Warnings: pre-slash (or slash if you squint), vagueness/ambiguity, oneshot, character introspection, MoD/Death!Harry, time travel(?), Tom Riddle vs. Voldemort persona,
Pairings: pre-slash/slash if you squint LV/HP (Lord Voldemort/Harry Potter)
Standard disclaimer applies: J.K. Rowling is pretty awesome. I apologize in advance for butchering some canons and building new head-canons.
I have always known the night suits me best. There is a comfort there, wrapped in what others fear—an icy safety, untouchable by the light of others. While they run towards the brightness, I walk against their motion into the darkness. And they pass me, sometimes close enough that I feel their wind, but never do we touch. The night becomes me.
And I, the night.
There is a pleasantness in the feeling, the lack of warmth. While others seek the world behind doors and underneath roofs, I am free. I am liberated. Here, here, I am not Tom Riddle—not the pathetic orphan with a coward of a father and an even more pathetic mother. There is no love here, but I need nothing of it. For in the night, as the night, Lord Voldemort becomes me, and I he.
I doubt no other has ever felt the night as I, the chill's caress and the whispered nightmares—so soft, so silent, so smooth, euphonic in the breathy tones and stinging purity. It can transition from fine silk to the sharpest dagger, or perhaps be the quandary of both. I hear the elegy of those lost; I hear the high-pitched screech of the dark's fangs; I hear the ruminations of the impatient and the insane. And I breathe them all in, leaving but their sibilance on the scarlet-stained tip of my tongue.
Lovely.
That is the night—that is I, Lord Voldemort—and I know it well. It is but the day that I hide in, under the restraints of Tom Riddle the genius, Tom Riddle the charming, Tom Riddle the deadly but still human. He is I, I am him, we are the night—but the mask of he is but a mask. Even the anger. Even the power. Even the control.
The night needs nothing, for it has everything. It is all-encompassing, and still even more nebulous than the stars it cradles.
This, the nature of my sanctuary.
In the day I wait, in the night I roam. It is, perhaps, then true that the time I am most… vulnerable is dusk, when the impatience grows unbearable and the feeling of yearning unspeakable. I do not roam at dusk, nor do I wait. One with the night cannot hide from twilight—the sliver of time when even the darkness is laid bare—I am no exception.
Twilight unravels me. I am neither Lord Voldemort nor Tom Riddle. Perhaps—perhaps I am what I always was, what we always are… a singular truth, in only our existence. I know not what I breathe, or hear, or touch, or smell or taste or see, only that I do. Dusk is when I am weakest, a victim to my human nature, filled with thoughts of the lost and lorn. My vulnerability becomes all that I am, and with it, an immortality that feels like the eternity of a curse.
And so it is no surprise that it is now, in the hesitance of light and dark, the shades of twilight, that I see him.
The rain has wet the sidewalk, staining it a darkened grey. I know not why I walk along the muggle streets of town, only that I am. There is a discomfort that drives me to my most basic instincts, and I walk without knowing, with a wonder lacking wonderment. I feel no rain, protected as I am, invisible as I am, but the gloom and the promise of night—so close, but always a lie with the rain—is such a temptation that I pretend I do.
I stumble upon him then, sheltered by a dark blue umbrella and standing in the middle of an empty park.
He is muggle. He cannot be anything else but a muggle, but I stop for reasons I cannot explain. I stop, I stare, I breathe, and I feel nothing but a hollowness in my chest and an intense awareness of my bones. In that moment as I stare at his back, Tom Riddle is not so pathetic—only human, and thankfully that—Lord Voldemort is not so great and terrible. In fact, the Dark Lord I fancied myself as is not so Dark at all, only a sham of one who reached for the night and could not grasp it.
I am small, standing behind him. So infinitesimally small, tiny; a triviality and my sudden fear—hatred—is not from this but the idea that I am alone. Alone, separate from the whole universe—discarded, severed, tossed away without even the reassurance of life.
I do not fear loneliness. I have always reveled in my solitude—but somehow this feeling is something so terrible and ineffably horrific that all of me, to the depths of my soul and back, quake in its presence. There has been nothing that has existed since then that has given me the same abject horror of that moment.
And the rain still falls. Falls and falls and falls. I do nothing but watch. Watch and watch and watch. There is perhaps a detached section of my mind that wonders exactly how I look now, in this confliction between the collision of emptiness and overflowing emotion. No storm wells within me, but it decidedly twists and turns within my heart despite the fact—and I am lost, without ever going anywhere in the first place.
He turns.
He cannot see me. I know he cannot.
But he meets me with green, and I am swept away. That image—covered by a curtain of raindrops, blue umbrella over his head, face turned toward me, gaze calm and eyes so vivid that a million and one stories are held within their depths—is seared into my soul. All the pieces of it. I will not forget—I have not forgotten.
