Author's Note: This started out as a prompt on tumblr, that demanded to be a more fleshed out story. It will be a couple chapters long, it was just a bit too long for a one shot and way too long for a drabble. Woops.

Prompt: "No one has a heart of stone" Tom+Harry

Savior Complex

The air was hot, electric and alive and pulsing. Singed with spells and curses that had been haphazardly thrown across the battlefield, bodies lost among the rubble of the once great castle. The sun hung low in the horizon, peaking above the mountain and trees as the once violet sky became painted with pinks and oranges, a palette of color that seemed inappropriately lovely to the scene before them, the circle forming around the two wizards, linked together by the colliding spells. Emerald and ruby grappled at the center, a knot that bobbed back and fourth as one fought to overcome the other.

The air hissed, filled with the sound of wood splintering and scorched magic before a deafening boom that threatened to tear down the remaining walls with the resonance encompassed them. The knot of magic burst, cascading the courtyard in a blinding light and several of the onlookers fell to their knees, burying their face into their elbows to act as a shield.

When the light subsided, eyes blinked open, jaws slacking in astonished gasps at what lay before them. A wail pierced the silence, followed by several anguished exclamations as a witch with wild hair ran forward, followed by a red-headed companion. The pushed through the crowd, dirt and broken fragments of stone kicking out from beneath them as they came to Harry Potter's side. He was strewn on the ground, prostrate and his legs beneath him at a grotesque angle. The witch prodded him, pulling him into her arms.

Lord Voldemort lay dead some feet away, red eyes open and unseeing. His hand was limp, the elder wand no longer in his grasp.

He was dead, and so was Harry Potter.

Death is...

It is pain. More pain than what could be possible. It is nothing, but it is painful and searing, and he opens his mouth to scream but there is no sound. The void before him- all around him? Engulfing him? Consuming him?- is empty and silent and he continues to try to scream, until the muscles of his jaw ache in protest and his throat feels as if it is raw and he tastes dirty pennies and venom in his mouth.

He is surrounded in white, in blinding blinding blinding white.

He cannot breathe, it is oppressive and suffocating and wraps around his chest and constricts like a boa. His lungs burn with the need, the desire to expand. To fill and consume and supply him with glorious air. To greedily breathe air as though it were wine and he longed to drown in the decadence.

It is chaos and terrible and filled with pain.

There is no coaxing memories for him to toil away with, no remembrance of life and earth and all its delights and failings. There is only screaming, incoherent and jumbled memories pulled from him at random and he can no longer recall their context. He is detached from his life- physically and mentally and his own name sits on the tip of his tongue but does not move any further.

A rabbit twitches from the rafters.

A woman with piercing and fierce green eyes falls to his feet.

A stone face opens it's mouth, the glittering head of a snake slipping between limestone teeth.

It is madness, and hands that he cannot see entangle in hair that he cannot feel. He is not just lost within the void, he is the void, a shadow that is being devoured by the blinding and awful white. He does not know how he came to be here, who he was. There are names, too many to catch onto that bubble and float at the surface of his subconscious before dropping beneath his gasp, empty fingers pinching at air and unable to hold onto them long enough to find one that makes sense. Why are there so many names, so many epitaphs when neither of them seem right? Neither seem to sit in his mouth, as if they are poison and he wants to spit them out. There is a name that is smooth and polished and full and the syllables glide from his tongue but it leaves a taste behind that he does not like, an enigma in its identity and to the senses. And then there is one that is pleasing and stirs something almost like joy or fear or anger but it is wrong, the feeling of his tongue tapping against the palate of his mouth makes him cringe with the remembrance of something he can no longer remember.

It is cold, and for some reason flashes of corpses cut into his vision, glassy eyes and deoxygenated lips. He does not know who they are, but he screams a silent and tormented scream with something (Guilt? Wrath? Terror?) as each one flicker before him. A bespectacled and startled girl. A man with wide and knowing and mournful eyes. A filthy girl, skin pulled taut over the sharp contours of her face. And then there are the eyes, like emeralds that glitter. Like the scales of a snake as candlelight illuminates the scalloped ridge of its skin.

