere above, the world turned. But down here—time just held.

It was a Thursday when Harry found the book.

He hadn’t meant to. He was rifling through a Ministry storage annex—searching for a wand log long overdue, something Kingsley had once asked him to maintain. The air had smelled of ink and mildew. Shelves leaned like crooked teeth.

And there it was.

Thin. Gold-lettered. Cracked at the corners.

A Treatise on the Twelve Uses of Dragon’s Blood, by Albus Dumbledore.

Harry froze. The sight of the title struck him like a hex—not pain, not surprise. Just stillness. Like something remembered too late. He reached for it before he meant to. Thumbed the spine. The pages were water-warped, but legible. It wasn’t a formal volume—not a print run. More likely a transcript, or collection of lectures someone had compiled. It didn’t matter.

He remembered the conversation.

It had begun with a line in the paper.

A retrospective. One of those puff pieces The Prophet ran whenever they were low on scandal—Great Wizards of the 20th Century. Dumbledore’s name in bold. A grainy photograph of him at some Ministry function, eyes twinkling as always, half-faded behind a banner that read Unity Through Wisdom.

Tom snorted. Not cruelly. Just tired.

“He always did love a motto.”

Harry, seated by the wall with his tea growing cold, glanced up. “What, that one?”

“No. All of them.” Tom’s voice was dry. “He collected them the way other men collect lovers. Or lies. Or—” He gestured vaguely, as though the word didn’t matter. “Ministers.”

Harry huffed. “He wasn’t that bad.”

“No,” Tom said. “He was worse.”

Silence stretched between them—comfortably at first, then tighter. Tom’s gaze drifted back to the paper. The photo. Then to something far past it.

“I hated him,” he said. “I loathed him. But I knew—he was the most brilliant wizard alive.”

Harry didn’t answer immediately. The words didn’t feel like bait. Not this time. Just memory, surfacing like rot. He sipped his tea, then said quietly, “Yeah.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. “You still grieve him.”

“I do.”

Another pause. Longer this time.

Tom’s voice came softer, but no less precise. “You were his favourite.”

Harry’s jaw tensed. “I was his responsibility.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” There was no sneer in it. No triumph. Just an observation, bleak and distant. “He groomed you for slaughter. You know that.”

“He tried to save the world,” Harry muttered.

“No.” Tom looked up, eyes sharp. “He tried to save you. The world was secondary.”

The words landed hard. Harry didn’t flinch, but something in him hollowed. He knew better than to argue. Not because Tom was right—but because there was a kind of truth in it that didn’t need to be clean to cut.

The fire crackled in the grate.

Then, as if the thought had arrived unbidden, Tom said, “I always wanted to read that bastard’s book.”

Harry blinked. “What book?”

“Twelve Uses of Dragon’s Blood.” Tom’s tone turned faintly amused. “You know the one. They mention it in every biography. Some genius little pamphlet he wrote during his Transfiguration tenure. It became legend.”

Harry tilted his head. “I didn’t think you’d care.”

“I didn’t,” Tom said. “Not after. Not once I became what I became. But as a boy—” He shrugged. “I couldn’t afford it. An orphan’s allowance didn’t stretch far.”

Harry couldn’t say anything.

Tom’s gaze lowered. “And later… I didn’t want to read the book. I wanted to be it.”

The line landed like a bruise. Quiet. Unexpected.

“What does that mean?” Harry asked, voice barely above a whisper.

Tom’s mouth twisted. Not quite a smile. Not quite anything. “I wanted to be indispensable. Elusive. Revered. The kind of brilliance no one questioned. The kind of name that never needed a first name attached. Just Riddle would’ve done. Or Lord. Like him. Like Dumbledore.”

Harry felt something rise in his throat then. Not pity. Not horror. Something harder to name. A hollow ache that felt too much like kinship.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t.

But he remembered the moment long after. Not for what was said. But for what wasn’t.

Now, standing at the top of the stairwell, tray in one hand and the book in the other, he wasn’t sure if it was an offering or an insult.

He entered quietly. The tray clinked once. Tea. Toast. One boiled egg. Same as ever. Tom sat at the cot, cross-legged, mending a spine with deliberate care. He didn’t look up.

Harry stepped to the shelf. Said nothing. Placed the book beside the half-repaired poetry volume, careful not to disturb the fragile stack beside it.

He turned to go.

But behind him, Tom’s voice—dry, flat—cut the silence.

“What is that.”

Harry paused. “Dragon’s Blood.”

He heard the breath Tom didn’t mean to take. Sharp. Then controlled. He didn’t thank him. Of course he didn’t.

But when Harry looked back as he left, Tom’s eyes had dropped to the cover. One hand hovered over it. Not reaching. Not yet. Just looking.

Like someone weighing the cost of memory. Like someone who’d never had the chance to read it. And now—maybe—would.

── ◈ ──

The first thing Harry noticed was the way the world had grown thin.

The wind no longer howled the same through Ottery’s chimneys. The fields behind the Burrow—though no longer the Burrow—had been divided, fenced, parcelled out to grandchildren and great-grandchildren. The orchard still stood. But its apples now dropped silently, rotting in the grass.

Harry hadn’t changed.

Not really. Not in the ways that mattered. His back didn’t ache. His hands didn’t shake. His vision—sharp as ever—could still spot a Snitch at two hundred feet. The robes hung differently now. Fashions shifted every few decades. But he still walked with the same lean, economical motion. The same scar. The same green eyes. The same shoulders, slightly hunched, like the weight never left.

He wore age like a costume.

A glamour: faint lines at the corners of his mouth. A subtle greying at the temples. Hermione had taught him how to cast it without flicker. Without magical residue. “The key,” she’d said, forty years ago now, “is to look tired. Not old.”

And it worked. On most people.

But not Ron.

Ron always saw through it.

They’d built the lie together.

It had been Hermione’s idea—naturally. She’d argued for permanence, for strategy. “You can’t disappear,” she’d said. “Not entirely. The goblins will notice. The press. Your Gringotts accounts are still active, and if you don’t want them tracing the deposits—”

So they built him a second name. A lineage. A son, abroad in America—an illusion constructed with precision and pain. Hermione drafted the records. Ron forged the handwriting. Harry gave the child a name. Not James. Not Albus. Just Caleb Potter. A quiet boy with a clean wand record and no traceable school history.

They never spoke of it as what it was: survival. Or maybe penance.

Even in the end.

The death came quietly. Of course it did.

Ron had never been built for dramatic exits. Not like Fred. Not like Sirius. His was a quiet sort of bravery—the kind that held a family together, that buried the war without ever forgetting it. That learned to laugh again, even when the laughter cracked in places.

He’d aged well, all things considered. His hair had turned to silver by seventy. His voice deepened with each passing year, warping into the sort of growl that made children giggle and lean in for stories about boggarts and Quidditch injuries.

He’d named one of his grandsons Harry. Another Remus.

The room was full when it happened. Ginny by the window, her own hands trembling from too many years and too many losses. Rose, now Minister, stood at the foot of the bed, still issuing instructions even as her voice cracked.

But Harry didn’t see them.

Not really.

Just Ron. Lying there in bed, thin as parchment, freckles faded into sallow skin, eyes still blue, still clear. And when the rest had been ushered out—when the family had left to allow the last few moments of privacy—Harry sat. Alone with him.

“You’re not crying,” Ron rasped.

