Chapter Text
The thing is, sometimes Harry wonders: what if.
Aunt Petunia was a witch.
And there were cauldrons in their kitchen, gnomes in the garden, nice (tasteful!) robes in exchange for nice dresses.
Uncle Vernon was a wizard.
There, his imagination usually stumbles, because while Uncle Vernon definitely would want the newest, best model of a broom, Harry can’t see how he would fly on it. Maybe Aunt Petunia would be a driver, then. Or maybe brooms wouldn't be considered a transport for a respectable wizard altogether. Maybe brooms are for punks and delinquents, after all.
The problem is, while Harry thinks about it, he can’t imagine that something that matters would change.
Of course, Uncle Vernon will never talk like Mr. Wesley: strangled, gentle with tone if not with his words, achingly caring. He is not… like this. He doesn't see himself like this and would never act soft.
His care is different. It sounds like - you gave as good as you got, aren’t you?
His care is a silent hand on the shoulder, heavy and warm and proud.
But Harry struggles so to see that hand on his own shoulder.
To imagine care where it’s never been.
Harry finds the diadem in a room full of forgotten treasures and useless old things. He is not exactly sure how he did it, why it opened for him - he was only searching for a Riddle.
For a thing that pretended to be his friend, and then was taken from him.
He is half sure that this - this treasure trove, that junk room (just like his bedroom) - is The Chamber of Secrets itself.
But maybe not.
Maybe someone who took Riddle just did Harry a service and brought him there to rot, like they were trying with a toilet once. Maybe they weren’t another Professor Quirell.
Some feeling guides him through the labyrinth. He probably should have brought Ron with him, but no, no - he doesn’t know how he found this room. What if he won't find it again?
There are so many pretty things around. Embroidered clothes dusty and moth-eaten, but still beautiful. Strange instruments of silver and gold, delicate, some alive still. Cages and books, jewelry. He wants to touch, to look closer, but hot shame stills his hand, burns his cheeks - he knows it’s not for him.
He has a mission here.
(He will look ridiculous anyway.)
But one thing stops him in his tracks. It is a diadem, intricate silver woven into the impression of a wing, a gem its heart, cold and pure blue. It rests on a marble head with heavy features, and a gem covers its eye. Harry’s fingers itch to touch it, and somehow it feels welcoming.
Like a friend, long forgotten, hands open in embrace.
Harry stops just shy of a touch.
He knows the feeling.
Diary welcomed him with it.
Diadem’s eye gleams at him, and for a moment, Harry can’t look away.
It is all it takes.
Invasion is sudden, harsh, unfamiliar in its intensity. There is no longer a circus of forgotten things, no more floor and walls - only a fall without direction. His scar screams with pain, but there are no hands to soothe it with.
What did you say about my diary, boy? What was it?
And pages of the diary suddenly bloom under his hands, handwriting so pretty it would suit a pretentious girl, and - hello, Harry Potter.
Another’s will bends his perception, and there is a lavatory on a second floor, and memory about Hagrid, and Missis Norris, and others, and Hermione, lifeless on a healer’s bed.
It follows a breadcrumb path right to his teacher’s notes on a first year’s Defense class. It understands with Harry what he already understood: handwriting is the same.
And then follows everything else backwards: Quirrel’s murder, halfhearted attempt at recruitment by (Lord, boy) Voldemort, Snape, Dumbledore, The Boy Who Lived.
“What a mess,” something says, voice a raspy gravel, “what a mess, little brother.”
Harry finds himself sprawled on a dusty floor, bone-deep tired, half of his face sticky with blood, his scar wailing in pain. Diadem - he can swear - peers at him from its perch on a cold marble.
Voice (its, his) then sounds in his head, reverberating between his ears:
“Stand up.”
Harry tries and fails; voice urges him:
“Stand up, brother.”