Something wraps around his neck, four long fingers crushing into the knot of throat as the pad of a thumb settles at the juncture of it and his shoulder. They are like ice, so cold that they burn against his skin He wants to scream but he does not have a voice, and he tries to move away from the hand but there is nowhere to go, he is the void and so is the hand. And then there are more, cold cold cold fingers coiling around his wrist, pulling his arms back. Fingernails digging painfully across his back. Fists pound against his chest, and he is in pain and battered and confused and angry and frightened and every emotion that he can name, and all the ones he has forgotten.

One hand rests against his cheek, the palm warm and he leans toward it, fingers brushing aside his hair. And for a moment, between the hands that grasp at his skin and punish, and the flashes of green light that fill his skull, of loud cackling that is impossibly cold and terrifying, he understands. A moment of knowing.

This is death, and it is filled with snakes and haunted eyes and pain and vengeful hands and nothingness.

Death is...

It is welcoming. It is warm and pleasant and smells like the burrow the night before Christmas, the smell of glazed ham and whipped potatoes filling his nose, of crisp sugar and melted chocolate chips. It is soft, and light filters through Harry's closed eyes- sunlight through a window- and he blinks at it. Once, twice...On the third time his vision focuses, and he is on the Hogwarts Express, lying across the seat and looking up at the window.

"How appropriate that we would meet here again," a familiar voice says, and he turns, smiling at the scarred and shredded and so very kind face of Remus Lupin.

For a moment, he doesn't understand, and he grins wider, raising a hand to adjust the glasses which have been skewed from his position. "How...?" he starts, and it is then that he notices they are not alone in the train. Sirius sits beside Remus, reclining with his arms draped on the back of the seat. The hollows of his cheeks have filled out, and his eyes are glowing and playful and Harry thinks that he has never seen him so young.

The door to the compartment slides open, and he sits up, shuffling across the cushions to make room as Lily Potter rushes to his side, a hand cupping his cheek as she presses a kiss to his untidy hair. It is nice and wonderful, and he forgets for a moment where he is- or where he isn't- and he falls into her embrace like he is a child and no longer a man. But he does not care, it is the first time he has felt his mother wrap her arms around him and he sinks into it, only half noticing the hand that settles on his head, ruffling his hair.

James Potter has joined them, and there is something complete and whole and warm and wonderful about the hand that soothes through his hair, that grasps onto his and does not let go.

"I died, didn't I?" he finally asks, knowing the answer to the question before it even leaves his lips. He is met with sad, sympathetic eyes, slow head nods and coos.

"I'm sorry," Remus says, but there is nothing to be sorry for, Harry decides. He had accepted death the moment he walked into the forest, the resurrection stone buried in soft dirt behind him. He had accepted and been prepared for death the very moment he pressed a kiss to the round surface of the snitch.

He had been living on borrowed time from the moment he awoke on the ground, with Narcissa Malfoy searching for a pulse. It had been all the time he needed to accomplish the task before him, to fulfill his prophesied destiny. He had died, but so had Voldemort.

The train is moving, lurching forward on metal wheels and metal tracks and he settles into the seat to gaze out the window. There is a blur of movement, and the shapes and colors shift into discernible figures and places. The train passes through a living room that is raining letters with blood red stamps, through the village of Hogsmeade and laughter and smiling faces. There are werewolves that howl at the moon, fading away as merpeople hold out spears, mouths twisting into a snarl. He watches his own life pass before him, the train barreling through unimpeded. He reaches out, places a hand against the window at the sight of Hermione hunched over a book, of Ron straddling his broom as he smirked triumphantly. But there is no ache, no painful weight in his stomach as he realizes he might never get to see them again. That an entire lifetime will separate them.

There is no pain, only peace.

"Where are we going?" he asks, turning from the window to look at the faces surrounding him. The familiar faces that he had memorized, from the reflection of an enchanted mirror to magicked photographs. From memories and dreams alike. He is surrounded by family.

"Home," Lily answers him, and he is satisfied by the answer even if he does not know exactly what Home might mean. It is not the burrow, or Grimmauld place, those places no longer exist to him.

But it is death, and it is surprisingly pleasant. And it is filled with people he loves, and who love him, and the sound of a train whistle in the distant as the heavy machinery chugs noisily along. It is the smell of pastries and treats, loving hands cupping his chin and kisses to his temple. It is the sound of an infant wailing in the back of his mind, but he can hardly hear it over the stories and the quips that are filling the compartment.