Harry swallowed. “You’re not gone yet.”

A smile tugged at the corner of Ron’s mouth. “You always were rubbish at goodbyes.”

“So don’t say it.”

They sat in silence. The clock ticked. The sun pooled on the windowsill like something spilled and forgotten. Outside, someone laughed—a child’s voice, distant. Harry stared at the sound like it didn’t belong in this world anymore.

Then, too softly: “I knew.”

Harry didn’t look up. “Knew what.”

“You’ve given yourself to him.”

Harry closed his eyes. “Ron.”

But Ron didn’t stop. His voice was quieter now, but steadier. Years behind it. Decades.

“I am old, Harry. Old and wise, apparently. And I see it now, clear as bloody day.”

Harry’s breath caught. His throat tightened, and something wild flickered behind his eyes. Panic. Denial. But not surprise.

Ron’s gaze softened. “You keep going back. Again and again. To that place. To him. Like it’s duty. Like it’s penance. But it’s more than that, isn’t it.”

Harry’s voice shook. “You don’t understand—”

“I do,” Ron said. “I do, mate. Because I know you. Because you and Voldemort were always entwined. You always were. Hallows. Horcruxes. Prophecy. You think you can’t stop because the war’s not finished. But it is, Harry. It has been. For a very long time.”

Harry was shaking now. He didn’t know when the tears started—but they were there. He blinked and they fell.

Ron reached for his hand. Gripped it, thin fingers dry and shaking but stubborn as ever.

“I know you were the final Horcrux, Harry.”

The words landed like a blow.

Harry bowed his head. His shoulders trembled. He couldn’t meet Ron’s eyes.

“I didn’t mean to,” he whispered. “I didn’t want to—”

“I know,” Ron said. “I know you didn’t. And I don’t blame you.”

“But he’s still in there,” Harry choked. “Some part of him. He never really died. I kept it alive. I am what’s left.”

Ron shook his head, faint but fierce. “No. You’re not. You’re what survived. And that’s not the same thing.”

Harry sobbed then. A quiet, awful sound, like something cracked open too long ago and never stitched back together.

Ron squeezed his hand.

“The world moved on, Harry. He’s gone. No one remembers him anymore. No one’s afraid. Kids don’t even know what a Death Eater was. It’s over.”

Harry couldn’t speak. His throat was full of salt and time.

“Just be happy,” Ron said softly, eyes slipping shut. “That’s all I ever wanted. For you to be happy.”

Harry tried to answer. Tried to promise. But all that came out was breath, wet and wordless.

Ron smiled.

A real one. Gentle. Certain. He breathed in, shallow. Out, slower.

Then he didn’t breathe again.

Harry didn’t move.

The room blurred. The sun dipped lower on the sill, spilling across the rug like spilled gold. The clock kept ticking.

And Harry sat there with Ron’s hand in his own, crying like the boy he’d once been. Not the war hero. Not the immortal. Not Death’s shadow.

Just Harry. Just his friend. Just too late.

── ◈ ──

The sky over Ottery had split open.

The funeral had been simple—dignified, as Ron would have wanted. No Ministry parade. No Order banners. Just a hand-carved coffin beneath the same orchard that had once held their summer tents. The earth was damp, the grass flattened by too many feet. Someone sang. Someone else wept.

Harry did neither.

He stood beneath the apple tree with his glamour still in place—face shadowed, eyes empty—and watched the dirt swallow the last person who’d ever called him mate without irony.

The grave was quiet.

Not the kind of hush that comforts, but the kind that presses too heavy against the lungs. Cold earth had swallowed Ron beside Hermione—ashes to ashes, parchment to parchment. The headstones stood crooked in the winter light, a little too close together, as if still leaning toward each other after all these years.

And Harry—Harry had never looked more like a stranger at his own life.

He didn’t stay for the wake.

Didn’t speak to Ginny. Didn’t look at the children—his godchildren, his namesakes. He Disapparated behind the old shed, boots crunching on gravel, and when he reappeared it was in the highest tower of the Fortress. The wind shrieked there. The cold bit down.

And still—he didn’t stop.

Because there was no other warden anymore.

Hadn’t been for decades, if he was honest. The Ministry still sent the reports—standard parchment, names printed by automatic quill, rounds signed off on by hands that had never once touched the walls of the Fortress. A fiction. A relic. There hadn’t been another set of boots in the lower corridors for twenty years or more.

There was only him now. Only Harry. And Tom.

The air grew colder as he descended. The lamps didn’t flicker anymore—most had burned out, and Harry hadn’t bothered to charm them. The silence pressed heavier here. Not peace. Just weight. The kind that settled into your bones when no one was watching.

The corridor to the cell smelled like damp stone and eucalyptus soap. The scent turned his stomach. The tray trembled in his hand.

He should have stayed at the funeral.

But instead, he was here—bringing dinner to a ghost in a prison that didn’t even exist on the maps anymore. Because habit was stronger than grief. Because rage needed somewhere to go.

He opened the door too hard.

Tom looked up from the cot—robed, languid, deliberate as ever. His head tilted at the slam, gaze flicking lazily to the tray, then to Harry.

A smirk touched his lips.

“My, my,” he said. “And here I thought grief made men quieter. But you storm in like a child denied sweets.”

Harry didn’t speak.

Tom stood, smoothing the front of his robe with deliberate elegance. “Don’t tell me someone else died. You’re running out of them.”

The words struck something deep.

Tom’s smirk widened. “Ah. So it was Weasley, then. Finally gave up the charade of breathing?”

Harry dropped the tray.

The clatter rang out like a blade unsheathed—porcelain shattered, tea spilled across the stone like blood. Tom blinked at the mess, brows lifting—but not in fear. Just amusement. Curiosity. Like he was watching a dog finally bite.

Harry moved before he thought.

He crossed the cell in three strides and slammed Tom back into the wall.

The impact cracked through the stone like a fault line. Tom grunted—more surprise than pain—as Harry shoved his forearm across his throat, pinning him in place.

“You want it?” Harry hissed. “You fucking want it?”

Tom’s eyes gleamed. Not a cruel red. Bright.

“Oh,” he said, low. “Finally found your wand, Potter?”

He said it like a joke, but there was heat under it—dry, deliberate, meant to hurt. Meant to provoke. But behind the mockery, something else flickered. Not challenge. Not fear.

Recognition.

Harry snarled. His hand tightened. He pressed harder—not to choke, not yet, but just enough to feel something beneath him. Heat. Bone. Resistance.

“You think this is a joke?” Harry spat. “You think you can mock him—them—and I’ll just walk away again?”

Tom didn’t flinch. “You always do.”

“Not tonight.”

There was blood pounding in his ears. He could feel it rising, surging, drowning the last of his reason.

“Do you know what you are?” Harry whispered, his voice shaking. “You are nothing. You are rot in a box. You are a mistake I keep feeding. And I keep coming back, and I don’t know why.”

Tom’s lips parted—but not to speak.

To breathe.

And that—that—was the last straw.

Harry slammed him harder against the wall, the echo like thunder. “You want to be a curse? You want to haunt me? Fine.” His hand moved lower, gripped Tom’s jaw, fingers digging into pale skin. “Haunt me, then.”

Tom’s breath hitched. Not in fear. Not in pain.

In want.

Harry froze.