“I am not your brother,” Harry murmurs angrily. His head feels split open, needles poking and prodding his brain, legs shaking. He stands up. “I am not your anything.”
His answer is a laugh, quiet, deranged. It reverberates in Harry’s skull, long and encompassing, as if there are dozens of people just near his ears mocking him.
“You are a mistake, first of all,” the voice says, “a grave one.” He cackles again, short and grating, and then continues darkly: “Mine, nonetheless.”
“What are you?” Harry bites, “What have you done to me?”
“Never look strangers in the eye,” the voice answers cryptically, “never touch objects you don’t know the origin of.”
“I didn’t - “
“That will be my first lesson to you,” the voice sounds tired now, “when you come back, I will tell you about The Chamber of Secrets.”
While their routine was quiet before, it has become one long silence now. It is new and terrible.
Meals are laid before Harry and Tom within it, they study within it. At least if it is a punishment, this time Voldemort punishes them both; it’s a strange relief. Harry doesn’t know how he would feel if he were once again treated decently while Tom is cast aside, unwanted, a burden.
It seems that threats of violence notwithstanding, Tom warms to Harry a little bit. They start talking, that is.
Usually it’s in the dark, after their curfew, both laying in their transfigured beds.
Not that Tom has to say anything pleasant.
“You could have pleaded with her to take you in,” he says about Mrs Weasley, “you saved her daughter. From me. You went to the secret place where an ancient monster slumbered for hundreds of years without a second thought. She owes you. They all owe you.”
So that is how it is in Slyzerin, Harry thinks. You still can be courageous, but if you must go to an evil lair, you are going there for a price.
(And your love for a price too, even if you are - aiming for - a role of a parent.)
“That's how you could have escaped me. Him, too. Fool. I knew you are. So you didn’t, and here we are.”
“Here we are,” Harry echoes.
They lay in silence for a time. Harry doesn’t feel even a shadow of sleepiness. He thinks, round and round, not sure himself what question his thoughts are even circling until it springs from his lips.
“Would you go and plead?” he asks quietly, not really expecting the answer.
“I,” says Tom regally from under his duvet, “would demand. What I have every right to.”
“Go demand him to brush your hair,” Harry taunts, suddenly fed up, “maybe he’ll forgive you.”
He half-expects Tom to go and light his head on fire as promised at that, but even he must be tired from all the endless confrontation, because instead of even insulting him back, he just asks: “Do they do that in Gryffindor?”
“Do what?”
“Showing you around. Herding you to classes. Kissing you goodnight.”
This is a strange turn of conversation.
“I don’t think I want Percy’s goodnight kiss,” is what Harry decides to settle on.
There is a pause. Harry waits for a mockery, but instead Tom gets out from under the duvet and gives him a long, long look. It’s eerie how his face, blank and tired, morphs into something else.
“Oh, don’t you,” Tom says softly.
There is a smile on his face.
It’s unfurling slowly, like a flower. The first time Harry was introduced to it in The Chamber. He blisters immediately, but doesn’t have time to say anything before Tom continues: “He would, you know. Not if you ask directly, of course. Then he would assume that it was a prank you were set on by his brothers. Because he is insecure as much as he is vain. But if you would follow him around like a good little duckling for a couple of days? If you ask him just enough questions with big enough eyes, would be polite and quiet?”
“Shut up,” Harry says.
“And then you will need to stumble a little with the school rules. Ten to fifteen minutes past curfew in the dorm, or maybe lost on the way to Binns' class.”
Tom’s voice now has that singsong quality, a little like Malfoy’s, if prat has bite as big as he has bark. A little like Fred and George. Cruel.
“Then seek his forgiveness as if it were he who you personally let down. Be desperate, but polite and quiet about it.”
Then Tom springs from his bed, full of strange energy, and lands straight on Harry’s, eyes gleaming in the moonlight. Harry barely cuts the urge to kick him to the floor. Tom doesn’t know the wonder of a personal space, or, more accurately, he doesn’t acknowledge that Harry is allowed one.
