Forever

Author: Adrienne Wolter (catsncritters).
Summary: Even Dark Lords suffer from haunting memories.
Rating: PG
Warnings: None really. There is an original character in here, but she is not a Mary Sue. If you are an insane slash fanatic you may find some implied HPTR slash, but really, there's none.
Reviews: appreciated--but not required. This was practice for writing Voldemort, really, since I have another story I need to deal with him in.
Archive: I don't really know how archiving works, since I've never had a story that's been archived. I'd certainly like to know if it is archived, however.
Noted: This is one-shot. I have used the HP Lexicon timeline for the events in this story.

.---.

"Is this your idea of a perfect life, Tom?"

Funny, how a sentence and a sigh could bring one back to their childhood. It was the summer of 1938. He'd turned twelve, and while the orphanage had recognized this by giving him a new set of clothes, he'd found himself wishing that someone he knew, another child perhaps, would notice. They didn't.
Well, that was actually too general. One girl had, the quiet one who slept in the dormitory down the hallway. She was a pretty Muggle, with perfect black hair that ended neatly at her shoulders, and her name was Katherine. Her dormmates ignored her; the boys in Tom's dorm seemingly did as well, as she always seemed to be on her own during meals or when they were told to go outside.

It was that summer that they became close; she had been at the orphanage as long as he could remember but never seemed to fit in with anyone. So, while their peers would romp outside and run around, they sat against the wall and read or talked.
He'd called her Kay. She just called him Tom.
On his birthday, she had given him a smile. It was more than anyone else his age had offered, and he'd smiled back. At the end of the summer, he had taken her hands and promised to come back the next summer, after a year at the boarding school, and she promised to wait for him.
That was the year that he heard a rumour about the Chamber of Secrets and began to study it intently; at first, he was just curious. Just wanting to find out if it existed or not. Something so legendary–only able to be opened by Slytherin's heir? The sorting hat had so quickly placed him in his house that Tom began to wonder. By the end of the year, he promised himself to find it, to open it.

That was the summer that he and Kay had grown closer still; they were thirteen and curious and foolish, to have fallen in what they imagined was love. Her eyes–he sighed. They had been the purest of greens, purer than even the grass around the orphanage. But so many other colors were in them–blues and reds and yellows and blacks. They were the deepest eyes that he had ever seen.
And Tom hated himself for falling in love with a Muggle.
The next summer they both turned fourteen; Kay had grown into a beautiful young woman and Tom knew himself to be growing taller, finally. She had cried when a guardian at the orphanage had taken him to King's Cross, and Tom had kissed her and promised to return. When he did, she was waiting for him.

But that summer something had changed. On his fifteenth birthday, she had given him a diary, which he had scoffed at–him, write his precious thoughts where others could see them? But he had accepted it. She seemed to want to come along with him to his boarding school, and became angry when he told her that she could not; she asked why she had to wait for him every school year. And he had angered her more by telling her that no matter what, she would.
She had asked him that impatient question. "Is this your idea of a perfect life, Tom?" They had snuck out of their dormitories, and were outside, staring up at the stars in the sky. Tom had looked at her and looked upward for the answer so long that she had laughed bitterly and stood to leave. His reply came as she was walking away, in a whisper that betrayed no emotion.
"Only if it lasts forever."
He remembered quite clearly the look she'd given him then–disbelief, hurt. What she said afterward was unimportant, and Tom knew she wouldn't be waiting for him in ten months if he returned. He just stared up at the stars.

That year, he'd studied like no year before. Lived in the library. And he found the book that finally made everything add up, and discovered the Chamber. He laughed when the Muggle-born Myrtle died, and only stopped his control on the school when he asked to stay for the summer and Dippet had told him no. Then he had framed a third year and won an award for service to the school, and had been allowed to stay the summer. He turned the diary, his gift from Kay, into a magical dark arts item with a few more weeks of research, and had lived his life in cold. Numbness didn't hurt as much.

And this was why, fighting the war, his battles against the Potter boy were never quite fought with all he had. Those green eyes haunted him, and sometimes the messy black hair, slicked with sweat or blood or who knows what else, turned into a shoulder-length cut. He would laugh bitterly at his own weakness when his plots failed, and Wormtail would never ask; his enemy got an advantage that he couldn't even speak of to his followers. He wasn't supposed to fall in love with Muggles. He wasn't supposed to fall in love. He was Voldemort.
But a voice in the back of his head said Tom.
Potter was his angry Kay, out to destroy him before being destroyed. He knew that someday, at the end, he himself would be the one to fail, the one to slip. So many Death Eaters were smug in their positions, assured victory, when it would end up being for nothing.

He opened his eyes again, coolly regarding the wizard in front of him. He'd known that Dumbledore would not attack him while his eyes were closed; the old fool never had been good at playing unfairly.
And the answer rose bitterly, in the back of his throat, as he plucked the wand that Dumbledore had taken from him off the floor.
"Only if it lasts forever."