For one breathless second, they stood locked—heat, fury, breath, ruin. And Harry could feel it. The line beneath his hands, the current running between them, the crackling echo of a grief that had nowhere else to go.

And the way Tom’s eyes flicked to his lips—sharp, hungry. Like he felt it too.

Harry hesitated. Tom tilted his head back. An invitation. A plea. His gaze went dark, his voice barely above a whisper as he breathed, “I already do.”

Harry shattered.

He lunged forward, crushing his mouth against Tom’s with brutal, bruising force. The kiss tasted of blood and salt and the sharp tang of something that shouldn’t be named. Not lust. Not hunger. Something more dangerous. Tom groaned—a low, desperate sound, as if the sound had been dragged from some hidden part of him.

Harry didn’t think.

He tore the robes from Tom’s shoulders. Buttons scattered. Fabric ripped. He shoved it aside, pressing his palms against bare flesh—against the lean, wiry heat of muscle and sinew. Tom arched beneath him, gasping—

Harry broke the kiss.

He flipped him, pinning him to the wall, chest to stone, one hand fisted in his hair. Tom didn’t struggle. Didn’t fight. He just pressed his cheek to the cold surface and groaned, “Yes—”

It was the groan that did it—the sharp, raw, broken sound of it. Like need. Like pain. Like something Tom didn’t want to want but couldn’t hide. Harry didn’t hesitate. He reached for the waistband of Tom’s trousers, jerking them down roughly. The fabric tore under his hands, baring skin, baring heat, baring Tom in all his awful glory. Harry pressed him harder against the stone, fingers biting into flesh, leaving marks that would linger. Would scar.

And Tom moaned.

The sound was ragged. Hungry. It scraped the air like a blade on bone, and Harry could feel it. Could feel the way Tom shook in his grip, the way his hips pushed back like a challenge. A dare.

Harry didn’t speak. Just reached between Tom’s legs. Fingers circled his cock. A sharp inhale.

Harry stroked once. Hard and slow. Then again, not bothering to be gentle, not trying to ease the ache but worsen it. His hand moved faster, rough and demanding, and Tom bucked into his grip with a hiss. His hips jerked, his cock stiffening beneath Harry’s touch, and the sound that rose from his throat was half-sob, half-growl.

“Is this what you wanted?” Harry snarled. “This is why you taunt me? Because you want to be fucked like the monster you are?”

Tom didn’t answer. Not at first. His breathing came in shallow gasps, his body straining, desperate. Then, finally, hoarse and broken: “Yes—”

Harry gripped him harder. “Then beg.”

He stroked faster. Faster. And Tom’s breath hitched, his body tensing, his cock throbbing, hot and heavy in Harry’s hand. He was close. So close.

“Beg,” Harry repeated. His voice cracked—something human, something vulnerable.

And Tom broke.

“Please,” he gasped, voice raw, eyes squeezing shut. “Please—”

Harry didn’t let him finish.

His free hand reached for the bottle in his robes, quick, clumsy, tearing it free. He didn’t bother to warm the liquid. Didn’t pause to make it easy. Just slicked his fingers, found Tom’s entrance, and pressed in. Not slow. Not soft. Just a sharp, brutal movement, two fingers at once, and Tom choked, head thrown back, spine arching like a bow. Harry worked him open roughly, cruelly, his fingers thrusting deep and hard, stretching him. Tom cried out—a hoarse, ragged sound, half-pleasure, half-pain. But he didn’t stop him. Didn’t pull away.

Harry didn’t ask. He just pulled his hand free and shoved his own trousers down, his cock springing free, hard and aching. He coated himself in the remaining oil, fingers shaking, and then he was lining himself up, pushing forward, breaching Tom with a single, savage thrust. Tom’s hands scrabbled at the wall. His jaw locked. A mangled sound rose in his throat, half-groan, half-sob.

Harry didn’t stop.

He fucked him in rough, punishing strokes—deep, hard, relentless. The cell echoed with the slap of skin on skin, the wet slide of Harry’s cock in his arse. Tom shuddered, his body trembling beneath the onslaught, his fingers curling against the stone. And still Harry didn’t slow. Didn’t ease. Just fucked him with brutal, merciless force, his fingers biting into Tom’s hip, holding him in place.

“Is this what you wanted?” Harry hissed, his voice cracking. “To be taken? Used? Fucked?”

Tom whimpered. His head tipped forward, resting against the cold stone. His cock was wilting from the rough treatment. But he didn’t ask for mercy. Didn’t plead for release. Just reached back to grip Harry’s hip, fingers trembling, urging him deeper.

“Yes,” he breathed. “Fuck me, Harry. Fuck me like you hate me.”

The words cut like glass. Harry’s rhythm stuttered. His breath caught, something sharp and fragile and dangerous rising in his chest. He didn’t answer. Just drove into Tom harder, faster, his thrusts turning frantic, almost desperate.

And Tom met him there. Half-collapsed against the wall, knees buckling, but still reaching back, still clinging to him like it was the only thing keeping him alive. Like he was afraid he’d break if Harry let him go. Like he wanted to break.

Harry slid his hand around to grasp Tom’s cock again. He didn’t bother to be gentle. Just stroked him, hard and fast, his fingers tight and cruel. Tom cried out, his hips jerking, his cock swelling against Harry’s touch. Harry’s own orgasm was building, coiling at the base of his spine, heat pooling low in his gut. His hips snapped forward, his rhythm faltering, and then—

“Come for me,” he growled.

Tom shattered.

He came with a hoarse, broken cry, spilling over Harry’s fist, his body tensing, shuddering, clenching around Harry’s cock. The pleasure hit like a blow, sharp and bright, and Harry couldn’t hold on. Couldn’t stop. He thrust into Tom, hard and deep, and came with a ragged groan, his cock pulsing, filling Tom with his release.

And in that moment, something in him broke.

Not desire. Not the old rage. Something else, something that had been clawing at him for years now, something that had no name but loss. He came apart. Collapsed forward, forehead pressed to Tom’s shoulder blades, shaking. He didn’t cry. Didn’t sob. But the grief was there anyway, rising in his throat, choking him.

And Tom—Tom didn’t move. Didn’t push him away. Just stood there, limp against the stone, breathing like something torn and pieced back together.

The cell was quiet.

Quiet in the way that silence was never quiet. The kind of silence that had weight. Breath. Presence. Harry’s own pulse beat loud in his ears, and beyond it, he could hear Tom’s, slow. Steady.

Finally, Harry straightened.

His hand slipped from Tom’s cock. Slowly, carefully, wiping himself with the ruined edge of Tom’s robe.

He pulls out too fast.

Tom flinches.

A sharp, involuntary twist of muscle—a breath caught and bitten down. His hands braced against the wall, wrists white-knuckled. A tremor ran down his spine.

And still, he said nothing.

Just stood there, bare and open, his body bearing the proof of it. Harry’s touch. Harry’s rage. Harry’s refusal to let go. His release dripped from Tom’s entrance, thick and obscene. Harry swallowed. His hands shook. He didn’t look at Tom. Just tucked himself away, fumbled with the waistband of his trousers, and stepped back. 

The distance between them was no greater than before, but it felt different now.

The silence pulsed. Pressed.

Harry’s eyes dropped—unwilling, but dragged by gravity and guilt. He saw the rawness. The reddened skin. The way Tom’s thighs trembled. The way his breath hitched through clenched teeth. Not from shame. Not from fear. But from pain. Honest, sharp, human pain.