Harry is grateful that Voldemort gave them separate beds.
“He will melt,” Tom says, grinning wider, his face a shade uglier each second of his runt, “and he will be so much better with you than me. After that breaking point, he will forgive you everything, will kiss you goodnight, will help you with your studies, will coddle and praise you, and reprimand only gently. If you just continue to look at him up. Like his own brothers are supposed to, but never will.”
What chills Harry to the bone is how casually Tom mentions the Weasleys recently. How familiar he seems with them.
(Freddy this, Georgie that. Mum this and that.
That happened the night before, and Harry nearly strangled him for this one.)
They are not just some family on the other side of the war for Tom anymore; now he knows them enough to tell what exactly to do, to say, how to act to get to them.
It’s not just an ugly taunt.
It’s a threat.
And then… Then Harry understands something else.
He understands it so vividly, in fact, that he just can’t keep his mouth closed.
“So,” he says quietly, “who was your Percy?”
Abruptly, Tom stands up. His face is suddenly hardly recognizable as a face.
Harry braces for a fight, for anything Tom can have in store for him - wishes for it, almost. Bares his teeth, however small they are in comparison to Tom’s.
But a harsh knock on the door stills them both.
“Either there will be silence, or I'm going to separate you permanently,” Voldemort sounds cold, and his voice carries as clearly as if he were in the room. “Good night.”
Tom returns to his bed, shoots Harry one last withering look and lays with his back turned.
Somehow, Harry feels like this is not over.
He welcomes the feeling.
When Harry tries to tell Ron about the diadem, his lips are sealed. His thoughts even feel heavy, sluggish, like he is half asleep.
He tries to write, and his hand cramps so badly he isn’t able to hold a quill.
Harry doesn’t try to go to McGonagall after that.
Diadem did something to him.
It also offered him answers, just like the diary did. It also felt the same, if older. If much more dangerous.
Diary, however, never called Harry a brother.
What if, Harry wonders, diadem had a hand, and in that hand was a quill - would the damn handwriting be the same?
Eventually, Voldemort starts talking to them again.
First to Harry.
“Never,” he says, heavy palm on his bony shoulder, another under his chin, “you flinch again from my hand. Never dare to go away while I am talking to you.”
“Never talk with me about kisses,” Harry gripes, “about my aunt.”
Voldemort tilts his head to the side, pensive.
“I guess you are right,” he says. “She is a poor mother, but the only one I left you with, is she? I never let people who talked about mine poorly live, as pathetic a woodland creature as she was…”
“She is not my mother.”
“Yet you defend her as one. I know the difference.”
Harry’s first instinct is to flinch, to get away from under Voldemort’s hands, his words, but he stills.
He can bear this.
Silence, on the other hand, is suffocating.
“I will not talk about her anymore,” Voldemort allows, “she does not deserve to cause a quarrel between us.”
About kisses, though, he promises nothing.
Tom is second.
(Always second in this house.)
It doesn’t go that well.
Harry wakes up to faint shouting from downstairs. Tom’s bed is already made, impeccable as always.
Harry rolls down from his own, dresses hurriedly (wizarding fashion is not that intricate), and rushes out of their room.
The scene he encounters in a room downstairs is not unlike that of a week ago: Tom and Voldemort against each other, one desperate, another deceptively calm.
“I AM YOU!” Tom shouts at the top of his lungs.
He sounds like a dying animal. He looks like he would cry or die from a heart attack any second.
Voldemort’s smile is a little, sharp thing that barely touches his lips. He leans forward, and his hand is gentle on Tom's scrunched face. His thumb caresses Tom’s cheekbone oh so light.
“Not yet, I’m afraid,” he says softly. “In your case, however… never would be the right word.”
Tom’s mouth is gaping fish-like. He trembles, his lips are moving without a sound; the expression on his face is the most heartbroken Harry has ever seen on a human.
