i am lord voldemort • Tom Riddle

Epilogue Part I of III

Harry slapped a hand over his scar as another wave of Voldemort's anger swept over him, more potent and painful than ever, momentarily stealing the the breath from his lungs. He doubled over as a new scene opened up in his mind's eye.

Overgrown weeds were overtaking a crumbling building that Harry took a second to recognise as the Gaunt house from the memories Dumbledore shared in the Pensieve. It had always been rundown, but decades of disuse had since led part of roof to cave in and plant growth to scale high up the walls.

That's not what angered him, though.

No, Harry had to remind himself, firmly. Not me. Voldemort. The fury came from Voldemort's mind, not Harry's, but at that moment it was difficult to distinguish the two, like distinguishing a single drop of water from the rest of the raging ocean.

Beneath the fury was something else Harry almost didn't recognise. Buried under layers of anger and the fear hid something even more devastating: anguish.

He left the ring there to put his past behind him, to close the door on his shameful mother and father and grandfather, just as he'd discarded the names they'd given him. If he locked the past away, then it couldn't harm him anymore.

But now the ring was gone! The last remnant of her was gone. She left nothing behind besides the single ring he gave her and retrieved again upon her death. Without it — without this shallow proof of her existence — it would be as though she was never born at all.

Without our ring, with Grindelwald dead, Dumbledore dead, everyone who remembered us together dead, she was finally, truly gone. He hated it as much as he did his best to make that fate happen. She would hate him, too, for so many cruel choices made, not least of all what he'd done to her precious uncle.

They looked so much alike, even decades later. When he finally killed Gellert Grindelwald, he only hesitated for a moment, but a moment plus a half a century of avoidance was more than he gave anyone else. For her. All for her.

Repressed memories pushed to the forefront of his mind, vivid, and beautiful, and awful in their strength,  like ripping off a bandage he didn't even know was there to reveal a wound that never healed.

Harry saw himself cradling a girl he never met, her head resting heavily in the crook of his arm. There was blood splatter everywhere, on his hands, on her face, in her hair, running in rivers from an open wound along her midriff. 

White hair, white snow, white robes, and skin pale as death, blank canvases all painted crimson with her own blood.

The girl, no older than Harry was now, blinked up at him with wary, soul-stealing eyes, and wordlessly mouthed, "I'm sorry, Tom."

He saw the brief exchange over and over and over again through the filter of Voldemort's roiling mind, knowing he would not, could not, follow her to the place she was leaving to. He was going into eternity alone, to a future she'd never see.

But sometimes...

Sometimes, it feel like she never existed at all.

He found himself pulled into the vortex of misery, her nearly forgotten voice a sickness and a cure. He needed her to stop, to release him from her spell, because he could listen to her saying his name forever and still never get enough. Even if it hurt like new each time, raw pain was still better than never hearing her again

He would never break free on his own.

I'm sorry, Tom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm —

"HARRY!"

Harry snapped back into the safety of his own head with a gasp, where he was laying flat on his back, being shaken violently by Hermione.