And it gutted him.

“Fuck,” Harry breathed.

His voice cracked on the word. It sounded like a confession. Like regret.

Tom didn’t speak.

He just pressed his forehead to the stone, breath slowing, fingers curled uselessly where they’d slid down the wall. The robe hung in tatters from one shoulder, his spine bare and arched, knees beginning to give.

Harry moved before he meant to. A step forward. Then two.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

His voice was quiet now. Brittle.

“I’ll—” He stopped. Swallowed. Tried again. “I’ll bring you a bath.”

Tom didn’t nod. Not at first.

Then—slowly, almost imperceptibly—he did.

A bare inch of movement. Then he let himself slide down the wall, knees folding, back against the stone. He sat in the wreckage of himself, one arm limp at his side, the other braced on the floor. His gaze was unfocused. Glassy.

Harry left without a word.

The door closed behind him—quietly this time. Not slammed. Not cursed. Just closed. As if any louder sound might snap what little remained intact.

The Fortress swallowed him in its cold. Hallways empty. Torches low. The Ministry still sent supplies, of course. Rations. Medical kits. Water-charms pre-bottled and sanitised, labelled for emergency field use. They hadn’t meant them for tenderness. But Harry had used worse.

He transfigured a basin. Cast warming spells with fingers that trembled more than he’d admit. Added eucalyptus. Mint. Something familiar. Something clean. He wasn’t sure if it was for Tom or for himself.

By the time he returned, the cell had darkened. The stones swallowed the light. The air was thick—humid with breath and sweat and something else that clung too tightly to the lungs.

Tom hadn’t moved.

Still slumped at the base of the wall, robe tangled at his waist, bare skin marked with sweat and fingerprints and the faint beginnings of bruises. His back rose and fell in shallow pulls. His fingers twitched now and then, but otherwise—stillness.

Harry set the basin down with care.

Then knelt.

Close. But not touching.

Steam curled between them, soft and fragrant. It broke the scent of stone and old magic—layered over it, pressed into the cracks. Mint. Eucalyptus. Warm water and something like apology.

“I brought the bath,” Harry said quietly.

No reply.

He soaked the cloth, wrung it once, and reached forward—slow, deliberate. But not to his back.

Not yet.

Instead, Harry set the cloth between Tom’s legs.

Tom flinched—hard this time. A sharp, instinctive twist, his thighs snapping shut with a hiss through his teeth. His hands scraped against the stone.

Harry didn’t pull away.

“I have to clean you,” he said, voice low, steady. “Just to make sure you’re not hurt.”

No answer. But the resistance eased—fractionally. Tom's knees parted, not fully, not freely, but enough.

Harry worked in silence. Gentle, careful. Wiping away the mess he'd left behind. His fingers shook. The cloth moved through slickness and salt and the remnants of what they’d done. There was a rawness there, already forming. And when the cloth passed over it, Tom gasped—biting it down into the back of his hand.

“I’m sorry,” Harry murmured.

No forgiveness came. Just breath. Just the tremble of a man who refused to make a sound.

He worked quickly then. Efficient, not detached. Trying to make it easier, even as nothing about it could be. When it was done, Harry rinsed the cloth in the basin, wrung it again—this time to keep his hands busy, to buy space. He swallowed thickly, throat burning.

Then he reached for Tom’s back.

The press of the cloth was softer now. Warm, steady strokes down the spine, across the curve of the shoulder blades. He cleaned the bruises he’d left. The sweat at the nape of his neck. The salt in the hollows where shadow clung. He worked in slow circles, rinsing and pressing, rinsing and pressing. Steam lifted with each breath. The air between them changed.

Tom didn’t speak.

But under Harry’s hands, he trembled. Not from cold.

Harry paused, cloth hovering.

“Is the not water warm enough?” he asked.

Still no voice. Just a faint shake of the head. Small. Barely there.

It broke something sharp in Harry’s chest.

He wrung the cloth again. Less for the water. More to do something. His fingers ached to fix it. To take it back. To make it right. But there was no spell for this. No counter-curse.

Just breath. Just presence.

The door closed behind him.

Not with a slam. Not with a curse. Just… quietly. Like a breath exhaled too late. Like an apology no one could speak aloud.

And for the first time that night, Tom was alone.

Truly alone.

The air still smelled of eucalyptus and mint—clean things. Gentler things. Things that didn’t belong in this cell. Steam still hung in the corners like ghosts. The basin was gone. The touch was gone. But the warmth lingered, faint as a dream.

He lay back on the cot slowly, stiffly. Muscles aching. Skin rubbed raw in places that still throbbed, still burned, still felt like they bore fingerprints in the flesh. The fresh robe Harry had brought him hung loose across his collarbones. It smelled of lavender and soap.

Clean. Too clean.

Tom stared at the ceiling. Blank stone. Uneven mortar. The same view he’d seen for years without counting. But now, somehow, it felt wrong. Too distant. Too white. His throat ached—not from screams, but from silence.

His hands, washed and wrapped, twitched against the sheets. They didn’t know what to do now that they weren’t braced. Now that they weren’t clenched. Now that the heat had gone. His lips still tingled with the echo of breath, of violence, of something that shouldn’t have meant anything—but did.

He hadn’t spoken since. Not a word.

He turned. Quietly. No sound. Just curled, inch by inch, onto his side. Pressed himself into the farthest corner of the cot, knees drawn up, shoulders tight, facing the wall. The clean fabric shifted against his skin. The scent followed.

And still, he said nothing.

For a while, he thought maybe that silence would hold. That if he could just be still enough, quiet enough, the trembling in his limbs would stop. That the absence would settle into him like it always had. That he would be alone again, properly, fully, the way he was meant to be.

But it wasn’t. Because something cracked. Something opened.

And the tears began before he knew.

Not the kind that thundered. Not the kind that gasped. Just—moisture, sliding down the edge of his temple. Over his cheekbone. Down to the pillow. At first, he didn’t recognise it. He thought it was heat. Sweat. But then the salt touched the corner of his lip. And he stilled.

He was crying.

His shoulders began to shake before he could stop them—small, involuntary shudders, as if his body were trying to wring something loose. His spine curled tighter. His face pressed into the wall. As if that could hide it. As if Harry might walk in and see.

But there was no one left to see.

And still the tears came.

Not from pain. Not even from the bruises.

From being seen. From being touched. From being treated like something human. Because he hadn’t been, not in decades. Because no one had come close enough to hurt him. Because even cruelty had warmth in it. Because even punishment had presence.

Because Harry had stayed. Because Harry had come back.

And now he was gone.

And Tom—who had once been Voldemort, who had once thought himself above want, above need—lay curled in the corner of his prison cot, clean and clothed and trembling.

And wept like someone who didn’t know how to stop.

── ◈ ──

Up in the tower, the orb pulsed faintly.

Harry hadn’t meant to check it. He told himself he wouldn’t. That tonight, of all nights, he would leave the damn thing dark. But something in him—bone-deep and sour—had dragged him back. Had drawn his eyes to the hovering light until, with a muttered curse, he’d activated it again.

He stared at the cell.

At him.

Tom was facing the wall. Small. Still. The robe wrapped too loosely around him now, collar askew, shoulder bare. The blankets hadn’t moved. The basin was gone. The steam had faded. But Harry knew that posture. Recognised the curve of the spine. The way the shoulders curled—not in rest, not in sleep, but in shame.