Abruptly, Harry has enough. He finds himself between the two of them, their contact cut short when he shows his body there. Voldemort looks amused; he is going to say something, but Harry talks over him:
“Why are we calling you Voldemort?”
His voice is very loud. Most rude and obnoxious he can make himself sound.
“Excuse me?” Voldemort asks, his smile is still there.
“Isn’t Voldemort the one with his own. Cult? Someone who nearly won a war?”
From behind, Tom grabs his wrist painfully tight. “Shut up,” he spats.
“Do you think?” Voldemort muses softly, friendly.
“I think,” Harry says, tugging his arm fruitlessly, jaw flexing, “that you are definitely not. Him. Yet.”
There is a bit of silence. And then one more.
Then Tom hauls Harry out of the room, Voldemort still standing there with a smile frozen to his face, hand tight on a wand.
(Harry can’t remember when it appeared. He doesn’t want to know for what.)
“You stupid, useless child,” Tom whisper-shouts on a way, “you’ve gone mad, you…”
Harry can’t really discern much; Tom’s words are quiet under the rush of blood in his ears.
Until Tom shoves him outside, whirls back on him, hands hard on Harry’s shoulders, and shakes him.
“What did you think you were doing? What did you think you were saying? There are six of us, do you understand?”
“Six?” Harry asks, dazedly.
Six, he thinks, horrified. Three more prisons for three more iterations, then. How can anyone hate himself so much, how -
“He won't spare you, Harry,” Tom whispers frantically, “he plays along for now, yes, because he’s gone mad from boredom, but I know him. I know him,” he repeats, not seemingly understanding that he does, “he’ll kill you and eat you if you anger him enough.”
“And why are you worried about that?” Harry bites, “Either you want to burn my hair off or you don’t want me killed. Pick one, ‘s not so hard.”
Tom shakes him again, so hard his glasses fall off, and he tries to show Tom away, but this is futile.
“Fool,” Tom spats, “you braindead imbecile! I am trying to take care of you, shield you where I can, and you? Have you ever in your life stopped to think about what and to whom you say?!..”
“That’s rich,” Harry gripes, “from someone who called him an animal and a garbage, you…”
“That's enough.”
They both freeze. There wasn’t even a crack of door - for such a large man, Voldemort rose behind them utterly silently.
“Harry,” he says without a hint of expression, “to your room. Tom, you stay.”
“No,” Harry breezes, “he just raised his voice. I said things to you this time. Let him go, let me stay.”
“Harry.”
“Let me stay,” Harry insists.
“Go to our room,” Tom says behind him, quietly.
“I won't.”
Voldemort closes his eyes, and stands like this. And stands, and stands. Every second is an unbearable weight.
“Very well. Tom, inside.”
Tom obeys without a word.
It is a relief, if a stinging one.
Now they are alone. Just like they were that time - when a drawing was shown to Harry, and when a matter of kisses came to light.
Harry braces himself.
“Must you defy me at every turn, Harry?” asks Voldemort evenly.
“But it’s true.”
“What is, dear?”
“I talked… out of turn. Not Tom. He was just upset.”
“Ah. So you did not mean what you said, then?”
Harry falls silent. He is actually not so sure if he did, but Voldemort was so cruel to Tom, and something in him, something which remembered desperation in Tom’s “what did he do”s, “did he hurt you”s wanted to bite and bite again in return.
“Let us walk,” Voldemort decides.
“I am going to tell you something, Harry.”
Harry just hopes it is not another story about him and Aunt Petunia.
“It is about us,” Voldemort says, and he lets his relief come out of his lungs.
“Did you ever wonder how we made? Tom, me, you? Others?”
“Not really,” Harry confesses, “something horrible, isn't it?”
“It is,” Voldemort says, his face to the sun, unblinking, “it is. First, you need to kill. The easy part… for me, it was always very easy.”
