The Prologue

Note: I do not own any of these characters.

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Harry was packing.

"Where are you going?" Ron asked, leaning against his bedpost in the 7th year boys' dormitory. That's strange, Harry thought, for Ron would not have calmly, smoothly inquired where Harry was going, as though it were an accepted fact that Harry would be leaving over Christmas break; Ron would have demanded, confused and hurt, what the hell Harry was doing.

But then it wasn't Ron anymore. The image of Ron flickered briefly before Harry's eyes, almost as though he were back at 4 Privet Drive and watching bad reception come out of Dudley's old, broken television up in Dudley's room of old, broken things.

Ron-not-Ron met Harry's eyes and smiled a slick, smooth smile that chillingly matched his tone of voice exactly.

He curved open his mouth to speak again. "Give me your wand, Harry," he said simply, in an eerie echo of words that Harry himself had spoken long ago in a dank, dark dungeon rotting deep under the school.

Harry jerked up from his current task of stuffing his trunk, expression hard. "No," he hissed. "Not you."

He whirled around and ran out the room and down the stairs, glad he had already shrunk his broomstick and invisibility cloak. He made sure those two of his most prized possessions were never far out of his reach these days.

"Oh, you can run, but you can't hide," Ron-now-Tom called cheerfully after him in Parseltongue, waving the Marauder's Map above his head.

Harry rolled his eyes and muttered to himself how he was not nuts enough to actually stay at Hogwarts.

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"I'm coming for you, Harry." Tom's words were like a poisonous gas that seeped through and stung his brain.

Harry summoned the very last of his resolve to try to cast up his strongest mental shields.

The last thing he heard before he blacked out, riding his faithful Firebolt over the fields past Hogsmeade, was Tom's triumphant whisper of, "Didn't think you could get rid of me that easily, did you, love?"

And the last conscious thing he registered was his reply, "I hope someone finds your goddamn diary and burns you through. Because that was the biggest mistake I've ever made."

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My first story up on ff.n-- Please, review!