He’d seen it once before. Years ago, maybe. Or just hours. It felt the same. And back then, he’d pretended not to understand. He’d told himself it was a trick of the light. A twitch. Nothing more. Voldemort didn’t weep. Voldemort didn’t feel. The tremble of those shoulders hadn’t meant anything.

But now—now, Harry knew better.

He watched for a moment longer. Long enough to see the way Tom’s hand moved—barely. Curled tighter near his chest, like he was trying to hold something in. Long enough to see the unmistakable shake of a breath that didn’t settle. The stutter of grief. The way silence had weight.

Fuck.

Harry turned from the orb. His throat was tight. His stomach twisted. And before he could talk himself out of it—before he could catalogue the thousand reasons why this was a mistake—he was already moving.

Down the stairs.

Back into the cold.

The descent was familiar. The stone, the dark, the way his magic pulsed too close to the skin—it all felt like ritual. But this time, his footsteps didn’t echo. This time, he didn’t bring a tray. Or a weapon. Or a lie.

Just himself.

He pushed the cell door open with care. Not a slam. Not a warning.

And there it was.

The sound.

Not loud. Not broken. Not theatrical. Just soft. Laboured. The sound of someone trying not to be heard. The rhythm of breath snagged in the throat. A hitch. A swallow. A sob that wasn’t allowed to become one.

Harry stepped inside. The cell was still heavy with eucalyptus, with steam, with warmth that hadn’t fully left the air. But the man on the cot—he was so small now. Curled in on himself, silent, raw.

Harry crossed the room.

Quietly.

And then, without a word, he knelt at the cot’s edge.

It was too small. Always had been. The sort of thing meant for containment, not comfort. But he didn’t care. He shifted forward, one knee, then the other, until he’d pressed himself into the narrow space, his body curled behind Tom’s. There was no room. No space. His chest pressed to Tom’s back. His legs tangled awkwardly beneath the blankets. His hand found its place at Tom’s waist—hesitant. Careful. Not possessive. Just there.

Tom stiffened. A breath caught in his throat.

Harry leaned in, his words almost inaudible.

“Hush,” he whispered. “I’m sorry.”

Tom didn’t respond. Didn’t flinch. But his breathing hitched again—rougher this time.

“Are you in pain?” Harry asked. His voice cracked. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. Not like that.”

Still no words. But the way Tom trembled—he didn’t pull away.

Harry let his hand rest, open-palmed, against the hollow just above Tom’s hip. He didn’t press. Didn’t claim. Just offered warmth where there had been none. Just a presence in the dark.

The minutes passed without sound.

And when Tom’s hand, slow and shaking, inched back to rest atop Harry’s—neither of them said anything.

Because the words would come later. But this—this was how it began.

Tom’s hand rested atop his, trembling.

Harry didn’t breathe for a moment. Didn’t move. Just held still—like any shift might break the moment, might snap it back into something crueler, colder. The stone beneath them was unforgiving. The cot creaked with every heartbeat. His knees ached from the press of the frame, but he didn’t care.

Tom needed warmth. So Harry gave it.

Grief still clung to his ribs like old ivy—twisting, thorned, impossible to cut away. Ron’s grave still felt fresh in his mind. The scent of damp earth. The hollow in Ginny’s eyes. Rose’s voice cracking on the eulogy. It haunted him. All of it. Still dragged at his bones like chain.

But there had been that moment.

Just before the end. Ron’s voice, thin but steady.

“I just want you to be happy.”

Harry swallowed. The memory threatened to splinter him again—but he didn’t let it. Not now. Not tonight.

Because Tom was shaking.

Because he was clean and small and quiet, curled like something once feral, now uncertain how to breathe. Because no one else in the world would see this. Not ever. Not like this. And Harry—Harry had seen it. Had touched it. Had been the one to hurt it, and now the only one who could offer comfort.

His thumb brushed against Tom’s wrist. Barely a shift. A whisper of motion.

“I don’t know how to do this,” Harry admitted softly. “I’m not good at it.”

No answer. Just warmth. Just silence. But the hand didn’t let go.

Harry closed his eyes, pressed his forehead lightly to the curve of Tom’s shoulder.

“I miss him,” he said. “I miss all of them.”

Tom didn’t speak. But his breathing slowed, fractionally. And somehow, that was enough.

So Harry stayed.

In the dark. In the grief. In the fragile, flickering place between punishment and permission. He stayed because Ron had asked him to try. Because Tom hadn’t pushed him away. Because the silence didn’t feel empty anymore.

And somewhere beneath the ache, beneath the shame, beneath the fear of what this might become—Harry felt something shift.

Not forgiveness. Not yet.

But the faintest edge of relief.

Because for the first time in centuries, he was not alone.

── ◈ ──

It began with the bowl.

A small one. Iron-wrought, dented at the rim. It had cracked last month—nothing unusual. Stone and cold did that. But when Harry passed it this morning, it was whole.

He paused.

Stared.

No spell. No mending charm. No Ministry shipment. And yet—the fracture was gone. Smoothed as if it had never split. As if time had undone what time had done.

His stomach turned. That old, slow dread. The kind that didn't feel like fear, but like memory surfacing too fast.

He tested it.

“Reparo.”

The word slipped from his mouth like a reflex, lazy and broken—he hadn’t used spoken magic inside the fortress in decades. Maybe centuries. But the handle of the teacup on the cot twitched. Shifted. A breath of light sparked at its base. It didn’t repair. Not fully. But it tried.

The air had changed.

The runes—those ancient bastards etched into the deepest stone, woven through layer upon layer of dead language and blood—they were failing. Fading. The Fortress was old. Older than the war. And it had been built to last only until it didn’t.

Harry stared at the cup like it might bite him. Then he laughed. Once. Bitter. Quiet.

So. It had begun.

He didn’t tell Tom. Not immediately.

He went through the motions. Tray. Tea. The old copy of Twelve Uses of Dragon’s Blood. Tom barely looked up. He had gone quiet again—not the collapse of weeks ago, but something colder. More deliberate. He sat in silence now the way some men wore crowns.

Harry almost envied him.

But that night—that night, after the cell door closed behind him and the orb flickered low—Harry went to the highest stairwell. The place where the winds still whispered like ghosts.

He pressed his palm to the stone.

And cast.

“Lumos.”

The wand lit.

Small. Flickering. But real.

His knees gave out. He knelt there, alone, light trembling at the edge of his palm, and felt everything collapse at once. Not from fear. Not even from hope.

But from knowing.

The prison was failing. The seals would break. And magic was returning.

Not to them. To him.

He waited three more days. Ran tests. Tried every spell he remembered. Most failed. Some sputtered. But enough worked. The Fortress was no longer sealed.

Not fully.

He went to the vault.

Not Gringotts. Not anymore. That had been gone for decades, swallowed in a Ministry collapse and a curse no one could lift. But the Potters had other vaults—older ones, buried in spell-threaded hollows and hidden beneath false names. He wore the face of his latest iteration—Hadrian Potter III—and signed the records with hands that did not shake.

He took what he needed. Left the rest to dust. He forged new papers that night.

A new wand registration. New bloodline. A falsified school record for the boy they would never trace: Tom Riddle. Muggle-born. Orphan. No known living relatives.

