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Challenge Name: seven kisses challenge

Challenge Issuer: femme fetal.

Where?: Harry Potter Fanfiction Challenges Forum

Challenge: "This is a challenge in which you must write a story centered around seven kisses a couple share, or the seven kisses a person received through their life."

A million thanks to tat1312, for the wonderful beta and general support. You helped so much! Also to pyroromantic19 for helping to inspire me to write this with her poem about Tom, "Immortal".

A/N: Another challenge, another Tom fic. I must say, there is something about him that fascinates me. If you're wondering about the title, I chose it mainly because I like the way it sounds. I hope you can enjoy this, and please, please review! Comments make my day.~

to kiss:

1. to join lips in respect, affection, love, passion, etc: They kissed passionately.

2. to touch gently or lightly: The breeze kissed her face.

Tom Riddle bent down to kiss his wife's swollen belly. "For our baby," he said with a particularly handsome smile.

Merope beamed, blissful. She felt the baby -- Tom, he could only be called Tom -- kick and knew that he had felt it, too.

"Thank you," snarled Tom as he bent over his father's still form with a smile like steel, his voice as soft as spider's silk.

Merope kissed her son feebly, looking into his eyes which were just a blur. They were blue but she knew they would soon turn to brown... such a dark, handsome brown. "Call him 'Tom Riddle' for his father," she managed to say through parched lips. And, almost as an afterthought, she added, "'Marvolo'... as a middle name... after his grandfather..."

With one last sigh, she died.

'What was your mother like?' wrote little Ginny Weasley in her childish, naive scrawl.

Tom hesitated before deciding on the truth. 'My mother died giving birth to me.'

'That's terrible!' the girl replied, almost instantly. 'But I wouldn't feel bad... mothers can be so annoying...' And on she rambled.

Tom's eyes sat half-open, completely black as they surveyed his prison.

Maisley Verinne was a first-year, he a sixth. But was it not the point, the essence of love, to indulge in something pure and untainted?

'It didn't work,' thought Tom, telling lie after lie about his relationship with the missing girl. A kiss -- over so quickly -- did not a relationship make. A life -- over so quickly -- was surely not worth the truth.

It was not pure: it was the opposite. Filthy: tainted: just like his soul.

It was a kiss, nothing more. And, as with the last one, different in every way as it had been, it left him just as numb as he had been before it. Nothing. Love, then, kisses and passionate romance, must be unimportant. Unnecessary.

"We have other things to focus on," he told the assembled group of his trusted ones.

Bellatrix bent down to kiss the hem of his long, stately robes, eyes shining brilliantly. "This child, My Lord... it will serve you --"

Ten months later, the child lay at the end of green light.

"Why?" she all but screamed. Her voice became fainter as he turned away with a warning twitch of his wand: feebler. "Why did you kill my son?"

Rodolphus made to put his arm around her, but she pushed him away. "He must have been defective," she spat.

She would never allow him to touch her again. Not even in Azkaban, when had she but tried they could have squeezed their hands through a tiny hole in the crumbling wall between their cells, and brushed each other's fingertips.

His fingers brushed against Nagini's cool scales as she left to go hunting. He could do nothing -- nothing -- trapped in the house of his filthy Muggle father. Still, Nagini would go out for him, tell him whatever news she could grasp from her surroundings. Generally useless to him, perhaps, but Lord Voldemort needed to know everything he could.

He was Nagini. He felt the sword pass through her tough scales. Knew when she and a part of his soul perished at the hands of an enemy he had underestimated all along.

The Dementor drifted alongside him vaguely; they were both ghostly in their own right.

Once, Voldemort would have been able to control it. He had had the full might of the Dementor race under his command some time past. When exactly, how long ago, he could not recall, but some part of him still knew it.

Not now, though. It lifted its heavy hood, breath rattling.

You only get to choose once. And Tom had already made his choice. To stay. To take the consequences of his continued existence because they meant existing.

So, a Dark Lord fell -- or the imprint of a Lord who had long since faded into history, a cowardly shadow of what he once was. No matter how long he had lingered in this world, no one had seen him or heard his screams for many years.

His soul was tattered and torn: unrecognisable. But the Dementor was satisfied with this last kiss. For now.

It, too, moved on.