we operate in sevens
In seven years, he'd known and then embraced every sin. But sin was for humans, and in all his life, he had only been human for seven years and then one day when he lost his seventh piece of soul.
lists are so much more logical than life
He'd spent that time cataloguing those years, those sins, that time in Hogwarts when he felt and loved—lusted—he had never been willing to call it anything but another aspect of his cruelty, his wrongness.
even to his own people he was wrong
If any of the Death Eaters had been anywhere near as good at Legilimency as he was, if he hadn't been flawless at Occlumency, he would have a revolution on his hands, and Bellatrix Lestrange, the perfect, the unfeeling, would have his head and his place in the new hierarchy. All he saw in her was the beautiful crack of a last heartbeat, a human mind shattered by hurt. Hers or some poor bastard's, it didn't matter.
he talked to himself sometimes and he called himself tom
As in, "Tom, get her out of your head," the words of a little boy with a crush, not the faceless fear-king he had become, but he could only go forward, and he wasn't capable of apology. Besides, he'd done enough to destroy his identity by now; he was Voldemort, a French phrase stuffed into a name that signified emptiness.
he was a blank title that sometimes remembered warmth
The year of love—lust—was his favorite, so different from the rest of him, reminding him of blood and light and openness. Blurred around the edges, speaking from beyond the grave in his head to remind him of what could be.
but lust is not based on minds
and that was why he loved her. What he regretted most was that they would have been perfect, if only he'd understood anything, if only he hadn't been a freak.
sorry, minerva.