The Ministry wouldn’t question it. Not anymore. Not after three hundred years of peace.

The world had no reason to remember the war. Not really. The Dark Lord was a bedtime story. The Boy Who Lived, a footnote. Even the Hallows had faded into children’s rhymes.

There was no one left to remember.

No poets to record the war, no children to whisper the names beneath blankets. The story had rotted into ash, its pages torn, buried, and burned again. History became caution. Then folklore. Then silence.

But he remembered.

And so did the other.

Harry descended into the dark just before dawn—quiet, deliberate, with none of the weight he once wore like armour. He carried no tray. No tea. No pretense. Only a wand, sheathed at his side like something ancient and reluctant to be touched, and a basin cradled in both hands. The water inside shimmered faintly, grey as memory. Infused with dragonbone dust, with the scorched parchment of old oaths, with the last few drops of something more intimate: blood shed without ceremony.

The door opened with a sigh, not a groan. As if the Fortress itself knew this was the end.

Tom sat on the cot, spine straight, one leg folded over the other. A book lay open in his lap, its spine split and re-bound, threads visible in the dim light. He did not lift his head. Did not speak. Not until Harry’s shadow stretched across the floor and kissed the edge of his foot.

Then—without surprise, without defiance—Tom turned the page. Once. Slowly. And then he stilled.

His voice, when it came, was low and precise. A blade pressed flat, not yet drawn.

“What broke.”

Not a question. Not even curiosity. Just the naming of a shift too old to fear.

Harry didn’t answer.

Instead, he knelt.

The basin touched the floor with a quiet chime. He dipped his fingers into the water, drew them free, and began to mark the stone. Ash and dust, black and bitter. The sigils rose beneath his touch like bruises reborn—patterns he had not dared trace since the war, since the Hallows, since death had turned its face away and left him cursed with breath.

Old magic. The kind that asked for nothing but everything.

Behind him, there was movement. Bare feet on stone. The whisper of cloth. And then the shape of the other knelt too—opposite him, across the circle. The prisoner. The ghost. The man Harry had kept and hated and watched for centuries.

Tom Riddle. Not tamed. Not forgiven. Just there.

Their eyes met over the basin’s lip. And in that stillness, something older than magic hummed between them.

Not jailer and captive. Not hero and monster. But two ruins. Two men cracked open by time. Bound by silence. Breathing the same air in a world that no longer had space for either.

Harry’s voice was rough with disuse, and with something else—something he hadn’t let himself name.

“It’s time.”

Tom inclined his head. The movement was small. Regal. He could have been kneeling at a coronation or a grave.

“Of course it is,” he said. Then added, quieter, “It always was.”

Harry's wand rose. Trembled once. The runes had no incantation. They didn’t need one. The magic was older than speech.

“It’s a binding,” Harry warned. The ritual compelled truth. “If I die, you die.”

Tom’s expression didn’t shift. “I know.”

“If you stray from me, it burns.”

A slow nod. “I know.”

Harry’s voice dropped, a whisper dragged from the hollow in his chest. “I could still kill you.”

This time, Tom smiled. But it was a ruin of a thing—crooked, bloodless, steeped in centuries of memory.

“But you won’t.”

And they both knew why.

The magic began in silence.

Wand to flesh. Palm to heart. The sigils etched themselves into skin—one over Harry’s sternum, one into the space just beneath Tom’s throat. They pulsed once. Then stilled. Not with pain. Not with power. But with permanence.

There was no light. No thunder. Only breath.

Only the weight of a bond made without cruelty or mercy. A bond forged from exhaustion. From mutual ruin.

When it was done, they both stayed kneeling. Breathing hard. As if the magic had taken something from them they hadn’t realised they still possessed.

And perhaps it had. Perhaps the spell had taken more than magic—had reached deeper, carving into the marrow of what they were, and what they had chosen to become. The bond had no light, no prophecy. But its price was written in breath, in silence, in the aching throb behind Harry’s ribs as he rose for the last time from the stone that had held them both in place for centuries.

They left the Fortress without ceremony.

No alarms flared. No runes flared to life. The ancient stones, once inscribed with wards meant to trap a god, merely watched in stillness. Dust did not stir. The chains did not rattle. Even the locked doors, sealed by rites long since lost to any Ministry archive, surrendered without a whisper. The final gate creaked open as if it, too, had tired of keeping secrets.

Above, in the highest tower, the orb flickered.

Once. Twice. Then it died.

Its light extinguished not by a spell, but by time. By rot. By irrelevance. For there was no one left to watch it. No warden to replace the last. No council to demand accounting. The seal would hold a little longer—perhaps a year, perhaps a decade—but the Fortress had already begun its slow collapse. Forgotten, like the war it was built to end. Forgotten, like the names carved beneath the foundations. Forgotten, like them.

And so they passed into the dark. Unstopped. Unseen.

The world did not know. The world did not care.

Far above, far away, in places where grass still grew and maps still mattered, the name of Voldemort had become little more than myth. A bedtime story for the magically inclined. A whisper used to frighten children who wouldn’t sleep. No one remembered the boy he had been. No one remembered the shape of his war, the cost of it, or the hollow-eyed man who had once stood against him.

Only one story remained. A fragment. A murmur. A half-sentence scrawled in a forgotten journal, its ink faded to dust:

He could not kill the last piece of him. So he stood guard. And the world forgot.

And now—after centuries of silence, of ash, of breathless survival—they stepped out from beneath the earth.

Warden and prisoner. Master and monster. Man and man. Not enemies. Not quite. Not anymore.

Not lovers either. The word was too small. Too clean. What bound them now had no name—only echoes. Only rituals. Only a mark burned into two chests, still tender.

They walked in silence. No wand drawn. No magic flared. The world stretched out before them like something half-remembered. Strange in its brightness. Sharp in its air. Trees had grown in the time they were buried. Roads had moved. The sky itself felt farther away.

And for the first time in three hundred years, two men who had once ended a world stepped into one that no longer had space for either of them.

Not gods. Not myths. Just ruins, walking side by side, into the after.

── ◈ ──

The cottage stood at the edge of the world.

Perched on a bluff above the sea, it looked as though it had grown there—stone walls softened by salt and wind, ivy clinging to its sides like memory. The roof sagged a little under the weight of age, and the windows were rimmed in pale blue paint, long faded by storms. It faced west, toward the horizon, where the sun bled into the ocean in long, slow strokes of gold and fire. At night, the waves sang lullabies to the stones. During the day, gulls wheeled overhead in lonely arcs, calling to no one.

Harry hadn’t meant to choose it.

But the moment he saw it—alone, alive, enduring—he knew.

The garden came first. Overgrown, but not ruined. Hardy rosemary and lavender still pushed up between the stones. Wild mint tangled at the fence. Harry dug with his hands the first day—no magic, just the old ache of muscle and breath. His fingers bled on the rose thorns. He let them. The pain made it real. Made this real. He planted sage, thyme, basil. Then tomatoes. Then carrots. He tended the soil until the scent of earth and saltwater settled into his skin like a second soul.

For Tom, he found a library.

Not a grand one. Just a room in the back, cool and dim, with tall shelves and sea-glass light spilling through the shutters. He filled it slowly—volumes chosen with care, not haste. Philosophy. History. Mythology. The lost and the forbidden. A single shelf of poetry, too, though he said nothing when he placed it there. Some things did not need words. Tom hadn’t crossed the threshold for days. But when he finally did, Harry found the poetry open by the window. Spine cracked. Bookmark made from the string that had tied the moving crate shut.