Harry shivers at that.
Easy.
Was it easy? His parents? It was, some umbilical, foreign memory in him suggests. It was.
Until it wasn’t.
It must be his shard that remembers this, Harry realizes. That thing in him. It was a participant, after all.
“But then comes the hard part,” tells Voldemort, self-absorbed, oblivious to Harry's realisations, “you have to find a splinch that murder created. You must separate a shard from yourself… made it so it and you are the same and completely different simultaneously.
For that, the foulest betrayal of oneself has to be committed.
You have to sit with yourself and convince that part that you are dead.
That you died ultimately, not simply as a man, but as a concept.
That dead part becomes us.
Our Tom is a foolish boy who was mauled by a basilisk for his dirty blood, because his brilliance was not enough for it. I am a man for whom revelations of a diadem were too much. Who stayed in a forest until my bones became a home for an adder.”
“You did this?”
“Yes.”
“To yourself?”
“Yes.”
“How can you love,” Harry says in a small voice, “if you don’t even love yourself?”
Six, Tom said that stale morning. Six horrible deaths, unforgiving failures inflicted upon himself, and for what?
“Oh, Harry. Of course, I love myself. Love is multifaced, and sometimes it has to be harsh for the lover’s good.”
They both look in a direction where their home rests, now hidden behind dense forest.
“I don’t want such love.”
“For you, I have another kind,” Voldemort smiles thinly, “and you will take it. Remember our agreement.”
“I remember,” Harry says quietly.
“So you are not right. Voldemort is my past, present, and future, but I am an impossible thing: Voldemort who failed. Who betrayed four times, and then was betrayed and left behind himself. My mind is a forest, cold and damp, and every night I am still there… Wondering without a path, with a wisdom that brought me nothing but itself… until my bones start to show from the cracks, and even my magic can’t support me anymore.”
“I am bitter, of course. I ask myself, like every other me asks: why him and not me? I am betrayer and betrayed, I love myself and hate. This is what we have to endure for Lord Voldemort’s success.”
“You hate me too, then?” Harry asks quietly.
“No…” Voldemort says, a tint of surprise to his tone, “not you, no. You are a mistake, but a lovely one. One he didn’t take responsibility for, but no matter. No matter. I will.”
To find a room of forgotten things again is not a challenge Harry expected: the same tether that seals his lips tugs him and bothers him when he is half asleep, until he dons his invisibility cloak and slips away from Gryffindor tower close to midnight. It leads him all the way to the seventh floor, it insists that he pace three times before an empty wall, until a familiar door blooms into existence.
Silence is liminal.
Diadem waits for him, regal and impatient, where he left it.
“Ah,” he whispers in Harry’s head, “you came. Good.”
Harry does an intake of air, and suddenly his feet are cold from a way he made barefoot, and he is tired, and his memory of how he got here is incomplete.
Anger comes next. It is a quiet, instinctive sort, a little viper in the grass. Familiar companion, reserved for his Uncle, for Snape, for Lockhart, even. For any man who is bigger and stronger, who punishes and controls - for now, this anger always whispers. For now.
“What did you do to me?” Harry asks darkly.
“Ensured that you will come to me again, brother. My diary is wreaking havoc, isn’t he?”
“So it’s him.”
“Of course. You have figured that out already, haven’t you? Handwriting. Clever.”
“Is yours the same?”
“It is.” Harry feels a smile behind that voice, and he doesn't like it one bit.
“What are you? What is he?” he tries.
“What he said: old memories, stuffed away out of sight, out of mind.”
It does not explain anything. Except it bears the question: if one memory was so strong that it made Hogwarts such a cold and dangerous place, what can another, older, stronger one do? How long was it there, sitting innocently right in the heart of his home?
“You are Voldemort.” Harry accuses.
“Lay your cloak on the floor, child. Sit with me.”
