Chapter Seventy
- May 2nd, 1998
In his last hour, Tom Riddle thought he had finally achieved what he had worked towards for years. Wools Orphanage settled in the back of his mind, he thought he could hear the clicking of the matron's heels down the hall – and far away, a whisper that sounded like Gwyn in the dead of night, or during prayer time, perhaps when they were being punished into silence.
When he killed Harry Potter, deep in the Forbidden Forest, the whispers got louder. As he marched with his followers back to the castle, it increased, and when he stood in the masses of battle, he saw her.
A young woman, with the same curls as Gwyn, dark but with flashes of copper, freckles dusting her nose. She had blue eyes, but the nose, the lips – it was Gwyn, but how could that be? And then the young woman was wrenched back by an older man, shouting.
"Anthea, get out! Take Ivy, Magnus, Orson – all of you!"
"I'm not leaving Papa!" she cried, and Tom got a good look at her father's face.
A man, not young any longer, but he recognized him. That was Tom's face, his features, with shades of Gwyn. And he remembered, the boy that was to be twelve in November, the obvious lie – the man he had encountered in an alleyway, the one person in that silly Order that had always been one step ahead of him besides Dumbledore himself.
Silas. Gwyn's son, their son. He watched the children that surrounded him, a patchwork of Gwyn, Tom, and the short, pale woman fighting at his side.
He had had his suspicions, of course – but if Gwyn had really been pregnant, she would have found him, she would have looked for him. She needed him, she depended on him, and she had no one else, he had made sure of that. She would never have kept this from him.
Unless he had lost her and never noticed, bothered to check – he just assumed that she would stay loyal, no matter what. Perhaps he had been wrong.
The whispers gained momentum, became louder and louder as he fought Harry Potter – and then, in the seconds before their spells hit, a voice:
"This is the end, Tom."
His last vision was the face of his son, the last piece of the one person who had loved him - and then it was over.
He stood in a bright mist, though it was not like mist he had ever experienced before. His surroundings were not hidden by cloudy vapor; rather the cloudy vapor had not yet formed into surroundings. He was barefoot, and his body felt odd; as he had before all the darkness, before he split his soul.
The floor on which he stood seemed to be white, neither warm nor cold, but simply there, a flat, blank something on which to be. The longer he looked, the more there was to see. A great domed glass roof glittered high above him in sunlight. Perhaps it was a palace. All was hushed and still. His surroundings seemed to invent themselves before his eyes. A wide-open space, bright and clean, a hall larger by far than the Great Hall, with that clear, domed glass ceiling. It was quite empty.
He wondered then if he looked like his old self, too, and as he wondered a mirror materialised as he turned; he recognized it as the one that had stood in the orphanage all those years ago – the only mirror there, so there were always a few children gathered around, a little boy inspecting a scratch on his nose, a teenage girl fixing her hair, a child comparing their features to people in news papers, looking for similarities if they, like Tom and Gwyn, had been left with no clue to their identity.
It surprised him when he looked, as his reflection was that of a much younger version of himself – why, he must have been in his early twenties. He looked as he had before he learned Gwyn had died.
As he gazed about, a soft sound could be heard in the distance. Bare feet walking, he realized – and then he saw her, emerging from the mist. She also looked young, younger than he; how she had appeared when he last spoke to her, hair mussed from sleep, wearing a deep blue dress, delicate white stitching around the collar and sleeves. She had tied a few curls back with pale ribbons.
"Gwyn." He breathed, unable to believe his eyes.
"Hello, Tom." Her voice still sounded the same, even after all these years, though Tom did not consider that he had never heard it past a certain age. Her image flickered as she spoke, from the blue dress to the day she kissed him on the platform, to a young child – and then pregnant, a form he had never seen her. Her image shifted back to the blue dress.
"Where are we?" he asked, moving towards her; however, as he moved closer she seemed to move too, so he could not get closer than a few feet.
Gwyn looked about. "I believe we are where you went to escape Muggle life, the gateway to your preferred world, and mine."
It dawned on him then, that the glittering ceiling was that of Kings Cross, the arching pillars and slowly, tracks formed as he looked for them. In their silence, he hears the sound of a train approaching in the distance.
Finally, he asks, "He is mine, isn't he? Silas?"
"He was never yours." Gwyn replied.
"But..." he struggled to find the words, then abandoned the effort. "You never told me."
"And why would I?" she asked, "You never loved me, told me so yourself – you would have never loved Silas, either. He was never yours."
Tom swallowed with difficulty, anxious to regain her trust in a space he felt so uneasy in, where he had no control. "What do I do now, Gwynnie?"
Gwyn's amber eyes held no sympathy, and her form flickered briefly back to her younger self, eleven years old – abandoned by her only friend. "You killed so many people." She whispered, and looked over her shoulder; the Hogwarts Express, drained of colour, was slowly chugging towards them.
"I –"
"I can't forgive you this time, Tom."
The train slowed to a stop, and Gwyn walked towards it, her bare feet no longer making sound. As she walked, her image flickered back to that of the day Dumbledore came to Wools, the start of Tom's life, really.
"Gwyn, wait –" she was boarding the train, and Tom tried to as well, but couldn't seem to get on; either it moved further from him, or an invisible wall at the steps stopped him. "Gwynnie, please wait for me –"
"Goodbye, Tom." Gwyn stood at the steps, and the train began to pull away.
"No – wait, Gwyn – WAIT!" he began to run, trying to catch up, but it was pulling away, fading away, taking Gwyn with it. As the train became a spec, the vapour began to turn dark, and the station turned into Wools Orphanage, with its dark tiled halls and echoing rooms.
This was Tom Riddle's end, and he knew it – this time, he would not have Gwyn as an ally. He was alone, once and for all.
A/N: holy moly I've been waiting so long to write this chapter. I always knew this is how it would end, and fuck it was satisfying.
Only the epilogue left now...what do you think will happen in the epilogue? Thoughts on this last chapter?
Seventy chapters even, wow.
Rose
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