He says nothing.
And he smiles—I do not remember how his smile looks, nor any other part of his face than his eyes, but I do remember that he smiles, genuinely, with no other intent than to smile. Strange. No one had ever smiled like that at me before. Nor has anyone ever since then. He is the first, as well as the last.
That moment is eternity. Even when it ends. Its capacity infinite, its volume unimaginable. And I think, know, wish, feel in my blood and my veins and the filling of my bones that he is more the night than I will ever be. More than Lord Voldemort, more than Tom Riddle.
I breathe. He breathes. The rain breathes, and the air bites us from all directions.
He turns away. And the skin of my flesh burns cold.
I don't remember who walked away—he or I—or when we parted. But afterward I felt that some connection between us had been forged, perhaps for forever. That he saw me, saw my heart and soul bared, and I saw a bit of him, underneath that dark blue umbrella in the shadowy curtains of rain and reflection, the sidewalk a deep grey beneath our feet.
Grey. Grey had been everywhere. Grey, the grey of clouds heavy with rain, that of muted silence and mystery, that of dusk and twilight, had been me. Him. Both of us.
It had only encompassed our world, ensconcing us away from both light of day and dark of night. It had left us with perfect dusk.
And I have never forgotten. Not even years, decades later, when I am but recovering from my existence as a wraith and then a homunculus. When I sit, before a fireplace, warm but cold, discomforted but relaxed.
The realization comes through the flames.
I had thought, with my expertise, that I knew everything of my mind despite its curiosity to the majority of the world. But how could I? My illusion of genius, so simply blown away with the sands of a dream. Dreams. For I cannot, with all my scouring of my own mind, remember what their contents were—surely if I knew everything of my mind I would vividly know those nightmares. All I knew was the sense of clarity and enlightenment to some great truth of the world, only the impression left behind and never the truth.
In each and every one of those dreams I also knew that he was there—the vision of his back from long ago the only thing present when I woke. Somber, solitary, a figure of quiet strength with no name and no face, who stood still standing even through the terror that shook my being. Only his eyes are vivid in my memories, their power still fresh and untouched like an endless expanse of snow. I have never found that shade of green anywhere else but his eyes.
And I do not know if I yearn, or if I mourn.
Because truth—a truth not the truth—has been here beside me, all-encompassing and intangible like the night, all along. There is no Lord Voldemort. And Tom Riddle has died long ago.
What I am now is a bit more than a ghost, a bit less than a whole.
All of my ambitions, they seem so small—infinitesimally trivial. It sets in like the diffusion of a low note, a bass resonating in the fall and consequential spread of a droplet in a puddle. Ripples, ripples in time and space and light and dark, grey and weakness and strength and emotion. And all that is left… is the twilight I am.
And I speak his name.
"Harry Potter… everything of mine but my birth. No, perhaps even that…"
He is there before me then—now—and I feel once more the overwhelming hollowness. He is night. More night than I. I have become nothing.
"Have you come to take me, Death?"
I wait, for he says nothing. There is nothing left within me to feel bitter—all that I am able to do is breathe. Then he smiles, and his eyes are so green again my vision is blinded with it. No more grey. No more.
He asks, "Will you stay here?"
"Instead of what?" I say.
He pauses. "Coming home."
Home… something within me pulls. It had always been sanctuary. Shelter. Comfort. What… what is home? He waits, patiently might I add, and the idea of the night having impatience is now so absurd there is a need to insult my younger self.
Home… I hear the word, but I know not what it is. But there is a quality to it, perhaps from the echo of the 'o' or the soothing hum of the 'm', that makes it pleasant. Not melodious or symphonic, not sweet or dulcet—simply pleasant.
I nod. It is a solemn, thoughtful action I believe, one of great weight and even more powerful trust.
"Take me."
Immortality is, after all, an eternity of a curse. The worth of living is only so much treasured because of the limitations, and I have given myself far too many infinities to confine them now.
Yaaaaaaay more oneshots! Haha.
So I'm not really a fan of first person PoVs, but it happened to fit this one... don't expect something like this often o_e I'd much rather go third person.
I really, really, really like the idea of a split!TMR-LV. Not necessarily personalities, but more like appearances. When he's LV, he's throwing everything he has at a goal; very in-touch with the troubles of reality, I find it. As TMR I guess you could say the same (seeing as he shifts into LV as TMR), but another part of him realizes, with detached observation, that the people he surrounds himself with and the people he sees on the street are all very different from him.
And he's kind of alone. Doesn't really know what he's doing this for-himself, but there are a million other things he could do for himself too.
Dunno if that makes sense...
Anyway, hope you enjoyed this one c:
Sincerely,
R.R.