Harry sits, but the cloak stays on: he feels too exposed, too vulnerable without it. His wand warms his hand, but does little to reassure him.
Voldemort does not comment on his decision. He doesn't have a need to see him fully when his voice sank claws into his mind already, apparently.
It is all very strange to Harry, like a cloying dream, not quite a nightmare, not quite not.
He remembers too well his encounter with a monster nearly a year ago, its ugliness, its madness - but then he hasn't had time to be truly afraid, only to push back.
There is nothing yet to push back against.
This - this quiet conversation in the dark, where he is utterly alone with a voice in his head - this makes Harry afraid.
“What do you want?” he asks briskly.
Light falls on a marble head at such an angle that it appears to be smirking at him.
“Nothing,” the diadem croons.
“Why am I here?”
“Because you have everything to want from me, and I have nothing to gain from you.”
Harry laughs incredulously and cringes immediately at how loud it sounds.
“Not going to offer to bring my parents back, then?”
“No,” the diadem answers, “that would be crude. I did not take them, so I won't offer them back, no.”
“But could he? Bring them back?”
That question - despite Harry being certain that Voldemort was - is - a filthy liar - kept him awake in the dark more nights than he can count.
“If you fancy two rotting corpses playing to his tune, then certainly.”
Harry feels like all the air left him in one exhale.
It’s relieving, if painful. If words that delivered that relief are callous and uncaring.
Diadem does not comment on how he hastily wipes his eyes.
“Chamber of Secrets,” Harry says, “you promised you would tell me about it.”
“I promised nothing,” the diadem corrects him mildly, “but I will.”
It tells Harry the truth, then: how many years ago Tom Riddle opened The Chamber of Secrets, where he found it, and what a dangerous gift awaited him here. It is a detached recounting, without much detail or emotion, as if the diadem - Voldemort - talks about someone else, long forgotten.
Not at all, Harry thinks, how the diary would have spun this tale.
He stiffens when Voldemort tells him how he framed Hagrid for his crime.
“Rubeus”, he calls him, with an air of mild disappointment.
“And now,” Voldemort concludes, “you won't be able to tell anyone about any of it, or lead anyone to it, little mistake. That will be my price.”
Harry feels like he's been plunged into ice-cold water.
“No,” he scrambles to his feet, “no, you can’t!”
But Voldemort can.
Harry feels like the stupidest boy in all existence - of course, it was a trap. He feels it’s iron teeth in his head already, recognizes them - protecting a secret, like they were protecting the diadem existence. Every quiet word spoken in his ear was a tooth of that trap.
“No, Harry,” and this is the first time this version of Voldemort calls his name, cold and stern, “I won’t have all the Hogwarts staff and swarm of aurors on my unfortunate paperback tail. Or in my Chamber. We will let the Rubeus take a fall; he used to it already, after all…”
Harry stands up, wand in hand buzzing like a swarm of angry bees, and he is going to burn that thing, to crush it -
“Sit down.”
And it feels like a cold hand slaps vertebrae in his spine. His legs give out, wand hand suddenly pliant and useless.
“He won’t stop,” Harry seethes, “He won’t stop, and they will find him anyway! And your stupid Chamber, and…”
“I know,” Voldemort answers simply.
Then he sighs. He sighs like an old tree could have, tired of its own weight.
“He will go too far, and he will not think about consequences for us all.” Voldemort, impossibly, sounds tired. “Come to me again when you are desperate, little mistake. I will save the day, for a price.”
Voldemort brings Harry back into the house by his hand. It is another new thing he was deprived of before, and he is ashamed at how much it grounds him.
Voldemort is pleased with him.
He tucks a stray wisp of hair behind Harry’s ear and tells him to be in the kitchen in half an hour.
Tom waits for him in their room, before a little stained mirror. He is so still that Harry is not sure he is breathing.
“He told me how we made,” Harry says hollowly.
It sounds like a confession to his own ears.
