"Avada kedav-"
"No!" I thrashed in the dark, drenched in a cold sweat and hardly able to breathe past the dreams, past the memories.
I am home. I am safe. That world is a lifetime away. He's not here. He's gone.
The words were a mantra that even I didn't trust as truth.
I stumbled through the dark to the bathroom, turning on the light to stare at my reflection.
Pale skin, angled jaw, dark hair.
I hated my reflection more than the next guy. My reflection wasn't just mine. A few decades ago, it could have been his and that was a truth I could hardly admit.
With shaking fingers, I pulled back my left sleeve, trying to push down the bile rising in my throat.
For the first time in years, the Dark Mark swirled and burned against my skin. I crumpled to the floor in fear, shock, and shame.
The Dark Lord lives again.
My father has returned.
For the first few years of my life, I didn't have a name. I was sure someone had named me, at some point, but there was never anything solid to give me identity. Until I meant something, I wasn't worth anything and was therefore undeserving of acknowledgment. For a while, I had thought my name was Tom. Then I realized that the name itself was a taint against me, a mockery of the Muggle name that I would be branded with if I wasn't worth a good name, a strong name.
The Dark Lord rarely had time for his precious heir, a boon I took for granted when I was young, so I had been raised by his most faithful and twisted followers. As I grew older and stronger, my father would take time to test me and try his best to break me into the perfect heir. I was trained extensively and, by the time other children were receiving their Hogwarts letters, I was helping to direct the Death Eaters on the battlefields. I was still too young, too raw, to risk in the true fighting but there was little to veil from me the death and suffering my father and his followers were spreading.
It wasn't until I was old enough to be welcomed into the war, to be baptised into the legion of followers, that the shallowness of my own existence really sunk in. All I amounted to was a cautiously molded general, a more advanced pawn to be ordered about and to never argue an order. I was expected to be a ruthless leader and a devoted follower at the same time, guiding my father's army as he realized his dreams of a new world order.
That was when I became something more than what they wanted, something different than what dear old Dad wanted, that I realized that the name had been mine all the while. I was, from the moment I decided to want something else, Tom Riddle the Third. I was given a name that meant nothing because, to Tom Riddle Junior, I was nothing. I was not the Prince my father wanted just as I was not the Dark Lord his followers expected. I wasn't even average- I was something far worse: I was good.
I wanted to be good. I didn't want to make a life through fear. I knew then why torture made me sick to my stomach and why death made me cringe from a young age. I became tolerant to both but only through necessity. If I hadn't, I would have died a young failure.
As soon as I was sure that I would be something else, my life got understandably more complicated. Sure, it was all too easy to allow myself to be captured by the Order of the Phoenix, but it was another matter to reassure them all that I truly was what I said.
It had taken years to gain that trust and to begin a life where I could be what I wanted. And now, as I stared at the black scar twisting and writhing against my skin, I could almost feel that life slipping away from me.
He's back. He's back. He's back.