Chapter 1:
These Memories are Your Curse
Tom stared at the bodies lying before him.
They were so very small, nought but looked so peaceful lying there.
The final trickle of life left them, wiping away the last vestiges of his incorporeal. As he became wholly flesh once more, so too did the world around him grow tangible.
His heart beat for the first time in the decades since he sealed his fractured soul in the diary. The blood in his veins was warm again, as warm as the tears cascading down his cheeks.
"No." He cried out as the foreign memories flooded his mind. Memories that were both his and yet not his.
Everything Harry had experienced in life, and in death, came to him. He remembered how he had punished Dudley at the reptile exhibit, just as he'd punished Billy Stubbs for feeding Helvetica to his rabbit. He remember the cruel words and apathy of his aunt and uncle, almost as cold as the apathy of those public 'servants' who took jobs at the orphanage for the sick pleasure of being in control of people weaker than them.
A stepping stone to their precious future careers in politics or social care.
"Harry? Ginny?" He moaned again as he dropped the holly wand and fell to his knees, heedless of the slick floor of the Chamber.
Tom remembered the violence inflicted on him by his older cousin and by the even older foster siblings. How he had run and hid from the many bullies, how he'd discovered magic accidentally. But then the two sets of memories stopped echoing.
He remembered two different lives. One in which he feared his magic and tried to rationalize it, another in which he embraced it. Played with it. Experimented with and mastered it.
He remembered going to Diagon Alley for the first time. Twice. The first first time he went alone, harboring suspicion and unease. The second first time with a giant beside him giving words of kindness and tragedy.
"Don't go. I'm sorry." He pleaded as he crawled on hands and knees to kneel between the children. The dead children.
Then memories he couldn't even pretend were his own came to the fore.
Tom realized they were not Harry's memories. They belonged to something else, something inside of Harry. Something trapped in a malignant, tar-like darkness and a suffocating silence. It's only window to the world a lightning shaped crack in its prison through which it could peer and see the outside world.
He saw the shattered home and his slain mother laid on the floor. He saw the half-giant who tried so desperately to be Tom's friend when they attended Hogwarts, only to be betrayed in the end, lift him up from the rubble and wrap him in a blanket. He watched as he fell asleep looking up at an ocean of stars with the roar of a motorcycle as his lullabye.
Twelve years. Twelve years of life experienced in a fraction of a second. That is what he remembered and it was too much for him.
"I'm so sorry." Tom Riddle choked on the words as he picked the limp children up and cradled their heads in his chest.
He remembered everything. The good. The bad. Most importantly, he remembered that twisted, monstrous face protruding from the back of another man's head. The thing he was destined to become. The thing he had become. The thing that had brought upon Harry - and countless other children - the same cold and loveless childhood he had suffered through.
He tried to vomit, but all his empty stomach could yield was the bile now staining his front.
Why? Why had Ginny Weasley painted Lord Voldemort as a great and powerful sorcerer when writing to him? So mighty that people dare not speak his name for fear of his wrath? That's not what he saw, not what these memories showed. What he saw was a disgusting, loathsome creature of cowardice and a parasite to boot. That Voldemort was a wretch, worthy of nothing but contempt and perhaps pity. Weak and disgusting.
That's not what he envisioned. That was not what he set out to become. That was not a man of greatness uniting the disparate magical communities into a new order.
He choked on the scream as it came out. Strange things like sadness and horror and fury are what he yelled to the heavens. His scream hit cold uncaring rock and echoed endlessly back to him. Weak, ineffectual and as pointless as his attempts to rouse the two children back from the dead by shaking them.
These emotions were not his own. Unlike the disgust and shame at what he saw, these emotions were filling him from the outside but just like the memories he couldnt parse the two apart.
In that moment of despair, disgust, horror and rage a smidgeon of another feeling, one entirely new to Tom Marvolo Riddle, peaked through the mass of emotions tearing at his insides. A smidgeon of remorse in a typhoon of anger and sadness blossomed.
A smidgeon is all that was needed.
In that moment two broken pieces of a soul became one and Tom Riddle knew nothing else but pain.
Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore lead his contemporaries through the rubble.
Minerva, Severus, Pomona and Filius followed him with wands drawn. Poppy took up the rear carrying a rucksack nearly as large as she was. It was filled with bandages, healing salves and potions of esoteric medical application.
He kept the charms professor and potions master close, making sure that he was flanked by the only two people in a thousand miles with more skill in their respective professions than he had. Save for Pomfrey.
Professors Sprout and Mcgonagall flanked the school healer and had orders to close off the entrance with herbological and transfiguration magic should the first three fall.
He would have had Minerva at his side in place of Filius were it not for the fact that his own skills at transfiguration were far superior to hers and the strategic advantages of having a charms master and someone knowledgeable of the dark arts taking point with him over a fellow master of transfiguring.
At least that's what he told the young(er) woman, knowing that the truth of his chivalrous designs would only infuriate her and his other fair companions.
They reached something like a vault door. It stood ajar and they carefully surrounded the sides, Flitwick ducking low to keep out of sight as he dashed to the other end and Severus taking the right.
With his two pointmen pressed against the sides of the vault door, Albus walked through the gaping portal and into a massive, truly awe-inspiring chamber
He squashed the childlike giddiness and desire to explore before it could rise up. The serpent statues, the elephantine pipeways, the smooth artisan floor and ceiling. They all begged him to investigate, but he refused those feelings in lieu of the urgent matter at hand.