“Did he?” Tom asks. And then - “You lied.”
“About what?”
Harry sits at the edge of his bed, quiet and cautious.
“He didn’t just brush your hair. He did something to you, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t,” Harry whispers.
He doesn’t really know if he is lying. Voldemort did not grab him, did not hit him, had nothing for him but words and a damn slip of paper.
But all of it did hurt.
“I can’t help us,” Tom turns his head to him, and Harry sees only his eye, bloodshot and crazed, “if you keep your little mouth shut.”
“I…”
“I can’t take us out of here,” Tom says, intense and quiet, “if you keep riding his coattails.”
Harry feels the heat flash his cheeks.
“I am not,” he whispers indignantly.
“Oh, but you do,” Tom straightens up and faces him, “I have seen how you look at him. How you talk to him.”
Tom looks at him as if he knows something that Harry does not. Something - condemning. He doesn’t want to know what it is, feels anger rising its ugly head to protect him from this knowledge.
“I just wanted to pull you out of trouble,” Harry bites, “thanks would be nice.”
“Oh really,” Tom says darkly, “what else should I thank you for, Harry? Maybe for this body of mine?” he gestures widely on his frame; Harry flinches, “maybe for a father I didn't ask for, but you generously provided for us both?”
“He is not my father,” Harry whispers.
“Yet you look at him as one,” Tom smiles, “yet you fear him as one fears a father.”
This is stupid, Harry thinks. He only ever seen a photo of James Potter, but he couldn’t imagine in a million years fearing this man, tall and warm, always smiling. Can’t imagine this visceral yearning for him to be tainted so.
Abruptly, Harry wants him, like once upon a time he wanted only the idea of him, in his cupboard under the stairs. It is crushing. More than a kisses talk, more than a talk about how to make an evil memory.
Because his father is so, so dead, so never coming back.
All he left is Voldemort now.
“You are stupid,” he says to Tom, and his voice wavers.
Tom smiles.
All he left, Harry thinks, is Voldemort.
He knows where to find a Chamber of Secrets, and he knows what awaits him here. Yet his teeth clasp together violently when he tries to tell Ron, and his legs won’t bring him there.
Come when you are desperate, the diadem told him, and Harry finally is.
Tom is going to kill Ginny, he escalated just like Voldemort said, and - and it all falls so neatly together.
Ginny was Professor Quirrell to Tom’s Voldemort, then, all this time. Her mouth just as sealed as Harry’s, her hands just as tied. But no: she was stronger than him, Harry thinks, tried and nearly succeeded in escaping him… if only he didn’t took blasted diary with him back to her.
“I know what to do,” he lies to Ron quietly.
He doesn’t.
“Wait for me,” he says.
It is not going to end well, Harry feels, and the only question is - for whom. He is fine if it is him. He was stupid twice over - for recognising Tom for what he is too late, for falling into diadem clutches so easily.
Voldemort waits for him where he left him, in his dusty kingdom of forgotten things.
“Hello,” he greets Harry pleasantly, “is it time already?”
“He took her,” Harry breathes, “he is going to kill her.”
“Ah. What an impatient boy.”
“What is your price?” Harry blurts out.
“My price…” Voldemort hums quietly, “you know, darling boy, it won’t be cheap. Are you quite sure? Is that mysterious 'she' very dear to you?”
“We don’t have time,” Harry whispers.
“We have,” and something tickles in Harry's brain, like it does every time to suggest a smile on a diadem’s nonexistent lips, “I know our Tom quite well. He will want you to come to him, to witness his success… to crush you beneath it. Come closer.”
Harry does. He resents it; resents that now, of all time, Voldemort decided to play games with him, but all other ways he can get help are severed clean. He just prays it won’t take too long.
He is ready to offer everything.
“Good boy,” Voldemort praises softly, “now look at me. I’d like to acquaint myself better with you, dear brother. We are to be inseparable from now on, after all.”