The first few days had been hard.

Sunlight stunned Tom like a curse. He couldn’t bear it—not at first. His eyes wept uncontrollably, his skin blistered from mere minutes of exposure. Harry had panicked, thinking it some old fragment of curse work, some leftover cruelty from the Fortress.

But no. Just light.

Too much of it, too suddenly. After centuries underground, the sky itself was too vast. Too blue. Too free.

So Tom stayed inside. Wrapped in loose shirts and silence, retreating from the open doors with a look Harry had never seen on him before—not fear. Not defiance. Just overwhelm.

Harry understood.

He never said it aloud, but in the evenings, as he sat in the garden and watched the sun melt into the sea, regret coiled around his ribs like sea fog.

This was what he should have done.

Not the spell. Not the ritual. Not the Fortress. But this. A life. Or something like it. As soon as Ron had passed—no, before—when the world had stopped watching, and grief had grown too loud to ignore. He should have left then. Should have brought Tom here. Not out of love. Not out of trust.

But out of mercy.

Instead, he’d waited. Waited until the last tether broke. Until the world forgot. Until Tom wept in silence and Harry had no one left to bury but himself.

Now they had the ocean. The wind. The sound of bees in the lavender. Quiet breakfasts where Tom did not speak, and Harry did not expect him to. Long afternoons where they passed each other in doorways like ghosts learning how to haunt gently.

Tom hadn’t stepped outside yet.

But one morning, Harry found the shutters open in the library.

And in the windowsill, a single shell. Pale, pink, spiral. A gift from the sea. He didn’t ask who had placed it there. He just let the breeze carry in the salt. And brought fresh mint in from the garden.

The sun was low when Harry stepped outside.

Evening spilled gold across the garden, staining the rosemary silver and the sea grasses bronze. The tide was coming in—slow, patient, soft. He could smell salt on the breeze, warm from the stones, threaded with lavender. His boots crunched softly on the worn path, and for a moment he thought he was alone. That maybe Tom hadn’t come out yet. That maybe he never would.

Then he saw him.

Down the slope of sand and weather-worn stone, where the land met the sea, Tom stood barefoot in the surf. His trousers were rolled to the knee, pale linen catching the wind, hair stirred messily by the breeze. The water lapped around his ankles, warm and shallow, foam curling over his toes. His arms hung loosely at his sides. His eyes were closed.

He looked peaceful.

Not weak. Not fragile. Not undone.

Just—content.

The expression startled Harry more than anything else ever had. Because it didn’t belong. Not on that face. That face had once been split by serpentine hunger, twisted by ambition, carved into cruelty. But now—bathed in light, eyes closed, mouth slackened by the smallest pull of serenity—it was beautiful.

And unchanged.

Not by time. Not by war. Not by death.

Three centuries, and Tom Riddle still looked like a man half-remembered from youth—a face too sharp to be gentle, too elegant to be kind. And yet there was nothing cruel in his posture. Nothing dangerous. Just stillness. Just skin and salt and silence.

Harry watched him for a long moment.

Watched the water move around his feet. Watched the breeze toy with the hem of his shirt. Watched the sun catch in the dark strands of his hair.

Then, quietly, he spoke.

“You’ll burn your skin if you stay much longer.”

Tom didn’t open his eyes. But a smile tugged faintly at one corner of his mouth. “I was cold for three hundred years.”

Harry said nothing. He stepped down to the shore, boots sinking slightly in the damp sand. The breeze picked up, pulling at his robes. Tom didn’t move to greet him. Didn’t offer words. Just stood there, barefoot and bare-faced, letting the sea hold him.

They lived quietly now.

Magic returned, little by little. In the herbs that grew stronger when Harry sang to them. In the books that no longer resisted repair. In the way Tom’s fingertips sparked, faintly, when he turned a page too quickly. He was careful with it. Strangely reverent. Like someone remembering a language he hadn’t spoken since childhood.

But the bond held.

Harry could feel it—always. A thread in his ribs. A pull behind his lungs. They didn’t speak of it. They didn’t need to. It was there, like the air between them, like the shadow at their feet. Always.

Tom began speaking again, weeks after the move.

First, it was practical. “We’re low on salt.” “The stove flares unevenly.” “The library window sticks.” Then came the questions.

Softly. Without warning. Spoken into the quiet like stones dropped in water.

“Why did you let me rot?”

Harry had looked at him, slow and steady. “Because I didn’t know what else to do.”

A pause. A breath.

“Why did you let me out?”

He hadn’t lied. “Because you didn’t break.”

Tom hadn’t asked again.

Not about the prison. Not about the bond. Not about why Harry stayed, even now, even here, where the sky stretched open and the sea breathed like a living thing.

Their days slipped into rhythm. Uneven, strange, but theirs. They rose with the tide, shared tea by the window, passed books across the table with fingers that brushed too long. They ate together in silence, side by side in the soft hush of the garden. They didn’t speak of the past. They didn’t need to.

Tom rarely wandered beyond the cliffs. The world beyond still felt too bright, too wide. The sea was enough—for both of them. Its rhythms mirrored their own: relentless, quiet, returning.

They touched, sometimes.

Not in lust. Not in grief.

But in something gentler.

There were nights Harry woke to sound. Not loud. Not screaming. Just breath—caught and twisting, torn from a throat too proud to cry out. The kind of nightmares that left no sound but stole the air.

And on those nights, Harry rose without words. Crossed the room barefoot. Slipped beneath the blankets and folded himself around the shaking shape in the bed.

Tom never asked for it. But he never pulled away.

Harry held him tightly—arms wrapped firm around his chest, forehead pressed to the back of his neck, breath steadying against damp skin. Sometimes he whispered things he didn’t mean to. Old apologies. New ones. Half-broken promises that couldn’t be kept, but mattered anyway.

When Tom finally breathed evenly again—when his fists unclenched and the tremor in his spine ebbed into something closer to sleep—Harry would stay. Hours, sometimes. Until dawn broke and the birds stirred and he could pretend the darkness had never happened.

And then, in the morning light, Tom would turn to him. Not shy. Not coy. Just there—close enough to kiss.

And Harry would.

Softly.

He’d press his mouth to the edge of Tom’s jaw. To the hollow beneath his eye. To the corner of his mouth. No heat. No haste. Just reverence. Just memory. Just the impossible, unbearable miracle of having someone to hold.

And Tom—Tom, who had never learned gentleness, who had never asked for anything he hadn’t taken—would close his eyes. Would tilt his face into the kiss like it meant something.

Like it hurt.

There were mornings when the kisses deepened. When Harry’s hand would lift, feather-light, to cup Tom’s face—his thumb brushing the faintest line at the corner of his mouth. When he’d shift closer under the sheets, his breath catching as their lips met again, and again, slower this time, surer.

It always began that way. With stillness. With a silence so sacred neither of them dared break it.

Harry would trail kisses down Tom’s throat, over the collarbone, across each hollow like he was mapping it from memory—reclaiming the ground he’d once ravaged. His hands moved with care, not to possess, but to honour. He would murmur things against skin—not names, not confessions, just breath. Just the shape of awe.

And Tom—Tom who had once been untouchable, who had known power but never this—let him.