Hell is...

Tom does not know how long he was trapped within the void for. Whether it is seconds or an eternity, if entire empires rose and fell as he burned in the nothingness of death. But slowly, the hands recede, and the tightness wound around his chest uncoil and warmth fills him. The nothingness and the numbness ebbs away, and he flexes his fingers, feels the sinewy muscles in his hand glide beneath skin. Overcome by the sensations as nothing becomes something, as cloth flutters against skin, as gooseflesh prickles from the sudden reawakening.

'Perhaps,' he thinks, as he inhales deeply, his lungs stinging from the air and the sudden intrusion. 'I was not dead. Just unconscious or cursed.'

And the thought fills him with such hope, such desperate and clawing hope like a caged animal seeking escape. This is not death, for he is not dead. And whether he is Tom Riddle or Lord Voldemort or He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, he is immortal and not even Death himself could conquer him.

The clamor in his head settles, and he is no longer assaulted by images of tufted white fur and crackling green light. He is no longer floating, and his palms rest flat against something solid. He tentatively runs fingers over it, over rough hard wood floor. He lifts his neck but rests it back down, as his head feels too heavy and star bursts cascade over his eyelids as he's overcome by dizziness. So he lays there, resigned for only a moment as he enjoys the feeling of feeling.

He is naked, but something- a blanket, perhaps, is twisted around him- and he shifts slightly to move it, wrapping it more comfortably around him. When the vertigo finally abates, and he can feel the tremors through his body as if he is finally settled into himself, he opens his eyes. He is staring at dust, at a forgotten coin pressed against the far wall. At the metal support and spring of a bed. He must have fallen off onto the floor, and he presses his hands on the floor to pull himself up.

His head throbs, and he pauses midway through the motion as he swoons from the desire to fall back down, to fall into the nothingness and the void. He fights against it, however, and moves to sit properly on the floor, resting his back against the bed as he clenches his hand into a fist and holds it at the center of his forehead.

When he opens his eyes, he is unable to stop the horrified gasp, the shocked noise that escapes his lips as light blossoms in his vision and he has to grab onto the bed for support as the room spins around him. The room from his childhood, from the muggle orphanage that he had tried to forget but lay at the edge of his memories.

He ignores the ache between his eyes, the unsteadiness as he stands and finds a folded set of clothes on the desk beside his bed- the bed. It is not his. He does not belong here, not in the orphanage or the muggle world. It is just a bed.

He grabs the black slacks and pulls them up, slips his arms into the plain white oxford but does not bother to button it before he begins searching for his wand. Panic fills his chest when it is nowhere in sight, and not even calling to it, attempting to stoke the flames of his own magical core can summon it to him. And the center of his magic, the heat that exists within him is noticeably absent. There are no flames to stoke, the fire extinguished. There is no thrumming as magic courses through his veins, he does not feel the hum of energy as it snaps and cracks around him. It was something that he felt since his youth, something that has always existed and been apart of him for as long as he could remember.

And it's gone.

His fingers are dirty, the pads of them gray from the dust collected as he pawed frantically under the desk and wardrobe. But he does not care, he is uncharacteristically frantic. He needs to leave, he needs to find his wand.

Raising to his bare feet, he takes two long steps to the door and grabs the doorknob, wiggling it back and fourth and pulling, pushing the door. But it does not budge. It is locked, and he tries to will it open, to tap into the well of magic that came so easily to him even as a child.

He falls to his knees, huffing and growling and snarling as he becomes more aggressive, heaving his entire weight against the door and back, fingers prying into the small crack between it and the door frame. He tries pulling at it, trying to help wiggle it free. But he cannot, and the desperation from before returns to him so quickly that he is thankful he is alone, that no one can see the near feral way he pulls at the door. The manic gleam to his eyes that he is unable to mask.

He does not know how long he sat trying to escape the room, but when he finally sits back, his hands are slick with blood and his fingernails are cracked and jagged. There are lines of blood from where he dragged his fingers over the door, smears along the wood from his palm. His jaw clenches, and he looks to the window, to see if there is anyone he can signal to. Anyone he can demand help him.

There is only white nothingness, and he falls to the floor, his knees too weak to support him.

He is dead.

This is hell, and it is filled with locked doors and dead magic and bloody hands.