Invasion is not as brutal and merciless as it was the first time. Now it feels as if a cold hand caresses his brain, coaxes this and that memory closer to be examined. Unlike before, Harry does not see where Voldemort looks, what he discovers, only faint emotions tied to experiences.
It’s unsettling. Exosting.
It thankfully comes to an end before Harry can do something drastic, like gouge his own eyes so no one ever again can do this to him.
“Now I see,” Voldemort says nonchalantly.
Harry tries not to throw up.
“Now,” he has to pause and swallow, “now will you help?”
“Yes. But you have to promise me a little something, my dear.”
This is it, Harry knows. As nearly pleasant as it strange version of Voldemort has been compared to what he met a year ago, surely now it would like his life. It’s ok, Harry tells himself. His life was short, but he had some good things.
Hogwarts.
Hermionie, Ron - who waits for him still.
He is ready.
“You will take me with you, discreetly,” Voldemort says, “and bring me to this teacher of yours. Lockhart.”
“What?” Harry asks, dazed.
“Ask for his help,” Voldemort whispers, “offer me to him. Say that I am a long lost diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw that grants,” he chuckles, “a wit beyond measure. I will be able to help you then.”
“What will happen to him?” Harry asks sharply.
“Nothing that is good, or concerns you at all. But it’s either him or a little Ginny. You choose.”
For that, Harry was not ready.
“What then?” he asks, numb.
“Then… I told you already, my help is not cheap. So my proposal to you is this: you are to obey what I say, you are not to leave my side without permission, and not to harm yourself on purpose. Then I will help you, and the girl will live.”
Everything about this proposal is bad, Harry knows: too much left unsaid and unspecified; too vague, too leashing. No time frame either.
But he has no time. Ginny is probably dying right now, and Ron will be devastated, and all his brothers, and Mrs Weasley.
But what of Lockhart?
“Tik tock, Harry. Tom will wait for us, but patience is not his virtue.”
It is a morning still, cold and fine, when they gather around a table in the kitchen. Voldemort reads a paper, surprisingly not a Daily Prophet, but muggle, familiar one.
Uncle Vernon used to read this one with his breakfast, too.
“Again bothering your brother with fantasies of escape, are you, Tom?” he asks shrewdly, not taking his eyes from the paper.
“Bothering him with fantasies of dignity and loyalty,” Tom bites, “of where it belongs.”
Voldemort laughs at that, still in good spirits after his and Harry’s morning stroll.
Or - from something else?
“And where is it, silly boy?”
“With Lord Voldemort,” Tom answers haughtily, nervously, his knife a little too loud when he cuts into his meal.
But for some reason, today Voldemort doesn’t rise to the bait.
“If there is something worth his name still in him, he’ll manage without you,” he dismisses, “we have one job. To survive and make sure dear Harry will too. Eat.”
Something is happening, Harry’s gut tells him. Voldemort is too permissive, when he was ready to - punish - Tom again just for raising his voice no longer then hour ago.
He had a little to no appetite after all the morning excitements, but now every forkful feels ten times unbearable.
When by some miracle he manages to finish his plate, Voldemort stands, gives him a long, long look - and then bends and kisses his forehead.
While he recovers from that, under Tom’s indignant glare, paper is laid before him, open.
For a minute, he can’t comprehend what he is seeing. What he is reading.
Voldemort stands by the window and hums a little melody under his nose.
“Well,” Tom says, looking over his shoulder, “congratulations.”
FAMILY OF THREE KILLED IN COLD BLOOD, NEPHEW MISSING, paper says.
There is a photo of Dursleys, nice and proper, all of them smiling. There is a photo of Mardge also, and an old one of Harry done by his school.
And a man, long hair, face deranged.
Killer on the run, paper says. Stay home, the police are going to find him, it says.
“Ah,” Voldemort says, nonchalant, “that one is your godfather. Congratulations, indeed.”