He lay beneath Harry’s mouth like a man learning a new language. His breath stuttered. His fingers curled in the sheets, not from fear, but from something too tender to name. And when Harry entered him—slow, patient, eyes never leaving his—Tom gasped, not from pain, but from the sheer strangeness of it. Of being held like this. Of being wanted, not for power, not for prophecy, but simply for being here.

Harry never moved roughly. Not now. Not ever again.

He held Tom as if he were made of something precious. He kissed his shoulders. His throat. His hands. He moved inside him like a prayer—gentle, aching, slow. Every thrust was careful, every breath shared, every tremble met with a soft “I’ve got you,” whispered against damp skin.

And when Tom came—silent, shuddering, his hands buried in Harry’s hair—he looked up like he didn’t recognise the ceiling. Like the world had shifted. Like the room had changed shape just to hold him differently.

Afterward, they didn’t speak.

Harry would hold him close, chest pressed to his back, one hand stroking his stomach in slow, grounding circles. Tom would rest there—quiet, pliant, still catching his breath—and for a long time, neither of them moved.

They didn’t call it love. They didn’t name it at all.

Because after a thousand lifetimes, love didn’t look like a vow or a flame or a war.

It looked like this.

Two men curled in the same bed. One holding, the other held. A kiss pressed to a fevered temple. A thumb brushing away the ghost of a tear. A body worshipped, not with fire, but with care.

It looked like silence, shared without fear. It looked like peace—fragile, unspoken, and impossibly hard-won.

── ◈ ──

Rain tapped against the windows like an old rhythm long forgotten. Gentle, persistent. The kind of sound that blurred the edge between dream and memory.

Inside the cottage, the air was warm—soft with firelight and the faint scent of chamomile. The hearth crackled low, casting flickering gold across old wooden floors and the curve of an armchair worn smooth by time.

Harry sat in it now, legs folded beneath him, fingers curled around a mug of tea gone tepid. He hadn’t spoken in nearly an hour.

Across the room, Tom was reading.

A paperback. Something mundane. Muggle. The cover bent at the corners from use. He wore a loose sweater—charcoal grey, sleeves too long. His feet were bare. His ankles crossed. His expression was focused, but not tense. Content, perhaps. Or something near it.

They’d been free for a year.

A whole year of salt air and open sky. Of no locks. No wards. No routines carved by grief. A year of silence that no longer punished. A year of quiet dinners and books without curses. A year of breathing.

And yet, the question slipped out like a stone tossed into still water.

“Do you ever regret it?”

Soft. Not pointed. Not rehearsed.

For a moment, Tom didn’t lift his gaze. The rain had grown heavier. A wind whistled faintly through the chimney.

Then, slowly, he turned the page. Finished the paragraph. Closed the book.

Not carefully. Not dramatically. Just… closed it.

His voice, when it came, was low and rough. “Regret what?”

Harry’s eyes stayed on the fire. His thumb brushed the rim of the mug. “Everything.”

The word hung between them. Not like a blade. But like something old and worn—too familiar to cut anymore.

Tom’s breath was audible, even across the space.

“Sometimes,” he said, “I wish I had never split my soul.”

The fire popped softly. The shadows shifted.

Harry didn’t move. But his grip on the mug changed—loosened, then steadied.

“That’s not the same,” he murmured, “as wishing you hadn’t done it all.”

“No,” Tom said. “It’s not.”

Another pause.

Then, from Harry—calmer now, but deeper, like something he’d carried for a long time:

“So… would you do it again?”

Tom looked up. This time, fully. His gaze found Harry’s—searching, cautious, unguarded.

There was no red in his eyes now. Not always. Not anymore.

He looked like a man. A man who remembered cages.

“Maybe,” he said after a long moment. “But it’s too late for regrets.”

Harry turned to face him. Slowly. The kind of movement that said he wasn’t sure he should. The kind that meant everything.

He smiled.

Not kindly. Not wistfully.

But with something mischievous and bright and unbearably young.

“What if it’s not?”

Tom blinked. “Excuse me?”

“What if it’s not too late?” Harry said, voice light—too light—but his wand hand steady. “What if we go back? Try again. You, me. The world. From the beginning.”

Tom stared at him.

And for the first time in perhaps centuries, something moved behind his eyes that wasn’t calculation or caution. Not suspicion. Not dread.

But fear.

Hope.

“You’re mad,” Tom said. Softly. Almost reverently.

Harry’s smile widened. “A little.”

He set the mug down on the side table. Stood slowly, every motion quiet. Measured. He crossed the room—not quickly. Just enough. Stopping when the firelight kissed both of their faces.

“I’m also the Master of Death,” Harry said, as if confessing. “And you’re still tethered to me. Through time. Through soul. Through blood.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Try me.”

The room held still.

The fire sighed in the grate. Rain etched silver ribbons down the windows. The hands of the clock ticked on, unbothered.

And Tom—who had once torn the world apart just to bend it to his will, who had carved nations from fear and split his own soul for the promise of more—sat still now, bathed in firelight, staring at the man who had never stopped coming back. The man who had held the line. Who had stayed.

“You’re talking about—what? Rebirth?” His voice cracked on the word. Like it had cut him, just to say it aloud.

“I’m talking about possibility,” Harry said softly. “Of going back. Of starting over.”

Tom scoffed—but the sound rang hollow. No venom. No sharpness. Just a brittle, broken exhale that barely passed for laughter.

Only ache.

“We wouldn’t remember,” he said at last.

It wasn’t a challenge. Not even a warning. Just truth. Low and bitter. Heavy with something too old for fear but too fragile for hope. A confession carved from the quiet shape of longing. As if he wasn’t afraid of forgetting—but of being forgotten.

And there it was—woven beneath the words. The thing he hadn’t said in hundreds of years.

I don’t want to forget you.

Harry’s heart twisted. His voice softened.

“Maybe not,” he said, as though handling something breakable. “But maybe we’d still find our way.”

Tom looked at him then. Really looked. Like he was trying to memorise his face—catalogue the lines, the green of his eyes, the way the corner of his mouth tugged upward when he was lying.

As though, if he could just study Harry hard enough, he might carry him through time.

“You think we’d find each other again?” Tom asked.

His voice didn’t carry the sharpness it once had. It wasn’t a challenge, nor a sneer wrapped in cleverness. It was something quieter—something raw. It was hope, trembling in bones too old for dreams.

Harry stepped closer.

His breath caught in his throat, the ache behind his ribs rising like tide. His hands didn’t tremble, but his eyes did—burning not from grief this time, but from something far more dangerous. Something gentler. His voice barely made it out.

“I think we already have.”

And then—without urgency, without demand—he leaned in.

The kiss wasn’t heat. It wasn’t hunger. It was breath against breath, lips brushing lips with the reverence of ritual. It asked for nothing. It offered everything. No promise spoken. But one passed, quiet and certain, between them.

Not a vow. Just a beginning.

When Harry pulled back, he didn’t speak. He just rested his forehead against Tom’s and let the silence settle.

And Tom—who had once ruled with fire, who had shattered himself into pieces for the sake of immortality—closed his eyes.

He let himself lean, let himself trust—and for the first time in a thousand lifetimes, there was no crown, no wand, no prophecy. Only two men, a kiss, and the world quietly waiting.

☾𖥧⩊༺༒༻⩊𖥧☽