They descended a steel ladder one at a time, the others keeping their wands at the ready to defend or catch their climbing partners at a moment's notice. He instructed the back three to remain near the vault door to make sure it remained open and to prevent anything from sneaking up on them, thus securing an escape route.
The three combat-hardened wizards sulked between the basilisk statues with no shortage of apprehension. Any one of them could be the real thing, and Albus was positive he wasn't the only one who didn't like their chances against the beast mister Weasley warned them about.
Even with the help of the other professors they were woefully unprepared to take down such a creature.
Flip. Thunk. Flip. Thunk.
Albus raised a hand to stop his companions. He recognized the first sound as pages in a book turning. The second was more difficult to place.
He motioned for the other two to take cover behind the statues on either side of him and they obeyed. Severus waded into the rancid, waist-high water without a sound. The poor part-goblin found himself completely submerged in the sewage but paddled along anyways.
In a less tense situation Albus would have chuckled at his old dueling opponent's misfortune. Instead he showed a modicum of professionalism and merely grinned like a Cheshire cat as the trio advanced.
That smile vanished at the horrific scene before him. It wasn't every day a wizard, headmaster or no, laid eyes on a millenia-old basilisk. The sight of the felled beast brought a great deal of relief and hope for the safety of his students, but that relief and hope soon vanished; replaced with sadness and despair at the smaller figures beside it.
He recognized two as Harry Potter and Ginevra Weasley. The third was larger and a few meters further away. He had his back to them.
Flip. Thunk. Flip. Thunk.
The young man was kneeling over something. A book by the sound of it. A book whose pages he turned before bringing something large and white down on it in a stabbing motion. A phoenix, his phoenix, stood next to the man with it's head on his shoulder, letting loose the occasional trill like a mother cooing her child.
Albus kept his wand trained on the young man, who he recognized must have been an upperclassman, sixth or seventh year. He couldn't tell who from this position or distance.
He crept closer.
Flip. Thunk. Flip. Thunk .
He crept closer still, and when he reached the two children he motioned for Severus and Filius to remain hidden.
Flip. Thunk. Flip. Thunk.
Albus reached down with his free hand, not daring to peel his eyes away from the mystery man in front of him.
He checked Ginny Weasley for any sign of life, but could feel no breath from her mouth, pulse from her neck or heat on her skin. Hoping against hope he pushed his magic into her body to see if her own internal magic would reject it, like a magnet repelling another of the same kind.
It wasn't the easiest way of checking to see if somebody was alive, and only truly powerful wizards could attempt such a trick, and only then to check if there was any chance of resuscitation or revival.
Nothing.
His magic passed through her dead body like any other lifeless matter. He did the same for Harry, skipping the regular breath, pulse and body heat checks. Again. Nothing.
Flip. Thunk.
Albus motioned again for the others to hold their positions before indicating that the two students were dead. He motioned for them to stay again when he heard the splash of Severus taking a step forward.
He felt the potions master tap on his occlumency shields with his own legilimency as he often did when asking permission to speak privately via the mind arts. Even with his shields up he could sense the fury and desperation of the man and desire to confirm with his own senses what his headmaster claimed. Albus ignored it and approached the kneeling teenager.
The only thing preventing him from killing the figure then and there was not his desire to know what happened, but the sight of Fawks crying on his shoulder. The poor bird never could understand that it's tears weren't capable of healing those kinds of injuries.
Albus had never known him to shed a tear for the undeserving.
Flip.
Albus tensed as the young man raised his arm to stab the leather-bound book again, but stopped mid-swing. He was close enough now to recognize the thing in his hands as an ivory tooth. A fang previously belonging to the basilisk, no doubt.
Before he could wonder what a perfectly unused journal had done to deserve such harsh treatment the man, the boy, turned to look at him.
"Tom?" Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore gasped as he, for the first time in a century, dropped his wand.
He picked it up again just as the puffy-eyed, red-faced and vomit-covered boy dropped his own weapon with a clatter.
"Professor?" He choked out with trembling lips.
It came out as more of a gurgle than a word as it left his throat. All theories of time anomalies, wormholes flinging students into far off futures and multiverse jumping left his mind at the sight of the Slytherin in such a vulnerable state.
Tom motioned to the two dead students as his mouth fought desperately to form words, but no sound came out.
"What are you doing here, Tom?" Albus asked in a manner as if finding an underage incarnation of the greatest dark lord in history in a legendary chamber beneath Hogwarts stabbing a nearly featureless book with a venomous fang pilfered from a recently slayed basilisk beside two dead children was a daily occurrence.
"I... I was..." He said motioning from Harry to the book. "I was trying to take it all back."
Albus understood. Someway, somehow, he understood. This sixteen year old boy, a child in his own right, wished for something he himself wished for every time he visited the man he once loved in that dreadful prison. A mulligan to undo all of the horrible things that happened in the interim he missed, or the consequences of his actions and inactions.
Thunk!
Albus jumped at the sound. He hadn't even noticed Tom retrieve the fang until he plunged it into yet another page of the seemingly unused journal.
"But I can't!" He gurgled out in his attempt at yelling, but with what came out barely above a whisper.
He left the fang buried in the pages.
"God help me! I can't take any of it back, no matter how badly I want to."
Albus dropped his wand again, this time deliberately, and swept the boy into his arms. He knew it was stupid. He knew it was unnatural and absurd. He knew, in his brain, that this couldn't be real and that if it was it shouldn't be believed. But somewhere deeper he knew holding the boy was what he was supposed to do. The right thing to do.
Tom wailed into his chest as he clawed meekly against Albus' robes and back.
"Why!?" He begged. "Why can't I take it back!"